12 October
Disastrous driving lesson, though not because of the driving. I have dreaded Edward making any kind of advances and hoped and prayed I had been stand-offish enough to make sure that he would not. But today he put his hand over mine when I changed into reverse gear, saying I was not being firm enough. He kept his hand there far too long. Then I found him sitting sideways and staring at me. He said I had a beautiful profile, quite the most beautiful he had ever seen. I laughed and said, For heaven’s sake; and he was upset and blushed one of his ferocious blushes. What can I do, I am stuck with him until I learn to drive. Later, I amused Daphne by telling her about Edward, exaggerating the pass he made, to entertain her. She teased me, saying he would be a good catch, certain as he is to inherit his father’s meat-packing business. I retaliated by suggesting she was his real target and that he was only making do temporarily with me until she is fully recovered. But it is not funny, this kind of thing. It is not funny for Edward either, I know.
20 October
Decided to invent a boyfriend for myself to solve the Edward problem. To make the lie convincing, I used Tom, making much of my devotion to him as a wounded hero. It worked like a charm. I did not even really have to lie, there was no need to go so far as to say Tom was a fiancé, which I was glad about. Edward is an honourable man. It is just a pity he is so very unattractive and dull.
*
Millicent masters the art of driving by Christmas (there was, of course, no test to take). Once she has done so, the routine of her days changes. She is able to drive Daphne around, and they begin a series of trips to places of interest within a twenty- or thirty-mile radius of Leeds. She so enjoys the driving, even in poor weather, that she begins to think of buying herself a car once being a companion to Daphne comes to an end. When that will be, she doesn’t know but assumes not for a year or so since her employer is still obviously weak and nothing like ready to apply to a university. When Millicent goes to Brighton for Christmas and New Year – grateful to miss the birth of Esther’s baby by two days (Stephen King was born on 4th January) – Daphne misses her dreadfully.
*
2 January 1926
It was the nicest thing to have Daphne so excited to see me return. I think, poor love, that she has had a dreary time of it on her own here over the festive season. Heaven knows, I was not exactly having a gay time of it in Brighton but at least I had my family about me and there was plenty of noise and laughter with so many children and that is what Christmas is supposed to be about. But Daphne had no one, though plenty of neighbours, feeling sorry for her no doubt, invited her for Christmas dinner and to parties on New Year’s Eve. She did go to Edward’s parents for Christmas dinner but declined New Year festivities which she is not strong enough to take part in anyway. I do wonder sometimes about the absence of family and friends in Daphne’s life. Mrs Harris referred to herself as a friend of the Willeses, but Daphne hardly knows of her. She says her parents were both only children of elderly parents who in turn had been only children and so there is a terrible dearth of relations. She has no guardian, even, and has had to manage everything herself. As to friends, she was at boarding-school in Switzerland and, though she did make friends there, has not managed to keep in touch since the accident. Yet she is such a friendly person, it still seems odd that she is so solitary. She loves to hear about my family and cannot believe I find them a trial and that I have concentrated so hard on getting away from them. She hints at how much she would enjoy meeting them and told me that one day she hopes to be matriarch of a large family herself. I said I had no such ambitions and she pressed me to reveal what ambitions I do have. I wish I knew. It is a question I always dread. It is awful not to have fixed goals in life. I came out with weak mutterings about wanting to travel. Daphne asked me if I wished I were a man. I said no, though I had often envied the greater freedom of men to do things.
11 February
Daphne spends longer than ever these days reading The Times. I don’t know how she can be bothered, it is so dull, but I am too ashamed of my lack of interest in current affairs to say so. Daphne is worried about the miners. She doesn’t know a single miner, I am sure, but she worries because she says some report has been published recommending their wages should be reduced. She says there will be a strike and the miners will lose and suffer terribly. Well, I don’t want anyone to suffer any more than Daphne wants them to, but I cannot get worked up about the fate of people I do not know.
20 February
Took Daphne to London to see her specialist, Sir John somebody, in Welbeck Street. We went by train and took a cab to the consulting-rooms. The waiting-room was like a mausoleum, a vast place with uncomfortable chairs. It was deathly silent and very unnerving. I sat there for almost a full hour waiting for Daphne, thinking how I should hate to be ill and have the need to come to a place like this. Because we had tried not to burden ourselves with heavy bags I had not a book with me and the only magazines in the waiting-room did not appeal. They all seemed to be about antiques, full of pictures of hideous furniture. I stared at an ugly object, said to be a William IV four-division canterbury, and wondered what a ‘canterbury’ was. There was also a painting of a bull, said to belong to Queen Victoria’s Jersey herd. It looked exactly like Edward, or rather he looked like the bull. I walked up and down the horrid brown carpet and stood at the window staring through the muslin drapes. They were not very clean. After half an hour a woman with a young boy was shown in. The boy looked awful, a ghastly white colour, and his face was so thin the bones showed through. The woman whispered to him and seemed to want him to sit on her knee but he would not. I said, good morning, and she said, good morning, but showed no inclination to talk. The silence was oppressive. When she gave the boy a barley sugar it was a relief to hear the unwrapping of the paper and his crunching of the sweet. I heard Daphne come out of the doctor’s room and gathered our things and bolted out to meet her before she could come back in, not wanting to delay our departure by even a minute. She introduced me to Sir John but he hardly looked at me. He was very abrupt and I did not like him. Neither does Daphne, but he is a colleague of the doctor who treated her in Switzerland and she was referred to him. The news was good. He thinks she is recovering well and will now make rapid strides. Her bones have mended satisfactorily, and her lungs are clear. It is just a question of gaining more strength. He has given her a diet sheet to follow. She hardly eats or drinks anything and will have a struggle following it. It is full of eggs and cream and beef to fatten her up. We went straight from Welbeck Street for lunch at a restaurant called Isola Bella in Frith Street, Soho, which Edward Barker’s mother had recommended, and had a delicious lunch, reminding me of the lovely food I enjoyed every day in Italy. I amused Daphne by telling her about how I used to be a vegetarian, not out of principle but because I wanted to be different, and then I went to Italy and it became impossible to resist the food. My favourite dish was scaloppine alvino bianco e aroncio, and I had it today. It was bliss.
Daphne was tired afterwards so we took a cab to the station and came home. She slept most of the way, looking very vulnerable hunched in the corner of our carriage. I do like looking after her, far more than I ever liked looking after my brothers and sister. My feelings of tenderness towards her quite surprise me. I feel a little uneasy about how much I want to mother her, not ever having suspected I might have such maternal feelings. I never felt them for my younger brothers and sister and never for Francesca. Daphne makes me feel much older than her yet there are only seven years between us, older and more experienced. She seems to me so very fragile and open and I worry that she will be hurt. I want to protect her. I feel needed by her and it pleases me. I have never wanted to feel needed before, quite the reverse, I know I have always evaded responsibility. I suddenly thought last night of Aunt J. and how she seemed to draw such satisfaction, even pleasure, from being needed. God forbid I am becoming like her.
21 February
Daphne stayed in bed m
ost of today, recovering. She is disappointed that she did not manage to do anything in London but have lunch. It was a strange feeling to be in London again and I must confess I liked it. Something in the air, a sense of bustle and importance. I don’t know. It is a pity we did not have time to visit Tilda. Daphne would have loved that. And yet there would have been something awkward about taking her to visit my sister. They each belong to different lives and I realise I want to keep it that way. It is not that I am embarrassed by either of them but perhaps I am embarrassed at the thought of what Tilda might make of my being with Daphne, seeing me as her employee, her servant. Or maybe even suspecting something else.
15 March
Daphne walked a mile today, without her stick, and was not at all tired. It was I who insisted that she should rest and made her sit down while I went back for the car. It was a lovely, warm day and we were up on the moors, on the top road, with not a soul in sight. When I came back with the car, we sat and had our picnic, not talking, just basking in the sun and listening to the peewits. Well, Daphne said they were peewits, but I know nothing about birds. It seemed a shame to go home, but eventually a stiff, cool breeze sprang up and I thought we should move. I realise I have become a little bossy and that I’m treating Daphne like a child, which is wrong. No wonder she grows a little irritated with me and has started to refuse to do what I suggest, even when it is clearly for her own good.
20 March
An estate agent came to the house today. Daphne had not told me he was coming so I was rather taken aback. She wants the house valued with a view to selling it soon. I think she is being a little premature, but I didn’t say so. She has no affection for this house, I must say, even though it seems she was born here. She always wanted to live in London.
24 March
A big post today. Daphne has sent for information about the colleges she fancies and the brochures, but that isn’t the right word – prospectuses, I mean – have begun to arrive. She would like to go to Cambridge, to Girton, and has suggested that we should both go and look round. We are going to stay a night there and as it is an awkward journey by rail I will drive. I love long drives and so does Daphne. She thinks she is now strong enough to learn to drive herself and is going to ask Edward to teach her. I offered, and don’t see why I can’t teach her, but she seems to prefer a man, which is rather insulting and, I should have thought, against her principles.
26 March
To Cambridge. We stayed at the Bull Hotel, in Trumpington Street, which was very busy with parents of students, come to visit them. They all seemed so smug, terribly pleased to have their darling sons at the university and making constant loud references to the superiority of one college over another. We went off to Girton, which is a good way out of the town I thought, and looked round. It is a very gothic building, rather ugly. I don’t think I should like to be there. Goldsmiths’ was much more attractive. Then we came back to the town and walked along the backs. Now, that is beautiful, and one could not help but be impressed. I told Daphne it was more beautiful than the river in Oxford and when she asked how I came to know this, I had to tell her about Tom. She leapt on this and cross-questioned me about him until I became quite irritated. She pressed me to admit I’d cared for him and would not believe I had not felt anything stronger than friendship. Daphne can be very childish sometimes. She is going to apply to Girton.
3 May
A General Strike has been called, much to Daphne’s excitement. She is on the side of the miners, of course, and has donated money to the strike fund. She would not tell me how much so I suspect it is a shockingly large amount. She reads The Times avidly, and listens to the wireless she has bought, and wishes she were in London. We are not much affected by it here, or not that we have yet had reason to notice.
6 May
A letter from Tilda, full of what is happening in the Strike, Daphne couldn’t get enough of it. Tilda says that for the first two days everything seemed to stop and there was complete silence in the streets with no buses running and few cars. She wheeled Florence to Regent’s Park and was amazed to find the army camped there and the park full of tents. But she writes that already, on day four, when she wrote this, there are signs of things starting to move again. Some underground stations are open, and a few buses are running, and supplies of milk and other essentials are plentiful. Here in Leeds, or rather on the outskirts of Leeds, we are still not affected at all. I think Daphne is sorry. She had a row with Edward Barker about the Strike when he came to give her a driving lesson. He said if he were in London he would volunteer to drive a bus, and she raged at him, saying strike-breakers were a disgrace and that everyone should support the miners. She says Edward looked astonished but said nothing. Daphne said afterwards that they went on to spend the whole lesson in silence, except for his instructions to her. I do admire Daphne’s outspokenness. She has such confidence.
26 May
The Strike is over. The miners have lost and will be worse off than ever. Daphne was near to weeping at the news, and even I felt sad. She is making me politically conscious, which I never was nor wanted to be. I have always thought only of myself and how things affect me and Daphne makes me see that this is not good enough. But I still find politics dull, which she can’t understand.
6 June
Mother wrote, reminding me that Albert and Alfred are 18 in August, and asking if I will be able to come home for a celebration. I can recollect no party for George’s or Tilda’s or my 18th birthday. However, to please Mother I have said I will go. I hardly know these brothers of mine. I suppose that is my fault. I think I am unfairly prejudiced against them because of what pests they were when young. We have never written to each other and don’t know what to say when we meet. All I know is that Alfred is lazy but cleverer than Albert, though not clever enough to go on to university. He is better-looking too. Daphne asked what they did and I was ashamed to have only the faintest notion and may have been mistaken in telling her that Alfred is some sort of salesman, to Mother’s disappointment, and Albert is a clerk in the post office. I must check that I am right.
15 July
I could not help feeling depressed today. I am not tired, but feel listless. I think it is the usual thing, to do with birthdays coming round, and that awful inner panic which rises in me when I wonder what I am doing with my life. Every birthday it overwhelms me, this realisation that I am doing little more than drift. I never seem to have plans. Where has my ambition gone? But then it was a formless ambition at best, just to be someone and do something. An empty sort of yearning after I know not what. I wait for things to happen but all that happens is ordinary and I long for the extraordinary. I try to be sensible and think about this. The fact is that I am qualified to teach in an elementary school and that is all. I am qualified to do what I do not do and do not want to do. This is ridiculous.
16 July
Daphne noticed my mood. I suppose it would have been difficult for her not to do so. I know I have been very quiet and unlike myself since my birthday. She asked if I was worried about anything and I was silly enough to say yes, about myself and my future, and that gave her the opening to invite confidences. It was embarrassing to give voice to the kind of thoughts I write in this diary and I made a stumbling job of it. But Daphne was very understanding though what she understood was not quite what I’d meant her to. I think she thinks I am merely like her, and burn with some kind of nameless desire to do good. But I don’t. Doing good does not appeal to me. It isn’t that I want to be doing something worthwhile, as she does. Oh, I don’t know what it is that I do want. Just, as ever, something to happen.
*
Almost at once, several things do happen. For a start, Daphne finds a buyer for her house and accepts the offer, with a completion date in mid-August. She and Millicent then begin hunting for a house or flat in London which entails frequent trips there before they find a small house in Edis Street, Primrose Hill, not far from where Tilda lives. But this place is only to be
a base for Daphne while she is an undergraduate: she has been accepted at Girton and is to take up her place in October. Obviously, this will mean the end of her need of Millicent, who is surprisingly upset about this. It seems, from her diary entries throughout this period, that Daphne’s success in obtaining a Girton place underlines her own sense of having failed ever to go to university. Daphne suggests to her, as Tom had once done, that she should apply as a mature student, but she will not hear of this. Meanwhile, in the middle of all this upheaval, she at last takes Daphne to Brighton to meet her family, choosing the twins’ 18th birthday celebration as an opportunity to do so. Daphne is at once attracted to Alfred, to Millicent’s consternation (and bafflement).
20 August
Well, here we are, in Daphne’s new home, and everything in a state of chaos but she doesn’t seem to care whereas I hate this mess. We have beds and that is about all in the way of furniture. I cannot imagine why Daphne did not select items from the Leeds house to furnish this place but she says everything there was too big in scale to fit into these small rooms and too old-fashioned in taste to suit her ideas. Maybe so, but it dooms us to discomfort until she has bought chairs and sofas and tables and I don’t know when she will get round to doing that. She is much too preoccupied with thinking about Alfred. Twice already he has been up to see her and she proposes to go to Brighton next weekend, and all that with so much sorting out to do here. I feel more and more like a mere housekeeper every day and I do not like it. She expects me to go on living here whatever I decide to do but, although it is generous of her to offer her house to me, I have no intention of accepting it. I must move on.
Diary of an Ordinary Woman Page 15
