Diary of an Ordinary Woman

by Margaret Forster

  21 August

  Alfred is here. He is sleeping on the floor downstairs, wrapped in a quilt. Daphne seems to think him endlessly amusing but he does not amuse me. He reminds me of George before he went off to the war, very sure of himself and full of smart remarks. I suppose he is attractive to look at, tall, with a good head of hair, and an easy way with him. He took Daphne dancing last night. I don’t know where they went and I don’t care. They announced that they danced until they dropped. Alfred is apparently a good dancer. I wonder where he learned, in Brighton. Daphne has never had a beau before and all this attention is going to her head. Since she has no mother or aunt or sister I feel I have to take on those roles and warn her to be careful, but with Alfred being my brother I should perhaps warn him to be careful. I will be glad when he goes home.

  26 August

  I have done it. I have applied for a teaching job at an elementary school in Brighton. It is not the one Grace goes to, which I think is a good thing. I may not even be given an interview since the authority will not look kindly on my lack of real teaching experience since I left my one and only post. But I have to apply for something, and somewhere in Brighton would make sense. It is not that I wish to be near my family, but I do for the time being need a place to live and to go back to Tilda’s would seem too much of a backward step. If I live in London, I must live on my own and though I have saved a good deal these past months it is not enough, without the security of a salary after October, even to rent, never mind buy, somewhere pleasant. I must live with Mother and make the best of it for a while. I refuse to live on Daphne’s charity. She would be very angry at my referring to it as that. She is so happy now. I wonder how she will bring herself to go to Girton at all now that Alfred is the light of her life. He is quite overawed by her intellect, and so he should be.

  1 September

  The strangest thing happened today. I was alone in this comfortless house and had warned Daphne I was determined to put at least the sitting-room into some sort of order. She said I was welcome to do whatever I liked but really it was beyond her why I fussed so, like an old mother hen. I knew she said this affectionately but it upset me. I feel like an old mother hen whenever she and Alfred are clinging to each other and being silly. Once they had gone off to Brighton, I set to and started dealing with the packing cases covering the whole floor. Daphne had wanted to burn the entire contents of her father’s desk without even looking at them which was pretty shocking but in the end she simply shovelled all the papers into packing cases and said she’d go through them later. I knew she never would. She said there would be nothing of value there, that everything to do with money and insurance and all that kind of thing was with his solicitor or in the bank and that these piles of papers would just be old letters and paid bills and she couldn’t be bothered with them. She has no reverence for the past. At any rate, I set to and began emptying the cases, though I did not feel comfortable doing it. I felt like a spy. There are letters there too personal for me to read, from Daphne’s mother to her father during their courtship. She should treasure them, and I will tell her so. But she was right about the bulk of the stuff, there are packets and packets of bills, all ticked and with ‘paid’ written on them, and old policies of one sort or another. I tied them all up in bundles, labelled them accordingly. Daphne will never look at them but I did not feel I had the right to burn them. The love letters I put beside her bed. But then, at the bottom of the third and last packing case, I came across a few sheets of yellowed paper, brittle with age, covered in fine, spidery writing, the ink faded to a faint grey. The writing began in what was obviously the middle of a sentence and I saw, turning the sheets over carefully, that it ended in the same way, so whatever this was, it was incomplete. I read it, and read it again, and for some reason wanted to copy it out for myself. Here is what it said:

  ‘– was a headless skeleton lying on the beach, the bones of a child in an abandoned hut, and a slate buried in the sand with scratched upon it the barely legible words I am proceeding to a river shown on my map some 60 miles north. Should anyone find this . . . There were more scratches, but they were indecipherable. All around were the bleached bones of countless whales, beautiful structures, great curving arcs of strong white bone. Seals crowded the line of the shore, barking and baying at the crashing waves. The wind was merciless, steady and stinging, lifting the fine white sand in handfuls and driving it forward in clouds. I was cold, so cold, though the sun blazed from a blue sky and I had just come from the heat of the desert behind me. Sixty miles north. I knew there was no river there, whatever this map had seemed to indicate. He would have walked to his certain death, or did he return, was this his skeleton? The child, left behind, would have died sooner, if not already dead when he left. A shipwreck, without a doubt. The coast is littered with them. Ships over the centuries smashed to smithereens and the survivors left with the choice of floating on any raft they could fashion and being attacked and eaten by sharks, or of walking into the desert stretching a thousand miles behind, or of walking the beach. A safe beach, wide and flat, with no sharp coral to negotiate or inlets to cross, but, like the desert, offering no sustenance for hundreds of miles. I stood beside the skeleton wondering which fate was the worse, death at sea, death in the desert. I wondered how he could have thought anyone would see his wavering scratches on the slate. Did he hope others had survived the shipwreck and that they would appear soon, with water and food, and go in search of him? Sailors, perhaps, who knew this treacherous coast and would know how best to survive. The pity of it filled me. I stood and prayed over the remains. A life unknown, come to this, bones, a slate, the memory of desperation still whispering in the air. A life unknown which –’

  That was all. I don’t know why it makes such an impression upon me, why it makes me shiver. It is something to do with those last words, ‘a life unknown’. I don’t want my life to be unknown. I don’t want to die having done nothing. I feel time is passing me by and nothing matters and I want to matter. It is all a muddle, as usual, what I feel.

  4 September

  I showed Daphne the sheet of paper I found and made her read it. She had no idea who had written it or what it was about, but at least she was intrigued, which I had thought she might not be. She said her father had an explorer friend who wrote to him about his travels and that this must be from him, part of a long letter which had become separated from the rest. She thought this man spent his time in Africa and we speculated as to where this coast and desert might be. Damaraland, maybe. But unlike me, Daphne did not seem struck by the words ‘a life unknown’. She said briskly that surely the vast majority of lives are unknown in the sense of most folk not being famous, yet thoroughly well-known to family and friends at the time of being lived. Isn’t that what matters? Daphne asked. She doesn’t understand what I feel and I cannot express myself adequately. It is not that I wish to be famous but that I don’t want to be unknown. Oh, it is no use.

  5 September

  I had given up all hope of hearing from the education authority in Brighton and was not altogether sorry because I don’t truly wish to go there even though I am desperate to be doing something, but today I got a telegram, of all things, asking me to go for interview tomorrow. I imagine they have been let down and that I am the only applicant not yet tried. I will have to go for the interview, heart sinking. I wonder if I should have my hair cut short again. It has grown so long and I’m obliged to pin it up if I want it to look tidy.

  MILLICENT GOES TO Brighton, is offered the teaching post there at once and accepts it. She starts work three days later, at a salary of £5 I2S a week. There then begin the four unhappiest years of her life (which is how she refers to them when she is 80). The work is hard, much harder than it had been in her first and only teaching job. The classes are large and the children unruly. She hates the staff, particularly the headmaster who is a vicious disciplinarian. The plight of many of her pupils distresses her, coming to school as they do with inadequate clot
hing, and clearly in need of nourishment. She had never imagined such poverty existed in Brighton which she had always thought of as an affluent town. She is exhausted at the end of each day and too tired at the weekend to do more than rest. Her only comfort is finding a flat to rent three months after starting her job. It is in Hove, the ground floor of a Victorian house, and she takes pleasure in decorating and furnishing it. It is the first real home of her own, of course. But on the whole her diaries during this period are repetitious and full of complaints and become tedious in their detailing of school routines. There are frequent protestations of being unsuited to teaching, and more lamentations that she ever trained as a teacher at all. There is a great deal of railing against the headmaster and a couple of the other teachers. But her personal life improves.

  Two new people of real significance enter the diaries. Both are men, and it is one of these men who finally helps her change her career and find satisfaction in her new work. Percy Webb is a doctor, a colleague of her brother-in-law Charles, and she meets him at her sister Tilda’s house in the summer of 1930 (Tilda and Charles have by this time had another child, Jack, born in 1929). Millicent is supremely conscious of being almost thirty years of age and of Tilda constantly trying to matchmake. Daphne, with whom she keeps in touch (though the romance with brother Alfred soon fizzles out), does the same, but in a less obvious way.

  It is through Daphne that she meets a young lawyer, Frank Johnson, with whom Daphne has been at Cambridge. Since both Frank and Percy are in London, she does not see much of them and begins to wish that she could. Daphne, who has graduated from Cambridge (though not with the double first to which she had been aspiring) is trying, in 1930, to embark on a political career and to that end is going to attend an International Socialist Conference in Brussels and then intends to travel to Germany and Italy. She invites Millicent to live in her house while she is away, for the whole of the school summer holidays.

  *

  31 July 1930

  Percy came for the day. It is the first whole weekend he has had off for weeks and weeks, and he said he felt giddy at the prospect. We walked the full length of the promenade and on past the Grand Pier, and then back again, before settling on the beach where we sat on a rug with our backs to the wall and our eyes closed. Percy is so pale I feared the sun would burn him but he said he did not care, it felt so jolly good having it on his face and made him feel better already. He talks such a lot about his work. I envy him his absolute dedication and the satisfaction it brings him to know he is doing something so important and worthwhile. But anyone can see how worn out he is. He looks much older than his 31 years, and not at all strong. I do like him. What I like best about him is that for all his absorption in his work he is interested in others. Well, he shows interest in me and what I do and tries to persuade me that my teaching is as important as his doctoring, which is ridiculous. He won’t accept that I spend half my time trying to keep order and watching pupils falling asleep through lack of adequate nourishment. I can hardly bear to witness the beatings these children receive for the most trivial misdemeanors. I told Percy it makes my blood boil but that I cannot stand up against the headmaster who is such a brute: I am too afraid and too weak. Percy said he could not believe I was too weak. He asked if I had been to any of my pupils’ homes and I said I had, to two or three, and how shocked I’d been to find mothers younger than I looking like old women and trying to care for children in rooms little better than hovels, with no running water and no comfort of any sort. Percy said it was far worse in London. In his hospital he sees children dying not of disease but malnutrition. They need changes in society not any medicine that he can prescribe. He is a member of the Labour Party, as Daphne is, and hopes in his life to see radical changes in the distribution of wealth in this country, and things made altogether fairer, he says. He asked if I belonged to a political party and I had to say no. I was relieved that he did not press the point.

  1 August

  Today felt empty without Percy’s company. It costs me something to admit that, even here. I know Mother is wondering if at long last her elderly spinster daughter has a beau, and Grace, whom unfortunately we met while out walking yesterday, is bound to report back that she saw me hand-in-hand with a young man. There will be an inquisition when next I go for Sunday dinner. I thought about indicating to Grace that I would appreciate it if she said nothing to Mother but that would have made matters worse. I really do not know if I am attracted to Percy in that way or not. I like him. We get on well. Heaven knows, I have not much experience to judge him by. All these years and only mild involvements with Tom and Matthew to look back on. I have hardly been kissed, whereas Daphne has already done a great deal more than that, if she is to be believed, and I do believe her. If it were not for Frank, I might think I am made of stone. I would like to feel within me when Percy touches me what I feel for Frank – oh, that is clumsy and badly put but I know what I mean. But I don’t like Frank as much as I like Percy and I am not nearly as comfortable with him. Frank is a bit like Matthew in that he takes a great deal for granted and by no means regards me as an equal. He is very masculine, and takes charge, and has no hesitation at all about embracing me. I always have to struggle to keep my composure and it is a strain. Frank tells me he loves me, which I hate to hear because his lack of sincerity is evident. He buys me flowers and gives me presents all the time and I am not stupid, I know he wants something in return. It is lucky that he is in London and I am in Brighton, but if I take up Daphne’s offer I will see much more of him and that may become dangerous.

  4 August

  I have decided to live in Daphne’s house for a month. I told Mother today, and she said she could not understand why anyone would wish to leave the seaside for London in the height of summer and what, pray, was the attraction of that dirty, noisy city. I said there were plays I wished to see and libraries I wished to use but even to my own ears this sounded feeble. It did not help that Grace, who at 13 is far too pert, said she expected there were gentlemen to meet too. I slapped her down sharply, but not before Mother had changed from being anti my going to London to suddenly being in favour. If I had friends there I wished to spend more time with, then of course she understood.

  6 August

  Moved into Daphne’s house. It is hardly more comfortable than when I left it four years ago. That is an exaggeration of course but not much of one. She treats her home as a dumping ground for her things and a place to sleep and that is all. While she was at Cambridge there was some justification for her neglect but now she lives here all the time it seems inexplicable. There is not a cushion in the house. Her curtains are bedsheets strung up on bits of cane. When I think of my own home and how cheerful and comfortable it is, and all done on so little money whereas Daphne has plenty, I see the enormous difference in us. It is no good saying anything to her. She will only call me an old woman and say I fuss over the unimportant things in life, like most women. It hurts when she says that because I suspect it is true.

  8 August

  Went with Frank to see The Importance of Being Earnest at the Lyric Theatre. It was great fun. Frank and I both laughed a lot. He liked the actress playing Lady Bracknell, but I thought the young actor, John Gielgud, in the part of John Worthing, was the best. Afterwards, Frank took me for a late supper. It was quite the smartest restaurant I have ever been to, but then it was not exactly a restaurant, or not what I think of as one. It was more like a club. We went down some stairs into a basement which was rather dark and smoky and sat at a small, round iron table, very close to others. There was a band playing jazz and a woman in a tight red dress singing, and the atmosphere was hectic. I thought we would never get any food, but finally some smoked fish and bread arrived and the wine Frank had ordered. I had one glass. The noise was so terrific after the singing stopped that I couldn’t hear a word Frank said, so I just smiled and nodded.

  He drove me home in his new car, in which he wants to take me for a spin on Sunday. I fretted all
the way back about how he would say goodnight and whether he would try to come in with me, but he merely kissed me in a friendly way. I thought that odd, when twice before he has kissed me very passionately. Maybe he is going off me. Maybe he is tired of attempting and failing to seduce me. I am struggling to be honest, trying to decide if this would upset me, I mean if he is cooling towards me and will soon not call any more. Yes, it would. But if that is so, what am I going to do about it? I wish I did not always analyse everything so much. I wish I was able to be spontaneous.

  10 August

  I am not sure why I agreed to come and live in Daphne’s house here. It is so hot, and I could be beside the sea. And I am not so poor that I could not have a real holiday. I could go back to Italy, I could visit places to which I have never been, or I could even accept Mr Russo’s invitation to Long Island. But here I am, in this small, rather airless house. In fact, I know why I came. It is all to do with Frank and Percy. I am making myself available, that is what it is. To see what happens.