Diary of an Ordinary Woman

by Margaret Forster

  15 November

  Another late night with Robert. We took the Thompson children into care and had Mrs Thompson committed. It was horrible. Mrs Potter could not take the younger two and I had to place them with Mrs Preston and she is not nearly as good. It is all such a mess and I can’t help blaming Mr Thompson’s absence. Until he disappeared this was not a problem family. I ranted on to Robert about how murderous I felt towards the man and Robert as usual showed equanimity, saying we’d never met the man and didn’t know the circumstances and there was no point being judgemental.

  We went afterwards for a drink. Robert has never, at least in my company, touched alcohol, but tonight he ordered a brandy and so did I. We both felt in need of something to buck us up. It was warm in the pub, a nice fire going, and it wasn’t too crowded so the corner we parked ourselves in was peaceful. I don’t know if it was the brandy, I suppose it must have been, but Robert was different, much less distant. He suddenly asked me if I had a steady boyfriend, and then immediately apologised for having asked. I said I didn’t mind a bit. I told him that no, I hadn’t a boyfriend, and hadn’t had one for some time. He said he was sure it was through choice. Flatterer, I thought, but found myself hastening to reply that, yes, as a matter of fact it was. Then he said, you’re very attractive, if I may say so. I felt the way I used to feel with Frank and tried not to show it. I would so have liked to reach out and take hold of his hand and tell him how I was feeling, but of course I did no such thing. Instead, I asked him if he had a steady girlfriend, and then he took my breath away. No, he said, looking straight at me, I am married. The shock made me start and I spilt my drink a little, and then was furious with myself because there was nothing very shocking about what he’d said and I’d made myself look like a silly goose reacting like that. He talked quite rapidly then, telling me he had married at 18 to a childhood sweetheart. When he was 16, he’d lied about his age and joined up, and when he came home from the war he was so shaken by what he’d been through that he had more or less fallen into her comforting arms and married her. Almost from the beginning the marriage hadn’t been a success and, when they had a baby a year later and it died, things got worse and worse. But his wife, Doreen, wouldn’t admit it and wouldn’t agree to a divorce, and so, after ten years of this, he left her, and came to London. He said only Doreen had grounds for divorce but since she wouldn’t start proceedings there was nothing he could do. He wasn’t a free man and couldn’t act like one, and that was that. I didn’t know what to say. It was all too much to take in. But all the time he was talking I felt more and more attracted to him and horrified myself by wishing he would kiss me. In the end, I managed to murmur a few strangled words, of sympathy I suppose, can’t remember what they were. Then we left the pub and as he walked me to the tube he put his arm round me to share his umbrella. I let him keep it there and he tightened his grip a little. He said goodnight very seriously and sadly, and I said it too, and that was all.

  8 December

  Promised Mother I would come to her for Christmas and stay at least a week but now that the time has almost arrived I wish I hadn’t done any such thing. I can’t take Robert with me and I don’t want to be without him: it is as simple, and as awkward, as that. I don’t know how I got into this state so quickly and I worry that the speed of it all means I will regret it, but then I remind myself that I have actually known Robert for over two years and it is only recently that things seemed to happen so quickly, since he confessed that he is married. He says now that he thought telling me this, speaking the truth, would mean the end to any chance of our becoming more than friends. He doesn’t know, I tell him now, how long and hard I thought about what I should do, how afraid I was that he would think me forward and the wrong kind of girl. It cost me a great deal in pride to make an overture and if he had hesitated for even a second in accepting the invitation to tea and a walk before, I would never have asked him again. It was so hard to take the initiative and I will never tell anyone that I did.

  12 December

  How changed I feel. A great quiet has come over me and I dream my way through half the hours in the day. I feel as if something raw in me has been soothed and for the first time I know the meaning of the word relaxed. All of me is relaxed and it feels delicious. I never felt this with Frank. With Frank, there was an excitement, a physical thrill, but it scared me sometimes and left me exhausted when the exhilaration was over. Now, lying in Robert’s arms, I feel as though I might melt entirely into him. It makes me weep. I want him with me all the time, I am distraught when he leaves and find myself returned to my old tense state. He is necessary to me, to my well-being, and I have dared to tell him so.

  19 December

  I go to Brighton tomorrow, leaving Robert alone in London for the whole Christmas period. I wanted him to stay tonight but he has just left, saying he thinks it wiser. He does not have Frank’s attitude to love-making. To Robert, it is all very serious and he goes on and on about being a married man unable to get a divorce and how it is not right for him to compromise me. It is such an old-fashioned word but it is the one he uses: ‘compromise’ indeed. I think he might be shocked at how little I care about such things as my reputation. If I worried over that I would never have slept with Frank, but then Robert does not know about that. There is no need for him to.

  20 December

  Mother says I look very well indeed, with what she calls a sparkle in my eye. Grace immediately piped up that I must be in love, which made me blush, and of course this was taken as proof. Mother asked so eagerly if I did have a new young man that I could not deny her the small pleasure of knowing that I did but warned her not to start imagining anything would come of it. She asked why ever not and I hadn’t the heart to say because he is already married. It would have hurt her so much. Poor Mother, always having hopes and plans for her unmarried older daughter and the most important of these being marriage. What a holy grail that is for her, ever to be sought. In her eyes respectability is all.

  22 December

  Alfred arrived with the news that he is getting married, with what Mother calls ‘unseemly haste’ which in her opinion can only mean one thing and she daren’t think about that, so is all in favour of the haste. Alfred is, after all, 27. Surely she wants him married, considering he is such a worry to her with his unsettled life; but no, it is me she really wants to see married. She has even started to add ‘before I die’! It is my great age, of course. I am on the shelf. She is even a little ashamed of me, though she won’t admit it. I don’t know how I am going to get through this week without Robert.

  29 December

  One more day to go. I think I would go mad if it had to be longer. Esther is so irritating in every way, fussing about the most trivial things and wanting to control everyone. She pretends to be interested in my work but I can tell that she thinks it no different from the voluntary work she does, which consists merely of taking a tea trolley round the hospital wards. Then she quizzes me all the time about how I spend my leisure time and with whom. It is worse than Mother and her endless inquiries about romances, or Grace with her teasing about what she calls lover-boys. Albert does not have to put up with all this. He seems never to have had a girlfriend and is the very opposite. of his twin. I think Father would’ve been pleased with how Albert has turned out: he is so sensible and dependable even if his job is not very grand.

  1 January 1936

  That was the happiest New Year I have ever seen in. It is rash to say so, but I feel it is going to be a good year for me even though there are no actual omens for such optimism. Robert will still be married, unless his wife relents, which is unlikely, but I am not going to let that ruin our lives. We can be together in all the ways that matter. I am lucky: I rent my own flat and I do not see why he cannot share it with me. He is the one who thinks this would be wrong and will not agree, but I am determined to persuade him.

  But it was a wonderful night, and he did stay, and I don’t think regretted it. I still haven�
��t told him about Frank and now I don’t think I will. It is not as if I had been married to him. I do feel a little guilty about this, it isn’t quite honest, and honesty between lovers is important. I will not make comparisons with Frank. That would be despicable.

  6 January

  Hard to be at work with Robert and obliged to keep up the pretence that we are just colleagues, especially with Mavis ever alert and beady-eyed. Robert manages better than I do. He is his usual distant, cool but kindly self, taking no more notice of me than of Mavis or Doris or Gloria. He says he had grown so used to having to deny his attraction to me that it is quite easy to keep it up. But I find it difficult. I long to touch him, and have to resist smiling at him in a meaningful way. When we go out on visits together it is such a relief to wait until we are clear of the building and then hide in a doorway and kiss.

  14 January

  Robert stayed the night again, but still will not move in. It is awful to think of him going back to his bed-sitting-room. I have seen it, though he did not want me to, and it is a horrid, dark little room without any comfort at all. He has lived there like a monk all this time and there is no need for him to go on doing so. He is so moral, and worries so about my reputation in a sweet but old-fashioned way. Frank never worried in the least. It is not as though Robert is a clergyman and it is not as though I cared two hoots about reputations. Except, I suppose, for Mother’s sake. She would be appalled to know I want a married man to live with me, and shocked beyond words that I am already sleeping with him. I wouldn’t like her to know, that’s all. Stupidly, I said so to Robert – adding that since she lives in Brighton she never would get to hear of it – and he pounced on this and said these things always leaked out and my mother would hear, which was exactly why he would not agree to living openly together. But we do not have to live openly. We could be ever so discreet. It could be managed somehow but Robert won’t even discuss how.

  20 January

  The King died today. I can’t say this means much to me. Mother telephoned, wanting to talk about it and full of royalist distress. I was surprised that Robert turned out to be quite a royalist too. He says he is for King and Country, it’s just an instinctive feeling. He says the new King will be a good one. As Prince of Wales, Robert says, he has shown concern for the poor. I didn’t know that.

  24 January

  It is extraordinary how many women I’ve visited in their homes these last few days have expressed royalist opinions. What has the King been to them, or done for them? Nothing, I would have thought, and yet they act as though he had been a much loved relative. One woman, Mrs Carruthers, was actually red-eyed with weeping over the poor King. She likes the Prince of Wales but wishes he were married because she’s heard – who from, in the circles she moves in? – he’s ‘a bit of a lad’. Well, it brightened up what is usually a pretty grim visit.

  1 February

  Alfred got married today, but thankfully my presence was not required with it being not much of an occasion and taking place in Skegness where his bride hails from. Mother went all that way, with Grace, and Albert too, quite enough to represent the family. My new sister-in-law is called Ethel and she is only 18. Heaven knows how Alfred is going to look after her and the infant when it arrives.

  5 February

  Most entertaining letter from Grace about Alfred’s wedding. She says Ethel is rather fun, much preferable to Esther, and very pretty indeed. Her family own a fish and chip shop, much to Mother’s chagrin, and are all big and fat and talk in broad Yorkshire and are impossible to understand. Ethel was a waitress in a hotel where Alfred stayed and that is how it all began. Grace says Mother kept muttering to her that at least Alfred had behaved honourably, but she was clearly smouldering with resentment that her precious son had been, she was sure, taken in and hooked by a trollop. The baby is due in June. The bride wore white all the same. No one knows where the happy couple are going to live but apparently Mother has a dreadful suspicion they will turn up in Brighton. I was enjoying all this gossip until I got to the end of the page and found a second sheet with some alarming news: Grace is coming to London. She has been offered a job at an establishment in Bond Street, making dresses, and is thrilled. She wonders if she could stay with me rather than Tilda, though Mother thinks it would be better if she went to Tilda. I must reply carefully, not seeming to reject her as a guest but siding with Mother. I will point out, though it is not really true, that Tilda lives much nearer to Bond Street and that it will be so much easier for her to get to work and back. But Grace is smart. She will be suspicious.

  2 March

  Grace arrives tomorrow. I am meeting her at Victoria and taking her home with me for the first weekend and then to Tilda’s. Spent the day removing all trace of Robert from the flat. It seems so silly to be hiding the truth from my own sister but she is young and impressionable and I don’t really know her intimately. But then I conceal Robert’s existence even from Tilda. I don’t know why I haven’t told Tilda. Partly, a big part, this is Robert’s fault. He doesn’t want my family to know. He says he would feel ashamed in front of them, and knows all too well what they would think of him.

  6 March

  Grace has moved to Tilda’s though made it plain she would much rather have stayed here. I tried to give her a good time. We did the sights, all the obvious ones, and walked for miles and went to the cinema and had tea at Gunter’s. Grace is a pleasure to be with, but I do feel more like a mother to her than a sister. She was asking me last night about Father and what he was really like and it was hard trying to describe him and how much I loved him. She has no memory of him at all, of course. Those years after Father’s death fascinate her and she wanted to know all about my being a shop girl and said she could not imagine it. Neither can I sometimes: it seems unreal.

  21 March

  Spring, at last. All week it has been warm and sunny, and even in the dismal streets I visit the blue sky above makes a difference. I want to go on holiday with Robert, somewhere abroad, Spain or France or Italy, somewhere foreign where no one knows us and we need not be furtive. Mr Russo included an invitation to his Long Island home with his Christmas card. I would love to go to America and introduce Robert to him and I could meet his new wife. Robert says America is out of the question, it would be too expensive, but he will think about somewhere on the Continent. But why does he have to, why does he hesitate? I cannot see a single thing against it. He says he has not much money yet he is paid more than I am. I don’t understand this. It hurts me to think he is just making excuses. He says he isn’t, but in that case why not go away with me?

  *

  Quite why Robert was so reluctant to go on holiday with Millicent is never clear, but after some pressure and persuasion (exhaustively detailed in the diary) he agrees, though insists that everything should be done as cheaply as possible. They go to Spain, travelling through France by train. Millicent keeps quiet, or says that she does, about memories of her previous luxurious ride through another part of France. The train is uncomfortable (they are in third class and the seats are wooden) and because Robert is watching the francs they make only one overnight stop, staying in a not very clean pension.

  But once they reach Cadaques, a fishing village some eighty miles north of Barcelona, she is happier. They find lodgings in one of the white-arcaded houses which line the main street hugging the shoreline. The two of them swim, walk, have long wine-drinking meals and make passionate love. At least, Millicent is passionate, or judges that she is, but there are one or two entries which seem to suggest Robert may be rather overwhelmed by her. There is just a hint of smugness about the way she records his astonishment at her sexual energy and she even goes so far as to deduce that since his only experience has been with his wife then she, Doreen, must have been frigid. The sun shines the whole time and Millicent wishes they could stay for ever. She never comments on the political situation in Spain, though there must surely have been plenty of signs of unrest, even in the quiet region where they we
re staying. But she does record that Robert describes how, in the elections of February that year, the Popular Front had gained a majority over all opponents, and that as a consequence many socialists and radicals had been released from prison. Millicent imagines that this pleased him, but he says the right-wing generals will never tolerate the new government and that trouble will soon result. He assures her that there is going to be a struggle between good and evil, it is as simple as that. Millicent reckons that he is being pessimistic and refuses to entertain the idea that there will be a war in Spain or anywhere else.

  Not long after their return to London the Spanish Civil War begins in mid-July, with the generals’ revolt, and to her surprise and alarm, Robert considers going to fight for the government forces against the rebel fascists. Millicent has never thought of him as likely to do such a thing (and he doesn’t do it) in spite of knowing that as a young man he volunteered in the Great War. She concludes that she does not know him as well as she thought she did, but she is rather proud that he is turning out to be a man of such principle.