Diary of an Ordinary Woman

by Margaret Forster

  We all ate together, just mince and potatoes and a great many onions and carrots to eke the meat out. Claudia ate none of it, and Grace very little. She said she was too excited and too exhausted to eat. So she has gone to bed with Claudia, and is at this minute sound asleep, because I have just checked, and I know nothing yet about where she has been all this time or what has happened to her. I dread hearing what I am sure will be the saddest of stories. I won’t ask her. I will wait, I will be patient, and she can tell me in her own good time, when she is rested and recovered. She has only a small bag with her and it seems to have only things for Claudia in it. Her own clothes are shabby, the biggest give-away of all. Never, never has the elegant Grace been shabby.

  2 October

  Hard to get the twins to go to school but I insisted. Grace, and Claudia too, need peace and quiet. They slept twelve solid hours and looked when they woke as if they could do with another twelve. I had some fresh eggs, a great prize, just got them yesterday morning, and I scrambled them, four of them, and Grace ate nearly all of it, to my immense satisfaction. Good girl, I said, and she smiled and said I sounded like Mother and I said I felt like her. Claudia couldn’t be persuaded to have any, though. She ate only some of the twins’ Weetabix and a little bit of toast, but she drank quite a lot of milk so I didn’t fuss. It was a nice morning so we had a short walk, not far, just along the brook and back. Grace said how pretty and peaceful everything was, as if there was no war and never had been, and I told her about my ambulance career and being a WAAF. She asked after the family and I had to tell her about Alfred and Albert and Michael, and this took a long time, with so much background to fill in.

  Claudia slept again when we got back and I thought Grace might start to enlighten me as I made soup for lunch, but she just went on asking more questions and we got on to Robert and I had to fill her in about the camp and then about Doreen dying, and then we ate and she yawned and said she thought she would have a nap and by the time she woke up the twins were home and there was no privacy to talk even if she had wanted to. As soon as supper was over, she went to bed again with Claudia and the twins. How long will this go on? Ought I to prompt her? Is what she has to tell me so awful or so painful that she needs encouragement to confess it? I thought at first Claudia’s father must be French, but now it begins to enter my head that this may not be the case. He may be German.

  3 October

  Connie came into my room this morning and whispered that Aunt Grace was crying. I got up and followed her into the tiny room where Grace and Claudia were sleeping and saw that she was right, Grace was lying there weeping, the bed shaking with the force of her sobs. I said, Grace, Grace, darling, what is it, sssh, sssh, while Connie stood by me watching. I sat down on the edge of the bed and held her face in my hands but the dreadful sobs continued and the tears flowed so thick and fast that the neck of her nightdress was soaked. I was so aware of Connie watching and what this sight would do to her, and even more aware of Claudia, lying next to her mother, still, mercifully, half asleep but her eyes beginning to open. I told Connie to go and get a glass of water and she trotted away, and then I found a handkerchief in my dressing-gown pocket and began wiping Grace’s face, all the time telling her that she was safe, she was home, there was nothing to fear. The sobbing began to quieten though the tears still came, and when Connie returned, carrying a glass so full of water it was slopping everywhere, I raised Grace’s head and put the glass to her lips and got her to swallow a little though most of it spilled onto the bedcover so that really, what with her own tears and the water she was practically lying in a swamp. I went on trying to dry her face and eventually the tears dried to a trickle and though she opened her eyes once and stared at me, she then went back to sleep. I was weak with relief. Claudia snuggled up against her mother, thumb in mouth, and slept on. I took Connie’s hand and we tip-toed out and she came into bed with me. She wanted to know, of course, why Grace was crying and I told her she was having a nightmare, probably accurate enough, and Connie said she had nightmares too and seemed satisfied. She dozed off, but by this time it was half past six and there was no point in my trying to go back to sleep, and I didn’t want to, so I got up and made tea and tried to think what to do. All the time I was listening for Grace, but there was no sound till well after the twins were off to school. Then she emerged, wrapped in a blanket, shivering and saying she was so cold and thirsty. She drank some tea and I asked if she felt ill and would she like some aspirin and she said yes, and that she would take two aspirin and if I had a hot water bottle she’d like it filled and she’d go back to bed. When I pointed out that her nightdress was wet round the neck, she felt it and seemed surprised. I told her she’d been crying, that it was wet with her own tears. Then I waited, giving her the opportunity to tell me why she’d been weeping, or to say it was because she was having a bad dream, but all she said was sorry, sorry. Then she took the hot-water bottle and went back to bed and stayed there till lunch-time. I pottered about, making yet more soup, listening for movement all the time and thinking that Claudia couldn’t possibly still be asleep. I crept up the stairs at midday and peeped into Grace’s room. She was asleep but Claudia was not. Her little eyes were wide open and she lay on her back, her right hand holding her mother’s left hand on top of the bedcover. I smiled at her but she didn’t move a muscle of her face, just tightened her grip and Grace moved in her sleep in response to it. So I left them. An hour or so later, when I’d been in the garden getting a cabbage, Grace came down, dressed, carrying Claudia, still in pyjamas. We had the soup. I wondered about a walk, when Claudia was dressed, maybe to meet the twins out of school, but Grace shook her head and said she hadn’t the energy. I’d sorted out some of the twins’ old toys and showed them to Claudia, tempting her to play with them but, though she allowed me to put a teddy bear into her arms and cuddled it in a half-hearted sort of way, she wouldn’t examine the contents of the open toy box. The afternoon passed, the twins came home, we ate, I read stories aloud to the children, they went to bed, and I waited again for Grace to begin her story. But she didn’t, she hasn’t.

  10 October

  A whole week of these terrible crying fits, always in the early hours of the morning, about four o’clock or so, and the same pattern of violent sobbing fading away into an exhausted sleep. I make sure Connie’s and Toby’s door is firmly shut and so is Grace’s and when I get up to go in to her I check Connie has not been disturbed. It can’t go on. I said so to Grace this morning, I said that if perhaps she talked to me about what had happened maybe she would feel better and the nightmares would stop. She shook her head and because I was feeling tired myself and worried I said that at least if she talked to me I’d understand more. She just shuddered and said what she always says, sorry, sorry. Today I tried another tack. I said if she wouldn’t talk about the past we had to talk about the future and what she was going to do. She looked stricken and said, You mean I have to leave? and I said no, of course not but, if she was going to stay, there were things to do, necessary things, like getting her and Claudia ration books, and thinking about clothes because neither she nor her daughter were equipped to face winter. Practical things like that. In fact, I’m not sure how I will get her registered with a ration book, or where we will find a warm coat and boots for each of them. She seems to be expecting me to take charge, and I will, and I am desperately sorry for her, but she must co-operate a little or I can’t do it.

  11 October

  This is new. Tears now during the day, sometimes most of the day. I will have to get the doctor to come. I said that to her today and then regretted it because the sobbing became worse. But I will have to. God knows what this wordless distress is doing to her own little girl, who is the saddest child I have ever seen. And the effect on the twins, especially Connie, is serious. They don’t rush in from school as they used to but instead peer round the door anxiously, afraid they’ll see this strange aunt of theirs crying. Toby asked today when Aunt Grace was going home. I
said I didn’t know, not daring to admit this was probably her home now.

  12 October

  I wish the doctor was a woman, and young. Dr Grant is very nice, and has always been good with the twins, but somehow I feel Grace needs a woman doctor. Still, a doctor is a doctor and there is no choice. I have to have a medical opinion, some help with this crying. I keep thinking of George and what he was like when he came back from the war and how long it was before ever he got proper treatment. Grace at least needs something to calm her, to settle her nerves.

  13 October

  Dr Grant came today. I’d been to see him and explained the problem and he was very kind and understanding and said he’d just pop in, as if he were a friend, and run his eye over my sister. By great good fortune, or at least that’s what I thought, he came while Grace was in the middle of one of her crying fits, sitting at the kitchen table supposedly peeling potatoes for me, her tears blinding her and making her careless with the knife so that she was cutting great thick wodges of skin off them wasting half of each potato. She hardly heard or saw Dr Grant sit opposite her though he said good morning and asked how she was feeling. She made no objection when he felt her pulse. After a few minutes of looking at her, he got out his prescription pad and wrote something down and then took some tablets out of his bag and asked for a glass of water and gave them to her. Claudia was watching him all the time, clinging to her mother’s leg, half under the table. Dr Grant tried to play peekaboo with her, but she wouldn’t respond. I went with him to the gate, and he looked worried and said Grace was undoubtedly in the middle of a breakdown and that he wasn’t sure it could be managed at home even with medication and that she really needed to be hospitalised, but that in the present circumstances he wasn’t at all sure he would be able to find a suitable place for her. He said it was a lot for me to cope with and did I have a relative I could call on to help and I said not really, though I have a brother and sister-in-law who have a farm and he said a farm would be a good place for Grace to be if nursing care there could be arranged, but he repeated that it might come to hospitalisation. My sister, he said, had clearly suffered terribly and the fact that she was unwilling or unable to talk about it, even to me, meant she had not begun to recover. It’s not just the soldiers who have suffered injury in this war, he said, as he left.

  21 October

  Daphne arrived, quite without warning, and I have never been so glad to see her in my life. She took one look at Grace and said, Good God, whatever has happened to you? and it was so direct and honest it seemed to startle Grace, who actually said, Everything, everything has happened, every terrible thing you can name. And I held my breath, hoping she was about to start talking but instead, as usual, she began weeping and then rushed upstairs, followed by Claudia, who never lets her mother out of her sight. Daphne raised her eyebrows at me, but I shrugged, and shook my head, and sighed and told her this had been going on ever since Grace arrived nearly three weeks ago. I told her I’d called the doctor and he’d prescribed tranquillisers and that the night-time sobbing had stopped but there are still outbursts in the day and that I am no nearer knowing what has happened. Daphne smoked and looked thoughtful and asked if I wanted to know what her guess would be. It was the same as mine. Daphne said only time and tender loving care would help poor Grace recover and I said I knew that but didn’t know if I was up to providing it. I have to look after Grace and Claudia but it isn’t the same as having to look after the twins, the obligation isn’t the same, and I have to think about the consequences for them too.

  *

  Life is tough for Millicent for the next eight months and there is a great deal of tension displayed in the diary. She reflects often that she hadn’t known how lucky she was in the previous year when she had had nothing more serious than feeling detached and bored to complain about, nothing more trying than the domestic and maternal duties she was bound by. Now, at the end of 1944 and until the end of the war in 1945, she is driven frantic coping with Grace who goes from those desperate bouts of sobbing to total inertia. She won’t get up, won’t wash, won’t eat and won’t attend to her child. Dr Grant finds a place for her in a mental hospital which is fifty miles away, near Oxford, but when Millicent goes to arrange for Grace’s transfer she is so appalled by the conditions there she cancels it and keeps her sister at home. The doctor helps by finding a nurse who will come daily, and gradually Grace improves. But that still leaves the problem of Claudia who, copying her mother, and wanting always to be with her, comes near to starving herself and is entirely mute. Millicent records that the twins, from being happy delightful children, are becoming aggressive and discontented. They say they hate Grace and hate Claudia. Millicent is bitter that having helped the twins survive their own tragedy she can now do little to protect them from the effects of someone else’s trauma. But she hangs on grimly, her sights set firmly on the ending of the war, her return to London and the return of Robert (from whom, in August, she does receive an official postcard saying his health is ‘usual’), when she convinces herself everything will sort itself out.

  The frustrating thing is that never, in all these months, is it revealed what happened to Grace or who Claudia’s father was. Grace, when on the way to recovering at last, doesn’t explain and Millicent stops expecting her to. It seems extraordinary that she didn’t insist on an explanation, but if she did, and if she was given one, it is not in her diary.

  But I think it is almost certain that Grace did have a German protector, who fathered Claudia, though whether this was a liaison of choice or whether she was coerced into it, is impossible to tell. A few clues to what happened emerge long afterwards, but at this point Millicent knows nothing, except that her sister has obviously suffered terribly and is greatly changed in appearance. It was not surprising, though, that Grace was so thin and worn because ever since 1943 food had been very scarce in Paris. Half to three quarters of all French produce was reckoned by then to have been siphoned off to Germany, and malnutrition among the population in Paris was inevitable. Rationing was strictly applied, but even the miserable rations were difficult to obtain. Not even bread could be relied upon, and though having Claudia would have entitled Grace to more generous amounts of staples like milk and eggs it is difficult to see how, being English, she could obtain a ration card – making it even more likely, of course, that at least at first she very probably had a German protector.

  *

  23 April 1945

  The blackout has ended, not that it was taken very seriously here. All the same, removing the thick black linings Tilda had fixed to the back of the shutters felt very significant. Became quite carried away, turning it into a metaphor for the removal of all that is black in my own life. Didn’t throw the cloth away though. The wartime habit of thinking every little thing may come in useful will not leave me easily.