Diary of an Ordinary Woman

by Margaret Forster

  26 July

  Toby rang today, wanting to speak to Connie. I told him where she was and he said he would ring back after she returned, and was about to hang up, but I protested and said he could talk to me for a while, surely. I haven’t spoken to him for months and haven’t seen him for well over a year. I’m afraid I pointed that out rather reproachfully and gave him what Connie calls a guilt trip, but I can’t hide that I am hurt by his lack of contact. It is not that I am a crabbed old aunt wanting gratitude for services rendered in the past, but I don’t like to think he cannot spare five minutes to talk to me. I wish I understood what his work consisted of and could ask intelligent questions and get closer to him that way, but I don’t. Connie says she doesn’t think anyone understands it, it is much too complicated. All she knows is that his research is to do with nuclear power and she wishes it was anything else but that. If only he had become a medical doctor like his father and not a physicist. I asked all the same how his work was going and he said slowly. I let that go and asked if he was well, and he said yes, but he was troubled with bad headaches, probably because there is a lot of eye strain involved in his work. Conversations have been like this for years now with Toby, I ask questions, he replies, and then he waits. He never asks me anything. I tried to open this stilted exchange out by telling him about his sister’s dedication to the feminist cause but he just grunted. Then I thought to inquire why he wanted her, was it for anything in particular, could I perhaps help. Astonishingly, he said he thought he should tell her he is going to America, to San José in California, to work and live, next month. I asked, calmly, whether he didn’t think I would want to know too. Why hadn’t he told me? There was a silence, though I didn’t feel it was caused by any embarrassment on his part; it felt more like surprise that I should want to know. I asked him if he was emigrating, or was this temporary, and he said it was permanent, he was emigrating. And then I had to drag out of him the reasons, which seemed to be only that the work opportunities are better. I can’t wait for Connie to get back so that we can discuss this.

  29 July

  I should have asked Toby if he would prefer to tell Connie his news himself, but I didn’t, and so worried about whether or not I should. In the event, she was hardly through the front door, looking exhausted and dishevelled, I may say, and not as though she had been at the seaside in this glorious weather, before he happened to ring. I hovered in the kitchen, half listening, waiting for her reaction and rather dreading it – she can be so violent and I don’t want her to break with her twin or say anything she may regret. However, she received his news calmly, almost indifferently. They only talked a bare three or four minutes. I expected her to come and discuss what Toby had said, but she went upstairs straightaway to have a bath, and I was left feeling a little cheated.

  When she came down, I was the one who had to ask what she thought. She shrugged and said it wasn’t exactly unexpected, opportunities were much better for scientists in the USA, and she knew Toby had been approached before and was tempted. All he’s got in his life is work, said Connie, so he might as well go where the best facilities are for doing it. I said it wasn’t very patriotic of him. Patriotic? she echoed, over and over, as though I’d said something incredible. But I stuck to my guns. Yes, I said, patriotic, leaving his own country to take all his skill to America when he owed his entire education to Britain. Connie laughed, but not with real mirth, or it didn’t sound like it, and said I was so insular it was ridiculous, and that patriotism had caused two world wars which was quite enough. I tried to insist that there is nothing wrong with loving one’s country and being devoted to its welfare, but she waved her hands about in that exasperating way she has and said there was everything wrong with it. I started to say that during the war – but she leapt up and put her hand over my mouth and said why didn’t I do something useful like making her a snack. So I did. But after we’d eaten, I couldn’t resist asking if she was not just a little upset about Toby emigrating. She said no, that she no longer had much feeling for him and he had none for her. This shocked me. But you are twins, I said, and you were so close as children, quite inseparable, where on earth has all that gone? She said it was just that they’d grown up and twins were no different to anyone else in that respect whatever people thought; there was nothing shocking about growing apart. I insisted there was, and that it was sad, and she said it was only I who was sad. There was a pause, and then she said she felt Toby was a damaged person. She didn’t know what exactly had damaged him, it was too facile to say it was their parents’ death, though maybe that was at the root of his detachment. She asked me to recall how he had suddenly changed in personality in adolescence, gone quiet and withdrawn and moody, whereas before he had been so energetic and lively. And yet nothing had happened specifically to cause this. I do remember, it is true what she says, but that doesn’t explain why she became so separate from him. It worries me. It isn’t right somehow. What have any of us got to be sure of but family? I sound like Mother – how she used to annoy me when she said that.

  *

  This seems an odd thing for a woman like Millicent to have written, a single elderly woman who, though always involved with family members (and who had of course in many ways sacrificed herself to family responsibilities in taking on her sister’s children), could not be said to have a life revolving round them. But Connie’s apparent lack of emotion about her brother’s decision to emigrate clearly upsets her and makes her wonder if somehow it is her fault. Although she is not a mother, she wants what most mothers want, to see their children close to each other and the family unit tight. But she shows herself to be marvellously undemanding of Connie when she might with justification have made claims on her. Connie after all is the only member of her family with whom she might see herself having a future. At the beginning of 1968, when her niece moves into a flat of her own (in Shepherd’s Bush, an area her aunt considered ‘seedy’) Millicent accepts that she will want to have a private life so she is pleasantly surprised when Connie keeps in close touch and shows no sign of doing so simply out of duty.

  Increasingly, the diaries for 1968 to 1970 demonstrate how Connie continues to influence her aunt in all kinds of ways, keeping up a determined campaign to make Millicent do something more than potter about her house and garden, give her time to voluntary work, and read. She doesn’t see this as scorning her aunt’s way of life, or as trying to humiliate her, though Millicent certainly feels this is implicit in all the lectures about wasting her brains, but as trying to make her aunt see that some use can still be made of her intelligence. It is all part of Connie’s feminist credo to make Millicent look at herself and, even at her age, fulfil her potential.

  *

  10 December 1970

  Connie burst in today waving a newspaper cutting and looking ferociously determined. I assumed she was about to bombard me with information about the latest insult to feminists, but no, it was nothing like that. It turned out to be an advertisement, or rather an announcement, about this new so-called Open University. Connie says it must have been thought up with me in mind and insists I must enrol. She says it is what I have been waiting for all my life, as if she would know, for heaven’s sake. I am much too old to become a student. But Connie got all excited, the way she does, and said she would never forgive me if I didn’t take this opportunity and study for a degree. What on earth would be the point, I protested, and that brought forth more passion, about how education was a point in itself and surely I saw that. I said I would go so far as to send away for details and then think about it, but of course I only said that to calm her down and change the subject. But after she’d gone, I did read the notice several times, and slowly I am beginning to wonder if I am not after all attracted to the idea. It is not the thought of having a degree which attracts me, I am too old to long for such a symbol of achievement, but that I have always wanted to study properly, in a disciplined way, and I have never had the chance. No, that is not true, I have had the chance in tha
t I have had the time and been near libraries and could have at any point in the last twenty years decided to educate myself further. What I have lacked, I suppose, is motivation and guidance. Doing a degree course at home would give me both. I wonder if I could do it.

  *

  Millicent went further than just wondering, sending off for details as she had said she would. At first, she is rather bewildered and finds the information about the different ‘disciplines’ (as they were called) confusing. Everyone had to do a Foundation Course and once she has grasped how it was organised she decides she might as well attempt that and then decide whether she wants to do, or is capable of doing, the six courses necessary to gain a degree. She elects to study Humanities, which had five disciplines that attracted her: History, Literature, Philosophy, History of Art and Music Appreciation. In February 1971 she duly registers as an Open University student (one of 24,000, of whom 40 per cent had no academic qualifications at all). She waits anxiously for the post to bring the first weekly ‘unit’ and is vastly relieved to find she can do the necessary exercises easily, gaining high marks from the beginning. Just as Connie had hoped, the studying gives a particular kind of disciplined structure to her life which it has lacked. It also gives her some excitement. She discovers a real interest in philosophy and reads far more than she is required to, and through the History of Art assignments she is stimulated to go to some London art galleries she has never visited. But the thought of attending the Open University Summer School (compulsory) in August worries her. She doesn’t want to be with other students or take part in group activity, and she is embarrassed about what she calls her ‘great age’ (70 in July). But there is no way out: she has to go to the new East Anglian campus for one week.

  *

  5 August 1971

  Am I mad? I feel as mad as Connie, all het up and excited. I remind myself hourly that I am 70 years of age and it is not appropriate to be in such a state just because I am going to summer school. I worry that I will not be given my own room, though I have been assured that I will. I simply could not go back to sharing, living in a dormitory, even for a week, the way we did in the WAAF. I need my privacy, and not just for the good of my soul. I would not wish, now, to undress in front of others. It is not that I am prudish, but that my body is no longer a sight I welcome and I do not care to show it to others. It is sad, all this shrinking and ageing of the flesh. People still say I look younger than my years, they have always said it, but it makes no difference because even in my late fifties, the insults of ageing had begun. I remember putting a bathing costume on in Greece and being transfixed at noticing for the first time the way the flesh on my thighs fell away in slippy little lumps, and hating the sight. And the way my hands, the backs of them, developed these ugly dark brown splotches. How vain this sounds, but it is not – I am merely facing up to the various disintegrations taking place. I wonder if most of the students will be old and feel as I do. I doubt it. Probably I shall be the oldest. Well, I shall be dignified about it. I shall not attempt to be chummy with those much younger than myself, nor shall I behave in an unseemly way. I am there to discuss our studies, not to form relationships.

  8 August

  Took a long time deciding what to wear before I set off today. I wear trousers a great deal these days – ever since I retired from teaching I’ve tended always to wear them if I am not going anywhere. They are so much more sensible for pottering about the garden. But I didn’t feel comfortable about wearing them to go to this summer school. I suppose I wanted to look dignified, smarter, more my actual age. So I bought a new dress and jacket from Marks & Spencer’s. It’s a rather attractive coral colour – now that my hair is white I can wear pinky shades – and looks fresh and cheerful. I wore Mother’s pearls with it, and her clip-on earrings. Connie says pearls are a joke, but I like them and my neck is not too scrawny yet, so I don’t mind the attention the pretty pearls draw to it. It’s strange the way growing older doesn’t mean I don’t care about how I look – I always thought that when I was old I wouldn’t care, but I do. At any rate, once I was satisfied with my appearance, I set off.

  Drove to Norwich with no difficulty. I am so glad I can drive and still feel perfectly confident in a car. I cannot imagine how I would have managed if obliged to use trains and take taxis or buses. It would all have seemed too much bother and would have discouraged me from travelling. I feel, too, that I can escape easily if I wish to. And I might. First impressions are not cheering, though I do have a small, cell-like room to myself, as promised. These new buildings are horrible, the whole university about as far from dreaming spires as possible: dreadfully ugly, like concrete garages, and the classrooms boom even when only one person speaks, never mind when the two dozen in our group all start talking. The day seemed long, nine to six, and I was fatigued by the end. We gathered in a cafeteria-type place this first evening, terribly uncomfortable plastic chairs, and everyone seemed awkward and unsure, even the tutors. There are ten men and fourteen women, not counting the tutors. All much younger than myself, except for two of the men who I would guess are either my age or older. We sat in a circle and introduced ourselves. It was impossible of course to take everyone’s name in or where they are from but I did register that the men who are my contemporaries are called Robert and Malcolm, Robert from London and Malcolm from Nottingham. It was explained how the school would operate and time-tables were handed out. There seems plenty of free time and mention was made of gathering in the bar before supper each evening. I don’t know that I shall do that, though I don’t want to be stand-offish. One of the women started talking to me while we ate after the introductory talk. She is called Claire, mother of two, always wanted to go to university but never had the chance, yet she is only 42, so it seems to me she could surely have had the chance, but I said nothing. She naturally asked me about myself. I always hate that. It is silly, I know, but I don’t like giving my age or saying I am a single woman – it makes me sound pathetic. There is never anything to say after I have said that. Claire asked me if I had had a career and to shut her up I said I had been a teacher, and that helped, she was instantly satisfied, has me pigeon-holed now. Claire has found the assignments tough. She has so little time to do them, what with having to look after the children and her husband and home and working part-time as a doctor’s receptionist. I admire her, and said so, but already she bores me. Always my trouble, too easily bored, fatal to socialising. I hope I didn’t show it.

  10 August

  I think one thing is becoming clearer each day and that is that this summer school does not in any way, so far as I can judge, prove a help to studying. Precious little studying goes on. I could understand more after sitting on my own in my room at home reading the texts than I have done here sitting with others discussing them. Yet people like Claire seem excited by this group participation. She is constantly exclaiming at how helpful and enlightening she finds other people’s observations and says again and again how glad she is that she came. I am not sure that I am glad. In so many ways it has proved a waste of time, and the fact that I have time to waste is no consolation. This school is all about socialising, as I suspected. There is a great deal of pairing off in the evenings and I imagine this is leading to rather more than platonic relationships. This makes me sound a prig, but I don’t disapprove in the least, for what after all has my life taught me but to take one’s chances when they come. Do I really mean that? I think so, but maybe not entirely. Chances have to be weighed. Being entirely spontaneous is never wise. Lord, how portentous I am becoming. I should remember Frank and what a chance I took then.

  11 August

  Went for a walk this evening. Too beautiful to stay in my cell and I’ve lost all interest in being with a group. Unfortunately, or I thought it was unfortunate at first, I met Robert, who had had the same idea. I saw him ahead of me and I tried to walk very slowly so that I would never catch up, and I had seen a path veering off to the right which I was going to take when I reached it, bu
t he chose to sit down on a bench just near it and it was impossible for me not to be noticed and impossible to pretend I didn’t know. I think he was as embarrassed as I was. I had to stop and say good evening, and he stood up, very gentleman-like, and I said please would he sit down, I was just having a walk and didn’t want to disturb his reverie. I was then going to walk on, but he nodded at the river in front of us and said it was such a perfect view, didn’t I think, and somehow I found myself sitting beside him staring at the view. It was, as he said, very lovely, the river at this point broad and fast-flowing and on this night catching the reddening rays of the setting sun; and beyond the river, on the far bank, there were three weeping willow trees gracefully bowing before a stone wall that enclosed a churchyard. Robert, who is Bob (unlike my Robert, who was never a Bob), said it did him good, scenes like this. He said it wasn’t that he felt Wordsworthian about it, but that it reinforced his belief that essentially the world is a beautiful and peaceful place and he needed that solace. We sat quietly for a while, without even exchanging pleasantries, which I was glad of, and then he said he was going to walk on before the light faded and I found myself rising and walking with him, though I had not been specifically invited to do so. He has a limp. I’d noticed it on the first meeting, as everyone was bound to. I thought initially that maybe he had arthritis but then I decided it was too pronounced for that. When we started walking together he apologised for his slowness and said I should not feel inhibited about walking faster and leaving him behind. I said something about it being an evening made for sauntering, ambling, and not rushing. A war wound, he volunteered, though I’d betrayed no curiosity about the cause of his limp. I was beaten, he went on, not shot, by the Japanese, in Changi, have you heard of Changi? I felt a little leap of alarm, though what I was alarmed about I’m not sure, there was no need or justification for alarm of any kind. I had to clear a sudden thickening in my throat to manage to say that yes, I’d heard of Changi. Then there was a choice. I didn’t have to explain the reasons why, I could easily, being the age I obviously am, have heard of it through what was written about it at the time and afterwards, but I chose to volunteer the information that my Robert had died there. I called him my fiancé. Nothing wrong with that. Bob asked his regiment and when he died, and I had to tell him that though I knew his regiment I couldn’t recall exactly when he was killed except it was in 1943. So, Bob said, was it malnutrition, was it cholera, typhoid, what was it? I told him.