6 April 1990
WHAT A MISERABLE business growing very old is proving to be. I thought I would keep my own teeth until the very end, but I have had to suffer the humiliation of having my top teeth extracted, or almost all of them, only the wisdom teeth and a molar each side left. What a miserable business. Mr Dawson said I had been unfortunate: after a certain age teeth don’t usually deteriorate but my old amalgam fillings had caused an infection and loosened the teeth and there was nothing he could do to save them. He assures me that the plate he is making will serve me beautifully, but I doubt it. I cannot bear to look at myself, my mouth now slack and ugly. Heaven knows, it is bad enough looking in the mirror, anyway, and I try not to. I can eat, my bottom teeth suffice, but it is awkward. Luckily, I have very little appetite now. Soup does me fine for the moment. Teeth, eyes, joints – all collapsing and the sudden heart attack I would have preferred is less likely all the time. I dread finding myself in an institution. I won’t let it happen. Yet I know, even as I write this, that I may not have the power or means to prevent it. It agitates me to think this. I feel decisions about my future ought to be made now, and by me, before it is too late. But like most people, because it is all so painful to contemplate, I defer it. I let time roll on, I lull my fears with a false sense of security, a foolish que sera sera attitude.
*
But Millicent’s worries about having to go into an institution are, happily, never realised. She never imagined she would ever leave her London house, where she has lived after all from 1936 (with an interruption of course during the war years), but in 1992, Harry and his wife persuade her to move to a cottage near to them. Although she doesn’t write about it much, Millicent says she thinks about it long and hard before deciding to agree. The plain fact is that she has no other family except Grace, who is still in New York, and Connie and Toby, with whom she has lost contact, and no close friends. Her neighbours seem to change all the time and she knows she could not depend on them in the future if she should become housebound. She doesn’t want to depend on anyone but knows it is likely she might be forced to. She also acknowledges that since she has stayed more and more in the house, London’s amenities now mean little to her. She no longer goes to the theatre or is able to roam the parks and squares as she once did.
So, in 1992, at the age of 91, she sells her London house and moves to the country. Harry and Joanna arrange everything for her and it is not nearly as traumatic as she has anticipated. In fact, she records in her diary that she feels she has been given a new lease of life. Her cottage delights her and she even quite likes being part of a village. People are kind to her, and Joanna and her children visit every day, if just for a few minutes. The only person apparently not happy about the move is Connie, but then Connie is becoming stranger by the minute. The entries about her are short and sound very controlled, though it is not exactly clear what is being controlled – anger, perhaps? Or alarm?
*
20 June 1992
I wish Connie would not keep telephoning if she is going to be so unpleasant. I have invited her to come and stay so she can see how comfortable and content I am but she says she hasn’t time.
25 June
A glorious day, roses fully out and cascading down the back wall of the cottage. Only a letter from Connie spoiled the day. I didn’t want to open it, but felt obliged to. I think being with this group has unhinged her mind. She rants on about my being taken advantage of and I cannot imagine what on earth she is talking about. Such a contrast with Toby’s reaction to my news. I never expected him even to acknowledge the letter I sent, telling him where I was going, but he has responded immediately, full of approval and enthusiasm for the whole idea of the move. Maybe he is happier in California – he sounds so much more like the young Toby, cheerful and forthcoming again.
4 July
What does Connie want from me? Money? Possibly. She may think now that I have a great deal, knowing as she does what I sold my house for. I suppose this ridiculous commune, or whatever it is, needs money. Well, it will not get mine.
*
Other entries about Connie are equally cryptic. Previously, Millicent has mentioned, in the late 1980s when her Greenham protest came to an end, that Connie went to the north-west of Scotland with a group of other women. She was going to write a history of Greenham Common while living with these other feminists in a self-sufficient way, growing their own food and so forth. Millicent gives this idea six months, but Connie stays (though no book seems to have been written, unless it was published under another name). Communication has become infrequent until Millicent writes to say she is moving to be near Harry. Then she records that an avalanche of letters descends on her. Why Connie, who hasn’t seen her aunt for years by then, should object so violently to this move is a puzzle. Millicent may have been right, it may indeed have been to do with money. Connie hasn’t worked since 1981 and cannot have much left of her own money. She may think Harry is trying to get Millicent to leave him an inheritance Connie regards as hers. Whatever the reason, it is sad to witness the drifting apart of aunt and niece. But on the other hand, the emergence of Joanna as a support for Millicent balances this. She likes Joanna very much, finds her kind and gentle, rates her an excellent wife and mother, and most important of all utterly happy with her life. In 1995, when Millicent finds writing too painful to struggle on with, she asks Joanna to become her amanuensis.
I May 1995
This diary is now being written for me by Joanna King, wife of my nephew Harry, my hands being too arthritic to make writing anything but a chore, I can still write but am finding it painful. I am sitting with my eyes closed in an attempt to pretend I am alone though I am very aware of Joanna opposite me writing this down. I don’t think it is going to work, though that will be through no fault of Joanna’s, of course. Speaking is not the same as writing, it was the writing itself, the very formation of the letters, which led me on. I don’t like the sound of my voice either. This will never do. Joanna, we will stop, I will wait until I feel I need my diary.
16 June
This is another attempt to speak my diary and if it fails to satisfy me I shall not try again. I have never written down dreams. It always seemed such a waste of time, especially as that is what dreams are in my opinion, waste matter – Joanna, you need not write this down – the waste bin of the mind. But this last six weeks I have been so bothered by the same dream that I know that if I was keeping my diary myself, I would be bound to describe it. I dream I am marching, a very pleasant feeling in itself at my age, very enjoyable to feel my legs moving so freely and painlessly, and the energy of the marching invigorates me and I know I am smiling. I am marching with many, many other people, men as well as women but mostly women – though no children I notice, where are the children if there are so many women? – at any rate, I am marching with hordes of others but I have no idea where to. We are not in uniform, we do not carry weapons, this is not an army, this is not a war dream. And there are no banners, nobody is shouting out slogans, there are no signs that this is a protest march. I march all night but I am never tired. Sometimes, I see the marchers, including myself, from above. There is no end to us, behind and ahead, still we come, a never-ending stream. Joanna, that is from a hymn, is it not, life like a never-ending stream, something like that?
Afterword
The hymn Millicent is probably thinking of is ‘O God, our help in ages past’, where in verse five ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream, / Bears all its sons away’. There is a note after this, saying that Millicent decides not to go on because trying to speak her diary does not feel comfortable. Harry then suggests a tape-recorder, so that his aunt can have the privacy she feels essential but, though she tries this, it is no more successful – the two existing tapes are mostly full of her fussing about whether the tape-recorder is working, and whether her voice is loud enough. But the failure of these methods focuses attention on what is going to happen to her diaries and, as related in the introduction,
that is how I came into the picture.
So, the diaries end, after all those years, not with a bang but with something of a whimper. They fade out with a dream. But of course when I’d finished studying them, Millicent was still alive and had promised to let me visit her again to ask her questions arising from them. I was looking forward to this, and spent a long time deciding which areas to concentrate on, feeling that if I bombarded her with what were essentially trivial inquiries, to do with dates and places and names, then she might not have the energy to satisfy my curiosity on deeper issues. Most of all I wanted her to concentrate on the significance to her of her diary throughout her life, and especially at times of crisis, those periods when she simply stopped writing it. The gaps spoke louder to me than the entries before and after, and though I worried about how painful it might be for her if I probed these areas, I wanted to do it. I also very much wanted, perhaps most of all, to get her to decide whether she felt she had indeed taken wrong turns in her life, and if so at what stage. Had life, in her opinion, been a series of choices, or did she see it as a random affair, a matter of being dealt a certain set of cards and her only choice that of how to play them? All the other people I’d known who had lived to almost a hundred, including my own father, had been remarkably firm believers in what is called ‘fate’ and I’d always found it interesting that this didn’t depress them, but instead appeared to please them. I guessed because it freed them from responsibility.
When I was ready, I made an appointment through Joanna to visit Millicent again. In fact, Joanna herself drove me down, picking me up after another trip to see her sister. I was relieved to hear from her that Millicent was still in good health, though she had been having some trouble with breathing and was becoming a little bit forgetful. This last bit was not good news, since I wanted her to do a great deal of remembering, but Joanna assured me it was just normal forgetting of names and nothing approaching senile dementia. On the drive down she asked if there had been any great surprises in the diaries and I said it depended what one already knew. Since I had known nothing, beyond the fact of Millicent’s age and status, everything had been a surprise. I hadn’t, I said, expected her to have had love-affairs of the kind that she did, wrongly thinking that she would have been too respectable and that for women of her generation it had been a case of nice girls didn’t. Joanna said she was glad that Millicent had had lovers. She’d always thought it odd that Millicent had never married because even now it was obvious that she’d been pretty and lively, and Joanna had always imagined she must have had a fiancé who was killed in the war. I told her then a bit about Robert, but not about the baby in case Millicent wanted that kept private till after her death. But then Joanna asked a question I’d given a lot of thought to: when, on the evidence of the diaries, had Millicent been at her happiest and her unhappiest? The first part was the easiest to answer – she’d been at her happiest, I was sure, during the beginning of her love-affair with Robert – but the second was harder. There were many times, I knew, when Millicent had been wretchedly unhappy – on the death of her father, after her miscarriage, and after several other deaths – and, apart from those tragedies, there were the miserable years teaching in Brighton and enduring lonely years in Blockley. She had had quite a lot of unhappiness in her long life and yet her spirit had never been broken, she’d never succumbed to despair.
Millicent was standing looking out of the window when we drew up and rushed to open the door but it wasn’t us she was so enthusiastically waiting to welcome but her beloved diaries. Helping her to stack them back in their cupboard was touching – she almost stroked each exercise book as she put it on its shelf and smiled with enormous satisfaction when the task was done and she had closed and locked the door. She asked me how long it would take for me to edit the diaries. I said, now that I had read them all and selected and photocopied the entries I wanted to use, it was a question of shape, of making sure that my own contribution provided a framework for her words. It would, I reckoned, take me about a year. I thought she might think that was far too long, but on the contrary she was pleased, saying that, as she’d told me at the beginning, she didn’t want the book published till after her death, so the longer it took me, the more likely she was to have departed this life.
We then went back into her sitting-room and settled down with some tea and she told me to ‘fire away’. I fired, and almost immediately became aware that for all her outward brightness and apparent coherence, Millicent’s mind was not nearly as sharp as it had seemed when I first met her. I hadn’t then, of course, been subjecting her to detailed questioning, but even so I estimated there had been considerable deterioration. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t recall names, or even that when names were mentioned they seemed to mean nothing to her (though that was more alarming), but it was so disappointing that she couldn’t begin to discuss emotions and feelings at crucial periods of her life. When I tried, as delicately as possible, to talk about the loss of her baby she looked shocked and said, ‘Did I have a baby? Are you sure, dear?’ When I produced the relevant pages I’d photocopied, and read them out to her, she became agitated and I ended up apologising and consoling her, regretting I’d ever tried to bring the subject up. After that, I was much more careful, sticking to the less traumatic mysteries, such as why did she not go ahead and gain her Open University degree. She was happy enough to offer explanations here but, even then, there was a lack of conviction in her voice. I knew there was no point hoping for enlightenment on sensitive matters, and our conversation quickly degenerated into general chat. ‘Well, you know everything about me now,’ she said, ‘my whole life, every little detail, is in those diaries.’ It would have been cruel to disagree, but I left full of regret that Millicent was not ten years younger and able to supply vital information as a kind of codicil to her own diaries.
A month later, she fell and broke her hip. On 13 January 2000, the anniversary of her father’s death, she died. At her own request, there was no funeral. If there had been, I would have gone to it, longing as I did to meet Connie and any other members of the family who might have attended. In her will, Millicent had left everything equally divided between Harry, Toby and Connie, with a small legacy to Julian, Alfred’s son (whom she had never met and knew nothing about). In an earlier will (in which Connie alone had been left the house), the diaries had been bequeathed to Connie, and this bequest still stood, which surprised me. Joanna told me that when Connie came down from Scotland to collect them, she told her of her aunt’s agreement that I should edit them, and that after her death they should be given to a university archive, but as far as she knows Connie has not yet deposited them anywhere. Connie has not contacted me.
I hope she will indeed entrust the diaries to some responsible person and that they will be treasured. They tell the story of an unremarkable life and yet what Millicent King experienced in her very ordinariness was shared by so many of her generation. To me, she is as symbolic, in her way, as the unknown soldier: the Unknown Woman of her times.
Acknowledgements
The following books (as well as many contemporary newspapers and magazines) proved useful during the editing process.
Women and the Great War, (ed.) Joyce Marlow (Virago Press, 1998)
Greenham Common: Women at the Wire, Barbara Hartford and Sarah Hopkins (Women’s Press Ltd, 1985)
Few Eggs and No Oranges: a diary showing how unimportant people in London and Birmingham lived through the war years, 1940–1945, Vere Hodgson (Persephone, 1999)
The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain Since 1820, Jill Liddington (Virago Press, 1990)
Lesser Gods, Greater Devils, Arthur Lane (Allen Lane, 1993)
Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940–1944, Ian Ousby (Pimlico, 1998)
Wartime Women: An Anthology of Women’s Wartime Writing for Mass-Observation, 1937–45, (ed.) Dorothy Sheridan (Heinemann, 1990)
Bombers and Mash: The Domestic Front 1939–1945, Raynes Minns
(Virago Press, 1985)
Wartime Jottings of a WAAF Driver 1941–46, Diana Lindo (Woodfield Publishing, 1992)
Goldsmith’s College: A Centenary Account, A.E. Firth (Athlone Press, 1991)
Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation 1940–1944, David Pryce–Jones (Collins, 1983)
The Thirties: A Dream Revolved, Julian Symons (Faber and Faber, 1975)
A Woman’s Place, 1910–1975, Ruth Adam (Persephone, 1977)
Penelope Hall’s Social Services of England and Wales, Penelope Hall (Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1983)
Author’s Note
This book began as described in the first two pages of the introduction, but I never did meet the woman in question. She cancelled our meeting at the last minute because of some family objections. I was already so looking forward to her diaries that I decided to overcome my disappointment by pretending I had indeed obtained and read them. The result is fiction. The real ‘Millicent’ has since died, and though her diaries exist, I have never read them.
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