The Diaries of Jane Somers

‘She is one of The Welfare.’

‘No, I don’t.’

All this with the sleet blowing across us and our faces turning blue.

‘She wants to see you, so she says.’

‘Well, what about?’

‘Seeing as you are a Good Neighbour, then there’s another that needs it.’

‘Well, I’m not one,’ I said.

‘Then goodbye, dear. We mustn’t keep you in the cold.’ And they went together toddling along the pavement, arm in arm, very slowly.

Joyce came back next day, and sat at her desk and went through the motions of working, and did work, but she was not there. She is simply not with us. She looked awful, badly dressed, even dusty, her hair greying at the roots, and a greyish edge to her black sweater.

Looking at her, I made an appointment with the hairdresser at once. And determined to devote an evening to my own care.

This is that evening. I have had a real bath, hours of it. I’ve done my fingernails, my toenails, my eyebrows, my ears, my navel, the hard skin on my feet.

What has made me, for so many years, that perfectly groomed person, whom everybody looks at and thinks, how does she do it? has been my Sunday nights. Never did I allow anything to interfere with that. Freddie used to joke about it but I said, Make jokes, I don’t care, I have to do it. On Sunday nights, after supper, for years and years I’ve chosen my outfit for every day of the week ahead, made sure there has been not a wrinkle or a crease, attended to buttons and hems, cleaned shoes, emptied out and polished handbags, brushed hats, and put anything even slightly soiled for the cleaner’s and the launderette. Hours of it, every Sunday night, and when all those pairs of skilled and knowledgeable eyes examined me at work, there has never been, but literally, a hair out of place. Grooming. Well, if I can’t keep it up, my style is in the wastepaper basket, just as Joyce’s style is now. A high-class gipsy, turned slattern, is bizarre; if my style is neglected, there’s nothing left but a dowd.

And now I shall make myself do it: buttons, shoes, collars, ironing, ironing, ironing, and not so much as a thread of loosened lace on a petticoat.

Over three months have gone.

It has been a choice between proper baths and the diary. I’ve had to have something to hold on to.

Joyce came back to work, but she was a ghost, a zombie. Felicity announced she was pregnant, husband Jack asked Joyce to be ‘generous’, Joyce said she wished he would make up his mind, he said, You are vindictive, she said, I must be crazy to want you at all. The poor children are both going crazy and punishing Joyce – she says.

It isn’t that she doesn’t do the work as usual, but she’s not in it. As for what I used to rely on so much, the good atmosphere, the way we used to work together as if we were one person – no, gone. We – Phyllis and I – support her, all the time, tact, tact, tact, oh full marks to all of us, everyone in Editorial, and I watch all this, fascinated, because of how it works. The woman who made the mag, because she did, it was her push, is fading out. I saw a film on telly, elephants supporting with their trunks a dying friend. It reminded me. Because Joyce is fading out. It can’t go on like this, is the unspoken thought. Unspoken, too, is that I will be the new editor. Meanwhile, Joyce says that she will stay in London, with the children, and she will be divorced. The children for the first time ring up here, making demands. Ridiculous, like, where is the jam, where did you put my sweater? Joyce patient, and anguished. For them. Very well, but there are limits to the people one can be sorry for. I’m learning my limits: small ones. Maudie Fowler is all I can manage.

It’s been wet, cold, dismal. Nearly every evening after work I’ve been in to Maudie. I’ve given up even thinking that she ought to agree to be ‘rehoused’; I said it just once, and it took her three days to stop seeing me as an enemy, as one of ‘them’. I am housed, says she, cough, cough, cough from having to go out at the back all weathers into the freezing lavatory, from standing to wash in the unheated kitchen. But why do I say that? Women of ninety who live in luxury cough and are frail.

It is a routine now. I go in about seven, eight, after work, and bring in what she has said she needs the night before. Usually she’s forgotten something, and I go out again to the Indian shop. He, the Indian man, a large pale man, pale grey really, who suffers from this weather, always asks after her, and shakes his head, and gives me some little thing for her: some sweets or some biscuits. When I give these to Maudie, she looks fierce and angry: she’s proud, but she’s moved.

While I shop she makes us tea. She has had supper at six, when she eats cake and jam and biscuits. She says she can’t be bothered to cook properly. She doesn’t want me to waste time cooking for her, because ‘it would take away from our time’. When she said this I realized she valued our time of sitting and talking: for some reason I was not able to see that, for I am defensive and guilty with her, as if I am responsible for all the awful things that have happened. We sit there, in that fug and smell – but nearly always I can switch off as I go in, so that I don’t notice the smell, just as I refuse to notice the smeared cups. And she … entertains me. I did not realize it was that. Not until one day when she said, ‘You do so much for me, and all I can do for you is to tell you my little stories, because you like that, don’t you? Yes, I know you do.’ And of course I do. I tell her about what I have been doing, and I don’t have to explain much. When I’ve been at a reception for some VIP or cocktail party or something, I can make her see it all. Her experience has included the luxurious, and there was her father: ‘Sometimes, listening to you, it makes me remember how he used to come home and tell us he’d been to Romano’s or the Cafe Royal or the music hall, and he’d tell us what all the nobs ate and drank.’ But I don’t like reminding her of her father, for she sits with her face lowered, her eyes down and hidden, picking in distress at her skirt. I like it when her fierce alive blue eyes are sparkling and laughing; I like looking at her, for I forget the old crone and I can see her so easily as she was, young.

She is wearing these nights a cornflower-blue cotton with big white spots: an apron, made from a dress she had when she was young. I said I liked it so much, so she tore out the sleeves and cut down the back: an apron. The black thick clothes I threw into the dustbin were retrieved by her. I found them rolled into newspaper in the front room. Stinking. She had not worn them, though. There is a photograph of her, a young woman before she was married, a little wedge of a face, combative eyes, a great mass of shiny hair. She has a piece of her hair before it went grey. It was a rich bright yellow.

We sit on either side of the black stove, the flames forking up and around, a teapot on the top, with a filthy grey cosy that was once … why do I go on and on about the dirt? Our cups on the arms of our chairs, a plate of biscuits on a chair between us. The cat sits about washing herself, or sleeps on her divan. Cosy, oh yes. Outside, the cold rain, and upstairs, the Irish family, quarrelling, the feet of the kids banging on the uncarpeted floors, the fridge rumbling and shaking.

She tells me about all the times in her life she was happy. She says she is happy now, because of me (and that is hard to accept, it makes me feel angry, that so little can change a life), and therefore she likes to think of happy times.

A Happiness.

‘My German boy, the one I should have married but I was silly, we used to spend Sundays. We took a penny bus ride up to where we are sitting now, or perhaps a stage further. Green fields and streams and trees. We’d sit on the edge of a little bridge and watch the water, or find a field without cows and eat our food. What did we eat? I’d cut cold meat from the joint, as much as I liked, because Mother wasn’t dead then, and clap it between two bits of bread. But I liked his food best, because his parents were bakers. Did you know the bakers were often Germans then? Well, his parents could just read and write, but he was a real clever one, he was a scholar. He did well later, more fool me, I could have had my own house and a garden. But I didn’t marry him, I didn’t. I don’t know why. Of course, my father wouldn’t have liked a foreigner, but he didn’t like what I did marry, he could never say yes to any choice of ours, so what would have been the difference? No, I don’t want to think of that, I spent enough time when I was younger thinking, Oh what a fool – when I’d come to understand what men were. You see, I didn’t know then. Hans was so kind, he was a gentleman, he treated me like a queen. He’d lift me down from the stiles so gently and nice, and we spread a little white cloth and put out the lovely white rolls and the cakes from the bakery. I used to say, No, I must eat mine, and you eat yours, and mine always ended up being given to the birds.

‘I think of those days, those Sundays. And who would believe it now? Where we sit in these streets, running streams, and birds … What happened to the streams? you are thinking. I know, I know how to read your face now. Well, you might well wonder where all that water is. It is underneath the foundations of half the houses along here, that’s where. When they built this all up, and covered the fields, I used to come by myself and watch the builders. By myself. My German boy had gone off by then because I wouldn’t marry him. The builders scamped everything then, as they do now; some things never change. They were supposed to make the water run in proper conduits, away from the houses, but they didn’t trouble themselves. Sometimes, even now, when I walk along, I stop at a house and I think, yes, if your basements are damp, it’s because of the water from those old streams. There’s a house, number seventy-seven it is, it changes hands, it can’t keep an owner, it’s because it’s where two little streams met, and the builders put the bricks of the foundation straight into the mud and let the water find its way. They did make a real channel for the water lower down, it runs along the main road there, but the little baby streams we used to sit by and put our feet in, they were left to make their own way. And after those Sundays, when the dusk came, oh, how lovely it all was, he’d say, May I put my arm around your waist? And I’d say, No, I don’t like it – what a fool. And he’d say, Put your arm in mine then, at least. So we’d walk arm in arm through the fields to the bus, and come home in the dark. He’d never come in, because of Father. He’d kiss my hand, and he’d say, Maudie, you are a flower, a little flower.’

A Happiness.

Maudie was apprenticed to a milliner’s and worked for them off and on for years. The apprenticeship was very hard. Living with her aunt, who was so poor, and gave her breakfast and supper, but not much more, Maudie had to do without a midday meal or walk most of the way to work. The workshop was near Marylebone High Street. She would calculate whether shoe leather would cost more than her fare. She said she could beg cast-off shoes from her cousin, who never got all the wear out of them, or pick up second-hand boots from a market. But she had to be neatly dressed for her work, and that was her biggest trouble. Her aunt did not have money for Maudie’s clothes.

Her employer’s wife gave her a skirt and a blouse once. ‘She valued me, you see. We had to have a decent appearance because the buyers would come into the workrooms. Oh, don’t think it was from a good heart, she didn’t have one. She didn’t want to lose me. It was years before I could buy myself a nice brown cloth dress of my own, and my own shoes. And when I did, oh, I’ll not forget that day. I went without so much for that dress. And I wore it on the Sunday first so Laurie could see it. And who gave you that? he said, for that was what he was like, tugging at my arm and hurting it. Who was it, tell me? It wasn’t you, I said to him, and as I pulled my arm from him, it tore under the arm. Not much, but the dress was spoiled. Oh yes, a person has his stamp all through him. You know what I’m saying? But I didn’t know that then. It wasn’t long before I knew that in everything he did, it was the same: a new dress I’d saved and gone without for, but he tore it the first time I put it on. But it didn’t matter, I mended it, it didn’t show, and I went into the workroom and peacocked around, and the girls all clapped and sang “A Little Bit of What You Fancy Does You Good”.

‘That was just before I was promoted, and soon I got another dress, a blue foulard, but I never loved another dress as I loved that first one I paid for myself.

‘Oh what times we did have in that workroom. There were fifteen of us, apprentices and milliners. We sat all around a long table, with the boxes of trimmings on trestles behind us, and the hats and bonnets we were working on on their forms in front of us. We used to sing and lark about. Sometimes when I got a bit carried away, she used to come up and say, Who’s making all that noise? It’s Maudie! The rule is, silence when you work. But I had to sing, I was so enjoying myself, and soon we were all singing, but she didn’t want to lose me, you see.

‘Did I tell you how I learned to know that I was a value to her? If I did, I’ll tell you again, because I love to think of it. You see, he used to go off to Paris, and see the new season’s hats in the shops, and sometimes in the workrooms of the Paris milliners, for he knew people who could snatch him a glimpse. He knew how to remember a hat or a bonnet that would do for us. He used to keep it all in his mind, and nip out quick and draw it. He couldn’t draw really, but he’d have the main things, a shape or the set of a ribbon. And then he’d come back and say, You do this, see, it’s this shape and that colour, made of velvet or satin, you do what you can. Well, it was as if I could see the real hat behind the scribble on the paper, and I’d work away there, and finish it, and I’d say to him, Is that anywhere near it, Mr Rolovsky? And he’d take it up and stare and say, Well, it’s not too bad, Maudie. That pleased me. But then I saw how he’d come and stand behind me and watch while I worked, always me, not the others, and then the way he snatched up the hat when I’d done, for he was so greedy, you see, he couldn’t hide it. I saw then I’d come near what he’d seen in Paris. And the girls all knew too, and we’d give each other winks. She saw us at it, and she said, That’s enough, I don’t see what there is to wink at. For she was clever, the missus was, but she wasn’t clever at anything but her job, which was making the workroom pay. Have you noticed that at all? A person can be clever as can be, in one direction, and stupid in another. She thought we didn’t know what she was trying to cover up, and yet it was all plain to us. I had a gift, you see, I had it in my fingers and in my mind’s eye, and it was worth everything to them, because when the buyers came in, he always showed them my work first, and it was always my work that he charged the most for.

‘I’ve stood outside the showrooms, just off Bond Street they were, and looked at the hats in the window, only two or three of course, not crammed the way the windows for cheap hats were done, and the hats were always mine. And snapped up as soon as I could do them.

‘Yes, I can see from your face what you’re wanting to say, and you’re right. I never got paid extra for it. I got the top wages for the job, but that was never much, never enough to free my mind of worrying about the future. Yes, you are right again, don’t think I haven’t thought and thought about why I didn’t go somewhere else, or say, Give me what I am worth to you or I’ll leave. But for one thing, I loved that work so, I loved it all, the colours and the feel of the materials; and then the other girls, we had worked together so long by then, and we knew each other and all our troubles, and then … Well, of course there was more to it. For one thing, it was partly my fault. He wanted me to go to Paris. Oh no, if he had anything else in mind, he couldn’t let it be that. He said, The wife’ll come too, don’t you worry, it will all be fair and right. What he wanted was for me to come with him into the workrooms when he could sneak himself in, and look at the hats for myself. He was really getting carried away by it all, he imagined my coming back to London and copying all those hats and bonnets, hundreds of them, I daresay, not just the few he could keep in his mind. And he said he would pay me properly for it. Well, being him, being that pair, I knew better than to think it would be much, but it would be a lot for me. And yet I couldn’t bring myself, I said no.

‘That was twice I was invited to France, when I was a girl, once with Mrs Privett and once with that pair of … One a real lady and then two nasty penny-pinchers, the good and the bad.

‘Yes, I know what you are thinking. It was Laurie. He’d never have let me hear the end of it if I’d gone to Paris, even if I’d gone with a regiment of guards to look after me, he’d have taken it out of me. And it was bad enough as it was, before we even married, I had bruises on my arms, and it was always: Who was it? Who looked at you? Who gave you that handkerchief? – because I used to pinch and save for proper linen hankies with real lace, I loved them, I loved pretty things. But he never knew I could have gone to Paris then. And if I had, perhaps I might have stayed, I might have married a Frenchie. I could have married a German, couldn’t I? Sometimes I look back and I see that my life had these chances, leading to something wonderful, who knows? And yet I never took them, I always said, No, no, to what was offered.

‘And yet I had such happy times, I think except for Johnnie they were the best in my life, better even than Hans and our Sundays. I like to sit here and think back to us girls, sitting around those lovely hats, oh they were so beautiful those hats, singing and larking and telling stories, and she always around, Maudie here and Maudie there, it’s always you who are the ringleader, she’d say, but I was her best and she knew it, and though she’d like to have seen the last of me, because he had his eye on me, and everyone knew it, she had to put up with me, didn’t she? And I didn’t care. I’d sing away, I’d sing – shall I sing you one of my songs? Yes, I will …’

And Maudie sits singing the old music-hall songs, some I’ve never heard of. Her voice is off pitch now, keeps cracking, but you can hear what it was like in her laugh.

A Happiness.

‘I must have got pregnant the night of our wedding. Nine months to the day, it was. And Laurie was so pleased once we knew. Would you believe it, I was so silly, I didn’t know what was wrong with me! I crept off to the doctor and said, I am sickening, I’m dying, I feel so ill, and I feel this and that. And I lay down and he felt my stomach, and he sat down behind his table and he laughed. Oh, it was a nice laugh, it didn’t make me feel bad, but I did feel silly. He said, Mrs Fowler, didn’t it occur to you that you are pregnant? What’s that? said I. You are going to have a baby, said he. Oh go on, I said, it can’t be – for I hadn’t got the expectation of it into my mind at all.

‘And then I told Laurie and he cried, he was so pleased. We were in the front room of a house in the next street to this. He painted the room beautifully, for he was a good tradesman, no one could say otherwise, he painted it a lovely shining cream, and the garlands on the ceiling he painted gold and blue, and the skirting boards and the picture rail blue. And he bought a little chest and made that blue, and kept buying little coats and hats – oh, sizes too big, Johnnie didn’t get into them for two or three years after Laurie left me. But I was so happy, I thought I was a queen for those few months. He treated me like I was a piece of crystal or a new cup. He kept buying me all sorts of fancies, for I was after pickles and chocolate and ginger and stuff, and they cost him.

‘And then the baby was born, my Johnnie. And you’ll never guess. From that moment on there was never a kind word for me. How is it a grown man behaves like a little boy? He was jealous, jealous of a baby! But I didn’t know then that was how it was going to be. I used to tease him, and then he hit me. All the good times were over. I used to sit there in my nursing chair, which he had made for me, and nurse the baby, and look at the lovely painted ceiling, and think, oh I’m so hungry, so hungry, because Johnnie was such a feeding baby, he sucked and sucked. I’d say, Laurie, get me a bit of lamb for a stew, buy me some bacon, we’ll have it with dumplings. And he’d say, What am I going to use for money? And he was in work. Well, I’ll not fill your ears with the misery of it when I understood what the future was to be, because what I like is, to look back and think of me sitting like a queen in that lovely room, in my lovely chair, with Johnnie, and thinking how when Laurie got used to it we’d all be so happy.’

A month later.

I’ve never worked as hard as this! If I keep a skeleton of this diary going, then perhaps later …

Joyce is just holding herself together, but she is not with us. I am doing all the interviewing, parties, running about, lunches, conferences. We keep her out of sight mostly. Her defences are well inside herself, not where mine are, outside in clothes, hair, etc. She looks awful, a mess. In addition, this series of articles on clothes as an expression of the mood of the seventies, sixties, fifties. They wanted more. I seem never to be able to lose it, undervaluing myself. I would not have thought of myself as able to write for a serious sociological mag, but here I am. So I get up at six to do the work for that.

And I see Maudie every evening, or if not I make sure she knows I’m not coming. I go in, exhausted, but then I shop and do a little bit of cleaning, and then I slump and listen, and listen. Sometimes she tells it well, and laughs, and knows she is pleasing me. Others, she mutters and is fierce and won’t look at me, sitting there in my lovely clothes. I have bought a whole new outfit, madly expensive, I feel it as a bulwark against chaos. She leans over and feels the silk of my shirt, none of this cheap Chinese stuff, no. She strokes my skirt, and then looks up into my face, with a sigh, for she knows how good my things are, who better? And then she will turn away her little face and put her hand up to her cheek to shield it, and stare into the fire. Shuts me out. And then she starts again, forgiving me with a little laugh: So what have you been doing today? But she doesn’t want to know, my world is too much for her, she wants to talk …

‘And then one day he left me, he said, You don’t care for me now you’ve got him, and he took up his tools and he left. I didn’t believe it. I was waiting for him to come back, for years as it turned out. But there I was, with nothing to pay the rent with. I went to the Rolovskys and asked – oh, that was hard, I’d never begged of them before. I had said I was getting married, you see, and she had given me a hard time, making me work all hours, to get as much out of me as she could before she lost me. And here I was again, after not even two years. Well, she made a favour of it. And someone else was forewoman now. And it wasn’t the same in the workroom. For one thing, I didn’t have the heart to sing and dance. I put Johnnie with a baby-minder. She wasn’t a bad woman, but it wasn’t what I wanted for him. I’d be sick worrying, has she given him his medicine, or his milk? For he was delicate, he always had a cough. But I had enough to keep us. Then the people where I was said they wanted my room. They didn’t want a baby, that was what they meant. And they did want all that lovely blue and gold for themselves. And so I came here. The woman who had the house didn’t mind a baby, but I had to keep him quiet, she said. I was on the top floor then, the little room at the back. It was cheap, and we looked out at the trees there, lovely it was. But I found it hard to pay for everything. I went to my aunt, but she could only just manage for herself. She said, Go to your father. But he had said if I married Laurie I should never darken his door. And he was right, for once … Did I tell you about my wedding?’

And Maudie sat laughing, laughing, and pulled out a drawer and showed me a photograph. A tiny woman, under an enormous flowered hat, in a neat tight dress. ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘I looked a proper mess. I had been saying yes and no, yes and no, because what would happen was, I’d say, No, and then he’d start his squeezing and wanting, and I’d say, Yes, and he’d say, I suppose Harry (there was another boy who fancied me) won’t have you, so I’d say, No. But at last we got to say yes at the same time. I borrowed my cousin Flo’s best hat and her church gloves. My dress was my own. I sent a message to Father and said I was getting married on Sunday. He came over to Auntie’s and Laurie was there, and he stood in the doorway and said to me, If you marry him that is the last time you’ll see me. Well, I hadn’t seen him for nearly ten years as it was. I said, Will you come and see me married at least?

‘On that morning Laurie was worse than I’d ever seen him, fit to burst with black looks and pinches and grumbles. We walked to church with my Auntie, and we were quarrelling all the way. There was Father, all in his best striped clothes and top hat, oh what a dresser he was! And she was there too, she had got so fat, and I couldn’t help crowing secretly, she could hardly walk, all in purple and black feathers, and by then I’d come to know what was really good and what wasn’t, and I could see she was nothing, we wouldn’t have her in our workroom. But I was nothing too, that day, I could have got a hat from the workroom for the wedding to marry in, but I didn’t want a favour from the Rolovskys. And so we were married, sulking and not looking at each other. After the wedding, there was a photographer who took this, and then when Father went off towards the carriage with her, I ran after them and said, Can I come with you? But you’ve just got married, said she, really astonished she was, and I don’t blame her. And Father said, That’s right, you come home and don’t waste time on him. So I got into the carriage and left Laurie at the church …’ And at this Maudie laughs and laughs, her strong, girl’s laugh.

‘After I’d enjoyed myself at home for a little, and eaten my fill of everything, I thought, Well, I have a husband, and I said to them, Thanks, but I’d better be off home, and I went, Father saying, Never darken my doors. And I didn’t, for he died soon after of a stroke. And they didn’t tell me about the funeral.