The Diaries of Jane Somers

Nearly all our ideas are filched from New Society and New Scientist. (But then this is true of most of the serious mags and papers.) I once fought a battle with Joyce for us to acknowledge our sources, but failed: Joyce said it would put off our readers. Phyllis rewrote the article, and called it: The Hidden Danger to You and Your Family. Two. An article about abortion laws in various countries. Three. My article about the Seventeenth-Century Kitchen. All garlic and spices! Fruit and meat mixed. Salads with everything in the garden in them. And then the usual features, fashion, food, drink, books, theatre.

I have started my historical novel. Oh, I know only too well why we need our history prettied up. It would be intolerable to have the long heavy weight of the truth there, all grim and painful. No, my story about the milliners of London will be romantic. (After all, when Maudie comes to die she won’t be thinking of trailing out to that freezing smelly lavatory, but of the joyous green fields of Kilburn, and of her German boy, and of the larks the apprentices got up to as they made their lovely hats, good enough for Paris. She will, too, I suppose, be thinking of ‘her man’. But that is an intolerable idea, I can’t stand for that.)

Yesterday, as I drove home, I saw Maudie in the street, an ancient crone, all in black, nose and chin meeting, fierce grey brows, muttering and cursing as she pushed her basket along, and some small boys baiting her.

The thing that at the time I thought was going to be worst turned out not bad at all. Even useful. Even, I believe, pleasurable.

I was standing at the counter of the radio and TV shop down the road, buying a decent radio for Maudie. Beside me, waiting patiently, was an old woman, her bag held open while she muddled inside it, looking for money.

The Indian assistant watched her, and so did I. I was at once matching what I saw with my first meeting with Maudie.

‘I don’t think I’ve got it here, I haven’t got what it costs,’ she said in a frightened hopeless way, and she pushed a minute radio towards him. She meant him to take it to pay for repairs he had done on it. She turned, slowly and clumsily, to leave the shop.

I thought it all out fast, as I stood there. This time I was not helpless in front of an enormous demand because of inexperience, I had known at first look about the old thing. The dusty grey grimy look. The sour reek. The slow carefulness.

I paid for her radio, hastened after her, and caught her up as she was standing waiting to be helped across the street. I went home with her.

For the pleasure of the thing, I rang Puss-in-Boots when I got home.

‘You are the person I saw with Mrs Fowler?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

A silence.

‘Do you mind if I say something?’ said she, efficient, but not without human sympathy. ‘So often we find well-meaning people making things so much worse without intending to.’

‘Worse for whom?’

I was hoping she might laugh, but she is not Vera Rogers.

‘What I mean is, specifically, that often well-meaning people take an interest in some geria – … some old person, but really it is a hang-up of their own, you see they are working out their own problems, really.’

‘I would say that that is almost bound to be true, in one way or another,’ said I, enjoying every minute of this. ‘But while it might or might not be bad for me, the poor old geriatric in question is likely to be pleased, since she is obviously friendless and alone.’

Another silence. Evidently she felt obliged to think out my remarks to their conclusions, in the light of her training. At length she said, ‘I wonder if you’d find an Encounter Group helpful?’

‘Miss Whitfield,’ I said, ‘there’s this old woman, don’t you think you should drop in and visit her?’

‘If she’s so bad, why hasn’t her doctor referred her?’

‘As you know, most of these doctors never go near the old people on their lists, and the old people don’t go near the doctors, because they are afraid of them. Rightly or wrongly. Afraid of being sent away.’

‘That is really a very old-fashioned concept.’

‘The fact is, at some point they do get sent away.’

‘Only when there is no other alternative.’

‘Well, in the meantime, there’s poor Annie Reeves.’

‘I’ll look into it,’ said she. ‘Thank you so much for involving yourself when you must be so busy.’

I then rang Vera.

Vera said, What was her name, her address, her age, her condition. Yes, she knew about Mrs Bates, who lived downstairs, but Annie Reeves had always refused any of the Services.

‘She won’t refuse them now,’ I said.

Vera and I met at the house. I took a morning off work. The door was opened by Mrs Bates, in her fluffy blue dressing gown, and her hair in a blue net.

She looked severely at me, and at Vera. ‘They took Mrs Reeves to hospital last night,’ she said. ‘She fell down. Upstairs. It’s not for the first time. But she hurt her knees. So it would seem.’

Between Vera and me and Mrs Bates vibrated all kinds of comprehension, and Mrs Bates’s disapproving looks were meant to be seen by us.

‘Well, perhaps it’s a good thing, we can get her rooms cleaned.’

‘If you think you can do thirty years’ cleaning in a morning,’ she stated, standing aside to let us in.

The house was built about 1870. Nothing cramped or stinted. A good staircase, with decent landings. Annie Reeves’s place at the top full of light and air. Nice rooms, well proportioned, large windows.

The front room, overlooking the street, larger than the other. Fireplace, blocked up. A brownish wallpaper, which, examined, showed a nice pattern of brown and pink leaves and flowers, very faded and stained. Above the picture rail the paper was ripping off and flapping loose because water had run in from the roof. There was an old hard chair, with torn blue cushions where the stuffing showed, near the fire. Some dressing tables and a chest of drawers. Linoleum, cracked and discoloured. And the bed – but I feel I cannot really do justice to that bed. Double bed, with brown wood headboard and footboard – how can I describe it? The mattress had been worn by a body lying on it always in one place so that the ticking had gone, and the coarse hair inside was a mass of rough lumps and hollows. The pillows had no covers, and were like the mattress, lumps of feathers protruding. There was a tangle of filthy dirty blankets. It was dirty, it was disgusting. And yet we could see no lice in it. It was like a very old bird’s nest, that had been in use for many years. It was like – I cannot imagine how anyone could sleep in it, or on it.

We opened the drawers. Well, that I had seen before, with Maudie, though these were worse. And I wondered, and I wonder now, how are these hoards of rubbish seen by those who let them accumulate?

One of Annie Reeves’s drawers contained – and I make this list for the record: half an old green satinet curtain, with cigarette holes in it; two broken brass curtain rings; a skirt, stained, ripped across the front, of white cotton; two pairs of men’s socks, full of holes; a bra, size 32, of a style I should judge was about 1937, in pink cotton; an unopened packet of sanitary towels, in towelling – never having seen these, I was fascinated, of course; three white cotton handkerchiefs spotted with blood, the memory of a decades-old nosebleed; two pairs of pink celanese knickers that had been put away unwashed, medium size; three cubes of Oxo; a tortoise-shell shoehorn; a tin of dried and cracked whiting for ladies’ summer shoes; three chiffon scarves, pink, blue, and green; a packet of letters postmarked 1910; a cutting from the Daily Mirror announcing World War Two; some bead necklaces, all broken; a blue satin petticoat which had been slit up both sides to the waist to accommodate increasing girth; some cigarette ends.

This had been stirred around and around, it seemed, so that the mess would have to be picked apart, strand by strand. Well, we didn’t have time to deal with that: first things first.

Vera and I went into action. I drove to the first furniture shop and bought a good single bed and a mattress. I had luck, they were delivering that morning. I came back behind the van with two young men to make sure they did deliver, and they carried it upstairs. When they saw what was there, they looked incredulous. As well they might. I bribed them to take the old bed down, with the mattress, to the dustbins. Meanwhile, Vera had bought blankets, sheets, pillows, towels. There was exactly half of one old towel in the place, and it was black. Looking out of the filthy windows, we could see neighbours in their gardens speculating over the mattress, with shakes of the head and tight lips. Vera and I wrestled the mattress to the top of my car, and we took it to the municipal rubbish heap.

When we got back the Special Cleaning Team were on the doorstep. Since the place was far beyond the scope of ordinary Home Helps, this flying squad of intrepid experts had been called in by Vera. They were two weedy young men, amiable and lackadaisical, probably from too much take-away junk. They stood about upstairs in the front room, smiling and grimacing at the filth, and saying, ‘But what can we do?’

‘You can start with buckets of hot water and soda,’ I said. Vera was already looking humorous.

I have not yet mentioned the kitchen. When you went into it, it seemed normal. A good square wooden table in the middle, an adequate gas stove, two very good wooden chairs, each worth at present prices what I would pay for a month’s food, ripped and faded curtains, now black, once green. But the floor, the floor! As you walked over it, it gave tackily, and on examination there was a thick layer of hardened grease and dirt.

The two heroes winced about on the sticky lino, and said, How could they use hot water when there wasn’t any?

‘You heat it on the stove,’ said Vera, mildly.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘aren’t you for the rough work the Home Helps can’t do?’

‘Yes, but there are limits, aren’t there?’ said one of them reproachfully.

‘Someone has got to do it,’ I said.

They did sweep the front room, and pushed a mop hastily over the floor. But over the kitchen floor, they went on strike. ‘Sorry,’ said they, and went off, good-natured to the end.