The Diaries of Jane Somers

We walked along it to the ‘kitchen’. I have never seen anything like it outside our Distress File, condemned houses and that sort of thing. It was an extension of the passage, with an old gas cooker, greasy and black, an old white china sink, cracked and yellow with grease, a cold-water tap wrapped around with old rags and dripping steadily. A rather nice old wood table that had crockery standing on it, all ‘washed’ but grimy. The walls stained and damp. The whole place smelled, it smelled awful … She did not look at me while she set down bread, biscuits and cat food. The clean lively colours of the grocery packages and the tins in that awful place. She was ashamed, but wasn’t going to apologize. She said in an offhand but appealing way, ‘You go into my room, and find yourself a seat.’

The room I went into had in it an old black iron stove that was showing a gleam of flames. Two unbelievably ancient ragged armchairs. Another nice old wood table with newspaper spread over it. A divan heaped with clothes and bundles. And a yellow cat on the floor. It was all so dirty and dingy and grim and awful. I thought of how all of us wrote about decor and furniture and colours – how taste changed, how we all threw things out and got bored with everything. And here was this kitchen, which if we printed a photograph of it would get us donations by return from readers.

Mrs Fowler brought in an old brown teapot, and two rather pretty old china cups and saucers. It was the hardest thing I ever did, to drink out of the dirty cup. We did not speak much because I did not want to ask direct questions, and she was trembling with pride and dignity. She kept stroking the cat – ‘My lovely, my pretty,’ in a hard but appealing sort of way – and she said without looking at me, ‘When I was young my father owned his own shop, and later we had a house in St John’s Wood, and I know how things should be.’

And when I left she said, in her way of not looking at me, ‘I suppose I won’t be seeing you again?’ And I said, ‘Yes, if you’ll ask me.’ Then she did look at me, and there was a small smile, and I said, ‘I’ll come on Saturday afternoon for tea, if you like.’

‘Oh I would like, yes I would.’ And there was a moment between us of intimacy: that is the word. And yet she was so full of pride and did not want to ask, and she turned away from me and began petting the cat: Oh, my little pet, my little pretty.

When I got home that evening I was in a panic. I had committed myself. I was full of revulsion. The sour, dirty smell was in my clothes and hair. I bathed and washed my hair and did myself up and rang Joyce and said, ‘Let’s go out to dinner.’ We had a good dinner at Alfredo’s and talked. I said nothing about Mrs Fowler, of course, yet I was thinking of her all the time: I sat looking around at the people in the restaurant, everyone well dressed and clean, and I thought, if she came into this restaurant … well, she couldn’t. Not even as a cleaner, or a washer-up.

On the Saturday I took her some roses and carnations, and a cake with real cream. I was pleased with myself, and this carried me over her reaction – she was pleased, but I had overdone it. There was no vase for the flowers. I put them in a white enamel jug. She put the cake on a big old cracked plate. She was being rather distant. We sat on either side of the iron stove, and the brown teapot was on it to warm, and the flames were too hot. She was wearing a silk blouse, black dots on white. Real silk. Everything is like this with her. A beautiful flowered Worcester teapot, but it is cracked. Her skirt is of good heavy wool, but it is stained and frayed. She did not want me to see in her ‘bedroom’, but I took a peep when she was in the ‘kitchen’. The furniture was part very good: bookcases, a chest of drawers, then a shoddy dressing table and a wardrobe like a varnished packing case. The bed had on it an old-fashioned quilt, plump, of chintz. She did not sleep in the bed, I realized, but on the divan next door, where we sat. Everywhere in the room were piles of rubbish, what looked like rags, bundles of newspapers, everything you can think of: this was what she did not want me to see.

When we ate the cake, she said, ‘Oh, this is real cream,’ and told me about how, in the summers, she and her sisters were sent to an old woman in Essex.

‘Every day of the summer we were out of doors. Lovely hot summers, not like the ones we have now. We got as brown as toffee. The old woman had a little cottage but no kitchen. She built a tripod under a cock of thatch in the yard, and she had a great iron pot on chains and she cooked everything for our dinners in the pot. First she put in the piece of beef, and around it the carrots and potatoes, and she had the pudding rolled in a floured cloth and that went in to boil at the same time. I used to wonder how it was the pudding tasted of jam and fruit and not the meat, but of course it was the flour the cloth had on it. And then she gave us great soup plates, and sat us on the steps, and we ate the meat and the vegetables, and then she peeled the cloth off the pudding, and it came out all crusty and rich, and gave us slices in the same plate we ate the meat off – but we had licked that clean as washed. And then she said, Off with you – and she boiled up water in the iron pot to wash our plates, and to wash herself, after, and we went off into the fields to pick flowers. Oh, I like to sit here and think of all that.’

‘And how old were you then?’

‘Children. We were children. We went every summer – several summers. That was before my poor mother died, you see.’

She talked about the old woman, who was so kind, and the little cottage, that had no running water, and only an outside lavatory in a little brick shed, and those hot summers, all afternoon. She talked and I listened. I did not leave till nearly seven. I came home, and switched on the fire, and thought it was time I did some cleaning. I sat by myself and thought of Mrs Fowler, by herself, the flames showing in the open front of her grate. I opened a tin of soup, and I watched television.

Next Saturday I took her a little pot of African violets and another cake.

Everything the same: the fire burning, the yellow cat, and her dirty white silk spotted blouse.

There was a reticence in her, and I thought it was because she had talked last Saturday for three hours, hardly stopping.

But it wasn’t that. It came out almost when I was leaving.

‘Are you a good neighbour?’ she said.

‘I hope perhaps I may become one,’ I said, laughing.

‘Why, have they put you on probation, then?’

I did not understand, and she saw I didn’t. It turns out that the Council employ women, usually elderly, who run into old people for a cup of tea, or to see if they are all right: they don’t do much, but keep an eye on them. They are called Good Neighbours and they are paid so little they can’t be doing it for the money. I made it my business to find out all this through the office. On the third Saturday I took her some fruit, and saw it was the wrong thing. She said nothing, again, till later, when she remarked that her teeth made it impossible for her to eat fruit.

‘Can’t you eat grapes? Bananas?’

She said, with humour, that the pension did not run to grapes.

And she was off, on the subject of the pension, and what coal cost, and what food cost, and ‘that Council woman who doesn’t know what she is talking about’. I listened, again. I have not pieced it all together yet. I see that it will be a long time before my ignorance, my lack of experience, and her reticence, and her rages – for now I see how they simmer there, making her eyes light up with what you’d think, at first, must be gaiety or even a sense of comedy – a long time before how she is, her nature, and how I am, my rawness, can make it possible for me to form a whole picture of her.

The ‘Council woman’, a Mrs Rogers, wanted her, Mrs Fowler, to have a Home Help. But the Home Help cheated her and didn’t do any work, and wouldn’t wash her floors. The Home Help was just the way all these young women are now, lazy, too good for work. She, Mrs Fowler, was not too good to wash floors, she carries her own coal all along the passage, she sweeps her own chimney once a week as far up as she could reach with her brushes, because she is afraid of fire. And so she went on, about the social workers, and Home Helps, and – a Good Neighbour, she was kind enough to come once, and she said it was time I was in a Home, so I said to her, You know your way out.

‘But, Mrs Fowler, you and I met in the chemist’s, how could I be a Good Neighbour – I mean, an official?’

‘They get up to anything,’ she said, bitter but distressed, for she was afraid I would be offended and not come back.

She went with me to the outside door when I left, and she was doing something I have seen on the stage or written in novels. She wore an old striped apron, because she had put it on to make the tea, and she stood pleating it with both hands, and letting it go smooth, then pleating it again.

‘Shall I drop in during the week?’ I asked.

‘If you have time,’ she said. And could not resist, ‘And it will make a bit extra for you.’ Yet she almost gasped as she said this: she did not want to say it, because she wanted to believe I was not an official, paid person, but just a human being who likes her.

When I went in after work on Wednesday, I took in a copy of our magazine. I was ashamed of it, so glossy and sleek and slick, so clever – that is how it is presented, its image. But she took it from me with a girl’s mischievous smile, and a sort of prance of her head – what remained of a girl’s tossed hair – and said, ‘Oh, I love these, I love looking at these things they think up.’

Because it was seven, I did not know how to fit myself in to her. When did she eat her supper? Or go to bed? On the newspapers on the table was a bottle of milk stout and a glass.

‘I’ve drunk it or I’d offer you some,’ said she.

I sat down in the chair opposite hers and saw that the room, with the curtains drawn and the electric light, seemed quite cosy, not so dreadfully dirty and grim. But why do I go on about dirt like this? Why do we judge people like this? She was no worse off for the grime and the dust, and even the smells. I decided not to notice, if I could help it, not to keep judging her, which I was doing, by the sordidness. I saw that the electric switches were broken, and made an excuse to go out to the ‘kitchen’: frayed cords trailing over the walls, only one switch for the whole room, up on the light itself, which she could hardly reach.

She was looking at the magazine, with a smile that was all pleasure.

‘I work for that magazine,’ I said, and she let the thing fall shut and sat looking at me in that way of hers, as if she is trying to make things fit, make sense.

‘Do you? And what do you …’ But she did not know what questions to ask. I could not bring myself to say I was the assistant editor. I said, ‘I do typing and all sorts.’ Which is true enough.

‘That’s the main thing,’ she said, ‘training. It stands between you and nothing. That, and a place of your own.’

That evening she talked about how she had fought to get into this flat, for at first she had been on the top floor back, in one room, but she had her eye on the basement flat, and wanted it, and waited for it, and schemed for it, and at last, got it. And they aren’t going to get me out, and they needn’t think it. She spoke as if all this happened yesterday, but it was about the time of the First World War.

She talked about how she had not had the money for the rent of these rooms, and how she had saved it up, penny by penny, and then it was stolen, two years’ scrimping and saving, by the wicked woman on the first floor, and she saved again, and at last she went to the landlord and said, You let me in down there. I’ve got the money for it. He said to me, And how are you going to keep the rent paid? You are a milliner’s girl, aren’t you? I said, You leave that to me. When I stop paying, then you can throw me out. ‘And I have never not paid, not once. Though, I’ve gone without food. No, I learned that early. With your own place, you’ve got everything. Without it, you are a dog. You are nothing. Have you got your own place?’ – and when I said yes, she said, nodding fiercely, angrily, ‘That’s right, and you hold on to it, then nothing can touch you.’

Mrs Fowler’s ‘flat’ is rent-controlled, twenty-two shillings a week. About a pound in new money, but of course she doesn’t think in terms of the new currency, she can’t cope with it. She says the house was bought by ‘that Greek’ after the war – the new war, you know, not the old one – for four hundred pounds. And now it’s worth sixty thousand. ‘And he wants me out, so he can get his blood money for this flat. But I know a trick or two. I always have it here, always. And if he doesn’t come I go to the telephone box and I ring his office and I say, Why haven’t you come for your rent?’

I knew so little that I said to her, ‘But, Mrs Fowler, twenty-two shillings is not worth the trouble of his collecting it,’ and her eyes blazed up, and her face was white and dreadful and she said, ‘Is that how you see it, is that it? Has he sent you here, then? But it is what the rent is, by law, and I am going to pay it. Worth nothing, is it? It is worth the roof over my head.’

The three floors above all have Irish families, children, people coming and going, feet tramping about: Mrs Fowler says that ‘she’ makes the refrigerator door rattle to keep her awake at night because ‘she’ wants this flat … Mrs Fowler lives in a nightmare of imagined persecutions. She told me of the ten-years-long campaign, after the first war, not the new one, when ‘that bitch from Nottingham’ was trying to get her rooms, and she … She, it seems, did everything, there was nothing she did not do, and it all sounds true. But now upstairs there is an Irish couple, four children, and I saw the woman on the steps. ‘How is the old lady?’ she asked, her periwinkle Irish eyes tired and lonely, for her husband is leaving her, apparently for another woman. ‘I keep meaning to go down, but she doesn’t seem all that pleased when I do, and so I don’t go.’

I showed Mrs Fowler the issue of Lilith that has Female Images. She took it politely, and let it lie on her lap. It was only when it was ready to go to press that it occurred to me there was no old woman among the Images. I said this to Joyce, and I watched a series of reactions in her: first, surprise. Then shock, small movements of head and eyes said she was alerting herself to danger. Then she, as it were, switched herself off, became vague, and her eyes turned away from me. She sighed: ‘Oh, but why? It’s not our age group.’ I said, watching myself in her, ‘They all have mothers or grandmothers.’ How afraid we are of age: how we avert our eyes! ‘No,’ she said, still rather vague, with an abstracted air, as if she were doing justice to an immensely difficult subject to which she had given infinite thought. ‘No, on the whole not, but perhaps we’ll do a feature on Elderly Relations later. I’ll make a note.’ And then she flashed me a smile, a most complex smile it was: guilt, relief, and – it was there still – surprise. Somewhere she was wondering, what has got into Janna? And there was in it a plea: don’t threaten me, don’t! And, though she had been meaning to sit down and join me in a cup of tea while we discussed the issue after next, she said, Must fly. And flew.

Something interesting has just occurred to me.

Joyce is the innovator, the iconoclast, the one who will throw an issue we’ve just got set up into the wastepaper basket, and start again, working all night, to get it down just so; Joyce presents herself – she is – this impulsive, dashing, daring soul, nothing sacred.

I, Janna, am classical and cautious, conservative and careful – this is my appearance, and how I think of myself.

Yet there are so often these moments between us, there always have been. Joyce says, ‘We can’t do that, our readers won’t like it.’

Me, I have always believed our readers – and everybody else’s readers for that matter – would take much more than they are offered.

I say, ‘Joyce, can we try it?’

But more often than not, whatever it is lands in the file I have labelled Too Difficult and which I leave out on my desk so that Joyce will see it and – so I hope, but most often in vain – be prompted to have another think.