Before the War

Consider Vivien in the year 1922. She’s waiting for the London train. It’s a cold November morning, the station is windswept and rural, the sky is threatening snow, and the train is late. Vivien is single, large, ungainly, five foot eleven inches tall and twenty years old. She has no coat, just a tweed jacket and a long brown woollen scarf to keep her warm. She snatched the scarf from a peg just before she left home for the mile long walk to the station. The scarf is a dreary dusty old thing. Moths have been at it. It’s been hanging on its peg by the back door amongst old coats, jackets, hats and caps for years. Not so long ago the scarf would have been noticed, laundered, darned, ironed, folded and put in its appropriate drawer within the hour. But time has passed and wars have happened and these days one just can’t find the staff to pay attention to detail.

I’m not asking you, reader, to step back in time. I’m asking you to stay happily where you are in the twenty-first century, looking back. Vivien has seared herself into my mind, this single stooping figure – she tends to stoop, being conscious that she is taller than most women and quite a lot of men – as she waits alone for a train on a crucial day in her life in November 1922. So I offer Vivien and her fate to you, the reader. We like to dream the costume drama of Edwardian times, all fine clothes, glittering jewels and clean sexy profiles – but we are less drawn to the twenty years between the wars. Understandably. Limbless ex-servicemen beg for alms on hard-hearted city streets while hysterical flappers, flat-chested, dance and drink champagne in Mayfair night-clubs. Shell shock, the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse – what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome – still stalks the land. Life expectancy for the poor is forty-five; for the rich, sixty-five.

Vivien is young and rich but no flapper. She is too large and ungainly to look good dancing, and one would certainly never guess she was rich from the frumpy way she dresses. Had she had a more exuberant personality her height would have seemed no great drawback; she could have sparkled and charmed and flung out her chest to the admiration of men and women both, but Vivvie was not like this. She suffered and let it be seen that she suffered. She stooped. For her special day in London she wears the long droopy brown scarf over a tweed jacket (taken also at random from the peg: it is actually her father’s); her black skirt is ankle-length and she has rammed a grey felt cloche down over her ears. None of it does the poor girl any favours at all. Nor do her thick, flesh-coloured lisle stockings or her pointy black button-strap shoes (size 9). These clothes quite suit the flat-chested and lithe beauties of the time, a droopy weariness being all the rage, but Vivien is no beauty and has a noticeably large bust which she declines to bandage flat. She is, moreover, mildly Asperger’s, though that is a word neither yet in use, nor a syndrome understood. She is often unaware of the impression she is making on other people – which is that she is decidedly odd and sometimes decidedly rude. When she does become aware of it, the understanding can be very painful. She does not mean to offend or upset.

Anyway…

The train is now eleven minutes late, which is not surprising since its driver feels obliged to stop for cows to saunter out of its way, workmen to leave the tracks, and for late-running passengers to reach its doors. Indeed, the 8.45 from Brighton, though it left on time, is not yet even in earshot. All is silent on the Dilberne Halt platform, no huffing and puffing in the distance, no mournful whistle as the steaming iron monster approaches, only the occasional cackle of crows in a dripping winter landscape. Perhaps it isn’t coming at all? That sometimes happens. Vivien looks at her little gold watch – too small on her large wrist – but finds it has stopped. She shocks herself. She hates the unexpected. She, usually so careful, has forgotten to wind the thing up. She must be more nervous than she realised. And she so much doesn’t want to be late; this is an important day for her.

Woman Proposes, Man Disposes

It is in pursuit of a husband that Vivvie is going to London this morning. She means to propose to Sherwyn Sexton, an attractive and many say charismatic young man, if NSIT (not safe in taxis), who is in her own father’s employ as an editor at Ripple & Co. In this she is very unwise indeed; she will suffer and be humiliated, but humiliation is her lot in life, as it is for most plain girls, forget one with an awkward nature. Indeed, it’s a marvel any ordinary girl gets married off at all in 1922, the inter-war years being such a buyers’ market, so many eligible young men of all nations dead and gone in foreign fields, and so many women left with nothing to do but mourn them.

We may see Vivien as living and dying in the past, before the days of the battery watch, but Vivien believes herself to be living in the present – as one does – and memories of her own past seem more than enough to put up with. You, reader, living now, have the advantage over Vivvie of knowing what will happen next in world affairs – though I can see to some of you that might seem a disadvantage – a mere increase in years of what can only end up, as Tennyson would have it, as ‘portions and parcels of the dreadful past’. All times probably seem equally troublesome to those who live through them. Be that as it may, Vivien has had the experience of growing up through four years of a war in which old men found young men expendable, and expended them by the million, thus very much limiting her chance of finding a suitable husband.

Vivvie may be a wealthy young woman in her own right, which certainly helps, but she is seen as very tall in the age she is in, and a man still likes a woman to look up to him, not down on him. He certainly does not want her to loom over him as they stand at the wedding rail. Vivvie is just too large for the normality of the times, when a girl’s average measurement is around 31-24-32 and her height five foot two. At the age of twenty, when her mother Adela last measured her and sighed rather loudly, Vivvie found herself 38-34-40, nearly six foot tall and suitor-less. Her height remains a disadvantage when it comes to marriage, even though her mother is Adela Ripple, née Hedleigh, cousin to Arthur, Earl of Dilberne, and wealthy girls of good family usually marry early. But she doesn’t smile when she should, utter pleasantries when she ought, has no idea how to flirt, prefers horses to men (in particular her stallion Greystokes) and possibly women to men, though she doesn’t like women much either.

But Vivvie is ambitious, intelligent and not without talent. Tucked under her long strong arm as she stands waiting on the station is a portfolio of her illustrations for
A Short History of the Georgians: An Outline
, to be published by Ripple & Co, her father’s publishing firm, in the following spring. They are not bad, if not strikingly good. She is Sir Jeremy’s only child and her father is training her up as he would a son to join him in the family firm. He has given up regarding Vivvie as a daughter since she has few feminine graces. He worries far less about this latter than does her mother, his wife Adela.

Woman Proposes, Writer Disposes

But I will not distress you with Vivien for ever. It is not normal in books, films or on TV for much attention to be paid to unattractive women of any age: few films are made, few novels written: the news camera instinctively seeks out the prettiest, youngest women in the street. Why should I break the rules? Vivien is to die before long, leaving girl twins (non-identical) behind, and at least one of them is very beautiful, though the other may be seen as rather plain. Even plainer than her poor dead mama: the kind of girl of whom my own grandmother (born in 1888) would say ‘such an unfortunate face. Poor thing!’ But that’s for the future.

Anyway, here is Vivien: mother-of-twins-to-be. Seared into my mind at the time she is, standing in her shapeless clothes waiting for a late London train, with no idea at all of what I have in store for her. I will give her an easy death. It’s the least I can do. She will drift away painlessly from loss of blood giving birth to twin daughters a day after their apparently safe delivery. Ergometrine was not isolated until 1935. Had Vivvie given birth any time thereafter, she could have been saved by a swift dose of the stuff, but so it goes, as Vonnegut was to say in his excellent novel
Slaughterhouse Five.
So it goes.

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