Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Singled Out (11 page)
Winifred beckoned the waiter and ordered. In return she got a puzzled
look; embarrassed, he shuffled off and brought back with him the manager,
who now made cautious enquiries. ‘I’m sorry – but are you residents?’
No, Winifred explained, they were waiting for their train. ‘I’m sorry,’
he responded, ‘I’m afraid you can’t stop here. We can’t serve you. You
must go.’
Protest was in vain. It turned out that there were quite unequivocal rules:
‘Ladies not admitted unless accompanied by a Gentleman’. These rules had
been made to safeguard public morality. Winifred and her respectable friend
were females, they were not residents, and they were entering the hotel
without a man after a certain hour. So they must go out.
And out we went. We walked up and down the bleak, chill, draughty platform
until our train arrived – twenty minutes late. Next day my companion was in bed with a bad cold and acute rheumatism . . .
Later, Winifred was furious with herself for not marching straight on to
the platform and borrowing the first friendly porter she could find to play
his part, but at least she had made her point in print. The assumption that
she and her nice middle-aged friend in her matronly hat, entering a cafe´
Singled Out
unaccompanied after ten o’clock, were prostitutes was, in the circumstances, laughable. But it was insulting and damaging too.
Life for the single woman was full of such grey areas. Should she entertain, travel alone, be seen in public? What should she wear? If she was not a housewife, could she be a house-spinster? And if she could not find a man
to support her, how could she support herself ? Job possibilities were very
limited, and after the war unemployment was high; between and
the female workforce increased by nearly a million, most of the uneducated
ones going into munitions factories or domestic service, while higher up
the social ladder they became nurses or teachers. Friendships, whether with
men or women, were cast into doubt by post-Freudian society’s heightened
awareness of sex (‘. . . Do they? . . . Don’t they?’), while sexual appetites themselves, ravenous and urgent as they might be, were virtually taboo in polite society. All these topics have their place later in this book; here, I want simply to establish that the Surplus Woman had many problems, not just of grief and loss, but of closed minds, of male (and female) hostility, of archaic expectations and the law stacked against her. A single woman’s life in the s and s often felt like a gritty struggle against prejudice, poverty and exclusion.
When she was nearly ninety, Miss Amy Gomm wrote a book of memories,
Water Under the Bridge
, for her nieces. She wanted to tell them about their grandparents, about the Cotswold countryside she’d grown up in; about how the family were always singing hymns and ballads because there was
no radio; about eating raw walnuts from the hedgerows on the way to
school; about seeing the grand folk at Oxford in Eights Week (‘. . . Such
hats! Such dresses!’); about how she shared a bed with her six cousins when
they came to visit; about her father’s charm and her mother’s quiet strength.
The memories brought back tears and smiles: ‘. . . you’ll think me an
emotional old biddy . . .’
Aunt Amy was born in in Charlbury, a small town in rural Oxford—
shire. She left school when she was fourteen and went to work in her
mother’s home-based laundry business. Obsessively puritanical, the Gomm
parents brought up their daughters in fear of ‘disgrace’. They were heavily
protected and not allowed to get work outside the home. There was a
saying then among mothers of big families: ‘Give me boys every time. They
don’t bring the trouble home.’ But after their mother died in the
laundry business disbanded, and Amy and her two elder sisters struggled to
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
get through the hard war years. Food was scarce and un-nutritious; as a
result, Amy was blighted by an ugly rash on her face which defied all
remedies. The three girls kept house together; Dorothy continued with
laundry work, and Laurie helped out at the local Liberal Club.
Amy, who was bright and motivated, yearned to get an office job:
‘. . . that was for me. It was pretty high-flying in those days.’ Despite her lack of qualifications, Sainsbury’s offered her a post as a junior clerk and cashier, but her father wouldn’t let her take it. Finally she insisted on taking a job at the haberdashery counter of the local Co-op, where she managed to hang on till :
[One day] I opened my wages bag and found myself with only one week to go.
The respite I’d enjoyed was explained by the fact that there was no man home from the war with an actual claim on a job in our shop. Those who had left didn’t return to it. Tragically, in some cases they couldn’t.
So the decision makers had let it ride. Mass unemployment now forced their
hands. There were men – married men with family responsibilities – begging for work. They couldn’t justify keeping girls on. The job was, always had been, a man’s.
Every cloud has a silver lining. We no longer had to spend our evenings and
weekends doing the chores. We had a domestic help living in. Me.
Getting food on the table for her sisters cheered Amy up, but the cloud
of unemployment was dispiriting. Jobs were snatched up as soon as word
of them got out, usually by people ‘in the know’. None of them were for
‘young ladies’. So Amy joined the queue at the Labour Exchange. In the
second week she was sent for a waitressing job at an unwholesome cafe´
where the manager offered her a pitiful half-a-crown a week’s wages which,
he implied, would be supplemented by earnings from demobbed soldiers
looking for pleasure. Tormented by her inflamed complexion, Amy was
morbidly conscious that no man had ever taken a second look at her. ‘With
my spotty face . . . ? I’d have to put my head in a bag, then. But it wasn’t my face he was looking at.’ Desperate for work, unlovely and unhappy as she was, she wasn’t yet ready to sell her body. After she turned the job
down, the Labour Exchange lost interest in her.
I had my twenty-first birthday that year. There must have been girls around
unhappier, more illused than I was. I wasn’t the only one who was living on her family . . . I wasn’t the only one with a stagnating brain and frustrated ambitions.
I wasn’t the only one with a spotty face.
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But I was the only one among the folks we knew . . . who suffered all these
miseries at once. So I had a lovely wallow in my woe; took time off from the shopping and the chores and the futile job-hunting, to have a ‘good birthday cry’
while the others were at work.
Determination, and her supportive sisters, came to Amy’s rescue. With
the last twelve pounds in the kitty – four years’ savings – the girls clubbed together to send her for a term to secretarial school. On the first day she was mortified by her spots, but after that she was too busy, and too
optimistic, to care. Bubbling over with excitement and happiness, she was
intent on her future, which now seemed full of hope and promise. Between
September and November Amy crammed in a year’s worth of shorthand
and typing. Every evening after work Dorothy and Laurie would spend
hours drilling her with dictation. She was driven on by their faith in her.
By Christmas she’d landed a job with a multiple tailoring shop in Ealing.
London!
I’d have gone anywhere, slept rough if need be . . . Now, at last, I’d got what I’d always wanted. I was in. Now there was nothing to stop me.
I was off to conquer the world. Now I’d got my foot on the ladder, I’d show
’em. The sky was the limit!
Amy’s robust good spirits helped her brave the bad times. Aside from
the occasional ‘lovely wallow’ she was not self-pitying.
Water Under the
Bridge
ends as its author sets off for a brave new secretarial career – book-keeping, tea-making and logging measurements for a chain of outfitters in West London. For a young single woman in this represented independence and victory. And in old age, with sister Laurie and her
husband close neighbours in Oxford, life was still ‘. . . wonderful – I’m
staying the course.’
*
For all the hardships, for all the obstacles, frustrations and stigma, it is not hard to find examples of single women setting out, like Amy Gomm, to rescue the image of the ‘old maid’ from the pitiable and grotesque model
so readily communicated by her enemies. Perhaps it came naturally to her.
Certainly women who scorned to fall into the ‘queer spinster’ trap shared
an innately optimistic outlook which upends the stereotype. Not all the
aunts were submissive or dowdy or bitter.
Bessie Webster, for example, was the most beloved of female relatives to
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
her niece, Isabel. This vital, adventurous, life-enhancing, maverick lady had loved her university tutor Jimmy Brown; he died in the war. She didn’t get over it, and always wore his ring; but her spirits were irrepressible.
‘There was always laughter when Bessie was around.’
Or take the writer Elizabeth Jenkins, whose avowed role model (and
namesake?) was Queen Elizabeth the First, the Virgin Queen (‘. . . she
refused to marry’). Despite her mother’s hopes and expectations, Elizabeth
Jenkins simply regarded herself from the outset as unmarriageable, and
never attempted to behave in any kind of way that would get her a husband.
Instead she concentrated her energies on teaching, writing and falling in
love. Pretty, high-spirited, self-centred and talented, she saw herself as a gift from providence to any man lucky enough to gain her fleeting attentions or get her into bed. Marriage was never in her sights.
Similarly ‘Rani’ Cartwright, a well-known model, described herself as
‘free-range’. Rani, daughter of a Siamese mother and an English father,
escaped from her convent education and came to Britain in the s,
where she discovered a world hungry for her exotic beauty. Success came
easily. She sat for Epstein, and was taken up by a top agency to model
clothes for Chanel, Lanvin and Molyneux, while her alluring glance was
soon on display advertising eye treatments as one of ‘The Optrex Girls’.
Travel, glamour, money and high society were there for the taking; in
comparison, marriage held little attraction. The thought of losing her freedom, of having to compromise with somebody else’s needs and habits, repelled her. Even in her nineties, reminiscing in the bedroom of her
comfortable residential home in suburban Suffolk, Miss Cartwright was
adamant: ‘I couldn’t bear to be with one person, so I’d much rather not
marry than have this to face; anyway, I’d seen so many unhappy marriages
that started out happy in the beginning. Until you live with a person you
don’t know their habits, do you? I didn’t want to know, so consequently
I didn’t want to get married. I don’t want to be tied down in anything.’
This was not sub-normality, or man-contemning, or ‘psychic sclerosis’.
These were women controlling their own destinies. Now that there were
too many of her to ignore, the time had come to give the single woman
not just a voice, but an image makeover. Though warped virgins still
outnumbered free-range singles in literature, the fictional model of the
spinster began to explore more rounded, complex portrayals.
*
One of the most extraordinary spinsters to come out of the s is Sylvia
Townsend Warner’s
Lolly Willowes
(). Laura – Lolly – starts out as a
Singled Out
classic aunt, sallow, plain and pointy-faced. Aged twenty-eight when the
novel starts, she is starting to look perilously unmarriageable. Lolly, who
lives according to the Victorian model under her brother Henry’s roof
in London, along with her conventional sister-in-law Caroline and their
children, seems to be an unobtrusive member of the family. It is true she is rather erudite and has shown an early interest in herbalism, but she does her fancy needlework conscientiously. However, she is also given to making
unexpected pronouncements. The one and only suitor to come calling is
rapidly deterred by Lolly’s blithe hint that he may, entirely without knowing it, be a werewolf. ‘This settled it. Henry and Caroline made no more attempts to marry off Laura.’
Lolly’s perceived eccentricities gradually accumulate. She roams London
secretly haunting second-hand bookshops and furtively feasting off marrons
glaceś. One late afternoon she strays into a greengrocer’s shop in Moscow
Road, where she purchases a bunch of russet-coloured chrysanthemums.
The flowers come with a generous spray of beech fronds:
They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she
came so often in the country of her autumn imagination. She stood very still to make quite sure of her sensations. Then: ‘Where do they come from?’ she asked.
Buckinghamshire, comes the answer.
Lolly moves out. Deaf to her family’s indignant protests, she takes a
cottage in the remote and secluded village of Great Mop, in the heart of
the Buckinghamshire Chilterns. Gradually she learns her new landscape by
heart; it is full of cooing pigeons and rustling beechwoods, and the nights