mood. Aggravating to live with but lovable in spite of her faults. Character and personality – or what Elinor Glyn has termed ‘It’ – counts more than brains or beauty.13
A piquant face not altogether unattractive, teeth a trifle prominent, skin almost sallow, lanky shingle, but lovely eyes. A button off the cuff of the short tweed coat she wore, darned woolly stockings, large flat-heeled old brown strap shoes, a wispy skirt of a thin dark blue artificial silk. And yet the most impelling personality in the room – at least I thought so.
She came and inspected my instruments. ‘Aren’t they nice?’ she said. And, ‘Where do you get your set-squares from? I’ve tried all over the place in Ealing and can’t get them with the rounded edges like that.’ Making herself charmingly agreeable in case she might want to borrow something. After she had gone I scratched my name on the set-squares.
After all, it was quite simple. There are 7 of us starting Architecture – 3 boys and 4 girls. The rest are doing their 2nd and 3rd years. One helped oneself to a drawing board, bought a sheet of paper in the next room, took a T-square and chose a place in the front row. And it was all fairly easy to begin with.
I wonder why these personalities dominate me so. Immediately I come into contact with anyone I take a fancy to I want to be like them.
Sunday, 11 November
For two minutes today we paused and dreamed. There was heartache and pain and awe in the silence, and the cry of a frightened child, and a man who coughed, and two girls who whispered once. And there was promise and peace and a vast universal stillness.
I am so very proud and glad I was there in Whitehall with all those thousands. Within a few yards of the King and his family. And to see the people who came: coarse, loud-voiced women. Slim supple girls. Old men and young. A cockney and his vacant-eyed wife – one of the bloody Tommies perhaps who came through. All of them bound together for one indefinable space of time by a relationship stronger than blood or spoken word. And the service at Albert Hall tonight, when songs and hymns were sung so familiar and so clear, grander than the men who first thought of them.14
Saturday, 15 December
Against the dictates of all reason, and minimising the chances of my eyesight ever becoming better, I must write. Today I watched a bride and bridegroom sent away by their relations and friends smothered in confetti. Confetti was thrust down their necks, bags of it emptied over them, their car lurid with it. Horrible, gaudy stuff that brings no happiness. And so my resolve is strengthened more fiercely than before: If I ever get married, mine shall be the quietest of weddings. I don’t want a lot of people for whom I care nothing get tight on Daddy’s champagne and ogle me at church and whisper to one another.
I have dreamed it all so often. One morning, Sunday perhaps, very early I and He, Leslie, Ethel and Daddy and his most intimate and necessary relations in a little church, and then to shy away. No fuss, no ribaldry, no hateful insincerity.
Sunday, 12 January 1929
Last night I met Harold Dagley. Margaret and I went together to join in the celebrations of P.’s 21st (next year I shall be 21!). And he came late. They had partnered me off with him, but as it happened, Martin was partnerless so I went round with him. H.D. was distinctly disappointing even at first sight – slight, thin, dark and weak-chinned. He is one of those boys who cannot be friends with a girl without wanting to flirt with her. And it is no use getting away from the fact that I am not a flirt in the same way Margaret is. I don’t think there’s anything frightfully admirable in that. Perhaps I said that because I am a bit jealous. I know that if anybody wanted to kiss me I wouldn’t refuse him – and yet damn it all I’ve just remembered that Percy did on Boxing Day under the mistletoe and I smacked his face.
Oh I don’t know – it’s all wrong. How often have I wondered: to give up everything for an ideal, or lose sight of it in the murk of an everyday existence? Is it made up of little things – washing up, typewriters and shoulder straps – or must one climb the hills to reach the stars alone?
Wednesday, 17 April
Daddy has hurt me so. I came in from the tennis club meeting full of the fun I had gleaned from it, and I told Daddy that Valerie had been elected to the Ladies Committee. ‘Oh, you are hopeless – if Valerie can, why can’t you?’ And it hurt, hurt, hurt. Why can’t parents help you by thinking a bit for themselves, instead of bringing up the same old platitudes? I am too damn proud ever to talk of these things with other people.
Monday, 23 December
‘The War has ruined us for everything.’ He is right. ‘We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.’ (From All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, translated by A.W. Wheen.)
I have not the time to say all I would about this book, nor to copy all the paragraphs I should like to. I think all my generation and all later generations should read it. We never knew the true ghastliness of war, its utter futility, its horror, the pitiless suffering of men. We should pray every night and every morning for no more war.
This book brings it home to you more than anything I have ever known. The details are harrowing – it spares you nothing, it makes you feel physically sick. Yet how much better for us to learn like this rather than ever enact it all again.
Monday, 6 January 1930
And so I pray. My one big belief is prayer. I pray that if all other faiths fail, this one may not. But the question that weighs heaviest on my mind at the moment is this one: Shall I leave the Tennis Club or not?
The idea came to me just before Xmas. At first it seemed the one thing left for me to do to establish my happiness. I want to write it all down so that I can get the pros and cons in a cold systematic review.
Pros: I shall be free every day to do exactly as I like. No one at the club cares whether I go or not. It is too large for me – I fit in nowhere. I cannot somehow play tennis well enough to arrest the attentions or kindly regard of the upper sects. The bright young people boss me. I am not able to drift with them: self-consciousness overcomes me. My eyesight, nerves and weakness generally are against me. I love tennis. If only there were someone who wouldn’t mind practising with me. No more mental agony, that lounging about in the summer hoping someone will ask you to make up a decent four, but no one does because there is always someone else. Then eventually to hide one’s shame and get one’s money’s worth, make up a four myself with a lot of old women.
The cons: Perhaps I didn’t try very hard last summer. I missed the tournaments quite by mistake – that always gives a bad impression. Many people are kind: no one is ever rude to me or obviously shuns me like they do Mrs Warner. There is always a chance that I may sometime convince them I can help, organise, could be of value to the club, can be light and amusing and attractive.
But I think the biggest and most important Con is Valerie. It is so hard not to be jealous. She is young and has won a gallant place among them. I don’t want to lose her, she is one of the best friends I have. If it wasn’t for her I shouldn’t think twice about leaving. Oh God, I don’t know what to do.
Sunday, 12 January
There is a dream: an exquisite little house set down on the borders of Cornwall and Devon near the sea. That may
