disaster has occurred – the R101 has crashed.17 40-odd people burned to death (all men). Terrible, ghastly, tragedy stark and dramatic. The papers will be full of it, much sympathy will be expressed for the remaining relatives, the men will be made heroes and their widows provided for for life, there will be whip-rounds and memorials and long, stirring speeches, and all the world will be horribly thrilled.
But I know of worse tragedies that go on every day unnoticed: patient, plodding workers scraping all they can together so that their children may have a better start than they had. I cannot forget that timorous little creature who came into the office for an education grant for her daughter. She was so shrunken and nervous and terribly anxious to get the best for her girl. She confessed to having had to borrow £4 for clothes. The patience of these people. What do they ever get from life?
Friday, 10 October
Thoughts accumulated during the past week: that in no other place apart from university can one be so completely and unintentionally ignored. I may hate the newness of it all, and the hardness of it, yet I must fight on. If I am to be the only girl in a class of boys, then let me get to know those boys. Already two have shown signs of friendliness.
Saturday, 6 December
Joyce Coates: A charming little person, rich, with a good taste in clothes and attractive manners. More in her perhaps than at first might be imagined.
Joan Hey: She is in the act of growing up. In fact she is only just beginning. Nonetheless she is easy to get on with and likeable, and has plenty of willpower.
Elsie Few: A most interesting personality. There is something of the texture of satin or cream about her, and above all she is an artist.
Thursday, 1 January 1931
So seldom have I succeeded in keeping any New Year Resolutions that now mine are rarely made in January, but at odd sudden moments in unconventional places.
But I have recently reached a conclusion on a point I have been considering for several weeks. I inherited from my mother the desire to write. This desire has haunted me from the time when I first scrawled the alphabet in coloured letters across a clean white page. I must write, even now, with my career chosen and my training begun. It is in my blood and will not be subdued. To satisfy this desire I am going to keep this Journal which I shall make as entertaining as possible. I am learning truths too, as I grow older, that I am unable to discuss at present, and I fear that with the coming years ideas will be forgotten unless I make an effort to keep them. So let this be my New Year Resolution – that I leave behind me something worth reading, which even if it doesn’t attract strangers, may at least surprise my friends and relations.
Saturday, 17 January
Pooh went back to work today.18 Our lives are made up of meetings and farewells. Think of the meals now! Once more ‘they two’ and me.
Ethel and I will never be more than superficially good friends. We are mentally opposed. I always feel that anything she does for me is rather a nuisance. When I was in bed the other day with a cold I felt the most brutal burden. She won’t read: how much she has missed. And if a discussion is started on anything more advanced than the latest family scandal she shuts up like an oyster at first signs of opposition.
But it isn’t her fault any more than it is mine. I admire all she has done for us tremendously, and she runs this house as if it were a ship. And she has looked after and cared for Daddy. But oh this banging about in the mornings when she makes herself do the housework she’s not feeing equal to. This agitation when a guest is late for a meal, this pride in her home. There is no sort of adventure about it, and she is too practical, too afraid of sentiment. I wish sometimes she might suddenly leave dusting the drawing room one morning and take a bus to Kew because Spring seemed suddenly to have arrived and she wanted to see young, green growing things.
Since I have so many more advantages than she has ever had and I have learned so much more from books than she has, I must be the one to regulate the friendship so that we do nothing to hurt each other. If she’d had the education, good school, made to work, college, a degree, travel. All desires outside her circle have been repressed by the atmosphere in which she was brought up – Wembley all her life.
I feel brutal writing these things, but … Mummy used to read Shelley and Keats and Tennyson. She’d have loved Rupert Brooke and Alfred Noyes and Walter de la Mare. Poetry is never something that has taken a very big place in Ethel’s life.
Saturday, 24 January
Tonight we played ‘cutthroat’ and Daddy won (1s. 5d.),19 and we half-jokingly urged him to put it to Dr Barnardo’s. But this he firmly refused to do. ‘It is wrong,’ Ethel said as he went to do the greenhouse. ‘He plays for what he can get.’ And later, when we were discussing the possibility of visiting Wisley Garden, a good Sunday outing in the car, she said, ‘But we never go out in the car. I never had a run all last summer. Daddy just will not use the car except to get him somewhere definite. We never use it and we never shall.’ So she too finds Daddy a little disappointing. There are times when I am ashamed of him – yet I love him. He came from his Saturday night bath very pink and clean, with his white hair fluffed in a halo round his head. I think I love him like that best of all. If in 5 years I manage to become an Associate of RIBA he will be 70. 70. Oh why wasn’t I born sooner?
I was smitten earlier this evening with a tremendous idea. I would write a book within the next 5 years and see if I could get it published. And here I am going to quote from Mr John Connell, for I must confess his book was partly responsible for the inspiration:
‘It can be no tale of carefully rounded edges, of neatly massed effects, a thing of plot or climax. Somehow life is not like that – it is not symmetrical, measured and finished. The weaver of the pattern doesn’t seem to care for neatly tasselled ends and pretty bows – it is all very rough and ragged. Yet through it all there seems to run a purpose and an idea, a kind of guiding line.’
And so I conceived the idea of writing a book on similar lines.
Friday, 30 January
This morning I felt foolish talking to Mr Ashworth. I kept imagining that he was wondering why on earth I had chosen Architecture and not Decoration, or in fact either.
On our way back from tea today Joan Hey and I passed the little 2nd-year decorator Philips. She was alone and her eyes were red and swollen and I heard her sob as she passed us by. ‘I am so sorry for her,’ said Joan. ‘She’s so dull and inanimate, but I expect inside she wishes she were dashing and attractive. Everything is against her. She has the ugliest figure.’
It is true. And I am sorry too. I know that feeling only too well.
Saturday, 31 January
This book I am going to write. I shall start with my schooldays and fill the first chapter or phase of the book with as eloquent and entertaining a description of PHC as possible. Then those bitter years, a very light and rather cynical sketch but quietly indicating growth of thought and so on, and I shall write I think in diary form. I must suppress all egoism. It’s going to be difficult. And then student days.
Lacrosse this afternoon, played in a bitter wind. I’m not very good but I love it – the tang in the air, the movement, the superb cleanness of it all. I wear my gym tunic under my coat now and don’t bother to change. It amuses me to see the sly, curious glances of the gentlemen
