I must have a garden, also an income large enough to enable our employing an adequate number of servants, for I know only too well how soul-destroying domestic trivialities can be.
Wednesday, 3 June
A Canadian architect visiting the college spoke to us of the great possibilities that lay before us. There was a germ of greatness in the modern movement. We are no longer hampered, as he was, by the conventional theories of the Royal Academy and RIBA – the war exploded all that.
Now I am at last clear in my own mind that I do not want the conventional finale to a young girl’s career – her marriage. Let the conventionalists laugh; from now on my career becomes of first importance. I will learn all that I am possibly able. I will build a new world!
Friday, 26 June
I feel disloyal when I say things against Daddy and E. Yet I don’t know of anyone among my friends and acquaintances who are on terms of complete and happy understanding with their parents. I think mine are the most tolerant and kind in their way, yet I can confide in neither. Nor have any desire to do so. It seems too much trouble even to hope to make them understand.
There is Harris (Gus). He has had so many rows with his father that he has been turned from the house and told never to come back again. He has an allowance and is now utterly happy in his newfound freedom. There is Few, whom Joan and I have envied with her independence, her lack of home ties. Then Cargill – she is older, and her parents seem more tolerant, but she is not happy and I have heard her complain of the parental attitude. And Joan – how she grumbles at her home life. And Alison: ‘My mother is very sweet of course, but I like her so much better at a distance.’
We want complete independence, to be turned out of our homes as the birds turn out their young. How many years since Shakespeare wrote Crabbed Age and Youth? And still we have not learned.24
Friday, 3 July
‘Next time,’ said Aunt Janie to me in the interval this evening as we sat in the two seats I had taken in the upper circle at His Majesty’s Theatre almost immediately behind Valerie and Jack who were celebrating V.’s birthday, ‘Next time I come to the theatre with you I hope it will be with your fiancé.’
The last time we argued about this I upset a cup of tea all over the tablecloth in the dining room. I will not be made to believe that this is the ultimate reason for a girl’s existence. I will not bind myself to any soul-destroying life when the chance to live so fully lies before me. Yet how much do I want to fall in love!
‘There is nothing very remarkable about getting married or having a child,’ writes Ethel Mannin. ‘But when you get down to rock bottom, love is the greatest of all human happiness because it is the only source of lasting, fundamental satisfaction, and there can’t be any lasting delight in beauty, work, travel or anything else unless one’s life is right at the core, and it can’t be right at the core unless one’s love life is right.’25
Wednesday, 23 September
4.30 a.m., Have sat talking with brother Pooh since 1.30 a.m. The possibility of my having Phyllis Robinson as a sister in law.
Sunday, 27 September
The lights failed this evening. The glow of candlelight stirred a number of indefinable emotions within me. Is the secret of living that we should consider life as a series of episodes, and joining Walt Whitman on the Open Road, treat the body’s death as an accident only, having no cognisance either at the beginning or end of our travels? So that were a World War suddenly to ravage the earth, severing me from the placid security of my parents’ home, scattering my friends, killing those I love, depriving me of my independence and prospect of a career, turning my stable life upside down, even carrying me captive to a strange land – I might look upon it merely as one scene in a play, one stage of a journey on which I am bent solely to garner wisdom in search of beauty and truth.26
Phyllis Robinson teaches cookery and needlework and could make an excellent housewife. But she is perhaps too fond of her own way. It’s for him to decide. I only hope his loneliness won’t drive him into an alliance he’ll regret.
Thursday, 29 October
I fear of inking the sheets again as I write in bed. I have got another ‘1st Mention’, the highest mark, for my Studio work. Although no mark I am afraid will ever again fill me with such amazement and rapture as the ‘1st Mention’ I received for my Classical Composition at the end of last term. After three consecutive Cs I began to think I could not improve. I have now every encouragement to work hard at this career I have so strangely chosen, and I must forget that I would rather be able to write a good book.
Friday, 20 November
‘I live as speedily as I can,’ said Olive Briggs in the cloakroom the other day. ‘I was having a conversation with my mother this morning when she asked me whether I had ever considered the value of my life. Had I ever asked myself should I mind if I died tomorrow? I asked myself that long ago, and I’m quite sure I shouldn’t.’
I too wouldn’t mind were I to die tomorrow, except that I might hurt the two people I care for more than anyone else in the world. If I could build one monument to the beauty of mankind, if I could write one book of real worth, I should feel I had not lived in vain.
[Note added later and pinned to her journal:] Olive Briggs became a fully qualified and competent architect and later married the son of a wealthy collar manufacturer. They were both found dead in his car on a lovely part of the Yorkshire Moors – voluntary suicide, from the car’s exhaust. It was widely publicised in the press, with the note they left. He could not face the future, the world seemed to him on the brink of chaos and nothing could save it. She took her life willingly with his. ‘Loyalty,’ she wrote, ‘I believe to be one of the virtues.’
Sunday, 13 December
‘What I believe,’ writes Bertrand Russell, ‘is that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.’ And this conviction is based on an expert knowledge of physical science.
Sometimes the idea of immortality has appalled me – that there shall never be an end and we must go on living through untold and inconceivable eras. But behind it all there must be some purpose. Why must we suffer so here on earth? Why should one be physically attracted to some people more than others? What is it that makes me believe I shall one day meet someone who will mean more to me than the satisfaction of sexual desires? Why torment us with a little knowledge and then stamp us out? Why are we here?
Until someone can answer these questions for me I will not surrender my belief in God or in life after death. There are so many questions that will go unanswered, but I cannot believe we shall never know the truth.
Boxing Day, 1931
We dined yesterday at ‘Milton’, the home of Ethel’s two unmarried sisters. They belong to a class dying out with their generation, the middle-class gentlepeople who lived in the quiet villages around London before the increase in road traffic developed them into the present revolting suburbs.
The girls were brought up with the main idea of finding a husband as soon as possible, and during the interim amused themselves at home with all the other young people of their own social standing in the village. They lived in big, comfortable houses run efficiently by a thoroughly domesticated
