musical at-homes and dances in the winter. They did a little sewing and possibly helped with the cooking and arranged the flowers, and could devote themselves to parish church work if they wished. No one found it necessary to question the religion offered them. They accepted what had satisfied their parents without demur, and were not troubled by their personalities or concerned with psychology. No passionate discontent urged them to leave home in search of adventure.
The main road where the trams now go clanking by was a long and lovely lane flanked by tall poplar trees, and I can remember the land ablaze with buttercups on blue May mornings, and two magnificent oak trees whose shade was favoured by lovers at dusk. All have gone. The buttercups were raked up long ago and the ground divided into neat little plots. One is called ‘Dreamcot’, and in another there is a collection of children who scream all day long and keep their dog chained up so that he is continually lifting his voice in complaint.
But the remnants of the old, gracious families still gather together at Xmas time, pathetic fragments of a society scattered and storm-tossed by the war, and shaken and bewildered by its aftermath. I must go my way. I can never go theirs.
‘We are never satisfied with what we have.’ Jean in her Chelsea Arts frock, 1932.
6.
The Popular Idea of Love
Monday, 4 January 1932 (aged twenty-two)
‘The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last,’ says Virginia Woolf in her article on Oxford Street.27 ‘It is built to pass. Its glassiness, its transparency, its surging waves of coloured plaster give a different pleasure and achieve a different end from that which was desired by the old builders and their patrons, the nobility of England. Their pride required the illusion of permanence … Today we knock down and rebuild … it is an impulse that makes for creation and fertility. Discovery is stimulated and invention on the alert.’
But to me it is all horrible. This cheapness, this tawdry turmoil and haste and sham values – I can only see it as the manifestation of the ghastly little minds of the people who tolerate these conditions. And ugliness of mind is inevitably inherited by the next generation as a physical deformity that they will not thank us for. It will be more difficult for them to knock down the heritage of deceit and insensitiveness than the walls and facades that seem ‘made of yellow cardboard and sugar icing’.
Nowhere in the suburbs, nor growing provinces, nor welter of humanity and toil in the thoroughfares of this degenerate London may be found peace or pause. If there is by some mischance a cessation of noise in some backstreet, the silence is empty and vacant.
But how well she has described it, the Babel and glitter of Oxford Street, and with what courage does she try to discover a value for its existence. ‘The mere thought of age, of solidity, of lasting for ever is abhorrent to Oxford Street.’ It most certainly is: who would want Oxford Street embalmed as a memorial to our present age? God forbid. So let us sweep it away before the harm of its ugliness reaches far into the lives of those who succeed us.
Saturday, 16 January
My discontent can be used as the ruling power of my life. After school it drove me from home into the office, from the office to college, and from suburban life to one of independence in town.28 I feel suddenly secure, knowing that so long as I am never content with any one state and achievement I shall go on to discover new people and make new things. I shall never grow smug and suburbanised and narrow-minded so long as I can overcome a natural apathy and lazy desire to dream. So long as the little material things of life don’t crush me down or hem me in so that I lose all vitality.
I find myself carrying a banner with a strange device: across it in letters of gold and flame is flung the word ‘Excelsior’.29 I discovered it in the train this morning as I was coming home from a night’s dissipation in town and I had stayed with D.V. Cargill. We had been with Peter and his brother to Bow Bells, and supper at the Troc. I wondered why such a delightful evening lacked something I couldn’t define. It was an excellent show, and my companions are charming and amusing. What is this nagging desire that will not be quieted?
Wednesday, 10 February
‘Immortality is hard to achieve,’ says D.H. Lawrence. I believe it, but I want immortality. If I find I cannot create great architecture I shall give it up.
God, why did I get a ‘C’ for my Farmhouse? I said I would get a ‘1st Mention’ for it. I know I didn’t finish it, but that alone couldn’t have given me so low a mark. I am still stamped with the stamp of suburbia. I cannot somehow get any stability into my work. Or am I right that everything I have done that has been well marked was more of other people’s brains than my own? Admittedly I had little to do with the Town House elevation, but the dovecote was quite a lot of my own …
But this is sick-making – only when I have strong influences to guide me do I turn out good work. If I am to face this truth, then dare I go back to the office at the end of this course? I shall be dragged under, mutilated.
‘I wish I had your profile,’ Joan said to me one day, but I wish I had her colouring. We are never satisfied with what we have. How can I tell her how lovely she is when flushed with excitement when watching Crockett come in at the studio door – her hair is a light, ripe gold, and her eyes are wide and blue and very bright, and she sits tensely upright on her stool, swinging her legs or waving her T-square in the air, and there is a vividness about her I envy. She may be childish now, but she will grow out of it and grow into a far more interesting person than I shall ever be.
She will outgrow her passion for Crockett. She has tried to persuade me to go with her to Cannon Street where she thinks he lives. ‘But what good will it do you?’ I argued. ‘Oh, but it’s interesting,’ she said. ‘One can imagine him so much better at home if one knows his surroundings, but you don’t understand.’ She added patronisingly, ‘One day you will …’
Johnny Hodgson despises me and I hate him for it. He described me more aptly than anyone else could have done. When he said, ‘Miss Pratt would never do anything unusual unless someone else was doing it too,’ I hated him for it but I knew he was right.
Saturday, 5 March
Peter (Gus) – I cannot bring myself to admit I am in love with him, for I don’t know how much is sheer animal sex and how much true affection.30 That at times I am terribly fond of the little blighter I mustn’t deny. I have messed around with him so much and taken him so much for granted that it is a little alarming to believe that I am growing to care.
He is weak and selfish and terribly affected, and at times irritates me beyond endurance, but I am thinking far too much about him to ignore facts. He is clever definitely, and interests me: who couldn’t be thrilled with the designer of my Chelsea Arts Frock? It is a dream, a miracle, something that completely transfigures me and which is of course so eminently pleasing to one’s vanity. But then he is so ridiculously young for his age, and I am afraid of what he may become now that he is going on the stage – he is so easily influenced.
At times I am consumed with a terrible lust for power. Power over men, power to make that light come into their eyes like I have sometimes seen with Peter’s when they look at me. That is the beast in me. I doubt whether anyone suspects it. ‘The Wee Bear’ says Peter. ‘Something soft and fluffy.’ Me. Me! Soft and inoffensive and wholly ineffectual – Christ! Is it any wonder
