Dyed SquirrelIntroduction
23 January 1941
I want, I need a husband. Thousands of other lonely frustrated females must be feeling the same way – why should I think that I am to be luckier? Because I intend to try to find one. One must tackle the problem positively, gather together one’s assets, accept one’s debits and go forth booted and spurred.
Assets: A fair share of good looks, physical attraction, generous nature and more poise than I once had. Subjects about which I know something and can use in work and conversation: architecture, literature, drama, people and certain places.
Debits: an agonising, thwarting knowledge of my deficiencies and general unworthiness; a confused, badly trained, porous mind, a tendency to bolt into silence at the first advance of difficulty.
I must take them, my debits and assets, out into the world, into the battlefield … and there must I learn to fight. I may lose, but at least I shall know I have tried while there is still a chance of winning.
In April 1925, at the age of fifteen, Jean Lucey Pratt began writing a journal, and she didn’t put down her pen for sixty years. She produced well over a million words, and no one in her family or large circle of friends had an inkling until the end. She wrote – legibly, in fountain pen, usually in Woolworth’s exercise books – about anything that amused, inspired or troubled her, and the journal became her only lasting companion. She wrote with aching honesty, laying bare a single woman’s strident life as she battled with men, work and self-doubt. She increasingly hoped for posthumous publication, and her wish is hereby granted; the pleasure, inevitably, is all ours.
I first fell under Jean Pratt’s spell in the autumn of 2002, but she had another name then. I was visiting the University of Sussex, immersed in Mass Observation, the organisation founded in London in the late 1930s to gain a deeper understanding of the thoughts and daily activities of ‘ordinary people’. As the project evolved and the war began, hundreds of people agreed to submit their personal diaries, and Jean Pratt was among them. Most of the diaries (and diarists) were, of course, anything but ordinary: they were diverse, proud, intriguing, trivial, insightful, objectionable and candid. Most entries were handwritten, some were illegible. Some were composed on office paper, some on tissue. Mass Observation soon became a unique rendition of history without hindsight.
I had called at the archive with the intention of collating the material into an accessible book. Many of the diarists wrote from 1939 to the end of the war, but I was more interested in what came afterwards. For the book to work, I knew I would need to tell the story of recovery not only from a political and social perspective, but also from a personal one: the quirks and preferences of the diarists would have to be compelling in themselves, each voice overlapping in the timeline.
Over the next few visits I selected five writers who were different from each other in age, geographical location, employment and temperament. There was a socialist housewife from Sheffield, forever at odds with her husband and hairdresser; there was a pensioner from London, endlessly creosoting his garden fence and writing abominable poetry; there was a gay antiques dealer in Edinburgh;
