account. Until I have grasped the reality, until I have felt it, knocked against and bruised myself perhaps, I cannot continue the romance in my mind.
Sunday, 14 May
Well we have met Mr Wildman. He came over the other evening and stayed till 1 a.m. drinking Daddy’s port and telling the most entertaining stories. He horrified the parents and amused me vastly. I have no fear of complications ever arising between myself and him.
He is typical of the age: coarse, sincere and dramatic, very sincerely dramatic, plays to the public from the pulpit and is not ashamed to admit it. Nor to take out his front tooth to show how it is attached to the plate, not to tell us of the woman who invited him to sleep with her because of divine inspiration she had received from God.
Cheap – yes he is cheap, and appeals thereby to the poorer classes. He much prefers to turn the mangle while Mrs Jones gets on with the dinner than be entertained in the front parlour. All good in itself, certainly. He talked an awful lot of scandal in a deliciously unmalicious way.
I am going to Jamaica. I shall see Pooh again.43
Undated, probably early June
Damn, Hell and Blast. Ethel cannot see that my hair looks any better after it has been done by Mr Ed of Dover Street than when I do it myself! She is so blind stiff she cannot see that the paint is cracking off her own wooden nose. God what a mood I’m in tonight.
Monday, 5 June
I have never known Ethel to look so charming as she did this afternoon serving tea to us in the drawing room, wrapped in a thin, pale blue dressing gown; it gave her a strange air of gracious freedom. I think I am often unfair to her. I know she resents the fact that I don’t confide in her as much as I might do.
This morning I was again accused of being inconsiderate; it is always the one weapon she can most easily handle against me. And all the evidence is in her favour. I am selfish and inconsiderate and often strangely rude and unkind to her. Don’t I often come down to breakfast very late so that she is put to the most immense inconvenience of getting me a fresh one? Don’t I often come in very late at night and disturb her in her first sleep? She always does her best, and is working now without a maid for the sake of the family’s overdraft. And what do I ever do to show my appreciation? How many times have I compared her to a little wooden doll whose limbs will only move in certain set directions? I love my father – there is sun in him. And I had a great and dreadful thought the other night that she is one of those people who are sunless.
Thursday, 6 July
The more one dreams of a thing, the more it recedes from one in reality. I could have given him so much. Marriage with Gus would be hell I know, but it would have rich compensations. But he doesn’t know I have been in love with him for the past 18 months. Perhaps he never will know. Why should he?
I think the idea of marriage with any of his most intimate friends terrifies him. He is sexually so very fastidious. How may I teach him that the thing that matters is that hard rich jewel of trust, and that is what we could have. It is as if I have seen a lame man trying to hobble along without a stick and wanting to lend him my arm, but he would rather endure his difficulty alone rather than the humiliation of support.
I am free anyway to consider further advances, and if none come then at least I shall have had Chris and Gus and Roy and David, each for a few brief moments. I have considered marrying them all but have failed to run my dreams into reality. It is the bourgeois taint – that sickly desire, fostered by cheap novels and films, to hear a man say, ‘I have been waiting for you all my life … we were made for each other … it is fate.’ Miracles I suppose do happen – but they are rare, and there is no reason to believe they might happen to me.
I am afraid of loneliness as everyone else. ‘Somewhere, somewhere afar, a white tremendous daybreak’ – what is it Rupert Brooke says? That is what we aim at. I will not give Gus up. I know he is not the type to grow old. He couldn’t live quietly in a cottage. He belongs to the night and the footlights and all the glamour of the city and the circus. And I belong to the soil.
8.
Of Her Own Accord
Saturday, 22 July 1933 (aged twenty-three)
Jamaica.
It is astonishing how easily I am able to disconnect myself from the affairs and atmosphere that affect me in one place and absorb those of another. These last few days there has been a devil raging within me, and it was roused by the devil in Hugh Patrick (‘Bill’).
He has been such marvellous fun to know even for a little while. But now I am crazy to know more of him, to search those deeps in him that I know are there. There was something in him that responded to the cry in me. Oh, if I could have him for a few hours at ease by my side, that I may say all I want to say and hear all I know he would say in return. It was not that he is in the least like Chris either – feature or figure – but he has the same latent depth and warmth of feeling, the same light in his eyes when he looked at me sometimes, the same rather stiff, amused little gestures, the same masculine magnetism, the same superficial gay recklessness that I find so irresistible. God, what a lover he might be, and how wild and impossible my ideas sometimes are.
But he sails on Tuesday back to his wife in Truro.
How magnificently he will work in as the character of the tragic love affair in my novel – he and Chris combined. Why do I always get my deep feelings roused by married men? It wasn’t the sea. I want to have him teasing me again, pulling my hair and being thoroughly rude, then growing suddenly quiet. Miss Neil (fortune teller) read my hand on board: ‘You will not get married until you are about 45, then it will suddenly happen.’
And now I must not waste Pooh’s electric light any longer, it is past 1.30. The Jamaican night is raucous with the odd strange calls of its creatures. My sheet is scattered with moths and insects, fireflies glitter past the windows, mosquitoes nibble at any bare part of me they can find. It is marvellous being with Pooh again. To think I am the aunt of a most magnificent niece!44
Monday, 31 July
Heat, damp sticky breathless heat, mosquitoes, flies, many moths, deep banks of green fern round the verandah, black ants scurrying across these atrocious Victorian tiles, Sam watering the roses, whistling as he handles the hose.
I never realised how hideous European clothes were until I saw them worn here. The girls adore pale pink georgette and bright shiny satins and flimsy hats. And why is our civilisation so efficient and so ugly? Everywhere one goes one finds the inevitable mark of the white conqueror’s Victorian heel. Beastly little houses, American advertisements, petrol pumps, cinemas. If someone would only put the black woman into loose brightly coloured skirts, beads and the gay head handkerchiefs many of them still wear. But as soon as she has won her freedom she must have her silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. And although they copy us so exactly and slavishly they hate us – all the black people. One can feel it everywhere. Except that everywhere the white man is feared and respected. But their deep envy and hate is there. Possibly the backwash, as Pooh suggests, of the bitterness of the slave.
Monday, 14 August
I am bored to the soles of my feet. Domestic bliss is all very well for the two people most closely concerned, but my God how tedious it can seem for the mere onlooker. I never realised
