side of the problem, the effect that all sexual intercourse has on the mind and the general composition of the person’s finer and more enduring qualities.
10.
Twentieth-Century Blues
Thursday, 24 May 1934 (aged twenty-four)
Dorset Square.
I have given up smoking until the exams are over. Why I don’t quite know; I suddenly decided last Sunday morning when I was at home that it might be quite a good thing to do. I must say it’s damned hard at times. I never realised how much it meant to me.
Aunt Elsie nearly died last Sunday. She has been in hospital nearly a fortnight now, and I have been convinced that her operation will prove successful and we shall eventually see her out and about once more.
Friday, 25 May
What mockery is this – Aunt Elsie died last night at 10 o’clock. Ethel has just phoned to tell me. She saw her yesterday afternoon after visiting me here, and the grapes I sent were never undone. She was my step-aunt: a quiet shadow of her sisters. How shall I write to them and what flowers shall I send?
Tuesday, 29 May
They buried her yesterday on Harrow Hill. The flowers, said Ethel, were magnificent, ‘and we felt really happy about it all – if only she could have seen them.’
I feel very tempted to pinch one of Lugi’s cigarettes. I have not kept to my resolution very well, having had one or two a day since Thursday and about half a dozen on Sunday. This weakness over so small a thing alarms me. Within a week or two I shall probably be smoking as much as I did before I left off. I like smoking and I want to smoke and at the present time I have no proof that it does me much harm.
Thursday, 14 June
I am angry and bitterly ashamed with myself. Gus is absolutely right: I have let myself slip, am getting fat and not paying enough attention to my clothes.
It seems damned unfair that some people – Joan for instance – can look marvellous by just stepping into the right frock and combing her hair, while I must spend increasing energy to achieve an effect which barely lasts longer than half an hour. I could, I know, look a little less suburban. In 50 years’ time some damn prig of a critic will be saying, ‘she lacked the necessary control of the organisation of her impulses’. Oh, we are bound with a thousand chains! For a hundred years we struggle to free ourselves of one, and while trying to file through the next discover that the other has once more twisted itself round our ankles.
Saturday, 23 June
For another fortnight I shall be in London making whoopee, wildly and without restraint: sherry parties, dinner parties, theatres, dances, art exhibitions, films – then peace, perhaps somewhere alone for a few weeks before I return to Bath.
As Virginia Woolf urges of young writers, I must not forget my patron, Posterity. And Posterity I must ask to be lenient with me, remembering that this is only an experiment. Stella Benson, I read a short while ago, has left an enormous journal to be published in 50 years’ time. 50 years!55 If I live I shall be 74 – dramatic thought! If I succeed in making of life what I think perhaps I may, my Journal shall not be left so long unfriended.
I sent six letters to Bath the other day, five of which I owed to the people there. But the sixth was to Colin Wintle, and I swear I had no intention of writing to him when I began the others. I have not, after all, forgotten Colin. What will come of this affair God knows.
The July issue of Good Housekeeping printed the attached letter which I wrote after reading Sewell Stokes’s article in the June number:
A Girl Defends Her Own Generation
While I agree with nearly everything Mr Sewell Stokes has said concerning the ‘education of our parents’ in your June number, I feel that I must protest that his theory is not so simple to put into practice! Mr Stokes must be fortunate in having an exceptionally broad-minded mother. My own is dead, but my father, though he does not want to be educated in the least, is sufficiently good-natured to let me go my own way without trying to interfere. However, I do know only too well of the strife that goes on in the majority of homes today …
It is no good telling us to be patient with their obsolete opinions on drama and art; to ‘teach them tactfully all we have learnt,’ for they are not always ‘surprisingly good pupils.’ They adhere doggedly to the ‘We’ve lived so much longer than you have, my dear, and therefore must know better’ principle, simply refusing to admit the possibility of their being wrong …
We cannot introduce them to our Chelsea friends unless we are sure they will receive them without unreasonable censure. But it happens often that anything new or unexpected, anything they cannot easily understand and which does not fit into their own knowledge of the world, the older generation will set aside at once as unacceptable …
Miss J.L.P.
University College, London
Tuesday, 24 July
Colin Wintle – the maddening flippancy of his letters throws me back into a torment of doubt and sick dreams. What does he mean, what does he want of me, what does he think of me? Who writes on the back of GWR pamphlets?56 ‘If only you were in Bath now … I am looking forward to seeing you next month … we’ll make a date now, for I’d love to take you out.’ It is bewildering. He may not be at all what I have thought he might be. Or he might be running away from himself, hiding behind the first woman who seems interested. It is possible, Gus said, to go either way or both.
Thursday, 26 July
Dollfuss killed in Vienna.57
‘This is a very terrible thing,’ said Mary Kate as she seized the Rice Krispies this morning. It seems she knows something about it.58 ‘The League of Nations is no good whatsoever. They’ve tried to suppress Germany and Austria, which is futile.’
War … war … the muttering goes on on all sides. War in the air. England’s lovely countryside devastated. No escape anywhere.
Yet supposing it happened. Bombs dropping, bombs bursting away the slums of London and Leeds, and the dirt and depression of all our big cities. Life will be lost of course, blood will flood the streets, beauty will be desecrated. But afterwards – for it couldn’t last long this war in the air – if any of us have survived, if any of us can still pick up the torn threads of our lives and go on, what a magnificent chance for us to begin again. Given men of foresight and wisdom and sensitiveness, we have every opportunity of creating an age more golden than the Elizabethan.
Monday, 13 August
Bath.
‘Never trust your memory,’ Mr Richard Pearce, one of the clerks of the Acton Police Court, advised me last week. ‘Make a note of everything.’
And here I am again. Was welcomed warmly by all in the office today. Colin … oh, I don’t know about Colin. He is still as baffling, still as distracting. What right have I to think he can mean anything to me or I to him? Actually I know remarkably little about
