the less she imagines a life beyond them. Between 1926 and 1959 her writing fills thirty-eight journals; between 1959 and 1986 there are only seven. But she kept at it. In the final years I do feel she was writing less for herself and more for her family and us, the unknowable reader.
At school she may have preferred botany to English, but words were unquestionably Jean Pratt’s craft and trade. Her drift into journalism and published biography seems at every stage a natural one (she made several aborted attempts at novels too). She read widely and wrote criticism, and then in later years she successfully ran a bookshop. Anyone who shares this passion for books cannot fail to recognise both a kindred spirit and a talented practitioner, nor marvel at the opportunity to witness a writer develop in style and intellect (let alone track a mindset from teenage naïveté to twenty-something disillusion to something approaching adult contentment). On a daily basis, the overriding value of her writing lies in the piecemeal narration and the telling details, the minutiae too often submerged in the bigger histories or airbrushed by heirs and estates. It’s a poetic list: the schoolgirl crushes, the depth of a grave as it appears to a child, the loss of a tennis match, bad car driving, classmates Yeld and Grissell, the dress-sense of Christians, the ‘Three Ginx in harmony’, the shock of Jacob Epstein, the disappointments of Jack Honour, the prominence of hunchbacks, the thoughts of war in 1931, the tears at a train station, girls playing cricket, the sodden film crew on a Cornish beach – the unfettered, absurd humanity of it all, and all this before she turned twenty-one.
How to sum up a life’s work? Certainly we may regard it as forward-thinking. She was clearly not the first notable woman to engage with the apparently mutually exclusive possibilities of spousal duty and career, but her modernity singled her out from her parents and the herd. She is not always the most humorous of companions, and her mood swings are often extreme (she doesn’t write when she is feeling really low). But her self-effacement more than compensates (and she is often funny without signalling the fact; she was aware of the Grossmiths’ The Diary of a Nobody, and occasionally I wonder if she is not extending the parody). At times her yearning for spiritual guidance leads her up some woody paths, but on other occasions she champions the principles of mindfulness long before it found a name. I admired her willingness to offend, although her wicked intentions never materialise beyond the page. But most of all I admired her candidacy, the raising of her hand. This is an exposing memoir, an open-heart operation. One reads it, I think, with a deep appreciation of her belief in us.
The dual responsibility (to Jean and her new readers) to deliver a volume that was both manageable in length and true to her daily experience – that is, something both piecemeal and cohesive – has resulted in a book incorporating only about one-sixth of her written material. Shaping her writing was a unique pleasure, but losing so much of it was not, not least because even the most inconsequential passages were refined with ardent beauty. In February 1954, for example, she looks from the window of her cottage. ‘Our world is frost-bound. Hard, hard, everything tight and solid with frost. I keep fires going in sitting room and kitchen, all doors closed. I fear there will be terrible mortality in the garden.’ Unremarkable in content, the words carry a heady poetic potency, the fine-tuned wonder of ephemeral thought. You will find a thousand similarly weighted reflections in the following pages, the work of a soul singing through time.
Looking for love all her life (from friends, from men, from pets, from teachers, from customers), Jean Pratt may have found her fondest devotees only now, among us, her fortunate readers. A quiet life remembered, a life’s work rewarded; Jean would have blushed at the attention. And then she would have crept away to write about it.
Dramatis Personae et Dramatis Feles
(in order of significant appearance)
Family:
Jean Lucey Pratt, a reliable narrator, 1909–1986
George Percy Pratt, Jean’s father, an architect
Sarah Jane Pratt (née Lucey), Jean’s mother, a concert pianist, died in 1922 when Jean was thirteen
Leslie Vernon Pratt, her brother, born 1901, engineer with Cable & Wireless
Ethel Mary Watson, later Pratt, her stepmother
Prince, the family Airedale
The Joliffe family: Aunt N. is Jean’s father’s sister, Joyce is her cousin
Margaret (Maggie) Royan, one of Ethel’s sisters, Jean’s first cousin
Elsie Watson, Jean’s other step-aunt
Aunt Jane, on her father’s side, an early loss
Ivy, Leslie’s wife
Ethel Lucey Pratt (Babs), now Everett, daughter of Leslie and Ivy
Martin Pratt, a cousin, a touring companion, RAF
Friends and acquaintances from youth, university and early travels:
Arthur Ainsworth, ex-Boys’ Brigade, kissed Jean’s hair
Jean Rotherham, an early crush
Lavender Norris, another early crush, an early tragedy
Miss Wilmott (A.W.), a significant teacher, another early crush
Joyce Coates, a lasting friend from architecture school
Harold Dagley, a disappointing young man
Lugi/Luigi, real name Dorothy Cargill, another friend from architecture class
Valerie Honour, née Buck, friend from Wembley, (much) better than Jean at tennis, wife to Jack
Gus, also known as Peter, real name Geoffrey Harris, significant long-term friend, actor/writer/interior decorator, pen name Heron Carvic, flamboyant
Phyllis Terry, his actress companion, part of the Terry thespian dynasty
Roy Gornold, delicate and opinionated family friend, artistic tendencies
Joan Bulbulion, a confidant since architecture days
Vahan Bulbulion, her architect husband, Armenian, increasingly annoying
Constance Oliver, artist friend, free spirit, casualty of war
Olive Briggs, tragedian
Eva May Glanville (Mary Kate), university friend
David Aberdeen, architecture student, another fleeting fancy, later famous in his field
Chris Naude, horny South African diplomat on trip to Russia
Mr Wildman, the stand-in vicar
Hugh Patrick (Bill), possible Jamaican hook-up, wife in Truro
Neville, cabin dweller, advantage taker
Marjorie ‘Nockie/Nicola’ Nockolds, latterly just ‘N.’, enduring friend from journalism course, complicated friendship
Colin Wintle (sometimes Winkle), marriage material in Bath
Dick Sheppard, successful architect, favoured rebel, disabled
Gwen Silvester,
