Doris Lessing - The Diaries of Jane Somers

She is rather afraid of early evening, so I have discovered. Once, going past to Annie, I saw her, her cheek on her hand. She turned her face away as I said, Oh, Eliza, good evening! – and then, when I went in, concerned, she gestured at the other wooden chair and I sat down.

‘You see,’ said she, ‘you should keep busy, because if you don’t, the grumps lie in wait for you …’ And she wiped her eyes and made herself laugh.

And then, amazingly, she put on her hat again.

‘Eliza, you aren’t going out? Shouldn’t you rest?’

‘No. I should not. I must keep moving if I feel low …’ And she went off again, creeping around the block, a dumpy brave little figure in the dusk.

She does not bother with supper, perhaps a piece of cake, or a salad. She is often visited by her friend from opposite after supper, or she listens to the radio. She doesn’t like the telly. And so she spends her evening, until she goes off to bed, very late, often after midnight.

And, two or three times a week, from spring to late autumn, she is off on coach trips to famous places, or beauty spots, organized by the Welfare or one of the two churches she uses. For Eliza is very religious. She is a Baptist, and she also goes to the Church of England church. She goes to church on Sundays twice, mornings and evenings, and to church teas and bazaars and jumble sales, to lectures on Missionary Endeavour in India and in Africa. She is continually attending weddings and christenings.

When she asked me what I did and I told her, toning it down a little, she understood everything, for she has worked for people in positions of responsibility, and asked me all kinds of questions that had never occurred to me, such as: Did I think it right, having no children, taking the job of a man who might have a family to keep? And loves to talk about – not the clothes she wore half a century ago – but the fashions she sees on the streets on the young girls, which make her laugh, she says, they seem so crazy, they seem as if the girls are having such a good time. She likes to see them, but she wonders if they know what it is like not ever to have a new dress, only what could be got in their sizes at the pawnshop.

For her poor mother had been left by her husband one day. He went off and was never heard of again. She had three small children, two girls and a boy. The boy, says Eliza, was not up to anything, he was born lazy, and would never work to help out, and he too went off when he was fourteen, and never sent back so much as a card at Christmas. Eliza’s mother had worked for the two of them. The pawnshop at the corner had their sheets, and often their clothes, from the Mondays to the Fridays, when they were redeemed again. And the woman who kept it used to put aside a good coat for the girls, or a pair of shoes she knew would fit. And she would say, ‘Well, if that poor soul can’t get in in time to redeem it, you’ll have first chance.’

Eliza brought out one evening an old postcard, circa World War One, of a ragged orphan girl with bare feet. When I had examined it, thinking how romantic, for that was how the poor girl was presented, all the harshness taken away from the truth, Eliza said, ‘That girl was me – no, I mean, I was like that. When I was twelve I was out scrubbing steps for the gentry for a penny. And I had no shoes, and my feet were sick with the cold and blue, too … They were wicked times,’ says Eliza, ‘wicked. And yet I seem to remember we were happy. I can remember laughing and singing with my sister, though we were often enough hungry. And my poor little mother crying because she could not keep up with herself …’

Eliza, disliking television, will go across the road to watch Upstairs, Downstairs. This makes me cross; but then I ask myself, Why then am I into writing romantic novels? The truth is intolerable, and that is all there is to it!

Gracious Lady!

It occurred to me that Hermione Whitfield and the rest of them (male and female) and Vera and myself are in fact the legitimate descendants of the Victorian philanthropist lady, and have taken her place.

Here is my new romantic novel:

My heroine is no titled lady, but the wife of a well-off man in the City. She lives in Bayswater, one of the big houses near Queensway. She has five children, to whom she is a devoted mother. Her husband is not a cruel man, but insensitive. I described him using language frankly stolen from a letter in one of the virulent Women’s Movement newspapers Phyllis used to leave on my desk. He is incapable of understanding her finer points. He has a mistress, whom he keeps in Maida Vale, much to our heroine’s relief. As for her, she occupies herself in visiting the poor, of whom there are very many. Her husband does not resent these activities, because it takes her mind off his. Every day she is out and about, dressed in her simple but beautiful clothes, accompanied by a sweet little maid who helps her carry containers of soup and nourishing puddings.

Of course, I do not allow that these invalids and old people she sustains are in any way difficult (though one, an ancient who carries wounds from the Crimean War, she describes with a small deprecating smile as difficile ). None of them screams and rages, like Maudie, or repeats the same ten or twelve sentences for an hour or two hours of a visit, as if you haven’t heard them before hundreds of times, or gets sulky and sullen. No, they may be living in dreadful poverty, never knowing where their next crust is coming from, living on tea and marge and bread and potatoes (except for the offerings of the Gracious Lady), they may have not enough coal, and have vile or brutal husbands or wives dying of tuberculosis or childbed fever, but they are always fine and gallant human beings, and they and Margaret Anstruther enjoy friendships based on real appreciation of each other’s qualities. Margaret A. certainly does not have the vapours, the languors, the faints; I do not permit a suggestion of the dreadful psychosomatic illnesses those poor women actually suffered from. For she does not allow herself to be bored, which was the real cause of lying for years on a sofa with a bad back or the migraine. (I have been brooding about writing a critical book called The Contribution of Boredom to Art. Using Hedda Gabler, whose peculiar behaviour was because she was crazy with boredom, as exemplar.) No, Margaret suffers nothing but unspoken love for the young doctor whom she meets often in those poor homes, and who loves her. But he has a difficile invalid wife, and of course these fine souls would never dream of transgressing. They meet over deathbeds, and sickbeds, and alleviate the human condition together, their eyes occasionally meeting, songs without words, and even glistening, very rarely, with the unshed tear.

What a load of old rubbish! Rather like Upstairs, Downstairs , and I adored that and so did everyone else.

But the research I’ve done (extensive) has led me to a real respect for those unsung heroines, the Victorian philanthropist ladies, who were patronized then, probably (how do we know, really?) by their husbands, and despised now. A pity they were so often silent about what they did, are so often written about rather than speaking for themselves. For they must have been a really tough breed, knowing by every-day, year-in-year-out slog and effort what Jack London and Dickens and Mayhew got by brief excursions into poverty and then retreating again, enough facts garnered. When I think of what it must have been like for them, going into those homes, late nineteenth century, early twentieth, the sheer, threadbare, cold, grim, grimy dreadfulness of it, worn-out women, rickety children, brutalized men – no, no, I won’t go on. But I know one thing very well, and that is that Maudie and Annie and Eliza are rich and happy compared with those people.