Doris Lessing - The Diaries of Jane Somers

Jim is a nice boy, not stupid. He was ashamed of what he was thinking, just as I am. He hesitated, and then said, ‘I didn’t know there were people still living like that.’

I said, worldly wise, the older experienced one, ‘Then you don’t know much.’

Still he lingered, troubled, ashamed, but insistent. ‘What’s the good of people that old?’ he said. And then, quickly, to cancel out what he had said, cancel what he was thinking, ‘Well, we’ll be old one of these days, I suppose. Cheers then!’

And went. It was delicacy that made him say, we’ll be old, not I’ll be old: because for him I am old, already.

And then I sat down and thought. What he said was what people do say: Why aren’t they in a Home? Get them out of the way, out of sight, where young healthy people can’t see them, can’t have them on their minds!

They are thinking – I have been thinking – I did think, what is the point of their being alive still?

And I thought, then, how do we value ourselves? By what? Work? Jim the electrician is all right, electricians are obviously category one – if you can get them to come at all. What about assistant editors of women’s magazines? Childless assistant editors? How about Joyce, editor, one daughter, who won’t speak to her, she says Joyce is beneath contempt for some reason or another, I forget; a son, difficult. I get so bored with these spoiled prima donnas, the teenagers.

How about Sister Georgie? Well, she’s all right, children, husband, good works. But how about Sister Georgie in fifteen years’ time? Statistically she’ll be a widow, children gone, she’ll be in a flat, no use to anyone. How will she be judged then?

How about my Freddie, if he had lived? A saint, no less, putting up with spoiled child-wife. But in fifteen years? I see the old men, lean and shadowy and dusty-looking, or fat and sagging and grey, going about the streets with their shopping, or standing at street corners, looking lost.

We are to judge people by their beautiful thoughts?

If my thoughts are not beautiful now, what are they likely to be in fifteen, twenty years’ time?

What is the use of Maudie Fowler? By the yardsticks and measurements I’ve been taught, none.

How about Mrs Penny, a nuisance to her children, to everyone in this building, and particularly to me – something I simply cannot face? Silly woman with her plummy I-was-in-India-in-the-old-days vowels, her secret drinking, her ‘refinement’, her dishonesty.

Well, how about Mrs Penny? There’s not a soul in the world who’d shed a tear if she died.

When I had paid off Jim I had another of my long baths. It is as if, in such a bath, my old self floats away, is drowned, a new one emerges from the Pine-Needle Foam, the Satin-Self Gel, the Sea-Breeze Ions.

I went to bed that night saying I had made a contribution to Mrs Fowler’s welfare that was more than she could possibly expect. And that it was enough. I simply would not go near her again.

In the morning I woke feeling ill, because of being so trapped, and I thought about how I was brought up. Very interesting: you’d say it was a moral household. Religion, of a mild kind. But the atmosphere was certainly one of self-approbation: we did the right things, were good. But what, in practice, did it amount to? I wasn’t taught anything in the way of self-discipline, self-control. Except for the war, but that was from outside. I wasn’t taught how to control my eating, I had to do that for myself. Or how to get up in the morning, and that was the hardest thing I ever had to do, when I started work. I’ve never known how to say no to myself, when I want something. We were never denied anything, if it was there. The war! Was it because of that, because so little was available, that children were allowed anything they wanted? But there is one thing I can thank Mother for, just one: and I lay in bed saying to her that morning, ‘Thank you for that. At least you taught me that if I make promises, I must keep them. That if I say I will do a thing, then I must do it. It isn’t much to build on, but it’s something.’

Thank you.

And I went back to Mrs Fowler after work.

I had been thinking all day about my marvellous bathroom, my baths, my dependence on all that. I was thinking that what I spent on hot water in a month would change her life.

But when I went in, taking six milk stouts and some new glasses, and I cried out from the door, ‘Hello, I’m here, let me in, look what I’ve got!’ and I strode in down that awful passage while she stood to one side, her face was a spiteful little fist. She wanted to punish me for her new electricity and her new comfort, but I wasn’t going to let her. I went striding and slamming about, and poured out stout and showed her the glasses, and by the time I sat down, she did too, and she was lively and smiling.

‘Have you seen my new boots?’ I asked her, thrusting them forward. She bent to peer at them, her mouth trembling with laughter, with mischief.

‘Oh,’ she half whispered, ‘I do like the things you wear, I do think they are lovely.’

So we spent the evening, me showing her every stitch I had. I took off my sweater and stood still so she could walk round me, laughing. I had on my new camisole, crêpe de Chine. I pulled up my skirts so she could see the lace in it. I took off my boots so she could handle them.

She laughed and enjoyed herself.

She told me about clothes she had worn when she was young.

There was a dress that was a favourite, of grey poplin with pink flowers on it. She wore it to visit her auntie. It had been the dress of her father’s fancy-woman, and it was too big for her, but she took it in.

‘Before my poor mother died, nothing was too good for me, but then, I got the cast-offs. But this was so lovely, so lovely, and I did love myself in it.’

We talked about the dresses and knickers and petticoats and camisoles and slippers and boas and corsets of fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. Mrs Fowler is over ninety.

And she talked most about her father’s woman, who owned her own pub. When Mrs Fowler’s mother died … ‘She was poisoned, dear! She poisoned her – oh yes, I know what you are thinking, I can see your face, but she poisoned her, just as she nearly did for me. She came to live in our house. That was in St John’s Wood. I was a skivvy for the whole house, I slaved day and night, and before they went to bed I’d take up some thin porridge with some whisky and cream stirred in. She would be on one side of the fire, in her fancy red feathered bed jacket, and my father on the other side, in his silk dressing jacket. She’d say to me, Maudie, you feeling strong tonight? And she’d throw off all that feathered stuff and stand there in her corsets. They don’t make corsets like that now. She was a big handsome woman, full of flesh, and my father was sitting there in his armchair smiling and pulling at his whiskers. I had to loosen those corset strings. What a job! But it was better than hauling and tugging her into her corsets when she was dressing to go out. And they never said to me, Maudie, would you fancy a spoonful of porridge yourself? No, they ate and drank like kings, they wanted for nothing. If she felt like a crab or a sole or a lobster, he’d send out for it. But it was never Maudie, would you like a bit? But she got fatter and fatter and then it was: Do you want my old blue silk, Maudie? I wanted it right enough! One of her dresses’d make a dress and a blouse for me, and sometimes a scarf. But I never liked wearing her things, not really. I felt as if they had been stolen from my poor mother.’

I did not get home till late, and I lay in the bath wondering if we could do a feature on those old clothes. I mentioned it to Joyce and she seemed quite interested.