Muriel Spark - The Girls of Slender Means

"For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell," rang the preacher's voice. "Hell, of course," he said, "is a negative concept. Let us put it more positively. More positively, the text should read, ‘It is better to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven than not to enter at all.'" He hoped to publish this sermon one day in a Collected Sermons, for he was as yet inexperienced in many respects, although he later learned some reality as an Air Force chaplain.

Joanna, then, had decided to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven. By no means did she look maimed. She got a job in London and settled at the May of Teck Club. She took up elocution in her spare time. Then, towards the end of the war, she began to study and make a full-time occupation of it. The sensation of poetry replaced the sensation of the curate, and she took on pupils at six shillings an hour pending her diploma.

_The wanton troopers riding by__

_Have shot my fawn, and it will die.__

Nobody at the May of Teck Club knew her precise history, but it was generally assumed to be something emotionally heroic. She was compared to Ingrid Bergman, and did not take part in the argument between members and staff about the food, whether it contained too many fattening properties, even allowing for the necessities of wartime rationing.

3

Love and money were the vital themes in all the bedrooms and dormitories. Love came first, and subsidiary to it was money for the upkeep of looks and the purchase of clothing coupons at the official black-market price of eight coupons for a pound.

The house was a spacious Victorian one, and very little had been done to change its interior since the days when it was a private residence. It resembled in its plan most of the women's hostels, noted for cheapness and tone, which had flourished since the emancipation of women had called for them. No one at the May of Teck Club referred to it as a hostel, except in moments of low personal morale such as was experienced by the youngest members only on being given the brush-off by a boy-friend.

The basement of the house was occupied by kitchens, the laundry, the furnace and fuel-stores.

The ground floor contained staff offices, the dining room, the recreation room and, newly papered in a mud-like shade of brown, the drawing room. This resented wallpaper had unfortunately been found at the back of a cupboard in huge quantities, otherwise the walls would have remained grey and stricken like everyone else's.

Boy-friends were allowed to dine as guests at a cost of two-and-sixpence. It was also permitted to entertain in the recreation room, on the terrace which led out from it, and in the drawing room whose mud-brown walls appeared so penitential in tone at that time-for the members were not to know that within a few years many of them would be lining the walls of their own homes with paper of a similar colour, it then having become smart.

Above this, on the first floor, where, in the former days of private wealth, an enormous ball-room had existed, an enormous dormitory now existed. This was curtained off into numerous cubicles. Here lived the very youngest members, girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty who had not long moved out of the cubicles of school dormitories throughout the English countryside, and who understood dormitory life from start to finish. The girls on this floor were not yet experienced in discussing men. Everything turned on whether the man in question was a good dancer and had a sense of humour. The Air Force was mostly favoured, and a D.F.C. was an asset. A Battle of Britain record aged a man in the eyes of the first-floor dormitory, in the year 1945. Dunkirk, too, was largely something that their fathers had done. It was the air heroes of the Normandy landing who were popular, lounging among the cushions in the drawing room. They gave full entertainment value:

"Do you know the story of the two cats that went to Wimbledon?-Well, one cat persuaded another to go to Wimbledon to watch the tennis. After a few sets one cat said to the other, ‘I must say, I'm bloody bored. I honestly can't see why you're so interested in this game of tennis.' And the other cat replied, ‘Well, my father's in the racquet!' "

"No!" shrieked the girls, and duly doubled up.

"But that's not the end of the story. There was a colonel sitting behind these two cats. He was watching the tennis because the war was on and so there wasn't anything for him to do. Well, this colonel had his dog with him. So when the cats started talking to each other the dog turned to the colonel and said, ‘Do you hear those two cats in front of us?' ‘No, shut up,' said the colonel, ‘I'm concentrating on the game.' ‘All right,' said the dog-very happy this dog, you know- ‘I only thought you might be interested in a couple of cats that can talk.' "

"Really," said the voice of the dormitory later on, a twittering outburst, "what a wizard sense of humour!" They were like birds waking up instead of girls going to bed, since "Really, what a wizard sense of humour" would be the approximate collective euphony of the birds in the park five hours later, if anyone was listening.

On the floor above the dormitory were the rooms of the staff and the shared bedrooms of those who could afford shared bedrooms rather than a cubicle. Those who shared, four or two to a room, tended to be young women in transit, or temporary members looking for flats and bedsitting rooms. Here, on the second floor, two of the elder spinsters, Collie and Jarvie, shared a room as they had done for eight years, since they were saving money now for their old age.

But on the floor above that, there seemed to have congregated, by instinctive consent, most of the celibates, the old maids of settled character and various ages, those who had decided on a spinster's life, and those who would one day do so but had not yet discerned the fact for themselves.

This third-floor landing had contained five large bedrooms, now partitioned by builders into ten small ones. The occupants ranged from prim and pretty young virgins who would never become fully wakened women, to bossy ones in their late twenties who were too wideawake ever to surrender to any man. Greggie, the third of the elder spinsters, had her room on this floor. She was the least prim and the kindest of the women there.

On this floor was the room of a mad girl, Pauline Fox, who was wont to dress carefully on certain evenings in the long dresses which were swiftly and temporarily reverted to in the years immediately following the war. She also wore long white gloves, and her hair was long, curling over her shoulders. On these evenings she said she was going to dine with the famous actor Jack Buchanan. No one disbelieved her outright, and her madness was undetected.

Here, too, was Joanna Childe's room from which she could be heard practising her elocution at times when the recreation room was occupied.

_All the flowers of the spring__

_Meet to perfume our burying;__

At the top of the house, on the fourth floor, the most attractive, sophisticated and lively girls had their rooms. They were filled with deeper and deeper social longings of various kinds, as peace-time crept over everyone. Five girls occupied the five top rooms. Three of them had lovers in addition to men-friends with whom they did not sleep but whom they cultivated with a view to marriage. Of the remaining two, one was almost engaged to be married, and the other was Jane Wright, fat but intellectually glamorous by virtue of the fact that she worked for a publisher. She was on the look-out for a husband, meanwhile being mixed up with young intellectuals.

Nothing but the roof-tops lay above this floor, now inaccessible by the trap-door in the bathroom ceiling- a mere useless square since it had been bricked up long ago before the war after a girl had been attacked by a burglar or a lover who had entered by it-attacked or merely confronted unexpectedly, or found in bed with him as some said; as the case might be, he left behind him a legend of many screams in the night and the skylight had been henceforth closed to the public. Workmen who, from time to time, were called in to do something up above the house had to approach the roof from the attic of a neighbouring hotel. Greggie claimed to know all about the story, she knew everything about the club. Indeed it was Greggie who, inspired by a shaft of remembrance, had directed the warden to the hoard of mud-coloured wallpaper in the cupboard which now defiled the walls of the drawing room and leered in the sunlight at everyone. The top-floor girls had often thought it might be a good idea to sun-bathe on the flat portion of the roof and had climbed up on chairs to see about the opening of the trap-door. But it would not budge, and Greggie had once more told them why. Greggie produced a better version of the story every time.