Singled Out (38 page)

Caton-Thompson, to pick lilies-of-the-valley, and wear ravishing evening

dresses, and eat strawberries with lashings of cream. They wanted to charleston, shingle their hair, wear short skirts, join the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, even buy rose-coloured carpets.

Set free from the shadow of death, many of these young women now

recognised the new decade as offering deliverance from another noose, that

of convention. And contraception was a reality. The use of birth-control

devices increased hugely after the war. For a liberated minority that meant

they were free to spurn the prevalent sexual Puritanism and patriarchal

standards of Edwardian Britain. Not entirely with impunity perhaps, but

the liberated single woman of the s was no longer spoken of as ‘fallen’.

She was no longer expected to flee the country in disgrace, as her equivalent only twenty years earlier might have been.

Eastbourne might seem an unlikely place to come across an unrepentant flapper from the twenties. Indeed, meeting Mary Cocker, now in her late nineties and living in a rather characterless old people’s home

in that dispiriting seaside resort, it was hard to visualise the old lady with bent spine, straggly hair and missing teeth as a saucy bachelor girl.

When she spoke, however, Miss Cocker was sprightly and decisive. No

nonsense.

I might not have found out so much from my meeting with Miss Cocker

had it not been for a mix-up with her visitor appointments that afternoon.

When I was shown into her room I was greeted with a cross ‘Who on

earth are you?’ She was clearly expecting somebody else. After some excuses

and explanations we proceeded with the interview, but ten minutes later

there was a knock on the door. It was Olive, the middle-aged friend she

had been expecting, so I excused myself and left them to chat. About

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

forty-five minutes later I went back to see whether we could resume the

interview and, as Olive was still there, she sat in while we talked.

The conversation ranged over Miss Cocker’s family and upbringing; her

mother died when she was four, and she was brought up by her father,

who worked in Customs and Excise, and her grandmother. She was a

Londoner. After she left school she trained as a shorthand-typist and learnt commercial French; she worked as a salesgirl at Harrods, had various jobs as one of the ‘business girls’, and did secretarial work in an advertising firm.

But it soon emerged that her real love was travel. Over a long life Miss

Cocker had been to America three times, to Germany, Austria, France,

Italy, Switzerland, and made a memorable trip to Iceland. She’d been to

Japan, and had also flown over Mount Everest en route to China, where

she’d seen the Great Wall and the terracotta army. Settling down simply

couldn’t compete. ‘All I was doing was thinking of the next holiday abroad.

I just liked to travel. That was much more interesting to me than any men.

I used to be saving up for the next holiday . . .’

I couldn’t help wondering how she could afford to see the world on

such a scale. The clue came in her approach to the opposite sex: ‘I was an

awful flirt. I was quite attractive I suppose, but I didn’t want to get married, and I never particularly wanted to have children. I had boyfriends – thousands of them. And I didn’t have to work, I could work if I wanted to.

Financially I was lucky. As a single person you’re responsible for yourself.

I think you’ve got to work it out – you’ve got to have a brain and use it.

That’s my advice.

‘A lot of women are so stupid. They are absolutely stupid. The feminists

are barmy – you know, they either know it all, or they try to be cleverer than the men. I never knew it all, I was never cleverer; I’d say, ‘‘How marvellous of you! Oh yes, aren’t you wonderful’’ and purr just like a pussy-cat. Play the helpless little woman. What’s the good of being a woman if you don’t get what you want? I like being waited on and having people do things, especially men. Not that I fancied them anyway. I didn’t want to sleep with them. I don’t think that going to bed is a great achievement. I didn’t do that much; and if I did, I knew exactly what I was doing. Next question!’

Later, on my way back from Eastbourne, the questions I had felt prevented from asking were answered when I unexpectedly ran into Olive in the station car park. She too was on her way home. ‘I couldn’t help

laughing,’ she said, ‘listening to you talking to Mary about her boyfriends.

You know, there’s only one word that would ever spring to my mind if

you asked me to describe her: Mary was like a courtesan. You see, she

knew exactly how to give men what they liked. Mary told me she never

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Singled Out

had to pay for a thing in her life. She got men to do whatever she wanted.

She could twist them round her finger.’

There were business girls working long hours for cranky bosses, strap-hanging on the underground, shivering in lodgings, eating buns in lonely tea-rooms, dreaming of romance; and there were business girls like Mary

Cocker. Mary Cocker had no time for the other sort. ‘There’s no point in

being miserable. If you are then you’ve brought it on yourself. I went to

all the places I wanted to go to, and that was the thing that gave me the

most pleasure in my life. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had some very good

friends – of
both
sexes. I certainly didn’t miss out on the man front. And it never, ever,
ever
crossed my mind to envy women who were married.’

Determination, drive and a certain artfulness got Mary Cocker what she

wanted out of life, and she very clearly had no regrets. ‘I believe there’s a God. I believe if you do something bad you get paid out. It’s good to get into the habit of being nice to people, and it’s easier to be like that, isn’t it? Things like that, they count to me.’

*

Mary Cocker may not have rated going to bed with men as a great achievement but, like many others of her generation, she was not plagued by guilty feelings at doing so. For fearless and free-spirited women who knew, as

recommended, how to use their brains, the risks were much reduced from a

few decades earlier. Winifred Holtby’s essay didn’t specify London’s Bohemia as fertile territory for lovers, but she undoubtedly had the CafeŔoyal crowd in mind when she referred to ‘certain sections of society’. Straight after the war, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury and Chelsea were full of single women tasting the joys of uncommitted sex – like Kathleen Hale, who escaped from her

repressive family, sold her bicycle for the price of a one-way railway ticket, and set off to be an artist in Soho. At the bar of the Studio Club she met the painter Frank Potter, recently demobilized. Having already previously

decided to fall in love with him, she was struck dumb with emotion. Frank

‘teased me out of my priggishness and the false values that I had absorbed

from my suburban background . . .’ Their love affair lasted several years, and though the subject of marriage came up, it ‘seemed to be something that happened to other people . . .’ and so she never took it seriously. During

that time Kathleen was working as secretary to the famously lecherous

painter Augustus John. Eventually, ‘out of curiosity’, she slept with him

too. With the sex element out of the way, their friendship increased.

Augustus’s seductions were legendary. This was a world of illicit

entanglements,
meńages à trois
, pick-ups and infidelities, labyrinthine
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

relationships.* ‘Spinster’ might not be the first word that springs to mind

when describing such women as his partner Dorelia, or Dora Carrington,

or Brenda Dean Paul, or Gwen John, or Stella Bowen, or Kathleen Garman,

or Viva King, or Dorothy Brett, or Irene Rathbone. These women were

not wives in the first instance, but they had sex with men, and in some

cases children, and in many cases rich emotional lives with their lovers.

They didn’t have the security of a husband, but neither did they have the

duties of a wife. And for the first time in history the sexually liberated single woman became possessed of a certain enviable glamour.

*

The writer Irene Rathbone is now largely forgotten, though the Feminist

Press has reprinted her most successful novel,
We That Were Young
(), an account of the war and its aftermath. Here, as in so much of her fiction, Irene Rathbone’s own life story is thinly disguised, and the voice is that of an adventurous and liberated woman, passionate and politically
engageé
.

Irene was born into a middle-class Liverpool family in . She was

sent to a south of England boarding school, and in the immediate pre-war

years flat-shared with a female cousin in ‘New Woman’ style in London.

Acting, and women’s suffrage, absorbed her energies; she played several

Shakespearean roles, and appeared in a Noe¨l Coward play. In  she fell

in love. Between  and  Irene threw herself into the war effort,

both in France, volunteering for the YMCA, and as a VAD in London.

Her beloved younger brother died in Germany in . Mansfield Priestley

Evans, her fiance´, survived the war, but went out to serve with the English military government in Iraq. In , two whole years after the Armistice was signed – by which time it must have seemed safe to assume a happy

outcome – the news came that he had been killed there in a village uprising.

By a cruel twist of fate Irene Rathbone joined the Surplus Women.

Post-war, Irene lived a semi-Bohemian life in Chelsea with a group of

women friends, financing herself with office work and occasional stage

roles. Dorothy Wadham of PEN and the writer Storm Jameson were

among her friends. Joan, her heroine in
We That Were Young
, leads a life that mirrored her own at that time: By night she danced, and went to studio parties up and down London, and was in all sorts of ‘swims’. There were so many people who were interesting, so * See Virginia Nicholson,
Among the Bohemians – Experiments in Living
, Viking, , Chapter : All for Love.

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Singled Out

many new books to be read and discussed. And there were occasional trips abroad.

. . . B ut in spite of her many activities, in spite of her genuine capacity for enjoyment, if Joan had been told, by someone who knew, that to-morrow she would have to leave all this and die, she would simply have said, ‘Oh!’

At the roots of her being there lay a vast indifference.

So her thirtieth birthday came and went; nobody of any significance came

to agitate her heart. But among the ‘many books to be read and discussed’,

one of the most talked-about of the late s was
Death of a Hero
().

Born in the same year as Irene, its author, Richard Aldington, was the

angry young man of his day; endowed with smouldering good looks and

brilliant talent, he was a glamorous figure in the literary world. Aldington had already made a name as a poet and co-founder of the Imagist movement, but
Death of a Hero
made him a celebrity. Irene must have read this excoriating anti-war satire when it first came out, admired it, and then sought out his poetry, but they did not meet until two years later in .

When they did, her world was turned upside down.

Six years after her affair with Richard Aldington ended, Irene set out her

recollections of their short idyll in a little book,
Was There a Summer?
().

By the time the book was published Richard himself had moved on;

he was living in America with Nellie McCulloch, his second wife and

daughter-in-law of a previous mistress, Brigit Patmore. For him the affair

with Irene had been a transient pleasure, one among many. But for her it

had been a sacrament; she never loved anyone else.

The prose-poem
Was There a Summer?
is not finely written, but every line is saturated with emotion, dwelling on the detail of the relationship, draining the draught of memory to its last, blushful, bubble-beaded drop.

From her park seat in misty London Irene conjures the warm south and

sunburnt mirth of their Provenc¸al interlude with thirsty nostalgia:

So fade out, London trees!

Fade, fur-wrapped ladies

Hurrying with small reluctant dogs back down dim paths

To teas in Kensington,

Fade . . .

And shine Provence!

So we learn their story. In  Richard was living in the south of France;

Irene had written him fan-mail about his work. For over a year they

corresponded, and finally he suggested she visit him at Le Lavandou, where

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

he had gone to write. He booked her into a hotel not far from the villa he

had taken and here, among the pines and sudden sunlit sea of the Coˆte

d’Azur, she found herself that summer. Of course she was already in love

with him, from reading his poetry, but even so she was unprepared for the

coup de foudre
which struck her when they eventually met:

He stood in front of me, sunbeams about his head

And smiled through the midst of them.

I thought a god was there.

Slowly she took in his appearance. Richard’s smile and rather quizzical

eyebrows gave him an irresistible charm; he was wearing a sleeveless blue

shirt, red-brown fishermen’s trousers and old espadrilles; his shoulders were broad and flat, his body slender, tanned and taut from swimming. This was more than a meeting of minds; Irene felt hollow with love and desire, for