Singled Out (45 page)

was their mantra. Also, the privileged public-school boys could be more

easily spared from their peacetime occupations than workers in industry

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and agriculture, and they were healthier too. Rickets and asthma saved the

lives of thousands of working-class boys who did not get through the

medical tests for military service. But the reality of the front line also ensured that, proportionally, officers took more of a beating than their men. When the lads went over the top, the captains and subalterns were in front.

Privilege had its price.

Thus when Winifred Haward wrote, ‘I knew that [marriage] was almost

impossible because hardly any men of my own age had survived,’ what she

meant was: ‘I knew marriage was almost impossible because hardly any

men of my own age and
class
had survived.’ Winifred was not a snob, but she only learnt, finally, to be flexible when all other avenues had closed.

Falling in love with a married working-class miner and naval deserter had

not been on her mental map. In the end Winifred had the courage to

outface social disapproval and the broad-mindedness to accept love when

it offered, even from the most unlikely quarter. To the end of her days she

gave thanks for the happiness that had, finally, come her way. Her memoir

ends with the words:

There is love and there is sorrow, but the gain outweighs the loss, if you will make it so.

*

As a coda, the story of Miss Amy Langley bears out Winifred Haward’s

affirmation. Like Winifred’s, her life saved its surprises till the last. And she too was overwhelmingly thankful. Miss Langley was living in an old people’s residential home when she wrote her autobiography in . Born in ,

she was one of the thousands who had never found a husband. Profoundly

shy and inhibited, a childhood experience with a friend’s father who had

tried to abuse her had left her ‘dried up’. Imprisoned by fear, she had never been able to talk about it.

Despite this, romance had briefly flickered into life during the First

World War when, under a ‘pen-friendship’ scheme, she started up a correspondence with an Australian soldier serving in France. One day she got a letter from him saying he was going on leave and asking to visit. ‘Of course I was all of a flutter!’ The details of that day were imprinted indelibly on her memory. An inexperienced cook, Amy was preoccupied with the anxiety of what to make her unknown guest for dinner. All went well with

her beef-steak pie until it came to the pastry, which would not roll out but fell apart in crumbs. In despair she did her best to press the dough together to make dumplings:
A Grand Feeling

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O the fuss and worry of that pie-cum-dumplings. I can see and feel myself tense and nervous waiting for the door knock to come. When the knock did come what a flurry it put me in! I had never seen this boy friend – he was only a ‘pen-friend’.

It all went off very happily and after the meal we went for a ride on the top of a bus. How excited I was! I wore a lavender check cotton summer dress which I had made . . . We had a happy day and he went back to France and our correspondence went on as before, but then a blank and no more letters from him.

Wounded, killed . . . ? Nobody ever thought to inform the soldier’s pen-friend of his fate, whatever it was.

Humble and industrious, Miss Langley spent her long working life as a

dressmaker, pinning and altering lavender check frocks and taffeta gowns

for other people. Years passed. After the soldier disappeared, there were to be no more flutters or flurries. Her capacity for feeling seemed to have atrophied; emotional lives were something other people had. In old age

she found refuge in Avenue House, a home for the elderly in Bristol.

Miss Langley was eighty-two when a new resident arrived who upset

the equilibrium of her calm old age. This was an elderly gentleman who at

first got on her nerves by being familiar and telling jokes. But his presence grew on her. In some indefinable way he reminded her of George, a much-loved brother, now dead. To her astonishment it turned out that he

and George had been born on the same day. When this ‘friend’ began to

call her ‘Dear’ she was agitated in the extreme. ‘Never in my life had

anyone called me ‘‘Dear’’, not in my home, never!’ The thaw had begun.

‘This was the first emotional moment in my life.’

Gently and unobtrusively, this man became Miss Langley’s closest friend.

They spent hours together watching tits and robins feeding from the bird—

table in the garden of Avenue House and gradually, with much trepidation,

she began to realise how much he meant to her. ‘Finding oneself in an

emotional situation at the age of eighty-two is both surprising and difficult!

This is the experience one expects to go through when one is young . . .’

Yet the inhibitions still ran deep.

One day over coffee with the residents the subject of a recent newsworthy

child-abuse case came up. Amy listened as her friend expressed his dismay

at the squalid story, and as he did so she suddenly and unexpectedly found

the barriers lifting. Buried fears and doubts began to rise to the surface; she was engulfed by powerful emotions of love and liberation: What an experience to fall in love at eighty-two! . . . I trembled all over . . . Falling in love had destroyed that which had held me back. [He] did not know what he 

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had freed me from . . . I came out of that room shocked but with a wonderful feeling of release and gratitude . . . [I was] ready to fall in love, [he had] given me peace at last . . . Now at last I was free.

On that note of reconciliation and hope, Miss Langley typed the last

lines of her autobiography. She does not tell us what was the outcome of

her release, but she concludes with a fervent prayer of recognition to her

Maker: ‘I offer up my gratitude to the Power that guides our ways. A

Divine adjustment is being made in all our affairs according to infinite

wisdom and love.’ God may well have intervened, or perhaps it really was

a miracle, but without question Amy’s story challenges despair, and records

a small victory for the human spirit.

.
The Magnificent Regiment of Women

The challenge of loss

Two years after the Great War ended, the preacher Maude Royden, then

at the height of her fame, stood before the delegates at the International

Alliance for Women’s Suffrage in Geneva and pleaded with them to help

prevent another war:

Women whose husbands or lovers the war has slain, mothers now childless, women who have not borne and now may never bear a child, to you above all belongs the service of the world . . . [Bring] to birth a new world . . . make the nations a family – and of the world a home.

Maude Royden, and many inspired by her, set out in those post-war

decades to make a better job of things than the incompetents who had

brought them war in the first place. Royden was in her forties when she

preached this message. Disabled – she was born lame – and unmarried, she

knew what it meant to be alone in the world. Until her death in 

Maude Royden directed her own considerable energies to the service of

the world, employing her God-given gift of eloquence to campaign for

ideals she saw as emphatically feminine: suffrage, women’s priesthood and

pacifism. She wrote too with indignation and deep sympathy of the plight

of the millions deprived of sex, marriage, motherhood and home-making.

Why, she later wrote, must an entire generation of ‘normal’ women be

required to accept perpetual virginity in the interests of conventional morality? Why must the cost of war be borne by unmarried women forced to endure imposed chastity? Celibacy could be glorious, but only if it was not imposed but embraced:

Where chastity has been accepted with ardour as a thing noble in itself or necessary for the attainment of some noble end, there is no repression: there is a wide and spacious freedom . . . Are not the great celibates of history among the greatest and most universal lovers of mankind?

. . . It is the ideal realized that is the best defence of the ideal.

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First and last a visionary, both through her oratory and by her own example

Maude Royden was an advocate for the single women of her generation,

and a prophet of the generation to follow.

In the first volume of her autobiography (
Under My Skin
, ), Doris Lessing angrily reminded her readers of the disaster that was the First World War: Unlived lives. Unborn children. How thoroughly we have all forgotten the damage that war did Europe, but we are still living with it. Perhaps if ‘The Flower of Europe’ (as they used to be called) had not been killed, and those children and grandchildren had been born, we would not now in Europe be living with such second-rateness, such muddle and incompetence?

Lessing writes powerfully, and many male commentators have endorsed

her view that contemporary failings were the result of that ‘Lost Generation’. Our traditional ruling classes had been wiped out, and with them had gone Empire, top-nation status and European supremacy: all the glittering

prizes whose lustre had irradiated that sunny prelapsarian Edwardian world.

‘Nobody, nothing,’ wrote J. B. Priestley, ‘will shift me from the belief, which I shall take to the grave, that the generation to which I belong, destroyed between  and , was a great generation, marvellous in its promise.’

All those beautiful Balliol boys became enshrined forever in a ‘Gone-with—

the-Wind’ myth of lives cut short and blighted hopes.

But there is another way, a less bitter, and also less romanticised way of

construing the world we live in. Rather than wringing our hands over the

loss of our ruling elite, we should perhaps focus on the lives of those left behind. The surplus two million had much to wring their hands over, but if such women – declared redundant in a maimed society – had weakly

submitted to being unjustly marginalised, we might still be living in a

patriarchy. Despite their many talents, the class of empire-building classicists running this country were not renowned for their impartiality towards women – and what if the Flower of Europe had turned out to be as bigoted

and sexist as some of their fathers? Women might still lack the professional, political and social status that they have today. Instead, in the twenty-first century, women feel empowered by history to expect the equality, respect and rights accorded to them by law and justice.

From the perspective of two generations, the single women of the s

and s would appear to have precipitated the already vibrant feminist

movement of the pre-war period into perhaps the most significant social

change of the twentieth century. A cohort of stay-at-home wives and

The Magnificent Regiment of Women

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mothers could never have achieved for women what this generation of

spinsters did in meeting the challenge of grief and loss. For them, being

denied marriage was a liberation and a launching pad.

They were not in the first rank of suffragettes and pioneers, but, on

foundations laid by those earlier women – education, opportunity, equality

– and through sheer force of numbers, they steered women’s concerns to

the top of the agenda, and there they have remained.

*

In  a delicately beautiful and immaculately well-dressed spinster named

Gertrude Maclean sat down over dinner with her relatives to try to decide

the matter of her future. She was thirty-seven. Seventh of nine children,

Gertie belonged to a privileged Victorian military family; there were ponies and picnics, long sunny days and a beloved nanny. Nothing could be more conventional, more idyllic than such a childhood. Like her friends in the

same social set, she grew up conforming to the expectations of her class:

church bazaars and dress fittings by day, dinner parties and dances by night.

One by one Gertie’s brothers and sisters got married. But Gertie didn’t,

despite dalliances, and despite offers. Why she remained so implacably single is hard to say; did she really, as her chronicler suggests, love clothes much more than men? Unquestionably, she loved children, but seemed to want none of her own. By the time war broke out she was already thirty, and

had stepped decisively into the role of perfect aunt to her numerous nieces

and nephews. ‘She was a rock and a sport.’ Forever absent on some tour of

duty in foreign parts or stranded in the shires, the mothers and fathers came to rely on her. A sort of down-to-earth Mary Poppins, Gertie was always on hand to solve the logistical problems of conveying their children from

port to station to school and back again, taking in the zoo, Harrods’

schoolwear department, and Gunter’s on the way. She told them stories,

packed their tuckboxes, and smelt subtly delicious. They all adored her.

But after the war Gertie began to feel redundant, surplus to requirements.

Being needed as an aunt had fulfilled her just as for other women being needed as a wife gave meaning to their lives. Now the absent mothers and fathers had come home, and the children had begun to grow up. Gertie had energy and imagination. What was she to do with the rest of her life? Her uncle

had no doubt that Gertie’s talent for aunting should not be wasted:

‘Why not, my darling gel, do for others what you have been doing for your own family?’

Gertie gave a quick reply.

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