Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (82 page)

8

Throughout 1923 we often went to Bethnal Green with Mr Harris to make speeches or attend ‘socials’, and he in turn, after an evening spent in his constituency, sometimes called on his way back to Westminster at the small top-floor Doughty Street flat into which we had now moved from the draughty studio. His modest demands on our hospitality never exceeded half an hour’s conversation and a glass of milk, but as these visits, and those of one or two other political friends who spoke at our request to the Bethnal Green Liberals, usually occurred round about midnight, the suspicions of the aggressively respectable charlady who ‘did’ for us were very soon militantly aroused. In her view, young women whose activities did not terminate at 10 p.m. sharp required careful watching by them that valued their good name, but we remained sublimely unaware of this prolonged vigilance until one chilly October morning soon after our return from the 1923 Assembly.

On this occasion Winifred had given a League of Nations Union lecture at a distant town; she decided to go back to London by the midnight train, and appeared at the flat with the morning milk still wearing her platform garments of the night before. That same evening I had gone to dinner with my parents in Kensington; as I had a bad cold my mother persuaded me to stay the night, and I returned to Bloomsbury soon after breakfast in the evening clothes in which I had set out. At tea-time that day a scrawled note on a screwed up piece of paper was pushed through our letterbox; Winifred picked it up and read it, and then passed it on to me with an amused, rueful countenance. It was from our charlady, giving us notice. ‘I’ve always been respectable myself,’ it concluded, ‘and I don’t care to work for them that arnt.’

To our unmitigated astonishment our landlady, to whom we protested about this baseless accusation, appeared to sympathise with the charlady and even to regard us as undesirable tenants for her impeccable property. For some time we had talked vaguely of moving, as our earnings were now sufficient for a full-time housekeeper, and being no longer restricted by the hypothetical requirements of ‘Metternich and Alexander’, we set out to look through numerous inexpensive districts for a flat, large enough to hold three females, which we could afford. Eventually we found the cheapness and space that we required in a block of ‘mansions’ off a Maida Vale thoroughfare. Had our landlady’s suspicions been correct we could not have moved to a district more likely to confirm them, but we were less interested in a ‘good address’ than in the ability to accommodate Winifred’s old nurse, who had agreed to come from Yorkshire to look after us. Nevertheless, our enforced exodus from Bloomsbury to Maida Vale was not one of the contingencies which we had foreseen as a probable consequence of our incursion into politics.

A more typical result of this Liberal phase was our brief membership of a famous political club to which Mr Harris introduced us. This long-established and highly respectable Liberal organisation had been for many years exclusively male, but after the War, in deference to the then fashionable conciliation of the newly enfranchised voters, a limited number of females were admitted as members, and in 1922 four women were even elected to its committee. Notwithstanding these hotly contested concessions, its attitude and outlook remained predominantly masculine, and its solemn periodic meetings at the National Liberal Club were marked by all the pompous ritual and the slightly suspicious personal exclusiveness so characteristic of male social gatherings.

When we joined the club we hardly knew any of the other members, and most of the younger men and women who belonged appeared to be in a similar position, yet no effort was made at the meetings to introduce the members to one another or to mitigate their somewhat militant attitude towards everybody else. After a few moments of awkward standing about, we each sat down, alone or with the friend with whom we had come, at small green-baize tables, and drank an isolated cup of tepid coffee while the chairman prepared to introduce the speaker. Most of the speakers were political or semi-political officials of various types, and I never heard an address from a woman throughout the two years during which I was a member. When the speech ended, the meeting was thrown open for discussion, and one male after another would rise and harangue the smoke-laden room in five-minute speeches as solemn as though the continued existence of the Government itself were at stake. After these masculine contributions had followed one another for nearly an hour, the president of the club, a benevolent elderly peer belonging to the old school of politics, would rise and remark, with a deprecating smile: ‘Now perhaps one of the
ladies
would like to give us her views?’

This invitation was invariably the signal for a fresh lighting of cigarettes, a new round of coffee-cups, and a general sense of the members leaning back in their armchairs with the restful conviction that no lady’s views could possibly be worth hearing. On one occasion, suddenly provoked into defending my sane, good-humoured East-Enders against an allegation of irrational revolutionary behaviour, I anticipated the benign invitation, and was immediately conscious of a rustle of scandalised astonishment at my temerity.

About the end of 1924, Winifred and I left this organisation; it was obvious that some years would have to elapse before ‘the ladies’ acquired anything like equal debating conditions, and our growing bias towards Labour had been so much increased by our tour of Central Europe that autumn that membership of a Liberal club was no longer really compatible with our convictions. When we resigned we wrote a long letter to the secretary, a young Oxford man with perfect manners and no initiative, giving in full our reasons for abandoning Liberalism, and making - as we frequently and hopefully made to the League of Nations Union - all kinds of suggestions for increasing the club’s efficiency. In those days we were still naïve enough to believe that suggestions need only be bright in order to be enthusiastically accepted, and had still to learn that in clubs and societies, as in Foreign Offices, the one thing that really terrifies officials is the prospect of any alteration in the
status quo
.

It had been, ironically enough, as much Bethnal Green as Central Europe which was responsible for our decision to quit the Liberal Party. For the first time, during those General Elections of 1922 and 1923, I came into intimate contact with the homes of the poor, and learnt, as my provincial middle-class upbringing had never permitted me to learn, the semi-barbarous conditions - intensified beyond calculation by the War and its consequences - under which four-fifths of the population are obliged to live in a confused and suffering world. I saw the men fighting one losing battle against economic depression and increasing unemployment, while the women waged another against excessive procreation combined with an accumulation of wasteful, interminable domestic detail, and the babies fought yet a third against under-nourishment, over-clothing, perpetual dirt and inadequate fresh air and sunshine. At the same time I realised, with a shock of poignant revelation, the kinship between the men and women in these wretched homes, and the Tommies whom I had nursed for four calamitous years. The same brave, uncomplaining endurance was there, the same humour, the same rough, compassionate kindness to one another in circumstances under which a complete absence of courage and humour and compassion might well have been understood and forgiven.

This new knowledge did not make me philanthropically minded - the attempt to alleviate such anxious misery with soup and blankets seemed to me a mere self-deception, an endeavour to delude one’s intelligence into a sense of having done one’s duty and being thenceforth absolved from further responsibility. But it made me politically minded once and for all; I knew that for the rest of my life I could never again feel free from the obligation of working with those who were trying to change the social system that made this grim chaos possible, and I began to turn more definitely towards the Party which represented the spirit as well as the substance of that democracy to whose future I was for ever bound by the common experiences of the War.

9

During both General Elections, a good deal of space was given by nearly all newspapers to the demands of the recently enfranchised woman voter. Women, as such, had always possessed for the Press a peculiar fascination in which the opposite sex seemed inexplicably lacking, and though their publicity stock had fallen during the wartime preoccupation with ‘heroes’, it rose again directly after the War owing to the fact that, unlike men, they had inconsiderately failed to die in large numbers. The reason universally given for limiting the vote to women over thirty was that the complete enfranchisement of adult women would have meant a preponderant feminine vote.

This excessive female population was habitually described, none too flatteringly, as ‘superfluous’, although the teachers, nurses, doctors and Civil Servants of whom it was largely composed were far more socially valuable than many childless wives and numerous irresponsible married mothers. An agitation over the mere existence of so many unmated women began with the census revelations in the late summer of 1921, and during the ‘Silly Season’ of that year their position became a favourite topic with the stunt Press, which published innumerable articles on Equal Pay, Marriage
versus
Career, and the Right to Motherhood. In a letter to Winifred, dated August 25th, 1921, I included, as one superfluous woman to another, some reflections upon a leader which had appeared on this subject in no less an organ than
The Times
itself.

‘Did you see or hear anything of the disaster to R.38 yesterday?’ my letter began. (Winifred was then in Yorkshire, and had not only seen the airship as it passed above her village, but had heard the explosion over the Humber a few minutes afterwards.) ‘One seems to have got over the feeling that one had during the War that these calamities are a matter of course - which I think is a good thing; we were all getting so callous.
The Times
is exciting itself over the surplus women, as revealed by the census - 101 per 1,000, I believe, to be exact! They were quite nice to us in a leading article to-day, and said that women who had lost their husbands or lovers in the War couldn’t be expected on that account to relegate themselves to perpetual widowhood or spinsterhood. But they suggested that women who were willing to seek work abroad would not only obtain for themselves a better chance of getting a husband but would be doing their country a service! It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want husbands; the article even talked about “finding the domesticity they desire”! Personally I haven’t the least objection to being superfluous so long as I am allowed to be useful, and though I shall be delighted for any work I may do to take me abroad, it will not be because I shall thereby be enabled the better to capture the elusive male.’

As the months went by, however, I had to decide how far it was really possible for us who were ‘surplus’ to make into a reality that boasted power of sublimation. As a generation of women we were now sophisticated to an extent which was revolutionary when compared with the romantic ignorance of 1914. Where we had once spoken with polite evasion of ‘a certain condition’, ‘a certain profession’, we now unblushingly used the words ‘pregnancy’ and ‘prostitution’. Amongst our friends we discussed sodomy and lesbianism with as little hesitation as we compared the merits of different contraceptives, and were theoretically familiar with varieties of homosexuality and venereal disease of which the very existence was unknown to our grandparents. We had not quite lost - and perhaps never shall lose - a self-conscious feeling of boldness in our candour; not all our experience could change us from the earnest, idealistic War generation into our flippant juniors the post-war youth, who had never been taught to think the terms of sex indecent and to see its facts, if at all, through a glass darkly. But we were now capable of the frank analysis of our own natures, and the stoical, if reluctant, acceptance of realistic conclusions.

One Sunday soon after Winifred and I had gone to live in Maida Vale, I went down to see Betty, who had recently been married, in her new Essex home. She was expecting a baby and seemed wrapped in physiological contentment, but this evidence of a still almost universal assumption that the interests of a husband and children provided sufficient occupation for an adult woman’s entire personality did not reconcile me to the idea of marriage with any type of man which the War seemed to have left available for those of us who were approaching the rubicon of thirty.

In spite of the feminine family tradition and the relentless social pressure which had placed an artificial emphasis on marriage for all the women born, like myself, in the eighteen-nineties, I had always held and still believed it to be irrelevant to the main purpose of life. For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work.

I was not, therefore, in the least attracted by the idea of marriage divorced from love - by which I no longer meant the invading passion that for me had burnt itself out, once for all, in 1915, but the loyal, friendly emotion which arises between mutually respectful equals of opposite sex who are working side by side for some worth-while end. But my experience had made love in all its aspects seem an essentially youthful quality; at school and in Buxton I had grown up in contact with a general supposition that the girl who does not marry early is unlikely to marry at all, and so much living and loving had been crowded into the few succeeding years that now, when I was nearing the end of my twenties, it all appeared to have happened very long ago, and made me feel that I was already growing old. Not only because, through the wholesale annihilation of my masculine contemporaries, I seemed likely to prove, in Queen Elizabeth’s phrase, ‘a barren stock’, but because the intense emotional relationships of the War had left an emptiness which not even the most intimate friendships could fill, I still felt that I was a haphazard survivor from another life, with no place in society, and no foothold on any permanent ladder except that which my own determination could construct for itself in a post-war world tormented with needs and problems.