Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Norah Elliott with her ‘longings for love buried by fear’, the terror that her life had indeed been wasted gave way to the certainty of comfort and reward in heaven.
Elizabeth Goudge looked at life through a more complex lens. Her soul’s
journey was a matter of fundamental importance to her; she believed that
she was made to love God, and that God loved her. Her life, imperfect as
it was, consisted of a quest to deserve God’s infinite love, and she gave
these matters much profound thought. Elizabeth’s love of her Maker was,
in her cosmology, an affirmation of her lesser, human loves, never a replacement for them. Geraldine Aves’s faith too was foremost in drawing her close to her friend Gwyneth Jones: ‘This year you have given me a new, very dear friend: one of Thy loving servants, may we help one another to
serve Thee more nearly; and may our love for one another be hallowed by
our love of Thee,’ she wrote.
*
In
The Art of Loving
(), the social psychologist Erich Fromm wrote: If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love. Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
Fromm’s wonderful essay stresses the active nature of love, and its inclusiveness: ‘Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an
attitude
, an
orientation of character
which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not towards one ‘‘object’’ of love,’ he asserts. To lower one’s loving horizons to the hunt for a husband was a denial of loving.
Elizabeth Goudge, with her emphasis on ‘the blessed fact of loving’,
Caring, Sharing . . .
would surely have agreed. And so would Maude Royden, who, speaking
to a generation of women who had lost their hopes of finding a loving
mate, preached: ‘Love alone can build. Love alone creates . . .’ She implored the women of the post- world not to let their maternal and loving impulses shrivel unused:
There is no power to create but love. We know this, we women [because] we are old in the work of making homes . . . for lack of this conception, the world perishes . . . the world needs it more than you dream.
In , still reeling from international cataclysm, those urgent words could not have been wasted on her hearers.
A cause, a purpose and a passion
War taught the people of Britain to lower their expectations of happiness.
In the s our country was a nation mutilated by loss. Much of what
Winifred Holtby wrote wrestles with the predicament of the young women,
buoyant and optimistic by nature, forced to come to terms with the disappointment of being single. In her essay ‘Are Spinsters Frustrated?’
she looked deep into the needs of unmarried women who, like her, sought
fulfilment where it appeared to be lacking. Winifred Holtby was in no doubt
that human contact was vital: ‘We need intimacy; we need tenderness; we
need love. But tenderness is not enough. We must have passion. We must
at least once in life have burned to the white heat of ecstasy.’ But she was not just talking about sexual fulfilment: We must have achievement. We must feel the pleasure of creation . . . [And] we can know no ultimate peace unless we have worshipped some purpose larger than ourselves – a God, a cause, a leader, an idea, even another human person. Without that reverence we walk crippled, our human stature maimed. We are frustrated.
So how did the Surplus Women find happiness?
*
In Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s life seemed to her an emotional
blank. ‘Carlyon’s death had left me with the feeling that nothing much
mattered . . .’ she remembered. Gertrude was thirty. The man she had loved
lay in a British war grave, and it seemed pointless to think of replacing him.
It was absolutely clear to her that she would never love anyone again.
When Gertrude wrote her book
Mixed Memoirs
(), she did so in a genial and factual style; she was also, as one might expect from her archaeological methods, meticulously chronological. She does not elaborate in them on how she emerged from this state of insensibility. We are simply asked to accept that she did. But the hints are there. After the Armistice was
declared Arthur Salter, her employer at the Ministry of Shipping, asked her
to accompany him to the Versailles Peace Conference. In preparation for
A Grand Feeling
her Parisian sojourn she went shopping with her mother and bought ‘spring
suiting, a ravishing evening dress, and a hat or two’. She was comfortably
billeted in Rue Bassano. On weekends out from Paris she went for walks
in the woods at Compiègne and picked lilies-of-the-valley. Salter and she
dined with friends in the Bois de Boulogne and relished a superb meal
‘which included cold salmon mayonnaise and bowlfuls of fraises-du-bois
with lashings of cream’. When the Conference was over there was a holiday
with friends in Ireland – ‘a happy time, doing nothing in particular except
golf and exercising dogs’.
Though Carlyon had died, Gertrude’s appetite for pleasure had not.
And then there was archaeology – a purpose larger than herself. On
November Gertrude set off for Abydos in Upper Egypt with her
teacher and mentor, the great Egyptologist Professor Flinders Petrie. Before the war she and her mother had travelled in first-class cabins and stayed in luxury hotels. This journey was rather different, but Gertrude was so excited that spending two days stranded by a seamen’s strike in an insanitary and disreputable inn in Marseilles did nothing to dampen her spirits. A week
later she was in Cairo; a day’s journey took them on to Luxor. She rode
out to Abydos on donkey-back.
For four months Gertrude slept in a tent. She and the other students lived
frugally off tinned herring; the Petries were famous for their abstemious lack of interest in food and comfort. Gertrude worked hard under the dictatorial and painstaking ‘Prof ’, brushing the sand from tombs , years old, and
unearthing skulls, amphorae, implements and artefacts, all to a background
rattle of machine-guns at Assiut, where the British were now defending
themselves against a mutinous native mob. This turbulent region was only
about miles across the desert from Baharia, where Carlyon had met his
dreadful death five years earlier. Gertrude’s memoirs pass over this, dwelling instead on the project in hand: From first to last I revelled in the work done in that glorious sunshine . . . I had minded not at all the poor food and unnecessary discomfort of camp life . . .
She was drinking it in, hungry to learn, excited, thrilled by the landscape, the people, the companionship of camp life, and by her own pioneering ambitions.
And so began a pattern in Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s life. The year
saw her excavating Neolithic tombs in Malta. In she started a
lifelong association with Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met
her closest friend, Dorothy Hoare. In she was back with Petrie in Egypt
Singled Out
again. Until the Second World War Gertrude’s life alternated between the
rigours and excitement of fieldwork, and the more decorous pleasures of
scholarship, friendship, walks, culture, golf and motor-car outings. (Economically she was self-sufficient, largely through skilful management of her own portfolio.)
In Qau in Egypt Gertrude lodged in a ninth-dynasty tomb which she
shared with a family of cobras: ‘the cook offered to kill them, but I would
have none of it: they had priority of occupation and their forebears had
probably used it since it had been hewn from the rock years ago.’ She
was more anxious about hyenas, however, and took the precaution of
sleeping with a pistol under her pillow.
Later in Malta she spent her days excavating a Neolithic temple, and her
evenings and weekends picnicking under the megaliths and enjoying the
gaieties of colonial military society.
In Gertrude set out on her own dig in the Fayum desert with one
other British woman to take charge of the camp, and five of Petrie’s best
Qufti workmen. Egypt was in a state of insurrection but, though advised
to leave, she was quite sure that the upheavals would not affect her in her
distant desert location, and determined to press on. She bought a box
Ford, piled on her equipment, hired a Nubian chauffeur, and got safely to
Medinet-el-Fayum. There the Governor earnestly recommended that she
abandon her car and take camels. ‘I ignored advice and proved that with
care and avoidance of certain types of ground the car was an unqualified
success.’ They arrived without incident and spent the next two months
making a detailed reconnaissance of Neolithic flints. It was a time of ‘utter bliss without an anxiety in the world’. She was to return twice more, making important discoveries about unknown Neolithic civilisations in that
area of north-western Egypt, and in published her findings in
The
Desert Fayum
. Over the years Gertrude Caton-Thompson was to earn a prominent place in the annals of twentieth-century archaeologists; her
methods of scientific sequence dating were revolutionary, and her conviction that occupied settlements could teach us as much about the past as cemeteries and tombs was endorsed by successive researchers. Her site
work in the Egyptian desert was acclaimed by the Egyptologist Gerald
Wainwright, who declared that in importance it rivalled Carter’s discovery
of the tomb of Tutankhamen.
In later expeditions Gertrude Caton-Thompson excavated the monu—
mental ruins at Zimbabwe in southern Africa, the Palaeolithic remains
at the Kharga Oasis in the Egyptian Sahara, and the Moon Temple of
Hadhramaut in southern Arabia. Leopards, fevers, fleas, swamps and preci-
A Grand Feeling
pices, storms at sea, floods, cyclones and crocodiles beset her undertakings, but Gertrude’s stoical upper-class upbringing and military correctness stood her everywhere in good stead: ‘Mercifully I am not easily alarmed,’ she wrote. But at the beginning of the Second World War her
usual robustness began to ebb away with spells of weakness and giddiness;
after the age of fifty there were to be no more field trips, though she
revisited excavations in East Africa. Her academic work and her friendships
flourished, however; in Britain she made her home with her dear friend
Dorothy, who had married a fellow archaeologist, Toty de Navarro. Gertrude
loved them both equally; she described Dorothy as ‘the mainspring of my
life’, while rejoicing in Toty’s wit, intellect and generosity. Toty had
no difficulty in making his wife’s closest friend welcome in their Worcester-shire home. ‘To this unique gesture I owe some years of unclouded happiness.’
Gertrude Caton-Thompson was twenty-eight when Carlyon Mason-MacFarlane died; she lived nearly another seventy years: they were years of intrepid adventure, intellectual purpose, deep friendship and simple, intense pleasure. She was admired, loved and widely honoured. A life bled of meaning had been reanimated. Could anyone describe such a woman as
unfulfilled?
*
It should not be assumed that for lack of husbands the unmarried women
of the s and s were universally celibate, nor that they conformed to
the expected model of frumpy, thwarted spinster. As Winifred Holtby
pointed out, ‘[the spinster] may have known that rare light of ecstasy. In
certain sections of society, it is possible that she will have had lovers.’ And it is true that one doesn’t have to look far to find unwed and childless women finding fun and fulfilment in ways often barred to the conventional
wives and mothers of early twentieth-century Britain.
The war had subverted all the old rules. Young women released from
their parlours and sculleries to join the war effort found opportunities for sex and romance with men of all backgrounds. When a soldier whose life expectancy was perhaps only a few weeks asked you to sleep with him, it
seemed somehow cruel to say no. ‘Life was very gay,’ remembered one
young woman. ‘It was only when someone you knew well or with whom
you were in love was killed that you minded really dreadfully. Men used
to come to dine and dance one night, and go out the next morning and be
killed. And someone used to say, ‘‘Did you see poor Bobbie was killed?’’
It went on all the time you see.’ After the war some wag suggested fixing
Singled Out
a plaque to the wall of a famous London hotel: ‘to the women who fell
here during the Great War’.
The legacy of loss would never be forgotten by the young women of
Britain – the memorials on every village green were there to remind them
– but now they wanted to turn their backs on grief. Barbara Cartland
was of that generation. She remembered the courage of many of her
contemporaries who, though crushed by bereavement, ‘reddened their lips
and [went] out to dance when all they loved most [had] been lost . . . They
accepted death with a shrug of the shoulders.’ Their elders expected them
to sit at home and cry, and condemned them as hard and callous, but the
new generation was, according to her, ‘out to conquer’. The s saw a
release of pent-up energy. In reaction to four years of crippling conflict,
and bedevilled by fear of the future, they simply wanted, like Gertrude