Singled Out (52 page)

In the light of Flora Robson’s longing for the children she was never to

have, perhaps she did indeed have special insight into this character; but it must have taken self-command to give the ‘handbag’ scene with Jack Worthington its full comic impact:

j a c k : Miss Prism, more is restored to you than this handbag. I was the baby you placed in it.

m i s s p r i s m [
amazed
]: You?

j a c k [
embracing her
]: Yes . . . mother!

m i s s p r i s m [
recoiling in indignant astonishment
]: Mr Worthing. I am unmarried!

j a c k : Unmarried! I do not deny that is a serious blow. But after all, who has the right to cast a stone against one who has suffered? Cannot repentance wipe out an act of folly? Why should there be one law for men and another for women?

Mother, I forgive you.

The reality was that the practice of a professional art itself often ruled

out marriage. Myra Hess’s luminous talent as a pianist was obvious from

early childhood. By her early twenties she was becoming successful, and

her fame steadily increased after her American debut in . It was to be

a career of constant touring and performances, often lonely, exhausting and

uncomfortable. Her mother, to whom she was devoted, lived in hope that

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her daughter would marry, but Myra was committed to her music. In an

interview she explained that she took both music and marriage too seriously

to be able to do both. ‘I couldn’t. I’m afraid I would be too earnest about

marriage, and in this business there is only one thing one can be really

earnest about. That is playing the piano. One sacrifices a great deal, but

there are compensations.’ It was a question of priorities, and she had to

choose. The cellist Beatrice Harrison and the singer Dame Eva Turner

remained unmarried for similar reasons.

‘You loved him’

How many of these talented and successful single women could have

acquired their qualifications, consequent positions and fame while conforming to the expectations of wifehood? It may be that their skill, professionalism and leadership merely displaced the more decorous gifts employed by their married sisters in dropping off visiting cards, shopping

and flower-arranging. It may be that their achievements cost them dear in

disappointed hopes.

But if they were sometimes envious, sometimes sad, sometimes lonely,

at least now they could no longer be regarded as superfluous. Thirty years

earlier society would have treated them as rejects. Now in their flourishing second-hand bookshops, their busy veterinary practices and auction houses, their offices, courts, boardrooms and cutting-rooms, on the stage and in

the studio, in the operating theatre and the laboratory, the lecture-hall

and the drill ground, spinsters found self-respect and the respect of society.

Like Muriel Spark’s spinsters in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, they channelled their considerable energies into social welfare, religion, vegetarianism, slum improvement and theatre companies. They flew over Mount Everest, kept pigs and chickens, saved up and bought their own houses, learnt German.

Feelings of social usefulness compensated for a lot, though when retirement came it could be hard. When Mary Grieve handed over the editorship of
Woman
magazine after twenty-five years she had to contend with a crisis of identity which shook her to the core. Her personality had been bound up with an entire working life spent on the magazine. At the age of fifty-six she no longer knew who or what she was. Forced on to her own company, it was only the realization that a new journey was beginning that made her

able to come to terms with the ‘stranger’ that she now encountered. Miss

Grieve picked up the pieces, turned to writing, and started a company

cooking and supplying home-made paˆte´ to the shops and restaurants near

The Magnificent Regiment of Women



her home in Hertfordshire. Her autobiography ended with the words:

‘Well, the journey is begun.’

*

Comparing the contribution of educated working women in the mid

twentieth century to those of our own times, the writer and educationist

Professor Alison Wolf has concluded that society as a whole was the

beneficiary: ‘The period . . . was a golden age for the ‘‘caring’’ sector in one major respect. It had the pick of the country’s most brilliant, energetic and ambitious women, who worked in it as paid employees, but who also gave enormous amounts of time for free. Now, increasingly, they do

neither.’

In  the feminist writer Cicely Hamilton – herself single – took stock

of the state of British spinsterhood:

Time was – and not so very long ago – when the middle-aged Englishwoman who

had not found a husband was considered fair game for the jester; by the humorists of the Victorian age she was always depicted as a figure of fun – an unattractive creature who, in spite of all her efforts, had failed to induce a man to marry her.

That was the old maid as a past generation saw her – and as we do not see her today; we have too many unmarried women successful in business or professional life, distinguished in literature, science, and art, to be able to keep up that joke.

Cicely Hamilton was perhaps unusual, if admirable, in seeing singleness

as a win-win situation. Typically clear-sighted, she weighed the pros of

spinsterhood against the cons of marriage, and concluded that marriage

required more sacrifice than she was prepared to make. Her friendships,

her interests and her pleasures, her independence and lack of fear for the

future, must have been jeopardised with a husband and children to encroach

on her time and prey on her anxieties. ‘When I ask myself, do I regret my

single blessedness? The answer is quite easily, No!’

As the author of
Marriage as a Trade
() and
Just to Get Married
(), Cicely Hamilton was a self-confessed feminist who gave much of her life for her commitments. These included votes for women, equal pay, abortion law reform, birth control and rights for unmarried mothers. In partnership

with the composer Ethel Smyth she wrote the lyrics for the suffragette

anthem ‘March of the Women’:

Life, strife, these two are one,

Nought can ye win but by faith and daring:

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On, on, that ye have done

But for the work of today preparing.

Firm in reliance, laugh a defiance,

(Laugh in hope, for sure is the end)

March, march, many as one,

Shoulder to shoulder and friend to friend.

And as she marched, firmly relying, bravely defying, banner aloft, with her

bold comrades beside her, surely Cicely Hamilton never cast a backward

glance at the kitchen, the nursery or even the drawing-room, or sighed for

a married life that was never to be. Didn’t that sense of a cause greater than herself, a glorious mission, suffuse her with idealistic passions every bit as heated as the ardour that burns between two lovers?

The writings of brave honest women like Cicely Hamilton and Margery

Fry, Winifred Holtby and Phyllis Bentley, Florence White, Caroline Haslett

and Rosamund Essex, Gertrude Caton-Thompson and Winifred Haward

are imbued with a stoicism and dignity that is hard to find today. These

women had lived through disaster. The world they had been brought up

to expect as their birthright had been taken away from them and destroyed.

Instead of complaining, they bravely faced the future. ‘Anyone can get

married,’ argued one of the NSPA branch members, ‘but it takes a good

valiant woman to remain unmarried.’ In many cases such women were

rewarded with abundant and fulfilling lives.

One could generalise that not having husbands gave the spinsters opportunities they could never otherwise have had – just as today one might also generalise that marriage and children reduce women’s competitiveness with

men. Beatrice Gordon Holmes believed that success was the ‘most satisfying

thing in the world – there is no champagne like success’. Though it would

obviously be simplistic to claim that spinsterhood guaranteed success, the

interwar decades saw the single woman’s emergence from the twilight

zone of maiden aunthood into an altogether sunnier realm. The women in

this chapter understood that marriage was only one kind of fulfilment. And

by the time the Second World War broke out, the idea that marriage was

‘the crown and joy of woman’s life – what we were born for . . .’ was

starting to appear very outdated.

The women whose lives I have traced in this book each had their own

mountain to climb. Whether or not our lives are engulfed by great historical events, we all try to make the best of the muddled, incompetent, second-rate world this is. And as death approaches it’s a matter of chance whether each of us can look back on the past with more pleasure than pain, more pride than
The Magnificent Regiment of Women



regret. In her ninety-fifth year Gertrude Caton-Thompson sat down to

assemble a narrative from eighty-four years’ worth of diaries. It was the final creative undertaking of an immensely hard-working and productive life.

*

Although she barely ever spoke of her love for Carlyon Mason-MacFarlane

again, the distinguished archaeologist never forgot him, nor how passionately she had loved him as a young woman. She kept in intermittent touch with his brother and parents, who had been family friends. Twenty-four

years after his brutal death in the Libyan desert, when Gertrude herself was in her fifties, she received a letter from Carlyon’s elderly widowed mother, who was still living at Craigdarroch in the Scottish Highlands. Would she be kind enough to visit whenever she was next in Scotland?

The opportunity arose in September . Newnham College, Cambridge, like everywhere else in the country, was preparing for the Blitz by blacking out its windows and digging bunkers in its garden. Gertrude took

a brief holiday from her academic work and her air-raid warden duties to

travel to Craigdarroch. There she found Mrs MacFarlane living alone in

the isolated manse, cared for by two elderly servants and a kitchen-maid.

She was frail and had greatly aged. For the five days she spent there Gertrude was left to entertain herself. The factor took her round the home farm and showed her the Highland cattle, and he organised her a day’s trout fishing

on the loch. In the silence and solitude of the glens it must have been hard for Gertrude not to remember how in July  she and Carlyon had set up their rods side by side on the banks of the Conan, and how they had

fished together in the peaceful waters while down on the Cromarty Firth

the warships lay at anchor. Surely she also remembered Derby Day ,

the carefree young man with his grey topper pushed back, munching his

game pie on the roof of the brake . . . With a second world war looming,

how could she have prevented the memories crowding back – of that tense

summer just before the outbreak of the last war, when she and Carlyon

walked those same purple moors in the pouring rain, knowing that hostilities would mean his departure for the Front? And how could she forget that she had never told him of her love, and that he had died horribly,

never knowing what he meant to her? None of these thoughts are expressed

in her memoirs, but her stay at Craigdarroch could not have failed to

prompt reflections on the past with Carlyon. Her departure, when it came,

must have left her with many more.

When she left, Gertrude went upstairs to bid Mrs MacFarlane goodbye.

The old lady was in bed, and she bent to embrace her. As she was about to

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leave she noticed for the first time a table which stood beside Mrs MacFarlane’s bed. It was spread over with fresh flowering heather, like a tablecloth.

On the heather lay a sword, and medals. Gertrude stopped and, looking at

Mrs MacFarlane, saw that they understood one another. ‘It’s been beside

me for twenty-four years,’ said the old lady. There was no need to acknowledge what, as a mother, she felt, and Gertrude was silent. Mrs MacFarlane was the next to speak: ‘You loved him.’

It was a statement, not a question. But this time it needed a reply. What

did it cost Gertrude to answer? For half a lifetime her secret had lain masked by scars. To surrender now would be to rupture a wound long healed over.

It wasn’t in Gertrude’s character to do it.

‘He was loved by everyone who knew him,’ she said.

The generalisation, with its tacit confession, would suffice. There was

nothing to be gained by self-indulgent histrionics. He was dead, and she

had her life to get on with.

That was the last time she saw Mrs MacFarlane, who died not long

afterwards.

After the Second World War Gertrude retired from fieldwork, but she

made further visits to East Africa and continued to travel in Europe. She

had many philanthropic interests and many friends. Into her eighties she

served on the council of the British School of History and Archaeology in

East Africa. Newnham made her an honorary fellow, in  she was

elected a fellow of the British Academy, and shortly before her death she

was also honoured with a fellowship by University College, London. A

fellow academic visited her in Wiltshire when she was in her late eighties:

‘. . . her pose was as upright and her mind as razor-sharp as ever, and she

had that ethereal form of beauty, unrelated to good looks, sometimes