Singled Out (15 page)

Muriel was persuasive, and though Winifred was initially plagued with

doubt, she now allowed herself to be talked round. ‘Life wasn’t very kind

to women like me. Wasn’t one entitled to warmth and happiness? I was

twenty-seven and my chances were going. So many nicely brought-up girls

were withering into virginity.’ She agreed to meet an acquaintance of

Muriel’s called Martin, a married man. There was a good rapport between

them from the start. Martin was intellectual, friendly and kind, and soon

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afterwards he gently and considerately relieved her of her burdensome

virginity. ‘I hadn’t any feelings of guilt. I thought, ‘‘I have become a

woman.’’ ’ Though not in love, they continued to meet for some time, but

Winifred still wanted marriage.

Miraculously, from somewhere, George appeared. George had survived

the war. George was unmarried. Best of all, George seemed to want

Winifred as much as she wanted him. He worked in the Ministry of Health,

and he just seemed so suitable. Could this be it? For two years they went

out together:

[We] went dancing, played tennis, and took long walks in the countryside . . . I thought it would have a happy ending. Suddenly, he fell for a young widow, and married her out of hand. I heard he said of me, ‘She’s too high class. I want someone commoner.’

This morale-shattering rejection left Winifred crushed, feeling she

couldn’t win. She was too clever and too ‘good’, and now she was too

‘high class’, plus she was not pretty, she was spoiled goods, and she was

nearly thirty into the bargain. What did men want? Whatever they wanted,

it wasn’t her.

Her work began to suffer, but fortunately Winifred’s PhD supervisor

was an understanding woman; an opening had come up for a lecturer to

exchange posts with their New Zealand counterpart in Christchurch for a

year, and this she tactfully proposed to her pupil. Fight or flight? Winifred unhesitatingly chose the latter; she booked her passage and did her best to face the lonely future stoically. ‘I left London at the end of the summer

term in  and spent my thirtieth birthday on board. The worst birthday

in a woman’s life didn’t seem too grim!’

*

Staring at the Pacific Ocean on  July , Winifred Haward felt angered

at the accident of being born into a generation of women denied their

natural mates. Though she knew a successful career could be hers, she

wanted more, and she felt the war had cheated her of it.

Despite fearing that she would never meet Mr Right, Winifred could

nevertheless look back on her twenties as a period of financial independence, sexual freedom and experimentation. Phyllis Bentley was not so lucky. Phyllis, who was born in , grew up in Halifax in an irreproachably conservative middle-class home. As a child, she daydreamed vividly.

The heroines of these dreams were beautiful Bronte¨-esque young women

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called Ellen, with Titian hair, who danced and ran wild on the moors; the

Ellens all married young, for love, to men like Heathcliff or Mr Rochester

– ‘outwardly rather difficult and dominant, inwardly very loving and protective’. Later, Phyllis recognised that the daydreams ‘released precisely those desires which I consciously knew I should not fulfil’.

Unlike Winifred Haward’s parents, Phyllis’s did not support her in

wishing to study at university, and when she left her boarding school, she

returned to Halifax where, as the only girl of the family, she fell into the role of daughter at home. Despite pressure to remain there, she managed to get a teaching job in a boys’ grammar school in . It didn’t last;

shy and inhibited, she was a disastrous teacher. So she went back to look

after her mother. But Phyllis had an ambition: what she longed to do was

write.

Phyllis Bentley’s autobiography,
O Dreams, O Destinations
, was published in . This book barely mentions any hopes she may have had in her youth of boyfriends, husbands, or babies. An early hatred of housework

had determined her that domesticity was not her thing. However, she

makes it very clear that she felt herself to be among the Surplus Women.

‘Surplus! Rather a bitter word. The reason for the surplus was even more

bitter: a million dead men. Still, it was depressing to think we had no value save as mates . . .’ Phyllis considered that she had much of value to offer without being a mate. She retained a strong belief in ‘the brotherhood of

man’, and a passionate desire to make the world a better place through her

books, which would concern themselves with nothing less than the reform

of humanity. Her struggle to achieve these noble aims – against the odds,

for her family always made first claim – forms the substance of her memoir.

But Phyllis did long for a husband. Pulsing beneath the surface of her

elevated literary ambitions were dreams never to be realised, destinations

never to be reached. Tenuous and evanescent, the dream was so unthinkably

intense that Phyllis’s account of the one profoundly hurtful romantic episode of her life occupies barely a paragraph of her autobiography.

It happened like this: after the war dancing was the rage. In cities and

towns across the country anyone not actually crippled went out and joined

a dance class. In hotels, homes and clubs there were people charlestoning

and quickstepping as if their lives depended on it. In a sense that was true – young women certainly saw dance halls as the best place to meet and mate. So Phyllis went along, often with a group of half a dozen of her

girlfriends as partners, for until demobilisation was complete it was quite

acceptable for women to dance together. But gradually the men came back,

some in uniform, some in lounge suits. For the men the lure of the dance

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was great: they could take their pick from the prettiest of the bunch. For

the girls, there was the agony of waiting to be asked.

Lack of men meant feminine charm and looks were at a premium. Phyllis

was not pretty and the competition for partners was fierce, so all too often there were awkward gaps when she was unclaimed. It was hard for nicely brought-up girls to push themselves forward for fear of being thought

‘cheap’. However, Phyllis made sure to go prepared – with a book. Rather

than be a wallflower, she would retreat to the cloakroom and retrieve

whatever small volume she had brought with her – Burke, Gibbon or

Benvenuto Cellini – and read unobserved for the duration. Then one day

a man who seemed different from the others asked her to dance. He was

‘large [and] agreeably ugly . . .’; he also seemed kind, warm-hearted and

well-read. Phyllis’s heart quickened. And yet that one foxtrot when her

dream took shape was so fleeting, so painfully insubstantial:

. . . for the space of a dance I thought my destiny was settled . . .

she remembered. For that was all it was. Minutes later, Phyllis’s partner

rejoined his group, ‘. . . [and] I perceived that he was already deeply in

love with an old High School schoolfellow of mine, a more than pretty,

intelligent, unconventional, altogether delightful girl whom I greatly liked; I perceived also that she was deeply in love with him.’

And so it ended. Phyllis’s ugly dream man married the pretty schoolfriend within the year.

In retrospect one smiles at this episode, so extremely brief, but that it was not trivial is shown by the fact that the man in question (modified suitably) descended into my daydream world and played the hero’s part for years . . .

Not long afterwards, in , Phyllis had her second, and final, brush with

romance. It lasted a little longer; this time the man quite visibly paid court to her over several months, but then abruptly got engaged to another girl.

Just as well, reflected Phyllis, though being rejected was painful. She was

dreadfully immature and not really in love. To be married to him would

have been a disaster. ‘It is significant, however, that this fickle swain never entered my daydream world.’

Phyllis Bentley: just one of the sober statistics of the  Census, which

showed the imbalance of the sexes hitting her exact age-group harder than

any other. She was twenty-seven at the time of this episode. The figures

revealed that the proportion of women to men was higher for twenty-five-

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to twenty-nine-year-olds than for any other group: so, for every , men

of the same cohort there were , desperate twenty-something women.

When the next Census was taken ten years later, in ,  per cent of

those women were still single, and longer-term statistics showed that  per cent of them failed to marry during their reproductive years. Phyllis was never to marry, but the bigger dream that drove her did come true. Books

poured out of her – novels, short stories, criticism and articles.
Inheritance
() was the first in a series of historical-regional novels set in her home county of Yorkshire, chronicling  years of the Oldroyd family and their mill. The books brought her critical and popular acclaim, and were

eventually made into a television serial. Phyllis became famous both here

and in the United States, found acceptance in London’s literary circles, and late in life was recognised with an honorary degree, an FRSL and an OBE.

*

Botched affairs, dashed hopes, the prospect of loneliness: two million

women now saw their dreams slipping away from them. For many, isolation

and longing replaced the cosy fantasy of home, hearth and adoring little

ones. ‘On the shelf ’, ‘old maid’, ‘sex-starved spinster’ – these were the

fearful labels attached to the Surplus Women. Terror loomed around the

prospect of spinsterhood. On her twenty-sixth birthday, Alix Kilroy (later

a senior civil servant) felt life was passing her by. She was full of ‘secret longings’; ‘I seem to want very badly to see some chance of matrimony in the future – for children and the physical side too . . .’ she confided to her diary. Walking in France that summer Alix became consumed with anxiety about a remembered mountain stream which had been her favourite bathing

place the previous year. Would it have dried up? ‘My thoughts dwelt on

minimised matrimonial chances and the passing years. My throat was tight

and I couldn’t have trusted myself to speak . . . When I got to the place

and found only a dry stream bed I sat down and wept.’

The novelist Christina Stead (born ) was tormented as a young

woman by her father, who told her she was too plain to find a husband.

The taunts found their way into her books; in
For Love Alone
() the heroine spends her youth anguished by the passing of time: Teresa suffered for herself and for the other girls; each year now counted against them; nineteen, and has she a boyfriend? Twenty, and does she like anyone particularly? Twenty-one, now she has the key of the door; she ought to be looking round! Twenty-two already! Twenty-three and not engaged yet? Twenty-four and not even a nibble?

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But maybe it wasn’t too late? At what point does the single woman abandon

hope of marriage? The agony was protracted as time ticked inexorably by:

twenty-five, twenty-six. ‘A girl of twenty-seven is lost . . . The long night of spinsterhood will come down. What’s to be done?’* Twenty-eight, twenty-nine . . . The Tommies in France used to sing – ‘
Hug me, kiss me,
call me Gertie,/Marry me quick, I’m nearly thirty!
’ For Rosamond Lehmann and her readers the assumption was that thirty was the upper limit. The ill-bred dressmaker in
Invitation to the Waltz
(), though warm-hearted and musical, is definitively past her sell-by date: ‘. . . she wouldn’t get a husband: she hadn’t a chance now. She was thirty. Letting I dare not wait upon I would, youth had gone by; and now the candour of her desires was

muddied, her spark of spirit spent.’ With reduced opportunities should she

have settled for second-best rather than hold out for a prince? ‘ ‘‘Good

husbands don’t igzackly grow like blackberries, do they? No.’’ ’ But a survey of single women done in the s showed that over a third of those over fifty years old still believed that marriage would bring them complete

happiness. Did one ever give up wishing and wanting? Must life for the

spinster always be provisional, a transit lounge between birth and death, no ground beneath your feet? This was not life, but an interminable holding pattern.

Novels like those of Christina Stead and Rosamond Lehmann, and

memoirs – like those of Winifred Haward and Phyllis Bentley – give a

close-up picture of what it felt like for middle-class women to be ‘on the

shelf ’ in the s; Phyllis wanted to tell the world about her life because by the time she was in her late sixties she had become a successful writer.

Winifred had another, odder story to tell. But it is harder to disinter the

emotional reality of singleness for the less literate members of society. One way to get close to the experience of working-class singles is by looking at the papers they read, the sixpenny magazines like
Woman’s Friend
,
Woman’s
Weekly
and
Woman’s World
, which printed romances, knitting patterns and advice on the complexion for servants and factory hands. For such women, the agony aunts gave important moral support. Through their replies to correspondents we get close to the poignant distress of the Surplus working