Singled Out (20 page)

Convinced in the early s that she was doomed to permanent spinsterhood, Vera was eloquent about her regrets: the powerfully physical longing for babies – ‘sweet anticipated comfort of warm responsive flesh . . .

visionary children for whom, during strange dark nights in Camberwell, I

had planned to work and achieve . . .’ – and forced herself to suppress them.

Her poetic lament
The Superfluous Woman
() concludes with the image of rows of black crosses silhouetted against an angry sunset, and the bitter questioning refrain –
But who will give me my children?

There was no answer.

The Single Woman
(), by Margery Fry, though written too late to help the Surplus generation, contains a wealth of wisdom and insight from

one who had lived through it and was well-positioned to offer it. She was

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then nearly eighty and long retired from her job as the much-loved principal of Somerville College, Oxford. Margery herself had never married; she had lived a life surrounded by spinsters and wryly compared herself to Saint

Ursula, ‘. . . who, you will remember, went about with , virgins . . .’

Her short book tells us at first hand much of what the author’s generation

experienced. She herself knew what it was like to be belittled by her own

mother for not producing grandchildren; and she had had to hide her

frustration from the outside world while she missed out on marriage.

She felt for the women whose love affairs had ‘come up against hopeless

obstacles . . .’ or just fizzled out. ‘There are the friendships which just don’t ripen as love affairs. The possible husbands who are just impossible. And perhaps the worst pain of all – simply watching the things taken for granted in other lives passing you by.’

Margery Fry also shared Mary Scharlieb’s view that for many women

the desire for children was ‘an instinct at least as profound as that of sex’.

The short poem she quotes to illustrate this is harrowing in its sense of pain and incompleteness, but also offers healing: Old Maid’s Child

Child of my body whom I never bore

Dear fruit of all a woman’s fruitless pain

Come, nestle in these empty arms again,

Come, nuzzle at my milkless breasts once more.

You cannot feel, and yet I hear your cries.

You seem to weep because, since you are blind,

You cannot even see if I am kind.

Hush, darling! Look through other children’s eyes.

The other children’s eyes, as Margery then explained, looked to the childless woman for comfort and love of a kind that only she could give. ‘She came when the new babies arrived, or when the scarlet fever children wanted

nursing . . . one associated her with sweets and presents . . . she remained a beloved figure to the end.’

Meanwhile women who couldn’t have children but were ‘passionately

fond of babies’ must be discouraged from falling into despair. Margery

Fry’s book speaks of the importance of friendship, of social utility, of

independence, realism and training for the single life.

Mary Scharlieb also urged women who wanted children to care for but

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Singled Out

couldn’t have their own to divert their energy into childcare. They should

become nurses, governesses or teachers. The preacher Maude Royden

delivered a clarion call to the childless to sublimate their creative and

maternal talents into bettering society – ‘I tell you what I know when I say that the power of sex can be transmuted into a power that will make your lives as rich, as fruitful, as creative as that of any father or mother in the world . . . those of you who have never borne a child may some day bear the new world.’

*

Nobody would judge Miss Olive Wakeham tragic or despairing because of

her childlessness. Born in , Miss Wakeham now occupies a bedsitting-room in an old people’s home in Exeter. Aged nearly , she is very lame, but enormously cheerful, and happy to chat volubly in her attractive West

Country accent over a cup of tea. The memories of her childhood in

Plymouth nearly a century ago come flooding back: they include watching

the First Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment with all their artillery,

marching away to the First World War – ‘I was stood outside St Luke’s

College, and they entrained at Queen Street – but hardly one came back!

They were just massacred.’ Two of Olive’s aunts lost their husbands. She

herself remembered that as she grew up there was a definite shortage of

men. Taken to Italy at the age of twenty while working as nurse-companion

for an elderly lady, Olive visited Sorrento. ‘It was lovely. I always said

I’d go back for my honeymoon, but I never had one, so I didn’t go back!’

she says, laughing, and remarks with the same blithe sense of distance: ‘I

would have loved to have had lots of children, and married, but I’ve got

over that!’

What helped Olive ‘get over it’ was her immersion in childcare. Her

earliest memory was coming home to view her new baby sister – ‘She was

so beautiful! She had little auburn curls tight all over her head – oh, she

was so pretty!’ From then on, she loved small children. Teaching would

have been her first choice of career, but the family couldn’t afford to pay

for her training, so instead she took up nursery nursing. The Plymouth Day

Nursery, where she worked, took in the babies of the local fisherwomen –

‘wonderful mothers’ – and she soon learnt to change the babies’ nappies

and get them breastfeeding when the mothers came in. ‘I loved those

children, all of them . . . and I’m an expert on washing nappies!’ Often, she recalled, she would ‘borrow’ one of the poorer infants for the weekend, bring it back to her parents’ home, and dress it in her little sister’s donated cast-offs.

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On top of that Olive had no fewer than twenty-eight first cousins.

Whenever the clan got together, Olive was in charge. Keen on acting, she

would marshal the entire crowd and make them learn a play by heart,

‘every word’; then they’d cut costumes out of coloured paper, rig up a

sheet for a curtain in her aunt’s sitting-room and charge the local children a halfpenny to come and watch. ‘It was lovely – I
did
enjoy it!’

Much later, ‘Auntie Olive’ became the mainstay of the family, especially

after her married sister was widowed. The nephews and nieces would come

to stay with her in Exeter, where she used her mothering skills with tact

and ingenuity, persuading the children off to bed with a wily combination

of bribes and firm discipline. ‘Aunts can do this . . . I would put their milk in the hall on a little shelf – somehow or other this appealed to them – and some biscuits, and at  o’clock they could take this milk and the biscuits and go to bed. And they’d always say, ‘Oh, we love going to stay with

Auntie Olive – she and her biscuits!’

The beautiful curly-headed little sister died at sixty-two, leaving Olive

as the stable centre of her extended family. By then she had done well for

herself, and greatly bettered her world into the bargain. Childcare had

occupied the first half of her working life; the remainder she spent employed by the Devon County Association for the Blind, ending as their President, with MBE to her name. ‘I’ve been so lucky. It would have been very nice

to have been married, but I’ve had to make the best of things and I have.

Above all, I’ve got all my nieces’ children, my great-greats; I’m so lucky!’

Giving love was the main thing, not giving birth, as Rose Harrison

pointed out in
My Life in Service
. Rose was a devoted daughter who never cut herself off from her humble family and, despite the elevated circles she attended, provided for her mother all her life. After long experience of the upper classes, she felt qualified to comment on their neglectful attitude towards their children. The children were given everything that money

could buy, but to Rose it was evident that all too often the grandes dames

of high society were uncaring mothers, spoilt by privilege. Poignantly,

though she is careful to exempt her employer, Rose juxtaposes these

comments with an account of her own adoring relationship with Michael,

the baby son of Lord and Lady Cranborne. Charged with his care on a long

train journey to Switzerland, Rose spent a sleepless night consumed with

anxiety lest the infant should fall out of his bunk. Michael loved Rose in

return. ‘We had a lovely time together. Little boys are always so appreciative of what you do for them and he was a great companion. It was tragic that he should have died so unexpectedly while playing football at Eton when

he was only sixteen. Richard, the youngest, was killed during the war.’

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Rose felt these tragedies almost as personally as if the boys had been her

own sons; their presence in her life pulled on her maternal heart-strings. In the end one of the greatest rewards of servitude was, for Rose, her inclusion as ‘a member of a wonderful family’.

Maternal instincts, the need to be needed, found outlets for women like

Rose Harrison or Olive Wakeham who became part of a larger family.

Aunthood could go some way to compensate for lack of motherhood. This

appears to have been the case with the author Richmal Crompton, a

much-loved aunt who was strongly drawn to the younger generation. Her

home was well provided with toys for any child visitors who happened to

drop in, and she was always happy to join in games and romps with her

numerous nieces and nephews – not easy, for Richmal could only walk

with a stick. The hugely successful books she wrote –
Just William
,
More
William
,
William Again
,
William the Fourth
and so on for another forty-odd volumes – are glorious proof of her ability to communicate with children.

Richmal Crompton’s biographer insists that the author’s anarchic, well—

intentioned but disaster-prone boy hero ‘was in no way a substitute for any

real-life son that she might have liked to have’. This is doubtless true, but the invention of William Brown shows a childless woman transmuting her creativity into the richest, most fruitful of channels.

Born in , the educated daughter of a clergyman, Richmal’s career

as a teacher was curtailed in  owing to an attack of poliomyelitis. This lost her the use of her right leg; in the thirties she developed breast cancer and had a mastectomy. Thus disabled, she turned entirely to writing.

Marriage, it would seem, was never on the cards. Rather than persuade

oneself that William was Richmal’s notional child, it would be safer to

speculate that he represented her own alter ego. The boy speaks as the small shrill voice of the misunderstood individual against the vast chaos of society.

In the
William
books, the grown-up world, with its rules, conventions and conformity, is oppressive and incomprehensible. It is tempting to think that Richmal Crompton, ruled out of the ‘natural order of things’ by her handicaps and failures, took refuge in a child-centric universe. William, like his creator, feels excluded from the middle-class normalities so convincingly described in the books – a world of conventional suburban marriages with subservient mothers and wives; adult mysteries like Women’s Guild

meetings, family gatherings and vicarage tea parties – in short, all the

adjuncts of the wife and mother.

Something inside Richmal Crompton rebelled against the bourgeois

orthodoxy of it all, and took shape in William Brown. To imagine Miss

Crompton, who described herself as ‘the last surviving example of the

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Victorian professional aunt’, dressed in odd shoes and a borrowed policeman’s helmet, with pockets full of woodlice, innocently sliding down coal heaps, painting cats green, putting frogs in teacups, and aiding and abetting the local burglars, is a liberating vision. The spirit of a dirty, lawless child with a pea-shooter lived within her; no wonder her nieces and nephews adored her, and no wonder the
William
books continue to reach out to thousands of children, even today.

In the end, maiden-aunting was what you made it, for the aunts of the

s and s were no longer expected to sink into the twilight zone.

Winifred Holtby was robust about her childlessness. She did not deny her

strong maternal feelings towards small children, but neither did she indulge in sentimental regrets for the babies she would never bear. It must have been hard for her when in  her best friend Vera Brittain found a

husband, Gordon Catlin, and harder still when their first child was born

two years later. But Winifred was simply fascinated gazing at Vera’s new—

born: ‘His head’s just like a pussy-willow,’ she observed. One might have

supposed that Winifred’s jumble of feelings would have driven her to avoid

contact with the baby, but far from it. According to Vera, she became John

Edward’s ‘discreet but devoted slave . . .’, deeply loving to him, often

pushing him in his perambulator to the Chelsea Babies’ Club clinic, and

even taking charge of Vera’s entire family of five under-sevens when she

and Gordon went to America on a lecture tour. Thus she was forthright

and realistic about children. Babies were ‘a nuisance’, and boring, and

anyone considering having one should contemplate seriously the prospect

of a great deal of laundry. At the same time she sought contact with them;

according to Vera children were, for her, an ‘essential part of experience’.