Singled Out (30 page)

Caroline Denton-Smyth, is brought low by her own ludicrous fantasies.

‘Artistic’, she is first seen draped in beads and lorgnettes, in an antique green coat trimmed with moth-eaten fur, her fringe in a frizz, topped with a feathered and ribboned red hat. In this guise she puts on a brave face,

lunching with a financier at Boulestin’s. But in reality Caroline lives up



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three flights of stairs in a bedsitting-room in West Kensington, eating bread, margarine and stale seed-cake, reduced to borrowing money. Her life is a struggle against despair and solitude. At nights, driven by her frantic need for companionship, she seeks out her landlady for a cup of tea and a chat – ‘Not so lonely as going up to that room alone, night after night . . .’ – but even that becomes impossible when she finds herself owing £ s d for the rent: ‘. . . I
can’t
speak to her when I’m in debt like this.’ Over the course of the novel, Holtby systematically demolishes the props that have underpinned Caroline’s dignity and will to survive; her hopes of love,

fortune and status disintegrate, until eventually her world collapses around her. A motor-car runs her over in Westbourne Grove, and she ends her days abandoned in a bleak public infirmary, her faith only intact. Poor

Caroline indeed.

Winifred Holtby died too young to endure her heroine’s fate, but single

women who lived into old age had the all too real prospect of facing death

alone. Norah Elliott was born in . Her working life appears to have

been spent as a schoolteacher, but as it drew to a close she seems to have

been consumed with regret and pain. A brief memoir she wrote in old age

gives little away, but there are clues that in her childhood her family was

forced by poverty into the workhouse, leaving her to be adopted. But only

remnants are now left to tell the world of Miss Elliott’s sadness as she

contemplated her final lonely days on earth and wondered whether oblivion

or rest with her creator awaited her. One gusty September day, when she

was eighty, she picked up pen and paper to try to express in blank verse

her sense of the suffering that threatened to engulf her:

Another dark, cold, rainy day,

So I am truanting from chapel

And will spend my time alone

Whilst the slow hours drag on relentlessly.

Death seems like a long-awaited friend

When the future holds no hope of joy . . .

Neglect and loneliness waiting to attend

My last hours, when soon I’ll expect to know . . .

To discover how my unconscious choices

Led to arthritic pains and suffering,

To virginity that fled from love,

Longings for love buried by fear,

Caring, Sharing . . .



So that they died and left me feeling

That I have thwarted my destiny.

Another teacher, Miss Ethel Wragg, wrestled to come to terms with her

enforced lack of companionship. She wrote a diary in which she weighed

up her enjoyment of privacy against the deprivation of solitude. Miss

Wragg, who was forty-five, worked in Wirral, and Sunday  September

 found her happily giving herself the treat of breakfast in bed alone. Small comforts like this seemed to her extra special. A once-a-week luxury, the relaxation allowed her to think uninterrupted, and she indulged in the

mental pleasure, for her, of attempting to solve some mathematical problems.

Somewhere in the background, barely heard, a door opened and closed:

Suddenly, I cry a halt to this wandering, because I am feeling sorry that there is no one here with whom to talk . . .

Miss Wragg stopped herself at this point because she realised that she was

at risk of sliding into an abyss of self-pity. She had caught the sound of Miss J., her fellow-lodger, leaving the house. The distant clatter recalled her to the fact that she was alone, and that her cogitations could have no interest to Miss J. There was a friend with whom she could have discussed her interest in mathematics, ‘. . . but she is miles away’.

While I was retracing my thoughts, I suddenly realised that at the bottom of my mind was a want for a friend – & this desire was working up into consciousness through a whole lot of extraneous thoughts – as it were . . .

Conscious finally that I want a friend to talk to – I ask myself why? The answer: – to lose myself in the friendship – to enter into the unconsciousness of friendship.

The answer was a shock. Do I crave friendships then in order to escape from life as it is? There is aloneness today. I want to think about friendship. What is it? . . .

I realise that on Sunday there is time to think.

With awareness came reconciliation. By evening Miss Wragg was able to

look back with satisfaction over her day and pass over that moment’s fear

of the abyss. It had gone.

. I realise that I have been quietly happy and content to be alone.

In the same year Harriet Warrack, a thirty-three-year-old single laboratory worker, was surveyed about her social life. She listed her friends 

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and acquaintances. Out of forty-eight people, twenty-eight were women

friends, and of these twenty-one were spinsters, whose average age was

thirty. (Of all her male acquaintance, only one was a bachelor.) The brief

descriptions of her friends given by Miss Warrack are enlightening:

Female. Known about  years. Spinster aged  years. Studied music. Shorthand typist. She has a small private income and does not have to earn her own living but does so because she is bored at home and does not get on with her mother who thinks she should be married.

Social circle.

Female. Known  years. Spinster, age  years. Insurance clerk . . . Would like to have a man friend and get married but is not very attractive to men which gives her a rather aggressive attitude to those she meets.

Lives at my digs. Social circle.

Female. Spinster aged  – Shorthand typist . . . Takes very little interest in politics or world affairs – occasionally reads the newspaper and a novel. Whole life is rather unhappy as feels she is a failure because she has not got married although very attractive and good-looking; still hopes to meet a wealthy man who will supply her with a handsome home.

Social and work.

Female. Known  yrs, age . Spinster, clerk, very conservative – lived with invalid mother for many years and looked after her entirely. Mother has now died so she is beginning to go out more. Rather frightened of losing her job as has made no provision for old age. Reads daily newspaper and very little else.

Work circle.

Evidently, as a working woman, Harriet Warrack was thrown among others

of her kind. She may not have deliberately sought to make friendships

among other single women, but it is surely likely that she made common

cause with their predicament.

Not surprisingly, single women often look to each other for attachments.

Then, as now, the feeling of being demonised and excluded from the ‘smug

married’ world led to the pairing-up of women who shared household

expenses and found companionship, understanding and closeness. In some

cases such relationships often came close to the Russell definition of happy mutual love, but where they did not they were still, for many, the best thing that life could give.

Caring, Sharing . . .

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Companions, consolations

Just as it drove people apart, the war united people, sometimes with indissoluble bonds. In Essex, two little girls were growing up in the early s; they went to school together. In their teens they courted two young men who were friends, and together they both agreed to marry their sweethearts.

Then their boys went off to fight in the war. They were both killed. Miss

Prior told this story in her eighties to the attendant who was looking after her in a home for the elderly. Miss Patch, her friend, and she were still together, sixty years later. They had never married, and though Miss Patch

suffered from dementia, the two of them still chose to share a bedroom.

Through thick and thin Miss Patch and Miss Prior had never parted. ‘After

our sweethearts died we set up home together, to share our grief. Of course, we would never have looked at anyone else.’

Vera Brittain’s war had left her beached and bereft; and yet it was

inconceivable to her that she return home to her parents in provincial

Buxton, where their narrow-minded social circle continually tut-tutted

about her failure to get a husband. Self-sufficiency was all, but self-sufficiency shared made for a less lonely independence. She and Winifred Holtby determined to survive on their scanty allowances, coaching, teaching, writing and part-time lecturing. They rented a partitioned studio in Bloomsbury. It was freezing cold, sunless and cramped. Her relatives were

astounded that she could endure the discomfort – ‘but to me it was Paradise’.

She and Winifred ‘revell[ed] in the uninterrupted companionship of

those crowded days, so busy and yet so free . . .’ It was a complicated,

fruitful partnership. Both were driven by literary and political ambitions,

both had lived through the dark days of the war, loving and losing. Both

were courageous, independent-minded feminists. For Vera, this friendship,

with its intellectual guidance and practical support, went some way to

replace the beloved brother Edward whom she had lost. For Winifred, it

saved her from the fate of poor Caroline. Together they wrote, lectured,

travelled, admired each other’s clothes, cleaned the studio and cooked their dinners. Together they praised, rejoiced, commiserated and remembered.

It would be easy to cite more examples of supportive females setting up

home together like this in the post-war world. The novelist Irene

Rathbone, whose fiance´ was killed in Iraq in , just after the war had

ended, set up home in Chelsea with a group of like-minded women friends.

Though she was living in an emotional vacuum, the parties and cultured

conversation kept her from despair, if not indifference. Ivy Compton-Burnett’s world was shattered by war. She was later to excuse her lack 

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of literary productivity between  and  with the consummate

understatement: ‘One was a good deal cut up by the war; one’s brother

was killed, and one had family troubles.’ Noe¨l Compton-Burnett’s death,

she would add, ‘quite smashed my life up, it quite smashed my life up’. In

 Ivy moved in with the writer Margaret Jourdain, whose humour and

vitality gradually restored her drained nerves.

As most women know, female friendships have the capacity to provide

compatibility and love of an entirely different order to the love of a wife

for a husband. In her friendship with Gwyneth Wansbrough Jones, the

formidable social reformer Geraldine Aves discovered an emotional attachment which brought a deep level of fulfilment to both their lives. Gwyneth shared Geraldine’s devout faith; they were fellow pilgrims. ‘It is good to be able to travel together . . .’ wrote Gwyneth, ‘. . . and although we have different obstacles to climb over, I expect we can help each other with

them, and that there will sometimes be a rainbow that we see all the more

clearly because there are two of us.’ Love could be expressed in practical

ways too; at the age of forty the pianist Myra Hess was rescued from

crushing loneliness and despair after the death of her mother by the devoted ministrations of her new secretary, Anita Gunn. Anita, known as ‘Saz’, was to remain at Myra Hess’s side for more than thirty years. There was nothing

she would not do for her. On tour she packed, took phone calls, pacified

impresarios and agents, got them in and out of hotels and concert halls,

shopped, ironed, and played double solitaire between fixtures. According

to Saz they had ‘high old times’ and ‘roared with laughter from morning

till night’.

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Such relationships were the ‘shining threads in my life’, ‘golden cords,

strong and untarnishable’, or simply ‘a real insurance for old age’. Whether or not one chose to share a roof, single women cite friendship more than any other factor as contributing to their happiness and fulfilment. The

psychologist Esther Harding stressed that one of the results of women forced to seek each other’s company was the evolution of female friendships into something of unprecedented value.

But if friendship offered solace and companionship to the single woman,

how much more might the ready-made relationship between sisters provide

an anchorage for women adrift? Many without husbands gratefully accepted

the consolation and continuity offered by that closest of confidantes. As

Irving Berlin famously wrote:

Caring, Sharing . . .

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Sisters, sisters,

There were never such devoted sisters,

Never had to have a chaperone, no sir,

I’m there to keep my eye on her –

Caring, sharing,

Every little thing that we are wearing . . .

If they ever performed it, no song could have been more appropriate to

Elsie and Doris Waters, musicians and comedians who lived, sang and

entertained the nation together for over forty years. They were East Enders, Elsie born in , her sister six years later. Show business was in their blood; Edward Waters, their father, ran his family like the von Trapps, as a performing troupe comprising himself, his wife and their six children Art, Jack, Bill, Sam, Elsie and Doll. Blacked up as minstrels and dubbed E. W.

Winter and his Bijou Orchestra, they appeared at church bazaars and seaside

concerts at Clacton-on-Sea. Elsie and Doris never married, but always lived