Singled Out (41 page)

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Singled Out

examples of lesbian women who quietly and discreetly settled down with

their chosen partner for a lifetime of tender intimacy and rewarding hard

work. Paul Fussell, an historian who grew up after the First World War,

recalled a cliche´d folk-memory of such women:

A common sight in the thirties – to be seen, for some reason, especially on railway trains – was the standard middle-aged Lesbian couple in tweeds, who had come together as girls after each had lost a fiance´, lover or husband . . .

This type was often to be found among the educational community, among

those who had read the more broad-minded psychological literature on

women’s sexuality and spinsterhood. So long as women like this maintained

a fac¸ade of utter probity, it was possible to have a full emotional life. Alice Skillicorn, principal of Homerton Teacher Training College in Cambridge from , first met Dorothy Sergeant in the early s. They were both

working in the school inspectorate at that time. But Alice’s appointment

as the leader of a premier educational institution, responsible for several

hundred young unmarried women, made it impossible for her to risk

scandal, so Dorothy remained in the background. Thus during the week

Alice lived in college and played out her headmistressy role to perfection:

gruff, forceful and bossy, she didn’t waste words and could be austerely

unapproachable.

The weekends and vacations were a different story. The couple shared a

house, where Dorothy’s abundant domestic skills came into their own, and

where her warm, easy-going, gregarious character melted Alice’s repressed

emotions. Alice and Dorothy remained together for nearly forty happy

years, until Dorothy died in . Alice was broken-hearted. Ten years

later she too was laid to rest in the same grave, whose tombstone records

their ‘dear and devoted friendship’. Everyone knew, but no one was

offended.

Relationships like this offered real and lasting happiness. Love, achievement and creativity were part of their lives, and many others’. The textile designers Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher found equal happiness

together. This pair of talented artists worked and lived together in a lovely Georgian house in the Cotswolds from . A friend described it as ‘a marriage of true minds’. Besides being a subtle and distinctive designer,

Barron (as she was always known) was a pillar of the community; she

was chairman of the Parish Council and a member of numerous local

committees.

Another devoted partnership was that of Dr Helen Mackay and the

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scientist Lorel Goodfellow. Also known by her surname, Mackay was an

eminent paediatrician, committed to finding the cause and cure of infant

anaemia; together she and Goodfellow published research into this important topic. They also shared a passion for bird-watching. Mary Renault met her lifelong companion Julie Mullard while both were training as nurses at

the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. The pair settled in South Africa, where

Renault devoted herself to literature. Female (and male) homosexuality

were to become dominant themes in her novels.

The novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner’s relationship with the poet Valentine Ackland is a great love story. Valentine’s early life was unhappy, confused and promiscuous (with both sexes); her attachment to Sylvia

brought much-needed stability and domestic contentment, and they too

stayed together until death parted them after nearly forty years. On New

Year’s Eve  Sylvia wrote to a friend from the Norfolk coast where

they were staying, conjuring a picture of cosy matrimonial bliss, tinged

with romance:

We have been snow-bound and ice-bound for days at a time . . . A devoted baker brought us bread twice a week; we had our woodpile, and the sea kept on adding to it with driftwood; once, when all the water froze, we melted snow . . . I have not seen Valentine so happy nor so much herself for years, and all her beauty has come back to her, and she walks about like a solitary sea nymph . . . a sea nymph who can split logs with an axe and manage a most capricious petrol pump, and cut up large frozen fish with a cleaver.

It was a brilliant idea to come here . . .

The urge

The new freedom wasn’t just a question of sexual licence, or the expression of sexual orientation. The rewards were great for women of energy and initiative like Winifred Holtby, or the stockbroker Beatrice Gordon

Holmes, or the campaigner Florence White. They fully justified their claims

to self-sufficient, contented lives. Marjorie Hillis summed it up in her

manual
Live Alone and Like It
(): ‘You will soon find out that independence, more truthfully than virtue, is its own reward. It gives you a grand feeling. Standing on your own feet is extraordinarily exhilarating.’

After the war a single, economically self-sufficient woman without family

responsibilities had the world at her feet, at a time when conditions abroad encouraged her to look beyond Bradford or Basingstoke for freedom and fulfilment. A journalist writing in
The Times
in  urged unmarried 

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women to take advantage of a new climate of post-war tolerance to be

found in France. The French respected initiative, seriousness and English

good manners, and in their country to be a spinster was ‘no longer a

disgrace; . . . merely a misfortune’. Nobody would ask awkward questions

if a single woman wanted to sit in a cafeálone; and she might visit whom

she chose:

She goes unquestioned and unprotected to studios, restaurants, and places of amusement. Whatever her means or her place in society, the unmarried Englishwoman in France has opportunities of seeing and knowing French home life which are rarely offered to the married woman.

A spinster with an income no longer needed to feel imprisoned.

In  a young woman named Etta Close found herself in exactly this

position. Her family’s demands were not compelling, but they were tire—

some. Luncheons with lady-friends had limited attractions, tea-parties even

fewer. She was sick of being treated by her relatives as a useful aunt endlessly available to accompany her nieces to have their teeth pulled at the dentist, or to pick up her nephews from railway stations, feed them and tip them before seeing them off again on the next train to Harrow. It galled her to

think of her married brothers and sisters saying to each other: ‘A single

woman, you know, with nothing in the world to do, of course she ought

to be glad to be of use to others.’ Their attitude set her to pondering how

somebody with ‘nothing to do’ should be spending their time, if not

servicing their nearest and dearest. It seemed to her that all too often such women, even when blessed with health and money, created fetters for themselves:

Looking with a disinterested spinster eye on the world, I notice that even . . . those who do not marry a man seem invariably to marry themselves to a garden, or a house, or a dog, and then having forged their own chains say pathetically, ‘If only I were free, how I would love to travel and see the world.’

Etta was determined not to fall into that trap. She was free, and realised it, and without further ado she made up her mind to go travelling.

There were a couple of false starts, however. Her stockbroker advised

her to go to Monte Carlo and, persuaded that a spell of dissipation might

be just the right antidote to life as a maiden aunt, she set off there. But the Casino and the Cafe´ de Paris left her cold. She drifted down the coast to Cannes for some tennis, then on to Menton. Everyone there seemed

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obsessed with talking about their ailments. The bright grass seemed fake,

and even the flowers seemed varnished, over-bright. ‘I felt sick, everything artificial . . .’ France wasn’t living up to its early promise. Then a friend said, ‘Go to Kenya.’ ‘ ‘‘If there is a ship going to Mombasa soon and there is an empty cabin on her I will go,’’ I answered, being a believer in fate.’

Ten days later Etta set sail.

Via Port Said and the Seychelles the steamer eventually docked at Mombasa, where, within hours of her arrival, the monsoon struck. Etta sat in a railway carriage with an umbrella over her head as the rain bucketed in

from both sides, forming a lake on the floor. Next day the line climbed

through mango trees and cocoa palms, then on uphill through thorn scrub

inhabited by lions, zebras and antelopes. Her adventure had begun.

Two years after her African journey Etta Close wrote her account of it

in
A Woman Alone, in Kenya, Uganda and the Belgian Congo
(). She had seen Kilimanjaro, encountered tarantulas over breakfast, eaten antelope, fungus, mealies and rotten fish, seen hippopotami, crocodiles and lions.

There had been mountains, banana forests, big-game hunts and tribes with

poisoned arrows. Etta had also caught malaria and heard herself described

as the first woman to go out ‘on her own’ into the game country. ‘On her

own’ was relative – she was accompanied by a Dutchman named Mr Trout

– but he forbore to help her:

I scrambled up and down the most horrible places, getting along alone as best I could . . .

Altogether I would say to a woman going to a wild country to learn never to

be hungry unless there is something to eat, never to be thirsty unless there is something to drink, and never be sleepy or tired unless you know your bed is ready for you. When you have mastered these three simple rules go out on safari and you will enjoy yourself.

Etta went to Africa intending to stay three months; she stayed eighteen.

The question to ask is – was it worth it? And I reply – a thousand times yes.

Etta Close’s safari had its challenges, and she nearly died of malaria, but she was doing nothing unprecedented. The world had opened up since the nineteenth century when Isabella Bishop and Marianne North had penetrated the Kurdistani desert and the jungles of Sarawak. Travel was getting easier. All it took to see the world was determination. Large numbers

of maiden ladies packed their portmanteaux and set out undaunted – as

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missionaries, mountaineers, archaeologists, explorers, soldiers, nurses and

naturalists.

The spinsters spread far and wide. Entomologist Evelyn Cheesman

described her passion for exploration as ‘the Urge’. In  she travelled to the Gala´pagos Islands with her specimen boxes and butterfly nets. Subsequent trips took her to the remotest jungles and mountains of Papua New Guinea. There the indigenous population knew her as ‘the woman who

walks’ and ‘the lady of the mountains’. But Evelyn was not ladylike: dressed in voluminous bloomers and canvas shoes, she was independent, brave and strong-minded. Una May Cameron, heiress to the Dewar whisky fortune,

educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, used her wealth to indulge her

passion for mountaineering. By  she had scaled peaks not only in the

Lake District and the Alps, but also in the Rockies, the Caucasus and East

Africa. She was the first woman to climb Nelion and Batian, the two peaks

of Mount Kenya. Standing on those summits, it is unlikely she ever wished

she were in Kensington.

The Gamwell sisters, Hope (‘the thick one’) and Marian (‘the thin one’),

had been brought up by their mother to treat life as an adventure. Both

were wartime members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, or FANY,

driving a vast Daimler fitted out with portable baths to wash and disinfect

the Belgian army. After the war they set out together – by car – to prospect for farming land in East Africa, and hacked a coffee plantation out of ,

acres of virgin bush south of Lake Tanganyika. When not battling off

hyenas or contending with tsetse fly, they were training as pilots.

The London parlourmaid Gladys Aylward* was determined to worship

a purpose larger than herself by becoming a missionary; she saved up her

wages and set out for China on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The endless

journey took her through Eastern Europe, across the Steppes and into the

immense grandeur of Siberia. On the Manchurian border a small war meant

the train could go no further. Gladys picked up her cases and walked down

the railway line. It was perishing cold and she heard wolves howling. In

Vladivostok she was arrested by Soviet officials, but escaped on a Japanese

ship; finally, famished and weary, she arrived at her destination of Yang—

sheng, Shansi province. There, for the next twenty years, Gladys put her

simple and fervent Christianity into action, tending lepers, helping refugees, caring for sick children, and always preaching the stories of the Testaments * Aylward became a household name when she was portrayed by the actress Ingrid Bergman in the  film version of her life,
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
. In fact, Miss Aylward strongly objected to the casting of Bergman in the role, since she was a divorced woman.

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that inspired and guided her at every turn. She adopted five Chinese

children, and watched them grow up. They called her Ai Weh-te – ‘the

virtuous one’.

*

The broadening of horizons helped to put personal unhappiness in perspective. At the age of seventy-seven Dame Margery Perham looked back on her youth in a BBC talk entitled ‘The Time of My Life’. The year she

chose to recall was ; the journey she took then fulfilled a childhood

dream, and provided a guiding purpose for the rest of her life. But at the