Singled Out (44 page)

It was there . . . one afternoon in solitude, that I found that Peace which Passeth Understanding. If IT comes to one in one’s lifetime and one recognises it there is no joy to equal it. It has not the fiery joy of passion, not the glory of happiness which comes to one with great love for another human being; it is a quiet God-given moment of such tranquillity that you can hear the precious stillness of extreme quiet and want nothing else at all.

The human appetite for joy finds satisfaction where it can. In
The Single
Woman
(), Margery Fry drew on a lifetime of experience as a spinster to address the question of how to find happiness outside the expected wifely and motherly roles. At the age of nearly eighty, enjoying the moment, living in the present and grasping beauty seemed to her more than ever

fundamental:

It seems to me that a pleasure in small things does come back to one; the beauty of the outward world and of people, the satisfaction of warmth in sunlight or fire or even in a hot bottle, the friendly gesture of a child or the ripe juiciness of a plum – it is good to savour these things as they come. Shall I admit to you that sometimes as I wait for a bus on a wet, London winter’s night . . . when no very obvious gratifications are present, I say to myself, ‘Well, anyhow I’m alive and I can see the other people and the play of lights reflected from the pavements and even the posters.’

*

‘Once you get over the disgrace, it’s the best life!’ was Anne McAllister’s

view of spinsterhood. She was an academic psychologist and expert on

phonetics who spent over sixty years helping children with speech and

learning difficulties. She never married.

A Grand Feeling



William Brown’s maiden aunt rediscovers pleasure (illustration from

William

the

Fourth

by

Richmal

Crompton)

Perhaps the generation who lived through the horrors of the –

war was less disposed than our own to expect large-scale gratifications

from life. Likewise, deep disappointment can engender equally profound

gratitude for small mercies, for wet pavements, hill walks and good books,

for the pleasures of the mind and fleeting loves, for the joys of friendship, and the grand feeling of independence.

Winifred Holtby paid tribute to the women who bravely faced out

disappointment and made fulfilled lives for themselves:

It is impossible . . . to call such women frustrated; most of them live lives as full, satisfied and happy as any human lives can be. Ecstasy, power and devotion have enriched them; they have served a cause greater than their own personal advantage.

You didn’t have to drag out the rest of your days in a state of blighted hope.

Being single could be better than that. Like Caroline Haslett, the feminist

writer Cicely Hamilton believed that the world had adjusted its view of

spinsters. Writing in , she looked at her society and her country and

concluded, ‘. . . there are, I imagine, few parts of the world where the once 

Singled Out

traditional contempt for the spinster is more thoroughly a thing of the past’.

Moreover, she simply rejected the love-centric view of the world. As a

young woman she had been, briefly, broken-hearted when a man she loved

left her. But barely a fortnight later she was astonished, and a little shocked, to find herself merry, carefree and heart-whole. She was somewhat ashamed at her inconstancy, but drew the conclusion that dying for love would have

been an error. ‘The realization . . . [cured] me, once for all, of the idea

that love was woman’s whole existence.’ And she learnt too, to bless her

‘single star’:

If I had married and been fortunate in husband and children, I should have known happiness of a kind that is strange to me; but on the other hand – not a doubt of it – I should have had to pay for that special form of happiness with some of the keenest of my interests, and with some of the best among my pleasures.

The writer Elizabeth Jenkins felt blessed too that she clearly lacked the

powerful personal desires that appeared to motivate most women. ‘It’s

remarkable really that, when I lacked so many things that other women

seem to want, I never pined to be married or have children. I feel I have

been undeservedly lucky.’

Feelings like these weren’t reserved for the privileged and educated. Just

a few years after she had gone into service with Nancy Astor, lady’s maid

Rose Harrison was asked by her employer’s son what her ambition was.

‘And I replied, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘‘To live my life over again.’’

Today my answer, without any hesitation, would be the same.’

Surviving the night

And yet Winifred Haward still felt incomplete. The ‘great love that survives the night and climbs the stars’ for which she longed continued to elude her. When she came back from her second, disastrous stay in New Zealand,

she drifted, feeling like a failure. She had been badly bitten in her twenties, with hopes raised and dashed. She had thought George would marry her, but he had rejected her on the grounds that she was too ‘high class’. Now,

though she had a couple of ‘mild affairs’, she looked in vain among her social group for anybody who could offer ‘great love’. At her age – thirty-five – it seemed increasingly unlikely that she would find him. Despite her Cambridge degree Winifred couldn’t get an academic post, so she boned up on north-country history and found work in Lincolnshire teaching evening

classes. The income was inadequate, and in the summer months she moved

A Grand Feeling



to York and took guided tours round Fountains Abbey and Bronte¨ country.

Her father lent her the money to buy a rather feeble shop in Lincoln selling teak elephants, papier-maˆche´ trays and Indian crafts. Then in  she persuaded BBC North to try her out writing and presenting a fifteen— minute wireless talk about an Elizabethan noblewoman from Skipton. They

liked it, and more talks followed. As war broke out Winifred applied for,

and got, the job of her dreams: she was appointed programme assistant in

Manchester, on £ a year, researching and producing talks for trans—

mission around the region. ‘All those years in the wilderness were over!

I was just forty-two.’

Winifred was a year into her new career when she first met Louis

Hodgkiss. Louis was a couple of years younger than Winifred, born in

. Two more unlikely routes coinciding in happiness could scarcely be

imagined. Their backgrounds and expectations were entirely dissimilar.

The country solicitor’s daughter from Suffolk who had won a top history

scholarship to Girton was now in her forties; she was short and plump,

with the reputation of being ‘rather formidable’. Her youthful hopes of

romance had all converged on the officer class of her youth, that lost

generation mowed down in their thousands at Mons and Ypres and on the

Somme. The war, she now felt, had denied her all chance of happiness.

Louis was emphatically not officer class. He had grown up in great

hardship in Wigan. Mary, his mother, had been a kitchen-maid; Edward

Hodgkiss, her husband, was an alcoholic and ne’er-do-well who beat his

wife and children. Mary Hodgkiss ran away and took work at a hotel

patronised by theatre folk. Though she returned to her husband, Louis was

probably her illegitimate son by one of them.

The boy was stubborn and pugnacious, but he was an eager learner and

loved reading. On his fourteenth birthday he started work down the pit.

Twelve months later, in , he signed up for the navy. Protected in

the gun turrets, Louis didn’t see much action; he survived the Battle of

Jutland and the attack on Zeebrugge. He was tough as wire and when

his ship moved south he became featherweight boxing champion of the

Mediterranean fleet.

After the Armistice Louis determined to get out of the navy; not so easy,

as it turned out. After a series of escapades he deserted and made his way

to Glasgow, where he was saved from starvation by a gang of criminals and

prostitutes. The police finally caught up with him and he was court—

martialled and sentenced to ninety days’ hard labour before being put back

on board a ship bound for the Middle East. Finally, at the age of nineteen,

he was given a dishonourable discharge.



Singled Out

It was back to the pits for Louis, and back to a new sea of troubles.

Before he was twenty-two Louis had married a pretty, ignorant and un—

scrupulous young woman named Nellie Walsh. She already had convictions

for theft and street-walking, and she lied to Louis that she was pregnant.

The marriage was a disaster from the start.

The Labour cause beckoned, and life seemed to be taking a new direction.

Louis joined the Left Book Club, and tried his hand at writing. In 

Louis Hodgkiss’s first mining novel made it into print; he got £ for it.

A certain glamour attached to him as a published author. Women were

attracted by his gritty charm; though small, he was sinewy and muscular,

with dark hair and strong, open features. His renown grew; BBC North

Region scheduled three plays by him for production in autumn , but

with the outbreak of the Second World War they were all cancelled.

It was an unlikely chance that brought Winifred and Louis together in

September . As talks producer Winifred had been asked to find a

speaker who could broadcast an appeal to the public for wartime economy

in the use of fuel. Who better than a coalminer, someone who had to dig

that fuel out of the ground? But where would she find one with the ability

to give a broadcast? A colleague of Winifred’s remembered the miner

whose plays had been cancelled. ‘Try Louis Hodgkiss,’ he suggested. She

wrote to him, and they met; they ‘got on well’. To him she seemed pleasant

but a bit formidable. Together they sat down and rewrote the draft script,

which had obviously been worded by someone who knew nothing about

mining. A few days later he successfully gave the broadcast, and afterwards

they chatted in the canteen. In Winifred’s words:

She said she would get in touch with him if there was any other material he could provide. He rather hoped they would meet again.

So, as it happened, did she.

Winifred and Louis continued to meet intermittently over the next nine

years. They did more broadcasts together, they went on moorland walks.

He told her about his writing and hinted at his unhappy marriage; she asked

him to the theatre. But after the war ended he became deeply depressed;

the writing didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Nellie and he were both

unfaithful to each other. There were violent rows, and he began to drink

heavily. Somehow his life had lost all its meaning; he considered walking

out on Nellie, emigrating, or perhaps just getting lost one day out on the

moors and never coming back. There were mine shafts out there where a

body could lie undiscovered for a long time . . . The only thing that deterred
A Grand Feeling


him was the thought of his friendship with ‘the lady from the BBC’. But

where could that go? He was nearly fifty, working-class, broke and battle—

scarred. She was a dumpy, bookish, fifty-two-year-old middle-class spinster.

In  Winifred’s boss died; her new boss was hostile and obstructive.

She considered moving to London, but ‘. . . it meant parting from Louis’.

That stopped her in her tracks. She decided to give it a chance.

I asked him to my flat. I told him about the proposed transfer to London and said that I would much rather stay in the North. I wondered if he would guess why.

He did. He said, almost with a sob, ‘I can’t bear to lose you.’ Then he took what must have been a colossal risk. He took me in his arms and kissed me. He said afterwards that he half-expected I would slap his face, or say something sarcastic. I responded with all my heart: he knew and I knew that come wind and high water, there wasn’t anything for us except one another.

*

Nellie refused to give Louis a divorce, and promptly went to earth. For the

next twenty-five years he and Winifred lived ‘in sin’. The ‘quality’ snubbed them, but they didn’t care. They were profoundly happy, ‘united by the deepest trust and affection’. Finally, divorce law reform enabled Lewis to

obtain a decree nisi from the elusive Nellie, and in , when she was

seventy-four years old, Winifred Haward married Louis Hodgkiss.

The story of Winifred Haward up till her mid-forties is a typical one.

Though the country’s losses were universal, women of her class were

particularly afflicted by the casualties of the Great War. Without disregarding the fact that for every officer killed, twenty ‘Tommies’ fell, it is worth looking at the implications of the real inequality in the casualties based on class. Simply put, the chances of dying were higher if you were

an officer than if you were a private. Statistically, for example, the death rate of Balliol graduates who joined the army was exactly twice the national average;  per cent of the generation who matriculated from Oxford in  were killed.

Why was this? Historians looking at the statistics of the Great War have

demonstrated various reasons: for a start, it seems that a higher proportion of middle-and upper-class men enlisted in the army. Certainly the public schools and universities so instilled the patriotic ethos into their pupils that only a few stubborn dissidents braved the accusation of cowardice that met their perceived dereliction of duty. ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’