Singled Out (48 page)

one’s bedsitter. In any case, ‘. . . men seldom came, frightened off by too large a flood of young females’.

One evening, as college tradition required from time to time, Rosamund

took dinner at high table and found herself seated next to the college

principal, who asked her what her future plans were. Well aware that her

options were not vast, Rosamund was nevertheless dead set against becoming a teacher. The principal was sympathetic. ‘Teaching has rather an old-maidish image, hasn’t it?’ she agreed.

‘I should hate to grow into an acidulated old spinster,’ I said, and went on without ever having thought of it before, ‘I think I shall adopt a child when I am earning enough money.’ The idea came right out of the blue. It was said lightly and
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casually. The principal laughed and said that I should probably forget such a fantastic idea soon enough. But I did not. It stuck at the back of my mind for many years to come, till the right time arrived.

Meanwhile, Oxford’s intellectualism sapped her childhood faith. By her

third year Rosamund was quite convinced that there was no God, and took

to walking round the college garden fiercely proclaiming her new-found

atheism: ‘There is no God. The whole thing is rubbish.’ Her parents wisely

tolerated this lapse; probably they saw that their immature daughter would

see the light in her own good time. Which she did, one evening at home

in her final vacation, when God Himself in person appeared to her quite

unexpectedly in a dark passage. After that, faith returned little by little; it was to guide the rest of her life.

One day, soon after she was twenty, Rosamund’s stutter suddenly ceased

– ‘I do not know why . . .’ From then on her confidence in her abilities

soared. She came down from Oxford in , with a vague ambition to

get ‘a really good job’ – in politics perhaps? Secretarial skills seemed like a must, so she enrolled at Mrs Hoster’s training school and found a room in a hostel near Sloane Square. The hostel was nicknamed ‘The Catteries’ – appropriately, as it seemed to her, for it was full of ‘lots of old cats . . .

very acidulated spinsters’. With a degree in Classics, plus shorthand and

commercial Spanish, Rosamund landed a job as political secretary to the

formidable Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda, who had been a militant

suffragette and was, arguably, the leading feminist of the interwar period.

Rosamund soon found herself out of sympathy with Lady Rhondda, whom

she regarded as a battleaxe. ‘She treated me like dirt. I began to hate rampant feminism, and I still do.’ For a while she assisted Lady Astor with her 

election campaign, but she had had enough of politics, and instead found

herself a post in the archaic and other-worldly offices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

In her own memoirs, Rosamund herself was quite unable to explain why

she took the next step in her life. Perhaps working for the Gospel Society

had directed her thoughts inwards towards her own burgeoning religious

impulses, or perhaps it had something to do with relinquishing any vestigial hopes she may have had of marriage. Maybe she shared Maude Royden’s view that supernatural love exceeded earthly passions. Whatever it was that

caused her to offer herself as a postulant nun to a small Franciscan Order in Dalston, it was a disaster from the start. ‘Never could there have been so unsuitable . . . a candidate.’ The tyranny, harassment and pettiness of convent life caused her to boil with rage; the lack of common sympathy and 

Singled Out

kindness baffled her and shook her convictions. Austerity – cold, hunger,

discomfort, hard work and exhaustion – she could cope with, but inhu—

manity, verbal abuse, intellectual starvation, pettiness and unreasoning

obedience were asking too much. Her rebellious posture caught up with

her when the Reverend Mother took her aside to criticise her pronunciation

of the word ‘refectory’ (the convent’s dining-room). Rosamund, a highly

educated Latinist, pronounced this word ‘refećtory’, from the Latin
refıćere
(
refećtum
). Reverend Mother insisted that it should be pronounced as she did, ‘re´fectory’, with the emphasis on the first ‘e’: ‘And’, she went on, ‘you must not only say what I say,
but you must believe that it is
right
.’ I could not think a thing true which was not. I said so. I was very soon dismissed from the community. And a good thing too. I was far too individualistic, far too independent, far too disinclined to blind obedience to fit into the Religious Life.

Afterwards, Rosamund came to believe that the twentieth-century decrease

in religious vocations reflected the fact that spinsters of the pre-First-WorldWar era, who retreated into nunneries because they had no other choices, were used to being pushed around. Modern women like her were better educated, less submissive. They had been taught to stand up for themselves,

and were not prepared to be bossed about by men, Mother Superiors or

anyone else.

Practically penniless when she left the convent, Rosamund had difficulty

adjusting to a world where it was now essential for her to earn a living.

Her father, whose sacrifices had paid for her education, had become priest

of the poverty-stricken East End parish of All Saints, Poplar. Though living under his roof, she was determined not to be a financial burden to him, and decided to try for journalism. The slump was at its height when she

went for an interview at the
Church Times
, and she was pessimistic about her chances. But luck was with her, and the editor offered her some temporary reporting work. She was told not to expect more. ‘I was a

woman. They did not want a woman on a staff where all the senior

journalists were men.’

But Rosamund Essex had found her life’s work; she remained on the

Church Times
from  until her retirement in , after ten years as its editor. She learnt on the job, though her colleagues were often unhelpful and misogynistic. At every step of her promotion she was told that this was an unprecedented concession for a woman, and that she would go no further.

Early on she quite deliberately appropriated the sphere of interest which

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was to become her own special field: poverty. In Poplar, the raw material for her articles was on her doorstep. There, whole families lived in rat-infested squalor; despair was endemic. Out-of-work men were known to cut their own throats when they could no longer support their children. The Church

opened its doors to meetings of the angry unemployed, risking a barrage of

scornful Cockneys: ‘ ’Ow would you parsons like to live on s d a week

with seven children?’ ‘We are living a life of misery, but it’s no bleeding

good taking it to the Lord in prayer.’ Rosamund was there to report it all.

‘I had chosen poverty; so if I was to write about it, I must understand it to the full.’ She was nearly cudgelled by a policeman at the unemployment rallies in Hyde Park, and narrowly escaped flying bottles at the Waterloo

out-of-work riots. Her pieces were endorsed by the paper, and her status

rose, along with her salary. Nor had she forgotten the wish expressed to

her college principal years earlier: ‘I think I shall adopt a child when I am earning enough money.’ With no prospects of partnership or marriage, at the age of thirty-nine, Miss Rosamund Essex became a mother.

Rosamund found David in a ‘home’ in South Croydon. She was methodical about her selection, seeking out one of many unwanted children from an institution which made no stipulations about access by the natural

mother or the adoption society. Knowing that as a working woman she

would have to employ a nanny, she wanted to be sure that the child could

let her know that all was well while she was out of the home, so she chose

one aged two and a half who could already talk. Her willingness to take a

boy amazed the official at the institution, who assumed that a childless

spinster like her would be craving a substitute doll to dress in frocks and

adorn with hair ribbons. David took a while to settle. He was fearful and

had difficulty walking, having spent a large portion of his infancy strapped into a pram. But from the beginning Rosamund loved her blond boy; it was almost an effort for her to remember that he was not hers by nature.

Gradually her happiness and pride instilled trust and an indissoluble bond

grew between them.

Rosamund Essex continued to break through barriers. In  she

became editor of the
Church Times
, the first woman to hold such a post for a London journal which was not aimed exclusively at a female readership; on retirement in  she joined Christian Aid as a speaker and fundraiser, and in  she became the first woman lay reader in her diocese, and one of the first in the country. Guided always by a powerful humanitarianism,

her work brought her into contact with royalty, archbishops and politicians; into her late seventies she travelled widely for Christian Aid, and she continued to preach in pulpits across the country. For this woman, the



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causes of her life were manifold – poverty, injustice, torture and racism

cried out to her for redress, but her heart was stirred equally by the need

to witness the gospel and defend her faith in Christ. Across the misogynistic and conservative territory of the Anglican church she blazed a fiery trail. In looking back over her life, there were no regrets about things left undone, only ambitions for things left still to do, and gratitude:

I am concerned in living [life]
now
, for whatever time I have left. I have so much, and want still to do so much. I have a son of whom I am intensely proud – he is a lay reader just as I am – a daughter-in-law who is my dear friend (can every motherin-law say that?) and two grandchildren, a boy and a girl, who are the crowning joy of the original adoption. How many spinsters have had the chance of such happiness? . . . I have a home and friends and work and impossible aims, which means I have a great deal of struggle to come.

Doing things that matter

War and the franchise changed the nature of women’s ambitions, giving

them new complexity and diversity. Fulfilment through marriage was still

the general expectation, but the image of wedded bliss that once seemed

so graven on female consciousness began to be blurred and effaced by new

dreams. The dream of political power, the dream of economic self-sufficiency, the dream of the boardroom, of public life, of professional achievement and personal affluence, of creativity, exploration and self— expression all took on reality, as more and more women showed them

coming true. Mrs Pankhurst’s followers grew up in an age intoxicated with

self-belief:

What a time those early suffragette days were to a young girl! The joy of marching and carrying a banner, the frenzy of great speeches, the defiance of unjust laws, the opposition to anything that prevented the coming of the great new world – no thrill of soldierly music could equal their appeal. The end of an outworn age was at hand, I believed, and the great to-morrow was being ushered in.

This woman was the young Caroline Haslett, aged eighteen at the time she

was writing about, fervent with grand but barely formed ambitions for a

future that would take her away from her restrictive Victorian upbringing.

Caroline was born in  and grew up on the Sussex Weald; her parents

were devoutly religious, with a deep sense of social responsibility which

they passed on to their children. Mr Haslett, a railway engineer, believed

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that duty to one’s neighbour was duty to God; and as it turned out his

eldest daughter took after him in ways he could never have foreseen.

Caroline was a dreamer, and though she was a voracious reader her teachers

at Haywards Heath High School were disappointed in her: ‘Caroline!

You’ll never be any good if you can’t make a buttonhole!’ lamented

her needlework mistress. Back home in her father’s workshop the girl’s

unladylike absorption with tools and mechanisms left Mr Haslett baffled.

How could she become a teacher, as he and her mother wished her to be,

if she could not learn feminine accomplishments?

And what else was she fitted for? For as a girl Caroline was not strong.

She suffered from a weak spine, for which the accepted treatment was

enforced bed-rest. Condemned to lengthy periods of inactivity, she lay on

her couch observing with mounting frustration and anger the prodigal

expenditure of female energies on what seemed to her an endless round of

pointless tasks. Were human beings fit for no more than carrying buckets

of coal from the outhouse to heat the stove, before emptying the ashes and

carrying them all back out again? Why toil all day to heat water so that a

mountain of dirty linen might be washed, then starched and laboriously

ironed, only for the whole proceeding to be repeated again the following

week, and so on and on till the crack of doom? ‘I did not want to spend

my life like that. It seemed a waste of time.’ At this stage Caroline had not yet made the connection between electricity and domestic labour-saving, but deep down she railed at the injustice of woman’s lot, and her interest in emancipation grew. She joined the Suffragettes. At the same time something inside her determined never to be a housewife.

If marriage was ever on the agenda, Caroline Haslett put it firmly where,