Читать книгу A Notable Woman - Jean Lucey Pratt - Страница 14

4.

Two Girls Who Whispered Once

Tuesday, 25 September 1928 (aged eighteen)

This ‘year’ is nearly over. I have come through fairly all right. I took Miss Walker’s place and stood the test. It was work I rather enjoyed in spite of the few long letters that got me down. It was hard work, doing the work of two at a busy time. But it gave me a sense of well-being and I gained in self-confidence.¹²

Tomorrow I start lessons in architecture at the Ealing Institute. Wednesday and Friday mornings at 10 to 12.30. Shall I be the only girl? And if so, shall I be an awful mug? Shall I be able to do anything?

Wednesday, 26 September

She came in some 10 or 15 minutes after the class had started. Tall, thin, dark-eyed, smiling impudently.

‘Come, come,’ said Mr Patrick, pulling out his watch. ‘First day of the term – this is dreadful.’ But there was a corresponding twinkle in his eye that I noticed afterwards always came when he spoke to her. Lazy, amusing, vibrant in every fibre of her … one of those people who go through life in a don’t-care-a-damn-for-anyone-life-is-fun mood. Aggravating to live with but lovable in spite of her faults. Character and personality – or what Elinor Glyn has termed ‘It’ – counts more than brains or beauty.¹³

A piquant face not altogether unattractive, teeth a trifle prominent, skin almost sallow, lanky shingle, but lovely eyes. A button off the cuff of the short tweed coat she wore, darned woolly stockings, large flat-heeled old brown strap shoes, a wispy skirt of a thin dark blue artificial silk. And yet the most impelling personality in the room – at least I thought so.

She came and inspected my instruments. ‘Aren’t they nice?’ she said. And, ‘Where do you get your set-squares from? I’ve tried all over the place in Ealing and can’t get them with the rounded edges like that.’ Making herself charmingly agreeable in case she might want to borrow something. After she had gone I scratched my name on the set-squares.

After all, it was quite simple. There are 7 of us starting Architecture – 3 boys and 4 girls. The rest are doing their 2nd and 3rd years. One helped oneself to a drawing board, bought a sheet of paper in the next room, took a T-square and chose a place in the front row. And it was all fairly easy to begin with.

I wonder why these personalities dominate me so. Immediately I come into contact with anyone I take a fancy to I want to be like them.

Sunday, 11 November

For two minutes today we paused and dreamed. There was heartache and pain and awe in the silence, and the cry of a frightened child, and a man who coughed, and two girls who whispered once. And there was promise and peace and a vast universal stillness.

I am so very proud and glad I was there in Whitehall with all those thousands. Within a few yards of the King and his family. And to see the people who came: coarse, loud-voiced women. Slim supple girls. Old men and young. A cockney and his vacant-eyed wife – one of the bloody Tommies perhaps who came through. All of them bound together for one indefinable space of time by a relationship stronger than blood or spoken word. And the service at Albert Hall tonight, when songs and hymns were sung so familiar and so clear, grander than the men who first thought of them.¹⁴

Saturday, 15 December

Against the dictates of all reason, and minimising the chances of my eyesight ever becoming better, I must write. Today I watched a bride and bridegroom sent away by their relations and friends smothered in confetti. Confetti was thrust down their necks, bags of it emptied over them, their car lurid with it. Horrible, gaudy stuff that brings no happiness. And so my resolve is strengthened more fiercely than before: If I ever get married, mine shall be the quietest of weddings. I don’t want a lot of people for whom I care nothing get tight on Daddy’s champagne and ogle me at church and whisper to one another.

I have dreamed it all so often. One morning, Sunday perhaps, very early I and He, Leslie, Ethel and Daddy and his most intimate and necessary relations in a little church, and then to shy away. No fuss, no ribaldry, no hateful insincerity.

Sunday, 12 January 1929

Last night I met Harold Dagley. Margaret and I went together to join in the celebrations of P.’s 21st (next year I shall be 21!). And he came late. They had partnered me off with him, but as it happened, Martin was partnerless so I went round with him. H.D. was distinctly disappointing even at first sight – slight, thin, dark and weak-chinned. He is one of those boys who cannot be friends with a girl without wanting to flirt with her. And it is no use getting away from the fact that I am not a flirt in the same way Margaret is. I don’t think there’s anything frightfully admirable in that. Perhaps I said that because I am a bit jealous. I know that if anybody wanted to kiss me I wouldn’t refuse him – and yet damn it all I’ve just remembered that Percy did on Boxing Day under the mistletoe and I smacked his face.

Oh I don’t know – it’s all wrong. How often have I wondered: to give up everything for an ideal, or lose sight of it in the murk of an everyday existence? Is it made up of little things – washing up, typewriters and shoulder straps – or must one climb the hills to reach the stars alone?

Wednesday, 17 April

Daddy has hurt me so. I came in from the tennis club meeting full of the fun I had gleaned from it, and I told Daddy that Valerie had been elected to the Ladies Committee. ‘Oh, you are hopeless – if Valerie can, why can’t you?’ And it hurt, hurt, hurt. Why can’t parents help you by thinking a bit for themselves, instead of bringing up the same old platitudes? I am too damn proud ever to talk of these things with other people.

Monday, 23 December

‘The War has ruined us for everything.’ He is right. ‘We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.’ (From All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, translated by A.W. Wheen.)

I have not the time to say all I would about this book, nor to copy all the paragraphs I should like to. I think all my generation and all later generations should read it. We never knew the true ghastliness of war, its utter futility, its horror, the pitiless suffering of men. We should pray every night and every morning for no more war.

This book brings it home to you more than anything I have ever known. The details are harrowing – it spares you nothing, it makes you feel physically sick. Yet how much better for us to learn like this rather than ever enact it all again.

Monday, 6 January 1930

And so I pray. My one big belief is prayer. I pray that if all other faiths fail, this one may not. But the question that weighs heaviest on my mind at the moment is this one: Shall I leave the Tennis Club or not?

The idea came to me just before Xmas. At first it seemed the one thing left for me to do to establish my happiness. I want to write it all down so that I can get the pros and cons in a cold systematic review.

Pros: I shall be free every day to do exactly as I like. No one at the club cares whether I go or not. It is too large for me – I fit in nowhere. I cannot somehow play tennis well enough to arrest the attentions or kindly regard of the upper sects. The bright young people boss me. I am not able to drift with them: self-consciousness overcomes me. My eyesight, nerves and weakness generally are against me. I love tennis. If only there were someone who wouldn’t mind practising with me. No more mental agony, that lounging about in the summer hoping someone will ask you to make up a decent four, but no one does because there is always someone else. Then eventually to hide one’s shame and get one’s money’s worth, make up a four myself with a lot of old women.

The cons: Perhaps I didn’t try very hard last summer. I missed the tournaments quite by mistake – that always gives a bad impression. Many people are kind: no one is ever rude to me or obviously shuns me like they do Mrs Warner. There is always a chance that I may sometime convince them I can help, organise, could be of value to the club, can be light and amusing and attractive.

But I think the biggest and most important Con is Valerie. It is so hard not to be jealous. She is young and has won a gallant place among them. I don’t want to lose her, she is one of the best friends I have. If it wasn’t for her I shouldn’t think twice about leaving. Oh God, I don’t know what to do.

Sunday, 12 January

There is a dream: an exquisite little house set down on the borders of Cornwall and Devon near the sea. That may never come true – those counties are already overcrowded during the summer, what will they be like in some years’ time? Maybe a husband, maybe a husband at sea, maybe a husband who is difficult, divorce, perhaps death. I should like 2 children, a boy and a girl with 2 years’ difference in their ages. Most of the time they are at boarding school.

Monday, 17 March

As far as I can gather, I come into an annual income of about £300 in October. I could devote one-sixth of the amount to the improvements in the office I so much desire. It has also occurred to me whether I couldn’t invest that amount in something solid and remunerative, such as flats or gilt-edged securities. The flats appeal to me, buying up old property, altering and redecorating and then renting them.

The alterations in the office will cost money. There will be one very, very unalterable condition if I do this though, and that is that G.P.P.¹⁵ must get rid of W.S.B. and engage some more reliable draughtsmen. If I had my way I would turn out W.S.B., E.H.S. and I am afraid J.G.P. I do not think I shall really speak of this until I am 21. I am then within my legal rights and should be capable of voicing an opinion. I am very serious about all this. In the meantime, a little patience and much thought.

Wednesday, 9 April

A success such as I have never known! How I have worked and prayed and dreamed, and now it is all over, their congratulations still ringing in my ears. And Mr Worrall, Mr Worrall himself came to me – asked for me – and told me he considered I was the best in the whole show. I’m just overwhelmed.¹⁶

And what a weapon I have in my short-sightedness. Without it I feel convinced I should not have done nearly so well. I could see nothing beyond the footlights, a faint blur that conveyed nothing to me, only sounds that came from that darkness. I didn’t feel nervous because I couldn’t see their faces or note their expressions.

Monday, 2 June

I have the inferiority complex, the hump and indigestion and a few other things. Yesterday Joan Hughes beat me 6–0 6–0 in the Open Singles. I know she’s good, but damn it all – not a single game! And after my prayers and that gay, calm confidence I instilled into myself. If I think of it too much I find myself asking absurd and desperate questions. Is there a God? Does he care or hear us?

I quite see that the best players don’t wish to play with weaker ones. Naturally it spoils their game. They will see that score, and all the committee, and they are the people that matter most, and they will say, ‘Good Lord, Jean’s even worse than we thought she was.’

Yet why should I let a tennis tournament so dampen my spirits? Only that I had hoped that by this year I might have proved to other people that there was some strength in me. The whole world is a dark and murky place and I am afraid I shall never rise to the heights I dream of, afraid that I shall settle down to an irritating existence of domesticity and the narrow little life of the average woman. But I shall always have the chance to write.

I have two more tournaments to play yet. And I must beat Elsie Warden.

Thursday, 5 June

Tonight Leslie Northam and I played Kit Rayner and Ken Matthews. They won the first set 6–0, and I thought, ‘Hell! This is going to be a repetition of Sunday’s fiasco.’ Then something in me stirred and I cannot quite explain it, but I started a sort of auto-suggestion in my mind. I brought my willpower into full force. We won the first two games – they only just beat us 7–5.

I have been thinking a lot today. The idea took a final shape in my mind as I walked to Sudbury Town. I am getting soft. My position at the office as daughter of the boss is too comfortable, and I am able to do too much what I like. It will never do: I cannot be a subordinate to Pop in that way, but as his partner I can do immense things.

They need doing badly too. He has worked the business to a certain point and here we have stopped. To be any use at all I must get my Associate RIBA certificate, and I shall never do that on my own at the office. I haven’t the ability and there is no one to coach me for the exams. I have decided – I want to go into another office, a large, modern and well-organised affair where they will help me achieve my work for the Intermediates. I shall see how a well-run office ought to be managed. Daddy is getting old and I feel it is essential that I get on with things.

Sunday, 21 June

Have just been glancing through my last entry and since then I have been brought to realise that it must be a school, a day school. I have written for prospectuses to the London University, Central School of Arts and Crafts, the Northern Polytechnic, the Regent Street Poly – it is the latter which I think I shall really prefer.

Tuesday, 17 July

And so another period of my life ends. Two years at the Ealing Art School. Today for the last time I bent over a drawing board in Room 15, and for the last time walked those bare stone corridors and clattered down the stairs. I said goodbye to Mr Patrick, waved farewell to Mary Moyes and Elise Folkes. I am not sorry it is over, the time I spent was but a stepping stone to something better.

Wednesday, 30 July

We eventually decided on the London University and I went up for an interview. It was most satisfactory, and I start on 6 October.

Now if I can only convince Daddy of my seriousness. I can encourage him to hang on for another five years. Then I will return to him and do all the things that need doing so badly. With all his long years of experience to help back me up I should be able to make a splendid thing of this. What a fool I have been! If I can only make him realise that he has someone here on whom to rely he will feel encouraged to carry on for a little longer. And Oh God I must not fail at the University.

And all my friends – they have not the first idea of the direction or depth of my ambition.

Monday, 4 August

The early passion of the garden is blown, and heavy rains have beaten the colour from the roses. Delphinium, larkspur and foxglove have died, Aaron’s rod is beginning to throw golden spikes up the border by the fence, phlox, gladioli, geranium and dark red antirrhinum bloom among a profusion of foliage washed deep green. Peaches are being gathered and lavender is nearly ripe for picking, and there is a whisper of autumn in the wind.

Thursday, 7 August

Supposing Daddy had been a singer or a cook, or anything but an architect, and I still had my income when I was 21, I dream of how I would plan my life:

Freelance journalism.

Music.

Cooking.

Dressmaking.

Gardening.

Golf.

I would get up at 7.30 for 8.30 breakfast every morning except Sundays. From 9 to 10.30 I would practise – singing, piano lessons, elocution too perhaps. Then the rest of the morning to English study and writing, and in the afternoon dressmaking, gardening or cooking. I would drive a car and play golf for recreation, and there would be social obligations to fit in in the afternoon and evenings. Yet I don’t know. I think I would rather go the way I have chosen. Something more reliable and strengthening about it.

Sunday, 5 October

A national disaster has occurred – the R101 has crashed.¹⁷ 40-odd people burned to death (all men). Terrible, ghastly, tragedy stark and dramatic. The papers will be full of it, much sympathy will be expressed for the remaining relatives, the men will be made heroes and their widows provided for for life, there will be whip-rounds and memorials and long, stirring speeches, and all the world will be horribly thrilled.

But I know of worse tragedies that go on every day unnoticed: patient, plodding workers scraping all they can together so that their children may have a better start than they had. I cannot forget that timorous little creature who came into the office for an education grant for her daughter. She was so shrunken and nervous and terribly anxious to get the best for her girl. She confessed to having had to borrow £4 for clothes. The patience of these people. What do they ever get from life?

Friday, 10 October

Thoughts accumulated during the past week: that in no other place apart from university can one be so completely and unintentionally ignored. I may hate the newness of it all, and the hardness of it, yet I must fight on. If I am to be the only girl in a class of boys, then let me get to know those boys. Already two have shown signs of friendliness.

Saturday, 6 December

Joyce Coates: A charming little person, rich, with a good taste in clothes and attractive manners. More in her perhaps than at first might be imagined.

Joan Hey: She is in the act of growing up. In fact she is only just beginning. Nonetheless she is easy to get on with and likeable, and has plenty of willpower.

Elsie Few: A most interesting personality. There is something of the texture of satin or cream about her, and above all she is an artist.

Thursday, 1 January 1931

So seldom have I succeeded in keeping any New Year Resolutions that now mine are rarely made in January, but at odd sudden moments in unconventional places.

But I have recently reached a conclusion on a point I have been considering for several weeks. I inherited from my mother the desire to write. This desire has haunted me from the time when I first scrawled the alphabet in coloured letters across a clean white page. I must write, even now, with my career chosen and my training begun. It is in my blood and will not be subdued. To satisfy this desire I am going to keep this Journal which I shall make as entertaining as possible. I am learning truths too, as I grow older, that I am unable to discuss at present, and I fear that with the coming years ideas will be forgotten unless I make an effort to keep them. So let this be my New Year Resolution – that I leave behind me something worth reading, which even if it doesn’t attract strangers, may at least surprise my friends and relations.

Saturday, 17 January

Pooh went back to work today.¹⁸ Our lives are made up of meetings and farewells. Think of the meals now! Once more ‘they two’ and me.

Ethel and I will never be more than superficially good friends. We are mentally opposed. I always feel that anything she does for me is rather a nuisance. When I was in bed the other day with a cold I felt the most brutal burden. She won’t read: how much she has missed. And if a discussion is started on anything more advanced than the latest family scandal she shuts up like an oyster at first signs of opposition.

But it isn’t her fault any more than it is mine. I admire all she has done for us tremendously, and she runs this house as if it were a ship. And she has looked after and cared for Daddy. But oh this banging about in the mornings when she makes herself do the housework she’s not feeing equal to. This agitation when a guest is late for a meal, this pride in her home. There is no sort of adventure about it, and she is too practical, too afraid of sentiment. I wish sometimes she might suddenly leave dusting the drawing room one morning and take a bus to Kew because Spring seemed suddenly to have arrived and she wanted to see young, green growing things.

Since I have so many more advantages than she has ever had and I have learned so much more from books than she has, I must be the one to regulate the friendship so that we do nothing to hurt each other. If she’d had the education, good school, made to work, college, a degree, travel. All desires outside her circle have been repressed by the atmosphere in which she was brought up – Wembley all her life.

I feel brutal writing these things, but … Mummy used to read Shelley and Keats and Tennyson. She’d have loved Rupert Brooke and Alfred Noyes and Walter de la Mare. Poetry is never something that has taken a very big place in Ethel’s life.

Saturday, 24 January

Tonight we played ‘cutthroat’ and Daddy won (1s. 5d.),¹⁹ and we half-jokingly urged him to put it to Dr Barnardo’s. But this he firmly refused to do. ‘It is wrong,’ Ethel said as he went to do the greenhouse. ‘He plays for what he can get.’ And later, when we were discussing the possibility of visiting Wisley Garden, a good Sunday outing in the car, she said, ‘But we never go out in the car. I never had a run all last summer. Daddy just will not use the car except to get him somewhere definite. We never use it and we never shall.’ So she too finds Daddy a little disappointing. There are times when I am ashamed of him – yet I love him. He came from his Saturday night bath very pink and clean, with his white hair fluffed in a halo round his head. I think I love him like that best of all. If in 5 years I manage to become an Associate of RIBA he will be 70. 70. Oh why wasn’t I born sooner?

I was smitten earlier this evening with a tremendous idea. I would write a book within the next 5 years and see if I could get it published. And here I am going to quote from Mr John Connell, for I must confess his book was partly responsible for the inspiration:

‘It can be no tale of carefully rounded edges, of neatly massed effects, a thing of plot or climax. Somehow life is not like that – it is not symmetrical, measured and finished. The weaver of the pattern doesn’t seem to care for neatly tasselled ends and pretty bows – it is all very rough and ragged. Yet through it all there seems to run a purpose and an idea, a kind of guiding line.’

And so I conceived the idea of writing a book on similar lines.

Friday, 30 January

This morning I felt foolish talking to Mr Ashworth. I kept imagining that he was wondering why on earth I had chosen Architecture and not Decoration, or in fact either.

On our way back from tea today Joan Hey and I passed the little 2nd-year decorator Philips. She was alone and her eyes were red and swollen and I heard her sob as she passed us by. ‘I am so sorry for her,’ said Joan. ‘She’s so dull and inanimate, but I expect inside she wishes she were dashing and attractive. Everything is against her. She has the ugliest figure.’

It is true. And I am sorry too. I know that feeling only too well.

Saturday, 31 January

This book I am going to write. I shall start with my schooldays and fill the first chapter or phase of the book with as eloquent and entertaining a description of PHC as possible. Then those bitter years, a very light and rather cynical sketch but quietly indicating growth of thought and so on, and I shall write I think in diary form. I must suppress all egoism. It’s going to be difficult. And then student days.

Lacrosse this afternoon, played in a bitter wind. I’m not very good but I love it – the tang in the air, the movement, the superb cleanness of it all. I wear my gym tunic under my coat now and don’t bother to change. It amuses me to see the sly, curious glances of the gentlemen in the direction of my knees as they become exposed with the flapping of my coat.

Tuesday, 3 February

Copy of letter to my father

Darling –

While I’ve got this still in my mind –

I’ve been thinking such a lot – I am really worried about you. You are the absolute centre of my future: without you I should be like a rudderless ship; all my inspiration would die. So it is absolutely essential that you keep well. And as I said the other night, you won’t keep well if you have to worry about the business.

Now the business is far more important than me – it even matters perhaps more than any of us. I can be of no practical use to it for at least five years, and even then I shall be very young and inexperienced to take up any sort of responsible position.

The only way out that I can see is for you to ensure the future of the business firm by taking a partner as soon as you can. You must have someone reliable, trustworthy and hardworking in the office. I am praying day and night that we may find the right man. I know it’s damn difficult – but don’t let W.S.B. do you down any more! If only you could find the right person to buy a share of your practice, and for you to leave your share to me in your will, then I shall not feel I am undertaking an impossible task as I do sometimes in moments of depression. And your health will benefit by easing your mind.

Sunday, 8 February

In bed with one of these blasted colds again – what a miracle and a blessing is the wireless. I think that with a good portable set, a library subscription, fountain pen and paper and ink, I should enjoy being bedridden. Through these mediums I could explore the world. I lay in the semi-darkness listening to some vaudeville in which The Three Ginx in harmony gave a delightful performance and Ann Penn contributed some very clever impersonations, particularly one of Gertrude Lawrence in the song she sang with Noël Coward in Private Lives.

Friday, 20 February

To and fro swings the pendulum: to have my hair cut or leave it long? On Tuesday Elsie Few put it to a vote in the studio, and most people seem to think it would improve my appearance rather than otherwise. ‘It would make you look so much more charming Jean,’ said Few. ‘Really we want the world to be as beautiful as possible – you owe it that. And think – you’ll have all the young men simply flat my dear.’ But Cargill objected. I respect Cargill’s opinion. ‘Don’t you have it done Pratt – it looks jolly nice as it is.’ And today Joyce Coates rather surprised me by saying, ‘Don’t you have your hair off Jean – I shan’t have any more to do with you if you do.’

And of course at home from Ethel: ‘Oh, you would be very foolish if you did it.’ ‘You’ll be no daughter of mine,’ says father magnificently.

Cheap – that is of what I am afraid, looking cheap. But if I were cheap I should be so now with it as it is. Outwardly it cannot make anything but a superficial difference: it is what I am that matters. So I shall have it done!²⁰

Saturday, 28 February

God – what dream is this? We study the architecture of Rome, and the vaguest fantasy rises before me: a dream of the City Beautiful.

To build a perfect city: buy an area of lovely untouched English country somewhere in the South. Plan first two straight wide roads, one running from N to S, the other from E to W, and where they intersect is the centre of our city. On the corners should be erected the most important buildings, i.e. the police station, GPO, council offices, fire station, possibly a bank etc. Shops should range on either side of the two main roads, the front portions being built out with flat roofs that could be used by restaurants in fine weather. The residential area should be built at the back of these streets, and all designs would have to be essentially twentieth century. No faked Tudor houses or ugly Georgian facades.

Fireplaces for coal fires would only be allowed as a luxury. For all domestic and industrial purposes gas or electricity should be used, and each house could only have one chimney stack.

Everywhere there should be as much light and air and clean lines as possible. And all designs would have to be passed by a Committee of men selected for their knowledge in good construction, hygiene and, most important, their appreciation of real beauty and proportion such as the Greeks knew.

Garages and hotels should be built at the four entrances to the town. Large recreation grounds provided for the inhabitants, sports grounds for tennis, golf, cricket, rugger and all athletics. Public baths built to Roman ideals: open-air baths for the summer, covered in for the winter. A gymnasium, dance halls, skating rink. Everything should be provided for public amusement: one or two good theatres, cinemas – everything for a residential people, no industries or factories of any kind would be permitted. This should be a city where the more successful workers of London might live, driving in their cars or going by the specially prepared railways to London each day and back at night. So that London may eventually be left to its fogs and dirt and manufacture, salesmanship and business. A rather preposterous ideal, because I doubt whether London’s entertainments might ever be excelled. But might it not be possible, if the world’s finest financiers were gathered together and formed a syndicate or something. And then the world’s best engineers and greatest architects and artists to plan and design the Perfect City?

There is no reason why it should not be international: let its inhabitants be as cosmopolitan as is reasonable. Possibly England has the best climate in the world, for all our complaining. To promote world peace we may not stand aloof and exclude any other country, and this applies to every race.

No building should be commenced until the general layout of the city was arranged. And the building would be lovely – their proportions please the eye, their design satisfy the artistic judgment. No tramways either. Perhaps even the main roads built with subways for heavy traffic and special paths for pedestrians. And another thing from Rome: the main streets colonnaded so that shoppers were not inconvenienced by a shower of rain.

Tuesday, 3 March

The only thing of importance I have done today is to visit the Leicester Galleries and seen Epstein’s Genesis for myself.²¹ Admittedly at first sight I was shocked but not repulsed. The more I looked the more I marvelled. I am hardly in a position to pass any criticism on the technique of his work, but all the busts in that room possess the same characteristic – i.e. strength, a vitalising staggering power that overwhelms one, as if one had been plunged in cold water. And the work strikes me as being sincere – the manifestation of a magnificent mind. And it is not crude or gross, but rather a beautifying of a crude and gross subject. I could feel the pain of that expectant negress myself. Because his art is not conventional he is condemned. Epstein is setting a totally different standard. That is where we fail: unconsciously we compare his work with standard works (i.e. the Greeks). It is what we have been brought up to do. We learn in our youth what is supposed to be beautiful and what is ugly, so that by the time we have reached the age of discerning these things for ourselves we are already a little biased. Most of us find it so difficult when we meet with something totally different. Epstein sees further.

To watch those who came to see for themselves was distinctly amusing. Nearly all betrayed a look of shocked propriety, hastily suppressed. ‘We are broadminded of course, this is the twentieth century,’ they tell themselves. One woman murmured, ‘I haven’t seen anyone looking like that – funny sort of figure.’ She was the bulky sort of person who, without her clothes on, would look far funnier than Genesis.

Friday, 6 March

Conversation at Aunt Janie’s this afternoon, on Epstein’s work. Mrs H.: ‘Well, there’s something about it … makes you come back for another look. Lovely bit of white marble to begin with. Of course the anatomy’s all wrong. I went with a doctor, that’s how I know. Of course Epstein’s a bit mental. Never washes.’

Thursday, 12 March

Lecture on Modern Architecture by Austen Hall. Architecture must express an adventure of the mind. Design must have strength and wit and character. In trying to break away from traditions we are taking the wrong path – must find a way of refreshing the old without eliminating all necessary detail, for some of it rightly applied is very beautiful. There seems no point in doing without a cornice (or as one modern architect does, wear a collarless coat).

Thursday, 19 March

Tomorrow is the long talked- and thought-about Foundation Dance at UCL. We are eight: Jo Coates, Dorothy Cargill, Alison Hey, self, Goulden, Tarrant, Gresham and Stoneham. Beginning the evening with the 2nd evening performance of Cochrane’s revue, we go on to dance at college until 5 a.m. God grant the evening will be a success! Tom Goulden is the only boy that knows us all. Tarrant we know to exchange an occasional greeting with. Gresham and Stoneham not at all. Stoneham is causing us all a certain amount of curiosity. I wonder if he will prove very disappointing.