The Diaries of Jane Somers. Doris Lessing

anywhere to go and sit, and I ate as little as I could because I knew there was poison in it. She would come up to my room – they’d put me up in the attic, just as if I was a servant – with milk and broth and say, Drink it, drink it, and I’d pour it into the slop pail and then creep down to empty the slop pail so she couldn’t know. I could taste the poison in it, I knew there was poison. Sometimes I went to pick up the bread that people threw to the birds, but I was afraid of being seen. We were known, you see, we were well thought of, Father with his goings and comings and his carriage and his free ways, and she with her pub. I was the daughter at home, the people envied me for my easy time. Yet I was on a thin bed at the top of the house in an attic, not a whisper of heat, never a new dress, or anything of my own, only her old clothes to cut down, and afraid to eat. Well, one evening it all came to a head, for I was in bed, too weak and sick to get up, and she had a glass full of sugared milk, and she said, I’m going to stay here till you drink it. I don’t want it, I said. I don’t want it. But she said, I’m going to sit here.

      ‘She had on a pink silk dressing gown with feathers that had grey velvet ruches around the neck, and high-heeled pink slippers. She had put on plenty of weight with all her liking for food and drink, and she was red in the face, and she was sighing and saying, Oh my God, the stairs, and Oh my God, it’s cold up here. Yet she never thought that I had to climb up and down the stairs, nor that I had to live in that cold. And yet there were two empty bedrooms on the same floor they had theirs. Later my Aunt Mary said to me, Of course they didn’t want you on that floor with them, they didn’t want you to hear their goings-on. What goings-on? I said, for I didn’t care about all that, I hated all that, I’m like my mother. I shut my mind to it. And besides, they weren’t married: she had a husband in a hospital somewhere, so she couldn’t marry my father. Now I look back and wonder at it all: people were strict in those days, and yet I don’t remember her suffering for her living out of the marriage bond with my father. But I wouldn’t have noticed: all I thought of was how not to eat in that house. That night, I had to drink the milk at last, though the taste in it sickened me. Then I pretended to sleep. And she went lumbering downstairs at last. I put my finger down my throat and brought up the milk. Then I put my other dress into my mother’s little bag and I crept out of the house.

      ‘I had no money, he never gave me any, ever, though I kept the house for him, cleaned it, did it all. I walked out to the village my auntie was in. It’s part of London now, you’d not know it was a village so recently, it was beyond Neasden. I got there as the streets filled with carts and horses and noise. I was nearly falling as I walked. I got to her house and rang and rang and when she came she caught me as I fell. She said I could stay with her, and pay her back when I was well enough to earn. She wrote to my father that Maudie had come to stay with her for a little, that was how she put it. And my father said nothing at all, though I waited and waited for a sign. Not for years did he acknowledge my existence. And my aunt fed me up and made me eat. She was poor herself. She couldn’t give me what she said I should have, cream and wine and stuff, but she did what she could. I was so thin and small I used to start shaking if I walked a few steps, but I got better, and then Auntie apprenticed me to a milliner in the West End. She got the money from my father. I don’t know what she said, but she got it.’

      

      It was nearly ten before I got home. I was full of the strong black tea Maudie drinks and feeling a bit sick myself, and so I couldn’t eat. Sympathy, no doubt with anorexia, for I suppose that was what poor Maudie was suffering from after her mother died. I have had a brief and efficient bath, and have finished writing this, and now I must go to bed. But I really wanted to write down the thoughts I have been having about the office.

      I told Maudie that I would not be in tomorrow night, but that I would definitely come and have tea with her Thursday.

      

      Wednesday.

      Joyce was not in the office and there was no message. That has never happened. The atmosphere in the office restless, a bit giggly, like school when there’s uncertainty. Phyllis and I worked together all day, and without a word being said how to behave so as to calm things down. We were brisk and efficient and kept at it. We will work easily together. But oh, she is so young, so young, so black and white and either/or and take it or leave it. Her cool crisp little mouth. Her crisp competent little smile. Phyllis has bought her own flat, we – the firm – helped her. She lives for her work, who should know better how than I? She sees herself editing the mag. Why not?

      I write that, and wonder at it.

      Now I shall write about my career, for I am very clear in my mind about it all because of the shocks and strains of the last few days, with Joyce, and then having to be alert and awake all the time with Phyllis.

      I came straight into the office from school. No university, there wasn’t the money; and I wasn’t good enough for university! It just didn’t present itself as a possibility.

      When I started work for Little Women – Joyce and I so christened that phase of the mag, a shorthand – I was so pleased and relieved at getting this glamorous job, in journalism, I wasn’t looking for anything higher. 1947, still a war atmosphere. It was a graceless production, bad paper, because of the war: full of how to use cheap cuts of meat and egg powder. How to make anything into something else – Joyce’s description of it. I, like everyone else, was sick sick sick of it all. How we all longed to throw off the aftermath of war, the rationing, the dreariness. There was a woman editor then too. I wasn’t into criticizing my superiors then, my sights went no higher than being secretary to the production manager. I just didn’t think about Nancy Westringham. They were all gods and goddesses up there. Now I see she was just right for that phase of the mag. Old-style, like my mother and my sister, competent, dutiful, nice – but I mean it, nice, kind, and my guess is never an original thought in her life. My guess it has to be: if there is one thing I regret, it is that I wasn’t awake enough during that phase to see what was going on. But of course then I hadn’t learned how to see what was going on: what is developing inside a structure, what to look for, how things work.

      They were changing the mag all right, better paper, brighter features, but it wasn’t enough. There had to be a new editor, and I should have seen it, should have been watching. It wasn’t only that I didn’t know how to observe: I was too drunk on being young, attractive and successful. At school no one had ever even suggested I might have capacities, and certainly my parents never did. But in the office, I was able to turn my hand to anything. I was soon just the one person who was able to take over from anyone sick or incapable. I cannot remember any pleasure in my life to match that: the relief of it, the buoyancy, tackling a new job and knowing that I did it well. I was in love with cleverness, with myself. And this business of being good at clothes. Of course, the fifties were not exactly an exciting time for clothes, but even so I was able to interest everyone in what I wore. My style then was sexy, but cool and sexy, just a little bit over the edge into parody: in that I anticipated the sixties and the way we all slightly mocked the styles we wore.

      I would give a lot now to know how it happened that Boris became editor. But it is too late now. When I ask the oldies who are still with us, they don’t know what I am asking because they don’t think like that.

      At any rate, Boris became editor in 1957, and he represented ‘the new wave’. But he didn’t have it in him. I was by then in the position Phyllis is now: the bright girl everyone expects great things of. The difference is, I didn’t know it. I liked being good at everything, and I didn’t mind working all hours. I adored everything I had to do. I was already doing all kinds of work well beyond what I was paid for, beyond what I was described as being. I was a secretary in Production. By then I had begun to watch what was really happening. The immediately obvious fact was that Boris was not very effective. Amiable, affable, trendy – all that, yes. He had been appointed by the Board when Nancy resigned; was asked to leave. He had the large room that is used now by the photographers, a large desk, a secretary who had a secretary, and a PR girl. He was always in conference, on the telephone, at lunch, giving interviews on the role and function of women’s magazines. ‘Women’s Lib’ hadn’t been born, though not till I came to write this did I remember that.

      What