One Saturday in November 1943, a single woman in her early 30s sat down behind the blackout screens of her little cottage near Slough (Berkshire, England) and took stock of her situation: “There are three million surplus women in Great Britain,” she wrote.
“I am resentful that I have to be one of them. There’s no good reason for it… No lost, dead lover. No physical defects. No domestic inability. No lack of potential warmth!”
Devoted to her books, cats and cigarettes, but never finding the husband she craved, the bunned and bespectacled Jean Lucey Pratt knew others had her pegged as a stereotypical spinster.
But the deliciously frank and funny journals she began writing, at the age of 15, in April 1925 and continued until her death in 1986, reveal the passionate inner life of a woman who yearned “to live in a real world of Romance… to sway men’s hearts to the danger mark”.
Writer Simon Garfield says he “fell under Jean Pratt’s spell” while trawling the Mass Observation Archive for his 2004 best-seller, Our Hidden Lives.
A national panel of Mass Observation diarists, of which Jean Lucey Pratt was one, was recruited from volunteers. He tracked down her niece, Babs Everett, and discovered Jean had left 45 Woolworths exercise books filled with her most intimate day-to-day impressions.
These stretched back into a Wembley childhood – “Bare legs and the wonderful silver fountain of the hose. Daddy in a white sweater. School. Very small, very shy.” And forward into old age: “Hot honey and milk, a saucer of rhubarb, a slice of bread and Marmite with a leaf or two of chicory…”
By removing most of her writing about her many cats and their antics, Garfield has edited her life down to an absorbing and deeply poignant 700 pages.
There’s not much about her mother, who died when she was 13, but a real tenderness towards her elderly architect father and a struggle to appreciate her efficient, unimaginative stepmother, Ethel.
We follow our heroine’s career from school through architectural training, a bash at journalism, a longer stint in the publicity department of a metals company and on to final happiness running a small bookshop.
It’s fascinating to read her account of conversational pre-war gender politics. One pompous young man warns her: “As soon as the women of a nation become equal with men, that nation falls: it happened in Rome, in Persia, in Egypt.”
Although young Jean is independent enough to be planning to run her own architectural firm, she finds this man’s ideas “decidedly stimulating and exciting. I want to know more of him”.
The constant theme is her thwarted quest for love. From her teens to middle-age, men toy with her, before settling down with somebody else.
Her opening page catalogues crushes and flirtations to date. There’s a man with a ticklish toothbrush moustache and another with “pale, deceitful blue eyes”. She’s put off another suitor because of his “humiliating lust for cream cakes”. Theorising herself into knots over this “damn silly sex business”, Pratt remains a virgin until her 30s.
Moving to the country just before war breaks out, even there bombs fall close enough to break the windows of her cottage. In Slough, civilians are machine-gunned from the sky.
In June 1940, she captures the atmosphere: “It is exciting to ride off late at night, through the dark woods… in nursing frock and apron, with gas mask swinging from one’s shoulder, one feels original and important.”
The war seems to make Pratt feel more alive than sexual intercourse, which she researches thoroughly, both by reading and talking explicitly with her more experienced friends.
We hope, along with her, for a dashing man to sweep her from her feet but, in the end, she makes do with a rather seedy, married salesman.
“I lay back on the bed and said in a sepulchral voice: ‘Now I’m ready for the worst!’ Well, it was damned painful.”
Though Pratt quickly learns to enjoy sex, she is left feeling like “an unlit lamp”. “All my lovers slip away”, she sighs, “without saying goodbye. Away they go, ghostly, unsatisfying, across the sea, to their death in a car, to study medicine, to Australia, to write plays, and that is the end.”
Pratt writes less as she gets older. In her 60s and 70s, skirmishes with men are replaced by battles with a surly boiler, parish council meetings and the series of X-rays, blood tests and tummy proddings that lead to a final cancer diagnosis.
Anxious not to “cause embarrassment and inconvenience by dropping dead without warning”, she shrugs off the depression that has dogged her existence and decides alcohol may prove an ally.
“An old friend who lived till she was 90 fought it with whisky, saying: ‘I’ve pickled it!’ So when I got home I started again on the gin and tonic.”
Her final entry includes sunshine, champagne and “lots of visitors”. “All delightful,” she knew, “but I was in a fidget.”
Restless right to the end, she fought to experience everything she wanted from life.
Yes, she was an “ordinary woman”, but she had an extraordinary talent for expressing the heroism of ordinary life.
Daily Mail