Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Singled Out (29 page)
the wrecked hopes that her success as a nurse had imposed on her.
Cassy started as a probationer in Leeds in ; like Gladys Hardy, the
hard domestic labour came as a shock to her. The girls woke at six, dressed
in their regulation corset, vest, bloomers, long dress, white cuffs, starched pinafore, bib, black lace-ups and peaked cap, and started work scrubbing the wards at seven. ‘[It] was quite mindless . . . but it certainly did teach you how to clean. I reckoned to be the best lavatory cleaner in the world in late ,’ remembered Cassy. At eight there was half an hour’s chapel.
After this they did an eleven-hour day of bedpans, cleaning, lectures,
bed-baths, studying, and more chapel before bed. There were long lists of
Don’ts
. Don’t smoke, don’t take off your stockings while sitting in hospital grounds, don’t call each other by Christian names, don’t communicate with the outside world, don’t go off the premises without permission. And
despite knowing how to give enemas and how babies were born, the
probationers were given a total of one quarter of an hour’s instruction
about human reproduction.
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When Cassy started work on the wards any stars she may have had in her
eyes were, in those pre-penicillin days, quickly dispelled. She encountered
oozing pus, rotting flesh and peritonitis; her stomach turned when she was
required to wipe off the maggots that were applied to cure wounds. Leeches
to draw blood were in common use. And despite all the cleaning the
hospital was crawling with insects – black beetles, cockroaches and ants.
Somehow Cassy survived (two out of five probationers didn’t), and by
the age of twenty-five, as a qualified staff nurse, had started belatedly to discover that there was more to life than gangrene and sick babies. There were after-hours parties in the doctors’ quarters: ‘I became a regular partygoer and generally started to let my hair down.’ For a girl with a Methodist background this was a breakthrough, though initially she didn’t touch the demon alcohol and contented herself with soft drinks. But one night a
young doctor decided that her elementary sex education was in need of
updating:
. . . my orange juice was liberally laced with gin or vodka. I naturally drank it like an orange juice – with the expected results. It knocked me out and I was put to bed upstairs.
When I came round the young doctor who had brought me the ‘orange juice’
was still beside me. I learned about more than just drinking that night.
Having notched up his conquest, Cassy’s seducer lost interest in his victim; for her part she was consumed with guilt and remorse. But Cassy was not disenchanted; rather this shabby episode awakened her dormant interest in
the opposite sex.
Harry appeared on the scene a year later, in : he was a young,
good-looking Canadian registrar, working for his surgery qualification, and
they fell in love. Now she was an operating theatre nurse, they spent much
of their working lives together, and there was plenty of opportunity to
pursue the affair. Had the Second World War not intervened, the relationship might have ended happily, but it was not to be. Harry could not serve as a doctor in Europe, since the British army would not recognise his
Canadian qualifications; he was forced to return to Canada, and they did
not see each other for three more years. His career there flourished, and
when he came back for her, it was to ask her to make a choice:
There are decisions which stay with you for the rest of your life – and a decision on Harry would obviously be one of those . . . It is still far from easy for women to choose between marriage and career, despite the great improvement in women’s
Singled Out
rights and conditions. For nurses, this can be an especial problem because they are facing a choice between two sets of emotional demands. In many careers emotional involvement is not required, but nursing is not one of them: the emotional demands of a working day in a hospital can be the equal of any marriage, so you want to get it right. In the more cloistered conditions of nursing up to this emotional link with work was perhaps even stronger and it seemed crazy to throw it all away when I was on the verge of having a satisfying career. It would take ages to get a similar position in Canada. On the other hand, it seemed crazy to say goodbye to the man who meant more to me than any other.
The decision was torture, for both of them. Eventually Harry went back
to Canada alone: ‘The affair was not called off, just put on ice for the time being. Again we parted not knowing if we would ever see each other again.’
By Cassy Harker was a matron. Sometimes her choice gnawed at
her; she was into her forties now and the chance of having children was
slipping away, but she did her best to count her blessings. She had never
liked housework, and didn’t feel she’d missed out on having a marital home
to look after. Irregularly, Harry kept in touch and meantime, if boyfriends
offered, she was available – though nothing stable materialised. But by the
time she hit her fifties Cassy realized that intermittent companionship was
not giving her what she wanted or needed. She had no trouble in diagnosing
her own disease, for it was one that she had come to recognise as common
to matrons: isolation. And now the regrets started to close in over her. ‘Was the real benefit of marriage companionship in later years? Should I have gone to Canada with Harry? What might have been?’ But he was now
married with children, and it was too late.
There was one final meeting. In the mid s Cassy’s commitments
took her almost by chance to Canada, and for two dreamlike days they
were able to make up for the lost past. ‘This was the mental and emotional
climax we both felt had been missing over the years. In those few hours of
completeness neither of us doubted that we could have made a happy life
together. But we had not taken our chance and we knew that it was too
late to start a life together now.’ When she returned to England, Cassy
broke down. Loneliness overwhelmed her; the empty house echoed with
misery and menace. She began to depend on sleeping pills. After receiving
a letter from Harry’s daughter to say that her father had died of a heart
attack, Cassy drank half a bottle of whisky, and was found the next morning
lying collapsed in the garden in her dressing-gown.
It was to be another six years before Cassy was able to fight free of
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the results of her depression. Psychiatric treatment helped, and she was
well-placed to secure the best, but even that failed to exorcise the demons
that tormented her. Crazed with loneliness, and desperate to alleviate it by any means, Cassy rushed headlong into an ill-advised marriage with an elderly man she had met through a match-making service; it was, of course,
a disaster. They had nothing in common, but unstitching her rash action
was tortuous; this was a time of strain and heartache. At long last, at the
age of sixty, and coinciding with the date of her retirement, she was free.
The last few years had taught me, painfully, that there was in fact more to be feared from living with the wrong companion than from living with your own company.
By early I was installed in a small terraced house in Darlington – alone, save for my dog Sally, and happy to be so. The phobias about living by myself were behind me and I had come to terms with life. From then on everything got better.
*
How hard it could be. Millicent Fawcett was right when she declared in
that the great convulsion of the First World War had revolutionised
the industrial position of women; unquestionably the absence of men
released women from their state as captive wives and childbearers to become
earners. When, after it ended, the Surplus Women had to support themselves,
it helped to feel that they had something of value to offer as workers, that they were doing their part ‘to heal the sickness of the world’. On the bad days, sometimes just the brutal fact of having to earn a living held them together.
As Miss Irene Angell told an interviewer years later: ‘With no one to go home to, unless you like your work, you’d put yourself under an electric train.’ But on the good days, there was the satisfaction of knowing that one could survive without a man. And there was always the hope – for the persistent
and talented – that rose-coloured carpets might be theirs.
But whether the new post-war world of the s offered them genuine
freedom is another matter. These were the pioneers, it is true. But wage-earning women still had a long bumpy road to travel, a journey hampered by inequalities, discriminative practices, lack of opportunity and prejudice.
Over the course of the last century many of these have, in this country,
been surmounted: unions have backed women’s rights and put pressure on
the government; laws have been passed regarding pay, discrimination and
conditions. Today a young woman can set out to be a railway driver or a
doctor without encountering obstacles in her path. But no legislation can
bypass the predicament that remains integral to the life of any single working woman: you can’t have it all.
‘Nature did not construct human beings to stand alone . . .’ wrote Bertrand
Russell in . ‘Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the
intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing
that life has to give.’ Russell himself, who went through no fewer than
three acrimonious divorces, was not the best advertisement for conjugal
happiness, but he was expressing a view that the happily married, at any
rate, would find it hard to argue with. The impulse of each human heart is
to seek closeness with another. With Russell’s case in mind, it might be
argued that such intimacy is rare in marriage, but his statement does not
define ‘happy mutual love’ as being necessarily that of husband and wife,
nor even that of man and woman. ‘Love is something far more than desire
for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives . . .’ wrote Russell. The human being needs sex, but more than that
he or she needs companionship, understanding, sympathy and just someone
to talk to. Perhaps these were, for the single woman, more fundamentally
necessary than heterosexual love, romance, motherhood and wifely status.
Lonely individuals reach in the dark for whoever may alleviate solitude.
Unless that need could be met, the alternative, for many women denied
the solace of marriage, was undeniably tough.
The loneliness could indeed be annihilating. Programmed for centuries
to nurture and love, a woman deprived of human contact felt its lack
more acutely perhaps than her aggressive male counterpart out there in the
jungle, killing, pursuing, making money and running the world. As the
author of
The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems
(), Laura Hutton, wrote:
The basic problem of the single woman is loneliness . . . To a man love is but one factor in his life. To a woman it tends to be her whole life.
May Wedderburn Cannan, whose fiance´ had died at the end of the war,
braved day after day the anguish of disappointment and depleted hope. But
Caring, Sharing . . .
it was no use struggling to leave the past behind; the regrets kept coming,
and with the regrets the feelings of emptiness:
It was lonely. It was lonely because I went to work and came home again alone; and to a house which dear as it was to me, and God knew how dear, could never be one to which he would come; never his and mine. We had planned to live in Hampstead and I had thought of coming home to a small house on the slope of Downshire Hill . . . a small house with a small garden with a magnolia and a lilac: a small house in which you could still write poetry and toast crumpets by the fire on Winter Saturday afternoons . . .
Well that was all gone now. It is not only the Beloved that death takes. It is all the bright hopes.
The Oxford scholar Enid Starkie lived all her life in hopes of a permanent
and all-consuming relationship, but it was never to be. Needy and temperamental, this wild Irishwoman never found the satisfaction she craved, as one relationship after another (some with men, others with women) crashed
and burned. ‘I have been lonely since I was a small child,’ she confessed to a friend:
Few people have penetrated into complete intimacy with me . . . I have always been lonely – very very lonely – in Oxford where no-one really knows me . . .
My last intimate relationship was one in which my friend penetrated more deeply into the inner core of my loneliness than anyone before, and I now feel a chill emptiness. I feel a weariness towards everything – a distaste. I know this will not last, but at the moment it makes me very unhappy.
And whereas today’s single woman frequently proclaims her self-sufficiency,
her satisfaction with solitude and freedom, for women of the interwar
generation isolation was all too often equated with being ridiculous. To
loneliness were added the burdens of poverty and eccentricity.
Poor Caroline
(), by Winifred Holtby, is a relentlessly uncomforting novel, its heroine a preposterous figure. It seems likely that in her portrayal of this sad spinster, Holtby was bravely and unflinchingly confronting her own fears of an unloved and lonely old age. The eponymous heroine, Miss
