The Diary of a Provincial Lady Read online

  E. M. Delafield

  THE DIARY OF A PROVINCIAL LADY

  With an Introduction by Rachel Johnson

  Contents

  Introduction by Rachel Johnson

  THE DIARY OF A PROVINCIAL LADY

  THE PROVINCIAL LADY GOES FURTHER

  THE PROVINCIAL LADY IN AMERICA

  THE PROVINCIAL LADY IN WARTIME

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  THE DIARY OF A PROVINCIAL LADY

  Widely regarded as one of the funniest English authors and an heir to Jane Austen, E.M. Delafield was born in Sussex in 1890. She took the name Delafield to distinguish herself from her mother (De la Pasture), also a novelist, and wrote over thirty books which could be ‘as laugh-out-loud funny as P.G. Wodehouse’ before her death in 1943.

  Rachel Johnson is a journalist who has written three novels and two volumes of diaries. The Mummy Diaries, Notting Hell, Shire Hell, A Diary of The Lady and Winter Games are all available from Penguin.

  Introduction

  Well done! If I might say so, you have made the perfect selection, for this book is a proper English treat, like a cream tea after a long, muddy country walk.

  It pains me to think how many potential readers might have been discouraged by the ironic title of this volume, so self-deprecating it almost invites a good dusting. For this book – or the eponymous first volume of it, at any rate – may have been first published in 1930, but it has the same stay-fresh, pin-sharp quality of all the best comic work, from Stella Gibbons to P.G. Wodehouse, even though it ostensibly concerns the narrow and unpromising subject of running a small family and a large household in the West Country of England more than eighty years ago.

  But, oh, it is so much more than that. Beyond being funny, which is reason enough to glue your face to its pages, and go about with this new edition as a faithful nose-gay, there are many other reasons why The Diary of a Provincial Lady is such a good pick. It is a yeasty combination of domestic drollery and historic document that will never stale (unlike those cut loaves left uncovered on one occasion in the diarist’s Devon larder).

  It can therefore sit in the incomparable canon of books alongside Diary of a Nobody, Lucky Jim and E.F. Benson, that invite the English to laugh at themselves. Yet it remains totally – as we say now, though E.M. Delafield would shudder at the neologism – ‘relateable.’ We can connect with it, on every level. ‘How was it that anyone living a comparatively sheltered, upper-class life could think and behave so exactly like me,’ as the writer Jilly Cooper has also wondered. And though she predates Caitlin Moran by eighty years, and Shirley Conran by forty years, in many ways Delafield got there first.

  Delafield was born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture in 1890. Her parents were a French count, whose family came to England during the revolution, and the writer Mrs Henry de la Pasture, and she came out, as gels did then, in 1909. After writing novels, many novels, there occurred one of those chance conversations that change the course of literary history. The editor of Time and Tide, then a large-circulation weekly of which Delafield was a director, wanted something chatty for the centre pages. ‘And so, in her beautiful house in Devonshire, she began to note down the routine follies and storms in teacups of life in the provinces. From the moment they appeared, the diaries enchanted everyone. They were incredibly funny, and yet, in a way, as homely and reassuringly familiar as the rattle of pips in a Cox’s apple,’ her fan Jilly Cooper noted with approval.

  But Delafield was not merely the first English mummy columnist (a genre so common now that Private Eye spoofs its many practitioners, including this writer, in its ‘Polly Filler’ column).Delafield got there first as she also wrote the first book (well the first I’ve ever read with howls of pleasure at least) which reveals and shares how to be a woman.

  So Delafield demands attention, even now, as she provides an entire Edwardian masterclass in how to juggle a grumpy husband, demanding children, help, garden, meals, rainy holidays, picnics, hats (hats are one of the many recurring themes, along with bulbs, frocks, conversation, correspondence). She is also supremely useful for those of us who are still keen to know how à l’epoque a woman managed to escape domesticity (although she does not work in the home so much as supervise the staff) and slip away up to London without the entire household turning against her, and Cook threatening to hand in her notice, as this is just one of the many stealthy achievements of our author.

  For it is my contention that our narrator and heroine, the scribing, Devon-dwelling and nameless mother of Robin and Vicky, loyal and baffled wife of the baffling, undemonstrative Robert, is the first woman in fiction, and perhaps the first woman ever, to ‘have it all,’ and then proceed actually to enjoy it. Not only does she try to be a good mother, a loyal wife, and run the household with the maximum of comfort and the minimum of outlay, she maintains a bellafigura even when a malevolent hat has slipped to cover not only her head but half her face while on a shopping trip to Plymouth. She is a pillar of the community. She is a leading light in the Women’s Institute, she opens her garden to the public on one memorable occasion too, but she is also, vitally, not ‘just’ a housewife and mother, our Provincial Lady also works.

  She writes books and articles whose success has to be something of a private, lovely surprise to her, and somewhat hidden from her husband, in case he becomes cranky about her gadding about, and her writing. She goes on a book tour to America, she rents a flat in Doughty Street with her own money and so, as we say now, she manages to self-actualize, without ever foregrounding her achievements in a forbidding way that chills the reader’s blood.

  But still, she always looks and finds the grit in the oyster, the fly in the ointment, the cloud on the horizon: ‘Return home has much to recommend it, country looks lovely, everything more or less in bloom, except strawberries, which have unaccountably failed,’ she writes, after a spell in town, and when she goes round her house, she notes with a professional eye that all is in order but her eagle eye can’t help spying that the ‘brass cans needs polishing.’ So E.M.D. really did have it all, but she dabs a bracing tincture onto each page, like a dash of Angostura bitters in an otherwise fruity, refreshing drink. For the life of the provincial lady is not without its conflicts. In fact, then – as now – there is pleasurable friction on every level, and the author knows exactly how far to spice each conflict and drama for our savour.

  She instinctively knows that whether she’s telling us about her bulbs or the Blitz, readers don’t want to hear about her triumphs, because like happiness, that writes too white. No interesting anecdote ever began, ‘we had a problem-free journey to Istanbul on the Orient Express’ after all. She understands that, so when it comes to the glorious house in Devon, we don’t want to hear about days without hitches, we want the interruptions to normal service. So the pantry sink blocks, tumblers break, skies cloud over just as chairs and rugs and lemonade are carried to the garden. As soon as something diverting and enchanting is planned, reality bites.

  We want to hear about the temperamental Cook, a major character. Cook always insists that every work trip to London is a merry jaunt – ‘Spend a great deal of eloquence explaining that I am NOT going to London to enjoy myself’ – and Cook’s relationship with the dodgy range, and the smelly cod. ‘Servants make cowards of us all,’ she notes.

  Delafield is wonderful on food, which endlessly repeats, and the tyranny of meals, so mince, rice-shape, prunes, potted meat, kedgeree and kidneys in chafing dishes, scrag-end for Irish stew, all make regular appearances on the page, as do the butcher’s boy and fishmonger at the door. The names of the dishes alone raise a smile, from riss
oles to rabbit-cream.

  She is brilliant on many things, but particularly on country conversational topics. Her husband tends to say nothing, but just as novelist Zadie Smith wanders through Poundland or goes on tops of buses in Harlesden, and records verbatim, our diarist keeps a careful note of topics, and observes, ‘Amenities of conversation afford very very curious study sometimes, especially in the country.’ At dinner parties, one dry-heaves with laughter at the scope of subjects covered: the water supply and springs in the west country, the letter the Vicar has written to the local paper about drains. At Sunday lunch with the Frobishers, ‘conversation suddenly becomes general, as topic of present day Dentistry is introduced by Lady F. We all, except Robert, who eats bread, have much to say.’

  Such conflicts make for perfect exploitation in prose: we have the chatty female married to dour male. We have the perennial clash of Town and Country, traditional Conservatism v experimental Liberalism (Robert only comes to London once, and he makes a beeline for the masculine outpost of Simpsons in the Strand, where he feels at home amongst the carvers and the bloody sides of beef). There is conflict between the creative free spirit and the nesting, nurturing maternal urge, and a political clash between the solid Tory shires of Devon with her own more mischievous and metropolitan proclivities (the diarist is a free-spirit unattached to any party, we are led to suspect, which is almost unheard of then in the darkest West Country.)

  So she has it all, and yet to our delight, everything conspires against her: from the weather, to the children’s health, her clothes, and especially her hats. A woman comes up to her at a literary party ‘and says I am what She Calls Screamingly Funny. Cannot make up my mind if she is referring to my hat, my appearance generally, or contributions to Time and Tide. Can only hope the latter.’

  The Provincial Lady is keenly social, but husband Robert is one of those rural, rooted men who thinks he has a perfectly good home of his own, so has no need of the hospitality of others (as our author notes, ‘a funeral is the only gathering to which majority of men ever go willingly.’) The cue for any social event, whether a tea or a literary lunch or a London party, is of course immediate panic about clothes: which frocks – which are always known by special names; the Blue, the Grey, the Check, or the Tussore – should she wear? As ever hats, or ‘head-gear’ are the snake in the grass, as she mentally puts together her ensembles: ‘Hat suitable for tussore too large and floppy for motoring,’ she worries. She goes to a Beauty Parlour and concludes, ‘Feel a great deal could be written on this experience,’ prefiguring in a few choice words a million magazine articles and websites.

  But in the same way that she glosses over Feminism (the author’s capitalization) she tends to gloss over the endless round of admin that maintaining a respectable appearance at all times places on the female, then as now – probably because it’s too dull to jump off the page, which is good a reason as any.

  By the standards of the time, our Provincial Lady has a life of exceptional achievement and interest, and her career follows the arc of the female from domestic to professional over the course of the last century. In the first third of the century, the woman’s lot was almost unrelentingly domestic, even if she was cultured and educated. It was only after the Second World War that they entered the workforce and did jobs equal and opposite to men, beyond being nannies or cooks or nurses or secretaries or governesses or teachers. Of course, our lady is somewhat unique: she becomes a celebrity too as well as a war-worker, but we are still so lucky to have her take on not just Devon tennis parties, shopping in Plymouth by bus, and rice-mould, but also female emancipation and women’s entry into the workforce. As Hitler is preparing an air-raid, she stands looking into a shelter, in a passage which combines her genius for social reportage, observation, and a typical twist of bathetic self-deprecation.

  ‘Stand at entrance to the underworld, with very heavy coat on over trousers and overall, and embark on abstract speculation as to women’s fitness or otherwise for positions of authority and think how much better I myself should cope with it than the majority … when ambulance-man roars at me to Move out of the way or I shall get run over. I go home shortly afterwards.’

  The war is a caesura in the life of a certain breed of English woman: as soon as war is declared in 1939, they rushed up to do ‘War work in London’ and their lives were never the same again – not least because they find themselves, with glee, in trousers or ‘slacks’ for the first time. This sense of excitement about breaking free from home and hearth is palpable, as is the desperate enthusiasm of women to escape domesticity. In order to prove their employment chops in the war effort, women of all ages and classes did anything, they scrubbed floors, and one even made a perilous journey across London to retrieve commandant’s clean handkerchief, left behind that morning. It is touching to read how desperate women of that age were to work, and to make a national contribution.

  This progression of the female’s lot is rendered with marvellous and welcome freshness. There is an early disdain showed for the modern curse of hands-on, professional parenting. ‘Have very often wondered if Mothers are not rather A Mistake altogether and now definitely come to the conclusion that they are.’ And at another point: ‘A mother’s influence almost invariably disastrous … and children always behave much more badly with mothers than anyone else.’

  Her beloved Robin is at boarding school, and as soon as she makes money she sends Vicky off as well, but her love for them – and it was the love that almost dared not speak its name in that buttoned-up era – shines through on every page. There are silent tears when she drops him at school, or he wins the high jump at sports day, and of course mothers only speak well of other children, never their own. ‘Robin and I say good-bye with hideous brightness and I cry all the way back to the station.’ Her leitmotif is a complete lack of sentimentality and display: ‘Most wonderful thing in the world would be to be a childless widow,’ she says, but she only says this, of course, because she isn’t a childless widow herself.

  When it comes to love, the Lady is unbelievably English, as is Robert: ‘A banking account, sound teeth and adequate servants matter a great deal more’ than love, she thinks to herself, although she admits she is moved when Robert writes to her that he misses her, and tells her he has found a hill from which you can see their house, and he would like to take her there. Such moments between husband and wife possess the powerful romance of understatement of Brief Encounter as they rarely happen between an Englishman and his wife, especially in the country.

  So read The Diary of a Provincial Lady, and you will not ever be disappointed, only charmed. In the pages that follow is laid out the best of British womanhood, and you will fall in love with a capable, funny, clever, and never cloying woman, her husband who patently adores her, even if he never says so (he never says anything), her two delightful children, and even her annoying tribe of hangers-on and house-guests and neighbours, the stroppy Cook, Mademoiselle and her nerfs, and Helen Wills the cat.

  E.M. Delafield has provided us with a faithful and funny and lasting record of having it all at a time when the concept was so alien that it didn’t even exist, and even though she lists the Lady’s responsibilities as ‘Robert, the children, the servants, the laundry, the WI, repainting the outside of the bath, the state of my overdraft,’ and never includes as a ‘responsibility’ her writing or her career at all.

  She died, far too young, in 1943, at the height of her fame and powers, but she would have been the last person to have made a fuss about it – such an event would only merit the lightest of quips in the imperishably crisp world of E.M. Delafield.

  Rachel Johnson

  THE DIARY OF A PROVINCIAL LADY

  Dedicated to

  the Editor and the Directors

  of

  Time and Tide

  in whose pages this diary first appeared

  November 7th. – Plant the indoor bulbs. Just as I am in the middle of them, Lady Boxe calls. I say, untruthfull
y, how nice to see her, and beg her to sit down while I just finish the bulbs. Lady B. makes determined attempt to sit down in armchair where I have already placed two bulb-bowls and the bag of charcoal, is headed off just in time, and takes the sofa.

  Do I know, she asks, how very late it is for indoor bulbs? September, really, or even October, is the time. Do I know that the only really reliable firm for hyacinths is Somebody of Haarlem? Cannot catch the name of the firm, which is Dutch, but reply Yes, I do know, but think it my duty to buy Empire products. Feel at the time, and still think, that this is an excellent reply. Unfortunately Vicky comes into the drawing-room later and says: ‘Oh, Mummie, are those the bulbs we got at Woolworths?’

  Lady B. stays to tea. (Mem.: Bread-and-butter too thick. Speak to Ethel.) We talk some more about bulbs, the Dutch School of Painting, Our Vicar’s Wife, sciatica, and All Quiet on the Western Front.

  (Query: Is it possible to cultivate the art of conversation when living in the country all the year round?)

  Lady B. enquires after the children. Tell her that Robin – whom I refer to in a detached way as ‘the boy’ so that she shan’t think I am foolish about him – is getting on fairly well at school, and that Mademoiselle says Vicky is starting a cold.

  Do I realise, says Lady B., that the Cold Habit is entirely unnecessary, and can be avoided by giving the child a nasal douche of salt-and-water every morning before breakfast? Think of several rather tart and witty rejoinders to this, but unfortunately not until Lady B.’s Bentley has taken her away.

  Finish the bulbs and put them in the cellar. Feel that after all cellar is probably draughty, change my mind, and take all up to the attic.

  Cook says something is wrong with the range.