LIFE AS IT IS
By EVELYN SIMPSON
IHOPE that some day someone will write a plain, unvarnished account of what it means to be a Professional Woman in the 194o's. I don't mean the glamorous " executive" of the women's papers, who sits behind a mirror-topped desk, and has long-distance calls -to New York, and whose background includes Old Nannies, Faithful Housekeepers, and Adoring Secretaries. I don't even mean successful doctors or M.P.s, but someone rather like myself, with an expensive training and a few modest desires, the chief of which is to be able to do an unspectacular but important job reasonably well, and to remain human—and humane, as I hope I am—while doing it.
On the face of things, nothing could be easier, so far as I am. concerned. I am married to a man in the same line of brains as myself ; I have a nice little flat, with every mod. con. ; I have an interesting job, and a lot of simple pleasures. • I am still quite young, and sufficiently energetic. But behind this pleasant-seeming façade lie pits, caverns, Muddles. For example, our particular pro- fession is one in which, beyond a certain very early limit, promotion (indeed, any kind of movement) depends quite literally on dead men tumbling out of their shoes ; so my husband and I are still in posts five hundred miles apart, and most of our income goes on travelling expenses and landladies' bills. Despite this we pay income- tax as if we were living under one roof, and we can claim not one single rebate: a doctor can have a surgery, a clergyman a study, a commercial traveller a car, and an office to write up his orders, but we may not have a room to work in, or an allowance for train- fares, which seem higher every year. Although our expenses are precisely the same as those of two single people, we are, of course, taxed as a married couple. (One amiable clerk, attempting to turn aside my wrath, offered to show me how to work out how much my husband earned in a year, when I pretended not to know.) Added to all this, our profession is the only one in which there has been no salary-ingrease of any kind to meet wartime conditions, so that while every book, every pencil, every sheet of paper we buy has soared in price, our salary cheques have dwindled almost to nothing by the time they reach us, stripped of income-tax, superannuation, and health and unemployment insurance.
But all this pales to nothingness beside the question of Domestic Help. This needs the pen of a Balzac to do it justice As I said, I have a little flat. It has one bedroom, one sitting-room, one kitchen and the usual offices. All I ask is a woman who will keep it reason- ably clean and day. She can come when she likes, and work un- hindered and uncriticised. She can have complete control of the polishes, the rags and the vacuum-cleaner. She can come one day a week, and call herself " respectable woman seeking cleaning," or five bits of five.days a week, and be a housekeeper or companion, or what she likes, so long as she will leave me free to get on with my own job, make my own clothes, work out my fuel target, make the most of my rations; run my Savings_ Group and my Red Cross Fund, take my first-aid classes. She can be old or young, matron or spinster, maimed or halt, though perhaps not blind.
This is what has happened since I got married, six years ago. For the first four years I had a gem. Her cleaning was sketchy, her washing-up perfunctory, but she was generous and punctual, and anxious to help me, and I was glad to help her when I could. We got along beautifully, and I wept when she " retired" on the old age pension. There followed a long interregnum, punctuated by appeals to the Labour Exchange (open amusement on the part of the girls behind the counter), and advertisements in the local paper. Then I got hold of Mrs. Clapp, who swept through theiilat like Attila, destroying all before her, while she took my breath away with tales of her married life. She went back to Lambeth when we had our big air-raid, and I was left to cope with the most important part of the year's work in the intervals of sweeping up plaster and looking out for the men who were mending the windows.. (This last was almost a full-time job.)
After a while appeared Mrs. Debb, a super-woman. She had moved in the houses of the great, and was married to a gentleman's gentleman, and had a daughter Haudrey, who used to.corhe home for days off and demand her mother's uninterrupted presence. When Mrs. Debb came to see me, she made a tour of the flat, sniffing as she went. "Dear me, the bath does need painting doesn't it. . . . Have you got a coal fire, then . . . Stair-carpet's getting a bit thin ; I shall have to mind I don't catch my heel in that. . . . Oh, well, I suppose it will look all right when I've given it a good dean out." At the end of her visit, 1 'just stopped myself from apologising for my humble mode of life. (" When I think of Lord X's 'all with the 'eds round it, that had a man with a ladder twice a year to clean them," sighed Mrs. Debb). I made a false start by leaving my dirty breakfast-cup and plate on the sink when I went out on her first morning ; when I came back, I found a note which read, " I am not use to washing-up, perhaps you had better get someone else mrs. Debb." But I managed to soothe her ruffled dignity, and for the next three months I lived in a kind of earthly paradise, though always conscious of my inferiority to the nobility and gentry of the county, and meekly doing all the rough jobs, like scraping the grease off the cooker and chopping the firewoqd, myself. At the end of this blessed time Mrs. Debb was lured away from me by vast sums offered her to cook for an American officers' mess, and I began once more the siege. of the Labour Exchange and of everyone I knew who could have any possible contact with any possible help.
At last the woman who keeps the sweetshop at jhe corner told me of someone who might oblige until I could get someone regular, and Mrs. Rinso turned up. Our interview consisted of her telling me how efficient she was, and hOw Mrs. K. had said, " Mrs. Rinso, what 'I should do without you I don't know, and I'm afraid you find Dorothy very slow and not very thorough, but you must excuse her, she hasn't been trained like you." Mrs. Rinso didn't really have to go out, but she was lonely • in this new part of the town, and Mr. Rinso said she'd better get something to take her out of herself. What a nice little flat, she said, and how easy 'to keep nice ; three hours a week would do it easy, and she'd start next week, cheerio. When next week came, I hardly recognised her. Her bonhomie had completely gone, and she glowered at me when she demanded a black-lead brush. As 1 bent down to get it from the cupboard, she said : " My word, you are packed in here, aren't you? Well, it may do for some, but it wouldn't do for me." Later, when I asked her to sweep the kitchen floor, I thought she'd knife me with the potato-peeler, Her rage overflowed when we had a tip-and-run raid that deposited a bornb outside the back garden, and she departed to be seen no more. I am once more " without anybody."
Now, I am not an isolated case. The P.'s have -had no help for eighteen months ; Miss K. found a treasure, who came twice, and stole her watch and three pairs of stockings ; the G.'s gave up the struggle and went to live in the country at an hotel ; F., who tried to combine a baby and a career, her husband being in the Army, could get neither • nurse nor maid, and had to give up the career and go to live with a married sister at the other end of the country. Z.'s angel in the house arrived one morning to find her em- ployer in bed, having pitched down two flights of steps in the blackout ; whereupon she took off her apron and put on her hat, and disappeared for ever. In fact, now I come to think it over, I don't know a single " professional woman " who has any domestic help of any kind. Nor is there any prospect of their ever getting any. The grandiose schemes set forth from time to time are to their jaundiced eyes the veriest pie in the sky. They will just have to resign themselves to doing double jobs, and sink into early and unnoticed graves. 'Even Virginia Woolf's three hundred a year and a room of one's own is now apparently of no avail to buy independence and unruffled calm.
Previous page
