Valentine Ackland, page 10
Valentine thought acceptance would be easier if they could marry, and wrote about this (then) social impossibility: ‘I see the vital importance of Lesbians being recognised as a third sex … which will come naturally one day, but too late to profit me.’ 18 Her belief that she’d been born different, and her reading around the subject, led to much pleasurable discussion about their sexuality and what it all meant – although they sometimes mocked the earnest conclusions of the sexologists. Thus Valentine wrote to Sylvia in 1931: ‘Perhaps you had better read all about extroverts, which is me, and introverts, which is you, before you develop any more desires.’ 19
Sylvia now took a great interest in stories about lesbian couples (as she always did ever after, as well as taking particular pleasure in the friendship of other lesbians). Among the many stories they relayed to each other, Sylvia ended a long account to Valentine about Little Zeal’s local lesbians ‘how romantic and delightful it all is … I hope one day someone will be writing a letter about us’. 20 She also hoped that ‘in the future the little girls [of Chaldon] should play at being Miss A and Miss W.’ 21 But this sentiment co-existed with satire at the expense of institutionalism; she and Valentine had a running joke about being advised to join the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry because of being bisexual (by which they meant of dual gender, rather than attracted to two sexes).
Of her conversion, Sylvia later wrote to Valentine:
Do you remember the ceremony of the Brides of France – that on the frontier they were undressed and crossed it only in a shift? And on the French side, the shift was whisked off, and the bride clothed in the husband’s country – I crossed my frontier in my shift, my darling, and left everything but myself on the other side of that flimsy wooden door painted pink. 22
This vividly describes Sylvia’s crossing the border from heterosexuality into another country, a new found land of sexual transgression in which Sylvia found herself entirely at home.
Not all the inhabitants would welcome her. The problem of Bo had occurred to Valentine very quickly; her new love was not like the previous ones which could exist concurrently with a continuing relationship. An unfortunate episode was recorded by Sylvia: the moment ‘when Bo broke in on us at 2: I tousled on the floor, no doubt about it, and serene. And [Valentine] sprang up and stood defensively between us.’ 23 Bo had endured what she regarded as frivolous infidelities before; now Valentine needed to convince her that this was a different thing. ‘I cannot bear to hurt her,’ she wrote, thinking of their long relationship. ‘It has to be done – it is cruel to keep her love, but I hate losing it.’ 24 A week later, having been to Winterton with Sylvia, she wrote about Bo in her diary again: ‘I feel such a swine, and yet what can I now do? … this is so swiftly the whole centre of my life.’ 25
After a distressing visit from Bo, when she played ‘My Old Dutch’ on the gramophone ‘a little ironically’, 26 Valentine realised that Bo intended to persist in treating Sylvia as just a phase. It wasn’t until several months later that Valentine could bring herself to write a letter reminding Bo that there had been a time when it was Valentine who wanted more from their affair than Bo would offer. Valentine explained that Sylvia had given ‘everything, without any possible reservation’. She continued: ‘I do not want to hurt you. Our love was far too dear to me. But the last yielding was not there. You had a separate life. Our love did not ever compel us to live together.’ 27 At this, Bo had to accept Valentine’s departure as permanent.
After visiting Winterton (and less than three weeks with Valentine), Sylvia also decided to end her long involvement with Teague, and tell him why. Previously, like Valentine with Bo, Sylvia had considered herself free to have simultaneous affairs (like the one with Stephen Tomlin), but had never felt the need to break off the background liaison. She had known, however, that their relationship was all but defunct, and Teague could hardly have expected Sylvia to remain living alone, apparently single, forever (however convenient this might have been for him). He was approaching sixty, she was thirty-six, there was no question that he could leave his wife and family, or even acknowledge that he and Sylvia had any relationship; it must presumably have crossed his mind that she might like to marry and have children of her own. If he had half-expected some such revelation, Sylvia’s news was still a surprise. ‘It was not an easy thing to say’, 28 she wrote in her diary with some understatement – but she managed. He was civilised and made no scene, accepting that their affair was over, whatever his private thoughts about Sylvia’s unconventional choice.
Winterton was Valentine’s test, not so much of her lovers, but of her response to them in that special place (which was where Richard had so absolutely failed). They drove there at night, on 28 October, at a speed which left Sylvia feeling that the journey had been an epic flight; although they arrived at 1.15am, she was shown all over the house, and the dark greenhouses. In the morning, there was a tour of the garden and outbuildings. Sylvia was particularly interested in the room above the stables which Ruth had allowed Valentine to use as a separate flat; it was full of interesting clues to her character such as jeweller’s scales, microscope slides, and poems written on the wall or scratched on the window. The house she saw as ‘like being in a liner’, 29 which was tactful; the large garden (with its bluebell wood, lilac grove by the pond, Aldeburgh Garden of daffodils, and donkey drawing water from the well) was perhaps easier to admire. Since Robert’s death, the grounds and house were no longer so carefully kept, and this neglect seemed poignant to Valentine. In Sylvia’s company, her childhood love of the place seemed closer: ‘Nothing is changed and I am come back,’ 30 Valentine wrote.
The rather ugly house was made romantic, Sylvia thought, by the presence of the sea; they ran across the dunes and paddled, wrote each other’s names in the sand, and walked barefoot back to the house. Sylvia was not in the least embarrassed to be an object of interest in the pub as ‘Miss Maaalie’s latest’; she was fascinated to observe Valentine’s swagger on her home ground, and hear her referred to as ‘his Lordship’ behind her back. 31 Her resemblance to Robert, thus commented on, perhaps seemed stronger at Winterton; the dilapidation of The Hill House was a constant reminder of past glories – and less happy memories. Sylvia was introduced to Trina, who delighted her by showing photographs of Molly, her face transfigured with pride and love as she did so. All the inhabitants of Winterton, even the village youths Valentine had once boxed with, seemed allies to Sylvia because of their regard for Valentine; the visit was a demonstration of her popularity. Later, Sylvia said that it was with Valentine that she first experienced the spell of the sea, and she suspected her of having mermaid blood.
It was significant that Sylvia enjoyed her visit to this so-significant place, and that her presence there made it all the more important to Valentine. Sylvia was aware of how central she had become to Valentine, so quickly, when she wrote in Chaldon in early November that she had ‘vowed and prayed that I might never hurt this wild sensitive love.’ 32 They argued often, usually over questions of precedence (accepting presents, respecting dignity), but also resolved such issues easily; as Sylvia wrote: ‘We are both of us tethered to savage senses of honour, no arrangement to which we have consented would have cast on either a slight.’ 33
Valentine was fascinated to discover that Sylvia really was a witch, or at least took the practice of witchcraft seriously, as Valentine’s poem beginning ‘“Call up the Devil!” cried Sylvia’ suggests. 34 Some of the pages removed from Valentine’s diary apparently refer to this; one of the remaining scraps reads tantalisingly ‘… [not] “bubble bubble” but worship and grave evil and feasts … But [Sylvia] did not take easily my joke about a coven to be held last night’. 35 Sylvia’s flamboyant love-spells or blasphemous cat-christenings (and her familiarity with the historic literature of witchcraft) found a counterpart in Valentine’s home-made rituals, and the personal superstitions which had always been one of her strategies for countering internal fears.
Sylvia now realised that Valentine’s unpredictable emotional weather was the result of the abuses she had suffered, but their exploration of each other as lovers rather than friends revealed strengths, as well as sensitivities. Sylvia was delighted by Valentine’s Noël Coward impersonations, and her habit of interspersing hymns with Coward songs ‘without a waver of tone.’ 36 And she was overwhelmed by the eroticism celebrated in poems like ‘The eyes of body’, with its explicit sensual exploration:
The eyes of body, being blindfold by night,
Refer to the eyes of mind – at brain’s command
Study imagination’s map, then order out a hand
To journey forth as deputy for sight.
Thus and by these ordered ways
I come at you – Hand deft and delicate
To trace the suavely laid and intricate
Route of your body’s maze.
My hand, being deft and delicate, displays
Unerring judgment; cleaves between your thighs
Clean, as a ray-directed airplane flies.
Thus I, within these strictly ordered ways,
Although blindfolded, seize with more than sight
Your moonlit meadows and your shadowed night. 37
Valentine and Sylvia saw in the New Year of 1931 together in London, and on 12 January they went to a concert of Mozart and Beethoven piano concertos at Queen’s Hall. Afterwards, they dined at the Monte Carlo restaurant (where a typical menu was sweetbreads followed by ptarmigan). In the taxi on the way home, Sylvia told Valentine ‘I looked at all those people during the interval, and knew that I wanted none of them, I only wanted you.’ 38 Valentine took this as it was intended, as a declaration of permanent and absolute commitment. When they got home, she recorded, ‘God spoke to me and I performed his word – we knew our greatest happiness together.’ 39 In the morning, Valentine went out and bought two wedding rings; for the rest of their lives, they celebrated this day as the anniversary of their marriage. It had taken them not quite three months to decide that this love affair was the great love they had both imagined, and longed for; a relationship which they hoped would last lifelong.
Now that Sylvia no longer wanted to keep their liaison secret, indeed wanted to flaunt it, she was amused by Valentine’s discomfiture when she realised that two women had seen them making love outside, in Chaldon. ‘I have been teased all evening,’ Valentine noted. ‘Sylvia was not abashed at all.’ 40 (Sylvia cheered her up by suggesting that it would re-open the village debate about her gender – one faction ‘had known for certain she was a man’.) 41 There were other hazards in making their love public. Bo cut Sylvia when they met, the Powys faction in the village was deeply disapproving (with the exception of Llewellyn, who wanted Valentine to supply detail). Ruth merely commented ‘Well, at any rate she’s a gentlewoman’, 42 and lost no time in taking Sylvia aside to confide that she didn’t expect to live long. There was no question, for Ruth, that any other relationship might ever lighten Valentine’s responsibility towards her; she could accept her daughter’s eccentric choice of lovers, on the understanding that she remained Valentine’s first obligation. Dorothy Warren was initially civil toward Sylvia, but only while under the impression that she was one of many; she was affronted to discover that this new love was to replace the old ones.
One evening (when Sylvia was out dining with her extinguished old flame, Teague) Dorothy came to Valentine’s flat, to look at Craskes. Presumably, she’d expected dinner to lead on to bed, and Valentine declined; certainly, when Dorothy understood the new situation she became very angry. Valentine, leaning elegantly against the mantelpiece and refusing to fight, was suddenly attacked; Dorothy knocked her down, banged her head against the floor, strangled her with her tie, and threatened to throw her out of the window. When gentlemanly Valentine wouldn’t retaliate, Dorothy tried to destroy her poems in the fire, which had the desired result; enraged, Valentine flung her to the ground. After this ugly struggle, Dorothy’s abuse and threats turned to howls of reproach and talk of suicide, but she eventually departed. Valentine summoned Sylvia to see the wrecked flat with its overturned furniture, scratched floor and ink-spattered carpets; she was shocked at this evidence of physical combat, and unimpressed by Dorothy’s later explanation: ‘You see, when I am angry I am always violent.’ 43 Negotiating Valentine’s past wasn’t always so dramatic, but it was to be a major preoccupation for Sylvia.
For Valentine this new life inspired an outpouring of poetry. Her transformed situation meant that she had the perfect subject for her work in Sylvia, who was also an enabler of creativity; both muse and mentor. Sylvia placed great importance on working; as a professional, she presumed that their life together would be structured to allow time and space for writing, and this was propitious for Valentine’s poetry. The emotions which Valentine was experiencing with such intensity every day were the personal yet universal themes best expressed in poetry, and a new maturity appeared in her work, which flourished. Love provided her with inspiration, something essential to write about.
The poems to Sylvia both create and celebrate her identity as Sylvia’s lover, and explore an imaginative landscape which Valentine never ceased to map. Some of these love poems are tender, others intensely absorbed in the lover’s dread of loss: ‘What must we do if we cannot do this – / Lose ourselves in our dark autumn kiss …’ 44 She could also write with fierce humour, as in ‘The clock plods on’, which describes waiting for her lover in a storm: ‘If she came and love’s storm should arise – / What then – / With the gale outside, and within / A fiercer wind blowing? / If she came with the storm in her eyes / There’s no knowing.’ 45
The moment I woke up in the morning I looked at her. She lay, still asleep, her black hair on my arm close to my face & her face turned towards me, burrowed into my breast.
I stayed still, lying easily on my back, remembering the night very clearly.
Then, after a while, she stirred gently and opened her eyes – looking straight at me. She remembered instantly & smiled at me so sweetly & confidingly that I felt like weeping. I held her closely in my arms, & she said ‘My darling!’ 46
Valentine often wrote like this about Sylvia’s love. Certainty of that love was important; it was not popular or easily accepted.
In March 1931 Sylvia’s step-father died suddenly of heart failure. Sylvia was upset, as she’d liked and respected Ronald, but she was also appalled on her own account. Nora was alone, living in their isolated house in Devon; she considered it her daughter’s duty to return home and look after her permanently. But Sylvia had no intention of extending her emergency visit indefinitely; Valentine’s trust in her was not misplaced. Sylvia wrote to Valentine from Little Zeal ‘if I am not to be yours on easy terms I am the more yours; and the better wife in my own eyes for being thought a bad daughter.’ 47
Even in her state of shock and anguish, Nora was avid to control Sylvia, and needle her. She remarked about Sylvia’s ring ‘with intent to startle and shame … It looks just like a wedding-ring,’ to which Sylvia answered ‘Yes, doesn’t it?’ (‘and who was then shamed?’) 48 Sylvia didn’t immediately enlighten Nora about her new marital situation, but she hardly needed to; Nora had obviously guessed.
Valentine found enforced separation unendurable, and could imagine how the bereaved Nora would be treating Sylvia. On the pretext of a condolence visit, she arrived with Ruth, who was immediately questioned by Nora about their daughters’ ‘sudden and intense friendship’, over which she and Sylvia had by now ‘had words’. Ruth assumed her well-practised naive air and observed that it was ‘so nice’ for them – but afterwards she warned Valentine that Nora really hated her. 49 This antipathy would probably have extended towards anyone who established an acknowledged relationship with Sylvia, but was particularly virulent because Valentine was a woman – Nora only liked men. She made it clear that she considered Sylvia undutiful for her decision to live with Valentine.
11.Valentine’s lover – Sylvia asleep.
Ruth had managed the situation far more skilfully. By accepting Sylvia and absorbing her into the Ackland sphere, she maintained her hold on Valentine, who wouldn’t have tolerated any antagonism towards Sylvia. Nora, by contrast, lost Sylvia’s respect through her rudeness about Valentine and, by behaving as though Sylvia was a bad daughter, made it difficult for her to be a good one. Sadly, for memories of a loving mother Sylvia had to go back to her early childhood, when Nora told wonderful stories of her childhood in India. After that, Nora was always barbed. In 1932, with the words ‘I found this and thought that you and Miss Ackland might like it’, she gave Sylvia a Victorian china pomade pot, decorated with the Ladies of Llangollen walking out in their top hats. Sylvia optimistically interpreted this as ‘a spirited and affable little dig in our ribs’; 50 Miss Ackland may have doubted the gesture’s goodwill.
Charles Prentice, an erstwhile lover of Sylvia’s, was another whose reaction was difficult to gauge. He appeared at Chaldon in July 1931; Sylvia had a scheme for his firm, Chatto & Windus, to publish Valentine’s poems. Charles was a gentle, cultured man but his history with Sylvia did not endear him to Valentine (who was already hyper-sensitive about her poems being read as a favour to Sylvia). Valentine concluded that he did not admire the poems though he did admire ‘the brandy, the Craskes and, I fear, Sylvia.’ 51 When Charles read Sylvia’s poems, some of which responded to hers, Valentine found it extraordinary that he still ignored their relationship. Whether intended tactfully or dismissively (or whether it was genuinely invisible to him), this led Valentine to speculate on the disadvantages of their unofficial status:
If Charles asked Sylvia to marry him, I wonder if it would make her look askance on me, and strangely? Which is truth? He or I? Socially that is a madman’s question; actually only love can answer it. 52
