Valentine Ackland, page 18
As a clerk (and later secretary) Valentine avoided notice, rather than seeking a more glamorous or even heroic role by joining the women’s forces, wearing uniform, and doing work – such as driving – which had previously been reserved for men. This uncharacteristic failure to indulge in gender disruption suggests ambivalence about the war itself, initially, as well as internal reservations about her own probable reception in a more conventional field of operations than Republican Spain. (She did, later, try and find a job with the Auxiliary Fire Service, which had women’s teams, but without success.) Joan, by contrast, had a high-ranking job in the Red Cross which gave her considerable power over others and gained her an MBE.
In the same spirit of self-mockery as the knitting-pattern codes, Valentine joked that she would make a model censor because she ‘was always perfectly shameless about reading letters not meant for her, and … was ideally suited for the work by never having much inclination to answer letters back.’ 29 MI5 were, of course, reading her letters perfectly shamelessly and reported anxiously, after she’d moved to the Civil Defence Office later in the war, that ‘she is not a person who should be employed on highly confidential work’ (and also asked ‘to hear whether Miss Ackland comes to your notice, in connection with the Communist Party at Dorchester.’) 30 Since Valentine was still young enough to be classed as a ‘mobile grade’ of unmarried female, she could in theory be drafted anywhere in the country. Sylvia, too, had to report for local war work; as she irately observed, if she’d had a husband that would have been of sufficient ‘national importance’ 31 to exempt her, but their relationship was, of course, unrecognised.
Sylvia found work lecturing, through the Workers Educational Association, to widely differing audiences; soldiers, evacuees, women in the forces (who, Sylvia noticed, had ‘all the disadvantages of being soldiers and none of the fun’). 32 MI5 were strongly against allowing her to ‘be virtually free to circulate and talk amongst troops at their station’, although one officer thought it might be permissible ‘provided the authorities are aware that she is a Party member … [and have] one or two of her lectures monitored.’ His colleague objected:
I do not consider this young woman is at all suitable as a lecturer to the troops. Miss Warner has been known to us for nearly six years as an active participant in Left Wing movements, and there is no reason to believe she has changed her views. If she were in one of the women’s Auxiliary Services, I should have to place her under observation … [it is] manifestly absurd that any person who would have to figure on the Special Observation List should be employed in this way. 33
Nevertheless, Sylvia was able to share her unorthodox views on subjects such as Matriarchy, Utopia, Thomas Hood’s ‘The Song of the Shirt’ or Jewry’s Bachelor Deity – to the chagrin of the secret service and the great enjoyment of her listeners.
Writing was not officially an occupation at all. This was one of the worst blows for Valentine, the loss of her self-image as a poet, the further erosion of that sense of special vocation which had always sustained her. ‘Is it wrong and stupid to be depressed that a fate so common as daily work should embrace even Valentine?’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I’ve been too long free, that’s the truth! To conform, to catch morning trains, to stand in corridors, to call Colonels “Sir”, to reason patiently, even respectfully, with fools … I find all this most difficult.’ 34 And she wrote, in ‘Protective Custody’: ‘Into the war the poet is taken, / Made one of, a comrade; returned / Swift to a life he had slowly forsaken / And for the duration interned.’ 35
It was Valentine’s superiors she found difficult; her co-workers treated her well; with ‘chivalry’, 36 she said. Since she had no experience of clerical work, but had aberrant class origins, Valentine was relieved to find her colleagues were protective and kindly. No doubt this reflected her own consideration and politeness towards them; her Communist convictions and experiences in Spain had convinced her that class divisions were iniquitous. Not many of her bosses shared this view – for many, one of the worst things about the war was the class upheaval it caused. But congenial workmates in the typing pool couldn’t disguise the fact that – like them – Valentine was wasting her time and sacrificing her freedom to no good purpose.
Sylvia, by contrast, had a good war in her way. Her enjoyment of human foible and keen sense of the ridiculous stood her in good stead, as did her use of her colleagues in the Women’s Voluntary Service as excellent copy; ‘county hags’ with their ‘high bred passions’ raging. 37 And from her office, Valentine contributed ‘keen passions and rivalries which toss all of us as tho’ we were the Balkan states’. 38 At home, they were busy planting subsistence vegetables in the garden and breeding their inedible rabbits. Valentine dug a trench which inexplicably contributed to the war effort; Sylvia experimented with new recipes for their ‘mingy and monotonous’ ration. 39 She was – extraordinarily – working on a novel, The Corner That Held Them, and often retired to Marxist contemplation of her medieval nunnery.
Valentine did not have a large project into which she could escape in her imagination. She also had a source of private pain. Many of the long letters she was still exchanging with Elizabeth dissected the course of their affair, and their current emotional condition. Of her defection to Evelyn, Elizabeth explained that she was not ‘stoic or hermit enough’ to live celibate forever, but she also admitted that she knew ‘how deeply wounded in sexual pride and sense of possession’ Valentine would be. 40 Valentine was certainly enraged; she was particularly upset that Elizabeth had – at Evelyn’s request – taken off a ring she had promised to wear forever, that as well as setting up house together they had established a business partnership (White & Holahan, Books) and exchanged ‘assertions of permanency’. 41 In her letters Elizabeth relayed all this with a wealth of detail which drove Valentine into a frenzy of jealousy, while continuing to assert undying love and to imply that Valentine was very immoral. (Valentine was moved to respond: ‘in taking it upon yourself to represent Morality as against Immorality, you are putting yourself into a false position … Your code is different from mine … Don’t so heavily assume that you are Puritan and White and I am therefore Sardanapolitan and Black!’) 42
What Elizabeth never did was tell Valentine that it was unreasonable to expect lifelong constancy after they had parted, especially while Valentine had a continuing relationship with Sylvia; that would have been to admit that the affair was over. It was far more effective to keep up a dialogue, examining and re-examining their past emotions, and keeping present emotions engaged. Deeply disillusioned, Valentine wrote to her:
One must recognise oneself in the eyes of the person who says ‘I love you’ … This is not egoism nor is it any kind of conceit; it applies equally to either person and is the essential of loving and being loved. There must be a true and recognisable Image. In our case, if it ever were true, it is now awry as anything in a distorting mirror. 43
But she continued writing. She let Elizabeth know that she considered herself bound by no vows of fidelity, and during the war she had several affairs (with colleagues at the office, among others). Valentine defended her promiscuity in a long letter which Elizabeth cannot have been pleased to receive:
It is possible and I am certain it is good, to enjoy physical contacts, pleasure and delight without any obligation beyond the natural courtesy of mutual gratitude and acceptance … There is NO INHERENT MORAL BADNESS in being able to enjoy without regret! … it is blasphemy only to recognise [desire / the flame of life] in its tremendous, apocalyptic appearances … the business of man is to kindle from that flame every time it touches him. 44
Although Elizabeth was not content to be merely a ‘light love’, according to this (somewhat exhausting) philosophy Valentine was unlikely to settle down to monogamy with Sylvia. Elizabeth still hoped.
As the war dragged on into 1942, civilian morale sank. It was a bitter, snowy winter and Valentine had a painful and persistent ear infection. Rations were getting short, so their stores of hay and paraffin were being stolen, and vegetables mysteriously vanished from the garden. At the end of January Valentine was given compassionate leave from her job at the Territorial Army HQ on health grounds. She and Sylvia were encompassed in their old intimacy, and had time to enjoy it. Sylvia was delighted when Valentine was observed by the baffled occupants of a grand car as she bowed ceremoniously three times to a magpie (an unusual superstition). Valentine pointed out to her that anyone who looked in through the kitchen window might think them eccentric to be stroking Thomas the cat with their forks.
Valentine’s leave wasn’t permanent, so they searched for more congenial work which would fulfil her wartime obligations locally (otherwise she could be called up). Despite much negotiation with the Fire Service, only office-based work seemed available. In March she began a job with Civil Defence in Dorchester which she found ‘beyond words bewildering’. 45 Sylvia hoped it might be less tedious; she was in the same building on WVS days and they could travel in and lunch together sometimes. There were other compensations, too; a uniform of sorts: ‘a fine topcoat and a rather rakish beret’ with
a very noble pair of trousers (called SLACKS when they’re female!) and a funny little jacket which is cut with a riotous swagger at the back and which has capacious pockets … they don’t supply anything for one to wear on top of the trousers or underneath ’em either, which is strange when you consider the high level of our public morals. 46
As a job, Valentine initially found it
pleasantly various … I do the usual work of typing, taking down letters, telephoning and so on, but in addition I handle equipment and issue [gas masks and first aid equipment]… and deal with the VERY odd, assorted people who are our Wardens, First Aiders, Firemen and so on. 47
There was an invasion scare on the Dorset coast, and they were told that in the event their house would be requisitioned as a machine-gun post because of its proximity to the bridge over the river. If this happened, not much would survive, so they packed up their most precious possessions to be sent to safety with Nora at Little Zeal – from their ‘fortress of books’ 48 sending Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and the literature of their life.
The local home guard now recruited an unofficial women’s troop, with hand-grenade practices and rifle-training. This prompted one of Valentine’s best-known poems, ‘Teaching to Shoot’, a wry commentary on the contradictions of war and love which expresses her feelings for Sylvia, and their characters, with extraordinary poignance:
When we were first together as lover and beloved
We had nothing to learn; together we improved
On all the world’s wide learning, and bettered it, and loved.
Now you stand on the summer lawn and I am to show you
First how to raise the gun to shoulder, bow head, stare quickly, and fire;
Then how to struggle with the clumsy bolt (outdated), withdraw, return, and again – fire.
As the evening darkens, even this summer evening, and the trees
Bend down under the night-wind and the leaves rush in a flaming fire,
I am to show you how to bend your body, take step lightly – and I hold your arm
(Thin and sleek and cool as a willow-wand fresh in my hand),
And in your hand you clasp fervently this dirty lump, this grenade… 49
15.‘Everywhere is the pattern of water’ – Sylvia fording the river, 1940s.
As 1942 drew towards winter, Valentine’s health again deteriorated; she succumbed to every infection in the office, and found recovery slow. Sylvia looked after her as best she could and thought – as always – of less fortunate comrades. ‘I am haunted,’ she wrote,
with the companionship of innumerable people in Europe who also nurse some loved one dependent on them, and have nothing for them, nothing beyond the barest coarse husks and hedge-brews. I feel as though I should be deformed for the rest of my life with this inequity of man’s making to which willy-nilly I consent and willy-nilly profit by. 50
This imaginative empathy with the suffering of individuals was inevitably painful. Sylvia alleviated her distress (and privileged guilt) through practical efforts to help those within her reach. Valentine, with her private, inward-looking and contemplative nature, did less and worried more; she looked on horrors which she was too sensitive to witness but powerless to prevent.
During these war years, outwardly Valentine’s life became very routine; a pattern of commuting by train to work in the office throughout the week, recuperating on Sundays, working in the garden and the house, and participating in the endless tedium of merely subsisting in wartime conditions. Inwardly, however, she was beginning to lose her ability to function as a poet – or a person. She well knew that her circumstances were relatively easy, but that did not help her to endure boredom, the petty tyranny of little Hitlers, and a regime which was obviously undermining her health. When she was free, the ecstasy which natural beauty had always given her, the pleasures of the river, weather and seasons, were almost unbearable by contrast.
The decline in Valentine’s mental health was disguised to most people (including her employers) by the breakdown of her physical health under the stress. But Sylvia knew of it, though she says they did not mention Valentine’s ‘mental sickness’. 51 There was always a bodily illness on her sicknotes: flu, ear infections, arthritis, infectious hepatitis, gastro-enteritis. Later Valentine blamed her alcoholism for this breakdown, but it was symptom as well as cause. The root of Valentine’s agony was unerringly named by Sylvia: ‘To be a poet was her deepest concern, her deepest obligation; to abdicate would be to sin against her light.’ 52 Sylvia believed that Valentine’s situation was frustrating ‘the process of poetry’, 53 thus her deepest self was being denied, her truest identity lost. In a poem of 1944, ‘Did I feel like a poet long ago?’, Valentine concludes: ‘Where’s the lost poet now, say! Oh take me a rifle / And show me the way.’ 54
Yet, as always with Valentine, there was another side to the story. Despite her despair and her sense of losing herself, Valentine could still write poems like ‘Winter Illness’ which shows technical control, delight in language, and a sense of calm contentment:
Birds sail across the blue square,
Diagonally across the window-boundaried air;
Winter birds, no thread-needle flight of swallows there,
The steady sombre passage of rooks outward or homeward bound,
The pigeons’ hasty passing, the lovely dart and dive,
Swirl, flounce, and set-aside,
Splash-water, the crossed and lively flight
Of seagulls over the river;
And best of all, in chequered and patterned cover,
Shaken out, drawn back, folded, and spread again over
All my window of sky, there fly the plover. 55
As time passed, Valentine became more reconciled to Elizabeth’s defection; once she accepted that the affair was over, she could begin some sort of recovery. Although there were still the long emotionally-charged letters, still the reproaches and justifications, Valentine began to write of their love-affair in the past tense: ‘what went wrong with us’, and to tell Elizabeth ‘It is probably better that we never meet again.’ She didn’t want Elizabeth to risk ‘what you have so properly & sensibly made for yourself [with Evelyn]’ and was even able to assure her:
I do not hate you at all. (Naturally I do not “hate” Evelyn either. I used to feel a spirited kind of rage with her which would have been very happily used up if I had been able to throw her into the river … that kind of nonsense fades out and time just obliterates it…) 56
Although Valentine wrote ‘it is still a considerable pain to me to probe like this into a wound which so nearly did not start to heal’, she accepted that it was now healing. And she explained, disarmingly, that she continued to want Elizabeth’s letters ‘because a heart loves to think that it is beloved and, I suppose, I have not wanted to let that go’. 57
Early in 1944, Dorset was declared a closed area; all non-residents had to depart (to the relief of some inhabitants) and residents were not allowed to leave. Bombing of the south coast intensified, and destruction extended even to Chaldon. Miss Green was hit by a random bomber dumping its remaining cargo after a raid. By extraordinary good luck, their tenants the Pitmans heard the Dorchester All Clear sounding, and were out of the cottage before it was hit. They were unharmed, but there was nothing left of the house. Sylvia reflected bitterly that the freak destruction had spared the workers’ cottages (owned by the wealthy local estate) in their disgraceful condition ‘with scarcely a bug shaken out of them’. 58 Apart from the financial loss of the property, this was not a good omen. Although they had outgrown Miss Green, it was their honeymoon cottage, the place of their first love, and for it to be physically obliterated seemed significant. Despite its symbolism, they bore the shock of the loss philosophically; so many others had lost so much more.
In April Valentine wrote her first Poems of Release, on sick-leave yet again. Sylvia had a new part-time job (as well as her WVS work and lecturing) as the local doctor’s dispenser and assistant. Dr Lander was a humane man with whom she discussed Valentine’s condition. His repeated insistence that she was too ill to return to work (this time because of severe gastric pain which might be gallstones or ‘nervous colitis’) eventually led to her discharge as unfit. Whether the symptoms were the result of years of alcohol abuse, stress-related, or psychosomatic, would be difficult to establish – most probably a combination of causes. But it seems clear that, while Valentine’s health problems were very real, they always paralleled her inner struggles with the shadows of her childhood; the fear of being unloved, exiled, forgotten.
