Valentine Ackland, page 8
Valentine’s social conscience was increasingly active. The time she spent in Chaldon, close to rural workers who were living in real poverty, made her aware of the economic problems of the Depression in human terms. Her seriousness about poetry as a vocation meant that this growing sense of social responsibility was inevitably reflected in her work. As well as the pastoral poetry she was writing in Chaldon, still heavily influenced by John Clare, which dealt with the realities of shepherding in the snow or working the fields, she also began to consider other lives, further away from her own. Without any political agenda, she wrote poems which were starting to show political awareness of social injustices of various kinds. A poem of this period about ‘The Lonely Woman’, whose independence leaves her solitary, is related to a poem about a youth ‘who … will be executed tomorrow’. 21 In both works the poet empathises with another person whose situation is different, but part of the communal whole. Ever after, Valentine wrote poems to commemorate judicial executions taking place near her; they are protest poems of the most subtle sort, asserting a common humanity by bearing witness to unacceptable acts and speaking on behalf of those who are, for one reason or another, silenced.
Sylvia was now profoundly connected, in Valentine’s mind, with the business of poetry, and she was no longer elusive. In London, they met regularly; many years later Sylvia recalled Valentine’s exact costume when she came to tea at 113 Inverness Terrace, down to her ‘pigskin shoes (faun’s feet)’. 22 Although Valentine was usually cautious about allowing anyone to see her poems, Sylvia was persuasive. Soon she was reading Valentine’s work regularly. On 13 April 1930 Sylvia wrote:
I am very grateful to you for showing me these. I think I should have guessed them yours anywhere. It was a true pleasure to read them, though sometimes rather a shy pleasure: for it is rare to find poetry that is genuinely out of its author … I like your way of writing, the lines that are sleek and cold like the pebbles the sea has but just now left. And I like, too, your sparseness. 23
She signed ‘Yours ever’. Some hope which had been extinguished, some belief in the possibility of joy, was being revived in her by Valentine. In her diary, Valentine noted some of Sylvia’s advice about poetry; she was worried that poems by Henry More, which she admired and wanted to emulate, Sylvia thought only ‘pleasing minor verse’. 24 Valentine thought that perhaps this meant that she was on the wrong track, but Sylvia reassured her. ‘As for poetry,’ she wrote, ‘I continue to think yours the genuine article – and you can no more renounce that than you can renounce a leak in the roof.’ 25
In the spring of 1930, Sylvia had a new project: to buy a cottage in Chaldon. Valentine could look after it during Sylvia’s absences in London; they would co-habit when they were both in the country. This was a reversal of the situation with Bo: the dreamed-of shared cottage, but without the love-affair. The available freehold cottage was ordinary enough but solid, with a good garden, and it was situated conveniently opposite the pub, where the drove road started to climb up from the edge of the village towards the Five Maries on the downs’ crest to landwards. The previous inhabitant had recently died, at a great age, so the cottage was known in the lawyer’s letters as The Late Miss Green’s Cottage. The scheme became so important to Valentine that when one of the Powyses helpfully informed her that Sylvia had failed to buy the cottage she ‘decided to die within two days’. 26 Fortunately, a letter from Sylvia ‘made it all right’, and Valentine confided to her diary: ‘I have good hopes.’ 27
What, exactly, Valentine hoped became gradually clearer over the next few months. Sylvia bought the cottage successfully, repairs and alterations were started, and Valentine began work in the garden. (She was delighted when a neighbour remarked, of the wild poppies coming up all over the lawn, ‘They fled there and grew theirselves.’) 28 The organisation of all this required much communication, naturally, and Valentine took to noting Sylvia’s letters in her diary. ‘Letter from Sylvia – very charming indeed. She is most of anyone composed of things I like. A most judicious admixture of metals … Letter from Sylvia. Very much as I like … I had a letter from her today. That makes four this week.’ 29 (Sylvia wrote gleefully many years later: ‘Even then I was wooing her with every word.’) 30
Valentine’s hopes were almost too delicate to name in writing; she could openly admit to herself ‘I long for Sylvia to come down while I am here’, but then she worried:
foreseen and expected happiness is a threat, as much of disappointment as anything else. The promise of happiness is intoxicating and a little unnerving. I hope to be happy here, but my position is still not defined.
When Valentine considered what it would be like living with Sylvia, she was unsure what might develop:
Her sensibility will react possibly towards … complete withdrawal – and that is death – or else towards an offering of intimacy – and that is life. So that is all very uncertain and insecure. But it is started. 31
Meanwhile, Valentine did not neglect her existing relationships. In January, she’d enjoyed an emotional night with Dorothy, with whom the power-balance had shifted; Valentine was less obsessed, Dorothy more. Then in June they went away together, and Valentine ‘made love to her’ on Valentine’s, rather than Dorothy’s, preferred terms. Dorothy was pleased and impressed by this new authority, and started to discuss Valentine’s sexual persona.
‘I have always wanted this’, she declared (somewhat to Valentine’s surprise). ‘Two people as sensitive and aware of each other as we are must meet like this as well – must have our naked bodies close together sometimes … You are very stern with me, darling! Why mayn’t I touch you? Oh, of course, I know that – But why not just stroke and love you?’
‘That is for me tonight!’ Valentine answered.
‘Do you really feel like that about it?’ Dorothy asked, impressed.
Valentine laughed as she said no, leaving Dorothy none the wiser as to how set her preference was for ‘being the lover’. 32
The satisfactory culmination of a difficult and sometimes very unhappy affair gave Valentine enormous confidence. She wrote:
the intensity of passion I knew that night was not only mine, but shared fully with her … I had her and I took her, and I deeply and passionately adored her. She cried in my arms and her tears were my joy and were her happiness and ecstasy as well … She gave me so generously that triumph and power. 33
This ‘blessed night’ appears to have been much more satisfactory for Valentine than her laudanum and razor-blade experiences, and also pleased Dorothy who ‘was not left unsatisfied.’ 34 She was interested in spending more time with this newly exciting lover, but Valentine vanished back to her duties in Chaldon.
Here she found that the reaction to her new but undefined position was anything but positive. Everyone told her – separately – that it looked as though her motives for cultivating Sylvia were financial (that age-old manoeuvre to separate the conveniently-single who are about to form a couple). The Powyses solemnly advised her against ‘toadying’, and simultaneously warned her against Sylvia. According to them ‘she might be the sister of the devil’, Valentine recorded wryly; ‘God knows what they would do if there was no one to hate.’ 35 Since Sylvia was still under the impression that Theodore and Violet thought of her as a daughter, it didn’t take too much imagination to guess that they were not entirely charitable when they talked about Valentine in her absence. Feeling embattled about The Late Miss Green only made Valentine more determined, though she was sorry that it was evidently going to make things socially difficult in Chaldon.
Sylvia, unaware of these disturbances, was now sending her own poems to Valentine regularly. Valentine searched them for clues to Sylvia’s feelings more obvious than those offered by her calm behaviour, but had to admit: ‘Her poems, to date, do not guide me much more clearly.’ 36 After her experiences with Lana, Bo and others, Valentine knew that she could afford to wait; she did not intend to jeopardise the intimacy she had achieved so far by hurrying Sylvia.
In August, Sylvia came to Chaldon, to inspect the progress of the cottage. She flattered Valentine by exclaiming ‘What a perfect steward! who can cut wood and make good tea!’ 37 and they enjoyed flirtatious conversations which raised Valentine’s hopes. She noted: ‘Sylvia’s clothes are always most attractive’, and was encouraged by Sylvia’s determination to feed her. 38
But at tea with the Powyses, Sylvia annoyed Valentine by trying to coerce her into politeness when their hosts were antagonistic towards Miss Green; she was presumably trying to save a social situation, without realising its antecedents. Valentine angrily vowed ‘I shall not any longer look to Sylvia … for house-room and companionship … I go my way.’ 39 But the following day she was more reasonable:
I wish I did not want to live with Sylvia. I do. However, I could not repay her … While I can easily bear and most often enjoy her love of power and the consequent dominion over my liberty – I cannot and will not endure a demand for forced tact and diplomacy and above all that social submission which anyway I cannot give. So today I am a sadder and a wiser woman – not so much of a woman, either, in grey flannel and a white shirt open at the neck. 40
That night, Valentine dreamed that she said ‘I love you very much’ to Sylvia, who replied ‘And I love you, my dear, and I love you.’ 41
If things had not progressed quite thus far by day, Sylvia was certainly sending unmistakeable signals. ‘I love it when you look like a fourth form schoolboy’, she told Valentine, ‘Won’t it be heavenly to have a house of our own?’ and ‘This has been a delightful foretaste.’ 42 After a week of this, Valentine was writing frankly ‘I should have liked to get into that bed beside her.’ 43 Sylvia – who was reputed to be a witch, and startled Virginia Woolf by explaining she knew so much about witches ‘Because I am one’ 44 – told Valentine the spell to compel a lover to come to you, by burning a red flannel heart soaked in your own blood, and intensely wishing for the one you desire. Encouragingly, Sylvia spoke of the object of this magic summoning as ‘she’. By now, Valentine was wandering about the lanes after she had walked Sylvia home at night, and returning to wait beneath her window. When Sylvia went back to London, Valentine went too, and here Sylvia was equally charming. After a long afternoon discussing poetry, Sylvia gave her a snuff-box full of cigarettes, and a parting kiss. ‘Look after yourself,’ she said, ‘and write a lot of poetry, and write a lot of letters to me’. 45 Valentine was exultant.
Sylvia sent her a long ironic poem, ‘Father, most fatherly’, about Joseph Staines Cope, the Victorian vicar of Chaldon, which Valentine loved and probably understood better than anyone. She described the experience of reading Sylvia’s work, and the closeness which it made her feel, in a poem for Sylvia, ‘The Cottage at Night’, which opens:
I sat reading your poems as the night went on,
Bread was beside me and there was a glass to hand,
While the fire burned clearly and outside all was still …
and concludes with an image of this shared ritual amounting to a religious experience, in which the absent poet is transubstantiated into a real presence:
… my heart was a quickened lover –
Familiar words became blest. I could understand
The plait of your craft, the divine half-awareness of will,
And I broke bread, took wine, and over
Far spaces offered for you my sacrament. 46
The prestigious (and paid) publication of several of her poems in Time and Tide passed virtually unnoticed by Valentine; so did Bo’s visit in September. Miss Green was almost ready, and its future occupants were amassing furniture and household paraphernalia – even their storage jars pleased Valentine, who interpreted them as ‘tangible proof’. 47 As they drove with a last load from Inverness Terrace, Sylvia gave herself up to a future with Valentine: ‘Watching her hand on the wheel, abandoning myself to a suavity of driving which was like the bowing of a master-violinist, I felt that everything was bound to go right.’ 48
Initially, it went wrong when Sylvia was bitten by the dog from the vicarage, a notoriously nasty Great Dane. (Sylvia was bitten quite often, arbitrarily, but on this occasion she was rescuing her affable Chow, William.) She continued on to tea with the Powyses and said nothing to Valentine until they got back to her room late in the evening, when she remarked ‘Now I can take my coat off. I didn’t want Violet to see the blood.’ 49 Valentine had to take over the preparations for moving in, and the all-important lighting of Sylvia’s cigarettes. This was no hardship for either of them. Valentine was confiding in her diary ‘She looked most tensely beautiful … her hands are quite exquisite …’ and so on, while Sylvia was simultaneously admitting to watching Valentine’s legs, admiring her hands, envisaging ‘joy and trousers’, and more along the same lines. 50 She told Valentine they would be like the Ladies of Llangollen, and Valentine recorded these conversations which came close to declarations:
S:What do you think I got the cottage for?
V:I have never been quite sure.
S:Surely it was obvious enough? That one reason (and that was, apparently my poetry).
S:You have got a real gooseflesh quality – when one stops in the middle of reading a poem and says – ‘Oh, my dear’ – that surely is a criterion? 51
They moved in to Miss Green on 4 October 1930. Sylvia was there first, and when Valentine arrived kissed her in greeting, and then felt that perhaps she had been too forward. Valentine recalled:
a duck cooking and one large dubious-looking horse-mushroom which she had picked on the Five Maries that afternoon. We ate that good dinner and drank some beaujolais and then some brandy … In the morning I came downstairs in my fine silk man’s dressing gown and morocco slippers, and lighted the first fire. It burned very brightly and kindled without trouble. 52
So the omens were good. Valentine and Sylvia settled in to their cottage, with its coral-pink woodwork, milk-white walls, gold-scrolled oval mirror lit by candle-sconces above the fire. They were rather grand, conversing with company manners in finished Paris style, listening to music seriously and cooking elaborate meals. Within this formality, their intimacy increased; Sylvia recorded that Valentine had told her more about her childhood ‘embellished with a mad nurse.’ 53 The stories Sylvia now heard of her friend’s background accorded oddly with the person she knew with ‘the composed low voice and the sardonic turn of mind and velvet good manners’. 54 She listened.
Valentine could claim ‘I was born and bred a Londoner’ and ‘Scotland is two-thirds my native country’ with equal conviction. 55 London-born she certainly was, in Mayfair, at 54 Brook Street – a tall redbrick Victorian extravaganza opposite Claridge’s Hotel. (It was a Sunday, 20 May 1906, and poor Ruth ‘so horribly feared and suffered’ during childbirth that Valentine thought ‘she shrank from’ physical contact with her children ever after.) 56 The Scottish connection was ancestral; Molly was christened Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland, to commemorate her mother’s Scots maiden name. Robert’s middle name, Craig, was also a Scots surname from his mother. ‘My father’s father was pure Devonshire,’ Valentine admitted, but ‘I am entirely Northern: Northumberland and Scotland.’ 57 This Northern blood seemed romantic to Valentine, but other parental inheritances she considered more problematic.
I have a really sinister heritage … extravagance, half-wittedness or at any rate flounciness, sombre melancholy, splenetic rage, violent and self-righteous determination, ambition, dramatic intensity, and a total disregard for accuracy … plus Robert’s almost lunatic scrupulousness. 58
Robert’s scrupulousness could take strange forms. His expectations of his children were unrealistic; ordinary childish nervousness about playing the piano at the school concert was transformed by him into proof of cowardliness, weak character and disgrace. He had a lucrative private dental surgery in the house, but his children’s teeth were so neglected that Valentine had none left by the time she was forty. During the First World War, he expected little Molly to accompany him on his ward rounds to visit his plastic surgery patients, all horribly disfigured and many blinded, young men who despite his best efforts would never be anything but dreadfully damaged. (It can only have added to their ordeal to have to play cards or haltingly converse with a shy ten-year-old child.) This experience left her with a terror of blindness, and a horror of what she saw as her own cowardice. In later life, Valentine believed that her father’s unbending strictness and formidable manner probably masked intense shyness like her own, and she certainly identified her own adult melancholies or furies with those of his she’d witnessed as a child. (The one person who remembered Valentine talking about her relationship with her father could only say to me ‘These are very deep waters, deep and dark.’) 59
Ruth did not hide from her daughter that she was afraid of Robert, and she often wept over his brusqueness. It was comforting to pray together for Daddy’s conversion – he was not a church-goer. Ruth, by contrast, was highly if idiosyncratically religious; she confided in Molly that she was a Saint and a Mystic, and inculcated in her daughter a tormenting sense of guilt. Molly knew that Ruth worried about Joan, who frightened her, and considered herself ‘very delicate in health’, overworked by the running of the house and supervision of the servants, and also ‘that she set for herself a standard of “unselfishness” which … she considered she almost always attained.’ 60 Ruth’s vague pious remarks had a disproportionate impact on such an imaginative child as Molly, who agonised about her sins, dreaded God’s anger, and practiced what she later described as ‘spiritual masturbation … hardly pleasurable at all – and more tiring than anything I’ve felt since’. 61
