A Week in September

Tuesday, 1 September

Johnny has asked me to marry him. I see the words in the most recent of these cheap shorthand pads where I’ve taken to scribbling away night and morning. I savour the thought in my mind and try to shift it round so it will fit and make sense. And none of this nonsense about not being sure if I imagined it. I did not imagine it. Johnny has asked me to marry him.

     It is the first proposal of marriage I have ever had in my life. Well, nowadays that isn’t unusual. My sixth form girls have told me that, with a couple of exceptions, they can’t see that marriage is such a bit deal.

     “When I was younger,” (oh, the humour and sadness of hearing a girl not out of her teens reminiscing about when she was younger) “and saw William and Kate getting married, I thought that was lovely, like a fairy tale. But even if I did get married, it would just be a civil ceremony – no point to wasting money on a frock and on feeding everyone!” That was Sophie Linton, who loves poetry and even writes it herself. But who still has outgrown romantic notions of marriage.

     “I wouldn’t mind the hen do, mind,” said Lizzie Martin. I held my peace. I hope I am not a pursed-lipped prissy headmistress but sometimes I despair when I read of these hen-dos. A few drinks, maybe a few too many, with your friends, is one thing, but when it comes to dressing up as – well, whatever they dress up as – and making a nuisance of yourself in foreign parts – that’s another matter.

     Still, I think my girls are responsible and have self respect, and are anything but promiscuous (at least I hope so) but with those exceptions they have no time for marriage. At least not yet. At least not with any grand ceremonies.

     But that’s not to say they’re not interested in boyfriends. Or girlfriends, of course.

     Johnny Howard is not just the first man to ask me to marry him. He is my first boyfriend. I know for a fact I am not his first girlfriend. I know that before he was married he had girlfriends, and so did his wife, though they had a long and happy marriage. I also know that referring to being anybody’s girlfriend when my next birthday will mean I could retire if I wished (which I do not) is absurd. I wouldn’t blame a feminist for taking issue with me, or a cheeky schoolgirl for laughing at me. But somehow, lady friend or woman friend sounds just as bad. Just as inappropriate. 

     Oh, of course he’s not the first male friend I’ve had. Good Lord, no! To tell the truth (and it’s not the first time I’ve told it) I tend to get on better with men than women sometimes, and even if they’re married, their wives have never minded. They’ve known I’m safe and a good sort and “like a sister!”. 

     I know that is meant as a compliment. But sometimes I even see myself as Sister Helen, in the kind of outfit that even most nuns don’t wear anymore. Mind you, a lot of nuns seem to wear cardigans now to make themselves more approachable. Bit like headmistresses, really, especially ones on the point of retirement.

     Still, I was wearing one of my prettiest cardigans when Johnny came over to have a chat with me at the village fete. The one that’s just the right shade of greyish-blue without too much grey or too much blue, and with a smattering of daisies and clover-leaves embroidered onto it. Even the buttons were pretty, a kind of iridescent pearly grey. I still have favourite words; silly at my age, I suppose, and iridescent is one of them. 

     But of course that wasn’t the reason I bought the cardigan. That would just be silly.

     Anyone reading these meanderings would think it was the first time Johnny and I had ever set eyes on each other. That we bonded in a heartbeat over the vegetable marrows or the home baking stall, or the name the teddy table. 

     But of course, I’d known him for years. He’s Rosalind Baker’s grandfather. And it’s in no small part thanks to him that she’s the fine young woman she’s turned out to be. I always take it as a sign that I must be doing something right when one of the girls decides to go in for teaching, though I know full well that as, in her case, she wants to be a science teacher, Georgina Marsden must take most of the credit. 

     It’s not my place to pass judgement on Rosalind’s absent father. But if you can’t be honest in your diary, where can you, and frankly from all I’ve heard she’s been far better off without him and with Johnny instead. I never knew his wife as well, though she was one of those quiet women whom you only appreciate when they’ve gone. She passed away two years ago.

     Johnny didn’t go to pieces but he didn’t turn into one of those studiedly merry widowers either. 

     He didn’t make a big fuss at the village fete. He just said, “If you’d like to come for a drink with me at the Farmer’s Arms tonight, Helen, it would be nice.”

     I finally persuaded him once and for all to call me Helen and not Miss Turner three or four years ago. Now she’s left school, Rosalind calls me Helen, too, which is absolutely fine, though I still have the feeling that she has to think before she does it. She might call me Helen but I fancy she still thinks of me as Miss Turner! 

     I thought about saying that I wasn’t a pub person, which I’m not, not really, but nor am I one of those people who makes an issue about NOT being a pub person. 

     And it’s no wonder that the Farmer’s Arms has thrived when other village pubs haven’t. Though she is tolerant of human frailty (probably more than I am) the landlady Phyllis Lucas is often prone to say that though she has every sympathy in the world for people who lose their business through no fault of their own, there are cases where some of the fault IS their own. Though she was a smoker herself at the time (she’s subsequently given up after a health scare) she always said that if anyone claimed the smoking ban was uniquely responsible for their pub closing, they needed to ask themselves if that really was all they thought folk should come into their pub for. 

     I’ve got side-tracked, and I want to read a couple of chapters of my book before I try to get to sleep, so enough of this for now.

Wednesday, 2^nd September

Helen Howard. It has a sound to it. Pleasingly alliterative! Not that you can marry someone just because it gives you a nice sounding name. Most of my girls say that even if they do get married, they wouldn’t change their names, and in principle I agree with them, but Helen Howard still has a ring to it. 

     Nothing wrong with the name Turner, of course. Not one of those like Pratt or Shufflebottom. Though going back – oh, it must be 20 years, before I was headmistress, I had a pupil called Shelia Shufflebottom. WHAT were her parents thinking of giving her a first name that began with “SH”? There’s alliteration and alliteration. Anyway, she was the nicest girl you could hope to meet. I suppose if I had a name like Beaumont or Trelawney I wouldn’t be so keen to change it. When I was a girl I used to fantasise about being called Beaumont or Trelawney. Now I’ll settle for Howard.

     That’s if I say yes, of course. 

     It was a while before I realised that Johnny was courting me – and yet at the same time it dawned on me in an instant. But which instant? When he put his arm round me when we were looking at the stream and we both knew in an instant that we wanted to play Pooh-Sticks? When he gave me a big bouquet of glorious gaudy bluebells, so blue they almost hurt my eyes, when I’d half-thought he wasn’t paying attention when I said they were my favourite flowers?

     I don’t know when it dawned on Mother that I wasn’t going to get married any time in the near future. She had been all for me getting a university education, and Father too, and they both said they were glad that we lived in times when it was as normal for a girl to go to university as a boy. And she fully approved of me being a teacher. But I could still see a look in her eyes when my friends got married. She even made a point of drawing my attention to the fact that one of my best friends from school, Rebecca, who was a doctor, “And isn’t it marvellous that nobody thinks twice about a woman being a doctor nowadays?” – fully intended to carry on working. “You can do that now, Helen, my generation couldn’t, not a lot of the time, anyway.”

     We generally got on well, but I couldn’t help saying, “You’re not being very subtle, Mother,” and we were quite at outs with each other for a couple of days. 

     I don’t know to this day if she was disappointed or relieved when she discovered (not that I made any great secret of it) that one of my guilty pleasures was the Gothic novels of Victoria Holt. Probably both. 

     But truth to tell, I’ve never been that attracted to those demonic tortured heroes, whether in Victoria’s work or those whom we are supposed to consider more literary. Fair enough, I had a soft spot (and still do) for Max de Winter, but still nurse this notion that our unnamed narrator could probably have done better for herself. 

     There is nothing demonic or tortured about Johnny. Well, at any rate, most certainly nothing demonic.

     I don’t know why I wrote that. Best to move on. 

     He doesn’t stand on ceremony, and I’ve seen him playing horsey with his younger grandchildren, and quite happy to be treated as a climbing frame. But there’s still a certain dignity about him. It used to surprise me that he was known as Johnny, and not John, but I found out that his father was also called John, and they didn’t go in for what John senior called that pretentious stuff about being – well, John senior and John junior! So he’s always been known as Johnny. I admit it sometimes makes me think about that story that I desperately wanted to be true when I was at junior school about Johnny Appleseed. Though so far as I know Johnny is happy pottering about in his own little garden, he has no aspirations to anything greater, but I can still see him strewing apple-seeds across a continent, quietly, and without any fuss, to flourish and bear fruit long after he’s gone. 

     Oh, what a fanciful idea! Maybe it’s because it’s autumn now, and the trees that gave us boughs of blossom in spring are now growing heavy with fruit. It must be one of the most generous of trees. I keep meaning to have one in my garden. I doubt I will. I always say, well, if anyone asks me, that autumn is my favourite season. It’s not untrue. How much because of poetic thoughts about apple trees and how much because it’s the start of the school year, I don’t know. 

Thursday, 3^rd September

     Anniversary of the day war broke out. That’s force of habit! Despite what some of the girls may think, and despite having days when I feel ancient, of course I wasn’t around at the time, but Mother always used to mention it, every year. One of those things that annoys you when people are around, and you want to hear again when they’re not. 

     Perhaps I am turning into my mother. Well, I could have worse role models, for all her little ways. Except, of course, I am not turning into my mother. She married and raised a family, had four children and had grandchildren, and received stacks of cards on Mother’s Day, did not just send a solitary one that I have not needed to send for the last five years. 

     This does not send me into some kind of existential panic or make me think my life has had no purpose. It is not like that at all. But I can’t pretend it doesn’t make me pensive. Yes, and a touch melancholic. Best do something useful. The sink won’t clean itself. And it needs it. But though I do keep a clean house, I don’t really have a domesticated bone in my body. Still, term starts soon.

     Later. I didn’t know whether to write this down or not. Like everybody else I like to think that my diary is the one place where I can be utterly frank, whether it comes to others or myself. But of course it isn’t true. There are thousands of things I haven’t recorded in my diary, either because they embarrassed me too much or because I thought that if I didn’t write them down, they would go away.

     This isn’t going to go away. I met Rosalind in the village. She’s off back to university tomorrow – the term isn’t starting for a week yet, but in her second year she is moving out of the hall of residence and into a flat and wants to make it a bit more homely. Though Rosalie has a sharp mind – sharper than mine ever was – she has the soul of a homemaker, too. A rounded personality – something I’ve probably never been. And she gets prettier every day, except pretty is too insipid a word for her vivid, vibrant looks. My cardigans are pretty. 

     Of course she knows about Johnny’s proposal, and she wholeheartedly approves of it. “I know I’ve said it before,” she said, and I told myself that she didn’t need to slow her pace because she was walking alongside me, or if she did, it was only because she was taller. “But you and Grandpa are made for each other, Miss – Helen. And he’s said I’m not to ask, but I’d like to be a bridesmaid!” I had to smile. There was still an eager little girl inside the serious minded science student. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that if I had my way we’d just have a quiet civil ceremony. It’s not even as if either of us is that religious, though I know, like me, he finds comfort and continuity in the circle of the church year. We haven’t really discussed it yet – of course, we should.

     Or should we? Out with it! Rosalind went on. “To tell you the truth, I was quite glad when I realised he didn’t carry a torch for Phyllis.” Carry a Torch – that’s one of Johnny’s idioms. Funny how little things pass down families. I’ve said that once today already, because I am basically a boring old woman.

     “I – didn’t know that,” I said, surprised at how casual my voice sounded.

     “Oh yes. Not long after Granny passed away. It was on the rebound, of course. Horrid expression, but true. I mean, don’t get me wrong – and I know you’d have told me off for using that phrase in one of your English classes! – I’m really fond of Phyllis. I wish I had half her energy, I can tell you! But – well, I can imagine she’d be a bit tiring to live with!”

     I don’t have half Phyllis’s energy, either. I don’t have a quarter of it. She has been married and had children, and has run a successful business, too, and still found time to go to Pilates classes and learn how to speak Russian and be a bigwig in the local chamber of commerce. 

     And what have I done? Taught girls who, at least some of the time, didn’t want to know, about metaphors and semi-colons and Dickens and Dryden.  Written platitudes about apple trees and never got round to planting one. I know what my answer will be. I know what it should be.

Friday, 4^th September

     My mind was quite made up this morning. I wanted Johnny to come round and dreaded it. He did come round. He had said he would, and so of course, he did. He had a bunch of asters. They’re another of my favourite flowers – and I don’t think I’d even told him that. “I just knew,” he said, looking as near as a nice man can to smug. “Or maybe it’s just being egotistical because I love them. I don’t know. But I was pretty sure you’d like asters.”

     But even as I was clutching the simple, lovely bouquet of asters, the beacon of the autumn, I couldn’t help the words slipping from my lips. “I wonder if Phyllis likes asters.”

     He is, I believe, a man who can’t dissemble. He can be kindly tacit, but not dissemble. And teachers learn to recognise artifice, whether it’s on a girl in her teens or a man in his sixties.

     And he looked genuinely puzzled. “Why on earth would I know what flowers Phyllis likes – mind you, no disrespect, but those artificial chrysanthemums in the pub hurt my eyes!”

     I made him a cup of coffee.

     And as we drank it, I told him my answer was yes.