I spent a lot of yesterday re-reading A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. It hadn't struck me before, but she gave that pair of lectures in 1928 - the same year women got the vote on an equal footing with men, and ten years after the end of the Great War.
What caught my attention was not her main argument, or her plea to young women to take up their pens and write - although we are a good way through the century of determined effort she describes, and I'm curious about how well she'd think we've done. What caught my attention was an allusion to the War, or to times before and after... to what people 'hummed' under their breath at dinner before and not after.
'My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose bows are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.'
Christina Rossetti
Women stopped humming; men stopped humming; conversations were dulled by a lack of humming; nobody's heart was 'like a singing bird'. And this touches on something I was struggling with in reading wartime letters and diaries. In the words, there is little amiss. People write cheerfully. They get on with things. They do not weep into the paper - the diaries I've read are far less mournful than mine. Their writers - mostly women working in hospitals - relish having something constructive to do and often get great satisfaction from their work. The War was a mad, horrible interlude that had to be dealt with, got through. But afterwards?
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