Jean McNicol

Julian Bell returned briefly to England in the spring of 1937. He was 29; he had been teaching in China for 18 months and was now determined to fight in Spain. Everyone knew this was his plan, or rather everyone except his mother, Vanessa, whom Julian had told that he might not go, that ‘of course it would depend on my persuading you.’ Perhaps he’d stay and work for the Labour...

In 1957 Jennie Lee wrote a long letter, which she did not send, to her husband Aneurin Bevan, asking him to give her ‘a little self-confidence’. The end of the letter makes it clear that Lee is really talking to herself:‘

‘Honey, she’s a forerunner, that’s what she is, a kind of pioneer that’s got left behind. I believe she’s the beginning of things like me.’ Radclyffe Hall has long since been left behind, along with Joan Ogden, the heroine of her first novel, The Unlit Lamp, and the character to whom these words refer. The young women she had overheard, Ogden thought, were ‘aggressively intelligent … not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair; women who did things well … women who counted and who would go on counting … They might still be in the minority and yet they sprang up everywhere.’ This passage, with its untroubled description of lesbianism, is unusual in Hall’s fiction – although it is true that even these confident young women exist only to point up Joan’s own failure in this respect and others. The portrayal of homosexual life in Hall’s famous novel, The Well of Loneliness, is much more gloomy and melodramatic, and bears little resemblance to her own not terribly tragic life.’‘

Soon after Vera Brittain returned to continue her interrupted studies at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1919, she began to avoid mirrors, believing that there was a dark shadow, like the beginnings of a beard, on her chin. A strikingly pretty woman with a concomitant interest in clothes she was thoughtfully given a college room containing five large mirrors: ‘I avoided it from breakfast till bedtime and if ever I had to go in to change my clothes or fetch a book, I pressed my hands desperately against my eyes lest five identical witches’ faces should suddenly stare at me from the cold remorseless mirrors.’ Her delusion appears to have been occasioned by guilt that she had survived the war and its nature underlines the degree to which she identified with the dead young men she wrote about in her autobiography Testament of Youth, which covers the years from her birth in 1893 until her marriage in 1925, but is centrally concerned with her experiences during the Great War, after which she felt herself ‘a haphazard survivor from another life’.

At around 9 p.m. on 9 December 1992 Nigel Bartlett was walking down a quiet suburban street near Wood Green in North London when a man began to follow him. The man – Bartlett said he looked ‘like the Michelin man’ – started walking backwards in front of him and asked him if he was the devil, and then if he was happy. He had something in his hand; Bartlett thought it was a knife as it glinted in the streetlights, but then realised it was a screwdriver. The man waved it around and then hit Bartlett on the bridge of the nose, probably with his fist. As Bartlett lay in the road shouting for help his assailant walked away. The policeman who eventually arrived said that he thought he knew who the culprit was, that he lived locally and that he was mentally-ill – and so was unlikely to be prosecuted. The policeman, a PC Sullivan, seems to have made the connection between Bartlett’s attacker and the elusive subject of an abortive Mental Health Assessment he had attended the week before. He later, rather unconvincingly, denied all this and claimed that he had had no idea who attacked Nigel Bartlett.