On 18 April 1925 15-year-old Jean Pratt began a journal: “I mean to go on writing this for years and years, and it’ll be awfully amusing to read over later.” She honoured her intention, continuing to write about her life and times for the next 61 years, though she may have found the experience of rereading it a trial: these pages are too steeped in regret and heartache, in loneliness and longing, for anyone to feel very “amused”. They are touched at times with the self-doubt, if not the lyrical ingenuity, of a Home Counties Larkin. Yet they are also hugely engrossing, spiked with wit and charm, keenly observant and consistently humane. They have a sensibility all of their own.
It’s one I had already encountered in Our Hidden Lives, editor Simon Garfield’s earlier volume of diaries gleaned from Mass Observation, a project founded in the late 1930s to record the daily experiences of “ordinary people”. Jean Pratt was one such diarist (she appeared pseudonymously as Maggie Joy Blunt) and proved a favourite among readers. Garfield, encouraged, applied to Jean’s niece, Babs Everett, who had kept not only Jean’s MO contributions but her cache of private diaries, recorded in 45 exercise books. A Notable Woman is a finely sifted digest. What’s straightaway remarkable about them is how quickly Jean, a schoolgirl in Wembley, found her voice: if you had to use a single word it might be “soulful”. “I have an imagination. It is my most precious possession,” she writes in August 1927. It proves a versatile instrument. She misses her mother – a concert pianist who died when Jean was 13 – adores her father and finds her stepmother a bit of a pill. But she determinedly occupies herself with the tennis club, amateur dramatics, local dances, and hopes for a life of significance: “I want to do great things.”
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