Delight: Pat 1952–1957
When she came back from Italy after the summer of 1952, Patty moved out of her digs and took a small furnished flat. She delighted in having her own kitchen and bathroom, as well as a sitting room and tiny bedroom. It was the ground floor of a Victorian house on Mill Road, within walking distance of school and the town center. She sent her washing out to a laundry, but she cleaned for herself and began to learn to cook, trying to re-create Italian food with inadequate British ingredients. She had parties, bringing together her friends from the different spheres of her life—boating friends, birding friends, choir friends, fellow teachers, Lorna and her friends from the homosexual community. To her surprise, after initial awkwardness they always seemed to mix well. Her parties were popular and people began to ask when she would have another. One of her work colleagues mentioned that she admired Patty for knowing such an interesting range of people.
She had a party for the Coronation which filled the flat and spilled over onto the stairs. She had bought a television for the occasion, but she was so busy talking to her friends and providing snacks that she hardly watched it. Late at night Lorna and Jim, an old man from the RSPB, helped her clear up. “A new Elizabethan age,” Jim said, skeptically.
“At least rationing is over,” Patty said, scraping a plate.
“Who knows what we’re heading for,” Lorna said. “But it’s nice to have a queen instead of a king. A young woman instead of an old man.”
“He wasn’t old,” Jim protested. “Middle aged. Young to die. The strain of being king killed him.”
“It’s still nice to have a new young queen, though,” Patty said.
They all murmured assent. The figure of the queen had been tiny in the small screen of the television, but unexpectedly moving when she made her vows and was crowned. “She doesn’t make any real difference, but it does seem like moving into a new era,” Patty went on.
Over those years Patty imperceptibly became Pat. It began with the birders and spread from there through the parties, eventually coming back to the staff room. It was a more grown-up form of her name, and she had never really cared for Patty, which had been her name at boarding school. Her mother still called her Patsy, her childhood name. She went to her mother’s at Twickenham dutifully for Christmas, and occasionally for a day or so at the end of the summer. She and her mother were formal with each other. They had one spat when her mother asked wistfully about her marriage plans. Pat felt she had put all that behind her.
She began to work on a guidebook to Florence, aimed at British people going there for the first time without any background in the history or art, the way she had. She sent it to Constable, who to her astonishment accepted it immediately, and with hardly any revision. It was published in the spring of 1955, and her editor asked her if she would write a similar book about Venice.
She thought about using the advance for the book to buy a flat in Cambridge, a flat like the flat she rented, but which would be her own. It wasn’t sufficient, of course, it would have covered perhaps half of what she needed. She approached the bank about a mortgage, and was informed that they did not lend to single women. A building society told her that they did lend to single women over thirty who had had accounts with them for at least five years. She was twenty-seven, so she opened a savings account with them. Then, the next summer, in Venice doing research for her guidebook, she looked at house prices and realized that she had enough to buy a house there. She felt drunk on the idea, even after she remembered currency controls made it impossible. She went around daydreaming about houses she could have afforded if she could have taken her money out of Britain. At that time the maximum that could be taken abroad was twenty-five pounds, which was barely enough to live on for a month.