#the lonely old widower and his doting housekeeper

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All’s well at Skeldale House

A couple of sketches that got out of hand for my favourite duo in All Creatures Great and Small.

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Click the read more for the full text! Holland’s Magazine 

When A Woman Is Not Married

A Message from a Contented Spinster to Other Women Are Partly and Might Be Altogether as She Is

I have just been reading the notice of another of those magazine “open forums” – or is it for a? – for the discussion of the question: “Why I Did Not Marry.” And I shudder when I think of the oft-garnered crop of soul-revealing letters that will presently advertise to the world how many blighted beings of my own sex think they have made an abject failure of life because they did not marry when they could; how many others couldn’t marry though they would; and how many others are still longing for light on the dark subject, “How to Get Married When Single,” so as to avoid the aforesaid blighted and desolate existence: It seems to me it is high time for somebody to come forward and reveal the fact that – in spite of so much epistolary evidence to the contrary – there are such things as contented spinsters in this world! And more desirable still that someone should beg those lamenting spinsters to remove their harps from the willows, “think of their mercies,” and let the law of compensation get in its happy work.  And someway I flatter myself that I am the proper person to do both these things. To begin with, I’m a spinster – the family Bible reveals that fact unblushingly – tell-tale that it is! -  and so does the numeral of my college class.  And I am a contented spinster – thank Heaven! – and for good and sufficient reasons. First of all: I support myself by work which I thoroughly enjoy. I didn’t fall into it, either. I tried things out until I found my “job” like the funny private in Ian Hay’s “First Hundred Thousand” who finally magnified the office of first assistant to the official chiropodist. And I firmly believe that everyone, married or single, has got to find her real every-day happiness in her “job” or she won’t find it at all. Let me hasten to avert a storm of protest by adding that the job may be home-making, of course. Secondly, I have no regrets over the men whom I might have married and didn’t – I fancy that we regard each other with equal satisfaction as we tabulate the marks which Father Time has set upon our respective persons, habits and manners. And it amused me no little to have their wives look at me commiseratingly and say: “Really I cannot understand why you never married! Men are so blind!” (This is supposed to be a compliment!) Personally, if I were a married woman I’d never dare to say that to any old friend of my husband’s. Still, after all, why not? Let the spinsters enjoy their innocent sense of humor. Maybe that is why they are spinsters. Who knows? Thirdly, there isn’t a man in my acquaintance that I would marry if he asked me tomorrow. Since I’m writing under the shield of anonymity, nobody can mistake this for a dare. This doesn’t mean either that I underestimate the charms of an “ideally happy” marriage. I’m not so foolish as that. Everybody of sense knows that an “ideal” marriage is the happiest possible life for a woman – or a man either. But not having that is nothing to break your heart over, dear but melancholy sister. How many ideal marriages do you know, anyway? I myself have an unusually wide acquaintance, in various cities, and I know two – possibly three, I’m not quite sure. (Let me interpolate right here, that if any of my married friends guess who wrote this and ask me who the two are, I shall throw truth straight into the discard and say to each and every one: “Yours, of course, dear, for one, but I refuse to tell about the other.”) The percentage then seems to be about as small as the percentage of geniuses. And very few people allow their lives to be blighted because they are not geniuses. 

Putting the question of the ideal marriage aside, then, and the problem of those people who are definitely in love with somebody who doesn’t reciprocate – poor dears! – may I say a word to those people who are merely in love with matrimony and wail because they have missed it. They are the people to whom I long to say “Brace up” and “Look for the compensations.” For it’s pretty foolish, isn’t it, to consider your life spoiled and a failure because you haven’t made a perfectly ordinary marriage with just any ordinary man with whom you’re not at present in love? Think of it! Aren’t there plenty of compensations for that? Brace up and look for them! Or if you can’t quite consider them compensations, call them “the advantages of your disadvantages.” First of all – you’d think I was an old time person, wouldn’t you – there’s that question of supreme importance: your “job.” If you were married, you’d probably be tied down to housekeeping and child-tending, whether you were fitted for it or not. Now you are free to try your hand at any one of the fascinating jobs opening up for women, until you can find the one which means the happiness of self-expression for you. Secondly – and following directly from the first – the compensation of having your own money to spend as you choose. Oh yes, I know there’s a popular theory that most men give their wives an allowance now-a-days. It’s a delusion! They don’t – not the rank and file of men. And were discussing not the ideal husband, you know, but the average one. Just casually bring up the subject of Easter hats, for instance, in any group of women, and note how many of them tell how they went to work to wheedle a certain one out of “Himself”; and how many others laugh over “big rows” when the bills come in – “only it was worth it.” And wouldn’t you hate that? Wouldn’t you rather spend your own small salary as you liked than have a great deal more that you had to coax for and explain about? And (thirdly) your friendships. Think of the nice men friends you can have, because there is no jealous husband to object. Think of the way you can keep up with your old friends of your own sex. I make wonderful long visits every year to some of my old school and college friends – visits which no married woman could possibly make; and I know they broaden and enrich my life to a wonderful degree. 

And aside from visiting, theres travel. I adore it. Don’t you? Just getting on a train to go to some new place gives me a thrill; and as to automobile trips – there’s nothing like them! But what ordinary mother of a family can gallivant like that? To say nothing of leaving Himself. I have deadfully strict notions, you see, of how a wife should stand by her husband. So have most of us spinsters. And then there’s reading. I love to read. A new book in the house is a constant siren-call from duty. And now if I want to be so foolish as to stay up late and finish it, there’s nobody who has the right to be annoyed. A charming married friend vame to visit me the other day and exclaimed with delight over the reading light by the side of the guest-room bed. “Don’t be alarmed if you see that light burning at all hours,” she cried. “I adore to read in bed and Ive not been able to do it since I was married.” A small compensation for the loss of home and husband, you say. True, but don’t forget that every little bit counts in the big sum of content. There’s another kind of amusement too. Now I personally loathe to go to vaudeville shows. Most husbands – to put it mildly – do not. And average husbands have a way of bringing home tickets for the things they themselves like. And it’s a very unusual one who buys seats for Grand Opera of his own volition. “But,” you mourn, “I’m lonely!” So are plenty of widows, and wives too – unfortunately. And a lonely spinster can frankly admit it and start right out for company and consolation without having to explain why and apologize for John’s absence. And as to children – of course that point is bound to come up – most spinsters look at children as well as matrimony through a rosy haze. All children are not assets, by any means. Some of them are liabilities. And anyway, if you are sport enough to chance the liabilities, why there are plenty of nice children to adopt – especially now. And the most doting mother that I know is a spinster with an adopted baby. She lies awake nights “just to hear it breathe!” Yes she does, she says so! So, as I said before: Brace up and count your mercies! You probably have more than I have – different ones anyway. There are no end of good things in life besides husbands. Remember the oft-quoted remark of the old mammy about “the single life being the happiest of all – once you quit struggling.” It’s funny, but there’s a great deal of truth in it.