Singled Out

My mother was the youngest of a family of ten siblings. Two of her sisters were my maiden aunts, Auntie Ollie and Auntie Doris. I had never thought much about why they never married until a few weeks ago when I read Singled Out, Virginia Nicholson's social study of the 2 million women left unmarried in Britain by the slaughter of their husbands and potential husbands in the Great War of 1914-1918. It's a sad book, sad like unrequited love. I don't think it is nearly as good as Virginia Nicholson's Millions Like Us, her subsequent book about the women who went to work to fill gaps left in the labour force when men departed to fight again in the second world war in 1939-45. Nicholson's sources were mostly still alive and available for interview when she wrote about their roles in the war of 1939-45, but most of the women left single by the slaughter of the Great War were dead or too old to be interviewed, so although she tries her best, Singled Out lacks much of the intimacy of Millions Like Us. She has to write about unfulfilled sexual desire mostly by inference and guesswork, compensating a little perhaps by excessive emphasis on flamboyant lesbians like Radclyffe Hall. It's a good book, worth reading, but it would have been better if it had been written 30 or 40 years sooner, and if the sad and lonely women she writes about had been free of inhibitions and able to speak and write frankly about their plight.
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Now I am reading the second draft of Cloud Messenger, Karen Trollope Kumar's excellent memoir of the years that she and her husband Pradeep Kumar lived and worked in the Himalayan foothills, in 1985 to 1997, eleven years altogether because she came back to Canada for the birth of her second child. Karen writes beautifully. This is a fascinating blend of lyrical travel writing, perceptive social and cultural insights, intimate glimpses of family life in India, medical care under conditions much less lavish than customary in Canada, and crises that tested her fortitude to the utmost. One more draft, perhaps, and this book will be ready to send into production.