Elsie Waters
The girl Bowling walked out with in Lower Binfield in 1913, and the first person, he says, who taught him to care about a woman. He stopped writing to her from the Army and never explained.
Nothing she states. Bowling gives her no ambition and no complaint, only a manner: gentle, submissive, and, in his words, the kind who would always do what a man told her.
The book
At a glance
- Bowling's girl in Lower Binfield, 1912–1914
- About two years older than Bowling; forty-seven when he sees her again
- London originally
- Shop assistant at Lilywhite's, the drapers in the High Street
- The vicar's Reading Circle, late 1912
- Mrs Cookson
- Part II, chapter 7, and Part IV, chapter 4
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeBowling met Elsie Waters late in 1912 through the vicar's Reading Circle, hardly noticed her, and then went into Lilywhite's the drapers on an errand for his employer and saw her leaning against the counter cutting a length of cloth. She had come to Lower Binfield from London and was about two years older than he was. He describes her as tall for a girl, with heavy pale-gold hair plaited and coiled round her head, a delicate and curiously gentle face, and a way of looking her best in the plain black dresses the shop made the assistants wear. She was quiet, not stupid, and at times, he says, dreadfully refined — although he adds that he was rather refined himself in those days.
They were together for about a year, in the form a country town allowed: officially they were walking out, which was not the same as being engaged. They went on May evenings to a mile-long stretch of straight road under horse-chestnuts that everyone called Lovers' Lane, and on Sunday afternoons over Chamford Hill to the water-meadows by the Thames. Both of them went on going to church throughout.
The scene Bowling gives most fully is the one in the grounds of Binfield House on a Sunday afternoon in late summer 1913. They slipped through a gap in the fence, went down to the big pool, and lay in the grass hollow among the wild peppermint. It was his first time and not hers. It is also the day he half went back for the carp and turned round after ten yards because he was in his Sunday suit and wanted her more, and the carp then faded out of his mind for years.
Nothing was ever ended. He joined the Army in 1914, stopped writing after two or three months, and avoided the town so thoroughly that he went back only once, for his mother's funeral, and was relieved not to run into her. He admits he treated her badly and says it gave him a bad half-hour many times, and also that he told himself if it had not been him it would have been somebody else.
How the book draws them
- How she looked in 1913Milky-white skin, a red mouth, and heavy dull-gold hair worn plaited and coiled round her head. At twenty-two she was tall for a girl, about as tall as Bowling, and he is clear that she was neither small nor weak. Her face he calls delicate and curiously gentle.
- In the shopThe draper's is where he first really sees her — the hushed feeling, the subdued light, the cool smell of cloth, the wooden change-balls whirring overhead, and Elsie against the counter with the big scissors. He says that as soon as you saw her you knew you could take her in your arms.
- The black dressShe is in black in every scene he remembers, because Lilywhite's made the girls wear it. He returns to it twice: soft, yielding, and, lying on the grass with her arm across her face, as though her body were a malleable stuff you could do what you liked with.
- Superior, and reading RuskinShe belonged to the vicar's Reading Circle, and Bowling swears the girls at Lilywhite's were so superior that she never dropped an aitch in her life. He offers this later as a measurement of what had happened to her.
- How he stoppedHe does not describe a parting. He simply says he stopped writing to her after two or three months in the Army, assumed she had picked up with someone else, and did not want to meet her. On his one visit home in 1916 the thing he records thanking God for is not running into her.
- The woman in the market-placeIn 1938 he follows a tallish, fattish woman in a shabby black dress and down-at-heel shoes for several streets, recognising something in her movements before anything else. She turns three-quarters towards him and it is Elsie, twenty-four years on, round-shouldered and shambling.
- Face to faceShe serves him across her own counter without a flicker. He describes the whole face as having sagged, the jaw gone underhung, the mouth turned down, the eyes sunken — the face of a bulldog, and unmistakably still her face. Her aitches have gone. He notices that their fingers touch over a half-crown pipe and that nothing whatever happens.
- What twenty-four years didAt forty-seven the word he keeps reaching for is not fat but shapeless. Her hips have gone, her waist has vanished, and he compares her body to a soft lumpy cylinder or a bag of meal. Her hair is not fully grey, only a dirty indeterminate colour, and there is much less of it than there used to be.
- What she becameMrs George Cookson, of G. Cookson, Confectioner and Tobacconist: a mangy little shop selling tobacco and the cheapest sweets, run with a small stoutish bald husband with a gingery moustache. Bowling had always assumed she would end on the streets, and notes that far more women end at the mangle.