The Collector

 Two things. M. I've never really thought of M objectively before, as another person. She's always been my mother I've hated or been ashamed of. Yet of all the lame ducks I've met or heard of, she's the lamest. I've _never_ given her enough sympathy. I haven't given her this last year (since I left home) one half of the consideration I've given the beastly creature upstairs just this last week. I feel that I could overwhelm her with love now. Because I haven't felt so sorry for her for years. I've always excused myself -- I've said, I'm kind and tolerant with everyone else, she's the one person I can't be like that with, and there has to be an exception to the general rule. So it doesn't matter. But of course that's wrong. She's the last person that should be an exception to the general rule.

 Minny and I have so often despised D for putting up with her. We ought to go down on our knees to him.

 The other thing I think about is G.P.

 When I first met him I told everyone how marvellous he was. Then a reaction set in, I thought I was getting a silly schoolgirl hero-pash on him, and the other thing began to happen. It was all too emotional.

 Because he's changed me more than anything or anybody. More than London, more than the Slade.

 It's not just that he's seen so much more life. Had so much more artistic experience. And is known. But he says exactly what he thinks, and he always makes _me_ think. That's the big thing. He makes me question myself. How many times have I disagreed with him? And then a week later with someone else I find I'm arguing as he would argue. Judging people by his standards.

 He's chipped off all (well, some of, anyway) my silliness, my stupid fussy frilly ideas about life and art, and modern art. My feyness. I've never been the same since he told me how he hated fey women. I even learnt the word from him.

 List of the ways in which he has altered me. Either directly. Or confirmed alterations in progress.

 1. If you are a real artist, you give your whole being to your art. Anything short of that, then you are not an artist. Not what G.P. calls a "maker."

 2. You don't gush. You don't have little set-pieces or set-ideas you gush out to impress people with.

 3. You _have_ to be Left politically because the Socialists are the only people who care, for all their mistakes. They _feel_, they want to better the world.

 4. You must _make_, always. You _must_ act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pic-tures you're going to paint. The most _terrible_ bad form.

 5. If you feel something deeply, you're not ashamed to show your feeling.

 6. You accept that you are English. You don't pretend that you'd rather be French or Italian or something else. (Piers always talking about his American grandmother.)

 7. But you don't compromise with your background. You cut off all the old you that gets in the way of the maker you. If you're suburban (as I realize D and M are -- their laugh-ing at suburbia is just a blind), you throw away (cauterize) the suburbs. If you're working class, you cauterize the work-ing class in you. And the same, whatever class you are, be-cause class is primitive and silly.

 (It's not only me. Look at that time Louise's boy-friend -- the miner's son from Wales -- met him, and how they argued and snarled at each other, and we were all against G.P. for being so contemptuous about working-class people and working-class life. Calling them animals, not human beings. And David Evans, all white and stammering, don't you tell me my father's a bloody animal I've got to kick out of the way, and G.P. saying I've never hurt an animal in my life, you can always make out a case for hurting human beings, but human animals deserve every sympathy. And then David Evans coming up to me last month and actually _admitting_ it had changed him, that evening.)

 8. You hate the political business of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have any time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You _use_ your life.

 I must have always wanted to believe in those things; I did believe in them in a vague sort of way, before I met him. But he's _made_ me believe them; it's the thought of _him_ that makes me feel guilty when I break the rules.

 If he's made me believe them, that means he's made a large part of the new me.

 If I had a fairy godmother -- please, make G.P. twenty years younger. And please, make him physically attractive to me.

 How he would despise that!