The Collector

 All sorts of bits left over from Ladymont days. From the days when I was a nice little middle-class doctor's daughter. They've gone now. When I was at Ladymont I thought I could manipulate a pencil very nicely. And then when I went to London, I began to find I couldn't. I was surrounded by people who were just as skilled as I was. More so. I haven't begun to know how to handle my life -- or anyone else's.

 I'm the one who needs lameducking.

 It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard.

 Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.

 G.P.

 I shall be hurt, lost, battered and buffeted. But it will be like being in a gale of light, after this black hole.

 It's simply that. He has the secret of life in him. Something spring-like. Not immoral.

 It's as if I'd only seen him at twilight; and now suddenly I see him at dawn. He is the same, but everything is different.

 I looked in the mirror today and I could see it in my eyes. They look much older and younger. It sounds impossible in words. But that's exactly it. I am older and younger. I am older because I have learnt, I am younger because a lot of me consisted of things older people had taught me. All the mud of their stale ideas on the shoe of me.

 The new shoe of me.

 The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

 We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.

 I think -- I will give myself to G.P. He can have me. And whatever he does to me I shall still have my woman-me he can never touch.

 All this is wild talk. But I feel full of urges. New independence.

 I don't think about now. Today. I know I'm going to escape. I feel it. I can't explain. Caliban can never win against me.

 I think of paintings I shall do.

 Last night I thought of one, it was a sort of butter-yellow (farm-butter-yellow) field rising to a white luminous sky and the sun just rising. A strange rose-pink, I knew it exactly, full of hushed stillness, the beginning of things, lark-song without larks.

 Two strange contradictory dreams.

 The first one was very simple. I was walking in the fields, I don't know who I was with, but it was someone I liked very much, a man. G.P. perhaps. The sun shining on young corn. And suddenly we saw swallows flying low over the corn. I could see their backs gleaming, like dark blue silk. They were very low, twittering all around us, all flying in the same direction, low and happy. And I felt full of happiness. I said, how extraordinary, look at the swallows. It was very simple, the unexpected swallows and the sun and the green corn. I was filled with happiness. The _purest_ spring feeling. Then I woke up.

 Later I had another dream. I was at the window on the first floor of a large house (Ladymont?) and there was a black horse below. It was angry, but I felt safe because it was below and outside. But suddenly it turned and galloped at the house and to my horror it leapt gigantically up and straight at me with bared teeth. It came crashing through the window. Even then I thought, it will kill itself, I am safe. But it sprawled and flailed round in the small room and I suddenly realized it was going to attack me. There was nowhere to escape. I woke again, I had to put on the light.

 It was violence. It was all I hate and all I fear.

    _December 4th_

 I shan't go on keeping a diary when I leave here. It's not healthy. It keeps me sane down here, gives me somebody to talk to. But it's vain. You write what you want to hear.

 It's funny. You don't do that when you draw yourself. No temptation to cheat.

 It's sick, sick, all this thinking about me. Morbid.

 I long to paint and paint _other_ things. Fields, southern houses, landscapes, vast wide-open things in vast wide-open light.

 It's what I've been doing today. Moods of light recalled from Spain. Ochre walls burnt white in the sunlight. The walls of Avila. Cordoba courtyards. I don't try to reproduce the place, but the light of the place.

 _Fiat lux_.

 I've been playing the Modern Jazz Quartet's records over and over again. There's no night in their music, no smoky dives. Bursts and sparkles and little fizzes of light, starlight, and sometimes high noon, tremendous everywhere light, like chandeliers of diamonds floating in the sky.

    _December 5th_

 G.P.

 The Rape of Intelligence. By the moneyed masses, the New People.

 Things he says. They shock you, but you remember them. They stick. Hard, meant to last.

 I've been doing skyscapes all day. I just draw a line an inch from the bottom. That's the earth. Then I think of nothing but the sky. June sky, December, August, spring-rain, thunder, dawn, dusk. I've done dozens of skies. Pure sky, nothing else. Just the simple line and the skies above.