When I was asked to sort through a box of Kirstie Morrison’s papers, I enjoyed the light they threw on her character, and her times.
Most of the papers related to the house at 12 Norham Rd – repairs and improvements, and to rent either paid by or to Kirstie, before and after she bought the house in 1970. They also included numerous notes to and from her tenant in the lower, and later upper, flat, Mary Souter.
When Kirstie moved into the two-storey upstairs flat in 1936 her rent was £72 a year and she agreed not to play a musical instrument, gramophone or wireless after 11pm. When the agreement was revised with the help of lawyers in 1965, she put in a plea to be allowed to listen to A Book at Bedtime after 11.00 on her recently acquired wireless set. She also undertook not to smoke in bed, while pointing out that she was a non-smoker.
The 1965 agreement was Kirstie’s first experience of working with lawyers, and she found it disillusioning. She wrote to her landlady, Myrtle Strode-Jackson, ‘In the first two drafts of the agreement your name was mis-spelled (in a different way each time) and there were two major ambiguities’ and then added, as a PS, ‘On scrutinising the final copy of the agreement I find that for the third time your name is mis-spelled – this time the Christian name’.
Amidst the more formal papers are a couple of jottings which give glimpses of Kirstie’s character:
On the back of an exam paper ‘keep a ping pong ball under water for five seconds’: she loved to entertain and engage people.
On the bottom of a letter from Dr Barnado’s thanking her for a charitable gift, ‘Lapidar is an obsolete word. Lapidary is the currently used word……’: her subject was English and she cared about words.
On a sheet of graph paper, a table listing the photos in an issue of the Radio Times, the numbers of men and women in them and how the women were portrayed: her concern was that women were too often portrayed in passive positions.
And in a letter from one of her MRA friends in Oxford in 1993, a reference to ‘your proposed wall-climbing exploits’. As a student at St Anne’s, Kirstie had climbed into college after hours – and thought it might be entertaining, and of interest to the press, to re-enact this escapade, now she was 90. In the end wiser counsels prevailed!
English
