In desperation, Nell’s mother went to the Poor Law Guardians, then to the Relieving Officer, then back to the Suffragettes at the Women’s Hall, and then round the same sad pilgrimage of Labour Exchange, pawn shop and anyone who might have work.
‘When they writes up the history of this war,’ said Nell’s mother. ‘I hope they tells about the wives and children starving to death!’
‘They won’t,’ said Nell, gloomy socialist. ‘It’ll be all “Our Boys”, and everyone enlisting and people doing without chauffeurs to help the war effort.’
‘Well, they ought to be ashamed of themselves,’ said Nell’s mother, as furious with the gentry of the future as she was with those of the present.
‘Vive la bleeding révolution,’ said Nell.
The Principle of the Thing
MAY HAD ALWAYS been odd. Somehow, before, it had never mattered. People at school had ribbed her, affectionately, about the suffrage badge on her coat collar, and her vegetarianism (which at school meant eating the vegetables and leaving the chop, or, sometimes, picking the vegetables out of the stew and leaving the rest). But May knew her own friends liked her, even if they thought her a bit queer, and who cared what the other girls thought anyway? Not her!
But now, things were different. Every girl in May’s school, every teacher, even the caretaker and the charwomen, everyone was a patriot. The school newspaper ran patriotic stories about ways a ‘Keen Girl Could Do Her Bit’. Handicraft classes were taken over by knitting for soldiers. In English, they all had to write patriotic essays about why Britain had to enter the war.
‘It’s awful,’ May said to her mother. ‘It’s like … like it’s a game or something. Don’t they realise people are going to be killed?’
But even this aspect of the war seemed romantic to the other girls. May’s friend Barbara had a brother who was actually a soldier, and Barbara told May solemnly that her brother had said he would be proud to die for his country – that dying on a battlefield would be a much better way to go than dying an old man in bed, and that he almost hoped he would die, and make them all proud. This way of looking at things was baffling to May, but apparently it wasn’t to the girls in her form who had all nodded, and agreed that were they men, they would all feel exactly the same way.
May refused to take part in any of the patriotism. She refused to knit for the soldiers, working doggedly on the embroidered handkerchiefs she was making for Mrs Barber’s birthday present instead. She wrote a patriotic essay on the idiocy of refusing to even consider a negotiated peace until thousands of men had been killed – a ironic idiocy, she wrote furiously, since the final peace would have to be negotiated anyway, so why not just do it first? She told Barbara she thought her brother was a twit, and she bet he would change his mind when he actually found himself on a battlefield surrounded by corpses.
This stance, unsurprisingly, did not win her any friends. People started to whisper things in the halls. An older girl, who May did not even know, tripped her up in the corridor, and laughed when all her books went flying. Arriving in her form room one morning, she found the word TRAITOR! scratched into her desk. From the giggles and whispers amongst the other girls, even May’s particular friends, it was obvious that they all knew all about it. The form mistress sighed when May had complained, and said, ‘Well, May, you do rather ask for it, don’t you?’
The girls at school had been fired up with lust to attack someone – anyone – and since Brightview School for Girls regrettably did not contain any actual Huns, they turned on May. Girls she had never spoken to before hissed ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Coward!’ at her as she passed.
‘What would you do if a Hun was attacking your mother?’ they demanded, at break time. ‘What would you do if the Huns invaded and killed us all? That’s what would happen if everyone was a pacifist.’
‘No, it wouldn’t,’ said May. ‘If everyone was a pacifist, the Germans would be pacifists too, and they wouldn’t do anything of the sort.’
‘Huns aren’t pacifists,’ said Barbara scornfully. May said heatedly that her mother knew several very nice German suffragists who were, and Barbara knew nothing about it. But that turned out to be a mistake too. The girls added ‘Hun-lover’ to their list of cat-calls, and taunted May with lewd suggestions about what she wanted the Huns to do to her. This was as baffling as it was hurtful. Arguments May could cope with, even arguments where every girl in her form room was against her. Not for nothing had she stood in the street while passers-by threw rotten vegetables at her mother. But the violence and the cruelty of this hate campaign was outside of her experience. You couldn’t argue with it. You couldn’t fight it. All you could do was put down your head and endure.
It wasn’t just at school that May was lonely. The outbreak of war seemed to mean an awful lot of committee work, and May’s mother had flung herself into the fray. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was full of pacifists; they had, after all, been saying for years that once women had the vote, there would be no more wars. This feeling was not, however, universal. Most suffragists came from middle-class homes, where the supremacy of King, Country and the British Empire went without saying. Furthermore, both Millicent Fawcett – leader of the NUWSS – and Emmeline Pankhurst – leader of the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union – knew that a suffrage movement which came out against the war would rapidly lose all public sympathy.
Mrs Pankhurst had early on declared the WSPU’s support for the war, but the NUWSS were less easily swayed. At meeting after meeting, they wavered between grudging support and out-and-out opposition. It was hoped that Millicent Fawcett would officially condemn the war, but she showed no signs of wanting to. And it all meant a beastly lot of extra work for May’s mother.
On top of this, there was the Women’s Peace Movement, as well as the Quakers, who, in true contrarian Quaker style, were in the process of reviving something called the Friends’ War Victims’ Relief Committee. Nobody was sure exactly what relief war victims actually needed, but they were determined to find out and provide it. May’s mother spent all day rushing from committee meeting to public meeting to lecture hall to picket.
She did, however, manage to find a morning to go down to the school and complain. This had not been a success either. The form mistress had listened politely, and explained that Brightview School for Girls was proud of its patriotic history, and that May should consider supporting her fellow countrymen like her classmates. Men in France were desperately under-equipped, and if May thought making handkerchiefs was more important than keeping a fighting man’s feet warm – well! What could the form mistress do? May’s mother said furiously that she would take May out of that disgusting school at once, and send her to one of the Quaker schools, Sibford, or Sidcot, but May begged her not to. Sibford and Sidcot were both boarding schools, and May knew how stretched their household finances already were. Besides, she didn’t want to go to boarding school. She didn’t even want to stop going to Brightview, exactly. It felt like a failure. It felt like giving up. And if May gave up, what sort of person would she be then? It would be just the same as knitting their beastly socks, and she was dashed if she was going to do it.
She was beginning to understand – a little bit – what life must be like for Nell. Nell might be awkward, and prickly, and shy, but not only did she wear what she wanted to wear, she marched down the street wearing it, clutching a banner and singing at the top of her voice. May loved it, but she had never understood it. She thought she did now, a little. If you gave in and became the person other people wanted you to be … well, you just couldn’t. It wasn’t possible, if you were the sort of person May was, or Nell was. May couldn’t just go into school and announce that she liked the war now. And Nell couldn’t just turn up one day with her hair in ringlets. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to, she literally didn’t know how she’d even begin. And once you realised that, there wasn’t anything left to be but the person you were, as loudly and stubbornly as
you could.
But even Nell was no comfort, now things were so difficult for her at home. May had tried to help, but Nell was prickly and proud about ‘charity’.
‘You ain’t a Poor Law Guardian,’ she said. ‘You’re me girl. You can’t give me money. Besides, how would I explain it to me mum?’
She would, however, accept meals, and Mrs Barber, who was surprisingly fond of Nell, would make her up parcels of treacle tart and pie and bread and cheese for her to take back on the long walk home to her family.
‘You could come and live here with us,’ May whispered, as they sat side-by-side on her narrow bed, Nell’s thin hand in hers.
Nell snorted. ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘Me, live here! No fear. I just got to get a job, that’s all.’
When Nell’s problems were so obviously so much more important, it felt absurd to talk about the girls at school. She felt, as she often did around Nell, like a child. Not that Nell asked. She was too locked-up in her own difficulties. May was vaguely resentful of this; Nell should have known that things were bad. She shouldn’t have had to tell her. Of course she knew it wasn’t important, compared to what was happening to Nell. But she should have cared anyway.
She didn’t say any of this, of course. But she thought it. Things didn’t stop being awful, just because someone else’s problems were awfuller, any more than you stopped being happy just because someone else was happier. You could still be perfectly miserable about people at school, even if your girl had lost her job. People dying in fields in France didn’t make Nell’s mother any happier, did they? Other people’s problems made you feel worse. Or they did if you were any sort of person at all.
It would have helped if Nell had at least pretended to understand May’s principles. But May suspected that Nell found her and Mama’s pacifism rather amusing. She supposed she couldn’t really expect her to agree with them; after all, her father was a soldier. But she could have tried to understand, at least.
She felt ashamed even thinking this. But she couldn’t help it. Sometimes it seemed to May as though she lived in another country to the girls at school. But Nell? Nell’s life was so different that she might as well live on the other side of the world.
Up
CHRISTOPHER COLLIS HAD – finally – been allowed to join up. He was offered a commission in a London regiment and went off wild with excitement to training. The German advance on Paris had been halted, but the Battle of the Aisne was showing no signs of being won by either side, and Christopher said joyfully that the war now wouldn’t be over until next year at least. Evelyn’s father was resigned and her mother quietly anxious. The girls were full of pride. Hetty immediately began knitting him a wobbly scarf in regimental colours, while Kezia took to telling everyone about ‘my brother in the army’.
Both of Teddy’s older brothers had also enlisted. Stephen was in an army camp near Reading, but Herbert, who’d been in the OTC all through Marlborough and Cambridge and was a reservist, had actually been sent to France. Evelyn didn’t know anyone else who was really in France. Hetty and Kezia flung themselves on Teddy every time he appeared, demanding to know what it was like ‘out there’, but Teddy was rather vague. Herbert sent dutiful letters to his mother, mostly demanding cigarettes and sweets, but they were short on details, giving a general impression of disorganisation, endemic low-level chaos, and boredom.
‘Has he killed anybody yet?’ said Kezia, and Teddy laughed and said he had no idea, but if Herbert had, he doubted very much that he’d write home and tell Mother and Father about it.
She’d seen rather a lot of Teddy over the last couple of months. A lot of his art-student friends had joined up, and she got the impression he was rather lonely. She’d been finally allowed to move downstairs, and he would come and sit on the end of the couch and draw her funny pictures of what was happening in the world outside. A significant proportion of the art students, apparently, considered themselves too internationalist and intellectual to want to fight. Teddy said he could see their point, if he squinted at it from a distance, but this didn’t stop him drawing rather sneery caricatures of them all, with long hair and painter’s smocks, tittering about the Germans while Christopher and Stephen and Herbert went off to defend them. She could see he resented being assumed to be one of their number, which worried her. So far he’d shown no inclination to join up himself, but she knew he wouldn’t wait for ever.
They were no longer allowed to be together unchaperoned, and had to endure either Evelyn’s mother or Miss Perring sitting in the easy chair with darning or knitting or letters, pretending this was where they’d intended to spend the afternoon anyway. This made conversation rather difficult. Evelyn had all sorts of things she wanted to say to him, private things, intimate things, and instead was stuck talking about soldiers, or art students, or books. It was maddening. She felt as though something huge and mysterious and vital had happened to her – to him – to both of them – and it was forced to stay trammelled inside her. Every time he left she swore that next time she would tell him, Miss Perring or no. She would wait with increasing impatience until he got there – all the time he wasn’t there she felt as though she was half alive, waiting … and then when he did arrive her courage would fail her again. How could you possibly tell someone you loved them with your mother sitting next to you, darning Father’s socks?
At the end of October, he came round to visit again. Evelyn was on the couch in the drawing room, wrapped up under a blanket in front of the fire, picking rather dully at a half-finished cushion-cover left over from last term’s needlework class. She perked up as she heard his voice, and her mother got up and went to greet him. There was a long pause, in which she could hear the murmur of their voices in the hall. Then he came into the room, alone, and shut the door behind him. Her heart began to beat rather quickly.
‘Hullo,’ he said, uncertainly, twisting his hat between his hands.
‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘You’ll muck up the brim if you keep doing that, you know.’
‘What? Oh!’ Teddy let go of the hat and looked around for somewhere to put it. He set it down on top of the couch, then changed his mind and put it on the coffee table instead. Then he sat in the easy chair.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I – that is – the time has come – I mean …’
It wasn’t about her at all. It was about the war. Her disappointment made her harsher than she’d intended.
‘You want to join the army,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I rather think I ought to. I didn’t at first – I can’t quite see me in a tin hat somehow, can you? But – well – when it comes down to it, I find I don’t quite like the thought of letting all the other chaps do the dirty work for me.’
‘You mean all the other fellows have joined up and you feel a heel,’ she said.
Teddy grimaced. ‘I don’t say that isn’t a part of it,’ he said. ‘But it’s more … there’s a job that needs doing, and they’ve asked for volunteers, and – well – when it comes down to it, none of my excuses really hold. I did think you might have understood that.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Evelyn. What about me? she wanted to say, which was ridiculous, and childish, but she couldn’t help herself. She was only now realising that if he joined the army he would go away and she wouldn’t see him again for months and months – perhaps ever. ‘You must do as you think best,’ she said instead, which was nearly as bad. The worst of it was, she didn’t exactly disagree with him. Of course he couldn’t be the only sensible chap still left behind in classes while everyone else was in France. Of course, if anyone had to go, it ought to be young, unmarried men like Teddy. But while those things were very easy to think in the abstract, even surprisingly easy to think in reference to Christopher, with his thick brown Collis hair all cut short and his brand-new second-lieutenant’s uniform, Evelyn’s patriotism faltered when she thought of laughing, curly-haired Teddy getting blown to pieces somewhere. Teddy’s workmanlike assessment of the
problem irritated her too. Kit, she knew, longed to be a hero. Evelyn had secretly always rather fancied herself as the next Emily Wilding Davison. But Teddy sounded like a boy scout volunteering to do the washing-up.
What happened to ‘No cause is worth dying for’? she wanted to say. Are the rotten Belgians really so much more important than … than my emancipation was? She knew this was a beastly selfish way of looking at things, and the knowledge made her furious.
‘Well then,’ said Teddy. ‘The other thing is – that is –’ She glared at him, and he stopped. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Do you want to marry me or not? Because I jolly well want to marry you, and if you don’t – well – I do think you might tell a fellow, that’s all, so he knows where he stands.’
‘I suppose you think I’ll say yes just because you’re going to go and get your head shot off,’ said Evelyn coldly.
Teddy flushed. ‘There’s no need to be such a cat about it,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want to, you don’t, that’s all.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t want to,’ said Evelyn. She felt suddenly ashamed. She had been waiting for this moment for months, and now when it had come, she’d gone and ruined it. ‘Oh, Teddy, I am being a brute. Of course I’ll marry you.’
‘Really? Will you really, though?’
‘Honestly, truly. I’ve been – ever since that day when you came into court, I’ve been – I mean, I’ve been wanting to tell you. I – well.’ She stopped in confusion. ‘I’d love to marry you,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything I’d like more.’
Teddy didn’t seem to know where to look. He picked up his hat, put it down again, picked it up, looked at it for a moment and then rammed it on his head. The corners of his mouth were twitching upwards in a most undignified fashion.
‘Oh,’ he said. And then he really did grin. ‘Jolly good.’