The Ghost of Christmas Future
LATER, WHEN THE congratulations, and the embraces, and the exclamations over Teddy going away were over, when everyone’s health had been drunk, and Teddy had gone home to tell his parents the good news, and Hetty and Kezia had been packed off to bed, Evelyn sat alone on her couch in the drawing room. She felt curiously wide awake. She sat with her half-embroidered cushion-cover on her lap, but she didn’t pick it up. She stared instead into the drawing-room fire and thought, I am engaged to Teddy! I am engaged to be married! But it didn’t feel real. It belonged to a make-believe world, a when-the-war-is-over world. Where would they live? What would she do all day? Would she have a job? Would they have children? Perhaps Teddy will die, she thought, but that didn’t feel real either.
She heard a noise, and turned to see her father come into the room. He shut the door quietly behind him and sat down beside her.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘So I have a daughter who is engaged to be married.’
‘Yes,’ said Evelyn.
‘And a son who is determined to get himself killed just as soon as ever he can.’ He exhaled. He looked tired, Evelyn noticed. His civil service job, which had always sounded rather dull, now seemed to involve enormously long hours and late nights. Evelyn realised guiltily that she still didn’t know exactly what he did for a living. The old nursery explanation: ‘doing figures for the government’ suddenly sounded incredibly childish. And of course he was old, older than other people’s fathers. She felt a stab of guilt. She had never, not even for a moment, considered that it was her job to look after her parents, but for the first time she began to appreciate how hard Kit joining the army must be for them. Another sort of daughter, she realised, might have been sympathetic and comforting. She could hardly have been less comforting if she’d run away to join the circus.
‘Kit’s just trying to do his bit,’ she said, awkwardly. Her father gave her a wry smile.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘In the most bloody and dramatic way he possibly can. I know.’
Evelyn didn’t know what to say to that, so she changed the subject.
‘Chin up,’ she said. ‘At least I’m behaving myself now. I’m going to be a good little housewife for the rest of my life. You ought to be delighted.’
Evelyn’s father did not greet this pronouncement with the enthusiasm which might have been expected.
‘My Evelyn,’ he said. ‘Engaged at eighteen. I never pictured you marrying young. I rather thought you’d want to go off and raise some hell first.’
This surprised Evelyn.
‘I thought you wanted me to be married,’ she said. Her father smiled.
‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘I never imagined you’d pay the slightest bit of attention to what we wanted. You never have before.’
Suddenly, Evelyn felt hope rising inside her.
‘Father,’ she said. ‘Teddy and I aren’t going to get married for ever so long – not until the war’s over, anyway, and probably not until Teddy finishes college after that. Couldn’t – oh, couldn’t I go to Oxford while I’m waiting? Teddy wouldn’t object. I think he’d like it. And I expect I could pay you back when we’re married. Or perhaps I could teach, or something – I can’t imagine I’d be much earthly good at it, but someone might pay me something. Please, Father. Just think of the money Kit’s saving you by being in the army instead of at university. Don’t you want me to do something with my life?’
Evelyn’s father blew out his breath. He leant forward, his face half in shadow, half warm in the light of the flames. Evelyn waited, holding her breath. She felt as though the whole course of her life were being weighed, and just by breathing right, or sitting in a certain way, or saying the wrong thing, she might tip the balance in the other direction.
‘Doesn’t it frighten you?’ her father said, suddenly.
‘Doesn’t what frighten me?’
‘A whole generation of young men. This war with Europe looming over them like the Ghost of Christmas Future. Aren’t you afraid?’
‘No,’ said Evelyn honestly. ‘I mean – a bit for Teddy and Christopher. But mostly I think it’s thrilling. Don’t you?’
‘Me?’ said her father. ‘I think it’s terrifying.’ He put the palms of his hands together in a gesture rather like a child saying its prayers. He rested his forehead on the tips of his fingers and closed his eyes. Evelyn wondered if he were praying. Then he raised his head. ‘Go to Oxford if you want to, daughter,’ he said. ‘I won’t stand in your way. There are too many lives going to be broken in this war, without us breaking another.’
A Storm in a Hobnailed Boot
IT WAS A rainy Saturday, the worst sort of day. All of the Swancotts hated rain. The children, cooped up with nothing to do and nowhere to go, fought and made trouble and got under everyone’s feet. Nell’s mother was in a foul temper because the floor needed mopping and the windows washing, and the blacks leaded, and how could she do any of that with all the children here? Dot and Bernie, catching her bad temper, quarrelled noisily in the corner over nothing at all, and Dot pinched Bernie on the arm and Bernie pulled her hair, and Dot screeched and knocked the cotton-reel Johnnie was playing with off the little table on his high chair, and Johnnie began to cry and woke Siddy, who started to howl.
‘Bleeding hell!’ cried their mother. ‘Can’t I get a moment’s peace in here? Shut your gobs, the lot of you, before I shut them for you!’ And she handed Siddy to Dot, lifted Johnnie out of the high chair, and shooed the younger children into the bedroom.
‘And don’t come out till you can behave yourselves!’ she yelled.
That left Nell and Bill, Nell cutting the mould out of a bucket of potatoes her mother had bought cheap at the market, and Bill toiling over a pair of Bernie’s boots. The sole had come away at the toe, and flapped about when you shook the boot. Obviously Bernie couldn’t wear them out in the rain, so equally obviously someone had to mend them.
Boots were Nell’s father’s job. He had a tin box full of scraps of leather, and a shoemaker’s needle, and hobnails, and a little tin of dubbin for waterproofing the leather. As the man of the family, this job now fell to Bill, but Bill, it seemed, didn’t have the first idea how to mend a pair of boots. He was sitting by the range staring glumly at them. At last, he pulled out the leather needle and, rather doubtfully, began to unwind the thread.
Nell, also in a foul mood, had been waiting for this. Why should she be stuck chopping potatoes when Bill, who didn’t have a clue what he was doing, was allowed to do her father’s work?
‘You don’t want to sew it,’ she said scornfully. ‘The hobnails’ve come out – see there. You got to nail it back on. Fancy you not knowing that!’
Bill flushed. He was sixteen and three-quarters, which wasn’t at all an easy thing to be in November 1914. Several of his older friends had already joined up, and had come back from the Recruiting Office to swank about it to the girls and the younger boys. They had made it very clear to Bill that men joined the army, and little boys stayed at home with their mothers and sisters. Bill’s father, indirectly, had rather exacerbated this view of things. Bill adored his soldier father, and from early childhood had loved to hear his stories of army life, and the Boers, and the ‘natives’ in Africa. Bill’s father knew this perfectly well, and used the army as a way to manage his sons.
‘Look sharp, private!’ he’d say. ‘Wash that face and polish those boots, or I’ll have you drummed out of the regiment.’
For years Bill had dreamed of joining the army like his dad, and it was a bitter thing to have this long-prophesied war with Germany finally come and to have missed out on it by so short a hair. By the time he was old enough to join up, it would all be over. Right now, Bill was feeling much less of a man than he should be, and his sister Nell lording it over boots was the last straw.
Bill had suffered quite a lot for Nell’s sake over the years. A little sister who was better than you at cricket and football! A little sister who guyed herself up like a boy, and s
pat, and fought, and smoked a pipe, and swore! Bill considered it his brotherly duty to defend her, and mostly he did just that, but he couldn’t help but resent it sometimes. It wasn’t as though she was ever grateful! Why couldn’t she just behave like other girls did? Didn’t she know the things people said about her? Even now, when things were so tight, she still insisted on going around in all that get-up. Who did she think was ever going to give her a job, dressed like that? And then for her to say a thing like that? It was too much.
‘How dare you?’ he spluttered. ‘How bloody dare you? What do you know about it, anyhow?’
‘More than you does!’ Nell sneered. She had been longing for a fight all morning. ‘Why don’t you come and chop the potatoes, and let me show you how it’s done?’
‘You – you – you!’ Bill swore.
His mother said, ‘William Swancott!’ but he ignored her.
‘You think you’re so clever!’ he raged. ‘Don’t you know everyone’s laughing at you? Who’s ever going to marry a girl like you? Who’s ever going to give you a job? If you were a proper man, you’d care more about feeding those children than swanning about looking a guy! If you can’t behave like a woman, at least behave like a man, and put on something sensible and get a bleeding job!’
His words stung. He was, Nell knew, quite right. But – but – ‘You think I don’t know that?’ she cried. ‘How can I dress like a girl? How? Tell me how! What am I supposed to wear?’
She was right. There was nothing. Her only dress, the one she’d been forced into on Sundays and packed off to Sunday School with the other children (‘Only time your dad and me gets any peace, Sundays! Off you trot!’) had been pawned way back in August. So had her mother’s spare dress. And in any case, Nell was shorter than her mother and broader in the chest – she couldn’t have fitted into her clothes. In better times, her mother might have managed something – Dot had had a costume for the Suffragettes’ annual May Day pageant made out of an old bedsheet, and several times she and Nell had run up entire items of clothing overnight when last-minute disasters had happened to trousers or shirts or skirts. But right now there was no money for cloth, or thread.
‘You should’ve thought of that before, shouldn’t you?’ Bill raged. ‘You ain’t a kid any more, are you? And you ain’t a man neither, so stop bloody pretending you is! This war is gonna be won by men, not girls in they’s brothers’ clothes! How many Huns is you gonna kill? None!’
He was almost crying. So, to her horror, was Nell. She knew the other kids talked about her, knew she would never be a boy, not really. But her own family! Bill! She had never, never thought he felt like this.
‘Yeh, cause you’s killing so many, ain’t you?’ she roared. ‘Why ain’t you joined up then, if you feel like that about it?’ She gave him a look of pure scorn. ‘Think I’d still be here if I was you?’ she said. ‘Not bloody likely!’
He launched himself on her. She fought back, with all of her Suffragette training, mixed up with years of bare-knuckle fighting in the streets of Poplar. Fighting like a girl who knew ju-jitsu, and how best to attack a policeman! And fighting like an East End boy as well. Bill was taller than her, and stronger, and furious with rage, but she was winning. The other children were in the doorway, Dot shrieking, Bernie crying, ‘Oh, stop it! Stop it!’
‘Enough! Enough, I said! Stop it right now!’
She felt a bony hand at her elbow, a bony shoulder shoved between them. Her mother was forcibly pulling Bill off by the scruff of his neck, the way she used to when they were smaller than Bernie and Dot were now.
‘Outside!’ She gave Bill a cuff on the cheek. ‘I don’t care if it is raining. Go up to the park, go to Jim’s house, whatever. Don’t come back till you’ve got your head on straight. D’you hear me?’
Bill swore, and wiped his hand across his cheek, which was bleeding, Nell realised guiltily, though not much. But he went. Nell’s mother turned on the children in the doorway.
‘Mum, Mum, Nell’s crying—’ Dot said.
‘And you!’ their mother bellowed. ‘Back in that room and play nicely, or you’ll be out on your ear, and all.’
They disappeared. Nell’s mother rummaged in her pocket for a handkerchief, and handed it to Nell, who took it, furious with herself. Crying, over bloody Bill! Her mother tutted to herself, sat down at the table, and began to peel the potatoes at twice the speed Nell had managed.
At last, Nell managed to calm herself. She came and sat beside her mother, handed back the handkerchief and muttered, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘S’all right.’ Her mother pocketed it. ‘Lord knows, I’ve wanted to weep enough times since this bleeding war started.’ She began to chop the potatoes into quarters with neat flashes of the knife. Then suddenly, decisively, she said, ‘You know Bill didn’t mean that, didn’t you?’
Nell shrugged. Bill had meant it and he hadn’t meant it, she knew. It was complicated. Just like he was right and he was wrong, all at the same time.
Her mother sat back and regarded her with exasperation.
‘My God, girl,’ she said. ‘Do you know how proud I am of you? The whole world wants to knock us down and you just keep on fighting, don’t you? God didn’t make the world the way you wanted it, and you’re damn well going to rip it up and rebuild it right, ain’t you?’
Nell blinked. Her mother had never said she was proud of her. Ever. Mum didn’t say things like that. She yelled, and commanded, and kissed you, and worried you, but she didn’t say she was proud.
‘I know I ain’t a proper daughter—’ she began, awkwardly.
Her mother hooted.
‘Proper daughter!’ she said. ‘What am I, Queen of Bloody England! You’re me daughter, and that’s enough for me. Now go find your brother and make it up, d’you hear me?’
She pushed Nell out of the door and Nell went, reluctantly. It was still raining heavily. She looked up and down Coney Lane, but there was no sight of Bill. He’d probably gone round to one of his mate’s houses. That’s what she would have done in his place.
She hunched her shoulders against the rain, wishing she had a coat, and hurried towards the high street. There, in the shelter of a shop front, she dug out her tobacco pouch. It was almost empty, but there were enough scrapings left to fill the pipe half full. She lit the pipe and drew in the smoke, then released it in a long, slow exhale.
She didn’t know what to feel. Mum, Bill, everything. It was too much to keep in her head. Mostly what she felt was despair. She would never belong. Never. Meeting May had made her hope that perhaps there was a space in the world for people like her. Maybe there was if you were someone like May. But for someone from a family like hers? Never. If even Bill thought those things about her … And the worst of it was, he was right. How could she possibly carry on dressing like this if it meant the workhouse for Bernie and Dot and Johnnie and Sid?
But how could she possibly do anything else? The thought of dressing herself up like her mother in petticoats and bodices filled her with a physical revulsion so strong she thought she might vomit. It would be like … like getting married to George or Albert or Robbie or one of the other boys on the lane and pretending to love them. It would be like joining the Anti-Suffrage League and protesting against Miss Pankhurst. It would be like dressing up as a German and shooting at her father. It was impossible. The whole thing was impossible. There was nowhere to go and nothing to be. She had thought May was a refuge, but May was just a window, showing her a world she could never enter.
She leant back against the wall and closed her eyes. I wish I was dead, she thought, very clearly. She was cold, she was hungry, and she was more exhausted than she had ever been in her entire life. The thought of going home, getting up the next day, doing it all again, was more than she could bear.
Bill had not gone round to a mate’s house. He was too angry. The quarrel was too private. And – though he would never have admitted it – he was too worried that Nell might be right.
He
clenched his hands into fists in his pockets and offered a silent, furious curse to the world that had made him sixteen at a time when the only men who mattered were those aged eighteen to thirty-eight. Everything important was happening overseas, and here he was, a boy, while in France the men who mattered were men.
He went stumbling down the high street, kicking his boots in the puddles and sending up little angry sprays of water. Already there were dividing lines drawn in the sand: Those Who Were There and Those Who Weren’t.
Of course, most of the boys he knew Weren’t There yet. They were in training camps. They came back to Coney Lane on leave in stiff new uniforms and shiny new boots and swanked about impressing the girls. But they would be.
And he wouldn’t.
She was still standing there, the pipe in her hand, when Bill came back down the road. He had been walking round the streets of Poplar in a fury, thinking of all the things he should have said to his sister, and how he should have said them. Yet at the same time, he couldn’t help but wonder if his mother was right. Nell wasn’t a bad sort, not really. A bit peculiar, but who wasn’t? And a fellow really ought to stick by his sister, oughtn’t he? Of course, everything he’d said was perfectly true, but still … perhaps he oughtn’t to have said it.
He pushed angrily past a woman with a perambulator, and saw her, her head tipped back against the wall of the tobacconist’s, her eyes closed. Her dark hair was slicked wet by the rain, and her shirt clung to her chest. She looked – Bill thought – utterly defeated. He was shocked and ashamed. A man shouldn’t make a girl look like that, even if she was a rum sort of girl. Women were emotional creatures, everyone knew that. That was why you had to treat them gently, and not punch them in the face the way you would a boy. Nell might look a boy, but she was a girl really, and if she wanted to forget it, it didn’t mean he should.
He went over to her and leant against the wall beside her, bumping his shoulder against hers. She started and flinched away, then saw who he was. He saw the shutters go down in her eyes; she was wary, he saw, preparing herself for another attack.