Things a Bright Girl Can Do
Dear God, she prayed, and then stopped. She wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted. A Teddy perfectly all right and unhurt? A Teddy so ill that he wouldn’t have to go back to France, like Herbert seemed to expect? Or just a Teddy who was alive?
Dear God, she prayed at last, with more honesty than she’d ever used to anyone before, even Teddy. Let him not die. Let him come home safe. Let him still love me, and let me still love him. Let him still be Teddy, please God, and everything else will come out right.
A Bailiff With a Teacup
MAY HAD GROWN used to the fight for women’s suffrage taking a back seat to the fight for peace. So it was something of a surprise when she came home from school on Friday to find a bailiff sitting in the corner of the back room, drinking a cup of tea and eating a biscuit. He was rather a portly bailiff, with a round red face, and a shiny red bald patch on the top of his head.
‘Hello,’ said May, and the bailiff raised his teacup and said, ‘Afternoon, miss.’
May’s mother was hovering by the table, her fingers drumming nervously on the pile of unsold Votes for Women. She seemed full of a sort of pent-up excitement. Something, May thought, was obviously up.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked, and her mother said, ‘It appears I’ve been declared bankrupt. It’s rather exciting, isn’t it? I don’t believe I’ve ever had a debt in my life before.’
May could only stare. Bankrupt! It was impossible. Money was tight, but it wasn’t that tight. Also, Mama was a Quaker. She wouldn’t buy something she couldn’t pay for. Mama’s stockings were so old, the darns had darns on them, and she’d had that same dingy brown handbag for as long as May could remember. If they couldn’t afford something, they didn’t buy it. They paid their bills.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, and her mother said, ‘It’s the tax resistance campaign, darling. No taxation without representation, remember? We don’t pay our taxes until the government gives us a vote.’
May did remember. Her mother had been very involved in the campaign, and she and May had stood outside the courtroom protesting when Princess Sophia Duleep Singh had been taken to court for non-payment of taxes. The government had impounded a diamond ring and sold it to pay her fines, but a Suffragette friend had bought it back for her, which May secretly thought was stupendously romantic. Princess Sophia was a very glamorous Suffragette; she lived in Hampton Court and had known Queen Victoria.
‘Most of the tax resisters gave it up when war was declared,’ May’s mother was saying, ‘but I couldn’t do that, of course. Anyway, the tax office kept sending me summons, and I just kept ignoring them, and then last week I got a letter telling me I owed them fifty pounds and they were turning me over to the Bankruptcy Court. Imagine!’ She gave a gurgly, slightly hysterical giggle and said, ‘This is Mr Moss, darling. He’s a bailiff. He’s coming to live with us for six weeks, though I can’t think where he’s going to sleep.’
Mr Moss said, ‘Anywhere will do, ma’am. I ain’t particular. Kipped in all sorts of holes, I have, and it’s nothing to what our boys on the Western Front have to put up with, now is it?’
May supposed that it wasn’t, but she wasn’t really interested in where Mr Moss was going to sleep.
‘Why is he coming to live with us?’ she demanded. ‘I didn’t know bailiffs did that! I thought they just came and took all your things away!’
‘A common misconception, miss, if I may say so,’ said Mr Moss. ‘Your mother, now, she has six weeks to find that fifty pounds what is due and payable. Beg, borrow, steal – we don’t care how, stealing notwithstanding, which we couldn’t be said to countenance. I’m just here to make sure she doesn’t do away with these here goods and chattels, what you might say are collateral, and what His Majesty’s Government, if the debt is not paid, will be forced – not what I’d prefer, miss, given a choice – to seize and distrain in payment of said debt. You see how it is, I’m sure.’
‘Not really,’ said May, who didn’t. ‘You mean you’re going to stay in our back room for six weeks, and if Mama doesn’t pay the government fifty pounds at the end of it, you’re going to take away all our things?’
‘That’s exactly what he means,’ said her mother.
‘Do you have fifty pounds?’ Fifty pounds was a lot of money. It was more than Mrs Barber earned in a year.
‘That’s beside the point,’ her mother said. ‘The government claims to have started this war to fight for democracy. If they care that much about democracy, I do think they might actually practise it.’
May agreed, of course. And she thought she knew why her mother had continued the tax resistance campaign while so many others had abandoned it; it was beastly to have given up the cause just because of this idiotic war. But she felt bewildered by the reality of it.
Three years ago, she knew she would have been wildly enthusiastic about this. Sacrificing everything for the suffrage cause! Privation! Publicity! Principle! And she still was in favour, she supposed. Certainly having decided not to pay tax, she quite saw that her mother couldn’t turn round and say, ‘Oh, it’s too difficult now, sorry.’
But at the same time … it wasn’t as though the newspapers were even interested in suffrage any more. It wasn’t like there were hundreds of them all doing it all over the country. As far as she could tell, it was just Mama and a couple of other pacifists. So what difference would it really make?
She went upstairs and looked around her bedroom; the books, the clothes, the patchwork quilt her grandmother had made for her when she was a little girl. Would they take all her things as well as Mama’s? Would they take all Mrs Barber’s?
There was a knock on her door and her mother came into the room.
‘I am sorry, darling,’ she said. ‘I should have talked to you about this. I never imagined it would ever get to this stage.’
‘I know,’ said May. ‘It’s all right. It’s quite exciting, really.’ But she didn’t want her mother to believe her, and her mother didn’t.
‘We do have the money. I’ve been keeping it safe – I intended to pay them when we finally got our freedom, you see. I would rather stick it out, because I do think it’s important that the cause isn’t forgotten, and it would be awful to give in the very moment it got hard. But it’s an awful lot to ask, I do know that. Say you want to stop and I’ll pay them now. Shall I?’
Should she? A very large part of May wanted to say yes. But …
‘No …’ she said. ‘Mama, of course not.’ She gave her mother a wan smile. ‘Imagine that man living in our back room for six weeks. Whatever do you think he’ll make of us?’
What Are You Going to Do?
IT WAS ANOTHER Sunday afternoon. Nell had been home for dinner, but Johnnie and Siddy were chasing each other, yelling, through the two rooms, and she felt she couldn’t bear it any longer. She had escaped to the offices of the East London Federation of Suffragettes and was stuffing copies of the Woman’s Dreadnought into envelopes; dull work, but necessary. Nell preferred envelope stuffing to selling; you got to sit down, and you didn’t have to deal with cat-calls and rotten vegetables. Nell got quite enough cat-calls, without going looking for them.
The little office was warm and cosy. There were three women, and Nell, and an old gramophone, playing music-hall songs.
‘How old are you now?’ said Mrs Cohen, suddenly. Mrs Cohen had taken something of an interest in Nell since the business with Mrs Danks.
‘Seventeen,’ said Nell. ‘Why?’
‘And what are you going to do with your life?’ Mrs Cohen persisted. ‘You can’t spend it all in that nasty factory, can you? What are you going to do when the war ends?’
Nell was used to this sort of question, and grimaced. However, she liked Mrs Cohen, so she answered, politely enough, ‘I ain’t never going to get married, Mrs Cohen, so don’t tell me I ought to. I ain’t that sort of girl.’
‘Bless you!’ said Mrs Cohen. ‘I didn’t mean that. I never thought you were the marrying sort, dear. Some girls are and
some girls aren’t, and that’s all there is to it. No, what I meant is, if you aren’t going to marry, what are you going to do? You’re a modern girl, you are. You should look around you. Look at what the Suffragettes are doing! Why, there’s Mrs Stevens, who used to work with your mother at the toy factory. Look at her! She’s only gone off and set up with a toy business of her own down south, and a very good thing too, what with her poor husband coming back from France so poorly, and her having to earn the money for all those children.’
This question took Nell somewhat by surprise. She had never given much thought to her future. One didn’t, really. One got a job, and if there wasn’t a job, one looked about until there was one. When you grew up, you got married, and had children. If you didn’t get married, you lived in a room somewhere, and worked. That was all there was to it.
‘Bright girl like you,’ Mrs Cohen was saying. ‘How much you earning, now?’
‘Twelve shillings a week,’ said Nell. ‘Which is rotten – the men get twice that.’
‘Aye,’ said Mrs Cohen. ‘But they’re doing all right, your family, aren’t you? Your mother’s working. And your father’s sending money home, ain’t he?’
‘Aye,’ said Nell. She wondered where this was going.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Cohen. ‘So, there’s money for you to train at something else, ain’t there? After the war, all the men are going to come home – they’re going to want their jobs back, aren’t they? You need to start thinking about that. All these jobs for women – they aren’t going to last.’
‘I s’pose not,’ said Nell. She’d been thinking about this too. ‘Doing what, though?’
‘Well!’ said Mrs Cohen. ‘That’s up to you, ain’t it? What do you want to do?’
Nell was quiet. She folded the copy of the Woman’s Dreadnought, put it in the envelope, and licked the flap. Then she dropped it on the pile for Mrs Cohen to add the stamp.
‘I’d like to work in an office,’ she said at last, rather shyly. ‘With me own desk and me own typewriter. And people calling me Miss Swancott and fetching me biscuits. And I’d do shorthand and typing and …’ Nell was vague about what people did in offices. ‘And write letters and things. Like them professional Suffragettes, at WSPU.’ She was thinking of the women who worked at the charities May’s mother was involved with. Or the people who worked at the Trade Unions. Could you get paid for that, or did you have to do it for love, like May’s mother did? ‘Or them Trade Unionists,’ she said. ‘Can you do that as job?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Mrs Rasheed, another Suffragette, who was listening to this conversation. ‘I think you ought to organise a strike at your munitions factory. Make them pay you what they pay the men!’
‘Not bloody likely!’ said Nell.
She bent her head over her envelopes to hide her confusion. She was used to people telling her she ought to act more like other girls did. It was rather bewildering to be told instead that she ought to act more like herself.
There’s a Long, Long Trail A–winding
TEDDY CAME BACK to England at the end of August. Evelyn had been sure he’d be sent to a London hospital, so it was rather a blow to discover that he’d somehow ended up in Bristol. She’d had to fight to be allowed to visit him; at first, to her horror, her mother had wanted to come too.
Still, she was fortunate that he’d been wounded in the vac; Somerville would never have allowed it. Teddy’s parents had gone down the week before, but Evelyn had been forced – loudly complaining – to attend a family wedding instead. Permission to visit, alone, a week later was something in the nature of a parental olive branch.
Teddy had, at last, sent several letters from the French hospital, but they’d all been rather uninformative, and had read rather like the dutiful missives he’d been forced to write from prep school. How are you? I am fine. The food is awful. Teddy.
It was a wet, blustery sort of day. The train was full of soldiers singing.
We’re here,
Because we’re here,
Because we’re here,
Because we’re here.
We’re here,
Because we’re here,
Because we’re here,
Because we’re here.
They were drunk, Evelyn realised. She and the other occupant of the first-class compartment – a portly lady in a dark purple dress – exchanged surreptitious glances of horror. But she needn’t have worried. The soldiers were riotous, but perfectly respectful; one, an Irish lieutenant, even insisted on fetching her mackintosh down from the luggage rack and carrying the portly lady’s suitcase off at Bristol.
Teddy’s hospital was in an old workhouse. A lot of soldiers seemed to be in places like this; Evelyn’s friend Joyce’s husband was in a Masonic hall. The workhouse had been abandoned some years previously, and it showed. There was a damp smell, which the hospital disinfectant hadn’t quite managed to cover. Many of the windows were boarded up. It reminded Evelyn of a dead thing. Of an animal with an untreated wound, dying slowly.
It reminded her of prison.
Teddy’s ward was a large room, with long, high windows. There was a gramophone at one end, blaring out There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding, which seemed an odd choice for a hospital, but the men didn’t seem to mind. The room was full of men, and for a terrifying moment, Evelyn couldn’t find him. Had he changed so much? What would he say if she couldn’t recognise him? Or – oh, God, had something happened to him? She was beginning to panic when she saw him, lying propped up in a bed by the window.
It was over a year since she’d seen him. What sort of person was he now? The trenches were foul. Everyone knew that. It was all rats and mud and people dying in unspeakable agonies and heaven knew what else. Going to France changed people, everyone knew that too. It had changed Christopher. He’d come home at Easter quieter, thinner, and somehow older – a young man instead of a boy pretending. But Christopher had always been distant and rather superior, so Evelyn hadn’t minded much, though she knew Mother had. Teddy was different. She couldn’t bear it if Teddy wasn’t Teddy any more.
She studied him, almost afraid to speak. He was thinner too, and his face was a queer bluish-white. He had a sketchbook open in his lap, a pencil in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Kit smoked now too, but she hadn’t known Teddy did. There was a scar she didn’t recognise down his cheek, and – more than that – something altered in his expression. He’s grown up, she realised, and although she tried to laugh at herself, she knew it was true. She came forward, rather nervously, and then he looked up and saw her, and his face came alive all at once, the way an electric lamp does when you turn on the bulb.
‘Hullo!’ he said, and she knew it would be all right.
‘Hullo, Ted,’ she said, rather tremulously. There wasn’t a chair, so she sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him, taking in every feature of him, trying to get used to the altered lines of his face.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said.
‘You too,’ he said. ‘Do you know, I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to come? I couldn’t sleep all last night – it’s a beastly noisy ward this, something’s always waking you up – and I kept looking at the clock and thinking, Twelve hours and Evelyn’ll be here. I suppose that’s rather absurd, isn’t it? But there you go.’
‘It’s not absurd at all,’ said Evelyn. ‘I’ve been doing just the same – for days, ever since Mother said I could come. How are you? I mean – how are you feeling? Do you know,’ she said, trying to speak lightly, ‘I don’t even know what’s wrong with you.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well. A bit of shrapnel in the lungs and another that just grazed the stomach. It was a dashed close shave, that last one – stomach wounds are pretty bad news.’
‘And they said you’d been gassed?’ It was the gas that had worried her most; it sounded so awful.
‘Not really. I mean, I wasn’t sharp enough with the gas mask, that’s all. But it wasn’t much. I wouldn?
??t be here if it had been.’
‘Oh.’ She wasn’t sure what to say to that. ‘Are you in much pain?’
‘No … it’s not so bad.’ She suspected he was lying, but she didn’t push him. ‘It’s dull, that’s all,’ he said, suddenly fretful. ‘And it’s so noisy. A fellow never gets a minute to himself.’
‘That does sound rotten,’ Evelyn agreed. Privately, she already thought the noise was a bit much, and she’d only just got there. ‘Won’t they let you come home?’
‘Not for an age, worst luck. And then it’ll only be for a week or so. They don’t let you convalesce at home now – it’ll be a convalescent hospital, though I thought I’d see if they’d send me to one in Oxford. That would be rather decent, wouldn’t it?’
‘Frightfully decent,’ she said, though she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever manage to see him. You couldn’t just go and visit young men unchaperoned, even if you were engaged; girls got sent down for less. But it didn’t seem the time to say so. ‘And will – Herbert thought – when he thought you’d been gassed, I mean – he thought you might be out of it.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I might. They think my lungs are going to be mucked up for ever. But the doctor thought I probably wouldn’t be. It won’t be France, anyway. It might be teaching cadets – my CO said he’d write and recommend me. I’d like that.’
‘Yelling at Tommies for not polishing their boots properly?’ said Evelyn. ‘Really?’
‘I’m quite good at it, actually,’ said Teddy mildly. And she felt, with a sudden, sickening swing, the chasm of experience widening between them. She thought about next term, about him convalescing in one of the colleges and her not being allowed to see him, and then once he was well, him going off to God-knows-where to shout at new recruits, and perhaps her not seeing him again for months and months and months. She felt she couldn’t bear it. Even with the promise of a week or so’s leave at home, she couldn’t.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘we ought to get married sooner rather than later.’