Things a Bright Girl Can Do
‘Crikey, you are a romantic,’ said Teddy.
Teddy wore his uniform, with his new first lieutenant’s pips. Hetty and Kezia were bridesmaids in pale blue muslin. Christopher and Stephen were both still at the Front, but Herbert was there as Teddy’s best man.
The reception was held in the church hall. There wasn’t much food, but there was a real cake, for which all the guests had donated sugar, or butter, or milk, or eggs. There were telegrams from Teddy’s friends on different fronts all over the world; there was even a rather lewd telegram from his unit, which made his mother shake her head and Herbert chuckle. The whole thing was ever so much nicer than Evelyn had expected. She had supposed it would be like her friend Joyce’s wedding last year, everyone hanging around in ghastly clothes, making polite conversation with other people’s aunts. But it turned out to be quite different when it was all your own aunts. She had never before felt so loved, or so surrounded by people who wished her well. It was an unnerving feeling, and one she wasn’t entirely sure she was comfortable with.
She was relieved that they weren’t expected to stay for the dancing, since by half past six Teddy was looking exhausted. Her father had booked them a room in a hotel, and Evelyn had a new going-away outfit with a little blue hat to wear, which made her feel frightfully grown up. They sat in the back seat of the cab and waved goodbye, while everyone cheered and waved back and called ‘Good luck!’ Then the cab turned the corner, and suddenly it was over.
‘All right?’ she said to him, and he nodded.
‘Just tired.’ He took her hand and smiled at her. ‘You?’
‘I’ll say.’
He was watching her with an odd expression on his face, a mixture of pride and anxiety.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so happy,’ he said. ‘I hope to God we aren’t making a terrible mistake.’
‘Oh, Teddy!’ she said. ‘Do stop talking such rot. It’ll be all right, I promise it will.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ he said, but he didn’t sound sure. She rested her head against his shoulder. He put his arm round her.
‘I love you,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I just hope it’s enough.’
Doors, Open and Shut
IT HAD TAKEN an age, but things for May were, finally, settling down. There had been a month when they’d lived with May’s grandparents in Greenwich, while May’s mother had cobbled together dishes and dressers and dining-room tables from friends and acquaintances. The Quakers had, as ever, been bricks, and had unearthed all sorts of furniture from box rooms and outhouses and attics. May’s grandparents had donated their piano, mostly unused since their children had left home, and although May’s mother grumbled that it was ancient and awful, it seemed to suffice for lessons. It was transported to their little house, and May’s mother bicycled from Greenwich to Bow each day to give lessons in the bare parlour.
The suffragists, meanwhile, had declared May’s mother a heroine. There had been stories about her in Votes for Women, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Herald. Donations and offers of help had been forthcoming from all sorts of unexpected quarters, and at last they were able to move back home and at least live, if in rather more straightened circumstances than before.
May secretly suspected that her mother rather enjoyed all this drama. It was all right for Mama; she didn’t have to spend her evenings staring at the spaces where familiar things had once belonged. Sacrificing everything for a cause was rather a grand and exciting thing to do. Having everything sacrificed for you by someone else was just awkward and frustrating and difficult. (That flash of Nell again. You can’t ask someone else to die for what you believe in! It was beginning to dawn on May that she’d probably behaved very badly towards Nell.)
She pushed the thought down; there was nothing she could do about it now, after all. Her mother bought her a subscription to a circulating library as a sort of apology for the loss of the books, and though of course it didn’t make it up, she discovered E.M. Forster, Edith Wharton, G.K. Chesterton, and a whole lot of H.G. Wells that the school library didn’t seem to have heard of. Which helped.
Perhaps due to the publicity surrounding the case, the Treasury seemed determined to make life difficult for them. Their gas was cut off, on the pretext of seizing the money they had paid on account, and it was with some difficulty that they managed to get it restored. Their post was diverted and opened in the hope of intercepting money.
At last, their furniture and other possessions were sold at auction. May and her mother made up a list of the most important things and were able to buy almost all of them back, although May’s secret hope that the photograph albums might be sold proved unfounded. But the money raised from the auction, together with money seized from the gas company and the postbag, was enough to pay the debt.
‘I hope you aren’t planning on repeating this performance next year,’ Mrs Barber grumbled. Mrs Barber’s as-you-wish-ma’am face had grown rather forced over the last year.
Mama flinched, almost but not quite imperceptibly. May hadn’t thought of that. But of course, if you’d decided not to pay your taxes until women had the vote, you had to keep not paying your taxes until women had the vote. How long would it be? Years, probably. For the first time, she felt actually angry at her mother, a confusing sort of feeling, since she knew perfectly well that she herself would probably have done exactly the same. But at least it would have been her decision.
She wasn’t sure whether what she felt was selfishness, and a lack of commitment to the cause, or whether what her mother had done to their family had crossed a line from which she could never return.
Still, for now, there was breathing space, which May sorely needed. She was seventeen. She would be leaving school in July, and then she would have to decide what to do next. She knew she’d be expected to get some sort of job, and the idea was a welcome one. Her mother’s idea of war work – anti-war work – had begun to leave her unsatisfied. No matter how hard you campaigned, no matter how many protests you went on and petitions you signed and speeches you gave, nothing seemed to change. And it did get awfully dispiriting after a while.
May thought of the cost-price restaurant, and the toy factory where Nell’s mother worked. At least they had made a difference. They might have saved Bernie’s life.
The older she got, the more May was wondering what sort of difference she wanted to make. A couple of years ago, making a difference meant shouting in the street, telling everyone around you as noisily as you could exactly what was wrong with whatever it was they were wrong about. Now … she wasn’t so sure. Deeds not words, Mrs Pankhurst and her Suffragettes said. May was wondering if there might be something in it. Not ripping up paintings and blowing up houses, obviously. But … May was beginning to wonder if it wasn’t better to build a house than shout about how awful it was that people didn’t have one.
‘Doesn’t it infuriate you?’ her mother said. ‘How few jobs there are for women? Teacher or companion or secretary … wouldn’t it be wonderful if after the war we could carry on being ’bus conductors and machinists and stretcher-bearers?’
‘Hmm,’ said May. She agreed, of course, but … ‘I wouldn’t mind being a teacher,’ she said.
March
1917
How Doth the Little Busy Wife
How doth the little busy wife
Improve each shining hour?
She shops and cooks and works all day,
The best within her power.
How carefully she cuts the bread,
How thin she spreads the jam!
That’s all she has for breakfast now,
Instead of eggs and ham.
In dealing with the tradesmen, she
Is frightened at the prices,
For meat and fish have both gone up,
And butter too, and rice has.
Each thing seems dearer ev’ry week,
It’s really most distressing,
W
hy can’t we live on love and air?
It would be such a blessing!
Wartime Nursery Rhymes,
Nina MacDonald
Points
‘MAY! IT IS you, isn’t it?’
It took May a moment to recognise the woman in the coat with the Red Cross armband on the sleeve. Then, ‘Sadie!’
She could feel the smile splitting her whole face. She couldn’t help herself. Sadie, after all these years! Sadie!
‘It’s so good to see you!’ she said. And she meant it. Sadie felt like a door to another time, a time when all the tumbledown houses were new and standing. Sadie!
In the three years since she’d seen her, Sadie had changed so much as to be almost unrecognisable. The red lipstick and the little earrings and the defiant bare-headdedness had gone. Instead, she was wearing what looked like army boots, and a trench coat so ragged it looked as though it had been used to carpet a barn dance.
‘What have you been doing?’ May said, and Sadie went into a long description; she’d been driving an ambulance; no, not on the Front Line, here in London, picking up men from the stations and taking them to the military hospitals. ‘I want to get over there – and I think I will soon, only it’s so difficult …’
She looked tired, May thought, and much older than she had three years ago, which was hardly surprising, she supposed. Everyone knew how overworked the VADs and the nurses and the ambulance drivers were. How strange to think of Sadie driving an ambulance!
‘How …’ She sought for the right platitude, and couldn’t find it. ‘Exciting’ was callous, but ‘awful’ seemed inadequate (although of course ferrying bleeding soldiers about must be rather awful). She supposed the bromide she was looking for was something like: ‘What good work all you girls are doing!’ which she couldn’t quite bring herself to say.
Sadie saved her by changing the subject and asking what May was doing now. May launched into a long convoluted explanation, which included handing out leaflets, and the marches, and the speaking in parks, and the school play, and the peace conference. Sadie listened vaguely. It occurred to May that perhaps an ambulance driver would think the war a good idea. Plenty of people still did, after all. She didn’t know which side of the internationalist/patriotic suffrage split Sadie had come down on. She’d never thought of her as a patriot. But you never knew, did you?
Sadie didn’t seem particularly interested in peace-building, though. She waited until there was a break in the flow of words, then said, ‘And what happened to Nell?’
May shrugged. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ she said stiffly. Sadie gave her a questioning look.
May sighed. ‘She’s working in a munitions factory,’ she said. ‘Making shells! To blow people up! You’d think she’d know better!’
‘Half the world is blowing up the other half,’ Sadie said mildly.
‘Well, they shouldn’t,’ said May.
Sadie raised her eyebrows. May had the grace to feel embarrassed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But shells are quite a different thing to ambulances, you must see that. Principles are important. Don’t you think they’re important?’
Sadie was quiet for a moment. ‘Perhaps. But don’t you think people are important too? This time next year, we might all be living in Germany. We might all be dead!’
May was startled. She’d known the war was going badly, but it wasn’t going that badly, surely?
‘Heavens!’ she said, trying to speak lightly. ‘I don’t imagine it’s going to come to that!’
Sadie didn’t answer. Then she said, ‘Look here. I admire your strength of feeling. But … don’t lose your friends over it, will you? People like us … we need all the friends we can get. We have to stick together if we’re going to survive.’
‘I know!’ said May, although she didn’t, not really, not the way Sadie did. ‘I know that!’
‘Do you?’ said Sadie. She scratched the back of her head. ‘It’s a wretched life this, May. I don’t think you realise yet quite how wretched it can be. Hiding everything that’s important to you … never quite respectable, never quite decent … it’s such a lonely way to live.’
May looked at her in wonder. She had never thought that Sadie might be lonely. It occurred to her to wonder what had happened to the glamorous Priscilla. Was she still around, living a romantic anarchist life in Bloomsbury? It seemed unlikely. Was she doing war work like everyone else? Was she dead?
‘Don’t you miss her?’ said Sadie, more gently. ‘You seemed so happy, the two of you.’
‘I’m not the missing people sort,’ said May stiffly. But her long fingers were clenched around the strap of her handbag so tightly that her knuckles were white.
Eat Less Bread
EVELYN THOUGHT THAT never in her whole life had she felt so grateful for spring.
Life right now, for Evelyn, was an endless state of struggle, fought blindly, half asleep, in the permanent knowledge that at any one time there were five other things you ought to be doing instead of the thing you actually were.
She and Teddy were living in a cottage in a village on the edge of Oxford. Evelyn had always rather grandly looked forward to the days when, like her mother, she should be in charge of a house, and could ring for tea, or order roast beef and meringues for dinner every day for a week. She had not reckoned with starting her career as a housewife at a time when every vaguely employable woman had been absorbed by the factories or the various armed services, and every household of her acquaintance seemed to be run by a dispiriting series of ‘temporaries’ of varying levels of incompetence. A housekeeper, or even a maid, turned out to be impossible, and Evelyn was forced to make do with a daily charwoman, whose housework was sloppy and hurried, and cookery skills limited to boiling, and heating up tins. The cottage, which had looked so charming and doll’s houseish at first viewing, turned out to be dark, and draughty, and damp. There was of course no electricity, or even gas, forcing them to make do with oil lamps and a temperamental oil stove. And the roof leaked.
These domestic trials were complicated by food shortages, which were only growing worse as the war dragged on. Evelyn and all the other housewives she knew seemed to spend their lives trailing from shop to shop following desperate rumours of butter, or sugar, or meat, or jam. Even when one found such things, they were usually extortionately priced, and Evelyn would be left to stare at the tatters of a budget so optimistically compiled, and wonder whether her household could better survive a lack of bread or a lack of coal. EAT LESS BREAD ordered the advertisements. Fat chance of anything else! Evelyn told them savagely, every time she passed.
They had, on top of Teddy’s lieutenant’s pay, a small allowance from both of their parents, but whether through Evelyn’s lack of experience, Teddy’s doctor’s bills, the wartime prices, or simply the sheer number of unexpected things one seemed to need when setting up a house, they were perpetually short. Teddy was reluctant to ask his father for more; several of his enterprises had folded when the war began, and although no one was exactly explicit about this, it was understood that there was less money to be spared for grown-up sons than there might have been a few years before.
Throughout her childhood and adolescence, it had been Evelyn who had railed against petty injustices and slights, and Teddy who, with laughing good humour, had turned the world right-side up again. Before the war, Evelyn was sure, he would have transformed their leaking cottage and burnt dinner into a grand and comical adventure. But now it was Teddy who struggled, Teddy who needed her to reassure him and raise both their spirits. And Evelyn was very quickly realising that Angel of the Home was not a role to which she would ever be well suited.
Teddy had spent the autumn and winter of 1916 fighting battles on several competing fronts. He had been ill a great deal, first, and terrifyingly, with bronchitis, then, while he was still convalescing, with a bad dose of influenza, then a seemingly never-ending series of stomachaches and bilious attacks. These were all the more fru
strating because one never knew whether they might be the start of something serious, in which case the doctor must of course be called immediately, regardless of the strain on the budget, or whether they would pass of their own accord. Teddy himself was no help.
‘For God’s sake, don’t fuss,’ he’d tell Evelyn irritably, sitting up in bed in jersey and dressing-gown and worsted cap and scarf, to save on coal, his face white and strained, his teeth chattering with the cold. He seemed to feel the cold much more easily since coming back from France, which made the rising coal prices all the more desperate. More than once, when he was very bad, Evelyn had tipped the whole coal-scuttle onto the bedroom fire in a rage, and then been forced to write humiliating letters to her mother, begging for money. This money had always arrived, though Evelyn knew her mother was struggling with domestic crises of her own, and her silent kindness never failed to reduce her to tears. She seemed to be perpetually hovering on the edge of tears, that winter.
Even when Teddy wasn’t ill, he had lost the easy cheerfulness which Evelyn supposed it was now her womanly duty to supply. Although he claimed to like his job at Cowley Garrison well enough, he was subject to fits of depression all the more infuriating for bearing no apparent relation to anything tangible. She had assumed that he’d be pleased to be home, but as the war stumbled on, he seemed to resent his comparative inactivity as much as she resented her perpetual busyness.
‘At least in France you’re doing something,’ he complained. Evelyn pointed out that most of his letters had been full of how bored he was, but this was evidently the wrong thing to say.
‘Oh, what do you understand about anything?’ he cried, a question as infuriating as it was unanswerable. He would sit by the oil stove for hours at a time, drawing ghastly pictures of nightmarish landscapes, leaving the washing-up piled in the sink and coloured pencils strewn across the table.