‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ May said. ‘Don’t you just feel … so alive? Oh, don’t you feel sorry for girls who don’t have any purpose in life?’
Evelyn didn’t quite know how to answer that. For as long as she could remember, her life had been a series of battles and frustrations. Was that something to be thankful for?
‘The girls at school,’ said May. ‘They just want to get married and have babies. Who wants babies when you could be fighting a holy war?’
On the banner behind her, Joan of Arc was lifting her torch with all the fervour of a young woman who knows she’s going to be a martyr. Nobody could look less like a martyr in a holy war than May, with her long hair with a blue ribbon in it, and her bony, rather rabbit-y face. But she evidently meant what she said. Evelyn began to wish that she believed in anything as fervently as May did. She looked around her, at the assembled hundreds of womankind. A boy in the street called, ‘Oughtn’t you be home minding the baby?’
‘Oughtn’t someone be home minding you?’ Miss Plom called back, and the Suffragettes cheered. May caught Evelyn’s eye, and grinned.
‘Isn’t it nice to belong to something?’ she said.
Belonging. Evelyn wasn’t sure she had ever belonged to anything. Family, she supposed, and England in an abstract sort of sense. And Teddy of course. If one could belong to people. Did she belong to the Suffragettes? Did she want to? Perhaps she did. Perhaps it would be nice to feel as ardent as May or as joyful as Miss Plom. Evelyn couldn’t remember ever feeling as enthusiastic about anything as May seemed to about suffrage. To her, this was a battle for the right to … to … to exist, not a crusade. There was nothing nice about it. It was fight or suffocate slowly to death in respectable Hampstead.
‘Oh yes,’ she said to May. ‘Glorious.’ And she hurried forward to catch up with Teddy. He had given up on Miss Plom and moved on to teasing Miss Colyer, who was telling him very earnestly all about vegetarianism.
‘I know it sounds a little eccentric,’ she was saying. ‘But, really, I feel remarkably healthy. Why, I haven’t had a single bilious attack since I gave up meat, and my dyspepsia is quite gone. And Miss Fitzpatrick says the same, don’t you, Miss Fitzpatrick?’
‘Indeed I do,’ said Miss Fitzpatrick. ‘I used to catch a chill every winter, regular as clockwork. And now! Not at all!’
‘Heavens!’ said Teddy. ‘But just think of the poor doctors. Why, if everyone went vegetarian, you’d put them out of business entirely. And then where would the poor dears be?’
Evelyn came up and put her arm round his waist.
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ she whispered in his ear, and he gave her a look of quite devastating innocence.
Miss Colyer lifted her chin and began to sing, ‘Rise up, women, for the fight is hard and long.’
Miss Fitzpatrick beamed, and joined her voice to Miss Colyer’s.
‘Rise up in thousands, singing loud a battle song.
Right is might, and in strength we shall be strong,
And the cause goes marching o-o-on.’
Evelyn had never heard the song before, but she knew the chorus of course, and joined in. Beside her, Teddy threw discretion to the wind and lifted his voice to the others’.
‘Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! The cause goes marching on.’
‘Hurrah!’ said Teddy, and kissed the top of her head.
Sadie
MAY WAS MARCHING with her mother and the Quaker suffrage society, the Friends’ League for Women’s Suffrage. Nell, of course, was marching with the East London Federation of Suffragettes. The various suffrage societies had assembled in their various meeting-places, then come together and waited, in increasing numbers, for the march to start. There were home-made banners and costumes, and people of all ages and social persuasions. Everyone was there, from the Actresses’ Franchise League to a battalion of Lancashire mill-girls in wooden clogs. There was an elderly woman in a bath-chair, with a sign reading: MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER, TAX-PAYER, SUFFRAGETTE. There was a little girl in a straw hat decorated with Suffragette ribbons.
May – impatient at waiting – had come down the phalanx until she found the ELFS, and Nell.
‘Nell! Nell!’
Both girls were excited, and a little nervous of what was about to happen – in May this came out in a giddiness and a tendency to gabble; in Nell in more awkwardness than usual, and a nervous tendency to clench her fists and move restlessly from one foot to the other.
May grabbed Nell’s arm.
‘Hello! You came! I mean, of course you came – but – well – it’s so good to see you!’ She glanced at an elderly suffragist who was watching them curiously, and dragged Nell out of earshot. ‘Come and meet my friend Sadie!’ she hissed, in what she probably thought was a whisper. ‘She’s – well, she’s – you know. Like us.’
Sadie was leaning against a shop window, smoking a cigarette. Nell had half expected her difference to be obvious, the way she supposed her own must be. And in a way it was; everything about this girl said rebellion, from the bobbed hair with the black bandeau and no hat, to the cigarette in the long jade holder, to the neat little ankle-boots clearly visible below her hemline, and the red lipstick. But despite the short hair, Sadie was definitely feminine. Nell felt a queer shiver go through her at the sight of her. Despite everything May had said, she had never quite believed in this other world of people like us. Was she about to be admitted to it?
Sadie drew in a long, slow breath of tobacco and blew it out slowly, watching Nell appraisingly.
‘Well,’ she said to May.
‘This is Nell,’ said May, excitedly. Beside Sadie she looked even younger than usual. Sadie shot Nell a look that Nell couldn’t quite interpret, somewhere between pleased and amused and conspiratorial. ‘She’s one of the East End Suffragettes.’ She beamed at Sadie, all teeth and happiness.
‘Aren’t you the cat who’s got the cream?’ said Sadie, amused. She nodded at Nell, then, seeing another woman waving to her across the crowd, gave an insouciant wave in the woman’s direction, pushed herself off the wall, said, ‘See you,’ to May, and was gone.
‘You see?’ May said, excitedly. ‘You don’t have to hide everywhere – I told you. What did you think – isn’t she wonderful?’
Swank, was what Nell thought. But good-looking swank. She scratched her arm.
‘Yeh,’ she said shortly. She didn’t trust herself to say more, but the blood was thumping in the veins. People like me, it seemed to be saying. People like me. People like me.
A Militant
BY THE TIME they reached the Wellington Arch, the gates had been closed, and the police were massed around it, on horseback and on foot. Large crowds had gathered to watch the affray. Evelyn’s stomach clenched. For the first time, she realised that Teddy might have a point. This wasn’t the part of Joan of Arc where she gave noble speeches and everyone cheered. It was the part where the cavalry charged.
By the time Evelyn and Teddy reached the gates, the battle – and it did look like a battle, despite the interested spectators and the petticoats – was already in full force. As far as Evelyn could tell, the mass of women were pushing against the police cordon, while the police attempted to drive them back. The line of policemen stretched far across on either side of the Arch. Evelyn glanced at Teddy.
‘Heavens,’ he said. ‘I had no idea the royal family were so uptight. All this fuss just so as not to read a lady’s letter!’
‘Rude, I call it,’ said Evelyn. She felt a little shaky. The noise of the battle – she couldn’t think of it as anything other than a battle – was immense. The women around the cordon were yelling and roaring. She reached out and took Teddy’s hand. He gave it a squeeze.
‘Funking it, are you?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said firmly.
‘I am,’ he said. ‘Oh well. Into the Valley of Death and all that, eh?’
‘Sometimes,’ sa
id Evelyn grimly, ‘I wonder why I don’t just leave you at home.’
Afterwards, they sat in the Maison Lyons at Marble Arch, and drank cup after cup of tea and ate shortbread fingers. The tearoom was full of women shoppers, and families, and parcels, and bulging shopping bags, and waitresses squeezing between the tables with plates of sandwiches, and a three-piece band playing an enthusiastic Gilbert and Sullivan medley, and the whole thing left Evelyn rather breathless.
‘What just happened?’ she said.
‘I think,’ said Teddy, ‘that that was what they call police brutality.’
‘It was frightfully brutal, whatever it was,’ said Evelyn.
She wasn’t sure how many women had been arrested, but it was dozens. She had watched as they’d been forcibly dragged to the police vans, kicking and yelling and thumping the policemen. She’d seen one woman grabbed by her breasts and pulled to the ground. Another had been beaten with a nightstick.
‘To be fair to the policemen,’ said Teddy. ‘Those women of yours were dashed ferocious. I jolly well wouldn’t want to meet one of them in a dark alleyway, I can tell you that.’
‘One of us, you mean,’ said Evelyn.
But she agreed with him. ‘Unwomanly’, the Suffragettes were called, which Evelyn had always thought something of a joke. Plump, socialist Miss Plom, unwomanly! Or little Miss Colyer, all in violet!
But after today, she wasn’t so sure. She had seen one woman use what looked like a horse-whip against a policeman. Another had attacked the police sergeant with a walking-stick. You could hardly blame them for retaliating, could you?
It was the Suffragette beaten with a nightstick who had quailed her. She’d watched as the woman had crumpled, and Teddy had put his hand on her shoulder.
‘Enough?’ he’d said, rather white in the face, and she’d nodded.
Evelyn believed, in theory, that a woman who hit a policeman was no worse than a man who hit a policeman. And sometimes, after all, policemen did need to be hit. Several of today’s policemen, she felt, had certainly deserved everything they’d got.
But it was one thing to hold these principles in theory, and quite another to see them enacted. Evelyn had never set much store on behaving like a lady. But to see women behaving like those women had behaved today … it made her feel cold.
She looked up from her shortbread, and saw that Teddy was watching her with an odd expression on his face.
‘Evelyn – don’t go on any more marches like that, will you?’ he said.
‘I don’t see what business it is of yours if I do or I don’t,’ said Evelyn.
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘Sell papers if you want, wear sandwich boards – I don’t suppose you’ll get much more than rotten fruit thrown at you. But – stay away from that sort of thing, won’t you?’
‘We’ll see,’ said Evelyn. She had been more shaken by the action than she cared to admit. This did not, however, mean she intended to let Teddy tell her what to do.
‘Evelyn, you could have been killed,’ he said, and she said, impatiently, ‘Oh, don’t be such a prig. Isn’t there anything you’d risk your life for?’
‘I’m blowed if I can imagine what,’ said Teddy. ‘Not a cause anyway. There’s people I might die for.’
‘Oh, people,’ said Evelyn. She thought gloomily that this was probably the difference between Teddy and herself. She knew one ought to risk one’s life to save someone like Hetty from a house on fire, but when it came down to it, she could never quite picture herself doing so. The Emancipation of Women was a much simpler thing to imagine dying for. But Teddy, who was so careful and sensible – Teddy would leap into the flames for Hetty without so much as blinking.
It was a rather depressing realisation, and to distract herself from it, she broke off a large piece of shortbread and said, ‘You’d jolly well better not get any ideas about rescuing me from any burning buildings. I’ll do my own rescuing, thank you very much.’
‘Ah, modern woman,’ said Teddy. He reached over, took the last piece of her shortbread, and popped it in his mouth. ‘So romantic!’
Release
NELL WAS YELLING at the top of her voice. It had started out as: ‘Votes for women! Votes for women! Votes for women!’
But as the noise had increased – the whistles blowing, the women screaming – it had become something less coherent, a violent, muddled, joyous, furious howl of rage.
Oh, how she loved this. There they were, all those people who spent their lives crushing her and her family: policemen, lawmakers, toffs, men. She swung the nightstick and roared. Perhaps they’d arrest her. She wouldn’t care – not her! Nell had never been arrested, but she’d always secretly rather wanted to be.
Only then she supposed she’d lose her job, and she couldn’t do that. So she didn’t actually hit any policemen and she didn’t actually break any windows. But she joined the mass of petticoats pushing against the police cordon, and she joined her voice to the roar of women and she put all her rage into it; rage at the jam factory where they paid her half as much as the men, rage at all those washdays she’d had to stay off school, rage at the boys and girls of Coney Lane. She roared with rage at the whole great world of men.
And she bloody loved it.
Consequences
TWO NEWSPAPERS RAN a story about the Suffragette rally, the Daily Sketch and the Daily Graphic.
In Evelyn’s house, the only paper that was read was The Times. Evelyn, therefore, did not discover how the rally had been reported until Monday evening.
She had a piano lesson on Monday afternoon after school, so it was past five o’clock when she came through the front door. She was barely into the hallway when Kezia – who had obviously been lying in wait for her – shot out of the drawing room.
‘I say,’ she said. ‘You are for it! Father’s so angry he’s practically throwing off sparks. Someone at the office showed him a copy of a newspaper story with a picture of you and Teddy in it. There’s going to be the most awful row.’
‘Is there?’ said Evelyn. She took off her school coat and hat with the closest thing to an air of unconcern as she could manage. ‘I really don’t think it’s any of Father’s business if I choose to spend my Sunday afternoon visiting Buckingham Palace.’
‘My hat!’ said Kezia admiringly. ‘Just you try telling that to Father, that’s all.’
‘I shall,’ said Evelyn. As she did so, the door to her father’s study opened, and he appeared, looking unusually grave.
‘Could I talk to you for a moment, Evelyn, please?’
Father’s study was off-limits to the children, except in times of high drama. The day Teddy and Evelyn had run away to join the circus. The day Evelyn had won the senior school scholarship. The awful day when their tiny, month-old baby brother had died of scarlet fever. It didn’t matter how many times Evelyn told herself she was practically a grown-up now. Being called to Father’s study still gave her an awful, sinking, headmistress’s-office feeling somewhere in the pit of her stomach.
Her father was sitting behind his desk, with a copy of the Daily Graphic on the table in front of him. He handed it to Evelyn.
‘Would you like to explain this to me, Evelyn, please?’ he said.
Evelyn took the newspaper. There, under the headline SUFFRAGETTE RIOT AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE, was a photograph of the women marching. At the front of the photograph was Teddy, his face shaded under his boater, but clearly himself. Clearer still was Evelyn, a few paces behind him, her face turned towards the crowd with a vague, rather distant expression.
Criminy! she thought. She really couldn’t have asked for a more dramatic unveiling. She laid the paper down on the table and said, still aiming somewhere near unconcern, ‘Well. Since you and Mother decided I couldn’t be educated, I’ve become awfully interested in the rights of women. It suddenly seemed so – well – so relevant, so Teddy and I went to a suffrage meeting at the Albert Hall. It was jolly interesting, actually, so then I joined the local Suffragettes in
Hampstead. And then at the weekend we walked to Buckingham Palace; there’s nothing criminal about that, you know. If anything, it was the policemen who were breaking the law, and—’
‘Enough!’ Her father was staring at her. ‘Evelyn, this isn’t some sort of a joke. I don’t think you realise at all the people you’re associating with. You don’t know – how could you? – the things these women do. Really dangerous, mindless acts of violence. You could end up in prison. You could very easily end up killed. There aren’t many things that are worth dying for, Evelyn. Is this one of them?’
Evelyn had a sudden, undaughterly urge to laugh.
‘But, Father,’ she said, as patiently as she could, ‘of course I know all that. I was marching with women who’ve been in prison yesterday. They aren’t at all what you think they are. I think you’d like them if you met them.’
‘Like them!’ He blinked. ‘My dear!’ He put on his glasses and then took them off again. ‘I can quite see that you might think going to prison was glamorous –’ (He’s thinking of Joan of Arc, Evelyn thought, remembering the days when she and Kit and Teddy had played at St Jeanne in the garden, and Evelyn had been tied to the pole of the washing-line with a skipping rope and martyred.) – ‘But really, dear, a prison cell is anything but romantic.’
What in heaven’s name do you know about prison? Evelyn thought. Up until that moment, she had had no intention of volunteering for prison duty, but suddenly it seemed remarkably appealing.
‘I do know,’ she said. ‘But when something’s important, isn’t it worth suffering for? Like in war. This is a sort of war, you know.’ She saw her father’s blank expression and said, gently, ‘A war for freedom.’
‘Freedom!’ He started to laugh. ‘Darling!’ he said. ‘You’re hardly a white slave, are you? What freedoms could you possibly want?’
She looked at him helplessly. How can I make you understand? she thought.