A Woman's Place (3 page)

They were being jostled between the double doors, people pressing on all sides. Moments later they were out into the chill of late afternoon, the still wintry sun going down. Eveline realised she was hungry and she needed to visit a toilet somewhere after sitting so long. She also realised she had lost sight of the young man who had smiled at her.

By the time she’d got off the omnibus at the Salmon and Ball pub in Bethnal Green Road, Eveline had decided to say nothing to anyone, much less her family, about the suffragette meeting. Dad would go potty if he knew and most likely Mum would support him even though she normally ruled the roost in most things.

With her mind still on the way the young man at the meeting had looked at her, Eveline made her way homeward, past Gales Gardens, Pott Street police station and Corfield Street before turning into Wilmott Street. She certainly wouldn’t say anything about him, which would mean letting on as to where she’d been. Not only that, Mum would start prying, forever eager to see her daughter settle on some nice lad and not be, as she saw it, left on the shelf. Mum’s idea of being left on the shelf began at the age of eighteen.
‘If you ain’t going steady by twenty, you’ll find yerself left on the shelf, you mark my words!’

Mum weighed up every lad she so much as glanced at. Visualising yet another admirer on the horizon, she’d start up an inquisition. ‘What’s his name? What sort of bloke is he? Do we know him?’ The business of the suffragette meeting was bound to come out. Her face would give her away. It always did if she tried to fabricate. Dad would have a fit – his daughter in the company of
‘them sort of shrieking females!’

Confiding in friends, of course, they’d see the funny side.
‘Is that all yer’ve got to do, go orf to some stuffy old suffragette meeting?’
Even her best mate Ada Williams would chortle, her other friend, Daisy Cox, even more so.

There was her younger sister, May, sixteen and eager to lap up any hint of a romance, but she might blab to Mum about this suffragette thing.

Eveline pursed her lips, her mind still on the meeting as she passed the black-velvet-lined window of the undertaker’s, the closed, rickety gates of the wood yard, the silent, frowning edifice of Wilmott Street School, and on to Finnis Street where her gran lived.

One person she might tell in confidence was Gran. Her second-floor flat, or letting as they were called, was at the far end of the street. Mum was her daughter. Gran and Grandpa Ansell had lived there ever since Waterlow Buildings were built. Though Grandpa had been dead four years now, his widow Victoria had refused to move to a smaller letting, even though smoke from the railway that ran just a hundred or so feet from her window billowed by at regular intervals, leaving sooty specks on windows and yellowing the curtains.

She continued to rattle around in two large bedrooms, living room and kitchen while Eveline’s family’s flat over Dad’s shop housed eight: him and Mum, her and May and their four brothers, Len, Jimmy, Bobby and Alfred. It had been even more crowded before her married sister Tilly and brother Fred had left.

Glad to have someone to tell about her little adventure, Eveline decided to pop in and see Gran. For all her seventy years, Gran was an open-minded, outgoing woman who didn’t always see eye to eye with her daughter. She could keep secrets, especially from Mum.

Eveline quickened her step, striding out beneath her skirts, hurrying past the many stone entrances, the iron railings that shielded the basement lettings below their sloping patches of grey grass that battled with the dry, infertile soil and dusty dandelions, passing the ground-floor window where Bert Adams, his brother and widowed mother lived.

She’d seen Bert Adams on a couple of occasions in Bethnal Green free library and thought him quite attractive in a broad-faced sort of way, his faded flat cap with its frayed peak set at a jaunty angle. She had in fact felt a tug of interest until her friend Alice let drop that he had a bit of a roving eye for the girls. Whether that was true or not, she’d put him out of her mind.

She put on a quick spurt past the window, forced to sidestep a group of children playing an energetic and noisy game of tag, these cobbled streets their playground. Reaching her gran’s entrance she hurried up the first half-flight of stone stairs, turning along the draughty, open-fronted landing with curved iron railings to stop anyone falling out, then up the next half-flight to Gran’s landing, her ascent impeded by half a dozen boys boisterously stampeding past her downstairs to the street.

Eveline smiled as she stood back against the brown-and-green-painted concrete wall to let the tribe scoot by. She knew they were up to the game youngsters had played ever since these places had been built – tearing up the ten flights of stairs to the top of one block, scampering across the tarred, flat roof with its smoking chimney stacks, down the next block, along the street and up the next and so on, making as much noise as possible to upset the tenants, even knocking on doors as they whooped past. Another game was to tie string to the door knockers of the two opposite neighbours on one chosen landing, knock on one, then scamper off to wait for it to be opened, jerking the string on the door opposite, to the fury of both occupants.

It was risky if the door to the roof over which they’d make their escape was locked. It meant retracing their steps to suffer a heavy hand from the irate tenants they were compelled to pass. And serve them right, Eveline thought as she continued upward.

Gran cautiously opened her door to her. ‘Oh, it’s you, love,’ she said with relief. ‘I could ’ear them noisy little buggers going past, up to their pranks again. Landlords don’t do nothing, nor do the police. Come in, love. Nice of you to drop by like this.’

‘I thought I would on my way home,’ Eveline said, following her in.

There was a time when she had spoken the way both Gran and her parents did, but working in an office, if only a factory office, she’d been expected to speak as nicely as she could. The office manager, Mr Prentice, set standards for his few staff and would glower if she let the side down. ‘I will not tolerate sloppy speech, young woman. So either you mind yourself, or …’ The unfinished sentence left her in no doubt that termination of her apparently prestigious position could follow. Trying to speak nicely was now here to stay. She remembered Gran having a sister who had been in service as a young girl, speaking beautifully to the day she died, despite living all her married life in the East End.

‘I’ll make us a nice cuppa,’ Gran was saying as she preceded her into the neat little living room. ‘Brightened up my day, you ’ave, popping in.’

Gran spent her days cleaning her little domain, keeping it as neat as a new pin in spite of the bugs that crept up the waste chute to lurk behind the wallpaper and which she fought with the stamina of a soldier going into action. At seventy she still regularly and vigorously scrubbed her portion of the stone stairs, a weekly chore usually shared between the two tenants on each landing, and complained about the stink of stale cabbage, and worse, the one that emanated from the less clean letting on the floor above.

‘Dirty lot,’ she remarked. ‘Don’t deserve to live in nice ’omes like these what was built for decent people. They’d make a slum of a palace, and if you ask me, that’s where the bugs come from – from them upstairs!’

‘So what’ve you been doing with yourself today?’ she asked now as she came back into the room after putting on the kettle in the kitchen.

Eveline took off her hat, reinserting the long hatpins, and laid it beside her on Gran’s old-fashioned couch. She took a deep breath. ‘I went to look at that new Selfridge’s store in Oxford Street. It’s beautiful. Their window displays are enough to make your mouth water. And while I was there …’

She paused, seeing Gran’s interest rise, and hurried on before she could think better of it. ‘I was looking in the window when some of those suffragettes came marching along.’

Quickly she described how brisk and unwavering they had looked, breaking off while her gran got up to go and attend the clamouring kettle, returning with the tea and a plate of biscuits. Handing her tea to her, Gran sat in her wooden armchair and prompted, ‘Go on, love. You was saying?’

Quickly Eveline told how she’d fallen into step and, fearing to offend the young woman who had taken her arm, had ended at the hall listening to speeches given by some quite prominent speakers. Gran looked stern.

‘You’d best not let your dad know where you was.’

‘That’s why I’m telling you,’ Eveline said, sipping the hot, sweet tea.

Gran always used sugar, never condensed milk. She wasn’t badly off for money, having married someone with a nice little grocer shop. She had never known hard work; in the past she had been able to afford someone to clean her house and even now sent her washing out, her hands still soft as a girl’s.

It was Grandad who had put Dad in his shop when he and Mum first married. Grandad had been something of a gambler, horses mostly, but died before getting through all of his money, as gamblers can often do, sparing his wife the poverty she might have ended up with if he’d lived.

She settled further back into her chair. ‘Is that it – the thing what’s making you look so flushed?’ she queried. ‘You went to a meeting?’

‘Yes, but …’ Eveline let her words trail off. While Gran had been getting the tea she’d had time to think. Was she making a fool of herself about a young man she would probably never see again?

‘Well?’ came the prompt. ‘Something else must ’ave ’appened to bring your colour up like that.’

Eveline made up her mind. ‘There was a really handsome young man, sitting behind me. When I looked at him, he smiled. It was a lovely smile. But he had someone with him, a young lady, so I didn’t look at him again.’

It now sounded very silly. She slowed her words. ‘But I kept feeling him staring at me all through the speeches, but when we came out, I lost sight of him.’

She ended as breathless as though she’d been running and sat there staring mutely at Gran, half expecting to see some revelation or other written on that smooth forehead with its greying hair swept up into an old-fashioned topknot. One hand was toying speculatively with the jet brooch at the high neck of the black blouse. As a widow she still wore black, even after four years. Looking younger than her years she might be, but at seventy she was no longer of an age to dress brightly.

‘And now you’ve got yourself all of a lather over an ’andsome face you saw for only a few minutes or so,’ she said slowly, then tutted. ‘Well, it do ’appen. But don’t worry, I won’t tell your mother.’

‘It’s not that,’ Eveline hastened. ‘It’s the suffragette bit. I don’t want her and Dad to know anything about that. You know what I mean?’

‘Oh, I do know all right, love.’ Gran gave a titter as though seeing it as some cloak and dagger escapade. ‘I won’t say nothing about that either.’

She was obviously enjoying every minute of it. Encouraged, Eveline found herself asking what she should do about the Saturday meeting that had been mentioned.

Gran looked smug. ‘It ain’t for me to say, love. You’ll ’ave to make up yer own mind about that. All I say is, women are people too and one of these days they’ll ’ave to ’ave a say in their own country’s future. Not me, I’m too old and your grandad was the salt of the earth, apart from ’is gambling, but he’d ’ave said I didn’t want for nothing so why would I want to go kicking over the traces? Mind you, there’s lots of women still don’t ’ave much of a life. They need someone ready to stand up for them.’

Emboldened, Eveline told her about the planned demonstration outside Number Ten.

This, though, was met with a warning frown. ‘Don’t go getting yourself too mixed up in things like that, love. It’s one thing going to little meetings, but causing a disturbance – you leave that to them what enjoy such things. I say, go to your meeting on Saturday – I won’t say nothing to your mum, I promise. But I won’t smile on any more than that.’

It was a warning that secrets only went so far. Eveline didn’t pursue it or point out that if she joined she might be expected to take part in such things. She wasn’t sure herself if this was what she wanted. Might a particular young man be at one of these meetings? Though why he would be she couldn’t imagine. Anyway, she worked all week so any weekday suffragette activity would be out of the question.

Her umbrella held at a fighting slant against the onslaught of March going out more like a lion than a lamb, Eveline pushed along George Street.

Counting the house numbers of the fine edifices she passed, she now wanted only to find the right place and be out of this weather. As the week had progressed, she had found the prospect of this meeting less and less attractive until she wasn’t looking forward to it at all. A wild goose chase, that’s what it was, a fool’s errand. Of course the face she hoped to see wouldn’t be there. But having come this far, it would be stupid to turn back, especially in this weather. Besides, she had promised Constance What’s-Her-Name that she’d come.

All the way on the bus she had even felt a little sick for thinking about it, partly because if Constance wasn’t there she would know no one, and partly because the vehicle kept slowing and stopping for passengers getting on and off, and being held up by other traffic. Horse-drawn vehicles, even in congested parts, had somehow always been kinder on the stomach.

Things had changed so fast in just six years. When she was twelve there had been hansom and hackney carriages and horse buses. Now the only horse-drawn vehicles were traders’ carts and brewers’ drays.

Anyone could see that the day of the horse was gone for ever. Nowadays it was noisy and stank of petrol where once there had been only the clop of hooves and the shouts of drivers and it had smelled only of horses and their droppings. Though that too had stunk, it had been a natural stink.

Engine fumes were pervasive. So was the odour of wet clothing inside the bus. She had been glad to reach her stop and inhale the fresher air of the side streets. But the empty feeling inside her hadn’t diminished. In fact the nearer she got, the worse it was becoming.