A Woman's Place (32 page)

Returning to the living room, Connie glanced at her as Eveline began collecting the empty plates. The half-dozen children of neighbours in Connie’s block had gone home and Rebecca herself, tired from the party, had been put to bed a little earlier than usual, leaving Helena sitting on the floor playing with Rebecca’s birthday present of a tiny cardboard doll’s house.

‘Lots of them used bicycles,’ she said, taking up Eveline’s remark about the pilgrimage.

‘I expect they needed them,’ Eveline said. The plates stacked, she gingerly sipped the tea Connie had poured for them. Connie’s tea always came scalding.

‘Going for miles and miles – going nowhere really. I can’t see the point of it. Not at all like our old processions with their colour and music. Who was going to take that much notice of women traipsing around from one end of the country to the other? There didn’t seem any purpose to it.’

It had seemed pointless. Admittedly, thousands of women had taken part in what was supposed to be a walking pilgrimage, but quite a lot had resorted to transport of one kind or another – bicycle, horseback, pony and trap, even the occasional motor car or small van lent to carry their luggage.

‘More like an outing than a serious intention to attract the notice of the public or the government,’ she scoffed and dismissed it. It was rather like some marvellous firework that had fizzled out. All that hard work they’d done had, it seemed, come to nothing.

Even so, there had been quite a few rallies in Hyde Park as thousands of the pilgrim women converged on London at the end of July. Some of the old verve took hold beneath the summery skies, the crowds that gathered surprisingly cheerful with no hostility whatsoever. Once again bands had played and banners had fluttered as the redoubtable, round-faced Mrs Fawcett addressed the Hyde Park crowds; an aeroplane had even dropped suffragette leaflets on the heads of the spectators, causing a sensation. But it hadn’t lasted. With summer fading there were no more rallies and even WSPU activity appeared to be dying down.

Turning her mind from it, Eveline gathered up the tablecloth, stepping over Helena on her way to empty the cloth over the balcony’s iron railings. The few crumbs floating on the air would cause no inconvenience to those living below. She came back, folding it absently, although Connie would want to wash it before putting it away, whereas she might have used it a couple of times more before it needed washing.

It had been a good little birthday. She thought of the passing years. In three months another year would be gone. How things had changed since first meeting Connie, a pampered, wealthy young woman and a girl from an entirely different walk of life. Eveline was amazed how Connie had adjusted to her world even to persuading the young man for whom she’d forsaken all to venture this side of London to be with her. The bond between her and Connie was of course their mutual interest in the suffragette movement. But one day they’d win and maybe Connie would sail off into the blue with her George to take up her old life of ease and plenty and forget all about her.

A passing thought but it suddenly made Eveline feel sad.

Connie and George had Christmas with her and Albert, in Eveline’s new little flat where even the winter sun came in. She’d invited Albert’s mum and his brother Jim, and Gran too, who needed only to walk the few yards from her block to Eveline’s and remained sprightly enough for the three flights of stairs.

She’d climb her own two flights several times a week when she went shopping, with no trouble at all though she was in her seventies and fiercely independent. Eveline was so proud of her, still willing to have charge of the children at odd times despite them being energetic three-year-olds.

‘They be’ave like little angels with me,’ she’d say. ‘Little ’uns always do when someone else looks after ’em. It’s when they’re with their mothers they start to play up. Lord knows why because it’s from them that they get the smacks. Don’t know for the life of me why. With me they’re little angels.’

Even so, Eveline made sure not to put on her too often, she and Connie for the most part continuing to look after each other’s daughters when attending the Saturday suffragette meetings, unless something special was going on, and that hadn’t been all that often this autumn.

It annoyed her that Gran was willing to take on both children for those couple of hours while her mother couldn’t offer to have her own grandchild for that short while. It had come to her ears that she had looked after both Tilly’s and Fred’s children on odd occasions, and it hurt even more that Mum could do that for her brother and sister and not her.

Boxing Day was spent at Mum’s, Connie and George happy to cosily spend it on their own. Mum and Dad’s house bulged with the whole family. Lenny, now twenty and courting a girl named Flossie, had invited her. May at nineteen also had a boyfriend, though he was with his own family, but she was talking of getting engaged in the New Year. With Eveline’s three younger brothers, her married brother and sister, Fred and Tilly, and their families, it was quite a crowd, yet she could never feel at ease here any more.

Mum thought a lot of Albert but there was this invisible wall between Mum and herself that made her feel she’d never really been forgiven. Nothing said, but it was there. Maybe it was all in her mind but the rift seemed to have grown between her and her married brother and sister, Fred and Tilly, who’d so far not come nigh or by to see her new flat.

It was Gran, bless her, to whom she turned, Gran who was in most ways closer than her mother. Also, the fact that Gran had taken Connie under her wing helped a little to compensate Eveline for the frigidity of her mother and she readily accepted Connie’s invitation to see in the New Year at her flat, in the hope that her presence would help take Connie’s mind off her own family.

Nineteen fourteen came in on an ominous note, though Eveline along with everyone else took very little notice of Lloyd George referring on the first day of the New Year to a build-up of arms in Europe as insanity.

But of far more importance to British suffragettes was the rearrest of Sylvia Pankhurst three days into January under the Cat and Mouse Act. It caused rumblings or, as some put it, squeakings, referring to the Act rather than the suffragettes, the relative calm of last autumn ready to explode into riots of retaliation against it. In fact four days into February came reports of Scottish suffragettes burning down two mansions and later the same month Whitekirk Parish Church in East Lothian.

When Sylvia Pankhurst was again arrested in early March on her way to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, the suffragettes there rose with renewed vigour. She and Connie were at the Trafalgar Square demonstration and when the news broke of Sylvia Pankhurst’s rearrest, they were caught up in the pandemonium that broke out.

‘If they think they’re going to dishearten us by continually sending her to prison, they’re much mistaken,’ Connie yelled defiantly as they were pushed about by the packed throng. ‘We’re going to fight on until we win!’

Eveline had never heard such emphatic words from her. She certainly sounded a different Connie to the one who a few months ago had been championing the moderate NUWSS, but she had to agree with her that the fight had to go on, especially when, a few days later, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst was once more arrested in Glasgow.

‘They’re trying to make us leaderless,’ Connie said grimly. ‘But we’ll always have other leaders to take up the sword in their place. They’ll never break us, no matter how they try.’ Again Eveline had to agree with her.

But when the news came of a Mary Richardson, a thirty-one-year-old journalist, who had entered the National Gallery with a meat cleaver under the noses of the attendants and hacked a masterpiece, the Rokeby Venus by Velazquez, causing irreparable damage, calmly stating as she was marched off by the police that she had tried to destroy the most beautiful woman in mythological history in protest at the government’s destruction of Miss Pankhurst, the most beautiful character in modern history, Eveline had a feeling that this was taking militancy too far.

‘It’s one thing destroying property,’ she confided in Connie, without sympathy this time for the woman arrested, ‘but wonderful art you can’t replace … She must be insane doing a thing like that.’

But it was soon setting off a chain of quite vicious militant deeds: British Museum cabinets smashed; a militant suffragette named Gertrude Mansell attacking Herkomer’s portrait of Wellington in the Royal Academy; a bomb thrown at a London church, another destroying Yarmouth pier, and another attack on the Royal Academy damaging John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James.

Then in May came a concerted onslaught by a small army of women led by a frail-looking Emmeline Pankhurst in an attempt to break through a thousand-strong police cordon around Buckingham Palace in an effort to deliver a Votes For Women petition to the King following the defeat of an enfranchisement bill. Though more than fifty women were arrested, two thousand petitions with over a million names had so far been presented to Parliament but it seemed nothing was going to sway the members to even consider the women’s pleas.

‘At this rate I can’t see us ever winning,’ Connie said, her spirits at last taking a knock. But it seemed women’s spirits refused to take any sort of knock as in June suffragettes set fire to yet another church, Wargrave Church in Henley, as well as disrupting services in many London churches.

On the Tuesday after Connie and Eveline attended their George Street meeting, Gran once again taking on the two children for a couple of hours, the police raided the offices of the WSPU and the next day arrested Sylvia Pankhurst for the eighth time whilst on a march.

‘But for the children we could so easily have been in that,’ Connie said. ‘What if we’d been among those arrested, knowing the state we’d have put our daughters in? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

There had been a good many volunteers on Saturday for the march and they’d almost been swayed by the persuasive words from the speaker that day. It was only Eveline saying that they couldn’t keep asking Gran to look after the children. With both their husbands at work and no one else to have them, neither wanted to go alone while the other looked after the two.

In the end they decided to wait for a Saturday march, feeling down and thoroughly out of it, annoyed that as mothers they were tied whilst others could do what they liked. Now, of course, it had been a blessing in disguise.

There was some kind of rally being planned for Sunday, intended to be peaceful. Eveline spoke to Albert about it on the Friday. ‘I never seem to join in anything these days,’ she said. ‘I really should be there, just for once.’

‘What about Helena?’ he asked, oddly obstructive.

‘It’ll be in the evening,’ she told him, trying not to show annoyance. ‘Helena will be in bed. It’s nearly midsummer. The evenings are light. Connie is asking her George if it’s all right with him.’ Albert’s face grew obdurate, his tone sharp, which wasn’t like him. ‘I don’t think you should go.’

‘Why not?’ she said angrily.

‘Things are getting a bit too nasty lately. Protest is one thing but all this bombing and setting fire ter things. You ’ave to think of Helena. If you went off and got yerself arrested, how’s she going to cope?’

He was right, of course, but it didn’t please her being told in this way. She hated arguing with him just to get her own way, he was such a good man, and even after all these years she still felt she owed him a debt of gratitude for what he’d done for her in her darkest moments.

Even after all this time, she couldn’t ever forget. The last thing she’d want to do would be to hurt him by her selfishness. But nature being what it was she felt sullen, especially when Connie told her the next day that George had given her permission to go.

As things turned out, there was no Hyde Park rally that Sunday. All plans were washed out by the worst thunderstorm in living memory. It raged over London like an Armageddon with several people killed as four inches of rain falling in three hours caused disastrous flooding.

Eveline, never happy with thunderstorms, crouched in a corner as the thunder cracked and roared simultaneously with blinding and continuous flashes of lightning, sheets of rain beating at the window panes threatening to break the glass. She thought of Gran all on her own in her flat but there was no way she could have gone out to keep her company.

After the storm it was obvious that Hyde Park would have been turned into a quagmire by all those feet, similar to the Mud March in 1907 when some thirty thousand women trudged through fog and slush until they’d more resembled mudlarks, their skirts and shoes covered in muck, a laughing stock.

No one wanted a repetition of that humiliation but by the end of the month, anything to do with the suffragette movement was threatening to be eclipsed by events beginning to take place in Europe.

George was one who found his interest pricked by it on Monday as he opened his
London & Manchester Daily News
during his brief midday break at his desk.

He’d have preferred to go home to eat, as Bert Adams did, working just around the corner to his. It would be nice to see a bit of Connie at midday to break up his working hours, but it took a good ten minutes by bus to get home from the City and another ten minutes getting back, and that only if his bus arrived on time or wasn’t too crowded to get on. Returning late would be frowned on; banks were very hot on punctuality and all in all it wasn’t worth the anxiety. His father had always said, when he’d first been taken on, ‘If you’re punctual, no one notices. If you’re not, everyone notices. Avoid being noticed for the wrong reasons, lad.’

Settling down to the cheese and pickle sandwich Connie had made for him this morning to be followed by an apple and a cup of tea in the three-quarters of an hour allowed for lunch, he acknowledged a slightly older colleague at the next desk, Mr Bertram – all employees were addressed by their title – who said something about trouble in Europe and opened his own paper.

‘Hmm,’ he murmured absently across the desks at the headlines:
ASSASSINATION OF AUSTRIAN HEIR TO THRONE
.