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Text copyright © Sally Nicholls, 2017
Extract from Unfinished Adventure by Evelyn Sharp reprinted by kind permission of Faber and Faber. Every attempt has been made to contact the Estate of Evelyn Sharp to obtain their permission.
Extract from The Home Front by Sylvia Pankhurst reprinted by kind permission of Helen Pankhurst
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Hardback ISBN 978 1 78344 525 7
Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 78344 637 7
TO ALL MY babysitters, without whom this book would have been even later than it actually was.
1914
REFORMS CAN ALWAYS wait a little longer, but freedom, directly you discover you haven’t got it, will not wait another minute.
Unfinished Adventure, Evelyn Sharp
‘YOU TELL ME that women are weak-willed! You tell me that women are weak-spirited, and foolish, and ignorant, and only fit to stay at home and raise the children.’ The woman on the orange crate paused, then added, ‘Hardly seems fair on the children, does it?’
There was laughter from the crowd. Evelyn, always fascinated by the Suffragettes, said, ‘Hold up a minute, can’t you?’ to Teddy, who stopped at once.
A man in the crowd called, ‘A woman’s sphere is the home! Do you contest it?’
‘Her sphere, yes. Not her prison. You may as well say a man’s sphere is the office, and take his vote as well.’
More laughter. This time, Evelyn joined in.
‘Oh, come!’ It was an older, rather apoplectic-looking gentleman. ‘A woman doesn’t need a vote! Her husband votes for her, and if she’s not happy with his choice, she has a hundred ways to make him change his mind. That’s a woman’s proper influence, not the ballot box.’
‘Indeed?’ The Suffragette was enjoying this. You could tell. ‘It’s rather hard on the unmarried woman or the widow though, isn’t it? And the husband.’ More laughter. ‘I’m not sure your idea of proper influence is very complimentary to either sex.’
A young woman in a fur coat was pushing her way past Evelyn.
‘Ooh!’ she said, to the man beside her. ‘I do think these women are perfectly horrid. As if any lady would want to stand on a nasty box and shout things at delivery boys.’
Evelyn bristled. She opened her mouth, but Teddy put his hand on her arm.
‘Cool it,’ he said. Then, before Evelyn could argue, he nodded at the Suffragette on the orange crate. ‘She’s doing rather well, isn’t she?’
‘I think she’s splendid,’ said Evelyn.
‘Isn’t she, though?’ It was another Suffragette, one of the ones who were standing at the edge of the crowd, passing out handbills. This one looked about twelve, although Evelyn supposed she must be older. She had long, loose fair hair under her tam o’shanter, and a wide, toothy smile.
‘Would you like a handbill? We’ve a meeting at the Albert Hall next week; you must come along if you’re interested. There’s more about it in Votes for Women, only that’s a penny.’
‘All right,’ said Evelyn, fumbling for her purse. The woman on the orange crate was lecturing her audience on the iniquity of British divorce laws. Evelyn took her copy of Votes for Women and scowled at the front page.
‘Look here,’ she said suddenly to the girl. ‘You Suffragettes think girls should be able to do all the things men can, don’t you? Live in flats on their own, and get degrees, and – oh, everything. Don’t you?’
‘Lord!’ said Teddy, audibly.
‘Oh yes,’ the girl said. ‘But the vote is the first step. Those things will follow once we get the vote, and heaps of other things too – state orphanages, and old-age pensions – why!’ Her little white face flushed. ‘Once women have the vote, we’ll never go to war, you know. What sort of woman would send her sons off to be slaughtered?’
‘You,’ said Teddy, ‘have obviously never met my Aunt Gwladys. Evelyn, Mother and Father will be wondering where—’
Behind them, there was an outraged roar from the crowd. Evelyn turned. The Suffragette on the orange crate was clutching her cheek, her mouth open in shock. As Evelyn watched, another missile was flung at her; she ducked and it missed. A boot-black and a man selling hot chestnuts at the edge of the crowd whooped appreciatively.
The apoplectic gentleman called, ‘I say, steady on! Mind the lady, can’t you?!’
The chestnut-seller pulled an awful face. ‘Go on!’ He yelled at the woman on the orange crate. ‘If you was my wife, I’d take a stick to you!’
‘Evelyn,’ said Teddy. ‘I’m frightfully sorry, but we’re going to have to look slippy if we want to catch Mother and Father. We’ll miss the first act at this rate.’
‘I know,’ said Evelyn. But she didn’t move.
‘Why don’t you stay at home where you belong?’ the chestnut-seller roared. He picked up a handful of chestnuts, cooling on the side of his brazier, and flung them at the Suffragette’s eyes. She ducked again, but did not step down from the crate.
‘Evelyn—’ said Teddy.
‘Cheese it, can’t you, Jimmy Boon!’ It was another woman, standing in the doorway of the shop behind them. ‘Some of us are trying to listen to the lady!’
‘You can cheese it and all, you daft cow!’ the chestnut-seller yelled. He pulled back his arm and flung a final chestnut in her direction.
It hit Evelyn square on the jaw.
She liked to say, later, that was the moment when she made up her mind.
EVELYN COLLIS WAS seventeen years old. And despite what certain poets might have to say about it, she was finding this more of an impediment than an ornament.
She was the second of four children. Her brother Christopher – known as Kit – was nineteen and away at Oxford. Evelyn, though she loved her brother in a dutiful sort of way, could not help resenting the fact that he’d been given everything she had ever wanted, without asking for it or even seeming to care very much when he received it. Christopher had been allowed to do everything at an earlier age than she had. He’d been sent off to boarding school – something Evelyn had always secretly longed for – and now her parents were paying for a university course he didn’t seem to even particularly enjoy. This was especially galling since Evelyn had discovered a desire to go to university herself, and her family had been decidedly unsympathetic.
Evelyn went to a small day school in Belsize Park, where playing the piano and speaking good French were considered the most important parts of a girl’s education. But, unusually, the girls also learnt Latin and Ancient Greek.
These were taught by a Miss Dempsey. Evelyn loved Miss Dempsey, and she loved Classics; loved that sense of lifting the lid on a world that was thousands of years old. At the end of last term, Miss Dempsey had said casually to Evelyn, ‘Have you thought about taking the Oxford entrance exam?’
Evelyn was so surprised she could only stare. Girls at her school rarely went to Oxford. It was nothing she’d ever considered in relation to herself. She’d never thought much about her future at all, except to suppose in the vaguest sense that she would get married and have a family.
‘No?’ Miss Dempsey had said mildly. ‘Perhaps you should.’
And that was all that was said on the matter. But the seed, once planted, had begun to grow in Evelyn’s mind.
Young women at Oxford couldn’t earn a degree. But they could go to the lectures, sit the examinations, and learn just as much as the young men did. Evelyn was becoming dimly aware that Classics, as taught to girls at her school, only touched at the edges of a world of knowledge that stretched seemingly infinitely into the distance. And that world was something she was beginning desperately to want a part of.
She had tried to explain this to Teddy, who’d been sympathetic, but baffled.
‘I do see it’s jolly unfair and all that,’ he’d said. ‘But does it really matter that much? There’s no earthly use girls learning things, unless they’re planning on forswearing men entirely and going to teach rotten little girls how to spell. And I would hope you aren’t going to do that.’
But Evelyn couldn’t explain why she wanted to go. Did one have to have a reason for wanting and wanting something?
She raised the subject of Oxford with her mother at Christmas. The two of them were coming home from a bridge game at the house of one of Evelyn’s mother’s friends. They’d done well, which had put her mother in a good mood, and Evelyn thought it unlikely a better opportunity would arise.
‘I spoke to Miss Dempsey about next year,’ she said diffidently.
Her mother wasn’t paying attention.
‘I should have known Mrs Weston had that ace,’ she said. ‘She’d hardly have bid otherwise.’
‘Hmm,’ said Evelyn. ‘Miss Dempsey thinks I could go to Oxford if I wanted. She tutors girls for the exams, you know. In her spare time, I mean, not at school.’
‘Really?’ said Evelyn’s mother. ‘That is a pretty compliment, darling. You must tell your father when we get home.’
‘Yes,’ said Evelyn. ‘Only – I think I’d like to.’
‘Like to what, dear?’ her mother said. ‘Oh look, there’s the vicar. No, darling, don’t wave, he wants a stall at the bazaar, and I really can’t, not after last time.’
‘Go to Oxford,’ said Evelyn fervently. ‘I want to go to Oxford next year and study at one of the women’s colleges. And Miss Dempsey thinks I could.’
Evelyn’s mother looked at her in astonishment. If Evelyn had demanded a motor car, she couldn’t have been more surprised. There were so few professions open to women, and those that were hardly demanded a degree. A university education, from Evelyn’s mother’s perspective, was simply an expensive way of unfitting one’s daughter for matrimony.
‘But, darling!’ she said. ‘Whatever for?’
‘I don’t know what for, exactly,’ said Evelyn. ‘Do I need a reason? I’d just like to, that’s all.’
She could see that this was exactly the wrong thing to say, and she hurried on before the moment should pass.
‘Just to learn things, you know – Latin and Greek and ancient history and all that. It’d be jolly useful having someone in the family who knew about classical civilisation, don’t you think? And anyway, what use is university going to be to Kit? He’s going to work for Teddy’s father, isn’t he? It’s all decided.’
‘But, darling,’ said Evelyn’s mother, again. She was a little dazed. Evelyn had been thinking of very little except Oxford for nearly a month, but this was an entirely new idea for her mother. ‘Christopher will meet all sorts of people who’ll be useful for him in business. He has to earn his own living, darling – but there’s no thought you’d ever have to do that. These university women lead very sad lives. I’d hoped for better things for you – a husband, and a family, and a home of your own. Don’t you want that?’
‘I don’t know what I want,’ said Evelyn. ‘I could go into business like Kit, or—’ She struggled to think what careers were open to respectable women. ‘Or give lectures, perhaps. Does it matter? And anyway,’ she finished desperately, ‘I don’t see that I’m giving up a family and all that. I could still have all those things and a degree. Teddy wouldn’t care.’
Evelyn’s mother noted Teddy’s name with relief. She was very fond of Teddy, but she had never been sure exactly how Evelyn felt about him.
‘I’m sure he wouldn’t, dear,’ she said comfortingly. ‘Teddy’s a very nice boy. But you can see it from our perspective, can’t you? Going to Oxford costs a lot of money. Why don’t you see how you feel next year when you leave school? I expect by then you’ll be much more interested in golf, or something. But if you still want to crib up on stuffy old languages, perhaps your father and I could find you a Latin master to come and give you lessons. Far cheaper, and you could stay at home, which would be ever so much nicer, wouldn’t it?’
Evelyn didn’t answer. She was rigid with fury, and shame that she couldn’t explain to her mother this desire that she couldn’t quite explain to herself. Her mother fussed with the umbrella and pretended not to see.
‘There!’ she said. ‘It’s about to rain. And just when we were nearly home too.’
Evelyn was struggling with herself. At last she burst out, ‘But it isn’t fair! Really it isn’t, Mother! Why should Christopher have everything and I have nothing?’
There was quite a lot Evelyn’s mother could have said to that. But she contented herself with the standby of mothers and nurses the world over. ‘Well, dear. Life isn’t fair, you know.’
‘No,’ Evelyn agreed. ‘But it ought to be.’
By which her mother assumed that the argument was over.
But as far as Evelyn was concerned, it had barely begun.
‘IT’S NOT FAIR! It’s the most beastly rotten thing that’s ever happened to me! I hate her! I hate him! I hate the whole ghastly lot of them!’
Evelyn had worked herself up into a fine rage, pacing up and down the schoolroom, twisting her gloves in her fury. The occasion of her rage was another conversation with her parents about Oxford – this time armed with a very politic letter from Miss Dempsey. It had not gone well. Unlike Teddy’s father, who owned several factories, Evelyn’s father worked in a government office, doing something dull-sounding with figures. There was no money lying around to educate girls who would only go and get married once they finished university anyway.
Teddy was sitting on one of the ancient nursery armchairs, his sketchbook on his lap. Evelyn’s younger sisters, Hetty and Kezia, loved Teddy’s sketchbook, mainly because of all the pictures of naked girls from art school that they weren’t supposed to know about. Most of the pictures in Teddy’s book were of girls. Life-class nudes. Girls in tearooms. Art-school girls, all modern and hatless and sophisticated. Kezia, late for school, running to catch the omnibus. Hetty curled up in the nursery armchair, reading Little Women for the hundredth time, a dash coming out of her mouth saying – Do you think Jo ought to have married Laurie, Evelyn? I do. Do you think, if you won’t marry him, Teddy might marry me? And dozens and dozens and dozens of pictures of Evelyn. Angry Evelyn. Thoughtful Evelyn. Evelyn in her school skirts. Evelyn dressed for dinner. Evelyn thumping resentfully at the piano. Evelyn reading. Evelyn frowning. Evelyn, her whole face alive with a smile that most of the world never saw.
He was sketching a rapid pencil-portrait of her now, her cheeks with their high colour, the furious, busy motions of her feet. Most of his thoughts were on the picture, almost all of the rest were on how much he would like to jump up and kiss her – right now, on the mouth – just to see what she would do. He had only the vaguest idea what she was saying, which was less dismissive than it sounds, since she’d been saying the same sort of thing over and over all afternoon.
Teddy’s and Evelyn’s fathers had been at school together. Teddy was very much the youngest of three sons, the unexpected pet of parents who had long assumed their childbearing days were over. His mother suffered from nervous headaches, with the result that Teddy spent much of his early childhood being hurried out of the house with his nurse. On cold or rainy days, they would be sent to the Collises’. To Teddy, the Collis house had been a place where he could slide down the bannisters, charge around the nursery, and shout as loudly as he wanted. Although he had never quite articulated this to himself, ‘home’, to Teddy, meant the Collises’ shabby nursery, their long wilderness of a garden, and Evelyn.
Teddy and Evelyn had been engaged since he was in knickerbockers and she in pinafores. He’d proposed to her again, more or less seriously, last year, but Evelyn had laughed. She’d no intention of marrying anyone for a good while yet.
Now she was – technically, at least – a young woman, and Teddy a young man, another mother would have made some effort to keep their relationship respectable. But Evelyn’s mother couldn’t bear to admit that her daughter was nearly an adult. Evelyn would be ‘coming out’ at some point in the summer and would be expected to let down her skirts, put up her hair, attend grown-up parties and dances and generally advertise her availability for matrimony. Her mother had no idea how one was supposed to mother a young woman, and was rather dreading it.
‘Oh, rather,’ Teddy said absently now, sensing a pause in the stream of words and taking a guess at what he was expected to reply. ‘Dashed unfair.’ Flick, flick, flick went his pencil, catching the falling strands of her hair.
‘And it isn’t just Oxford!’ said Evelyn. ‘It’s everything. Why, you and Christopher could be anything! Explorers! Soldiers! Inventors! What can girls be? Governesses, or teachers, or lady companions, or mothers.’
The last was spat. Teddy said, ‘It’s not so bad as all that. Modern girls can be heaps of things. You could be a lady doctor like Mrs Garrett Anderson. Or a writer – or an artist. Plenty of girls go to art school.’
‘You can’t just be an artist or a writer,’ said Evelyn furiously. ‘You’ve got to have a metier, or talent at least. And I don’t, not a jot. And I don’t see how I could be a doctor when all the science they do in my school is ‘nature walks’ on the Heath. And it’s Dr Garrett Anderson, not Mrs.’
‘You could always marry me,’ Teddy said mildly. ‘I’d let you go to Oxford.’
‘Ass,’ said Evelyn. She wanted to stamp her foot in frustration. ‘It isn’t just about me,’ she said. ‘It’s about us all! All women! How can women live like this? How can women like Mother just go on – not caring?’ Her eyes were shining with rage. She looked, thought Teddy, magnificent. Like St Theresa, or Joan of Arc, or a goddess; Athena, or Diana, one of those ones who were always dashing about on a chariot full of righteous indignation. The urge to kiss her grew stronger, until his whole body was tingling with it. It was rather unsettling.
‘Oh, quite,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Rotten show all round.’ He began to sketch a lioness, of the sort Britannica was always dragging around with her, following his pencil-Evelyn. ‘Only – begging your pardon – if your mother and father say you can’t, what are you going to do about it?’
‘Hang Mother and Father! I’m not talking about Mother and Father!’ She stopped pacing and faced him.
‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘You mean the Suffragettes, don’t you?’
‘And what if I do?’
‘Oh,’ he said, again. ‘Oh dear.’ He laid down his pencil and rubbed his eyes, wondering where to begin.
A WEEK AFTER she had sold Evelyn a copy of Votes for Women and promised them a future free of war, May Thornton was eating breakfast with her mother.
‘So then Miss Aitchson said Boudicca was an aberration of nature, and a nice girl like myself wouldn’t want to take a barbarian like her as a model, would I? But I said I would. I think it’d be ripping to be Boudicca, and have my own chariot, and fight the Romans, except I told Miss Aitchson if I was Boudicca, I wouldn’t go to war, because I’m a Quaker and we’re pacifists. I said if I were Boudicca, I’d use diplomacy and political wiles instead. Miss Aitchson said it wasn’t ladylike for women to involve themselves in politics. But I think if your country’s been invaded by the Romans, you’ve got to do something about it, haven’t you? Even if they did bring central heating and straight roads and all that? But then Miss Aitchson got out of it by saying that we weren’t studying the Romans now, we were doing Henry VIII. I do think Henry VIII was a wart, don’t you, Mama? I don’t think it’s very royal to chop off your wives’ heads, even if they are witches. Do you?’
‘Don’t drip egg on your school skirt, darling,’ said May’s mother, who was reading a letter and frowning. ‘Though I always did think Henry VIII a frightful man. I’m sure Mr Freud would have simply dreadful things to say about the inside of his subconscious. And really, I must go and complain to that school of yours. They’re positively Victorian. I told Miss Cooper I’d be very willing to come and give you girls a lecture on the true history of the matriarchal society, but she never did reply.’
May and her mother lived in a narrow terraced house in one of the more respectable streets in Bow, in the East End of London. May’s father, who had died when May was a year old, had been the headmaster of a free school for the education of the poor. When he’d died, May’s mother’s friends had expected her to move back to one of the nicer areas of London. But she’d stayed.
The house was a cosy, chaotic republic, full of books, and music, and incendiary ideas. May’s mother was a vegetarian, a suffragist, a pacifist, a Quaker, a Fabian, a Bolshevik sympathiser and a believer in Rational Dress for women. They were looked after by their housekeeper, Mrs Barber, who had ‘done for’ Mrs Thornton since she was a new bride, and listened to all her ideas with a slightly pained resignation. May’s mother had handed her numerous pamphlets and articles explaining the digestive benefits of lentils and black-eyed beans, but she had remained unconvinced.
You know best, my dear, she seemed to say. But couldn’t we just have a nice chop once in a while?
As a little thing of five or six, May had sat in the offices of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, solemnly sticking postage stamps to envelopes to aid the suffrage cause. There was a photograph of her aged seven standing outside Buckingham Palace wearing a white muslin frock and holding a banner reading FOR HEARTH AND HOME. Aged ten, she had met H. G. Wells, and had shaken his hand and asked him earnestly whether he really believed there were men on Mars.
Right now, May’s mother was still frowning at her letter.
‘Are you frightfully keen on going to the Albert Hall this evening, darling?’ she said. ‘Because I did wonder about going to see what Sylvia Pankhurst is doing instead. What do you think? Would you mind?’
May looked up from her egg in surprise. She and her mother were suffragists rather than Suffragettes; they wanted the vote, but they didn’t use violence to get it. Suffragettes threw stones through windows, slashed paintings in the National Gallery and detonated petrol bombs in deserted houses. May’s mother thought behaving like this set back the campaign – who would want to be associated with crazy, violent women like that? She preferred to work through peaceful means, like petitions, and marches, and articles in the press. The Suffragettes were rather scornful of women like May’s mother, pointing out that these methods had been used with little success for forty years before Emmeline Pankhurst had entered the fray.
Sylvia Pankhurst was Emmeline Pankhurst’s socialist daughter. She lived not far from May and her mother, and ran a local suffrage movement for East End women.
‘Miss Thumpston gave me a very interesting article that Miss Pankhurst had written for that paper of theirs,’ May’s mother was saying. ‘She says – and I think rightly – that our movement is too concerned with recruiting the middle classes, and ignoring the struggles of working women. Naturally, I disapprove of her methods, but she’s really doing astonishing things for the women here. I thought I’d like to go and take a closer look, if it’s something that would interest you?’
‘If you like,’ said May, who always enjoyed doing things with Mama. Her mother smiled at her.
‘Now, run and get your things, or you’ll be late for school. Give me a kiss before you go.’
May slid out from her chair. Her mind was already on the day ahead – gymnastics this afternoon, and the results of last week’s geography test, and whether Barbara and Winifred would be speaking to each other this morning or not.
She had no idea that this evening’s excursion was about to change her life for ever.
‘LISTEN!’ SAID KEZIA Collis, sitting up in bed.
‘Is it them?’ said Hetty. Her pyjama jacket was half over her head, and her voice was therefore somewhat muffled. She wriggled her shoulders and tugged the jacket down, then ran to the door. She could hear voices in the hall, and Teddy’s laugh, rising high and delighted up the stairwell. Hetty felt that even if she lived to be a hundred, she would still recognise Teddy’s laugh.
It was the evening of the mass suffrage meeting in the Albert Hall. Evelyn had told her mother she was going to a lecture at her high school.
‘It’s about the Pre-Raphaelites,’ she said airily. ‘So I told Teddy he could come too – you don’t mind, do you?’
Hetty charged across the landing and leant over the bannisters.
‘Evelyn! Teddy!’ she called. ‘Do come and tell us about it! We aren’t a bit asleep!’
Evelyn paused in the middle of unwinding her scarf and looked up with a small frown. It would be just like Hetty to spoil things by telling their mother where she and Teddy had been. But before either girl could say any more, their mother appeared in the hallway.
‘Hetty! Aren’t you two in bed yet? How it could take you half an hour to put on pyjamas, I really don’t know. What in heaven’s name has Miss Perring been doing?’
Miss Perring was the younger girls’ governess. All three girls went to school, but for everything else, from taking Hetty to school to supervising prep and darning their stockings, Kezia and Hetty were Miss Perring’s responsibility.
Miss Perring was a small, grey, wispy woman, who gave the impression of life having passed her by. The children vaguely despised her.
‘Oh, it wouldn’t have done a bit of good if they’d been in bed,’ said Teddy. He tipped his head up and turned the full force of his smile on Hetty, who was leaning as far over the bannisters as she could, her long hair dangling around her face. ‘How,’ he said, ‘could I come to visit and not say hello to young Henrietta?’ And he bounded up the stairs two steps at a time, while she stood on the landing beaming foolishly.
Kezia was twelve; small, wiry, fierce and terribly superior to plump, mousy, ten-year-old Hetty, the family baby.
Both had been consumed with curiosity over the trip to the Albert Hall, but were rather uncertain how they felt about Suffragettes: Kezia thought it rather grand to swank about not letting any man tell you what to do, but she did wish they didn’t look so frumpy and earnest while they did it. Hetty thought that of course women should have a vote – and if Teddy and Evelyn were going to be involved it must be all right – but could it really be ladylike to throw things through windows?
Teddy, meanwhile, had attended the meeting under duress. He’d already had several heated conversations with Evelyn about the Suffragettes, and had come along this evening out of an uneasy sense that one really oughtn’t to let a schoolgirl go to a political meeting on her own. Probably, he suspected, he ought to be forbidding her to have anything to do with these women. But something in him revolted against the idea. He and Evelyn were going to be married one day, if he had anything to say about it, and he didn’t want the sort of awful Victorian marriage where one ordered one’s wife around. He wanted equality, or as close to it as he could get.
But this, of course, was the problem. He and Evelyn were not equal. In so many ways she was still a child, and an appallingly sheltered child at that. She wasn’t allowed to read newspapers. She wasn’t allowed to meet boys – beside Teddy himself, of course – and he was pretty sure no one had ever told her the facts of life. Teddy knew perfectly well that Evelyn’s mother trusted him to look after her, and that allowing her to join women who set off bombs and smashed windows was not at all how she expected him to behave.
If it came down to it, he didn’t much like the idea of it either.
The four of them held a solemn powwow in the night nursery. Now they were growing up, the night nursery was officially the younger girls’ room, and the day nursery the schoolroom. But it had been the nursery for so long that even Evelyn forgot to call it by its official name. There were heaps of nursery things still there; an old rocking horse that no one had played with for years, a battered collection of old games piled up in the nursery cupboard, Just So Stories and Mother Goose still leaning companionably on the nursery bookcase beside Robinson Crusoe and The Hound of the Baskervilles and 301 Things a Bright Girl Can Do.
Teddy sat at the end of Hetty’s bed, and pulled the eiderdown over his legs in a friendly manner. There was no fire and the room was cold.
‘Tell us everything!’ Kezia commanded.
‘Did you blow up pillar boxes and sock policemen in the jaw?’ said Hetty.
‘Did you get arrested?’
‘Hush!’ said Evelyn. ‘Mother will hear, and then we’ll be for it. And no, of course we didn’t. It was just people talking. Look, though! We brought you badges.’ She threw the badges to Kezia and Hetty. Little round enamel badges in the colours of Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union: green, white and violet. VOTES FOR WOMEN, the badges said. ‘But for heaven’s sake, don’t let Mother and Father see you wearing them.’
‘Who was there?’ said Kezia. She took her badge and turned it over and over in her fingers. The mark of rebellion! ‘Was Mrs Pankhurst there?’
‘She might have been,’ said Teddy. ‘There were simply hundreds of people.’
‘All women?’
‘No, men too. All the speakers were women though. There was a lady – well, I suppose she wasn’t a lady really – who worked in a mill, talking about how hard it was, and how all the mill-girls wanted the vote. That was jolly interesting. And there was a lady from Wyoming – in America, you know – where they have suffrage already, talking about what they’d done with it.’
‘What is suffrage?’ said Hetty.
‘The vote, juggins,’ said Kezia. ‘Did you put your name down to get put in gaol?’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Evelyn, rather thoughtfully. ‘They didn’t have a gaol list pinned up anywhere. We signed the petition, though. And I took out a subscription to Votes for Women – only, I’m having it delivered to Teddy’s house, because I don’t want a row.’
‘You wouldn’t go to gaol though,’ Hetty said anxiously. ‘Would you?’
Evelyn looked at her with scorn.
‘I would,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want to, but I would. It’s not as though I have any freedom to give up now, anyway.’
‘I say!’ Teddy said. ‘It isn’t as bad as all that, is it?’
‘Yes,’ Evelyn said. ‘It is. It absolutely is.’
And Hetty, peering at her solemnly over her button badge, was suddenly afraid.
MISS SYLVIA PANKHURST was speaking in the Bow Baths Hall. This was quite an occasion. Miss Pankhurst had been released from prison a week earlier, to recover from the effects of hunger strike. Her licence for release having now expired, she was liable to be arrested at any opportunity, which lent a certain air of daring to the whole enterprise.
The Bow Baths Hall was full of people. There was a list of Suffragette speakers, and the rumour of Miss Pankhurst rippling out through the crowds. Would she come? There were mounted police outside the hall, watching the women as they went in. If she did come, she would surely be rearrested.
The audience was mostly women, mostly working-class East End women. Another girl might have felt self-conscious, but May never felt self-conscious. The air was thick with the scent of sweat and human bodies. All around May and her mother, people were whispering:
‘Is she coming?’
‘She won’t come. She was only released last week.’
‘She’ll come all right. She always does.’
‘Is she here? Do you know?’
‘We’ll be ready if she is.’
They were. The woman who had spoken thumped her walking-stick meaningfully on the floor, and May realised with astonishment that it was, in fact, not a walking-stick at all, but a stout wooden truncheon. A woman behind her had another stick just the same. May felt a ripple of something that might have been fear, but was closer to excitement. She nudged her mother and pointed to the sticks.
‘Do you think they’re going to fight the policemen?’ she said. Her mother frowned.
‘If they do, keep well back,’ she said. She looked around the hall. Police violence against the Suffragettes had been growing. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have come …’ she said uneasily.
May looked around. There was a boy beside her watching them with open curiosity.
‘Will it be dangerous?’ May asked him. He looked startled, and shook his head, rather furtively, as though ashamed of being caught looking.
‘Nah. You’ll be all right. Just stay inside till it’s over.’
He was about her own age, or a little younger. And – May realised with a jump of surprise – he wasn’t a boy. He was a girl. A stocky girl, with short brown hair, in breeches and jacket and a flat cap like a boy. A girl holding a stick like the women preparing to go up against the police. May felt a shiver of something like excitement go through her. She’d heard the Suffragettes described as ‘mannish’ or ‘unsexed’ before – these were common cat-calls, she’d even heard them used against her own mother. But they were intended as insults. This girl was ‘mannish’, but she was in no way ‘unsexed’.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
Erotic was not a word many of May’s friends would have used; sex was not something most middle-class girls were expected to know anything about. But May had had it all explained to her at the age of twelve, with the help of the Family Medical Encyclopaedia. Eroticism was a relatively new concept however, and she found it thrilling. At fifteen, all sorts of unexpected things were erotic for May. Thousands of women, marching down the Strand, waving banners and singing suffrage songs, that was erotic. Poetry was erotic, good poetry anyway, the power, and the rhythm, and beauty of it. The back of the girls’ heads in school, their long shiny hair with the school ribbons, all in a row. And a girl with a cockney accent in a flat cap sent a shiver down her back. Like knowledge. Like a recognition. I know you, May thought, illogically. I know you.
The girl turned back to the women she was standing with. May – suddenly desperate not to lose her – said, ‘You aren’t going to hit a policeman, are you? Are you going to get arrested?’
‘Na,’ said the girl. ‘The stick’s just to defend meself. They’re wicked cruel to women, policemen. But we’s ready.’ She kicked the stick casually with her foot, and added, ‘We does self-defence classes in Victoria Park on a Saturday.’
Even that was erotic, the violence, even to a pacifist like May. You didn’t have to approve of a thing to find it erotic.
‘Do you think Miss Pankhurst’s here?’ May asked. The girl nodded.
‘I ’spect so. Probably in disguise,’ she added, knowingly.
Just then, the gaslights dimmed. The people hushed. May waited, expecting to hear the old, familiar arguments. But what she heard was a voice from behind the stage curtains. ‘Friends and comrades,’ it said, and there was an instant murmur from the crowd.
The girl said, ‘It’s her! That’s her!’ Her face was rapt.
May said, ‘Mama, it’s Miss Pankhurst!’ and a woman behind her said, ‘Shh!’
‘They would like to stop me speaking to you –’ the voice was saying. May leant forward, thrilled, and became aware of a commotion behind her.
Fists were hammering at the door, voices calling, ‘Open up in the name of the law!’
‘It’s the police!’ the girl said delightedly. ‘But they won’t let them in – look at them!’
She was right. The crush of people in the hall was pushing against the door, blocking the policemen by the sheer force of their bodies. The crowd was cheering:
‘That’s right!’
‘Keep them back!’
‘Let her speak!’
‘But I am here today to tell you –’ Miss Pankhurst had to raise her voice to be heard above the clamour. Then, suddenly, there was more movement at the front of the hall. May drew in her breath. It was hard to see in the dim light, but figures were scrambling up onto the stage – two or three men, it looked like – and heading towards the curtain. Voices shouted from the audience:
‘Miss Pankhurst!’ and, ‘Miss Pankhurst! The police!’
‘Plainclothesmen!’ said the girl in the flat cap, in an ecstasy of indignation and excitement. ‘The stinking rats! Who do they think they are?’
Miss Pankhurst appeared from behind the curtain. She was younger than May had expected, with a long, plain, rather melancholy face. She’d been hunger striking only the week before, May remembered. The plainclothesmen made a rush for her. More voices were shouting from the floor:
‘Jump!’
‘Jump!’
‘Miss Pankhurst, jump!’
Miss Pankhurst jumped. Off the stage and into the audience, which caught her. The women roared. The policemen leapt after her and into the crowd. They began pushing against the massed women, but the women pushed back. Miss Pankhurst was being carried over their heads – or – was that her? No, it was another woman wearing her hat. Where had she gone? May was bewildered and exhilarated. The policemen fought their way through the Suffragettes, who fought back joyously, with fists and sticks and knotted lengths of rope; ‘Saturday nights’, they were called, May knew.
Her mother grabbed hold of her arm.
‘Are you all right?’ she said, breathlessly. May nodded.
‘It’s wonderful!’ she said, but her mother didn’t seem to think so.
‘We should leave!’ she said, but May couldn’t see how. They were being crushed on either side, and the crush was fiercest around the door, where the policemen were still fighting for entrance. May was being shoved on both sides by elbows and shoulders and pressing feet. A woman barrelled against her, pressing her into the girl in the flat cap. At the front of the room she saw – to her horror – a policeman lift a chair and smash it against the head of a woman who was obstructing his way through the melee. They had their truncheons out, she saw. Another policeman lifted a woman by her collar and threw her aside. The Suffragettes cried out in rage and flung themselves against him.
‘You said we wouldn’t be hurt!’ May’s mother yelled furiously at the girl in the flat cap. The girl ignored her. She was looking at a woman who was standing on a chair and peering through the hall’s windows.
‘They’re all around the hall!’ the woman called down. ‘They’ve got reinforcements – on horseback!’
Another woman was forcing her way through the crowds, yelling. She was clambering up onto the backs of the other women. She was clawing at the window. She was carrying a fire extinguisher, and – heavens! – she turned it on and aimed it at the men outside. They could hear shrieks and yells and the screams of the horses as the water reached them. Outside, May could hear the men cursing as they pulled back from the hall. The Suffragettes cheered and rushed at the door, pushing out of it and into the melee.
May’s mother called, ‘May!’ in terror, but May was swept along in the crush, pushed up against the girl in the flat cap. Despite her panic, a small part of her brain thrilled to this.
‘Why are they trying to get out?’ she yelled, over the pandemonium. ‘Aren’t they afraid?’
‘Course they ain’t!’ said the girl, scornfully. ‘Miss Pankhurst’s got to get out somehow, ain’t she?’ She gripped her stick, and for one brief, unpacifist moment, May wished she too had brought a weapon to use against the policemen and help free Miss Pankhurst.
The crowds were fighting at the door. May was banged against the wall. Her chest was crushed, her skin red and sticky with heat. She felt breathless and a little dizzy. She kept hold of the sleeve of the girl in the flat cap, and to her relief, the girl didn’t try to break free.
The press of bodies pushed them through the narrow doors and out into the welcome cold of the March evening. The noise the women were making was immense. The mounted police were still struggling to control their horses. May didn’t know much about horses, but these were obviously unhappy; their ears were back, and their eyes were wide, and although they were no longer rearing, they were moving in little distressed dances, as the policemen tried to soothe them. The policemen were pushing back against the press of women. Evidently they still hoped to trap Miss Pankhurst inside, and they were pushing back against the Suffragettes, trying to get to the open door, but with little success. They had heavy oak truncheons, and horses, and they were, for the most part, bigger and stronger than the women. But the women had sticks and cudgels and Saturday nights. The women were furiously determined. And there were many, many more of them.
The girl with the flat cap was forcing herself forward. May just wanted to escape. She could hear her mother’s voice in her ears; ‘One day, one of those women will get herself killed.’ A Suffragette had died last year, at the Epsom Derby, although they said that was a suicide. One of these women could easily be killed, tonight.
But if she ran away, she would probably never see the girl again.
The girl was yelling terrible things at the policemen, the sort of things May’s mother would definitely think gave the suffrage movement a bad name. She still clutched a stick, which she was struggling to bring upright.
May cried, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, let’s get to the edge.’ She was finding it hard to breathe. The girl began to force her way sideways in the crush. May was relieved, then a horrible thought struck her. Perhaps the girl didn’t want to escape. Perhaps she just wanted to get closer to the policemen.
She fought to keep up with her, but it was almost impossible. Elbows and knees and hips and suffrage placards banged against her body.
‘Oh, please,’ she gasped. ‘Please, let me through.’
And then suddenly, the pressure relaxed. The policemen were pulling back, admitting failure. May surged forward with the rest, struggling to keep her footing. She saw an old woman pushed to her knees, and shouted a warning. But the crowd ploughed forwards regardless, those at the front crying out indignantly at those pushing behind them, even as they themselves were forced to trample the woman down. For the first time, May was really afraid.
And then they were free.
The noise of the crowd was still deafening. The air smelt of sweat and fear and horses and coal-smoke from the nearby houses. May grabbed the girl by the arm and dragged her, stumbling, out of the press of bodies and into an alleyway. The girl was gasping for breath. All May’s ribs were bruised and sore. She stumbled, and they fell together against a wall, sucking in air like long-distance runners.
‘Are you all right?’ said May, urgently. The girl took in a long, shuddering breath, and raised her head. Her face was red, and her hair stringy with sweat.
‘What d’you do that for?’ she demanded. ‘We was winning!’
‘We could have been killed!’ said May. She felt dizzy and rather dazed. Her whole body was tingling.
‘So?’ the girl demanded. She thrust her face up against May’s. All May could think was how much she wanted to kiss her. She leant forwards, almost unconsciously, and the girl jumped back, unnerved.
‘Bloody hell!’ she said. May stopped. ‘Who are you?’ she said.
‘I’m May,’ said May. ‘May Thornton. Who are you?’
‘Nell. Ellen. Nell. Nell Swancott.’
Pleased to meet you, May almost said. She wanted to giggle.
‘What the hell—’ the girl began, but what she was about to say, May never discovered.
There was a shadow at the end of the alleyway, and a voice said, ‘May! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!’
It was her mother, looking dishevelled, her face flushed and her hair a marvellous bird’s nest. There was a sharp, anxious note to her voice, which was most unusual for May’s mother.
‘Whatever were you doing hiding down here? Didn’t you know I was looking for you?’
‘I was just …’ May turned back to the girl, to explain.
But she was gone.
NELL MADE HER way down the alleys towards home in a daze. She felt bruised and sore and bewildered. But more than that, she was filled with an excitement so strong it was dizzying.
Did that just happen? Did that girl really just try to kiss her? Part of her – a very large part – wanted to turn back and find her. To say, How did you know you could do that? Do people do that where you come from? Perhaps posh girls like May kissed each other all the time. Perhaps everyone did.