Things a Bright Girl Can Do

by Sally Nicholls

  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.

  Of May and Her Mother

  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.

  Button Badges

  ‘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.

  Speaking Out of Turn

  MISS SYLVIA PANKHURST was speaking in the Bow Baths Hall. This was quite an occa
sion. 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.