Things a Bright Girl Can Do

by Sally Nicholls

  Evelyn – it was the strangest thing – felt as though something inside her had burst open. Seeing him there was like coming home. Like feeling safe for the first time in what felt like her whole life.

  She couldn’t stop looking at him. The courtroom and the other women felt very far away. Her heart was pounding tremendously inside her. Of course, she thought. Of course, it was you I wanted. She had never felt anything so clearly. She wanted to shout it out to him, to pull away from the other Suffragettes and run up the courtroom aisle and tell him right now: Of course it was you I wanted.

  ‘Evelyn,’ said Mrs Leighton, and she dragged her attention back to the judge.

  The hearing was astonishingly brief. One of the policemen gave evidence that the Suffragettes had attacked him, and that he’d been forced to arrest them for his own protection.

  ‘The liar!’ Miss Miraz whispered indignantly. ‘He can’t say that, can he? Can’t we stop him? We can call our own witnesses, can’t we?’ She looked into the crowd. ‘Miss Gregory’s there, look – I’m sure she’d come up and say that never happened.’

  ‘No fear!’ said Mrs Leighton. ‘Not unless you want her held up for contempt of court. Just stay quiet – they never listen to what we say, anyway.’

  ‘But that’s outrageous!’ said Miss Miraz. She’d gone pink.

  After the policeman had given evidence, the magistrate asked if the Suffragettes had anything to say. Mrs Leighton and the other women shook their heads, but Miss Miraz stepped up.

  ‘Excuse me, your worship,’ she said. ‘But that policeman isn’t telling the truth. We didn’t attack him, or hurt him – we just tried to push past him to get to the hall. If you don’t believe us, you can ask him to show you the injuries we’re supposed to have given him. Why! I bet he hasn’t a single bruise!’

  The policeman bristled.

  ‘Calling me a liar, are you?’ he said. ‘You just listen to me—’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said the magistrate. ‘That’s enough. Two weeks, second class, the lot of you. And an extra week for you, Miraz, for contempt of court.’

  ‘I – what?’ said Miss Miraz. ‘That’s—’

  ‘And if you’re not careful, it’ll be two,’ said the magistrate. ‘Next case!’

  The women were led away. And now, all at once, Evelyn was really afraid. Prison. Real prison. And not with the other women – from whom it suddenly felt desperately important not to be separated – a cell on her own. To hunger strike. The panic fluttered at her stomach. She glanced up at Teddy. He was standing, looking very white, his hands still gripping the back of the bench. It seemed desperately important to speak to him, to tell him – but a policeman’s hand was on her shoulder, pushing her forward.

  She turned her head back to look at Teddy as they went out of the court, twisting it round to keep his face in sight for as long as possible. She tried to store up every particle of it in her memory – the line of his jaw, the slight tremble in his mouth, the light curls that tumbled over his ears, and the blue eyes full of anxiety. It might be the last time I ever see you, she thought, and then she told herself firmly not to be a bloody idiot. Two weeks, she thought. That’s nothing. That other woman’s getting a month for helping a lady with her parcels. But it wasn’t the two weeks that were worrying her.

  It was the hunger strike. Hunger and thirst strike.

  Starting now.

  Alone

  THE FIRST TIME Nell had ever fallen in love with a girl, she’d been eleven years old.

  The girl in question had been Mabel Tonge, who sat two desks along from Nell at school. At eleven, Nell had been old enough to know that girls didn’t fall in love with other girls. For the longest time, she’d tried to convince herself that what she felt for Mabel Tonge wasn’t love. She liked her, that was all. It wasn’t often Nell liked other girls, so that, surely, must be what the funny, nervous, butterfly-y feeling she felt around Mabel was about. Other girls, mostly, didn’t much like Nell either; she wasn’t quite a girl and she wasn’t quite a boy, and that made them wary and a little contemptuous. Nell minded and she didn’t mind. But when it came to Mabel, she minded a lot.

  Mabel Tonge was a blackboard monitor, the best speller and the best skipper in the class. Nell thought she was perfection itself. She would watch her in class, whispering secrets to her deskmate Mary Henson, and thought she’d die of envy. What wouldn’t she give to have that dark head whispering secrets to her!

  But even at eleven, Nell knew it wasn’t exactly friendship she wanted with Mabel. What she did want, she wasn’t sure. Something grander and nobler, like Sir Walter Raleigh laying down his cloak for Queen Elizabeth across a ‘plashy place’. Or like Sir Lancelot dazzling the Lady of Shalott on his war horse with the burnish’d hooves. Nell wanted to protect Mabel from muddy puddles and black magic. She wanted … she didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t dare to look at it face on.

  But she was ashamed of it, even so. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t how other girls felt. The other girls giggled about boys, but Nell thought that even if she lived to be a hundred she wouldn’t understand why. The boys Nell knew were noisy, chaotic, blood-and-guts types, all scabby knees and fisticuffs. They lived more interesting lives than the girls did, but Nell couldn’t imagine wanting to marry one of them.

  Girls, though … girls were beautiful. Everyone agreed on that. She didn’t see why anyone would rather marry a boy over a girl.

  Nell rarely thought of Mabel Tonge these days; she’d gone to work in a steam laundry in Poplar, and was walking out with an Irish boy from the docks. But the older she got, the harder it was to ignore the fact that something about her make-up was intrinsically inverted. That there were rules about how girls were supposed to behave, and she seemed built to break them all.

  There was very little space for introspection in Coney Lane. There was very little space for breathing, Nell sometimes thought. She was used to it, them all living on top of one another, they all were. Mostly the younger children were out playing in the street, or at school. She and Bill went out too, when they weren’t working. You had to.

  They hung around in gangs, like adolescents everywhere, the girls watching the boys and the boys watching the girls watching them. There was still cricket, sometimes, the boys showing off and the girls in little huddles shooting them admiring glances. Nell hated it.

  ‘Mating rituals!’ said Bernie scornfully. He was clever, was Bernie. But he was right too. It was a mating ritual, only Nell was all wrong, like Albert Kumar’s monkey, who thought Albert’s father’s fox terrier was its mother, and tried to chase sticks and roll over like she did. Albert Kumar’s father was a Lascar who’d come to Poplar on a ship from India. He’d bought the little monkey from another Lascar and given him to Albert, but it was the fox terrier who’d adopted him.

  Nell often thought of the little dog, barking and barking in panic as her strange son leapt about the room, from the table to the fireplace to the top of the dresser and back again. When the boys fooled for the girls in Victoria Park, she felt just like that monkey, a creature from a far-off country, dropped down amongst the soot and smoke of the East End docks, longing for the jungle.

  Could you be homesick for a place you didn’t even know existed?

  Sometimes, as she washed herself in the Public Bathhouse, she’d sneak sideways glances at the other girls as they undressed, then down at her own body, short and squat and awkward. Other girls felt like a different species to Nell. She’d decided as a child that she wasn’t one of them, and as an adult that feeling had only grown. What are you? strangers said to Nell in the street, or sometimes What is it? which was worse. Nell never knew what to say.

  How could she? She didn’t know the answer to their question herself.

  She just knew that whatever it was, it was a desperately lonely thing to be.

  Until May came along.

  No Surrender

  THE CELL WAS small and bare. As Evelyn was a Suffragette prisoner, and expe
cted to hunger strike, she was assigned a hospital cell. The main difference between this and last night’s cell, as far as she could see, was that instead of the bare boards she’d slept on last night, she had an iron bedstead. And somewhere close by, she could hear a baby crying.

  It had been a very long day. After the trial, the Suffragettes had sat in a small room for what felt like hours, waiting to be processed. A few years ago they would have been given prison clothes, but to Evelyn’s relief, that did not happen now. She was allowed to keep her own clothes. She was expected to wash, however. She’d been longing and longing for a bath all day, but when she was presented with it, the bath was cold and the water greyish. Looking at it, Evelyn wanted to weep.

  ‘Couldn’t you at least change the water?’ she said to the guard, her desperation conquering her previous resolution to keep quiet and stay out of trouble.

  ‘All prisoners must wash before being admitted to prison,’ said the guard, in a rather bored tone, as though she hadn’t asked the question. And Evelyn, recognising defeat, began to undress.

  She was not permitted to wash herself, and had to submit to the ministrations of the guard.

  Instead of last night’s porcelain, the walls of her cell were whitewashed and much graffitied. I DID IT FOR MY CHILDREN, read one message, rather pathetically. MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON OUR SOULS said another. NO SURRENDER a third. Others were crude, or obscene.

  DETECTIVE SMITH KNOWS HOW TO GEE.

  TELL HIM HE’S A C—— FROM ME.

  Evelyn hadn’t the first notion what it was that Detective Smith knew how to do. The obscenity was a new word too, although she understood the violence of it. It was an ugly, dirty thing to share a cell with. She’d hoped that Holloway might be better organised than the police station, but this cell was just as filthy as the other. There was a low-level, grey, grimy beastliness about everything. She felt, very much, a stranger in an unwholesome place. I should never have come here, she thought, very clearly. I should never have come.

  She banged her fist on the wall of the cell.

  ‘Hello!’ she called. ‘Hello! Are there any Suffragettes here?’ No answer. She did the same on the other side.

  ‘Hello! Hello!’

  Nothing.

  She was alone.

  There was something desperate about being alone. The Hampstead house was always full of people: Mother, Father, Christopher in the vacs, Kezia, Hetty, Miss Perring, and before Miss Perring, the nursemaid, Ann. Cook and Iris, the between-maid. Friends of Mother’s coming to call, or their own school-friends coming for tea. And all of the everyday people, knocking on the front door or the back – gypsies selling heather, the vicar wanting subscriptions for the church roof, the clock-winder, the coal man, the butcher’s boy, the baker’s boy, the newspaper boy. Teddy. School was full of people. The streets of Hampstead were full of people. Evelyn, in all her seventeen years, had never been really alone before in her life, and it terrified her.

  ‘No surrender,’ she said, out loud. ‘No surrender, no surrender, no surrender. Oh, criminy. Oh, Teddy, I do wish you were here.’

  After a while, two warders came into the cell, carrying a chair and a table with a tablecloth. They left, and soon returned with plates of food, of quite a different quality to the bread and margarine she’d been given in the police station. Tea. Steak. Fruit. Jellies. Brand’s Essence. A large earthenware jug of water. This food, Evelyn soon realised, was to be left permanently in the cell, to act as a constant temptation. She discovered that she was not, in fact, very tempted. She felt much too tired and nervy to eat. And too thirsty. She had been given nothing to drink since that morning. The water was very tempting indeed, so she took the jug, and the teapot, and the milk jug, and she tipped them out onto the floor. Then she felt better.

  Perhaps tomorrow, she thought, when she was hungrier, the food would bother her more. But in all her time in gaol, she discovered that it could not touch her.

  A woman on hunger and thirst strike does not care about food. Almost from the first, she craves only water.

  By the next morning, Evelyn’s throat was dry and parched and her head was throbbing. At first it was an annoyance, but it soon became all she could think about. It didn’t help that she had no other distractions (although what could distract you from dying of thirst?) She was denied both exercise (and therefore companionship) and books from the library as punishment for the hunger strike. She took to walking from one side of the cell to the other, backwards and forwards, talking to the walls as though they were a friend; Teddy perhaps, or one of her friends from school, or Mrs Leighton.

  ‘Well then,’ she’d say, ‘this is a pretty mess I’ve found myself in, isn’t it? I must look a guy. I wonder what Mother is telling her friends. I wonder if I was in the papers. Do you think I might have been?’

  Neither Teddy nor her schoolfriends were very impressed. And as the day went on, and the jug of water was replaced, none of them could see why she didn’t give in and take a sip, just one sip, just a little sip, no one need ever know!

  ‘Mrs Pankhurst wouldn’t take even a little sip,’ Evelyn told them sternly.

  ‘Oh, hang Mrs Pankhurst!’ the imaginary Teddy cried. ‘You’ll make yourself ill if you carry on like this!’

  ‘That’s rather the whole point,’ Evelyn told him. She liked telling him, it made her feel very grand and noble. But she did wish her own imaginary friends might be more helpful. In the end, she took to tipping the water out onto the floor of the cell as soon as it arrived, so as not to be tempted. But it was hard.

  Mrs Leighton was a better companion.

  ‘Just think of what you’re doing this for,’ she said. ‘Just think of the other women in the other cells doing this same thing. You don’t want to be the only one who gives up, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Evelyn. She gritted her teeth, and kept walking.

  But soon she began to wonder how long she could bear this. Her tongue was coated in a foul-tasting gunk, and felt huge and hot and swollen. Her saliva – how disgusting! – was thick and yellow. A bitter-tasting phlegm rose constantly in the mouth. She longed to be sick, but although she tried again and again, she could not manage it. What little urine she could pass was dark and painful. And as night fell, she discovered that she could not even sleep. Her thirst and her headache overpowered everything else. She sat on the bed, hunched forward with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders and shivered. The police cell had been warm, but here she was constantly cold. The wardress gave her a hot-water bottle, but it burned her skin, and left the rest of her body as cold as before.

  Soon, it hurt too much to walk. Added to the throb of her headache was a constant pain in the small of her back, and other sudden, stabbing pains in the abdomen and stomach.

  ‘Heavens,’ she said, still trying desperately to pretend she was cheerful. She bent double, listening to the flutter of her heartbeat. It was as though there was another Evelyn, a detached, observant Evelyn, who could watch this torture without being immersed in it. She leant forward, clutching her stomach. Some Suffragettes had lasted as long as six or seven days on thirst strike before they were released. Evelyn wondered how on earth they had managed. She listened to the baby still crying somewhere close by in the prison hospital, and wondered how long she could endure.

  Changeling Child

  IT HAD TAKEN May much longer to realise she was different.

  None of May’s friends knew many boys. May didn’t, certainly. There were people’s brothers, but mostly, of course, they were away at school. She knew a couple of boys through the Quakers, but not well; they were older and rather distant. There had been boys at children’s parties at Christmas, and boys at the dancing class she’d attended for a term, but you couldn’t call that knowing, exactly. There were three boy cousins in Scotland, and really, that was it.

  Despite this, all the girls at May’s school were in love. Barbara was in love with young Nelson and with a red-headed boy who worked at the stationer’s on the c
orner. Winifred was in love with Edmund – they’d been doing King Lear in English that year – and also Miss Cage, the games mistress. It was quite common to be in love with mistresses. There simply weren’t many other options.

  The mistresses themselves rather frowned on love. People who stared out of the window at boys, or dressed ‘flash’ in order to attract them, were the subject of stern lectures on the perils of being ‘forward’. May, without really thinking about why, knew that sort of girl was not quite nice; not in the Fourth Form at least. Nobody had ever said anything about falling in love with a girl, though. Falling in love with a girl was a different order of things entirely, something pure and beautiful, almost holy.

  It had taken May until she was fourteen to realise that she only ever fell in love with women, or girls. This had come to a head last year, with a passionate, week-long relationship with Margaret Howard, involving lots of secret kissing and intense discussions about the nature of love. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, Margaret Howard had decided May was too ‘immature’ and ‘peculiar’ and that had been that.

  The suddenness of Margaret’s about-face had bewildered May, and forced her to confront the fact that what she thought of as love was quite different to what other girls thought. She’d taken this problem – as she took most problems – to Mama, who’d listened with unusual seriousness and said, ‘There’s much more of this about than there used to be, you know – I expect it’s one of those perils of modernity we hear so much about. I’ve got a frightfully interesting book about it somewhere.’

  And she’d lent May Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex.

  ‘Do be careful though, darling,’ she’d added. ‘You know I don’t mind what you do. But I rather think Miss Cooper might think it fearfully Freudian, or immoral, or inverted, or something awful like that.’