A Pin to See the Peepshow
F. Tennyson Jesse
First published in 1934
This edition published in 2021 by
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London nw1 2db
Copyright © 1934 F. Tennyson Jesse
Preface copyright © 2021 Lucy Evans
Afterword copyright © 2021 Simon Thomas
Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
e-ISBN 978 0 7123 6798 1
Text design and typesetting by JCS Publishing Services Ltd
Contents
The 1930s
F. Tennyson Jesse
Preface
Publisher’s Note
Day Piece to Julia
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Night Piece to Julia
Afterword
The 1930s
1930: The average age at first marriage is 24.3 for men and 21.3 for women.
1930: The National Birth Control Council is founded, merging five existing birth control societies. Its stated purpose is that ‘married people may space or limit their families and thus mitigate the evils of ill health and poverty’.
By the 1930s, a third of women in the UK do paid work outside their home, of whom about a third work in domestic service.
1932: Lilian Wyles is the first woman to be appointed Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police, having been among the first female police officers to be given the power to arrest.
1933: The Children and Young Persons Act 1933 raises the minimum age for capital punishment to 18, though nobody under that age had been hanged since a 17-year-old boy in 1889.
1934: A Pin to See the Peepshow is published.
1936: The Abortion Law Reform Association is established, campaigning for the legalisation of abortion. A 1929 Act had added the caveat that an abortion ‘done in good faith for the purpose only of preserving the life of the mother’ was not a crime. In 1938, a legal precedent is set when Dr Alex Bourne is acquitted of having performed an illegal abortion.
1937: The Matrimonial Causes Act extends the right of women to divorce their husbands, no longer requiring incest, sodomy, cruelty, etc., to be an additional offence to adultery. (Men could already divorce women for adultery, without additional offences.)
1938: The Married Woman’s Association is founded by Edith Summerskill and Juanita Frances, with the aim of promoting financial equality between husband and wife and securing equal guardianship rights for mothers and fathers.
Throughout the decade, three women are hanged in the UK, all of whom committed murder with poison. There are no laws that distinguish between men and women as regards capital punishment. The last woman to be hanged in the UK is Ruth Ellis in 1955.
F. Tennyson Jesse (1888–1958)
Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse was born in Kent on 1 March 1888 – her first name was originally spelled Wynifried, and ‘Tennyson’ was later added to honour her relationship to her great-uncle, the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Her father was a clergyman who spent several periods posted with his young family in other countries, including South Africa and the Canary Islands.
Tennyson Jesse attended the Newlyn School of Painting in Cornwall and afterwards, not welcomed home by her mother with whom she had a fraught relationship, she began earning her living by writing. Her first novel, The Milky Way, published in 1914, she later considered ‘very bad’, though it started a career with wide-ranging output, covering topics from detective stories to sailing to a fictionalised account of a real-life, nineteenth-century maid of honour bringing about the fall of the Burmese Royal Family. As well as nine novels, Tennyson Jesse wrote volumes of short stories, poetry, essays, plays and non-fiction.
Tennyson Jesse was also one of the first female war correspondents, reporting on German attacks in Belgium during the First World War, as well as from Red Cross hospitals in France. At the end of the War, she married Harold Harwood – known as Tottie – a businessman and theatre manager with whom she collaborated on several plays.
An interest in murder isn’t only seen in A Pin to See the Peepshow. Tennyson Jesse also contributed to the Notable British Crimes series, covering many trials including that of the serial killer John Christie. Her interest in the topic led to an analysis of killers in Murder and its Motives (1924), in which she divided motives into gain, revenge, elimination, jealousy, conviction and lust for killing.
Her hand was badly injured in an aeroplane propeller in her mid-twenties, and she started wearing prosthetics to replace two fingers. The treatment also led to an addiction to morphia, which seems to have affected her health until she died, aged 70, in August 1958.
Preface
From films, to plays, to novelisations, there can’t be many crimes from the twentieth century which have been explored and interpreted in so many ways. A Pin to See the Peepshow is a fictionalised account of the story of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, a case of murder and adultery which gripped Britain in the 1920s. The genre of true crime can conjure up all kinds of preconceptions. Sensationalism, serial killers and scandal, glossy book covers and a reliance on the horrible details to titillate the reader are the usual clichés. What, then, can we make of such a sensitive and nuanced work as A Pin to See the Peepshow, written by the criminologist F. Tennyson Jesse?
Tennyson Jesse’s writing career was eclectic. Perhaps the most interesting aspect, in the light of A Pin to See the Peepshow, is her contribution to the Notable British Trials series, which were respected accounts of crimes (published between 1905 and 1959). In Tennyson Jesse’s take on the story of Edith Thompson, she is reimagined as Julia Almond, a successful businesswoman who makes a poor marriage and throws herself into a passionate love affair. What makes this novel stand out is the intensity of Julia’s inner narrative and rich fantasy life which envelopes the reader in her journey. As the novel reaches the inevitable conclusion you feel caught up in the same momentum as the characters. The reader wants to intervene and save the characters from themselves and their poor choices.
A Pin to See the Peepshow is a worthy addition to the British Library Women Writers series. It highlights some of the themes we see elsewhere in the series. Where is the place for the woman who has desires and wishes for her own life outside of what might be expected for her? How does the social class of a woman narrow or widen her opportunities? Tennyson Jesse has developed a character at times unlikable and frequently unreliable as a narrator. However, there can be no doubt where the author’s sympathies lie.
Lucy Evans
Curator, Printed Heritage Collections
British Library
Publisher’s note
The original novels reprinted in the British Library Women Writers series were written and published in a period ranging, for the most part, from the 1910s to the 1950s. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers, however in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that some elements in the stories selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience. With this series, British Library Publishing aims to offer a new readership a chance to read some of the rare books of the British Library’s collections in an affordable paperback format, to enjoy their merits and to look back into the world
of the twentieth century as portrayed by their writers. It is not possible to separate these stories from the history of their writing and as such the following novel is presented as it was originally published with minor edits only, made for consistency of style and sense. We welcome feedback from our readers, which can be sent to the following address:
British Library Publishing
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DAY PIECE TO JULIA
But man, proud man!
Dressed in a little brief authority;
Most ignorant of that he’s most assured,
His glassy essence—like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven,
As make the angels weep. …
Morning
The tram roared and swung down the Goldhawk Road towards Young’s Corner. Julia, in the front seat, was pleasurably aware of the feeling of height and authority that such a position seemed to give her, almost as though she were driving the great swaying, clanging thing herself.
There came the grinding of brakes, Julia’s body adapted its rhythm to the slowing rhythm of the tram, she peered over the edge at the fat woman slowly descending, while the conductor called loudly: “Young Scorner, Young Scorner” … How funny if there really had been a young scorner, and if so, what he scorned? Fat old women who climbed slowly off trams, probably. The bell clanged, the driver pushed his shining brass lever, the tram, with a screaming of wheels on the rails, went on round the curve and down the Chiswick High Road, taking up its part again in the orchestra of Greater London.
And what an orchestra—Julia, with no actual thought, was yet aware of it through all her consciousness. It was too insistent all round about her, with its stringed instruments and its brass instruments, its bass notes as of gongs, its sudden sharps both of sound and of colour—in twanging bells and in the thin fine young green leaves of the plane-trees flickering in the sunlight—for anyone as alive as Julia not to be aware of it. She did not think of it as the voice of London, but she did think of it as the voice of life, and she herself was not only part, but the very central core of life. Impossible to imagine any life in which she would not, at some time, share. For Julia did not think of the world as being enclosed in Heronscourt Park and Chiswick; she thought of it as being a great wide splendid place where she and whomsoever elected to be half of herself, could and would roam at will. Thus strange Eastern countries, inhabited by other peoples; Embassies, where the great of the earth walked covered in stars; vast drawing-rooms called “salons” in Paris, where women ruled, and swept about in marvellous dresses, and tapped gentlemen on the arm with fans—all these places so alien from the small red-brick villa off Heronscourt Park, were the world to Julia. The trams were no clearer to her ears than were the cultured accents of the diplomatists of Seton Merriman (whose ancient volumes she obtained from the Free Library in the Park) and the green and gold flicker of the plane-leaves in the sunlight were only the prelude to the day of thrilling emotions that lay before her at the High School.
The “Packhorse and Talbot” (what sort of a dog was a Talbot?) had been left far behind; the thin grey Gothic of Turnham Green Church had faded to the left, so had the sulky, dark-red building that was the Roman Catholic Church at the top of Duke’s Avenue (there were some rich houses with very well-off people down that avenue, houses with a window on each side of the door and several black-and-white maids and a garden); and the school was rushing nearer and nearer, with a roar and a clanging. Life was approaching Julia, as it approached her each morning, with a quickening of the orchestra about her and of her own pulses, that chimed in delicately with the whole overture like the thin, fine notes of a flute. Julia, whose appreciation of music had at one time, so she thought, reached its climax with the Indian Love Lyrics, had since absorbed Dvorák’s Humoresque, and she thought of herself as the light sweet air of it, coming in again and again, with repeated importance, through the blurred shapelessness that all music save a definite “tune” was to her ears. The rhythmic trams, the bright blown plane-trees, the horses’ hoofs, the tooting of horns, the grinding of brakes, the clanging of bells, the flicker of colour in gowns and faces, the light tapping of heels, the flutter of curtains at open windows, the tiny contacts with unknown human beings who would remain for ever unknown, as she caught the glint of an eye or the self-absorbed look on a passing face—all these were to Julia at sixteen what they are to anyone at sixteen—the music that set her own life dancing.
Julia Almond was on her daily great adventure, she was going to school. There it was, the grey-porticoed building, with its basement where one had lunch just showing its dark blank eyes about the level of the neglected garden; and the paler patches where the stucco had peeled off, making fantastic faces that grinned from beneath a gutter or a window-sill. An ugly building, but holding all of beauty and excitement to Julia.
She gathered up her books, pushed back her hat so that it should not flop in the wind on this fine day and blind her as she alighted, and made her way down the deck of the swaying tram. Arrived at the far end she hit the bell before she started to descend the stairs. The conductor glanced up annoyed—conductors always seemed to think it was an infringement of their privileges if one rang the bell oneself, but how otherwise was the tram to stop by the time one was at the foot of the stairs? This man had his revenge by ringing again before Julia’s foot was fairly off the step, and the jerk of the car as it re-started nearly threw her on her nose, but with the easy resilience of youth she steadied herself, and sped across to the pavement.
There was that dull Mary Barnes, who didn’t wash enough under the arms but was unaccountably good at Latin, just going in at the varnished wooden gate, her fair, serious face, that somehow was all pointed, like a fox terrier’s, poked out in front of her. When Julia arrived at the gate, it was still moving from the earnest passage of Mary Barnes. Julia absorbed the backward swing of the gate into her urgent palm, set it off on its forward journey again, and walked, with that untaught grace that was hers by some miracle or freakishness of nature’s, up the path between the dingy laurel bushes.
“The girls” went past the portico, without affronting its majestic steps—those were reserved for parents and mistresses—and Julia followed Mary Barnes round the side of the house to the back, where a glass-house that had once been a Victorian conservatory was now used for hats and coats. Julia had caught up with Mary Barnes by now, and, passing her with a careless nod, went into the glass-house and up to the mirror that hung upon the wall. Mary could either wait or take off her hat without looking at herself, nothing made any difference to her eager pushed-forward face, anyway.
But Julia knew already, with the precocity of the London girl, that hers was a face that needed everything to be just right. She hung up her black cloak—she rather liked that cloak, although it was three years old, being a relic of Aunt Mildred’s mourning for King Edward—because it had wide wing-sleeves and she felt she looked like Portia in it. Her black skirt was cut down from one of her mother’s, and her scarlet blouse, with its white “Peter Pan” collar, she had bought for herself at a sale, and she had bought as well the scarlet felt hat with the wide brim that made her look, she felt, like an art student. She was to learn fashion-drawing, before going into the dressmaking, and that meant that she would be in a sort of way an art student.
She perched the hat on a peg, a-top of the cloak, and stared at herself in the glass, smoothing the bright wing that lay over her brow. It was nice, that bright brown wing of hair that curved down so low it hid one of her straight brows. Then the soft bright brownness was puffed out a little over each ear by combs, and tied with a big black bow at the nape of her neck. If she hadn’t tied it, it would have spread out all over the shoulders and down to her waist. Rather fun, perhaps, for then she could have tossed her head perpetually to
get it out of the way, but on the whole more bother than it was worth. She felt freer to turn her head with her hair tied back, and she knew that the curve of her head and the line of her long full neck were the best things about her. Miss Tracey had told one of the other mistresses, who had told one of the other girls, who had told Julia, that Julia Almond had a Chinkwy Chento neck. Julia wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she knew it was something to do with pictures painted by the early Italians, and she had had a rapturous afternoon on a half-holiday, with Miss Tracey at the National Gallery, surreptitiously searching for her neck.
Miss Tracey … soon she would see her, see that swift distracted smile, that was less distracted for her than anyone else. But at that moment Julia met her own eyes in the glass, and Miss Tracey, for whom she wished to look pretty, was forgotten just because she was looking pretty. Yes, it was a good day. She had felt that it was as she sat on the top of the tram, even the fact that the conductor didn’t like her hadn’t spoiled that conviction. The air had not been filled with trumpets for nothing. Yes, yes, said Julia’s heart at the glance of those narrow grey-blue eyes in the mirror, it’s true, I’m pretty.
Julia was wrong: she wasn’t pretty, except occasionally. She was very short-sighted, and she saw the pallor of her skin, the narrow brightness of her eyes and the gleam of her hair through a haze that lay like a bloom over everything at which she looked. But she was right in believing that there was no other girl in the school who gave back quite that brilliant reflection, a reflection so brilliant that it assaulted the senses even of her who gave it life. She was so young that the hard white light from the roof of the glass-house was becoming to her. There were no pockets beneath the eyes, no lines from nose to chin, and the thick texture of the skin drawn over the rather high cheek-bones, a skin with the matt quality of an eggshell or a white kid glove, defied the searching light to find an impurity. If the modelling of her face had been as good as the spacing of the features she would have been a beauty, but there was a sloppiness in contour, a thickening of the irregular nose, a too great fullness round the lower lip, that only youth could make of no account. On a plain day Julia could look incredibly like a pudding, and she knew it, but she looked lovely to herself that morning, and she turned her glossy head upon her neck like a bird, and smiled for pleasure.
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