Milkman

by Anna Burns

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  Go and have a wee word? Was he crazy as well as blind and deaf and dumb to what was said about those women in this area? I’d be committing social suicide even to catch eyes with one of them in the street. So no thanks. Not keen to have a word, not now, not ever. These women, constituting the nascent feminist group in our area – and exactly because of constituting it – were firmly placed in the category of those way, way beyond-the-pale. The word ‘feminist’ was beyond-the-pale. The word ‘woman’ barely escaped beyond-the-pale. Put both together, or try unsuccessfully to soften things with another word, a general word, one in disguise such as ‘issues’ and basically you’ve had it. Awful things were said about these women with the issues in our district, not just behind their backs but to their faces as well.

  It started with a notice put in the window of a house by the housewife who lived in that house and who seemed traditional and normal until she put up this notice. She had a husband and children, with nobody violently killed in her family either, to have accounted, it was said, for her subsequent out-of-character behaviour, but she put this notice up and it was far from the usual type of proclamation to be seen in windows of certain houses in our area at this time. The usual ones said things like ‘KEEP OUT OF THIS PROPERTY ON PAIN OF DEATH – THIS, THE ONLY INTIMATION’ then signed ‘DISTRICT RENOUNCERS’ as a warning to any of us wayward inhabitants, including children, who might have a notion to break into some vulnerable person’s residence – to have a play there, to have a teenage person’s dossing-down drinking session there, to explore and poke about there, even to squat there – without giving any thought to the usually far-gone and wretched alcoholic who already lived there and whose house it was. They were making it clear, our renouncers, that if we persisted in our unjust, inconsiderate and merciless behaviour towards the more fragile of our district, then ramifications would follow that certainly we would all regret. In contrast, this housewife’s notice said ‘ATTENTION ALL WOMEN OF THE DISTRICT: GREAT GOOD NEWS!!!’ then followed information about some international women’s group that had been inaugurated recently into the world. It was seeking to set up sister branches in all the world’s countries, with no place – no city, no town, no village, no hamlet, no district, no hovel, no isolated residence – to be excluded from the remit, with no woman – again, any colour, any creed, any sexual preference, any disability, mental illness or even general dislikeability, indeed, of any type of diversity – to be excluded from the venture, and amazingly a sister branch of this international women’s group sprang up in our very downtown. Its first monthly meeting received shocking reports in the media both before and after it happened, reports based mainly on this meeting having had the audacity to come into existence in the first place. The criticism was bad, very bad, much along the lines of ‘depravity, decadence, demoralisation, dissemination of pessimism, outrages to propriety’ as had been levelled at that red-light street when first it became inaugurated. However, the media backlash did nothing to prevent at least some women from some of the areas moseying along downtown to see what all this sisterhood branch of international women’s issues was about. These female participants hailed not just from the two warring religions here, but also from a smattering of the lesser known, lesser attended to, indeed completely ignored, other religions. One woman from our district went along and did so too, off her own bat. She didn’t seek permission, didn’t seek approval, didn’t ask anyone’s opinion or request they go with her for moral support and protection. Instead she put on her shawl, took her purse, her key, and went out her door just like that. It turned out this woman was the housewife who subsequently stuck up the notice. ‘And she stuck it up,’ said neighbours, ‘barely a fraction of time after she got back from that meeting downtown.’ Meanwhile, in liaison with the downtown sister branch, which was itself in liaison with the overall international women’s movement of the world headquarters, this woman was now seeking to set up a sub-sorority branch in our district, just as some other women from other districts were now attempting in theirs. That was what she did. In her notice in the window, and in a daring modern fashion, she invited all women from the area to put their children out for their evening adventures as usual then, unencumbered, to make their way of a Wednesday evening to her house to hear talk. They would be amazed, promised the poster, by points of female significance such as had arisen during that downtown branch meeting; also, should they themselves feel inclined to air views on anything which could be classed as an overall women’s issue, such would be fed back monthly to the next downtown meeting, then fed quarterly to the next overall international meeting. Confusingly, there was no mention in this notice of our border issue or our political problems here at all. Men and women in the district were astonished. ‘What can she be about? Whatever can she mean to put such a thing in her window?’ And they gossiped about her, and her notice, leaving off only to move back to normal topics, such as who might be an informer, who was having the latest adulterous sex, and which country might win Miss World when next it had its airing on the TV. So this notice was talked to death, then it was dismissed, with most in the area of the opinion that nothing could come of it other than the woman would be felt sorry for or, if she persisted, wondered at as another candidate for beyond-the-pale. At worst, the renouncers-of-the-state would take her away as the latest person acting suspiciously in our area, which would be, more or less, true. Instead, and in the first week since the notice went up, two local women appeared at the door of this housewife, which made three for the inaugural Wednesday Women’s Issues Meeting. The following week there was added another four. No more women turned up after that, but altogether there were now seven of these individuals and they met every Wednesday evening, being joined fortnightly by a knowledgeable coordinator from the downtown group. This coordinator would give pep talks, speak of expansion, introduce historical and contemporary comment on women’s issues, all to help bring, she said, women from everywhere out of the dark and into the fold. Once a month too, this group would travel downtown to the branch meeting of the combined sub-groups from all districts ‘this side of the water’ and ‘this side of the border’ which had managed to get themselves inaugurated. Naturally, by this time, in our area, the usual paranoid stories started up.

  One story circulating about our group of sub-branch women centred around the place of their meetings because after the first three Wednesdays the first housewife’s husband didn’t want them carrying on in this feminist fashion in the actual house he and his wife lived in because, nice as he was, conciliatory as he’d like to be, he was sorry but there was his own reputation to look out for. This didn’t deter the women for they set about making the first woman’s backyard shed nice and cosy for their meetings instead. Before this though, they had approached the chapel to see if one of the tin hutments on the wasteground could be made available for them. The chapel owned the hutments and often it permitted various bodies – chiefly, the renouncers – to have use of them for their business, such as defence-of-the-area meetings, furtherance-of-the-cause meetings, kangaroo-court meetings but it refused to let the women borrow one or hire one because there’d been a transformation in opinion regarding these women by this time. No longer were they viewed as harmless, as childlike, as objects of raillery, as playing about at holding adult-issue meetings because here they were, now seeking a proper venue in which to pursue these meetings. A new belief sprang into existence as to why exactly they’d want to do that. ‘If they get a hutment,’ said the area, ‘they could be up to anything in it. They could be plotting subversive acts in it. They could be having homosexual intercourse in it. They could be performing and undergoing abortions in it,’ the result being, of course, that the chapel said no. It stated that in accordance with …, in contravention of …, on the grounds that .…, to grant the women’s request would be as scandalous and unprincipled of the chapel as already it was for the women to be making it. So they disallowed use of the hutments owing to disgrace and unspeakablenes
s which didn’t stop the women, for right away they set about painting and decorating the shed. They put up shelves, curtains, brought in oil lamps, a primus stove, colourful teacups, a tea caddy, a biscuit tin, warm fluffy rugs and flowers and cushions. Around the walls they put posters of exemplary worldwide issue women obtained from the downtown sister branch which had obtained them from the international women’s headquarters. But before that, our seven women got the husband of the first woman to go into the shed to deal with the spiders and the insects for them, which the husband, under condition they kept silent about his involvement in this matter, agreed in the dead of night to do.

  The second story put about about these aborting homosexual insurrectionists was that the eighth one, the woman who wasn’t from our district but the wise, knowledgeable facilitator from the downtown sister branch who’d come to visit our women fortnightly – to buck them up, to encourage with zeal and who brought with her each time mounds of pamphlets on the abundance of women’s issues – was from the other side’s religion and also from the country ‘over there’. Normally this would have been fine, completely all right given that, first of all, she was female, which meant of lesser significance as a potential threat to district paramilitary activity than would have been some visiting male person to the area. Two, she’d been invited into the area by seven local women which ordinarily would have been ample reference and recommendation for her. However, owing to these particular women being themselves hardly normal, any invitation they might extend would carry nowhere near the same weight as that of anyone else. This meant the eighth woman could no longer be allowed to enter, least not until vigorously vetted. After all, warned the grapevine, might she not be an issue woman really, a women’s libber really, but instead some slippery agent provocateur for the state? After a bit of exaggeration and the usual escalation of rumour, a spy, of course, became what she was. In the eyes of the community, and especially in the eyes of the paramilitaries, this eighth woman was an enemy out to entrap into informership our seven naïve and dotty women. So one Wednesday night-time the renouncers burst into the shed to take her away. They barged in – in Halloween masks, balaclavas, with guns, with a few secure enough in power and stature to eschew any type of facial covering – but all they found when they got inside were our seven women in their shawls and slippers, having tea and buns and discussing in chintz earnestness the ramifications of the massacre of the women and children by the yeomanry at the nineteenth-century Battle of Peterloo. On the walls around the shed, and overshadowing, also momentarily stunning the renouncers, loomed enormous, larger-than-life pin-ups of inspirational, prototypal past and present wonderwomen: the Pankhursts, Millicent Fawcett, Emily Davison, Ida Bell Wells, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Mariana Pineda, Marie Curie, Lucy Stone, Dolly Parton – those sorts of women – but there was no eighth woman, because the other seven, attending carefully to the grapevine in our district, had warned their sister of this imminent danger and instructed her in no small terms not to come. All the same, the renouncers, recovering from the brain-shock of the false impression produced by additional, enormous women from down the centuries being present in that moment with our seven women, ransacked the tiny shed, which took a second, looking for the eighth woman. Then they warned the issue women not to have her back on pain of her being killed as a spy-agent with they, themselves, severely punished for aiding and abetting the state. Owing, however, to a burgeoning outlook that encompassed an attitude of confidence and entitlement, something snapped within the issue women and unexpectedly they declared they would not. What they meant was, they would not be dictated to, that in spite of the eighth woman probably never to return because the renouncers ruined everything, should she choose to do so, not only would they not reject her, they’d stand foursquare behind her and the renouncers themselves could go hang. Things were said then on both sides, with further threats from the renouncers and declamations on the ills of patriarchy and of pedagogy from the issue women. Finally, ‘Over our dead bodies,’ said the seven in a somewhat fatalistic ‘digging their own graves’ fashion, which of course, played straight into the renouncers’ hands. Unlike the traditional women from our district who, on occasion, would instinctively unite and rise up to put an end to some gone-mad political or district problem, these seven women – bold as they’d been in their inspired moment of standing up to the renouncers – didn’t and couldn’t constitute the same robust critical mass. So they said, ‘Over our dead bodies’ with the renouncers replying, ‘Okay then. Over your dead bodies’ and if it hadn’t been for the traditional women, including ma, getting to hear, then involving themselves in this matter, our particular sister branch of the international women’s movement – owing to the sudden and violent demise of all of its members – would there and then have come to an end. As it was, the district’s normal women did get to hear and, uniting once more, they threw themselves into action. This too, was in spite of reservations they held, not just of having to deal with what was, in its own amassment, a tenacious killing-machine of renouncers, but because of the third story doing the rounds about these tiresome issue women, one which impacted adversely and exasperatingly upon the traditional women themselves.

  Women always broke the curfews. That would be the traditional women because until recently, there hadn’t been any newfangled branch of sisterhood women. This breaking of the curfews too, would be because the traditional women’s patience would have been stretched far enough. It would have been over-tried, over-tested and the subsequent snapping of it would be directed towards any group of men, any religion, any side of the water, setting up rules and regulations, overreaching themselves with their rules and regulations, expecting everyone else too – meaning women – to go along with the preposterousness of the silliness they had concocted as rationale in their heads. Basically, it was the toybox mentality, the toy trains in the attic, the toy soldiers on the toy battlefield and, in the case of the state and the military, the particular toy of choice that they’d get out of the box every so often was curfews where the rules were, if you broke one without a permit after eighteen hundred hours and sometimes after just sixteen hundred hours, without fear or favour, without respect for station, on sight you would be shot. So it was bad enough having to deal with your own particular brand of paramilitaries with all their touchy rules and pedantic expectations. But when also you had to factor in the other side with their equally ridiculous runners and riders, it was out of the question really, that the traditional woman’s forbearance would not, in these circumstances, snap. So it would snap – because life was going on – children to be fed, nappies to be changed, housework to be done, shopping to be got in, political problems, best as could be managed, skirted around or in some other way accommodated. So patience would snap then, united, and in spite of the police and military poring over and adjusting beloved touches to tactics and game-plans before setting out with rifles and loudhailers to make sure nobody was breaking the curfew, these women would break the curfew by taking off their aprons, putting on their coats, shawls, scarves and with the bush telegraph already up and running, they’d go out their doors in their hundreds and deliberately, and permitless, and after eighteen hundred hours or just sixteen hundred hours, encumber the pavements, the streets, every patch of disallowed curfew territory, amply spreading themselves all around. Not just themselves either. With them would be their children, their screaming babies, their housepets of assorted dogs, rabbits, hamsters and turtles. Also they’d be wheeling their prams and carrying their pennants, their banners, their placards and shouting, ‘CURFEW’S OVER! EVERYBODY IS TO COME OUT! CURFEW’S OVER!’, thereby inviting all in the area who weren’t already out, to come out, so that everybody could enter into state defiance and every time so far when the traditional women had done this, when they’d reclaimed sanity, the police and the military would find the latest curfew, right before their eyes, had stopped. To shoot up a district of women, children, prams and goldfish otherwise,
to run them through with swords much as one might like to, would not look good, would look grave, sexist, unbalanced, not only in the glare of the critical side of the home media, but also in the eyes of the international media. So, curfew over, the military and the state would go back to the playbox to find out what else might be in there, with the traditional women – after further obligatory banner-waving, picketing, pressure protests and interviews – returning home in haste, emptying the streets in seconds, all to get in to get the evening tea on.