by Maggie Ford
Connie was still chatting away. ‘It’s been going for more than fifty years, you know, but the actual organised suffragette movement only really started this century. We’re in the right. How can it be fair for any drunken labourer to have the franchise when respectable and upright women of property are left outside the polling booth?’
‘I don’t think it’s fair, either,’ Eveline obliged, but Connie hardly stopped for breath.
‘There are lots of women compelled to pay taxes to the country yet still forbidden any opinion on how that tax is to be managed. You will hear in a moment how very wrong it truly is and how we must and will continue to fight by whatever means for the right of women to be given the vote.’
She sounded so fervent, as though quoting words drilled into her by an endless succession of speakers, that Eveline was almost tempted to ask if she had any opinion of her own. But it was best not to antagonise someone who had just befriended you so generously, so she contented herself nodding or shaking her head where appropriate while surreptitiously taking stock of those around her. Everyone seemed to have the same intense expression as they talked among themselves or watched the goings-on on the stage.
People were still coming in. As the hall filled rapidly, more chairs were being found and set up along the back. Connie had turned back to Mrs Strickland, leaving Eveline free to look about her, and she amused herself by picking out working women, factory girls taking advantage of half-day Saturdays; shop girls were not so lucky, having to work until eight or nine this evening.
She was surprised to see more men than she had expected. It was good to know that not all were against the effort of women to gain a say in their own country, an effort that had so far brought them only hardship and suffering.
Suddenly her roving gaze was brought up sharply by a young man seated two rows behind and three seats to her right, staring straight back at her quite openly, his eyes brilliant blue.
Her cheeks grown suddenly hot, Eveline looked quickly away, returning her attention to Connie.
‘Next week,’ Connie was saying, quite unaware Eveline’s attention had strayed, ‘there is a big demonstration planned outside Number Ten Downing Street. You might like to be there. You’re not expected to be one of those who will chain them selves to the railings, of course, but we need all the support we can get.’
She seemed to take it that her companion would be only too eager to attend. ‘It could become rough, my dear, and some are not up to that. But you’ll be quite safe if you stay on the perimeter.’
With no wish to be hustled into joining without giving it any thought, Eveline said she’d need to think about it.
‘On Saturday afternoons,’ Connie continued, ‘a group of us meet for a social gathering with tea and scones. We chat about this and that, not all politics, just general small talk. Perhaps you’d like to come along. It’s in George Street, near Marble Arch. I’ll give you the address as we leave.’
Eveline nodded obligingly, still sensing the young man’s eyes upon her. She just had to make sure it wasn’t merely imagination and under the pretext of patting her hair in place she stole a quick peek.
He seemed to be with a woman, at least that was what it looked like from here, the woman talking away to him although he appeared not to be paying much attention. Instead, to her intense alarm he was still regarding her as if his eyes had never left her and, as he met her glance, the corners of those wide, sensitive lips beneath a small moustache lifted in a faint smile of amusement. Confusion rippling through her, Eveline turned hastily back to face the front and concentrate on what was happening on the stage. How could she have been such a fool, turning round that second time? And to have him smile at her, so obviously aware of her subterfuge.
Now she felt angry. How dare he smile at her? She didn’t know him. Who did he think he was? More to the point, who did he think she was to be looked at with such familiarity?
The answer to that made her feel all hot and cold. Had he taken her for a cutie, a bit of all right? Their eyes meeting not once but twice, she must have struck him as a bold hussy?
She turned quickly to her new companion and for something better to say, asked, ‘What if there’s not enough chairs – people are still coming in?’
‘They will stand, my dear,’ returned Connie. ‘Mrs Kenney is such a popular speaker.’
Eveline had to force herself not to turn again to see whether he was still staring at her or had lost interest. It was hard to relinquish the image of that audacious invader of her peace of mind. All through the speeches she could almost feel those blue eyes penetrating the nape of her neck and she hardly heard a thing that was being said.
There were two speakers before the main one, each getting a huge round of applause, but Mrs Kenney’s stirring, rallying speech that had included the announcement of a great pageant to be held in April had the audience rising to its feet as she came down from the stage and along the aisle, acknowledging this one and that as she left.
‘Wasn’t she rousing?’ Connie said as they joined the crush slowly making its way out of the hall. ‘I’ve every intention of going to that pageant next month. What about you?’
Eveline nodded absently. The young man with the brilliant blue eyes, the well-groomed dark hair and the trim moustache had joined those filing out, the woman she’d seen with him having threaded her arm through his.
‘It’s to be the Pageant of Women’s Trades and Professions for the International Suffrage Alliance,’ Connie quoted, laughing. ‘I’m sure they could have chosen a shorter title but I suppose it encompasses everything. Mrs Kenney said it is to start at dusk. I think that’s very clever because working women as well as trade and professional ladies will be able to be there. It can’t be easy for working women.’
In the growing crush around the exit Connie said, ‘I hope you can come. Mrs Kenney says the procession will be lit by hundreds of lanterns and there’ll be at least ninety different occupations gathered at Eaton Square. It should be marvellous. I forgot to ask, what is your occupation?’
The direct question dragged Eveline’s mind from the back view of a man’s head that might have been that of the young man who’d smiled at her and with an effort of will she focused on Connie. ‘I work in a biscuit factory.’
‘Oh, you have a trade.’
‘Not exactly.’ Eveline experienced a strange fancy to shock this gently brought up young woman out of her high-minded if well-meaning vision of working women. ‘It’s where workers put biscuits in packets on a moving belt, hour after hour, day after day. It’s not a trade. It’s boring, mind-sapping work!’
She hadn’t meant to be so curt and the look on Connie’s face made her immediately regret her words. She relaxed her expression a little.
‘I don’t do that though I can see the factory people through a glass partition of what I suppose you can call an office. There are five of us, two typists, a secretary, the office manager and me – I do the adding up and things on a calculating machine. There’s other offices but that’s where I work – overlooking the factory.’
Connie beamed, the correction quickly dismissed. ‘Then you’re an office worker. Your banner will probably show that. Mrs Kenney said there are to be banners depicting every trade.’
A thought stopped her and she regarded Eveline dubiously, realising she had been overlooking something. ‘Do you think you’ll join, then?’
‘I don’t know.’ She hadn’t really thought about it. The back of the head on which she’d been trying to keep her gaze was now almost lost in the crowd converging on the main exit. Soon he would put on his hat and become just another figure merging with all the others.
‘My dear! After all you’ve heard?’ There was accusation in Connie’s tone. ‘And you don’t know?’
The hurt tone made Eveline turn back to her, full of contrition. ‘I do want to, but I have to work. It makes it difficult to attend lots of meetings.’
‘You don’t have to attend every meeting. No
one expects to give up her entire life for the cause – only those who have dedicated themselves to it and they are special, women like Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters, and Annie Kenney and Mrs Pethwick-Lawrence, and … oh, the list is endless!’
They were being jostled between the double doors, people pressing on all sides. Moments later they were out into the chill of late afternoon, the still wintry sun going down. Eveline realised she was hungry and she needed to visit a toilet somewhere after sitting so long. She also realised she had lost sight of the young man who had smiled at her.
Chapter Two
By the time she’d got off the omnibus at the Salmon and Ball pub in Bethnal Green Road, Eveline had decided to say nothing to anyone, much less her family, about the suffragette meeting. Dad would go potty if he knew and most likely Mum would support him even though she normally ruled the roost in most things.
With her mind still on the way the young man at the meeting had looked at her, Eveline made her way homeward, past Gales Gardens, Pott Street police station and Corfield Street before turning into Wilmott Street. She certainly wouldn’t say anything about him, which would mean letting on as to where she’d been. Not only that, Mum would start prying, forever eager to see her daughter settle on some nice lad and not be, as she saw it, left on the shelf. Mum’s idea of being left on the shelf began at the age of eighteen. ‘If you ain’t going steady by twenty, you’ll find yerself left on the shelf, you mark my words!’
Mum weighed up every lad she so much as glanced at. Visualising yet another admirer on the horizon, she’d start up an inquisition. ‘What’s his name? What sort of bloke is he? Do we know him?’ The business of the suffragette meeting was bound to come out. Her face would give her away. It always did if she tried to fabricate. Dad would have a fit – his daughter in the company of ‘them sort of shrieking females!’
Confiding in friends, of course, they’d see the funny side. ‘Is that all yer’ve got to do, go orf to some stuffy old suffragette meeting?’ Even her best mate Ada Williams would chortle, her other friend, Daisy Cox, even more so.
There was her younger sister, May, sixteen and eager to lap up any hint of a romance, but she might blab to Mum about this suffragette thing.
Eveline pursed her lips, her mind still on the meeting as she passed the black-velvet-lined window of the undertaker’s, the closed, rickety gates of the wood yard, the silent, frowning edifice of Wilmott Street School, and on to Finnis Street where her gran lived.
One person she might tell in confidence was Gran. Her second-floor flat, or letting as they were called, was at the far end of the street. Mum was her daughter. Gran and Grandpa Ansell had lived there ever since Waterlow Buildings were built. Though Grandpa had been dead four years now, his widow Victoria had refused to move to a smaller letting, even though smoke from the railway that ran just a hundred or so feet from her window billowed by at regular intervals, leaving sooty specks on windows and yellowing the curtains.
She continued to rattle around in two large bedrooms, living room and kitchen while Eveline’s family’s flat over Dad’s shop housed eight: him and Mum, her and May and their four brothers, Len, Jimmy, Bobby and Alfred. It had been even more crowded before her married sister Tilly and brother Fred had left.
Glad to have someone to tell about her little adventure, Eveline decided to pop in and see Gran. For all her seventy years, Gran was an open-minded, outgoing woman who didn’t always see eye to eye with her daughter. She could keep secrets, especially from Mum.
Eveline quickened her step, striding out beneath her skirts, hurrying past the many stone entrances, the iron railings that shielded the basement lettings below their sloping patches of grey grass that battled with the dry, infertile soil and dusty dandelions, passing the ground-floor window where Bert Adams, his brother and widowed mother lived.
She’d seen Bert Adams on a couple of occasions in Bethnal Green free library and thought him quite attractive in a broad-faced sort of way, his faded flat cap with its frayed peak set at a jaunty angle. She had in fact felt a tug of interest until her friend Alice let drop that he had a bit of a roving eye for the girls. Whether that was true or not, she’d put him out of her mind.
She put on a quick spurt past the window, forced to sidestep a group of children playing an energetic and noisy game of tag, these cobbled streets their playground. Reaching her gran’s entrance she hurried up the first half-flight of stone stairs, turning along the draughty, open-fronted landing with curved iron railings to stop anyone falling out, then up the next half-flight to Gran’s landing, her ascent impeded by half a dozen boys boisterously stampeding past her downstairs to the street.
Eveline smiled as she stood back against the brown-and-green-painted concrete wall to let the tribe scoot by. She knew they were up to the game youngsters had played ever since these places had been built – tearing up the ten flights of stairs to the top of one block, scampering across the tarred, flat roof with its smoking chimney stacks, down the next block, along the street and up the next and so on, making as much noise as possible to upset the tenants, even knocking on doors as they whooped past. Another game was to tie string to the door knockers of the two opposite neighbours on one chosen landing, knock on one, then scamper off to wait for it to be opened, jerking the string on the door opposite, to the fury of both occupants.
It was risky if the door to the roof over which they’d make their escape was locked. It meant retracing their steps to suffer a heavy hand from the irate tenants they were compelled to pass. And serve them right, Eveline thought as she continued upward.
Gran cautiously opened her door to her. ‘Oh, it’s you, love,’ she said with relief. ‘I could ’ear them noisy little buggers going past, up to their pranks again. Landlords don’t do nothing, nor do the police. Come in, love. Nice of you to drop by like this.’
‘I thought I would on my way home,’ Eveline said, following her in.
There was a time when she had spoken the way both Gran and her parents did, but working in an office, if only a factory office, she’d been expected to speak as nicely as she could. The office manager, Mr Prentice, set standards for his few staff and would glower if she let the side down. ‘I will not tolerate sloppy speech, young woman. So either you mind yourself, or …’ The unfinished sentence left her in no doubt that termination of her apparently prestigious position could follow. Trying to speak nicely was now here to stay. She remembered Gran having a sister who had been in service as a young girl, speaking beautifully to the day she died, despite living all her married life in the East End.
‘I’ll make us a nice cuppa,’ Gran was saying as she preceded her into the neat little living room. ‘Brightened up my day, you ’ave, popping in.’
Gran spent her days cleaning her little domain, keeping it as neat as a new pin in spite of the bugs that crept up the waste chute to lurk behind the wallpaper and which she fought with the stamina of a soldier going into action. At seventy she still regularly and vigorously scrubbed her portion of the stone stairs, a weekly chore usually shared between the two tenants on each landing, and complained about the stink of stale cabbage, and worse, the one that emanated from the less clean letting on the floor above.
‘Dirty lot,’ she remarked. ‘Don’t deserve to live in nice ’omes like these what was built for decent people. They’d make a slum of a palace, and if you ask me, that’s where the bugs come from – from them upstairs!’
‘So what’ve you been doing with yourself today?’ she asked now as she came back into the room after putting on the kettle in the kitchen.
Eveline took off her hat, reinserting the long hatpins, and laid it beside her on Gran’s old-fashioned couch. She took a deep breath. ‘I went to look at that new Selfridge’s store in Oxford Street. It’s beautiful. Their window displays are enough to make your mouth water. And while I was there …’
She paused, seeing Gran’s interest rise, and hurried on before she could think better of it. ‘I was looking in the win
dow when some of those suffragettes came marching along.’
Quickly she described how brisk and unwavering they had looked, breaking off while her gran got up to go and attend the clamouring kettle, returning with the tea and a plate of biscuits. Handing her tea to her, Gran sat in her wooden armchair and prompted, ‘Go on, love. You was saying?’
Quickly Eveline told how she’d fallen into step and, fearing to offend the young woman who had taken her arm, had ended at the hall listening to speeches given by some quite prominent speakers. Gran looked stern.
‘You’d best not let your dad know where you was.’
‘That’s why I’m telling you,’ Eveline said, sipping the hot, sweet tea.
Gran always used sugar, never condensed milk. She wasn’t badly off for money, having married someone with a nice little grocer shop. She had never known hard work; in the past she had been able to afford someone to clean her house and even now sent her washing out, her hands still soft as a girl’s.
It was Grandad who had put Dad in his shop when he and Mum first married. Grandad had been something of a gambler, horses mostly, but died before getting through all of his money, as gamblers can often do, sparing his wife the poverty she might have ended up with if he’d lived.
She settled further back into her chair. ‘Is that it – the thing what’s making you look so flushed?’ she queried. ‘You went to a meeting?’
‘Yes, but …’ Eveline let her words trail off. While Gran had been getting the tea she’d had time to think. Was she making a fool of herself about a young man she would probably never see again?
‘Well?’ came the prompt. ‘Something else must ’ave ’appened to bring your colour up like that.’
Eveline made up her mind. ‘There was a really handsome young man, sitting behind me. When I looked at him, he smiled. It was a lovely smile. But he had someone with him, a young lady, so I didn’t look at him again.’