A Woman's Place

by Maggie Ford

  It had been a quiet affair, with a few sandwiches at Gran’s flat afterwards. The guests consisted of her parents, relieved that she was getting married, Connie and George, Albert’s mum, a small woman, broad-faced like her son, and his seventeen-year-old brother Jim as his best man. With so few present the church had felt virtually empty, their voices echoing as if in a cavern. It hadn’t mattered. The wedding had been a mere formality anyway.

  At Connie’s little wedding the church had been even emptier but at least Connie had married for love, not in desperation with no other choice left to her.

  It had rained on her own wedding day and blown half a gale as though the weather itself saw the lack of romance in this marriage. She wore a coat, her dad holding an umbrella over her as best he could in the high wind. It had been bad everywhere with floods in France and hurricane winds in England causing severe damage and several deaths.

  Albert had arranged a church at short notice. She carried no bouquet, just the small white Bible belonging to Gran. Gran had made a wedding gown from cheap white satin bought in Petticoat Lane, making the thing loose with a high neck and wide sleeves, like a tea gown, disguising the normally pinched-in waist with some lace she had found so that the bride’s condition wouldn’t be so noticeable.

  It had been an odd sort of courtship, with no engagement ring. When he made to kiss her she’d turn her cheek, unable to see him as anything but a friend. Such a short while had passed since the time she hadn’t really known him at all, even though he’d been her salvation which she silently thanked him for from the bottom of her heart. It hurt her that she didn’t feel love for him, that exciting love a young bride should feel for her husband. Whether it hurt him he had never said and she’d never been able to bring herself to enquire.

  He’d said that he’d fancied her for a long time and she felt bad that she hadn’t the same feelings for him. Lately she’d begun to grow fond of him but it wasn’t the same as love. It could hardly even be called a marriage, since they were sleeping back to back in the double bed. If he turned over she would ease herself carefully to the edge of the bed. He must have noticed because he’d quietly withdraw his arm and she’d be left lying awake thinking how different it would have been with Larry while the tears would trickle from the corners of her eyes to dampen her pillow.

  She tried to console herself that, even in a normal marriage, making love wouldn’t be recommended for a woman soon to have a baby. But what about once it was born? Surely Albert would expect her in time to honour her marital duties. Kind and gentle though he was, he wasn’t made of stone.

  Eveline gnawed her lip as she looked about her. In a day or two her so-called happy event would occur. She’d had quite an eventful few months, Marriage, a home of her own, and of course the General Election ending in a dead heat between the Tories and Liberals dashing all hope of a favourable decision on female suffrage. She turned her thoughts to that.

  Suffragette determination not to back down had led to increasing demonstrations, more arrests and growing unease at what was going on inside those prisons with women virtually tortured by forced-feeding. Often they would be released in a state of collapse and utter exhaustion to recover. She knew all about that, though her own experience hadn’t been half what some women were enduring, not once but six or seven times, being rearrested to go through it again. Their courage was indomitable.

  Just as well her condition hadn’t allowed her to attend any of the demonstrations; both Gran and Albert had advised against it. He was however sympathetic towards the suffragettes and said he wouldn’t prevent her later as long as it didn’t interfere with her looking after the baby, which he knew full well would virtually stop her anyway. Sometimes he acted as if the baby were actually his.

  The thought provoked a twinge of bitterness that was now mingled with envy. Connie too was pregnant. She’d come hurrying over to see her in March, full of her good news and glowing.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ she’d gushed.

  Eveline had hugged her, trying to stem that feeling of envy that in fact had grown in strength as Connie began to glow even more. Somehow it seemed justified, though she knew it was wrong. Connie still had her savings despite her father’s allowance having ceased when she’d left home, whereas she and Albert were struggling on his earnings with a baby on the way. Often she wondered if Albert didn’t regret his move. She dared not ask him.

  Connie had a lovely bright flat, and George was bringing in decent wages while all Albert could afford was this dismal basement. Connie’s baby had been conceived in wedlock whereas she’d had to accept charity from a man who was not the baby’s father no matter how selfless and good-hearted that offer.

  She frowned as the ache around her middle began to make itself felt again, not severe but enough to tell her that Gran could be right, she could go into labour in a day or two. If it happened tomorrow, it would be a day to remember, not just by her but millions.

  Tomorrow was the twenty-first of May, the funeral of King Edward. On the fourth of May the King had been reported seriously ill with pneumonia. Two days later he was dead. It had taken everyone’s breath away.

  It was almost unearthly. An object called Halley’s Comet had become visible in the evening sky over London. Seen every seventy or eighty years and regarded as an ill omen in the past, it was now as bright as the brightest star, with a great long, ominous tail. Strange the King should pass away while it was still visible – the coincidence made the flesh creep, as people wondered what other ill could befall the nation.

  As she waited for Mrs Martin she wondered whether this comet would affect the birth of her baby. Recollection of old wives’ tales that a woman in labour carried her own coffin sent a shudder through her as at the open front door she could hear Gran and Mrs Martin talking, no doubt about her. She didn’t want the woman sitting with her, poking around, asking questions.

  Mrs Martin was a nice enough person, glad to help whenever needed. She was fortunate to have such a good neighbour but she didn’t feel at all like talking until Gran returned. The ache that had frightened her had faded and she now felt a fool, panicking and making such a fuss.

  Helena was born three days later, Gran and a local midwife tending her – a painful thirty-six hours which afterwards she could recall only vaguely as she held her daughter to her breast for her first feed.

  Albert, coming home from work, had beamed down at the child as if she were his, brushing away the fear Eveline had felt that faced with the reality of his actions he would regret them. But his smile swept away those fears and for the first time she felt she almost loved him.

  The procession was huge. Despite being five months’ pregnant, with the baby due in October, Connie had made up her mind to be among the fifteen thousand here today. She still hardly showed and by tightening her corsets was able to get into last year’s summer dresses, probably because she had grown thinner since leaving home to get married. The dress was white and the green, purple and white sash helped to disguise any telltale bump.

  Her hat too was white, the wide brim covered in tulle. She’d bought it with her own money but George’s reaction had made her feel guilty and certainly angry. When she told him what she was buying, he’d frowned as if it was his money she was spending. Yet he refused to touch hers.

  ‘It’s your money, darling, to use as you wish,’ he’d once stated with such finality that she knew he’d see himself as less of a man if he couldn’t provide on his earnings alone, but that slight frown had annoyed her and in retaliation she’d gone out and bought the hat anyway.

  He couldn’t say she hadn’t been careful with her money. Nor had she ever relied on him to clothe her. She still had an extensive wardrobe. Her father had sent on all her belongings when she left – a declaration if ever there was one that all ties with her family had been broken utterly – but it was her money and the fact that George had stressed that it was, generous or not, was like saying that though it was hers it shouldn’t be frittere
d away needlessly. Had the hat been needless? She didn’t think so, not when everyone else was dressed so beautifully for this momentous occasion.

  She wished Eveline were here today to listen to her grumbles. Eveline would have so enjoyed this great spectacle with its seven hundred banners and forty bands, the green, white and purple sashes of the WSPU blending with the green, white and gold of the Women’s Freedom League and all the other different shades and colours.

  This procession had been long awaited. Postponed to this Saturday the eighteenth of June due to the King’s death, it was the first large-scale public procession for two years, made possible by news of the introduction of the Conciliation Bill, which was still in progress and looking hopeful. So it was with jubilation and hope that the two-mile-long procession marched.

  There were women around her whom she knew yet without Eveline she felt oddly lonely. But positioned well behind the huge hunger strikers’ banner, she knew that Eveline would have been walking not with her but with those six hundred other prison veterans, wearing her prisoner’s brooch, the white, broad arrow brooch glittering bravely on her chest. She felt a stab of envy that Eveline was one of them and she was not. No use blaming her father. She should have defied him that day and demanded the fine he’d paid be returned, or behaved so badly as to have been had up for contempt.

  Connie gazed stolidly at the enormous banner just ahead of her bearing the embroidered signatures of eighty women heralded as having ‘faced death without flinching’ and another emblazoned with the words ‘From Prison to Citizenship’.

  In the golden light of a fine June evening, a fife band led the prisoners’ pageant, its band mistress swinging her silver-mounted staff as competently as any guardsman, and behind that, the prisoners’ tableau – two white horses with gold and purple trappings and laurel wreaths drawing a cart with a group of young women in white and a single suffragette in prison apparel. It took the whole of Connie’s resolve to push away the knowledge that if she hadn’t just had had her baby, Eveline would be there enjoying pride of place among that group.

  Similar pageants and tableaux were positioned at intervals along the entire length of this visual expression of women’s strength: nurses in their uniforms; bicyclists, their machines decorated with flowers; athletes and sportswomen in their sportswear. There were artists with their palettes and brushes hung with flowers and ribbons; university graduates; actresses, the best dressed of all with their rose pink and pale green banner and staves tied with foliage and pink roses. There was the Writers Suffrage League and the Freedom League, the Church League led by a group of clergymen, the younger suffragettes, the Fabians, the Ethical Societies and scores of others. The Men’s League, formed in 1907 in support of women’s suffrage, brought the biggest surprise to the watching crowds. One contingent was made up of hundreds of sweated labourers who toiled in factories and stuffy workrooms, all wearing or carrying the products of their trade. There were those from far places, such as the Irish Women’s Franchise League who, so Connie heard, had travelled all night to be here, and others from as far away as Canada, Australia and America.

  Bringing up the rear was a veritable stream of motor cars brightly decked out with flowers. Coachmen wearing rosettes had picked out the wheels and shafts of their coaches with white roses, the harnesses with purple, green and white.

  It was all so well planned. Nothing as splendid had been seen since the 1908 Hyde Park rally and after the solemn funeral of King Edward a few weeks back it was a sight to stir the hearts of those crowds lining the route, which was exactly what it was meant to do, the redoubtable Mrs Drummond astride a huge charger having raised her whip on the dot of six thirty this evening to begin the procession. Her slow and determined advance along Northumberland Avenue had obliged the mounted policemen to clear the way for her as the forty bands struck up all at once.

  To Connie’s mind, walking in its midst, it was like a festival, every women in summer dress with her bright sash, banners held high, bands playing, traffic forced to pull to one side for them to pass, yet all she could think of was how she’d have felt with Eveline walking in honour in the prisoners’ pageant while she remained just one of these fifteen thousand.

  Eveline had had her baby on the twenty-third of May, barely four weeks ago. She had named her Helena.

  ‘I want to be there,’ she had said. ‘A month will have gone by and I’m sure I’ll be all right by then.’ But even Albert, an easy-going sort, had been against her going off while nursing a month-old baby. Walking all the way from Northumberland Avenue to the Albert Hall and standing with the WSPU prisoners as a guard of honour, she would never have lasted.

  She had popped in to see Eveline before leaving and found her fretful and sulky. ‘I’ll tell you all about it,’ Connie soothed, which seemed to make her even more sullen. But she would go and see her after this was all over, try to cheer her up though it might be best to play down the rousing din and wonderful spectacle if she could contain herself to do so.

  Poor Eveline. It was hard not to see her as poor Eveline and as envy melted she realised how much she had to be thankful for.

  Albert came home with a look of someone who’d won a small fortune.

  ‘I didn’t say nothing before,’ he said, taking off his cap and his coat to hang them on the peg behind the living-room door, ‘but a few weeks ago I asked for a rise, said I had a kiddy to support now. I never really thought I’d get it, but guess what? I’ve been given two bob more.’

  Eveline stared at him. Two shillings, to some a drop in the ocean, to her meant a bit of extra food on the table, or a dress for Helena.

  ‘We can put in for a transfer to a nicer letting,’ he was saying. ‘Means paying a bit more rent but Helena will soon need her own room ter sleep in.’

  Eveline smiled. ‘Best not be too hasty.’ She still couldn’t trust luck.

  It was hard to believe how life had changed; last autumn she had felt out of her mind with worry, abandoned, disgraced. Now she had a home of her own, a husband, her baby with Albert’s name, and soon a bit more cash.

  One thing was lacking. She missed the suffragette meetings. But it wasn’t possible while still nursing. At regular times her breasts would grow hard, milk seeping from her nipples, and as if by instinct Helena would begin to whimper, then bawl if she wasn’t given her feed there and then. How could any mother go off on her own pursuits when so tied down?

  Even if she could have left Helena with someone, she couldn’t have been away for too long before her breasts began to harden and leak uncomfortably. It would be months before Helena was weaned. She had heard somewhere that it was possible to dry the milk up sooner but she had no idea how. There was no question of asking Mum. She’d be appalled and refuse to talk about it, But Gran might know. She knew most things.

  A couple of afternoons a week Eveline would pop across to spend an hour or two with Gran. She loved seeing the baby whereas Mum was always busy down in the shop and didn’t seem all that interested in Helena, maybe because of the circumstances of the child’s birth. Despite Helena being a pretty baby she didn’t seem to touch Mum’s heart at all.

  This afternoon, after days stuck indoors with Helena demanding to be fed every two or three hours so that Eveline was hardly able to go shopping before having to rush back with her to feed her again, she decided in desperation that it was time to ask Gran’s advice.

  She was certain that even if she disapproved she’d at least be kind about it and understanding. So she was a bit taken aback when Gran lifted her gaze from smiling down at her six-week-old-great-grandchild she was cuddling on her lap to regard her granddaughter with a critical eye.

  ‘Why would yer want to dry it up this soon?’ she enquired.

  ‘I need to attend suffragette meetings again. But like this I can’t.’

  ‘Need?’ The question had a reproving ring to it. Eveline wilted.

  ‘I feel I ought to,’ she modified.

  ‘I see.’ Gran looked down at He
lena and clucked her tongue at her. ‘Have you spoken to your ’usband about it?’ she asked, not looking up,

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he might not be too happy about it.’

  Gran nodded, her eyes still on the baby. ‘If yer think he might not be too ’appy about it, then why’ve you come to me?’

  Eveline knew she was losing. Her voice grew high and urgent. ‘That’s exactly why we’re fighting, to have the same rights as men. Why should I have to ask Bert’s permission if I want to do something?’

  ‘Because you’re ’is wife and Helena’s his child.’

  ‘She’s not his child …’ Eveline broke off, realising what she had said. Gran hadn’t lifted her gaze once from little Helena’s face surrounded by its knitted white shawl, the baby’s round, deep blue eyes staring up at her with wide curiosity.

  Silenced for a moment, Eveline fought to gloss over what she had just said. ‘I have to get back to what I was doing,’ she rushed on. ‘So many things are happening and before long I’ll find myself left out.’

  Her grandmother looked up, her tone cynical. ‘If that’s what you’re concerned about, don’t worry, they won’t forget you. You’re too important. You’ve been in prison for your cause. They need women like you.’

  ‘That’s why I must get back into it as soon as possible.’

  It was as though her grandmother hadn’t heard her. ‘But if it’s just that you’re missing the excitement, you’ll ’ave to be patient a bit longer and put your mind to being a good mother.’

  Eveline caught the dig. ‘Please, Gran, I am a good mother, but I’m a good suffragette too, and it’s for her future as well that I have to stand with them in this fight for our equality.’ It sounded as if she were standing on some soapbox giving a speech. But Gran was taking it all in her stride.