by Maggie Joel
‘The unions are infiltrated with red sympathisers intent only on anarchy and revolution!’ interrupted Matthew, and beside him Bertha squirmed, perhaps unused to hearing her husband raise his voice. ‘It may be all very well on the Continent,’ he went on, ‘but it’s not the British way of going about things. Your union pals will find out soon enough that the British people have no stomach for that kind of thing.’
Jemima waited, her eyes on Matthew. He spoke with a clear, strong voice that rang out with the authority of conviction and made you believe what he said. Well, it made you listen. Unlike Ronnie who ought, you would expect, to be used to expressing his viewpoints in public by now. Perhaps it was just that Matthew was so much older than Ronnie. A man, in fact, compared to Ronnie, who at this moment looked like a silly schoolboy hauled up before the headmaster.
Ronnie’s eyes were almost popping out of his head.
‘Why can’t any of you see?’ he demanded. ‘Things can’t go on as they are! This—this Empire is built on the...the backs of workers who are now starving in the streets! It just isn’t fair!’
Jemima stared down at her hands in her lap and in that moment she despised him. Despised him as she had never despised Dad or Mum or Bertha or Matthew or the fat, smug customers in the tearoom or even spineless Godfrey Gilfroy and his little wife at home in leafy, dull Rickmansworth. No, this was a burning fire that raced through the limbs and made her fingers rigid in her lap and her face burn with white heat.
‘It just isn’t fair!’ she mimicked. ‘Most people stopped saying that when they left the nursery. Wouldn’t you say, Matthew?’
There was a silence and she smiled at Matthew, who returned her look with a rather surprised and somewhat embarrassed expression. Bertha had flushed even redder and wasn’t looking at anyone. Jemima couldn’t see what Ronnie was doing and frankly she didn’t care.
‘That’s enough, girl,’ said Dad in a stern voice, but Jemima ignored him because it was fine for the men to speak their minds so why shouldn’t she?
‘Anyway, I’ve got some leftover ham from dinner in the icebox if anyone’d like a slice?’ inquired Mum, as though finishing a conversation from earlier. No one replied.
Jemima nibbled a crumb of walnut cake which, perhaps in deference to the atmosphere in the living room, had gone distinctly stale at the edges.
Suddenly Ronnie stood up. Jemima remained perfectly still, though her heart beat loudly.
‘There’s a rally tonight,’ he announced. ‘Steyne Hall. We’re to wait for word from Westminster to see if the strike’s on.’
He paused, no one said anything and Jemima thought, Is he waiting for us to offer our congratulations? Or is he expecting us to accompany him? In the end it appeared that all Ronnie was waiting for were the right words to excuse himself. ‘So if you’ll pardon me leaving early, sir...’ He swallowed as he dipped his head at Dad. (‘Sir’! Why couldn’t he say ‘Dad’ like Matthew did?) Then he nodded at Mum and turned to Jemima, but there was no question of her going with him, surely he could see that there was Baby to think of, anyway. So Ronnie ducked out and a moment later the front door opened and closed.
‘I’ll have some of that leftover ham, Mum,’ she had said, and she had eaten two slices before Matthew had offered to escort her and Baby home.
And now it was late, the rain had stopped and the traffic was silent on High Street and still Ronnie hadn’t returned.
Jemima brushed the raindrops from her shoulders irritably. How childish. How like Ronnie to stay out late to punish her. Did he really think she cared? Did he really think she noticed his presence or not? It was like having another child underfoot. She turned and climbed the stairs to the flat to be met by silence.
Thank God.
But...
She crossed the tiny hallway in two strides, threw open the door to the little boxroom, and stood there in the moonlight staring at the cradle. Baby was quite still. And silent, utterly silent.
For a moment she was paralysed, every limb weighted down, and it seemed as though she might never be able to move again. Then Baby snuffled and sighed and all the feeling in her limbs flooded back so that she lurched forward and snatched the little thing up and clasped it tightly to her. She closed her eyes and fought down something hard that was stuck at the back of her throat, choking her.
Loud footsteps sounded outside and a moment later the front door opened then banged shut.
‘Jem!’
A beam of light hit her but she didn’t turn around. Baby stirred restlessly and let out a murmur of protest. She held her hand over its eyes to shield it from the sudden light.
‘Jem!’
He was behind her now in the bedroom doorway but before she could turn around he had come in and taken her roughly by the shoulders so that suddenly she was afraid. But only for a moment.
‘It’s happened!’ he gasped, shaking her. ‘It’s really happened, from midnight it began! The strike has begun!’
She spun around, stunned. Ronnie’s face was shiny with perspiration, the hair sticking up in a peak at his forehead. His eyes were wide, wild, excited.
Was this her husband? Was this the man she had married? She thrust Baby into his empty hands.
‘Do you really think I care about your stupid strike? How can you be so stupid?’ and she marched into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MAY 1926
THE FOLLOWING MORNING IT was not, for once, Baby who woke her but a shout from outside in the street, followed immediately by an answering roar from what sounded like a large crowd of people. The roar was abruptly muffled by the growl of a bus engine, gears cranking and a conductor’s bell, all of which made Jemima sit up with a start.
The strike. Had it started? If so, why could she hear a bus?
She was up and out of bed, grabbing her shawl and pulling it around her shoulders. She pulled aside the faded blue curtains, rubbed the mist from the window and peered out to the street below.
The first thing she saw was people, droves of them, in their working clothes and all on foot, moving in excited clusters east towards the city. On the road was every sort of motor vehicle you could imagine. From the earliest horseless carriages to the latest Morris, from charabancs to delivery vehicles, milk carts and even a hearse, all laden with passengers and all making their way slowly east. One vehicle, a fruit delivery van, carried a dozen bowler-hatted city gentlemen, crammed in like apples in a barrel. Behind it a brewer’s dray pulled by a sluggish cart horse contained a gaggle of shop girls who waved at the crowds and blew them kisses until, accompanied by loud shrieks, the cart slid into a rut, tipping them all forward so that they tumbled over each other.
The bus that Jemima had heard was a few yards further up High Street. It was a big red double-decker General and it was surrounded by a vocal crowd of furious young men intent on stalling its progress, their faces contorted with rage.
Such hatred and the day had only just begun. She felt a shiver run across her shoulders and she pulled the shawl closer about her.
Forcing the reluctant window to open, she leaned her head out to hear their shouts. The slow-moving bus lurched to a halt in the congested traffic and the small crowd surged forward as though they would storm it by force.
At that moment a large open-topped touring car packed with police constables veered through the traffic, mounting the kerb and sending pedestrians scattering in all directions. It bore down on the stranded bus and disgorged its troops. They at once flung themselves at the crowd of boisterous strikers who had surrounded the bus, and for a few moments a confused scuffle ensued, during which punches were thrown, helmets were knocked to the ground and the traffic came to a complete halt before the strikers made a run for it, the constables in hot pursuit.
Yes, the strike had begun. And was this Ronnie’s glorious revolution? Men brawling in the street?
In the next room Baby suddenly awoke and began to wail. And yes, there could be a Genera
l Strike, there could be a biblical flood or the Second Coming, but there was always Baby to feed and change, wasn’t there? And where was Ronnie?
Baby’s wails increased and as Jemima pushed herself up off the window sill to shut it up, the bedroom door opened and Ronnie stood in the doorway, already dressed.
‘I’ll be off then,’ he announced, not meeting her eyes, instead reaching for his hat on the peg behind the door.
‘Where are you going at this time? School won’t even be open for another hour.’
She knew the answer before she’d finished asking the question.
‘The strike.’
And for a moment she was dumbfounded, stunned. How could someone be so single-minded? So certain about something? So excited? It defied belief. Defied logic. He was a little boy counting off the days to the start of the school holidays. The agony of waiting had nearly killed him and now it was here.
‘There’s work to be done,’ Ronnie went on, and Jemima felt her nerves stretched taut. God, why were men so self-important?
‘Oh? And what exactly are you going to do?’
Annoyance flashed across his face and she felt a moment of triumph.
‘How can you not understand?’ he demanded, advancing into the bedroom. ‘This is it! This is the moment we’ve waited our whole lives for—longer!’
‘How can we have waited longer than our whole lives?’
The irritation grew. ‘Not you and me: the unemployed, the miners, the dockers, starving families...’
‘And meanwhile I live in a cupboard over a butcher’s shop!’
In the boxroom Baby’s crying had reached a critical point and Mrs Avery in the flat next door began banging on the dividing wall.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he declared. ‘The league needs me. The people need us.’
She shrugged. All her energy of a moment earlier had dissipated.
‘Go then. I’m sure the strike will collapse if you’re not there.’ She pulled the curtains shut and prepared to get back into bed.
Ronnie stood in the doorway for a moment as though he would argue with her but then he turned and left. The front door opened and slammed behind him and in the street outside a horse whinnied and someone swore angrily.
Then quiet.
For a while Jemima lay in bed refusing to move. She had little enough time for herself what with Baby and her husband and the flat all demanding more hours from her than she had to give. She was damned if any stupid strike was going to make her get up. So she lay there, rigid, with the counterpane pulled up to her chin against the early morning chill. But it soon became obvious she wasn’t going to get back to sleep, she couldn’t even doze. Baby’s cries continued, Mrs Avery’s banging became more insistent, and the shouts and laughs and curses from outside weren’t just disturbing, they were making her want to get up and see what exactly was going on.
‘Load of socialist rubbish!’ she muttered to herself as she jumped up and hurriedly got dressed.
She grabbed Baby and, leaving the horrid little flat, together they went down to the street.
Rather disappointingly, the disturbances of earlier had died down. Yet a slow-moving stream of workers on foot seemed to be growing by the minute. So too the line of overcrowded lorries and delivery vans that made their way cautiously and, in some instances, recklessly, through the congestion.
And what difference, wondered Jemima, is this daft strike going to make? Folk were still going to work, weren’t they? And pushing Baby before her in the perambulator she headed along High Street towards her parents’ house.
At Wells Lane there was no indication a strike had even been called. No one was about, and the street was silent. Jemima wondered for a moment where Ronnie had gone. Was he even intending to go to work today? The schools weren’t officially part of the strike. If he failed to turn up he would be sacked.
Sacked. Husband and father, a rented flat above a shop, and he was risking it all for what? Some coalmining family in Stockton-on-Tees that he’d never even met. And who probably weren’t even grateful.
As she wheeled Baby in between the elm trees lining the lane she felt a rising hysteria that was partly fear about what on earth would happen to them if Ronnie got sacked, and partly a secret delight at the thought of seeing him finally realise what a fool he had been. Well, she wouldn’t hang around too long to see that; she’d move back in with Mum and Dad before it came to that.
‘Hullo, Jem—what do you think? Isn’t it exciting!’
And here was Bertha coming along the lane from the direction of Oakton Way, her face flushed and perspiring in the May warmth. ‘How’s Baby? Can I have a push?’
‘No, you can’t. We’ve just come from the flat and we’re tired. And no, Bertha, it isn’t exciting,’ she added, forcing her way past and negotiating the front gate. ‘Actually, it’s daft and pointless. I’m surprised you can’t see it,’ and she thrust open the front door with a loud, ‘Hello-oh!’
‘In the kitchen,’ called out Mum.
‘Here,’ said Jemima, leaving Baby and the perambulator in Bertha’s care, and she walked down the hallway into the kitchen.
‘Hullo, dear,’ said Mum. ‘We’re just having tea.’
‘We’ was Aunt Nora, Cousin Janie and little Herbert, Janie’s baby. Herbert, who was now nearly five months old, was a miserable red-faced little thing that you knew, with depressing certainty, would never amount to anything much.
‘Hullo, girls,’ said Aunt Nora. ‘Isn’t it exciting?’
‘Your dad’s gone off to be a special constable,’ announced Janie, jiggling the wretched Herbert on her knee.
‘Really?’ replied Jemima in a bored voice, fetching herself a teacup off the dresser. Who did Janie think she was, telling her things about her own dad? Of course, Janie didn’t have a dad of her own. And she didn’t have a husband either, come to think of it. Rather a careless girl, Janie.
‘Dad a special constable?’ exclaimed Bertha. ‘Fancy!’
‘Yes, he went off first thing,’ said Mum proudly. ‘Over at Steyne Hall, that’s where they’re enrolling ’em. A Special Constable of the Metropolitan Police! What do you think of that?’
‘I think Dad’s been waiting his whole life for it,’ said Jemima, pouring tea into her cup.
‘Fancy!’ said Bertha again. And then, ‘Do you think he’ll get a uniform?’
‘Probably,’ said Janie. ‘Else how would folk know he was a special constable else?’ Herbert made a gurgling noise and began to regurgitate something.
‘’Course he won’t get a uniform,’ said Jemima, exasperated. ‘He’ll probably get some wretched little armband. Like the VADs in the War.’
This remark was met with a disappointed silence.
‘Well, never mind,’ said Mum cheerfully. ‘I expect he’ll get to guard something important and keep folk under control.’
‘Folk are walking to work—what’s he going to do? Help them cross the road?’
‘Really, Jemima, I don’t think you appreciate how dangerous it might be,’ said Mum indignantly. ‘Nora said she saw some young men attacking a bus in High Street earlier.’
‘I did!’ confirmed Aunt Nora, leaning forward eagerly. ‘And some of the young men looked quite rough. Dockers, I shouldn’t be surprised. There was some shocking language, I can tell you.’
‘It is a general strike, Aunt Nora,’ admonished Bertha, putting on her serious face. ‘It’s not tea at the palace. Men are fighting for their rights. You have to expect that kind of thing.’
‘What’s Matthew doing?’ inquired Jemima.
Bertha shuffled about in her seat. ‘He’s at the post office, naturally. The GPO isn’t on strike, you know. Folk still need to send letters and telegrams.’
‘And people have got to get to work but that doesn’t stop the buses and trams and trains being on strike.’
‘That’s different.’
But how it was different, Bertha did not elaborate on.
‘Your Matth
ew’s a very principled young man, Bertha,’ declared Aunt Nora, who obviously was a good judge of husbands.
‘He’s going to volunteer, too,’ said Bertha with a sideways glance at Jemima. ‘On the buses. As a driver. He drove ambulances, you know. In the War.’
Jemima hadn’t known and frankly she found it difficult to imagine her dull, ponderous brother-in-law dodging machine guns and mortars at the wheel of a rickety old ambulance on the Western Front.
‘At Portsmouth,’ Bertha continued (and Jemima thought, Ha! I knew it). ‘He’s going to go down to the bus garage after work to volunteer to drive on the early shifts. They’re enrolling people today.’
‘A bus driver!’ gasped Janie in hushed tones, as though Bertha had announced Matthew had signed up for the Secret Service and was being posted to Bolshevik Russia. But then, Janie had no husband of her own with whom to be impressed.
‘What’s young Ronnie up to, love?’ said Mum suddenly, as though she’d just remembered she had two sons-in-law.
‘I bet he’s excited,’ said Bertha rather too casually. ‘The big day, finally come...’ And as Jemima turned to her Bertha looked away and flushed.
‘The big day? An excuse for grown men to skip work and play about in the streets like schoolboys? Oh, he’s excited alright. I hope he doesn’t see your Matthew driving a bus, that’s all.’
‘Perhaps your dad will arrest him?’ suggested Janie in wide-eyed delight, and Jemima gave her a withering look.
‘How long do you think it will last, Alice?’ asked Aunt Nora of Mum. Why Aunt Nora thought Mum would know anything at all about it was a mystery to Jemima.
‘Matthew says they will be lucky if it lasts the week,’ said Bertha. ‘He said folk’ll just get fed up with the strikers and the strikers will just give up. That or there’ll be anarchy and the army will be called out. But either way it’ll be over by the weekend.’
‘Anarchy!’ said Jemima. ‘What does Matthew know of anarchy? He works in a post office!’
Bertha’s face darkened.
‘The post office is at the heart of a society’s communication network!’ she retorted, so pat that Matthew himself might have said it.