The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  But it was exactly at this moment of triumph that things started to become unstuck. In fact, that day late in April 1928, when the girls strode onto the station, was actually the last day when Clara appeared to have pulled it off – broken the spell, if you like – because, the next day was the day of Grays fair. And the day that Alice agreed to elope with Joseph Davidson. The wicked fairy had barged back into the christening and the whole fragile illusion that the spell had been broken was shattered by a wager made in front of the Mighty Striker.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Flappers!

  Alice first saw Joseph dancing on a table in the ballroom of the Queen’s Hotel in Grays. He was wearing a rather distinctive orange bow tie. He was tall and thin, wobbling like a drunken giraffe, his limbs unfeasibly long and lanky. He caught her looking at him and grinned, his wavy hair flopping into his eyes as his arms flew wildly over his head. He was kicking so hard it looked as if he was going to fly off the table at any moment.

  Alice was to ponder it later, that first locking of their eyes. She felt like she knew him. And she felt a sense of responsibility – she needed to get him off the table, or at least slow him down, before he did himself a mischief.

  Things had got rather out of hand. The revellers had launched streamers over the top of the extravagant chandeliers, and balloons were being kicked around with abandon. Alice suspected that the band had drunk too much as well, as their playing had become frenetic. She took a breath from her high-kicking Charleston and gazed at the sweating players and the way they manhandled their instruments as if trying to snap them in two. Their clothes were awry and their faces glistening with drops of sweat, which plopped down onto their music. The bacchanalian troop seemed appropriate for the stage. It was festooned and framed by golden cherubs and vine leaves, like a Roaring Twenties’ hallucinogenic trip. The business of getting dressed up and going into a grand hall, pounding with live music, packed with a few hundred young people, had got them all over-excited. And what with it being New Year’s Eve as well, the party tipped into a frenzy.

  But now Alice’s attention was focused on the young man with the orange tie, and getting to him before he fell off the table. She pushed her way through cavorting bodies. The swinging arms and legs posed quite a hazard, but she batted them away. And then, just as she was feet away, the inevitable happened: Joseph Davidson kicked his legs too hard and came flying off – straight into Alice’s arms.

  ‘Wooooo … crikey!’ he said, breathless. ‘I’m sorry. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m all right, yes,’ she replied. ‘But are you all right?’

  And then, as both of them struggled to catch their breath, they started to laugh.

  ‘I think I need a breath of fresh air,’ he said.

  ‘Me too.’

  Joseph raised a single eyebrow at Alice’s forwardness as she raised a metaphorical eyebrow at her own forwardness too. And then she laughed again. ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That thing with your eyebrow.’

  ‘Years of being surprised by young ladies.’

  ‘I see.’ Alice stopped smiling.

  He realised he’d said the wrong thing. He took her arm. ‘But none as pretty as you. It would be an absolute pleasure to escort you.’

  Alice hesitated and studied his face. It quite hurt her neck, he was so tall. But she saw only good humour, and the unease evaporated.

  ‘Thank you,’ she replied, and took his arm. They started to pick their way through the dancers to the door.

  ‘Actually, it should be me thanking you. You saved me from a rather nasty tumble there. Thank you.’

  ‘It’s my pleasure, I think.’

  ‘Well, let me make sure it is.’

  And they stopped and looked at each other, and then he bent down and placed a kiss on her lips. All around them the room was moving and the music pounding, but Alice was only aware of the warmth of his breath and the sensation of his lips on her lips. She felt the pressure of his hands on her waist and the smell of him, so unlike the feminine world she inhabited. He was like a foreign creature. Their faces parted and he looked at her, studying her face.

  ‘You have eyes like a pussy cat.’

  Alice laughed.

  ‘And you have a tongue like the devil.’

  And then they both laughed and she totally forgot about Grace, whom she was supposed to be chaperoning – and who was supposed to be chaperoning her – as she let herself be led outside.

  Meanwhile, Grace had totally forgotten about Alice. She was gazing at the band too, but they had a greater hold on her attention because her boyfriend, Bill, was the piano player. This had the disadvantage that she either had to dance with Alice, or sit out the dances like a rejected wallflower, which she wasn’t. Young men couldn’t help but notice Grace’s cheeky look and the way she danced with a joie de vivre that seemed to guarantee a good time. But Grace politely declined all offers. She knew from experience that Bill’s intense preoccupation with his piano was deceptive. If she started dancing with another man, he would look up, glower, and at the end of the song jump down from the stage and assert his territorial rights. In fact, Grace never danced with another man again – something she was to ponder at leisure in the decades to come. But tonight she was still living in a state of enchantment. Bill gave Grace the same passion and concentration that he gave to his piano.

  ‘I love you more than I love the songs of George Gershwin,’ he said.

  And she replied with a smile: ‘And I love you more than I love dancing the Charleston.’

  And then he said with a look of utter seriousness: ‘Ah, yes, but nobody could love Gershwin as much as I do.’ And he would bend down and kiss her on the lips.

  And on this New Year’s Eve, on the stroke of midnight, as the room erupted into a mass of cheers and embraces, Bill leapt down from the stage, pushed his way over, grabbed Grace and kissed her passionately in front of everybody. Except nobody was looking – they were all too busy kissing someone else. That is until the trumpet player came over shouting, ‘Come on, Bill, put her down. “Auld Lang Syne”!’

  Bill whipped off his tie, tied one end around his wrist and another around Grace’s. Grace objected: ‘Bill Smith, what are you doing? Stop it right now!’

  But he just grinned and said, ‘No one is going to separate me from you. Not now, not ever,’ and he set off, pulling her up through the crowds, Grace struggling to keep up and nearly falling flat on her face. She kept protesting, ‘Bill, watch out! Stop!’ but he ploughed on – very much a man on a mission.

  When they reached the stage he executed a complicated and rather ungainly manoeuvre, pretty much hauling a slightly hysterical Gracie up onto it – at one point she was lying flat on her front like a beached whale and wondered what on earth Miss Faber would say – then he hauled her up and dragged her over to the piano. With his arms wrapped around Grace and one wrist still tied to hers, Bill then proceeded to play ‘Auld Lang Syne’ faultlessly. Grace was laughing so much she thought she would do herself some serious damage.

  It was only when the song ended and Bill had well and truly kissed her, and she had come back up for air, that Grace looked around to see if Alice had witnessed the exhibition. But she couldn’t see her big sister anywhere. The room was crowded, but Alice’s strawberry hair usually stood out, not to mention the bright pink silk dress she’d insisted on wearing.

  ‘Can you see Alice?’

  Bill scanned the room. It was beginning to empty as the exhausted youngsters began to go home to their mums and comfy beds.

  ‘No. Last I saw, she was dancing with you over at the back.’

  ‘I didn’t see where she went. One minute she was there, the next she was gone.’

  ‘Well, let’s go and see if we can find her,’ he said, and took the opportunity to steal another quick kiss.

  They wandered around the hall, still tied at the wrist until Grace started to get panicky, muttering under her breath, ‘Mum o
nly let us go on condition we didn’t lose sight of each other. She’s going to kill me.’

  ‘She won’t have gone far. She’s probably just off with some bloke somewhere.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m worried about.’

  Grace was thinking of Alice’s previous form. Despite being rather shy, Alice always seemed to be surrounded by suitors.

  ‘Those young rascals gather around our Alice like bees to the sweetest honeypot,’ Charlie used to say proudly to Clara. But she would give him a worried look. Because that was the problem – Alice was the sweetest Scarlet Sister, always wanting to please, which was good if it was her mother making demands, but potentially ruinous if it was a young man.

  She would watch her two eldest daughters getting ready to go out on a Saturday night, with a lack of corsetry to hold them in, their arms bare, skirts short – and the cosmetics … ‘What do you look like? A right pair of dollymops! You’ll get the neighbours talking,’ she would say, shaking her head.

  Grace would carry on applying her bright pink lipstick and say nonchalantly: ‘Who cares?’

  ‘I care and you should care. You don’t want to get the reputation for being that sort of girl.’

  ‘What sort is that, then?’ Grace paused and cast a coy look at her mother.

  ‘The sort of girl my mum would have locked up in her room and thrown away the key.’

  ‘Are you going to lock us up, then?’

  And there was Clara’s dilemma. She loved to see her girls experiencing a freedom that she had never had – and very few women had ever had. The dislocation of the First World War had opened the cage, the young lady birds had flown, and many of them could not be put back in. They had worked in larger numbers and earned more money. They had opportunities for activities like the cinema and dances. Sometimes they were unchaperoned. Their skirts had become shorter due to a lack of material during the war and, when it ended, many women fought the pressure to bring hemlines back down, seeing it as a matter of personal freedom.

  Watching her girls get ready on a Saturday night filled Clara with pride, but she worried for them, and their reputations too. It was uncharted territory and she couldn’t see how it was going to end. As they walked out of the door and cheerily pecked her on the cheek, she felt anxious. She always waited by the fire until they came home.

  Clara was not alone in her worries. The blue-stocking feminists of the Victorian era watched askance as women used their hard-won freedom not to go into politics, but to attend dances. Money from these new jobs was spent on cosmetics to make themselves more attractive to men. Sylvia Pankhurst disparaged, ‘the emancipation of today which displays itself mostly in cigarettes and shorts … painted lips and nails and … absurdities of dress which betoken the slave-women’s sex appeal rather than the free woman’s intelligent companionship.’

  Those early feminists made an unholy alliance with reactionary men. Doctors condemned high heels on the grounds that wearers would displace their wombs, and when the first dance hall opened in Hammersmith a clergyman said ‘the morals of a pigsty would be more respectable in comparison’. When the Charleston came over from the United States, the Daily Mail denounced it as ‘reminiscent only of Negro Orgies’. It would be the sisters’ favourite dance.

  Of course this argument rumbles on today. As women, we’re still doing it: a mixed message, a confusion. I watch my teenage daughter riling against the Church of England for not taking women bishops, declaring her intention to become a journalist and campaign for women’s rights, while going off to school every day with highlighted hair, mascara and ludicrously short skirts. She then announced she was going to be a cheerleader, spending her time cavorting on the touchline in skimpy clothes, supporting the boys at her school rugby matches.

  ‘Is this what women threw themselves under horses for? All those women who went on hunger strike so we could get the vote and equal rights?’ I said. ‘Can’t you do something useful, like write for the school newspaper?’

  ‘Only geeks do that,’ came the reply. ‘At least I’m keeping fit.’

  It seems we can’t help ourselves, and of course I’m as guilty of this ambivalence as she is, along with plenty of others in my generation.

  Back in the 1920s the young women in short skirts, smoking, dancing and hanging around with young men were denounced as ‘flappers’. But did they care? As Alice and Grace danced the night away, flinging their limbs around with a wild freedom, they had a sense of elation – for the first time in their lives they were really having fun. How could anything that felt so right, be wrong?

  Back in the dance hall, Grace was still worrying about her sister and her ability to attract unsuitable men: ‘I don’t know how she does it.’

  ‘It’s the eyes,’ Bill said. ‘Mischief. The quiet ones are always the worst,’ he added. Grace shot him a look. He laughed and squeezed her hand. ‘Let’s take a look outside. I bet she’s up to mischief in a dark corner.’

  They hurried into the street, and it didn’t take them long to spot the pink dress enveloped in the arms of a tall man.

  ‘Alice Swain, what are you doing?’ asked an exasperated Grace.

  The couple quickly broke apart and the man turned around.

  ‘Joseph Davidson!’ Bill said. ‘Well, I never!’

  ‘Hello, Bill. Let me introduce you,’ Joseph said.

  ‘No need, I know Alice.’

  ‘She’s my sister,’ Grace added.

  ‘And this is my girlfriend, Grace,’ Bill said.

  Joseph and Bill were classmates from primary school so the happy foursome chatted until the clock on the town hall struck one and the sisters realised they were supposed to be home.

  ‘Quick!’

  Grace, still attached to Bill by his tie, grabbed Alice’s hand and started to run down the road, the three of them making a ridiculous picture and laughing so hard that Alice tripped and her shoe went flying.

  ‘Who do you think you are, flaming Cinderella?’ Joseph said, running after them and picking up her shoe. He bent down and carefully placed it on Alice’s dainty, stockinged toes.

  ‘Does that make you Prince Charming, then?’ Grace said archly.

  ‘I’d like to be,’ Joseph said. Still bending on one knee, he took Alice’s hand. ‘Alice Swain, would you do me the honour of coming to the pictures tomorrow night?’

  Alice blushed right to the roots of her strawberry-blonde hair and said, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, ‘Only if I can chose the film.’

  ‘I don’t care what we see as long as I’m with you,’ Joseph replied, still holding her hand.

  At which Grace rolled her eyes at Bill and grabbed Alice’s hand. ‘Come on, you! Enough of this charmer. If we don’t get back soon, none of us will be going to any movie or anywhere ever again. Mother’ll have us chained to her knickers for ever.’

  ‘Grace!’

  But she just laughed and started pulling Alice down the street again.

  Finally in bed, surrounded by their sleeping sisters, Alice and Grace lay with their limbs aching, voices hoarse, and heads buzzing from too much excitement. Grace propped herself up and stared down at her big sister. Alice was looking dreamily at the ceiling, with one hand behind her head, her fine hair framing her face like a saint’s halo in a medieval fresco.

  Grace whispered, ‘What’s your New Year’s resolution then, saucebox?’

  And without hesitation Alice replied, ‘To marry Joseph Davidson.’

  Grace leapt up. ‘What? Are you serious?’

  ‘Totally. Tonight I met the man I’m going to marry. It’s Destiny.’

  ‘Destiny? I’ll tell you what it is – it’s nuts! Have you been on the old jag juice?’

  ‘No, my dear. I just know what I know. The future has been revealed to me tonight.’

  ‘Ha!’ Gracie snorted too loudly and a little sister stirred. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just do. Believe me, when you meet the man you are going to marry, you just know.’

/>   Grace was slightly affronted. ‘Why don’t I feel that about Bill, then?’

  ‘Because you are not going to marry him. Whereas I am going to marry Joseph Davidson. And I am going to marry him before the year is out, you’ll see.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

  ‘Do that. In fact, what do you bet me?’

  Grace giggled. Unlike her father, Alice may have eschewed the delights of alcohol, but she had inherited his love of a wager. She spiced up her daily life with a constant string of flutters.

  ‘OK, Mrs Davidson-to-be, I bet you I marry Bill Smith before you marry Joseph Davidson, and whoever loses has to catch the bouquet at the wedding.’

  ‘Done!’

  They shook on it, nestled down and finally went to sleep.

  The next night a rather weary Alice met Joseph Davidson outside the Empire cinema in Grays. Going to the pictures was the sisters’ most popular pastime after dancing. With no televisions, and cinemas offering a respectable way to escape their parents, most young ladies went to the cinema at least twice a week, particularly if they were working.

  With their London wages, the Swain sisters had no problems finding the means to indulge. Of course, they liked the romantic movies best, particularly if they were sitting in the back of the cinema with their suitor of the moment. Chaperones were pretty helpless in this environment, and cinemas soon earned the nickname of ‘petting pantries’. Which is why Alice had told her mother that she was meeting Edith, a rather upmarket friend she’d met at Miss Faber’s, of whom Clara totally approved.