Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

  The women were interested in another parliamentary fight too: the ‘child benefits’ issue. The government of the day had a long-standing commitment to making a weekly cash payment to mothers, financing this by increased taxation of fathers; transferring money, as the newspapers liked coyly to put it, ‘from wallet to purse’. Unfortunately, at just the time when this scheme was due to come into effect, the government was making a deal with the mighty trade union movement (mighty compared with the organised strength of mothers) that the workers would reduce their pay-demands if the government would reduce taxation. Stalemate. The government had made two contradictory promises, one to women and one to trade unionists, mainly men; and so it was, late in May, that the government flew in the face of its commitment to women’s rights and postponed the child benefit scheme indefinitely.

  Feminist anger and agitation about this was less vocal and coherent, however, than the response to the Select Committee’s threat to abortion rights. Abortion was a simple matter. Anyone who did not approve of abortion did not have to have one, but it should be each individual woman’s right to choose. Child benefits, though — that raised other issues. Of course it was monstrous that the organised males of the trade union movement should object to their wives having a right to some of ‘their’ money, monstrous that sexism should so blatantly coerce government policy. But feminists weren’t sure that they wanted men’s miserable pay-packets docked to finance child benefits, they weren’t sure they wanted to be paid to stay at home and have children, which was how some of them saw it. Shortly after the government announced its decision, a gathering of women sat and argued these points on the roof of Collindeane Tower.

  Lynn Byers was thirty-two, short, red-haired and a journalist; she freelanced occasionally for the local paper and had been a vitriolic opponent of the demolition of Collindeane, though privately she had known that all the rehabilitation in the world would not make a twenty-four-storey tower suitable for children to live in. Lynn lived with her husband Derek in a house that they had bought for a song in nearby Seyer Street. The house was cheap partly because it was falling down and partly because Seyer Street was a slum; but it was harmless enough for a healthy couple in their thirties, for whom freedom from a heavy mortgage far outweighed the odd rat.

  Lynn had never been in a women’s liberation group, though she had felt complete sympathy with the movement insofar as she perceived it from Spare Rib and the women’s page in The Guardian. She’d been on a few marches, usually alone, and was as incensed as ahyone about child benefits and the threat to abortion rights. She was in a state of ambivalence herself about having children — the steady advance of the years, Derek’s clearly stated (but not harped upon) desire for fatherhood, and her own curiosity and yearning vied with the knowledge of how hard it would be to give up the independence and pride of self-employment and self-support. And political events weighed heavily against having children. The mammoth arrogance of a government closing off women's escape route from unwanted pregnancy while at the same time withholding the tiny improvement that they’d promised in mothers’ financial position, made Lynn sweat with rage.

  The women in the tower had been friendly enough to Lynn, particularly in the early days of their occupancy when the weather was still cold and she brought them thermoses of coffee and let them use her bath and her phone; but she never felt fully accepted, partly, she supposed, because she was married and liked her husband (quite apart from loving him); and partly because she earned her living. She had no particular objections to people squatting or drawing social security, which was how most of the women lived, or, for that matter, to the one called Marsha living on money inherited from a dead relative, most of which she had paid into an account to which all the women had access for the refurbishment of the flats. It seemed a perfectly reasonable use for state or private wealth. Nevertheless, Lynn had the feeling that they had the feeling that she disapproved. Or perhaps it was just Marsha. Marsha was new to the group, and, despite having been the one who struck the first blow to the planks boarding up Collindeane with her axe, didn’t actually live there. This was partly (she admitted to Lynn one day when no one was listening, obviously seeing her as a partner in the crime of incomplete commitment) because she liked to escape to her own place, and partly because she had a boyfriend called David who was a social worker of rather traditional opinions who would not visit her in a women’s commune even if he were allowed through the door. Marsha compensated for her assorted guilts by recounting, to anyone who would listen, conversations in which she had rebuked David for his authoritarian and moralistic attitude to his clients, twiddling her long, dark hair, and pouring her money and energy into the flats. In fact, Lynn doubted how far the thing would have got without her; many of the other twenty-odd women seemed to prefer consciousness-raising to clearing out rubble.

  Apart from Posy, of course. Posy provided organisation and skills; there seemed nothing she couldn’t do from glazing windows to restarting vandalised lavatories. They made a curious couple, Marsha skinny and penitent, Posy blustering and huge.

  From the first day the outer windows of the Collindeane squat had been plastered with posters claiming abortion on demand, but political activity had been postponed while a few flats were made habitable. Now Lynn was on her way home from the dust-filled sweaty inferno that central London had become and her spirits lifted to see evidence that they were thinking as she was thinking, and planned action too.

  CHILD BENEFITS PROTEST PLANNING MEETING, ALL WOMEN WELCOME.

  She noted the time and the place (the roof of the tower, what a nice idea) and continued on her way.

  Derek was in. He was marking a student’s essay on the kitchen table. The table was spotless and the morning’s breakfast things wet and draining. I’m not going to thank you, she thought, because that implies it’s my job; but it is nice not having to fight you about housework, as so many women do with their of-course-I’m-in-favour-of-women's-lib husbands.

  ‘Hello. You look awful,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’

  ‘Red-haired ladies shouldn’t go out in this heat. D’you want a bath?’

  ‘Why, do you think I need one?’

  He sniffed. ‘Definitely.’ He buried his nose in her neck. ‘Don’t tell me ... Victoria Line to Brixton, then a bus.’

  ‘I’ll have that bath.’

  ‘It’s run. I picked up your approach on my antennae.’

  She sighed as she lowered herself into pleasantly tepid water. ‘You are nice to me.’ He was sitting on the toilet seat to chat. ‘It takes such ages for water to piddle out of these taps.’

  He said airily, ‘It’s all right, you deserve it.’

  She started sweating and feeling dirty again almost as soon as she was out of the water, and the cream she put on to soothe her sunburn only picked up dust from the old house. She went to the kitchen and started hulling strawberries.

  ‘The women in the tower,’ she said, ‘are going to make some kind of protest over child benefits.’

  ‘Over what, dear?’

  ‘Child benefits.’

  ‘Oh that.’

  ‘Oh that. It’s only the nub of what women’s liberation’s all about. Economic control of mothers by men.’

  ‘Rather academic concern to us, wouldn’t you say?’

  Her hand slipped on her knife and a tiny thread of blood mixed with strawberry juice. She threw the strawberry away, and immediately wondered why she had. She glanced at Derek. He was deep in his essay. The meaning of the remark was clear, but it could have been at any level. It was probably a joke. He was not the man to follow a cryptic sarcasm with a meaningful silence. Such finely-honed weapons were not for him, he was a babe in arms when it came to verbal quarrels.

  ‘Yes, but you’re supposed to be an academic. Look, get that junk off the table, unless your student wants food all over his essay.’

  Derek looked at her in reproachful surprise. ‘It’s not a his, it’s a her.’ And
he whistled smugly as he laid the table.

  It was a hot, exhausting business, getting to the roof of the tower. The lift, of course, was long dead, and the shaft bricked off; the stairs were endless, though fortunately less fragile than they looked. Footsteps echoed, and even Lynn’s healthy, non-smoking lungs were rebelling before she reached the top. She felt beside her the ghosts of arthritic pensioners, and mothers with push-chairs. She peered into derelict flats as she climbed, trying not to wonder about rats or loose bricks or asbestos. The women had attacked the building, they said, like rising damp, but had not yet risen very far. Most of the front doors were open. Here and there were sticks of furniture — a wet armchair with a rusty spring poking through the fabric, cracked white china cups with fabulous crops of ferny mould. She doubted, if she was honest, whether the squat would last, or if it would spread beyond the first floor, and then she doubted herself for doubting the women. Whatever they might lack in realism or resources, they had an indomitable spirit in Posy.

  Lynn had felt sorry for Posy the first time she met her, before sharply reminding herself that feminists do not waste pity on other women’s looks. But it was true that big, muscular, denim-clad Posy, with her puggish face and mighty strength was the sort who drew sneers about feminism being the last refuge of women who could not attract a man. Not that Posy cared. The women accepted her for herself and her skills, and that was as it should be. Of course, she did have a way of rubbing people up the wrong way, but that was nothing to do with her looks.

  Lynn remembered sitting on a dusty floor one wintry day very early in the squat (she’d gone round with curtain material given to her as a wedding present seven years ago) and hearing Posy’s tales and plans.

  She came from Australia originally, she said — ‘where male chauvinism was invented’ — but now regarded herself as a woman of the world. At a very early age she’d realised that the only hope for the world in general and women in particular lay in an international female revolution, led by her; she didn’t specify precisely where, how or to what end the revolution would be accomplished, but her deep-set, slightly hooded eyes shone when she described the early skirmishes.

  ‘I was in the first women’s liberation group that was ever started,’ she liked to allege, ‘In fact, I seem to remember I thought of the name. It was an anti-war group in California in ’sixty-six. We were talking about having a mill-in at the local draft office —’

  ‘A what?’ said someone.

  ‘A mill-in, you all go along and mill about and gum up the works. Anyway, we were planning it and one of the guys said, “Could one of you chicks get us some coffee?” and I got up and said, “Chicks, is it? What about women’s liberation?”’

  ‘And that was how it all started?’

  ‘Well, more or less.’

  Lynn had enjoyed this as well as Posy’s other stories (she’d fought the dowry system in India, she’d been on hand in Southern Africa when women guerillas wanted equality with their male comrades, she’d joined Irish women pelting customs officials with pills and condoms to protest against the contraceptive ban in the South) but she’d shared the scepticism she saw in the other women’s eyes. If there was one thing they liked less than leaders, it was people seeking personal glory from the collective struggles of sisters. And perhaps, this afternoon of the Child Benefit meeting, she had at last realised this, for when Lynn stepped out on to the sizzling roof Posy was sitting quietly with Marsha and showing no sign of taking command. There were about fifty women, in various stages of sunbathing undress. A few were smoking dope. Lynn slipped in behind Posy; her bulk provided the only shade there was. Everybody was talking at once, so it wasn’t clear whether the meeting had begun.

  ‘It’s disgusting.’

  ‘Millions for defence, so-called, nothing for us.’

  ‘Women and children first, eh? First for the chop.’

  ‘International Women’s Year plus one, and they think the men of this country would go on strike rather than let their wives have money of their own —’

  ‘They would, too.’

  ‘Sisters, we mustn’t let this degenerate into an attack on men.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s what the state wants. It divides the working class.’

  ‘Men divide the working class. What about those right-on trade union brothers who don’t tell their wives what they earn?’ ‘But we don’t want money from men. We want it from the government.’

  The argument went round and round. Lynn began to feel irritated. Someone would propose something and the next woman would politely and rationally refute it. The original speaker would accept the refutation, then five minutes later make exactly the same point again. No one was even pretending to be in the chair, and everyone who spoke prefaced her remarks with ‘Sorry’. There seemed to be no mechanism for making decisions, even if there had been agreement. Posy was brooding silently, her chin on her knees. Lynn glanced at Marsha, who rolled her eyes hopelessly. Lynn rolled hers back. Posy scowled.

  ‘We'll get local union branches to pass motions —’

  ‘Unions! Instruments of male power, just like —’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘March —’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘We don’t want child benefits, we want abortion on demand —’

  ‘The whole money system’s sick anyway —’

  ‘Look, I belong to NUPE, and —’

  Marsha whispered to Lynn, ‘You look like I feel.’

  ‘Is it always like this?’

  Posy whispered ‘Patience, sisters,’ and closed her eyes. Meanwhile someone suggested that they break into small groups to discuss how they felt about motherhood. Someone else said that would be a waste of time, but by then the small groups appeared to have formed themselves by spontaneous fission.

  Posy gestured for Lynn and Marsha to get together. ‘Raise your consciousness, sisters,’ she said, ‘I’ve been there.’

  ‘Is two a small group?’ Marsha asked anxiously.

  ‘It’s as small as they get,’ said Posy, ‘one is individualism.’ Marsha blushed, looked helplessly at Lynn, apparently forgetting that she was a new girl too.

  ‘Have you got any children, Lynn?’

  ‘Hm. Sore point.’

  ‘Oh — sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. No, I haven’t. Have you?’

  The question seemed to amuse Marsha. She said, ‘I’ve never had sex with a man.’

  Lynn tried to hide her surprise which, she supposed, was not very well-mannered. Or with anyone? she wondered. Many of the women were openly lesbian, and she’d assumed Posy was, though not Marsha, who, after all, had a boyfriend. But what the hell? Thinking in stereotypes, Lynn. Go to the bottom of the class. Maybe an element too — go on, don't let yourself off, you really ought to be doing this out loud — of liking Marsha so much she didn’t like to think it of her. Facing the thought, she resolved it; she thought so what? and meant it. The weather was glorious, her skin was getting used to the sun and she felt suddenly very happy and powerful and sensual, perched on top of a building that the authorities had put up and then washed their hands of, with a lot of relaxed, anarchistic, half-dressed women. She felt a lazy smile uncurl as she caught a glimpse of why women might choose each other. Derek, poor Derek, seemed suddenly very small and very far beneath them. The sun shone through Marsha’s hair, she looked like an anxious saint. Posy was eyeing the two of them thoughtfully.

  Lynn spoke fast. ‘I’m married. My ...’ (She hesitated. My Husband sounded like the queen. My Bloke, My Man, My Fella, were apologetic.) ‘Derek wants us to have kids. Well, one, anyway.’

  ‘And you don’t want to?’ said Marsha.

  ‘I can’t.’ It sounded like a serious illness. ‘I don’t mean physically can’t. I don’t know if I can or not. I’m the most efficient contraceptor in the world. Textbook. Cap in every night, even when he’s dead on his feet. Sometimes I feel I’m fizzing with fertility and then I as
k him to wear a durex as well, and withdraw. It drives him crazy.’

  ‘So what do you mean, you can’t have children?’

  ‘I can’t take the decision.’

  Lynn’s euphoria was gone. She was down again — bored, almost, at the prospect of having this conversation once more, even though she’d never discussed it with anyone other than Derek, and (endlessly) herself. It was impossible to explain to feminists like Marsha in their mid-twenties how she felt. They were still intoxicated and belligerent about their freedom not to have babies. It was going to be interesting when this generation became old enough to realise it was almost too late for them too. What would happen? A lovely harvest of strong little girls and gentle boys with early middle-aged parents? Or a new bitterness, a politics that saw in their choice just another male plot? ‘I can’t take the decision. It would be like voluntary mutilation.’

  ‘You mean birth?’

  ‘No, no. I think that must be amazing. I’m talking about my life, me.’ She shrugged, reached for something to say that didn’t sound as banal as: ‘I’m used to pleasing myself.’ She looked around at animated knots of women on the hot roof, as if she would escape.

  ‘So, don’t do it. Your husband isn’t trying to force you, is he?’

  The idea of Derek trying to force anything! ‘Let me tell you about my ideal day. It isn’t always like this. But sometimes, on an ordinary, working weekday, I lie in bed till nine o’clock and read a novel. Then I get an off-peak train into town, deliver some copy here, go and see a firm there that wants some promotional stuff written, set up some work for next week. Have lunch with someone useful or nice or preferably both. Pop in at some specialist library — you’d be amazed the places you can get into by just looking confident, even military installations at the height of a bomb-scare. Then home to work, or maybe a film. There’s nothing so delightful as an afternoon film in the West End. I work out why everyone else is there — she’s retired, he’s unemployed, they’ve come in for an illicit grope — me, I’ve given myself an afternoon off because I feel like it. I work too, of course, but I decide when.’