Goodbye Piccadilly

by Betty Burton

  The change had been wrought in a gown shop where a forceful madame had brought out the very latest fashions for Otis.

  ‘No, no,’ said Emily Hewetson, looking at the drape and narrowness of the open-fronted skirts and imagining the stimulating way the fabric would divide, giving glimpses of stocking. She shook her head. ‘Something more suitable; you know that my daughter is only sixteen.’

  Seventeen in a few days, thought Otis, but held her tongue. Emily Hewetson had enough to cope with, accepting this overnight transformation of a daughter from girl to maiden, without leaping into womanhood.

  ‘Ah,’ said the clever lady who had had for twenty years the privilege of dressing Mrs Martin Hewetson, wife of the Hewetson of Hewetson, Hewetson, Batt and Hewetson. ‘Of course, you are right, Mrs Hewetson. What a pity that madam is not thinking of adding to her own wardrobe. These, of course, as you will well know, are the newest styles to come to London. You are right, of course, I shall bring Miss Hewetson some separate items: some pretty blouses and plain skirts.’ She did not, however, take away the new styles, but left them hanging at a seductive distance from the chaise-longue upon which Emily Hewetson rested, and from there the desirable dresses hummed siren notes to mature vanity.

  In Fortnum and Mason’s restaurant, restored with a little salmon pâté, green salad and brown bread, and a compote of fruit, Emily Hewetson smiled across the table at her daughter and sipped fragrant green gunpowder tea. ‘Well Otis, I think we have done very well this morning. Are you pleased with your wardrobe?’

  ‘I don’t like the idea of the stays.’

  ‘This is neither the time or place…’

  ‘I like the skirts, and the white blouse, and the spotted one.’ As she had tried them on in the gown shop, Otis had imagined the effect the deep yellow skirt and blouse with the gathered bodice would have upon Jack Moth when he saw her wearing them.

  ‘I shall get the Southsea man to come and look at your hair.’

  ‘Oh, Ma, must you? It will just get blown about on the seafront.’

  ‘Well, at least you will start out looking ladylike.’ Offering Otis some more of the refreshing tea, Emily said, ‘You wouldn’t have liked those new models at all, would you? I can scarcely see you, stepping out as you do on Southsea front, in those narrow skirts.’

  ‘Goodness no! They are so perfectly you, Ma.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ She smiled at the thought of all those tissue-lined boxes already on the van for delivery to The Grand.

  Emily Hewetson was not really concerned for Otis’s immature opinion, but she did want somebody to whom she could talk of the six new gowns she had ordered. Six! She laughed lightly. ‘Heaven alone knows what your father will say.’ And oh, the trays of Madeira and sponge fingers they would have sent to their room over the next week or so.

  ‘He would never say a thing to you about your clothes. I don’t think he would mind if you had bought the jackets Madame showed you as well.’

  ‘Ah, my dear, that is where you are mistaken. When you have a husband you will know what I mean. The wife of a prosperous lawyer may go a little over her dress allowance if her husband feels flattered by having his wife looking rather better than his colleagues’ – clients have no confidence in a man who has a dowdy wife – but to go too far over at one time is to appear spendthrift.’

  ‘Pa would never deny you a couple of jackets – they were terribly pretty on you.’

  ‘They were, weren’t they? Horribly expensive. I did love them. But I shall have them, never fear. And your pa will feel all the better that he thought of buying them himself – as a surprise. You know your pa and surprises.’

  Otis did. It had apparently been his idea to surprise her by the trip to London for the new clothes. ‘But he will not know about them.’

  ‘Oh, be sure he will know, Otis. He will know that Madame had thought only of me when she ordered, and that I refused them, reluctant to be profligate with the money the poor man works so hard for.’

  Otis smiled a falsely compliant smile at her mother whilst she said to herself, I shall never, never be like you, Ma. You may as well have a bowl of trifle for brains the little use they get.

  ‘A woman understands not philosophy, but the making of a dumpling. Stick to socks and avoid sociology, and look after your husband…’

  Ladies! This advice was given to women in Portsmouth Town Hall recently by Mr Victor Grayson.

  The combined societies advocating both female and universal suffrage meet in unity tonight to put the varying arguments for

  DEMOCRACY AND JUSTICE

  Mr Frederick Pethick-Lawrence Miss Blanche Ruby Bice Portsmouth Town Hall, 7.30 P.M. Admission Free. Collection.

  Jack Moth did his very best to show concern for his mother in the way that his father would have done, though he did think that his father, having been so careless as to do this to his mother, might have – this year at least – come away from London for a couple of weeks. It was never admitted, but the whole family knew very well that George Moth hated not being at work and that some particularly difficult investigation would always come up only days before they were due to leave.

  One day, Jack thought to himself, one day I shall tell him just what I think.

  It was now the Tuesday when Victoria Ormorod had said that she would be attending a public meeting in the town hall. He had carried out a survey of the hall and the roads leading to it so that he might loiter with the intent of seeing her when she arrived.

  When he had asked his mother if she would be happy for him to go out that evening, he had discovered that it was one of Nancy’s free evenings.

  ‘No, I shall not ask her to change her evening off, Jack. To servants, free time is part of their wages. I would not go to my servants for a loan of money, neither shall I ask Nancy for a loan of her evening. Particularly as you have free time for the entire day.’

  ‘It’s a pity that Father doesn’t give you a bit more of his time. I sometimes wonder whether he wouldn’t rather live at Scotland Yard and visit us occasionally.’

  ‘Jack! Your father does the kind of work that knows no hours.’

  ‘My father does the kind of work that absorbs him so that he does not know that we exist.’

  When Anne Moth looked down at the little jacket she was embroidering, Jack was at once contrite. ‘Oh, Ma, I’m a beast. It is only that…’ he paused, wondering whether he should tell his mother the whole story of how he fell in love and was likely to lose the lovely Victoria Ormorod if he did not go to the town hall tonight. He knew that she would be touched by the tenderness of it.

  He related his romantic story. ‘…And I may never see her again after tonight.’

  ‘You will probably fall in love many times, Jack, before you discover your true love.’

  ‘How many times did you fall in love before you met Pa?’ He, of course, knew the answer, having heard their story related often.

  ‘Touché, my dear. But holiday romances usually have such short roots that they do not transplant well to everyday marriage.’

  ‘Goodness, Ma, I am not thinking of marriage.’ Which was not true: he had thought of marriage to Victoria Ormorod very many times lately.

  ‘As it happens, Mr Martin Hewetson has kindly said that he will come here this evening to discuss something with me. Esther will be here, and Nancy will be back by ten, so go along to your meeting.’

  He gave her the kind of hug a young man gives his mother as compensation for having got his own way by playing on her maternal love. Having received many such hugs, Anne Moth smiled at her tall, handsome son and said, ‘Get along with you, and take your cupboard love with you. And what is this meeting all about?’

  ‘Blessed if I know. A Mr Pethick-Lawrence is speaking, that’s all that I know.’

  She looked up sharply. ‘Frederick Pethick-Lawrence? Then it must be a Suffrage meeting. He once spoke at a Fabian meeting I attended. A good speaker, he was very persuasive.’

  With that, every
thing about Victoria Ormorod fell into place. She was – she had to be of course – a supporter of female suffrage.

  ‘Enjoy your evening, my dear, it will do you no harm to listen to what Mr Pethick-Lawrence has to say.’

  Now, as Jack haunted the entrance to the town hall, and saw the posters announcing Mr Pethick-Lawrence, he understood Victoria Ormorod’s manner – the way she had approached him at the fountain, her firm handshake, and the off-hand way she paid the luncheon bill. And she had said to him: ‘You may not enjoy the meeting.’ But he would. He really had nothing against women having a voice.

  By the great trek of people making for the town hall, it was obviously a very important meeting. It was no wonder Victoria wanted to be here: it seemed that every young woman in every surrounding parish had come out in the summer sunshine. Many wore sashes of purple, green and white; others red, green and white. Some came in little groups carrying banners indicating ‘WSPU’, ‘NUWSS’, ‘WOMEN’S CO-OPERATIVE GUILD’, ‘UNION OF WOMEN TEACHERS’, ‘UNION OF WOMEN WORKERS’. There were Women’s Freedom Leagues, Church Leagues and National Leagues, Conservative Women, Temperance Women, Liberal and Independent Labour Women.

  Which, Jack Moth wondered, might Victoria Ormorod support? Or could it be that she supported the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League and had come in opposition to all those? No, no, that did not fit at all.

  At the entrance, young women were thrusting handbills and literature into people’s hands. Accepting one, he smiled down at its distributor, who wore a white hat trimmed with red and green and an armband showing that she was an ‘Official Steward’.

  ‘Nancy!’

  ‘Oh, Lord! Master Jack. Whatever are you doing…? I never took you to be interested.’ A shadow crossed her face. ‘I hope you aren’t an “anti” and come to beat us all up.’

  Had a servant spoken so familiarly to any of his Cambridge friends, she might well have been sharply rebuked, but Jack Clermont Moth had inherited much of his mother’s attitude to the pecking order. ‘I’m not an anything. Somebody asked me to come along. I didn’t even know that it was a Votes for Women meeting. More to the point, I never took you to be interested.’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m interested in the whole lot of it. I don’t know all that much yet, but I have a friend who is teaching me. I do love the rousing feeling you get at meetings like this. It is food and drink to me.’

  Jack saw the shine in her eyes, transforming her from the rather undistinguished servant who went determinedly about her work, to a bright, enthusiastic young woman in a white hat.

  ‘You look very nice tonight, Nancy.’

  ‘Thank you, Master Jack. I hope you enjoy the meeting.’

  ‘I understand Mr Pethick-Lawrence is a fine speaker.’

  ‘They’re both good speakers. They say the two of them fair turns your belly over – pardon the expression.’

  The crowds were thickening and he found it difficult to check every face that passed them. But he felt sure that he would be able to pick out her statuesque figure and copper hair.

  Nancy continued thrusting literature into people’s hands. ‘Was you supposed to meet your friends here, Master Jack? It an’t going to be easy, and if you wait too long you won’t get a seat.’

  By seven twenty-five the hall was full.

  ‘Tell you what, Master Jack, if you want to you can come round the side with me where I’m going to get the collecting bags ready. You can get a good view of the audience from there, so you might be able to pick out your friends.’

  The meeting got under way. And from his elevated position Jack systematically scanned the rows and rows of faces. He had got about half-way when Mr Pethick-Lawrence began speaking but, urgent as he was to discover Victoria, Jack found his search disturbed by a growing interest in the speech, and when the speaker talked of ‘wealthy women who own houses and land, employ servants and run the complex economy of a household and are yet debarred, merely because of their sex, from having any say, by way of a vote in the political life which is so vital to her interests’, Jack’s thoughts were drawn to his mother. Was he mistaken, or had she looked eager when she had said that she had heard Mr Pethick-Lawrence speak?

  Frederick Pethick-Lawrence’s speech received such tumultuous applause that it drowned the jeers of the ‘Antis’. In spite of his desire to continue scanning the hall, Jack joined in. Nancy, who had come to stand by Jack, thwacked her hands together rapturously. ‘Isn’t he fine? Isn’t he a fine speaker, Master Jack?’ And he agreed that it was a truly passionate speech.

  ‘Passion? You’ll hear passion now. Blanche Ruby Bice is next. Come down with me into the aisle and listen.’

  Realizing the impossibility of finding Victoria Ormorod in this great crowd, he went with Nancy who guided him to stand by other official stewards from where he continued to let his eyes roam over the heads of the large audience.

  The buzzing and rustling suddenly ceased, and he followed the direction of all other eyes towards Miss Blanche Ruby Bice. Dressed in a white suit, her abundant copper-coloured hair bulging from under a plain, flat hat, Blanche Ruby Bice moved to the podium. The striking woman in white who had hushed the audience without a word was, without doubt, his own Victoria Ormorod.

  Whilst he had been waiting in the street, she must have entered through a private entrance with the rest of the platform. And whilst he had been facing the audience and scanning their faces, she had been looking down upon them from the platform. Whilst he had looked for Victoria Ormorod, she had become the apparently heroic orator, Blanche Ruby Bice.

  When she reached the podium it was obvious that, whatever the posters said, this was Miss Bice’s meeting. It was a woman’s cause and she was a woman. And what a woman. Jack Moth’s entire body felt singed by her presence and excited by the prolonged applause of the audience before she had even opened her mouth.

  She did not begin speaking immediately but, without excuse or apology, she withdrew the pin and removed her hat, unwound a long filmy scarf, and flicked off her gloves finger by finger. All this she did so slowly and with such deliberation that for one fleeting moment Jack wondered where it would stop, and saw ahead where she pop, pop, popped the buttons at the neck of her blouse, unfastened her cuffs…

  Having held the audience like an accomplished actress, she held up her bare hands in fists. At even the most rumbustious meeting of a Cambridge debating society, Jack Moth had never heard the whoops, whistles and applause that greeted her opening sentence.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am ready to fight for justice. Are you?’

  Smiling, confident, she waited until the noise subsided into silence, then she leaned forward over the podium, resting on her forearms. Informal. Friendly. Smiling. Her eyes crinkling at the corners as they had crinkled at Jack over the tin-topped table on the pier.

  ‘This voting business that we have come together in Portsmouth to talk of this evening; this act that is so sacred, so important to the future peace of this country, so vital to the well-being of any democracy…’ She paused for a second, held up her hand and changed the tone of her voice to brusqueness. ‘I do not exaggerate, for I sincerely believe that the vote is all of these things. But…’

  Now all puzzlement ‘…there are men (very many men) who would have us believe that it is only their sex which is capable of rational thought, only their sex which has the necessary grasp of fundamental politics to decide upon who shall govern us, only their superior sex which is capable of philosophic thought.’

  ‘Quite right!’ The response of that anonymous male voice did not raise the laughter it must have anticipated – it raised only angry hissing. Victoria/Ruby Bice held up her hand.

  ‘Ah, the gentleman says “Quite right”. Perhaps he is one who believes that our great novelist, George Eliot, ought to be at home making dumplings whilst her butler is thinking philosophical thoughts about how he may use his vote.’ The gales of derisive laughter must surely have made the heckler wish that he had never opened his mout
h.

  Jack leaned forward, wishing that he was as close to this goddess of a woman as he had been when sitting opposite her on South Parade Pier.

  ‘Does he also say “Quite right” when asked about convicts who have the right to vote? (I mean of course male convicts). Does he say “Quite right” when questioned about lunatics (male lunatics) having a perfect right to vote? And does he say that it is right that a white slaver and a drunkard should have more say in the government of this country than any woman in the land?’

  If Victoria Ormorod knew anything, it was obvious that she knew how to use the passion and the tension that she had built up.

  ‘And so, whilst the convicts, lunatics and drunken white slavers of this country are voting, what of our women? What kind of women are we – we dumpling makers – who do not have a say in our own destiny?’

  As she spoke, she used her hands constantly – long, large hands that bent backwards at the knuckles like a ballet dancer’s – and Jack could not but help remember the practical way those hands had dampened the towel and picked the streak of seagull lime from his sleeve. Had that really happened? Had she really teased him about laundering her towel, and had he sat tête-à-tête with her eating sandwiches and fruit?

  She continued, ‘A woman may be a nurse, and not have the vote. A woman may be a doctor, and not have the vote. A woman may be a mayor, a teacher, a skilled worker or factory labourer, and not have the vote.’

  She paused briefly; the silence was so charged with the tension she had built up that it seemed possible that it would arc like electricity. Her voice, quiet now, penetrated to the furthermost corners of the large, silent hall. ‘And a woman may be a mother, she may be the help, guide and be the greatest influence in the life of any man. It is she who will teach him most about morality, to know what is right and what is wrong; it is she who will teach him to be honest and honourable…’ Again she paused, seeming to let her gaze search out every eye for a response. Then her voice came out powerfully, passionately. ‘But she is not…’ she pointed her two forefingers like pistols ‘not to be trusted to have any say in the making of the very laws by which she must live. She may not’, again the pistols, ‘have the vote.’