Goodbye Piccadilly

by Betty Burton

  ‘In every sphere we are influenced by the masculine.’

  ‘That is true. That is so true. The world might be a very different place.’

  ‘That is something we shall never know. But that is no reason why we should not discover our own history and justify our own art and take back our own religion. It may be that we shall find that art and music has no gender bias, but we must test it. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘I do. I absolutely do.’ Again she laughed, her cheeks flushed with pleasure. ‘How amazing. How closed my mind has been. I can see the world changing before my eyes.’

  ‘I warn you, if you follow on this line of questioning, you are likely to be ridiculed, if you begin to attack the sacred cows… or bulls.’

  ‘I can imagine. My father, for instance, probably thinks that such things were laid down on the day of creation: such and such constitutes a great painting, such and such else constitutes great music, and for ever and ever, amen.’ She frowned. ‘But then, so does my mother.’

  ‘Many women are afraid to question anything. Some are too comfortable, some too afraid, others do not even know that there is anything to be questioned.’

  Victoria saw, as she had seen on other occasions, the beginnings of enlightenment dawn upon the girl’s pretty face, and felt her own spirits lift. Well, something good might come from this weekend. Annie said that striking a spark of awareness in a woman was like fishing. You cast out the bait, hope for a bite and then, when you feel a twitch on the line, gently bring the catch in. Victoria disagreed, the analogy was too predatory. She preferred the description that was analogous to a seduction. And this is how it was with Otis Hewetson, who was love-starved for an identity. Victoria, journeying round the country to address meetings, met young women like her in mills, factories, offices and homes. All of them with the same gnawing hunger to have a place in history, in society, in the future.

  ‘Well I doubt that the world will change, but perhaps you will begin to see that there is another viewpoint.’ Victoria knew that, had it been Annie here, then she would have touched the girl, held her hands perhaps, or put an arm about her, but Victoria did not find that kind of contact very easy. ‘I have a close friend, Annie, who loves to quote a book of quite some antiquity – “Adam is the product of nature… Eve the creation of God. Adam was admitted to the Paradise for the sole purpose that Eve might be created.”’

  Otis laughed delightedly. ‘Oh, what a boost to female spirits. I must remember that. My pa will love to hear it. But you mentioned the bookshop…’

  ‘Would you? Oh wonders! We have prayed to find someone who would give some time to work there on a Saturday. Could you do that?’

  ‘Yes. I could give a day. I am doing my best to live close to my pupils. It is not easy. I am ashamed to say so, but until I went to college, I had no idea how the majority of people lived. I think the first time that I had any inkling that working people were not different, just poorer, was when you spoke to the crowd on Southsea front.’

  ‘When the meeting broke up in chaos?’

  Otis bowed her head low and put her face in her hands, her shaking shoulders puzzling Victoria, until she saw that the girl was shaking with laughter. ‘I was the cause of the police breaking up your meeting.’

  ‘The girl with the parasol?’

  Otis’s laughter rang out across the lake and was joined by that of Victoria. ‘I was taken to the Black Maria and given a real dressing down…’

  * * *

  George Moth, taking the morning air with his son, saw the two women and heard their laughter. The older man, .endeavouring to restrain his interest at seeing the apparent abandon with which Otis threw back her head as she laughed, wished that he had been the one who had caused her to laugh.

  ‘I’ve wanted to tell you, Father, but the opportunity has never been given till now… I have asked Victoria to marry me.’

  George Moth forced his gaze away from the tableau of the lake and beautiful women. ‘Yes… well, I had feared as much.’

  ‘Feared?’

  ‘Yes. I am aware who she is, you know – the Bice woman… Ruby Red.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say that you knew?’

  ‘I might ask the same.’

  ‘What Victoria is or does is her own affair. In any case, I wanted you all to meet her without prejudice.’

  ‘Which we have done, though Ess knows of the alter ego. The lady of Speakers’ Corner, international committees, women’s societies, suffragist federations – all kinds of unsuitable movements.’

  ‘She works entirely within the law, she has nothing to do with the Pankhurst people.’

  ‘I know that –I know them all, it is my job to know them, keep an eye on them. She is still Ruby Red.’

  ‘So you did not meet her without prejudice.’

  ‘An experienced detective does not jump to conclusions.’

  ‘So why mention Ruby Red?’

  ‘You’ll not get far in your profession if you are so naïve, my lad.’

  Jack clenched his teeth, determined not to quarrel with his father over this matter. If Victoria did eventually agree to become his wife, he did not want there to be bad family feeling about it. ‘A lawyer is trained to believe in his client without prejudice.’

  ‘The difference being that you are not proposing to take her on as your client.’

  George Moth wanted to end this discussion, and walk to where he could test his resolution to fight his feelings for Otis Hewetson and replace them with something more suitably avuncular. But there were things that must be said. Jack was going off to training-camp within days, men did rash things at such times. He did not put it past Jack to make a sudden decision and purchase a Special Licence to marry the woman. Although he well knew that he must tread carefully, he jumped in with both feet. ‘Do you realize that if there were to be some trouble with the anarchists, or the hint of a socialist uprising, she would be one of the first to be picked up?’

  ‘Picked up? You mean, arrested?’

  ‘Of course arrested. You don’t suppose any government would let the likes of Red Ruby and her cohorts give aid and support to revolutionaries.’

  ‘You cannot be serious.’

  For months now, the whole country, with the aid of journalists, had been in a fever of spy scares and rumours. Perfectly innocent people with un-English names had been hounded by their erstwhile neighbours, and harmless aliens had been put into prison camps. In other circumstances, Inspector Moth might have confided the nature of his new responsibilities to his son earlier, but with Red Ruby in the picture, it was not a wise thing to do. And now he had blurted it out in a fit of emotion.

  ‘I am very serious.’

  ‘Do you believe that I shall not tell her?’

  ‘She knows. Of course she knows. Every agitator knows that he treads a fine line between freedom of speech and sedition.’

  ‘If Victoria is anything, she is a most loyal Englishwoman.’

  ‘She’s an Internationalist, Jack.’

  ‘I have never heard her utter a seditious word and I have listened to her speak many times.’

  ‘I know.’

  Jack looked as shocked as he felt. ‘You… know?’

  ‘My best man has seen you on more than one occasion.’

  ‘Has seen me? And has reported to you?’

  ‘Not reported. I have always thought that it was a youthful rebellion and of no consequence.’

  ‘And you could come home, sit at the breakfast table with me and never say that you have had a man spying on me? I cannot believe it.’

  ‘Don’t be so flamboyant, Jack, gathering information is not spying. And in any case this man shows me personal loyalty, he never entered your name on official reports. So, as far as I am concerned, it is not an official matter. I had hoped that it was a passing fancy, that you liked the idea of free love that these people express.’

  ‘They do no such thing.’ Jack blustered in his fury.

  ‘It is part of their
philosophy of the breaking down of order, but let that go now, it is the question of your idea that you and she should marry that is important. I have said nothing about your action in rejecting the Clermont traditional regiment – I understand that – I even think that I understand your action in refusing rank… I do not understand how you can imagine a woman with her beliefs would take on all this.’ He indicated the acres, the woodlands, the stables and the lovely manor house. ‘She’s a dyed-in-the-wool rebel from a family who have taken pride in their rebellion. If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you the records: riot, imprisonment, transportation, going back generations.’

  The two women were now walking towards them, slowly, obviously at ease, stopping here and there to pick a few spring flowers. Otis’s head was bare and George Moth recalled the fresh smell of her hair when he had sat with her in the park, which led him to recall the feel of her lips and the tip of her tongue touching his.

  ‘I thought I knew you, Father, but I am shattered. As I have been about your attention to Otis.’ He felt bitter and wanted to lash out, to wound his father. ‘Leave Otis alone, you are too old and corrupt for such a sweet girl.’

  His father drew breath to protest but Jack stopped him. ‘You give yourself away every time you look at her. You are pathetic. Isn’t it enough that you have a kept woman? Leave Otis alone.’

  Now it was the father’s turn to look taken aback.

  As the women approached, they both tried to look relaxed and casual.

  Jack said quietly, ‘I shall make some excuse to Ess and go back to London soon after the christening. You may be right, in which case she will want nothing to do with this family, and she cannot be blamed for that. But if she will have me, then we shall be married at once.’

  But he did not know that, under the tranquil atmosphere of Mere Meldrum, she had seen that her long-ago decision not to marry was not to be altered by a physical attraction for a man who struck a chord in her.

  * * *

  When Jack and Victoria parted, he looked less devastated than his protestations of passion might suggest. It was obvious to her that something had happened between himself and his father; she did not broach the reason. Also he was preoccupied with going to the training-camp.

  When they parted, she kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Thank you for taking me to Mere, it is beautiful. It has done me good to be away for a short while. I’ve been able to take an eagle-eye view of what is going on. There are things that I have to do. Perhaps it would be kind to say that I wish that things were different. But I can’t, Jack. Marriage isn’t for me.’

  He held on to her hand, looking puzzled, as though wondering what on earth had been happening.

  Her inclination was to hasten away, but that appeared too careless of his feelings. She said, ‘Even if we had tried, it would have lasted only as long as we found excitement in one another’s bodies.’

  Once he had gone, she swung up the stairs to her lodgings with Annie.

  ‘Well! You look like that cat that got the cream. Don’t tell me you succumbed to the man who’s gone for a soldier?’

  ‘No, Annie dear, but I’ve found us a splendid woman for the bookshop.’

  —

  STONEHENGE, WILTSHIRE

  A weird place, Ess, qt like the pic on reverse, but less colourful. A gt sense of the insignificance of it/us all. It may be some time before I am in postn able to write. With affection.

  Jack

  There was no telling where they were now. Rumour on the lower ranks had it that this was France, which, as far as they were concerned, was as good a general name as any to give territory which lay across the English Channel.

  From Hampstead to training-camp on Salisbury Plain, from training-camp to a billet in a coal-mining village, from the village to the Front Line.

  Until they embarked for France, time had been a slippery thing, slithering over anonymous days. But, once in the war zone, it set into spans of days at the Front and days behind the Lines.

  Before that? For Jack, days of drill. Of inflamed muscles, blistered toes and heels, calloused soles. Night-times of oblivion. Arousal at first light with the rank odour in his nostrils of himself and other men whose tobacco and armpits were equally rank.

  Drilled, paraded, sweated, hefted.

  Elation, fulfilment, camaraderie and unreasoning dislike.

  Enthusiasm, futility, acceptance.

  Jack rammed a bayonet into the guts of sacks of sawdust and straw; aimed inaccurately at targets and learned to clean his rifle with the same pernickety care with which he tended his boots. He obeyed commands unquestioningly and submerged his ego.

  The loyalty that developed was unique to the rag-tag raw group as it became unified and changed.

  In the course of three weeks the amorphous parcel of ingredients that had made up John Clermont Moth were crushed into the mould of Private Moth which was quite unsuited to his old accent and manner. On the way to becoming Private Moth he learnt to roll a cigarette, to perform hitherto private ablutions without privacy, and to expect food to provide nothing but sustenance and exercise no satisfaction.

  Like his fellow greenhorns, Private Moth learned to submit individuality for the betterment of the group wherein one laggard demeaned the unit and endangered its existence. And, like his fellows, he made friendships of a kind that might, in their previous existence, have taken years to become forged and enduring.

  Over cobbled roads, the unit marched into a coal-mining village.

  ‘Have you ever known the like of it? Take a man away from his own valleys, and put ’im down in another’ undreds of miles away.’

  ‘Et’s what et’s all abowt, boye.’

  Taff from the Rhonda and Farmer Giles from Norfolk. They had civilian names, and they had army numbers, but whilst they wore khaki they were, to their close companions, known only by the names that welded them to one another – Taff, Farmer Giles, Chalky, Ginge, Cully and Lofty. Except only briefly and on rare occasions, they kept them uninvolved with one another’s domestic existence.

  The shallow sentiment of a myth that called itself ‘Hearth and Home’ called its sacrificial young men by the name ‘Tommy’, but Tommy knew himself to be ‘Taff’, ‘Farmer Giles’ and ‘Lofty’. Jack’s family had never much used ‘pet’ names or names of endearment, but, having been given the name ‘Lofty’, he felt himself to be a more loyal member of their particular circle than he had ever felt as a member of his college teams and clubs.

  As a youth, Jack had been on the Continent several times. He spoke French fluently and so, as well as being a wonder to his friends, he was useful during the long cross-country march. When it came to the price of a round of drinks in a town or a dozen eggs from a farmer, Lofty was their negotiator.

  Two days before they marched to their encampment on the boundaries of the coal-mining village, they heard their first guns, a rumble that gave no greater surge of adrenalin than if it had been the sound of thunder which it resembled. A cheer went up and somebody played ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ on a mouth-organ for the singing of a blasphemous version of the hymn.

  It was probably the last cheer that this raw platoon was likely to give, for they were soon to be in terrain where orders were not heard clearly as on a parade-ground, neither would they carry as in clear Wiltshire air, but would be half-heard through machine-gun rattle and cut short by shrapnel.

  Food-scraps not scavenged by dogs but by rats.

  Blankets not shared by a few nibbling mice, but by lice that even with familiarity never ceased to cause disgust.

  The plunge of a bayonet would not be into homely-smelling sawdust, nor its withdrawal accompanied by a hiss as it passed through straw. Here, beyond the mean houses, pit-tips and railway lines, would be snapping bones, stink, and slurping human viscera.

  Here was the place to which Hearth and Home closed its mind.

  Here was where few of those who got away would ever find the courage to speak of, but would never be rid of.


  Here was where ‘Tommy’ ceased to exist.

  ‘Men’, ‘Lower ranks’, ‘Casualties’, ‘Dead’.

  But, thankfully billeted, Jack, like his companions Taff and Farmer Giles and the rest of their platoon, did not let his thoughts run further ahead than something hot inside him and his head down for a few hours’ rest.

  * * *

  Wally Archer, as a single man of the right age, was one of the first to be called after Conscription was introduced.

  He waited until he and Nancy had clocked off their late shift and were walking through the chill, January streets of Bethnal Green to tell her that he had received his papers. They were late because of the fog, a sodden, yellow cheesecloth that hung like curtains before their faces. The damp coalesced into drops on their uniforms and Nancy’s hair, the chemicals from the gasworks and factory chimneys choked them, and the coal-smoke from domestic fires stung their eyes and throats.

  ‘Gawd, Nance, nobody don’t need to go to France tonight to get gassed, you can stop home and cop it.’

  Because the sounds were deadened or distorted, cabs and other vehicles loomed suddenly upon them. Passers-by tumbled along, guided as well as they could manage it by railings and walls.

  Wally’s arm held Nancy Dickenson firmly as they made their way in the direction of Nancy’s lodgings. ‘I shan’t go.’

  ‘We could get married, Wally. It’s only single men they’re conscripting, isn’t it?’

  ‘If we get married, Nance, we’ll do it because we want to. It’d be like a shotgun wedding. I shall go before the Tribunal.’

  ‘I heard that they’re making objectors go to France and collect bodies.’

  ‘They’ll have to carry me then, I don’t want nothing to do with their bleedin’ war, what’s war got to do with people like us? Nothing! Our class hasn’t never got nothing out of war except pain and death. Let them that wants a war fight it. Let some of them what’s making millions out of munitions get out there with one of their own guns. Fat chance of that!’