Daughter of the House

by Rosie Thomas

  Once they discovered that they had both been present, Jinny and Nancy sometimes laughed about the evening. Nowadays Nancy considered Spiritualism to be an eccentric but benign cul-de-sac, although the spirits themselves were a different matter.

  Nancy met Jinny Main in a café after a rally in Parliament Square. She was fifteen, and Jinny was two years older. She was struck at once by her grace. Jinny listened to what other people had to say even when it was nonsense, and she never said a bad word about anyone. She was motherless and her father was a drinker, but she never complained about her difficult life.

  ‘I’m lucky compared with some,’ she said, with her enclosed smile. She wasn’t otherwise vain about her appearance but she did mind about the protruding teeth that overcrowded her square jaw.

  Jinny was employed as a printer’s devil. She was boyish enough to be inconspicuous in a male environment, and she worked as hard as any of the men. One evening before the next meeting her new friend took Nancy to Lennox & Ringland to show her round the printworks floor. Jinny was setting up the type for a new WSPU leaflet and Nancy watched in fascination as she demonstrated how to hand set.

  ‘You need good eyesight and quick fingers. This is eight-point type,’ she said.

  Each tiny letter had to be read backwards, picked and dropped into a metal slug, spaced to form complete lines that also had to be read backwards.

  ‘Have a go,’ she invited.

  Nancy fumbled her way through five words. Jinny grinned and took a pull of her efforts, then held up the result.

  ‘Omadood barm besarves amather. Really?’

  They laughed until they had to prop themselves up against the bench.

  Nancy’s version of ‘one good turn deserves another’ became their comfort phrase.

  ‘Omadood barm,’ Jinny would call to her as the insults and catcalls flew over their heads from the anti-suffragist masses.

  Nancy left school in 1913, just before her sixteenth birthday. A dismal interval followed in which she was supposed to be learning French and, if she was to be anything like the girls she had been at school with, beginning to cast around for a husband. Neither of these activities appealed to her and she begged her father to let her do something useful at the Palmyra instead. Devil insisted there was nothing suitable. Nancy understood that his expectations were different when it came to Cornelius and Arthur. When they were much younger Devil had always been murmuring about ‘Wix and Sons’, and as the daughter she was being advised to train as a bilingual secretary to some businessman.

  ‘Commerce is where the future lies. It is a much better world for you than the theatre. You will have the security of a career,’ Eliza said. Infuriatingly, since Nancy knew that her mother had not placed great emphasis on suitability or security in her own younger days.

  ‘I am never going to be bilingual’.

  ‘Apply yourself, Nancy. Mamselle Schenck says that you have a good brain.’

  Lucie Schenck was a middle-aged French lady who was supposed to be teaching her the language.

  Then seemingly without warning, like a thunderclap out of a summer sky, the war came.

  It did not end before Christmas, even though most people had been certain that it would, and Mlle Schenck hurried back to her family in a village only ten miles from Neuve Chapelle. At the same time Jinny Main told Nancy that so many of the skilled men were leaving their benches at Lennox & Ringland to join up that no one remained to print the pamphlets and journals. Dust was gathering on the typesetting machines. Within a week she had applied for a job alongside Jinny, and was employed at once as the print floor dogsbody. Jinny herself had been promoted to Linotype operator.

  At the end of 1914 Jinny volunteered to be a nurse with the London Ambulance Column. From the front, the wounded men were evacuated by train to the French coast and from there brought across the Channel to be loaded on to another train. Finally the LAC met them in London and drove them onwards to their final hospital destination. At the railway stations the ambulances were sometimes overwhelmed by crowds of well-wishers who had come to cheer the men home.

  The LAC organisers were used to dealing with a different class of girl, and they advised Jinny that she did not have the required nursing qualifications. But she stood her ground in the matron’s office and insisted they at least recruit her as a driver. She was a country girl who knew how to operate farm machinery so they agreed in the end to let her try the work. Her supervisor later told her she hadn’t been expected to last a week, but Jinny settled into it and spent many of her nights threading her stretcher cases through the dark streets. Nancy would cover for her on the days when she crawled away to sleep in a cupboard, unable to stay awake any longer.

  On the busiest ‘push’ nights when the trains pulled in with a seemingly unending stream of smashed bones and bloodied dressings, Nancy helped out at the Column HQ in Regent’s Park. She begged but Eliza had refused to let her train for proper nursing, so her work was little more than folding blankets and smoothing laundered slips on to stretcher pillows, or even making cocoa for the dispatch riders. But it was something.

  Those nights deepened her friendship with Jinny. Day after day, in an attempt to bridge the chasm between the demands of the night and the ordinary working world, the two girls talked and shared their secrets.

  Early one morning, as they sat in the fresh air under an unfurling chestnut tree in Regent’s Park to recover from an unusually bad night, Jinny told Nancy about the grey coaches.

  Tacked on to the end of some of the hospital trains from France were locked carriages with blanked-out windows. The doors were never unlocked while the regular wounded were being unloaded, but plain grey vans discreetly waited until the rest of the train was empty. The ordinary ambulance drivers did not ask questions and no one speculated about the men who must be inside the coaches. There was no cheering for them.

  Nancy listened to this account in silence.

  This time in the Uncanny she did not see anything clearly and that was a mercy, but she could hear all too well. There was darkness barred with slats of light, a terrible weeping, and a husky voice that tonelessly whispered, ‘All gone,’ over and over. And there was a low growling, sounding less like a man than an animal, a wounded bear or some other creature she did not even know.

  Jinny saw her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she cried. ‘It’s your other sight, isn’t it? I didn’t mean to wake it up, Nance.’

  Nancy had never told another soul, but she had described to Jinny how as a girl she had glimpsed the war long before it had begun.

  She breathed deeply. ‘It’s all right. We’re both all right, aren’t we? It’s the soldiers. They’re dying, not us.’

  Worse than dying, some of them, she now understood.

  Cornelius was out there, and her cousins Rowland and Edwin. Arthur was still too young to enlist but he was already at Sandhurst on an accelerated officer-training programme. Even Arthur would soon be going to France.

  Jinny clasped her hand until the voices faded. Sunshine sparkled on the grass as they walked to a café to buy a bun for breakfast before catching the bus to Lennox & Ringland.

  It was at the beginning of 1915 that Cornelius had suddenly decided he must join up in the ranks.

  Devil was too old to fight in France, but he believed in doing his duty. He devised a series of shows for the Palmyra that featured comedy routines, patriotic songs and choruses, and uplifting speeches from popular public figures. They were called ‘Union Jack Nights’, and seats were given away to men in uniform. On one of these nights, Cornelius was sitting in a front fauteuil. Devil had asked him to watch the performance and give him some ideas for improving the static sets. A soloist came out to the apron to perform a song about joining up. The chorus went, ‘I do like you, cockie, now you’ve got yer khaki on.’ The women sitting in the seats near Cornelius sang and clapped and the singer marched down from the stage. Passing through the audience she stopped in front of Cornelius and handed him a white feather.<
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  The next morning he went out to the recruitment office. He didn’t tell Devil and Eliza about his intentions, and even Nancy only heard about it afterwards. He was examined by a medical officer and – to his intense humiliation – immediately classified as medically unfit.

  A different man might have accepted this judgement and looked for useful war work at home, but the normal rules could not be made to fit Cornelius. As always, only his personal logic applied. Once he had decided it was what he must do, he could not contemplate not going to France. He loved motor vehicles and driving with a passion that had begun with Devil’s De Dion-Bouton, and he concluded that if he was not to be a soldier he must be an ambulance driver.

  He volunteered, and within days he was on the Western Front.

  The field dressing stations were canvas shelters crammed with wounded and dying men. Cornelius and the other drivers collected the injured from the dressing stations and ferried them behind the lines, through the mud and chaos of the nearby battle, to the clearing hospital. The hopeless cases were set aside, and there were more than enough of those, but men with even the smallest chance of survival were roughly patched up and transferred to slow, crowded casualty trains.

  Thus two people who Nancy dearly loved had formed the first and final links in this long rescue chain, and she was proud of them both.

  At last the war to end all wars came to an end.

  After the armistice Cornelius finally came home. Arthur also survived, although he remained in France with his regiment. Edwin and Rowland Shaw were among the many thousands of men who did not come back. The landscape of the Uncanny was thronged with lost and dead men, but if her cousins and others she had known were amongst them Nancy did not distinguish them. It was like being a mechanical conduit for images that were distressing but not connected to her, and for this she was deeply grateful.

  Recalled to the present by a nudge from Jinny, Nancy collected herself. ‘What were we saying?’

  Jinny said gently, ‘How’s your brother?’

  ‘Not bad, thank you. Some days better than others.’

  Some days for Cornelius were very bad.

  ‘Is there any more tea in that pot?’

  Nancy sloshed thick brown brew into their cups.

  ‘Why don’t you come out with us tonight, Nance? Me and Joycey and some of the others are going to have our tea at Willby’s and then quite likely a half-pint at the Eagle.’

  Nancy liked poached eggs on thick slices of buttered toast, and the pleasant heat in the neighbouring saloon bar afterwards when Jinny’s friends crowded round a beer-ringed table to argue about communism or rights for women. The war had changed the group’s political objectives, as it had changed everything else, because women had the vote now – or some of them did.

  ‘There’s still a lot of work to be done,’ they agreed.

  For the last two years the group had been all female, but just recently one or two soldier boyfriends had reappeared. The men perched suspiciously on the edge of the circle and their presence changed the whole atmosphere.

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t tonight. Ma’s expecting me home.’

  ‘Fair enough. Better get back to it, I suppose.’

  ‘See you tomorrow.’

  Miss Dent was at her typewriter. The keys clacked like hailstones on cobbles and the carriage return pinged every few seconds.

  Mr Lennox strolled out of his office.

  ‘Find me the Platt correspondence file, Miss Wix, please.’

  She knelt at the lowest drawer of a tin filing cabinet and extracted the folder. His shoes looked as though someone polished them every morning and she wondered whose job this might be. Most certainly Mr Lennox did not shine his own shoes. There weren’t many domestic servants these days, but perhaps his wife did it for him.

  It was twenty to six. Miss Dent collected Mr Lennox’s signature on a handful of urgent letters. ‘Shall I take those down to the post?’ Nancy asked.

  Five minutes later she had completed her errand and was free to make her way home. Although it was an easy bus journey to Islington from the printworks in an alley behind Fleet Street, Nancy usually preferred to walk. She told herself she was saving the fare and she needed the exercise, but the truth was that she was in no hurry to get back home.

  Pulling up her coat collar against the rain she headed towards St Paul’s. The pavements were crowded with home-going workers, the street lamps down Ludgate Hill burnishing their wet umbrellas so that they resembled insects’ wings. Nancy had no umbrella. She lifted her face and let the thin, cold drizzle wash away the grime of the day.

  Fleet Street was always busy but tonight the road was at a standstill, choked with idling buses and wagons bearing great webs of paper to the newspaper printworks. She stopped for a moment at the kerb, intending to cross over to buy Cornelius an evening paper from an old news vendor who always gave her a cheerful good evening. But the stationary vehicles offered no room to pass. In the distance she could hear shouting followed by a ragged burst of cheering.

  She became aware of a big cream-coloured car standing motionless just three feet away. A man was leaning forward in the rear seat, and she noticed the chauffeur’s peaked cap as he tilted his head to listen to what his passenger was saying. A deep blast on the car’s horn followed. Hooting was perfectly pointless, she thought impatiently, because anyone could see that the road was blocked all the way to Ludgate Circus. She was about to step off the pavement and somehow worm her way between the vehicles and through the clouds of exhaust fumes, but she hesitated for two seconds for a last look at the elongated curves of the cream bonnet. The raised black eyebrow of the wheel arch was close enough for her to have stroked it with her fingertips. As she hung there, the car door was thrown open and the passenger stepped out. The polished handle just grazed her elbow.

  ‘I am so sorry. I almost knocked you over.’

  The man was tall, wearing a soft hat. He lifted it politely and she saw smooth fair hair and a narrow, chiselled face.

  ‘It’s all right. I was staring at your car instead of crossing the road.’

  ‘Were you? Do you like it?’

  ‘My father would. He loves cars. He used to have a De Dion-Bouton before the war but he had to sell it.’

  ‘Poor chap, that must have been hard for him. They are beautiful machines.’

  ‘He has a Ford now.’

  The man raised a sympathetic eyebrow. ‘Quite serviceable, I should think. This one is a Daimler, the new model.’

  As he spoke, the car gave a shudder and the engine stalled. The man gently shoved the running board with the shiny toe of his shoe. ‘Not as reliable as a De Dion, as you can see. What’s the trouble this time, Higgs?’

  The chauffeur hurried to unclip and fold back the bonnet.

  ‘Spark-ignition again, Mr Maitland, I’d say. Don’t like the rain, it seems.’

  Mr Maitland stared down the street.

  He asked Nancy, ‘Do you know what’s causing the de-lay?’

  The chanting and cheering was louder and she could hear the shrill, familiar blasts of police whistles.

  ‘A march or protest of some sort. Heading for the Embankment, probably. Is there a vote in Parliament to-night?’

  He frowned. ‘Yes. I wonder who it is this time? Jobless ex-servicemen, coal miners? Suffragettes?’

  She disliked this form of the word. ‘I would know if it was suffragists because I would be with them. But women do have the vote now, you know. Some of us do, at any rate.’

  ‘Not you, you are too young.’

  ‘I am twenty-one.’

  He looked at her, and she found herself staring straight back. She had to tilt her head to meet his eyes.

  He added, ‘I’m not unsympathetic to unemployed men, by the way, or to the miners. I shouldn’t have let impatience with the car and the hold-up get the better of me. I apologise again.’

  Nancy marched a few steps on the spot to indicate how free she was, not encumbered eve
n by an umbrella. The felt brim of her hat was beginning to droop with the weight of damp.

  ‘I usually find walking is the best way. It’s fast, free and good for you.’

  ‘Yes, on this occasion you’ll certainly get wherever you are going before me. Are you in a hurry?’

  She hesitated. ‘Not really. I’m on my way home.’

  ‘I was in a hurry. But I’m already late, and I expect I’ll be invited to plenty more dull City dinners.’

  Poor Higgs folded a piece of sacking to protect his trousers and knelt to peer underneath the Daimler. The buses and lorries had not moved which meant the police must have closed the road.

  ‘Would you like to come and have a drink?’

  No, Nancy prepared to say, but another unexpected instinct shouted Yes, oh yes.

  ‘There’s a place just down that alley,’ she pointed.

  ‘Very good.’ Mr Maitland cheerfully told Higgs that they would be waiting inside, out of the rain, and swept Nancy towards an inviting doorway.

  The pub was well known to Nancy and she didn’t think about the row of workmen at the bar, or the cindery fire, or the reek of spilled beer rising from the bare floorboards. But the man took all this in before pulling out a chair for her at the table closest to the hearth. Only when he had made her comfortable did he remove his own coat and white silk scarf. He was wearing immaculate evening dress, quite different from the kind Devil wore on stage. He spoke two words to the usually surly publican who came running with kindling to restore the fire. He called Mr Maitland ‘sir’ without a flicker of insolence.

  Nancy asked for a half of bitter, and two polished glasses were set in front of them without any spillage on the table. This man was used to being served.

  ‘Do you usually drink beer?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes.’ It was hardly worth pointing out that she liked whisky but couldn’t afford it, or gin, or even sherry.

  Although he didn’t smile readily, he had an unusual dimple high on his left cheek that seemed to deepen when he was amused. Nancy took off her sorry hat and her hair came down with it. He looked more closely at her.