Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  Hetty, he would judge, would recoil from Mrs. Pankhurst and her cohorts, seeing them as an admission of failure on the part of women everywhere to bring pressures to bear upon men by methods for which nature had endowed them. Apart from that she had never, in his experience, shown more than a passing interest in politics and would not have bothered to use the vote Mrs. Pankhurst sought to win for her. Politics, in her view, qualified as a male profession, like the Army, the Law, and the Church. It was not a fitting occupation for a woman, even a woman luckless enough to journey through life as a spinster. An identical view, he imagined, would be held by his daughter Stella, over at Dewponds, for Stella Fawcett already enjoyed as much independence as Emmeline Pankhurst demanded. Everyone at Dewponds deferred to "Mother," and he for one had never been fooled by the token deference she paid to that husband of hers, Denzil.

  It would be similar, he imagined, in the case of his daughter Joanna, and his youngest daughter Margaret. Both were essentially feminine, the one relying on her instincts to regulate the balance between herself and that rackety chap she had married, the other endowed with a disposition that would immunise her against the doctrines of women like Emmeline Pankhurst and her valiant daughters. For he thought of them as valiant, remembering the courage and confidence it required to challenge established British practices, particularly those as firmly-based as those at Westminster, so that he saw the campaign as rather pitiful, fearing it could never prevail against such fearful odds. Yet, deep in his heart, he applauded them for their spirit, and even more for their ingenuity. All his life he had hated humbug, especially humbug in high places, and where was humbug more deeply entrenched than among the legislature? Giles, no doubt, would discover this in due course. Until he did, poor wight, let him continue to regard the Mother of Parliaments as the womb of human progress and not a creaking stage, where practised posturing advanced men far more swiftly than originality or virtue. Life had taught Adam Swann many lessons, among them the hopelessness of setting off in search of the Holy Grail ill-equipped and under-capitalised.

  His mind continued its probe of the possibilities of Pankhurst alignment within the family. His daughter-in-law Gisela would be found among the neutrals. She had never sought equality with men, least of all with George, whom she regarded as the new Galileo, but Lydia, Alex's wife, would regard the campaign with contempt, seeing it as the negation of all the disciplines she had seen practised inside the prisoners' base of a barrack square. He was not so sure about his daughter Helen. Years ago, no doubt, she would have taken Joanna's view, but her experiences in China had changed her in a way that might encourage her to admire the courage and tactics of the W.S.P.U. and their leader. A woman who had shot a man at close range, and in cold blood, would be unlikely to regard the soot-spattering of a Cabinet Minister's waistcoat as a cataclysmic event. Word had reached him that Helen was adjusting to the Irish set, and the liveliest activist among the suffragettes would be eclipsed in extravagance by a man like Rory Clarke. As for support on the distaff side of the family, he thought he could count on two: Giles's wife, Romayne, and his adopted daughter, Deborah, now helping her husband, that pleasant chap Jeffs, to run a tinpot newspaper in the west. Both women, he felt, were likely recruits for such a crusade. Romayne because she had always been a rebel of sorts, Deborah because, alone among the Swann womenfolk, she was what he could accept as an educated woman, whose involvement with the underdog went back to the early 'eighties, when she and W. T. Stead and that tub-thumping evangelist Booth had challenged the white slave traffic here and on the Continent. But musing thus, he thought gratefully, Thank God I'm old enough to be objective about issues of this sort, and thankfully turned the page to the Stock Exchange listing.

  4

  He came far closer than he imagined. At the precise moment he was sunning himself on the terrace of his Hermitage, two far-reaching decisions were being made in the family, each involving, more or less directly, Mrs. Pankhurst and her troupe of wildcats. Less than twenty miles away, in a rented flat at the top of Northumberland Avenue within easy walking distance of Giles Swann's new workshop, man and wife were soul-searching on the subject of his maiden speech in the House. Meantime, some two hundred miles to the west, in the sleepy seaside town where Milton and Deborah Jeffs had lived since quitting the London scene, mail from London was pointing them towards changes that had been in their minds for some time now, ever since they had received a tempting offer for their weekly newspaper from the Harmsworth group, who led the newspaper field in the peninsula and were engaged in adding local weeklies to their empire.

  They had been very happy down here, all but out of range of national controversy and engrossed in purely parochial affairs, where they felt their influence was often sufficiently powerful to decide an issue. Both, in their younger days, had worked in Fleet Street, Milton as a feature writer on a range of radical journals, and Deborah as one of the first woman journalists in the Street, serving under W. T. Stead. With the prospect of marriage, a vague dissatisfaction had settled on them, reaction in some degree to all the misery and strife they had chronicled, and when Milton proposed to realise every Fleet Street man's secret dream—that of owning and editing his own broadsheet—Deborah had encouraged him to take the plunge.

  Since then they had vegetated, or so they thought of it, moving molehills in preference to mountains, with no thought of returning to the London scene until events conspired to make them take a closer look at the probable course of the years left to them. Former friends of Deborah, drawn into the Pankhurst maelstrom, wrote regularly of the mounting fury of the suffragist campaign, and one of Lester Harmsworth's scouts offered them a handsome profit for the newspaper, enough to enable Jeffs to buy a footing in a much more important journal serving a wider area of population. The coincidence caused the hidden wishes of both of them to surface simultaneously. Milton had said, "It's at least double what I would have asked if I had ever put it on the market. Money is no object to the Harmsworths when they want a thing, and a man ought to think twice about refusing a profit of this kind if it falls into his lap. We built this paper up from scratch, remember? It was no more than a local newsheet when we moved in, and if we could do it once we could do it again, before we're too old and too lazy to try." But then he had paused, regarding her thoughtfully, "Only one thing stops me wiring acceptance, Debbie."

  "What's that, Milton?"

  "You. You and young Deany. We've had a good life down here. And a useful one, too, in a modest way. Maybe I oughtn't to quarrel with the kind of luck I've enjoyed ever since I ran into you."

  They were well accustomed to talking things over and pooling points of view. There was no paternalism here, for Jeffs's respect for his wife's intelligence dated from the moment he read her articles in the Pall Mall Gazette on the sale of fourteen-year-old children to rich old roues. He added, "You've been thinking of a change yourself, haven't you? Ever since the W.S.P.U. began to steal the headlines?"

  He was right. She was fifty now, a time for reappraisal, and while she, like him, had found fulfilment in publishing their own journal, she had a sense of the years slipping by at an alarming pace since her son had passed from cot and toddling stage to boyhood. They still called him Deany, a diminutive of Houdini, the nickname he had acquired as a particularly active baby who had to be watched throughout his waking hours, for he seemed to be born with a working knowledge of escapology. He was away at school now, her half-brothers' old school on Exmoor, and a change of venue would not affect him much. The flow of letters she had received from former colleagues, inside and outside the Women's Social and Political Union, had stirred her deeply, as had press accounts of the rough-handling the campaigners had received at political meetings. She said, "How long do you suppose Asquith and those other politicians will hold out against the franchise of women, Milton?"

  "Indefinitely," he assured her. "Make no mistake about that." And then, shrewdly, "You'd like to play a part in it, wouldn't you? Well, come to that, so would
I. They get practically no press support, and I see what's happening to them lately as a national disgrace. It's the domestic equivalent to the hammering we gave those poor devils in South Africa. That's what's disturbing about this country. The average Briton, from Prime Minister down to the layabout in the street, honestly thinks of himself as a standard bearer of human rights. But national arrogance, a century of commercial success, suzerainty over a quarter of the world's surface, and a navy capable of blowing any rival out of the water, seem to have blinded a majority to aspects of human dignity. Did you know even Hungary has universal franchise?"

  "No, I didn't."

  "Then say what you have in mind. Irrespective of this Harmsworth offer."

  "It's my age partly. With luck I've got around twenty years left to play a part in affairs, to use what talent and experience I've got to alter things, to try and change them for the better. It can't be right to spend them writing about the Withy Brook overflow, and the decaying fabric of our infants' schools in this backwater. Sometimes… sometimes I feel an itch to head back to London, to find out things for myself and write about them… where are you off?"

  He paused by the door, smiling at her over his shoulder. "To wire Harmsworth," he said. "And just for the record, I've had the same itch for a year or more and lately I've been scratching it raw."

  5

  The problem, similar in so many ways, yet with undertones more far-reaching concerning each of them, was not so easily resolved by Giles, mulling over his notes in the first-floor flat they had leased from a departing Tory member for a Welsh constituency.

  It was conveniently central and they had been lucky to get it, but already both of them were missing the soft, southwest wind over the Rhondda uplands, and the singsong lilt of their constituents. In London, Giles felt, a man could lose his identity if he wasn't careful, and his initial reactions to the fulfilment of a dream that had preoccupied him since his early twenties had been oddly deflating once L.G., and another Welsh Liberal, had introduced him to the House of Commons at that first jubilant assembly, following the February landslide.

  He had always thought of it as a very solemn place governed, of course, by tradition, but generating a kind of magisterial impulse that conditioned the mood of the entire country outside. Everything that happened to ordinary people began right here beside the Thames, and one was almost tempted to speak in whispers once the portals had been crossed, and one found oneself rubbing shoulders with men whose names had been familiar to him since boyhood. But the sense of majesty was soon dissipated, perhaps by L.G.'s gentle raillery, and he recalled now that David Lloyd George never had been the least impressed with the place. He had called it crabbed when they met here one afternoon as long ago as spring 1879, Giles an awed thirteen-year-old, tagging on to a bunch of sightseers, Lloyd George, seventeen and clad in rough country clothes, making his first-ever visit to a building that would dominate his life and destiny.

  "It's more of a club, Johnny Peep," he said, "and no club is worthy of Stardust. Think of it as a workshop if you can, where policies are hammered out, as upon a bench. Fashioned, refashioned, recast, and more often than not rejected after infinite palaver among the journeymen. We get things done, of course, but never in the way we hoped or imagined. We have to compromise one with the other in order to make progress, and that's in the nature of things, there being more than six hundred of us all trying to catch the spotlight."

  "I've never known you to compromise over anything you regarded as important, L.G.," but Lloyd George had replied, "Well, never in front of an audience, lad. But here? You'd be surprised, shocked even, until you come to understand how essential it is."

  There was one issue, Giles had noticed, concerning which most of his closest associates were prepared to compromise upon, and that in the company of men whose policies they had attacked for years while in opposition. No one, excluding that saintly old Scotsman Keir Hardie, seemed disposed to make a party issue out of women's franchise, and it distressed him that this should be so, for he had long since been convinced that it was a vital plank in the efforts of the Liberals to broaden the stage of democracy.

  Down in the valleys, Romayne had already played a part in forming a local branch of the W.S.P.U., and he had encouraged her even though the response among the miners' wives had been apathetic. It seemed quite monstrous to him that women as intelligent and socially aware as she or Debbie were denied a voice in the nation's destiny, and his misgivings were not dispelled by L.G.'s bland assurances on the subject.

  "It's all a question of priorities, Johnny Peep," he reasoned. "It will come, you can depend on that, but in its own good time, when we've dynamited our way through centuries of rubble half-burying the body politic. There are so many issues that I see as vastly more urgent. National insurance, pensions for the old and disabled, reform of the House of Lords, higher education and opportunities for the poor, public ownership of certain national products, a basic minimum wage, the relegation of the very idea of tariffs on to the bonfire, and don't deceive yourself that Free Trade won't be in danger from time to time. Home Rule for Ireland, to shed that pack-load of trouble, all manner of things, many of them linked to the future of your miners and their families. We simply haven't the Parliamentary time and that's a fact, and the tactics of Emmeline Pankhurst aren't doing much to persuade the electorate that women can be trusted with the vote."

  "But what else can they do?" Giles had argued. "They've tried lobbying and talking for a generation without gaining an inch. At least they've brought the matter into the open."

  "Kaiser Wilhelm is a star turn at doing that, but it doesn't make him more credible in the Chancellories of Europe."

  He had gone away less than half satisfied to discuss it all again with Romayne, and discovered, as he had expected, that L.G.'s arguments made no impression upon her. Sometimes it struck him that she did not trust the man and this pained him a little, for he still regarded L.G. as the greatest campaigner for reform in the land. She said, "It isn't important what L.G. thinks, Giles. You're a Member of Parliament now. What do you think? Honestly and deeply, down in your heart?"

  "You know what I think. That all women over thirty ought to have the vote now. And that a Commission should be set up to consider extending it to women over twenty-one. You couldn't get the public to swallow a mouthful that big in one gulp, but it could be done in two."

  "Would you be prepared to say that in public?"

  "Of course I would. I only played it down at the election because L.G. warned me it wasn't wise to raise it until Liberal policy had been decided on the issue."

  "And now?"

  "There's absolutely no hope that the W.S.P.U. will win enough support in the House to get a bill through the Commons. As for the Lords, why they'd throw it out in ten seconds."

  "Then if you believe in it, sincerely and utterly, why not introduce it into your maiden speech?"

  He did not answer at once. The possibility had occurred to him but he had shelved it, half agreeing with L.G. that there were so many more important priorities. He said, finally, "I've roughed out my speech. It's devoted almost entirely to the miners' minimum wage. After all, the miners put me here and I owe them the honour of the first salvo."

  "Their wives helped, and I'm not talking about work in committee rooms and so forth. I mean by keeping their homes and families together, year after year, often under impossible conditions. You owe them a salvo, Giles. Wouldn't it be possible to slip in some reference to a wife's right to have a say in the family's future?"

  He looked down at his notes again. "I don't know. I should have to think about it very carefully."

  She did not press him further, knowing he was already under some strain concerning the prospect of the speech. His platform confidence, she noticed, varied from shuffling nervousness to a buoyancy where he could dispense with notes altogether and hold an audience for an hour or more. It depended entirely on atmosphere. If he could sense sympathy in the upturned faces, he coul
d race away in galloping style, garnishing a theme with all kinds of anecdotes, some from the mountain of books he had scaled, others from personal experiences. But there were times, as now, when the prospect of hostility or indifference could make him sound humdrum or even dull. All the best of his speeches were made in the valleys, where the great majority of his listeners were men whose cause he had espoused as a youth during his first visit to Wales, so that sometimes she thought his father was right when he told her, "Old Giles ought to have settled for the Church. They need people like him, with his kind of innocence and integrity. Politicians can do without it, for politics is a dirty business most of the time. A politician who won't hit below the belt is at a disadvantage."

  He came to her briefly the day he was to make his parliamentary debut and said, "Well, I took your advice. I slipped in an oblique reference to the W.S.P.U. campaign."

  "Just how oblique, Giles?" she asked.

  "I'll read it to you tonight, when it's all behind me. I'd prefer it that way if it's all the same to you. I'm going over there early. I want a word with L.G. before the debate. He's promised me ten minutes before lunch."

  "Good luck, Giles," she said, kissing him, glad now that they had agreed she should not avail herself of an opportunity to hear him from the Ladies' Gallery. She thought, He'll be more relaxed when he gets back late tonight, and I can convince him he wasn't half as bad as he imagined.