An occasional cough from Reith restored order for a few weeks, until the determination of the “real” writers took sway again. The magazine was expanding, adding longer articles as accompaniment to the listening fare, and profiles of broadcasters. These were supposedly democratic, but the stage and film performers always held prominence, especially the prettiest women with the sultriest photos. Broadcasters like Vernon Bartlett shrugged this off—“I’d rather ogle Betty Balfour than my poor mug any day”—but Hilda was outraged. Maisie, convinced this was a lost cause, threw her passion into a defense of the prepared listings.
“It’s dashed ugly for a girl to lecture a fellow, you know,” Bert lectured her. “In medieval times, you’d be put in the stocks,” he added, delighted with his wisdom.
“I don’t mean to be impolite. It’s only that we need you to print the listings as we write them,” Maisie told him. “We shouldn’t have to keep asking.”
Or indeed, ask at all, but Bert required temperance. He was a young man trying to be old, thinking his journalist’s requisition bow tie, tortoiseshell glasses, and pencil in permanent residence behind his right ear gave him gravitas.
“I keep telling you, we know what we’re about; the magazine sells well and it’s helping pull in more listeners. And we print those letters, too,” he added with a gusty sigh. He’d have preferred real writing there, but letters from listeners were more of Reith’s darlings, their effusion from the masses proof of his greatness. At Hilda’s insistence, the Radio Times also printed some criticism. (“So long as they aren’t the ones that sound like they came from Broadmoor, and via Mars at that,” Hilda directed. “But thoughtful criticism is good for balance and makes everything more interesting.”)
“Who’s making the work that pays you, anyway?” Maisie argued.
“Awfully shrewish, aren’t you? They always said you were a silent one.”
I bet he wears glasses to keep people from seizing that pencil and cramming it into his eye.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we do need these listings to be accurate, you see?”
He took the pages in false surrender and stalked away, a string of grumbles in his wake. Maisie lingered, eyes wandering over the layouts and the pile of magazines, fresh from the printers. A photograph of a large wireless was on front.
“Could I have the loan of some back issues?” she asked.
“What?” He hadn’t realized she was still there. “What do you want them for?”
“Just to read. May I? Three months’ worth? Oh, and the new one, please?”
He scrunched up his mouth. Eventually, the desire to thwart her was overcome by the reasonableness of her request.
“Well, all right, but don’t get the idea I’m a lending library,” he warned. He made a great show of finding a box and going to the storage shelves to fetch the magazines. “You’ll be sure to keep them clean, of course?”
“I shall handle them with gloves,” Maisie promised, lying with solemn ease.
“Now, if there’s one thing Lady Astor cannot abide, it’s being treated as though with kid gloves,” Hilda warned the Talks Department. “The attention she demands for her status is as an MP, not as a viscountess. So long as anyone who encounters her employs the same general respect, politeness, gratitude, but firmness we have with all the broadcasters, you can’t go wrong.”
Meaning, “Don’t bow thricely and no pulling of forelocks.” Or, in the case of staunch republican Fielden, don’t call her “Mrs. Astor.” Maisie was excited. She wanted to bask in the great lady’s presence again. Lady Astor was the sort of woman people stepped aside for, and Maisie wanted to study her mien. It couldn’t all be position, could it? There must be something to learn.
Lady Astor swept in and greeted Maisie as a friend, or at least a favored courtier. She insisted on Maisie’s remaining for the broadcast, which meant getting to see the engineers regard her with respect, but also appreciation. At nearly fifty, Lady Astor still radiated the mesmerizing beauty that had captured fascination, as well as a viscount, in her youth. Maisie could see the shadows of the piled-up curls, Gibson Girl silhouette, sweep and flow of long silk skirts. But what she couldn’t have had then was the laserlike glitter in her eyes that could likely cut through someone more readily than any sword. That came with age.
On seeing Maisie, Billy attempted to melt into the machinery. Maisie, both because she was interested and it was fun to unnerve him, watched his work. Wouldn’t that be something, knowing how to make our broadcasts go? Women weren’t engineers, certainly not under Eckersley’s fiefdom, but still . . . it would be something.
Lady Astor’s broadcast was about Florence Nightingale, by way of introducing their new series on nursing. Maisie’s idea, changed considerably, but from her kernel. As she listened to Lady Astor’s lilting patrician voice—“Women have always nursed, but when Florence Nightingale set down the lamp and opened a school, she turned an expected avocation into a proper profession that has arguably done as much to save lives as penicillin”—Maisie crammed her fist in her mouth to avoid squealing. Did Hilda feel like this every day, or did the thrill wear off?
Can’t imagine which scenario is more painful.
“That was rather fun,” Lady Astor proclaimed when the broadcast was finished. “Good lark, broadcastin’. I hope it lasts. Do give me a tour of the place, will you? I want to see more of our government’s investment.”
“Most certainly,” said Hilda, “but—” She had twenty phone calls to make, plus the usual crisis management.
“Miss Musgrave can do very well,” Lady Astor said. “You’re far too busy; you always were. I’d say you’ll work yourself sick, but you’re healthier than all the colts at Goodwood.”
Hilda’s chuckle echoed as Maisie commenced the tour. Lady Astor might have been Queen Mary (or indeed, the Queen Mary) as she sailed through Savoy Hill. In the Engineering Department, Eckersley was reclined in his chair, reading Electronics Today. In Schools, Siepmann had his back to them, gazing out the window, hands folded behind him. Cyril and one of the assistants were playing darts and joking about their school days. Mary Somerville and the secretary were deeply immersed in revisions on a broadcast.
“I hear typin’; must be the girls,” Lady Astor observed, and indeed the typing pool was, as usual, competing with a herd of stampeding rhinos for terror-inducing volume. But nothing was as deafening as Sound Effects. Lady Astor swung open the door to nod at the sight of the men engaged in a blazing row over a pile of coiled springs.
“Well, what do you think of our operation?” Hilda asked when Maisie delivered Lady Astor back to her.
“Very impressive. I congratulate myself on talkin’ you into joinin’. And you must feel right at home—it’s exactly like the House of Commons! All the men are loafin’ about, and the women are the ones doing all the actual work.”
Hilda’s lips twitched.
“The House managed to get plenty done well before women were allowed in,” she felt obliged to point out.
“Oh, certainly, certainly. But they’re the ones with their feet up, loungin’. It’s the women with their feet on the ground; that’s all I’ve noticed.”
Once Lady Astor was gone, Maisie observed to Hilda, “She’s not entirely wrong about us, is she?”
“Thank heavens for that,” said Hilda. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one to tell her if she were. Would you?”
“Reading again? You girls work too hard,” Mr. Holmby, proprietor of the Savoy Tup, chided Maisie as he set down her stew. She was very fond of the Tup, whose hot lunches had earned her loyalty from her third week at the BBC, and enjoyed Mr. Holmby’s appreciation of her rounding face, to which he attributed his wife’s cooking and his own liberal hand with the accompanying bread and butter.
Maisie preferred to lunch with Phyllida, but the vagaries of a day in Talks meant she often had to lunch alone
. She didn’t mind. The Tup’s patrons offered excellent eavesdropping opportunities, and she’d always enjoyed listening to people—it was almost like being in a conversation herself.
“I hear they caught some Bolshie spy in Walthamstow.”
“Ah, go on. If any spy thinks that’s a worthwhile place to do his work, he’s not any good, is he?”
“Point is, bastards are everywhere, aren’t they? And what are we doing about it?”
“A few rotten Russians can’t overthrow Britain, though wouldn’t I pay money to see them try? Those layabouts couldn’t even make it to the Channel.”
“Chuh, don’t you read? It’s about ideas now, not armies. Get inside the minds, is what it is. And they’re working on it. That’s what those trade unions are all about, softening people to Bolshevism.”
Another group was fretting over the softening of the British mind and body, the “advanced and irregular” ideas of “all these artists and writers and unionists” who apparently lived in some namby-pamby world (Maisie didn’t see how that was possible for someone in a trade) and didn’t know what proper values were.
Then the inevitable: “I told her that if she dared cut her hair and wear a skirt too short, she’d get a good whipping, so that should hold her.”
Most likely talking about a daughter. Though possibly a wife.
Maisie turned over the page in her pad and wrote: “Advanced Ideas”—perhaps a week of Talks about how new ideas were shaping society? Then she opened the latest Radio Times and turned to a story about performing for radio: “Miss Adelaide Whithouse is a comely performer of the stage, but her terror of the alien microphone in the BBC’s Studio Two was evident as she prepared to broadcast an original comedy. Miss Whithouse had to be asked more than once not to twitch her papers, lest she disrupt the broadcast, and this only served to make her more . . .”
Oh, for goodness’ sake, that’s not how Beanie tells it. What rot. Honestly, I could write better stories than these.
Her spoon hovered inches from her open mouth.
Maybe I should try.
“Really, Maisie, do be careful,” Lola scolded. “If you keep writing this much, your fingers will end up with permanent graphite stains.”
Lola’s penchant for hyperbole didn’t seem misplaced. Maisie had worn down a whole pencil in a week. There was a Talk coming up on the rise of women as hairdressers, and she wanted to write a companion piece on the glory of short hair. Not the most exciting subject, but it seemed like an easy start. Or so she’d thought.
“At least it’s just pencil,” she said. Pens were an extravagance, and anyway, she was doing far too much erasing. Also doodling. She was good at drawing mice.
She was also very good at ideas, at notes, at beginnings. At writing sentences and rubbing them right out again, creating palimpsests before wearing holes straight through the paper. Her fingers hurt, her hand hurt, her arm hurt. And she loved every bit of the pain, with the love of a mother for her teething infant, screaming all through the night. Because increasingly, more and more sentences were being written, and staying put. She just wished her brain would remain focused on one thought at a time. She wrote, “The notion that women are given to excessive adornments and frivolity is generally just that, a notion. Most women prefer to be simple and practical, which doesn’t have to mean Spartan,” and start thinking about Sparta. From Sparta to war, from war to Hilda’s notes on broadcasting, saying things like: “The general level of knowledge of the ordinary man concerning other countries, their politics, their people, their way of life, their interests, sports, recreations, would be enough to make them seem not vastly different in certain respects from his own. It would probably be less possible today to find a soldier’s wife who thought the Germans were black than it was in 1914.”
And then Germany and that propaganda Hilda pored over so carefully.
When Vernon Bartlett came in to broadcast—he had a regular series now, The Way of the World, widely touted as a “must-listen,” a sobriquet he found both delightful and perplexing—Maisie asked him about Nestlé. He was in the League of Nations, after all, and they were based in Switzerland.
“Nestlé?” Mr. Bartlett echoed. “Big, obviously. I’ve never been. They’re on the other side of Lake Geneva, you know. I will say I stock up on Cadbury chocolate when I’m here. But don’t you let on, now.” He wagged a finger and winked. It was hard not to feel like a ten-year-old with him, especially when asking questions.
“Would Nestlé have anything to do with Germany, do you think?”
“I’m sure they sell their foods wherever anyone’s willing to pay for them,” he said in surprise, not expecting basic capitalism to be beyond her grasp.
“No, that’s not what I meant. You see, Miss Matheson had a pamphlet, from a German political party—”
“Oh, that. Yes, she wanted me to sound out the German League ambassador about those Nazi chaps ages ago. Mussolini-style Fascists, I told her, the usual lunatic fringe. We can’t get hetted up about every crank with access to a typewriter and a mimeograph machine. We’d never get anything done.”
“But some of those men, a lot of them, they were the ones who tried to commit that coup, in 1923,” Maisie persisted. Thank you, British Library.
“There are always going to be crackpot parties, even here,” Bartlett snorted. “Especially here, to be frank. But that’s what democracy’s all about, and rule of law sorts them out as well. The little Hitler fellow and his friends went to prison, and Germany’s in the League, so no need to start picking away at them.”
He absently reached for his cigarettes and Maisie snatched them from his hand, just saving him from Billy’s flying tackle. Smoking was death to a clean studio.
On the tram ride home, Maisie wrote Bartlett’s comments on one page of her notebook. Then she doodled a chocolate bar. On the facing page she wrote: “There’s no point in getting aerated over short hair anymore. Women love its style and practicality and the look is here to stay.” She stared at the words for several moments. Then she looked back at all the paragraphs that preceded them. Then she shrieked, “That’s it!” creating airspace between several passengers and their upholstered seats.
“So long as you’re sure, dear,” her solicitous neighbor murmured, patting her hand.
Now I just have to submit it.
NINE
Bert rolled his eyes up to her from the carefully typed pages.
“Bit of a screed, isn’t it?”
“I hope not,” Maisie demurred, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “It’s just a supplement for our Talk this week. I thought, perhaps, at least for the women’s stories, something written by a woman would be . . . useful.”
“No, we can’t have girls writing articles. That would be—”
“There aren’t any bylines!” Maisie burst out.
“What does that have to do with it?” Bert asked, blinking in surprise.
“Well, only that, if it’s good enough, no one should care who wrote it.”
Bert gaped at her, whether overcome by her logic or struck dumb by her ignorance, she didn’t dare guess.
“I only thought you might consider it,” she amended, softening her tone. “Of course I didn’t expect you’d necessarily take my first submission.”
“I am awash in relief,” Bert drawled. “Now, then, I suppose if you were capable of writing to our standards, a small interview, something nice and light, with one of the lady broadcasters, might be something I could consider. One of the prettier actresses, so we can do more photos. Oh, and mind the suffragette-y tone. Readers don’t like it.”
“But there are some women voting now. Why—”
“This is why I don’t allow girl writers. Never take direction, always these questions, awfully tiresome. Are these the listings?” he asked, pointing to the sheets in her hand, his finger under the heading “
LISTINGS.”
“They are indeed, Bert,” she told him. “And thank you,” she added, because it was expected. In fact, she wanted to cry, but though they were tears of anger, not misery, he wouldn’t know the difference and he was another man who wasn’t getting her tears.
I’ll just have to try again.
Her words, that was what she wanted. An interview didn’t seem the same at all. But why should I get anything, even in the Radio Times? I’m not a writer. Except maybe . . .
She put aside the vacillations and took out her pencil for Hilda and Reith’s weekly meeting. Writing shorthand wasn’t what she meant at all, but at least she was stellar at it.
“I suppose you’ll be pleased to know the governors have reviewed your proposal and decided to lift the ban on controversial broadcasting,” Reith informed her, with a sigh sharp enough to peel paint from the ceiling.
“Glorious news!” Hilda bellowed, thumping Reith’s desk so hard, his decorative mallard swam the length of the ink blotter.
“Yes, well, let’s remember our decorum,” Reith advised, sliding the duck back into position.
“It’s a great triumph, Mr. Reith,” she crowed. “Onwards and upwards.”
“Some might say you have been thwarting the ban all along,” he pointed out.
“Oh, not thwarting,” Hilda assured him. “More like nudging the bounds.”
Reith’s scowl smiled, but Maisie could see it was perfunctory. In fact, it sometimes seemed to her that he was starting to dislike Hilda. But Maisie was sure she was wrong. More than two million households had found ten shillings for the BBC license fee to bring radio into their homes, with any number of listener letters expressing their pleasure in the Talks, and the newspapers regularly extolled Hilda’s taste and original thinking.
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