‘One of the things I used to ask myself when I was growing up was “Why did she do it? Why did she ever let herself in for the job of Alf Dickenson’s wife?” And when I had thought it through, I didn’t have a single, clear-cut answer.
‘Women sometimes become wives because they fall in love, and often because they have a natural need to have children. We become wives sometimes because there is a promise of a roof over our heads when we’re shown the door by our own families, or because we’ve got ourselves into “trouble” – and in my neck of the woods it might be because we’ve been raped on the way home from work. So we do a deal with a willing chap who’s looking for somebody cheap to cook and clean for him.
‘My mam? She fell in love with Alf Dickenson, and found out too late that the marriage bed was no bed of roses. But she had chosen it and she had to lie on it – as well as work in a factory to get a few shillings to keep the family going. In as many years he gave her more children than he’d got fingers on his hands, and he’d likely have started on his toes if he hadn’t fallen into the water between the dock and the ship he was working on. It’s all right, don’t feel embarrassed about wanting to smile – there are times when I have to smile myself.’
The atmosphere in the hall was electric. It is doubtful whether any Fabian guest-speaker had ever been so bold and honest.
‘My father was a man brought up to use his fists – and he used them. On my mam and on all of us children. He was a drinker and, in a funny way as it turned out, it was no bad thing… because if he had not been drunk, then he wouldn’t have fallen into the docks and my mam would have had half a dozen more children that she could not feed on his non-existent wages.’
Now she rose to her feet, placed her hands wide on the table, leaned slightly towards the audience and smiled upon them warmly. ‘And now to the matter of the votes. Many years ago radical suffragists, like me, rejected the notion that women should strive for the vote “equally as accorded to men”, because that would not enfranchise the majority of women.
‘Mrs Pankhurst came upon the scene and urged something similar – “a property or householder’s vote”. Of course, from her point of view this wasn’t at all a bad idea, because it would give her and her kind the power that she would deny her poorer sisters who are neither tax-nor ratepayers. In her desire to win this privilege for herself by any means, she urges her members to ignore all other social reforms and concentrate their attention on securing the vote for a small élite of women.
‘Never mind the rest of us!
‘I and other radical suffragists urge only total and universal suffrage. What use is a vote if women are not educated? What use is a vote if we have no rights in the work-place, if working mothers have no facilities for the care of their children. If this country is truly the fine, democratic nation that it holds itself to be, then women must have the vote. All women must have the vote. Working women must have the vote.’
Although she was now impassioned and articulate, she was forced to wait for the applause to die down.
Not noticing that – as always when she came to this part of her speech – tears were trickling down her cheeks, she held her hands palm outwards in an attitude of supplication. ‘Alf Dickenson’s wife must have the vote.’
Jack Moth found himself on his feet with both hands in the air, cheering her along with the rest of the audience. He was so moved that for the moment he had forgotten why he had come here.
—
HEREIN LIE THE MORTAL REMAINS OF CAROLINE
1829–1914.
Victoria Ormorod detested funerals. The one she had just left was worse than any. The macabre secrets of the graveyard had always disturbed her; now she shrank from the thought of her grandmother encased in pine, lowered into a pit and left to rot.
She tried to think of it, as her grandmother had said they should: None of you are to fret when you bury me. I had a good life. It will be just a box of old skin and bones that’s been hanging about the place for seventy year and more. And until we can have our bodies set fire to nice and clean, then they must be buried for hygiene purposes. ‘Hygiene purposes’ lay behind the few rules she had for the running of the ‘Home’.
I shan’t be in there, never you fear, I shall be off somewhere interesting and where it don’t rain too much – I don’t reckon eternity will be much fun if they’ve got rain there.
Aunt Kate, Grandmother’s ally for fifty years, had looked into the grave and said, ‘That’s the end of an era. The Old Lady was the last of her kind.’
In spite of her melancholy mood, Victoria smiled to herself: not only was Kate several years older than Grandmother, their era, the one when rural communities had been opened up and changed for ever, would not be ended until Aunt Kate died. But Victoria knew what Kate meant, that it had been her grandmother who had run things for forty years – things, meaning the benevolent (hygienic) lying-in home for village women and a shelter for children.
Although she must have been a young woman when she took charge of the place, in Victoria’s memory her grandmother had always been the ‘Old Lady’. Her temper as gingery as her hair had once been, the Old Lady had, with only a few exceptions, been fiercely against men and the maleness of the world; it was she who had fostered Victoria’s inbred rebellious nature.
The name ‘Caroline’ which was inscribed there was the one given by her mother; her father’s surname she abandoned, as her lover, the father of her three children, had abandoned her. I don’t want no man’s name, not even the one I got from my father, no nothing from any man-jack of them.
The funeral had, to Victoria, been a formality; she and her grandmother had taken leave of one another a month ago: ‘I’ve seen this happen times enough to know that I’ve got about four or five weeks before the end, and I reckon that if you and me talked to each other for every minute of it we should still find we had something to say. I never had favourites, as you well know, Victoria, but if I did have, then you would be it. The main thing is, we said most things worth saying years ago.’
As Victoria walked back to the house with the aged and arthritic Aunt Kate silently limping beside her, she wondered about her own future. Am I as strong as Kate and Grandmother were at my age? She has always told me that I am – and I could be whilst she was there reminding me.
Perhaps, like that of Pinocchio’s cricket, Grandmother’s voice would always be in her ear. What a comfort if that were true: Lord sakes, Vicky, don’t be such a wet week in a thunder-storm. When you know what you say is the honest truth, you must not be afraid to say so.
And on that last occasion when, even though the Old Lady was dying, her voice had been tetchy and strong: ‘Victoria, war is a man’s thing. Look at it this way, there don’t seem no good reason why men was given bigger and stronger bodies than ourselves (for I tell you, there hasn’t ever been a job known that a woman didn’t have her own way of doing as good as they. Women have done it all, from the killing of beasts to the chopping down of trees and the building of anything from a boat to a cottage). But there it is, men have got this strength and for some reason they think that they have got to throw it around… they have to size up to one another, take things from one another, show everybody who is master. Perhaps it’s inbred in male humans just like charging and goring is inbred in some beef bulls, but that don’t mean that women just have to sit back and let them do it, we have to show them how to live peaceable and we have to try to change things. Lord above, how unfair and unjust that is. We carry them, birth them, have our bodies turned all way out to get them – ’tis women’s sons as much as men’s that go away to fight and get killed and hurt, and we don’t even have a say in it.’
The straggling line of mourners wends its way through the old churchyard. Kate pulls back to rest on a tombstone, Victoria sits beside her. The lichen-encrusted stone is warm and the grass that covers the graves is long and seeding, neglected these days as is the very fabric of the village. Kate and the Old Lady had known the village be
fore the last of its young blood leached away into the industrial towns. They had seen the old mansion turned into a brewery and the downs slashed open to insert railway lines.
Except for skylarks, birds, which do not in any case do much singing in July, are silenced by the growing heat, but bees make up for it as they constantly visit the scabious and cornflowers that have infiltrated from the surrounding fields.
Springing from one grave is a briar, and Victoria wonders whether it was planted as a memento. From others grows cranesbill, and in dust-dry patches along the paths red pimpernel lies flat open to the sun. Two ancient yews whose root spreads are equal to their huge canopies must be infiltrating the subsided graves. This is the oldest part of the graveyard, where the stone tomb of a long-dead squire had been one of the first to encroach, with its granite marker, upon centuries of unnamed graves.
The Old Lady’s grave will not have an identity.
I want you to lay me there in the old way, without any old cross or marker. Anybody who cares tuppence for me will know where my bones are, and the others can bide curious.
There are thousands of spring bulbs at home. Victoria thinks that she will bring some here and cover her grandmother’s grave with them: perhaps that is as good an end as any of us deserves, to feed roses and yew trees and spring bulbs.
‘She left me some money, Aunt Kate.’
‘I know she did, Vicky. It is so you can keep on do-en your work to get us the vote.’
‘Yes, but what sort of a midwife will I be if I keep spending weeks at a time away from here. I always feel guilty when I go away and leave the others to make up for me.’
‘If it was any of them that had the gift of the gab like you, then it’d be them that she would’a left the money to. It an’t as though it’s personal money is it? It’s money for a purpose, so don’t you let me hear no more of that sort of talk. Guilty! Whoever heard the like? There’s plenty of midwives about, but not women with the gift of the gab.’
‘When I go this time, it will be different. There is talk about an international campaign for peace, and they want me to help with the organization and running. It will mean being away from home for quite a long spell. Perhaps longer than my time in Sicily.’ That name, spoken in the dry heat and the hot smell of dry grass and dust of the simmering graveyard, brought for a brief moment to one of the windows of her mind a tall, broad young man with heavy black hair and a handsome profile. Tankredi. And now, Jack Moth. Victoria Ormorod, always attracted by unsuitable men.
‘I know that, Vicky. I shall miss you. You always been like one of my own. The Old Lady and me shared our children and our grandchildren. I always took to you because you was like me, always one for books. I don’t think nobody except you realized how hungered I was for books when my eyes went. When you read to me it was like they all come to life.’
‘Cathy?’ Victoria’s spirits, sprung with a quick laugh, rose.
‘Ah, you was a sight that day, standen up on Ole Winchester Hill callen “Heathcliff, Heathcliff” clear across the valley to young Derry Carter. You was a couple of young tearaways.’
‘Derry Carter.’ Natural child of the Lord only knew who, he had somehow come under the Old Lady’s care. ‘Lord above, I haven’t thought of him for years.’
‘He volunteered for the war, on his own accord. A course, you can’t blame him, there’s nothing much round here ’cept the brewery, and they only wants girls because they’m cheap – brings they here in a wagon from Blackbrook town.’ She gazes up at a sky that is to her a misty haze of cerulean blue, the same colour as her own old eyes. ‘I always did like the old Cathy but what happened was never right – they all treated that young Heathcliff so bad…’
Victoria squeezed Kate’s arm and helped her to her feet. A decade ago she had used up her three score years and ten: it could not be long before she too was buried here.
It was a midday of one of the last days of July, so they walked slowly in the pre-noon heat. The horsy smell of ox-eye daisies mixed with that of drying grass recently scythed hung dustily around them. The comforting village sounds of barking dogs, the whirring and clattering beer-bottling plant, the clang of a milk churn being rolled, a lowing cow, all came to attack Victoria in her throat and tear-ducts – she could hardly bear the thought that once again she would be leaving it all.
Again she and the old aunt had fallen into silence. Inevitably Victoria’s memories of her grandmother flitted about her mind, as random as a flight of bats. As soon as the Old Lady had read of the assassination of the Archduke, she had said that nothing could now stop the whole of Europe going to war: ‘Now listen to me, Victoria, you got to face it. If you women start talking peace just when the country got the smell of fighting in its nostrils, you won’t be very popular, because if there’s one thing that raises the English to dangerous stupidity, then it’s a whiff of war. But you know and I know that war is a sin and a crime against the people that are sent to fight in them. “Thou shalt not kill.” That’s an order as plain as plain, and “Thou shalt not kill” can’t be twisted to mean anything else. We are supposed to be Christian – why good Lord, girl, labouring people should be gathering in the streets at the very idea of putting swords and shot into other ordinary labouring people. My mother and father were rebels in a great cause. Did I ever tell you?’
She had, many times. And how they had lived in exile because they had stood against bad conditions and bad laws. And before them, down the ages, other rebels. A family history designed to produce a woman like Victoria who was prepared to be one of a tiny minority to speak out against the coming war.
‘I have a few pound put by. Some of it came from my mother. It would have pleased her to know that you had inherited her nature. She knew well enough herself that women can never do anything unless they can live independent. The Pankhurst women can only go about the country because they’ve got the means – and so must you have.’
At Kate’s pace they reached the lych-gate from where Victoria looked back at a scene that was at once both universal and unique. The world over, there were small village churches surrounded by fertile fields and, closer to their walls, by generations of people who tilled those fields, yet nowhere else on earth was there another place like this one, where lay those who had gone into the creating of Victoria Ormorod.
Something extraordinarily sad touched her and in the shade of the lych-gate she shivered.
‘You must have got cold hanging about so slow with me.’
‘No, no, it was just a goose running over my grave.’
‘Let’s say that it was a good fairy touched your shoulder.’
1914
Standing rigid before the cheval mirror in her bedroom, Esther Moth, having sent away Kitt’s nurserymaid who had been helping her to dress, watched her head being wreathed in stephanotis and orange blossom by Otis Hewetson who was already dressed for the wedding.
Otis groaned. ‘I shall never last the day in all this boning: it has been ages since my waist was so confined, I shall probably faint.’
Esther made a mock fierce face. ‘You just try stealing the limelight with a trick like that.’
Otis stood away to view the head-dress and its short lace veil. ‘I say, Esther, you are the very picture of a virgin fairy. So beautiful.’ From behind she put her arms about her friend, taking care to avoid crushing the white georgette and tulle bridal gown. ‘I don’t think that Bindon will have the courage to violate such an image of purity.’
‘Otis! You say the most outrageous things these days. I think that the women you mix with must be very saucy.’
Otis smiled. ‘But such bland sauce, you may be sure, Esther. We are ladylike in the extreme, for who would be likely to put their children in our care if we were not?’
‘Ladylike! When half of you go about uncorseted and the other half smoke tobacco.’
‘And the other half have love-affairs, and the other half envy them.’
Otis smoothed her temporarily nipped-in wa
ist and thrust-out bosom. ‘Not uncorseted – merely unboned. You really should try, give your poor figure a little freedom.’
‘You will become saggy.’
‘On the contrary. Without stay-bones, one’s muscles hold one’s figure in the correct position.’
Esther lifted the veil to cover her face and picked up a posy of flowers with trailing ribbons and surveyed the finished picture. ‘Well, I should not like to go about like that.’
‘I dare say that Bindon would not mind, though. Have you never thought how devastating it must be for a lover to press his loved one to him, only to feel a parcel encased in whalebone. I think that it must be rather like taking a mouthful of Dover sole only to discover that it is not filleted.’
‘Heavens, Otis, if it is not for the men that we lace ourselves in, then why do it?’
‘Ah, ha! Why indeed? Think about that some time when you are not so preoccupied.’
Now they both looked in the mirror at the reflection of a bride.
Otis knelt at her friend’s feet and adjusted the folds of her skirt. ‘Jesting aside, Esther, I have never seen a more perfect bride. Are you ready?’
‘Yes, tell Father that I am ready, if you will, but I should like a few minutes to myself.’
Occasionally during the past month, since the preparations for Esther’s marriage had been nearing completion, Otis had encountered George Moth. He had behaved with such charm and respect that, had it not been for the fact that she had occasionally caught a particular look in his eyes, she might have wondered whether the episode in his office had been her imagination.
She had also encountered Jack, and on each occasion her heart had leapt as though a wonderful surprise had been sprung upon her. She could not get over the fact that in the three years since the Southsea holiday, they had gone from being boy and girl and had become man and woman. Jack’s attitude towards Otis was almost that of two equals. He behaved as though he greatly respected her, and in fact said as much.
Goodbye Piccadilly Page 13