Authors: Maggie Ford
A Woman's Place
Contents
Eveline’s father believes a woman’s place is in the home ...
But when she is accidentally caught up in a suffragette march, it changes her life forever.
She finds friendships, and even the possibility of love too in the form of the gentlemanly Laurence Jones-Fairbrook. But will she be forced to choose between her family and friends ... between duty and love?
(Note: previously published as
Give Me Tomorrow
by Elizabeth Lord)
Maggie Ford was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.
She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.
The Soldier’s Bride
A Mother’s Love
Call Nurse Jenny
To my good friend Beryl Meadows with thanks for her
valuable advice on the suffragette movement and women’s
fight for their right to vote during the early 1900s. And to
my two daughters who can now do so.
This novel is set against the backdrop of what I’ve always considered a fascinating period in British History. Many readers will be familiar with the history of the suffragette movement in the UK and may realise I’ve taken certain liberties with the timing of events. Forgive me, but I wanted to tell Connie and Eveline’s story my way – two ordinary girls who find themselves in extraordinary times.
The buzz of Oxford Street’s Saturday-afternoon shoppers had begun to be disrupted by the regular beat of a drum. Eveline Fenton glanced in the direction of voices raised in song, one strident voice, hollowed and amplified by a megaphone, repeating a familiar, rhythmic doggerel:
‘Votes for women! Justice for women! Give women the right to vote!’
Heads turned. Some faces creased into expectant grins, others into frowns. Despite these women keeping to the kerb, traffic could be disrupted, in which case the police would come down like a ton of bricks. A few truncheons would be raised, a few helmets knocked off, a few militants bundled kicking, flailing and screeching into a police wagon. One or two ladies’ large hats would be trampled underfoot, carefully piled hair coming loose to hang in unsightly strands; perhaps even a sleeve or two would get ripped in the fray, womanhood being shown up – a good reason for leers and frowns according to popular opinion.
Once the wagon had driven off with its load to the lockup, the rest would disperse to lick their wounds and plan another march, sure of eventual success in persuading a Liberal government to grant women the vote. When that would be was anyone’s guess. Not this side of 1909, not for years, if ever. Even those massive rallies at the Albert Hall and in Hyde Park last year had made no impact whatsoever on politicians. Still, one had to admire their tenacity.
Eveline certainly did, though until a moment ago her mind had been on a tea gown tastefully displayed in one of Selfridge’s huge windows – white mousseline with silver lace and ribbons. She had been imagining how it would show off her dark brown hair and her slim figure with its eighteen-inch waist – the same in inches as she had in years. The gown was of course well beyond her pocket, costing all of four weeks of her pay, but she could still dream.
The American-style multiple store with its breathtaking displays, newly opened last Monday the fifteenth of March, was busy. So many ladies were pulling their menfolk to a halt to gape at the clothes that she’d had to squeeze sideways through them all for a better view, being jostled on all sides until, like everyone else, she was distracted by the drumbeat, the singing and the loud hailer.
They came on, a dozen women, striding out in single file, hugging the kerb – using the pavement could mean being arrested for obstruction. Heads up, they walked with a confident step, skirts swinging heavily about their boots, muddy from the gutter, still wet from last night’s rain.
All held placards, several with the wording WSPU HAMMERSMITH BRANCH, displaying purple irises, hammers and horseshoes, others with the inscription DEEDS NOT WORDS. The large, well-made hats and several coats with astrakhan collars and cuffs proclaimed the wearers to be middle class with time on their hands. Working-class women with husbands and children had little opportunity to go on marches or even to stand on street corners selling Women’s Social and Political Union news-sheets.
Eveline didn’t consider herself exactly working class, and certainly not poverty-stricken despite living in the poorer East End of London. True, she worked, as did her brother Len Junior, but Dad had a shop in Three Golts Lane, a general grocer’s selling anything, from bootlaces, butter, tinned goods, dried goods like sugar, peas and rice, all loose in sacks, to candles, firelighters, gas mantles, and paraffin in kegs with taps for pouring it. Mum helped behind the counter while her other daughter May, who didn’t work, was happy to be Mum’s unpaid housekeeper. Making a modest living, two apart from Dad in a family of eight also bringing in wages, they didn’t do badly, though not so that she could fritter money away on some fine dress in Selfridge’s window.
Eveline watched the marching women as they came abreast of her. Dad was dead against them. ‘Lot of blooming nonsensical females,’ he called them, his walrus moustache bristling. ‘Ain’t got nothing better ter do but stirring up a lot of blooming trouble.’
He never swore at home, and respected female sensitivity, but still brooked no contradiction. He was the breadwinner working all hours God sent in his shop a few yards from Bethnal Green railway station and saw his family as having enough to do without bothering with politics and female dissension. A woman wouldn’t know what to do with a vote anyway, if she got one. That was what Eveline too had thought until last summer had helped to change her mind.
Eveline and her workmate, Ada Williams, had wandered off on that Saturday in June to watch a huge procession of suffragettes from every part of the country make their way to the Albert Hall. On the Embankment beside the Thames the parade had taken over two hours to pass in a continuous river of colour and music. She’d been so awed that the following Sunday she persuaded Ada to go with her to Hyde Park to see a similar rally.
In the bright warm sunshine it was a sight for sore eyes with seven separate processions marching into the park, carrying hundreds of coloured banners to the accompaniment of stirring music; nearly eight hundred women stood on twenty platforms and thousands of milling onlookers enjoyed it all, though Ada hadn’t been all that impressed, apart from relishing the spectacle.
‘All very well fer them what’s got time to mess about,’ she’d said, wrinkling her thin nose. ‘But the likes of us ’ave got ter work for a living.’
‘They are right though,’ Eveline argued. ‘Some women can’t stand up for themselves, they need people with a voice.’
Ada had shrugged again. ‘You try taking time off work to go off ter meetings. And fluttering yer pretty eyes at that leering old Mr Prentice won’t ’elp.’ Ada, plain as a stick, was always on about her being pretty. ‘No boss is going ter give you ’alf a day off work just when you want. You’ll be out on your ear fast as love against a wall, even if old Prentice do fancy yer.’
Her office manager would leer at her, if he got the chance would lean over her, hot hands on her shoulders, to see if her sums added up correctly. She’d tried pushing him away but it wasn’t easy. He was her boss. If ruffled he could find an excuse to sack her.
‘Where will yer votes fer women be then? And yer dad wouldn’t ’alf ’ave something to say.’
Ada was right, but one speaker had made her think when she described women refused a say in their own destinies, downtrodden at home, poorly paid at work; they had no voice, nor, along with convicts and lunatics, were they allowed to vote – the first time she’d heard it stressed that way. Realising her own little worth, it had made her angry. It still made her angry whenever she thought of it but she’d put it aside in the flurry of becoming eighteen with lots of friends and things to do. Now, this afternoon, as this small column of women with their placards and their single drum drew abreast of her, the anger came flooding back.
Though it was not a particularly impressive procession, Eveline’s spirits rose at the defiant clump of their feet striding out in step to their song, eyes unflinching before the derisive taunts of some male bystanders. As they passed something made her want to keep up with them, for a little while at least. But moments later, without quite realising why, she had stepped off the pavement to fall in alongside the last person in the procession. Hazel eyes glanced at her from below an enormous hat and a soft mouth smiled. ‘Thank you for joining us,’ she said, taking Eveline’s hand in such a friendly way that even if Eveline had intended to leave she couldn’t decently have done so now.
Fortunately no police interfered. One constable was walking alongside just in case of trouble from bystanders, but there was none, just one or two catcalls or the odd remark, ‘Go back to your kitchen!’ Often Eveline could hear ragged clapping, no one showing any real belligerence. The owner of the megaphone was now announcing:
‘There is a meeting at Ambrose Hall – two thirty this afternoon! Come and listen to our brave and talented speaker, Mrs Annie Kenney! All ladies welcome – men too!’
The marchers were dressed for March weather, not like at the huge June rallies with white dresses and red sashes, or the green, white and purple of the suffragette’s adopted colours. Warm coats and hats kept in place by veils were the order of the day for this little band.
Despite her own warm, half-length coat over an equally warm skirt, Eveline couldn’t help feeling a little shabby beside her new companion’s fashionable tweed coat with embroidered collar and cuffs. Against that large-crowned hat with its satin bows and silk roses perched sedately on a mass of hair like an enormous mushroom, hers struck her as small and drab even with its wide brim and brave ring of flowers and leaves.
The girl, just an inch taller than her own five foot five, had an arm now firmly linked through hers; it seemed that having secured a new recruit she had every intention of keeping her. Such familiarity should have put Eveline off, yet it didn’t. The drum’s steady beat and the singing brought a sense of exhilaration as the procession turned off Oxford Street into a side road.
Converging on a stone building were streams of other women, some having marched there from different directions, others just coming along in small groups. There were even a few men. Surrounded on all sides as they reached the building, Eveline and her captor mounted the worn steps.
