After the War Is Over (24 page)

T
here simply wasn’t enough room in the budget. No matter how often she sifted through
the numbers, it wouldn’t be enough. She would have to let Miss Rathbone know, and
perhaps they could—

“Someone here to see you.”

Charlotte nearly fell out of her chair in surprise; it was so late she’d assumed she
was alone in the office. “Miss Margison! Heavens—I didn’t see you there. Do you know
who it is?”

“Didn’t think to ask. We’re the only ones left, else Gladys would have asked.”

“Ah . . . well, I’ll be straight out. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.”

“Humph.”

She followed Miss Margison back down the hall. In the reception area were a man and
woman; Charlotte recognized the latter, a Mrs. Dooley. Presumably she had come with
her husband. She had last seen Mrs. Dooley that morning, when the woman had come in
search of help. Her husband hadn’t worked since his demobilization, they had a new
baby due to arrive at any minute, and they had no way
to pay the midwife, or even to buy nappies and gowns for the infant.

As Charlotte approached, she saw that Mrs. Dooley had been crying, and was still clutching
a handkerchief. Mr. Dooley was angry, so angry the man fairly seethed with ill will.
She suspected it would shortly be directed at her.

“Mr. and Mrs. Dooley. I do apologize for the wait. Perhaps we could speak in my office?
I—”

“No. We’ll say what we have to say and then we’re gone.”

“Very well. I must say I am surprised. When you departed this morning, Mrs. Dooley,
you seemed quite pleased with how we had left things.”

“She’s not. We’re not,” Mr. Dooley said, his voice so loud that Miss Margison, back
in the office she shared with the other clerk typists, must surely have heard.

“I come home just now, and she give me
these,
” and he threw a pamphlet for the Personal Service Society, together with Charlotte’s
handwritten recommendation on behalf of the family, on the floor between them.

“Don’t, George. Don’t. You said you wouldn’t make a fuss,” Mrs. Dooley implored.

“I’m not making a fuss. I’m telling this woman we don’t need no help from her. Not
from any of her do-gooder friends either.”

“Mr. Dooley, I am sincerely sorry for any upset I may have caused. I truly am. If
I offended you—”

“We’re in a tight spot, I’ll admit it. But we don’t need handouts. We’re not that
hard up.”

“George, she was only trying to—”

“You hush. I know what she was trying to do. Same lot as
hands out paupers’ clothes with ‘charity’ stamped on the back. They’re all the same,
these types.”

“But what are we to do when the baby comes?”

“We’ll manage. We always do, don’t we? And you know what’d happen if anyone got wind
of you coming here, cap in hand, to ask the grand ladies for their help. We’d be the
laughingstock of the street, that’s what.”

He turned to Charlotte, fiercer than ever, and advanced on her so suddenly that she
took a step back.

“You leave her alone.” It was Miss Margison, of all people, come to her rescue. “Say
your piece, and then go.”

“Fine. We’ll be off, now. Like I said, we don’t want none of your charity.”

“I truly only intended to help, Mr. Dooley. I am so very, very sorry for offending
you.”

“You do-gooders. You’re all the same. Swanning about like God put you on this earth
to fix everything that was wrong with it. You’re not even from Liverpool, are you?”
He sneered.

“Somerset, actually.”

“Oh, you are, are you? ‘Somerset, actually,’” he echoed, imitating her polished accent.
“Well, you can go straight back there, you and your charity, and leave off meddling
with my business. Come on, Mary, we’re done here.”

“But, George—” his wife cried, but he was already pulling her to her feet. Mrs. Dooley
cast one last, desperate look at Charlotte, and then they were gone.

“Sit down,” Miss Margison ordered, guiding Charlotte to the chair behind Gladys’s
desk.

“I . . . I can’t believe that happened. I had no notion . . .”

“Let me get you a cup of tea. You stay put.”

Miss Margison bustled away, and as Charlotte sat there, her face burning with chagrin,
her hands shaking so badly she had to fold them in her lap, she asked herself what
had surprised her most about the past five minutes: the fervor of Mr. Dooley’s accusations,
or Miss Margison’s decision to come to her aid.

“I’ve put the tea to brew. Are you all right?”

“I am . . . at least I think I am. I don’t understand how that could have happened.
When I saw Mrs. Dooley this morning, it seemed perfectly straightforward. I had no
notion . . .”

“Men are a funny lot. You never know when something will get up their nose. And it’s
not as if he was angry at you.”

“He wasn’t? He certainly put on a fine show of it.”

“All bluff and bluster. He’s angry at himself, poor sod, and he took it out on you.”

“I only hope he doesn’t take it out on his wife.”

“I don’t think as he will. Otherwise she’d already have a blackened eye.”

“What will happen when the baby comes? She hadn’t any nappies or clothes for the infant,
and she was so worried about how they’d pay the midwife . . .”

“Their neighbors will see to them. You stop here a minute more. I’ll fetch the tea.”

Miss Margison returned with a mug for them both, and pulling the chair from the telephone
across to Gladys’s desk, she plunked herself down and blew at her tea to cool it.

“I’ve always wondered,” she said, “why you up and left when you did.”

“You mean during the war?” Charlotte asked, a little taken aback by the question.

“Mm. Miss Rathbone missed you so much in those early days. She was run off her feet,
putting together the allowances
for soldiers’ and sailors’ families, and managing everything else. You could have
done some good here.”

“I know.”

“It never made any sense to me, why you did it. I’m not having a go at you,” she clarified.
“Only wondering why you went.”

“It seems so long ago. I can hardly remember it now. I think . . . I suppose I was
just swept along by all of it. I do remember that I was very upset by what was happening
in Belgium. How savage the enemy seemed to be. If I’d been allowed to put on a uniform
and fight, I imagine I’d have jumped at the chance,” Charlotte admitted.

She’d been seized by an urge to do more, to
be
more. And there had been her terror of what could happen to those she knew and cared
about, Edward most of all.

“Everyone here talked about you like you was walking the wards at Scutari with your
lamp,” Miss Margison said. “But it never made any sense to me. I don’t mean any offense
by it.”

Charlotte looked her colleague in the eye. “I am sorry. I think, looking back, knowing
what I do now, I ought to have stayed. The work you did here really did save lives.
And I’m not so sure I can say the same for what I did.”

“You, a nurse?”

“I wasn’t patching up men who’d come straight from the front lines. After I’d finished
the first part of my training, I went to the Special Neurological Hospital for Officers
in Kensington.”

“Special in what way?”

“It was a neurasthenia hospital.”

“Shell shock, you mean.”

“Yes. Though I’ve always thought the term too simple for
something so complicated. The men we cared for were broken. And I learned, very quickly,
that it’s harder to fix a man’s spirit than his body. Sometimes the methods the doctors
used there were . . . well, they didn’t always sit well with me. It was a difficult
time, you know, and sometimes I regret . . .”

“I’ll wager you did a lot of good for those men, no matter what you say. Anyhow, it’s
done and dusted now, as my mum would say. No point in looking back. It doesn’t help,
and sometimes it makes things worse.”

“You’re right. Of course you’re right. Thank you, Miss Margison. And if I may . .
. I’m sorry if I ever treated you in a discourteous manner. If I ever failed to show
you the respect you deserve.”

“Shouldn’t that be the other way round? I’ll admit it—I made a right pill of myself,
mucking about with your outgoing post when you first came back. I shouldn’t have done
it, and I’m that sorry for it now.”

“Please, you needn’t—”

“It got up my nose, that’s all. The way everything always seems to turn up roses for
you. I used to dream of going to school. I could’ve, you know. I always did well.
But there wasn’t any money to pay for it. So I started work when I was fourteen, at
the bakery down the street. Hated it. Up at dawn six days a week. Still can’t abide
the smell of fresh-baked bread.” Miss Margison smiled then, really smiled, and it
transformed her appearance entirely.

“How did you learn how to type?”

“I saved up and started going to evening classes. Thought I’d died and gone to heaven
when Miss Rathbone hired me on.”

“She would be lost without you. We all would. You know this office upside down and
sideways.”

“Nice of you to say so. Well, I suppose I’d best be off now. Half past six and black
as pitch outside.”

“Will you be going north?” Charlotte asked. Perhaps they might walk awhile together,
and talk of easier things. Friendlier things.

“No, I’m off down Garston way. Thanks all the same. You will be all right, won’t you?”

“I will. Thank you again.”

It would have been sensible to take the tram, for winter had arrived with a vengeance,
the rain outside threatening to turn to sleet. But the walk home would give Charlotte
the chance to be alone with her thoughts, and her doubts, and so she turned up her
coat collar and continued north, though she was walking in the teeth of the wind nearly
the entire way.

It had been a normal day until a half hour ago. A long day, a sad day in parts, for
there was so little help she could give, and so many who were suffering. Her encounter
with Mrs. Dooley had, to her mind, been a positive one. Yet . . . could she have been
more understanding? Had she become so inured to requests for help that she had grown
insensitive in her conduct?

A memory assailed her, as sharp as a slap across the face, of Lady Cumberland and
her outings to dispense charity. Wrapped in an unbreachable aura of self-righteousness
and smug entitlement, the countess had handed out baskets of food and castoffs to
her family’s tenants each Christmas and Easter, secure in the knowledge that none
would ever dare to complain or even question the laws of God and state that had set
her so high and them so low. Humiliation had been an accepted part of the equation.

Such petty humiliations were everywhere, even when charity wasn’t being dispensed.
Even in her own office, she realized,
such class divisions were alive and well and unthinkingly accepted by everyone. The
clerk typists made less than Charlotte and Mabel, for a certainty they did. They weren’t
even given the dignity of being addressed by their surname; only Miss Margison had
been brave enough to insist on that common courtesy.

It wasn’t that anyone, least of all Miss Rathbone, had consciously decided to erect
a barrier between the clerk typists and the constituency assistants; it had simply
been there, likely predating Miss Rathbone’s election as a ward councilor.

So where should she begin? Not by suddenly addressing the clerk typists by their surnames,
nor by charging into Miss Rathbone’s office and demanding a rise in pay for her colleagues.
But perhaps she might ask the other women if they might like to use her Christian
name. Perhaps she might fetch them tea, instead of waiting for one of them to bring
it to her each afternoon.

Great change comes from small steps
. Her father had told her that when she was little, likely when she was bemoaning
an injustice she had read about. Pit ponies, or little boys set to work as chimney
sweeps, or something similarly distressing.

Change wouldn’t come overnight, and possibly not in her lifetime—yet she had already
cast a vote for a member of Parliament, something her undergraduate self would never
have believed possible, and each year women were being accorded more freedom and greater
rights. One day it might even be possible for men and women alike to be judged by
their character and actions rather than the accent with which they spoke, or the God
to whom they prayed, or the color of their skin. One day.

The ideas were crowding upon her; she had to get home,
had to set her thoughts down on paper. She would send the column to John in the morning,
and ask him to run it instead of the piece she had submitted earlier in the week.

                
My last few columns have turned on instances of the government’s failure to act, or
its failure to act in a manner that I believe to be in the best interests of the British
people as a whole. While I find no shortage of material in that regard, this week
I have decided to set aside the theme of what is being done for us, or to us, and
instead I wish to focus on a different matter entirely: what I can do, and what you
can do, to make this country fit not only for our returning heroes, but also for every
man, woman, and child who calls these islands home.


                
Although I do not presume to think the Christmas story is one that resonates with
every reader, I do feel, in this season of Advent, that it is worth using as an example
of how the very great may at once be perfectly humble as well. Who among us has not,
at one instance or another, thought poorly of another human being simply because of
the way he or she talks, or dresses, or because of where he or she lives, worships,
or works? Who among us has not sat in judgment upon another, though we know full well
that God tells us not to judge, else we be judged instead?


                
You may decide, if you have not already, that my words mark me as a socialist, or
some other species of radical bent on the leveling of British society. I assure you
I am not; my radical views, such as they are, lie in my conviction that no one of
us is born superior to his others. Only by a man’s actions should he be judged, I
believe, and not by his origins, profession, religion, politics, or race.