John pushed testily through the crowd.
“Mornin’ Guv’nor. Managed ter save yer a couple. Bit of a job, though. Could’ve sold ’em ten times over, that I could. The old King’s up an’ died. Poor old Teddy. Read all abaht it—” The newsboy, a scrap of a child in a cap several times too large for him, raised his voice, “—read all abaht it.”
* * *
On a hot early summer’s day in 1910 King Edward VII was laid to rest; enormous crowds of his affectionate subjects lined the route of the procession. In the cortège were nine of the crowned heads of Europe. And on that sad day, royalty and commoner had something more than usual in common. Neither was aware that in mourning “l’Oncle de l’Europe” they were also mourning the passing of an age.
Chapter Thirty-Four
To no one’s surprise but his own Jack Benton took to running his own carting business like a duck to water. As summer moved into autumn he was able to look with justifiable pride at the results of his hard work as, slowly, the Danbury accounts moved from losses to small profits and he was able to start repaying the money he had borrowed from Molly. He and George Danbury worked well together; they were two of a kind – honest, hardworking, straightforward. Molly breathed a sigh of relief and restrained herself with some difficulty from saying “I told you so”. Jack’s relationship with Nancy improved a little as well – in a close-knit family like the Bentons it was impossible to remain entirely at loggerheads. But still it distressed Molly that there was, constantly, the feeling in the air that hostilities were suspended rather than ended, and that their relationship had never got back on to the old footing.
On a dull and cheerless Friday in November Jack tried to warn his sister against attending a suffragette meeting at Caxton Hall that day. It was planned to send a deputation of respected and distinguished women to Parliament to protest against the vetoing of the Conciliation Bill, which, if passed, would have given at least a small proportion of women the vote. Inevitably Nancy resented what she saw as her brother’s interference.
“There’s going to be trouble, Nancy. Big trouble. There are rumours that Churchill’s given orders that no woman is to be allowed near the House. There’ll be massive precautions… He’s got enough trouble with the Welsh miners – he’ll not let a few women plague him. He’s for stopping you once and for all, by all accounts.”
“He won’t stop us.”
“He will. This time.”
“If we let ourselves be intimidated we’re beaten before we start. And that’s just what they want, isn’t it? We’re simply exercising our democratic rights. We were promised this Bill—”
“For God’s sake, girl, can you see no further than the ends of your noses? Do you think the government has engineered a constitutional crisis and called another general election just to spite you? Anyone would think that your precious Bill is the only thing that’s suffered—”
Molly recognized the short-fused impatience that any conversation with Nancy seemed to produce in Jack and tried to head off trouble. “Jack, didn’t you say you had a meeting—?”
“We’re not letting them get away with it.” The familiar, stubborn vertical line creased Nancy’s forehead. “They’ve had nearly a year. We’ve kept the truce. We’ve not disrupted their wretched Parliamentary games, and now they’re backing down. Asquith’s got to be shown that we mean business.”
“Two elections in a year, the Lords and the Commons at each others’ throats, Churchill mobilizing troops against the miners of the Rhondda, and you march on Parliament in support of a lost Bill that would only have given a tiny minority of women the vote anyway. You’re touched in the head, the lot of you. Can’t you see the country’s falling into anarchy? And all you can do is—”
“—That’s why we want the vote, stupid!” Nancy snapped. “Fine state you men have brought us to!”
Jack strode to the door, barely containing his anger. “Just take my advice and show a bit of sense this time. Stay at home. There’s going to be trouble.”
“Not from us,” Nancy said obstinately.
Into the silence that followed Jack’s irate slamming of the door behind him, Molly sighed. “I think on balance,” she said, “I preferred it when you two weren’t talking. It was more peaceful.”
* * *
Molly spent that afternoon in the office. With Nancy away she had plenty to keep her occupied. The children dropped in to see her when they came home from school.
“Can I cook some crumpets for tea?” Kitty asked.
“You’ll burn them,” Meghan protested.
“I won’t!”
“You did last time.”
“That was your fault! You wouldn’t—”
“Why don’t you both go out and come back in again?” Molly asked with some self-restraint. “And Meghan, what in heaven’s name have you done to your hair? It’s all over the place again.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Meghan flicked at the mass of fair curls that tumbled across her shoulders. “I just can’t seem to keep the clips in. If she’s going to do the crumpets, can I make some fudge?”
“No.”
Meghan pulled a face. “Oh, go on.”
“Meg, I have absolutely no intention of spending my Friday evening clearing up a fudgy mess after you. Now, off you go. And don’t fight about the crumpets!” she added before the door slammed shut behind them and they clattered down the hallway in an avalanche of noise.
A couple of hours later she said goodnight to the departing typists, locked the door of the darkened office and prepared hopefully for a half-hour of peace. Jack was not yet home, the children were quiet, the kitchen was warm, silent and empty.
The urgent knocking on the front door came before she had even sat down.
“Oh, no!” Irritated, she hurried along the hall, threw the door open. “What – Nancy! What’s happened?”
Nancy was supported by Christopher Edmonton. In the faint light her face, the eyes closed and purpling, blood smeared and dribbling from her nose, was all but unrecognizable. She was nursing her left arm in her right. Her clothes were torn and covered in mud and blood.
“Bring her in. Quick.”
In the kitchen Molly bathed and tended the battered face, eyed Nancy’s twisted arm doubtfully. Danny had already been sent flying for the doctor. “What on earth happened?” she asked Christopher who, himself dishevelled and with a large bruise on his cheek, had so far said not a word, but was sitting at the table watching with anxious, angry eyes.
“She was thrown under a horse,” he said in a shaken voice.
“Thrown?”
“A policeman punched her in the face and then pushed her down. ‘Ride over her,’ he said.” He shook his head as if still unable to believe it. “‘Ride over her!’”
“I hope the bloody horse broke its leg,” Nancy muttered through swollen lips and drew a sharp, pained breath as she tried to move her arm.
“Sit still, and don’t talk. The doctor won’t be long. Meghan, Kitty, get away from that door. Aunt Nancy isn’t a peepshow.”
“O-oh, but—”
“Out!”
They went.
“Jack’ll be here soon,” Molly said.
Christopher lifted his head. “Will he mind my being here? I’d like to stay. Until I know that Nancy’s all right.”
“Christopher was very brave,” Nancy mumbled. “He could have been hurt himself, hauling me out from under that animal.”
Molly smiled at him. The young face had firmed since last she had seen it, the shoulders broadened. “Of course you must stay.”
The doctor arrived on the doorstep in the same moment as Jack. Jack erupted into the kitchen.
“What’s happened? Who’s – good God!” He stared, shocked, at Nancy’s battered face.
“You were right, our Jack,” Nancy said, attempting a painful grimace that might have been a smile. “There was trouble, six hours of it”
The doctor stepped past Jack. “Hot water, Mrs B
enton, lots of it. And Dettol. But first let’s look at this arm.” He spoke around Nancy as if she were not there. “Has she had a cup of tea? Hot and sweet, please. And she should get to bed as soon as possible after I’ve dressed this. Where does she live? Is there someone to look after her?”
Nancy opened her bruised mouth. Jack forestalled her. “She’ll stay here,” he said gruffly. “She’s got rooms upstairs. Danny, run and light your Aunt Nancy’s fire—”
And so Nancy moved back into the attic flat at The Larches. At first they all pretended that it was a temporary arrangement, until her injuries had healed, but as time went on it became perfectly obvious that for all her protestations about inconveniencing everyone she had no more desire to leave than Molly had to see her go.
In December the general election saw the Liberals once more in power, but still dependent upon the forty-two MPs of the Labour Party and the eighty Irish Nationalists for their majority. Molly “persuaded” Nancy to stay for Christmas, and then into a new year that began, perhaps prophetically, in dramatic and violent fashion for Londoners when 750 policemen and a detachment of Scots Guards with a machine gun were used in a battle in Sidney Street, Stepney, where three anarchists, who had taken refuge there after killing three unarmed policemen, were killed.
“Getting into practice for the next suffragette march,” Nancy said, and laughed a little shakily.
So far Jack had made no comment about his sister’s continued stay, and Molly, racking her brains for a diplomatic way to bring up the subject, decided it was best left well alone. There was enough trouble about without stirring up more. In Wales the miners were out solidly now, in support of a national minimum wage. Prices were spiralling. Jack gave Danbury’s carters a raise, after months of argument with George Danbury, a penny an hour over union rates.
“They’ve families to keep,” he said, “rents to pay. We want the best; what good are dissatisfied men to us? We’re a small outfit. The men’s goodwill and loyalty is as important to us as the customers’. They can make or break our reputation.” But still he said nothing about Nancy. Until, one day, he bumped into her in the hall.
“Enjoy the party last night, did you?”
She looked at him blankly. “Party?”
“Wasn’t that what it was? It sounded like it.”
She flushed. “I’m sorry if we disturbed you,” she said stiffly. “Some of my friends called. I did ask them to keep their voices down.” It was dark in the hall, she could not see her brother’s face. He stepped past her to the parlour door.
“It wasn’t their voices,” he said, placidly, “it was their blessed feet on those floorboards. If you’re going to settle in, happen we should see about a nice bit of carpet for that living room of yours. That’d help the noise, I daresay.”
“Jack!”
He turned.
She ran to him, flung her arms about his great frame. “Jack, oh Jack!” She could say nothing else.
“There, lass,” he said gently, holding her to him. “Where else would you go, in the end?”
* * *
A year after the death of King Edward, through a spring that promised a blazing summer, the preparations for the coronation of King George V went on against a background of unrest at home and heightening tension in Europe. On a bright May afternoon Molly stood at the window of Adam’s apartment looking out to where the foliage of the trees was already looking a little dusty, a little tired.
“Molly?” Adam’s light voice, lazy with pleasure. “What are you doing over there?”
“Thinking. I thought you were asleep.” She pulled the silk coverlet that she had taken from the bed around her body. “Adam?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think there’s going to be a war?”
“No. Take that thing off.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“Economics. No one can afford a war, not even Kaiser Bill. Take it off.”
She turned, a halo of light silhouetting her body and her cloud of hair. “I ought to go.” The sight of him, the sound of his voice, still made the blood race in her veins.
“Come here.” He pushed back the bedclothes, held out a demanding hand.
She came.
* * *
On the 22nd June 1911 King George V was crowned in Westminster Abbey. Two days before there had been rioting and fire-raising in Hull by striking seamen and “coalies”. It was not an auspicious start to the new King’s reign.
Worse was to follow.
Within two weeks of the coronation the country was in the grip of yet another war scare, as, flouting British wishes and policy, the German gunboat Panther lay off Agadir intent upon securing German interests against French expansion in Morocco. Most of the rest of the massive and menacing German battle fleet steamed in the North Sea, uncomfortably close to the British coasts. At home the hottest summer for seventy years was well set in; London, Liverpool, Manchester sweltered. Tempers frayed. In Wales, the miners, on strike now for nearly ten months, were close to being starved back to work. But the seamen had won, and the hopes and expectations of other unions were raised.
On 25th July the British Foreign Secretary warned the Admiralty that the British Fleet might be attacked at any time. But the bogey had been brought from the cupboard once too often, and to the ordinary man in the street there were more pressing problems. Wars happened in other places, to other peoples. The army and the navy coped with them, that was what they were there for, wasn’t it? Empty bellies and emptier pockets were something else again. This time the impetus for change was coming not from the militant extremists but from the mass of the workers.
On a sweltering first day of August – ironically, the same day that the Welsh miners were finally broken – dockers all over the country began to strike. Other unions followed – carters in Liverpool and London, other associated workers. In the British Parliament a critical battle was being fought to ensure that the second House could never again baulk the wishes of the Commons. In the country as a whole services and transport ground slowly to a halt. Shortages were soon felt as food rotted on the quaysides in the incredibly hot weather. Butter, meat, piles of perishing fruit and vegetables. As day after steaming day passed in the strangely silent, strike-bound cities, rail, road and river transport was stopped. A real threat of famine grew. In Wales and in Liverpool the Riot Act was read, there was fighting in the streets and four men died, shot down by soldiers who sweated, confused, in the heat facing rioters and fire-raisers who might have been their fathers, their brothers.
“How long will it last, do you think?” Molly, Nancy and Jack were in the kitchen of The Larches, every door and window propped to its widest to gain advantage of the slightest stirring of air. With trade and industry virtually at a standstill Molly had closed the office for the duration of the troubles. Jack’s carters were out. Jack himself had insisted on it. “We’re not strike-breaking. I wouldn’t ask my men to do it. We’ll stick it out with the rest.”
“How long?” he asked now. “God only knows. There’s no sign of a break on either side.”
“The shops are running out of food,” Nancy said, fanning herself, “and prices are sky-high. Strikers broke into a shop in Silvertown and beat up the owner for profiteering.”
Molly, frowning, was studying her husband’s face. “What have you done to your cheek?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? It looks as if you’ve walked into a door.”
“Oh, that. Yes, that was what happened.”
“Where?”
“What?”
“Where did it happen?”
He moved uncomfortably. “I don’t remember.”
She got up and marched round the table for a closer look, “Oh, come on now, that’s a fresh bruise. You can’t have cracked yourself that hard without knowing you’d done it?”
Jack lifted a hand to his face, then too late remembered and tried to cover it.
“Ah!” Molly caught his wrist, sta
red in disbelief at the scraped knuckles. “Fighting?” she asked, faintly.
“Not exactly.” He paused. “A difference of opinion.”
“This morning?” Light dawned, slowly. “You mean you went to that meeting after all?”
“I wanted to hear what Ben had to say. Lord, Molly, it’s only a year since I was one of them—”
“And they showed you that now you aren’t? What did you expect, Jack? In their eyes you’re a boss now. The enemy.”
“It was only a couple of them. There was a scuffle. There were some rough words used.” He could not quite keep the hurt and bitterness from his voice.
Molly touched his shoulder. “Then what happened?”
“Ben Tillett saw it. He stepped in, called me up onto the platform. Got me making speeches.”
“But Jack—”
“They’re my mates still. They deserve my support. Sixpence they won, twelve years ago. The docker’s tanner. And nothing since. It isn’t good enough.”
In the office across the hall the telephone rang.
“Blast the thing,” Molly said.
“Leave it.” Jack wiped the sweat from his face. “It can’t be anything important.”
“Shall I answer it?” Nancy asked, making no move.
Molly stood up tiredly. “No, I’ll go.”
The telephone shrilled again as she opened the office door. She picked it up. “Hello?”
“Molly?” Adam’s voice came as a shock; it was the last one she had expected to hear.
“Yes.”
“Can you talk?”
She pushed the open door with her foot. She could hear the murmur of Jack’s and Nancy’s voices from the kitchen. “Yes.”
“I want to see you about something. Can you get away?”
“It would be difficult.”
“It’s important. Very important. It wouldn’t take long, I promise. Will you meet me in the park by the station, later this afternoon?”
“I can’t, Adam. It’s too—”
“Oh, come on, Molly darling. For me. Something very important. Please?” Familiar, warm tone, intimate, physical as a touch.
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