by Sarah Waters
Even Ralph was involved in it. He had been asked, as secretary of his union, to write a little address for the day itself, and deliver it - in between the grander speeches - before the crowd. The title of the address was to be ‘Why Socialism?’, and the composing and rehearsing of this threw Ralph - who was no very keen public speaker - into a fever. He would sit at the supper-table for hours at a time, writing until his arm grew sore - or more often gazing bleakly at the empty page before him, then dashing to the bookcase to check a reference in some political tract, and cursing to find it lent out or lost: ‘What has happened to The White Slaves of England? Who has borrowed my Sidney Webb? And where the blazes is Towards Democracy?’
Florence and I would gaze at him and shake our heads. ‘Give the thing up,’ we would say, ‘if you don’t want to do it, or feel you can’t. No one will mind,’ But Ralph would always stiffen and answer, ‘No, no. It is for the sake of the union. I almost have it.’ Then he would frown at his page again, and chew on his beard; and I would see him imagining himself standing before a crowd of staring faces, and he would sweat and start to tremble.
But here, at least, I felt I could help. ‘Let me hear you read a bit of your speech,’ I said to him one night when Florence was out. ‘Don’t forget I was an actress of sorts, once. It’s all the same, you know, whether it’s a stage or a platform.’
‘That’s true,’ he said, struck by the idea. Then he flapped his sheets. ‘But I am rather shy of reading it out before you.’
‘Ralph! If you are shy with me, in our parlour, what will you be like before five hundred people, in Victoria Park?’ The thought set him biting at his beard again; but he held his speech before him as requested, stood before the curtained window, and cleared his throat.
“‘Why Socialism?’” he began. I jumped to my feet.
‘Well, that is hopeless, for a start. You can’t mumble into your hands like that, and expect the folk in the gallery - I mean, at the back of the tent - to be able to hear you.’
‘You are rather harsh, Nancy,’ he said.
‘You will thank me for it, in the end. Now, straighten your back and lift up your head, and start again. And talk from here’ — I touched the buckle on his trousers, and he twitched - ‘not from your throat. Go on.’
“‘Why Socialism?” he read again, in a deep, unnatural voice. ’ That is the question I have been invited to discuss with you this afternoon. “Why Socialism?” I shall keep my answer rather brief.’
I sucked at my lip. ‘Some joker is sure to shout “Hurrah” at that point, you know.’
‘Not really, Nance?’
‘You may count on it. But you mustn’t let it unsettle you, or you’ll be done for. Go on, now, let’s hear the rest.’
He read the speech - it was a matter of two or three pages, no more - and I listened, and frowned.
‘You will talk into the paper,’ I said at the end. ‘No one will be able to hear. They will get bored, and start talking amongst themselves. I have seen it happen a hundred times.’
‘But I must read the words,’ he said. I shook my head.
‘You shall have to learn them, there’s nothing else for it. You shall have to get the piece by heart.’
‘What? All this?’ He gazed miserably at the pages.
‘A day or two’s work,’ I said. Then I put my hand upon his arm. ‘It is either that, Ralph, or we shall have to put you in a funny suit...’
And so through the whole of April and half of May - for of course it took considerably longer than one or two days for him to learn even so much as a quarter of the words - Ralph and I laboured together over his little speech, forcing the phrases into his head and finding all sorts of tricks to make them stay there. I would sit like a prompter, the papers in my hand, Ralph declaiming before me in an effortful monotone; I would have him recite to me over breakfast, or as we washed the dishes, or sat together beside the fire; I would stand outside the kitchen door and have him shout the words out to me as he lay in his bath.
‘How many times have you heard economists say that England is the richest nation in the world? If you were to ask them what they meant by that, they would answer ... they would answer ...’
‘Ralph! They would answer: Look about you -’
‘They would answer: Look about you, at our great palaces and public buildings, our country houses and our ...’
‘Our factories -’
‘Our factories and our ...’
‘Our Empire, Ralph!’
In time, of course, I learned the whole wretched speech myself, and could leave the sheets aside; but in time, too, Ralph managed more or less to con it, and was able to stumble through from start to finish, without any prompts at all, and sounding almost sensible.
Meanwhile, the day of the rally drew nearer, our hours grew ever fuller and our tasks more rushed; and I - despite my grumbles - could not help but grow a little eager to see the thing take place at last, and was as excited and as fretful, almost, as Florence herself.
‘If only it does not rain!’ she said, gazing bleakly at the sky from our bedroom window, the night before the appointed Sunday. ‘If it rains, we shall have to have the pageant in a tent; and nobody has rehearsed that. Or suppose it thunders? Then no one will hear the speakers.’
‘It won’t rain,’ I said. ‘Stop fussing.’ But she continued to frown at the sky; and at length I joined her at the window, and gazed at the clouds myself.
‘If only it doesn’t rain,’ she said again; and to distract her I breathed upon the glass and wrote our initials in the mist, with a fingernail: N.A., F.B., 1895 & Always. I put a heart around them and, piercing the heart, an arrow.
It did not rain that Sunday; indeed, the skies above Bethnal Green were so blue and clear you might have been forgiven for thinking God Himself a socialist, the brilliant sun a kind of heavenly blessing. At Quilter Street we all rose early, and bathed and washed our hair and dressed - it was like getting ready for a wedding. I very gallantly decided not to risk my trousers on the crowd - socialists having such a poor name already; instead, I wore a suit of navy-blue, with scarlet frogging on the coat, and a matching necktie, and a billycock hat. As ladies’ outfits went, it was a smart one; even so, I found myself twitching irritably at my skirts as I paced the parlour waiting for Flo - and was soon joined by Ralph, who was dressed up stiff as a clerk, and kept pulling at his collar where it chafed against his throat.
Florence herself wore the damson-coloured suit I so admired: I bought a flower for her, on the walk from Bethnal Green, and pinned it to her jacket. It was a daisy, big as a fist, and shone when the sun struck it, like a lamp. ‘You shall certainly,’ she said to me, ‘not lose me in that.’
Victoria Park itself we found transformed. Workmen had been busy raising tents and platforms and stalls all through the weekend, and there were strings of flags and banners at every tree, and stall-holders already setting up their tables and displays. Florence had about a dozen lists of duties upon her, and now produced them, then went off to find Mrs Macey of the Guild. Ralph and I picked our way through all the drooping bunting, to find the tent he was to speak in. It turned out to be the biggest of the lot: ‘There’ll be room for seven hundred people in here, at the least!’ the workmen told us cheerfully, as they filled it with chairs. That made it greater than some of the halls I had used to play at; and when Ralph heard it, he turned very pale, and retired to a bench for another reading of his speech.
After that, I took Cyril and wandered about, gazing at whatever caught my eye and stopping to chat with girls I recognised, lending a hand with fluttering tablecloths, splitting boxes, awkward rosettes. There were speakers and exhibitions there, it seemed to me, for every queer or philanthropic society and cause you could imagine - trade unionists and suffragists, Christian Scientists, Christian Socialists, Jewish Socialists, Irish Socialists, anarchists, vegetarians ... ‘Ain’t this marvellous?’ I heard as I walked, from friends and strangers alike. ‘Did you ever see a sight li
ke this?’ One woman gave me a sash of satin to pin about my hat; I fastened it to Cyril’s frock instead, and when people saw him in the colours of the SDF, they smiled and shook his hand: ‘Hallo, comrade!’
‘Won’t he remember this day, when he’s grown!’ said a man, as he touched Cyril’s head and gave him a penny. Then he straightened, and studied the scene about him with shining eyes. ‘We’ll all remember this day, all right ...’
I knew he was right. I had grumbled about it to Annie and Miss Raymond, and I had sat sewing flags and banners, not caring if the stitches were crooked or the satin got stained; but as the park began to fill, and the sun grew ever more brilliant and all the colours more gay, I found myself gazing about me in a kind of wonder. ‘If five thousand people come,’ Florence had said the night before, ‘we shall be happy ...’: but I thought, as I walked about, then moved to a rise of ground to lift Cyril to my shoulders and put my hand to my brow and survey the field, that there must be ten times that number there - all the ordinary people of East London, it seemed to be, all jumbled together in Victoria Park, good-natured and careless and dressed in their best. They came, I suppose, as much for the sun as for the socialism. They spread blankets between the stalls and tents, and ate their lunches there, and lay with their sweethearts and babies, and threw sticks for their dogs. But I saw them listening, too, to the speakers at the stalls - sometimes nodding, sometimes arguing, sometimes frowning over a pamphlet, or placing their name upon a list, or fishing pennies from their pockets, to give to some cause.
As I stood and looked, I saw a woman pass by with children at her skirts - it was Mrs Fryer, the poor needlewoman whom Florence and I had visited in the autumn. When I called to her, she came smiling up to me. ‘I got my place in the union, after all,’ she said. ‘Your pal persuaded me to it ...’ We stood chatting for a moment — her children had toffee-apples, and held one up for Cyril to lick. Then there came a blast of music, and people shuffled and murmured and craned their necks, and we stood together, lifting the children high, and watched the Workers’ Pageant - a procession of men and women dressed in all the costumes of all the trades, carrying union banners and flags and flowers. It took quite half-an-hour for the pageant to pass; and when it had done so the people put their fingers to their lips, and whistled and cheered and clapped. Mrs Fryer wept, because her neighbour’s eldest daughter was walking in the line, dressed as a match-girl.
I wished that Florence were with me, and kept looking for her damson-coloured suit and her daisy, but - though I saw just about every other unionist who had ever passed through our parlour — I did not see her once. When I found her at last, she was in the speakers’ tent: she had spent all afternoon there, listening to the lectures. ‘Have you heard?’ she said when she saw me. ‘There’s a rumour that Eleanor Marx is coming: I daren’t leave the tent, for fear of missing her address!’ It turned out she had eaten nothing since breakfast: I went off to buy her a packet of whelks from a stall, and a cup of ginger ale. When I returned I found Ralph beside her, sweating, still pulling at his collar, and paler than ever. Every seat in the tent was taken, and there were people standing, besides. It was stiflingly hot, and the heat was making everyone restless and cross. One speaker had recently made an unpopular point, and been booed from the platform.
‘They won’t boo you, Ralph,’ I said; but when I saw that he was really miserable, I took his arm, left the baby with Florence, and led him from his seat into the cooler air outside. ‘Come on, come and have a fag with me. You mustn’t let the crowd see you are nervous.’
We stood just beyond a flap of the tent - a couple of men from Ralph’s factory went by, and raised their hands to us - and I lit us two cigarettes. Ralph’s fingers shook as he held his, and he almost dropped it, then smiled apologetically: ‘What a fool you must think me.’
‘Not at all! I remember how frightened I was on my first night; I thought I would be sick.’
‘I thought I would be sick, a moment ago.’
‘Everybody thinks it, and no one is’ This wasn’t quite true: I had often seen nervous artistes bent over bowls and fire-buckets at the side of the stage; but I did not, of course, tell Ralph this.
‘Did you ever play before a crowd that was rather rough, Nance?’ he asked me now.
‘What?’ I said. ‘At one hall - Deacon’s, in Islington - there was a poor comedian on before us and some fellows jumped on to the stage and held him upside-down over the footlights, trying to set his hair on fire.’ Ralph blinked two or three times on hearing that, then looked hastily back into the tent, as if to make sure there were no naked flames about, over which an unfriendly audience might take it into their heads to try and tip him. Then he looked queasily at his cigarette, and threw it down.
‘I think, if it’s all the same to you,’ he said, ‘I shall just go off and have another run through my address.’ And before I could open my mouth to persuade him otherwise he had slipped away, and left me smoking on my own.
I did not mind: it was still pleasanter outside the tent than in it. I put the cigarette between my lips and folded my arms, and leaned back a little against the canvas. Then I closed my eyes, and let the sun fall full upon my face; then I took the fag away, and gave a yawn.
And as I did so, there came a woman’s voice at my shoulder, that made me jump.
‘Well! Of all the gals to see at a working people’s rally, I should’ve said that Nancy King would be about the last of ‘em.’
I opened my eyes, let my cigarette fall, and turned to the woman and gave a cry.
‘Zena! Oh! And is it really you?’
It was indeed Zena: she stood beside me plumper and even handsomer than when I had seen her last, and clad in a scarlet coat and a bracelet with charms on. ‘Zena!’ I said again. ‘Oh! How good it is to see you.’ I took her hand and pressed it, and she laughed.
‘I’ve met just about every gal I ever knew here, today,’ she said. ‘And then I saw this other one, standing up against a tent flap with a fag at her lip and I thought, Lord, but don’t she look like old Nan King? What a lark, if it should be her, after all this time - and here, of all places! And I stepped up a bit closer, and then I saw that your hair was all clipped, and I knew it was you, for sure.’
‘Oh, Zena! I was certain I should never hear from you again.’ She looked a little sheepish at that; and then, remembering, I pressed her hand even harder and said in quite a different tone: ‘What a nerve you’ve got, though! After leaving me in such a state, that time in Kilburn! I thought I should die.’
Now she made a show of tossing her head. ‘Well! You done me very brown, you know, over that money.’
‘I do know it. What a little beast I was! I suppose, you never did get to the colonies ...’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘My friend who went to Australia came back. She said the place was full of great rough fellows, and they don’t want landladies; what they want is, wives. I changed my mind about it after that. I’m happy enough, after all, in Stepney.’
‘You’re in Stepney now? But then we’re almost neighbours! I live in Bethnal Green. With my sweetheart. Look, she’s over there.’ I put my hand on her shoulder and pointed into the crowded tent. ‘The one near the stage, with the baby on her arm.’
‘What,’ she said, ‘not Flo Banner, that works at the gals’ home!’
‘You don’t mean, you know her?’
‘I have a couple of pals what’ve lived at Freemantle House, and they are always talking about how marvellous Flo Banner is! You know, I suppose, that half the gals there are mad in love with her ...’
‘With Florence? Are you sure?’
‘I’ll say!’ We looked into the tent together again. Florence was on her feet now, and waving a paper at the speaker at the stage. Zena laughed. ‘Fancy you and Flo Banner!’ she said. ‘I’m sure, she don’t take no nonsense from you.’
‘You’re right,’ I answered, still gazing at Florence, still marvelling at what Zena had told me. ‘She don’t.’
/>
We moved into the sunshine again. ‘And how about you?’ I asked her then. ‘I bet you have a girl, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ she said shyly. ‘The fact is, indeed, I have a couple of ’ em, and can’t quite decide between the two ...’
‘Two! My God!’ I imagined having two sweethearts like Florence: the thought made me ache and start yawning.
‘One of them is about here, somewhere,’ Zena was saying. ‘She is part of a union and - There she is! Maud!’ At her cry, a girl in a blue-and-brown checked coat looked round, and wandered over. Zena took her arm, and the girl smiled.
‘This is Miss Skinner,’ said Zena to me; then, to her sweetheart: ‘Maud, this is Nan King, the singer from the halls.’ Miss Skinner - who was about nineteen or so, and would still have been in short skirts on the night I took my last bow at the Brit - gazed politely at me, and offered me her hand. Zena went on then, ‘Miss King lives with Flo Banner-’ and at once, Miss Skinner’s grip tightened, and her eyes grew wide.
‘Flo Banner?’ she said, in just the tone that Zena had. ‘Flo Banner, of the Guild? Oh! I wonder - I’ve got the programme of the day about me somewhere - do you think, Miss King, you might get her to sign it for me?’
‘Sign it!’ I said. She had produced a paper giving the running-order of the speeches and the layout of the stalls, and held it to me, trembling. Florence’s name, I now saw, was printed, along with one or two others, amongst the list of organisers. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Well. You might ask her yourself, you know: she’s only over there -’
‘Oh, I couldn’t!’ answered Miss Skinner. ‘I should be too shy ...’
In the end I took the paper, and said I would do what I could; and Miss Skinner looked desperately grateful, then went off to tell her friends that she had met me.
