A Woman's Place

by Maggie Ford

  Again she shook her head. ‘Verity will be there. She will stay by me.’

  ‘She’s closer to your mum than you are and she might not be of any comfort. I really ought to be there with you, Connie.’

  This time Connie put up no objection, merely nodding absently.

  When Verity’s next letter came giving Thursday as the day of the funeral, together with time and place, Eveline hurried over to her mother-in-law to see if she would take care of Helena overnight, hoping Gran might do the same for Connie. To her surprise, Albert’s mum without hesitation offered to take both.

  ‘I raised two blooming boisterous boys,’ she said firmly. ‘If I can’t look after two little well-behaved seven-year-old girls fer one night, I’m a blooming monkey’s uncle! Of course I’ll ’ave ’em.’

  ‘But two’s more trouble than one,’ Eveline said, relieved even so.

  ‘They don’t ’ave ter be. Now don’t yer worry, Ev love, they’ll be orright with me. They can both go in Albert’s old bed with no trouble.’

  She and Connie left early that Thursday morning. Having informed their employers the day before that there was a family bereavement, no questions were asked. Bereavements had become a frequent occurrence with thousands of men being slaughtered daily.

  Eveline hadn’t anticipated the shock of witnessing a mother and daughter divided. Somehow it seemed far worse than when she had been divided from her own mother over Helena. At least the rift had healed even if Mum would never alter from the cool-natured woman she’d always been.

  Meeting Verity for the first time she was surprised to see how like Connie she looked, a friendly, likeable, approachable girl with no side to her. Their mother, whom they both took after in looks and carriage, was another matter entirely. She kissed Verity warmly but the sight of Connie had her moving back, cold and distant, almost as though she didn’t see her.

  Not once throughout the entire funeral service did she speak to her, Connie taking the hint and standing on the far side of the grave among the friends and colleagues of her father as the coffin was slowly lowered.

  Eveline could not see whether the woman wept or not for the dense black veil over her gaunt face, but she held herself erect the whole time, for which Eveline found herself admiring her. She started to see how she could have held herself so aloof from her daughter for so long.

  She felt Connie, standing with an arm through hers, give a small tremble and heard a stifled sob. Immediately she firmed her grip on the arm. The sob ceased abruptly and it was Connie she now found herself admiring. Watching her father being lowered into his grave, not once in his life having offered words of forgiveness much less love, and her mother standing cold and aloof, well away from her, it had to be a terrible ordeal for any girl to endure. But worse would come.

  With her arm still through Eveline’s, she moved in the wake of her mother and sister, all that were left of her family, towards the smart funeral limousine taking them back to the large and lonely house.

  They were three feet from the vehicle when Connie’s mother stepped in front of them, barring her daughter’s path.

  ‘You have paid your respects to your father,’ she said curtly with not a tremble to her tone. ‘Now I ask you to go home. It is a pity you could not show your respect to him whilst he was alive.’

  Eveline could hardly believe what she’d heard uttered. Connie seemed shocked into silence for a moment or two, but finally found her voice.

  ‘It was he who asked me to leave my home. And it was both he and you who refused to see me again. I had every respect for Father, except …’

  ‘Except that you preferred to go against his wishes.’

  ‘I was in love with George. I couldn’t …’

  ‘You chose your life, Constance, chose to throw your father’s concern for your future back into his face. Now you seek to ingratiate yourself with me through your poor father’s death. Well, Constance, I think not.’

  In all this, the woman had held herself rigid and calm. Now suddenly, she seemed to crumple. She lifted her veil to stare into her daughter’s face and Eveline saw the fine features twist. The eyes, lit by a gleam of almost insane fury, almost made her step back. But it was the words hissing from that twisted, unforgiving mouth that stunned her.

  ‘Why is your husband still alive when both my sons are dead, my daughter’s husband dead, my own husband dead?’

  ‘Mother!’ The cry ripped itself from Connie’s lips.

  ‘That rogue you call your husband, why should he live when all the men in my family are gone?’ Her eyes burned and glittered with animosity. ‘Why are you still living – the one person I shall never grieve for?’

  Eveline heard Connie gasp, saw her body begin to fail. She caught her before she could slip to the ground, but Connie’s mother had already turned on her heel and was getting into the limousine. Verity, helping her, looked back at her sister, her eyes beseeching.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered quickly over her shoulder. ‘I’m so very sorry, Connie.’

  Clambering in beside her mother she closed the door, the limousine moving off slowly.

  Eveline sat at ease on a wooden packing case, Connie next to her, eating their lunchtime sandwiches.

  Beside her, Connie had her head buried in a newspaper she’d just bought from a vendor outside the factory gate. She had recovered pretty well from the deaths of her brother and father though she never mentioned them or her mother in any conversation and Eveline felt it best to let sleeping dogs lie.

  She ate slowly to make it seem more than it was. A frugal lunch had become a necessity these days with food shortages biting hard – patriotically she’d cut the bread thin, with a sliver of cheese plus a bit of pickle, and a flask of tea; it was hardly filling. Cake was becoming a thing of the past, even home-made cake, with flour in short supply. Indeed, with German submarines attacking merchant ships – more than a hundred sunk last month alone – everything was in short supply. It was even a job to get a pound of potatoes and everywhere shops and stalls had signs proclaiming no this, no that, so that most of her time after work was taken up trying to find provisions, even with the rationing.

  With her back against the warm brick wall of the factory, she closed her eyes against the glare of the June sunshine, its heat on her face making her think of seeking shade. But most of her more sensible fellow workers had already taken up what shade there was.

  It was so hot. Inside was unbearable but even out here there was little breeze to temper this heatwave: ninety-three degrees, the newspapers were quoting.

  Suddenly Connie looked up, pushing the newspaper at her.

  ‘Eveline, look, just there!’ She pointed to the column she had been reading. ‘It says that the Commons have voted by a three hundred and thirty majority to give the vote to married women over thirty. To think, after all this time.’

  Eveline took the paper and scanned it. ‘Married women over thirty,’ she echoed. ‘It won’t include us. Me twenty-six and you twenty-seven.’

  ‘But we will eventually be able to vote. It’s a start. Wonderful news. After all our struggles, it takes a simple war to give the vote to women.’

  Simple! Eveline wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. Connie could be so giddy at times. Yes, they had struggled, and fought, and suffered, and some had died. They’d endured imprisonment, forced feeding, ridicule, had been ignored, loathed and often viciously handled by men averse to them. Perhaps Connie was right, it had to take a simple thing like countries going to war against each other to achieve what they had been striving for so long to gain.

  She looked at the newspaper column again. So few words, as if it was merely a throwaway decision. Last March, Asquith, who had always been opposed to women’s suffrage, had stated that women should work out their own salvation. And they had, thousands of women doing what had once been men’s jobs, working for their country while men were away fighting, and all there was to be seen of it in the papers was this one small column. Well, gran
d!

  She handed the paper back to Connie. ‘You can call it a start, but it hasn’t been passed yet. It still has to go through a third parliamentary reading. Goodness knows when that will be.’

  The same old routine: an encouraging beginning, then a few months later, the bill thrown out. She would lay no store by it. The proof of the pudding was in the eating.

  ‘It is a start,’ Connie pouted, for once stubborn, but Eveline couldn’t feel that convinced.

  ‘We’ve had so many starts, all false,’ she added as she folded her empty paper bag to save for tomorrow’s sandwiches, got up and went back into the shade of the factory floor, stifling though it was, ready for an afternoon’s grind at a gaping machine making shell cases.

  Even so, the news was mulled over at their Wednesday branch meeting, though with the same sense of not having achieved it by their own campaigning, as if they had been done out of some triumph. In fact after the first flurry of chatter over it, conversation turned to the recent air raids on London, not by Zeppelins but aeroplanes. These proved far more alarming, being swifter and harder to hit; at one time fifteen had been counted in one air raid. Worse, they caused far greater loss of life. One had hit a school, another a railway station, wrecking a train.

  ‘I don’t know what things are coming to,’ said one member, going on to complain of the government’s decision not to install air-raid hooters in factories in case workers used them as an excuse to take time off work. ‘It could cause more loss of life and I think it’s disgraceful.’ Her listeners murmured agreement, any more talk of women’s enfranchisement taking second place to the events of the times.

  Len married Flossie early in September. It was a quiet wedding, with him on crutches; his new false leg had been rubbing his stump so badly that it had become infected and was still being treated. She hung on to his arm at the altar as if fearing he might fall down. But they were happy, even though after a hot, dry summer it decided to pour with rain on their wedding day.

  The church smelled of wet macs and umbrellas left inside the porch as Flossie divested herself of her mac to reveal a somewhat crumpled wedding dress. Afterwards it was almost a sprint to Len’s parents’ flat for the celebrations, a sign on his dad’s shop saying SORRY – CLOSED FOR THE WEDDING OF MY SON.

  This time it was the Fentons’ flat that smelled of rain-soaked macs and umbrellas hanging on the coat stand in their narrow upstairs passage, but the weather didn’t diminish the fun of eating, drinking and singing – jolly old songs: ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag’, and ‘Goodbye-ee, Don’t Cry-ee’, and specially ‘The Bells are Ringing for Me and My Girl’, which felt very appropriate to the day.

  For a few hours they could all forget, or try to forget, the desperate fields of Flanders, the pictures of the gaping craters of Ypres and the quagmire Passchendaele was becoming, where their fighting men had got bogged down by mud. It was raining there too. Three women who couldn’t forget for one minute were Eveline’s sister Tilly, her husband having recently been sent out there, and Eveline and Connie, who was more like her sister than Tilly. Their husbands they now knew were already there, training camp having ended many weeks ago.

  Eveline wrote a long letter to Albert all about the wedding, hoping it wouldn’t be too delayed. She wanted to tell him about his brother Jim, but thought it best not too. Jim’s girl had broken it off with him, while he was away somewhere in France. It seemed such a terribly unfair and cruel thing to do, though from the way his mother had described her perhaps he was better off without her. But it was hard to be told that sort of news when a man’s away fighting for his country unable to do anything.

  The shattered remains of the small town of Ypres seen from a distance resembled a jumble of rotten teeth, but Albert’s mind was too blasted to even look at it as he and a team of wet and weary men heaved and pushed and pulled at a field gun bogged down in the mud. It hadn’t stopped raining for so long, he couldn’t remember when last it hadn’t rained.

  ‘Get yer shoulders to it, yer useless buggers! Move it!’

  At the hoarse bellow of the corporal, he heaved harder. Out here in the open wasn’t good. But most of the trenches had caved in, from shelling and subsidence from incessant rain, some with three feet of water in them, just like the shell holes, just like the one he could see to the left of him, the water it held deep enough to drown a wounded man if he fell into it. No getting out again up those steep, wet chalky sides. Calm the water looked, calm as any country pond, calm and treacherous, benignly reflecting the overcast sky and other toiling figures on the far side of it.

  ‘Adams! Stop gazing ararnd like some bleedin’ lovesick woman! Put some bloody weight be’ind it.’

  He saw George grin briefly at him, and saw his feet slip in the slimy morass as he heaved, threatening to send him almost flat on his face, his puttees thick with mud. He couldn’t see his own boots, ankle-deep in it; one or two of the others were in halfway to their knees. And they were being expected to haul this perishing gun out? Some bloody hopes! What a blooming life!

  He saw the aeroplane, heard the rattle of its machine-gun fire and ducked instinctively as it swooped. Something disengaged itself from the plane and he threw himself flat as the bomb hit the ground with a terrific explosion. He caught a glimpse of George describing a strange revolving movement as though dancing in slow motion and knew George had been hit.

  Automatically, with the roar of the aeroplane and racket of returning rifle fire from men on the ground seeming a long way off like in a dream, he leaped towards him with some idea of protecting him.

  Others had been hit but he didn’t see them. Showered by mud and debris, he caught George’s arm as he began to slide down into the newly formed crater along with tons of thick mud. All he could see of his friend’s right side was a mass of bloody flesh as if he’d been sliced in two, but he still hung on, he himself almost sliding into the hole. If he went in too he’d never get out again and he knew instinctively that George was already dead.

  Letting go, he lay face down in the mud, watching as if in a trance as the limp body slid away from him, slipping slowly downwards amid a flow of wet clay and silt. He saw it come to rest at the bottom while the disturbed sides of the crater continued to flow, slowly, inexorably covering the body, a ready-made grave. He realised he was crying as someone got him on his feet and began helping him away.

  There were other bodies nearby, but all he could see was George sliding away from him; he might never be found in this forsaken acre of mire men were fighting over. The gun they’d been trying to extricate was nowhere to be seen; that too had gone into the crater.

  ‘I’m so sorry, mate,’ someone said. ‘So sorry.’ But Albert hardly heard him.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Connie’s grief was awful to see, not because she hadn’t stopped crying but because she hadn’t cried at all – two months had gone by since getting the telegram and not a single tear had Eveline seen her shed, this girl who usually wept at the drop of a hat.

  These days of war, grief was kept behind locked doors. With so many men being lost every single day, who would dare to insult the grief of others with public tears as if they were the only one bereaved? And so Connie hadn’t cried and Eveline felt utterly helpless to comfort her. In fact any attempt at comfort seemed lost on her.

  It was like watching someone in a trance to watch her going about her daily life. Even the day the telegram had come, she’d gone to work as usual, the admirable young widow refusing to let her loss get the better of her, but Eveline believed she knew different.

  That day she’d waited for Connie at the school gates as usual, having seen Helena into school. As Connie arrived, Eveline noticed how rigid she seemed and when she straightened up from kissing goodbye to Rebecca, her face was stiff as a mask.

  She had held out the buff-coloured telegram every family dreaded. ‘It came this morning,’ she said, her tone steady, while shock spread through Eveline’s system with no need to re
ad the words that began: regret to inform you …

  An instant later, her breath escaping in a heartfelt cry, she had flung her arms about her, but Connie had pulled away to tug her coat straight as though embarrassed that other mothers might have witnessed the gesture.

  ‘We’ll be late for work,’ she’d said in such a quiet tone that Eveline could hardly believe she’d heard her right. Never had she seen her so calm, Connie who usually resorted to tears at any given moment. It was unnatural.

  ‘You can’t go to work,’ she’d said, wanting to cry for her. ‘I’ll stay with you. I’ll take the time off. You can’t be alone.’

  Connie had shaken her head. ‘We have to go to work. It’s what we have to do.’ And that was what she did.

  Now Christmas was upon them, their girls on school holiday sitting in Connie’s flat, heads together, making paper chains. Connie had said at first that she wasn’t having any, but had meekly submitted to Eveline’s urging to have some sort of Christmas decoration for Rebecca’s sake. After all, the girl did not seem to be missing her dad, having not seen him for over three years except for the few brief days of his leave.

  ‘She still needs to enjoy Christmas, Connie,’ she said and saw the slight, careless shrug of Connie’s shoulders.

  It was upsetting to see her like this. But how would she have behaved if it had been Albert? Where they had once happily exchanged snippets from their husband’s letters, she felt it better not to share the bits of news in Albert’s letters. Connie never asked after him, which was understandable, but sometimes she would catch Connie giving her a sideways glance that, if she hadn’t known her for her sweet nature, she’d have said bore a touch of pettiness. Perhaps it went with bereavement.

  It was, of course, asking too much to expect her to perk up because it was Christmas, but she had hoped it might have made a difference. It didn’t.