by Maggie Joel
Bertha watched him go and felt a little astonished. And a little disappointed.
After purchasing a stamp for the letter and dropping it into the postbox, she stood in the street looking to the left and right as though she were contemplating the next task on her list of errands. When she saw the young man, now with a small bowler hat on his head, sitting on the bench outside Mulligan’s tea shop, it was almost as though she had willed him there. He was fishing in his pocket for something, a coin perhaps, but his fingers emerged instead with a large fob watch at which he frowned. Then he looked up.
Bertha quickly looked away. Around her, people bustled past with market-day urgency, banging against her with their Saturday shopping. A tram trundled to a stop at the kerbside, disgorging a family of small boys and their young nanny. The conductor leaned out calling, ‘Room up top!’ and pulled the bell. A motor car rumbled up behind the tram, its engine spluttering, and tooted its horn impatiently. But all these noises faded into a distant murmur as Bertha stared straight ahead, her heart fluttering very fast in her ribcage, aware that this was An Important Moment.
Something was going to happen that would change her life forever, or if it did not then an opportunity would be gone and it might never present itself again.
“Scuse me, miss, you forgot your change.’
Bertha spun around to see Mr Lake from the post office standing beside her, his green clerk’s visor pushed to the back of his head, an apron tied around his middle and a small collection of coins in the palm of his ink-stained hand.
‘One and ha’penny for a standard letter. You gave me threepence.’ He tipped the change into her hand then jerked his head down in an oddly formal salute, glared at the young man who was still sitting on the bench, and disappeared back into the post office.
Bertha stared at the coins in her hand and, with a sinking sense of despair, realised that if the young man had noticed her at all, he would now think her a silly, flighty girl with not even a rudimentary grasp of arithmetic.
‘Are you alright, miss?’
She froze and stared with even more intensity at the two coins in her hand. He had stood up! Had spoken to her! What ought she to do?
‘Yes, thank you for asking, I’m perfectly alright.’ She managed a glance at him. Had that been too formal? Too dismissive?
Smile. That was what people did; she must smile at him. She turned her head and smiled directly at him (he did have such nice vivid green eyes!) and he smiled back.
‘I, er, I’m afraid I made a bit of a fool of myself in there,’ he said then, nodding his head at the door to the post office, and his slight stammer, the tinge of colour to his cheeks, gave her courage—he was shy!—and even though she thought he had indeed made a fool of himself, she rushed to his defence.
‘Oh no! I thought it was marvellous!’ She swallowed. Had that been too much? ‘I mean, I think it’s wonderful when—when people say what they mean. When people believe, really believe strongly in something!’
He took a tentative step towards her, his eyes observing her eagerly. ‘Do you? So few people do...’
‘Oh yes!’ said Bertha, unsure what it was that she was agreeing to and then realising she could think of nothing to follow up with. ‘Oh yes,’ she repeated, less certainly.
‘It’s so refreshing to hear you say so, miss. So many people, young people like us who have seen first-hand the horrors of the world our fathers have created, who ought to be concerned, who ought to be shaping the world we shall some day inherit, are just...apathetic. Too concerned with dances and American films and mass-produced garments from these foreign-owned stores that are squeezing out honest working people...’ He stopped, his face quite red now. ‘Sorry. No manners.’ He snatched off his little bowler hat and ducked his head at her. ‘Booth. Ronald Booth. Ronnie.’
Ronnie. Bertha sighed. She had always liked the name Ronnie. It was friendly, sort of. Familiar.
‘Bertha, Bertha Flaxheed. Miss.’ She flushed at this last word. Was she being too forward?
There was a slight pause, the initial rush of emotion and then the formalities of introductions leaving a gap that for a while appeared too vast to ever be bridged. Bertha skidded from one corner of her mind to another, seeking with increasing desperation a subject, a sentence, a word that would break the silence. There was nothing, her mind was empty.
‘Are you—do you involve yourself in politics, Miss Flaxheed?’
She experienced a rush of relief.
‘Well, Mr Booth, I was saying to my father just the other day how I am twenty-two years old now—’ Dear Lord, she had told him her age! ‘and how in eight years’ time I may find myself in a position to exercise my democratic right and vote for a government and...and how I intend to...to understand, to read, to know as much as possible before that time so that when that time comes, I should be able to make the correct choice.’
She had said nothing of the kind to Dad, though now that she thought about it, it was something she felt she might tell him, one day.
‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Mr Booth enthusiastically. ‘If only more of your sex felt the same way, Miss Flaxheed, then we would show them, eh?’
‘Indeed!’ said Bertha, wondering who ‘they’ were and what exactly she might show them.
‘I am a teacher, a teacher of music, at the grammar school and it is fair to say that few, very few indeed of my female pupils take but the slightest interest in the current political climate, or indeed in any political climate.’ He reflected sadly for a moment or two. ‘In fact, they take only the slightest interest in music, it must be said.’
‘Girls are so silly and self-absorbed,’ said Bertha, who had once been one and felt this excused her betrayal of her sex. ‘But I beg you not to lose hope, Mr Booth, for out of every class of silly and self-absorbed girls there will be one who will trouble herself to learn about the world.’
This sounded pompous but she hoped he would ignore this and instead look upon her as the one girl in the class.
‘I’m certain you are right, Miss Flaxheed, and if every classroom in England can produce such a girl then there is hope for the New World.’
This seemed a little excessive, but Bertha smiled brightly.
Mr Booth seemed to hesitate before reaching a decision.
‘You see, I am involved in a group that meets occasionally to discuss just such issues as these, Miss Flaxheed: the rights of the worker, the role of the trade unions, the place of socialism in our world, that sort of thing.’ Bertha nodded wisely. ‘Indeed, this letter I was intending to post was concerned with a rally we are holding this Sunday coming. It—I—the rally is open to all, and we welcome our sisters in the fight. Should you care to come, I would be honoured.’ He swallowed. ‘It will be at Hyde Park at three o’clock. You ought to come, Miss Flaxheed—it is every woman’s duty.’
Bertha swayed and the pavement gradually melted away and so too did the tram and the market-day shoppers into the September sunshine far away so that all she could see was his vivid green eyes.
‘Yes, Mr Booth, I should like to very much.’
The tram trundled along Bayswater Road and elegant young courting couples swam before Bertha’s eyes. The north side of Hyde Park was on her right, surrounded by black-painted railings over which she could see the bandstand decked with red, white and blue pennants and a brass band in scarlet tunics tuning their instruments. The waters of the Serpentine glittered in the distance.
The tram swung around the corner into Park Lane. One side of the road was lined with the magnificent mansions of London’s wealthy and a number of the newly built American hotels. On the other side of Park Lane, within the park itself, was a great crowd of people and their noise, and the shouts of the men on soapboxes, could be heard above the rattle of the tram. This was Speakers’ Corner.
They must get off! This was their stop.
Bertha found she couldn’t move.
‘Have a peanut,’ said Jemima and Bertha stared at her sister th
en down at the white paper bag in her sister’s outstretched hand.
‘A peanut?’ she said incredulously. Was this a moment for peanuts?
‘Left over from the Globe on Friday night. Thought we might need nourishment.’
‘But we must get off—this is our stop!’ gasped Bertha, lunging from her seat, which, as Jemima had yet to move from the aisle seat, proved ineffectual.
‘Do be careful!’ protested Jemima crossly, extricating herself from her sister’s lunge. They untangled themselves, tumbled down the spiral staircase as the tram screeched to a halt, and skipped down onto the kerb, Jemima forgetting her crossness of a moment ago and laughing at their near miss.
Bertha stood on the kerb trying to regain her balance and feeling quite sick.
‘We ’ave been betrayed!’
From inside the park a cheer went up, followed by a few jeers.
‘Aye, brothers, betrayed I say—betrayed and duped by the very men we voted for! The very men we trusted to deliver us from this yoke of poverty and degradation!’
The words, a hoarse shout delivered in a thick northern voice, were drowned out by another cheer and a flurry of shouts and whistles. From across the road Bertha and Jemima strained to see through the railings. Two red double-decker Generals had swung into Park Lane and disgorged their passengers, so that for a moment it was impossible to move at all. When finally they were able to cross the road and to hurry arm in arm, and with growing excitement, into the park, they were confronted by a throng of people that stretched from Park Lane all the way to the Serpentine.
Groups of young men, some in cloth caps and shirt sleeves, others in brown Sunday-best suits and bowler hats, stood around heckling the speakers and bantering with each other. Courting couples strolled from one speaker to another, amused as much by each other as by the words they were hearing. Children dodged between legs, chasing each other and running from their parents.
Of the speakers themselves, there were preachers of a dozen different hues, from Baptist to Methodist to Jew to a single Hindu in a white turban skilfully dodging the rotten fruit that routinely came his way.
‘Mr Ramsay MacDonald! Ha! I say you are no friend to the working man, Mr MacDonald! What have you done, in your eight months in your fancy new office at Downing Street? What have you done for the likes of us?’
The speaker was a lean and heavily moustachioed young man in a striped shirt and braces, with a cloth cap on his head, who stood on a wooden box punching the air with his fist.
‘He’s done more than the likes of you ’ave, anyhow!’ shouted a bearded man in wire spectacles, and as Bertha and Jemima hurried off the shouts of a dozen speakers pursued them...
‘I’ve seen first hand, brothers, the conditions of our brothers in the northern collieries and I can tell you it’s a scandal! Poverty, brothers, poverty and famine! Wages have been cut by forty per cent! Forty per cent!’
‘This government cares nowt for the working man. You were better off with a Tory—at least then you knew who your enemy was!’
‘And I ask you why? Why is it, brothers, that this government, and all governments, hunt down the communists? Why it is that all across the country, laws are passed and free-speaking men—men like yourselves—are hunted down and imprisoned? I’ll tell you why: it’s because they are afraid!’
‘Beware! Beware my friend, for they are everywhere! The communist is in your place of work, he is in your street, he is your neighbour, he may be in your family—he is everywhere! Pervading and spreading his revolutionary filth, for make no mistake, my friend, he will stop at nothing.’
It was quite dizzying, all these different voices, made more so by the crowds who seemed in no mood to listen to anybody for more than two minutes, and regularly called back responses to the questions posed, often in sarcastic or rude tones.
‘Where is he, then, this young man of yours?’ gasped Jemima, as they dodged to avoid a scuffle that threatened to erupt near by. ‘He’d better not be one of these cloth-cap-and-braces sorts.’
Bertha looked all around, but the number of speakers was so great she felt quite confused. Mr Booth had said a rally and she had taken that to mean a great political assembly of people of a like mind, come together to share their thoughts and to rouse themselves to action, not this chaotic and inarticulate rabble.
(Would he be in a cloth cap and braces? Surely not.)
‘This way!’ she said, dragging Jemima past a particularly large white banner. The banner belonged to the League of Women for a Return to Domestic Duties and was held by two stuffily dressed middle-aged ladies. Above them, a third lady, in a wide-brimmed hat and clutching a parasol, stood atop a small stepladder.
‘...urge you, my dear sisters, not to be tempted by the ways of the man’s world, for it is not for us! It is God’s bidding that we, the fairer sex, embrace the duties that He has deemed are ours. Do not be tempted by these changes in the laws that offer suffrage for all, for that way lies disaster! It will spell the end of home life, the end of marriage, the end of childbirth. It my dear sisters, the end of Femininity itself!’
‘Piffle!’ said Bertha, annoyed.
‘Miss Flaxheed! Miss Flaxheed, over here!’
Bertha saw him immediately, only a few feet away, waving to her though prevented by a particularly thick crush of people from reaching her.
‘Mr Booth! There he is!’ she said triumphantly, and she waved at him to seal the matter.
‘Ha!’ said Jemima enigmatically.
Bertha elbowed and pushed her way through the crowd, pulling Jemima after her, until they had reached a little group of younger men and one or two young women who were gathered around an elaborate speaker’s box. It was really more of a lectern, and over it was draped a large red and gold banner on which was embroidered a crest. Closer inspection revealed it to be two crossed arms in red and black with the words Socialism Through Unity woven around the top, and People! Organisation! Rights! along the bottom.
They weren’t communists, were they?
‘Stupor,’ said Jemima.
‘What?’ Bertha turned to her distractedly.
‘Socialism Through Unity. People! Organisation! Rights! STUPOR.’
‘Miss Flaxheed!’
He was not, thank God, in a cloth cap, and he was wearing a Sunday jacket over his shirt so Bertha couldn’t see if he was wearing braces or not. On his head was the smart little bowler and his auburn hair was smoothed back very neatly, the large moustache trimmed and very tidy, his eyes still that quite dazzling shade of green.
‘Mr Booth!’
‘Miss Flaxheed!’ He came forward, fighting his way through the throng, and Bertha despaired of them ever getting beyond this heralding of each other.
‘Oh, you must be Mr Booth. Charmed I’m sure,’ and Jemima swept ahead and held out her gloved right hand.
Immediately Mr Booth, who had been about to offer his hand to Bertha, changed direction mid-stride and, registering her sister, withdrew his hand to tip his hat to her instead.
‘Oh. My sister, Mr Booth, Miss Jemima Flaxheed,’ explained Bertha, feeling uncomfortably that she had been outmanoeuvred.
‘A pleasure, Miss Flaxheed, indeed a great pleasure.’ His eyes shone as though he were thrilled that they were, both of them, there. Then he turned and hesitantly reached for Bertha’s hand, and as Bertha had assumed she had been forgotten where hand-shaking was concerned, there was a moment of confusion as his hand hovered unanswered in the air and Bertha, realising her mistake, dived at it, missed and stumbled into him.
‘Sorry, I’m so sorry,’ said Mr Booth and Bertha smiled bravely and was mortified. ‘You had a safe journey, I hope?’ he asked, which, considering they had come on the tram from Acton and not on the Mauretania from New York seemed excessive.
‘At least the tram was running,’ complained Jemima. ‘They seem to be on strike more or less all the time at present.’
‘And that is the very reason we are here, Miss Flaxheed!’ exclaimed M
r Booth, turning to her eagerly. ‘We—’ and he spread his arm in a sweeping motion to take in the crowd surrounding the lectern, ‘are the embodiment of all that is wrong with England today!’ He paused. ‘By which I mean, we are here to try to put right all that is wrong with England today.’
‘Rather a tall order, wouldn’t you say?’ remarked Jemima.
Bertha rounded on her impatiently. ‘A tall order is only tall until you scale it!’ she declared, trusting Mr Booth wouldn’t recognise the quote, which she had stolen from the Girl Guides handbook.
‘That’s it! That’s it exactly, Miss Flaxheed,’ replied Mr Booth. ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head. The Socialism Through Unity league endeavours to identify the many injustices in our society and bring them to the attention of those in the opposition parties, in the unions, in various political leagues and organisations...’
‘In other words, to get them to do your dirty work for you,’ finished Jemima, and Bertha felt her irritation reach such a level that she was quite breathless.
It was a very warm afternoon now, the trees around the edge of the park and down by the Serpentine offering little shade to the crowds at Speakers’ Corner, and Bertha could feel her dress sticking to her underarms. A pinkish tinge had appeared on Mr Booth’s forehead and cheeks as though his fair skin was already catching the sun. Jemima, in her slim cotton summer dress was the picture of cool disdain. She gazed past Mr Booth at the scowling, pale-faced man who had just stepped up to the lectern.
‘Mr Jamie Cannon,’ explained Mr Booth. ‘Our West London delegate and one of our founding members.’
Mr Cannon, who was wearing a dark suit that was a size too small for him, paused, fingering his collar, which was buttoned tightly at his throat. He suddenly gripped both lapels and his eyes—black, unblinking eyes—swept the assembled crowd.
‘Mr Cannon has just returned from a tour of the north,’ whispered Mr Booth.
‘Ah,’ said Bertha nodding, and Jemima, with a snort of derision, wandered off.
