Hannah had never seen so many well-dressed people – men in tall hats and beautifully cut suits, swinging silver-topped canes as they strolled along; women in a multitude of colours, silks, laces, feathers, ruchings, ribbons and artificial flowers. They looked like glorious dolls, good enough to eat. The well-to-do people in the Borders had been sober dressers and any woman who turned out in daytime wearing the sort of outfit that went almost unremarked in London would have scandalized the entire neighbourhood.
The huge London emporia, selling everything anyone could possibly want from all over the world, entranced the girl. She walked from street to street gazing at the goods displayed, imagining the lives of people who would eat off the gilded silver and the painted plates or wear the corseted ball gowns and beautifully trimmed straw hats that she saw displayed.
When Aylie and Hannah went shopping in Melrose it was a once-a-year expedition for a new bondager’s hat, a pair of sturdy boots or a length of printed cotton.
They rarely went into the town grocery shop because they grew most of their food. In London Hannah wandered round food shops selling huge pink hams, rounds of cheese as big as cart wheels, bottles of preserves and pickles, crystallized fruits in a myriad of colours, tea and coffee from open crates that scented the air outside on the pavement.
It was the largesse of London that she found so astonishing – nothing was done in small measures.
It took a week before she was definitely sure that she wanted to stay in London. The memories of her home faded gradually away till they caused her less anguish. If she was to survive at all, however, she knew that she had to get away from the Kennedys and she had to find some work… but what could a girl with no training and no references do? She looked around on her walks and saw that the busiest places in London seemed to be the public houses. They must always be in need of staff. She’d be a barmaid.
She was lucky. Her first job came her way because the owner of a large and busy bar in Cheapside was impres-by her majestic appearance. He put her behind the china-handled beer pumps with the instructions, ‘Take no cheek, gal, just look at them with those eyes of yours and you’ll have no trouble.’
Clerks from nearby offices came into the hostelry and stared in amazement at the new barmaid, a disdainful Fury with her thick, dark curling hair and striking face, for although Hannah did not have the refined beauty of her mother and Jane, she exuded an energy that drew men to her like flies to honey. She did nothing to encourage this, in fact quite the opposite, because she treated her admirers with a scorn that only made them keener.
One of the other barmaids was a buxom girl called Bella Marshall whose slanting, knowing brown eyes made her look as if she was always three jumps ahead of everybody else. She took a fancy to Hannah and invited her to share her room in an alleyway off Fleet Street. The offer was eagerly accepted because Hannah was glad to get away from the gypsy family. She was tired of having her possessions systematically fingered over and stolen every time she left their overcrowded hovel.
In the 1870s and 1880s London was a refuge for political agitators from all over the world who fled to its anonymity and crowded into its bars and eating houses, talking agitatedly among themselves, holding surreptitious meetings and making abortive schemes for world revolution under the indulgent eyes of authorities who did not take them very seriously. Bella knew a good many of them and listened to their talk with cheeky dimples marking her cheeks and a sceptical look in her eyes.
One morning when Hannah got up to make their morning tea, Bella was standing staring out of their window and stretching like a surfeited cat.
She smiled at Hannah and, gesturing with her thumb over her shoulder, said casually, ‘Meet Gunther.’
A blond-haired young man was still reclining, naked as far as Hannah could see, between the crumpled sheets of Bella’s bed.
Hannah was used to her friend’s casual pick-ups and she nodded briefly in Gunther’s direction while she went on making their tea. That first day she hardly noticed him but he came back so frequently that in time she accepted him as a semi-permanent fixture in their lives.
‘Where do you come from, Gunther?’ she asked him one day.
‘I’m from Potsdam,’ was his reply.
‘What are you doing here? What do you work at?’
‘I’m an artist.’ He had a guttural accent but his English was very good.
‘An artist, are you? But you never seem to do any work. Have you a studio?’
He grinned, his face lighting up like the face of a naughty small boy. ‘You’re right, Hannah, I don’t do much work. You’re very observant.’
She felt that he was making fun of her and she reverted to being stiff and disapproving with him, an attitude that seemed to make him even more eager to tease her. He annoyed her most when he criticized her political beliefs.
‘You’re so bourgeois, Hannah. You say you want to change the world but you’re stuck in the old ways. You believe people should work and earn money, don’t you? Have you ever considered alternative ways of living?’
‘Of course I have but I also know that everyone has to eat…’ She resented the charge that she was conventional in her attitudes. It reminded her too strongly of the accusations she used to throw at her mother.
Gunther liked a discussion. ‘But that could be arranged if property was redistributed, couldn’t it? There are far too few people owning far too much – the rest of us have to scrape along as best as we can. I’d like to see things arranged differently, wouldn’t you?’
She nodded vehemently. ‘Yes, of course, but I’m beginning to think it’s impossible. I’ve been in London for five months now and I’m still amazed at the lives people lead in the richest city in the world. In one district they’re living in luxury but only a mile away, others are dying of starvation.’
‘You have such fervour!’ teased Gunther. ‘You should come to our meetings. On your next night off, I’ll take you.’
Her free night was Sunday. He took her to an attic room in Clerkenwell above a tailoring workshop where women were still working though it was after ten o’clock. A group of Gunther’s friends, men and a few women, were gathered together, all arguing loudly in a variety of foreign accents and drinking bottles of ale brought in from the public house next door. There were two Russians; a Frenchwoman; three vehement, noisy Scots from Glasgow; an intense-looking Englishman and another woman; Gunther and Hannah. No one took any notice of her at first but when she heard the Englishman, who had a very upper-class accent, expounding the theory that everyone should leave the city and go to live in the country in order to create the perfect Utopian society, she spoke up loudly, though none too tactfully, in protest.
‘Oh, you’re talking rubbish, you don’t know anything about what it’s like to be one of the labouring poor. I come from a family of agricultural labourers and I can tell you there’s nothing Utopian about it. People like you only see the country in good weather – if it’s too cold or too wet, you rush back into your big houses and sit round the fire – a fire that’s made up for you by a housemaid. You don’t even carry your own coal! Have you any idea of what it’s like to work in mud that reaches your thighs, to carry bags of corn on your back that weigh more than you do, to chop up turnips with frozen fingers to feed cows that are better housed than you are? I bet you haven’t!’
Her scorn was magnificently withering and the crowd in the room looked at her with awe. Before she left, a bearded man came over and said to her with approval, ‘You spoke well, young woman, but have you any suggestion that would be better than his?’
Hannah flushed scarlet. All eyes were on her and she had to justify herself so she thought rapidly and said, ‘There must be some way of removing inequalities, there must be a better way than sending everybody back to the land. You can’t turn back the pages of history, can you? Manufacturing is necessary. It’s just that all the profits should not go into so few pockets.’
The bearded man nodded sympathetically
and said in a friendly way, ‘My name’s Kropotkin, Peter Kropotkin. I’m an exile from Russia because of my political beliefs. You and I seem to think the same way… Tell me your name, tell me about yourself.’
Peter Kropotkin was an aristocrat who had become converted to the theories of Anarchistic Communism and his advocacy of it meant that the Tsarist authorities threw him into prison. He had escaped in 1876 and arrived in London, by way of Switzerland. Around him the London Anarchist movement was rapidly growing. Hannah, dazzled by his conviction and charisma, became one of his most enthusiastic followers. Gunther was one already, but much more lukewarm than she rapidly became.
The dashing-looking girl with her intense, slanting cheekboned face made a charismatic representative for Kropotkin’s movement because she could talk with authority about the life of the poor – not only because of what she saw in the East End but because of the way she had lived as a child and, most especially, because of her bitter memories of her father’s fate. She built Hugh into a sort of folk hero, ignoring the fact that his transportation sentence had been for smuggling, and painting him as a political martyr. Talking about her father, whom she hardly knew and had only really seen when he was a raving lunatic – made her incandescent with rage.
She became the perfect mouthpiece against the wrongs society inflicted on its people. As she talked and lectured, as she persuaded people to follow Kropotkin, she became more and more convinced that anarchy was the answer to society’s problems. Only when the people were prepared to take the law into their own hands, to kill and steal if necessary for the cause, would things ever change, she said.
‘It’s no use waiting for legislation, it always comes too late and in a watered-down form. What is needed is a root and branch attack – a cut at the heart of the world we know.’ Her argument, combined with her exotic appearance and burning conviction, brought many followers to her in dazzled admiration.
* * *
Hugh Kennedy had not been expected to live more than ten years when he was admitted to Craighouse Asylum but the strong body that had kept him going through the privations of Australia sustained him again and he stayed alive for more than twenty years. He was blind, he was raving, he knew no one, but he kept on living. Each year when his wife made her pilgrimage to the hospital and stared at him through the bars of his cell door where he was kept chained to his bed like an animal, she silently prayed that he would die soon. It would be a merciful release.
In the autumn of 1885 the news of his death finally arrived at Charterhall in an official letter from Edinburgh. She felt no great grief as she read the words, for the man she had married on that winter day in Coldstream had died long ago as far as she was concerned. His death would be a blow for Hannah, however, for she had always cherished an unreal idea of her father. Aylie sat down and wrote her daughter a tender letter. When she finished, she stretched back in her chair and her eye wandered out into the garden where the leaves were drifting down from her apple trees and the last of the flowers were slowly fading.
I’m in my autumn too, she thought, I’m fading just like my flowers and I’m so lonely… so terribly lonely.
The world of ‘it might have been’ was too painful to contemplate so as usual she closed her mind to such thoughts and went bustling about preparing to take Hannah’s letter to the post. She was grateful that her health was good and she was still able to turn out to work in the fields at harvest time or hay making. She thought nothing of walking miles to visit friends, among whom the most highly regarded were the Hepburns. Sandy was a middle-aged man now and his son John was almost grown up. There had been much sorrow when Sandy’s wife died but eventually he had married again, to a much younger, pleasant girl who had given birth to a daughter and was once again pregnant.
Aylie took a great interest and pride in all of the Hepburns and they regarded her as an honorary aunt, including her in all their family celebrations, weddings or christenings. They filled the yawning void left by her own children – Hannah far away in London and Adam even more distant in Canada. Adam wrote to tell her that he was thriving, the proprietor now of his own wood yard in Nova Scotia, and twice a year a remittance from him was paid into her bank although she always wrote back to protest that she did not need the money… ‘I’ve nothing to spend it on, dear Adam. Keep it for yourself. It’s time you were getting married and raising a family,’ she wrote.
* * *
When Aylie’s letter reached Hannah, she was plunged into depression but it did not last, she had far too much energy to languish for long. Now the telling of Hugh’s story was even more passionate – he had died for the people’s cause, she told her listeners.
Along with the principles of Anarchism, she had embraced the theory of free love and took lovers from among Kropotkin’s followers whenever she wanted. They were not hard to find because as the years passed she grew even more impressive, and her slim figure and sensual face attracted many men. She had also adopted the medieval style of dress favoured by Pre-Raphaelite women, most successfully by William Morris’ wife Jane, and the loosely flowing, brightly coloured clothes suited Hannah. They made her look like a character from a fairy tale – a wicked witch, said some catty women.
Among her casual lovers were a young Scot called John Mackay and a Prussian ex-army officer called Von Egidy, but they came and went. The man to whom she was most faithful, perhaps because it had to be kept a secret, was the blond and indolent Gunther. Ostensibly he was Bella’s man but when she was absent, he slipped into bed with Hannah. It was difficult for her to rationalize Gunther’s attractions, for he was lazy and unreliable and his political convictions were never as strongly held as hers but, when he chose, he was charming, attentive and amusing.
One day Gunther said, as casually as if he were announcing his intention to stroll down the street to take the air, ‘I’m going back to Germany, Hannah. I’m leaving tomorrow.’
‘Are you going for a visit?’ she asked, but he shook his head.
‘No, darling, I think I’ll stay. I’m tired of politics. My father’s died and I’ve come into my estate.’
‘What estate? You never said anything about an estate.’ It struck her as ironic and typical of Gunther that the Anarchist follower should be the heir to an estate.
He waved an airy hand. ‘Oh, we’ve a palace near Potsdam. I’ll go back there and paint. My mother says I ought to get married and I suppose she’s right. There’s someone she’s got lined up for me.’
Hannah felt the cold hand of jealousy grip her heart. She had never expected to feel that way about Gunther.
‘Take me with you,’ she pleaded and he was genuinely surprised at the request.
‘You, dear Hannah? But you’d hate Germany – it’s so property conscious. No, you’ll be far better here with your friends, trying to change the world.’
She knew he was teasing her again and hated his flippancy. She regretted allowing her guard to slip and feeling even the smallest affection for him.
‘You’re no revolutionary, I never thought you were. You’re like all the rest, as soon as you get your hands on money, you’re off to take care of it. I’m glad to have seen through you at last. Get out, get out and never come back,’ she shouted.
* * *
He had been gone for a month when she began to suspect that all was not well with her… By the time another month passed, she knew for certain that she was having his child.
Lark, 1891
One look was enough for Aylie to realize what had brought her daughter home.
She hugged Hannah tight in her arms and then led her inside the cosy little cottage, crooning over her as if she were a child again. When her cloak was off and she was seated in the chair beside the fire, Aylie simply asked, ‘When’s it due, Hannah?’
The girl lifted her head and said wearily, ‘In about two months, I think… I’m not quite sure of when I conceived.’
Aylie thought for a moment and then said, ‘That’ll be the middle of April t
hen. It’s a good time to have a baby, in the spring when the blossom’s on the apple trees.’
‘Oh Mother, you never change do you? You always think of dates in terms of what’s growing,’ said Hannah with a fond laugh.
* * *
They were friends now, their old differences forgotten as they sat side by side in front of the glowing hearth at night, talking about the past or Hannah’s vision of the future. What she said appalled her mother – ‘But you can’t think it’s right to kill people if they represent things you disapprove of,’ she protested.
‘Why not?’ Hannah’s face had a hard look as the flames flickered on it. ‘Political assassination is a potent weapon, it’s been used with effect in the past and will be used again in the future. Nothing else works, does it?’
She told her mother that during her time in London she had been briefly involved in the movement for women’s suffrage but she was disillusioned with the Suffragettes. ‘They’re far too soft and middle-class in their way of getting things done. They’ll never achieve anything. They’re just waiting for something to happen. If they get the vote in the end it’ll be because it suits the men – not because women have forced it through. Besides, I’m not so sure that it matters whether women have the vote anyway. If you vote you’re subscribing to a system that’s corrupt, you’re maintaining it. I wouldn’t vote, even if I could.’
Aylie stared longingly into the fire and said with a sigh, ‘I’d love a vote. I’d love to be able to express my opinion like a man. I don’t think it’s right for women to be treated like children or lunatics.’
‘Of course not, but we could construct a world in which we all had an equal share, men and women. Voting won’t bring it to us,’ said Hannah vehemently.
Lark Returning Page 30
