‘Sorry,’ Vee says, and the cider, helpfully, adds, ‘it’s just that I’ve never met lesbians before. I think you’re my first lesbians.’
Leonie laughs, ‘I doubt it,’ she says, ‘and anyway, I’m not a lesbian. I just go with women some of the time. The rest of the time, I go with men. But, on behalf of the lesbians, hello.’ And Leonie leans forward and kisses Vee on the mouth. There’s a chorus of whistling from the journalists at the bar; Leonie gives them a V-sign and they laugh. Vee doesn’t know which is worse: the kiss, the odd soft buzz of it, or the feeling of being drunk, or the centre-of-attention discomfort that having a camera usually protects her from.
‘I’ve got a fiancé,’ she says, ‘we’ve been going steady since we were fifteen.’ Because one thing she is certain of: you can flirt (whatever Leonie says), but you don’t want to be a tease. And that must apply to lesbians too.
‘Good for you,’ Leonie says, with a smile Vee doesn’t really like. One of the crowd at the bar brings two more pints over. Leonie tells him to sod off, and he responds by telling her to sod off herself. From this, Vee gathers that they know each other. One of the strangest things about working at the paper is how rude everyone is to each other. Vee’s dad is a great believer in good manners and the result of this, for Vee, is that she spends most of her working life being either mocked for her politeness or shocked into silence by the casual, inconsequential rudeness of her colleagues. She cannot imagine what would provoke her father into telling anyone to ‘sod off’. And if he knew she was in a pub, talking to someone who uses the word ‘prick’ in public, he would not be happy.
‘He wants us to get married next year,’ Vee adds.
Leonie feels around in her pockets, pulls out a tin and starts to roll a cigarette. She, Bea and Fen had been smoking Bea’s Benson & Hedges before. Vee had declined. She has tried smoking, with some of the typists from work who gather around their pooled copies of Marie Claire and My Weekly at lunchtimes: she just doesn’t like it. It makes the inside of her mouth hot, unpleasantly tingly. She can say the same thing about kissing women now. Maybe. Though everything, the first time, is more strange than anything else. ‘What do you think about that?’ Leonie asks.
Vee says, ‘I don’t know. I think we should wait a bit longer. He says I can keep working, and all that. At least until we have a baby. But he says we don’t need to do that straightaway.’
‘Does he? That’s good of him.’
Vee knows that Leonie is being sarcastic, and she can see that, for a lot of women, that sort of situation would be sad; they would be wasting their capabilities. But Leonie doesn’t know Barry. Barry’s mother has never worked, and she’s always making digs about Vee’s ‘little job’, like it’s a joke. But Barry takes Vee seriously. ‘He wants me to have a career. He thinks it should be normal for women to have serious jobs, not just work for pin money.’
Leonie takes a drag on her cigarette. ‘What do you want? Surely that’s the question.’
‘Me?’ Before she got here, Vee had been thinking that she has all that she wants, really. Her job isn’t perfect, but she can learn, and even if she is going to have to work her way up and earn respect, she’ll get there. She has enough money coming in, and Dad’s happy, and Barry’s happy. But sitting here, in a pub where the same people have been sitting on the same barstools for what looks like fifty years, and where close by, women in short dresses are shouting for their rights, like they really believe they deserve it, she’s no longer sure that what she has is happiness. If you see a wrong, right it, her dad says when he picks up other people’s litter from the pavement outside their gate.
‘Yes, you. There’s no one else here that I’m talking to, honey.’
‘I want . . .’ Vee senses that only her most audacious dreaming will be good enough for Leonie. ‘I want to take photographs that mean something to people.’
No, that’s not it. All photographs mean something to someone. Her first efforts, blurred line-ups of family and a shaky shot of a birthday cake, are terrible attempts at capturing moments, but that didn’t stop Dad from sticking them in an album.
She tries again.
‘Women,’ she says. As she speaks the word, she realises that that was why she got the feeling she did at the picket line when she pressed the shutter. It’s what she’s been feeling her way towards, at the paper, even though every time she tries something different she gets shot down. Her photos of women talking over a cup of tea at a coffee morning are not used. Her photographs of women in a line, one holding a wonky home-made cake on a plate, one with a teapot, are what Bob wants. Even though no one looks comfortable; even though there’s nothing in these line-ups that isn’t interchangeable with last week’s church fair, tomorrow’s get together at the Mothers’ Union. ‘I want to take photographs of women where they look like . . . themselves.’
Leonie doesn’t take her gaze from Vee’s face. Vee feels her intention forming as the words emerge. She has the feeling that she is waiting to see what she will say, as much as Leonie is. ‘I mean – women are always meant to look like something, aren’t they? Like their job. But most of them ain’t good jobs, real jobs, like being a carpenter or a lawyer or something. So photos are usually being somebody’s wife, or with something they’ve baked, and even if they’re something like – like a singer, like Dusty Springfield, they still have to look – their looks still matter more than they would if they were a bloke. I mean, look at Pink Floyd. Women couldn’t get away with that.’
Leonie nods. ‘And how does all that fit with getting married?’
‘I don’t know.’ The cider is going down quickly. ‘Barry wouldn’t mind. And anyway, why shouldn’t I get married if I want to? What else are women supposed to do?’
Leonie lights her roll-up. ‘Well, if they’ve got the guts, they could follow their heart. They could take their profession seriously. They could build a career. If they had a vision. And they recognised that the world was about to start taking women seriously. In all respects.’
Vee sits up straighter at the thought of herself as being someone with a vision. The room rocks. ‘Is that really going to happen, though?’
‘Well,’ Leonie says, ‘we’ve got Barbara Castle in our corner. That’s one woman in the Cabinet. It’s a drag that there’s only one, but it’s a start.’
‘There are loads of MPs this time, though.’ Vee’s father had commented on it, after the 1966 election, with something like wonder.
‘Twenty out of six hundred plus,’ Leonie says, ‘that’s not what I’d call representative.’
‘No.’ Vee should have thought of that.
‘We’ve got the women out there bringing Ford to a standstill, because for all their production lines and big swinging bollocks, those men can’t make cars without seats – and the women are the only people who know how to do it. We’re getting power. We deserve power.’
Vee feels her head nodding. ‘Yes we do,’ she says.
Leonie balances her roll-up on the ashtray, takes off her cardigan. The peace badge on it clatters against the edge of the table. Vee catches, unexpectedly, the scent of lavender; then a glimpse of unshaven armpit. There are jokes, of course, about women with hairy armpits, but Vee has always imagined they are an exaggeration, a cliché. Because surely having clean, smooth armpits is the same as having clean teeth or brushed hair? Vee feels something close to queasy, and at the same time she wants to put her finger in it, just to see how it feels. Her own armpits have been scraped smooth once a week for as long as she can remember. It’s just what you do. Her friend Patty’s mum had showed them both how, the summer they were fifteen. Leaning back against the wall behind her, Leonie asks, ‘Why do you like taking photographs?’
She just does. She always has. After Betty’s wedding, whenever her dad got out his precious Contax rangefinder on holidays and at Christmas, she asked and asked until she was allowed to use it, then she asked and asked until she got a camera of her own.
Leonie�
�s gone back to smoking, and though she’s watching Vee, she doesn’t seem impatient for an answer. Oh, this is pleasure: not to feel compelled to say something clever, fast, not to have to dive into a silence, say anything, if there is to be any hope of being heard. If work were like this, she might get further, faster.
‘I think,’ she says, ‘I like being able to control what I see. What other people see, when they look at my photos. I can tell the story how I see it. But nobody knows I’m doing it. Not really. They think the camera never lies, don’t they?’ The black box of the viewfinder that holds the whole world, in that instant: the way that, in moving the camera, or zooming in, just a little, she can change the story, make something else important – that’s what Vee likes. Well, one of the things. Leonie nods, and then she seems to wait for more.
‘And so it’s—’ Vee takes another gulp of her drink. ‘Control. Yeah, control. I took photos at my little cousin’s wedding last year. Her mother was a cow to me when my mum died. I was only eight. She told me I needed to grow up. And so I cropped a little bit of her out of every photo I took. Top of her hat, end of her legs. She’d got these new shoes, went on and on about them beforehand, how pricey they were. Them shoes ain’t in one single photo of that wedding.’
Leonie laughs, a throaty half-bark, head thrown back, shoulders rising. ‘Woman, beware woman.’
‘It was nothing to do with her being a woman,’ Vee says. ‘It was because she was a cow.’
‘Well, good for you. So you like – control.’ Leonie takes a drink. ‘What else?’
‘Hiding,’ she says.
Leonie cocks an eyebrow.
‘Nobody sees the photographer. I mean, they see you, but they ain’t interested. They only really see the camera. So you’re not the centre of attention. Not if you don’t want to be.’
‘Why wouldn’t you want to be the centre of attention?’
She will never know what makes her say the next thing. Maybe it’s that she’s already mentioned her mother’s death. ‘I hated it when my mum died. There was just me and my dad. People came and they wanted to help but it was like – like the zoo. If you cried, they were all over you. If you were normal, they said you were in shock. If you made them a cup of tea you were brave and good. I couldn’t stand it.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ Leonie says. ‘When my father died and me and my sister were the same. A friend of our parents’ came to pick us up from boarding school. We barely knew him – he used to come to dinner parties, but we were always sent to bed – but he still told us that we had to pull ourselves together for our mother’s sake. We didn’t even know his name.’ And everything that’s intimidating about Leonie – the voice, the stride, the way she swears and doesn’t seem to care, the kiss, the armpit, the general lack of apology that seems stitched into her – drops away. It doesn’t matter. Vee isn’t out of her depth anymore. Because all she’s doing is sitting at a table with a woman who looks as though she might understand. Leonie sighs, smiles, drinks, and then the bravado’s back. ‘So, you have power, and you have invisibility. And you like it. And you want to use it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Welcome to feminism,’ Leonie says. ‘We need sisters like you.’
‘Thanks,’ Vee says. She must be a feminist, then. Although at work the word feminist is usually followed by ‘ball-breaker’. This might not go down well with Barry. She finishes her pint. He wouldn’t like that either.
Leonie smiles a sideways smile, something that would look like flirting on a man, and asks, ‘How about we get some food, soak this lot up a bit, and then you take my photo? That would be groovy.’
‘Groovy,’ Vee repeats. She’s never heard anyone say that in real life before, only on the TV. Being with Leonie feels like being at the heart of something.
*
As she drives home, Vee thinks back to when she and Barry got engaged. They’d been boyfriend and girlfriend for four years, since they were fifteen, and he is good and kind, and they have a laugh. It was the logical next step, he said, and she agreed. The night they talked about money and planned for the future is nearly six months ago now but she’s never forgotten how she felt. She’d slapped his hand away when it started to slide up her thigh, because she was tired, and it felt too much like he wanted a reward for telling her what his wages were. And after he’d gone she’d worked out what she might earn, before she had kids, what she could earn afterwards, if she went back to work part-time. And when she’d seen the difference between what she would be likely to achieve, and what Barry could take for granted as an estate agent, even without commission, she’d felt stupid for thinking of herself as a career woman. It had seemed that there was no such thing.
When she gets back, Barry is at the house. She’d forgotten they were supposed to be going to the pictures. ‘Hello, love,’ she says, and he looks at his watch before kissing her on her cheek. He’s always prompt, is Barry. Reliable. That’s one of the things Vee and Stanley like about him. He can be funny, too, and kind. ‘You smell like a brewery. What have you been doing?’
‘Really?’ Stanley looks concerned. ‘You know it’s not a good idea to drink if you’re driving, treasure. And now they’ve got breathalysers.’
‘I’m not drunk. I had a drink at lunchtime, that’s all. Just . . .’ Vee thinks back, and subtracts the last round for the sake of peace, ‘a sweet martini and a pint of cider.’
‘A pint?’ Ah, of course – these two won’t be fans of women drinking pints.
Well, may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. ‘Yeah. With some lesbians I met. Now come on, we don’t want to be late for the film.’
July 1968
This Month magazine
Leonie Barratt: Letters from a Feminist
Our monthly column from the front line of the Battle of the Sexes
Dear John,
After three weeks out on strike, the Ford Dagenham machinists have gone back to work. I know you’re relieved. You might not drive a Ford, but you respect a Ford. And I bet you respect Henry Ford. Because he was a man who knew how to put things in a good old-fashioned honest way, for other men to understand.
We might call his wisdom homespun, if that wasn’t such a womanly expression. And wisdom from the hearth cannot possibly bring anything worth knowing to a factory, can it? Factories are for well-ordered pumping, hammering, and screwing. Factories are places of oil, toil and sweat. Women might have their places, on some production lines, packing or checking, doing the small unworthy tasks. But factories, like Mr Ford’s, are run by men.
Yet Ford was brought to a halt by women. There’s something to ponder, John.
I’d like to know what Mr Henry would make of what went on in Dagenham. He is, after all, the man who said, ‘Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.’ I’m not sure how paying your workers who wear bras less than the ones who don’t constitutes working together. It could be that my hormones, or my breasts, are getting in the way of my understanding. Perhaps you can explain it to me. When I’ve finished sewing the buttons back on your shirt.
I know this won’t be the first time you’ve read about the strike in the press. I know, us women, we do go on, don’t we? I expect you’ll write to me, to complain, once you’ve worked out whether I’m nagging or ball-breaking. Allow me to save you some time. I couldn’t care less what you think of me.
The reason I’m going on about the strike? It’s important. And it’s always going to be important. I visited the picket line this week, and do you know what I saw? I saw determination. I saw a sense of what was right – certainty and conviction. And it’s hard to keep that going when you’re hungry. Three weeks on strike pay might not make much of a difference to your life, John, but if that’s the money that goes in the electricity meter or pays the milkman, then believe me, you’d soon feel the lack of it. If there are no savings in your tin, because you only get paid three-quarters of what the men get paid, then striking is not somethin
g to be done lightly. It’s something to respect.
Something else I saw on that picket line was support, from my sisters – and my brothers, too, like the postman turning back because he belongs to a union. I met people who had travelled, just to see, to find out what was happening. And now the strikers may have gone back to work, in victory, not defeat, but don’t think for a minute, John, that that is the end of it.
What happened at Dagenham was about more than car seats and machinists getting too big for their bras. It is about more and more of the world waking up to what’s right. You need to get on board, John. You need to see which way the wind is blowing. You need to pay the women who work for you the same as you pay the men doing equivalent jobs. Or stand with your sisters if they aren’t being paid as well as you. That’s all. We don’t want favours. We don’t want anything we don’t deserve or we’re not entitled to. I’ve told you this before, remember? The reason women wheedle things out of you, the reason some of us expect you to pay when we go out with you, or like to be ‘treated’ to meals or clothes – that’s because we don’t have as much money as you. Can you see what might happen if we were paid equally, for equal work?
The next time you get into your car – and the seat’s probably been sewn by a woman, even if you do prefer a Hillman – remember something else Henry Ford said. ‘If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.’ Go on. Give it a try. It’s the manly thing to do.
Leonie
2 February 2018
Four days ago, stars at the Grammy awards carried white roses to draw attention to the Time’s Up movement against sexual harassment in the music industry.
Eleven weeks and six days until exhibition opening
‘Will you be home for dinner?’ Marcus asks Erica. He’s gathering up his keys and phone in readiness for leaving for work; she is rummaging in the fridge to make sure there’s something in there for her mother-in-law’s lunch. And Tom is in his highchair, playing with his cereal now rather than eating it. Marcus has managed to kiss him without getting smeared in anything, which is more than Erica ever achieves.
The Woman in the Photograph Page 3
