The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

‘I thought you might stop sending me your work. After—’

  She’s gone too far. Leonie looks away, stiffens. ‘The only thing my books have got going for them is that they’ve been read by the award-winning Veronica Moon.’

  Vee unlocks the car, and they get in and drive off in silence.

  After about five miles, Leonie asks, ‘You didn’t take a photo of me when I got stuck with that baby, did you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She did, but she went close up, so the baby wasn’t part of the shot. Leonie had looked thoughtful, serene, when she framed the shot, but by the time Vee pressed the shutter she had realised she was being watched and was glaring straight into the lens. Some you catch, some get away. Leonie will never see the photo, so she doesn’t need to know.

  ‘Good,’ Leonie says, with a slightly disbelieving look in her eyes that Vee knows she deserves.

  ‘I saw Bea. It’s been years.’

  ‘She said the same about you,’ Leonie says, ‘we were saying how you’d changed.’

  Vee knows this is a dig but she doesn’t need to let it touch her. ‘Well, haven’t we all? But yes, I probably had further to come than the rest of you.’ She runs her hand over her head, feeling the hair so short and sharp against her hand, and thinks of how when she came to see the strike at Dagenham she still slept in rollers, and sprayed the waves in her hair solid every morning. A willing party to her own oppression, in those days. She was sleepwalking, really, apart from that little curious corner of her heart that was sufficiently awake to want to see what was going on at the Ford machinists’ strike. ‘I wasn’t exactly assertive.’

  Leonie laughs, but it’s a kind sound, a recognition. ‘You weren’t the only one. There are thousands of women, now, still, not asserting themselves’ – she winds down the window, lights a cigarette from the remains of the pack Bea gave her – ‘but the fact is, you can’t be a woman in this world and not be assertive. Unless you’re going to just accept your oppression and go and lie down under some man, have his baby and give up on yourself.’

  Dagenham-Vee would have eaten this up, but Greenham-Vee ponders before replying, ‘You’re presupposing a lot about men, there.’

  ‘I just spent half an hour talking to Tanya. She used to be all for slashing tyres. Now she’s leaking milk from both tits and talking about peaceful protest.’

  Vee laughs, ‘That’s not a man’s fault, though, is it? That’s Tanya. She once told me I was letting myself down because I didn’t want to go to some workshop she was running. I think it was about masturbation.’

  ‘Probably. She’s always been all about the cunt. Which is great, you know. You have to choose your . . . battleground.’

  Vee winces. ‘True. But I’d rather think of it as an area of interest than a battleground.’ She glances to her left, just as Leonie looks towards her, and smiles; they spend a mile or two in silence, the happy kind that reminds her of Sunday mornings in the flat, reading the papers, drinking tea, listening to London’s church bells and, as Leonie always said, steadfastly ignoring the call to prayer.

  ‘You’d be happy enough to call it a battleground if you’d pushed a baby out of it,’ Leonie says.

  ‘How are you feeling now? About—’ Vee begins, even though she knows what will happen.

  ‘You don’t get to ask,’ Leonie says, ‘you know that.’

  Vee nods, eyes on the road. ‘I know.’ She doesn’t blame Leonie for refusing to talk to her; she let her down. Leonie is punishing her by not telling her what happened to the baby. That hurts. And she feels an odd responsibility to the child that might have been given into her care, and to that fine, bright spark of Leonie that is out there in the world, now, somewhere.

  10 April 2018

  Erica

  This is not the Vee Erica first encountered, in the Photographers’ Gallery two months ago. She looked up glioblastoma and she knows personality changes are likely as the disease grips. She knows the survival rates, too. She’s amazed that Vee can walk through her life, day to day, with such hurt and care in her. But then again, she thought the same thing about herself, once. She didn’t believe she would live through losing her mother. And here she is. ‘It must have been amazing, to be here,’ she says. ‘When all that was happening.’

  ‘We were just getting on with things, Erica,’ Vee says, and then, indicating Tom, ‘like you are. We didn’t really know. We just—’ she pauses. ‘Everyone I met in the movement was there because she couldn’t not do anything. Your aunt too.’

  ‘And you.’ Tom grabs for her ear, rubs the lobe between his fingers. This is what he does when he’s tired, whether going to sleep or waking. Any ear will do. Erica cannot help but smile.

  ‘I was just – here,’ Vee says, and the way she says it, wistful and only half-believing, makes Erica wants to cry. Then Vee points downwards, towards one of the rocks that forms the base of the central sculpture. ‘Look.’

  It takes a second for Erica to see what Vee is pointing at, but then she spots them; stacks of smaller stones, carefully balanced on top of another. She imagines the women who come here – perhaps the daughters of the ones who formed part of the human chain around the fence – selecting a pebble. They must choose it with care from the land around the garden, then place it on top of one of the piles that are already here, hand pausing in the air, a millimetre away, to see that the balance is kept. Erica feels her own emotional equilibrium teeter at the thought of it. ‘Cairns,’ she says.

  ‘Of course.’ Vee is bending, searching for a stone. ‘I couldn’t remember the word.’ She takes off a glove in order to pick up a small, sharp flat piece of flint, or maybe slate, and she looks at it for a moment, turns it over, before squatting to put it in place, on top of one of the smallest cairns there. Her hand is shaking. When she stands again, she says, ‘I was here.’ This time, though, it’s something more like a prayer than a statement of fact. There is power in this place.

  Vee steps back, and then holds out her arms. It takes Erica a moment to understand: why would Vee take Tom from her? But then she sees the space that Vee is offering her, and why she’s done so. She hands the now sleeping child over, feeling how Vee is braced for his weight, then relaxes when she has sensed the perimeters of his body, its density. Half-woken by the movement, Tom looks between the two of them – both women hold their breath – and then he smiles and finds the space at Vee’s shoulder that will best cradle him, settling his head there. He reaches for Vee’s earlobe.

  Erica squats and looks for a stone of her own. After a moment of searching she finds a smooth, tiny oblong, slightly tapering at one end. She places it, gently, on Vee’s flint.

  And now she wants to cry again, which is not like her at all. Marcus laughed at her when they got married, because he cried and she didn’t. The only time she’s ever been this emotional was when she was first expecting Tom.

  Oh, shit.

  October 1981

  This Month magazine

  Leonie Barratt: Letters from a Feminist

  Our monthly column from the front line of the Battle of the Sexes

  Dear John,

  I’m not going to lie. My relationship with you has been the longest constructive relationship with a man there’s ever been in my adult life. I mean, my dad’s fine, but he’s – he’s over there, you know? On the right wing, with the money to send his daughters to boarding school. So when we do spend time together, as adults, it’s nothing meaningful. Matching eyes mean don’t mean a lot.

  I’ve never married, and I don’t intend to. I don’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend, and I never have, for long. (I’m only telling you this because I choose to. To give you credit, you haven’t asked, which is just as well, because no one has any right to.) I get bored, especially with people who can’t keep up with a decent debate. I need intellectual stimulation. I haven’t found enough of it in one person to make it worth making space in the wardrobe for them. And why should I? I’m happy. I don’t buy the ‘one is lonely’ narrative.
One is enough. Enough for me, anyway.

  So you, John, are my long-term meaningful man. I think you’ve listened and I hope you’ve learned. Talking to you has been interesting. It’s helped me to think about the world we live in, me and you, and how it’s the same world, although we experience it oh, so differently.

  But all good things must come to an end. Times change and things move on. It’s time for us to part.

  I bet you’re feeling pretty pleased with yourself right now, John. I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, I really can read your mind. You’re thinking – well, we must have done it. They must be equal, the women. It must be sorted. Because there’s no way Leonie Barratt would give up before she’s got what she wants. If she isn’t writing to me anymore, it’s because I know everything there is to know about women and equality.

  And you’ve helped, haven’t you?

  You’ve read this column, right to the end, most of the time.

  You’ve defended your wife’s right to go back to work to your parents and hers, when they pulled faces about it.

  You can go to the supermarket with the best of them, and there was that time you tried to sew a button on.

  We’ve won. We can share a victory lap, hand in hand, you and I, completely equally.

  I see you, John, pointing at all the women in power. Thatcher, ruling over her nest of fawning, subservient men. Billie Jean King, who came out and the sky hasn’t fallen in. We’ve even got a black woman newsreader.

  I’m not saying we’ve achieved nothing. We’ve got a sort of veneer of decency when it comes to equal rights for women. We’re like a couple who were fighting before their party. We’re conspicuously civil, but that doesn’t mean everything is peachy. Yes, there’s legislation about equal opportunity, and equal pay. But the fight hasn’t gone away. It’s just moved. Equality is being achieved in some places – equality of a sort, at least – but, like any good opponent, the patriarchy has regrouped. Misogyny is mutating. You don’t rule the world for millennia without learning a few survival tricks.

  The fight has gone to greater places, and smaller ones.

  At Greenham Common women are saving the world because none of you penis-wielding lot seem much interested. Either that or you’re too invested, in all senses, in those giant phallic symbols your American buddies want to parade all over the countryside. We’re fighting for women to be recognised as a force in their own right, but we’re doing it WHILE WE’RE DOING SOMETHING ELSE – getting rid of nuclear weapons. Women doing more than one thing at a time, John – does that sound familiar to you? Let me let you into a secret. You don’t actually live in a self-cleaning house.

  Women have taken the fight deep into their own lives, too. Not all women. But enough of us. There’s only so much a sister can do to shift that thinking, no matter how hard she tries. And the ones who haven’t – well, that’s patriarchal indoctrination in action for you, John. That and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em trying to make everyone believe that incompetent men-children are a hilarious, harmless good thing. Let’s hope this decade does better on the light entertainment front.

  Women are seeking equality in their relationships and their homes, expecting and assuming that there will be help from the men they choose to share their lives with. And by help, I mean hands-on, dinner-cooking, bed-making, nappy-changing help. Not the I-earn-the-money-you-do-the-work arrangement that’s been masquerading as an equation for all these years.

  You should be benefiting from this too, John. Because equality really is what we seek, not a reversal in dominance, with men scrubbing floors and snivelling for scraps while women subjugate them in their turn. So you should be finding life better, these days. Maybe in private you’re not afraid to say you don’t feel like sex, or that you’re worried about work. Rather than spending a Saturday on football or gardening, you read a book or go for a walk. It could be that in your house both washing the car and cooking the dinner have become shared activities. If you have a son, you might tell him it’s all right to cry. If you have a daughter, I hope you’re dressing her in trousers and encouraging her to ride her bike just as fast and recklessly as her brother does.

  I hope that, if you feel like crying, you feel that you can cry.

  Everyone should be benefiting from a changing world. Not that I much care what happens to men – you’ve had things your way for most of evolution, and a bit of emotional repression doesn’t seem like that high a price to pay. But life should be fair.

  So, here we are. We’re moving on. This column is going and it’s going to be replaced by something else.

  But don’t think feminism has gone, John. Don’t think for a moment that all of the angry women who are left have taken themselves to Greenham Common, or that the world has reached some sort of manageable, workable compromise. We might have pockets of legislation and workplaces and homes where we’re getting there. That doesn’t mean everything is fixed.

  My sisters and I are still here. We’re in all shapes and sizes, because women come in all shapes and sizes. We have crewcuts or plaits, six kids or no desire whatsoever to add more to the population of the world. We work in cafes and we’re called to the bar. We’re going nowhere and we’re not going to forget that we are equal to you.

  I’ll see you around, John. Remember, wherever you are, a woman is watching.

  Leonie x

  Part 6: Exposure

  To take a portrait is, in its simplest terms, to capture the essence of a person, using film and light. To go beyond the idea of how a woman thinks she should look takes time and patience, and the subject must have confidence in you. If a relative of the subject looks at a portrait and says, ‘wow’, then you know you’ve done it.

  Veronica Moon, Women in Photographs (unpublished)

  ‘Leonie Barratt’

  Veronica Moon

  Exhibition Section: Moment of Death

  Camera: OM-1

  Film: 200 ASA

  First published: Observer magazine, October 1984

  If you’ve only seen one photograph taken by Veronica Moon, it’s probably this one.

  It’s the image that Veronica Moon is both most famous for and the one that, in effect, ended her career.

  Leonie Barratt is sitting in a chair; her eyes are half closed, and her mouth is half smiling. The camera captures her from the waist up, and a bookcase is visible, blurred, in the background. In contrast, Barratt’s face is sharp, with lines around her mouth clearly visible, and shadows beneath her brows and chin. It’s an honest portrait; there’s no soft focus, no flattering light. To the casual glance it looks as though she is lost in thought. But actually, she has died, seconds before the photograph was taken.

  This image could be considered as a lesson in how photography works. We often say that ‘the camera never lies’ but at the same time, we see how much the viewer’s perspective brings to an image. If you don’t know that Barratt has just died, she seems at rest. The moment you are told that she passed away moments before, it’s all you can see.

  The Observer, the publication which had commissioned the portrait from Moon, used this image on the cover with the line ‘The Death of Radical Feminism?’ At the time, the magazine’s editors insisted that they did not know the photograph was taken post-mortem, although the news of Barratt’s death was, by then, public. Moon was vilified in the press and within the women’s movement for what was seen as a betrayal – in 1984, the world was much less used to the frank images of death that we now encounter so frequently, and without comment, more than thirty years on.

  Moon disappeared completely for a time after the publication of this image. When she did reappear, in 1989, it was as a lecturer in photography at Roehampton College (now University). She taught there until she retired in 2005, but she never published a photograph again.

  You can also view the contact sheet from which the cover image was taken. This has never been made available to the public before. The cover image is the third-to-last image; in the next frame Barratt’
s head is slumping to the side, and the final shot on the roll is a skewed image of a doorway.

  Barratt’s sister was vociferous about the lack of life-saving help that Leonie received, at the time.

  Veronica Moon has never spoken publicly about what happened.

  In 1984:

  • The halfpenny was withdrawn from circulation

  • It was a year since the appointment of the first female Lord Mayor of London

  • Torvill and Dean won a gold medal for ice skating at the Winter Olympics

  • The Miners’ Strike began, and Women Against Pit Closures was formed

  • The Thames Barrier was opened

  • The Provisional IRA bombed the Brighton hotel where the Conservative Cabinet was staying, resulting in five deaths and several serious injuries

  • Margaret Thatcher was still Prime Minister

  • ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ by Band Aid was number one in the singles chart for five weeks

  • The first episodes of Crimewatch and The Bill were shown on television

  • Anita Brookner’s novel, Hotel du Lac, was published

  • The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks was published

  • Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology edited by Robin Morgan, was published

  And it’s a big year for Leonie Barratt, who is finally getting the recognition she deserves.

  July 1984

  Colchester

  ‘You’ll find, Miss Moon, that your father left everything in excellent order for you.’ Derek Davison is her father’s solicitor and the son of an old friend of his, and Vee hasn’t met him in person before now. It’s been easier to do all of the paperwork related to Stanley’s death by post. But she’s come back to Colchester to deal with the loose ends. (She doesn’t like to think of them as loose ends. She will never tidy her father away.)

  She has made sure the house has been cleared properly. She’s taken all she wanted after the funeral and employed a house clearance company to do the rest. Once she’s finished here she’s going to meet Barry, who had come to the funeral and been more than decent afterwards, showing her photographs of his kids and joking that the photographs she took of him back in the day must be worth a fortune. He’s the manager of a branch of an estate agent now, and he’s going to sell the house for her. She knows she can trust him to do it properly, and to treat her like a human, rather than a woman. Though she still feels animal, really. Raw at being in a world without her steadfast father in it.