Goodbye Piccadilly

by Betty Burton

  Esther, who had heard a great deal from Otis of the famous Uncle Hewie, had expected more – or, perhaps, less, for she thought him rather too jolly for so good-looking a man. Esther liked handsome men but preferred that they be serious and intellectual.

  That was Jack’s trouble too, he was far too jokey. Truly, it was impertinence on the part of men to think that women are entertained only if they are lighthearted and talk of inconsequential matters.

  Esther had ideas, theories, beliefs that she would have liked to test out against men, but she hardly knew any men – Jack was so often away and in the vacations refused to be serious because he had enough of that kind of thing in term-time. Her father was always too tired or was going somewhere. Her schoolfriends’ brothers, whom she met from time to time, expected her to listen and be amused by them. Her uncles and cousins she seldom saw, since they mixed with a very different level of society from that of the Moth branch of the Clermont family.

  The sea is flat, and as glittery as bathroom glass newly cleaned with vinegar. Short waves, edged with white ostrich plumes, uncurl and roll along the shingle shore like ringlets let loose from their pins.

  Saturday morning and the hotels facing the sea are busy with cabs and porters and departing guests. Resort visitors on longer vacations stroll – as do these four – apparently aimlessly, eastward and westward, back and forth along the promenade between the two piers.

  The morning is of the kind that English travellers like to set in the aspic of memory to take with them when setting forth down the Solent to go abroad – calm, sun-bathed and clear. Glittering windows, bright stone and well-painted façades, the hotels and apartments border the town with their pillared entrances, iron-railed gardens and window boxes, iron balconies and iron-framed canopies.

  Set out before the hotels is the open common, the Rock Gardens, and Ladies Mile gardens. Here a vast army of invisible men, in coarse shirts, thick trousers and waistcoats, bend their backs to clip straight edges to the gardens, they razor its grass, dead-head flowers, feed, mulch and rake its borders to a profusion of foliage, bloom and scent.

  Sloping away from this controlled environment is the seashore, which, except for the twin pier and a couple of rickety wooden jetties, is middling wild. Here, young ladies with full skirts and nipped waists walk uncertainly on shifting shingle, occasionally clutching their young man’s arm for support, whilst their married sisters, and mothers with full bosoms and stay-boned waists, walk the flat promenade. The predominating colours of the women’s clothes are those of the sweetpeas and annual summer plants blooming in the town parks.

  The men here see themselves as gentlemen; and retired sea captains see themselves as gentlemen of rank, their naval titles being cherished and aired daily, lest anyone think that these are merely old men wearing peaked caps and blazers. With great frequency these retired officers, who still ache to issue orders, soon take ‘JP’ to their name. What would the Portsmouth Bench do without its retired naval officers to clap offenders in irons?

  Children with broad hats and healthy faces patter around the sedately moving adults. Little girls dare the waves to touch their boots and squeal at a spot of foam; small boys hurl back into the sea large stones that have taken a millennium to be eased out of the water and up the beach.

  But we are talking only of Southsea, and only of the promenade, and only of the people with enough leisure and income to spend their Saturday mornings with nothing more to do than to wait for Saturday afternoon.

  In Nancy Dickenson’s part of town, whose shoreline is a continuation of that of Southsea, things are different.

  There. The air smells of fish, tar and oil, of unwashed clothes on unclean bodies. Peeling doors and shopfronts, market stalls, noisy taverns and grimy bars. A smell of fish and staleness. Cobbled streets, dankness and water. Poor houses, street runnels. Dogs on the loose. Strings of monotone washing strung across yards. Sailors briskly coming ashore, sailors lurching aboard, sailors making business with prostitutes. Alleyways, yards, narrowness. Rickety wooden structures that strangers can never fathom. Occasional splash of colour from a potted geranium in deep shadows. Back-yards that smell of fish and beer, urine and vomit. Even in the sunshine, walls greened from dripping gutters are damp.

  There the sea has no shingle to push around for, before the waves can unfurl, the swell hits the man-made piers, wharves, landing-stages and docks, and slaps itself against these barriers, churning its soggy cargo of fish-gut, rotten vegetables, rotten fruit and, occasionally, a rotten human. There the sea is apparently not even middling wild, but when the tide runs it runs deep and fast in the undertow, surging and swirling and sucking its way in and out of the narrow channel.

  There the children go mostly barefoot and often bare-arsed. They are thinner than average and shorter. Already many work the Saturday market, pushing carts, holding horses still, shouting wares and minding stalls whilst the holder goes to the tavern or the cockle-stall; and many young girls are at their machines in the stay or shirt factories.

  Close to the Harbour Station, where the two worlds meet, the shoreline is a stinking sludge of oil and sewage and mud. Into this ooze at low tide, near-naked children leap to retrieve coins flipped by passers-by. The mud-larks are popular entertainment. As far as anyone knows, few children have come to harm here. Good healthy mud… certainly good, healthy pickings.

  On Saturdays, Nancy does not get time off. She is at Garden Cottage pressing out the creases where she has altered the waist of her mistress’s gown, and pressing in the pleats of the minutely tucked bodice of Miss Esther’s dress and stiffening Master Jack’s collars to spring-coils.

  So, she is not with the people she knows best, the crowd of girls and women released from the stay-making factory who, fuelled by the prospect of not having to get up in the morning, are hurrying and laughing to wash their faces and arms and feet and put on their best skirts and hats and go about in groups.

  At least the single women are.

  The married ones who have put in six and a half days bent over a sewing machine in the crowded factory, look forward to a day at the sink beating dirt out of clothes, a bit of a gossip over the clothes-line, an evening in a bar with a glass of stout, and a night on their backs with their hard-handed men.

  To anyone outside this community and outside its time, dockland is not a gentle place. Girls become drudges too soon, boys become cheap labour. But they have taste-buds that respond to beer and cockles and sweetness of any kind. They have ears that love the old squeeze-boxes played in bars, and street-organs trundling the streets. They have nostrils through which they are tantalized into wanting hot pies and hair-oil and flowery scent. And they have nerve endings as sensitive to the touch as any lady and gentleman who have tempted one another in bed with Madeira and sponge fingers.

  It is from those docklands, where she has been meeting some of her most ardent admirers at their factory gates, to Speakers’ Corner on the promenade at Southsea, where she is to address equally loyal but better-off members of the NUWSS, that Victoria Ormorod is striding like a youth.

  THE AUDITORIUM OF THE THEATRE-ROYAL, PORTSMOUTH, IN 1900.

  Aunt Flora, I have arrived safely, but have not yet seen Martin. Otis sends you her love. She looks much more her age now that Em has got her up a bit. (Pleases you, eh?) Am taking luncheon al fresco on the Pleasure Pier. Southsea appears to be a most affable town, with much to do. Within a mile or two of where I now sit is the Isle of Wight, all green and mysterious. Yours, Maximilian Hewetson

  Jack, pleased to have male company, was on tenterhooks and feeling a bit of a cad as he watched Max Hewetson leisurely writing his local view cards.

  It had been Jack’s scheme that they come here, and to achieve his ends he had been forced to use subterfuge, for had Esther known why he wanted to come, she would have teased him in a very childish way. His trick had been to let Esther and Otis believe that it had been their own idea to eat here, and it had worked, for Otis had sworn them to secrec
y about the true reason for coming this far from The Grand Hotel. ‘We cannot help it if we happen upon a meeting, and if it happens that we are caught up in the march by accident, then Pa cannot say anything, but if he believes that it is a scheme, then he may well try to chain me to the wall again.’

  Jack felt caddish, because they were here not in order that Otis’s uncle could take in the sea air, but so that Jack Moth could once again see Victoria Ormorod in the flesh and hear her as Blanche Ruby Bice making an open-air speech at Speakers’ Corner. He knew that there was some bad feeling between Victoria’s faction, the NUWSS, and the militant Pankhurst followers, the WSPU, to say nothing of the Anti-factions. The Pankhurst faction worked to get publicity and notoriety, to get the police and press involved, to get arrested, to get reported, to go to prison.

  Jack Moth knew all this and, now that it had come to the hour, foresaw the possibility of another fiasco involving Otis as when, in showing off to Otis, he had capsized the dinghy. Then as now, Otis’s exuberant enthusiasm for new experience had carried the scheme along.

  ‘Heavens, Jack, we only wish to hear the lady speak. Don’t you consider it part of one’s education to listen and debate issues? Surely you do? I have heard that at university there is a great deal of debate going on.’

  Jack thought that Esther, in her sly way, was amusing herself looking on to see whether anything might happen. Now, second thoughts. Father had said that he might come down next week – Jack would be mortified to be accused of not caring for the women whilst Father was sweating away in London.

  Too late! Max Hewetson had heard the band and seen the tops of the banners as the parade, flanked by police constables, made its way past the Rock Gardens to Speakers’ Corner.

  ‘I say! Is that a carnival? Shall we go and look?’

  He noticed that the two girls again glanced at one another, and wondered whether this parade was the reason for the rather over-long walk they had brought him on to eat a few indifferent sandwiches and a slice of rather good apple pie.

  When they reached Speakers’ Corner a large crowd had already gathered.

  ‘Heaven save us,’ said Max Hewetson, ‘it’s Mrs Pankhurst’s Lot. Who wants to hear their twaddle?’ Jack Moth’s neck reddened and stiffened and looked ready to crow. Oh, Lord! thought the older man, been and ruffled some feathers. Has the young cock fallen for the twaddle, or for some campaigning young lady?

  Following the direction of Jack’s gaze, Max Hewetson had no doubt. Not a girl, but a full-blown woman. Certainly the lad had taste, even though she might prove wasted on so young a graduate. ‘Who’s the pretty copper-nob?’ he asked.

  ‘I believe that she’s called Blanche Ruby Bice, and I believe that she is to make a speech on the conditions of work in the local shirt-making factories.’

  ‘Ah… so that’s Ruby Bice. Of course I have heard of “Miss White, Red and Green” – isn’t that how her name is made? Who has not heard of her? But I have never seen her in the flesh, so to speak.’ And very nice flesh too: his gaze taking in the detail of Victoria’s figure and face. ‘I’ve heard it said that she is a French aristocrat. But I say… look at that hair… Russian princess, no less.’

  ‘From her looks, that may well be true,’ said Jack Moth, placated by the warmth of his acquaintance’s admiration. ‘How do you come to know of her? Until this week, I had never heard of Ruby Bice.’

  ‘She makes speeches. That’s how she gets known. In London, she can fill any hall to capacity, so I’ve heard.’

  ‘Does she go to prison?’

  ‘No, no. The trouble-makers are Mrs Pankhurst’s Lot. Apparently our Miss Ruby is a bit of a pacifist. I should like to know what she would do if a man grabbed her by the waist – she’d soon become a warrior lady then.’

  ‘I don’t see that that is the same thing at all, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Not at all, old man.’

  ‘Well then, any lady fights for her honour, no matter what.’

  ‘But pacifism means peacefulness, and not peacefulness when it suits,’ said Max Hewetson with the condescension of a Sunday-school teacher, or perhaps with the sweet reason of a lawyer.

  ‘I believe you are mistaken. I can see that a woman may be pacific in her beliefs yet not eschew entering a fight… as in fighting for a just cause. Your argument fails because you equate passivity with pacifism.’

  A banner pole carried horizontally caught the two debaters behind the knees. ‘And if you two ignoramuses don’t shut up, you’ll get a demonstration of the difference.’ The interrupter of Jack and Max was a small woman wearing the mauve, green and white of ‘Mrs Pankhurst’s Lot’. ‘If you want to hold your own meeting, go somewhere else, though if you ask me, you’d do better to listen to the speaker.’

  Jack was more than willing to stand and look at the woman who was still Victoria Ormorod as he had known her during those days when he had fallen secretly in love. She was dressed in the plainest of clothes, a full-sleeved white voile blouse across which rested a band of white, green and red which swelled and fell over the contours of her figure, and rose and dipped with her every breath; a creamy white skirt with the same plain front and swaying back as at the last meeting, and the ubiquitous white flat straw hat, around which was bound a ribbon of white, green and red.

  Jack Moth’s heart cracked, for it suddenly occurred to him that such a creature could not possibly have remained in an unmarried state. She did not wear a ring, but that did not signify, he had heard that suffragettes often went ringless. Then he remembered that he had undertaken to be responsible for Esther and Otis. ‘Where are the girls?’ he whispered to Max Hewetson.

  ‘They have wormed their way to the front.’

  ‘Lord! They shouldn’t be there.’

  ‘Oh come, Jack, there will be no trouble today – the sun is shining.’

  ‘Sssh! Sssh!’ Hissed all around them.

  ‘You stop here, old fellow, and I shall fetch them back.’ He disappeared into the crowd.

  Suddenly the crowd cheered, and he was lost. Victoria Ormorod stepped up on to the banana-box platform. He did not care that she was Ruby Bice, he did not mind what she said, yet, almost against his inclination he was drawn to listen.

  She smiled in a most friendly way at the crowd, and at some policemen. ‘Gentlemen, the day is so hot that we shall not take it amiss if you remove your helmets and loosen your collars.’

  Some wag called, ‘Or we could do it for you.’ The crowd laughed, and Victoria Ormorod shook her head at them in disapproval.

  ‘No, no, ladies, the NUWSS is a peaceful movement, concerned to better the lot of working-class women, which we cannot do if we are languishing in gaol.’

  A woman shouted, ‘They take no notice of our cause if we are not destructive.’ Supported by some cheers by members of Mrs Pankhurst’s Lot.

  Jack would have liked to leap to her defence and tell them to be quiet, that he had not come here to listen to them, but to the great Ruby Bice. Oh Lord, how the name clashed with her personality. She was Victoria Ormorod.

  ‘…and only today, I was in a factory where girls work from eight in the morning till eight at night for less than half of the agreed rate, and there are girls, of sixteen or seventeen years of age, who work for as little as one and sixpence a week.’

  The crowd drew in its scandalized breath.

  ‘Yes, ladies and gentlemen, in your own town. One and sixpence! Less than the price of a six-inch pudding basin (which, for those among us who may not be au fait with such domestic matters, costs one and ninepence). And do you know what these girls are producing… for less than the cost of a six-inch pudding basin?’ Her eyes alighted on Jack and held his gaze. ‘They are producing items of uniform for the Royal Navy.’

  Her eyes still held Jack’s, but only Jack knew that; to the rest of the crowd she was addressing each of them. She said to him, ‘If our English officers knew of the conditions under which their uniforms are made, I am sure that they would
never wear them.’

  Jack nodded, indicating how fiercely he agreed.

  ‘Thirteen shillings and sixpence is the agreed Board of Trade rate for an eighteen-year-old girl performing this very best kind of tailoring.’ Her eyes returned to Jack. ‘And we intend to put an end to such injustices as these.’

  A man at the front of the crowd called in a hectoring voice, ‘What you going to do, dot the factory manager one with your parasol?’ He was either a brave man or an idiot of the first water to ridicule the idol before her own crowd.

  Jack thought him a fool, but wonderful Victoria Ormorod was not put out in the slightest by him. She smiled at him, and then at the audience. ‘Poor gentleman, he still believes it necessary to use violence to achieve one’s ends. Now, if you will allow me, sir, I will continue my story of my visit to the tailoring sweat-shops of Portsmouth. There will be plenty of time for questions later if you wish.’

  He would not give up. ‘Would you say you were a pacifist, then?’

  From the university debating society, Jack had learned the technique of heckling speakers to throw them off balance. It seemed obvious that this was the man’s purpose.

  ‘Yes, sir, I would say that I am a pacifist, an ardent one. I believe in settling any dispute by peaceful means.’

  ‘Right, so that if your meeting was to be spoilt by some person who kept interrupting, you would not lose your temper.’

  ‘I hardly promise that, I have a very fine temper. However, what I do believe is that the world has had its fill of aggression. Our only fight is for the minds of our masters. Our army is the common people, our ammunition, words.’

  ‘You got plenty of them, all right.’

  The audience, most of whom had come solely to listen to their adored Ruby Bice, were becoming restless. There were a few angry shouts to throw him out. Victoria dowsed those sparks with laughter when, indicating the wide expanse of sea, she said, ‘We can hardly throw him out… can we?’