Polly's March

by Linda Newbery

  I think I want the best for everyone, not just for myself.

  I can sometimes be sensible.

  I am loyal to my friends.

  I

  Then, defeated, she paused and sucked her pencil. It would be easier to think of bad things about herself, really: I am not very good at arithmetic. I don’t always try hard enough at school. I don’t think Mama and Papa can trust me not to do things they wouldn’t like if they knew about them.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lily

  The weather continued hot and sunny, as if it had no intention of ever changing; Polly counted the days to Lily’s visit, helping Aunt Dorothy to plan outings and surprises. To mark the start of the summer holidays, Mr. and Mrs. Dalby took Maurice and Polly on a boat trip along the Thames, all the way from Chelsea to Greenwich. Gazing from the deck, Polly imagined herself voyaging to hidden reaches of the Amazon, or travelling down the Nile to see pyramids and camels. She forgot to wear her hat, and her nose came out in a sprinkling of freckles, which Mama dabbed with lemon juice to make them fade.

  It seemed impossible for Mama to get any bigger, but the baby bulge continued to swell. Feeling, she said, like a galleon in full sail, Mama wore loose, light garments, but the heat made her uncomfortable. She fanned herself as she moved slowly about the flat and garden, saying that she could not wait for Folkestone, and the sea breezes. Polly had to remind herself that Mama’s normal size and shape would eventually be restored; it seemed so unlikely. The baby was due at the beginning of August, and the doctor visited regularly, proclaiming that all was well, diagnosing rest and plenty of fluids. Polly hoped the baby would come early, while Lily was here; then maybe she and Lily could take it for walks in its perambulator and pretend to be grown-up aunties.

  The good thing about Mama resting so much was that Polly could make several escapes to the flat upstairs, each time with a thrill of defiance. “I thought Violet told me you weren’t allowed?” said Edwina; but Edwina, of all people, did not let other people tell her how to behave, so she understood. Polly finished off a whole banner by herself, VOTES FOR WOMEN, and pasted posters to boards which could be carried high. It became her secret project, escaping up the stairs every afternoon if she could. As Violet was out at work at these times, only Edwina was there, and Kitty, who sometimes helped. Occasionally other people called in – usually ladies, but once there was a young man called Leonard, who must be one of the male suffragists Violet had told her about. Certainly, he spoke with just as much certainty and determination as Edwina did.

  “I’m definitely going to be a proper suffragette as soon as I’m old enough,” Polly announced one afternoon.

  “I hope,” Edwina said, looking at her over the top of the spectacles she wore for sewing, “it won’t be necessary to be a suffragette by the time you’re grown-up. If women haven’t got the vote by then, I shall be very disappointed. You must be a traveller, and come home whenever it’s time to vote.”

  “Mama thinks it’s a game,” Polly said, “me wanting to be an explorer. Like believing in fairies, something I’ll grow out of. She thinks I’ll be a wife and mother, just like her. But I don’t think I’d be very good at it. Wouldn’t you like that?” she added; after all, Edwina was the right sort of age, and so was Violet. “I mean, as well as all the other things you do, of course.”

  “I would only like it,” Edwina said, snipping a thread, “if I met exactly the right man. And I haven’t, yet. I don’t have time to think about it. Now, what about tea with Lily? Shall we say next Thursday?”

  Polly coloured up. “I’m not sure. We’re going to be very busy, you see, with Aunt Dorothy.”

  Edwina shot her a shrewd glance. “Oh. Of course, you’re not supposed to consort with a lawbreaker. How silly of me.”

  Polly nodded, her face hot.

  “What a shame.” Edwina was sewing on a letter F, with quick darts of her needle. “Well, tell me about Lily. What’s she like? What does she want to do when she grows up?”

  “Lily does want to get married and have children,” Polly said confidently. “Four, she wants. But apart from that, she’d like to be a nurse. I should think she’d make a good nurse.”

  “But perhaps she could be a doctor!” Edwina said at once. “Why shouldn’t she be?”

  “Because girls don’t—” Polly began, already knowing how Edwina would respond.

  “But girls will! One day, Polly, when we achieve our aims, women will have exactly the same chances and choices as men do. Isn’t that only right and fair? Think of you and Maurice – you’re just as clever, aren’t you? Just as sensible? Just as capable of learning new things?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” Polly had never met anyone who spoke as Edwina did – who made her feel that anything was possible, that she could choose whatever she wanted from a whole world of opportunities.

  Polly returned, as usual, just in time before Mama stirred from her afternoon rest, and blinked at her vaguely. “Oh, there you are, darling! I do hope you’re not getting bored.”

  “Oh, not at all, Mama,” Polly answered, innocent-faced.

  For now, there was one opportunity she wanted more than any other – she must find a way of going on next Saturday’s march! After all, she had folded the leaflets, sewn the sashes, pasted the posters – she was almost a part of it, now. How feeble it would be to miss the event itself! But Mama and Papa would never let her go, that was for certain.

  At last the long-awaited day came – the day of Lily’s arrival. Lily was to travel up by train, accompanied by her father, as her mother was reluctant to leave Tunbridge Wells for the heat and smoke of London. Polly, desperate to go and meet them at Victoria so as not to miss a single second of Lily’s visit, was told that her parents couldn’t allow her to loiter in the station on her own, and of course Mama couldn’t think of going all that way in the heat. The only solution was to persuade Maurice to go with her, “as your escort” was the way Mama put it, though Polly thought of him more as cumbersome baggage. As Maurice liked trains and stations, he agreed quite readily; and they managed to walk all the way to Victoria with only one small argument breaking out, about whether or not Maurice would be able to go on hunger strike and submit to force-feeding, the way Edwina had on her first spell in Holloway.

  “I can’t see what would be so bad about it,” Maurice stated. “All you’d have to do would be lie there. I’ve had a tooth out, and it can’t be nearly as bad as that.”

  “That’s all you know! Violet told me – because Edwina told her, though she’s never talked to me about it – it was the most awful agony. Can you imagine? Having tubes forced down your throat and into your stomach, nearly choking you – people holding you down so you can’t even struggle, then horrible stuff like gruel pumped in – and the tubes ripped out again afterwards? It was the prison doctor doing it, only you’d never have thought so from how rough he was, Violet said. Edwina only had it once, but some of the suffragettes have had it done to them time and time again. Don’t you think they were brave?”

  “Brave, or stupid? None of them had to have force-feeding – they could have given in and eaten for themselves. They want to make themselves martyrs, that’s what my mother says!”

  “You have to be brave to be a martyr,” Polly said stubbornly.

  Maurice was silent for a moment; then, to her surprise, he said, “Yes. All right, then. They are brave, to go through all that when they didn’t have to.”

  He had surprised her in another way, too. Two days ago, in the garden, she had boasted to him about her afternoon visits to the flat upstairs. The moment the words were out of her mouth, she had regretted it; but Maurice had not, apparently, said a word to his mother. Polly was forced to think that maybe even Maurice had his good points.

  They reached Victoria, and found the right platform. “I do hope they haven’t missed their train!” fretted Polly; but there, already, was Lily, waving, and walking as fast as she could towards the barrier, outpacing her father, who was str
uggling with a number of bags and cases.

  “Polly! Polly!”

  The two girls hugged; when they broke apart, Lily said, “Oh, hello, Maurice. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  “Maurice came with me,” Polly explained, “otherwise Mama wouldn’t have let me come.”

  Lily was wearing a new dress of kingfisher blue, with a low waist and a white collar; her well-brushed fair hair was caught back in matching turquoise ribbons. Polly couldn’t help thinking that she already looked a little taller and more grown-up than when they had last met; was that possible, in such a short time?

  “She’s brought enough luggage for a whole family for a fortnight,” Lily’s father said cheerfully, catching up.

  Everything was stowed in a taxicab; then all four of them took their seats and were conveyed in style to Wellington Square.

  “Er, I might as well go home, then,” Maurice said awkwardly, while Mr. Bradshaw paid the cab driver, and Aunt Dorothy came out to greet the arrivals with cries of delight. Polly had almost forgotten about him.

  “Oh, do come and join us for tea!” cried Aunt Dorothy, but Maurice said that he was expected at home, and slipped away.

  Shortly afterwards, Lily’s father left to catch his train back, and now Lily and Polly could talk properly – about Lily’s new school, and what it was like living in Tunbridge Wells, with the shops and the Pump Room and the Common, and how tedious Polly was finding Maudie Marchant, and the novelty of having suffragettes living upstairs.

  “Oh, how exciting!” exclaimed Aunt Dorothy. “I do so admire them!”

  “My mother doesn’t. Neither does Mrs. Dalby,” said Polly. “But I do. They’re my friends, you know,” she added importantly.

  “Now, girls,” Aunt Dorothy swept on, “we’ve got so many lovely things to look forward to! I’m getting tickets for Swan Lake – we can all go, you too, Polly—”

  “It’s going to be such fun!” Lily couldn’t keep still. “Polly, come up and see my room. You can help me unpack my things.”

  At last they were alone together: just like old times, when they’d giggled and chattered in Lily’s bedroom or Polly’s, trying on their mothers’ hats, pretending to be very grand, and striking poses in front of the mirror. Aunt Dorothy’s spare bedroom was very pretty and girlish, as if decorated specially for Lily: white candlewick bedspreads; curtains sprigged with rosebuds, and matching cushions; a bedside lamp in clouded glass, shaped like a bluebell flower. “Two beds!” said Lily, flumping down on one and kicking up her feet. “Maybe you could come and stay – wouldn’t that be fun?” Quickly she sprang up again: “I must hang up my new dress before it gets creased.”

  From her suitcase she produced more things Polly hadn’t seen before: a party dress in ruby velvet, and bar shoes to go with it, with jet-button fastenings. “For going to concerts and smart occasions like that,” she explained.

  “You’ve got a lot of new clothes,” Polly remarked. She couldn’t help feeling that Lily had overtaken her, and was rushing on into grown-up-ness.

  “Well, there are such lovely shops in Tunbridge Wells! Just wait till you come and see them. Your dress is quite nice too, Polly. Now tell me all about these suffragettes! I do hope I’ll meet them!”

  Before Polly knew what time it was, Papa arrived to collect her on his way home from the bank, and she and Lily had to say goodbye to each other until tomorrow.

  “I hope you thanked Maurice for going with you to the station?” Papa said, in Flood Street.

  Polly felt herself going hot. She hadn’t said a word in thanks. She had hardly even said goodbye to him, so eager had she been to hear all Lily’s news – and after he had behaved quite nicely, for once. “I’ll go and see him now,” she mumbled.

  While Papa went in at the side entrance, Polly went round to the front, through the gates, and rang the Dalbys’ bell. It was Elsie, the gossip, who answered. Polly gave her a stony look, and asked for Maurice.

  Elsie showed her in: across the tiled hall that Mama so envied, and up the stairs that led nowhere. There was a halfway landing here, then three stairs that led straight into a blank wall. Before the house had been converted into flats, this had been the grand stairway leading to all the floors. Now, the landing was an odd in-between place, a dead end, a sort of hidey-hole, and Maurice often left out his games here, or his chess set. He was busy lining up two armies of model soldiers: one side in bright scarlet, the other in royal blue, facing each other across the Turkish red carpet.

  “Maurice.” Polly paused two stairs short of the landing, and cleared her throat. “I came to say, you know, thank you for coming to the station.”

  Maurice looked up from his manoeuvres, puzzled, as if he’d already forgotten about it. “Oh, that’s all right. Hey, Pegs, what d’you think of the news?”

  “What news?”

  “There’s going to be a war!” he announced. “My father says so!”

  “In Ireland?”

  “No. In Europe. Haven’t you seen the newspapers?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you should look at them, then. You know about the shooting of the Archduke of Austria a couple of weeks ago?”

  “In that place called – what was it – Sarah-something?” Polly remembered the news-stands.

  “You mean Sarajevo, in the Balkans.”

  “Why does that mean there’s got to be a war?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” Maurice gave her one of his lofty, you’re only a girl looks that made Polly want to hit him.

  “Go on, then! Tell me why, if you know all about it!”

  Maurice sat back, folding his arms. “Well, it’s complicated. My father says Austria is looking for any chance to declare war on Serbia, and this is it. Then it’s about all the countries supporting each other, like teams. Germany’s on the same side as Austria. Russia will support Serbia. And we’ll be in it, too, because we’re on the same side as Russia and Serbia. No one can stay out.”

  “That doesn’t sound very likely to me,” Polly scoffed. “All because of one shooting? So this is the war, is it?” She indicated the red and blue armies at her feet. “They’re just – dolls for boys, that’s all they are!” With her toe, she pushed over two of the royal blues, so that they fell face-down on the carpet.

  “It is! You wait and see.” Maurice scrambled to pick up his fallen soldiers, going red in the face – the way he did very easily, Polly had noticed. “And if there is a war, and it goes on long enough, I’m going to be in it!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Plotters

  Polly was finding it hard to keep up with Lily’s new, consuming interest in clothes and fashions. As Aunt Dorothy shared her niece’s passion, they spent a whole afternoon in Selfridges, the huge new store, grand as a museum, which Lily and Aunt Dorothy both thought the next thing to Paradise. “Everything under one roof!” marvelled Aunt Dorothy. “You could spend all day in here!”

  They rode the escalators from floor to floor, gazing at the glittering array of goods for sale, from shoes to chandeliers. “It’s like Aladdin’s cave!” Polly said, content just to wander; she lingered in the toy department, but Lily dismissed that as “for children” and swept on to Fashions for the Modern Miss. Eventually, after much trying on and several changes of mind, Lily bought a hat and a silk shantung dress; Aunt Dorothy bought a blouse, and a box of lace-trimmed handkerchieves for Lily’s mother. For the sake of joining in, Polly decided to spend her pocket money on new hair ribbons. Dazzled by a rainbow of tempting colours displayed glossily in a drawer, she was about to choose pale lilac, but changed her mind at the last moment and picked green, white and purple.

  “You’d have done better with the lavender,” Lily remarked. “That was a perfect match for the stripes in your blouse.”

  “These are suffragette colours! Green for hope, white for purity, purple for dignity.”

  “I know that! But I don’t see why you’ve wasted your money – you can hardly wear them to school. And your
mother won’t let you wear them when she’s around.”

  Polly didn’t care. The point was to have the ribbons – a private expression of her loyalty to Violet and Edwina.

  Tired from all the shopping, they had cakes and lemonade in the restaurant, and afterwards walked towards Marble Arch, for the bus home.

  “Couldn’t we go over there, just for a little while?” asked Polly, attracted by the greenness of Hyde Park.

  “My feet ache,” Lily complained, but Aunt Dorothy thought it was a good idea.

  “We can walk down to the Serpentine, and catch a bus from Knightsbridge.”

  They crossed Park Lane, dodging motorcars and omnibuses, horses and bicycles, and entered the park at what Aunt Dorothy said was Speaker’s Corner. Polly looked around her, seeing nothing but a bare space with railings on three sides, and trodden dust.

  “Oh! This is where—”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Aunt Dorothy. “Where anyone can stand up on a soapbox and make a speech.”

  “Could we do it now?” Polly asked, imagining herself, at this very moment, launching into an address about votes for women. How would people react? There weren’t all that many people around to listen – a few strollers, a nursemaid with twins in a perambulator, a family having a picnic. How foolish she would feel!

  “Well, you could,” said Aunt Dorothy, laughing. “But I think there are special times. If you’re going to start airing your views, you need an audience. I’ve heard Mrs. Pankhurst speak here, you know. Very stirring, she was – but there were those in the crowd who booed and jeered at her. A lot of courage, it must take, to stand up and expose yourself to ridicule. I’m quite sure I couldn’t do it!”

  “You’re not a suffragette, are you, Aunt Dorothy?” asked Lily, swinging her shopping bags.

  Aunt Dorothy shook her head. “No,” she said, with a small sigh. “I half wish I were – I take my hat off to them. But, well, I’ve got my living to make. Who’d send me their daughters for piano lessons, if I were out on the streets smashing windows and setting buildings on fire?”