Light & Dark

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  ‘Did you hear what I said, miss?’ The man’s voice had turned nasty, but Agnes refused to be ruffled.

  ‘… to the Women’s Enfranchisement Bill, so that it may become law during the present session of Parliament.’

  This was met by a storm of male catcalls, which did not however stop Betsy from jumping to her feet, hat feathers quivering, to second the motion and speak at some length.

  ‘It’s clear from the comments of the men tonight that a woman’s interests are not taken care of through the votes of the man in her family. Women are not content with this,’ she insisted. ‘It denies us recognition as individuals—human beings in our own right—and it’s crucial that men should stop seeing us only in relation to themselves. It’s time they took us seriously and realised we have minds and opinions of our own. Otherwise the suffragist movement will become an autonomous force completely outwith men’s control …’

  Her speech was constantly interrupted by heckling, but she seemed to gain strength as she went along and by the end of it she was shouting back at the hecklers.

  Clementina spoke next on a theme dear to Betsy’s heart, but one which it had been decided Betsy should not touch on in case her father found out and took revenge by becoming even more selfish and restrictive than he already was. Clementina cut through the man-made myth that women should be self-sacrificing and infuriated the men in the audience by mercilessly pulling to pieces the belief that women ought to sacrifice the development of their own personalities for the sake of men and children.

  ‘This is a most convenient belief for men.’ She spoke in clear, ringing tones, chin up and eyes bright with resolution. ‘But it is a sin against women, because it’s wrong for any human being to cease striving for self-development. By keeping women as slaves, men deny women this right. And they use the same arguments to support this slavery as men have always done to justify any slavery as far back as Aristotle. It has always been said that it was the natural order of things. It has a paternal quality. And, like a child, the slave is incapable of enjoying freedom. He is not educated enough or mature enough to cope with it. The dominant person in society and the slave, they claim, have different natures. Slaves should only try to be good slaves; that is where their happiness and self-fulfilment lies.’

  Looking straight at the women in the audience now, she continued, ‘Don’t you believe it! It is not out of any consideration for women’s interests that men want women to be womanly, to be pure and virtuous and to keep out of public life, to practise self-sacrifice, marriage and maternity. It is because this is in men’s interests. Pure selfishness,’ she said, ‘is the motive of men’s desire to oppress women. Men want women to specialise in virtue and sit at home, while they career around the world having sinful and enjoyable adventures. Men want women to be efficient only at massaging their egos so that they can appear twice their natural size. This is one of the ways in which the illusion of male mastery is kept intact.’

  Her last words were almost drowned by the boos of the male section of the audience and cries of ‘Get off!’ and ‘Beat it!’, but Clementina kept forcing her words to surface. Her small but sturdy frame, far from beating a retreat, had such an aura of obstinacy that she looked as if she had nailed her shoes to the floor. Question time brought more angry abuse, but both Clementina and Betsy continued to face the challenge and refuse to be intimidated. Until, that is, one working-class girl wearing a coarse tartan shawl round her shoulders asked a question that took Clementina aback. The girl, whose name she later discovered was Rhona Lindsay, wanted to know if the West Lothian Justice for Women Group had thought about justice for working-class women.

  ‘Does Miss Blackwood, for instance,’ Rhona Lindsay asked, ‘believe in improving the working conditions of women in the Blackwood Mill?’

  This aspect of justice had never occurred to Clementina and she frowned, brows down, eyes thoughtful. Eventually she said, ‘I don’t know anything about the working conditions in the Mill.’ She raised her voice above the jeering of the working men in the audience. ‘But if you see me afterwards, I shall be interested to hear what you have to say on the subject.’

  After the meeting she managed to have a brief few words with Rhona Lindsay and was impressed with the girl’s intelligence and her strong sense of injustice. There was also something hypnotic about her violet eyes and the veiled impertinence in them that almost amounted to menace. Clementina was reminded of gipsies she had seen in the Littlegate woods. Although unlike the gipsies, Rhona’s thick curly hair was bundled up on top of her head and at least partly secured there with hairpins.

  ‘I take your point,’ Clementina conceded, ‘that the vote is not much use to working women unless it can be used to improve working conditions and general social and economic inequalities. But without the political power that the vote gives, surely no real pressure can be put on politicians to do anything?’

  Just then Kitty flounced in and after giving Rhona a brief, uncomfortable glance, addressed Clementina. ‘Your carriage is waiting in Jarvie Street, Clementina. The rest have all gone. Do hurry!’

  ‘Very well.’ Then to Rhona, ‘We’ll talk again.’

  All in all it had proved a most exhilarating and challenging evening and once it was safely behind them, Clementina and her friends were able to discuss the meeting with enthusiasm and even enjoyment. There was also the wonderful sense of achievement, of at last doing something fulfilling and worthwhile. No fewer than twenty-nine ladies from Bathgate and the surrounding area had joined the Group and paid the agreed subscription. A group of ladies who had come from the nearby town of Linlithgow had suggested that if a meeting was held there, even more members would rally to the Cause. And so a meeting had been planned in that historic town which had played such a forceful role in Scotland’s turbulent and bloody history.

  On this occasion Clementina was interested to see, in the front row of the audience, the sullen-looking figure of Rhona Lindsay. Right from the start of the meeting until the very end, the violet eyes fixed on her with what to anyone with less spunk than Clementina would have been a totally intimidating stare. It was as if the girl hated her, Clementina thought. It was as if she was secretly sneering at every word she uttered. Curiosity had always been one of Clementina’s strongest characteristics so, nothing daunted, after the meeting she left the platform and stopped Rhona from leaving.

  Rhona stared down in silence at Clementina’s hand resting on her arm as if it was a futile but repulsive kind of bug.

  ‘We didn’t get the chance to finish our last conversation,’ Clementina said.

  The girl waited until Clementina had removed her hand before shrugging, ‘I hadn’t anything else to say.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true. Have you time to step into the ante-room? Just for a few minutes?’

  Rhona shrugged again, but she followed Clementina into the small room behind the platform. Once there, Clementina immediately burst into the subject of politics and social reform as if there had been no interruption to their previous conversation. She had been giving the matter a great deal of thought and she now tried to explore these thoughts about the policies of Mr Asquith and Mr Lloyd George and other prominent and influential politicians. However, before she had got very far, Rhona dismissed her words with a scornful, ‘What do the like of them know about mill houses and working conditions in the Blackwood mill? What do you know about them?’

  ‘I’m willing to learn,’ Clementina said.

  Rhona gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘How? By going to the mill and seeing for yourself, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, if necessary.’

  ‘You won’t do that.’

  ‘Oh? And what makes you say so?’

  Rhona’s mouth twisted. ‘I’m sure it’s not the place for you, you being such a fine lady!’

  ‘If I say I will go to the mill to learn about what goes on there, then I will. I always mean what I say.’

  Despite herself, Rhona felt a glimmer of respect for Cleme
ntina. There was something in those emerald eyes that indicated a force to be reckoned with. She even began to suspect that Clementina might have enough nerve to carry out her threat and actually turn up at the mill. She smiled maliciously to herself at the picture this conjured up. That would give the fine lady food for thought all right.

  Clementina’s friends, on the other hand, were distressed and worried when they heard of the planned visit. There was no need to subject herself to such an ordeal, they insisted. Whatever the factory or conditions in it were like, it had no relevance to their aims. The Cause, after all, was to get a share in the franchise so that ladies could gain more control of their own destinies and have some opportunity to develop their potential as individuals.

  Clementina’s mind was made up, however, and she could—as her friends knew only too well—be exceedingly stubborn. So eventually, despite their pleas, she set out for the factory on her bicycle. It was a good few miles the other side of Bathgate, in the centre of a miserable huddle of two-storey houses and one-roomed hovels which had taken the name of the factory and become Blackwood village.

  Her cycling expeditions had never taken her to this area before and she was immediately depressed by the sight of it. Over the other side of one of the hills and sunk in a small, claustrophobic valley, it looked dismal and cold as if no sunshine had ever reached there. The nearer she got to it, the more she became aware of the overpowering melancholy of the huge red-brick factory with its row upon row of bare windows and many turrets rearing up from the roof. As she dismounted from her bicycle and approached the entrance, she had a sudden shattering insight into what it must feel like to come here day after day, condemned to work in the place for the rest of one’s life. It took all her willpower to prevent her feet from faltering and she only regained her strength of purpose from the challenge of a bowler-hatted and moustached foreman who dared to try to stop her from entering.

  ‘I am Miss Blackwood,’ she announced, brushing aside the horrified man. ‘And I have come to inspect the factory and find out something about what goes on here.’

  ‘Miss Blackwood!’ The man hastened after her. ‘This is no place for a lady. You are liable to get lost or faint or some such …’

  ‘I have no intention of fainting,’ Clementina told him. ‘And to prevent me from getting lost, you may show me around. It would also help if you explained everything to me. Now, where do we start?’

  He was a big iron-backed, barrel-chested man like a sergeant-major, but he hesitated, his mouth loose and weak and his eyes bewildered, in front of the small expensively dressed woman with the direct, determined stare as hard and glittering as emeralds.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded impatiently.

  ‘Follow me, miss,’ he capitulated.

  For days afterwards Clementina could not rid herself of the nightmare of the next couple of hours. She became completely disorientated, knowing that she was safely at home in Blackwood House yet feeling she was still incarcerated in Blackwood Mill. Even weeks afterwards she would experience sudden rushes of noise in her head that would shake her whole body and for a few seconds would be completely smothered by the dense suffocating atmosphere of the spinning mill. Then she would have a spasm of coughing like the one after her visit, in a frantic effort to rid her nostrils, throat and chest of the fluffy pieces of cotton that had swirled around in the air like a thick cloud of poisonous snow.

  Clementina had made sure by her serious and unwavering attention that she learned as much as possible. First there was the ‘opening process’. She had been shown into the bale-breaking room where a man wielded a long-handled axe to break the metal band fastened round the tightly compressed bales of cotton brought from the cotton field. Then the bales were lifted through to the blow room—well-named because of so much blowing about in it. Afterwards they were tossed on to a spiked lattice feed that brought them up to a beater-roller in a rumbling chamber. The beater-roller kept knocking the cotton back so that it was rumbling about and getting opened, the heavy impurities being sucked out and taken away. A scrutcher lap machine called a double opener came next, the cotton falling on it in blanket form and being carried along another spiked lattice under beaters that continued to remove impurities.

  Then there was the carding engine, its noise battering at her head to such a degree that it was only with great concentration and determination that she heard the foreman’s shouted explanation that the carding process converted the lap into a form of soft rope or silver. The lap of cotton was led in for several reasons, including the removal of finer impurities and the preparation of the fibre for parallelisation. The cotton fibres now became like a fine web. But there was still the ‘lickerin’ and the doffer cylinders and many other processes like combing and roving. Eventually the cotton or rove had the thickness of rather less than that of a pencil; for the first time it had a slight twist and as it was produced it was wound on to bobbins.

  And all this rackety process that thickened the air with choking fluff was only the spinning preparation. The actual spinning, the deafening din, the overpowering crash of machinery, the madly whirling bobbins, the thick suffocating atmosphere, the rows of ghostly faced women remained with Clementina like a film that kept suddenly unfolding in a panic-stricken rush before her eyes.

  She was overwhelmed by it all—the wit-shattering noise, the fluff, the nauseating smell of warm oily waste and the wretchedness in the women’s eyes. She was so stunned to find that such a world existed and it was so different from anything that either she or her friends had ever experienced, that at first she could not even find a way to tell them about it. She just kept thinking about Rhona Lindsay and marvelled that the girl had survived her years of toil in the place. And not only survived, but had retained such a strong rebellious spirit.

  43

  ‘Mrs Musgrove,’ Lorianna said. ‘I wish you would let Lizzie do my hair. She has lighter, nimbler fingers.’

  ‘She can put it up as usual.’ Mrs Musgrove’s voice was strangely subdued and quiet. ‘But brushing needs a heavier, stronger hand.’

  The long strokes by brush and hand, tugging the head each time and more and more strongly, the electrical crackling of silk mittens, jerked Lorianna’s heartbeats faster. She wanted the brushing to stop.

  ‘I hope to goodness some nice young man acquires a special interest in Clementina tonight,’ she said breathlessly.

  ‘They will be after her like a pack of wolves.’

  ‘I know she’s beautiful with that gorgeous colour of hair and those stunning eyes. I know I shouldn’t worry, but I sometimes think her cheeks are a little too rosy. There is an altogether too robust quality about her, in fact, which I am afraid gentlemen might not find very appealing.’

  She gazed anxiously up at Mrs Musgrove like a lovely child. Her delicate complexion was paler than usual against the rich earthy gloss of her hair flowing free over her shoulders and the wide cherry softness of her mouth. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘She’s not as beautiful as you, madam.’

  Lorianna gave an embarrassed little laugh. ‘I sometimes get the feeling that she’s not my daughter at all and that she must be some kind of changeling. A milkmaid’s daughter who has been passed off as mine! We are so different in so many ways.’

  ‘Yes, she can look after herself. You cannot.’

  ‘As if those suffragette meetings weren’t enough,’ continued Lorianna. ‘Now there is all this business about the factory. She keeps going on and on about the working conditions there. I didn’t believe she was serious when I heard her pestering Gilbert to show her around the place. I thought she was just being argumentative as usual and trying to shock and annoy everyone. But she actually went to the factory in spite of his refusal. She bullied one of the foremen to show her round. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Oh, for goodness sake, Mrs Musgrove, that’s enough brushing. You surely have other more important things to attend to today?’

  ‘Yes, madam.’ Mrs Musgrove carefully pl
aced the brush on the dressing-table, but even with that slow controlled movement there was the slight jangle of keys and the sound pricked at Lorianna’s nerves.

  ‘Send Lizzie to me at once.’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  Lorianna could hardly contain her annoyance. She kept remembering that at an important occasion like a dance there ought to be menservants in attendance, a butler and a few footmen. She had said so to Mrs Musgrove, of course, but the icy response she had received told her, without the housekeeper putting it into words, that if she engaged menservants she would lose Mrs Musgrove’s help and cooperation and dire consequences would result.

  The sharp bird eyes had glittered with anger. ‘Does madam feel she no longer has confidence in me …’

  ‘No, no,’ Lorianna had hastily assured her. ‘I have every confidence in you, of course.’

  And so it had been decided that additional maids would be taken on for the day. Lorianna and Mrs Musgrove discussed the menu for the supper and Lorianna did the floral decorations so that the house would look its best and most welcoming. She had worked for hours during the two days immediately prior to the event, until the house was a rainbow of colour and the heady perfume of shrubs and blooms now pervaded the whole place. It filled her with a sweet pain she no longer dared think about.

  Another worry was over what Clementina would wear. She had ordered the dressmaker to fit her for several new dresses for both day and evening wear and a very special one for this evening. Clementina had not caused too much trouble over the numerous fitting sessions and the discussion about clothes, but on the other hand she had not shown much enthusiasm either. As Hilda and Mary Ann said, it didn’t seem natural. They had been hysterically excited about their first dance and had chattered endlessly about clothes for months beforehand.

  Even up to the last moment, Lorianna was haunted by vague fears and insecurities to the point of asking Flora McGregor, Clementina’s personal maid, to keep a special eye on Clementina and make sure that nothing went wrong. She had a horror of Clementina deciding not to turn up and just disappearing; because of that she invited her daughter to have lunch with her in the dining-room, so that she could keep an eye on her for at least part of the time herself.