Give Us This Day (50 page)

The bolder the foray on the part of the Pankhursts and their converts, the wider the acreage of print they won for themselves, and the more talking points they provided in first-, second-, and third-class compartments of branch trains steaming citywards from the suburbs between seven and eight-thirty a.m. each morning. The progress of the Japanese War and the toll of the San Francisco and Valparaiso earthquakes ran poor seconds to the latest outrage of the suffragettes at a byeelection in the provinces or on the streets of the capital, and some of the bulletins were all but unbelievable.

Frock-coated statesmen, rising to deliver addresses on matters of moment, like the disestablishment of the Welsh Church or the growth of the German Navy, had not uttered a dozen words before they were assailed by Furies—old, young and middle-aged—rising from the body of the hall to pose that utterly irrelevant question, “Do you support votes for women, sir?” And as if this was not enough, redoubling their outcry when stewards dragged them from their seats. Nor did it stop at heckling, followed by ejection. Realising that their storming parties were physically unequal to the task of maintaining lodgments in public hall and Corn Exchange, the assailants resorted to a bizarre range of tactics, involving chains and padlocks (with keys secreted where no steward could search for them), bags of soot, bags of flour, the stinkbomb, and even banners that unrolled before the statesmen’s eyes like the writing on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace and bearing much the same message. But in a tongue everyone present could understand.

Soon, as the usage of hall stewards became less chivalrous, and frustrations on their part swept aside the dictates of modesty, glimpses of petticoats and worse were vouchsafed public and press, so that the purists, currently campaigning for the closure of music halls in London, found new targets in the display of undergarments exposed to public view in many a parish and town hall, and sometimes on the pavements outside. But even outrage on this scale did not seem to lessen the determination of Mrs. Pankhurst’s converts to make themselves heard, not even when persistent hecklers were down to their well-laced stays. Neither were these unseemly scrimmages confined to public meetings attended by Cabinet Ministers and other notabilities. By the time the year 1906 was drawing to a close, the new banditti were roving the streets of the West End, scratching their slogans with diamonds on the windows of blameless tradesmen, marching en masse through the streets of the capital to one or other of their interminable rallies, and generally hellraising on a scale that had not been witnessed in London since the week of the Gordon riots.

More and more arrests were made and more and more jubilant martyrs elected to go to gaol rather than pay fines, or give undertakings to return meekly to the seraglio. Most of them, indeed, seemed to glory in an arrest and a ride in the Black Maria, regarding a spell in gaol as a kind of promotion in the ranks of the politically enlightened. And while Fleet Street editors made no bones about where their sympathies rested in this David and Goliath contest, they lost no time in despatching their most experienced reporters and photographers to the scene of the nearest riot or vigil, even when the latter took place within a handcuff-span of Buckingham Palace railings. There came a time when a suffragette riot took precedence, in news value, over coverage of the latest match at Lord’s Cricket Ground, and Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters were thus accorded more space in one week than poor Florence Nightingale had won during her sojourn in the Crimea halfa-century before. National and international topics dwindled to a column, half-acolumn, and, occasionally, if Mrs. Pankhurst’s storm troops had been unusually active or original, to a few inches. Clear across the land, her name was heard in barparlour and corner shop, during pauses in the musical programmes of suburban soirees and on the terraces of country houses where guests, meeting one another for a few moments between meals and changes of costume, asked one another what the country was coming to when parties of six women proved capable, time and again, of prohibiting free speech and decorating the waistcoats of their opponents with all the ingredients that went into the baking of a Christmas cake. Or, elsewhere in the provinces, where eggs and flour were put to more conventional uses, seeking ammunition in the interior of a master-sweep’s hearth-sack.

* * *

Adam Swann, watching the world go by and ruminating on these frolics from the vantage point of the Hermitage knoll at Tryst, knew his family well enough to make educated guesses at their likely response to Mrs. Pankhurst’s campaign. Nowadays he was more domesticated and less informed on what was happening out on the network. Each of his children, passing into maturity, had engaged his mind on one level or another.

Hetty, he would judge, would recoil from Mrs. Pankhurst and her cohorts, seeing them as an admission of failure on the part of women everywhere to bring pressures to bear upon men by methods for which nature had endowed them. Apart from that she had never, in his experience, shown more than a passing interest in politics and would not have bothered to use the vote Mrs. Pankhurst sought to win for her. Politics, in her view, qualified as a male profession, like the Army, the Law, and the Church. It was not a fitting occupation for a woman, even a woman luckless enough to journey through life as a spinster. An identical view, he imagined, would be held by his daughter Stella, over at Dewponds, for Stella Fawcett already enjoyed as much independence as Emmeline Pankhurst demanded. Everyone at Dewponds deferred to “Mother,” and he for one had never been fooled by the token deference she paid to that husband of hers, Denzil.

It would be similar, he imagined, in the case of his daughter Joanna, and his youngest daughter Margaret. Both were essentially feminine, the one relying on her instincts to regulate the balance between herself and that rackety chap she had married, the other endowed with a disposition that would immunise her against the doctrines of women like Emmeline Pankhurst and her valiant daughters. For he thought of them as valiant, remembering the courage and confidence it required to challenge established British practices, particularly those as firmly-based as those at Westminster, so that he saw the campaign as rather pitiful, fearing it could never prevail against such fearful odds. Yet, deep in his heart, he applauded them for their spirit, and even more for their ingenuity. All his life he had hated humbug, especially humbug in high places, and where was humbug more deeply entrenched than among the legislature? Giles, no doubt, would discover this in due course. Until he did, poor wight, let him continue to regard the Mother of Parliaments as the womb of human progress and not a creaking stage, where practised posturing advanced men far more swiftly than originality or virtue. Life had taught Adam Swann many lessons, among them the hopelessness of setting off in search of the Holy Grail ill-equipped and under-capitalised.

His mind continued its probe of the possibilities of Pankhurst alignment within the family. His daughter-in-law Gisela would be found among the neutrals. She had never sought equality with men, least of all with George, whom she regarded as the new Galileo, but Lydia, Alex’s wife, would regard the campaign with contempt, seeing it as the negation of all the disciplines she had seen practised inside the prisoners’ base of a barrack square. He was not so sure about his daughter Helen. Years ago, no doubt, she would have taken Joanna’s view, but her experiences in China had changed her in a way that might encourage her to admire the courage and tactics of the W.S.P.U. and their leader. A woman who had shot a man at close range, and in cold blood, would be unlikely to regard the soot-spattering of a Cabinet Minister’s waistcoat as a cataclysmic event. Word had reached him that Helen was adjusting to the Irish set, and the liveliest activist among the suffragettes would be eclipsed in extravagance by a man like Rory Clarke. As for support on the distaff side of the family, he thought he could count on two: Giles’s wife, Romayne, and his adopted daughter, Deborah, now helping her husband, that pleasant chap Jeffs, to run a tinpot newspaper in the west. Both women, he felt, were likely recruits for such a crusade. Romayne because she had always been a rebel of sorts, Deborah because, alone among the Swann womenfolk, she was what he could accept as an educated woman, whose involvement with the underdog went back to the early ‘eighties, when she and W. T. Stead and that tub-thumping evangelist Booth had challenged the white slave traffic here and on the Continent. But musing thus, he thought gratefully,
Thank God I’m old enough to be objective about issues of this sort
, and thankfully turned the page to the Stock Exchange listing.

4

He came far closer than he imagined. At the precise moment he was sunning himself on the terrace of his Hermitage, two far-reaching decisions were being made in the family, each involving, more or less directly, Mrs. Pankhurst and her troupe of wildcats. Less than twenty miles away, in a rented flat at the top of Northumberland Avenue within easy walking distance of Giles Swann’s new workshop, man and wife were soul-searching on the subject of his maiden speech in the House. Meantime, some two hundred miles to the west, in the sleepy seaside town where Milton and Deborah Jeffs had lived since quitting the London scene, mail from London was pointing them towards changes that had been in their minds for some time now, ever since they had received a tempting offer for their weekly newspaper from the Harmsworth group, who led the newspaper field in the peninsula and were engaged in adding local weeklies to their empire.

They had been very happy down here, all but out of range of national controversy and engrossed in purely parochial affairs, where they felt their influence was often sufficiently powerful to decide an issue. Both, in their younger days, had worked in Fleet Street, Milton as a feature writer on a range of radical journals, and Deborah as one of the first woman journalists in the Street, serving under W. T. Stead. With the prospect of marriage, a vague dissatisfaction had settled on them, reaction in some degree to all the misery and strife they had chronicled, and when Milton proposed to realise every Fleet Street man’s secret dream—that of owning and editing his own broadsheet—Deborah had encouraged him to take the plunge.

Since then they had vegetated, or so they thought of it, moving molehills in preference to mountains, with no thought of returning to the London scene until events conspired to make them take a closer look at the probable course of the years left to them. Former friends of Deborah, drawn into the Pankhurst maelstrom, wrote regularly of the mounting fury of the suffragist campaign, and one of Lester Harmsworth’s scouts offered them a handsome profit for the newspaper, enough to enable Jeffs to buy a footing in a much more important journal serving a wider area of population. The coincidence caused the hidden wishes of both of them to surface simultaneously. Milton had said, “It’s at least double what I would have asked if I had ever put it on the market. Money is no object to the Harmsworths when they want a thing, and a man ought to think twice about refusing a profit of this kind if it falls into his lap. We built this paper up from scratch, remember? It was no more than a local newsheet when we moved in, and if we could do it once we could do it again, before we’re too old and too lazy to try.” But then he had paused, regarding her thoughtfully, “Only one thing stops me wiring acceptance, Debbie.”

“What’s that, Milton?”

“You. You and young Deany. We’ve had a good life down here. And a useful one, too, in a modest way. Maybe I oughtn’t to quarrel with the kind of luck I’ve enjoyed ever since I ran into you.”

They were well accustomed to talking things over and pooling points of view. There was no paternalism here, for Jeffs’s respect for his wife’s intelligence dated from the moment he read her articles in the
Pall Mall Gazette
on the sale of fourteen-year-old children to rich old roues. He added, “You’ve been thinking of a change yourself, haven’t you? Ever since the W.S.P.U. began to steal the headlines?”

He was right. She was fifty now, a time for reappraisal, and while she, like him, had found fulfilment in publishing their own journal, she had a sense of the years slipping by at an alarming pace since her son had passed from cot and toddling stage to boyhood. They still called him Deany, a diminutive of Houdini, the nickname he had acquired as a particularly active baby who had to be watched throughout his waking hours, for he seemed to be born with a working knowledge of escapology. He was away at school now, her half-brothers’ old school on Exmoor, and a change of venue would not affect him much. The flow of letters she had received from former colleagues, inside and outside the Women’s Social and Political Union, had stirred her deeply, as had press accounts of the rough-handling the campaigners had received at political meetings. She said, “How long do you suppose Asquith and those other politicians will hold out against the franchise of women, Milton?”

“Indefinitely,” he assured her. “Make no mistake about that.” And then, shrewdly, “You’d like to play a part in it, wouldn’t you? Well, come to that, so would I. They get practically no press support, and I see what’s happening to them lately as a national disgrace. It’s the domestic equivalent to the hammering we gave those poor devils in South Africa. That’s what’s disturbing about this country. The average Briton, from Prime Minister down to the layabout in the street, honestly thinks of himself as a standard bearer of human rights. But national arrogance, a century of commercial success, suzerainty over a quarter of the world’s surface, and a navy capable of blowing any rival out of the water, seem to have blinded a majority to aspects of human dignity. Did you know even Hungary has universal franchise?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then say what you have in mind. Irrespective of this Harmsworth offer.”

“It’s my age partly. With luck I’ve got around twenty years left to play a part in affairs, to use what talent and experience I’ve got to alter things, to try and change them for the better. It can’t be right to spend them writing about the Withy Brook overflow, and the decaying fabric of our infants’ schools in this backwater. Sometimes… sometimes I feel an itch to head back to London, to find out things for myself and write about them… where are you off?”