Daughter of the House

Although they did not meet on that night, Jinny had been present at the first WSPU meeting Nancy ever attended. When she shyly followed Lizzie into a drab hall behind a Methodist chapel, the space was swelling with a sound that Nancy had never heard before. It was a loud chorus of women’s voices, rising unconfined, uncut by rumbling male noise. Their talk sounded as exuberant as birdsong.

A woman had mounted the platform, dressed with refined elegance, a cameo brooch at her throat. Her grey hair was arranged under a felt hat with a purple, white and green badge pinned to it.

‘Good evening, friends,’ she said, and silence fell at once.

Nancy learned that the Honourable Mrs Frances Templeton was the chairman of this section of the WSPU. She opened the meeting with a series of reports, from news of leafleting initiatives to the present condition of hunger strikers in Holloway Prison, and Nancy had been astonished and enthralled to find herself apparently at the hub of these important protests.

After the business of the evening was concluded, Mrs Templeton had introduced a speaker. Mamie Bullock Dodd was an American Spiritualist who had lectured them on the links between their organisations.

She boomed in a rich tenor voice, ‘Many Spiritualists are suffragists, and socialists too. “Those terrible triplets, connected by the same umbilical cord and nursed from the same bottle.” That is a quote, but I will not dignify the gentleman by speaking his name.’

Mrs Bullock Dodd had attempted to conduct a seance but it had not been a success. The packed benches of militant suffragists did not give off the faintest whiff of psychism, and Nancy and Lizzie had got the giggles so badly that Mrs Templeton had frowned at them from the platform. Mrs Dodd struggled gamely on. Were they aware that Spiritualism was the only religious movement in the world that acknowledged the equality of women and men? They were all women of the twin spheres. A woman was a communication from heaven to earth and the spirits of the universe breathed through her lips.

A bareheaded girl had jumped up.

‘Will the spirits breathe us rights at the ballot box, then? A vote’s what I’m after. I’ll ’andle my menfolk in my own way, thanks very much, wi’out the spirits’ ’elp. ’Cept those my ’usband drinks when ’e can afford ’em. I’ll worry about the hereafter when I gets there.’

Lizzie had to cram her handkerchief between her teeth to stifle her gasps. But oddly enough Mrs Dodd’s vaporous claims had made Nancy feel better. As she represented them the Spiritualists didn’t sound threatening or even eerie and if this was Lawrence Feather’s domain, there was nothing to fear. The Uncanny still lay within her, and it was hers alone.

Once they discovered that they had both been present, Jinny and Nancy sometimes laughed about the evening. Nowadays Nancy considered Spiritualism to be an eccentric but benign cul-de-sac, although the spirits themselves were a different matter.

Nancy met Jinny Main in a café after a rally in Parliament Square. She was fifteen, and Jinny was two years older. She was struck at once by her grace. Jinny listened to what other people had to say even when it was nonsense, and she never said a bad word about anyone. She was motherless and her father was a drinker, but she never complained about her difficult life.

‘I’m lucky compared with some,’ she said, with her enclosed smile. She wasn’t otherwise vain about her appearance but she did mind about the protruding teeth that overcrowded her square jaw.

Jinny was employed as a printer’s devil. She was boyish enough to be inconspicuous in a male environment, and she worked as hard as any of the men. One evening before the next meeting her new friend took Nancy to Lennox & Ringland to show her round the printworks floor. Jinny was setting up the type for a new WSPU leaflet and Nancy watched in fascination as she demonstrated how to hand set.

‘You need good eyesight and quick fingers. This is eight-point type,’ she said.

Each tiny letter had to be read backwards, picked and dropped into a metal slug, spaced to form complete lines that also had to be read backwards.

‘Have a go,’ she invited.

Nancy fumbled her way through five words. Jinny grinned and took a pull of her efforts, then held up the result.

‘Omadood barm besarves amather. Really?’

They laughed until they had to prop themselves up against the bench.

Nancy’s version of ‘one good turn deserves another’ became their comfort phrase.

‘Omadood barm,’ Jinny would call to her as the insults and catcalls flew over their heads from the anti-suffragist masses.

Nancy left school in 1913, just before her sixteenth birthday. A dismal interval followed in which she was supposed to be learning French and, if she was to be anything like the girls she had been at school with, beginning to cast around for a husband. Neither of these activities appealed to her and she begged her father to let her do something useful at the Palmyra instead. Devil insisted there was nothing suitable. Nancy understood that his expectations were different when it came to Cornelius and Arthur. When they were much younger Devil had always been murmuring about ‘Wix and Sons’, and as the daughter she was being advised to train as a bilingual secretary to some businessman.

‘Commerce is where the future lies. It is a much better world for you than the theatre. You will have the security of a career,’ Eliza said. Infuriatingly, since Nancy knew that her mother had not placed great emphasis on suitability or security in her own younger days.

‘I am never going to be bilingual’.

‘Apply yourself, Nancy. Mamselle Schenck says that you have a good brain.’

Lucie Schenck was a middle-aged French lady who was supposed to be teaching her the language.

Then seemingly without warning, like a thunderclap out of a summer sky, the war came.

It did not end before Christmas, even though most people had been certain that it would, and Mlle Schenck hurried back to her family in a village only ten miles from Neuve Chapelle. At the same time Jinny Main told Nancy that so many of the skilled men were leaving their benches at Lennox & Ringland to join up that no one remained to print the pamphlets and journals. Dust was gathering on the typesetting machines. Within a week she had applied for a job alongside Jinny, and was employed at once as the print floor dogsbody. Jinny herself had been promoted to Linotype operator.

At the end of 1914 Jinny volunteered to be a nurse with the London Ambulance Column. From the front, the wounded men were evacuated by train to the French coast and from there brought across the Channel to be loaded on to another train. Finally the LAC met them in London and drove them onwards to their final hospital destination. At the railway stations the ambulances were sometimes overwhelmed by crowds of well-wishers who had come to cheer the men home.

The LAC organisers were used to dealing with a different class of girl, and they advised Jinny that she did not have the required nursing qualifications. But she stood her ground in the matron’s office and insisted they at least recruit her as a driver. She was a country girl who knew how to operate farm machinery so they agreed in the end to let her try the work. Her supervisor later told her she hadn’t been expected to last a week, but Jinny settled into it and spent many of her nights threading her stretcher cases through the dark streets. Nancy would cover for her on the days when she crawled away to sleep in a cupboard, unable to stay awake any longer.

On the busiest ‘push’ nights when the trains pulled in with a seemingly unending stream of smashed bones and bloodied dressings, Nancy helped out at the Column HQ in Regent’s Park. She begged but Eliza had refused to let her train for proper nursing, so her work was little more than folding blankets and smoothing laundered slips on to stretcher pillows, or even making cocoa for the dispatch riders. But it was something.

Those nights deepened her friendship with Jinny. Day after day, in an attempt to bridge the chasm between the demands of the night and the ordinary working world, the two girls talked and shared their secrets.

Early one morning, as they sat in the fresh air under an unfurling chestnut tree in Regent’s Park to recover from an unusually bad night, Jinny told Nancy about the grey coaches.

Tacked on to the end of some of the hospital trains from France were locked carriages with blanked-out windows. The doors were never unlocked while the regular wounded were being unloaded, but plain grey vans discreetly waited until the rest of the train was empty. The ordinary ambulance drivers did not ask questions and no one speculated about the men who must be inside the coaches. There was no cheering for them.

Nancy listened to this account in silence.

This time in the Uncanny she did not see anything clearly and that was a mercy, but she could hear all too well. There was darkness barred with slats of light, a terrible weeping, and a husky voice that tonelessly whispered, ‘All gone,’ over and over. And there was a low growling, sounding less like a man than an animal, a wounded bear or some other creature she did not even know.

Jinny saw her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she cried. ‘It’s your other sight, isn’t it? I didn’t mean to wake it up, Nance.’

Nancy had never told another soul, but she had described to Jinny how as a girl she had glimpsed the war long before it had begun.

She breathed deeply. ‘It’s all right. We’re both all right, aren’t we? It’s the soldiers. They’re dying, not us.’

Worse than dying, some of them, she now understood.

Cornelius was out there, and her cousins Rowland and Edwin. Arthur was still too young to enlist but he was already at Sandhurst on an accelerated officer-training programme. Even Arthur would soon be going to France.

Jinny clasped her hand until the voices faded. Sunshine sparkled on the grass as they walked to a café to buy a bun for breakfast before catching the bus to Lennox & Ringland.

It was at the beginning of 1915 that Cornelius had suddenly decided he must join up in the ranks.

Devil was too old to fight in France, but he believed in doing his duty. He devised a series of shows for the Palmyra that featured comedy routines, patriotic songs and choruses, and uplifting speeches from popular public figures. They were called ‘Union Jack Nights’, and seats were given away to men in uniform. On one of these nights, Cornelius was sitting in a front fauteuil. Devil had asked him to watch the performance and give him some ideas for improving the static sets. A soloist came out to the apron to perform a song about joining up. The chorus went, ‘I do like you, cockie, now you’ve got yer khaki on.’ The women sitting in the seats near Cornelius sang and clapped and the singer marched down from the stage. Passing through the audience she stopped in front of Cornelius and handed him a white feather.

The next morning he went out to the recruitment office. He didn’t tell Devil and Eliza about his intentions, and even Nancy only heard about it afterwards. He was examined by a medical officer and – to his intense humiliation – immediately classified as medically unfit.

A different man might have accepted this judgement and looked for useful war work at home, but the normal rules could not be made to fit Cornelius. As always, only his personal logic applied. Once he had decided it was what he must do, he could not contemplate not going to France. He loved motor vehicles and driving with a passion that had begun with Devil’s De Dion-Bouton, and he concluded that if he was not to be a soldier he must be an ambulance driver.

He volunteered, and within days he was on the Western Front.

The field dressing stations were canvas shelters crammed with wounded and dying men. Cornelius and the other drivers collected the injured from the dressing stations and ferried them behind the lines, through the mud and chaos of the nearby battle, to the clearing hospital. The hopeless cases were set aside, and there were more than enough of those, but men with even the smallest chance of survival were roughly patched up and transferred to slow, crowded casualty trains.

Thus two people who Nancy dearly loved had formed the first and final links in this long rescue chain, and she was proud of them both.