‘All right?’
‘Yes’.
‘Nothing there?’
They rarely spoke about Nancy’s Uncanny but Jinny did not dismiss it, or even seem to regard it as particularly strange.
‘There are more things than we understand, I know that much,’ she shrugged. ‘I don’t need an old freak like Mrs Bullock Dodd to make me believe or not believe. Remember?’
It was Lizzie Shaw who took Nancy to her first suffragist meeting in 1911, but by the time she was fifteen Nancy had been drawn into the Women’s Social and Political Union on her own account.
Nancy knew how her mother’s independent spirit had been worn down by her circumstances, and she thought that her own future was unlikely to be any different unless women came together with a shared intent.
Why should men own almost all the property and retain all the power?
The answer came to her in the clear voice of the WSPU.
Because the men gave themselves permission to do so.
Nancy and her fellow campaigners believed that change could only come if women won the right to vote. Why should there not be women Members of Parliament, even, to speak up for other women?
Her family were sceptical about her gradual political awakening. Eliza advised her that she would do better to find a steady, well-paid job and ideally a rich husband, but she made no particular objection to Nancy attending meetings in the meantime. Devil laughed and referred to ‘my daughter, the radical’, which was one way of not taking her seriously because she was only a girl. Cornelius was indifferent to politics and organised protest of any kind, but Arthur was opposed to all her ideas.
‘Why do you want to boss men around? Men look after girls, always have done, and you should be glad of that.’
‘I don’t want to boss anyone. I want my voice to be heard, the same as yours.’
‘What for?’
Her little brother was now a head taller than her. He looked down at her in bafflement.
As the years passed, at meetings and on marches Nancy made new friends. These women were different from the girls in her class at school, and even from the far less conventional company backstage at the Palmyra. They weren’t like Lizzie Shaw either. As Nancy had suspected she might, Lizzie turned out to be only a part-time suffragist. She loved the rhetoric, and the mischief of behaving badly, but she was too interested in having fun to spend her free time handing out leaflets in the rain or splashing paint on banners.
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