knuckles and the stubborn remains of a head cold.
On the way back to her desk she stuck her head out of the door. She heard the rat-a-tat clatter of the small press running in the print room downstairs and a snatch of someone whistling before Jinny Main’s hooting laughter rose up the stairwell. Nancy sighed. Up here she had only the ticking clock and Miss Dent for company. She was hardly back in her seat before Jinny herself looked in.
‘Got a minute, Nance? I could do with a hand down there.’
Nancy followed Jinny down the stone stairs. Her friend’s brown overall was ink-stained, pulled in at the waist with a thick leather belt. Her hair was tied up in a scarf to keep it clear of the machinery. During the war when she worked on the print floor Nancy had dressed the same, and she kept her own work coat hanging on a peg in the women’s lavatory at the back of the building. But in her new position as office assistant she must wear more suitable clothing, or so Miss Dent had advised her. Uncertain of herself and hoping for the best, Nancy now dressed in a jersey with a plain flannel skirt, fixing her hair with a pair of cloisonné combs Arthur had brought back from Antwerp.
‘Take the other end of this blasted trolley,’ Jinny ordered.
Old Desmond the machine minder was shifting flat sheets ready for the collating machine and there was no one else free to help. Using the trolley they manoeuvred the finished copies of the left-wing magazine New Measure through two sets of doors to the dispatch room.
‘That’s my girls,’ the dispatch manager greeted them approvingly. Frank was another old man who had worked through the war at Lennox & Ringland. ‘Let’s pack ’em before that van driver sticks his ugly mug in here.’
Jinny counted out the magazines in batches of two dozen, Frank wrapped them in brown paper and Nancy finished the packages with string. The job was soon done. It was only a short print run, a typical job for L & R. Frank stood upright, wincing.
‘The knee still hurts, does it?’ Jinny asked. She had sympathy for everyone.
‘I’ll live, darling. Look at you, Nancy Wix. Black smuts all over your pretty face.’
Frank pulled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and dabbed at her cheek. The hanky smelt bad and she craned her neck away. At least he hadn’t spat on it first.
‘So long, Frankie,’ Jinny called, taking her arm. ‘See you in the morning, eh?’
The two girls escaped the pipe-smoke fug of the dispatch room just as the van driver arrived for the magazines.
‘C’mon. Let’s have a quick cuppa,’ Jinny muttered.
‘Ma Dent …’
‘You can tell Ma Dent we shifted and packed the whole run of New Measure for Frankie Fingers, can’t you?’
There was a tiny kitchen beyond the typesetting benches. The girls passed behind two printers perched at the keyboards of the rattling Linotype machines, their copy pegged beside them and their hands flying over the keys. On occasions even Nancy had been called upon to work a machine shift, but since the armistice the men had come back to take up their old jobs. Jinny was relegated to the hand-setting benches and Nancy made the best of the uncongenial work upstairs in the office.
Nancy filled the kettle at the single cold tap and lit the gas ring. She rinsed a pair of cups and swiped them with a drying-up cloth. The printworks floor was noisy and dirty, thick with oil and acrid fumes from the machinery, but she loved it.
There was nowhere to sit down so when the brew was ready they leaned against the sink.
Jinny smacked her lips. ‘That’s better. Here, Nance. Have one of these. The jam ones are good.’
She took the biscuit and ate it while her friend rolled and smoked a cigarette. Even now, this made Nancy think of her cousin Lizzie.
Poor Lizzie. Or not so poor nowadays, Nancy reminded herself. Lizzie had been unlucky, but she had refused to let circumstances get the better of her.
Jinny’s cigarette tilted in the corner of her mouth. She was squinting at her friend through a haze of smoke.
‘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,
