A Quiet Life. Natasha Walter
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go out alone?’ This was more than Laura expected. She remembered the telephone conversation she had just had with Florence, and Florence’s assumption that she would come to the demonstration the following weekend, and wondered hopelessly how on earth she would manage it. Winifred was explaining how her mother’s protectiveness irked her. For instance, there was a rather nice man she had met recently at the cricket club dance, and he had asked her out for supper, but he was a divorcé, and Dee would not approve, so what could she do?
The two girls were sitting in Winifred’s bedroom talking, their heads together, when Aunt Dee came in to tell them it was time to come down for tea. Winifred nodded, and once her mother had gone, she suddenly turned to Laura, her hands opening as if pulling apart a parcel, her eyes widening as if she could see a new vista. ‘But now you’re here – we could sort of chaperone each other, couldn’t we?’
2
Although the march had begun to move off by the time Laura got to Hyde Park, there were still what looked like hundreds of people, dozens of banners, waiting in line. Laura thought she would never find Florence, and began to feel foolish for having made the complicated arrangements and spoken the shocking lies that had enabled her to be there. She had not even told Winifred what she was doing, simply that she wanted to have tea with someone she had met on the boat. That Winifred assumed it was a man, and that the assumption had made her eyes crinkle up knowingly, had embarrassed Laura but had not encouraged her to reveal the whole truth. So the two girls had told Aunt Dee that they were going shopping in town and then to tea with Cissie, an old school friend of Winifred’s. Just as Laura was beginning to feel hopeless about the whole escapade, she saw the red lettering of the banner she was looking for, and then the familiar face she longed to see beside it.
Florence did not notice her immediately; she was talking to a tall, bareheaded woman who was holding one pole of the banner in her gloved hands. Laura had to push awkwardly past a couple of men and tap her on the shoulder, and then Florence only briefly acknowledged her before turning back to the tawny-haired woman. ‘Elsa, this is Laura – I told you about her.’
But just to see Florence again sent a great chime of happiness through Laura’s mind. This was where she wanted to be, even in this great crowd of people, so long as Florence was by her side.
Elsa nodded at her, heaving the pole, which seemed heavy in her hands, a little further upwards. ‘Don’t keep pulling it about, Else,’ came a yell from a young man holding the other pole.
‘Shall I take it for a bit?’ asked Florence, but just then their part of the march began to move off.
After a few moments the first bars of ‘The Red Flag’ began to rise up from the crowd. Laura didn’t know any of the words and couldn’t join in the singing, but as she lengthened and slowed her steps to fall in with the rhythm, she felt that the crowd was fumbling for a sense of togetherness, and that the song, marvellously, seemed to give it to them. Even when the song faded, that sweet sense of being enfolded by a common purpose remained. Looking around her, she was rather reassured by the look of the people on the march; she had been nervous that the communists would be a raggle-taggle bunch, but in fact a drab propriety seemed to characterise them. Everyone was in shades of grey and navy, so that it was only the brilliance of their flags that brightened the streams of people. The walking and the singing seemed to go on and on, and Laura began to get nervous about time passing. ‘When does this finish?’ she asked Florence, who was now holding one of the banner poles.
Florence turned to her, and told her there would be speeches in the square, but they would leave before that for the other protest. At Laura’s puzzled look, Florence explained that a few of them were going to take the march to Halifax. Laura had never heard the name before. ‘The Foreign Secretary, you know?’ Elsa said. Her voice was low and brusque. ‘We can’t just do this, the marching, Trafalgar Square, just what they want us to do.’ Laura could not see why this was not enough, the thousands of massed people as they got to the huge square lined with its grimy buildings. There were so many, she would have felt afraid of the crush, but there was a reticence about their movements, and one said ‘Sorry, comrade,’ in a gentle voice as he stepped on her foot. But as soon as their part of the march had filed into the square, Florence took Laura’s arm and led her to what was obviously a prearranged meeting spot down a side road. Here, about two dozen women holding bags and rolled banners were waiting, and after a while they all moved off, down a broad avenue bordered by the chilly expanse of another London park.
‘I have to go back soon,’ Laura said, looking at her little silver watch. ‘I told my aunt I was shopping with my cousin – we’re going to meet at teatime.’
But Florence was not listening, and the pace of the women now was quicker and more urgent than the march had been. It was Elsa who was directing the group, with the help of a map, and at one point they had to retrace their steps to find their way into a wide square. Here, the sounds of traffic were muffled, the sidewalk unrolled smoothly under their feet, the trees opened huge branches under the quiet grey sky, the houses rose white and cold behind their sharp railings, a woman in a coat with a high fur collar was getting out of a car, holding a tiny dog, two policemen were standing indifferent in front of one of the blandly graceful houses – and that was the one the group was making for.
‘Now, girls!’ shouted Elsa, and suddenly all the banners were unfurled, some women were lying down, while yet others threw a pot of red paint at the shining black door of the house, shouting ‘Halifax, murderer!’ and ‘Arms for Spain!’ as they did so. Laura felt a spurt of fear run through her body, and stepped away from the group as the policemen moved towards them. A policeman bent over one woman who was lying down on the sidewalk and started to drag her along, so that her dress rucked up below her, showing the tops of her thick stockings, while another policeman started to blow his whistle in panicked bursts. The woman on the pavement in the fur-collared coat paused for a moment, and Laura caught her eye, expecting a secret sign of sympathy. ‘War-mongers,’ she spat. ‘Stupid bitch.’
Laura started to walk away, almost into the path of a couple more policemen who were running along the pavement. As she hurried off, she could hear shouts behind her, and the noise of further struggle.
3
The memory of the march stayed sharp in Laura’s mind. She had got to the tea room on Piccadilly only a little late, after asking directions from a woman once she had got away from the square. Winifred had been keen to tell her about the lunch she had had at the Criterion with the chap from the cricket club dance, and had hardly noticed Laura’s distraction. All the way home and all the next day the voices of the singers, and the startling physical courage of the women in the square, had remained vivid. Part of her felt nervous about what she had witnessed, but the sense of urgency pulsed through her. What would change, now that the women had been so brave?
But she looked in Aunt Dee’s Times newspaper, and saw no discussion about it at all; neither the next day, nor the following one. Reading the dense and impersonal reports of political speeches in the newspaper, she gradually came to understand that Halifax’s policy of non-intervention in Spain had not shifted in the slightest. In fact, nobody but her seemed to have heard about the protest, and gradually she came to realise that it had not rippled the quiet life of the Highgate household, let alone the government.
As the days went on, it was hard to imagine what would create ripples in Highgate. There was a constant decorum to life here, which was both reassuring and claustrophobic. As Winifred said, Aunt Dee seemed to think that the best way for Winifred to behave was the way laid down during her own youth; it was a repetitive round of visits and walks and luncheons with girls who had much the same manner and appearance as Winifred herself, together with French conversation lessons and piano practice, and games of cards and reading aloud with Aunt Dee in the evenings, or the occasional concert or trip to the theatre. This round of activity quite easily accommodated Laura, and it was only her pact with Winifred, which meant that once a fortnight or so the girls said they were going shopping or to tea with a friend, while each went their separate way for two or three hours, that caused a secret rift in the tight tapestry of good behaviour.