Peggy, January 1935
The dress was possibly the most beautiful thing that Peggy had ever seen. It was covered in a print of pink roses and had a smart little collar and a belt made of the same material, to pull in at the waist. It would suit her for work and for going out to the cinema with George. She desperately wanted to try it on but she bit her lip and handed it back to Eva.
‘I can’t take this, Eve,’ she said, reading the disappointment in her little sister’s eyes.
‘Why not?’ said Eva. ‘Don’t you like it?’
‘I love it,’ said Peggy. ‘But that is not the point. I know where it’s come from.’
‘Well, it’s come from a shop, if that is what you mean . . .’
‘It’s stolen, Eva.’
Eva gazed out of the window. ‘How long do you suppose it would take the likes of us to save up to buy a dress like that?’
‘A long time,’ said Peggy. ‘I can’t accept it because it is stolen and I don’t believe in stealing.’
Eva spun round. ‘You think you’re better than me, a cut above.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Peggy, reaching out to give her a hug. ‘I know you did it for me with the best will in the world, but I want to work hard to earn what I have. And I believe that if wages for people like us, who work hard, were better we would all stand a better chance in life.’
‘Oh, Gawd,’ said Eva, ‘you’re going to give me one of Georgie Harwood’s little sermons, aren’t you?’
‘That’s not fair, Eva,’ said Peggy, reddening. ‘I happen to share a lot of his views about the way workers are not paid enough and the need for us all to stand together. Being part of a gang of thieves—’
‘Don’t you go saying that in the house where Dad can hear you!’ hissed Eva. ‘You know he’ll give me what for.’
‘I won’t say anything, of course I won’t. I’m your sister, Eva, I want to look out for you. I’m just worried about you, that’s all. What if you get caught?’
Eva snatched up the dress and stuffed it under her mattress. ‘I won’t get caught. Now, off you go, Miss High and Mighty, or you’ll be late for work.’
Peggy mulled it over on the way to the office in Kensington. She could have taken the dress; nobody would have known and it would probably have got her a few admiring glances on the tram. But, as she settled down to read her latest book on Communism from George, she soon forgot all about the frock and was too absorbed to notice the way that men were looking at her, in any case. She wasn’t as beautiful as Kathleen, who seemed to have inherited their mother’s good looks and easy manner, but she was tall and striking, with strong features and dark, wavy hair, which she now wore loose to her shoulders and pinned back above her ears. Her friend Susan had showed her how to style it like the ladies in the magazines.
When she got to work, Edna, who sat opposite her, was already there, working away quietly. She’d been with the company for fifteen years and was still on lower clerical duties, like most of the other women, even though she was as bright as a button and knew the workings of the Post Office Savings Bank inside out. Whenever Peggy had a problem, she’d only to ask Edna. She knew each ledger, each rule, like the back of her hand. She’d adjust her cardigan and shuffle off to the other side of the office and return with whatever Peggy needed, with a ready smile.
Edna lived with her mother over in Acton and only ever talked about her cats. Her hair was grey and wiry and her eyes watered almost constantly behind her glasses. Peggy feared that she was looking into her own future whenever she gazed at Edna. If she wanted to keep working, she could never marry or have children because the Post Office, like all big firms, wouldn’t employ married women. The unions wouldn’t stand for it either – taking jobs away from men in a time of such high unemployment – and even the Government had been looking into what it called ‘the women question’, George had told her. He believed that women, married women, should have the right to go out to work if they wanted to. ‘And in Russia, they have nurseries paid for by the state to allow women to do just that,’ he said. Peggy wasn’t sure she would want to work if she ever got married, especially if she had children – not that she had been thinking about that.
Miss Fisher, their supervisor, was one of the few women who had managed to progress up the career ladder a bit, but she had seen countless blokes promoted past her, even though she could probably have done their jobs with her eyes closed. She was really buttoned up, precise and proper. Peggy couldn’t imagine her ever having any fun, or a boyfriend. She’d sacrificed everything for her career and was married to the job. Rumour had it she had even marched with the Suffragettes and campaigned for women’s rights but no one had dared to ask her about it. She was such a stickler for protocol, it would seem like an intrusion, talking to the boss like that, but Peggy was secretly intrigued.
Susan arrived ten minutes late that day, looking a bit off-colour. Miss Fisher glared at her and tapped her wristwatch. ‘The old dragon’s watching me again,’ said Susan, shrugging off her jacket and sitting down at the desk next to Peggy.
‘Was the bus late?’
‘No,’ said Susan. ‘I wasn’t feeling too good and it took my mum ages to persuade me to get out of bed.’
Miss Fisher came over. For once she didn’t tell them off. ‘Now, girls,’ she said. She was including Edna in this, even though Edna was probably older than Miss Fisher. ‘Girls, there is a staff-side meeting after work today, in which we will discuss the possibility of some extra work opportunities for women.’
‘What kind of opportunities, miss?’ said Peggy, whose interest was piqued. Perhaps she had been a friend of the Suffragettes and gone on marches, waving Votes for Women placards, after all, although she couldn’t imagine Miss Fisher breaking the rules. She was just too straitlaced.
‘Extra training to work in areas such as a cable room,’ said Miss Fisher, with a note of softness in her voice. It was not a tone Peggy had heard from her before. Maybe she wasn’t so bad. ‘Good opportunities for bright girls such as yourself, Peggy.’ She pointedly excluded Susan from that compliment, Peggy noticed. Edna’s eyes lit up.
‘We’re looking for younger girls, Edna,’ said Miss Fisher gently, as Edna’s shoulders sagged with disappointment. ‘But there is no reason that you can’t come along and lend your weight to the argument. The point is, the representatives from the union are meeting to discuss the possibility of this and we will hear differing viewpoints . . .’
‘You mean, the men don’t want us to do this,’ said Peggy flatly.
‘Well, some men do and some don’t, but it is important that as women our voices are heard. I wrote to the union magazine Red Tape with some of my own views about it and they just published my letter.’ She brandished a copy of the magazine under Peggy’s nose. ‘In the meantime, the more women we can get along to the meeting, the better. I will put a note up in the women’s lounge at lunchtime. Perhaps you can let some of the others know?’
Susan yawned as Miss Fisher walked back to her desk at the other side of the office. ‘Sounds dull as dishwater. I won’t be going.’
‘Oh, don’t be like that,’ said Peggy. ‘Imagine working the cable room!’
‘She’s turned into a right Mrs Pankhurst; don’t you go joining her!’ said Susan. ‘Oh, God, I feel sick again. Tell the old bat I’m going to chuck up, if she asks.’ And she ran from the room.
The yellowing wallpaper of the men’s lounge at the other end of Blythe House was testament to the long hours the workers had spent puffing away in there, on their breaks. Women were normally not allowed anywhere near that side of the building but as it was a union meeting, the bosses had waived the strict segregation rule. This alone had persuaded Susan to join Peggy.
‘I can’t wait to see what stuff they have got in there. Bet their chairs are more comfy than ours,’ she whispered, as Miss Fisher led a delegation of her ‘girls’ into the men’s den.
Susan was rather disappointed to see that their easy chairs, if anything, were less homely than those in the women’s lounge. Everything was in shades of brown: the carpet, the table, the seats. There were no cosy touches – no vase of flowers, no pile of magazines to flick through – just overflowing ashtrays and a dartboard.
‘Smells like the inside of a bleeding pub,’ she grumbled to Peggy. ‘All those sweaty blokes.’
The meeting was called to order and the assembled crowd stopped chatting to each other and stared at the gaggle of female interlopers.
‘Comrades,’ said the union rep.
‘And ladies,’ interrupted Miss Fisher, who clearly wasn’t having any truck with this Moscow nonsense.
He cleared his throat as a ripple of laughter washed across the room. ‘Comrades and ladies, thank you for coming along this evening to this very important meeting.
‘Management want our views on whether there is scope for some jobs – men’s jobs and in the cable room, to be precise – to be made available to our female comrades in the workforce.’
Miss Fisher sighed audibly.
‘They’ll do our jobs for less pay, and where will that leave us?’ said one bearded man, stuffing tobacco into his pipe with vigour.
‘And what about the unemployed? There’s not enough jobs for the menfolk as it is!’ The room became rowdy with an exchange of complaints from the assembled male workers.
‘Order!’ cried the union rep. ‘We want to support our female comrades but the mood of the meeting seems clear—’
‘If I may be allowed to speak,’ interjected Miss Fisher, as Peggy stood at her side. ‘It is not a case of women taking men’s jobs. Yes, we are paid less for doing the same tasks, which is something that the union should be talking to the management about in any case, but women are capable of doing more, much more, than they are allowed to do within the Post Office. At busy times, such as Christmas, it would be useful to have women trained and ready to step in and help at the very least in areas such as the cable room.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said Peggy, before she realized what she was even saying.
Susan nudged her in the ribs. ‘Shush! You’ll draw attention to yourself.’
Miss Fisher went on, ‘We would also ask the union to support the demand for the marriage bar to be lifted, so that if women wed, they should not be forced to resign.’
A loud chorus of jeers erupted. ‘Oh, come on, love!’, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know, we’ve got enough problems of our own!’
‘Who will look after the kids, then?’ another man said.
Miss Fisher produced a copy of Red Tape from behind her back and waved it in the air. ‘If you want a real revolution, let it be a women’s revolution. Please feel free to read my letter in the latest edition of the union magazine on equal pay for women and the right for women to have both a fulfilling private life and a professional career.’
The boos were almost deafening but Miss Fisher would not back down that easily and began engaging her detractors, one by one. Peggy was amazed to see her boss calmly taking on the men in this way. It gave her a new respect for Miss Fisher. She was about to ask Susan what she thought of it all but when she turned around, she saw that Susan was no longer by her side. She pushed her way through the double doors and into the corridor, to see her friend running off down the stairs and into the staff canteen.
Peggy followed, quickening her pace, and got into the canteen just as Susan darted into the ladies’ lavatories. The sound of retching bounced off the tiled walls.
‘Are you all right, Susan?’ Peggy whispered, knocking on a cubicle door.
Susan emerged a few moments later, wiping flecks of vomit from around her mouth. Her hands were clutching her stomach. Peggy noticed, for the first time, that it was fuller than usual, and protruding from the tight waistband of her skirt.
Their eyes met, in a moment of recognition and horror.
Susan began to cry. ‘I think I’m pregnant, Peg. I’m done for. Me dad will kill me for this.’
Susan disappeared from her work at the Post Office Savings Bank almost overnight, before the shame of her situation became glaringly obvious. Peggy didn’t tell her parents about it. She wasn’t sure how her mother would react but her father would tell her to cut off all contact with her friend. She desperately wanted to see Susan but was too frightened to go around there in person. Peggy was almost ashamed to admit it but she was scared: scared to face Susan’s parents, in case they blamed her. She was supposed to be with her on the night that it all went wrong with Bert, so she felt somehow responsible and now Susan was pregnant, which was the worst thing for an unmarried young woman.
She spoke to the one person she could trust: George. Peggy skirted over the more gruesome details of how Susan came to be in this predicament but she made one thing clear: it wasn’t really Susan’s fault.
‘What do you suppose she’ll do?’ said George, as they made their way down to the Trocadero to catch another show. They talked in hushed tones, so that Kathleen and his little brother Harry didn’t overhear.
‘I’m going to write to her and find out,’ said Peggy. ‘I suppose she’ll have to keep it.’
George lowered his voice even further. ‘There are other ways . . .’
They both knew that in their neighbourhood there were women who would help girls who had got themselves into trouble. One was rumoured to do it with a knitting needle and the payment was a bag of coal. But there were also horror stories, whispered in the draughty corridors of tenement blocks and passed around in hushed tones at the communal laundry, of things going wrong: of girls left unable to have children or bleeding to death after botched abortions.
Of course, girls did have babies out of wedlock. There was one around the corner in Tenison Street, for a start. But her mother was raising the baby as her own and the daughter just pretended she was her sister and went out to work at the jam factory. Her parents watched their daughter like a hawk, though, and she was never seen on the streets after dark. The whole area knew the child was illegitimate but nobody said anything about it or made fun of the baby, in fact, quite the reverse. It became a sort of neighbourhood secret. Even Mrs Davies from number 16 kept her trap shut on that one, which was a mercy.
‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ said Peggy, wringing her hands. ‘I expect she will have to have it but she was worried that her dad was going to beat the living daylights out of her for getting herself in the family way.’ Peggy could only hope that people in Susan’s neighbourhood would be as nice as her own but she had her doubts.
Back at the office, if Miss Fisher knew the real reason for Susan’s absence, she didn’t let on to Peggy. Edna didn’t have much to say about Susan’s departure either, other than a rather barbed comment about her friend having had ‘a rather high opinion of herself’. Edna bustled off towards the filing cabinet, singing an old musical hall song: ‘Little bits of powder, little bits of paint, make a girl look like what she ain’t.’ Had Edna guessed what had happened to Susan?
Peggy found it hard to focus and kept glancing out of the window, wondering whether a letter from Susan might be waiting for her on the mat when she got home from work. She’d tried to keep the tone of her letter to her friend jolly, she offered to meet her somewhere for a proper chat and told her she missed her but part of her didn’t really expect a reply. Families tended to close ranks when such disasters happened and she wasn’t even sure if Susan’s father would let her out of his sight to post a letter, in any case.
Just as she was about to go on her tea break, she heard a commotion in the corridor outside. A crowd of clerks were gathered around a notice which had been pinned to the back of the door.
‘I saw a fella put it up just now!’ said one girl. ‘He wasn’t even supposed to be over this side and he ran off, sharpish, when he saw me.’
Miss Fisher came storming over from her desk at the other side of the room to see what all the fuss was about.
In bold, black writing, the notice said: ‘Miss Fisher is MRS SMITH. We know the truth!’
‘What does it mean, miss?’ said another girl, as the colour drained from Miss Fisher’s face.
The supervisor reached up and tore it down, screwing the paper into a little ball. ‘Get back to work!’ she whispered.
Peggy tried to put her hand on Miss Fisher’s arm, to comfort her in some way, but she brushed her away. ‘No, Peggy. Please return to your seat and get on with what you have to do.’ Her tone softened. ‘Whatever happens, I want you to know that you are a very promising young clerk and I expect the very best from you.’
Then, Miss Fisher turned on her heel and marched twenty yards down the corridor and into the manager’s office. Moments later, she left, walking out of the building with her back straight and her head held high. The manager followed her for a few steps, his mouth open in shock.
Nobody ever admitted pinning that notice up about her. Nobody was punished for it but some of the girls insisted it had been the work of the men in the union. Others around the office – including Edna – said she’d let everyone down by lying like that, marrying and still coming to work day after day, to boss them all around.
Peggy just felt sad that Miss Fisher, who had turned out to be a good boss, was no longer working just because she had dared to try to have a life and a career at the same time.