September, 1922
‘I wish I could help people more,’ Alice remarked to Fergus as they left their shift together. There were many hopeless cases in the medical wards, so many conditions that the doctors did not know how to treat, and sometimes Alice felt so helpless she could hardly bear it. ‘Sometimes I think I ought to go into medical research.’ It had been a particularly bad day. First a woman with consumption had died, then a youth of sixteen who had sustained a simple cut on his finger that had become infected and eventually poisoned his whole body. ‘On the other hand, I don’t know that I’d be very good at lab work. I prefer working with patients.’
‘Remember, they’re finding out new treatments all the time,’ Fergus said, his brown eyes full of compassion. ‘They say there are researchers here who’ve made progress with diabetes. They’re isolating the insulin enzyme in a form that can be given by injection.’
‘That would be simply marvellous.’ Alice had seen several young patients who had been diagnosed with the condition and they had not lived longer than a few months.
‘It would have to be administered every day, I suppose. Think of the difficulties involved.’
‘And it might be another expense for some families. That is wrong and unfair.’
‘If they can’t afford it the hospital won’t charge. And children would get it free.’ Fergus held open a door to let her through first, but she forgot to thank him, so intent was she on her own thoughts.
There was so much that her comfortable upbringing had protected her from. Not the horrors of warfare or bereavement, she knew all about those. No, she meant simple, mundane things she’d always taken for granted, but which were neither simple nor mundane to many. She had always had enough to eat; her parents had called the doctor out without question if one of the family was ill, and she knew that her father helped the farmworkers and their families in bad times, too. Yes, she’d had to budget carefully as a student to be able to buy new clothes, but she had still been able to dress well and to afford life’s little necessities. Now, in Whitechapel, she was witness to the most appalling situations: breadwinners who might be covered by government medical insurance themselves, but for whom consulting a doctor for a wife or child was an option only if they went without something else important, such as food. There were families who could not afford to bury their dead. How would a father go out to work to earn money if he needed to attend hospital to receive an injection every day?
*
It was the following week, while returning from a visit to the beleaguered Wiggins family, that Alice passed a community hall in the Whitechapel Road and noticed a flyer tacked onto a board outside. It advertised a public lecture on the Friday night.
‘Barbara can’t come,’ she told Fergus when she bumped into him the next day. ‘Would you keep me company? It’s about birth control.’
‘Birth control?’ Fergus frowned. ‘I suppose so,’ he said after a moment and she felt a rush of warmth towards him. They’d discussed this matter before, and Fergus had explained that it wasn’t a subject even to be mentioned in Catholic Ireland, so it was open-minded of him to attend a meeting about it.
Alice had come to like Fergus immensely, and so had Barbara now that they’d learned more about him. Barbara had been right in some respects. He came from a middle-class family in Dublin which had been dragged into politics a few years ago when his eldest brother Stephen, something of a firebrand, had been imprisoned for insurrectional activities, and this had split the family. Fergus was a peaceful sort; he’d always wanted to be a doctor like his father and change the system from the inside, unlike his brother, but his mother, who was very devout, had wanted him to go into the Church. He’d refused, instead choosing to study medicine. Then there had been the trouble with Stephen, and Fergus had won a rare scholarship to come to London. He wanted to see a bit more of the world, he’d told them, and be useful, then maybe he’d return. His younger sister Rose had been particularly upset. Can’t you be useful in Ireland?, she’d asked, but though it broke his heart to leave her, Fergus had remained steadfast. ‘You can’t understand your own place until you go away from it,’ he told her. Now Ireland was getting Home Rule, and his brother might be released and everything would settle down, but he liked London too much to go home yet. He did miss Rose, though, his other brother, Kevin, and his youngest sister Mary and his mam and dad.
‘The things I do for you!’ Fergus said in mock weariness. He smiled at Alice and it felt as though the sun had come out.
She smiled back. ‘Thank you, Fergus.’ Then she bid him goodbye and set off for the hostel, turning back briefly to wave. There he was, still on the pavement, watching her.
It was a shame, really it was, she thought as she darted into the road then waited for a tram to pass. She loved his glossy golden-brown hair and his charming, gentle manner, and despite what she’d thought at first, that he was interested in Barbara, she sensed that if she, Alice, encouraged him, Fergus would see her as more than a friend. She’d determined early on in her training, however, to erect a guard against all that, and always adopted a certain way with men, a brisk practicality designed to put them off. Having set herself on a particular course in life to become a doctor, she had quickly recognized that it would be more difficult to succeed in her career if she married.
Back at the hostel she thought about this as she helped herself to tea and sandwiches in the dining room. It wasn’t simply her career that stood in the way of marriage; there was something else, there always would be. She had never contemplated marrying anyone who wasn’t her soulmate, to whom she could tell everything. Everything. She hadn’t even told Barbara that she had already had a child. Barbara was fun to be with, kind and supportive, liberal-minded when it came to men, but she kept her own counsel and they did not swap confidences. Loving a man enough to want to marry him was one thing. Trusting him with her shameful secret was another thing entirely. Oh, it was such a tangle.
Alice ate a piece of fruitcake and considered the conversation she’d had with her stepmother the previous weekend when she’d gone home. At luncheon Gwen had asked wheedling questions about the doctors at the hospital, whether she’d socialized with any of them and what they were like. Knowing exactly what her stepmother was up to, she’d given evasive answers until Gwen, exasperated, suggested outright that Alice shouldn’t pretend to be ‘one of the men’ or she’d never find a husband.
‘I’m not sure I want to,’ Alice replied, sitting back in her chair and straightening her napkin.
‘Alice, you must be over that unfortunate young man by now. You shouldn’t keep a candle lit for him. That’s all in the past.’
‘It’ll never be the past for me,’ she muttered. ‘And I could never marry a man whom I couldn’t tell what I’d been through.’
‘My dear Alice! You mustn’t tell anyone, ever. You know that. It’ll ruin you.’
‘I wouldn’t want a husband I couldn’t be honest with.’
Her father, quietly finishing his bread-and-butter pudding, did not offer his opinion, but listened to every word, smiled and glanced at his wife before saying, ‘Alice, you’re a girl after my own heart.’
‘Don’t take her side, George.’ Gwen frowned.
‘I’m not, it’s the idea of secrets that amuses me. All women have little secrets, it seems. What you do on your trips to London, Gwen, I simply don’t know. Not until I see the household accounts, that is,’ – he waved a finger at his wife in mock admonishment – ‘when I find there are all sorts of fripperies I’m expected to pay for.’
‘Really, dear. Curtains and cushions are not fripperies, they make a house into a home. And anyway, what I’m talking about is completely different. A gentleman should be allowed to assume that his wife had no lovers before him. Such discretion is essential to a happy marriage.’
‘I am sure you and I never discussed the subject.’ He looked embarrassed.
‘You know there would be nothing to discuss.’ Gwen snapped.
Alice felt briefly sorry for her stepmother, who being long-faced and awkward in movement might not have attracted many offers, but one should not assume that she had had none. She was capable and full of life, and on occasion, flirtatious. Her father, after all, had seen enough in her to want to marry her.
*
The red-brick community hall was already packed with people by the time Fergus and Alice arrived on a rainy Friday evening. The porch was full of dripping umbrellas and the warm hall smelled overpoweringly of damp.
They were late and caused sighs of annoyance as they stumbled their way over people’s feet and possessions to a pair of empty seats near the middle. By the time Alice had unbuttoned her coat and peeled off her gloves the room had fallen silent. She glanced up to see that a harassed-looking woman had mounted the wooden stage. Everyone stared expectantly while she unfolded her notes. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she began, ‘on behalf of the Fabian Society, thank you for coming out on what has proved a very inclement evening . . .’
After a few words of rambling introduction she sensed their restlessness and quickly announced, ‘With no further ado, I should like to welcome our speaker for tonight, Mrs Lydia Hawkins from the Society for, er, Constructive . . .’ she paused to consult the scrap of paper, ‘yes, Constructive Birth Control.’
There was a rattle of applause as a neat, lithe woman in an elegant long jacket climbed the steps to take her place at the lectern. Her eyes were fearless as she surveyed her waiting audience.
‘How many of us,’ she began in a crisp educated voice, ‘know of women with a dozen children, women exhausted by childbirth, women who have no time to recover from having one child before another is on the way? How many families are thrown into poverty by having too many mouths to feed? Or, worst of all, who lose a mother in the peril of giving birth?’
There were murmurs from the audience and a nodding of heads.
‘All good parents must welcome each new baby as a gift from God. They must make sacrifices to help them thrive. But if you ask many women with large families they will tell you that enough is enough. They want to be able to look after the children they already have, thank you, not produce more that they can’t. They desire that choice. Every child a wanted child is the hope of our organization, and this is why I have come to talk to you today.’
‘No fornication here!’ a male voice thundered from the back and everyone craned their necks to see who’d spoken. A silver-haired man in a respectable black suit and a clerical collar had risen from his seat.
‘Shh, mister, nobody’s fornicatin’,’ another male voice called out. ‘We’ve come to hear the lady. Let her speak, for gawdsake.’
‘As I was saying . . .’ Mrs Hawkins shot the cleric a glare of annoyance and continued. Alice listened in fascination as she laid out her case for wider availability of birth control to working-class women. The figures she quoted were distressing, many of them new to Alice. Women who had more than eight pregnancies were at the highest risk of mortality. Dr Marie Stopes, campaigner for women’s rights, had pointed out, movingly, that more coffins were bought by working-class mothers for their dead babies than by the middle classes.
There was little to offend polite sensibilities in the detail of Mrs Hawkins’s speech, no description of the different methods of birth control available. The example of a doctor who advised an exhausted mother not to have any further babies caused tender members of the audience the most discomfort. ‘The poor woman asked how she might avoid becoming pregnant in future and the doctor replied in a tight voice, “I’m sure you know the answer to that.” This woman was charged money for that shoddy piece of advice. What do you think?’ Mrs Hawkins went on. ‘Was she expected to refuse her husband for the rest of her marriage? What would you advise your wives to do, gentlemen?’
There was an outbreak of embarrassed shuffling and coughing.
At the end of the talk the heckling cleric stood up again and pronounced in the admonishing tones of an Old Testament prophet: ‘Marriage was made by God for the purposes of procreation. Anything except abstinence is a sin. Do you, Mrs Hawkins, wish to encourage promiscuity by enabling men and women to escape their responsibilities?’
‘No, of course not,’ she replied in soothing tones. ‘I wish only to save the lives and the health of women and their infants.’
He was about to speak again, but another voice broke in. A portly man with a pointed beard arose to address the room. ‘I’m one of these unfortunate doctors you appear to think so little of,’ he said with a bow to Mrs Hawkins. ‘You should ascertain your facts. I think you’ll find there is strong evidence that some of your, ah, methods, cause great physiological damage to women and, in some cases, can render them ah, unable to conceive, in short to become, ah, sterile.’
‘I have not heard of any such cases, Doctor,’ Mrs Hawkins replied coolly. ‘Perhaps you would like to supply me with this evidence yourself.’
‘Delighted to, my good lady,’ the doctor murmured, but very hurriedly sat down.
Another doctor enquired in more emollient tones, ‘Shouldn’t the government’s new antenatal and mother and baby clinics offer advice on birth control?’ This caused an argument to break out in the room. How would the country maintain its level of population if the government were to discourage women from having children? Was it not the private province of the married couple to discuss such things between them? There was again concern that freer availability of methods to prevent babies would lead to lax morals and the breakdown of family life.
Alice felt unsure about this argument. It was speculative catastrophizing and therefore did not convince. She thought back to the Wigginses. The desperate father, able to find only casual work, the woman, still young but ravaged and exhausted by continually giving birth. Both trying to manage their children without sufficient money or anyone much to help. This was the reality Alice had to keep in the forefront of her mind.
A young dark-haired woman seated near the front, who appeared to know Mrs Hawkins, entered the fray. ‘I am a trained nurse,’ she told the room. ‘I work at one of the mother and baby clinics. The government is doing good work in this area, but we are not allowed to give birth-control advice. This is a great shame. Is it not better to have fewer babies born who are healthy, than so many who die?’ She spoke of encountering desperate women. ‘They try to end their pregnancies, at great danger to themselves.’
There were murmurs of dismay. Perhaps it was this unpleasant subject, combined with the lateness of the hour, that made people start to gather their coats and prepare to leave. ‘I think we’d all like to thank Mrs Hawkins for coming out in this terrible weather . . .’ the Fabian woman called above the rumpus. There was a smattering of applause and the event was brought to a hurried close.
As they walked back towards the hospital, Alice discovered that Fergus, though interested in what Mrs Hawkins had had to say, was afflicted by doubts.
‘So many women of the lower classes are ignorant,’ he said. ‘They would not use birth control devices properly. All kinds of medical problems could arise.’
‘How patronizing! And what about the women the nurse was talking about, who jump off a high step and damage themselves while trying to be rid of their babies? Would it not be better for the problem to be avoided in the first place?’
‘It’s a terrible, sinful thing to do that, Alice. A baby is not a problem but a little life.’
‘Of course it is. I’m not saying that it’s right. But if women had more control over their own fertility it would mean fewer cases of that sort.’
‘It would cause a lot of arguments, you mean,’ he said, smiling down at her. ‘We men wouldn’t give up our positions of authority that easily.’
‘I suspect you’re right.’ Alice felt angry at his response, but bit her tongue. ‘I’m glad to have heard Mrs Hawkins. Thank you for coming with me.’
They’d reached the corner of the street where they must part. A lamp shone above the entrance to the hostel.
‘It was a pleasure. Perhaps you’ll have dinner with me one evening,’ Fergus suggested.
Alice smiled at him in the flare of the lamp. ‘That would be nice,’ she said slowly, wanting to let him down gently, for she saw the hope in his eyes, ‘but it might not be for a while, given that our exams are not far away.’
Part of her badly wanted to say yes, but she sensed his seriousness and knew that if she did, things could proceed in only one direction. No, she must remember that she had turned her face against marriage and motherhood.
‘You don’t think that you’d benefit from the break? All work and no play and so on?’
‘Not at the moment, Fergus. I’m quite behind with my work.’ That was a lie and she felt miserable telling it. He did his best not to look disappointed.
They shook hands and went their separate ways. Alice felt depressed. She liked Fergus very much indeed, she thought as she hurried up the echoing staircase of the hostel, although she’d learned this evening that on some issues there was a gulf between them. On the positive side he had proved curious and ready to discuss matters on which they disagreed, but she sensed depths in him that she could not plumb.
He was a Roman Catholic, to start with. How difficult it must be to counter the beliefs of his upbringing. He was one of six children and the youngest, she had recently learned, had not lived. Childbirth was an emotive topic for him and she should try to understand. But her last thoughts as she turned out her bedside light that night were of the Wiggins family, and the exhausted expression in Peggy Wiggins’s eyes as Alice had placed the newborn girl in her arms. She would, she decided, find out more about Mrs Hawkins’s work and try to help.
Fergus continued to issue invitations, and Alice continued to prevaricate. She was happy to accompany him to meetings and lectures, anything public like that, but she avoided being alone with him if she could help it. They were friends, she told anyone who asked, just friends. Eventually he got the message and left her alone.