Suffragette soulmates who saved hundreds of soldiers
JACK AND EVE by Wendy Moore (atlantic £22, 400pp)
THE aristocrat and the chorus girl: as romances go, it’s hardly original, but the lovers at the centre of Wendy Moore’s dynamic dual biography upend any preconceptions the reader might bring to their story.
Both are women for a start. There’s also the fact that at various points they’re to be found driving an ambulance under bombardment, tying up thieves, and smuggling secret messages out of revolutionary Russia.
Born in 1867, baron’s daughter evelina ‘eve’ haverfield grew up in a Scottish castle. Clever and beautiful, she inherited her father’s daring and self-discipline, and her mother’s fiery spirit. She married an Army major, then another military man after her first husband died, leaving her with two young sons.
Vera ‘Jack’ holme, meanwhile, was 14 years her junior, a gregarious character with a boyish figure and unruly dark curls. She lost her timber-merchant father as a teenager, and his dwindling legacy left her to fend for herself, which is how she found her way on to the stage. She endured many a flea-ridden boarding house before more successfully becoming a male impersonator.
It was as suffragettes that these two very different personalities crossed paths in 1908. Jack was by then juggling her theatrical career with a role as emmeline Pankhurst’s chauffeur; eve was leading a life separate from her second husband. United by a
shared passion for outdoorsy pursuits as well as women’s rights, they declared themselves soulmates and began living together in a Devon cottage.
Mining letters and diaries for small details
that enliven the bigger picture, Moore intertwines an account of their relationship’s halcyon early days with the history of a movement becoming ever more militant, leading to an impasse with the Government that only the outbreak of war could overcome.
The couple’s World War I exploits form the book’s heart. Desperate to help, but repeatedly knocked back by officials who insisted there was no role for women beyond the home front, they joined surgeon Elsie Inglis’ Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Services and set off for Serbia.
There, contending with sub-zero temperatures and scarce supplies, Eve helped to set up and run relief hospitals that treated allied soldiers with appalling injuries. Jack became an ambulance driver, braving treacherous dirt tracks to collect the wounded from the front lines. The sheer horror of warfare is unflinchingly captured, but it’s leavened by homelier, sometimes comical touches of colour. At one point, given just eight hours to evacuate 600 patients with enemy forces closing in, the women insist on taking half a dozen stray dogs with them.
Before the war is over, they’ll be held as prisoners of war, raise the modernday equivalent of millions of pounds in aid back home and, in Jack’s case, help to save Serbian troops stranded in Russia by recklessly crossing war-torn Europe to deliver a secret report.
While the camaraderie was intense, and Jack’s fireside singalongs and fried bread perked up flagging morale, Moore doesn’t gloss over inevitable tensions. In particular, the death of Eve’s oldest son in battle seems to have exacerbated her already chafing leadership style. Even so, Jack remained loyal to a fault.
Eve would die, aged 52, in 1920, having returned to Serbia to set up an orphanage, but Jack lived long enough to see the cultural shifts of the 1960s.
Moore has a light touch when it comes to her heroines’ sexuality, resisting the temptation to impose a pronoun-fixated 21st- century filter, and showing that their commitment to one another was unassailable. Interviewed in 1965, decades after Eve’s death, Jack still wept when speaking of her.
Theirs is a rip-roaring story characterised by old-fashioned courage, and a decidedly contemporary determination to live lives true to themselves. What makes it so refreshing is that their focus remained outward, intent on finding ways to enhance the world around them and help others.