Forging Links

This powerful short story by Alison Carter takes place in the West Midlands.

With William on the other side of the world, Elspeth needed something to fill her days . . .

AS the weeks went by, Elspeth Cunningham didn’t know how much she wanted her husband to come back, and it made her wretched.

She sometimes lifted the photograph taken on their wedding day, wondering what it was about William that had led her to that sunny afternoon in 1904.

Her husband’s good looks were obvious, even if in the photograph they were both stiff and sombre. He was a kind man, too, and worked hard at his government job.

But the life they led had been predictable and sedate from the start. Elspeth had begun to feel stifled.

She told herself it was the life of most married women, that nobody could expect constant change, challenge, or excitement.

William went to the office; she stayed at home. There were meals, and the planning of meals, and the management of a staff of two in the house who needed no management.

Sometimes she and William visited family. Each summer they went to North Wales and looked at the seaside.

Elspeth knew she was lucky, yet on her heart there was a sensation of being pressed down. Her husband was a dull man, with little to say to her; that was the core of it.

Then William was asked to go to Patagonia. Elspeth had only a hazy idea of where that was, but William explained it was a huge tract of land in the southern part of South America, and it had to be divided up between the nations of

Chile and Argentina.

“I worked on similar matters when I was in the London service before our marriage,” he told Elspeth. “It’s my duty to go.”

“For how long?”

“It’s a four-month task. Will you be all right, Elspeth?”

Since the miscarriage, he constantly asked her if she was all right.

“I will be fine, William. Four months is nothing.”

“I estimate five, with the usual delays, and the journey out is forty days – it’s remote – so the journey back will be the same.”

“Closer to seven months, then.”

She looked at William and wondered how much life would change when he was absent. With a sinking of her heart, she felt it would not be much.

****

He had been gone nearly two months when Elspeth’s sister, Adeline, called and asked Elspeth to accompany her to a tea party at a friend’s home.

“I’m told some fascinating women will be there.”

Elspeth knew to leap at any chance of something interesting, even if it was just more teapots, so she said she’d go.

“Have you heard from my handsome brother-in-law?” Adeline asked.

“Two letters only. The post takes a long time.”

“And?” Adeline threw herself into a chair.

“Patagonia seems to have public houses, exactly like the ones here in Smethwick, and the people there play football and polo.”

“Goodness. So it’s the same life for him there as here?”

Elspeth nodded. “Apparently. I suppose he sticks to those people who are like him.”

The letter had been without incident. Elspeth noted how much William’s foreign life resembled life at Dukes Road, Smethwick, and how much that seemed to suit William.

****

The following afternoon the sisters drank tea and ate madeira cake at a house in the countryside outside Cradley Heath, five miles away.

They talked about industrial unrest, chain making being one of the main local activities.

Giant chains for ships or heavy industry were made by men in Birmingham factories, but handhammered or “countrywork” chains for farming were made in the sheds and lean-tos of cottages.

“They want a higher wage,” their host said.

“Don’t all workers?” Adeline smiled.

“This work,” the host, Mrs Quentin told them, “is done by women – and too often their children alongside them – in cramped and hot conditions that can barely be distinguished from their very kitchens.”

“Don’t they call it sweated labour?” Elspeth knew a little about chain making but had never seen it done.

Mrs Quentin looked at her.

“Worse than sweat is hunger, Mrs Cunningham. These women are exhausted by slave wages.”

Adeline seemed disappointed as they set off back home in a cab.

“The main attraction was absent. Mary Macarthur, a great agitator and trade union leader. Mrs Quentin told me she’s unwell.”

Elspeth had never heard of Mary

Macarthur, and thought no more of it.

Another letter from William awaited her at home, and late that evening she drew out her pen ready to reply.

She calculated that it would now be the end of his working day. He would be sitting with colleagues in the shared accommodation, giving his opinion on whatever news of Britain and the Empire had reached them.

He would be smoking the pipe that contained the same tobacco he used at home. Only the armchair would be different.

Elspeth looked round the room. William would come back in good time for Christmas, and what would be different? The flowers in the garden would have died; the wallpaper would be a little more faded.

They would return to the rhythms of their life, and she would get a little . . . smaller.

The weather is wonderful, she wrote. Mabel is still dropping dishes.

What else was there to say to him? What else would he want to hear, a man whose outlook seemed, to her, limited.

I had my grey dress with the frill repaired after I tore it on a boot scraper.

****

A fortnight after Mrs Quentin’s tea party, Elspeth set off to visit her sister in Halesowen. She ordered a cab and found on the back seat the local newspaper.

Chain employers will not pay, a headline read.

A trade board had decreed that the chain workers should receive two and six per hour, replacing the current meagre piecework rates. But many employers – presumably the men who sold on the chains – refused.

The cab trundled on. Elspeth thought of what she would do at her sister’s house – play with the children, fretting again that she had none of her own.

She looked out at the summer sunshine and knew that she had to climb out of her rut, or die.

“Cabby,” she called. “I’ll go via Cradley.”

It was a detour of more than two miles, and Elspeth never knew what made her want to go to that place. But it changed her life.

“Can you tell me,” she asked the driver, “where I might see the work of the light-chain makers?”

He gave her a look. “That’ll be Anvil Yard, if you want a row of ’em.” “Can you take me there?” Anvil Yard was a triangle of scrubby land, bounded on all its sides by small cottages, all with small outbuildings facing the triangle.

The smells were powerful – singed hair, hot bricks and sewage from the open drains between buildings.

Elspeth walked, trying not to stare at the women heating and hammering iron rods, lowering chains to the dirt floors.

Little children watched her, sitting in the unglazed windows of the sheds, while older children – some perhaps only eleven or twelve years old – worked the glowing fires.

Elspeth could see that what lay beyond these workshops – the tables and chairs, a cot here and there – was hardly separate from anvil and furnace.

They called them “light” chains, but here she saw rods many inches thick.

A woman came out of a cottage, a small, wiry thing. Behind her she dragged a chain that looked like it might drive some huge part of a farm machine.

Elspeth stepped aside as the woman began to cross the yard towards her.

“May I ask where you’re taking the chain?”

The woman didn’t stop. “To the gaffer, o’ course.” “Gaffer?”

“Beddowes.” The woman nodded towards the main part of town, and Elspeth guessed that it was a full quarter of a mile before cottages petered out and commercial buildings began.

“Nora!” the wiry woman called out, and Elspeth noticed that another, older woman had come round a corner.

Across her shoulders she carried iron rods, secured at their two ends with what looked like canvas straps.

“Nora, glad yo’ back. Can yo’ mind the babs while I take this?”

Nora nodded and kept trudging. Elspeth could see she was sweating freely.

Elspeth stood and absorbed this other world, and listened to the ring of hammer on iron and the clank of new chains.

“Let’s hope her chain’s the right length.”

The voice came from behind her, and Elspeth spun round, startled.

A woman stood there.

She wore an unbecoming black hat and her hair was a mass of flyaway fairness, like spun sugar.

“If a worker’s broken a link and wasted it, there’s a forfeit to pay,” the woman said in a Scottish accent.

“A forfeit on two and six an hour?” Elspeth wondered what such a small wage could buy.

The woman came closer. “And they’re no’ getting the two and six. They work the night, too, or they build a second hearth to forge more chains. There’s widows here.

“And these women . . .” the woman waved a hand along the length of the slum dwellings “. . . cook and bring up the children as well.

“They clean, of course, although it’s like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill for it to fall back down again, because how d’you keep this place clean?

“They need a real wage. The men they call gaffers need a scare.”

Elspeth swallowed. Her instinct was to say something polite but non-committal, then to hurry off to another cab.

But the woman fixed two pale blue eyes on her.

“My name is Mary Macarthur,” she said. “I wonder, can I rely on you?”

****

Later, Elspeth wondered if other people had come to ogle Anvil Yard, and whether Mrs Macarthur drew them in, too, and tied them up in her charisma.

However she did it, that day was the beginning of something for Elspeth.

There was a meeting of interested parties – mostly female – and she learned of letters already being written, representations to the trade board and to councillors and employers, and the silence they received in return.

Elspeth was asked if she would write letters.

“To whom?” “Businessmen. The press.” A large lady with a notebook in her hand looked her up and down. “Politicians. There may be a strike if we fail with this work. Grease them up ready to donate for a strike, Mrs Cunningham.”

That night, Elspeth wrote to Patagonia. Her pen hovered over the paper as she wondered what to say to William.

He would be flummoxed if she told him about the great change in her life and ideas.

It would worry him as he ate his two slices of toast with English marmalade spread up to the edges. More than that, she knew that she was moving further away from him than ever.

He would be utterly unable to embrace what his wife was doing.

He would understand her needs even less now that she had more of them, and to try to explain would only complicate matters between them.

If the marriage was to end, then let her keep the process simple.

I have found some voluntary work in Cradley. I am keeping busy.

****

As the summer went on Elspeth struggled to write to William at all.

Her life accelerated so quickly that she hardly had time to do anything but the work, and at the end of July she found other positions for Mabel and Cook, because she was barely at home.

It was discovered that employers had been tricking women into signing away their right to an hourly wage.

“But why do they sign?” Elspeth asked.

Mary Macarthur herself answered the question.

She was passing by on her way to the rostrum, about to address a meeting.

“Because they cannot read, Mrs Cunningham.”

In August of 1910 the National Federation of Women Workers called a strike. It was Mary’s own union, created in 1906.

She wanted the chain makers to be able to unite.

“Women are unorganised because they are badly paid, and poorly paid because they are unorganised.”

For 10 weeks, Mary and her friends worked.

Elspeth travelled to and from printers, demanded meetings with public figures and went door to door for donations for the women.

She wrote so many letters that she ended up with a sharp and constant pain in her hand.

“I saw you wince again,” Harriet Brown, a friend in the Federation, told her one morning.

“I don’t mind it,” Elspeth said. “The pain tells me that I’m alive.”

The look on Harriet’s face said that she had no idea what Elspeth meant. Her young husband came to fetch her from meetings, and kissed her right in front of everyone.

Elspeth would hear them arguing about safety on the coalfields, or whether they’d ever dare to go up in an aeroplane.

This was the kind of man she should have married.

Four thousand pounds came in from other workers, trade unions, politicians, members of the aristocracy, bankers and the clergy. In the little study at their home in which William did household accounts, Elspeth tried to keep her Federation work organised.

Sometimes a letter from William got muddled with it.

I am very busy, he wrote. I look forward to explaining all the tricky funny things that go on in this far-flung place, although by now, of course, it has become a little like home.

“Tricky funny things.” It was a phrase that William used all the time to refer to things that were neither tricky nor funny – a mouse hole found in a skirting; the butter going off too soon.

It seemed he had created a replica of number 32a Duke Street on the pampas lands of South America.

The Tehuelche people live here. The name means Fierce People, apparently.

There was more about the tribes of Patagonia, but Elspeth saw a list of tasks that were overdue, and laid the letter aside for now.

****

The strike was, at last, effective. On October 22 every employer had signed a genuine pledge to pay the wage.

It was a moment of celebration. But for Elspeth it was mixed with anxiety: she had received a letter from William’s London bosses that morning which told her that he was already on his way home.

It was as though a bubble had burst in her face and made her real world come back into focus.

She must hire staff, get the house back to its usual state, await the return of tedium and a marriage of polite companionship with a dull man.

Or . . . she could take that frightening step, and tell William that it must be over or she would suffocate.

She had glimpsed a life of thought and action, and it was too hard to forget.

William came home one wet November evening at six o’clock. His skin was tanned and his chin dark with stubble.

He kissed her, and asked for her news, and they sat beside each other on the sofa.

William seemed uneasy, even nervous, and Elspeth reminded herself that they had been apart for most of a year, and that whatever warmth and understanding would return between them would take a little time.

She decided to leave until tomorrow the talk that she knew they must have.

“My dear,” he said after a short silence. “I am embarrassed to say that I am going to leave you once again and meet a friend.

“It’s just for an hour. He’s on his way back from Montevideo like me, and is in Birmingham

only briefly to visit his father. I don’t want to miss him – we took ships a month apart.”

“Of course you must go,” Elspeth said. “I’m going to turn in early, so you might not find me around the house when you come back. Enjoy your first evening on home soil.”

William would meet this friend, she knew, at the Old Chapel Hotel in Smethwick. It was the only place they ever ate outside the home.

He would drink a single glass of beer.

“You’re kind,” he said, and hurried out.

Elspeth was restless and full of dread. There was no point trying to lie down.

Dressed in her nightgown and a robe to keep out the chill now that the fires had burned low, she wandered around the ground floor, planning what she would say to him, and how to manage his reaction.

Would he be angry or distressed, full of pain or just disappointed?

She dared not even think, yet, of the reaction of other people.

The end of a marriage, she knew, was the start of a scandal.

****

She heard the garden gate creak open and shut soon after ten, and dithered – she had not realised how much time had passed.

Should she scurry upstairs and hide under the covers, or face what was to come?

Then, as she stood in the hall, she heard two sets of feet coming up the path.

William spoke just outside the door, and though the sound was muffled, she heard everything in the quiet evening.

“It’s a way of life that’s been mostly crushed,” William was saying. “We arrive there with our three-piece suits and our blessed accounts books, and they’ve been travelling the plains for centuries.”

Elspeth didn’t know what he was talking about. She crept closer to her side of the door.

“They’re magnificent people,” another voice came, “although I got to know them less than you did.”

“You were working hard elsewhere, old man.”

Elspeth heard her husband’s shoe kick aside a few bits of the gravel that lay alongside the path.

“I did come to know those families, and those proud men. They are unusually tall and it gives them a certain grandeur, you know.

“Those ladies with long plaits and wide smiles are always hospitable, always kind.

“Men like me have worn away their hunting skills and their ancient nomadic ways with our booze and our tobacco. We’ve ransacked their plains for feathers and hides.”

“You have spoken up, Bill.”

“And I must speak again, now I’m home.”

“You have to talk to her,” his friend said in a soft voice.

There was a pause.

“It’s not fair to her,” William replied. “This feeling, this itch, is not enough to make me do something so terrible to a good woman.”

“Yet you say that your life here had become –”

“Yes.”

There was a long silence. “Elspeth is a dutiful wife. But this life here will suffocate me.”

“It’s hard, but if you’re not truly suited –”

“I loved her. What happened to that? Is it the children who didn’t come?

“And now, after what I’ve seen – the realities of other lives, the possibilities of protest and change, the way worlds collide – oh, Elspeth wouldn’t understand!”

His voice had risen, impassioned.

“I couldn’t blame her if she didn’t. She lives in a world of weekly menus and tea parties.

“She wrote to me, you know, saying that she has ‘found some voluntary work to do’. She made it sound like an obligation, while I feel an imperative to act on what I know.”

Elspeth pressed her hands to the paintwork of the door and tried to get her breath.

There was the soft thud of a man’s hand, clapping another man on the shoulder.

“I think the Tehuelche see you, Billy, as a true friend and protector. You’ll have to go back.”

“Yes, I will, or shrivel up. Inside here, Tom, are pieces of furniture and cushions that make me want to run away, and a fine and lovely woman with whom I cannot connect.”

Elspeth was crying now. Gulping, she flung open the door.

William stood only two feet from her, his eyes wide with astonishment.

She saw, in the light that spilled from the hall lamp, a face that she had loved, and had desired.

She reached up, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him.

She heard the other man stumble back into the gravel and leave.

****

It was hours after midnight when they stopped talking. Both of them had tried to explain everything they had experienced, to be clear, saying how sorry they were over and over again.

There was so much to share and so many surprises.

“How could I not know?” Elspeth asked a dozen times.

“How did I not ask you?” William replied, holding her in his arms.

“I thought I had a dull husband.” Elspeth was crying as she said it.

To think she might have done something terrible before she knew that he, too, had felt stifled.

“I dreaded the conversation we’d have to have,” he said, and kissed her.

They unpicked the letters, extracting the sentences that had made each of them sigh and feel low.

“‘Tricky funny things’. I know I parrot that phrase, but I felt I couldn’t tell you that I had experienced an awakening, an overwhelming need for action.

“It was a longing to stop pushing paper about and do good in the world.”

She laughed.

“I don’t need to say what I was going to say next – you just did it for me!”

“And you have done good. That triumph for those workers, Ellie – I am all admiration.”

He jabbed at a letter.

“It was ‘a little like home’ because I found friends out there – strange men in colourful clothes whose language I had to learn.” He touched her cheek. “Do you think it was our childlessness that started the rot?”

“Perhaps. I suppose that made us sad, and made us stop talking.”

“We are both easily bored. Who’d have known it?”

“Well, we will have no more of that. Shall we go to Patagonia?”

William laughed.

“Yes, I think so, after I have done some work here towards it.”

He looked around the room.

“Have we still got Mabel and Cook?”

“No, we haven’t. And there is no weekly menu plan. There is no plan even for breakfast.”

“Who needs one? And breakfast tomorrow – today, I should say – will be very late indeed.”

He took her hands and led her to the stairs.

“Plans! Who knows where a person might be tomorrow, next Thursday or in 1911?”

“I have a meeting next Thursday, actually. I am considering membership of the Women’s Social and Political Union. It’s at five o’clock.”

William laughed.

“On Thursday, then, I will make our supper. I learned how to roast a fillet of guanaco.”

“I don’t know what that is, but I will tell you now, my darling, in case I forget on Thursday, that it was delicious.”

The End.