Tony turned to Bobby and Charlie with the bawdy joviality that a second pint usually produced in him. ‘How’re we doing then, you two? You going to be producing bairns of your own soon, or are you still working out how to do it? I don’t mind drawing you a picture if you need help, Charlie.’
Charlie looked irritated, but Bobby, anxious though she was to avoid talk of babies, flashed Tony an amused smile. She was used to his crude humour, and that joke was mild by Tony Scott standards. Besides, seeing his concern for Lilian had put her in a humour to appreciate his better qualities.
‘Shut up and have a cigarette, Tony,’ she said, taking the liberty of offering him one from Charlie’s pack. ‘I hope now we’ve bought you a pint, you’re going to stop sulking about work.’
Tony shrugged, lighting the cigarette. ‘Wasn’t sulking. I just think the natural order ought to be preserved, that’s all. A married woman’s place is at home – no offence, Charlie.’
Charlie didn’t say anything. He just lit a cigarette of his own and smoked it from between his trembling fingers. Bobby squeezed his knee to thank him for making an effort to keep his temper. Tony’s teasing, even when friendly, always seemed to hit on some sensitive issue guaranteed to rub his brother-in-law the wrong way.
‘That might have been the way it was before the war, Tony, but things are different now,’ Lilian observed, sipping her second sherry. ‘It’s changed things for women.’
‘Aye, for the worse.’
‘In some ways, but in other respects it’s opened a lot of doors – and a lot of eyes. Now we’ve shown what we can do, why shouldn’t we girls expect more?’
‘Jobs are all right for the single girls, get them a bit of pocket money, but those who’ve got husbands to keep them ought to be at home. Call me old-fashioned if you want but that’s the way I feel.’
‘Not every household has that luxury,’ Bobby said. ‘Working-class women have always had to work, married or not. Our mam was back in the mill a few days after Ray came, and even whenshe had four of us at home she took in washing. She couldn’t afford not to work.’
‘Aye, well, that’s different, isn’t it?’ Tony said, exhaling a column of smoke. ‘When you need the money, I mean. But it’s not the natural order. Men must work and women must weep, as the old song says.’
‘Who was it created this “natural order”, Tony?’ Charlie asked. ‘You never struck me as the religious type.’
Bobby flashed him a surprised look. Before going to war and even in his RAF days – at least, prior to the crash that had killed two of his crew – Charlie had been a social being. He still could be, when the mood took him, but at other times he was often quiet in company. Tony in particular was someone he found it hard to be companionable with. Bobby wondered if he had felt the need to come to her support when he spoke up.
There was no need, though. She was used to Tony, and felt comfortable challenging him. He took it better from her, as a friend and non-threatening female presence. Already she could see him fixing Charlie with a resentful look, although he didn’t rise to the bait – perhaps mindful that he was currently drinking a beer his brother-in-law had bought him while smoking one of his cigarettes.
‘Perhaps “natural order” is the wrong phrase,’ he said. ‘It’s about doing what we’re fitted to. Men earn a crust; women keep home and raise the bairns. Men toil; women nurture. We’d be in a hell of a mess if we turned it around, wouldn’t we? We can’t rebuild the world with a lot of hard women and weak men.’
‘Perhaps it’s not so black and white as that,’ Charlie said quietly. ‘Perhaps that’s the lesson we ought to take from this war.’
‘Besides, women aren’t only good at nurturing. We’ve got individual talents,’ Lilian said, her second sherry making her bold. ‘It seems hard to me that those of our sex who’ve foundsomething they’re good at, like our Bobby has, should have to give it up to dust and polish. It’s a waste of clever girls to give them nothing to do besides make a home. Well, thanks to the war those girls are finally starting to realise there can be more for them.’
‘Gawd’s sake,’ Tony muttered, stubbing out his cigarette. ‘I thought I was coming out for a drink, not a ruddy meeting of the league of militant suffragettes.’ He glanced at the robust, hardy girls of the Women’s Land Army drinking at the bar. ‘I don’t see what’s so wonderful about the war working you girls until you’ve got calluses all over your hands and muscles like blokes.’
‘What’s so wonderful is that we’re needed now,’ Bobby said. ‘Not just by our husbands and children but by the world.’
Lilian nodded. ‘It’s going to be hard to put the cork back in the bottle now the war’s shaken things up. A lot of men are going to find things are rather different when they come marching home.’
Bobby gave her sister a smile of solidarity. Lilian had always been the traditional one. While Bobby had been ambitious, dreaming of making it as a journalist, all her twin had ever wanted was to fall in love and make a home. Yet it seemed the war had made a difference to Lilian’s view of the world too. Bobby wondered if her sister thought wistfully of her career in the Wrens, cut short by her pregnancy after an ill-fated night with Tony, just as Bobby did about the WAAF.
Lilian’s words made Bobby think of their mam. Nelly Bancroft had been a clever woman who had encouraged her daughters to study hard and aim for a better life, yet despite her innate intelligence, Nelly had had little education, leaving school at fourteen to work in the mills like generations of her family before her. Her short life had been one of toil and penny-pinching, until she had been taken by cancer aged just thirty-five. Bobby often wondered what her mam could have been if hersex and class hadn’t condemned her to a lot far below her natural capabilities.
How many people in the history of human existence had been forced into lives of drudgery and illiteracy when they could have been great men and women? All because the Tony Scotts of the world decreed that they had no right to more than what had arbitrarily been designated ‘the natural order’. Jolka was right when she said that too often, the world only allowed women to bewhatthey were rather thanwhothey were.
‘You’re very full of your opinions tonight, Lilian,’ Tony said, turning a look of disapproval on his wife. ‘You sound like your sister.’
‘Do I? Good.’
‘It wasn’t a compliment.’
‘You know, Tony, I’m right here,’ Bobby said, glaring at him.
‘Am I not entitled to opinions then?’ Lilian demanded. ‘Women don’t give up their brains when they marry, Tony Scott, however much you might wish they did.’ She threw back the last of her sherry.
Now Lilian had finished her second drink, her speech had become noticeably slurred.
‘Better make that your last one, eh?’ Tony said. ‘Can’t afford to have you drinking away my wages in the pub.’
