Bobby’s irritation with herself quickly shifted to anger with the comic who’d rejected her work, however.
Twenty good jokes, rejected for the utterly ridiculous reason that the brain that had come up with them was lodged inside a woman’s head rather than a man’s! It was absurd to think someone would rather throw away good work than admit a woman had written it for him. What a world this was.
She couldn’t even enjoy a cathartic rant about it to Charlie, since she had kept her joke-writing so deadly secret. She would have to pour out her rage in a letter to Scarlet, and wait until her friend could reply for the soothing, sympathetic words she needed.
She shoved the crumpled letter in the salvage bin rather violently, pushing it under some old newspapers so Charlie wouldn’t spot it, then went to lie down. Her back was very sore after a morning of shopping.
Bobby felt tears start to rise at the unfairness of it all. That outlet would be closed to her henceforth, she supposed, now those in charge knew the secret of her sex. No amount of signing herself ‘Robert Bancroft’ could undo that slip of the pen. She would never sell another joke again.
It wasn’t right. Her brain was the same one it had been when they had believed her a man, and her work had been deemed good enough then. Why should this change anything? Men were so proud of being the more logical sex, yet there was no logic to this at all.
She had needed this, damn it! She had lost her job atThe Tyke, and now it felt like the one thing that had been keeping her going in lieu was being taken away from her.
Bobby had been planning to write that very afternoon. There would have been enough time before she needed to cook the tea to pen a good nine or ten jokes.
But there was no point now. Her gaze landed on her notebook lying on the bedside table, and she swallowed a sob.
Some words of Jolka’s came back to her as she lay staring at it.
You can write for other publications as well as you can write forThe Tyke, I suppose…
Which was all very well, but which ones? There wasn’t much she knew about apart from life in the Dales, and no magazine other thanThe Tykewould be interested in that. Perhaps she could write about other things – she had briefly been a newspaper reporter, after all – but it was difficult to chase down stories when she was the size of a house.
Bobby’s attention was drawn to a periodical under her notebook: not one for adults but a story magazine for children,The Girl’s Own Paper. Charlie had brought it from Skipton as a present for Florrie, and Bobby had put it by the bed to remind her to give it to Lilian when she saw her.
She slid it out and flicked through.
The stories were just what Bobby had loved when she had been Florrie’s age – the sort she had striven to emulate in all her early jottings. Bobby, too, had been an avid reader ofThe Girl’s Ownwhen she had been in pinafores and long socks.
Her interest in journalism had been sparked by a piece in that publication, now she came to think of it: an account of the exploits of the woman reporter who had become Bobby’s idol, Dorothy Lawrence. But it was fiction stories that had been her first love, and made her dream of a writing career.
The tales inThe Girl’s Ownwere filled with action, usually featuring a plucky heroine uncovering a mystery, winning a hockey match for her school, taking first place at a gymkhana or – in these days of war – bringing down Nazis. Tales with titles like ‘Susan of St Agatha’s’, ‘The Cravensdale Mystery’ and ‘Jane Does the Job’. Bobby spent an informative hour reading the magazine from cover to cover.
People before things, Reg had always told her – that was what made for a compelling magazine article. Bobby was sure it applied as much to fiction as non-fiction. That was why there was so often a Jane or a Susan in the titles of these tales – because it told readers that here they would find a friend, someone they could aspire to emulate. More importantly, it told them that here was someonejust like them. If you could craft a heroine readers could root for, she would carry the story on her back.
Bobby put the magazine aside and reached for her pen.
Chapter 25
By the time she needed to start cooking tea, Bobby had covered several pages of her notebook.
What she had produced was a more mature version of the stories she’d written in childhood. It drew heavily on her experience in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Bobby was a little worried it might be too similar to a storyThe Girl’s Ownhad already serialised, ‘Worrals of the WAAF’, but since she had little other experience to draw upon as the basis of a thrilling adventure story, she had decided to stick with what she knew.
Besides, her WAAF heroine – Lindy Langstaff, Bobby had named her – wasn’t much like well-to-do Worrals. She was from a more humble background for a start, which Bobby hoped would make her relatable to girls from lower-class families. She well remembered how she had longed to read about girls like herself as a child, rather than the plummy heroines she seemed to encounter in every tale. She had also drawn on her experience in The Flying Aces concert party and given Lindy theatrical aspirations.
The story dealt with Lindy using her experience as a ventriloquist to outwit a Nazi paratrooper, throwing her voice in order to lure him to her commanding officer. Of course, the CO then rewarded the plucky teenage airwoman with instant promotion. Bobby smiled as she thought how her ventriloquist friend Ellis would appreciate that. She had tried to infuse her story with humour too, which she modestly felt she wrote well.
Bobby had no idea if the story was any good, but writing it had significantly improved her spirits. For so long, writing had been something she had done as part of her job, always striving to earn the approval of those above her – whether that meant RegAtherton, Don Sykes or the nobs at the BBC. This was the first time in ages that Bobby had written something solely to please herself.
It had been enormously satisfying to lose herself in the world she had created. Stuck in the house as she had been since passing the six-month point in her pregnancy, sighing as she watched the fells putting on their spring garb through the window, it had been liberating to join Lindy for her adventures. Even if, when she read it back, Bobby felt the story wasn’t somethingThe Girl’s Owncould be interested in, she felt she was now in a state of mind to bite her thumb at the BBC brass with aplomb.
Her sex wouldn’t count against her with theGirl’s Owneditress. There were a few male authors who contributed, but the majority of its stories were written by women. She could abandon subterfuge, submit material under her own name and experience the pleasure of seeing that name printed under the story’s title – if, of course, the story was deemed good enough. Many writers for the periodical were professional authors, like Captain W. E. Johns, the creator of Biggles, who wrote the Worrals stories. That was some stiff competition. But the magazine did have a wide pool of contributors, not all of whom were famous names, and after all, she was a professional writer. Bobby decided that she would read her story back with fresh eyes after a few days, and if she felt it had a future, she would take a chance and send it in.
By the time Charlie arrived home, Bobby was in the kitchen, humming merrily as she stirred a pan of stew.
‘You sound happy,’ Charlie said when he came in, wrapping his arms around her sizeable belly and kissing her neck.
‘I am,’ Bobby said, rather surprised to find this was true. Whether her story was accepted for publication or not, writing it had done wonders for her spirits. Not to mention that her brainhad been kept too busy to let her worry about the imminent delivery of her baby once.
