Hanging on the Wire

ONE

ONCE THE WORST OF THE riot was over I managed to read the letter from Jenny Chesney. I was sitting on the roof of a Birmingham meeting hall at the time, along with a pugnacious pacifist called Arthur Ricks, and a crowd of munitions workers were shouting insults at us from below. The letter had arrived by the early post that morning in June 1917, just before I’d set out from my home in Hampstead to speak at a Stop the War rally organised by the Midlands branch of the Women’s International League. I’d stuffed it into my pocket, intending to read it later.

Since then, I’d had no time to spare for it. Some people in Birmingham were doing very well out of the war. Our rally had been disrupted by toughs sent along by the owners of local munitions factories, most of them well primed in the pubs, in spite of the law that said you weren’t allowed to stand people rounds of drinks in case it sapped the war effort. Rotten vegetables flew, but we were used to that and had kept going. It was only when they were followed by lumps of wood and metal and a cohort of munitions workers stormed the platform that we decided to call a halt. Arthur, who is built like an omnibus, managed to keep the crowd at bay with a chair long enough for our main speaker, Ramsay Macdonald, to escape through a ground-floor window. When that route was cut off, Arthur and I took refuge on the flat roof, via the balcony and fire escape.

Now, as the long summer evening settled over the smoky roofs of Birmingham, Arthur had his arm hooked round a flagpole and was leaning out, trying to reason with the crowd below at the top of his voice.

‘Twenty thousand dead – on the first day of the Somme. How many more – do you want?’

The reply floated up from below.

‘Hang the Hun lovers.’

Arthur turned and grinned at me.

‘I think they’re getting tired. You quite comfortable, Nell?’

‘Quite comfortable, thank you Arthur. We can wait. It won’t be dark for two hours yet.’ I settled my back against a chimney stack and took Jenny’s letter out of my pocket. She wasn’t a close friend, but we’d met from time to time at meetings and rallies during the campaign for the Vote. I remembered her as a live-wire of a woman in her mid-twenties with a mass of honey-coloured hair, good-looking enough to disconcert men who thought all suffragrettes must be old hags. Since then the outbreak of war had split the suffrage movement down the middle and set half of us at odds with the other half. Now as I and others travelled up and down the country appealing for an end to the war, our paths crossed with our former leaders’, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, addressing rallies to send more trainloads of machine-gun fodder to the trenches in France and Flanders. I’d lost touch with Jenny and didn’t know which side she was on, but at least the opening of her letter made that clear.

‘Dear Nell,

I read about your activities. Thank goodness some of us are trying to stop this madness. I’ve been seeing some of the effects of it. I’m working as an assistant at a small auxiliary hospital for shell-shocked cases in Wales. It’s an experimental unit, run by a man called Dr Julius Stroud. He’s financing it himself, so the War Office have to put up with us for the present, but they’d like to close us because they think we’re not getting men back to the fighting quickly enough. That’s why I’m so worried about what’s been happening here over the past few weeks and very much need help. I’m writing to you because I remembered that Mrs Pankhurst dropped some complimentary hints about a peculiar business in Biarritz you were involved in some time ago …’

I laughed. It had indeed been some time ago and Emmeline Pankhurst had been less complimentary since. The last time we’d met, in the booking hall at Euston station, she’d hissed ‘Traitor’ and swept past with her nose in the air. I read on.

‘… and I know you can be quite tactful when you try, in spite of what people say. For the past two months or so we’ve been under attack from an appalling war-mongering woman called Monica Minter, who’s staying near here. She’s a leading light in something called the Duty and Discipline Movement and seems to have got it into her head that we are all German agents. She used to be in the suffrage movement and must have heard of you, so perhaps if you came here you could see her and reason with her.’

Jenny seemed to have spacious ideas about disposing of my time. I glanced at the address on her letter: Nantgarrew, near Llanvihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny, Monmouthshire. It would take me several days to pronounce the place, let alone go to it. There was one more page.

‘But that’s not the worst of it. Yesterday somebody shot at us. We don’t know who it was. Dr Stroud and two of the patients were in a conservatory at the back of the house and they might have been killed. Dr Stroud is firmly against involving the police in any way because it would disturb our patients and make complications with the War Office. So if you could find two or three days to come here and see if you can find out anything, I’d be eternally grateful. Only, if you come, it might be best if we let it be known that you’re a friend of mine who’s interested in Dr Stroud’s work. Please come if you can.

Yours, in hope,

Jenny Chesney.’

Arthur was still carrying on his discussion with the voices forty feet below. I waited for a lull.

‘Arthur, have you heard of a Dr Julius Stroud?’

He knew an amazing variety of people.

‘Yes. Neurologist. Done some very interesting work. He went out to Vienna and studied with Dr Freud for some time. You know, the dreams man.’

My knowledge of the work of Dr Freud was hazy. I find that people who spend too much time worrying about their own minds seldom have minds worth worrying about. Still, at least it proved that Jenny’s letter wasn’t entirely fantasy.

‘What about the Duty and Discipline Movement?’

‘Peculiar. Put out pamphlets telling people to send their gardeners to fight in the trenches, that sort of thing.’

I re-read Jenny’s letter. It was warm on the roof and in spite of the voices below, quite peaceful. If I rearranged my work I might be able to spend a couple of days in Wales before final preparations for the big Manchester rally.

Arthur strolled over to me.

‘There aren’t many of them left, Nell, and there’s another fire escape down to a side street. Shall we try it?’

We tried it. According to the newspapers, women’s skirts had risen to an astonishing six inches above the ground because of the demands of war work. As we scrambled down, it struck me that it came in useful for anti-war work as well. I wondered whether I dared adopt trousers like the women wore in the munitions factories, but supposed that would be considered tactless. When we got down to the side street – with the opposition round at the front still baying to the roof for our blood – we ran for the railway station. The newspaper placards there read: ‘Allies Control Messines Ridge’. People said it would be all over by Christmas. Which was what they’d said three years ago. Arthur and I parted, he to go back to Leeds, I to London.

After seeing him off, I had an hour to wait for my train. There were a group of young soldiers on the platform, on their way back to France after leave. They sat on their kit-bags in the warm dusk. One of them had a mouth organ and they sang as he played, not the songs of the patriotic rallies but the doleful, stoic soldiers’ songs from the trenches. There was one in particular that stuck in my mind:

‘When you’re hanging on the wire, Never Mind.

When you’re hanging on the wire, Never Mind.

Though the light’s as bright as day,

When you die they stop your pay.

When you’re hanging on the wire, Never Mind.’

TWO

WAR-WOUNDED MEN WERE EVERYWHERE in the long summer day’s journey to Wales. At Paddington, women medical orderlies and volunteers with tea wagons were waiting for the arrival of a hospital train. At Newport, the first city the train came to in Wales, there was a big military hospital. I had to change there, and while I was waiting for the local train to Abergavenny I watched convalescent patients, in their blue hospital uniforms, out strolling in the sunshine in a public park. Of the men who came home wounded, three-quarters were declared cured and returned for duty to the hell-holes that had hurt them in the first place. I looked at the nurses, as they watched their walking patients, and was angry that their care and gentleness should be used in such a cause. If I could help Jenny in keeping even a few men out of the clutches of the War Office, then my time would not be wasted.

When I got out at Abergavenny I found there were no buses from there to Llanvihangel Crucorney. Luckily before I left London I’d taken the precaution of changing into walking skirt and shoes and packing my things into a haversack. I’d had a lot to do that morning before I could leave, so it was early evening before I asked for directions and started my walk along the dusty road. The heat of the day was over. High green hills rose on either side of me as I walked, with patches of woodland and scattered farmhouses set well back from the road. There was a smell of hay in the air, and the bleats of half-grown lambs.

About three miles out from Abergavenny a flat farm cart caught up with me. It was drawn by a brown cob and driven by a middle-aged farmer with a placid face, wearing tweed jacket, breeches and gaiters.

‘Good evening, ma’am. Would you be the lady who was asking for Nantgarrew?’

I said I was, not surprised that the arrival of a stranger should be public knowledge in such a quiet place.

‘They said at the station you’d been asking. If you don’t mind the cart, I could give you a ride as far as Cymyoy.’

His voice was as Welsh as Cadwallader. I thanked him and got up beside him.

‘Are you a nurse, ma’am?’

‘No. I’m visiting a friend who works as Nantgarrew. Her name’s Jenny Chesney.’

He beamed.

‘I know about Miss Jenny, she’s the one who helps the doctors. Gwenda’s very fond of Miss Jenny.’

‘Gwenda?’

‘My daughter. She used to work in the kitchen there. Doesn’t any more.’

His smile faded.

We came round the side of a hill into a deeper valley with steep hills on either side and a stream running down beside the road. The cob paced on, with no guidance from the slack reins, as the farmer talked.

‘I hear they had a bit of a scare up there last Sunday. Somebody nearly shot.’

‘What happened?’

I thought Jenny wouldn’t be pleased to know it was the talk of the valley.

‘We heard about it from the lad who does their garden. Apparently it was one of them doing a bit of target practice, only it went off target like.’

‘I thought it was a hospital. Do they usually do target practice?’

‘Well, it’s not an ordinary kind of hospital, is it? It’s for people hurt in their nerves. I suppose they have to keep their hands in for when they get sent back to the fighting. Though, as I said to Gwenda, if that’s what their aim’s like, I don’t see them doing much harm to the Germans.’

A group of grey buildings came in sight about half a mile away up the road.

‘That’s my place. I’ll have to put you down there because I’ve got the cows to milk before dark, but Nantgarrew’s only two miles on from there.’

The sun was balancing on the top of the hills, filling the valley with golden light. Up the road there was a dust cloud coming towards us. When it got nearer, we could see it was a khaki-coloured motor wagon.

‘Is that from Nantgarrew?’

‘Yes. It will be taking some of the men back. Eight of them going back today, the lad said.’

‘Back where?’

‘Back to the big hospital in Newport, then to the war.’

The wagon came nearer, towards the farm turning. I could see a small figure standing there by the road. As the wagon passed it waved and waved, so vigorously that it almost fell over. I looked at the farmer’s face, about to ask who it was, and stopped myself. The wagon came on, past us. The men inside it, in their khaki uniforms, were sitting on the floor or standing and clinging on to the sides. They waved and shouted as they passed, called goodbye to the farmer, some even raised their hats to me, then they were gone in the dust cloud down the valley.

When we got to the farmer’s drive, the girl who’d waved at the wagon was still standing there. Tears were pouring down her cheeks.

‘Go in Gwenda. No good waiting here.’

The farmer’s voice was gentle. He added something in Welsh. She glanced at us, turned, then ran away up the drive, made clumsy by misery. Her father watched her for a while, sighed, then held the horse steady while I got down.

‘You just keep straight …’

Another vehicle came down the valley, much faster, horn tooting at us. It was a red motor car that must have been doing at least twenty miles an hour. The driver made no attempt to slow down as it passed us and the cloud of dust it stirred up made the cob snort. I had just a glimpse of the person at the wheel, a woman in a long brown motoring coat, goggles and a tricorn hat, tied firmly down with a long red scarf to match the car. She was sitting very straight and upright, as if riding a hunter.

I said: ‘Would that by any chance be Monica Minter?’

He gave me a sideways look.

‘Yes. Do you know her?’

‘No. My friend mentioned her.’

‘She stays with her aunt at the next house up past us. She’s a very strong-minded lady.’

His tone was cautious.

‘I gather she doesn’t like the people at Nantgarrew.’

‘Her husband’s a captain in the Navy, up in the Atlantic looking for submarines. She lost her brother at the Somme.’

He seemed determined not to commit himself. He handed me down my haversack.

‘Just keep straight along this road for two miles or so. Don’t take the first turning on the right, that’s the road up to the old quarry. Half a mile past that, you’ll see a waterfall coming straight down and a big white house near the bottom of it in some trees, well back from the road. That’s Nantgarrew.’

For the first half-hour or so I followed his directions, then I got lost. There must have been a turning he hadn’t allowed for in his directions, or perhaps I’d mistaken the subtle difference between grassy track that didn’t count and a grassy road that did. In any case, the result was that I wasted the next half hour on the road I shouldn’t have taken and found myself at the foot of the quarry, then another hour trying to take what looked like a short cut back to the road. By the time I’d scrambled over half a dozen dry stone walls, scattered several flocks of yelling sheep and floundered up to my ankles in a patch that even in midsummer contrived to be boggy I was ready to curse Jenny, Nantgarrew and all its works. It was dusk when I got back to the road, almost dark when I saw a gash of gold against the hillside that turned out to be a narrow waterfall reflecting the last glint of the sun and a square white house below it. It was set close against the steep hillside, its back huddled into a thicket of rhododendrons and birches. A winding drive led towards it from the road with pasture fields on either side, through a narrow opening in a high grassy bank. A sign on the gate said ‘Nantgarrew’ but there was nothing to show it was anything other than a private house.

That morning I’d telegraphed to Jenny to expect me by dinner time. Even if the telegraph had reached her in such a remote place, she’d surely have given me up for the day. I closed the gate behind me and began to walk up the drive, tired and hungry, hoping there’d be some dinner left. As I came close to the bank it looked as if it might be an ancient earthwork, built up to make a modern boundary. There was a ditch below it, then a few yards of rough grass and a barbed wire fence, dividing the grounds of the house from the fields. It was a very elaborate fence, coils of barbed wire nailed to thick wooden stakes, far more than needed to keep sheep out. It looked alien and threatening in the half-light. The drive ran through an opening in the wire, then through a gap in the bank, over a cattle grid. For a small auxiliary hospital, Nantgarrew seemed alarmingly well defended. I paused at the cattle grid to adjust my pack, looking back down to the darkening valley.

‘Halt, who goes there?’

I jumped round. The voice had come from behind the bank, a cultivated voice, but nervy. I took a step forward.

‘Identify yourself, friend or foe?’

I could see somebody now, a head and shoulders in silhouette. Jenny might have warned me about military guards.

‘My name’s Nell Bray. I’m expected. Jenny Chesney invited me.’

A man appeared in the gap in the bank. He was tall and thin and although, as far as I could see in the dusk, he wasn’t wearing uniform he held himself very straight. Then another voice behind him, less nervous and obviously Yorkshire.

‘What’s up, sir? Who have you got there?’

‘It’s a woman.’

The first man’s voice made that sound like a crime in itself.

‘The mad woman?’

‘No, another one. She says Miss Chesney invited her.’

The second man came scrambling down the bank towards me.

‘Evening ma’am, sorry you’ve been troubled. Don’t worry about the lady, sir. I’ll escort her up to the house.’

He was short and square and his voice was cheerful. He hoisted the pack from my shoulders on to his own and gave me an arm to help me over the cattle grid, not that I needed it. The taller man fell back to let us through.

The house had been hidden by the bank but it came into sight again as we walked up the drive, lights shining in some of its windows.

‘My name’s Jack Kelso. Most people call me Jacko. I hope Captain Hunter didn’t scare you, Miss.’

‘Do you always keep a guard on the house?’

‘Well, you couldn’t call it a guard exactly. It’s mainly the Captain and