A Short Introduction to the Suffragette Movement

    Arthur Morton was a small, round man, with a round face and round eyes. The roundness, however, was only external. Inwardly, Arthur was composed of jagged edges of passion, rage and resentment. These irregular shapes were never exhibited in his work, as the warehouseman of a shoe company.  There, Arthur presented a comfortingly rotund figure, as warm and reassuring as a freshly cooked doughnut.

     But not at home. In the semi-detached in Didsbury, the jagged inner Arthur Morton ruled his family with an intensity all the more powerful since it was held in check during working hours. He had many obsessions, but one above all: the changing status of women. The post-war freedom of working women excited his direst forebodings. He berated his long-suffering wife, Beryl, on the subject by the hour. A timid soul, Beryl nodded while thinking of other things, a long practiced skill.

     While most of this ranting remained in the field of theory, it found a practical target in their son. Ben was his father’s hope. He would one day be a man and inherit the mantle of natural male supremacy. In his own person, Arthur felt, he offered an example which could be followed in the domestic sphere.

     While Ben was small, this ambition had free rein in his father’s imagination. However, as the boy grew, disappointment set in. Ben was quiet, gentle and dreamy, not given to asserting himself. Thin and angular on the outside, he appeared to be emotionally soft and rounded. Just like his mother, Arthur grumbled.

    Challenges, Arthur felt, were needed. Races to be run, games of strength, competitions, quizzes, all had to be endured by the shy, pale boy. He suffered agonies, but a kind of stoicism gradually took hold of him. Arthur would catch the lad studying him with an odd, quizzical air. This probing look of intelligence, unfathomable to Arthur, only stimulated him to the invention of further torments. He refused to believe there could be any hidden resistance lurking in his son. Sooner or later, Ben Morton would become the man of his father’s dreams.

    Then along came baby Amy. Like her father, she was round on the outside, with bright blue eyes. But already, at a few months old, something jagged began to show. She loved to throw herself over the side of her pram and hang by her harness, kicking and screaming. Her parents and older brother could only watch in awe as the jaggedness grew day by day.

    For Arthur, this was a bitter irony. He had no control over this small, round pink monster. He would expound on a subject, only to find, as he reached the climax of his argument, that his daughter was pulling the tablecloth overboard, or spearing her brother’s fish-cakes with her fork. His fury was compounded by Beryl’s indulgence. While fond of her son and protective of him, she worshipped her wild little daughter.

     One evening, after both children were asleep, Beryl casually slipped in a remark to her husband.

  `It’s funny. She’s only like that when you’re here. Never with just me.’

   For once in his loquacious life, Arthur was stuck for a response. It was clear, though, that new tactics were called for. His family had become polarized. No longer was the war outside the house. It had invaded the sacred domestic arena. He resolved that he and his boy would form a two-man front against this threat.

    Thus began a new nightmare in poor Ben’s life. His father no longer threw challenges at him. Instead, they were now chums; they were pals. All Ben wanted was to be left alone to make his balsa-wood aeroplanes or read his Boy’s Own paper or his Eagle Annual, but these chances became increasingly rare. As the boy moved hesitantly into puberty, Arthur felt the urge to share his life’s experiences with his son. That these experiences, aside from a spell as quartermaster of a military camp in Salisbury Plain during the war, consisted of looking after several thousand boxes of shoes in a warehouse, did nothing to dampen his ardour.

     With these mental workouts, went bracing physical exercise. To operate as far as possible from the corrupting influence of the two women in the household, Arthur initiated the father-and-son walk. Three or four times a week, he would throw aside his newspaper, snatch down his coat, hat and scarf and bark at Ben:

  `Walk, Ben!’

   Off they would trudge into the foggy mancunian night. At first, the walks were more or less at random, until, quite by accident one evening, they landed in a small Victorian park. In the corner of the park there waited a living lesson, the symbol of everything that churned around in Arthur’s addled brain.

   They would not have known about it, had not an ancient park-keeper, working late and on his way home, stopped to tell them about it. Ben listened as carefully as his father, but Arthur, as was his style in these matters, took over the story, and the example it offered, as uniquely his own. After this, it became his park, his glass-house, and, above all, his cactus.

    The conservatory was in the far corner of the park, half hidden among yew and monkey-puzzle trees. It was tall and narrow, with grimy, cracked panes of glass. Inside, though, it was warm and humid, a consolation for Ben, usually frozen to his fingertips by this stage of the walk. There was a concrete tank with a couple of goldfish drifting around in it and various tropical ferns and fronds. But it was the cactus that dominated the greenhouse.

    It was about fifteen feet high, reaching almost to the domed roof of the structure. Though its size and its ferocious-looking spines were impressive, its outstanding feature, and the focus of the park-keeper’s account, was a large brown scar, about two-thirds up the dark green shaft. This had been caused some fifty years earlier, when the cactus was still young and vulnerable, by a Suffragette bomb. The bomb, as Arthur repeated several times, had not killed the cactus. Indeed, the shock might even have stimulated it to renewed growth and vitality. Side by side, father and son stood gazing at this symbol of priapic survival against the might of militant womanhood. Finally, Ben asked, hesitantly:

   `Dad, what’s a Suffrathingumy?’

  `A Suffragette?  They were women, son. A whole army of them carrying placards and posters and – and umbrellas and bombs. Yes, bombs. Women, with bombs,’ he repeated in hushed tones. The awe was palpable, and Ben was infected by it. In his mind, a horde of murderous women, wielding placards, posters and umbrellas, swam into view. In their handbags were concealed bombs, explosive devices to be thrown at tropical plants in obscure Manchester parks. Was there a cactus anywhere in the British Isles that could call itself safe?  He glanced up at his father’s expression. It reminded him of the face of one of the Old Testament prophets in the family Bible. It was stern, unforgiving. It was almost a surprise to hear his own voice pipe up with a question.

     `But why, Dad?’

     `Because, son, that’s what they were like. They were like that. They were those sort of women. That’s what the Suffragettes were like!’

      And he was off, for another half hour, both in the greenhouse and on the way home, repeating the same strange and fearsome mantras about these menacing creatures. At the end of it, Ben was no wiser as to what a Suffragette actually was. He hoped for some enlightenment at home, but even this was cut off. At the front door, the key in the lock, his father turned on him and said:

    `Not a word to your Mum and Amy, mind. Not a word!’

     So the park and the cactus became a secret of the Mortons, father and son. Every few days, off they would troop to their ritual in the glass-house. Ben, the mystery deepening by the day, contemplated asking at school what a Suffragette was, but felt he would invite ill-omen, would be tempting the wild women to come after him, and throw a bomb at him.

    Day after day, his unease deepened. He began to dream of screaming Suffragettes. He saw himself being stabbed by umbrellas, imagined being turned into a cactus, and, not being of the virile, healthy kind in the park, being blown to bits. Would his father come then and stare at him, make another one of his interminable and incomprehensible speeches?  He felt madness looming.

    He was rescued by Amy, of all people, one freezing autumn evening. He was tucked up with a blanket around his knees, doing a jigsaw puzzle of a pirate ship in front of the fire, when his father threw down his newspaper and sprang to his feet, announcing the time had come for yet another walk with Ben.

     `And me, too!’ yelled Amy.

    `You can’t,’ Arthur snapped. `It’s too cold, and you’ll freeze.’

    `No, I won’t. I’ve got my gloves and my hat and my scarf and I’m coming. If Ben can go for walks, I can, too!’

  She disappeared into the hall, came back struggling into her outdoor clothes. Arthur turned to his wife.

   `What’s the matter with you?  Why don’t you stop her?’

    But Beryl merely smiled vaguely, tucked her daughter’s scarf in.

   `She’ll be all right. Just keep her walking, that’s all.’

    So it was done. Off they went, father, son and daughter into the night, Amy striding defiantly ahead of them, carolling back over her shoulder.

     `Where are we going, Dad?’

    `Just around the block, and then back home. A short walk tonight. It’s too cold for anything longer.’

    Amy halted, swung around, mittened fists on her hips, glaring furiously at them.

   `It was just as cold last night and you went out for ages. I want to go where you went last night. Or I’ll sit down and scream till someone comes and sees you making me scream. I want to go where you went!’

    Arthur began to bluster, but Ben looked at Amy and said, quietly but clearly:

   `We went to see the cactus.’

   Arthur tried to head it off, but it was too late. Amy was not going home without seeing the cactus. By the time they were all three lined up in front of it, Arthur had walled himself off inside a black sulk. It was left to Ben to provide the explanations.

   `When this cactus was young,’ he said, `a Suffragette threw a bomb at it. You can see the scar up there. But it survived and went on growing.’

   Amy said, `What’s a Suffragette?’

  There was a pause, while Ben allowed his mind to clear away a mountain of verbal rubbish, once and for all.

    `I don’t know,’ he said.

   That was the end of the expedition to the cactus. Arthur stalked out of the greenhouse and strode away home, the two children tumbling along behind him. Once back in the house, he disappeared behind his newspaper. Amy planted herself in front of her mother, and said:

    `Mum, what’s a Suffra…suffra…Ben, what is it?’

    `A Suffragette.’

    Beryl put down the sock she was darning. She read the anxiety in their eyes, in the angular face and the smaller, rounder one. She did not look at her husband as she explained about the Suffragette movement. She told them what it had stood for, the sacrifices it had made, and how it had liberated women from centuries of bondage. She even included the contribution of the more militant wing of the movement. It took some time, and at the end of it, Amy asked:

    `Have you got the vote, Mum?’

   `Yes.’

   `Will I have it, too?’

   `Yes, you will. I’m sorry, but it’ll be too late for you to throw any bombs.’

   `Not even at a cactus?’

   `Cactus?  What cactus?’

    Amy explained about the cactus, with a few corrections from Ben. There was a silence for a moment, then Beryl suddenly laughed. She put her hand over her mouth, trying to smother it, but to no avail. Ben started to laugh, too. Then Amy joined in, shrieking and throwing bombs at imaginary cacti. During this pandemonium, Ben became aware that his mother, through her tears of laughter, was staring at his father. Arthur raised his newspaper, then lowered it again. Ben waited, his breath held, for an explosion. Why wasn’t he raging around the room?  Where had the fury gone, the bullying and the browbeating?  Instead, he found himself looking at a small, shrunken, frightened middle-aged man.

   From that moment on, Ben, like the cactus which had survived the bomb, grew in strength, and in love for his quiet mother and his noisy sister. For his father he felt love of a kind, but it was never a pure love. It was always mixed with the memory of fear and the discovery of pity.

John Kench was born and raised in Manchester, but has spent most of his working life in Cape Town, South Africa, where he has specialized in non-fiction books on regional topics, including architecture, wine, furniture and the seashore. He has also written a number of plays, including `Traitor on the Ice’, a black comedy about the Soviet explorer, Ivan Papanin, set on an ice-floe in the Arctic Ocean.

 

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