Page 65 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
‘Maybe we women should make our own structures,’ Nancy said lightly, and she was pleased when Eleanor pursed her lips thoughtfully.
‘Perhaps we should!’
There were only the three of them to start with, Eleanor, Dorothy and Nancy, but they sat down together and made a list of possible names. There was a quiet but purposeful-looking researcher in her thirties named Jean Parr, whom Eleanor knew slightly and agreed to approach. ‘She’s working on a project about fertility in mice.’ Jean was pleased to be asked.
Dorothy had befriended Sally Banes, a young technician with a doctorate, who’d married a schoolmaster who was often ill so she had decided not to pursue research because‘life is difficult enough’. Sally was glad to be included in the little network.
Nancy decided to ask Anne Durban. ‘She’s based at Prince’s, but she might be interested to come to a meeting if it’s only once a month.’ They’d all agreed this to be a realistic frequency.
The six women met for the first time over supper at Frank and Eleanor’s. Frank, his expression genial, agreed to absent himself for the evening. ‘It’s not that we don’t love you,’ Dorothy insisted the night before, ‘but you’ve got your own networks.’
‘I have indeed. I’ll be meeting some of my old team from Bristol, Eleanor. I won’t be back at all tomorrow night. Bill Jameson’s offered to put me up.’
The meeting wasn’t one in any formal sense of the word. Eleanor had made a large Lancashire hotpot to warm the chilly March evening. Nancy met Anne at the station and the six women introduced themselves to one another and spoke about their work and experiences, hesitantly at first, but after finding that the others had encountered similar problems, with more confidence.
‘I’ll be absolutely clear,’ Eleanor said, ‘this should not be a moaning session. Nor will we have an agenda and minutes and that kind of nonsense. We may be at different stages of our careers, but we’re all equal and – I must emphasize this – what we say here stays within these four walls.’
‘I agree,’ Sally Banes sighed, ‘though I can hardly be said to have a career. I work as a technician because we need to pay the bills.’
‘You’re a scientist and you’re a woman. Those are the only qualifications you need to be welcome here.’
‘You’re all so kind,’ Sally said, her eyes shining with unshed tears. ‘I feel invisible sometimes at Brandingfield. Some of the men treat me like a Victorian serving maid. Do this, do that, never a please or a thank you. They don’t speak like that to the male technicians.’
‘I think we should challenge them about that sort of behaviour,’ Eleanor said, frowning. ‘If we all do it when we come across it, they might take notice.’
‘Ask them if they treat their wives like that,’ Dorothy said.
‘I expect some of them do,’ Sally said glumly.
The women were interested to hear of Anne’s experiences in her lab at Prince’s, where she felt increasingly uncomfortable when the owner of the fish tank was around. ‘He stares at me with the unblinking intensity of one of his wretched fish,’ she complained, her face pink with embarrassment. ‘I hate being on my own with him in case he tries something. I can’t report it because nothing nasty has actually happened and I’d sound stupid. Do you understand what I mean?’
Everyone murmured fervent agreement. ‘It’s monstrous if it stops you getting on with your work,’ Jean Parr said.
Eleanor thought for a moment. ‘I think it would be worth you having a word in authority’s ear,’ she said. ‘Then they couldn’t claim not to have been warned if something unpleasant does happen.’
‘Though anything unpleasant should be prevented,’ Dorothy said. ‘I’d keep something sharp nearby – a pair of scissors – and go for the eyes.’
‘I couldn’t do that,’ Anne gasped amid general laughter.
‘What about Mrs Hall?’ Nancy said, remembering Miss Pick’s helpful assistant technician. ‘Maybe she would pop by unexpectedly from time to time and glare at him.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Anne said weakly. ‘Perhaps I’m misjudging the poor man.’
‘Misjudging, my foot,’ Dorothy muttered. ‘He shouldn’t be allowed to make you feel uncomfortable in your own lab even if he is otherwise harmless.’
Their meetings continued regularly. They agreed at the end of the first one that they should not become a closed clique, so if other women expressed an interest they would be warmly invited. By the summer, numbers had risen to nearly a dozen and the event was turned into a pot luck supper, with everyone bringing a dish and the atmosphere more like a party than a meeting. It was still enjoyable, the house ringing with lively conversation and laughter, but the group lost something of its early purpose, which was to address serious issues for women at Brandingfield, and, though useful, it became more about friendship and mutual support. Nancy did not mention the supper group when she wrote to James. She was nervous that he might sneer. His replies to her letters were sporadic, but amusing. She giggled at descriptions of his fellow recruits and frowned at the messes he got himself into.‘I’m too slow at everything,’he complained.
I don’t know why, but I never seem to be ready when everyone else is. You can’t imagine the hot water I findmyself in. I’ve told you about our sergeant. He calls me the Boffin and says if they’d had to rely on me in the war it would have been all over for us by Christmas. I feel sorry for him sometimes having us lot. Nobody wants to be here and many can’t see the point of it. If our platoon were sent on active service, that would be a different matter, but instead it’s all square-bashing and cleaning rifles. How I’ll stick it out for another nine months without going barking mad, I know not. Now, tell me how old Ed Buckland is. And do you ever hear anything from the lovely Miss Durban?
She read this last sentence with a pang, for it seemed that James still held a candle for Anne.‘Anne is very well,’she wrote back after leaving it a week to appear cooler than she felt, but she kept the matter of Anne’s difficulties to herself. Anne would be horrified to think that anyone beyond the original women’s supper group knew about Mr Fish Tank. She’d not spoken of the matter again in Nancy’s hearing, but Nancy understood that Anne had confided further in Eleanor and that with Mrs Hall keeping a watchful eye things were better.
Thirty-Eight
By mid-July, the inhabitants of Brandingfield began to disappear on holiday. Nancy ran down her supply of locusts because there would be no one to tend them over the summer. She offered the final few to a reptiles expert who presided over a tank containing a large, hungry iguana. Then she filed her papers, tidied her work station and took a last lingering look round the little kingdom where she reigned supreme. Despite all her difficulties, the year had gone well and she’d earned her holiday. She closed the door with a soaring sense of freedom and went to say goodbye to Edmund, who was leaving shortly himself to take his young daughter, Marianne, to stay with his parents in Dorset.
Nancy was to accompany Frank, Eleanor and Dorothy on her first trip abroad, a month driving through France to Switzerland, where they were to stay in a chalet belonging to a cousin of Frank’s. Their first stop was Paris, where Frank had worked for a while before the war, and where he stillhad friends including a married couple who had a young son. It was a bit of a squash in their St Germain apartment, but if anybody minded the forced intimacy they were too polite to say.
Nancy loved Paris. It was extraordinary that, given all that its people had suffered under German occupation, the city itself had been largely undamaged. Coming from tired old London, where children played in weed-infested bombsites and rain made giant puddles of craters in the streets, she felt she’d been set free. She loved the opulent stores in the Champs Elysées, bought beautifully crafted chocolates for her family in a smart little shop full of mirrors and admired the great coloured glass windows glowing out of the echoing gloom of Notre-Dame. She enjoyed sitting outside cafés drinking cups of bitter coffee and watching elegantly dressed Parisians swan by. Eleanor took Nancy and Dorothy to the Louvre, where they wandered endlessly until they were drunk on the richness of Renaissance altar panels, portraits of blowsy nudes and delicately patterned porcelain. Gaps on the walls told a different story, though, as did the haunted eyes of wounded veterans begging on the streets and their hosts’ stories of surviving under the Occupation.
