‘I know what it means!’ Flo glared at her friend. ‘I’m not daft, you know.’
‘No, you’re not, Flo.’ Sophy’s face was straight now. She glanced at the others as she added, ‘None of you are. So think for yourselves, that’s all I’m saying.’
She told Kane about the conversation when she got home that evening and he grinned at her, shaking his head. ‘I don’t think some of those husbands know what’s going to hit them if their wives continue working for you,’ he said dryly.
Sophy smiled back. ‘Peggy has already told Flo to hit her husband over the head with the frying pan next time he comes home drunk and knocks her about. It worked for her, apparently. She only had to do it the once and he keeps his hands to himself now. Peggy says Flo’s husband is a little rat of a man and she’s twice his size, but she’s always let him get away with murder. Funny that, isn’t it?’
They stared at each other, the spectre of Toby suddenly in both their minds. ‘Or perhaps not so funny,’ Sophy murmured. No. Not funny at all. It was amazing what people put up with when it became commonplace in their lives.
Chapter 27
At the beginning of July the theatre was almost ready, the stage-manager and everyone had arrived, actors and actresses had been hired and rehearsals had begun. The first play they were putting on was one by Mr Arncliffe-Sennett, entitled An Englishwoman’s Home. The central theme of the play was the artificial division between women’s work and that of men, highlighting the fact that although inflation and unemployment had forced many women to take in work in their homes or take work outside where they could find it, there was resistance on the part of husbands and older sons to help with housework or childcare.
The play was a mixture of styles which was one of the reasons Sophy had chosen it for the all-important opening of the theatre. The opening scene carried a serious look at the effects of poverty on the relationship of the two main characters, a married couple, but this contrasted with the monologues in which each appeals to the audience for sympathy, and with the slapstick elements which came in with other characters demonstrating the inability of men to deal with ‘women’s work’. She wanted a play which would speak to the mainly working-class audience she was aiming for, and a couple of lines in particular – when the wife in a conversation with her husband says, ‘You don’t believe then, that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander?’ and his reply of, ‘I don’t know nothing about goose’s sauce ’cos we never have none,’ had made her little army of women workers howl with laughter, which she took as a good sign.
Their first night in the middle of July was to a full house and was enthusiastically received by audience and local press alike. Originally Sophy had thought she would like to take the lead female role when they had first begun work renovating the theatre, but over the last two or three months she’d felt increasingly that she wouldn’t be able to do it justice. She had thrown herself into the cleaning and hard physical work as vigorously as anyone else, wanting the women to see her as part of the team and not as a remote figurehead they couldn’t talk to. She was the first one to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night, and once she got home she often had further work to see to – checking accounts, making lists of materials and items still to buy, settling bills, sorting out the women’s weekly wages, answering letters, writing letters – the list was endless.
She had lost weight and she knew Kane was worried about her, as she was tired all the time and very emotional, but she kept reassuring him that things would settle down once the theatre was ready and the show under way. They had known the first few months would be sheer hard work, she told him. It would all be fine in the end. Nevertheless, she hired another actress for the lead female role and was glad she had done so on the opening night. Kane had insisted she sit with him in one of the boxes and watch the show from the auditorium rather than clucking like an anxious hen with one chick in the wings. She sat, in an exhausted stupor, unable to judge whether the show was a success or not, and when it ended and the audience rose to their feet cheering and clapping, she stood automatically, feeling very strange. And then she fainted clean away.