“At least it’s just pencil,” she said. Pens were an extravagance, and anyway, she was doing far too much erasing. Also doodling. She was good at drawing mice.
She was also very good at ideas, at notes, at beginnings. At writing sentences and rubbing them right out again, creating palimpsests before wearing holes straight through the paper. Her fingers hurt, her hand hurt, her arm hurt. And she loved every bit of the pain, with the love of a mother for her teething infant, screaming all through the night. Because increasingly, more and more sentences were being written, and staying put. She just wished her brain would remain focused on one thought at a time. She wrote, “The notion that women are given to excessive adornments and frivolity is generally just that, a notion. Most women prefer to be simple and practical, which doesn’t have to mean Spartan,” and start thinking about Sparta. From Sparta to war, from war to Hilda’s notes on broadcasting, saying things like: “The general level of knowledge of the ordinary man concerning other countries, their politics, their people, their way of life, their interests, sports, recreations, would be enough to make them seem not vastly different in certain respects from his own. It would probably be less possible today to find a soldier’s wife who thought the Germans were black than it was in 1914.”
And then Germany and that propaganda Hilda pored over so carefully.
When Vernon Bartlett came in to broadcast—he had a regular series now, The Way of the World, widely touted as a “must-listen,” a sobriquet he found both delightful and perplexing—Maisie asked him about Nestlé. He was in the League of Nations, after all, and they were based in Switzerland.
“Nestlé?” Mr. Bartlett echoed. “Big, obviously. I’ve never been. They’re on the other side of Lake Geneva, you know. I will say I stock up on Cadbury chocolate when I’m here. But don’t you let on, now.” He wagged a finger and winked. It was hard not to feel like a ten-year-old with him, especially when asking questions.
“Would Nestlé have anything to do with Germany, do you think?”
“I’m sure they sell their foods wherever anyone’s willing to pay for them,” he said in surprise, not expecting basic capitalism to be beyond her grasp.
“No, that’s not what I meant. You see, Miss Matheson had a pamphlet, from a German political party—”
“Oh, that. Yes, she wanted me to sound out the German League ambassador about those Nazi chaps ages ago. Mussolini-style Fascists, I told her, the usual lunatic fringe. We can’t get hetted up about every crank with access to a typewriter and a mimeograph machine. We’d never get anything done.”
“But some of those men, a lot of them, they were the ones who tried to commit that coup, in 1923,” Maisie persisted. Thank you, British Library.
“There are always going to be crackpot parties, even here,” Bartlett snorted. “Especially here, to be frank. But that’s what democracy’s all about, and rule of law sorts them out as well. The little Hitler fellow and his friends went to prison, and Germany’s in the League, so no need to start picking away at them.”
He absently reached for his cigarettes and Maisie snatched them from his hand, just saving him from Billy’s flying tackle. Smoking was death to a clean studio.
On the tram ride home, Maisie wrote Bartlett’s comments on one page of her notebook. Then she doodled a chocolate bar. On the facing page she wrote: “There’s no point in getting aerated over short hair anymore. Women love its style and practicality and the look is here to stay.” She stared at the words for several moments. Then she looked back at all the paragraphs that preceded them. Then she shrieked, “That’s it!” creating airspace between several passengers and their upholstered seats.
“So long as you’re sure, dear,” her solicitous neighbor murmured, patting her hand.
Now I just have to submit it.
NINE
Bert rolled his eyes up to her from the carefully typed pages.
“Bit of a screed, isn’t it?”
“I hope not,” Maisie demurred, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “It’s just a supplement for our Talk this week. I thought, perhaps, at least for the women’s stories, something written by a woman would be . . . useful.”
“No, we can’t have girls writing articles. That would be—”
“There aren’t any bylines!” Maisie burst out.
“What does that have to do with it?” Bert asked, blinking in surprise.
“Well, only that, if it’s good enough, no one should care who wrote it.”
Bert gaped at her, whether overcome by her logic or struck dumb by her ignorance, she didn’t dare guess.