Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

In a way they were born to be aunts. Emancipated, eccentric and brave, the Norchester sisters lived in a tall grey house in Bloomsbury, within a stone’s throw of the British Museum.

It is a district known for its intellectuals. Blue plaques adorn many of the houses, paying tributes to the dead dons and scholars who once inhabited them and even the professors and librarians who were still alive walked through the quiet London squares with the abstracted look of those whose minds are on higher things.

No. Three Gowan Terrace, the home of Charlotte, Phyllis and Annie Norchester, belonged firmly in this tradition. It was a three-storey house of amazing discomfort. The furniture was dark and disregarded; the bedrooms contained only narrow beds, desks, and outsize typewriters; in the drawing room the chairs were arranged in rows to face a large table and a notice board. Yet in its own way the house was a shrine. For the sisters, now middle-aged, had belonged to that stalwart band of women who had turned their back on feminine frippery, and devoted their whole beings to the securing of votes for women.

Charlotte, the oldest, had been for six weeks on hunger strike in Holloway Prison; Phyllis had spent more time chained to the railing of the hated women’s gallery in the Houses of Parliament than any other suffragette; and Annie, the youngest, had knocked off the helmets of no less than seven policemen before being dragged away, kicking and protesting, to join her sister in prison.

It had been a glorious time. Victory had come in 1918 when the heroic work of women in the Great War could no longer be gainsaid. But though women had had the vote now for some twenty years, the sisters were faithful to the cause. The curtains — in the suffragette colours of purple, green and white-might be frayed and dusty but they would never be removed. The picture of their leader, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, still hung in the dining room, though she herself had been dead for many years and was now a statue on Victoria Embankment. Rubbing themselves down with the frayed, rough towels in the bathroom with its cake of carbolic soap and rusty geyser reminded them of those heady days being hosed down by brutal wardresses in prison; the boiled fish served to them by the elderly cook general scarcely differed from the food they had thrown out of the windows of their cells as they began their hunger strike. And the suffragette motto, They Must Give Us Freedom Or They Must Give Us Death was still written in large letters on a poster in the hall.

But if they played the “Do you remember?”’ game as they sat in their Jaeger dressing gowns drinking their cocoa, Charlotte and Phyllis and Annie never forgot how much was still owed to women even though the vote was won.

Charlotte had qualified as a doctor and was now Senior Registrar at the Bloomsbury Hospital for Women-a brisk and busy person who wore her stethoscope as society women wore their pearls. Phyllis was the Principal of a Teacher Training College and Annie was the only female Professor of Applied Mycology, not only in the University of London, but in the whole of Britain.

They might thus have rested on their laurels, but they did not. Every week there were meetings in the ice-cold drawing room: meetings to proclaim the need for more women in Parliament, in the universities, on the committee of the League of Nations. Lecturers came to discourse on the evils of female circumcision in Bechuanaland, on the shamefully low intake of women in the legal profession, on the scandalous discrimination against girls in Higher Mathematics. Leaflets were circulated, articles written, meetings addressed and as the Twenties moved into the Thirties and the canker of Fascism arose in Germany and Italy and Spain, women were urged to declare themselves against Hitler with his dread doctrine of Kinder, Kirche und Küche which threatened to put them back into the Middle Ages.

But it was during this decade that something disquieting began to be felt in Gowan Terrace, a development as unexpected as it was difficult to deal with, and it concerned Charlotte’s only daughter, Ellen.

None of the Norchester sisters had intended to marry but in the year 1913 a brave and beautiful woman named Emily Davison threw herself under the King’s horse in the Derby to draw attention to the suffragette cause, and was killed. It was at her funeral that Charlotte found herself standing next to a good-looking gentleman who, when she faltered (for she had loved Emily), took her arm and led her from the open grave. His name was Alan Carr, he was a solicitor and sympathetic to the movement. They married and a year later their child was born.

It was, fortunately, a girl, whom they named Ellen, and Alan had time to dote on her and spoil her before he was killed at Ypres. The baby was enchanting: plump and dimpled with blonde curls and big brown eyes-the kind of person found in paintings leaning out of heaven and bestowing laurel leaves or garlands on deserving mortals down below.

What mattered, however, was that she was clever. Every possible kind of intelligence test proclaimed that all was very well and her mother, Dr Carr, and her aunts, Phyllis and Annie, spared no effort to stimulate the little creature’s mind. This girl at least should not struggle for her opportunities. Oxford or Cambridge were a certainty, followed by a higher degree and then who knew… an ambassadorship, a seat in the cabinet — nothing was out of Ellen’s reach.

So they did not, at first, feel in the least alarmed. All little girls picked daisies and arranged them in paste jars, usually in inconvenient places, and Dr Carr, bidden imperiously by her daughter to smell them, duly did so though the scent of daisies is not easily perceived by someone accustomed to the strong odours of lysol and chloroform. It was natural for little girls to bake buns and Ellen, perched on a stool beside the usually morose cook general with her curls tied in a handkerchief, was a sight that her mother and her aunts could appreciate. Children made little gardens and planted love-in-a-mist and forget-me-nots, and for Ellen to claim a patch of earth in the sooty square of ground behind the house which all the sisters were far too busy to cultivate, was natural. But children’s gardens are generally outgrown and Ellen’s little patch extended until she had cultivated a whole flower bed and then she found cuttings of honeysuckle and clematis and trained them to climb up to the first-floor windows.

Then again there was the question of the maids. It was of course all right for children to help servants: servants after all were a kind of underclass and should have been liberated except that it wasn’t easy to see how to run a house without them. But it soon became clear that Ellen enjoyed making beds and polishing the grate and setting fires. They would find her folding sheets and putting her nose voluptuously against the starched linen. Once when the maid was ill they came across her with her school uniform hitched up, scrubbing the floor, and she said: “Look, isn’t it beautiful, the way the light catches the soap bubbles!”

Did she perhaps do altogether too much looking? The sisters had read their Blake; they knew it was desirable to see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. But the world in a scrubbing brush? The world in a bowl of fruit?

“Perhaps she’s going to be a painter?”’ suggested Aunt Phyllis.

A great woman painter, the first female President of the Royal Academy? It was a possibility.

But Ellen didn’t want to paint apples. She wanted to smell them, turn them in her hands, and eat them.