Anna Burns - Milkman

Go and have a wee word? Was he crazy as well as blind and deaf and dumb to what was said about those women in this area? I’d be committing social suicide even to catch eyes with one of them in the street. So no thanks. Not keen to have a word, not now, not ever. These women, constituting the nascent feminist group in our area – and exactly because of constituting it – were firmly placed in the category of those way, way beyond-the-pale. The word ‘feminist’ was beyond-the-pale. The word ‘woman’ barely escaped beyond-the-pale. Put both together, or try unsuccessfully to soften things with another word, a general word, one in disguise such as ‘issues’ and basically you’ve had it. Awful things were said about these women with the issues in our district, not just behind their backs but to their faces as well.

It started with a notice put in the window of a house by the housewife who lived in that house and who seemed traditional and normal until she put up this notice. She had a husband and children, with nobody violently killed in her family either, to have accounted, it was said, for her subsequent out-of-character behaviour, but she put this notice up and it was far from the usual type of proclamation to be seen in windows of certain houses in our area at this time. The usual ones said things like ‘KEEP OUT OF THIS PROPERTY ON PAIN OF DEATH – THIS, THE ONLY INTIMATION’ then signed ‘DISTRICT RENOUNCERS’ as a warning to any of us wayward inhabitants, including children, who might have a notion to break into some vulnerable person’s residence – to have a play there, to have a teenage person’s dossing-down drinking session there, to explore and poke about there, even to squat there – without giving any thought to the usually far-gone and wretched alcoholic who already lived there and whose house it was. They were making it clear, our renouncers, that if we persisted in our unjust, inconsiderate and merciless behaviour towards the more fragile of our district, then ramifications would follow that certainly we would all regret. In contrast, this housewife’s notice said ‘ATTENTION ALL WOMEN OF THE DISTRICT: GREAT GOOD NEWS!!!’ then followed information about some international women’s group that had been inaugurated recently into the world. It was seeking to set up sister branches in all the world’s countries, with no place – no city, no town, no village, no hamlet, no district, no hovel, no isolated residence – to be excluded from the remit, with no woman – again, any colour, any creed, any sexual preference, any disability, mental illness or even general dislikeability, indeed, of any type of diversity – to be excluded from the venture, and amazingly a sister branch of this international women’s group sprang up in our very downtown. Its first monthly meeting received shocking reports in the media both before and after it happened, reports based mainly on this meeting having had the audacity to come into existence in the first place. The criticism was bad, very bad, much along the lines of ‘depravity, decadence, demoralisation, dissemination of pessimism, outrages to propriety’ as had been levelled at that red-light street when first it became inaugurated. However, the media backlash did nothing to prevent at least some women from some of the areas moseying along downtown to see what all this sisterhood branch of international women’s issues was about. These female participants hailed not just from the two warring religions here, but also from a smattering of the lesser known, lesser attended to, indeed completely ignored, other religions. One woman from our district went along and did so too, off her own bat. She didn’t seek permission, didn’t seek approval, didn’t ask anyone’s opinion or request they go with her for moral support and protection. Instead she put on her shawl, took her purse, her key, and went out her door just like that. It turned out this woman was the housewife who subsequently stuck up the notice. ‘And she stuck it up,’ said neighbours, ‘barely a fraction of time after she got back from that meeting downtown.’ Meanwhile, in liaison with the downtown sister branch, which was itself in liaison with the overall international women’s movement of the world headquarters, this woman was now seeking to set up a sub-sorority branch in our district, just as some other women from other districts were now attempting in theirs. That was what she did. In her notice in the window, and in a daring modern fashion, she invited all women from the area to put their children out for their evening adventures as usual then, unencumbered, to make their way of a Wednesday evening to her house to hear talk. They would be amazed, promised the poster, by points of female significance such as had arisen during that downtown branch meeting; also, should they themselves feel inclined to air views on anything which could be classed as an overall women’s issue, such would be fed back monthly to the next downtown meeting, then fed quarterly to the next overall international meeting. Confusingly, there was no mention in this notice of our border issue or our political problems here at all. Men and women in the district were astonished. ‘What can she be about? Whatever can she mean to put such a thing in her window?’ And they gossiped about her, and her notice, leaving off only to move back to normal topics, such as who might be an informer, who was having the latest adulterous sex, and which country might win Miss World when next it had its airing on the TV. So this notice was talked to death, then it was dismissed, with most in the area of the opinion that nothing could come of it other than the woman would be felt sorry for or, if she persisted, wondered at as another candidate for beyond-the-pale. At worst, the renouncers-of-the-state would take her away as the latest person acting suspiciously in our area, which would be, more or less, true. Instead, and in the first week since the notice went up, two local women appeared at the door of this housewife, which made three for the inaugural Wednesday Women’s Issues Meeting. The following week there was added another four. No more women turned up after that, but altogether there were now seven of these individuals and they met every Wednesday evening, being joined fortnightly by a knowledgeable coordinator from the downtown group. This coordinator would give pep talks, speak of expansion, introduce historical and contemporary comment on women’s issues, all to help bring, she said, women from everywhere out of the dark and into the fold. Once a month too, this group would travel downtown to the branch meeting of the combined sub-groups from all districts ‘this side of the water’ and ‘this side of the border’ which had managed to get themselves inaugurated. Naturally, by this time, in our area, the usual paranoid stories started up.

One story circulating about our group of sub-branch women centred around the place of their meetings because after the first three Wednesdays the first housewife’s husband didn’t want them carrying on in this feminist fashion in the actual house he and his wife lived in because, nice as he was, conciliatory as he’d like to be, he was sorry but there was his own reputation to look out for. This didn’t deter the women for they set about making the first woman’s backyard shed nice and cosy for their meetings instead. Before this though, they had approached the chapel to see if one of the tin hutments on the wasteground could be made available for them. The chapel owned the hutments and often it permitted various bodies – chiefly, the renouncers – to have use of them for their business, such as defence-of-the-area meetings, furtherance-of-the-cause meetings, kangaroo-court meetings but it refused to let the women borrow one or hire one because there’d been a transformation in opinion regarding these women by this time. No longer were they viewed as harmless, as childlike, as objects of raillery, as playing about at holding adult-issue meetings because here they were, now seeking a proper venue in which to pursue these meetings. A new belief sprang into existence as to why exactly they’d want to do that. ‘If they get a hutment,’ said the area, ‘they could be up to anything in it. They could be plotting subversive acts in it. They could be having homosexual intercourse in it. They could be performing and undergoing abortions in it,’ the result being, of course, that the chapel said no. It stated that in accordance with …, in contravention of …, on the grounds that .…, to grant the women’s request would be as scandalous and unprincipled of the chapel as already it was for the women to be making it. So they disallowed use of the hutments owing to disgrace and unspeakableness which didn’t stop the women, for right away they set about painting and decorating the shed. They put up shelves, curtains, brought in oil lamps, a primus stove, colourful teacups, a tea caddy, a biscuit tin, warm fluffy rugs and flowers and cushions. Around the walls they put posters of exemplary worldwide issue women obtained from the downtown sister branch which had obtained them from the international women’s headquarters. But before that, our seven women got the husband of the first woman to go into the shed to deal with the spiders and the insects for them, which the husband, under condition they kept silent about his involvement in this matter, agreed in the dead of night to do.