You need not call me sir!

Hearts and Minds is the second historical novel in Jay Taverner’s ‘Brynsquilver’ series and is set in the 1730s. In this extract, Lucy, daughter of a washerwoman and an enslaved manservant, has run away to Shrewsbury, where the woman she loves has been imprisoned. Destitute, Lucy finds work selling ‘Mountain’s Elixir’ in the market.

This morning she was working alone, the now-familiar patter coming almost without thought.
‘Step up now, ladies and gentlemen! ’Tis time for a spring tonic - Mountain’s Elixir will put the bounce back in your step, ladies, and the sparkle in your eyes. ’Tis good for a sweet breath and a strong grip, my lads - you’d not have your sweetheart disappointed, now, would you?’

A passing trio of apprentices giggled and pushed each other, but did not stop. 

Lucy paused to listen to a shy girl in a new pink hood, blushing and whispering her question. She was new-married, and wanted to know if the Elixir would help to get her with child. Mrs Mountain’s rule was to say yes to everything. But the girl was so young – about Lucy’s own age – and so full of longing, that Lucy’s heart softened towards her. Whatever else it might do, the Elixir was some kind of purge – that, too, made people believe in it, according to its inventor – and Lucy had a strong feeling that it was likely to put a swift end to pregnancy, rather than encourage it. She said as much to the girl, who looked disappointed. 

Lucy put on a wise face. ‘Better to take green tea fasting of a morning, and elderberry syrup before bed,’ she improvised wildly. ‘Then I’d not be surprised if you had good news before the month is out.’

The girl thanked her earnestly, but could not be stopped from buying a bottle of the Elixir for her husband. Lucy dropped the money into the purse she had set on the table, and cast an eye over her stock. It was well down; she would soon need to bring out some more bottles. She raised her voice again.

‘Mountain’s Elixir! Renowned throughout the Marches for its wonderful properties! Proven good for all ills - sovereign remedy for the gout, the quinsy, for apoplexies and agues. Good for falling hair, flat feet and stinking breath. Mrs Mountain’s secret ingredients have been brought from the far Indies, here to you! Mountain’s Elixir cures the gripes, the toothache, the bellyache and the screws! Taken on a fasting stomach daily, it protects against the wandering mother, blackening of the skin, hardening of the veins and mortification of the tripes!’

The crowd was thick, but not very interested in her wares. She needed to stir them up to the point of buying. She took a deep breath but, before she could start again, she became aware of music coming up the hill. The crowd heard it too, and Lucy cursed under her breath. A gaggle of boys pushed into the cramped space, and behind them came a troupe of pipes and tabors, making for the steps of the Butter Cross. Lucy’s crowd wavered and started to drift that way; she hurried to serve the three or four who were ready to buy. As she dropped their money into her purse she wondered if it was time to finish for the day. But the music might bring a fresh crowd that she could share: she would stay a little longer. She ducked down behind the draped table to stock up while there was a lull.

She was on her knees behind the table when she heard a bloodcurdling yell. Flinging the cloth aside, she snapped her head up. As her eyes came level with the edge of the table, she saw two hands poised over her open purse. A grubby paw was plunged into coins and held there; its owner had clearly been about to lift her takings. But his wrist was clamped in the grip of a larger, stronger set of fingers, a hand that had caught him in the very act. The hand was black. As dark as - no, darker than Lucy’s own. 

Her eyes travelled slowly from the hand to the snowy ruffles at its wrist; from the ruffles to a deep, buttoned cuff, a cuff of canary yellow that extended almost to the elbow of an elegant yellow silk coat. And on up, to a black face smiling at her over more snowy linen. Lucy felt a surge of excitement, followed by shyness that made her face hot. 

‘Now, miss,’ said her saviour, ‘what would you have me do with this wretch? Shall I call the watch?’

The would-be thief began to whine and struggle.

‘Oh, no, sir! Please - please to let him go,’ Lucy stammered.

The thief’s head snapped round to goggle at her. He began to babble thanks and apologies.

‘Stop your noise, codshead,’ said the young black man scornfully. He shook the limp hand he still held, like someone flicking water from a cloth, to make sure there was no money in it, before he thrust the man away.

Lucy hardly spared the fellow a glance. She could not take her eyes from her rescuer. ‘Thank you, sir. It was my whole morning’s take,’ she said.

His smile widened. ‘Faith, little sister, you need not call me sir! Benjamin will answer nicely - or even Ben, when we are better acquainted. Your servant, ma’am!’ With a flourish of his hat, he made her an elaborate, courtly bow. Several people in the crowd laughed and clapped. 

As he straightened up, Lucy saw the gleam of the silver collar nestling in the lace at his throat. But his eyes shone with fun. ‘And now, ma’am, if your la’ship pleases, I shall convey you to dine at the best eating-house in this town.’

Dazzled, Lucy let herself be swept along, her mind whirling, confused. He was a slave, like her father, but he dressed like a lord. And behaved like one, too, with his airs and graces and his confident smile: the poulterer on the corner of Butcher Row had agreed at once to Ben’s suggestion that he keep Lucy’s stock safe for an hour or two. She followed her new friend through the maze of streets until the bustle of shops and markets was left behind. Ben stopped in front of a tall and beautiful brick house. 

He waved an arm at it and grinned. ‘My humble abode, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’

He led her through the carriage entrance at the side of the house, and down some steps to a basement door. They hurried along a flagged passage with many doors, some standing open. Lucy caught glimpses of huge painted cupboards, of a girl sewing, of two men in yellow suits like Ben’s, playing cards. It was like a dream. They came at last to a kitchen that would have swallowed her mother’s cottage whole. A long, warm room, lined with shelves where bright brown pans were ranged, each larger than the one before. Ham and poultry hung from the ceiling; there were bowls of eggs and China oranges, buckets of fish and baskets of vegetables. A small girl in a large mob-cap was working at one end of the long kitchen table; she looked up as they came in, but did not speak. At the fire a great joint of meat, half an ox at least, twirled solemnly to and fro by itself amid a forest of gleaming metal hooks and bars. The dripping pan swam with fat juices whose smell made Lucy feel faint with hunger.

The queen of this paradise, she found, was called Mistress Rundle. She was a fierce, stringy woman with a red face and a sharp tongue for anyone who came into her kitchen – except for Benjamin, who had clearly charmed her as Lucy suspected he charmed everyone. It seemed he had been at the market on an errand for Mistress Rundle, and now flicked three little papers from his huge yellow cuff. She was pleased, tapping the ground spices out at once into the bowl where the kitchen-maid was pounding something with a heavy blunt stick. The girl still stared at Lucy, but did not stop working.

‘Little sister, indeed!’ said Mrs Rundle scornfully. ‘Black she may be, but green I am not. You’re a shameful young rascal, Benjamin, and I hope the girl knows it.’

‘What she knows, Mistress Peg my darling, because I told her, is that you make the best mutton-pies in England. Look how thin she is! You’d not turn her away, now, would you, and you a good Christian woman as you are?’

For answer the cook slapped Benjamin’s behind as if he were a small boy, and showed Lucy a seat at the corner of her huge table. 

‘There’s no guest goes hungry from this kitchen, lassie,’ she said, putting a large plate of broken meats on the scrubbed white wood in front of her. ‘Though the Lord knows ’tis not what I call a kitchen! Nasty mean, low place – miles of stairs to the dining room and a day’s walk to the pump. And will you look at this poor wee fireplace with its nasty iron contrivances? Modern improvements, indeed! You’ll wait all day for the meat to warm through merely, and there’s no room at all for a dog to turn the spit or a boy to do the basting. Bet, what are you at? Put some go into it, lassie, you’re not stroking your bairn’s bottom there!’

She pushed the little maid aside and stirred the stuff in the bowl about, sniffing at it. Ben caught Lucy’s eye and winked. Lucy went on eating the wonderful food.

‘Now, I've really come to be myself. I always wished to get to this point, where I could talk about everything.’

This week we're honoured to share Jane Traies' account of how she became involved in collecting stories from the Lesbian Immigration Support Group. Published to celebrate International Women's Day, they sharply illustrate the horrors faced by lesbian and bisexual women escaping persecution - and the difficulties of proving their cases when claiming asylum here. Please buy the book - Free To Be Me - proceeds go towards supporting the work of the LISG.

 ‘FREE TO BE ME’

In the spring of 2017, I received an email from a volunteer with the Lesbian Immigration Support Group in Greater Manchester called Sorrel. She told me they were supporting a Ugandan woman whose claim for asylum on the grounds of her sexual orientation had been rejected by the Home Office, because they did not believe her to be a lesbian. Among the reasons given for not believing her were: that she had been married, that she had been apparently heterosexual until quite late in her life, and that she and her lesbian partner had not lived together. Of course, many older lesbians have such a life story, so I was surprised at what I then took to be simply old-fashioned ignorance on the part of the Home Office (I know now that it was typical of their hostile approach to LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers). 

Clearly, this African grandmother did not fit the Government’s stereotype of what a lesbian ought to look like. Grace, the woman seeking asylum, was working with her solicitor to put together a fresh claim to the Home Office; Sorrel had heard of my life history work with British lesbians born before 1950, and wondered if there were case studies in my previous research that could be used to support Grace’s new claim? Would I be prepared to contribute an ‘expert statement’ about the trauma and difficulty of coming out as an older lesbian? From the brief details of Grace’s story that Sorrel had given me, I could already see that many aspects of her experience were mirrored in the life-stories I had collected in the UK. Of course I would write for her!

Sorrel also told me that Grace was now 71 years old. So Grace and I are the same age. I sat at my computer, thinking about the differences between Grace’s life and mine, and understanding my own privilege in new ways. Whatever difficulties I had faced in the past because of my sexual orientation, they paled into significance beside Grace’s struggles. I am an educated white woman with a good pension, living in a country which now has laws to protect LGBTQ+ people. I’m also fortunate to be able to engage in research work that gives me immense personal satisfaction. The opportunity to use some of that privilege to help someone else was an unlooked-for gift. 

And that was how I came to meet not only Grace, but also some of the other members and volunteers from LISG. We had plenty of time to get to know each other in the months that followed, because Grace’s fresh claim for asylum was also refused in its turn. It was more than another two years before she was finally granted ‘leave to remain’ in the UK. During that period, I learned a good deal about the asylum system in the UK and also about the admirable work of LGBTQ+ asylum support groups up and down the country. Of these, the Lesbian Immigration Support Group in Greater Manchester is one of only two dedicated solely to helping lesbians and bisexual women. 

It seemed to me, as I got to know them, that the work of the group and the lives of its members were exactly the kind of subject that oral history exists to preserve. I tentatively proposed the idea of an oral history of LISG. By this time, I knew several of the group members personally and had met others at Grace’s appeal hearing and at the 2019 lesbian summer festival, LFest. I hoped that these shared experiences had begun to create a context of familiarity and trust between us, that would enable us to work together. 

LISG currently has about 30 members, supported by half a dozen volunteers. Under normal circumstances, there is a LISG meeting once a month. This is a sociable occasion as well as a business meeting and always includes sharing food. Most of the members are in social housing in various outer suburbs of Manchester and many were fairly isolated even before the pandemic, so the monthly meeting is a much-valued gathering. In the first week of January 2020, I attended this meeting for the first time, to talk about the idea of making a book based on the oral histories of some of the women in LISG. I shared my hopes that such a book would do three things: raise awareness of the particular issues faced by lesbian women claiming asylum on the grounds of their sexual orientation; publicise the work of LISG; and, potentially, raise funds to support the group’s work. At the end of the meeting, the group voted in favour of going ahead with the project and ten women said they would be interested in taking part.

I then needed to find a suitable place to carry out the interviews: somewhere sufficiently private, and as cheap as possible since the project was unfunded. A few days’ queer networking on social media led to the offer of free accommodation at the LGBT Foundation in Manchester’s gay village. This very generous gesture was particularly welcome since most of the women were already familiar with the building: it is home to several asylum support and LGBTQ social groups which they had engaged with previously. It also meant that our only immediate expenses would be paying the women’s bus fares into central Manchester. (The subsistence benefit paid to people seeking asylum – the Asylum Support Rate – was slightly raised in 2020 to £39.60 a week, which means that the asylum seeker is surviving on £5.66 a day. At the time of our project, the return fare from the outer suburbs into central Manchester was £6.00.)

In the last week of January, I returned to Manchester and carried out seven interviews. They were emotionally challenging, both for the researcher and for the narrators. Many of the stories were distressing: women told of physical and sexual abuse, rape, forced marriage, mob violence and murder. Many tears were shed during the interviews; sometimes there were gaps in which we had to stop the recorder, make coffee and talk about something completely different. In spite of this, I was struck by the absolute determination of the women to speak out in this setting. Mary, for instance, whose experience had been particularly horrific, wept quietly and continuously throughout her interview. I reminded her at several points that she was free to stop, but she pressed on in spite of the tears running down her cheeks. She explained that not being able to talk about what had happened to her was part of the past she felt she had escaped: ‘Now, I've really come to be myself. I always wished to get to this point, where I could talk about everything.’

By the time of my second trip to Manchester in early March, concern about the spread of the new coronavirus Covid-19 was already widespread. I had planned a third visit two weeks later but by then the whole country was in lockdown and, reluctantly, I had to abandon it. But by then thirteen women had told me their stories and there was enough material for our book.

The pandemic lockdown was stressful for all the group members, many of whom were already struggling with poor mental health and found enforced social isolation very difficult. In June, the much-missed monthly meeting was resurrected via Zoom, and was joyously welcomed. I also realised how important the LISG WhatsApp group became during this time – not only to inform members about practical developments, but also for the flurry of greetings and loving wishes which appeared each day.

On 25 May, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. The chilling video footage of his last minutes spread rapidly via social media; ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests erupted across the world. Almost all the current members of LISG (and a few of the volunteers) are women of colour; the majority are black. At this terrible time, the members of LISG responded with an outpouring of love and affirmation for each other, sending many messages, including video clips illustrating the beauty and power of black women. The role of our project in making marginalised black voices heard suddenly had a new context. Against this background, I started transcribing and editing the interviews.

Making the book ‘Free To Be Me’ became my ‘lockdown project’. With the help of the wonderful Helen Sandler at Tollington Press, the book was completed in just under a year. It is to be published on International Women’s Day 2021. All profits from this book will go to support the work of LISG. Please buy it, and tell your friends about it. 

(Buying direct from the publisher or the author https://www.tollingtonpress.co.uk/free.html  means that more of the money goes to LISG.)

Waiting for judgement

This week we have a powerful and thought-provoking extract from Free To Be Me: Refugee Stories from the Lesbian Immigration Support Group, edited by Jane Traies. 

The door to the tribunal office in Mosley Street is so quietly anonymous that you wouldn’t notice it unless you had a reason to be there. Before it slides open to admit you, the mirrored glass gives no hint of what’s inside: a small, equally anonymous hallway, where a friendly man politely searches your bag. Thoroughly. Then you need to step through an electronic gate, like the ones you see at airport security. On the other side, a second kindly Mancunian pats you down with equal thoroughness and passes a drug-searching wand over your body, just to be sure. Only then may you take the lift to Reception. 

Reception is a long desk at one end of a large, low waiting-room. All the rest of the space is taken up with seating of that modern kind made for offices: light oak veneer and soft blue fabric, functional, pleasant, neutral. The staff, like their colleagues downstairs, are friendly and courteous: public servants doing their sometimes-difficult jobs in the kindest way they can. At a few minutes after nine, there are already people waiting, even though nothing will happen until at least ten o’clock, and for some of them it will be a much longer wait. They sit in ones and twos, with serious, worried faces. Their tension is infectious. The staff on Reception are white; with one or two exceptions, the anxious people on the chairs are not.

I have arrived early, so I have time to observe all this before the women from the Lesbian Immigration Support Group start to arrive in ones and twos. They bring life and movement into the room. Lesbians and asylum seekers themselves, they have come to support a sister. They hug each other in turn, like the family they have become, and talk animatedly, catching up on each other’s news: who is well or ill, who has a new girlfriend, who has been sent a date for her appeal hearing, who has been granted leave to remain in the UK – or not. We are all here this morning to support Grace, whose final, last-chance hearing is today. She has been fighting for asylum in the UK for thirteen years, and none of us can bear to think about what will happen if she is rejected this final time. Three of us are here to be witnesses in her case; all the rest have come as observers, to offer love and friendship. I do not see such a crowd of sisters anywhere else in the room.

A black man in a very good suit approaches us and introduces himself as Grace’s barrister. I examine the small shock of surprise this gives me: there is clearly a stereotyped ‘pale male’ barrister in my head; and there are still so very few black barristers in England. So, in spite of his expensive suit and his privileged education, this man knows what it’s like to have the odds stacked against you. That feels like a good omen. He beckons the witnesses into a small office where he briskly outlines the case he plans to make and the questions he will ask us. We are all very tense, because we are fighting for our friend’s life. He explains that the Home Office’s Presenting Officer can cross examine us, and might be aggressive. He tells us that the judge who is presiding over our case is not known for his liberal views. I feel sick.

Back in the waiting room, Grace has arrived at last. The women surround the short, stocky figure, trying to reassure her. With her smooth skin and jet-black hair, Grace looks much younger than her years, but she will be 74 in a few months and she has not slept well. It’s no surprise that her asthma is bad today. She sinks down on one of the seats, coughing, groping in her bag for her inhaler. She did not have asthma – or rheumatism in her knees – when she arrived from Uganda; years of struggle in the UK’s hostile climate have taken their toll. 

The room has filled up now. So many people waiting for judgment, watching anxiously as men in suits with files under their arms thread the crowd looking for the people they have been assigned to help. Suddenly our barrister is here again, looking for Grace. He introduces himself to her, putting out his hand. I watch her quick frown of non-comprehension; then her face clears and she smiles up at him. For a second it seems to me that they are holding, as well as shaking, hands.

Then everything happens at once. Grace’s case is called; an usher comes to take her off to the courtroom. The chattering crowd of women follow her out. They will be too many for the public chairs in the courtroom – the system does not expect this level of support. It is quiet when they have gone. The three of us are left, sitting in a row. As witnesses, we cannot join the observers in the public seats, but must wait to be called into court one by one. The tension ratchets up a notch. Our conversation falters into silence.

That was the day that the idea for the book Free To Be Me: refugee tales from the Lesbian Immigration Support Group was born. You can read all of Grace’s story – and a dozen diverse others – in this book, due to be published on 8 March 2021.

Proceeds from the sale of Free To Be Me will go to support the work of the Lesbian Immigration Support Group. 

https://www.tollingtonpress.co.uk/free.html 

"Remembrance Day is complicated..."

This week Jane Traies gives us her thoughts on Remembrance Day. In the UK ceremonies are held on the Sunday nearest to Armistice Day (11th November) - that's today.  

REMEMBRANCE DAY

This Sunday the royal family, accompanied by representatives of Her Majesty’s government and the armed forces, will gather in Westminster as they do every year for the National Service of Remembrance. It won’t be quite the same this year, because we are in the middle of a pandemic and a national lockdown. So the ceremony has been adapted for social distancing, and the traditional march-past will not take place. But there will still be a two-minute silence at 11 o’clock, followed by wreath-laying at the foot of the Cenotaph by the Great and Good. 

Every year I try not to watch this service at the Cenotaph, because I know it will make me cross and depressed. Yet, every year, as it gets to about 10.55 a.m., I put the television on in spite of myself, and watch as institutional privilege, militarism, class inequality, the self-righteousness of politicians and the obedient sentimentality of the British people are solemnly paraded yet again. The commentator (and yes, it is still a Dimbleby) speaks in the same tone of hushed reverence that we heard at the Coronation nearly seventy years ago. And I am furious and disgusted, because nothing has changed, soldiers and civilians are still dying as we speak, and the ceremony seems to start from the premise that all of that is noble and acceptable and inevitable. But it’s not. It’s just the ‘old lie, dulce et decorum est.’

My great-uncle George was still a teenager when he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme. We were never quite sure how long he lay in a shell-hole before he was found. When I first knew him, he was a middle-aged man with what was then called ‘nerves.’
In 1943, my father landed on a beach in Italy and stepped on a mine that blew his foot off. His leg was amputated; he was twenty-two. In those days there was nothing heroic about disability. He walked with pain for the rest of his life.
My Auntie Joy, a twenty-one-year-old Army nurse, was part of the first medical team to go into the concentration camp at Belsen after it was liberated in 1945. She woke screaming from nightmares for the next ten years. She stopped believing in God. For the rest of her life, she found it easier to love animals than human beings.

There’s nothing dulce or decorum about any of that.

So, for people of my generation and older, Remembrance Day is complicated. The first time I heard the Last Post break the two minutes’ silence, I wasn’t yet old enough to go to school; but, even at that age, I absorbed the solemnity and the pride of it from my parents, for whom the struggles and losses of the Second World War were still recent and painful. Growing up in the 40s and 50s, I was taught – at home, at church and at school – the twin doctrines of noble sacrifice and national gratitude. ‘I vow to thee, my Country…’ Those weren’t abstract things for us, because they were about real people: the distant cousins in uniform in Gran’s photo album; our dad’s Old Comrades, whose names on the regimental war memorial we heard read out every November; and all those friends and relations who carried the visible and invisible scars of two World Wars. As late as the 1960s, when I started driving, I remember stopping the car at the side of the road for the two minutes of the Armistice Day silence, as drivers did in those days, and feeling that I was part of something serious and proper. Strange, now, to think of it; but that’s how it was. Doubt would have been disloyal. 

So, what do I do now, awkward old pacifist-atheist-republican queer that I became? That’s not straightforward, either. 

I don’t wear a poppy these days (or if I do, it’s a white one); but I still put money in the box, in memory of Dad and Uncle Georgie and Auntie Joy. I wouldn’t dream of joining my neighbours as they process to the village war memorial behind a marching band; but I do put down my gardening gloves and go and stand on the pavement to watch them. It makes me feel grumpy and conflicted, but the sight of the old men in their medals still moves me as deeply as it ever did. Then I go indoors and, after my little ritual struggle, I put the television on and ‘Nimrod’ still makes me cry. 

So why do I still watch that pompous ceremony? Why, every single year, as they settle to the two minutes’ silence, does a lump form in my throat and make my eyes sting? It’s partly a Pavlovian reaction, of course; but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

A loyal lie

 Jane Traies has kindly given us permission to use an extract from her forthcoming novel. Set in the late nineteenth century, it centres on the lead mining communities of Shropshire, England, where Jane herself lived for many years. Here we meet Edie, missing school to bring lunch to her father.

There was a perfectly good road leading out of the Dingle all the way to the mine, but Edie preferred to go over the hill. She liked the effort of the climb through the moving shadows of the wood, and the sudden brightness as she came out onto the top of the ridge. Her path (hers, because she knew no-one else who used it) started just behind the cottage and climbed steeply between the trees. No wider in places than a sheep track and slippery with rotten leaves, it was familiar as the path to her own door, or the road she walked to school. The ground between the trees was mined with holes and burrows, but she rarely saw anything move, however quietly she tried to walk. The birds gave her away, so that anything that lived in the wood had hidden itself before she came in sight. Once, a pine marten had poked up its head at the mouth of its tunnel and looked straight at her, bright eyes in a black mask; and sometimes in a mild winter she had seen a day-time badger, too hungry to stay asleep. Today it was quiet.  She stopped to catch her breath and to hoist Father’s dinner onto her other shoulder. Looking back, she could no longer see Wren’s Nest. A stranger passing by would not know it was there, or that anyone at all lived at the bottom of that dark wooded cleft. Which must, of course, be how the cottage had got its name.

She turned her face uphill again and walked on. The brambles along the edge of the path had only a few shrunken berries left now, unwholesome for people but useful for the birds and wood mice. She started to look in earnest for fungus; the weather was just right. Soon she found a clump of yellow and white toadstools; then a sprinkling of tiny brown ones just off the path; pretty, but not special. Further on she spotted a strange bright yellow fungus between the toes of an oak: it was crumpled into a wriggly pattern, like one of the pictures of south sea corals in the Children’s Encyclopaedia. Edie stood still and looked at it, storing its colour and shape in her head, and then walked on. 

However many times she came this way, she always had the same little rush of joy as she came out of the trees into the huge sky. After the enclosed space of the wood, the world was suddenly endless and the air always moving, even on the calmest day. She stood in the October sun breathing hard. Below her the Dingle was a dark crack furred with trees. Ahead, autumn bracken gilded the rocks at the valley’s mouth, where the land fell away in a patchwork of greens. Straight ahead, the clump of trees on Bromlow Callow stood out in silhouette against the sky. The mist and fog that had hung over the Dingle that morning had gone, and a brisk south-easterly was blowing the sky blue. Edie set off at a trot along the path above the valley.

The land still rose gently as she crossed the grassy hilltop, bitten close as a lawn by wandering sheep; and then she was on the windy crest of the ridge, and queen of the whole world. The wide expanse of green and blue and purple was patched here and there with whitey-brown ploughed fields, netted with hedgerows and sprinkled with farms. The tall chimney at the mine, standing up like a warning finger, was way below her, dwarfed in the great sweep of the view. Whenever Miss Deakin read them the Bible story about the Devil taking Jesus up into a high mountain and showing Him all the countries of the world, this was the picture that came into Edie’s head. Slowly, she turned in a circle, naming the familiar shapes: the bump of Earl’s Hill, the long slope of the Mynd, the ridge of Corndon; and, as she came full circle, a view which stretched beyond the Callow far into Wales. Right on the horizon she could just see Cadaer Idris. The air was so clear today, the colours so beautiful, it made her almost want to cry.

As she ran down the last field towards the stile, the dark chimney grew taller and taller, its red brick sides towering over the trees, until she could smell the soot that sifted down day and night from its mouth. The stile was the door to another wood, but this one was different. Beyond the fringe of crisp brown bracken, the trees were ghostly grey, their leaves sparse and coated with ash. Further down the hill, nearer to the chimney, the trees were quite dead, bare as winter all year through. Nothing twittered or rustled here. Edie hurried through the birdless silence towards the thump and wheeze of the engine house. Trapped behind stone walls two feet thick, the great beam engine groaned like a monster in chains, pumping water from the deep shafts so that men could work in the dark, hacking out the lead ore. Her father had been one of them, long ago. The rock fall that had crushed his leg had happened when Edie was a baby – all her memory of him was as she knew him now, a man with a crutch and an uncertain temper.

Just above the engine house the railway cut across her path. She stopped and listened for the rattle and chug that meant a coal wagon climbing up from Minsterley. When she was sure none was coming, she stepped carefully over the shiny rails and the sharp grey chippings between them. There had been no railway when the Cornish Giant was set up here – Edie’s grandfather had seen the great stone blocks for the engine-house pulled uphill from the road, each wagon-load drawn by ten horses. Edie let her eye travel up the smooth grey wall, as high as three cottages, and heard her name called in greeting. It was Arthur Jones, Tom’s father, whose job it was to feed and watch the engine. She waved back, though she could not hear what he said above the noise.

Shifting the satchel to her other shoulder, she followed the stony path down towards the road. The noise of the engine house was replaced by the clang of hammer on anvil from the smithy, the shouts of men and the creak of the winding gear bringing the ore from under ground. The smell of soot gave way to the wood-smoke of cottage chimneys and the warm smell of horse dung. No one was waiting at the head of the shaft, for it was two hours yet to the next shift. The wheels atop the great black head-frame revolved slowly against the bright blue sky, winding up the cage with its baskets of ore. A steady whine came from the smithy, where men took their drills to be sharpened before each shift. Across the road from the shaft-head, a trio of men were smoking and rolling dice outside the barracks where some of them lived in the week. It was a long hard walk to the mines from Priest Weston or White Grit, especially in winter, and many of the single men preferred the companionship of a shared billet, however lacking in home comforts.

They worked eight-hour shifts in the pit, and John Dorricott must be there at the candle-house before each cage-load of men went down, to provide them with fresh supplies. He worked from five in the morning until ten at night, winter and summer. If Mother was well, she would get up and make his dinner before dawn, and he would take it with him and be gone before Edie woke in time to walk to school. But on the days when Jane Dorricott lay staring at the wall and did not speak, there would be no school. Instead, Edie must light the fire and sweep the house, make her father’s dinner and take it to him prompt at noon. School for Edie was a special place, orderly and satisfying. The other children, especially the boys, grumbled about going to school as much as their parents cursed about having to send them when they would be more use on the farm or in the shop, but Edie loved it. At school she was praised for doing things well, as she never was at home. She was in the highest standard now; her father wanted her to leave next summer, but she could not bear to think about that. Since Mother had been poorly more often, Edie had tried her hardest to wake at four o’clock, to see her father off in the cart with everything he needed for the day, so she would be free to go to school after. But it was tiring work, running a home. There were more and more days when she slept too long, or forgot to light the copper or to set the bread to rise, and she had missed school far more often.

She tried not to think about that now. The candle-house lay across the road, a little beyond the mine buildings and the handful of cottages that made up the settlement. As Edie arrived outside the squat stone building, a short man in the moleskin working trousers of a miner swung up the path towards her, stowing a fistful of candles in his jacket pocket. 

He saw her and smiled. ‘All right, our Edie?’ He nodded at the satchel. ‘That’s a good girl. No school today?’

It was Uncle Andrew. He must be on the two o’clock shift. 

Edie looked at the ground. ‘I don’t mind about school. I’d rather see to Father.’ 

He patted her arm, knowing it for the loyal lie it was, and knowing that his brother did not tolerate what he saw as a meddling curiosity in his family’s affairs.

‘Well, it’s good luck for me, meeting you,’ he said, reaching into his pocket. ‘A man that has neither wife nor sweetheart does well to meet a pretty maid in the path, that will put a light in his darkness.’

She smiled, grateful to him for changing the subject, and put out her hand for the candle.

Uncle Andrew took off his hat. It was a bowler such as all the men wore in the pit, rubbed with resin to stiffen it and with a lump of clay stuck to the brim in front. The clay had hardened round the first candle that had been pushed into it, forming a socket for the one she fixed there now. 

She kissed his cheek. ‘Good luck and God bless, Uncle.’

‘And so He will, my dear, thanks to you.’ His hand was warm on her shoulder. ‘Now in to your father with his bait.’   

She listened to him whistling up the path, and turned towards the door.

'I wouldn't want you to think I went to York looking for sex ...'

This week we're delighted to host this short story by Jane Traies, revealing what really goes on at lesbian book festivals, apparently ...

GENRE FICTION

by Jane Traies

I wouldn't want you to think I went to York looking for sex. I'm not that kind of person - honestly. I didn't even want to go to the festival, until Lee and Jan talked me into it.

‘Do you good,’ Lee grinned. ‘Time you got out and met some new women.’

‘But,‘ I protested, ‘I’m not a two-thousand-women-at-a-disco kind of girl.’

‘Just come to the bookfest, then,’ said Jan promptly. ‘You can’t be a librarian and not be interested in books, now can you?’

Which is how I found myself, that Friday morning in October, in a crowd of over-excited lesbians at York Race Course. Since Lin and I had broken up I’d not been out much - I suppose I’d become a bit of a hermit, really - so from the moment that good-looking woman in uniform (think NYPD Blue, think Bad Girls) asked to see my ticket, the whole thing rather went to my head.

Friday was wonderful. I did everything. Saw and heard all my heroes -Val McDermid, Manda Scott, Sarah Waters - reading from their brilliant books. Librarian’s heaven – and Jackie Kay still to come! But on the Saturday morning, when Lee and Jan set off to a session on lesbian erotica, I said I’d see them later. It’s not that I’m prudish - I like a good sex-scene as much as the next reader (and since I get first pick of the new titles, I’ve read rather a lot) - I just didn’t fancy sharing the experience with a roomful of strangers. I studied the programme again. Lesbian romance? I’d rather lost faith in that since Lin walked out on ours, so in the end I followed a smaller crowd upstairs for something called The Spice of Life.

The title hinted at the variety of the line-up. The author of A Different Light (Meditations on Lesbian Spirituality) was swiftly followed by a comic novelist with a cheeky grin and faultless timing; the third writer was on a mission to revive sci-fi as a lesbian genre. We’d already hi-jacked crime, romance, the historical novel and sword-and-sorcery, she said, but no-one had taken lesbians into outer space since Joanna Russ in the seventies.

I wanted to ask her if anyone had considered capturing the Western for dykedom. That’s my secret vice, westerns. People expect librarians to like highbrow writing, so I don’t tell people about my obsession. I read westerns, watch them, collect them. I even have a lesbian video with a western theme. Well, I suppose it’s erotica, really, if I’m honest. It’s about this mysterious cowgirl who arrives at a lonesome ranch just as the woman of the house is taking a shower… My fantasy cowgirl.

I came back to attention as the microphone was seized by the last author of the session: a butch dyke in bike leathers who’d written a string of books about the adventures of an irresistible-to-women butch biker. As soon as she started to read, I knew I wasn’t going to escape public sex after all. And just as I was feeling glad that I was sitting on my own at the end of a row, a latecomer dropped into the seat next to mine. I hoped I wouldn’t go too red.

The sex in question took place mainly on the back of a Harley, and involved a lot of muscle control and some axle-grease. Could have been quite exciting, you might think – but it was so badly written that by the time our hero took her overworked dildo in hand for the fifteenth time, I was choking with the effort not to giggle.

The woman who’d come in late caught my eye and grinned.

Oh.

Tall, lean. Seriously handsome. Denim shirt. (Think early Clint Eastwood, think Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar, think All Torch and Twang.)

Think Fantasy Cowgirl. Now I really was going red.

And the funny thing was, she was at every panel I went to after that. She didn’t sit next to me again, but she always managed to catch my eye.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said to Lee as we applauded Jackie Kay. ‘I think I will go to the disco, after all.’

It was no exaggeration about the two thousand women. It might have been ten thousand, they made that much noise. And of course, it was far too crowded for me to have seen her, even if she was there. I felt such a fool. You can be very lonely in a happy crowd, and by midnight I had had enough. As I started to push my way towards the exit, I felt a hand on my arm.

Western shirt, this time. Cowboy boots. Slow smile.

‘Dance?’

And we did. All night. She held me dizzyingly close; and, as the last dance ended, she bent her head and kissed me. And then – oh, dear, I’m going red again right now, thinking about it - we went outside and had sex in her car. Yes, I know! Really. In the car park at York Race Course! Oh my god.

So there you are. That’s how it happened.

I know what you’re wondering. Which kind of western is this? Did they climb into the horse-drawn buggy and ride off side by side to the happy-ever-after, like in High Noon? Or did the mysterious stranger tip her hat in farewell to the little woman at the ranch house door, like in Shane, and clip-clop away into the setting sun?

In westerns, the ending can go either way. Certainly we have both kinds in the library at Little Muchlock.

You choose.

[First published in the Festival Programme for the York Lesbian Arts Festival 2005]