already made up. Later that evening, she rang the number printed in the newspaper from Nat’s workshop telephone, and an arrangement had been made for May to take the train from Victoria down to Polegate station where she would be met and driven to Cuckmere Park. She had been told by the housekeeper, who in a deep voice introduced herself as Mrs. Cage, that Sir Philip Blunt would be at the house and would be pleased to interview her himself.
“He needs to be certain of getting the right one this time,” Mrs. Cage had said. “And he’s not the only one here at Cuckmere who doesn’t want any more balls-ups, pardon my French,” she continued. “Spent too much time abroad with men and their bad ways with language, I have. Mind you, a woman might cause a bit of attention behind the wheel. I hope you scrub up nice and smart,” a note of warning in her voice as she replaced the receiver.
Nat had made Sarah a warm coat for the winter in thick tweed. Sarah insisted that the coat was ideally suited to May’s neat figure and would be perfect for impressing Sir Philip. She also leant May a pair of cotton stockings. May, who had never worn such things before, pulled the stockings up and clipped them to the suspenders just as Sarah showed her. She did not know that legs could experience claustrophobia, even though Sarah assured her the stockings would soon expand and wrinkle at the knees and ankles. At the last moment Nat had produced a striped, battered box from which he lifted a small black velvet hat with a jaunty feather on one side.
“Mum would be honoured to think of the daughter of her favourite sister wearing her best hat on such an important day. This is the only piece of clothing the prison returned to us after Mum died. All her other clothes had been burned because she was too thin to wear them.” Nat’s voice faltered. “But Mum didn’t mind. ‘Anything for the suffragette cause,’ she always used to say. I always wish she had lived on just a bit longer to see women given the vote and Lady Astor taking her seat in Parliament. Then she would have known the fight was worthwhile.”
“Well, I want to try and do Aunt Gladys and her hat proud,” May said, reaching up to give Nat a kiss on his cheek. “So here comes a woman aiming for a man’s job.”
Placing the hat on May’s head, Sarah pronounced it a perfect fit.
As May sat on the train in her third-class carriage she passed innumerable back gardens and yards. The scene passing her eyes was as strange as anything she had seen at the pictures. Some of these tiny patches of horticulture were pristine in their winter tidiness, the flowerbeds turned and forked with the care given to the potato topping of a meat pie, paths swept of leaves and the still stark trees forming a skeletal silhouette against the sky. Other gardens were overrun with weeds, and sometimes, just visible in the thick mist, the train passed an abandoned swing settee, its seat rotting in the damp, a reminder of summers past. Most of these small plots were devoid of life, although as the train slowed down for a station, May spotted a sleepy cat curling itself around the back fence of a house and a bent-over figure emerging from his potting shed, probably escaping the demands of domesticity in the house. And yet this unlikely jigsaw of semi-tended earth, despite the apparent mismatch of the pieces, slotted together to form the overall effect of a satisfying collage.
As the London suburbs gave way to the muddy greenish-brown of the Sussex winter countryside, a thin white frosting covered the fields. May had never seen snow before. The pictures illustrating Hans Christian Anderson’s icy queen in her white fur coat were the closest she had come to such a sight. There was no one in the empty railway carriage to whom she could show her excitement. Sam had wanted to come with her but that day he had an appointment on board HMS President, the huge ship permanently moored at King’s Reach near the Law Courts at the Embankment. She wondered how he was getting on. His hope that the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve would take him on as a rating was a long shot but even so Sam was confident that he would soon be wearing