Radio Girls (18 page)

Meaning, “Don't bow thricely and no pulling of forelocks.” Or, in the case of staunch republican Fielden, don't call her “Mrs. Astor.” Maisie was excited. She wanted to bask in the great lady's presence again. Lady Astor was the sort of woman people stepped aside for, and Maisie wanted to study her mien. It couldn't all be position, could it? There must be something to learn.

Lady Astor swept in and greeted Maisie as a friend, or at least a favored courtier. She insisted on Maisie's remaining for the broadcast, which meant getting to see the engineers regard her with respect, but also appreciation. At nearly fifty, Lady Astor still radiated the mesmerizing beauty that had captured fascination, as well as a
viscount, in her youth. Maisie could see the shadows of the piled-up curls, Gibson Girl silhouette, sweep and flow of long silk skirts. But what she couldn't have had then was the laserlike glitter in her eyes that could likely cut through someone more readily than any sword. That came with age.

On seeing Maisie, Billy attempted to melt into the machinery. Maisie, both because she was interested and it was fun to unnerve him, watched his work.
Wouldn't that be something, knowing how to make our broadcasts go?
Women weren't engineers, certainly not under Eckersley's fiefdom, but still . . . it would be something.

Lady Astor's broadcast was about Florence Nightingale, by way of introducing their new series on nursing. Maisie's idea, changed considerably, but from her kernel. As she listened to Lady Astor's lilting patrician voice—“Women have always nursed, but when Florence Nightingale set down the lamp and opened a school, she turned an expected avocation into a proper profession that has arguably done as much to save lives as penicillin”—Maisie crammed her fist in her mouth to avoid squealing. Did Hilda feel like this every day, or did the thrill wear off?

Can't imagine which scenario is more painful
.

“That was rather fun,” Lady Astor proclaimed when the broadcast was finished. “Good lark, broadcastin'. I hope it lasts. Do give me a tour of the place, will you? I want to see more of our government's investment.”

“Most certainly,” said Hilda, “but—” She had twenty phone calls to make, plus the usual crisis management.

“Miss Musgrave can do very well,” Lady Astor said. “You're far too busy; you always were. I'd say you'll work yourself sick, but you're healthier than all the colts at Goodwood.”

Hilda's chuckle echoed as Maisie commenced the tour. Lady Astor might have been Queen Mary (or indeed, the
Queen Mary
) as she sailed through Savoy Hill. In the Engineering Department, Eckersley was reclined in his chair, reading
Electronics Today
. In Schools, Siepmann had his back to them, gazing out the window, hands folded
behind him. Cyril and one of the assistants were playing darts and joking about their school days. Mary Somerville and the secretary were deeply immersed in revisions on a broadcast.

“I hear typin'; must be the girls,” Lady Astor observed, and indeed the typing pool was, as usual, competing with a herd of stampeding rhinos for terror-inducing volume. But nothing was as deafening as Sound Effects. Lady Astor swung open the door to nod at the sight of the men engaged in a blazing row over a pile of coiled springs.

“Well, what do you think of our operation?” Hilda asked when Maisie delivered Lady Astor back to her.

“Very impressive. I congratulate myself on talkin' you into joinin'. And you must feel right at home—it's exactly like the House of Commons! All the men are loafin' about, and the women are the ones doing all the actual work.”

Hilda's lips twitched.

“The House managed to get plenty done well before women were allowed in,” she felt obliged to point out.

“Oh, certainly, certainly. But they're the ones with their feet up, loungin'. It's the women with their feet on the ground; that's all I've noticed.”

Once Lady Astor was gone, Maisie observed to Hilda, “She's not entirely wrong about us, is she?”

“Thank heavens for that,” said Hilda. “I certainly wouldn't want to be the one to tell her if she were. Would you?”

“Reading again? You girls work too hard,” Mr. Holmby, proprietor of the Savoy Tup, chided Maisie as he set down her stew. She was very fond of the Tup, whose hot lunches had earned her loyalty from her third week at the BBC, and enjoyed Mr. Holmby's appreciation of her rounding face, to which he attributed his wife's cooking and his own liberal hand with the accompanying bread and butter.

Maisie preferred to lunch with Phyllida, but the vagaries of a day in Talks meant she often had to lunch alone. She didn't mind. The
Tup's patrons offered excellent eavesdropping opportunities, and she'd always enjoyed listening to people—it was almost like being in a conversation herself.

“I hear they caught some Bolshie spy in Walthamstow.”

“Ah, go on. If any spy thinks that's a worthwhile place to do his work, he's not any good, is he?”

“Point is, bastards are everywhere, aren't they? And what are we doing about it?”

“A few rotten Russians can't overthrow Britain, though wouldn't I pay money to see them try? Those layabouts couldn't even make it to the Channel.”

“Chuh, don't you read? It's about ideas now, not armies. Get inside the minds, is what it is. And they're working on it. That's what those trade unions are all about, softening people to Bolshevism.”

Another group was fretting over the softening of the British mind and body, the “advanced and irregular” ideas of “all these artists and writers and unionists” who apparently lived in some namby-pamby world (Maisie didn't see how that was possible for someone in a trade) and didn't know what proper values were.

Then the inevitable: “I told her that if she dared cut her hair and wear a skirt too short, she'd get a good whipping, so that should hold her.”

Most likely talking about a daughter. Though possibly a wife.

Maisie turned over the page in her pad and wrote: “Advanced Ideas”—perhaps a week of Talks about how new ideas were shaping society? Then she opened the latest
Radio Times
and turned to a story about performing for radio: “Miss Adelaide Whithouse is a comely performer of the stage, but her terror of the alien microphone in the BBC's Studio Two was evident as she prepared to broadcast an original comedy. Miss Whithouse had to be asked more than once not to twitch her papers, lest she disrupt the broadcast, and this only served to make her more . . .”

Oh, for goodness' sake, that's not how Beanie tells it. What rot. Honestly,
I
could write better stories than these.

Her spoon hovered inches from her open mouth.

Maybe I should try
.

“Really, Maisie, do be careful,” Lola scolded. “If you keep writing this much, your fingers will end up with permanent graphite stains.”

Lola's penchant for hyperbole didn't seem misplaced. Maisie had worn down a whole pencil in a week. There was a Talk coming up on the rise of women as hairdressers, and she wanted to write a companion piece on the glory of short hair. Not the most exciting subject, but it seemed like an easy start. Or so she'd thought.

“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.

B
ert 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.

“I only thought you might consider it,” she amended, softening her tone. “Of course I didn't expect you'd necessarily take my first submission.”

“I am awash in relief,” Bert drawled. “Now, then, I suppose if you were capable of writing to our standards, a small interview,
something nice and light, with one of the lady broadcasters, might be something I could consider. One of the prettier actresses, so we can do more photos. Oh, and mind the suffragette-y tone. Readers don't like it.”

“But there are some women voting now. Why—”

“This is why I don't allow girl writers. Never take direction, always these questions, awfully tiresome. Are these the listings?” he asked, pointing to the sheets in her hand, his finger under the heading “LISTINGS.”

“They are indeed, Bert,” she told him. “And thank you,” she added, because it was expected. In fact, she wanted to cry, but though they were tears of anger, not misery, he wouldn't know the difference and he was another man who wasn't getting her tears.

I'll just have to try again.

Her
words, that was what she wanted. An interview didn't seem the same at all.
But why should I get
anything
, even in the
Radio Times
? I'm not a writer. Except maybe . . .

She put aside the vacillations and took out her pencil for Hilda and Reith's weekly meeting. Writing shorthand wasn't what she meant at all, but at least she was stellar at it.

“I suppose you'll be pleased to know the governors have reviewed your proposal and decided to lift the ban on controversial broadcasting,” Reith informed her, with a sigh sharp enough to peel paint from the ceiling.

“Glorious news!” Hilda bellowed, thumping Reith's desk so hard, his decorative mallard swam the length of the ink blotter.

“Yes, well, let's remember our decorum,” Reith advised, sliding the duck back into position.

“It's a great triumph, Mr. Reith,” she crowed. “Onwards and upwards.”

“Some might say you have been thwarting the ban all along,” he pointed out.

“Oh, not thwarting,” Hilda assured him. “More like nudging the bounds.”

Reith's scowl smiled, but Maisie could see it was perfunctory. In fact, it sometimes seemed to her that he was starting to dislike Hilda. But Maisie was sure she was wrong. More than two million households had found ten shillings for the BBC license fee to bring radio into their homes, with any number of listener letters expressing their pleasure in the Talks, and the newspapers regularly extolled Hilda's taste and original thinking.

Hilda, along with Arthur Burrows, the premier presenter, was becoming synonymous with the BBC. It was possible, Maisie conceded, that Reith's absence from the parade of praise was the problem, but he could hardly fault Hilda for that. Besides, he wasn't without recognition—he had been awarded the Knight Bachelor and was now “Sir John Reith.” With the grace he decided came of being ennobled, he insisted the staff continue to address him as “Mr. Reith.”

“Yes, well, you no longer have to nudge,” Reith acceded. “But not
every
broadcast has to be challenging.”

Maisie wasn't sure what Reith meant by “challenging,” but her own opinion, born of Hilda's, was that a Talk should always have something new to say, in some new way.

Onwards and upwards, and all that.

It was a miserable cold spring in 1928, and the Talks Department was huddled on the floor again, everyone vying for a place nearest the fire. In the six months Maisie had been the proper Talks secretary, she felt her greatest skill was securing a prime spot with the most frequency.

“At this rate, we'll all have chilblains in June,” Fielden muttered. He never cared that no one responded.

“We're going to expand the poetry and book discussions,” Hilda announced, reading from her green diary. “Virginia Woolf is coming in for a few readings, and Rebecca West, but it looks as though Vita Sackville-West will be our permanent fiction reviewer.”

“With so many bluestockings, we could compete with Selfridges' hosiery department,” Collins hissed. Only Fielden heard him, and gave him a withering glare. He allowed no one to impugn Our Lady.

“We're fixed very nicely with political and household Talks, and Talks on the arts and sciences. But I think we could do with more in the way of general interest. And perhaps the occasional foray into light absurdity. Any thoughts?”

It started to rain, fat drops tapping at the windows. Maisie snapped a biscuit in half, liking the swishy crunch sound. She thought of something Hilda had written in her notes on broadcasting, that it was “a capturing of sounds and voices all over the world to which hitherto we have been deaf. It is a means of enlarging the frontiers of human interest and consciousness, of widening personal experience, of shrinking the earth's surface.” Such a lovely way to describe this curious creature they were continually inventing. The stranger inviting itself into a silent home, asking to become a friend.

“Miss Matheson, what about a Talk on memorable sounds?” Maisie burst out, watching the drops splatter against the glass. “Sounds that mean something to people, something about their personal experience? A scythe in the harvest, or typewriter keys?”

“She would say typing,” Collins again, more sotto, still voce.

“Marvelous,” Hilda congratulated her. “We could thrill the Sound men for days. Of course, what would be really delightful would be to take a microphone up and down the country, asking people about sounds and perhaps recording those sounds in real time. Wouldn't that be evocative?”

Hilda sighed, momentarily despondent at radio's limits. There were valiant attempts at broadcasting outside the studio—the sports announcers were very keen on it—but it was a deeply cumbersome affair that thrilled and vexed the engineers equally and whose results were not quite on the cusp of satisfactory.

How do you choose just one gorgeous sound? Children laughing. Bees in a summer garden. The rattle of beads on a dancer's dress. A kiss.

“Why are you blushing?” Fielden asked her, not even trying to be sotto.

“I have tuberculosis,” Maisie confided. Everyone laughed. Another nail in Invisible Girl's coffin. And she'd had another Talk idea accepted. She hummed as she headed to the mimeograph room, her cheerfulness compensating for lack of tune, when Cyril loped into place beside her.

“Hallo, New York. How are you?”

Cyril. She felt a rush of nostalgia for all the days he hadn't entered her thoughts. He had the nerve to still be deliriously good-looking, hair flopping over his temples, freckles, dark blue eyes. That high-voltage smile, so contagious as to almost make her smile back. She clenched her jaw.

“I'm doing very well, Mr. Underwood. How are you?” she asked, affecting what she hoped was a professional tone awash in detachment, sparing him only one curt nod as she continued to stride down the corridor.

He kept pace with her. “Never a dull moment—more's the pity. A chap could sit down then. The DG expects a great deal from Schools, you know. Minds of the youth, and all that.” He gave a vague gesture to indicate all those minds.

“Yes, indeed. And how are you liking Mr. Siepmann as a superior? Awfully clever, isn't he?” she asked, hoping the question would annoy him. She was rewarded with a frown.

“Well . . . yes, actually. Likes details. We call him the devil in the details,” he confided, eyes twinkling, inviting a laugh.

“Do you?” She nodded gravely. “I'm sure he'd appreciate that.” Another prize: the flash of alarm turning him pale, his freckles poppy seeds in a milk pudding.

“You, er, you wouldn't mention that, would you? I was only joking.”

“Of course you were,” she agreed in a chirp. “I know better than to assume you're in earnest. Ah, here's my stop. Cheerio!” She bid him goodbye with a flick of her pinkie, swung into the mimeograph
room, and set up stencils at record speed. Her ears were getting very good at picking up sounds, and she sensed him hesitate, swaying at the door, before he went on to wherever he was going.

“Honestly, I was happy never to talk to him again. What the heck was that for? ‘Hallo, New York,' indeed, that beastly, blasted blackguard—”