Chapter 24
Before Bobby knew it, it was early March – just eleven weeks before they expected to welcome the baby. The days had grown longer and daffodils nodded by the side of the road. It was strange to think that when the trees were once again clothed for summer, she would be a mother.
Monday was washing day, which left little time for anything else, and Friday was the day Bobby went shopping in Settle.
Yet in spite of the many jobs that had to be done, she found she still had a few hours each day to herself.
The doctor had urged her to prioritise rest now she was well into the final stage of her pregnancy, but Bobby didn’t feel guilty about using the time to write.
It wasn’t strenuous, and it kept her mind off worry about the birth.
The fact she was still managing to write only made Bobby more irritated when she read The Tyke and noted the decline in quality.
Tony’s work was… well, fine. He wasn’t a bad journalist when he committed to doing some work.
But he had never really understood what the little magazine was all about, and besides that he was no Dalesman, either by birth or adoption.
Circumstances may have dropped him in Silverdale, but Tony Scott was a townie through and through.
His articles lacked heart, Bobby felt. The freelance reporters produced good work, but as Bobby knew from her stint as deputy editor, that came at a higher price than using staff writers.
She could do so much better! Reg might at least have considered keeping her on at home until the birth, while there was no baby to care for. What could have been the harm in that?
Bobby had seen a little success in her new endeavour of writing for the wireless, but not enough to compensate for the loss of her work on the magazine.
Whenever she had a spare hour, she set herself the same goal: a dozen jokes, which she would aim to sell to one of the radio comics.
She didn’t confine herself to ITMA, but sent material for the attention of all the great and the good – even Arthur Askey, the BBC’s golden goose.
Sometimes Bobby’s letters fell on stony ground, but other times she received a response – occasionally accompanied by a very welcome postal order.
Her success rate, Bobby supposed, was about twenty per cent.
If she wrote a dozen gags, perhaps two or three would be considered good enough.
Not all the comics paid five bob either.
If her work was rejected by Askey or Handley then Bobby might try her luck with one of the up-and-coming names, but from them she would be lucky to get half a crown.
Still, while the money didn’t flow in as fast as Bobby might have hoped, it gave her a buzz to hear her work broadcast. The fact it was a secret only added zest. And she was increasing the twenty-five pounds her dad had advised her to put away, little by little.
By the time she had passed the seven-month point in her pregnancy, Bobby had earned an additional three pounds for her rainy-day pot.
She might have hoped for more, but it wasn’t bad for a few hours’ work every week.
It also performed a valuable function in occupying her mind.
As the date she was due to give birth drew nearer, Bobby was becoming increasingly anxious – almost to the exclusion of everything else.
She couldn’t help being haunted by that night Lilian had given birth.
Lil had nearly lost her life that night, and then there was what had happened to poor Georgia.
Writing had become a lifeline to Bobby at a time when her worrisome brain badly needed something to dwell on other than the potential for catastrophe.
Her writing sessions did carry a feeling of guilt, however, that she could derive so much pleasure from them. It made her think of Reg’s words the day she had begged him to keep her on: that she’d never fully commit to motherhood while she had half her mind on her job.
It had started Bobby thinking: would she be a good mother?
It wasn’t something she had questioned before.
She had cared for her brothers when they were young, she often minded Annie, and she loved helping Jess and Florrie with their problems. It was the Parrys’ presence in her life that had made her realise how much she wanted a child.
But her thoughts had always been about herself: how much she wanted to be a mother.
She hadn’t considered it from the child’s point of view.
Would it be bad for Marmaduke to have a mother who wanted to do more in her life than care for him?
Would he feel neglected, and resent her for it?
And yet Bobby knew she did need more than motherhood.
It was frustrating to have the pleasure of creativity swamped by feelings of guilt.
She wished she could be like Jolka, who stood defiant as she claimed her right to be more than simply a woman and a mother.
Bobby couldn’t detach herself from the weight of society’s expectations the way her bluestocking friend seemed able to do.
She worried about Charlie too. He had been working at the bank for over a month, but although he rarely complained, Bobby could sense he wasn’t entirely happy there.
He seemed to have made his peace with his role, although he would still describe himself as a clerk when asked. He was grateful to be earning a wage, even if the salary wasn’t what he had been used to. He admired his boss, Mr Miller.
The big problem, Bobby could tell – and she could tell because she had been in that position herself – was that Charlie was bored.
There was little to challenge him in typing and filing.
She knew he missed his veterinary work, and would give anything to be able to practise again.
Bobby wished there was some miraculous cure for the tremor in his hands, but there wasn’t.
The only part of Charlie’s new job that produced a spark of interest was learning Pitman’s shorthand.
Forming the symbols was easier for him than writing longhand, and like Bobby when she had first studied it, he enjoyed feeling he was learning a sort of secret code.
One of Bobby’s favourite parts of the day was when Charlie asked her to help him in his learning.
He would attempt to write her love notes in those strange-looking symbols.
Bobby laughed as she corrected them, rewarding him with a kiss for every word he got right.
Today was Friday, Bobby’s shopping day. The post hadn’t arrived when she left to get the bus into Settle, but there were two letters on the mat when she returned.
One was for Charlie and one for her, both with typewritten addresses, which usually heralded something official. Charlie’s letter bore those always significant initials: OHMS.
Could it be about his DFC? He hadn’t confided whether he had written again to the Air Ministry now he had a job, turning down the decoration.
To be honest, Bobby had forgotten all about it in the flurry of things that had happened recently: leaving her job; her father’s wedding to Mrs Hobbes, a low-key affair that had taken place the previous month; helping Captain Parry with the arrangements for his own wedding in late May.
Bobby wondered if Charlie had forgotten too.
She put the envelope on top of his newspaper for him.
The name ‘Bancroft’ caught her eye on the other envelope. That meant it must be from the BBC.
She tore it open, hopeful it might contain another welcome postal order, but there was only a letter.
Dear Miss Bancroft,
I have been asked to thank you for sending your work to Mr Jenkins. However, I’m afraid he feels it would not be suitable…
Bobby didn’t bother reading on. It was a standard rejection: she’d had too many like it not to recognise the format. She sighed and stuffed the thing into the pocket of her voluminous maternity housecoat.
It was a shame, though. Bobby had been proud of her last lot of jokes, persuaded they were some of the best she had written. There had been twenty in total, and all of sufficient quality for broadcast, she had felt. Yet not a single joke had met with approval.
Bobby frowned as something in what she had read registered. She pulled the crumpled letter out and looked again at the first line.
Dear Miss Bancroft…
Miss! Why would they address her as Miss? She always sent her work in under a male name.
She took out the envelope. That, too, was addressed to Miss Roberta Bancroft.
Oh Lord. Had she inadvertently signed her real name? Pregnancy did seem to be making her absent-minded.
Well, that accounted for the rejection then. What an idiot! Why hadn’t she checked her letter over before sending it off? She could slap herself.
Bobby’s irritation with herself quickly shifted to anger with the comic who’d rejected her work, however.
Twenty good jokes, rejected for the utterly ridiculous reason that the brain that had come up with them was lodged inside a woman’s head rather than a man’s! It was absurd to think someone would rather throw away good work than admit a woman had written it for him. What a world this was.
She couldn’t even enjoy a cathartic rant about it to Charlie, since she had kept her joke-writing so deadly secret. She would have to pour out her rage in a letter to Scarlet, and wait until her friend could reply for the soothing, sympathetic words she needed.
She shoved the crumpled letter in the salvage bin rather violently, pushing it under some old newspapers so Charlie wouldn’t spot it, then went to lie down. Her back was very sore after a morning of shopping.
Bobby felt tears start to rise at the unfairness of it all. That outlet would be closed to her henceforth, she supposed, now those in charge knew the secret of her sex. No amount of signing herself ‘Robert Bancroft’ could undo that slip of the pen. She would never sell another joke again.
It wasn’t right. Her brain was the same one it had been when they had believed her a man, and her work had been deemed good enough then. Why should this change anything? Men were so proud of being the more logical sex, yet there was no logic to this at all.
She had needed this, damn it! She had lost her job at The Tyke, and now it felt like the one thing that had been keeping her going in lieu was being taken away from her.
Bobby had been planning to write that very afternoon. There would have been enough time before she needed to cook the tea to pen a good nine or ten jokes.
But there was no point now. Her gaze landed on her notebook lying on the bedside table, and she swallowed a sob.
Some words of Jolka’s came back to her as she lay staring at it.
You can write for other publications as well as you can write for The Tyke, I suppose…
Which was all very well, but which ones?
There wasn’t much she knew about apart from life in the Dales, and no magazine other than The Tyke would be interested in that.
Perhaps she could write about other things – she had briefly been a newspaper reporter, after all – but it was difficult to chase down stories when she was the size of a house.
Bobby’s attention was drawn to a periodical under her notebook: not one for adults but a story magazine for children, The Girl’s Own Paper. Charlie had brought it from Skipton as a present for Florrie, and Bobby had put it by the bed to remind her to give it to Lilian when she saw her.
She slid it out and flicked through.
The stories were just what Bobby had loved when she had been Florrie’s age – the sort she had striven to emulate in all her early jottings. Bobby, too, had been an avid reader of The Girl’s Own when she had been in pinafores and long socks.
Her interest in journalism had been sparked by a piece in that publication, now she came to think of it: an account of the exploits of the woman reporter who had become Bobby’s idol, Dorothy Lawrence. But it was fiction stories that had been her first love, and made her dream of a writing career.
The tales in The Girl’s Own were filled with action, usually featuring a plucky heroine uncovering a mystery, winning a hockey match for her school, taking first place at a gymkhana or – in these days of war – bringing down Nazis.
Tales with titles like ‘Susan of St Agatha’s’, ‘The Cravensdale Mystery’ and ‘Jane Does the Job’.
Bobby spent an informative hour reading the magazine from cover to cover.
People before things, Reg had always told her – that was what made for a compelling magazine article.
Bobby was sure it applied as much to fiction as non-fiction.
That was why there was so often a Jane or a Susan in the titles of these tales – because it told readers that here they would find a friend, someone they could aspire to emulate.
More importantly, it told them that here was someone just like them.
If you could craft a heroine readers could root for, she would carry the story on her back.
Bobby put the magazine aside and reached for her pen.