Miss Cameron, hanging

The tabloids reported 2 million 'surplus' women post WWI. With futures as wives and mothers stolen from them in an age when there was little alternative, they tried to survive and thrive. Not all did.

When she turned her head Elsie Cameron’s large grey eyes were magnified by bottle-bottom steel-framed glasses. Her close-fitting cloche hat obscured all but the tip of her nose when viewed from the side. Her back view was modishly tall and slim and she took care to walk daintily with a slight sway of the hips.

Sound of men’s tread sped up
To skirt around me
Thud of hob-nailed boots
Slap of leather soles, soft pad of plimsolls
Boldest turned to stare
Even bolder take some paces backwards
Some smiled and winked, some murmured
Stirring words about my body
And what they’d like to do to me.
Some turned
And walked away without reaction
My damned gig lamps, spectacles, what you will
Dad always said:
Men don’t make passes
At girls who wear glasses
But they do, they do, thank God
I’d pretend to be annoyed, shake my head
Look down, demure.
All a game…
A desperate game

5th December 1924, and Miss Elsie Cameron hurried to the train, heart going pitter pat. No one knew her secret. At last it was going to happen. She’d be the envied girl getting married. Never going home again.

Norman Thorne with his high white forehead and thick black hair would be hers at last. Crammed full of Advice for Ladies in Search of a Husband, she knew what to do now. No more shilly shallying. He’d marry her or else. Who cared about money when you were in love? If it took a teeny tiny kink in the truth, no one would remember once they were wed. She could always claim a miscarriage.

No more uncomfortable silences. No more maddening afternoons where he put it in and pulled it out before the rising tide had broken on her shore. And that Bessie shouldn’t have him, with her bold ways and grating laugh. She’d got there first, and she’d have him up the aisle before he knew what’d hit him.

First year of the war, the vanishings began
Anyone male from my Mixed Infants class
Born in 1898 like me
Doomed year, longest service
Jerry, Tom, Jack, William x 3
Graeme, Greg and John
All gone
Down into the monochrome mud I saw at the Kinema
Pathé News never showed a body but
Casualty lists grew like Topsy
So I knew my classmates were all gone
No secret, the decimation of my generation

As each boy went down into the mud
Up popped a spinster
Like daffodils from dead brown bulbs
Reversal of that Greek chap sowing dragon’s teeth
To grow warriors

Who was going to marry us when all our men
Were dead or mad or maimed?
Ugly, angry, lazy, stupid men
Cowards and reserved occupations and conchies
Got the best girls
The prettiest, most perfect girls
The girls with money and charm to spare

For a man, just being alive was enough
Me, groping like a mole without my glasses,
Beset with fears and worries
Who would ever want to touch me
Let alone wed me, keep me, bed me, clothe me, feed me?
No one, that's who

The train jerked, throwing her forward. Third class, windows smeared tobacco brown both inside and out, worn plush seats turned to sepia from their pre-war brightness. It wasn’t a through carriage. Just her and an old man bulging on the bench seat opposite. She’d been careful to put her cardboard suitcase on the string rack above her head, thinking the compartment might fill. But it didn’t.

She spent the journey thinking of Norman, from their first proper meeting at evening Chapel in 1920. How he’d been so manly and masterful, shielding her from the rain with his umbrella as he’d walked her home. In her constant surveys of available men, she’d dismissed him before as he was only 18, and she was practically on the shelf at 22. He’d almost missed the war, just catching the tail end and surviving. Then he’d lost his job as an engineer in 1921. She was frightened that all his ardent declarations, all the exciting kisses, were for nothing. He trudged the streets looking for work, while she waited and waited and her nerves began to fray.

Then he made a plan – he’d read some books, got his dad to front him £100, and bought a piece of land at Blackness, in Sussex, to farm chickens. She was thrilled by his endeavour, but so frightened she’d never see him again. To her joy he’d cycle 40 miles back to London to see her, and by Christmas they were engaged. The long bicycle rides went from weekly, to monthly, to not at all, and she began to visit him. To save money, he no longer rented rooms, but converted a chicken shed into a dwelling. That meant privacy and goings on, and nakedness and frightening joy on the promise of marriage. But the chickens were not turning a profit, money was scarce. Marriage delayed by this failure, she felt herself giving way into neurasthenia[1].

Dr Walker with his bromides and strychnine
His iron tonics that made me vomit
His annoying ‘Now, now, Miss Camerons’
His hygienic hand upon my leg
I want to bite him hard where it hurts
What does he know of my longing for love?
The fever and pain of longing for other hands
Other bodies, other mouths, other...
I open my mouth and keen like a widow for my dead dream

Checking her fellow passenger was sleeping – piggish grunts rose regularly from his nose –  she took the suitcase down to gloat over its contents. Months she’d spent dreaming and stitching, stitching tiny mouse stiches in the art silk. Bought an underwear pattern and the glossy pink material, carefully cut out in her attic room. Camisoles and three pairs of drawers, nighties and night dress case, brassiere and garters. A precious pair of pink silk stockings to match. Lisle stockings for every day. Housecoats to play the housewife – at least when Norman had started to prosper and they weren’t living in a chicken shed any more. A couple of cotton frocks and her new jersey. The blue wool dress she was wearing that she could get married in. Her coat was pre-war, but she given it a good sponging, shortened it and changed the buttons. Her trousseau.

When panic broke
I'd close my eyes and dreams would come
To obliterate the pain
Just like the flicks but in colour
I'd play a favourite story in my head
Me as princess bride, all floating lace,
Like last year’s duchess
Jacquard, and dropped waist
Flower bandeau and huge bouquet
Satin strap shoes and rows of pretty kids
Sweeping up some endless aisle
Lined with loving, cheering folk

So deep I'd go that if someone
Disturbed me I'd shriek with shock
They laughed in the office
That's why I'd had to leave, oh
Six or seven jobs in a year

Or I’d be tripping into church
In my blue dress, a posy from the hedgerow
In my hand
The kindly vicar
Wholesome village ladies
Tea urn in the hall adjoining
They’d have made jam sandwiches,
Sausage rolls, lemon sponge
And my wedding cake
Enough for everyone to have a sliver
And to send to absent friends
For luck
I practiced signing Elsie THORNE
For deckle-edgéd greetings cards

She tried not to think about the reality of her visits. Mud, drafts, smells, cold, rain. Sex. The stinking earth closet out the back. Chickens with their mad eyes. The only present he’d bought her in all the years of courting was a pair of rubber Army surplus trench boots. She’d have to wear them with overalls to help out on the muddy farm. He’d get cross when he’d set her to a task – say, nailing together a new laying box – and she’d wander back indoors to huddle over the stove, read her library book and dream.  She’d rather starve than eat another egg.

She’d slipped away while Mum and Dad were out. They worried too much about her, and that just made her nerves worse. That and running out of money because she seemed to have lost the knack of holding down a job. She was so nervy, jumpy, scared of her own shadow. She’d spent eight years at the Triplex Glass Company. What had changed? The war, Norman and sex.

With her sister engaged, and brother safe home from the war, she was the last to settle. She knew full well what was wrong with her as she writhed and sweated in her bed at night, unable to sleep, hand between her legs, plunging into temptation over and over again as she thought of Norman’s hands on her naked, narrow hips. Was she ashamed? She was beyond shame. Norman was receding, like the train through a tunnel, out of sight, not there to transport her into marriage any more.

Fears of being alone scurry round my mind like rats
I can't be left behind because our husbands all are dead
I have to be alive and wedded, and bedded, oh bedded
A man between my thighs
I longed and longed for that male smell, the roughness, wool, damp, their combinations
Everything male, separate and strange, the scent of stale beer, sweat and cigarettes
Last meal mustiness of moustaches pressed on my mouth
The red scouring of my chin when he hadn't shaved since morning
Oh god oh god oh god how I longed for a man of my own
Didn’t matter too much who…

Today, it would all be over. They would consummate their marriage in the bed not on the bed or on the floor or up against the wall, and she would no longer need to go back at night to the old couple she had lodged with for appearance’s sake. She might just as well be pregnant, mightn’t she? She’d heard of that society woman getting pregnant from a bath sponge, still a virgin. It’d been all over the papers, lurid details.

Both their dads were intent on marshalling the troops for godly behaviour - or stopping all the fun. Norman was a member (lapsed) of The Alliance of Honour for Young People (Be Saved from the Sins of the Flesh). Even if he did technically have sexual intercourse with her – front very occasionally, and back. He preferred back, even though it hurt to begin with (butter helped and she quite liked it now), because he could finish in there and not make her pregnant.

He’d called his chicken venture Wesley Poultry Farm, after the great Methodist, and then committed so many delicious sins with her under its corrugated iron roof. She used to laugh at the name, but latterly she hadn’t been able to stop and the laughter had turned into something else.

Now she was going to make herself his properly. Didn’t matter that he’d never asked, got down on his knee with a ring. Didn’t matter that he’d been so peculiar when she’d told him she was pregnant and wrote that he was ‘caught between two fires’. The two Chapel dads would make sure he did the right thing. They’d never stand for the shame of it, the blame of it.

In quiet moments, when the fire was not raging between her legs and the storm of frustration had left her mind, she knew the truth of it. Then the longing would pour back as irresistible as her mum’s strong sweet tea into a big china cup.

Blackness, near Crowborough
Black is the colour of my true love’s heart
Black are the crows that peck at dead men’s eyes
Black is the mud that clags my boots

She’d watched him dancing with that Bessie at the village hop. Round and round and round they went, flushed and flying while she sat and trembled and tried to smile. When she was bad, she woke in the night, and nightmares would pounce and she’s remember the job he’d got her as a nursemaid to a neighbour. They’d taken her to the seaside with them, but she’d succumbed to nightly weeping and had to be sent home like an unwanted parcel. The all-healing sea air had done her no good at all.

So she told herself a story about a cottage, roses round the door, scattering corn for fluffy little yellow chicks in the sunshine, while the mother hens pecked about her feet. Her last letter hadn’t told Norman she was coming. Surprise, she thought, he wouldn’t be able to say no when she was actually there with all boats burnt – and pregnant. He said he’d marry her if she were really pregnant.

She was poised on the edge of her seat as the train pulled in to Crowborough. Opening the window, careful not to get the filth on her sleeve, she reached down and opened the door. She stepped onto the platform all stiff and conscious of her romantic status, a bride coming to her bridegroom at last. No more village whispers. No more shameful status as the fiancée whose engagement stretched like perished knicker elastic, never snapping back. In her dreams he’d be there, waving, pulling her into his arms.

She’d walk the mile and a half to his hut stranded in a sea of mud, like those Pathé  newsreels of Passchendaele. It was a dank and glowering afternoon, light already leached from the sky. Two working men passed her on the road. She recognised one of them, and they greeted her as she trudged through Blackness.

I didn’t like the dying
But it was fine once I was dead.
By that time I was somewhere
Up near the ceiling
Calm for the first time for years
Just watching and wondering
To see what Norman would do next

Pity about my new hairdo
Little pin curls and the auburn tint
Mr Andre had rinsed through to brighten it
Cost a few bob too
All wasted on Norman

As soon as I came through the door
He’d jumped up and gone white
A guilty thing surprised
Then he went red with ripe rage
Ripping into me

I’d decided he’d be pleased
Love the romantic surprise
Take me in his arms…
Instead he snatched
An Indian club he used for exercise
And laid about me with a will

Over very fast
Next I knew I could see myself
Crumpled on the floor

I was tall for a woman at 5 foot 7 inches
We were well matched and
I could look him in the eye
Now I look down on him
Black is his hair, a bit like a
Shop window dummy, painted on
I can’t come down from above
So what his face looks like now
I’ve no idea

What I do know -
The cause of this
Is bigger than all of us
Norman, Miss Bessie and me
I was doomed by the war as surely
As our brave Tommies.

When he was sure I was dead
His movements became less jerky
And he sat down to think
Then he went out, while I stayed
Both there and not there
If you know what I mean

Five days, and two loving lying letters from Norman, later, and Mr Cameron’s telegram arrived at the farm:

ELSIE LEFT FRIDAY. HAVE HEARD NO NEWS. HAS SHE ARRIVED? REPLY. CAMERON

Norman replied:

NOT HERE. OPEN MY LETTERS. CANNOT UNDERSTAND. THORNE

Having opened the letters addressed to Elsie from Thorne, and still feeling uneasy, Mr Cameron contacted the police. From then on, with the inevitability of a flood, Norman’s lies began to leak truth bit by bit. Having said he hadn’t seen her, his story changed when her proudly packed suitcase was found beneath his potato patch. Sensing a commotion in the police station outside the cell door, Norman broke down and began to hammer and kick, screaming for attention saying he wanted to tell them what had really happened.

He’d ‘popped out, and come back to find Miss Cameron hanging from the beam’.

Norman had been so shocked and frightened that he’d panicked, chopped her up and hidden her. He’d thought about getting a doctor but changed his mind, he explained.

From my position near the ceiling
I can tell you
Norman wasn’t panicking at all
He left me lying there till I went stiff
Going out to flirt with Bessie
He fetched his hacksaw from the shed
He took off all my clothes
And burned some in the grate
He put sacks on the floor
And, by the light of the fire,
He laid my naked body down
One last time
The police unearthed a soggy sack
From underneath the chicken run
Where he’d posed for the press
Before his arrest.
It held my legs, top to tail, tied together
Like sardines
The second parcel was my torso, arms attached
A ring still on my finger
A biscuit tin contained my head
With pretty pin curls still intact
And all my long white neck
For six weeks and a day
Thorne had lived with my remains
Not far away
He cut me up with as much emotion
As when he dismantled one of his
Old boilers for a stew
He wasn’t unfamiliar with death
It wasn’t a shock
He’d been in a war after all
Bodies were no big deal to him
Especially dismembered ones
But
I wasn’t that crazy or depressed
Not enough to top myself
I just wanted to be wed
As was my perfect right
And as I felt my hopes evaporate
I was sad when I was away from him.
That’s all.
He said he’d marry me
If I was pregnant, which I said I was
Why would I want to die?
No logic to the act at all
And no rope marks on my neck or on the beam
Sorry, Norman, all lies
The jury found him guilty there and then
It never was Miss Cameron hanging,
Dangling from the beam in that pathetic shed,
But Mr Thorne who had to take the drop
Victims both of that appalling war.

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[1] Obsolete condition characterised by emotional disturbance, sleeplessness, hysteria, dizziness.