Radio Girls(48)

“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.