Radio Girls(72)

Phyllida gripped hold of the sink and stared at her.

“Nae. Is it really true? It must be. Lady Astor wouldn’t spread a rumor. Oh, my life!” She began to weep. “Can you believe it? We’re all of us going to have a voice at last.”

“We really are,” Maisie said, and she started crying too.

Both of them were still red-eyed when they emerged a few minutes later. Eckersley saw them and chuckled. “What would you poor girls do without lavatories to bawl in?”

They were floating far too high to bother with a response.

Meeting Dame Millicent passed in a blur. She was frail, with papery-white skin and trembling hands, but like Hilda, her eyes were shining.

“I think I lived to see this out of sheer stubbornness,” she declared in a voice much stronger than her body.

She bore herself with extreme elegance and sat as upright as if she were still wearing corsets. Which perhaps she was. Mr. Burrows, the BBC’s announcer, had to be brought into the secret so he could interview Dame Millicent—there was no time to find anyone else. And listeners would think the presence of a man added gravitas to the occasion.

Maisie stepped outside the door, set the BROADCASTING IN PROGRESS sign in place, and gave it a fond pat.

“I believe you just squealed,” Fowler, the sound effects man, told her. A short performance was to close the evening’s broadcast, and he wheeled up a trolley bearing a gramophone, an amplifier, a tea towel, and a head of cauliflower.

“I suppose I did,” Maisie agreed. “Good thing I’m not in there.” She jerked her thumb at the studio door. An unscripted background squeal was punishable by firing squad. “What’s all this?” She waved a hand at the trolley.

“Items for sound effects, of course,” Fowler answered, with that stunned expression the sound effects men always got when someone asked about their work, baffled as to how they were fated to work among such imbeciles.

“A gramophone, Mr. Fowler? That looks like cheating.”

“Does it?” he asked sharply. “And do you see any records here?”

She didn’t. Seeing her properly chastised, Fowler chose to educate rather than upbraid her.

“Here. Put your ear right against the amplifier, and have a listen.” He wound the gramophone and set the needle on a tea towel, so it just brushed the fabric. He tapped lightly on the towel in rhythmic beats, creating a thump-thump, thump-thump that, she gradually realized, was the sound of a heartbeat. “Close your eyes,” he advised. She did, the sound washing straight through her.

“Crikey, it’s hardly anything to cry about,” Fowler scolded. “You girls, you get weepy over the strangest things.”

Maisie wiped her eyes and grinned, feeling no need to ask where the cauliflower came in. Even at its most mundane, the BBC was pure magic. That was worth a few tears.

“Tell me, Mr. Fowler, can you create a sound for being so happy, you just want to hug the entire world and never let go?”

He shrank from her in horror. “That’s not for an upcoming Talk, is it?”




The newspapers outdid themselves with stories on what was formally titled the “Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928,” and were generous enough to congratulate the BBC on its prescience and fine discussion with the great Dame Millicent Fawcett. Reith’s incandescence wilted under the weight of the congratulations that showered on him all morning, though Maisie wondered how many of those congratulations were more about his genius in hiring Hilda.

Reith towered in the middle of Hilda’s office. He never seemed to fit there—Maisie thought cozy spaces made him uncomfortable.

“I appreciate that I was not available, Miss Matheson, and so you had to make a swift decision and you decided to err on the side of risk.” His scowl contorted, indicating his general feeling about risk. “It does seem to have been successful. But in future, I hope you will show more discretion, or at least seek the advice and support of another senior. We can’t have staff simply throwing on broadcasts without proper vetting. It will certainly lead to chaos.”

Maisie could see that Hilda yearned to tell Reith that senior staff absolutely needed that discretion, and it was flexibility that would help the BBC grow. But she smiled placidly and nodded.

“Yes, of course, Mr. Reith. I do apologize.”

“We have no idea what could have happened,” he pointed out.

“No, indeed.”

“Well, let’s be more mindful on another occasion.” He turned on his heel to leave, nodding at Maisie in a way that made her realize he was expecting her to accompany him. “We miss you up in the executive offices, Miss Musgrave,” he said when they reached the corridor. “You were a pleasant girl to have around.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, rather touched.

“What do you think of this voting business?” Ah, that was why he wanted to talk to her alone. He remembered the devotee of the Old World and wanted some youthful sympathy. “My wife has never seen the need for it—she’s happy to let me make all such decisions. We were both quite troubled seeing any women vote, but single, and perhaps uneducated women at the polls, that seems a guarantor of trouble. I know it’s all down to these times, but it does worry me.”

“I suppose we’ll just have to see?” Maisie said. She couldn’t point out America’s success with women’s suffrage, since he considered Americans to be an ungrateful, degenerate rabble who should be corralled back into the empire.