Miss Purdy's Class by Annie Murray

Author:Annie Murray [Murray, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780330527682
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Within days, however, he was back and she went to her first party meeting with him in a murkily lit room in the centre of town.

‘What’s it going to be about tonight?’ she asked on the way.

‘Oh, it’s not a speaker or anything like that tonight. More of a business meeting. But it’ll give you an idea – it’s the centre of all the activity, where we get things done.’

The party offices were over a left-wing bookshop. The room was thick with cigarette smoke, though there were fewer than a dozen people round the table, and on first impressions Gwen thought them disappointing. The great majority were men, though she saw three women, all of them dressed in the most workaday clothes and two looked particularly dowdy. The third had a head of thick, black curly hair which could have looked very pretty but was scraped severely back into a bun, and she had thick eyebrows and strong, intense features. A certain intensity marked the atmosphere in the room. Gwen immediately felt as if her pretty frock and hair ribbon and the smile that she directed at them marked her out as trivial and she shrank back inside herself, wondering what she was doing there.

Daniel’s manner was confident, though she felt suddenly as if he was very distant from her.

‘This is Gwen Purdy,’ he told them. ‘She’ll likely join the party. She’s here to listen in, see how we do things.’

There were nods and looks of approval in her direction and she immediately felt proud to be with Daniel. The man closest to her stood up, holding a cap in his hand and offered her a chair.

‘Welcome, comrade,’ he said solemnly.

Gwen sat, feeling the intense, unsmiling gaze of the black-haired woman on her from across the table. On the wall to the woman’s left she saw a banner on which a muscular man was waving a huge red flag.

Once the meeting began, Gwen struggled to concentrate. There was a good deal of talk about the practical details of printing leaflets and recruiting members.

One of the younger men spoke despondently. ‘It’s such an uphill struggle. Everyone seems to live with their head stuck in the sand. They can’t see that it’s getting closer. The fascist tide is sweeping over Europe and all they can think about is the next pint, the next pay packet . . .’

‘That’s for those who get any pay,’ an older man retorted scathingly. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have a clutch of screaming kiddies with empty bellies, that’s your trouble. No wonder the masses can’t think for themselves when they’re drugged with hunger and want. After the revolution, no one will go hungry. They will be awake!’

A debate ensued about tactics. One minute they were talking about a United Front and a Popular Front and about Italy and the National Government’s appeasement of Mussolini. Then the discussion moved on, bitter in tone, to the Labour Party and the ILP and during this Gwen began to feel sleepy and wished there was a clock in the room.

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