Mattie Simpkin, former suffragette, is referred to by the disparaging epithet of the book’s title only once, by an insignificant young man (all the males in this novel are peripheral). It’s 1928 and at last the suffrage is to be extended to women over 21. It doesn’t come soon enough for Emmeline Pankhurst, who dies mere weeks before the act is passed, but Mattie and her fellow radicals, now stout and bedraggled, can finally celebrate victory. Except that Mattie is not the sort of person who can relax. A chance discovery leads to a daring plan of action, which risks being scuppered by the other kind of old baggage – the emotional sort.
Evans’s previous comic novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half, about the making of a wartime propaganda film about Dunkirk, was justifiably acclaimed and filmed as Their Finest. Set amid bombs and blitzes, it evoked a gripping sense of peril and a strong period feel. Old Baggage is less sweeping, a study of aftermath and let-down rather than wit and optimism, but no less affecting for that. The indomitable Mattie is a creation as amusing as she is blinkered and egotistic.
Mattie has never let down her guard. “I have no wish to look like a veteran of an historic war,” she announces. “The battle is not yet over; every day brings fresh skirmishes.” Robbed on Hampstead Heath by another of those pesky, peripheral males, an infuriated Mattie throws a bottle that accidentally hits a young woman, Ida, in the face. Her idea of reparation is to found an open-air club for disadvantaged women, involving healthy activities: “Javelin throwing. Archery. Use of the slingshot.” Membership grows, the girls thrive and Mattie’s scheme is a wild success until a rival club for boys and girls, organised by rightwing admirers of Mussolini, begins to encroach. A showdown seems inevitable, but who will prevail – the disciplined, uniformed marchers or the shabby female individualists?
At Emmeline’s funeral, Mattie wears her prized suffragette medals: “the miniature grille commemorating her incarcerations; the silver disc bearing the dates of hunger strikes, the pin topped with a chip of flint” that signifies she once chucked stones through plate glass windows. Yet she spends the actual funeral propping up a former comrade, now an alcoholic, who has turned up drunk. Under the impervious breastplate Mattie has a kind heart, but when Inez, a sly new recruit, joins her league, she loses her moral focus, for Inez is the offspring of a suffragette and one of the only men Mattie has ever rated. She has no time for fascism but might be guilty of an unconscious belief that breeding will out.
Historical novels frequently shine a light on contemporary mores, and Old Baggage is a timely read, not only for the anniversaries it commemorates but because of the present hostility towards feminism. The joy of Mattie is not just that she would have seen it coming, but that she would have relished the battles ahead.
- Old Baggage by Lissa Evans (Doubleday, £14.99) To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
