1925 — Ethel

The gas lamps still burned on Whitechapel Road but the electric ones were coming, and Ethel could tell which buildings had been wired by the hum. She was nineteen years old and she had been working in the garment factory on Commercial Street since she was fourteen, and she could tell a hundred things by their hum: the treadle on a sewing machine that needed oil, the foreman's footsteps on the wooden stairs, the quality of the silence when the foreman stopped walking because he was looking at someone. The factory was called Rosenbaum and Sons, and the sons had all been killed in the Great War, so now it was just old Mr. Rosenbaum and the girls, thirty-seven of them in rows in a room that smelled of machine oil and damp wool and the particular sourness of women sweating through a ten-hour shift. Ethel worked the third machine from the left, second row from the window, and in winter the draught came through the frame and numbed her fingers and she learned to sew by feel when the feeling went. She was good at her work. She was good enough that Mr. Rosenbaum had moved her from piecework to the bespoke orders, the dresses for ladies who came in from Kensington and Chelsea and did not know they were being measured by a girl who lived in a tenement with a shared toilet and a single gas ring for cooking. This was 1925 and the East End of London was still the East End, which meant it was a place where the smells of breweries and tanneries and the river mixed into a single olfactory signature that told you exactly where you were and exactly what you could hope for if you were born there. Ethel had never been west of Aldgate. She had never been on a train except the one that took her to Southend once, when she was twelve, for a factory outing that her mother had saved six months to pay for. She remembered the sea. She remembered the way the horizon did not end at a warehouse or a public house or another tenement but just kept going, and she remembered thinking that this was what freedom looked like, an edge that did not end.

The two men who wanted to marry her could not have been more different. John was a docker, thirty years old, steady as a bollard. He worked the Royal Docks eight hours a day and sometimes twelve when the ships came in and the overtime was there for the taking. He had hands like shovels and a face that had settled early into the lines it would wear for the rest of his life, and when he came to the tenement on Sunday afternoons he brought flowers wrapped in newspaper and a manner that Ethel's mother described as respectable. Respectable meant he did not drink to excess. Respectable meant he had a job that would not disappear. Respectable meant he could provide a house with an indoor toilet and a door that locked and a future that did not include the workhouse, and the workhouse was the shadow that fell across every conversation about the future in the East End, the unspoken terminus of every road not taken. Ethel's mother approved of John. Ethel's mother approved of John so completely that Ethel sometimes felt the approval as a weight on her chest, a pressure that made it hard to draw a full breath.

The other man was called David and he was a tailor's apprentice in his uncle's shop on Wentworth Street. He was twenty-three and he had eyes the colour of the Thames at low tide, which was not a romantic description but was the description Ethel gave herself when she tried to explain to her own mind why she could not stop thinking about him. He was not steady. He was not a docker. He was not respectable in the way that the word meant something specific and measurable. He read books. He read books in Yiddish and English and sometimes in German when he could get them, and he talked about things that had nothing to do with wages or rents or the price of coal. He talked about the Bund and the General Strike that everyone said was coming and about the way the world was changing in places far away from Whitechapel Road. He talked about Palestine — not as a dream, never as a dream, but as a question, a problem, something that people argued about in meetings that Ethel had never attended and could not imagine attending. When she was with John she felt safe. When she was with David she felt awake. She did not know which feeling was more important. She did not know if a person could have both. She did not know if the question even made sense, because in 1925 a woman who worked in a garment factory did not get to ask philosophical questions about the nature of love. She got to choose between the docker who offered security and the apprentice who offered something that had no name, and she got to live with the choice for the rest of her life.

1975 — Julie

The record shop was called Revolver and it was on Whitechapel Road in the space that had once been a tailor's shop, then a greengrocer's, then a betting parlour, and was now a place where you could buy vinyl records and smoke cigarettes inside and listen to the new music that the older generation said was not music at all. Julie was twenty-two and she had been working at Revolver since 1973, when the shop opened and the owner, a man called Steve who wore leather trousers and had been at the Isle of Wight Festival, hired her because she knew more about music than anyone he had interviewed. This was true. Julie had been listening to records since she was old enough to hold the needle, her father's collection of jazz and blues and then, when she was old enough to have her own tastes, the stuff that came out of the pirate radio stations before they were shut down. She knew the difference between American soul and British soul, between Motown and Stax, between the early Who and the late Who and the Who in between. She knew that the New York Dolls were about to change everything and that glam rock was about to die and that something new was coming from a part of London that Julie had never visited but could feel in the bass frequencies, something raw and fast and furious that would go on to be called punk. The Sex Pistols had played their first gig the previous year, November, at Saint Martins, and Julie had been there, not because she knew what it would become but because a friend of a friend had told her about it and she had gone out of curiosity. She remembered the noise. She remembered the way the noise felt like an argument, like a demand, like a door being kicked open.

The flat was on the fourth floor of a council tower block on the Collingwood Estate. Julie shared it with two other women, Carol and Sue, who worked at the hairdresser's and the unemployment office respectively. The three of them split the rent and the electricity and the arguments about whose turn it was to buy toilet paper, and together they formed a unit that was not quite a family and not quite a friendship and not quite a political collective but was something that contained elements of all three. This was 1975 and the Women's Liberation Movement was everywhere, which meant it was in the conversations at the flat, in the pamphlets on the kitchen table, in the way the three of them talked about their jobs and their relationships and the men who assumed things about them that the men had no right to assume. Julie had been to the marches. She had been to the meetings. She believed in the cause, or she believed she believed in it, which was not quite the same thing but was as close as she could get while also believing that the Sex Pistols were important and that personal style was a form of politics and that wearing platform shoes did not make you a traitor to the sisterhood. These contradictions lived inside her without resolution, and she had stopped expecting them to resolve. She was twenty-two. She was living through the three-day week and the power cuts and the slow collapse of the post-war consensus, and she was trying to figure out what a woman owed to herself and what a woman owed to the world, and the two answers did not match.

1975 — Julie (continued)

The power cuts changed everything and nothing. They were supposed to change everything — the government was bringing down the miners, the miners were bringing down the government, the country was running out of electricity and consensus and the will to keep pretending that things would go back to how they had been — but the cuts mostly meant that the record shop closed early on Thursdays and the flat was lit by candles and the conversations went longer because there was nothing else to do. Julie learned to read by candlelight. She read Spare Rib and The Female Eunuch and a biography of Bessie Smith that Steve had given her from the shop, and she tried to reconcile the things she was reading with the things she was feeling, which was that she wanted to be free and she did not know what freedom looked like. Her grandmother had died when Julie was ten, in the nineteen-sixties, and Julie remembered her as a woman who always wore a hat to church and who had hands that looked like they had done a lot of work and who never said much about her own life. Julie wished she had asked more questions. She wished she knew what her grandmother had wanted, back in the twenties, back when the East End was a different country and the choices available to a woman were so narrow that even wanting something different was a kind of rebellion. She wished she could ask her grandmother what freedom felt like when freedom was not a word you were allowed to use.

1925 — Ethel (continued)

On a Saturday in July, Ethel went dancing at the Palais on Commercial Road. The Palais was a dance hall that had been built before the war and still smelled of the war, which is to say it smelled of the absence of men, the particular atmospheric pressure created by a generation of women dancing with each other because the men who should have been there were in graves in France. Ethel went with her friend Lily, who worked the machine next to hers at Rosenbaum's, and they wore their Sunday dresses and did their hair with pins and walked the six streets from the tenement to the Palais in the summer twilight that made the East End look almost beautiful, if beauty was something that could be understood as the absence of industrial ugliness rather than the presence of anything lovely. The hall was crowded. The band was playing ragtime, or something that had started as ragtime and had been filtered through the particular sensibilities of East End musicians who had learned their instruments in Salvation Army bands and music hall pits. Ethel danced with a boy she did not know and then with another boy she did not know and then she stood at the edge of the floor and watched the dancers and thought about John and David and about what it meant to choose. The choice felt impossible because the two options were not on the same scale. John meant a future. David meant a feeling. You could not measure a feeling against a future because they were different kinds of things, like comparing a length of cloth to a cup of tea. They did not convert. Ethel stood at the edge of the dance floor in the gaslight and the cigarette smoke and she understood something that she would never be able to explain, not to her mother and not to Lily and not to anyone: that whatever she chose, she would lose the other thing, and the other thing would always be there, a ghost at the edge of the life she had not chosen.

1975 — Julie (continued)

On a Saturday in July, Julie went to a pub in Camden Town to see a band she had never heard of. The pub was called the Dublin Castle and the band was called Dr. Feelgood and the music was raw and fast and made her feel like something was about to happen, which was how she felt most of the time in 1975, a sense of imminence that had no specific object. She went with Sue from the flat and a boy named Mike who worked at the market and who Julie was sort of seeing, which meant she had slept with him twice and was not sure if she wanted to again. The pill made it possible to not be sure. The pill made it possible to not have to make the kinds of decisions that had defined her grandmother's generation, the decisions about marriage and children and security, the decisions that were really only one decision — who — that determined everything else. Julie could choose Mike or not choose Mike, could change her mind, could change her mind again, and the consequences were limited to awkward conversations and the particular sadness of ending something that had never quite started. This was freedom. She knew it was freedom. And yet she sometimes felt that freedom had its own weight, its own gravity, its own way of demanding something from you. When every choice was possible, every choice was also a burden. When you could do anything, you had to know what you wanted, and Julie sometimes suspected that she did not know what she wanted, that she had been given the gift of knowing what she wanted and had never developed the skill.

1925 — Ethel (continued)

The decision came in September, and it came not because Ethel made it but because it was made for her. David asked her to marry him. He asked her on a Sunday afternoon on a bench in Victoria Park, the autumn leaves beginning to turn, the sound of children playing somewhere beyond the trees. He had nothing to offer, he said. No house. No security. Only the tailor's shop, which would be his one day, and the books, which would always be his, and the particular way he looked at her that made her feel like she was not a factory girl but something else, something that had not been named yet. Ethel said yes before she could stop herself. She said yes and then she spent the rest of the afternoon walking home through the East End streets in a state of terror and excitement that felt like the same thing and was probably the same thing, the same chemical reaction with two different labels. She told her mother that evening. Her mother cried. Not because she was angry, or not only because she was angry, but because she was afraid. She was afraid of the workhouse. She was afraid of poverty. She was afraid of the thing that had happened to her own mother, Ethel's grandmother, who had married a man with a dream and no money and had spent the rest of her life paying for the dream with her body, with her hands, with the years that had hollowed her out from the inside. Ethel listened to her mother's fear and recognised it as love, which made it harder to ignore. She listened and she nodded and she went to bed in the room she shared with her two younger sisters and she stared at the ceiling and she thought about David's eyes and John's hands and the sea at Southend and the way the horizon did not end. She thought about the life she was choosing and the life she was not choosing, and she understood that she would spend the rest of her life thinking about both.

1975 — Julie (continued)

The decision came in September, and it came because Julie was offered a job at a record label in Soho. The money was not much better than the shop but the possibilities were different: the possibility of meeting people who made things happen, the possibility of being in the room where the decisions were made, the possibility of becoming someone who was not just a witness to the music but a participant. She would have to leave the flat. She would have to leave Carol and Sue and the conversations on the kitchen table and the candles during the power cuts and the life she had been building since she was nineteen and first walked into Revolver and asked Steve if he was hiring. She sat on the floor of the flat on a Thursday evening, the candles lit because the power was out again, and she thought about her grandmother. She thought about the woman in the hat who never said much about her own life. She thought about the choices that woman had made, or had not made, or had been unable to make, and she thought about the distance between those choices and her own. She was free. She knew she was free. And the freedom meant that the choice was hers, entirely hers, with no one to blame and no one to thank and no one to tell her whether she was doing the right thing. She decided to take the job. She decided it the way you decide to walk through a door without knowing what is on the other side, which is to say she decided it because not deciding was worse than deciding badly. She wrote Steve a letter that she would deliver in the morning, and she blew out the candles and went to sleep on the floor because the mattress was in Carol's room and they were not speaking this week, and she dreamed about her grandmother, about the hat and the hands and the factory and the two men and the sea at Southend, about the horizon that did not end.

Epilogue — 1975

Julie's grandmother had chosen David. She had chosen the tailor's apprentice with the Thames-coloured eyes and the books and the particular way of looking at her that made her feel like more than a factory girl. She had chosen him and she had married him in a small ceremony at the synagogue on Fieldgate Street and she had spent the next thirty-five years cooking and cleaning and raising children and never going west of Aldgate and never seeing the sea again. She had been happy. Julie knew this because her mother had told her, had said the words your grandmother was happy in the tone of voice that people use when they want something to be true. Julie believed it and did not believe it in the way that you believe and do not believe things about people you loved but never really knew. Ethel had chosen David and she had been happy and she had died in 1963, ten years before Julie would walk into Revolver and ask Steve for a job. She had died before the pill and the power cuts and the Sex Pistols and the Women's Liberation Movement and everything that made Julie's world possible. And Julie, sitting in her new office in Soho in December of 1975, the Queen's Silver Jubilee preparations beginning to appear in shop windows, the country lurching toward the end of the decade and the end of the consensus, thought about her grandmother and about the word happy and about what it meant to live a life in one frame of reference and be judged by another. She thought about the two women, the grandmother and the granddaughter, the past and the present, two lives separated by fifty years and the same question: what does a woman owe to herself, and what does she owe to the world, and can the two debts ever be paid with the same currency? The answer, she suspected, was no. But the question was worth asking anyway. It was worth asking every day, in every life, in every frame of reference, until the frames shifted and the question changed and the answer, if there was one, disappeared into the distance like a horizon that kept receding.