The Carhullan Army

laughed and said I would think about it.
    Towards the end of the second week she found me in the kitchen helping those cleaning the plates and rinsing them in the sink. She handed me a piece of blue stone looped at the ends with wire and attached to a lace. She had on a similar necklace. ‘You don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it,’ she said. ‘There won’t be any offence.’ I thanked her and asked her to fasten it behind my neck but she refused, saying it would be inappropriate and that I should do it myself. She moved back into the crowd and began drinking with the rest of the women. In the corner I saw Jackie watching me, a bottle of spirit stowed next to her on the hearth, the contents glowing in front of the flames.
    *

    Not all the evening meetings were given over to entertainment and carousing. There were formal discussions and debates that ran to order. There were at least two of these a month I learned. I could remember hearing some of the debates in the old Houses of Parliament on my father’s radio. They were torrid and wasteful affairs, conducted by obtuse politicians, interrupted by jeers and barracking, and filled with disparaging comments. In the weeks preceding the collapse they had ceased to be broadcast and the public had been left to speculate about whether the dysfunction had increased and paralysed the mechanism altogether, or whether representatives were belatedly getting down to the business of trying to prevent the country’s ruin. Not long after that, the Thames flood barrier had been overwhelmed and tidal water had filled the building.
    At Carhullan things were startlingly different. Disagreements were expressed through uninterrupted statements and anyone butting in forfeited her right to speak that night. Women took turns to put forward an idea or a problem, one after the other, and then there was a rebuttal or agreement. Occasionally something might be put to a vote. The speakers presented their views concisely or at length, depending on who was speaking and what was being said. Meanwhile a hush from the others was expected. The room listened. Whoever chaired the meeting did so with a firm but fair hand. Jackie did not host the gatherings, but she had an almost presidential right to comment, to approve or veto. The influence she carried was quiet and pervasive. It was not that she out-argued her opponents. She did not have to. It took only a slight nod from her for an appeal to be granted. Usually she accepted whatever was being said. If not, her disagreement would be carefully couched and resolute. Over the next months I would find that there were only a few women willing to go up against her in earnest about the running of the place, or challenge her fundamentally on the nature of what it was she was doing with her unit.
    The first meeting I attended, though I had agreed in principle to speak, I was granted a pass. I heard Lorry and Jackie discussing me in the kitchen the morning before as I came down the stairs. Through the open door I saw that they were hanging a yellow swatch of cloth above the lintel. ‘Give her another couple of weeks,’ Lorry was saying, ‘until she gets her strength back. There’s no need to rush things.’ Jackie seemed less keen to have me sit it out. ‘It’ll be better if she’s still sick with it. Better for them all to see it in her. They need to see it.’ Lorry sighed. ‘That may be, but she needs rest. She’s still not sleeping through.’ Jackie nodded, and when I came into the room she told me curtly not to worry about speaking that evening, and she left the house.

    Instead I sat quietly and listened to the proceedings. There was a brief request for people to stay off the growing furrows when they walked to the bothies; the plants were being trodden down and damaged. Soap was being used up quicker than it could be made again. One of the dogs was ailing and might need to be put down. After practical business the floor was opened up to other things.
    If Carhullan appeared on one level to be efficient and united, it was also fraught on others. I could see that there were old areas of conflict, matters that had been worried at again and again by the inhabitants without resolution. There were several men nearby, I discovered, in a lower lying hamlet on the other side of the valley. They were involved with the farm’s running, but remained at a satellite location. Whether to include them at Carhullan seemed to be a matter of