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1928: What do you do next, after you’ve changed the world?
Old Baggage
What you need to know before your trail
Matilda Simpkin, rooting through a cupboard, comes across a small wooden club – an old possession of hers, unseen for more than a decade.
Mattie is a woman with a thrilling past and a chafingly uneventful present. During the Women’s Suffrage Campaign she was a militant. Jailed five times, she marched, sang, gave speeches, smashed windows and heckled Winston Churchill, and nothing – nothing – since then has had the same depth, the same excitement.
Now in middle age, she is still looking for a fresh mould into which to pour her energies. Giving the wooden club a thoughtful twirl, she is struck by an idea – but what starts as a brilliantly idealistic plan is derailed by a connection with Mattie’s militant past, one which begins to threaten every principle that she stands for.
Locations
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Suffragettes in London
What did they do next?
After the vote had been won….what happened?
The story opens on Hampstead Heath when a bag snatching changes the lives of many women. Ida whose bag was taken, comes to work in the house of Mattie Simpson of ‘Crooked Heart’ fame. Mattie lives with her friend Florie Lee, and they were both major players in the suffragette movement.
The situation might be improving but slowly. Women are still suffering from inequality in many ways. The next generation don’t seem to care what has been won for them. European political idealsseem to be coming in to play such as fascism and young minds are ripe for the taking…
The Hampstead Heath’s Girls Club is one of the groups tasked with taking women’s rights forward and educating women and girls that this vote is more important thatn they realise. The birth of the welfare state depends on it.
How should the suffragettes hope to change things:
“one should try to spark a few fresh lights along the way. To be a tinderbox rather than a candle.”
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
This was such a joy to read and extremely apt and poignant in the year we’re all supporting and remembering what these woman did for us. These were the early days of feminism and women’s rights but it’s told in such a poignant, warm witty way that it feels like you’re stepping into a sepia photo, a moment in history with some of the loveliest women I’ve met in a book. I really wanted them to pop by for a cup of tea after I’d read it, I missed them so much!
Lissa Evans has really achieved something special with this book. It’s packed full of information woven into a charming tale so you never feel you’re ‘learning’ but you do feel so much wiser and enlighted by the end. Curious even and that’s no bad thing with a subject matter as important as this one.
I’d love to see this on the TV. I’d go down to the set and hug Mattie and Florrie for real!
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Old Baggage
Destination : London Author/Guide: Lissa Evans Departure Time: 1928
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