Sisters of Silent Street

The Sisters of Silent Street

 In the Autumn of 1916 four  women named Margaret meet for the first time in their lives at a large
old house they have never seen before. They are told that they are half sisters. Their father (a travelling salesman) had a daughter each with 4 women, and named all his daughters after his mother, Margaret Elizabeth. He has left them a large old house, but on one condition –
they must spend one month there living together.

In their month together the women discover their sisters, and in doing so discover themselves. As zeppelins float overhead and the newspapers are filled with the daily toll of the dead, Peg, Em, Maggie and Margot have their own problems to think about.

Em is 17 – she works as a ‘Munitionette’ in South London, living in the factory women’s hostel.
She is skinny, with a yellowish complexion caused by the chemicals in the munitions factory. Her loose uniform covers the fact she is 5 months pregnant, but she knows her secret will be discovered soon. The Father of her child is barely an adult, but he is on the front lines and Em
knows she may never see him again.

Maggie is a mother to three children and her husband is fighting in the Somme. She 28 - a good cook and confident mother, but her life has been held back by the fact she is illiterate. Away from her own neighbourhood she is almost helpless.

Margot is also 28, but a difficult haughty person with few friends. She has grown up the only child of an affluent household but now finds herself bound by duty to look after her elderly grandparents and becoming increasingly more isolated as her friends marry and move away.

The last sister is Peg, who is 38 - energetic, intellectual and gregarious. Brought up in a well-to-do but Liberal household, her life revolves around campaigns. Campaigns for women’s rights, worker’s rights, the abolishment of this and the establishment of that. She met her husband
at a march and she is fully behind his decision to become a conscientious objector. But now he is in Prison she finds herself alone, and like Em, secretly pregnant. Peg worries day and night because this is her third pregnancy but her previous two ended in miscarriage. She does not show yet, so her secret worry remains for the moment, untold.