Pink carnations

They filled the chamber with pink carnations that July day in 2013. A fragile splash of colour against the dark wood and red leather of the House of Lords. Lord Waheed Alli had organised a box full of the flowers to pass around, a visible show of support for the bill of same-sex marriage.

Lynne Featherstone writes of this moment in her memoir (Equal Ever After), and of the custom-made Ben & Jerry’s that arrived at her office as a show of support. Among legal arguments and public debates, it was flowers and ice cream that became the cherished touchstones of her campaign work.

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Carrie Gracie served as the BBC’s China Editor for years when she discovered only by accident that her male colleagues earned nearly double her salary for equivalent roles. The institution she had devoted decades to had been paying her less because of her gender, then spent months explaining to her why this wasn’t actually a problem.

When Gracie became the reluctant center of attention over the BBC’s gender pay gap in early 2018, going public with an open letter on the front page of the Times, she entered a landscape both blindingly public and profoundly isolating.

She writes movingly of the protracted couple of years she spent in dispute with the BBC. She eventually won a settlement out of court, which she donated to the Fawcett Society.

One of the most harrowing aspects of her fight was that it put her in conflict with an organisation she loved, and found herself alienated from/by close colleagues. She writes, “When you’re in the fight of your life, everything is heightened. You never forget who steps in to help, who stops to acknowledge your existence and who strides past with eyes averted.”

At the end of a testimony she was giving to a Parliamentary committee, a group of BBC women game and presented her with a locket engraved #IstandwithCarrie. A small chain of silver, heavy with meaning.

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Amelia Gentleman was the journalist at the Guardian who worked to expose the Windrush scandal. Initially it was seemingly a lone case of a woman in Wolverhampton, Paulette Wilson. Paulette had worked in the House of Commons canteen for years but then found herself needing to regularly report to the Home Office before being sent to a detention centre.

One case became two, then ten, then dozens. Gentleman persisted in profiling stories of people who had arrived in the UK as British citizens for over a year before the story gained traction during the 2018 Commonwealth summit. People who had built lives, raised families, paid taxes – only to be told they didn’t belong.

As the pressure on the government mounted, journalists worked round the clock to supply information, rally support and guide those coming forward as victims.

In the midst of this, Gentleman recounts the arrival of a shoebox of chocolate bars from Dorset, sent by someone who reckoned the office was likely in need of sustenance.

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The conviction we hold about what is possible and right itself shapes what is possible and right. It is conviction that is the driver of action for battles that stretch for years, that distort people’s sense of reality and which fuse people’s identity with a cause.

When Featherstone began advocating for same-sex marriage, when Gracie challenged the BBC’s pay structure, when Gentleman reported on the Windrush scandal – each confronted a reality that seemed fixed and unmovable. Marriage was traditionally defined as between a man and a woman. Pay disparities were explained away. The treatment of long-term residents was dismissed as unfortunate but isolated incidents.

Conviction is both empowering and burdensome. It is necessary for continuing to fight, but it is alienating from the status quo. Significant change only seems inevitable in retrospect.

I think this is why the small details of carnations, chains and chocolates matter so profoundly. They might not solve anything, but they acknowledge something. They are the antidote to the quietly devastating line in Gracie’s book which describes fights for justice as “like a bereavement, everyone’s there for the funeral but then they drift away.”

Initial outrage can cools, attention can shift, elsewhere, allies grow weary. In the midst of this, small gestures become proof that you’re not entirely alone; artifacts of the human kindnesses and courage that make history.