John Thomas Raynor is an inspector on the trams and Annie Stone is a conductress. He is good-looking and cocky, and he’s been out with all of the conductresses but Annie. She has a sharp tongue, and, she believes, knows his measure. Nonetheless, an exciting evening at a local fair leads to growing intimacy, and when Raynor proves uninterested in more than flirtation, Annie’s revenge is terrible.… terrible.
“Tickets, Please” is a short story by D.H. Lawrence set in the English Midlands during the First World War.
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With time, people forget D.H. Lawrence’s books were banned, called obscene, and that he was essentially exiled from England because he married a German just at the time of WWI. He also narrowly escaped dying of the Spanish flu. Lawrence wrote everything, including travelogs, novels, stories, novellas, poems and essays. But stories were a special passion of his and he even said that when he wrote a story he was put in touch with his inner “daemon” in a way that he wasn’t when he wrote in other forms. Two of his best are “Tickets, Please” from his collection England, My England and “The Horsedealer’s Daughter” from Selected Stories. Both stories are about a world divided into female and male and the utter irrevocability of this fact. Lawrence is unique for how deeply he thought about the divide and how much it mattered to him and his work. “Tickets, Please” is about a man shortage that happened to women all over Europe during WWI. The main characters are Annie, a train conductor, and John Joseph, a train inspector, who happens to be one of the few desirable males not off fighting the war against Germany and is working on a train with dozens of young women who have taken jobs normally done by men. John Joseph does what many would do in his place: he takes advantage. But he is careful to pick a different woman to walk home every few days to prevent any of them from really laying claim to him. It seems harmless and looks innocent and it appears it will go on this way right through the war. That is, until a night after work when a number of the girls manage to crowd him and themselves into a small space with only one door, which is then locked. “Horsedealer’s Daughter” is about the historical moment when the millions of horses all over the world were suddenly no longer needed because of readily available mass transit. Overnight, hundreds of thousands were thrown out of work and as many family businesses collapsed. Mabel, a main character in the story, has just watched it happen to her family. And now she and her brothers, with parents already in the cemetery, must split up. The brothers will fill openings in other trades and work for others. But Mabel who is unmarried has no choice but to go live with relatives where she will do chores for her room and board and be a burden. So instead she plans to drown herself. Another main character is Ferguson, the country doctor, who is also unmarried, also young, and is attracted to Mabel, and is really the only eligible male for miles. Lawrence is fascinated by the absurdly painful dilemma facing women and men which is that life can’t go on unless we somehow find a way to get together. Mabel is in a bind she can’t escape because she has no prospects. Ferguson, too, is in a bind because the one decent young woman he knows would’ve killed herself if he hadn’t stopped her. For both, there’s a terrible realization dawning as they confront each other: this person facing them across the room is probably the only one who might offer them a way out.