‘Oh my God,’ said Phyllis. She looked at me and Nora and then stared wildly around the room. There was no way any of us could get past the policemen now. ‘Get behind me.’
‘But why are they here?’ I said. ‘No one’s doing anything wrong.’
‘All right, ladies,’ said a large police officer in booming tones. ‘I’m Inspector Campbell and I must order you to take down that flag.’
An old woman in spectacles stepped forward.
‘What’s going on?’ she demanded. ‘We’ve rented this room perfectly legally. We’re not breaking any laws. How dare you barge in like this?’
‘We have it on good authority,’ said Inspector Campbell, ‘that this room is being used to launch an attack on the Prime Minister.’
Everyone started talking at once. I could hear Mrs. Mulvany shout, ‘That’s an outrageous lie!’
‘Quiet, please!’ boomed Inspector Campbell. A young policeman rushed into the room carrying a large flag pole.
‘I got this at the door, sir,’ he said. ‘Some old biddy …’
‘Ahem!’ said Inspector Campbell. ‘Some respect, please, Constable Brosnan.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ said the abashed Constable Brosnan. ‘A woman, sir, was coming in with this big old stick. A dangerous weapon, sir.’
‘It’s a flag pole, you great fool,’ said Mrs. Mulvany contemptuously.
‘Flag pole it may be,’ said Inspector Campbell. ‘But it’s also a dangerous weapon. What would happen if you hurled something like this from the window in the direction of the Prime Minister’s carriage?’
‘I wouldn’t be able to do any such thing,’ said Mrs. Mulvany. ‘It’s far too heavy. We just want to attach a flag to it and wave it out the window.’
‘A likely story,’ muttered Constable Brosnan.
‘All right, Brosnan, that’ll do,’ said Inspector Campbell. ‘But really, Miss …
‘Mrs. Mulvany,’ said Mrs. Mulvany.
‘Mrs. Mulvany, then,’ said Inspector Campbell. ‘This visit is a very serious occasion. We can’t have dangerous radicals waving giant sticks at the Prime Minister.’
‘What of the crowds below?’ said Mrs. Mulvany.
‘What about them?’ said Inspector Campbell, who was starting to look impatient.
‘Well, some of them are waving paper flags,’ said Mrs. Mulvany. ‘Perhaps one of them could be thrown at Mr. Asquith and poke his eye out.’
‘This isn’t a laughing matter Mrs. …’ Inspector Campbell’s face reddened as he tried to remember her name. ‘Mrs. Mulvany. We take the security of the prime minister very seriously. Brosnan and Donnelly, stay here with me. The rest of you, go outside and keep an eye on the street. Don’t let anyone else in here.’
‘We’ve rented this room perfectly legally!’ protested Mamie Quigley.
‘That’s as may be, Miss,’ said Inspector Campbell.
‘Mrs. Quigley,’ said Mamie, primly.
Inspector Campbell sighed.
‘Mrs. Quigley, then,’ he said. ‘As I told your friend here, we have a right to search the premises. And that’s what we’re going to do.’
There was a burst of protest from the assembled suffragettes and their supporters, and then another police inspector strode into the room. He wasn’t as burly as Inspector Campbell.
‘I’ve checked the roof, Campbell,’ he said. ‘Nothing up there.’
‘Of course there’s not!’ cried Mabel. ‘Really, this is outrageous.’
Both inspectors ignored her.
‘Thank you, Inspector Cummins,’ said Inspector Campbell. ‘Search the room, boys!’
Constable Brosnan and his colleague Constable Donnelly started poking through all the poster boards and opening the various drawers, under the watchful eyes of the two inspectors. They shook out the flags before dumping them on the floor by the suffragettes’ feet and even went through the pockets of the coats that were hanging on a hatstand in the corner, despite the protests of their owners.
‘What do they think they’ll find?’ I whispered to Phyllis.
‘Shut up,’ Phyllis hissed back. Her face was very white. ‘Don’t bring any attention to yourself.’
Then Mabel, who had been glowering out of the window, unable to bring herself to look at the policemen, let out a cry.
‘He’s coming! He’s coming!’
I whirled round and, looking out onto Nassau Street, saw a large and impressive carriage making its way down the street from the direction of Westland Row. The crowd started to cheer and lots of people waved their little flags. Everyone in the room, apart from the policemen, crowded around the windows.
‘Stand back there, ladies!’ called Inspector Cummins, but we all ignored him.
‘Quickly,’ said Mabel. ‘Roll out the flags!’ And several suffragettes grabbed the flags and rolled them out of the window, clutching the edges tightly to stop them falling down onto the crowds and policemen gathered below. One said, ‘HOME RULE FOR IRISH WOMEN’ and the other just said, ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN’.
‘Stop that at once!’ said Inspector Campbell, but it was too late. Mr. Asquith’s carriage was practically upon us, and now I could actually see his face, so familiar from pictures in Father’s newspaper. Mr. Redmond, whose features were equally familiar, sat next to him in the carriage.
‘VOTES FOR WOMEN!’ roared Mabel, and everyone else took up the cry. I knew I should have been trying to fade into the background, but I couldn’t resist. I roared ‘Votes for Women!’ along with the rest of them, and so did Nora. And, even though she was so worried about me and Nora getting arrested (and, more importantly as far as she was concerned, getting her into trouble), so did Phyllis. As the Prime Minister went past us, he turned his head towards the sound of the roars, and I’m not going to say he acknowledged our shouts, but he definitely heard them and he couldn’t possibly have missed the enormous flags.
‘Mollie!’ cried Nora. ‘The confetti!’
And I pushed under Phyllis’s arms, leaned as far out of the window as I could, and shook the paper bag with all my might. The little circles of paper floated down onto the crowd, and several people looked around to see where the mysterious confetti was coming from.
‘Votes for women!’ I cried, and ‘Votes for women!’ yelled Nora, and then Phyllis yanked me back so hard I nearly fell onto the floor which, as I pointed out later, would really have made the policemen notice me, so she should have just left me alone. Not that she was thinking of that.
‘Stop fooling about!’ she snarled. ‘Good lord, why did I take you here?’
But before I could answer her, the two constables were in our midst and were pulling the flags out of the hands of those who had been waving them out of the window.
‘All right, all right, you’ve had your fun,’ said Inspector Cummins. ‘Now, why don’t you go home to your husbands and stop this play-acting?’
‘You’d be better off occupying yourselves down there,’ said a stout woman in a dark purple coat, pointing down to the street below, where two drunken men had pushed their way through the crowds and were now following the procession with many roars and rude chants.
‘And that pair probably have the vote,’ muttered Mamie.
‘Come on, lads,’ said Inspector Campbell. ‘We’ve done all we can do here.’ He raised his hat at the suffragettes still gathered by the window. ‘Ladies.’ And with that, he strode out of the room, followed by his colleagues. Mrs. Mulvany went over and shut the door, then turned to face the rest of us.
‘Well!’ she said. And she sat down very suddenly in the nearest chair. ‘Good lord, I feel quite faint.’
‘I’ve got some salts,’ said Mamie, rushing to the hat stand and picking up a small velvet bag, from which she produced a bottle whose strong-smelling contents soon restored Mrs. Mulvany. I have never been revived by smelling salts but they smell jolly strong so I am not surprised that just having them wafted under your nose would restore you.
‘Thank you, Mrs. Quigley,’ said
Mrs. Mulvany. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’
‘It sometimes happens after great exertion,’ said Mabel. ‘My father’s a doctor and he says that when one’s been very brave, one sometimes collapses once it’s all over. As if one’s run out of oil.’
‘What could have led them to raid us?’ said a young man with curly hair, who was folding up one of the flags.
‘Ignorant trouble-making,’ said Mrs. Mulvany.
‘They can’t have thought we were really going to do something to the Prime Minister,’ said Phyllis. She looked nervously around the room. ‘Can they?’
‘You’ve read how we’re described in the papers,’ said Mamie Quigley. ‘They’d believe us capable of anything.’
‘Apart from voting,’ said another suffragette dryly, and everyone laughed.
‘Well, ladies,’ said Mrs. Mulvany, sounding much restored. ‘We may have been rudely interrupted, but we managed to get our point across nevertheless.’
‘Three cheers for the I.W.F.L!’ cried the irrepressible Mabel. ‘Hip, hip, hooray!’
And everyone joined in. Then they all started gathering their coats and bags and discussing what to do next.
‘Are there more protests happening this evening?’ asked Nora.
‘If there are, you won’t be anywhere near them,’ said Phyllis firmly. ‘I’m going to get you two home before anything else dangerous happens. If the hat shop’s still open, you can change there. And if it’s not, we’ll go to the Farm Produce.’
There was no point in arguing with her. We followed her down the stairs, with Mabel bringing up the rear.
‘I was thinking of trying to get in to the Theatre Royal meeting tomorrow,’ Mabel said. ‘You know, where Mr. Asquith and Mr. Redmond will be speaking.’
‘There’s no point,’ said Phyllis. ‘You know they’re only letting women in if they can be vouched for by a man. And they’ve already been refunding tickets to any men they’ve discovered are sympathetic to the cause.’
‘Such babies!’ said Mabel in disgust. ‘Call themselves politicians, and then they can’t even bear to answer a few simple questions.’
‘I heard Mr. Sheehy-Skeffington is going to try to get in anyway.’ Phyllis had reached the street door when suddenly she paused. A familiar figure was pushing her way through the crowd towards us. ‘Kathleen! I didn’t think you were coming.’
‘I had to warn you …’ gasped Kathleen. She looked as if she had just run a mile. Her cheeks were flushed, and her hat, a typically flamboyant affair the shape of an upside down pie dish, with a large cream satin rose that looked more like a cabbage to me, was askew over her dark curly hair.
‘Come in here and sit down.’ Mabel took charge. She led Kathleen back into the building and sat her down on a small hard chair near the door. ‘What’s happened?’
‘It was on Sackville Street,’ said Kathleen, whose breathing was returning to normal. ‘Just at the bridge. Someone threw a hatchet at the Prime Minister.’
There was a shocked silence for a moment. When Phyllis broke it, her voice was shaking.
‘You’re joking.’
‘I wish I was,’ said Kathleen.
Nora’s face was very pale. ‘Is he … dead?’ she asked.
I felt my stomach lurch. The Prime Minister was my enemy, being opposed to the cause. But I certainly didn’t think he should be murdered.
Kathleen, however, shook her head. ‘It didn’t hit him. It got Mr. Redmond, but he wasn’t badly hurt.’
‘But who could have done something like that?’ said Phyllis. ‘Was it a Nationalist? Or someone against Home Rule?’
‘No,’ said Kathleen. ‘It was a suffragette!’
We stared at her, too stunned to speak.
‘I was shocked too,’ said Kathleen. ‘But there’s no doubt. Mrs. Joyce saw it happen.’
‘But that wasn’t one of our plans,’ said Mabel. ‘I know we don’t get told everything, but there’s no way any of the leaders would agree to something like that. Not here. Not now.’
‘She was from a group of Englishwomen,’ said Kathleen. ‘At least, that’s what Mrs. Joyce told me. She was next to them in the crowd and she heard them talking – I was a little further back. They threw a hatchet with a message tied to the handle. She couldn’t make out what it said.’
‘What were they thinking?’ cried Phyllis. ‘If they wanted to throw hatchets at him – not that I think they should – why couldn’t they do it in England? Why did they have to come over here where we’ll all get the blame?’
‘I think we should all get home straight away,’ said Kathleen. ‘The crowds were getting very angry. I only came over here to warn you.’
I know she’s always been rather snobbish and patronising towards me and Nora, but braving the crowds in order to warn her friends was jolly decent.
‘If we go around by Westland Row and then across the bridge to Beresford Place we can go down Gardiner Street,’ said Phyllis. ‘At least that way we’ll avoid Sackville Street.’
That was when Kathleen seemed to notice me and Nora for the first time.
‘What on earth are those two doing here?’ she demanded. ‘And why are they dressed up like that?’
I stopped feeling sympathetic.
‘They’ve earned the right to be here,’ said Mabel firmly. ‘Now come on, let’s get going.’
She, Kathleen and Phyllis led the way, with me and Nora trailing behind. It wasn’t easy to walk quickly in high-heeled shoes. There were still a lot of people milling around Nassau Street, though the policemen were nowhere to be seen. I pointed this out to Nora.
‘They’re probably down in Sackville Street arresting the English suffragettes,’ she said.
‘Come on, you two,’ said Phyllis, grabbing my arm and yanking me along like a baby. ‘I’m not going to risk losing you in this morass.’
‘You don’t have to pull me,’ I grumbled.
‘I shouldn’t let you out of my sight.’ Phyllis looked genuinely worried, not just annoyed (her usual expression when dealing with me). ‘We could all have been arrested!’
‘It was terribly bad luck,’ said Nora. ‘I mean, we were in a nice, safe private room. You couldn’t have known we’d be raided by the police.’
‘It was quite exciting, though,’ I said. ‘Come on, Phyl, you must admit it was. After all, nothing bad really happened.’
Phyllis wasn’t going to admit any such thing.
‘It wouldn’t have been exciting if you’d been carted off to jail for throwing that stupid bloody confetti.’
I have never heard her swear before. And calling the confetti stupid as well! Nora and I gaped at her in horror.
‘Phyllis!’ I said.
She had the grace to blush.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that in front of you.’
‘Or at all,’ I said severely. ‘Anyway, we weren’t carted anywhere. We’re all perfectly safe. And now we have a jolly good story to tell.’
‘You’d better not tell it to anyone,’ said Phyllis.
‘I meant when we’re old and grey,’ I said. ‘We can tell our great-grandchildren.’
‘I doubt they’d be interested,’ said Phyllis. ‘Oh, blast it all, these crowds!’ We had reached Great Brunswick Street, where just a few weeks ago we had tried to attend the giant suffrage meeting. We had no choice but to walk down to Tara Street, where we could cross the river.
‘I think we should try and get a cab,’ said Mabel in a low voice. ‘The crowds could turn on us if they realise we’re suffragettes.’
‘But weren’t the jarveys protesting today?’ said Phyllis. ‘I read in the paper they’re objecting to motor cabs.’ You may have forgotten, but ‘jarvey’ is our Dublin word for cab driver.
‘They’re still operating their cabs, though,’ said Mabel. ‘I saw a few on my way here. It’s worth a try.’
Phyllis nodded. There was a jarveys’ rest near the train station, so we went back to Westland Row and
luckily managed to get one straight away.
‘I’ll be happy to take you ladies home,’ said the jarvey. ‘Town’s not safe this evening, with those suffragettes roaming the streets.’
None of our group trusted themselves to say anything, but the jarvey didn’t seem to care.
‘Did you hear about the hatchet? Bleeding disgrace – pardon my language, ladies.’
‘It’s quite all right,’ said Mabel, faintly. With a subtle movement, she adjusted the lapel of her coat so that her I.W. F. L. Votes for Women badge could not be seen. ‘Can you take us to Drumcondra, please?’
‘Just climb aboard,’ said the jarvey.
As the cab clattered along the street and over Butt Bridge, I saw that the crowds were still fairly thick. There were quite a large number of angry-looking men, and I was very glad Phyllis had thought of getting a cab. The crowds had thinned out by the time we reached Gardiner Street, and it wasn’t until we were rattling down Drumcondra Road that something very important struck me.
‘Phyllis,’ I said. ‘Our clothes!’ In all the fuss and excitement, we’d forgotten to change back into our own things. As soon as she realised this Phyllis looked as if she were going to cry. But once more, Mabel took charge.
‘Kathleen, block out that window. I’ll get in front of this one. Right, girls, get changed. And do it quickly.’
We were so squashed that it was difficult to move at all, let alone unbutton and wriggle out of the borrowed long skirts. We barely had room to open the bag and get out our ordinary clothes. There was a terrible moment when we thought one of Nora’s own shoes had been left behind in the hat shop, but it was found wrapped up in her skirt. As the cab turned off Drumcondra Road and towards the corner where we’d asked to be let out, I managed to squash the borrowed hats, skirts and shoes back in the carpet bag. There was no time to take down our hair but as Mabel said, ‘It can’t be helped. Besides, you can brush that off as a joke. Just say you were trying to look sophisticated for the theatre. It’s harder to explain why you were parading around the streets in long skirts and my mother’s shoes.’
The cab clattered to a halt and we tumbled out (almost literally in the case of me and Nora). Mabel paid the jarvey, who looked at us curiously as he drove away, probably wondering why two sophisticated young ladies who had got into his cab half an hour earlier had been transformed into slightly grubby schoolgirls. Our appearance wasn’t improved by the fact that, when they were all squashed into the bag, our shoes had managed to transfer a surprising amount of dust onto our skirts.