‘What are you doing galumphing about like an elephant?’ Harry was his usual charming self. I gave him my best Phyllis-ish look.
‘I’m not galumphing anywhere,’ I said. ‘I’m just full of energy.’ And I strode past him and into the drawing room, where Mother was lying on the sofa with a handkerchief over her eyes.
‘Are you all right?’ I said. I hoped she wasn’t coming down with scarlet fever or whatever Grace’s family have. The last thing I want is for us all to be quarantined.
Mother removed the handkerchief, and I got a whiff of Eau de Cologne.
‘It’s just a headache,’ she said. She does get them sometimes. ‘Draw the curtains, there’s a good girl.’
I obeyed. I wasn’t sure if this was a good time to ask her if I could go over to Nora’s house, but I didn’t really have a choice. Luckily, if slightly offensively, she seemed happy to be rid of me.
‘Julia’s invited Christina over for tea,’ she said. ‘So that’ll save Maggie some trouble. She’s been run off her feet with an extra person in the house all week.’
I had to admit that I had never thought about the fact that Frank being here meant more work for Maggie. I thanked Mother and went down to the kitchen to tell Maggie that I wasn’t going to be home for tea.
‘I hope you’re not thinking of going into town.’ Maggie’s face was stern as she turned from the sink, where she was busy washing the dishes.
‘Phyllis won’t take us,’ I said, which wasn’t a lie.
Maggie turned back to the dishes.
‘That hasn’t stopped you before,’ she said.
I was glad she couldn’t see my face because I’m quite sure I was blushing.
‘I’m just going to meet Nora,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you later.’
But when I reached the hall, the door to the dining room opened and Harry appeared.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, with typical lack of manners.
‘I’m going to see Nora, if you must know,’ I said, in my haughtiest tone.
‘Well, me and Frank and Father are just about to start a game of Consequences. You can play if you like. Father told me to ask you.’ This, by the way, is about as close as Harry ever gets to a polite invitation.
As you may recall, I love playing Consequences. It’s the funniest paper game. (You know, it’s the one where you write down different things and fold over the paper and the next player continues the story without reading the first part.) It did sound like a jolly evening. And maybe even a chance to make things go back to normal with Frank, but then I heard the clock in the drawing room strike the hour. I had more important things to do than play Consequences with a very nice boy (and my stupid brother and quite nice father).
‘Sorry,’ I said. And I really was. ‘But duty calls. I mean, Nora calls. I’m going to her house.’
‘Oh well,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t care if you play or not.’ And he went back into the dining room. He really does have the manners of a pig.
I had arranged to meet Nora at the corner near her house. I have to admit I was relieved when I saw her trotting around the corner with a large bag in her hand and two large but simple straw hats tucked under one arm, stacked on top of each other. I hadn’t had total faith in her ability to sneak into the kitchen and get the clothes out of the bundle in the manner of one of Peter Fitzgerald’s skillful jewel thieves.
‘Well done!’ I said.
‘I told you I could do it.’ Nora seemed affronted by my lack of faith. ‘But where are we going to change into them? We were idiots not to think of that last night.’
‘I’ve thought of something,’ I said. ‘But it’s rather … well, daring.’
I told her my idea.
‘The church?’ she said. ‘But Mollie, we can’t!’
‘There won’t be anyone there at this time of day!’ I said. ‘We could just hide in the pews if we hear someone come in.’
‘We can’t take our clothes off in a church!’ Nora was still appalled.
‘We won’t really be taking them off,’ I argued. ‘Well, I mean, we sort of will, but only our skirts and we could put the long skirts over them first so we won’t be standing there in our petticoats. And then it’s only a matter of changing coats, and that’s hardly indecent.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Nora, but she didn’t look absolutely comfortable with the idea.
And to tell you the truth, as we slipped through the side door of the church and cautiously looked around, I felt quite uncomfortable myself. There was no one around, and we made our way to a dark corner where Nora took the skirts and coats out of the bag. It did seem wrong to take off anything. But desperate times call for desperate measures. We put the long skirts over our usual ones (and very difficult that was too) and then stepped out of our own skirts. Once we had changed into Mrs. Cantwell’s coats (there was an unfortunate stain where, Nora said, Barnaby had once jumped up on her mother at the tennis club after rolling in something unspeakably horrid) and tucked our hair up under the hats (there was no time to do it properly so we just pinned our plaits on top of our heads, puffed the front of our hair out a bit, and hoped our hat pins would keep it all in place), we looked quite grown up. Or at least grown-up enough not to earn a second glance in a crowded street.
‘After all,’ said Nora, ‘it’s not like yesterday, when we had to fool a room full of grown-up suffragettes at close quarters. We just have to make sure Phyllis and Co. don’t notice us from a distance. In a crowd.’
We had to walk into town – the bag wasn’t very heavy with just our skirts in it, and we wanted to save our money for the tram fare home – and I was pleased to see that apart from some ragged children playing near the canal, no one seemed to notice anything strange about our appearance. We hadn’t bothered with the grown up shoes – I hadn’t taken Phyllis’s warnings very seriously, but just in case there actually was any trouble in town I wanted to make sure we were wearing shoes we could run in. And after all, no one was going to be looking at our feet in a crowd. My skirt was still a little bit too long, but I folded over the waistband which pulled it up a bit, and I could walk easily in it without any danger of treading on the hem. But, even with our comfortable shoes, it was quite late by the time we reached Gardiner Street and made our way down towards Beresford Place (we had decided to avoid Sackville Street in case we bumped into Mabel or Phyllis, who usually took that route).
In fact, by the time we reached the Custom House, we could see that a huge and restless crowd had already gathered at the corner of Beresford Place, where the suffrage meeting was due to take place. For the first time I felt a genuine twinge of nervousness. Nora was clearly feeling the same way.
‘They don’t look very friendly, do they?’ she said. And I had to agree.
The people gathered there were nearly all men and the atmosphere was riotous. I couldn’t be sure that some of them were Ancient Hooligans, but it seemed likely. There were a few women there, but they didn’t look particularly friendly either. One of them was staggering around and laughing in a way that, like the man outside David Byrne’s yesterday, made me think she might be intoxicated. (I have never knowingly met an intoxicated person but I have read about them in books.)
There were so many people that at first I could barely see the lorry from which the speakers would give their speeches, and I could see no sign of Phyllis and Mabel at all as we made our way closer to the lorry platform. But I was very glad we were wearing disguises that (hopefully) meant we wouldn’t stand out too much in the crowd. I didn’t like the idea of attracting any of these people’s attention. All of sudden there was a mixture of raucous cheers and boos and hooting, and a woman whom I recognised as Mrs. Cousins mounted the lorry to address the audience.
‘Thank you for coming, everyone,’ she said, as the hooting continued. ‘My fellow campaigners are here this evening because we love liberty as much as, I am sure, you do.’
‘What about the hatchet?’ roared a red-faced man not far away
from me and Nora.
‘What about the hatchet?’ cried someone else in the crowd. And although Mrs. Cousins tried to continue her opening remarks, soon what felt like the entire crowd was roaring ‘What about the hatchet? What about the hatchet?’
‘I will explain our views on that matter,’ cried Mrs. Cousins, but to no avail. The crowd continued their chanting. Now they were yelling, ‘Down with the suffragettes!’ They all seemed to be enjoying themselves tremendously, which I suppose was a good thing for me and Nora, because they were too busy yelling to pay much attention to a pair of small ladies with their hats pulled over their eyes. Because of their roars we could barely make out a word of Mrs. Cousins’s speech, and when it was over she left the makeshift stage, and two other ladies took her place.
‘Down with the suffragettes!’ came a cry, and ‘We will never forget the hatchet!’ If there had been any good humour in the hooting at the start of the meeting, there certainly wasn’t any now. Some of the drunken women were now very near the stage, and they started shouting at the speakers, saying that they didn’t want the vote. One drunk woman screamed that she didn’t want to listen to these old – and then she said a word which is used to describe dogs, but which I know should never be used to describe a lady. For the first time I definitely wished we hadn’t come. But we were hemmed in by the crowd now, and I feared that if we started to push our way through, we would attract attention from the rowdies.
The woman on the stage (whose name, we just about managed to hear, was Mrs. Chambers) was trying to speak. But every time she opened her mouth, the boos and roars were so loud that not a word could be heard by the audience. The speaker cried out as some of the drunken women, who had apparently crept up behind the lorry, seized her from behind and tried to pull her off the stage. She broke free, but they just laughed and reached out to seize her again. Suddenly she stumbled, and I realised that some of the mob were trying to push over the lorry. I looked around and saw that the crowd had now grown so much it stretched right back to Abbey Street in one direction and the quays in another. No traffic could pass that way now. And, unless we pushed our way through with more force than either of us possess, neither could we. I hoped Phyllis and Mabel were all right, wherever they were.
Mrs. Chambers stopped speaking, and another woman took her place. By this time, Nora and I had been pushed forward by the crowd and were now so close to the lorry that, under normal circumstances, we would have been easily able to hear the speech. But as soon as she began to talk, someone in the crowd started singing ‘A Nation Once Again’ and soon what felt like the entire mass of people was singing along, drowning out the suffragette’s words. The men shook their fists, and the drunk women waved their hat pins in the air. Then the woman on the platform stumbled and I realised another attempt had been made to push over the lorry.
‘Stop that, you bowsies!’ bellowed a strangely familiar voice nearby, and I looked around to see Inspector Campbell and some of his men approaching the speakers. They quickly dealt with the rowdies and stood guard in front of the lorry, but the crowd was becoming even more threatening. I grabbed Nora’s hand and she squeezed mine tightly.
‘Do you think we could get away?’ she whispered, her voice shaking.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘We’ll just have to wait until it’s over. Oh!’ Someone in the crowd had thrown a stone at the speaker, narrowly missing her face. Another missile soon followed. Inspector Campbell turned to her.
‘I think you’d better stop the meeting now, madam,’ he said in his booming voice.
The woman on the stage nodded, her face pale. Inspector Campbell and his men helped her off the lorry and formed a ring around her and the other speakers. As the crowd surged towards them, Nora and I were almost lifted off our feet. I clung on to Nora’s hand as hard as I could as we stumbled with the mob towards the lorry. I thought I saw Mabel on the other side of the vehicle and then a section of the crowd surged towards the ring of policemen, briefly leaving a gap.
‘Come on!’ I cried, and dragged Nora through the gap and underneath the lorry. We huddled together, watching the stamping boots of the mob as they continued to hurl abuse at the brave women and their protective policeman guards. I remembered Phyllis saying that the Dublin policemen behaved in a much more gentlemanly manner to the Irish suffragettes than their brutal English equivalents. We couldn’t see Inspector Campbell and his men, but from the noises made by the crowd it sounded like the protective circle was moving away, followed by their harrassers. I heard a woman scream and I clung to Nora’s hand even more tightly.
‘What should we do?’ Nora’s eyes were wide in the darkness beneath the lorry. ‘Will we wait here until it’s over?’
‘I think so,’ I said, but just then the lorry shuddered above us as some of the men barged into it. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. This doesn’t sound safe.’
‘We should go,’ said Nora. ‘Now. This way.’ She led the way and we crawled out from under the lorry, emerging on the far side where the mob had thinned out a little. Mabel was nowhere to be seen, if she’d ever been there at all, and luckily the drunk women had gone. We crept to the end of the lorry, climbing up on one of the wheels of the vehicle to get a better view, without being seen by the mob.
In the distance, the policemen and their charges were heading towards Abbey Street. There was a shriek and some raucous laughter, and I realised that the mob had torn the hats from the heads of two of the ladies. Inspector Campbell and his men drew their batons and roared at the crowd to stand back, which they briefly did, but as the suffragettes and their protectors moved towards Abbey Street, the mob continued their assault.
‘Mollie!’ cried Nora, forgetting to whisper. ‘Look!’
One of the women had been dragged away from her friends. We watched in shock as she was roughly shoved to the ground.
‘We have to do something!’ I said. But what could we do against the mob? The woman screamed in pain and fear as a laughing man gave her a sickening kick in the stomach. Some of the policemen realised what was going on and tried to reach the fallen suffragette, but the crowd was jostling around them and they could only move towards her with what felt like agonizing slowness. I almost closed my eyes in horror – I knew we couldn’t help her, but it felt so awful to just watch. Then, thank heaven, some other men shoved away her attackers and helped the woman to her feet. The policemen finally broke through the crowd and formed a sort of shield around her, leading her towards Butt Bridge. They passed a few yards away from our vantage point, and as they drew near I could see that the woman’s face was cut and she held one of her arms with the other hand, as if in great pain.
‘They’re probably taking her to the police station,’ said Nora, her voice shaking. ‘Oh Mollie, I wish we hadn’t come.’
‘Most of the crowd seem to have moved down to Abbey Street.’ I tried and failed to keep my own voice steady as I thought of all those horrible men pursuing the suffragettes and their policeman guards. ‘Maybe if we get a tram on Westmoreland Street we’ll avoid them.’
‘I wish we weren’t wearing these stupid clothes.’ Nora sounded as if she might burst into tears at any moment. ‘If we were wearing our ordinary clothes they’d leave us alone. But they have no qualms about attacking ladies.’
‘If we hadn’t been wearing our disguises Phyllis might have …’ I stopped mid-sentence. ‘Where is she? You haven’t seen her, have you?’
‘No,’ said Nora. ‘Or Mabel.’
‘They weren’t with the women who went with the policemen,’ I said. ‘Maybe they got away through the quays? We might bump into them if we go that way.’
‘That’s a risk we’ll have to take,’ said Nora. In the distance we could hear what sounded like glass being broken, followed by raucous cheers. ‘I want to go home right now.’
We climbed down from the wheel of the lorry. Keeping as close to the grounds of the Custom House as possible rather than striking out across Beresford Place, where I feared we might attr
act more attention, we made our way towards the bridge.
‘Look straight ahead,’ whispered Nora. ‘We mustn’t catch anyone’s eye.’ The crowd had thinned out, as most of the mob had either followed the suffragettes and their escorts or given up and gone home. We had just reached the corner opposite Liberty Hall, that new union building I passed on my way to my very first suffrage meeting, when I heard a scream from the corner of Eden Quay.
I couldn’t help looking around, and to my great horror I saw that a group of men were gathered around someone – a young woman, judging by the scream. The policemen who had been standing guard over the meeting seemed to have vanished – most of them had left with the speakers, while the others had gone with the woman who had been kicked to the ground. There was no one left to intervene now.
‘Look!’ I clutched Nora’s hand.
‘What will we do?’ Nora looked as distressed as I felt. ‘We can’t just leave her to her fate!’
‘We’ll have to try to find a policeman.’ We began to cross Beresford Place, but there wasn’t a policeman to be seen. I looked wildly around me. ‘There must be someone!’
There was another scream from the corner of the quay, and the gang began to chant.
‘Throw her in the Liffey! Throw her in the Liffey!’
‘Oh, where are the policemen?’ wailed Nora as we hurried towards the rowdy crowd.
Suddenly, from the middle of the mob, a struggling, shouting young woman was lifted into the air by a group of laughing men. Her hat had fallen off but there was something familiar about her coat, and her hair …
‘Phyllis!’ I cried, and ran through the crowd as fast as I could in that stupid skirt. I pulled it up over my knees and kept going, Nora racing at my heels. The mob were carrying Phyllis toward the wall that bordered the river, and although she was struggling to get free with all her might, they held her fast.
‘I’m going to find a policeman,’ yelled Nora. ‘We’ve got to stop this.’
‘I can’t leave her,’ I yelled back.