I nudged Nora.
‘Yes,’ said Nora quickly. ‘I do mean it, Grace. Thank you.’
‘I told you,’ said Grace. ‘I couldn’t do it after seeing those awful people trying to throw your sister in the river just for going to a suffragette meeting.’
‘Going to a what?’ said an awfully familiar voice. And Harry strode into the tent, followed by Frank. My stomach sank.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said.
‘We were waiting outside for you lot.’ Harry pointed at Frank. ‘He wanted to get you all some buns. Not my idea, I might add.’
‘We’ve got to tidy up here,’ I said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘We’ll see you over at the pavilion.’
‘Not before you tell me what your friend meant about a suffragette meeting,’ said Harry. ‘Who threw Phyllis in the river?’
‘No one,’ I said. ‘You must have misheard.’
‘Come on, Carberry,’ said Frank. ‘Let’s go and get some tea and cake and wait for the girls.’
‘No,’ said Harry. ‘There’s something going on here. Is this about those riots in town on Friday? Was Phyllis involved?’
‘How would I know?’ I said.
‘I’ll just have to ask Mother, then,’ said Harry. ‘If someone threw her daughter in a river, she should know.’ And he turned as if to leave the tent. I had to stop him.
‘They didn’t throw her in!’ I said. ‘They just held her over the parapet.’
Harry stared at me.
‘How do you know?’ he said. The truth was dawning on him. ‘Oh my goodness. You were there too.’
I looked over at Nora, who was clearly as horrified as I was. Even Grace didn’t look very happy.
‘Did you go to a suffragette thing?’ said Harry. ‘Were you caught up in that awful riot?’
I didn’t know what to say. Harry already knew that Phyllis had been there. He was clearly planning to talk to our parents about it. How could I let her get into trouble without admitting my own involvement? So I did the only thing I could do. I told the truth.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You mean … you’re a suffragette?’ Harry looked like he couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘Have you been sneaking out to meetings and marches and things?’
Grace had once told me that she knew I’d never deny my ‘precious cause’ if I was asked about it directly. And she was right.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have.’
‘And I have too,’ said Nora suddenly. ‘But you can’t tell your parents, Harry. Really you can’t. We’d all get into so much trouble for going to the meeting.’
‘And rightly so.’ Harry actually looked worried. ‘You should all be stopped from doing such stupid things. I can’t have the girls in my family going out and getting into danger.’
‘Phyllis is two years older than you!’ I said.
‘She’s still a girl,’ said Harry, priggishly. ‘I have to do my duty and save her from herself.’
‘She doesn’t want to be saved!’ I cried. ‘Harry, you can’t tell. They won’t let Phyllis go to college if they know what she’s been up to. And they’ll probably send me off to boarding school.’
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ said Harry, but he looked like he was wavering. ‘You know it is.’
And then Frank said, ‘No, it’s not.’
‘What?’ said Harry.
‘It’s not up to you to decide what’s safe for the girls,’ said Frank. ‘As far as I know,’ and he smiled at me and Nora, ‘they’re fighting for the right to decide things for themselves.’
‘That’s a lot of rot,’ said Harry. ‘They need us to look after them.’
‘No,’ said Frank. ‘They need us to stand beside them.’
And then, to my great surprise, Grace spoke.
‘If you wanted to do anything for girls,’ she said sternly, ‘you’d tell boys and men not to behave like those awful hooligans last week.’
‘You were out there too?’ Harry was astounded. He didn’t know Grace very well, but he knew that she wasn’t exactly the rebellious sort.
‘I saw it from the bridge with the tennis club,’ said Grace. ‘It was utterly horrible. And if there had been more young men like Frank here, it would never have happened.’
‘Come on, Harry,’ said Frank. ‘Play the game.’
Harry looked around at our solemn faces, and the pompousness seemed to leak out of him.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it. But I won’t tell.’
I felt my shoulders sag with relief.
‘Swear,’ I said. ‘On … on your honour.’ I wasn’t sure Harry’s honour was worth very much, but I knew he thought it was.
He sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I swear on my honour that I won’t tell anyone else about Phyllis and you lot being suffragettes. Or whatever you are. I won’t tell about you going to a meeting.’
‘Good,’ I said.
‘And,’ said Frank, ‘to apologise for scaring you, let us help you stack those chairs and carry these things back over to the pavilion.’
And they did. Harry didn’t even grumble about it. I must say that Frank really has proved to be a very good influence on him. I said as much to Frank when we were walking over to the pavilion for our tea and buns.
‘He’s not a bad chap, really,’ he said. ‘He just needs a push in the right direction every so often. I mean, so did I.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘Well, I had never really thought about all the suffrage business until I talked about it with you,’ he said. ‘Maybe now he’ll think about it a bit more.’
‘Maybe,’ I said doubtfully.
‘Oh ye of little faith!’ Frank laughed. ‘You seem to have done something to Grace. I remember you telling me how much she despised suffragettes. But she stood up for them just now.’
I looked at Grace, who was marching along ahead of us, her arms full of cardboard boxes.
‘I think that was more thanks to her tennis-club leader than me and Nora,’ I said, as we passed the white elephant stall, where Miss Casey was urging someone to buy a small china dog that looked a bit like Barnaby.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Frank. ‘It just shows people can change their minds.’
He smiled at me, and somehow I tripped over a footstool which I presume belonged to the white elephant stall. Frank grabbed my arm in time to stop me crashing to the ground.
‘Are you all right?’ he said, and suddenly I couldn’t think of anything to say in reply. I just stared stupidly at him for what seemed like ages but was probably just a second or two.
‘Come on, Nugent!’ called Harry.
The others had reached the entrance to the pavilion.
And I remembered how I had never really thought about the suffrage question myself until I followed Phyllis to that meeting just a few months ago. I hadn’t thought that sort of thing had much to do with me. But once I found out more about it and really started asking questions, I changed my mind. And if I could change my mind, so could Grace. Or Harry. Or anyone really.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and have a bun.’
And that, I suppose, was that. I hope this account of our adventures has entertained you on your return from the American wilds. There’s not much more to tell, apart from the fact that I didn’t get a chance to talk to Frank very much once we had joined Mother and Julia and Mrs. Sheffield (and Barnaby, who had calmed down after his adventures and was looking as angelic as he possibly can, which is not very) in the pavilion.
After a while Frank and Harry left the club to meet their famous friend Harrington. After eating a bun, Grace took Barnaby home to Mrs. Sheffield’s house. (Mrs. Sheffield was staying on at the club to oversee the rest of the fête, but decided that Barnaby should be taken home in case he got even more over-stimulated.) Mother and Julia went to look at a tennis demonstration on the biggest court. And finally, having watched the demonstration for a few minutes, Nora and I, fatigued by the day
’s excitement, decided to leave.
‘Well,’ said Nora, as we walked along the hot and dusty road. There was a rumble of thunder in the distance. ‘What a day.’
‘I feel utterly exhausted,’ I said, and yawned. ‘What time is it?’
‘It was only two o’clock when we left, according to the pavilion clock.’ Nora yawned too. ‘Goodness. I really am looking forward to some peace and quiet.’
‘Me too,’ I said. We walked along in comfortable silence for a while. There was another rumble of thunder, closer this time.
‘But not forever,’ I said suddenly.
‘Oh no,’ said Nora. ‘Definitely not forever.’
‘I mean,’ I said, ‘we need a break from all the excitement now.’
‘But in a few weeks …’ said Nora. ‘When things have calmed down at the meetings …’
‘We’ve still got our disguises,’ I said.
And then it started to rain and we had to run all the way home.
Best love and VOTES FOR WOMEN!
Mollie
A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK
Mollie, her friends, teachers and family, Mrs. Mulvany and Mamie Quigley are all figments of my imagination (though Barnaby is based on a small and hilariously noisy Bichon Frise who lives very near my house in Marino, Dublin, and barks angrily at me every time I walk by).
Many events described in this book, however, really did take place. The account of the trial of the Irish Women’s Franchise League activists is based on the report that appeared in the IWFL magazine The Irish Citizen in July 1912. An English suffragette called Mary Leigh did throw a hatchet at Mr. Asquith’s carriage on the prime minister’s visit to Dublin (in a 1965 interview in the Radio Times, she claimed she just ‘put it’ in the carriage) and was involved in the attempt to set fire to a box in the Theatre Royal. She was sentenced, along with fellow English suffragette Gladys Evans, to five years’ penal servitude. Subsequently the two women became the only suffrage campaigners to be force-fed in Ireland. They were released from prison less than three months after their conviction.
My accounts of the yacht-based protest in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), the raid on the house on Nassau Street (including the confetti) and the meeting at Beresford Place the next day, are based closely on the accounts written at the time for The Irish Citizen, including a piece by one of the speakers who was nearly removed from the lorry by a gang of drunk women! In her piece she thanked the police, including an Inspector Campbell, for their protection and help. I decided to make Inspector Campbell the policeman who raided the Nassau Street house the day before. The newspaper headlines from that day that are quoted in the book are all real, and a young suffragette really was almost thrown in the river on Eden Quay by an angry crowd and was rescued by the police. I couldn’t find her name in any accounts, so I let the incident happen to poor Phyllis instead.
WHEN DID IRISH WOMEN GET THE VOTE?
The Representation of the People Act 1918 became law on 6 February 1918. It gave the vote to virtually all men over 21, and women over 30 who met certain requirements. In November 1918 an act was passed which enabled women to stand for parliament in the forthcoming elections.
The only woman to win a seat in parliament across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales in December 1918 was Constance Markievicz, who was elected by the people of south Dublin but who did not take her seat. In 1922, the new Irish Free State gave the vote to all women over 21, finally giving Irish women the same voting rights as Irish men.
About the Author
Irish Times
ANNA CAREY is a journalist and author from Dublin who has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent and many other publications. Anna’s first book, The Real Rebecca, was published in 2011, and went on to win the Senior Children’s Book prize at the Irish Book Awards. Rebecca returned in the critically acclaimed Rebecca’s Rules, Rebecca Rocks and Rebecca is Always Right. The Making of Mollie (2016) was her first historical novel and was shortlisted for the Senior Children’s Book prize at the 2016 Irish Book Awards.
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2018 by The O’Brien Press Ltd,
12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, D06 HD27, Dublin 6, Ireland.
Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777
E-mail:
[email protected] Website: www.obrien.ie
The O’Brien Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.
First published 2018
ISBN: 978–1–78849–035–1
Copyright for text © Anna Carey 2018
Copyright for typesetting, layout, design © The O’Brien Press Ltd 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Layout and design: The O’Brien Press Ltd.
Cover illustrations: Lauren O’Neill
Anna Carey, Mollie on the March
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