Ellen Lives On by Lynda Haddock

Author:Lynda Haddock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile historical fiction
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden

The ache in the words made Ellen want to cry. Her mother had never found her way into the rose garden – and neither had she.

Ellen sat for a while reading the words over and over. Then, to stop herself crying, she got up and wandered over to the shelves. In a far corner, at the opposite end to the librarian’s desk, she paused in front of a noticeboard fastened to the wall. A sign saying ‘WOMEN’S RIGHTS – FROM THEN TO NOW’ was pinned to the board above a picture of a determined looking young woman wearing a long fitted coat and a large hat. High above her head the woman was holding a banner that said ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN’. Ellen had learnt about suffragettes at school and been impressed by the bravery of the women who had endured repeated imprisonment and forced feeding during the hunger strikes they had staged while campaigning for a woman’s right to vote. An arrow below the poster led her eye to an open display case of the kind Ellen remembered from the book corner at primary school. Elastic strings held the books in place on narrow shelves.

There were lots of copies of a book on show here. The first that Ellen saw had a picture of a smiling young woman with cropped blonde hair and a high-necked shirt on its cover. Her name, Andrea Fookes, was printed in large white capitals on a black cover and her book, called Men and their Attitudes, promised to offer ‘MY CASE FOR A WOMEN’S REBELLION’. Andrea Fookes didn’t look much older than Ellen herself.

Intrigued, Ellen picked up a copy of Men and their Attitudes, went back to her seat and opened the notebook she had brought with her so that she could pretend to be working and, she hoped, avoid drawing attention to herself. The book was dense and difficult but she leafed through it determinedly and found a sentence that intrigued her:

‘If we are to believe what we are told, we live in a world where the great scientists, artists, poets, novelists and explorers have all been men.’

As she read, Ellen remembered a discussion they had had in school about a government report, ‘The Newsom Report’, which her civics teacher, Miss Lawton, had quoted in preparation for a class debate about ‘A woman’s place is in the home’. Ellen remembered it well:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.