Like Fire-Hearted Suns by Melanie Joosten

Author:Melanie Joosten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ultimo Press
Published: 2023-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Four of them took the train out to Kew one Friday night and hid themselves in the gardens when the gates were locked at sundown. Olive Wharry, Lilian Lenton, Maude Smith and Beatrice Taylor. They did not know each other well; it was best that way. It was Mary Home and Olive who had started the YHBs, a club committed to danger duty, of any kind they could imagine. They told no one what the acronym stood for, their secrecy driving the older women in the movement bonkers, demanding they shut it down. Careful you don’t go too far, Genevieve had told Beatrice one evening as they packed up the chairs after a meeting. After all, you still have your future to worry about. Genevieve had finished her studies and was working as a doctor at a women’s hospital—all the more reason not to get caught, she said.

‘But what future do we have without the vote?’ Beatrice had queried. She had begun to think that Genevieve was not as committed as she might be.

The YHBs met at Alan’s Tea Rooms in Oxford Street every Saturday at half past four, delighted in the subterfuge, never otherwise acknowledging one another throughout the week. The first few weeks it was all discussions about who they’d include and what they would do; tickled by the exclusivity of a tight criteria, wary of diluting their focus if they went too big. They settled on three rules: to be a YHB you had to be no older than thirty, an age when they imagined one could not help but be respectable. You had to be unhindered by responsibilities that would hold you back. And if you took a salaried position in the WSPU, you had to leave the YHBs immediately—you couldn’t be an organiser and a Young Hot Blood because you risked compromising the organisation. The less the organisation proper knew of their antics the better, so they could not be held accountable for them. That said, occasionally Mrs Pankhurst would come along to meetings, an eyebrow raised at some of the more audacious suggestions. Beatrice suspected she pined for Christabel, away in Paris; she loved to be surrounded by the youth and recklessness of the YHBs. Not that Christabel had ever been reckless, only pointed; ruthless. She had expelled Emmeline and Fred Pethick-Lawrence—who had founded Votes for Women and raised thousands of pounds for the cause, funding the WSPU’s legal costs, paying their fines, bankrolling the whole movement in a way that bake sales and abstinence weeks never could—when they refused to condone the arson campaign. The Union had to find new headquarters at Lincoln’s Inn House in Kingsway and launched a new weekly newspaper, The Suffragette. Strength to strength, Beatrice told herself, and tried not to worry about how they might stay afloat without Fred’s generosity.

But as the jail sentences accumulated, there was a sense that Christabel’s self-exile was more self-serving than anyone was prepared to admit. They needed a leader, went the murmurings, but one in the field, like Mrs Pankhurst herself.

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