No Greater Love by Janet MacLeod Trotter

Author:Janet MacLeod Trotter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MacLeod Trotter Books
Published: 2013-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

The early weeks of 1914 were the happiest Maggie could remember. She was an outcast from her old life in the teeming streets of West Newcastle, yet she was experiencing the greatest freedom of her life. It seemed to mark the dawning of a new age of optimism and progression. Ready to continue her campaign of militancy when instructed by headquarters, she felt increasingly that they were winning the fight for the vote. More and more politicians were speaking out on their behalf and the publicity given to the treatment of women prisoners was beginning to sicken citizens with a conscience. She had been told to lie low for several weeks, until the furore over the arson attack at Hebron House had died down.

Yet she managed to meet other suffragettes in discreet tearooms in the east of the city, in parlours of sympathetic supporters. She frequently wondered what Alice Pearson thought of her now, but all she could learn about the magnate’s daughter was that she was touring on the Continent.

Maggie continued to work part-time for the coal merchant and in the evenings she looked forward eagerly to George’s return from the shipyard.

Sometimes she shook her head in amazement at how they had been thrown together in adversity. She had thought it impossible that she would find such a soul-mate in a man, least of all in a man like George Gordon, raised in a tough community that took men’s superiority over women for granted. But beneath his brawny, aggressive stance, George was as much an idealist as she was.

At night they would curl up by the small fire and express aloud their dreams of how they would better the world together. Sometimes they went to the house of a friend of George’s, a Jewish musician called Isaac Samuel who attracted around him a small group of intellectuals. George had met him at the Pearson library and been amazed by the thin, bearded Russian who had fled persecution and arrived on a merchant vessel up the Tyne. He scraped a living by giving music lessons, while his sister Miriam took in sewing.

Maggie enjoyed the cosy evenings in Isaac’s over-furnished rooms, sitting among chairs strewn with music and books, arguing with the others about religion and imperialism, capitalism and the new Bolshevism seeping out of Russia. She was the only woman who took part in the discussions; the enigmatic Miriam chose instead to read or embroider by the corner lamp, unperturbed by their arguing.

‘Lenin’s right,’ George announced one evening. ‘The workers need to organise more into a revolutionary force. Organise and protest - disrupt production if necessary. Not like our lot who allow the bosses to divide them into different classes, so each thinks they’re a step above the others.’

‘But your bosses,’ Isaac Samuel said with a wave of his long bony hands, ‘allow a great freedom of speech among the working classes. You have open-air meetings and say things that would get you shot in my Russia.’

‘There’s precious little freedom of speech for us lasses,’ Maggie interjected.

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