The Making of Mollie by Anna Carey

Author:Anna Carey [Anna Carey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847179036
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2016-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Wednesday

Nora and I have taken to the streets at last! Yes, we finally took action and went chalking. As the English suffragettes say, ‘Deeds not Words’. And we really needed to do some deeds after talking about it for so long (do you ‘do’ deeds? Or commit them? I suppose that’s not very important right now). We had a very good reason to go chalking because, as I said before, there is going to be a huge meeting this Saturday and we knew from what Phyllis and Mabel said that they wanted as many members of the public as possible to come along to it. It’s not free – entrance is one shilling and sixpence – so they need to do lots of advertising because unlike the outdoor meetings they can’t rely on passersby. Which all meant that it was the perfect opportunity for me and Nora to stand up for the cause (or rather kneel down).

We made the decision at school yesterday. And actually, Stella helped us make it, when we were telling her about this meeting.

‘Are you going to go?’ she asked.

‘If we can,’ I said. ‘I’ve got just enough money.’

‘Me too,’ said Nora. ‘It’s definitely worth one and six to see all those speakers and really feel like we’re, you know, part of the movement.’

Stella didn’t look convinced but she was too polite to say anything.

‘The only problem is,’ I said, ‘that we’ll have to persuade Phyllis to take us. And you know what she’s like. Mercurial moods. Especially after we turned up on Saturday.’

‘Imagine if we could go on stage and speak at it,’ said Nora dreamily. ‘The young politicians of the future.’

‘I can’t imagine anything worse,’ said Stella, alarmed. ‘The thought of standing up there in front of all those people.’

‘Well, they’re going to have lots of important speakers,’ said Nora. ‘I do hope enough people turn up. It’ll be a terrible waste if the hall is half empty.’

‘How do they spread the word about these meetings?’ asked Stella. ‘I mean, do they have advertisements and things?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But they do other things too, like the posters. You know, women going around with poster-boards hung over their shoulders. And then other girls go out chalking the details on the pavement.’

As soon as I said those words, the idea struck me. I could see that Nora was thinking the same thing.

‘Could we?’ she said, her eyes wide.

For a split second I hesitated. I know we’d been dreaming of chaining ourselves to things and speaking on platforms, but this wasn’t just a dream. Did I really want to do something so public as kneel down in the street and chalk slogans? What would people say? Would they stop us? Then I chided myself for my own cowardice. It was time to stop imagining things and actually do them. The English suffragettes are definitely right about ‘deeds not words’. Well, maybe not right about setting fire to postboxes (imagine if one of your letters to me got burned up) but right about lots of other things.

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.