No Greater Love (4 page)

The belligerent man who had provoked the scene attempted a retreat, but the woman with the small child clasped to her drab tweed coat blocked his way.

‘You’ve not paid your debt yet, hinny,’ she told him with mock familiarity. ‘One penny for the women’s cause,’ she cackled.

With a foul oath the man dug a coin out of his trouser pocket and hurled it onto the ground.
^‘
I hope the lot of you rot in hell,’ he fumed.

‘Aye, well, we’ll see you there then,’ Maggie answered with a flash of a smile. Her aggressor stalked away with his wife bustling to keep up with him.

Maggie bent to pick up the penny and she and Rose quickly distributed newspapers before the crowd dispersed along Grainger Street and into the town’s shops and pubs. Rose shivered suddenly in the raw air of the early April afternoon and nodded up the street.

‘Two policemen coming - that man’s probably complained about us,’ Rose said with unease.

‘We’ve done nothing wrong.’ Maggie was unconcerned.

‘That won’t stop them picking us up,’ Rose responded quickly, taking Maggie by the arm. ‘Let’s go back to the office - I need to thaw out anyway.’

Maggie felt reluctant, undaunted by the police or the cold, although her only protection was a thin purple jacket over her coarse green woollen skirt, both scavenged from her mother’s second-hand clothes stall. To complete her outfit of suffragist colours she always campaigned in a white scarf which in cold weather she tied over her hat and secured under her narrow chin.

‘I’ve still half a dozen papers to get rid of,’ Maggie said, fired with energy from the encounter.

‘Well, I need a hot drink,’ Rose insisted, ‘and so do you, your hands are quite white, so come along.’

Maggie could see her companion’s thin lips set stubbornly and knew why Rose Johnstone was so feared and respected by the children she taught at elementary school in Elswick. She was older than Maggie by five years and had been a pupil teacher at the school Maggie had transferred to when they had flitted to Gun Street after her father’s death. Maggie and Rose had taken to each other immediately, sharing a passion for books and knowledge. How she had yearned to follow Rose into teaching, Maggie remembered, but her overworked mother and resentful sister Susan had insisted she found employment at fourteen.

Maggie and Rose had remained firm friends; Rose treated her to theatre visits and took her to lectures that released her briefly from the drab poverty of her dank home by Pearson’s shipyard and her back-breaking cleaning job. It was Rose who had taken fifteen-year-old Maggie along to listen to Emmeline Pankhurst speak on the Town Moor and lit the spark of her suffragism and interest in politics. Rose had also paid for Maggie’s night classes in typing and book-keeping that had led to a better position as typist in Pearson’s armaments factory. Maggie knew she owed so much to Rose that the least she could do was allow her to have her own way over trivial matters such as a cup of tea.

‘Tea it is then,’ Maggie smiled and blew on her hands, suppressing her disappointment that this Saturday’s campaigning was over.

Merging into the crowd, they made their way through the shoppers and street sellers to the modest office in Blackett Street used by the Women’s Social and Political Union as their Newcastle headquarters. They prided themselves on being the most militant and active of suffragist groups in the area, each member prepared to risk imprisonment for her actions. Since their campaign of defiance had been stepped up, so had the persecution against them. Rose had been arrested for breach of the peace for merely selling newspapers, but released with a caution after the intervention of Miss Alice Pearson, daughter of the shipping and armaments magnate, Lord Pearson. Miss Alice patronised the local WSPU to the disapproval of her father, but in recent months any meetings she attended were broken up before she could speak and Maggie had never met her.

‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to come to Susan’s birthday supper tonight,’ Rose told her as they hurried up the steep stairs to the office. They had managed to give the two policemen the slip, but a solitary constable watched the office from across the street.

‘Why not?’ Maggie asked in dismay.

‘I’m singing at Miss Pearson’s soirée,’ Rose said breezily, going ahead through the door. ‘It was arranged at short notice. Sorry.’ She avoided Maggie’s gaze.

Maggie could make no protest as they entered the office which was bustling with fellow unionists, but she could not veil her disappointment. Rose would have been an ally against the carping of Susan and her mother and the snide asides of Aunt Violet about her involvement with the movement. Family get-togethers usually ended with her mother and Uncle Barny having too much to drink and Maggie, goaded by her captious aunt, arguing heatedly about politics. As the unpopularity of the suffragettes grew in the newspapers, so did her mother’s disapproval of Maggie’s friendship with Rose. Where once her friend had been warmly welcomed at Gun Street, now she was cold-shouldered. No wonder Rose shirked invitations to her home, Maggie thought, preferring to cultivate her acquaintance with Newcastle’s well-to-do through her suffragist friends. Most of their comrades were from quite a different class to their own; moneyed, well-educated, middle-class women with the odd sprinkling of upper-class celebrities such as Miss Alice Pearson who added glamour to their social events and opened fund-raising bazaars.

In the office they swapped news and drank tea with the other women.

‘Maggie was so brave the way she handled that awful man,’ Rose told the assembled, making her friend blush.

‘That’s the wonderful thing about having a girl like Maggie in the ranks who can rub along with the common people,’ said Jocelyn Fulford with a benign smile. ‘By the way, how is your mother, Maggie? She hasn’t called for a month or more.’

Maggie bit back her annoyance at being patronised by this tea merchant’s wife from Jesmond.

‘She’s not been that well lately,’ Maggie answered ‘But I’ll tell her you were kind enough to ask after her,’ she forced herself to add, knowing her mother’s second-hand clothes business relied on donations from wealthy women like Mrs Fulford.

‘Well, tell her to call, won’t you, dear.’ The older woman patted her hand and added in a loud whisper, ‘I’ve several of last season’s dresses she might like.’

Maggie thanked her stiffly, hoping that nothing she was wearing came from the Fulford household. At times she was acutely aware of being socially inferior to her fellow suffragists, yet put her in a room with people talking politics and she would hold her own with the Prime Minister if necessary. While they fought the same cause, class difference seemed irrelevant; it was only when they reverted to social chit-chat or returned home to their separate parts of the city that the barriers between them went up again.

Rose came to her rescue. ‘I’ll get the tram with you, Maggie. You don’t want to be late for Susan’s party, do you?’

The young women left together and headed towards Central Station, detouring through Grainger Market so Maggie could bargain with the butchers for a joint of brisket and some black pudding to see them through the week. Her purchases made, they headed out of the glass-roofed market with its smell of raw meat and pipe smoke, their long skirts swishing across the sawdust-sprinkled aisles.

‘You could join the choir too,’ Rose broke the silence between them, ‘you’ve got a good enough voice.’

‘I haven’t the time,’ Maggie said in excuse. ‘You know the trouble I get into at home as it is. Imagine the fireworks from Mam and Susan if I was off singing at Hebron House on Susan’s birthday.’

‘That’s not the reason you don’t want to come,’ Rose challenged her with a direct gaze from behind her spectacles. ‘You don’t approve of Miss Alice, do you?’

‘You can choose to curry favour with the likes of the Pearson’s, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable,’ Maggie said with resentment, crossing the road quickly to avoid a large dray horse. Rose caught her up.

‘Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice,’ she said sharply, grabbing Maggie’s arm.

‘And don’t speak to me as if I were one of your pupils,’ Maggie retorted, throwing off her hold.

Rose glared at her, red-faced, but Maggie stood her ground. Unexpectedly, Maggie began to laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ Rose demanded.

‘You are! You look as if you’re about to send me into the corner,’ Maggie grinned, unable to remain cross with her friend. Rose relaxed and snorted in amusement. They linked arms and continued.

‘I know it’s difficult for you at home,’ Rose sympathised ‘I’m lucky that my mother supports our work.’

Maggie nodded ruefully, thinking of Rose’s bird-like mother who had once waved an umbrella at the liberal Winston Churchill, demanding votes for women.

‘But listen, Maggie,
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Rose became brisk, ‘Alice Pearson can hardly be blamed for your father’s death or the shabby way your family were treated by Pearson’s afterwards. Can’t you see that women like Miss Alice are fighting on our side so that we can change things for widows like your mother and my mother once we have the vote?’

‘Yes, I can see that,’ Maggie sighed, feeling contrite and remembering that Rose’s comfortable childhood had been shattered too by her father’s untimely death at sea and a will leaving all his wealth to a mistress and son in London. ‘Still, I don’t have time to join the choir.’

Maggie kept the thought to herself that Rose was much more socially assured than she was and that the ladies’ choir would probably be horror-struck if Maggie joined their soirées at Hebron House. Bright she might be, but the way she spoke and the clothes she wore labelled her as working class. Maggie knew that, for her, there was no escape from Newcastle’s gritty West End. But it did not stop her wondering what it might be like to see inside the blackened, decaying, Palladian mansion that stood in its modest grounds, surrounded now by working-class terraces, where the eccentric Alice Pearson continued to live. Her parents and the heir, Mr Herbert, had long since abandoned Hebron House and moved up the valley to their new home, a Gothic castle with acres of grouse moor.

Through the dank drizzle that had begun to chill them, the women hurried on in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts, and reached the tram stop just as a tram clanked into view, blue sparks flying from its screeching wheels. It was crammed with passengers, wrapped in a warm fug of tobacco smoke, and Maggie and Rose had to stand. No one offered them a seat, which was usual when they wore their bold suffragette sashes for all to see.

Maggie did not mind, content to let a comfortable drowsiness envelop her as they jolted along the tramline, the smoky terraces of Elswick slipping past the window. The tram stopped outside a parade of shops on Scotswood Road, their faded awnings giving shelter to late shoppers and inquisitive children. Rose alighted with a farewell wave. ‘Best wishes to Susan,
^’
she called.

Maggie waved back, knowing how little Rose thought of Susan. Maggie sighed as she thought of her fussing elder sister, already careworn and middle-aged at twenty-two. Rose had found her dull and unwilling to learn at school and had been constantly irritated by her truancy. But Maggie knew Susan’s uninterest in learning was less a mark of stupidity than a sign of her burning sense of duty to her mother and the family.

Ever since their father had died, Susan had mothered her younger sisters and brother while Mabel went to work in the public laundry. With the help of Granny Beaton, Susan had brought them up, obsessive in her mission to turn them out clean, starched, fed and polite to the outside world. Many a time Maggie had sparred with her sister over a dirt-smeared pinafore or lateness for meals.

‘Girls don’t climb trees!’ Susan had once scolded.

‘God made trees for lasses as well as lads,’ Maggie had replied, unconcerned as she brushed at the offending stains.

‘You should be setting an example for our Helen and Jimmy,’ Susan’s nagging continued.

‘I’ll show them how to climb trees any time they want,’ Maggie had quipped, ‘though the day our Tich climbs anything more than the back steps they’ll hang flags from the High Level Bridge.’

Criticism of their sickly brother Jimmy always riled Susan. A blazing argument ensued, only brought to an end by a slap from their forceful mother and the gentle intervention of Granny Beaton. Granny was the one family member who stuck up for Maggie no matter what trouble she landed in. Her wizened, becapped Scottish grandmother who attended the John Knox Presbyterian Kirk in Elswick every Sunday was Maggie’s quiet ally and the only one who did not criticise her involvement in women’s emancipation.

Maggie’s musings lasted until her stop, in the shadow of the fortress gates to Pearson’s shipyard. She left the warm tram with reluctance and pulled her scarf tighter against the increasing rain as it bounced off the high roofs of the factory sheds. Clutching her purchases and dashing across the tramlines, Maggie was soaked by the splashing of a passing coal cart. Cursing the weather and looking down at her mud-spattered skirt, she thought how Susan would enjoy reprimanding her. Then it occurred to her that she had not bought Susan anything for her birthday. Knowing she could not return empty-handed having spent the afternoon in town, Maggie bent her head and hurried up the steep hill to Alison Terrace, the main street of shops that cut through the uniform ranks of terraced rows with a dash of colour and interest.

Luckily the haberdasher’s was still open and Maggie in a fit of generosity spent the contents of her purse on a selection of ribbons and lace and delicate pearl buttons for Susan to lavish on one of their mother’s second-hand garments. The light was fading from the dull grey day as Maggie hurried to the end of Alison Terrace. She felt the old familiar churning as she neared the corner, for across the road she could glimpse the start of their old street, Sarah Crescent, where they had all lived so happily until ten years ago. Even in the gloomy April evening, Sarah Crescent wore an air of stylish prosperity, a calm respectability that mocked their impoverished existence in Gun Street. No amount of Susan’s painstaking housewifery could change the reality that they lived in a Victorian slum, ten minutes
^’
walk and a social world away from that pleasant Edwardian street.