No Greater Love (40 page)

‘And where the devil have you been?’

George started at the voice. A figure rose from the chair by the dying fire and turned to face him.

‘Maggie?’ he gasped.

‘Aye, Geordie, they’ve hoyed me oot.’ He could not see her face clearly in the gloom, but the amusement in her voice was clear.

She stepped towards him and in a moment his arms were about her, squeezing her close to him so that she protested she could not breathe.

‘Maggie! Oh, Maggie!
^’
He picked her up and swung her round. ‘It really is you!’

‘Well, I hope you wouldn’t be doing this for that lass from the dairy I found here,’ Maggie teased.

‘Only on Saturdays,’ George teased her back.

They kissed in relief and delight.

‘But why didn’t you send word you were being freed?’ George demanded. ‘You’re under licence again?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘I’m not going back this time, Geordie. They’ve given us all a pardon - Mrs Pankhurst, all of us. It all happened that quickly. Mind you, it’s a bit of a cheek - pardon indeed! It’s the government should be asking us for a pardon!’

George laughed and hugged her to him again.

‘That’s me fighting lass!’

‘Aye, well, that’s what Mrs Pankhurst is saying we should be doing now,’ Maggie told him, ‘fighting with the government and not against them in the war effort. She’s told us to be loyal to them and the country. At least that’s what it says in the paper the prison governor showed me.’

George sighed. ‘And is that what you think you should do?’

Maggie sank onto a chair, the excitement of being reunited with George leaving her suddenly weak. ‘I don’t know. It’s been so sudden. One minute I’m an enemy of the state, serving a two-year sentence and starving myself to death for me beliefs, then the next minute I’m free and being told by me leaders that I’ve got to support me persecutors.’ Maggie looked at him in bewilderment. ‘What’s it all been for? All that struggling and pain, and now it’s suddenly over and we haven’t won an inch in the fight for the vote. I really thought we were coming close to winning the battle, Geordie, but this war in Europe’s put a stop to everything. I feel cheated. I want to go on fighting for women’s rights, just like I’ve always done, but the leadership’s gone, so what can I do?’

George knelt down beside her and put his rough hands round her face. ‘You can gan on fighting, bonny lass,’ he said. ‘There’ll always be summat worth struggling for. Don’t give up just because the ruling classes are closing ranks - that’s nothing new. As long as there’s breath in your body you can fight for what you believe in, Maggie.’

She felt a rush of gratitude towards him for understanding how she felt and for giving her the strength to go on. The past few days had been so confusing that she had not known what to do or who to believe. But George had shown again that he loved and accepted her for who she was and it filled her with warmth.

She raised her face and kissed him tenderly. ‘Us against the world then?’ she joked.

George laughed softly as he helped her to her feet. ‘Aye, you and me, lass,’ he agreed, ‘that’s all that matters.’ And he carried her up the ladder to their bed in the rafters.

Surprisingly, Maggie found she settled into the mundane chores of daily life, despite the extraordinary events occurring far away in Flanders. Her strength returned and she devoted her time to caring for her grandmother and the household while George worked increasingly long hours at the shipyard and Jimmy got odd jobs fetching and carrying down at the station, for many porters had rushed to enlist.

The usual shop sales and regattas continued that strange hot August, the war somehow unreal and remote, and there was talk of it all being over in a couple of months as news filtered through of a Russian advance and the Kaiser’s troops being repulsed.

‘Even them Belgian lasses have seen off the Hun,’ Jimmy proudly told his sister. ‘Hoyed boiling water over them in the street, Uncle Barny said.’

Maggie wondered about those factory workers who had armed themselves in the face of invasion and tried to imagine what she would do if Newcastle was ever threatened. Would she forget her strong leanings towards pacifism and rush to defend her home town? Like George, she believed this war was about imperial gain and that the people had been cruelly tricked into supporting it by crude appeals to their patriotism. Nevertheless, if foreign imperialists tried to storm Newcastle from the North Sea and overrun them, Maggie knew she would not be able to stand by. She would fight.

By September, the first lists of war casualties began to be published in the local newspapers. At first it was the officers who were named and other ranks were merely listed as figures of killed or wounded. There were thousands.

Appeals were made for ex-NCOs to join for the duration of the war and reports began to describe the situation on the Western Front as being ‘not quite satisfactory’. Hundreds from the pit villages round about flocked to the recruiting stations and the streets of the town were flooded with raw recruits who encamped on the Town Moor in leaky tents. They trained with wooden dummy rifles and wore civilian clothes with coloured cord round their right shoulders because there was a shortage of uniforms.

Jimmy went to watch them drill the new service battalions with names like the Tyneside Scottish, Tyneside Irish, the Commercials and the Pioneers. He had taken to wearing Uncle Barny’s old military jacket, which swamped his narrow shoulders, and tried to cultivate a wisp of a moustache on his soft upper lip.

Winter arrived and a week before Christmas three German battlecruisers crept in from the North Sea and shelled Hartlepool. The war was suddenly too close to home and the shock was followed by outrage as news broke of civilian casualties. One hundred and nineteen men, women and children had been killed. Recruitment posters appeared again, portraying dashing cavalrymen - and volunteers flocked once more.

Jimmy’s seventeenth birthday was two days before Christmas and Maggie baked him a special cake. When he did not return from the station by seven o’clock, she sent George out to look for him. He returned two hours later, supporting an inebriated Jimmy crying into his shoulder.

‘Tommy Smith told me where to find him,’ George grunted. ‘In the Forge and Hammer.
^’

Maggie cuffed her drunken brother and demanded, ‘Tich, what you makin’ an exhibition of yourself for?’

‘They wouldn’t have me,’ Jimmy sobbed and staggered outside to be sick.

George explained. ‘He tried to enlist with the Tyneside Scottish - went down to the camp at Newburn. But they didn’t believe him when he said he was nineteen and they told him he was too small anyway - wouldn’t pass the medical.’

Maggie saw her peaky-faced brother appear in the doorway.

‘The lads laughed at me,’ he whispered miserably.

‘Oh, man, Tich;’ Maggie said, holding out her arms to him in comfort. But he flinched away from her.

‘Don’t ever call me Tich again!’ he shouted and staggered back outside.

Christmas passed quietly, with Jimmy spending his time increasingly away from the cottage, roaming the town with Tommy Smith and getting into fights on a Saturday night, returning with his eyes blackened and lips cut more often than not.

Maggie despaired of her brother but George would intervene and tell her to leave him alone, recognising the deep anger and frustration within the boy. When the spring came, he coaxed Jimmy down to the rowing club and by the early summer the youth was coxing in four-oared races on the Tyne.

But the war increasingly began to intrude into Maggie’s quiet haven at the farm. One afternoon a gang of boys came up the hill and started to shout at the gate. Maggie went out to discover the cause of the commotion.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

‘You’re spies, aren’t you?’ one of them shouted.

‘Don’t be daft!’ she laughed. ‘Be off and don’t pester me.’

‘We’ve seen the old hag you’re hidin’ in there,’ the tall vocal boy persisted. ‘We know she’s Boches. We’ve heard her speakin’ funny.’

‘You mean me granny? She’s Scots and she speaks Gaelic not Kraut,’ Maggie snapped in annoyance.

‘Same difference,’ the boy jeered. ‘Scotchie or Boches, we don’t like her here. You’re spies and that man you live with is a coward for not joining up like me dad and me uncles.’ At this, the other boys began to chant menacingly.

‘White feathers! White feathers!’

The ringleader split open a pillow he had been carrying and a deluge of feathers flew about like a white storm.

Maggie advanced on them with the chamber pot her grandmother had just used and which she had been going to empty. She hurled the contents at the boys. They squealed in disgust and jumped back.

‘Shove off, you little wasters!’ Maggie yelled at them.

‘You’re a witch, a bloody witch!’ the tall boy screamed.

‘Aye, I am,’ Maggie cried, ‘and I’ve plenty more of that witch’s brew you’ve just tasted!’

They turned and ran off down the hill in fear. Maggie laughed in relief, but later, when she recounted it to George, he seemed to take offence.

‘I’m no coward,’ he bristled.

‘Of course you’re not,’ Maggie soothed. ‘I know that.’

‘And I don’t like the thought of you being up here on your own all day with your grandmother,’ he fretted. ‘I think we should move back into town.’

‘I’m not afraid of a bunch o’ silly bairns calling me names,’ Maggie scoffed, ‘and I don’t want to leave here.’ She searched his troubled face. ‘What is it, Geordie?’ she asked. ‘Something else is on your mind, isn’t it?’

‘Aye,’ George admitted at last. ‘It’s our Billy.’

‘He’s been sent to France?’ Maggie guessed.

George looked at her unhappily. ‘He’s already back. Sent up the line the minute they arrived. Fought at Ypres. Poor buggers weren’t there long enough to know the Germans from the French.’

‘You’ve seen him?’

George nodded

‘Is he... all right?’

George shrugged. ‘He’s still in one piece, but he’s ill from that poison gas the Germans are using against our lads. He’s - changed. Even Irene can’t get more than two words out of him.’

After that, George grew more preoccupied and subdued and he and Jimmy would disappear for most of the evening to the rowing club. Wounded soldiers became an increasingly common sight in the town as they haunted the parks in their blue hospital uniforms and regimental bonnets, taken on picnics by worthy committees and photographed with munitions workers. On several occasions Maggie saw Alice Pearson’s name in the newspapers, praised for her fund-raising efforts for the newly created local battalions, with no mention made of her one-time association with the suffragettes.

Sometimes Maggie wondered whether the past turbulent years of women’s struggle had ever been, so little was there to show for it. The government were taking increasingly Draconian powers to stifle any dissent to the waging of war and George came home fuming one July day with news that strikes had been declared illegal.

‘They’ve got us over a barrel,
^’
he growled. ‘Any push for better wages or conditions is being seen as unpatriotic or worse. We’re working flat out and Pearson’s are coining it in but we’re told we’re putting the country in jeopardy by asking for more pay.’

‘You will be careful, won’t you?’ Maggie urged in concern. ‘We need your job to pay for this place - I can’t go out and leave Granny alone all day.’

George gave her a bewildered look. ‘What’s happened to the fighting suffragette?’ he demanded scornfully. ‘I thought you were on my side.’

‘Of course I am,’ Maggie answered irritably, ‘it’s just...’

‘What?’ George demanded.

Maggie shrugged in despair. She could not explain her feeling of foreboding at a future she could not see but could sense lay in wait like a predatory animal. Her biggest fear was that their tranquil life at the cottage would not last.

When she did not reply, George grunted, ‘I’ll tell you something queer. That Turvey’s working down at the yard.’

‘Richard?’ Maggie asked in surprise. ‘What’s he doing there?’

‘The devil knows. Some sort of clerking, I expect. Bobs up all over the place - even union meetings. Never struck me as the political type, but you never know who your friends are.’

‘Or your enemies,’ Maggie murmured and turned away, deeply troubled.

Then, quite suddenly, on a warm summer’s morning, Granny Beaton called Maggie to her bedside. The urgency in the old woman’s voice made Maggie drop the wet washing she was about to hang out and hurry over.

Her grandmother was trying to sit up, her eyes for once clear, her speech lucid.

‘Maggie, don’t trust him,’ she warned.

‘Granny, lie back,’ Maggie coaxed. ‘Were you having a bad dream?’

But the ancient woman resisted with surprising strength. ‘Not a dream, lassie,’ she cried. ‘He’s a wicked man ... he betrayed you.’

‘Who, Granny?’ Maggie asked, perturbed.

‘Thinks I’m mad but I knew what he was up to. That’s why . . .’ She clutched Maggie’s arm, her eyes filled with sudden terror. ‘Don’t let me go back to that place!’

‘I won’t,’ Maggie assured her, watching the old woman’s mind recede back into chaos. She must have been thinking of the workhouse and her dreadful days of imprisonment there, Maggie thought. Agnes Beaton began to mumble and call her Peggi, until her eyes closed and she sank into unconsciousness, her breathing shallow and ragged.

Maggie sat by the bed for an age, holding on to the soft skeletal hand of the old woman, recalling her life. Her craggy, ancient face had at last lost its tense fretfulness and lay serene on the linen-covered bolster. Maggie was reminded of the vigorous, red-haired lady who had burst into their life on the death of her father with her fanciful tales and magical songs. She had protected and loved them, always a calming presence in the wake of the storms wreaked by her volatile mother.

Maggie tried to imagine the young Agnes Beaton who had grown up in the shadow of Sgurr Beag, delighting in the songs and tales of her people and singing them to her small boy, oblivious of the terrible hardships that lay ahead. Her grandmother had endured eviction and banishment from her beloved Highlands and had been forced to flee to the strange and terrifying city of Glasgow. She had told Maggie how she had to be taught to use a stove, for the young Agnes had only ever cooked on an open fire, but she had adapted and managed without complaint.