The Making of Mollie

by Anna Carey

  And now Nora looked as if she was starting to blush.

  Anyway, we walked to the tearooms. Frank asked how Harry was.

  ‘He looked a bit feeble when he called over to my house,’ he said.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ I said. ‘I think it was all a ruse to get out of school.’

  But Frank said no, Harry really had been very sick and there was no way he could have gone home on the train with the rest of the team.

  ‘Well, there’s definitely nothing wrong with him now,’ I said.

  ‘He really isn’t that bad, you know,’ said Frank, laughing. ‘Though I will admit that as a brother he leaves something to be desired.’

  ‘He definitely wouldn’t approve of that meeting,’ I said, gesturing back towards the site of all the drama.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ said Frank. ‘Oh well, maybe you’ll convert him in the end.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. We were nearly at the tearooms. ‘What did you think of, you know, the window smashing?’

  And he said he was impressed by the suffragette leaders’ deeds.

  ‘Really?’ asked Nora, surprised.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I always approve of breaking windows and that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘But it was very brave. And it’s certainly getting people’s attention.’

  ‘Not always in a good way,’ I said, thinking of the rude men in the crowd.

  ‘True,’ said Frank. He smiled at me. ‘I half expected to hear you had been smashing windows yourself, after all your chalking.’

  Now both Nora and I definitely went bright red. For a moment I wondered if we could ever tell Frank the truth, but I knew that probably wasn’t a good idea. The fewer people that knew about it, the better. So I laughed (I don’t think it was very convincing) and said, ‘Oh, we’re not going to do anything like that.’

  ‘No,’ said Nora. ‘Chalking is enough for us.’

  We had reached the tearooms.

  ‘Well, Mollie, I suppose I’ll see you soon,’ said Frank. ‘You can tell me more about your crusading.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Even if I couldn’t tell him about the postbox painting, I could tell him about missing the meeting, I thought. In fact, I was sure there were lots of things we could talk about.

  ‘Goodbye, Nora,’ said Frank. ‘It was very nice to meet you.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Nora, smiling back at him.

  ‘Goodbye Mollie,’ he said. ‘If you need me to catch any more terrible dogs for you, do let me know.’

  And with a cheery wave, he strode away towards the North Circular Road gate. I do hope I see him again soon. Though hopefully without Barnaby having anything to do with it.

  ‘Well!’ said Nora.

  ‘Oh Nora,’ I said. ‘Don’t go on about Romeo and Juliet again, it’s quite ridiculous.’

  ‘All right, I won’t,’ said Nora. ‘But,’ she added in her grandest voice, ‘I give you my blessing.’

  I thumped her arm but I couldn’t help laughing because she is very funny when she talks like a duchess. And then Kathleen and Phyllis returned, looking very hot and out of breath.

  ‘Well, they’ve gone off on a tram,’ said Kathleen. ‘And those louts seem to have given up quickly, for once. For a minute I thought they were going to break the windows.’

  ‘Now, let’s have some tea,’ said Phyllis. ‘And then I’d better get you two home. Don’t you have exams this week?’

  And so when we had finished some decent buns, we got two trams home. After all the excitement of this week, I ended it studying French verbs and Latin poetry, and of course writing this letter to you. And there I suppose I should end the letter, because this coming week will be devoted to exams and I really don’t think I can write anything interesting about them.

  I do hope you have found everything else interesting – I always worry that my letters are too long, even though you always say you prefer long letters to short ones. Anyway, I will put this in the post on my way to school tomorrow. I hope all is well with you and that your own exams haven’t been too awful. And just think, soon it will be the holidays, and who knows what will happen then?

  Best love,

  Mollie.

  P.S.

  Monday

  I know this letter is even longer than usual (which is saying something), but I’m glad I forgot to post it this morning because something has happened that makes me realise how much things have changed in the last few months. And not just for me, or for Nora. Things are changing in general.

  But I’ll start at the beginning. It seemed very strange to be back at school today, when so much had happened since we were last there. I wish they could have just let us go on holidays early. I mean, our summer exams aren’t that important, surely? Though I suppose they can’t just abandon the Inter. Cert. and Matric. girls (Their exams don’t start for another week or so).

  Anyway, there was nothing we could do about it. Just as there seems to be nothing we can do about Grace (unfortunately).

  ‘I saw those suffragettes of yours were making trouble last week,’ she said snootily, when me and Nora were hanging up our hats in the cloak room. She’s more or less given up on her pretend niceness now. ‘I think it’s disgraceful, ladies throwing stones like little boys.’

  ‘We wouldn’t expect you to understand,’ said Nora haughtily.

  ‘I’m quite glad I don’t,’ said Grace. ‘A lot of grubby nonsense.’

  And then the bell rang for our first lesson – which was historical geography, one of my very least favourite subjects. It was very hot, and the classrooms seemed even stuffier and smellier than ever. In fact, as the morning went on, I found myself feeling strangely flat and depressed. Just a few days ago, we’d been brave suffragettes – or at least we’d felt like them. But now we were back in school with exams starting tomorrow, while our leaders were probably going to prison in a few days. And what difference had it made, really? None to those rude men in the crowd. And certainly none to Grace.

  What were we doing at all? That was what I thought as a bluebottle buzzed relentlessly against the glaring classroom window. What was the point of it? Did it really make a difference if two girls tried to go to meetings and annoyed their classmates and chalked slogans and even painted something on a postbox? Did anyone notice? And if they did notice us, would they just laugh and jeer like those awful men on Sunday? I mean, if people could laugh at such brave ladies (and Mr. Sheehy-Skeffington), would anything ever change? We hadn’t even managed to change people we know. After all, Grace was still being Grace, only worse. Harry was still being Harry.

  And me and Nora didn’t even have the courage of our convictions. If we were real suffragettes, I thought, we wouldn’t have got rid of the paint and run home. We would have proudly stayed at the scene of the crime and got arrested. They’d have dragged us off to prison shouting ‘Votes for Women!’ And maybe we’d have got to talk at the meeting on Saturday instead of just standing there eating ‘suffra-gate oranges’ like good little girls. I sighed.

  ‘Are you quite all right, Miss Carberry?” asked Professor Costello.

  I sat bolt upright.

  ‘Yes, Professor Costello,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Professor Costello gave me a stern look and then went on talking about the Boyne valley or some such nonsense. I slumped back down in my seat and tried to ignore Grace, whom I could see looking smugly at me from the next desk. And so the morning wore slowly and hotly on.

  And then, at break time, it happened. Nora was telling Stella about everything that happened last week, and I left them to go to the lavatory. It was blessedly cool in there, and after I’d washed my hands I leaned my head against the looking glass over the sink for a moment. And in the reflection, out of the corner of my eye, I saw some pink lettering. I turned around and there it was. Someone had written VOTES FOR WOMEN NOW! in large letters of pink chalk on the door of the lavatory cubicle.

  Nora must have done it, I thought, or maybe eve
n Stella. Though it’s strange neither of them told me they were planning to chalk something at school. I made my way back to the refectory and when I was pushing open the big door at the end of the corridor I saw that someone had scratched VOTES FOR WOMEN into the corner of one of the panes of glass in the door. I was very impressed – scratching into glass is a lot more difficult to get rid of than chalk, or even paint – but again, it did seem strange that Nora and Stella hadn’t mentioned it. Still, seeing it cheered me up a bit. When I got back to the refectory the two of them were sitting in a corner drinking their milk and eating buns.

  ‘Nora’s been telling me about how you managed the postbox,’ said Stella eagerly. ‘You are brave. Well done.’

  ‘I told her we should have worn our scarves,’ said Nora. ‘I never knew it was so cold at that hour of the morning.’

  ‘Which one of you did it?’ I said.

  ‘Did what?’ asked Stella.

  ‘One of you must have,’ I said. ‘Was it you, Nora?’

  ‘My dear Mollie,’ said Nora, ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Have you had a touch of the sun?’ said Stella in a worried voice. ‘Maybe Mother Antoninas was right about the scarf giving you sun stroke last week.’

  ‘In the loo!’ I said. ‘The pink chalk. And on the window of the door.’

  Nora looked a bit worried now.

  ‘I think she has had a touch of the sun,’ she said.

  ‘No I haven’t,’ I said, crossly. And I told them what I’d seen in the lavatory and on the door.

  ‘It wasn’t me. I don’t think I have the nerve,’ said Stella. ‘Yet,’ she added quickly.

  ‘It wasn’t me either,’ said Nora. ‘I wouldn’t have done it without telling you.’

  The three of us looked at each other, our eyes wide.

  ‘You know what that means,’ said Nora. ‘It was someone else. Or two someone elses.’

  ‘Someone we don’t know,’ I said. ‘I mean, we must know at least one of the people who did it, because the chalk was in the Middles lav, but we don’t know who exactly it was.’

  ‘But who could it be?’ said Stella.

  We looked around the classroom, at Maisie and May and Johanna and Daisy and all the others. Inside at least one of those girls – maybe even two, or three, or five, or ten of them – beat the heart of a suffragette. Me and Nora and Stella – we weren’t alone. And maybe everything we’d been doing really had made a difference here. Maybe our ideas were spreading out. Like the bilious ’flu or a cold. Only good, of course. Maybe someone had heard us going on about suffragettes and started thinking for the first time about why it was important for women to get the vote, like I had done after I heard the speaker at the Custom House. And just like Frank, I remembered suddenly, had only started thinking about it after I talked to him. Maybe someone had always felt it was important but had thought she was alone until she heard us. And maybe it was nothing to do with us, maybe someone in our class just happened to believe that women should have a say in how the world was run. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that there were lots of us who cared and were also willing to do something about it. Well, at least four of us: me, Nora, Stella and the mystery chalker/glass-scratcher. But that is four more girls than there were last year, or even a few months ago. And that has to be a good thing.

  Anyway, I didn’t feel as glum after that. And of course I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But I’m glad that Stella made us suffragette scarves, and I’m glad that those brave ladies broke those windows, and I’m glad we painted that postbox, and I’m glad that mysterious suffragette schoolgirl wrote Votes for Women in the lav and on the window. I do think that what happened this week brought us one step closer to getting the vote. It might take months, or even years, but we’re going to win this fight. I know we are.

  And won’t Grace and Aunt Josephine and Harry be absolutely sick as pigs when we do?

  Best love, and votes for women!

  Mollie

  A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and the other militant suffragette activists mentioned in the book were all real people. Mollie, Nora and their friends, families and teachers are all products of my imagination.

  The school the girls attend, however, is real, and I went there. Dominican College was founded in Eccles Street in 1883 and moved up the road to Griffith Avenue in Drumcondra over a century later in 1984. I entered the school four years later, though it wasn’t until the twenty-first century that I discovered Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington had been a pupil and a teacher at the school over a hundred years earlier.

  One of Sheehy-Skeffington’s students, feminist activist and educator Louise Gavan Duffy, went to Eccles Street in 1907. She later wrote that ‘it was a very exciting place for me in a very new life: there were crowds of girls from all parts of Ireland – there were whiffs of politics – we had lectures from some very fine women, to whom we owed more than we knew, and who, as well as giving us outstanding teaching in their subjects, let in for us a little outside air.’

  While I was researching the book, the school’s archivist Sister Catherine Gibson very kindly allowed me to look at the old Eccles Street yearbooks, The Lanthorn. As well as providing me with details about the routine of the school and the subjects the girls studied there, pictures of some of the rooms and inspiration for the names of all of the characters in The Making of Mollie (apart from the male ones, who are all named after my relatives), the yearbooks also included fascinating and often very funny articles by the girls themselves. These were full of contemporary schoolgirl slang. If you’re wondering if Irish girls around 1912 really did use the word ‘kid’ for a child or use expressions like ‘I say’ and ‘frightfully’, I can assure you that they did!

  No Surrender by Constance Maud, the book that inspires Mollie and Nora, is a real book. It was first published in 1911 and was reissued by Persephone Books in 2011. You can find more about it at www.persephonebooks.co.uk

  While Mollie and Nora’s adventures are fictitious, they take place against a backdrop of real events. The parade attended by Phyllis which was disrupted by the Ancient Order of Hibernians took place in the spring of 1912, and the Dublin police protected the suffragettes from the violent mob. Dublin suffragettes really did share information about all the cafés, restaurants and shops that would allow suffragettes to use their toilets, and they also chalked slogans and information about suffrage meetings all over the city. The scene in which a passerby thinks Mollie and Nora are praying is based on a real incident which was reported in a Dublin newspaper!

  The big suffrage meeting in the Antient Concert Rooms that Mollie and Nora fail to get into took place on the 1 June 1912 and was a big success (Louise Gavan Duffy was one of the speakers). The I.W. F. L. held meetings in the Phoenix Park every weekend and outside the Custom House every Wednesday. There are some descriptions of these meetings in the I.W.F.L magazine The Irish Citizen (which was launched on May 25th 1912), though these reports are not very detailed.

  Most of the suffrage meetings I describe in the book are wholly imaginary apart from the very last one, which took place just a few days after the I.W.F.L. women were arrested for breaking windows. That scene in the book is based very closely on the Irish Times report of the meeting which appeared on 17 June 1912. All the speeches and the heckles are direct quotations. The same report includes the story of the melodeon and the women selling ‘suffragate oranges’. The report says that a young suffragette politely corrected the women’s pronunciation, though her advice was ignored – it didn’t give the name of the young activist, so I thought Nora could do it!

  And finally, according to the Irish Citizen’s report of the suffragettes’ appearance in the police court on the day they broke windows all over the city, the court was told that on the same morning, the words ‘VOTES FOR IRISH WOMEN’ had been painted on several postboxes across the city, ‘for which the police were not able to produce a single culprit’.


  About the Author

  Anna Carey is a journalist and author from Dublin who has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent and many other publications. Anna’s first book, The Real Rebecca, was published in 2011, and went on to win the Senior Children’s Book prize at the Irish Book Awards. Rebecca returned in the critically acclaimed Rebecca’s Rules and Rebecca Rocks. The Making of Mollie is her first historical novel.

  Copyright

  This eBook edition first published 2016 by The O’Brien Press Ltd,

  12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, D06 HD27, Dublin 6, Ireland.

  Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777

  E-mail: books@obrien.ie

  Website: www.obrien.ie

  First published 2016.

  The O’Brien Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-84717-903-6

  Copyright for text © Anna Carey 2016

  Copyright for typesetting, layout, design © The O’Brien Press Ltd

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cover illustrations: Lauren O’Neill