The Making of Mollie

by Anna Carey

  ‘Fate really is in our favour,’ said Nora. ‘What time should we set the clock for?’

  I had already been thinking about that.

  ‘Half past four,’ I said. ‘So we can get back long before the servants wake up.’

  ‘That’ll be lots of time,’ said Nora.

  Neither of us said anything for a moment. I thought of what it would be like to creep through the deserted streets, and what might happen if a policeman caught us, and a shiver ran down my spine.

  ‘You do really want to do this, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Nora. ‘We can’t keep going around in circles like this. I was asking you this the other day.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But it’s just that I started all of this. And I don’t want you to feel that I’ve, you know, dragged you along into something.’

  Nora looked affronted.

  ‘You’ve done nothing of the kind,’ she said. ‘I’ll admit that if it weren’t for you, I might never have thought much about the cause. But once I started thinking about it, I made my own mind up. And my mind says we should paint that postbox tomorrow.’

  I felt much braver and more enthusiastic on my way home. But not everything went smoothly. I had been taking it for granted that I’d be able to swipe the alarm clock from Harry’s bedside table without any problems, so it was a shock when I went into his room that evening and couldn’t see it anywhere. For a terrible moment I wondered if he could have taken it with him to Dundalk (but why would he have done that? Especially when he thought he was going for the day). Then I looked closer and saw that it had fallen off the table and got wedged between the table and the headboard. It must have got knocked back there while he was packing his sports kit. That was quite reassuring, because it showed me that Maggie or Mother wouldn’t notice it was missing if, by any strange chance, they should decide to enter the room over the next twenty-four hours.

  I grabbed the clock and quietly slipped out of the room. My heart was beating like mad. Sneaking things out of rooms is terribly nerve-racking, I don’t know how burglars and people like that do it. I knocked on the door of my room just to make sure Julia wasn’t in there praying or something (I wouldn’t put it past her, even though it was two in the afternoon), but luckily the room was empty, so I was able to quickly set the alarm for half past four and wrap it up in two woolly cardigans. Then I shoved the alarm clock bundle under my pillow next to my nightie. I hoped that the cardigans and the pillow would muffle the sound of the alarm enough so that Julia wouldn’t wake up too.

  The rest of the evening wasn’t much easier on my poor nerves. It was another Peter Fitzgerald night (Father has promised he’ll let Harry read the bits he’s missed when he returns home), and Peter found himself sharing a train carriage with one of the dangerous jewel thief gang. The jewel thief person didn’t recognise Peter because Peter has grown an enormous beard, but Peter was still, understandably, quite worried about being found out and was convinced that his fear was visible on his features, despite the beard. I couldn’t help wondering if the same was true for me – and I don’t even have a beard to hide behind. And I think I must have been right to worry about my anxiety showing on my face, because halfway through the chapter, at a particularly exciting moment, Father stopped reading and said, ‘Mollie, are you quite all right? You look very pale.’

  ‘I hope you’re not coming down with Harry’s ailment,’ said Mother.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, and tried very hard to look normal. I don’t think it worked, though, because both Father and Mother kept looking over at me in a concerned way all the way through the chapter. When Father finished reading (The member of the gang had seen through Peter Fitzgerald’s bearded disguise and he – Peter F, I mean, not the jewel thief person – had been forced to escape the carriage and crawl along the roof of the moving train. It was almost thrilling enough to distract me from my nerves, but not quite), he turned to me and said, ‘I think Mollie needs to go to bed early. She looks worn out.’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ said Julia. ‘It’s not like she’s done anything strenuous today.’

  ‘I do actually feel a bit tired,’ I said. ‘Maybe I will go to bed.’

  Everyone looked surprised to hear this, because usually I try to avoid going to bed for as long as possible, but of course tonight was different. Going to bed before Julia meant that I was able to put on my nightdress over my clothes (which would save dressing time the next day). I had read about people doing this in books, but it is surprisingly uncomfortable in real life. For one thing, my clothes seem to have lots of layers, and so are terribly bulky when worn under a nightie. For another, it was extremely hot, too hot to actually get under the covers straight away after I’d said my prayers. When I was saying them I added a special extra bit asking Him to look after me and Nora during our painting, though I did wonder if this was all right. I mean, should one ask God to help you break the law, even if it’s for a good cause? Especially after I’d been thinking about stealing a clock during that rosary the other night. I can’t imagine God was very pleased with me at the moment.

  When I’d finally finished my prayers, I just sat on the bed and tried to read the end of Jane Eyre until I heard Julia at the door. Then I leapt under the sheets and blankets and hoped she wouldn’t be able to tell how much I was wearing under there. Of course, she guessed something was up.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not coming down with something?’ she said. ‘You look very red in the face.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, although I wasn’t.

  ‘I’ll pray for you if you like,’ she said, in her most saintly voice. ‘You don’t look very well.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said sincerely, which was so unlike me that Julia gave me a very suspicious look. But she was obviously quite tired herself, because a few minutes later she had said all her prayers and got into bed, the light was turned out and she was snoring in a very loud and unsaintly manner.

  Of course, as luck would have it, when I eventually closed my eyes I couldn’t get to sleep, and not just because I was boiling hot and Julia was making the sort of snuffling noises that I can only describe as ungodly. I kept worrying about the alarm not going off, and then I started worrying about it going off too loudly and waking up Julia. And then I worried that I wouldn’t be able to wake up Nora, or that I’d throw a stone through her parents’ bedroom window.

  It felt as though I were lying awake all night, but I must have dropped off at some stage because I started having a very odd dream about wearing a false beard while travelling on a train with Mrs. Sheehy-Skeffington and Peter Fitzgerald. Peter Fitzgerald had just accused me of stealing a Votes for Women posterboard when I was woken up by something rumbling and shaking under my pillow. The cardigans and the pillow had done a pretty good job of muffling the sound, but it was only now that I realised how difficult it was going to be to turn the alarm off without removing all the muffling materials. And if I removed them now, Julia would definitely wake up.

  There was no time to think too much about it. I shoved my hand desperately into the bundle and fumbled around with the knobs and switches. And somehow, to my great relief, I hit the right thingamabob. The alarm stopped vibrating just as Julia rolled over and made a worryingly awake-sounding snort. I held my breath for what felt like a very long time, and then Julia let out a proper snore and I knew the danger had passed – for now. I hid the bundle under my pillow, pulled off my nightie and slipped out of the room. Then I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face in the hope that it would wake me up a bit. Which it sort of did.

  My shoes were in the hall, so I tip toed down the stairs in my stocking feet and put them on. The next challenge was getting out of the house. What if Father’s keys weren’t on the hall stand? Climbing out a window would be easy, but it was going to be a lot harder to get back in. But fortune was smiling on me once again, because there on the stand were the keys on their ring with the leather fob. I checked t
he clock in the hall. It was twenty to five. I had an hour and a half to meet Nora, go to our target, do the deed and get back to the house before Maggie got up. It was absolutely loads of time, as long as everything went well. But there were, I knew, so many things that could go wrong.

  I turned the key in the front door’s lock, unhooked the heavy chain and pulled it open as gently as I could. Please, I thought, PLEASE don’t squeak today. But it did. Very loudly. I froze, expecting to hear the sound of Father or Maggie leaping out of bed and coming down to investigate. But nothing happened, and after a minute or so I went out and closed the door behind me. It only made a little squeak that time, thank heaven.

  The sky was starting to get light, and there wasn’t a person to be seen as I ran down the road to Nora’s house. It felt quite odd and a little bit frightening being out at that early, lonely hour. It was only when I got to the Cantwells’ redbrick villa that I wondered if I should have gathered some stones in advance. I couldn’t see any lying about the place, and I was wondering if I could throw my shoe at the window without either breaking the window or the shoe when I noticed that one of Nora’s neighbours had a sort of gravelly patch between the bay window and the railings. I grabbed some of the gravel and threw it up at Nora’s window as accurately as I could.

  It rattled against the glass so loudly that I was sure it would crack, but a moment later the curtains parted and Nora peered down at me through the crack and waved. She was wearing her nightie, but she must have had her clothes on underneath, because just a minute later she slipped out of the front door holding a little bag.

  ‘Did you have any trouble getting out?’ I asked.

  ‘I told you my parents are very sound sleepers,’ said Nora. ‘What about you?’

  I told her about the alarm and the noisy door, but we agreed it could have been worse.

  ‘Imagine if Julia had woken up,’ said Nora.

  I shuddered at the thought. Actually, I shuddered a bit from the cold too.

  ‘I should have brought one of the cardigans I used to wrap the clock,’ I said. ‘Or Stella’s scarf. I didn’t realise it was so cold at this time of the morning.’

  ‘The walk will warm us up,’ said Nora. ‘And so will running,’ she added, ‘if we get spotted by a policeman.’

  I looked around nervously, but there wasn’t a policeman in sight. Or anyone else, for that matter. It was so quiet that every time we spoke, even in a whisper, it seemed to boom through the streets, so we didn’t say much. But when we reached the main road, we started to see delivery lorries and carts. Just before we reached the North Circular Road a lorry full of coal passed us. The driver gave us an amused look and called out, ‘Are you right there, girls?’ as he drove by.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s hurry up.’

  We quickened our pace and it wasn’t long before we were at the postbox at the corner of Nelson Street and Eccles Street.

  ‘Right,’ said Nora. ‘Here we are.’

  But neither of us moved.

  ‘Do you have the paint?’ I whispered.

  Nora nodded and held up the small pot. I looked around. The street was deserted.

  ‘Come on, then,’ I said.

  Nora unscrewed the lid and dipped in the brush.

  ‘Do you want to go first?’ she said. ‘After all, it was your idea to get involved in all this in the first place.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘We’re both in it as much as each other,’ I said. ‘You write the first bit and I’ll write the last few words.’

  Nora gave one nervous look behind us, and then she wrote VOTES FOR on the pillar box in big letters.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now it’s your turn. Quickly, in case anyone comes.’

  She passed me the brush. I took a deep breath. All our playing around with songs, even the chalking, were nothing in comparison to this. Now we were breaking the law. Now we were – what had Frank said? – defacing public property. Now we were really standing up for the cause.

  Good.

  I dipped the brush in the pot and wrote IRISH WOMEN! in even bigger letters.

  We both stared at the postbox for a moment, then at each other.

  ‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s go.’

  And, after throwing the paint pot and the brush behind some railings, we shot off down the road as fast as our legs could carry us. Which, as I have pointed out, is quite fast indeed, at least for short distances. But it wasn’t long before we got out of breath.

  ‘Stop, stop,’ I wheezed, drawing to a halt. ‘I can’t go on.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ said Nora. She was panting too.

  We leaned against the wall. Then Nora looked at me, and I looked at her, and we both started laughing (though not too loudly, in case we woke anyone up).

  ‘We did it!’ I said. ‘We really, truly did it!’

  ‘We’re militants,’ said Nora. ‘Like Mrs. Pankhurst. Except nobody has carried us off to prison.’

  ‘Yet,’ I said. And that sobered us up a bit, but only for a moment. Now that the immediate danger of discovery had passed, we felt giddy and bubbly, like soda water. We started laughing again.

  ‘Oh, it hurts,’ said Nora. ‘I still can’t breathe properly.’

  And we tried to pull ourselves together. It had got much brighter and more people were starting to appear: servants and delivery men and even a few rather ragged-looking children. A Boland’s bread van went past, the driver glancing at us with mild curiosity. He – and everyone else – was probably wondering what two girls dressed like us were doing out at this hour of the morning.

  ‘We’d better get home,’ I said.

  And off we went. We decided it was safe to start walking normally again. After all, we were far enough away from the postbox that even if someone noticed us and asked us what we were doing roaming around in the wee hours, no one would connect us with the vandalism. But just in case anyone had spotted our daring deed and was following us, we took a sort of roundabout route home.

  When we reached the corner where Nora turns off, and were quite sure no one had followed us there, I asked, ‘Do you think it will get in the papers?’

  ‘It might,’ said Nora. ‘I mean, it’s not just chalk, it’s actual paint.’

  Just then, the church bells started to ring out.

  ‘Six o’clock!’ I cried. ‘Maggie will be up soon.’

  And, after agreeing to meet up later, we each ran home. Luckily, the door decided to behave itself and opened silently when I let myself in. I knew it was much more likely that a noise would wake someone now, at a time that was much closer to their normal waking up time, than when I left the house. I tiptoed down the hall and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, but of course the range and the fire weren’t properly lit, and I didn’t want to risk making a mess with either of them by trying to stoke them up, so I couldn’t boil a kettle. I cut a slice of bread and got some butter and milk from the cold press, and was sitting at the table eating the bread and butter and drinking the milk when Maggie came in, yawning and rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  ‘Good morning, Maggie,’ I said.

  Poor Maggie nearly jumped out of her skin.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said.

  ‘I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep,’ I said. ‘The sun always wakes me up early at this time of year.’ Both of which statements were perfectly true.

  Soon Maggie had laid the fire and stoked the range. I asked if I could help, but she just looked at me and said I’d be less trouble sitting at the table. I was still feeling fizzy with excitement about what we’d done, so fizzy that I almost told Maggie about it. But I knew it wouldn’t be fair to burden her with the knowledge of what me and Nora had done, even though she might approve of it (and I had a feeling she would).

  I ate more bread and butter and tried not to think of the poor suffragette hunger strikers in England, and soon Maggie had made the tea. She gave me another shrewd look over the pot.
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br />   ‘What have you been up to?’ she said. And then she sighed and said, ‘Actually, don’t tell me. I’m better off not knowing.’ Then she leaned over and lifted the end of one of my plaits.

  ‘Is that paint in your hair?’ she asked.

  It was as if the earth had stopped turning. I stared at her for what seemed like ages and didn’t say anything, but she didn’t ask any more questions. She just said, ‘Honestly, I don’t know how a nice girl like you ends up covered in muck’, got a clean dish cloth and wiped my plait with it.

  ‘There you go,’ she said. ‘Now, off you go and do something useful. I’ve got shoes to clean and breakfast to make.’

  So I went. I sat in the sitting room and tried to read the last few pages of Jane Eyre, but I couldn’t concentrate. I can’t imagine ever being able to concentrate on anything properly again; I’ve felt so jangled over the last few days. It was quite a relief when the rest of the family all started to come down for breakfast, even though they were all so surprised to see me there before them that I felt quite insulted.

  ‘I just woke up early because of the sunlight,’ I said. ‘It is the middle of summer, you know.’

  ‘I just wish it had been so easy to get you out of bed during term time,’ said Mother.

  And then Julia said she was going to start getting up at six and going to Mass every day, and Mother said that was very nice but who would take her, and that drew everyone’s attention away from me. Which was a good thing, as the fizzy feeling had entirely evaporated by now, and instead I was gripped by a terrible fear. What if someone had seen us? What if they’d tracked us down? If I had managed to get paint in my hair without either me or Nora noticing, what other clues might we have left behind? I became completely terrified that I’d dropped a hanky or something (even though my hankies are all plain white with some flowers embroidered on them, rather than my initials or any other features that would identify the owner, so even if I had dropped one no one would figure out that it was mine). I was so worried about it I had to go out and check the pockets of my coat to make sure that my hanky was still there (which it was. It was also still plain white with a pansy embroidered in one corner).