No Greater Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

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