Free The Great Lover by Jill Dawson Page B

to her she simply makes more work for me later; she has complete want of a system of any sort and you might think she had to pay for water by the pint, so miserly is she with it. Left to herself, she would go on using the same drop–no matter what the colour–to the bitter end. Kittie’s mind is on other things. And if her miserly use of water isn’t bad enough, her treatment of the teacloths is worse! She doesn’t seem to understand that a soiled teacloth is unhealthy and means smeary china. That girl has had no training at all and her home is obviously a poor one.
    Yesterday she arrived from an errand at the butcher’s in Grantchester with a badge saying Votes for Women . A tin badge, with a safety-pin attached. I could scarcely believe it. ‘What are you doing with that thing?’ I said. ‘Take it off this minute and throw it away!’ (Kittie does remind me of my sister Betty, with her dreamy ways and her want of good sense.) She looked surprised at my cross tone. In truth, I think she was surprised at how quickly I’d taken charge of things. She carefully took the badge off her coat and slid it into her apron pocket, but she didn’t throw it away. ‘Where on earth did you get it?’ I hissed, as we stood at the basin, wiping the china. ‘Surely you’d lose your position here if Mrs Stevenson saw it?’
    ‘I went to Camden Town with my sister Fanny and listened to a woman speaker. Fanny says—’
    ‘Listen, Kittie. Women are destined to make voters, rather than be one of them. That’s our task in life, not to stand onstreet corners making a show of ourselves,’ I said. This was something Father had told me many times while we stood together by the hives, wiping the bees from the frames with our long sticks of feathers. I thought that Kittie, like Betty, would then fall silent, on account of my greater age and unyielding tone, but to my astonishment she didn’t.
    ‘Fanny says we are brave soldiers in the women’s army. That the time for talk is over. Action is what we need…’
    The girl is more stupid than I thought. She pores over the Daily Mail every morning, and yesterday she brought in something new, the Daily Sketch . She read it all through breakfast, which, given that we are only allowed ten minutes for that meal, seemed to me like a royal waste of time. She read things out to me: women throwing stones and raiding the House of Commons and Mrs Pankhurst smacking a police inspector’s face. It made my blood boil. ‘Do you seriously think that these grand ladies with their big hats are fighting for the Vote for girls like us?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you know that, were they ever to win such a thing, it would only be for grand ladies and married ladies and ladies with property? Why should we risk our positions and our good names so that they might vote at every turn against the working man’s best interests?’
    ‘Oh, but you’re wrong, Nell,’ she replied, cool as you like. ‘There’s many a maid or a girl like us what wants the Vote. Have you not heard of Annie Kenny? Look, here she is, right here, and look how she’s lost a finger. That happened in the cotton mills…’ She pointed at a grubby, blackened picture in the Daily Sketch , which I could barely make out.
    ‘Well, that only proves that this Kenny girl is accident prone and hardly to be admired,’ I said.
    That was yesterday, but it’s clear the subject is not forgotten, any more than the badge. I notice that Kittie is fiddling with the place on her apron where the pin was and, to forestall another argument, I say, with a firm tone, ‘See that that teacloth is scaldedout, Kittie, and do pick another one–otherwise it will never boil clean.’
    Mrs Stevenson comes into the scullery; thankfully Kittie falls silent. She hates to be scolded, and within hearing of Mrs Stevenson too. She sets her mouth firm and her brows against me, plunging her hands back into the water with a great splash, practically knocking the bucket off