The Making of Mollie

‘I do like him more than I’ve liked any other boy I met,’ I said. ‘But first of all, I’ve barely met any boys, and second of all, I know we’re far too young to think of boys at all. That’s what everyone says. And don’t go on about Juliet again because that was hundreds of years ago. You know things are different in the twentieth century.’ And I wondered what it would be like if everyone thought it was all right for a fourteen-year-old girl to be in love with someone, but I couldn’t really imagine what we’d do if they did.

I know ‘thou shalt not blackmail’ is not one of the ten commandments, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything about it in the Catechism, but maybe that’s because it’s so bad God didn’t think He had to tell you not to do it (although I suppose you could say the same about killing people, which is definitely worse than blackmail).

We were practising verbs and learning how to say things like ‘I have sold the pen of my aunt. I am selling the pen of my aunt. I will sell the pen of my aunt’ in French. I don’t know why, but we never seem to learn how to say any useful things in French class (or rather en français, as they say in France. I suppose I have learned something). If I ever tried to sell the pen of Aunt Josephine, she’d probably have me arrested for theft.

Most of the time when I hear grown-up people talking about politics it’s about Home Rule and independence, and it never seems to have much to do with real life. But what the woman said made me think that maybe politics could have something to do with real life. It even has something to do with us girls all giving the good bits of dinner to Harry and Father, and with us darning their socks, and with Phyllis having to fight to be allowed go to university when Harry took it for granted that he was going. Why should Mother not have a vote when Harry is going to have one in five years? And why didn’t we ever talk about things like that? Maybe because we all took it for granted that boys deserved certain things and girls deserved other, less interesting things.

People don’t always have the same political opinions as their parents. Otherwise nothing would ever change at all.