Description
Excerpt from Jessie Kenney’s unpublished autobiography, “The Flame and the Flood”.
In this excerpt, Jessie recollects the peaceful family Sundays of her childhood. Discussions ranged from articles in the latest issue of The Clarion to opera and reincarnation. The afternoons would be passed in conversation until the church bells announced the Evening Service, which the family would attend. After church, the older siblings would go out for the evening whereas the youngest would stay home and play board games with their mother. Their father would usually be near by reading a newspaper or an herbal book, as he was fond of botany. Jessie fondly recalls being taught to play a good game of draughts by her mother. “Little did I realise then,” she writes, “that it would be a symbol of a broad arrowhead that would become one day not only a badge of shame and ridicule stamped on the clothes of prisoners in the gaols of our country but would evolve into a symbol of the pioneer which have to pierce through ignorance on one side, prejudice on the other and with its point cut through apathy and inertia”. She refers here to the famous arrowhead pikes suffragettes carried during marches and demonstrations to signal that they had been imprisoned for the Cause.
