Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  She raised her voice and spoke louder into the uproar.

  ‘That man there is only going to testify that the painting I slashed was priceless, which we all know anyway. What he won’t tell you, because no one will ask, is that it was a painting of a naked woman lying voluptuously across a bed, which was painted with the clear intention of giving lascivious pleasure to men — the same men who not only deny the vote to women, but refuse to pay them equal wages, live off their sweated labour in laundries and brush factories, and seduce the daughters of the poor into prostitution. I know that happens, and I am quite sure that many men here know that it happens, too. Even my husband knows it is true. He is as bad as the rest . . .’

  Heads turned, swung towards Jonathan. The reporters scribbled frantically. Oh Jonathan, Jonathan!

  ‘And the painting which was exhibited by that man there . . .’

  The noise was so great now that she wondered if anyone could hear. The policeman, embarrassed, began to drag her by the arm sideways out of the dock. But she caught hold of the brass rail and clung on. Perhaps no one would hear her but it was her trial, she would speak when she wanted to! She saw the reporters scribbling away in shorthand below her to the right, and a great feeling of joy and defiance bubbled up inside her. This was what she had come here for! Whatever they did to her later, tomorrow people would read her words in the papers and understand what she had done, and why!

  ‘You men care so much about that painting which is just a matter of canvas and paint, and nothing at all about the real living women that are all around you! What do you have to say about Mrs Pankhurst and all my sister suffragettes, who are locked up in prison and tortured as I suppose I shall be, tortured until they can scarcely walk? Do you care about the damage you do to their bodies? Bodies of real living women, not paintings! We are your mothers, your sisters, your wives — don’t you think we deserve the same right that you have — the right to vote for the government whose laws we live under?’

  The policeman had been joined by a colleague, who managed to prise her hands free from the rail, finger by finger, bending them back until they almost broke. The first policeman wrapped his arms round her waist and lifted her bodily backwards out of the dock. For a moment she struggled, kicking the shins behind her, but it was futile. The bearhug drove the breath from her body, and the second policeman held her wrists to prevent her fighting back with them.

  The last thing she saw as she was carried backwards like a naughty child out of the dock was Jonathan. He was on his feet, angrily shouting from the far side of the court. She wondered if he had understood that she knew his secret. She had shouted it out clearly enough. But even if he had, there was nothing he could say to her now.

  The policeman lugged her down into the bare whitewashed staircase leading to the cells. The walls echoed with laughter from the courtroom above. That hurt her more than anything else had so far. It’s all for nothing, she thought. I’m just a freak, a monster to these men.

  A child who got married and thought she was loved. A doll that thought it was human . . .

  The collecting cell below the court was a long narrow room with wooden benches down either side and a toilet at one end. There were several women there when Sarah arrived, and more appeared throughout the afternoon. Most had been convicted of various petty crimes, and some were merely being remanded in custody until a later trial. There were pickpockets, prostitutes, thieves — several only fifteen or sixteen years old. Some were in despair, others proud and defiant. All, at one time or another, felt the need to use the toilet at the end of the room, in full view of the rest.

  Shortly after Sarah had been brought down, a policeman had come in to tell her her sentence. ‘For cutting the picture — five months. And for contempt of His Majesty’s Court of Justice — one month. All in the third division. Consecutive!’

  He said the last word with malicious relish and emphasis and one of the other women grinned as he went out.

  ‘Must have hurt his pride, dearie, when he had to carry you down. Or did you catch him a good one in the cockles?’

  ‘What? No — no, I don’t think so,’ said Sarah dazedly. Six months! She could never survive that long! But then she wasn’t going to have to. They would let her out because she wouldn’t eat.

  She gazed at the woman vaguely, wondering what such a large, blowsy, motherly-looking woman could be doing here. ‘What are you charged with?’

  The woman laughed, her double chin wobbling up and down. ‘Solicitin’,’ she said, shortly. ‘Picked me up in Piccadilly Circus.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Sarah said bitterly. What man could possibly pay to make love to a woman like that? She must be at least forty, and plump in all the wrong sorts of places. Did Jonathan betray me with a woman like that, she wondered. Or with a child? Both ideas were equally grotesque.

  Something in her expression seemed to offend the woman. ‘There’s no need to turn up yer nose, milady. Suffragette, are yer?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Going to starve yourself to get out?’ The rest of the women in the cell were watching with interest now. Previously, when Sarah had been arrested, she had had other suffragettes around her. She had never been quite alone like this before.

  ‘Yes, I am. I shan’t be in here for six months, whatever they say. I’m not going to do anything they tell me.’

  The woman raised her eyebrows. The others in the cell contemplated her with a flat, incurious stare. Not exactly hostile, but there was no sympathy there, either. No sense of sisterly solidarity.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to do that,’ the woman said. ‘Hunger strikin’ an’ all that. They’re pretty bitter about that in Holloway now, you know. Some of the doctors used to be sorry for the suffragettes once, but they left. Governor slung ‘em out.’

  Sarah had no response to this, and for a while the conversation lagged. More women came in as the court continued its process up above, and by midday the cell was quite full. There were women of all ages — a grandmother of sixty with wrinkled face and black teeth, convicted of stealing fruit; a young servant girl with wide, scared eyes and a pinafore over her drab grey dress, who had taken the spoons and a silver teapot from her employer’s house; shop-girls who had stolen from the till or walked out with clothes stuffed under their skirts; a middle-aged woman with a swollen lip and black eye who sat in a corner and glared at a girl with a scratched cheek on the far side of the room, ostentatiously ignoring her.

  And then there were the prostitutes. As well as the fat blowsy woman who had spoken to Sarah earlier there were half a dozen girls aged between about sixteen and twenty-five who had been picked up for soliciting in the streets. Most still wore their finery, splashed round the hems with the mud of the gutters and crumpled after a night in the cells. Most had hard, strained faces, some garishly covered with too much make-up, smeared from the night before. None of them were in the least bit beautiful. The make-up made it worse.

  Two of the older ones were crushed up against Sarah as the cell filled. They glanced at her curiously, taking in her fine, good quality clothes, the plain gold ring on her finger.

  ‘Lady, are yer?’

  ‘Yes. I’m a suffragette.’

  The fat woman on the other side of the cell laughed, a deep, throaty, suggestive chuckle. ‘Not just any suffragette, neither! She slashed the picture in the National Gallery, she did! You mind your manners, Sal — we got a top-notch dafty ‘ere!’

  ‘You may think it’s crazy, but I did it out of principle. You ought to understand.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Go on, tell us, then.’

  For a while Sarah tried to explain. The oppression of women, the low wages, the exploitation, the futility of their lives, the way the whole of society worked to the advantage of men. She was not a great orator, and had only spoken in public once or twice before, but here in the crowded airless cell she provided a welcome distraction. Her audience was captive, but sullen, frightened and cynical too.

  ‘Look
at us all here now! How many of you would be in prison at all if you were paid a decent wage by men instead of half what they get? If you had a proper education, if there were women lawyers as well as men — if the laws were made by women? If women had the V . . .’

  ‘Sal would!’

  ‘What?’ Sarah shook her head, confused, as the fat woman’s laughter interrupted her. She was pointing at one of the two women sitting beside Sarah — a slim woman in a blue print dress, handsomer than most of the others, who might have been pretty if it were not for a certain hard strength to her chin, and the plucked eyebrows which Sarah loathed.

  ‘Sal likes doing it, lady! Can’t get enough! She’d be ‘ere whoever made the laws — wouldn’t yer, Sal?’

  ‘You shut your mouth, you old pissbag! If I had a decent flat of me own I wouldn’t need to be ‘ere at all, ‘course I wouldn’t! Just because no one but a blind drunk beggar’s been near you in the last . . .’

  The two women got up, facing each other, and in a moment the cell erupted into conflict, which lasted until two large policemen waded in to restore order. Quite how serious the turmoil had been Sarah was not sure, but it was obvious no one was prepared to listen to her arguments any more. She relapsed into silence, and desultory conversation resumed all around her. After a while she became aware that the two women beside her were discussing children. Sal, the woman next to her, was advising her friend about her daughter.

  ‘I told you, didn’t I? They’ll look after her. She’s a looker, ain’t she?’

  ‘I know that, but not yet. She can show it off if she wants to, but she’s just a kid. Thirteen next July. I wanted something better.’

  ‘Like what? Look, face it. She’s got six months now to fend for herself without you — what’s the choice? She could go into service and get up at five every morning shovellin’ ash out of grates, and then scrubbing floors and polishing silver all day till eight or nine at night — would that make her happy? Or she could get a job wearing the skin off her fingers stuffin’ bristles into brushes ten hours a day for one and six a week — is that what you want?’

  ‘It’s straight, in’ it?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s straight. Straight way to death by exhaustion, I say. I know, I done it, dearie. Look, if Mavis has come and asked you already, your kid must be a looker, mustn’t she? It’s her chance, ain’t it — are you going to stand in her way? That Mavis, she may look like a pig but she gets some of the best clients in the business, she does. Listen, there’s a kid I know, Rachel Hargreaves. Mavis took her on a couple of years ago. Found her in that charity hostel when her ma was in Holloway — Lord knows what Mavis was doing there. Anyhow, she started her out at that place in Hackney, Red Lion Street, the one that doctor owns, Armstrong. Just like your little one she was, couldn’t have been more’n thirteen then, and now I swear she earns more’n I do. In demand all over the place, top hotels, Kensington, the lot — sends her old ma four or five quid a week, never mind the rest.’

  The other woman wavered. ‘I could do with that, God’s truth I could. And my Linda would send it to me, she’s a good girl, she is.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. Play your cards right and you never need work again. And you’ll get a good bonus for her being pure.’

  The other woman sighed. ‘I know, I know. I just wish it could wait a year or so, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, it would have waited, if you hadn’t quarrelled with your Dan and got forced out on the street again. But you’re getting on, dearie, we all are, you got to look out for number one. At least this way your kid has a good lie in, keeps her looks, and has a chance of going somewhere . . .’

  The cell door opened, three more women came in, and Sarah lost the rest of the conversation as she had to move up along the bench. But she had heard enough. There could be no misunderstanding what the two women had been talking about. They were talking about selling a young girl into prostitution through the services of some woman called Mavis. And they had even mentioned a doctor called Armstrong — where was the place he owned? Red Lion Street, Hackney. Could there be two doctors involved in this with the same name? Surely not! It was too much of a coincidence to be a mistake.

  I suppose this is the evidence Alice Watson wanted, Sarah thought. If we could just produce those two women in court, get them to swear on oath what I have just heard them saying, then the scandal would be proven. Or even just tell Alice the name of the street in Hackney and the fact that Martin Armstrong owns a — a brothel there. If it is him . . . All we would need then would be the names of the men who are actually paying to seduce — is that the word?

  Paying to deflower — to destroy — to ruin thirteen year old girls!

  Oh Jonathan, Jonathan! In the overcrowded cell Sarah felt herself trembling, sweating, scarcely able to breathe. She tried to imagine what would happen in a bedroom in that house in Kensington when a man — a mature man, bearded perhaps, distinguished, socially secure, thirty-eight years of age perhaps, my husband! — came into a bedroom with a thirteen-year-old girl. A child who might be his daughter . . .

  It can’t happen.

  It does. Those women were talking about it, just now. Men pay extra because the girl is pure, a child, a virgin. Some of these men must be fathers, with daughters of their own. As that woman is a mother, who is selling her girl.

  Not my Jonathan. Please God, let it not be him.

  Let there be some mistake. Oh dear Father in heaven — why is God a father, would He have done this too?

  My father did . . .

  Sarah sat very still, trembling, her hands clasped so tightly in her lap that her fingers were white and bloodless. She closed her eyes and tried to pray, not knowing what she believed in any more.

  Certain only that hell was all around her . . .

  At four o’clock they were marched out, thirty women together, to the Black Maria. Sarah had been arrested twice before, but for some reason she had always been taken to prison in a cab, never in one of these until now. The Black Maria was a motor coach, a little longer than an omnibus, but with a single deck and no windows. One by one, two policemen ushered the women in through the doors at the back.

  When it came to Sarah’s turn, panic seized her. There was no room inside! The door at the back opened into a long narrow corridor, almost entirely filled by the bulk of the policeman crouching in it. His head was bent because of the low roof, and he was holding open the door to a small cubicle, a cupboard, on the right.

  ‘Here you are, Ma’am. First class passengers step this way!’

  ‘But — I can’t!’ She began to back out. It was too small, too cramped!

  ‘Here, George, catch her back! This one’s leery!’

  The policeman behind caught her waist, and between the two of them they manhandled her through the little door into the cupboard, like grooms dealing with a skittish horse. ‘It’s all right, dear, you’ll get used to it!’

  ‘But I can’t! I can’t breathe! I . . .’

  The door closed in front of her. They had sat her on a small plank, facing the closed door and the corridor she could no longer see. She had to sit, there was no choice. The cubicle was not high enough for her to stand up, or wide enough for her to turn round in. Her knees touched the door in front of her. And it was quite dark. She heard the door at the back of the vehicle slam shut, and total darkness enveloped her.

  There were women all around her, in other cubicles, but she could not see them. One or two were cursing and crying, but several called out mockingly to each other. They have been here before, they are not afraid, Sarah thought. If they can bear it I can — I must. I can’t set out to battle for women’s rights and then not be able to bear what a common streetwalker can.

  It was the darkness that saved her. After a moment’s panic she found it relaxing, comforting even. Do nothing, she thought. Feel nothing, don’t move. And then, as her eyes grew accustomed to it, she saw a marvellous thing.

  On the back of the door in front of her, an imag
e appeared. Very faint at first, a blur of light where there had been utter blackness before, but then it grew clearer. It was round, about the size of her hand, and there were shapes moving in it. As she felt the Black Maria lurch out of the gates of the police station into the street, the shapes of the images in front of her changed, growing one minute dark, then lighter again, and with little blurs of different colours moving this way and that.

  It fascinated her, and she forgot to be afraid. What could it be? The images seemed to be moving along the top of the picture, while the lower part was brown or red, like the upper stories of buildings. Very like . . . In fact, they even had square shapes like windows which moved across them. And below, something blue, like a streak of sky — except that it was right at the bottom of the picture instead of at the top!

  Then something clicked in her memory and she realised what she was looking at. She had seen something like this before, as a child. Her father had taken her and her little sister Deborah to an exhibition of photography, and there had been something — what was it called? A camera obscura — that was it! She had sat inside one with Deborah, he had drawn the curtain, and when their eyes had become accustomed to the darkness the same thing had grown on the wall in front of them — a picture of the world outside, but upside down, because the light came in through a pinhole in the wall behind them and changed places somehow.

  Sarah laughed, and the panic drained out of her like bathwater. She felt clear, clean, relaxed. That was it — the little figures moving busily across the top of the picture were people on the pavement, and there were vehicles bustling past them, upside down! For a while she watched them, entranced, smiling to herself in relief. The discovery had released her from fear, like a children’s story at the edge of night.

  But it was like childhood in another way too. It came back to her now, with the pain of a memory that had not been released for over twenty years, what it had been like in that camera obscura. At first she and Deborah had been fascinated by the tiny figures; but just as now, they had been blurred, difficult to make out clearly. And when you did make them out, they were only ordinary people in the street, after all. So she and Deborah had started to talk, in hushed whispers, about a secret they had learnt about their father.