Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  What was it, that secret? The memory came back to her with such painful clarity — she could even feel the print dress with ruffled sleeves she had worn, feel the way her feet only just touched the floor from the high seat. How old had she been? Eleven? Yes, she had had her birthday a few days before and Deborah had given her the butterfly brooch she was wearing. She could see it now, so painfully clear! And outside the booth, her father, in tweed coat and flannels, for it was a holiday, and he was trying to be jolly. She could even smell his cigar.

  But what was the secret they had talked of?

  The Black Maria lurched over a bump in the road, and the picture on the back of the door in front of her changed. They were going over the river, Sarah realised. She could see ships. But for the moment it didn’t matter. Her mind made this memory seem immensely important.

  Deborah had . . . met someone, that was it! A woman — the two girls had been watching a woman in the pinhole picture inside the camera obscura, going along upside down in front of them, and she had been wearing a purple coat — that was what had reminded Deborah of it. Deborah had seen this woman a week or so before, and she had been totally mad. Deborah hadn’t actually spoken to the woman — she had been playing with a hoop in the park at the time — but she had seen the woman come up to their father and speak to him. She was rather a poor woman, Deborah could see that, but she had been wearing this gaudy purple coat which made her stand out. And she had called her father by his Christian name — George — just like that, as though she knew him! She had even put her arm through his, tried to walk down the path with him; it was terribly funny!

  And all the time Deborah had been bowling her hoop along between the trees, watching, and seen their father go awfully red, because of course it made him look ever so silly. Then he had given the woman some money and spoken sharply to her, to make her go away. When Deborah had asked him about it he had said she was a poor madwoman, who didn’t know who she was, and ought to be in hospital.

  Yes, that was it! It came back to Sarah now, all in a rush. She remembered Deborah telling her about it in the camera obscura, and the two of them had started giggling. Their father had pulled back the curtain to ask what was so funny and they had danced out, still giggling, linked his arms, one on each side, and dragged him away to the ice-cream stall. They were both pretending to be that silly woman, without letting their father know. What a strange daddy he was! All you had to do was come up to him, link his arm, call him George, and he would give you money. Or ice-cream.

  It was an exquisitely painful memory. Sarah could even see her father — young, as he had been then, with brown hair and slim waist instead of the paunch and bald head he developed later. No sign of that embarrassing rash on his neck which he had covered up with a scarf as he grew older.

  The rash that was the first visible symptom of the syphilis that killed him when she was nineteen . . . The shock had turned her mother into a permanent hypochondriac who always wore black and hardly ever left the house until she died too, nine years later. It had made Sarah fear and distrust all men, until she had met Jonathan.

  The most painful thing of all, was how she had once loved her father. So long ago; she had been so innocent. He had been a jolly man who bought them ice-creams and swung them up on his shoulders and made them laugh, and never looked worried or tired or ill as their mother often did. That was before she had learned what men were really like. Before she had learned what he had done to her mother . . .

  Because he did what Jonathan was doing now.

  The Black Maria stopped in a traffic jam under a railway bridge, and the tiny pinhole of light failed utterly. Sarah Becket sat hunched on the wooden seat in her cubicle, rocking from side to side to calm herself. A thin shabby woman crushed into a box in a coach full of boxes. Some small boys, passing outside, casually threw handfuls of gravel onto the vehicle, and it thundered on the roof like hail . . .

  5

  HOLLOWAY. SARAH knew they had arrived even before the door at the back of the Black Maria was opened and light began to seep in. This time, when the vehicle stopped, the engine was switched off, and in the sudden quiet she heard the distant thud of a heavy gate shutting outside.

  The first of many, she thought with a grim shudder. She pictured the massive, metal-studded gates she had seen when she had been imprisoned here before, and remembered how she had felt then. Hopeless, forgotten, alone. But she had starved her way out and she would do it again. She took deep, steady breaths, to calm herself for the struggle ahead.

  Her compartment door was thrown back with a crash and she was hustled out with the others into the dazzling grey daylight of the prison yard. She stumbled, hands in front of her eyes, blinking, and before she could fully recover she was led through a prison door, down a noisy echoing corridor, to a room where her name was entered in a ledger.

  Here the policemen delivered her, like a parcel, and the prison wardresses took over. She looked at these women curiously, searching for the least trace of sympathy. On her last two visits there had been none. And yet, she thought, wardresses need the vote too. We are all women here, it is the men who are the enemy. But these wardresses did not even look at Sarah or the other prisoners. They stared somewhere above her head, or to the side, and spoke in loud harsh voices as though addressing someone who was deaf, or stupid, and far away.

  ‘Out of the door, turn right, down the stairs to the washroom!’

  ‘Will I be allowed to . . .’

  ‘Button that lip! No one to speak unless spoken to!’

  All this in that rude, harsh, impersonal voice, with no eye contact at all. A shove on the shoulder — from a woman! — and Sarah was out in the corridor. The wardresses seemed worse than she had remembered, harsher, as though those with any hint of sympathy for the suffragettes had been weeded out. There has been a change here, she thought, this place is worse than it was . . .

  In the washroom the wardress took her into a cubicle with a large enamel bath. She turned the taps on with a quick, assertive flick of her wrist and then stood facing Sarah with her hands on her hips. She was a young woman, Sarah noted, not more than twenty-five, well-built, with strong arms and a rather wide, plain face. She was staring at a point slightly to the right of and above Sarah’s head.

  ‘Right then, you. Strip!’

  Sarah considered. She had submitted to this last time but it had left her feeling foul, humiliated. The bath had evidently not been cleaned for some time. There was a grimy ring around the sides and a broad streak of rust leading to the plughole. The water coming out of the taps had a yellowish tinge, and a froth of grey bubbles was forming on its surface.

  If I am going to resist at all this time, this is where I start, Sarah thought. If my maid had run me a bath like this she would have been sacked on the spot. And this surly girl is no more than a jumped-up maid, even if she has power over me. I must win her over. After all, my protest is for women like this, too. She decided to try humour.

  ‘Is this really necessary? It doesn’t look as though I shall derive much benefit from it.’

  The young woman’s eyes flickered for an instant in her direction, then resumed their stony stare at the wall.

  ‘All prisoners wash on arrival. Regulations.’ The wardress stepped slightly to one side and Sarah saw the usual torn, greyish towel on a chair behind her, next to a green chemical-looking bottle. ‘Make sure you wash your hair, too. Nit shampoo.’

  ‘There is absolutely no need for that, young woman! The idea is absurd!’

  The grey bubbles on the surface of the water were now halfway up the side of the bath. Splashes and groans came from some of the neighbouring cubicles, but no words. Sarah did not move. Surely this young woman realised that she was talking to a lady — a Member of Parliament’s wife, no less! Perhaps that was why she was rude and abrupt; it was a sign of nervousness. She looked as though she might have a pleasant face, if she did not scowl.

  Sarah smiled and said: ‘You know I am a suffragette
, don’t you? I am only here because of a protest to get votes for all women. You should support me in that, you know. If you oppress me, you only oppress yourself.’

  The wardress glanced at her, briefly, and something like fear or fury flickered behind her eyes. Then she reached down to her belt, raised a whistle to her lips, and blew The sound in the small echoing room was piercing, an assault on the ears. Before it was over the door was flung open and a second wardress appeared. She was slightly older and shorter than the first, with iron-grey hair and the forearms of a washerwoman.

  ‘Yes?’ She glanced at the younger wardress.

  ‘Suffragette. Won’t bath.’

  Without another word, or looking her in the eyes, the second woman strode straight up to Sarah and began to undo the buttons of her blouse. Sarah was appalled. It was like the behaviour of her maid but utterly, horribly different. Did this monstrous woman think she was a doll, perhaps, or a baby? Feebly, Sarah stepped back and raised her arms to push the woman away, but there was a wall behind her and the women were used to this, knew what to do.

  Each of them gripped one of her arms with one hand, and continued unbuttoning with the other. Then the blouse was pulled down, off, thrown on the floor.

  ‘Skirt next.’

  One woman pinioned her arms, the other unfastened her skirt, flung it down. And so on with her petticoat, camisole, corset, undervest, stockings, drawers. The two women were grimly efficient, relentless, swift. They undressed her with hardly a word between the two of them, and never a glance in her face. Just a slight grunt of effort as they pulled and tugged at the fastenings. As though she was just a huge doll being undressed in nursery by — what? Monster children, without words or souls?

  As the clothes came off Sarah felt a sudden enormous urge to laugh. It was so ridiculous — it was not even humiliating, it was absurd! Here she was now, a grown woman of thirty-three, the wife of a Member of Parliament, being stripped quite naked in this grubby little cubicle by two . . . underservants, they might be, if they did not work here. Factory girls, coalheavers! Women whose husbands Jonathan was elected to help. Women she wanted to get the vote. It had the unreality of a dream.

  Her body was limp in their hands, without will, stunned. She lifted her foot like an obedient mare as they nudged her leg and pulled off her shoes, stockings, drawers. It dazed her. Nothing in her social training had taught her how to deal with this.

  The laughter which welled up inside her came out more like a sob. The older woman slapped her smartly across the face, as one might treat a hysteric. Then they both dragged her by the wrists to the edge of the bath.

  ‘You do what you’re told here, first time. Get used to it.’

  Sarah lifted a foot and stepped into the grey, tepid water. They let her go then and she sat down. The grime spread up over her waist to her breasts and she felt grit scratch her bottom and thighs.

  ‘Every time I’ve bathed here I’ve come out more filthy than when I went in . . .’ The mocking, superior tone returned to her voice, despite herself. It was the only way she knew to deal with such a situation. But even to herself it sounded feeble, false.

  ‘Head up!’ The younger woman lifted a large white enamel jug from the floor, filled it with bath water, and raised it above Sarah’s head.

  ‘Oh no!’

  Fingernails dug into her shoulders as she tried to get up. The water did not fall and Sarah stopped struggling. She spoke in the words of a child.

  ‘Please! I don’t . . .’

  ‘Regulations.’

  As the fingers let go the water sluiced down, drenching her hair, getting into her eyes. Then, while she sat shuddering, something cold on her scalp.

  ‘The nit shampoo. Rub it in well. Then rinse your own head in the bath water.’

  Miserably, she did as they said. She understood now. She was quite naked, dripping, a baby in front of them. Covered with shampoo and dirty water in a mockery of cleanliness. And she had to co-operate with the process, wash her own hair. Each movement that she made to wash herself in this grime humiliated her more than when they had pushed and shoved and undressed her.

  After the first grimy rinse, a thin smirk of satisfaction flickered across the face of the older woman, who was still staring away from her at the wall over the taps.

  ‘All for your own good. A clean prison is Holloway. No germs, no diseases. They all learn, in time. I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble now, Miss Harkness.’

  It was always the same, on the first days. They brought you the best food, carefully cooked, to tempt you to break your fast. The porridge was in a clean china bowl on a tray, with a little jug of cream beside it, and a bowl of sugar.

  Sarah had never imagined that porridge could smell so good. Before her first prison sentence, she had scarcely thought of it, except as a solid, reliable food which she had for breakfast on cold mornings. Now, after two full days in prison without food, the steaming bowl of hot porridge filled her cell with a scent like that of the food of the ancient gods.

  She crouched at the end of her wooden bed, her knees clasped to her chin, savouring the memories the smell brought with it. It reminded her of the cold, early spring mornings on holiday in Ulster. Days when she and her sister Deborah would get up at first light to go across the fields to see their ponies. Their breath would steam in the crisp morning air, and frosty grass would crackle underfoot as they ran.

  We were such friends then, Sarah thought. And Deborah is probably walking across her own fields now, at Glenfee, while my bones ache from the cold of this wretched cell. She remembered the little girl who had run beside her, all those years ago. Deborah had always been such a cheerful, obedient child; it had been a pleasure to play with her. She had worshipped that pony, Blaze, which she had had to ride in the holidays. Probably it was then, when she was twelve and Sarah was sixteen, that Deborah had first met Charles.

  Strange, Sarah thought. For a moment a tall, handsome young man rode into her memory — a young soldier with a lopsided smile and a proud new moustache, riding a bay hunter towards them across the fields. If anyone had seen us then, they would have expected Charles to marry me, not Deborah. I was sixteen, but she was only a child — even on her pony her head only came up to Charles’s waist.

  Oh, I wish I could go there again . . .

  The cell door crashed open. A wardress came in and scowled at the uneaten porridge.

  ‘Not eating your breakfast again, I see?’

  ‘No. I told you, I shan’t eat anything until I’m free.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ The wardress picked up the porridge bowl and carried it out. ‘It’s a long time, six months, you know.’

  But I shan’t be in here that long, Sarah thought. Three days already. They daren’t let anyone starve to death in prison. They let me out after a week last time. I can last that long.

  If only it wasn’t so infernally cold . . .

  Resolutely, she swung her feet over the side of the bed and began her daily walk. Four paces from the window to the door, four paces back again. Already she had worn holes in the lumpy stockings, but the prison shoes were impossible to walk in — two sizes too small, and stiff as iron. The clothes were little better: a rough serge dress with arrows stamped all over it, and a ragged, yellow-stained apron and cap. Already she felt so grimy she would have welcomed a bath even as filthy as the one she had had that first day. And always she was cold. On the first day she lad huddled on her bed with her blanket round her, but the wardress had taken that away during the day because she refused the ‘hard labour’ of sewing.

  She paced up and down. She had not properly recovered from her previous fast, and her body felt curiously light and weak. But the walking made a little warmth flow through her. By counting the paces she could work out how far she had gone. Three miles this morning, she decided, then she would rest and write another text on the wall. Already there were two. She scratched them on with a slate pencil she had found, and then made them stand out with
an ink she made from soap and the grime of the cell floor. On the first day she had written ‘Votes for Women’ and yesterday a text from Joshua, ‘Only be thou strong, and very courageous.’ Today she thought she might quote the Irishman, Wilde: ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.’

  That’s right, she told herself. This is my morning walk and I have to make myself see the grass, hear the birdsong, feel the sunlight. Perhaps, when I am out again, I will confront Jonathan more calmly with what he has done, make him understand and stop it.

  Make a new start . . .

  There was a clatter in the corridor outside, and the cell door opened again. Two wardresses came in — one of them the big young slab-faced girl like a coalheaver who had forced her into the bath. This girl, Miss Harkness, took Sarah by the arms, pushing her back towards the window so that a man could come in behind them. A third wardress came in behind him, pushing a trolley.

  ‘What do you want now?’

  The wardresses ignored her. The doctor said: ‘You haven’t been eating, Mrs Becket.’

  ‘I refuse to eat anything while I’m unjustly imprisoned.’ The words came pat, she did not think about them. But she had seen the trolley and, despite herself, her thin body began to tremble uncontrollably. This is not supposed to happen. They don’t do this any more. The whole point of the Cat and Mouse Act is to get away from the horror of . . .

  ‘Then we must feed you.’

  She did not look at the man at first; all her attention was focused on the trolley. There was a white enamel jug on it, a bucket, two large mechanical devices rather like clothespegs, one wooden and one metal, a funnel, a jar of what looked like glycerine, and a rubber tube. The tube was about half the width of a garden hose and very long. It lay there, curled round and round and round on itself, like a sleeping cobra.