The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  In March, also, Margot Asquith decided to intervene secretly. She wrote to a labour leader who had been invited to luncheon, and proposed a secret meeting. It was a very feminine plea.

  The big question I long to ask a man of your ability, sympathy and possibly very painful experience is: What do you want?

  I don’t, of course, mean for yourself, as I am certain you are as straight as I am, and disinterested. It would be on far higher grounds than this that I would ask it.

  Do you want everyone to be equal in their material prosperity? Do you think quality of brain could be made equal if we had equal prosperity?

  Do you think in trying or even succeeding in making Human Nature equal in their bank books, they would also be equal in the sight of God and Man?

  I am a socialist, possibly not on the same lines as you… People who get what they want at the cost of huge suffering to others I would like to understand more perfectly.

  Just now I suspend judgement, as I don’t really comprehend. I don’t care what creed a man holds, but the bed-rock of that creed should be Love, even of your enemies, which is a hard creed to put into practice.

  Having suffered greatly yourself, I expect you don’t want anyone else to suffer, and this is what makes you a socialist. It is also my point of view, but I am only a woman. I don’t like to see my husband suffer in his longing to be fair, just and kind to both sides in this tragic quarrel.

  The letter continues on the same note, which William Trotter would have been able to identify as a making of human moral structures into tangible Things, where they are not. She received no answer. The strikes went on.

  So did the suffrage protests. Miss Emily Davison was arrested in Parliament Street holding a piece of linen, saturated with paraffin, burning brightly, which she was inserting into the pillar box of the Post Office. The Prime Minister and a gathering of friends and family, returning from a Scottish holiday, were jostled at Charing Cross by a crowd of shouting suffragettes. The party fought back: Violet Asquith “had the satisfaction of crunching the fingers of one of the hussies.” It was Violet, wielding a golf club, who had driven off a group of women attempting to strip the Prime Minister of his clothes at Lossiemouth Golf Course. Asquith wrote in a letter that he himself resembled St. Paul at Ephesus “fighting with beasts—Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras dire—as Milton says somewhere.”

  In April, that year, the City was snared in the invisible strands of the wireless. There were posters everywhere announcing that the new, invincible wonder-ship, the Titanic, had struck an iceberg in mid-ocean. The ship sent radio messages to the land, which after a time became confused and fragmentary and then ceased. A rumour began that the passengers were saved and the ship being towed into Halifax. The City went to bed quite cheerful, and woke to disaster in the morning. Among the drowned was W. T. Stead, the crusading journalist, who had so long ago purchased a young girl for sex, and exposed a business of procuration and abuse.

  The Webbs returned from their global journey and took in the changing world. The Committee for Reform of the Poor Law was wound up, and replaced by the New Fabian Research Bureau. The Society moved closer to the Independent Labour Party and campaigned for a national minimum wage. Ameliorating the condition of the poor was changing to a syndicalist ideal of revolt.

  Individuals were in odd states of mind. Rupert Brooke had taken Ka Cox to Munich and ended his heterosexual virginity, which he was convinced was causing a nervous breakdown. They returned—Ka pregnant, nervously exhausted, Rupert on the edge of madness. Madness was cured by a drug to repress sexual desire and by a regime of immobility and “stuffing”—lamb cutlets, beef, bread, potatoes. Rupert wrote wild letters of anti-Semitic nausea to his friends, and told Virginia Woolf, also enduring a breakdown, also being “stuffed,” the tale of a Rugby choir where

  Two fourteen-year-old choirboys arranged a plan during the Choral Service. At the end they skipped round and watched the children enter. They picked out the one whose looks pleased them best, a youth of ten. They waited in seclusion till the end of the Children’s Service. They pounced on their victim, as he came out, took him, each by a hand, and led him to the vestry. There while the Service for Men Only proceeded, they removed the lower parts of his clothing and buggered him, turn by turn. His protestations were drowned by the Organ pealing out whatever hymns are suitable to men only. Subsequently they let him go. He has been in bed ever since with a rupture. They were arrested and flung, presumably, into a Reformatory. He may live.

  The tone of this is not quite the insouciant tone of the Bloomsbury/ Apostles school of buggery chatter. And it was written to a woman temporarily mad. To his neo-Pagan friends he was writing diatribes against Lytton Strachey’s filth and prurience, not unlike D. H. Lawrence’s horror of the same group as black beetles creeping out from under. Brooke knew, almost certainly, that it wasn’t funny. What did he think—who did he think—he and it was?

  Margot Asquith was one of a social set called the Souls, who were clever with words and sporty with tennis and bicycles. Margot’s set liked to be daring and unusual, unconventional and “natural.” The children of the Souls, including Margot’s stepchildren, Raymond and Violet Asquith, formed what came to be known as the Corrupt Coterie. Raymond was the king of this group, who indulged in “chlorers” and opium, impiety and black humour. Lady Diana Manners said “Our pride was to be unafraid of words, unshocked by drink, and unashamed of decadence and gambling.” Diana was, Raymond Asquith said, “an orchid among cowslips, a black tulip in a garden of cucumbers, nightshade in a day nursery.” They parodied the charades and theatrical tableaux of their parent Souls (the nomenclature has an odd echo of the private grades of the Cambridge Apostles, or the Munich Cosmic Circle, with their embryos, godfathers and Angels, their Giants and Peripherals). They had a particular game called Breaking the News. It consisted of acting out as comedy the breaking of the news of a child’s death, to his mother.

  In November 1912 the great “silver scandal” gripped the City and filled the newspapers. Messrs. Simon Montagu & Co. had been secretly purchasing silver for the Indian government as part of its currency reserve. There were accusations of corruption, and smears of anti-Semitism. John Maynard Keynes—who believed in the gradual elimination of the gold standard, and of a tangible currency reserve—published his book, Indian Currency and Finance, in June 1913. In November of that year there was a crisis. “The great silver speculation has failed and the Indian Specie Bank is bankrupt. What a tragedy!” wrote Sir Charles Addis, who was instrumental in forming a syndicate of bullion brokers who in December managed to avoid the disaster.

  Geraint Fludd had become more and more involved in the currency and bullion work of Wildvogel & Quick. He bought Keynes’s book and read it carefully. Basil Wellwood invited the young man to dinner in Rules restaurant one evening and fed him on potted shrimps, venison, Stilton and syllabub, with a bottle of very good claret. It had never been clear to Basil exactly what had happened to Geraint’s “engagement” to Florence Cain, who was now Mrs. Goldwasser. He had noticed a difference in Geraint—a grimmer determination about his work, an unsmiling propriety. At the end of the dinner he said

  “I wanted to tell you how much I admire the resolution with which you have worked over the past year or two. I think you have had setbacks to contend with, and have contended with them.”

  Geraint said that that was so. He observed that if things could not be mended they should be set aside in the mind, but that that could be hard.

  Basil said that he had come to feel that Geraint was in many ways another son to him. His own son made no pretence of being interested in the drama and life of the City. In that sense, Geraint was his spiritual heir—a spiritual heir of material things. He wanted to advance him as best he could, as fast as he could. He had been very impressed with his work on the Indian silver crisis. What would Geraint feel about being sent out there, next year, to take a good look at the Bank’s business in that country?

&nb
sp; They raised their glasses. The room smelt of wine and bread and gravy, and the light was rich and dim. Geraint didn’t answer.

  “I thought a change of scene …” said Basil. “A long voyage on an ocean liner. Full of hopeful beautiful women,” he added, daring.

  Geraint read Kipling. He thought of the mystery of India, the jungle, the light, the colours, the creatures. The complexities of the silver dealings. The distance. He was, he saw, in need of distance. And his imagination touched on the beautiful young women sailing across dark starlit oceans in search of husbands. A journey like that made you free, made you a different man.

  “I should like that, sir,” he said. “You have been very kind to me.”

  Basil said “It was a fortunate day for me when you came into the Bank. You are too young to be fixed by one setback. You have all your life in front of you. The world in front of you.”

  Geraint set his hurt against the pull of the oceans and the strange continent. He could feel his own energy stirring.

  “I know,” he said. “You are right. Thank you.”

  49

  On Derby Day, June 4th, 1913, Herbert “Diamond” Jones rode the King’s horse, Anmer, in his silks with the royal colours. He was a national hero. The huge crowds applauded him. Emily Wilding Davison, wearing a tweed suit, high-collared blouse and unobtrusive hat stood by the rails at Tattenham Corner, where the horses wheeled round, flashing colours against the sky. Inside her sleeve was a flag with the suffragette tricolour, purple, white and green, and another was wrapped round her waist. When the heavy pounding of the hooves was heard, and she saw Anmer leading the galloping herd, she stepped out, in front of the horse, raised her arms, and grabbed at the bridle. They all came down, jockey, horse, screaming woman, on the bloodstained turf. “Diamond” Jones lay still: he was concussed, and his shoulder was hurt. The scene was filmed: Davison can be seen, crumpled and dragged, like a damaged puppet, her skirts awry. Her head was smashed. They wrapped it in a newspaper. She was taken to Epsom Hospital, where her fellows hung her bed like a bier with purple, white and green bunting. She died four days later.

  The fallen horse had risen, and cantered away. King George wrote in his diary “Poor Herbert Jones and Anmer were sent flying. It was a most disappointing day.”

  Queen Mary sent Jones a telegram, commiserating with him after his “sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal, lunatic woman.”

  Jones said, much later, that he was “haunted by that woman’s face.” He had little success on the racecourse after this event.

  Emily Davison was buried with ceremony by the WSPU. There were ten brass bands and six thousand marching women. They carried purple silk banners embroidered with Joan of Arc’s last words: “Fight on, and God will give the Victory.” Davison’s flag, stained with grass, mud and blood, was retrieved and became a relic. Some men, and some women, threw bricks at the coffin. Hedda Wellwood, who had sat up late at night embroidering and hemming the banners, marched with the women, and turned a white face, full of contempt, towards the hecklers. Her feet kept time, the music held the women together, they were a creature with a purpose.

  The group held her: the strangeness of all this wild, inventive, dangerous activity by creatures who were expected to be docile, timid, domestic and loving. Hedda as a child had been a rebel. She had stood outside groups—the Wellwood family, girls at school, Fabians. She subverted structures, she found out awkward truths. She could not find a purpose. And then she found it in a community of rebels, an army with a cause, and a programme of destruction. She enjoyed marching, hip to hip, skirt to skirt, shoulder to shoulder with women who had subdued their own needs and movements to a larger cause. Group life held and perturbed her, for she was naturally claustrophobic. Every now and then she thought they would crowd and crush her, like the Red and White Queens and the flying jury in Alice.

  An army needs a general, as well as a martyr. Emmeline Pankhurst was now fragile with suffering through hunger-strikes and force-feedings. When the campaign of increasing violence induced the press to report that she was a wicked old woman, she replied “We do not intend you should be pleased.” Yet the army was increasingly, and paradoxically, directed by pretty Christabel, tending her pretty dog in her pretty apartment in Paris, arguing that a leader must remain safe, and out of custody, to plan strategy. Like many absolute leaders, she quarrelled with people, with the Pethick-Lawrences, Frederick and Emmeline, who had paid, planned and suffered for the women’s cause, with her sister Sylvia, who lived amongst the poor, in the East End, and upheld her socialist principles, whilst Christabel courted the rich, the Tories, the coteries of the famous and “influential.” She issued diktats. On Bastille Day in 1912, Emmeline’s birthday, Sylvia had organised a spectacular display in Hyde Park, caps, banners, smaller flags, all decorated with scarlet dragons and decked with white fringe. It was a huge success.

  Christabel telegraphed from Paris. Sylvia was to burn down Nottingham Castle.

  She refused. She didn’t believe in burning things down, or destroying works of art.

  But there were those who did.

  They wrote each other coded telegrams. “Fluff, feathers, wax, tar violets poppies powder.” They bought and secreted cans of paraffin and petrol. They put cayenne pepper and molten lead through letter-boxes. They grew braver and wilder as 1913 became 1914. In the first seven months of that year 107 buildings were set on fire. They burned castles in Scotland and set about the inherited culture of solid Britain. In 1913 they ripped valuable paintings in Manchester and smashed the orchid hothouse in Kew Gardens. They blew up Lloyd George’s new house at Walton-on-the-Hill. They cut telephone wires and slid pebbles into railway connections, to derail trains. They showed less and less reverence—ancient churches were burned down, mediaeval Bibles mutilated, the Carnegie Library in Birmingham burned. Like the anarchists before them, they exploded a bomb in Westminster Abbey and flooded the great organ in the august Albert Hall. They themselves were bashed, bullied, defrocked by police and angry crowds. Their breasts were twisted, their hair torn out. They interrupted King and Prime Minister with determined harangues and the suffragette anthem, which was sung to the tune of the Marseillaise. Mary Richardson set out methodically to mutilate Velasquez’s self-regarding, elegantly fleshly Venus, a painting she disliked. She waited until the watching detectives took a lunch-break (one was merely hiding his eyes behind a newspaper) and rushed at the painted woman, and her protective glass, with an axe. She got in one blow. The detective looked instinctively at the skylight. The attendant skidded on the polished floor. Four more blows were struck. German tourists helped to bring Miss Richardson down, by aiming Baedekers accurately at the back of her neck. And then she was back in Holloway prison, facing force-feeding.

  These stories were circulated, in shocked whispers, with wild laughter. Emily Davison’s sacrifice seemed to mean that all women were called to act. The idea of “doing something” crept insidiously into Hedda’s mind. Sewing was not enough, marching was not enough, posting pepper and glue through respectable doors, or spreading tin-tacks on office floors, was not enough. An act was required.

  The problem was, she was afraid. At first, the problem was to think of an appropriate act, and then, one day, when there was discussion of Emily Davison’s life, the act rose in her brain, golden and gleaming, quite literally, in the dark.

  Emily Davison—whose speeches had been long and rambling, whose presence had often been creepy and irritating—had become sainted. She had once had the very clever idea of hiding at night in the House of Commons, and springing out—on the day of the census—to claim that Place as her address. She had been found in the broom-cupboard by a kindly cleaner, and given tea and toast and sent out to make her way to her real home. She had found other ways of making sure of prison. In prison she had leaped like an acrobat from a balcony, to what would have been certain death, if she had not been saved by wire netting. Carried upstairs, she had leaped again. And again, dashin
g herself on the iron staircase.

  There were tales of suffering in cages, of force-feeding that amounted to torture—wooden gags between the teeth, or metal clamps, breaking them, the terrible tube forced in, whilst the warders held the struggling woman, by the ears, by the breast, by the hair, by the hands and legs. And the snaking pipe might miss the surging target, might enter the lung, might rupture the bowel—all this was known, and recounted, the tales of the heroines, women who went into their captivity looking forty and came out looking seventy. Sylvia Pankhurst had refused to eat or to drink, and had been hosed with water and fed with the foul tube. She had walked. All day and all night and all day and all night. Her eyes, Hedda had been told, had become suffused with blood, entirely. Her legs had swollen to bolsters. At night Hedda dreamed of this gaunt red-eyed figure, walking, walking, and woke up in a sweat.

  Because she knew what she had to do, she also knew that she had to do it, or it would not have come to her. It came out of the true tale she had been told as a child, of the boy who had hidden in the basement in South Kensington—a tale told by Tom, and by Philip himself, of the way in through the van-loading bay, and the watching plaster casts, and the tombs. A woman could hide down there, and come out with stones, when all was quiet, and smash the cases with the cold gold and silver, and smash the metals to chips and dust.

  She didn’t have real friends. It must be done on her own.

  There was no real need to smash anything.

  There was an imperative call.

  It was May 1914. She had sharp stones. She had gone on flint-collecting picnics with other WSPU women. Out of rage with her past life, which would now end, and the dreamy, comfortable, unsatisfactory muddled order of Todefright, she quite deliberately took a collection of stones—some of them rare, some of them collected from the endless shingle at Dungeness—old flints and chalk from the Weald (including one or two Stone Age knapped hammers), a chunk of Etna pumice (too light and springy to do any damage), a rugged chunk of the White Cliffs of Dover. These stones were in a big, stoneware bowl Philip Warren had made, which stood in Olive’s study in lieu of a bowl of fruit. In amongst them—put there apparently casually, to get lost amongst its semblances—was the Dungeness stone with a hole that had been found in Tom’s overcoat pocket on the beach. She took it deliberately, knowing that to take it would hurt Olive, and half-understanding that Tom had meant to—be revenged on Olive, evade Olive, free himself from Olive and being written about? Olive had been mildly in favour of the suffrage, as part of the atmosphere of Fabian lawns and Fabian firesides; she had not approved of the violent acts. She would take Olive’s stone with the hole and throw it at the golden bowl.