After the Party

by Cressida Connolly

  ‘You make it sound awfully sinister. It’s as if I’m going to prison,’ said Phyllis. Once again, the officers exchanged smiles.

  ‘You just enjoy your cup of tea. Have a little wander, after, if you feel like it. You’ve been cooped up in the car, you look a bit green.’

  ‘I should like a moment in the fresh air, yes. Thank you.’

  ‘Jack will accompany you, won’t you, Jack?’

  ‘That’s very good of you.’

  They all three finished their tea. The driver pulled out a packet of cigarettes and a matchbook with ‘The Flamingo Club’ printed on its cover. The man who hadn’t driven, the one who she now knew to be called Jack, got up. He extended an arm, as if inviting her to dance.

  ‘Shall we?’ he asked.

  Phyllis stood. She found she was unsteady, as if she’d received a physical blow. The two of them came out of the tea-room and made towards the common. It was a still, clear afternoon. Wood pigeons were murmuring their soft call. On the common a handful of boys were playing an informal game of cricket, using their blazers for wickets. Their school satchels lay in a bundle on the fresh grass, with one or two jerseys strewn among them. This early in the year their knees were still pale below their grey shorts. With a stab of longing Phyllis thought of Edwin.

  ‘I will be home before too long, won’t I? Only my little boy, it’ll be his exeat, you see,’ Phyllis said. She thought she might cry.

  The man turned to her and regarded her face to face now, not unkindly. ‘Ours is just to deliver you, that’s all we’re told. The non-uniform boys make the decisions, not us. We’re just cabbies, really, when all’s said and done. We’re just along for the ride, to drive you from A to B. You’re only the second we’ve had under our custody. It’s a new power of detainment they’ve got for you lot: God’s honest truth, I’ve no idea how long they’ll keep you. I doubt they even know themselves.’

  This made Phyllis feel a little calmer, although there was nothing in his words to reassure her. But the fact of his looking directly at her, talking to her as a fellow human, stilled the panic that was threatening to engulf her.

  ‘Where am I being taken?’ she asked him.

  ‘Other side of London. Holloway.’

  ‘But surely you can’t take me to prison without arresting me, without putting me on trial? I haven’t done anything wrong! I must be allowed to speak to a solicitor first, surely?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it. No doubt someone will explain things once you get there. You won’t be by yourself, they’re picking people up from all over the South East. Your husband being in possession of a firearm isn’t too clever, though. That won’t help.’

  ‘I’ve never seen that gun before in my life, you must believe me. I had no idea it was there. I should never have allowed him to keep it in one of the children’s rooms.’

  They had come to a standstill.

  ‘We’d best be heading back to the car,’ said the officer. ‘We’ve still got a ways to go.’

  Phyllis didn’t answer. It didn’t seem to make any odds, what she said; whether she spoke or not.

  The rest of the journey passed more or less in silence. Phyllis felt very tired. By the time they arrived at their destination she was too exhausted to be any longer afraid, or even indignant. Once she had been brought inside she resigned herself to the small series of indignities to which she was subjected: her belongings removed, the lining and hems of her skirt and light overcoat ripped unceremoniously before they were returned to her, so that she looked as scruffy as a ragamuffin. She was weighed and measured, like a parcel. Then she was issued with a pair of coarse sheets and two thin blankets with a stiff, close texture like cardboard. After all this – which seemed to take an eternity – she was required to wait in a small locked room, little better than a cage, until such a time as someone was free to escort her to F Wing. Here, at least, she was not alone. There were three other women already in the tiny space: one of them was plainly a tart; one a young woman of a mousy, clerical-worker type; while the last was an older woman with wire-framed spectacles and hair in a tight grey perm. The latter two certainly did not look as Phyllis imagined criminals might look: they were women who would attract no attention whatsoever in a railway waiting room. The tart jiggled her crossed leg as if listening to a dance tune, but the other two sat still. It had been a warm day outside, but now Phyllis felt cold.

  They introduced themselves. The tart said her name was Diane, but that they shouldn’t trouble themselves to remember what she was called, because she would most likely be let out within the hour. She explained that on Fridays and Saturdays she was sometimes kept in, because these nights in detention cost her trade; it was intended to be a deterrent, yet what it really meant was that she had to work twice as hard the next weekend, to make up for loss of earnings. But on a weekday such as this they generally didn’t bother, and let her go after a few hours in the cage. She had been brought in umpteen times, she announced. They weren’t bad people, who worked here, if you didn’t cheek them. The food was filthy and there wasn’t much of it. The tea wasn’t made with tea at all, but with iron filings: it’d never so much as seen a leaf. Everyone knew that. As for the stuff they gave you to put on your bread! Car-grease, it was. Not even lard and certainly not margarine. She spoke in a harsh monotone, without smiling or even really looking at the others, yet Phyllis felt grateful to her for prattling on so, covering her own awkwardness. All the time her leg fidgeted.

  When Diane stopped talking, the office-worker-looking girl said her name was Kathy and the older woman introduced herself as Jill. Phyllis noticed that Jill hesitated for just a moment before saying her own name and guessed that in ordinary life she would introduce herself not by her Christian name, but as a Mrs So-and-so. Under normal circumstances, she would do the same herself. They did not shake hands, but nodded cautiously.

  Phyllis didn’t like to ask what had brought these women here, but at length Kathy spoke.

  ‘It must be a mistake, my being here. No offence to you, of course,’ she said, glancing at the others.

  ‘You didn’t do it, I’ll wager. That’s what everyone says,’ said Diane.

  ‘Well, that’s just it. I didn’t do nothing.’ The girl went pink. ‘Anything, I mean.’

  ‘Well, you must have done something, or you wouldn’t be in here, would you?’ said Diane.

  ‘They came and searched my flat – it’s more of a bed-sitting-room, really – went through all my things. Even my smalls drawer. Do you know what they did, as well? They took the lids off my saucepans. I’ve only got two. I don’t do a lot of cooking, just potatoes, the odd bit of greens to go with a fried chop. Anyway, they took the lids off the pans and looked in them. And the tea-tin. The worst of it was, they shook out my talcum powder. All over the linoleum in the bathroom, the place looked a tip. I share the bathroom with two other girls. My landlady’ll kill me. What on earth do they expect to find, in a tin of talc?’

  ‘But why, dear?’ asked Jill.

  ‘It’s my boyfriend they’re interested in. He’s Italian. Works at the Italian Embassy. I met him at a church social. We’re Roman Catholics, see.’ She looked slightly defiant at this, as if she expected the other women to take issue with her religion.

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Phyllis. ‘They can’t just lock you up because of your friend. That’s not right, not right at all.’

  ‘That’s what I kept telling them, all the way here in the car from East Sheen. That’s where I live. They kept asking if he’d left anything with me, any papers or letters. Why would he do that?’

  ‘What about you?’ Phyllis asked Jill.

  But before the older woman could respond there were footsteps, a rattle of metal on metal. A warden Phyllis had not seen before signalled to them to follow and they traipsed after her, along corridors and up flights of cast-iron stairs. The last was a spiral staircase leading to a short, broad landing. Phyllis had completely lost her bearings and had no no
tion what storey she was on, nor where she was within the building. A dozen or so doors gave off the landing into cells. The doors were open and Phyllis saw that each was identically furnished with a washstand, a wooden chair, a small table and a very low, narrow bed. The windows were tiny and high: a smudge of London sky was visible but nothing green, no grass nor even the branches of distant trees.

  ‘Here you are, Madam,’ said the warden with a false flourish. ‘Your room awaits.’

  Seeing the naked alarm on Phyllis’s face, she added: ‘These good ladies will be just along the way, so you won’t want for company. Lock-up’s not for another half hour or so, give you a chance to find your feet. Toilet’s down there on the right if you’re feeling brave enough; otherwise there’s a po in your cell.’

  Phyllis went into the cell and sat down on the bed. It was almost a relief that there was no give in the mattress: any semblance of comfort would have mocked her. Seeing now the back of her thick cell door, how it had no handle on the inside, gave her a jolt of fear. Before long the older woman, Jill, came in.

  ‘Kathy’s breaking her heart in the cell along from mine; should we go in to her, d’you think, or give her some privacy?’

  ‘Well, I suppose we’ll have plenty of time to be on our own, once they lock us in for the night. I rather think we should go to her.’

  ‘I agree. We don’t want her getting hysterical.’

  And so Phyllis’s life in prison began. There were two things above all other things: the cold and the dirt. Phyllis had never in her life been anywhere so grimy. Fat eels of black dust lay coiled beneath the legs of chairs and tables or nestled in the crooks of walls and the elbows of steps. When the air was stirred, if someone walked by or opened a door along the way, these moved sluggishly in response, like dead things adrift underwater. Something worse than dust – an almost oily dark film, a sort of sweated, acrid soot – lay over everything. The smell was at once sharp and yet with a cloying undernote of foul sweetness, catching in the nose and at the junction of the throat, so that the constant presence of nausea threatened to mature into actual sickness. The lavatories and adjoining washbasins were unspeakable. Phyllis thought she would never get used to the dirt, the smell. The cold was more difficult to comprehend. It had been a fine day when she arrived, and the dry, warm spell of the late spring endured. In the building, though, a damp chill seemed to dwell in the very fabric of the walls and floors, in the ironwork and the fetid air. Long hours of inactivity slowed the circulation: often her toes and fingertips were the colour of candle wax, until she rubbed and pummelled the blood back into them. She had left home in only the clothes she stood up in and it took more than a fortnight before she was permitted to receive a few more things: spare stockings and knickers, a couple of warm jerseys. It was the sort of cold that gets in deep to the bone, the kind that can only be resolved by long immersion in a hot bath. But the prisoners were allowed just one bath a week and that was a scant few inches of water. She was cold all the time. It was hard to get to sleep at night, shivering.

  The day after she arrived and the one after that and throughout the ensuing weeks the cells filled. It was impossible to get information about what was happening to families and husbands, although a rumour spread that some of the male internees had been taken to Ham Common. The women were already frightened and anxious and many of them feared for their husbands’ lives. If it was possible to lock people up like this, without trial, anything could happen. The sound of weeping could be heard in the corridors at night.

  By the end of June there were almost seventy women under custody in the wing, all but three or four of them political affiliates. One of the women, Rita, came from a village not far from Manchester, out on the moors. Somebody had informed the police that Rita and her husband went to meetings once a week, which was true. When the police came knocking they went through everything in their cottage and found their membership cards and some printed leaflets they’d been asked to distribute. But, Rita said, the thing that had really interested the plain-clothes people who’d come with the local bobby was her husband’s diary. He’d written ‘Remove British Queen’ and then a few days later ‘Install Italian queen’, and so they’d got it into their heads that this was an Italian fascist plot to overthrow the monarchy. In actual fact, the man kept bees: that was what he’d been referring to. All the women enjoyed this story: there was a bitter sort of comfort in illustrating how unreasonable and pointless their incarceration was.

  Phyllis had met a few of her fellow inmates before at meetings and rallies and it was a huge relief to see familiar faces. She liked young Rowena Bingham, who’d worked at London headquarters, and June Driscoll seemed a lively sort of person, with a wide smile. For the first month or more no one received any information as to how long they might be detained and Phyllis got only muddled snatches of news of Hugh. She heard nothing from him directly, but incomers brought rumours of the detention camp at Ham Common, where the men had supposedly been taken. A newly incarcerated branch secretary from Surrey caused an outbreak of near panic when she announced that gunshots had been heard from Ham: there was talk of the detainees facing firing squads. This couldn’t be true, surely? This was England. Things like firing squads simply didn’t happen in England, least of all in the affluent suburbs. And yet, with no way to quell the rumour, it somehow caught light. Cooped up with no access to outside events, gossip and hearsay assumed the force of doctrine. Phyllis didn’t really believe that her husband had been executed; yet if she could be taken from her home, locked up without trial, without committing any crime, without explanation, perhaps anything was possible after all. She had never been a smoker, but now she found that tobacco calmed her frazzled nerves, as well as staving off hunger pangs.

  The women began to organize themselves. Each morning they were woken at 6.30, when their cells were unlocked. An hour later, half a dozen of them had to troop across to the kitchen to fetch breakfast for the wing: by the time they got back the porridge would have congealed into a grey paste, like papier mâché. Between them they arranged a roster, so that everyone would take their turn on the meal-runs to and from the kitchen three times a day; they set about cleaning the wing as best they could. Squabbles broke out here and there, but mostly there was a spirit of shared defiance which bound them together. Some chafed at being bossed about. In any case, Phyllis did not mind being told what to do: it meant she never had to think or plan.

  To begin with they weren’t allowed parcels, but once these were permitted people began to share out cigarettes and squares of chocolate and books. Each inmate was allowed to write and to receive just two letters a week. For Phyllis this was agony, since she always wrote to the children at least twice a week each, and sent them tuck on Fridays: a tin of butterscotch, or a box of fudge or Edwin’s favourite mint humbugs. Now she had to make do with a shared letter to the girls and then a separate letter to Edwin. If she wanted to correspond with anyone else, it meant missing a letter to the children. It seemed cruel to make them wait a whole fortnight to hear from her, and yet she desperately needed Patricia and Nina to champion her cause. The long school holidays would shortly begin, and she needed to get out in time to be at home for the children. Much as she’d have wished to have kept her incarceration from the children, there was no way of writing to them which did not reveal her true whereabouts: her letters were censored and bore her prison number and Holloway postmark. She couldn’t simply stop writing to them. It was better that they should know where she was than imagine that she had simply disappeared. She hoped that Greville, with his friends in high places, would be able to wield some influence.

  Lady Mosley was brought in. The Leader’s wife tended to keep herself to herself up in her third-floor cell. It was odd to think of someone with as much warmth and charm as OM being taken with such an absurdly drawling-voiced, brittle sort of a woman, although she was certainly beautiful. You had to give her that. Not without a sense of humour, either, although she didn’t look the type. And
you had to take your hat off to her; she bore her imprisonment without complaint. It must have been very hard on her, being carted off to jail leaving her new-born behind; and his small brother. Just babies, both of them. Nevertheless it embarrassed Phyllis, the way some of the other women fawned over her, at mealtimes and about the place. Like the rest of them Lady Mosley was always cold: more so, being such a wraith. For the first few weeks she wore a raccoon jacket all the time, and when parcels were allowed she must have got one of her sisters to send in a fur coat: after that she was never seen in anything else. It set off a fashion among the wing, for those of them who had furs.

  There seemed to be no rhyme nor reason as to who was detained. The woman in the next cell, Margaret Thomas, for instance, had only ever been on the periphery of things. Here too were little nobodies like Kathy, while key personnel walked free. And Nina. When Phyllis thought about it, she could not understand why it was she who had been incarcerated and not her sister. Nina had been involved so much longer than she had. She was on the approved speaker list and had been asked to stand for a parliamentary seat, by the Leader himself. She had run the summer camps all but single-handedly and been active in every aspect of Union business, from handing out leaflets to collecting subscriptions. She had come into contact with almost all of the top brass, at one time or another. So had Eric. His not being detained was also deeply puzzling. More so even than his wife, for Eric had been in charge of printing and publicity material for the Southern region and several of the pamphlets he’d produced had been distributed nationwide. It was a mystery.

  Phyllis, 1979

  Patricia didn’t offer to have the girls. I think that’s where the rot started to set in, between the two of us. There was plenty of room at Rose Green, you see; she could easily have fitted them in. She wouldn’t even have had to give up one of the spare rooms; there was the nursery she’d used for the monthly nurse when Antonia was born, where the toys were kept, that would’ve accommodated them. It wasn’t as if she’d never had anything to do with girls, she had Antonia, and Antonia was always rather a lonely creature, I never saw her have a friend of her own to stay. Don’t repeat this to her, but we all felt rather sorry for her. She’d have loved to have had the company, I expect. You might think. She was always very precious about Antonia, everything had to be just-so: the perfect nursery with the perfect doll’s house and of course the perfect clothes. Her dresses were stiff with organza lining and she wore hair-bands to match and those grand coats with velvet collars that the two royal princesses had worn.