by Michel Faber
But that decision, as I was only too painfully aware, was not mine to make or unmake. In telling me about her abduction by Miss Sugar, my mother had reminded me that children are subject to the will of grown-ups, and cannot choose where they live or where they go. How clever she was to have that little heart-to-heart with me! Was it deliberate, I wonder? She made me believe that my outburst of grief had pushed her to reveal her most secret memories, memories too intimate to be shared with anyone but me, Papa and Aunt Primrose. How special I felt! – even as she was telling me that my wishes counted for nothing. How vulnerable she seemed, as she recalled her childish bewilderment at the way her life had been turned upside down. It was enough to make me forget that she’d shown no mercy in overturning my own.
However. There’s no point blaming her now, is there? We emigrated, and that was how it was. The colonies went their own sweet way, and we went ours, and I have become, for good or ill, an Englishman. Last of the old-fashioned gentlemen, as the nurses here call me! And of course I learned, in the fullness of time, that my mother was right. Life defies our intentions to be rational; it misleads and teases us until we are driven to do foolish things. I know. Oh God, I know.
But you don’t want to hear about my life. You want to hear about the march. I’m getting to that, I really am. I give you my solemn promise I won’t die before finishing the story. I do understand how maddening it is to get only so far, and not know what happened next. I wouldn’t do that to you!
The first thing to be said is that, as a boy of seven, I had only the haziest notions of what all this was about. My parents had been discussing the march and its importance for months, but mostly amongst themselves, and so they felt free to use words like ‘franchise’, ‘empowerment’, ‘Asquith’, ‘progressive’ and ‘suffrage’, whereas I preferred words like ‘play’, ‘eat’, ‘toffee-apple’ and ‘kiss’. ‘Suffrage’ was something I thought people experienced when they got sick or when a horse kicked them.
As for marching, I had been under the impression that it was something only soldiers did. Yet Mama and Aunt Primrose were counting down the days to the 21st of June, when they would do their duty. I wondered how they would manage the strides, in their long skirts, and whether Mama might trip on the cobbles. (She was shorter than Aunt Primrose, and her boots had quite a heel on them.)
My father was an integral part of the preparations for this momentous event. He had helped the ladies paint a banner – the only collaborative artistic endeavour he’d ever undertaken, I believe – which resulted in Mama getting green paint all over her hair. The banner turned out very handsome, though. VOTES FOR WOMEN, it said, in green, white and purple, the colours of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Green for hope, white for purity and purple for dignity. On either side of the inscription, my father had painted a statuesque woman in a long, flowing dress, with a helmet on her head and a trumpet in her hand. It strikes me now that these two Amazons may well have been the only female figures, apart from the ladies in his portrait commissions, to gain entry into my father’s oeuvre with their clothes on.
There were in fact two marches that June, within a week of each other. The first was organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and, as far as I’m aware, my family didn’t go. I’ve since learned, from history books, that the NUWSS favoured polite, constitutional, law-abiding means of change. That doesn’t sound like my parents’ style, I must admit. The June 21st march was organised by the Women’s Social and Political Union, a far more militant group. They were the ones who published the penny newspaper my mother sold in the street. They were the ones who had the champion colours (the other team had red and white, which my father dismissed as a crude combination). They were the ones who interrupted gentlemen’s political meetings, got arrested, got thrown into prison. Sensational! In our household, Emmeline, Christabel, Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst were heroines on a par with Hercules. Not that Hercules was a woman, but you know what I mean.
The march would have been exciting enough for me had I merely heard tell of it and seen the lovely banner my Mama and Papa had made together. But I was actually going to be a participant. I was going to be there, in Hyde Park! I would march with my father and my mother and Auntie Primrose, and the prime minister would peep from behind the curtains of his palace and tremble in fear, and then the laws would change. It was all fantastically thrilling; my only worry was how I would cope with the physical demands of the march, since my legs were a great deal shorter than grown-ups’.
How fortunate, then, that my new school took my training in hand. Clearly, Torrington Infants was well aware of the impending challenge and was determined to ensure that its pupils were up to it. A few weeks before the big day, a rigorous, vigorous system of exercises was introduced to our curriculum, to make us hale of lung and strong of limb. At the peal of a bell, we boys, uniformly dressed in our grey caps, grey worsted jackets buttoned up to the neck, grey knickerbockers, long black socks and black shoes, would be marched out of the classrooms. We would tramp round the school building twice, kept in rhythm by our master chanting ‘Left, right, left, right.’ Then we would assemble in the quadrangle, shivering in the chill of an English summer morning, and our master would instruct us to do battle with the air. We’d fling our arms and legs about, lift our knees up to our chests, pirouette, salute the sickly sun with our ink-stained little hands. Half-hearted gestures were not allowed; anyone failing to strike a strenuous pose was instantly barked at.
I was able to perform well enough, but I felt sorry for some of my schoolmates who couldn’t – in particular, a wretched lad called Jerome who had a club foot that he was forced to heave off the ground, and another boy whose name I forget, who would spurt snot and blood from his nose whenever he bent to touch his toes. You know, I’ve been an eye-witness to some truly historic things in my life – the Great Floods of 1928, for example, or the first Olympic Games after Hitler, at Wembley in 1948 – and can barely remember them, but until my dying day I will have a picture-perfect recollection of that poor boy’s socks as he seated himself at his desk each morning: flaccid, furry, misshapen, pinkish grey, from his mother’s nightly attempts to wash the blood out of the wool.
And yet, however much pity I felt for these poor lads, I was grateful that my physical fitness was being improved for its June 21st appointment. Grateful for a couple of weeks, at least. Like the notion that my mother and father had taken turns to fashion my top and bottom half, my conviction that Torrington Infants School wanted to help me march with the suffragettes was shortlived. And this time, it wasn’t my mother who enlightened me to my mistake, but my father. I mentioned my participation in the exercises at my school, and assured him that I was confident that, come the day of reckoning, I would be able to keep pace. He laughed. He told me that my school’s exercise programme was all because the British Army had put on a poor show in a war against the bores (or that’s how I understood it) and there was now widespread fear that the nation’s young were puny and enfeebled. In schools all across the country, he said, children like me were being arranged into little battalions, to learn how to march to war and engage in hand-to-hand combat with future enemies.
‘Who shall I have to fight, Papa?’ I asked.
He smiled, cupped his hand over my head, and wiggled my skull affectionately.
‘Your Mama and I will make sure you shan’t ever have to fight anyone, Henry. We are specialists in escape.’
‘But who will be the enemies?’ I persisted. ‘Is there a war coming soon?’ I knew about wars; I had seen paintings of them in art galleries with my Papa, giant pictures of sword-brandishing Italians and chariots and circus animals and wounded horses and flaming fortresses, lacquered with what looked like nine coats of furniture polish.
My father laughed. ‘It’s already here!’ he said. ‘The war between rich and poor, the war between employers and workers … Oh, and let’s not forget the war between men and women!’
Pleased as I w
as to see my father laughing, I was unnerved by this last comment.
‘You won’t ever fight Mama, will you, Papa?’
He laughed again.
‘Your Mama and I are on the same side, Henry. Always on the same side. Remember that.’
I did.
Now, as I promised, the day of the march … The day of the march … You know, it’s a bit like the 1948 Olympics. One feels a tremendous responsibility to recall everything in detail, because one was there, and it was a key moment in History. But for me, the march was only one of many key moments in the history of our family – in the history of my mother and me. Oh, don’t fret: I remember a respectable amount. I’m not going to suddenly claim that the entire day is a blank. But some of it has gone missing.
What I wore, for example. Odd, that. I still have an after-image, in my mind’s eye, of the socks I mentioned earlier, the socks of that poor lad whose nose bled all the time, but if I try to picture what my Mama dressed me in for this wonderfully special occasion, I draw a blank. My school clothes? My Sunday best? I don’t recall if I even had a Sunday outfit. My family, despite Mama’s sentimental attachment to her uncle Henry’s Bible, were not churchgoers. In fact, Sunday the 21st of June, 1908, was probably the first time we’d ever attended any solemn ceremony as a family, and we were going to the Church of Female Suffrage.
Mama wore her long black feedbag coat, as always, and her shapeless piano-cushion hat. Aunt Primrose was decked out in the colours of the WSPU: snow-white skirt and blouse, purple jacket with white buttons and green cuffs, green chapeau decorated with a sprig of lavender. She’d even bought a purple umbrella, but left it at home because the weather that morning was cloudless and brilliant. My father wore his usual outdoors suit, augmented with a neckerchief that might or might not have been green. I’m glad he didn’t wear white, green and purple; it would have been unmanly. He carried the banner and the two long poles it was sewn onto, rolled up under his arm. It must have been jolly heavy, but his face betrayed no effort.
We walked to the junction of Gray’s Inn Road and, to my surprise and delight, were fetched from there by a float of suffragettes. The float was drawn by two horses in gay head-dress, with a female at the reins (sensational!), and had about a dozen women on board already. VOTES FOR WOMEN flags and pennants hung off it on all sides, fluttering in the breeze. The women were smiling and excited, chattering amongst themselves. One of them reached down to me from her perch and helped me clamber up. We were off.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so amazed at our smoothly synchronised transport. The demonstration was, as I learned much later, a triumph of planning, a fearsomely premeditated campaign on a military scale. A thousand pounds had been spent on publicity, a vast sum in those days. There can scarcely have been a woman in Britain who hadn’t been informed when, where and how to participate. Thirty special trains had ferried demonstrators from all over the country. There were seven separate processions snaking towards Hyde Park through London’s major thoroughfares. Our little float of suffragettes was part of an army 30,000 strong.
Of course, many more people came to watch. More than a quarter of a million, in fact. As we trotted further into the city, my eyes goggled at the sheer profusion of human beings. They were thronging on the pavements, jostling on balconies, poking out of windows, standing on rooftops, clinging to lampposts, popping up from signs that said THROUGH THICK & THIN WE NE’R GIVE IN and COLMAN’S MUSTARD. Instinctively, even though I was on top of the float and in no danger of being crushed, I shrank back. My mother – I assume it was my mother, maybe it was one of the other women – put her arm around my chest and hugged me from behind. The woman next to me introduced herself, shouting to be heard above the hubbub of the crowd and the blaring of the brass band that paraded in front of us. She said her name was Emily. I wonder now: can this have been Emily Wilding Davison, who, five years later, would become the first suffragette martyr, trampled under the hooves of the King’s horse? If so, she looked remarkably cheerful to me that Sunday morning.
‘This,’ she said, waving her white-gloved hand at the multitudes, ‘is something they can’t tear up and throw in the waste-paper basket.’ I didn’t know what she meant, but her confidence was infectious. I smiled and nodded, and she patted my knee lingeringly.
I don’t recall the moment when we parted company from Emily and the other ladies on the float. The next thing I remember is marching with my parents in the midst of a vast sea of people. I needn’t have worried about keeping up: we moved very slowly, much more slowly than I was made to march at Torrington Infants. More like a stroll, really, except that the music of the brass bands and the thunderous din of the crowd reminded me that this was a magnificently important occasion. What route did we take to Hyde Park? I haven’t the foggiest. I was three feet tall. There were thousands of adult bodies around me. Mama and Papa were walking slowly in step, each holding a pole straight up against their chests, the VOTES FOR WOMEN banner stretched in the air between them. I was bursting with pride. For a while, at least. Then I was bursting to have a pee. No one else seemed to need it, and the multitudes marched on, bearing me along with them.
There is nothing so ruinous to a sense of historical occasion as a full bladder. Jesus Christ could be descending from the heavens arm-in-arm with Helen of Troy, and you’d still be on the lookout for a loo. I remember glancing up at my parents’ faces, hoping to catch their eye, but it was no use. Mama, Papa and Aunt Primrose were as erect as they could be, radiant with conviction, focused on the future. It was as though they were prepared to march for days on end, never tiring until they’d achieved everything there was to be achieved. It was as though they meant to flush the prime minister out of his hiding place and hound him, step by step, across London until he was obliged to topple backwards into the Thames. I became increasingly frightened. At one point, the crowd parted somewhat and I thought we were going to escape into an open space. But then another procession marched into view: a mighty horde of women in very big hats, advancing.
Finally I found the courage to tug at my mother’s coat and tell her I needed to relieve myself. She had to bend almost double to hear me, the banner dipping as she leaned her ear against my lips. She nodded. She handed her pole to Aunt Primrose, who took hold of it without hesitation. Primrose and Papa fell into step with each other, and my mother and I began to squirm our way through the crowd, swimming at right angles to the tide.
With each second, I became more convinced that I was doomed to wet my trousers. Even assuming that we managed to locate a public toilet, there would probably be several hundred people queuing up to use it. But my mother had thought of that. The nearest bush we came up against (we were in Hyde Park by this time, evidently), she selected as my urinal.
‘I’ll shield you,’ she said, and turned her back on me, opening her coat wide and flapping it with her hands, as though attempting to cool herself in the broiling heat. I lost no time. Within seconds the leaves of the bush were dripping with my pee. I tapped on the back of Mama’s coat, to let her know I was ready to rejoin the fray. She said,
‘Now, you shield me.’
We changed places and she squatted next to the bush. I didn’t see what happened next, as I had my back turned. There were people hurrying past constantly: men in cloth caps, men in bowlers, men in boaters, women in WSPU colours, even a pair of policemen who, although they were a good ten yards away, gave me a cold thrill of terror. Nobody looked in our direction, though, and before long I felt my mother’s warm hand on my shoulder.
Finding Papa and Aunt Primrose was not going to be easy. The teeming horde had moved on. We hurried to catch up, got snarled in a scrum of men and women engaged in a heated political discussion. The men had been drinking, I think, even though it was Sunday. There was a pretty young lady balanced precariously on a folding chair, very white in the face, clutching her VOTES FOR WOMEN sash tightly in one fist.
‘Why don’t you (blah blah blah)?’ bellowed one of the men. (I
couldn’t make out what his suggestion was.)
‘Because that’s not how change has ever happened in this country, sir,’ retorted the white-faced lady. ‘Women will get the vote in the same way that William the Conquerer got England, or Henry the Eighth got his wives – by crushing the opposition.’
Another man laughed. ‘You can crush me anytime, Miss!’
The lady’s cheeks turned from white to crimson. She said something, but her voice had lost its power and I couldn’t hear the words.
‘You won’t change Asquith’s mind by squeaking in a public park!’ yelled another man. ‘Now, if you took him to bed …!’
The lady bit her lip, looked round at her friends for support. A stocky woman with a stern face waved her hand at the tormentors and exclaimed: ‘It’s this sort of degenerate behaviour that will be swept away when there are women in Parliament!’
‘Humbug!’ yelled one of the men.
‘Prostitutes!’ yelled another. ‘You’re all whores!’
My mother grabbed me by the hand and we hurried away, in a different direction from the one we’d been pursuing. I presumed she was taking a long way round, reasoning that the crowds were too thick in the middle. But when I chanced to look up at her, I saw that her face had undergone a remarkable transformation. Its glow of excitement faded, leaving her pale and distracted. Her gaze had lost its bright-eyed focus, and flitted over the heads of the crowd, disconsolate. She’s lost without Papa, I thought.