A small, caustic smile lit Sally’s face for a moment. ‘That a fact?’ She turned to the door.
Charlotte’s head lifted sharply. Her face, already pale, drained to the shade of skimmed milk. ‘You – you aren’t going back there? To that – that dreadful man?’
Sally lifted an eloquent shoulder, her face expressionless.
‘But – if you go back – what will he do to you?’
‘What will ’e do to the kid if I don’t?’ The words were terse, the husky voice flat and hard.
Tears brimmed helplessly in Charlotte’s eyes, ran with no check down her marked cheeks.
With no word and no gesture of farewell Sally left her, closing the door firmly behind her.
Chapter Three
I
More than once in the sultry month that followed that exhilarating, if in many eyes outrageous, demonstration in Cavendish Square against the detested Mr Asquith, Chancellor of the Exchequer in His Majesty’s Government and avowed opponent of woman’s suffrage, Hannah Patten, with the fervour of a zealot, wished herself in gaol. The crusade was on, and martyrs there already were, suffering bravely and defiantly for the cause, but to her regret she was not of their number. Quite obviously she had been too restrained; apparently the forcible removal of a bemused young policeman’s helmet had not proved protest enough. She would do better next time. In the meantime, with the country’s alarmed eyes focused at last upon them, with fervent protests in Parliament both for and against the women, with a debate in the press that raged from John O‘Groats to Land’s End, that aroused passion and prejudice, support and condemnation – in short that was making people think – there was plenty of work on hand for those still free to do it. In the House of Commons Mr Keir Hardie, respected leader of the infant Independent Labour Party which had had its own first political success earlier that year when in the General Election that had brought a Liberal landslide no less than twenty-nine Labour Candidates had been elected, was a champion indeed. Why, he demanded, in a free country such as Britain claimed to be, was it considered necessary to apply the letter of the law so severely that it became an offence for a deputation to approach a private house? Why too, if offence it were, should it be considered a crime heinous enough to warrant a two-month prison sentence? The women in Holloway were suffering for nothing but their desire to take advantage of what should be every citizen’s right, to protest to the Government about injustice. And on street corners, in market squares, outside railway stations and in shopping arcades women stood on their chairs or on their soapboxes echoing him fiercely – and were in many cases as fiercely heckled by their audience. Battles raged in the correspondence columns of the newspapers, one man’s – or woman’s – heroine was another’s ‘female hooligan’. But at least, and at last, no one in their senses could any longer ignore the lifting of these women’s voices, who had been protesting – and had been ignored – for so long.
‘The vote is not, or should not be, about property, about profit and loss!’ Hannah proclaimed sturdily from a rickety chair on the corner of Angel Street. ‘It is, or it should be, about education for our children, health for our families, support for our aged and unemployed.’
‘Get back to your kitchen sink, woman!’
‘I can vote as well from there as can you from the dockside!’
‘Ah!’ the man pounced, eyes sharp, work-hardened finger jabbing the air. ‘But I can’t, can I, by God? Why in ’ell’s name should women get the vote when most workin’ men can’t? Answer me that!’
‘Universal suffrage will follow! It’s bound to! But first we have to have equality under the system as it stands.’
‘Equality to vote the bloody Tories back an’ keep Labour out!’
‘Don’t throw me that old chestnut!’ She turned, appealing to the crowd, her plain face lit with laughter. ‘Wouldn’t you think a good Poplar lad would have more sense than Henry Asquith?’ And then, as they chuckled, she targeted a face in the crowd, a woman in her twenties, who had been listening intently, unsmiling, a shawl over her head, a baby in her arms. ‘What do they think women are? Foolish dolls to vote as they are told by father or husband? Brainless idiots who can’t make up their own minds about what’s important and what isn’t? Children whose sons are thought to know more than they do? What nonsense! We live in their world, we obey their laws, we pay their taxes, it is our world, they are our laws, our taxes. Why should we have no voice in the running of it, the framing of the laws, the spending of the revenue?’ The young woman nodded vigorously.
‘Why don’t you try wearin’ the trousers while you’re about it?’ called a young wit from the back of the crowd.
She found him, regarded him with interest. ‘You mean the wearing of trousers improves the working of one’s mind? Strange – I hadn’t noticed it to be so.’
Hannah always came away from these small battles stimulated. A young woman of sense and courage, she was rarely intimidated, a warm and loyal personality she found the comradeship of the votes for women movement very much to her liking. And – passionately and with no reservations – she believed in her cause, and counted herself lucky to be in the position to fight for it. That her own menfolk were ready to support her was a happy bonus, and one, she knew, not enjoyed by all her comrades in arms. Her father, remarkable man that he was, had from the start treated her as the equal of her brothers; she had been educated as they had, had been encouraged to form and argue her own opinions, had never been shackled by the chains of convention with which so many nineteenth-century fathers still attempted to curb their twentieth-century daughters. Her older brother Ben, fierce champion of socialism, was himself a strong advocate of universal suffrage – and if he were not so certain as she that extending to privileged women the ability to vote now enjoyed by equally privileged men would automatically lead to the democratic, and for some still fearsomely revolutionary, ideal of one man one vote, he did not make it any great cause for conflict. Peter, of course, did not pretend to care one way or another, though he would always blithely and readily admit that his sister would use the vote to which he would one day be entitled far more knowledgeably than he ever would himself. And Ralph, who though no actual blood relation was, she felt, as much a brother to her as either of the others, supported the fight for woman’s suffrage as fervently as she did herself. That he did it as much to please her as from his own undoubtedly sincere convictions – something that anyone else in the household could have told her – never so much as crossed her mind.
It was in Charlotte, who like Ralph had been accepted on their father’s death two years before openheartedly into the Patten family circle, the sister for whom Hannah had always openly longed, that she was sometimes secretly disappointed. How wonderful it would have been to find a true comrade in arms there. But try as she might she could detect no likelihood of it. It seemed to Hannah sometimes that pretty, fragile Charlotte had no convictions at all. Like an obedient child she would agree eagerly with anything she was told, anxious not to offend, anxious always to be liked, and never, that Hannah could see, using her brain for any exercise more testing than a decision about the colour of a ribbon on a new hat or the dedicated and absorbed perusal of the latest romantic novel. Informed by Hannah that in being born an unenfranchised woman she had been born to be exploited, underrated and enslaved she would placidly agree – and as placidly, Hannah suspected, subscribe to a luncheon partner’s opinion that the suffragists were immoral, unwomanly fiends out to shred the very fabric of society, who deserved nothing so much as a sound flogging from husband or father. Sometimes, it was true, some small spark of interest would surface – but, especially lately, those moments had been very few and far between. In fact, during this last month of even more than usually strenuous activity, in between the soapboxes on street corners, the meetings of the Working Woman’s Suffrage Society, the Clean Water Committee, the Worker’s Educational Association and the small network of dedicated women who had joined her as health visitors to
her father’s deprived and ever-fertile flock, some small nagging anxiety had lately made itself felt with regard to Charlotte. She had become listless, her pretty face pale, pinched even. Taxed with concerned questions she had murmured convincingly about the weather – and certainly it had been extraordinarily hot – a summer cold, a loss of energy. But if the weather and a summer cold might account for her unusual lethargy, her quite obvious and uncharacteristic preference for her own company, a less than enthusiastic application to tasks and duties she would normally have undertaken with biddable good humour, they could hardly explain the odd and obvious sharpening of her nerves and her temper, the frequent lift of tears in those wide blue eyes. Several times Hannah had started the day determined that she should have a quiet word with Ben, or with her father, about the change in Charlotte; but each time a thousand things had occurred to distract her and the word had not yet been spoken. And perhaps, indeed, it never should be. Hannah truly detested interference in her own life, and so would certainly think twice about interfering in another’s. The notion had occurred to her – based she would be the first to admit upon hearsay rather than personal experience – that the symptoms Charlotte was displaying might well be those of nothing more desperate than the agonies of a first love affair gone awry; young Wilfred Barnes had noticeably not been much in evidence lately. And if that were the case then understandably and justifiably Charlotte would thank no one for drawing Ben’s eagle eye in her direction. For all his apparent commitment to equality her estimable brother still retained a downright primitive, occasionally welcome but much more often irritating protective instinct that could, as Hannah knew only too well, lead him confidently and exasperatingly to meddle with affairs not in the least his business. And so, with some degree of relief, she did nothing.
Meanwhile, as Charlotte drooped through the end of June and into a blazing, suffocatingly hot July, fever flickered like fire in the squalid back streets of Poplar, Bow and Limehouse, flaring here and there into a conflagration, smothered in places by the carbolic, the hot water, the limewash, the scoldings and the good practical advice administered by Hannah and her fellow health visitors in those places where such commodities were welcomed and accepted. And in Holloway gently born women learned to live without light and without freedom, to scrub their own floors and empty their own foetid slop buckets, to exist in many cases in a degradation beyond anything they had ever imagined.
And Sally Smith – unenfranchised, unemployed, unprotected and on the whole uncaring about any of these things since, to her, they were the norm – watched her pitiful savings diminish terrifyingly and knew, grimly, that the open door of the workhouse beckoned; a door to be avoided at any cost. Before she saw Toby separated from her, cowed and brutalized, savagely and publicly thrashed for the slightest misdemeanour, she would turn him loose again in the streets. Before she herself became one of that army of defeated, despairing women, isolated, imprisoned and punished by the Poor Laws for the crime of being destitute she would have sold herself and – if she had had one – her sister. But in her current state of health finding work was beyond her. She had to regain her strength. She had to!
The inevitable confrontation with Jackie Pilgrim had been as dire, if not as immediate, as she had known with certainty it would be. For a week and more that downstairs door had remained shut, a threat to be scuttled past, to be laughed at in bravado, to terrify in night shadows as she lay listening to the steady breathing of the child beside her. A thousand, thousand times she had castigated herself for her foolishness in coming to Charlotte’s aid that night – and no recollection of the other girl’s tear-stained, terrified face and frail, innocent, battered body had persuaded her that she had not been utterly mad to challenge Jackie so. What had possessed her? Who, in similar circumstances had ever held – or would ever hold – a helping hand to her? Why had she not left well alone, left the silly little beggar to the consequences of her own actions? Inevitably word had got round – exaggerated as it flitted, in whispers and chuckles, from ear to ear. Jackie was not by a long chalk the most popular lad in the area, certainly not amongst those young rivals who did not possess the physical attractions and insolent Irish dash that he used to such devastating effect. Had the law been invoked to punish him, Jackie it was who would have been the hero, Sally the villain. But given that – apparently – no such retribution was to fall, the story spread and grew happily in the telling. Everyone knew Sally Smith for a shrew with a tongue as friendly as a stinging nettle and a temper to match, and the younger half of the street population of Poplar was more than ready to credit her with the nerve to march in and steal Jackie’s prize from under his very nose or, as the more extreme tales would have it, from under an even larger and more famous piece of his anatomy. That the girl – whose name thankfully remained unknown whilst her social status advanced with each telling – had already been raped God, Jackie and she only knew how many times often escaped the story altogether. The myth grew, Jackie’s fuse grew shorter with every gibe, and, one night almost two weeks after the incident he came after Sally not with his fists and his feet as she had expected and as she had survived before but – sodden with several days’ steady intake of cheap brandy – with a knife.
She had given him fair exchange, meeting him with desperate and angry courage, fighting like a demon with tooth and nail and booted foot, leaving him at last sprawled upon her attic floor, dazed for an instant by a well-aimed blow with her cracked chamber pot. Then she had fled into the street, a terrified Toby at her skirts, blood pouring from a horribly deep wound in her upper arm. They had spent two nights in the open, afraid to return, and in the close and unhealthy atmosphere as they slept huddled in rat-infested corners the brutal wound, inflicted by a filthy knife, had festered. On the third day they had crept back to that oven of an attic, and in the wrecked room Sally had fallen on to the pallet weak and feverish and in intolerable pain, Toby beside her, his worried eyes fixed fearfully upon her burning face.
She remembered little of the following days. Toby it was, child of the streets, who had fed them by means known only to himself and which Sally had been too drained and too sickly to question. He had begged, borrowed or she suspected more often stolen bread, milk and cheese that had all but choked her as she forced it down her dry and swollen throat. He had gone to the Dicksons once, but finding the neat little house empty, its occupants at work – Josie at the laundry, the menfolk at the West India Docks – had been afraid to wait, afraid to leave Sally alone for too long and so had returned empty handed. The fever had subsided a little at last; the wound, though still savagely inflamed and very painful had begun to knit. Angry at her own weakness she had forced herself from her bed to look for work: but if employment had been hard to find before it was impossible now, thin and weak-looking as she had become and with the flush of fever more often than not on her cheeks. The wound had closed, but even to her unpractised eye it looked less than healthy, and it still gave her a great deal of pain. With the stoicism of her kind she endured and as far as possible ignored it; such things happened – they got better, or they did not. For now she simply existed from day to day, their only hope of sustenance the soup kitchen or the scraps that Toby so dubiously acquired, her small, precious store of savings diminishing at a terrifying rate as the rent man called, and the tally man from whom Toby’s threadbare and now ruined jacket had been purchased in better times.
Jackie had left them alone. Once they had seen him, lounging in his doorway as they went downstairs. Toby’s hand had tightened convulsively in Sally’s. Sally had ignored the watching figure, head up, thin, flushed face stony, and he had neither moved nor spoken as they had passed.
For a while then the pain had eased – or perhaps she had simply got used to it? She wasn’t sure – and the puckered flesh around the wound had come to look a little less baleful, though it was still an unhealthy colour and almost unbearably painful to touch. She slept a little better, ate with a little more appetite. It had seemed that
the worst was over and that she was mending.
Until this morning.
She had known during the night, awakening to a suffocating, airless darkness and a fiery stab in her arm more agonizing than had been that first, vicious blow, that all was far from well. She had lain, teeth gritted against the pain and the renewed lift of fever, trying not to move, not to disturb the child who slept beside her, his dirty, cherub’s face peaceful. She had battled with a will stubborn as ever but weakened by nearly two debilitating weeks of misery and ill health against the tearing agony of the infected wound, the rise of delirium as the poison pulsed through her body with her blood, bringing crashing pain to her head and lightning flashes of lurid brilliance behind her closed lids. Dawn had found her burning with fever again. Grimly aware that this time she could not hope to cope alone she set herself to rest a while, gathering her strength. The time for pride was long past: simple survival was now the question. She would do what she knew she should have done in the first place; she would go to the Dicksons, accept the help she knew – had known all along – they would freely offer. But since the journey must be made on foot and the Isle of Dogs was no mean step away for a fevered girl and a small child, she must wait until she felt ready to tackle it – and, too, the soup kitchen in Angel Street was on their way and would be open at twelve, a place to stop and rest and for the child at least to eat.
Late in the morning she struggled from her bed. Her skin was dry and blazing hot, as sore to touch as if she had been flayed. The throbbing agony of her arm seemed to swell with each movement, invading her body, bringing back those shattering anvil clashes of light and pain to her head. She said little, teeth clenched against the torment until her rigid jaw became just another, smaller pain in the sea through which she moved and which threatened any minute to drown her. Toby held her other hand, unusually subdued, his face paler and thinner than usual, his eyes desperate with worry as he cast swift glances at her from beneath long lashes. She walked very carefully, avoiding any possibility of contact with the world about her, almost oblivious to her surroundings except inasmuch as they threatened her.
Tomorrow, Jerusalem Page 8