A Mad, Wicked Folly

by Sharon Biggs Waller

  I set the trunk down. “Your offer of a place to stay . . . does it still stand?”

  Thirty-Eight

  Lucy Hawkins’s flat,

  August to November

  LUCY’S FLAT WAS bigger than Will’s, with two rooms instead of one. But unlike Will’s, hers were gloomy and dark inside, though she had done much to brighten them, gracing them with the beauty of an artist. Two overstuffed upholstered chairs faced a little coal fire, and a table filled with jars of paste stones, beads, metalwork, and tools sat under a window. A large iron bedstead covered with a colorful patchwork quilt filled one corner. One of Alphonse Mucha’s advertisements hung on the wall over the bed. It was a drawing of a woman sitting on a bicycle, a laurel branch in her hand. Over her stretched the words WAVERLEY CYCLES.

  Lucy had given me a section of her wardrobe for my things and cleared a little space on her dressing table in her tiny lavatory. She had a flush toilet and a wash-hand basin, but like Will, Lucy bathed at the public baths.

  Things were difficult at first, and I fear I tried Lucy’s patience. I didn’t mean to, but unused to doing for myself, I simply left my clothing in a pile on the floor, expecting it to be laundered in the morning. By whom, I did not know. “Enchanted mice?” Lucy suggested once. After meals I got up from the table and left the dishes behind. Of course, when Lucy pointed it out, I dealt with the mess, but she always had to ask.

  Finally, fed up with me, Lucy took things into her own hands. One day I found my breakfast dishes stored in my bureau drawer. Egg yolk and marmalade had dripped onto my chemises. Lucy calmly explained what I would have to do to get the stains out. I had never considered what work a stain could create. It was an entire ordeal. I had to rub the soiled marks with butter and then let the garments sit in ammonia and washing soda. Once the stains had faded, I took them to the City of London Municipal Bath and Wash House and waited in line to use the boiler and mangle. I hung my damp wash on a clothesline strung across the rooftop garden and then pressed the garments with an iron heated up in the coal fireplace. I never forgot to wash my dishes again.

  Once a week we bathed at the wash house. Despite the noise and bluster, it was tolerable enough. The building was clean and tidy, with wrought-iron columns and green-and-yellow tiles on the floors and walls. To save money, Lucy brought soap so we wouldn’t have to purchase a tablet. Still, we each had to pay a tuppence for the bath and another penny to hire a small towel. Each little slipper tub was behind its own curtain, and one could change in a private cubicle beforehand. There was plenty of hot water, and the towel was clean.

  But once again, I behaved like a toff. I sat on the little stool by the tub and waited for someone to come and draw the bath. When no one appeared, after waiting a quarter of an hour, I poked my head around the curtain into Lucy’s cubicle and asked when the maid would come in. I think at that moment Lucy wanted to drown me in her bath.

  Through all of this, my thoughts flitted briefly to the comforts of home, but I turned them back firmly toward the present. After all, I needed to learn to do for myself if I wished to be independent.

  Lucy was as patient as she could be. She helped me find a shop to sell my grandmother’s jewelry. The trinkets weren’t the crown jewels, only oddments of old-fashioned things that no one ever wore, but because she knew jewelry well, she made the clerk give me a decent sum. Lucy and I joined together to make jewelry to sell to the local department stores, and Mr. Pethick-Lawrence gave me a job working at WSPU headquarters. I illustrated articles for Votes for Women, answered telephones, and performed other assorted duties three days a week. In all, everything added up to enough money to help Lucy with the rent and food.

  A week after I’d left home, Lucy and I saw Sophie at the headquarters sewing banners. She had found employment with a family in Park Lane. The mother was one of the WSPU’s biggest supporters, so Sophie didn’t have to hide her politics anymore. She was even given a paid day off each week to help at headquarters.

  I told Sophie all about what had happened when I went into the RCA. “If I’m to get a scholarship next year, I need to do what the female winners did,” I told her. “I need to be published and to enter some sort of contest.”

  “What about PC Fletcher?” Lucy asked. “Why not see if the two of you can get your novelette idea off the ground? Votes for Women is all well and good, but I don’t know how much sway it will have with the old establishment at the RCA. Remember how they felt about Sylvia Pankhurst. No sense putting their backs up if you don’t have to.”

  “PC Fletcher and I are not a partnership anymore. We haven’t been for a long time; I told you that before.”

  “Yes, I know,” Lucy said. “But that was when you were engaged. You aren’t engaged now, so what’s to stop you?”

  “You love him; you know you do!” Sophie said. “Every time you were with him, you’d come home smiling. Whenever you were with your fiancé, you were so serious.”

  Before I left home, I would have lied about my feelings for Will. I had only ever admitted them to myself. But now, hearing Sophie say you love him made a little thrill of happiness shoot through me. “But Will doesn’t feel the same way about me.”

  “I’m sure he does!” Sophie insisted.

  “Well, if he did, he doesn’t anymore,” I said. “The last time we talked, he didn’t want anything to do with me. After the RCA exam he came to see me, and I told him I was engaged. I tried to explain, but he didn’t want to hear. You should have seen the look on his face, as if he loathed me.”

  “Are we talking about PC William Fletcher, the knight in shining armor, who helped us all the time, risking the wrath of a lot of police constables?” Lucy said. “Vicky, I never thought you were dumb, but sheesh.”

  “What are you going on about, Lucy?” I said. I was growing impatient with both her and Sophie. It was enough for me to be rejected once by Will. If I heard him talk to me in that formal voice again, I didn’t think I could bear it.

  “You told him you were engaged!” Lucy said, exas-

  perated.

  “As a servant living in an upper-class household, I can see why he acted like he did,” Sophie put in. “He thought there was more between you, and then he realized he really had no right to love you. And as Lucy said, he’s a gentleman through and through. He backed away.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You never thought of that, did you?” Lucy said.

  “It’s probably too late, anyhow,” I said, feeling hopeful despite my words. “It’s been ages since I’ve talked to him. Not since July.”

  “At least go to him to see if you can work together again. You need a publishing credit for your portfolio.”

  “I suppose I could write to him.”

  “No!” both Sophie and Lucy shouted.

  “You know where he lives, so go there,” Sophie urged.

  “I know one thing.” Lucy picked up a box of leaflets. “If I had a chance with a guy like PC Fletcher, I’d grab hold of him and cling on until he cried uncle. No foolin’.”

  I looked at Sophie. She shrugged. “I’ve seen him. I have to agree with Lucy.”

  It took me several days to get up the nerve to go, but finally I took the Underground to Praed Street and walked to Will’s flat. When I arrived, I knocked on the door, but no one answered. After a moment, the door across the hall opened, and an elderly man with a walking stick stepped out.

  “Are you looking for the police constable?” he said.

  “I am. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “He’s gone. He’s moved away.”

  I felt myself grow cold. “When?” I whispered.

  The man leaned on his stick. “Now, let’s see. A month ago, I suppose.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  He shook his head slowly. “No, I’m sorry, miss. I don’t know.”

  Everywhere I went, I
looked for Will, but I never saw him. I even went to Cannon Row Police Station, but they wouldn’t give me any information about him and eyed me suspiciously when I asked. I sat down several times to write a letter to him care of his parents in Rye, but I didn’t know what to say.

  I wrote my parents and Freddy letters from time to time, letting them know I was well. My parents never replied, but I knew that was my father’s doing. I knew he could never forgive me for what I had done. I was sure he’d renounced all attachments to me. I knew my mother had to do as my father commanded, because she wouldn’t dare do otherwise, but I didn’t blame her anymore. She didn’t know how to be any other way. But still, for all of our arguing, I found I missed my mother. And if I was honest, I found I missed my father too.

  Freddy wrote to me and told me that Papa had returned to the Reform Club, and that little by little his compatriots began to speak to him again. I received a letter from Freddy on my would-be wedding day, telling me that Edmund had become engaged to Georgette Plimpton, Mrs. Plimpton’s crushingly boring daughter. But for all my opinions of Miss Plimpton, I hoped that Edmund would be happy with her, and she with him.

  ONE DAY IN late September, Sophie, Lucy, and I were on our way home from a WSPU poster parade when we saw a crowd bustling around a newsagent. Several men in the crowd were laughing and saying something about how the women finally got what was coming to them.

  We pushed through the crowd to see Clara, one of the mural artists. She was holding a copy of the Daily Bugle, her face grim.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  Clara passed me the paper; her finger marked a story just above the fold on the front page. Lucy and Sophie leaned over my shoulder.

  Suffragettes Undergo Hospital Treatment

  in Winson Gaol

  A Home Secretary spokesman, Mr. G. Masterman, confirms the prison in Birmingham has resorted to the “hospital treatment” of feeding hunger-striking suffragette prisoners Laura Ainsworth, Charlotte Marsh, and Mary Leigh by way of the stomach pump.

  Keir Hardie was the solitary voice against such practice. Many MPs in the House of Commons found the situation amusing and laughed when Mr. Hardie touted the dangers of force-feeding, stating that the last person who had received such treatment had died the next day. “I could not have believed that a body of gentlemen could have found reason for mirth and applause in a scene which had no parallel in the recent history of our country,” Mr. Hardie said.

  One Mr. C. Mansell-Moullin, MD, said, “As a hospital surgeon of thirty years’ standing, I indignantly repudiate the use of the term ‘hospital treatment.’ It is a foul libel. Violence and brutality have no place in hospitals, as Mr. Masterman ought to know.”

  Mr. Masterman declared the government was within its rights to force-feed the women because they were weak-minded.

  “As if they were inmates in an insane asylum!” Sophie said. I could feel her behind me shifting from foot to foot, beside herself with rage.

  “It’s front-page news.” Clara gestured to the newsagent’s window. Nearly every paper there had the story blazoned across the front page. “But not all the papers are on our side. Most of them are on the government’s side. Several doctors have come out saying it isn’t at all what the suffragettes are making it out to be. Have a look.” She unfolded another broadsheet and pointed to the article.

  The story was illustrated with a photograph of a woman neatly dressed in prison garb, sitting calmly in a chair while a smiling doctor held a tube to her mouth. The woman gazed up at him, a grateful look on her face, as though she hadn’t the sense in her addlepated brain to work out the right thing to do until the doctor pitched up with his hosepipe.

  I looked up from the paper. “Is this what force-feeding is like?”

  “That’s staged,” Lucy said. “That woman is no one Birmingham headquarters knows. But there’re many people in this country who’ll think that’s real.” She made a noise of frustration. “It’s gruesome, that force-feeding. Mr. Pethick-Lawrence received a telephone call from the WSPU branch in Birmingham this morning. A sympathetic wardress called to report what had happened. Four prison wardresses hold the women down; a doctor wrenches their mouth open with some sort of metal gag and then shoves a tube down it. He pours raw eggs and Benger’s Food down the tube with a funnel. The wardress said she was resigning because she couldn’t bear to be part of it. Said it was torture.”

  I felt nauseated thinking of having a tube pushed into my stomach. I could almost feel the rubber brushing down my own throat. My stomach roiled, and I swallowed hard to keep from retching.

  “I’m not sure I understand the hunger-striking, Lucy,” I said. “Why do you do it?”

  “When we did it after the deputation in June, it was because we were denied the rights of political prisoners. Hunger-striking is protest, pure and simple. But now, with this barbaric force-feeding, this is war. The women’s suffering will boost determination and encourage many women who wouldn’t otherwise do so to stand up and take part.”

  “Only if they know the truth!” I said. “This photo certainly won’t encourage anyone.”

  Later, at WSPU headquarters, I drew an illustration for Votes for Women bringing the horror of force-feeding to life on the page. I sketched a woman captive in a chair, held there by four wardresses while a man forced her head back and another poured liquid through a gruesome tube trailing into her mouth, wrenched open with a gag. At the top of the page I wrote in block letters:

  THE TRUTH AS WE KNOW IT.

  I had once thought that I could only express myself through a sketch or a painting, but now I knew that was not true. I could express my beliefs in many ways, be it an illustration, a cartoon, or even a chalk drawing on the pavement, if I was so inclined. With every stroke of my pencil, I felt more and more inspired and triumphant. So instead of my real name, I signed the drawing: Victorious.

  Mr. Pethick-Lawrence printed it the next day. It was on the front page of Votes for Women. It was an honor, but I couldn’t help but feel we were preaching to the converted.

  LUCY, HAVING BEEN among the first to hunger-strike, wasn’t content to let other women sacrifice themselves while she stood idly by, and so I knew something was up when she rose early on the ninth of November and dressed in the plainest clothes she had.

  I leaned on one elbow. “What are you doing, Lucy?”

  “A little something I’ve been planning.” She pulled on a pair of kitchen sleeves.

  “Are you cleaning something?”

  “You might say that. Going to help the Lord Mayor.”

  The importance of the date sifted through my tired mind then. The ninth of November was the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall, and every politician of note would be there to celebrate the new mayor. “Are you going to the Guildhall?”

  “Good guess!”

  “Why?”

  “Never been to a knees-up at the Guildhall,” she said. “Might be a laugh.”

  “Wait!” I said, fully awake now. “Are you going there to get arrested?”

  Lucy made a face. “Not going for the canapés, I can tell you that.”

  “But . . . but . . . if they arrest you, will you hunger-strike again? If you do, they’ll force-feed you.” I was terrified for Lucy. People died from being force-fed, like that man in the paper said.

  “Look, Vicky, the government doesn’t seem to know the weapon they’ve handed to us now because of this force-feeding. We’re in all the papers, and if we don’t stop, the truth will come out eventually, and people will be on our side. We’ve all got to do our bit. And this is what we’re all about.”

  If the end result hadn’t been so grave, Lucy’s escapade would have been hilarious. Lucy and two other suffragettes, a fellow American called Alice Paul and a Brit called Amelia Brown, slipped into the palatial Guildhall by dressing as charwomen. Each time they saw someone, they’
d ask the way to the kitchen. One time when they saw a police constable, they hid in a cloakroom. The constable, not knowing they were there, actually threw his cloak over them. Eventually they worked their way to the gallery in the banqueting hall, and when everyone was seated, tucking into their feast, Lucy and her friends shouted and threw stones through a stained-glass window.

  They were, of course, arrested. Mr. Pethick-Lawrence went to the court to sit in at their hearing. The judge sentenced them to thirty days’ imprisonment in the dreaded second division at Holloway.

  A week dragged by. I missed Lucy so much. The flat was empty without her. I even missed sharing the bed with her.

  Lucy had been in prison for ten days when Mr. Pethick-Lawrence got word from a sympathetic wardress that Lucy had gone on hunger strike and they had begun force-feeding her. I worried about her well-being in prison, though I knew she was proud to be there. If only I could make everyone see my cartoon for Votes for Women, make everyone understand what Lucy was going through right now.

  Then I remembered Étienne’s posters of the cabaret girls. I would make posters of the force-feeding and hang them where everyone would see them! The WSPU didn’t have to be at the mercy of the newspapers. Anyone with eyes would see the truth.

  Thirty-Nine

  Clement’s Inn, WSPU Headquarters,

  Saturday, twentieth of November

  “I HAVE AN IDEA to get the truth of force-feeding out to the public,” I said. “I want to make an illustration for a poster that we can stick up.”

  It was the next morning, and I had sought out Mr. Pethick-Lawrence in the newspaper room at Clement’s Inn.

  “What do you have in mind?” he asked.

  I pulled out my sketchbook and set it on the table, turning it to the page with my sketch. “This is an illustration of the wardress’s statement. We can paste the posters on hoardings, pub walls, buildings, signs.”