Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  He breathed deeply, glaring at her. ‘You’re refusing my order,’ he said. ‘Is that what it is?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I’m refusing. Like the government. This is a protest against the refusal of the government to grant the vote to women. They refuse. I refuse.’

  ‘Then I shall have to arrest you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is understood.’

  He left her attached to the railings and clomped off to speak to his sergeant, who was standing in the road, chewing the end of his waxed moustache. Another constable joined them and there were several minutes of earnest conversation. Then the sergeant walked away.

  There was another woman in chains a few feet further along the road. ‘Name of Polly,’ she said, introducing herself. ‘We’ve set them a problem.’

  But not for long. They were soon back with another constable, who was carrying a hacksaw. He moved along the line, cutting through the chains and grumbling. ‘You’d better keep still if you don’t want to get hurt,’ he warned Octavia. ‘I got no time fer silly women.’

  A small crowd had gathered and there was a photographer on the other side of the street setting up his camera. Octavia watched him, hoping he worked for one of the newspapers. But then the Black Maria arrived and they were rounded up and led towards it, shouting, ‘Votes for women!’ all the way.

  I’m a criminal now, Octavia thought, as she was pushed into one of the L-shaped cells inside the van. It was airless and dark in there, for there was only one small, blacked-out window, and unpleasantly claustrophobic, being designed to force a prisoner to sit bolt upright with his legs in the space under the unseen seat in front of him. Octavia’s face was just a few inches from the wall in front of her, her back was jammed against the wall behind her and her legs were so tightly wedged under the seat that she couldn’t turn her feet to left or right. She could hear other prisoners being pushed in behind her and recognised Polly’s voice still shouting, ‘Votes for women!’ and that encouraged her. We shall be sent to prison now, she thought, and even though she felt proud of what she was doing, she shuddered despite herself.

  It was late the following evening before she got a chance to write the promised letter to her father and she was too weary to say much but she wrote what she could.

  ‘Holloway Gaol,’ she said.

  ‘Dear Pa,

  ‘I have been sentenced to six weeks and I am here in Holloway Gaol. It is not a pleasant place, I must confess to you, but then I did not imagine it would be. Prisons are designed to be unpleasant. However, I think that being here will prove to be an educational experience, if nothing else. I am a category A prisoner, which means I shall be allowed books and writing paper, and I intend to keep a diary so I shall do what I can to make the six weeks pass quickly.

  ‘We were booked in by a very unpleasant woman. She gave us our prison uniforms, which are rough and ugly, and took away our own clothes and all our personal belongings with the exception of my spectacles, which she allowed me to keep, and said, “Don’t go giving yourself airs. You’re here to be punished and punished you will be.” Strange to think that when we win the vote we shall be winning it for her too.

  ‘Tell Mama that I am looking after myself. I may be a convicted criminal but I am still your most loving daughter Tavy.’

  Her father wrote back by return of post to applaud her courage and ask if there was anything she needed that he could supply. ‘I hope you will tell me everything you can about life “inside”,’ he said. ‘Your mother and I need to feel we are still close to you and letters must stand in lieu of conversation now.’

  ‘I will do my best,’ Octavia replied, ‘although I fear that much of what I write will be censored, for opinion here is not free. Everything about this place is a punishment, from the air we breathe, which smells of stale cabbage, dirty clothes, unwashed bodies, sweat and used chamber pots – if you can imagine such a thing – to the discomfort of the cell. When I was first left alone here I felt like a caged animal and had to pace about. I simply couldn’t sit down or keep still. However, I am accustomed to it now. It is a matter of adjusting the way in which you think. There are still times when the walls seem to be looming in on me but I tell myself that this is because the cell is so small and the brickwork has been painted such a claustrophobic green; the barred window is so high I can’t see out of it but I tell myself that at least it lets in light; the plank bed is hard and uncomfortable but no worse than a lot of women endure every night of their lives; the uniform is a shapeless dress made of rough cotton with large black arrows stamped all over it, a rough holland apron and a mop cap like the ones skivvies wear. I think it is to show us how low we have sunk, but we wear it like a badge of pride. However, there are some things that cannot be improved by thinking. The food is badly cooked and often inedible, cockroaches scuttle about the cell all night, and the warders still enjoy their power and bully whenever they can.’

  The conversation continued. She wrote about the other prisoners she met in the yard: the petty thieves, ‘who have no other way of earning a living’, and were rough and tough and swore like troopers; the pickpockets, ‘who take what they can, where they can’; the prostitutes, ‘who are weary and slipshod and old before their time’, and one in particular who had become a friend. ‘She is an intelligent girl, sharp-witted and funny and quick to understand what is said to her. She has had very little education for there were six younger brothers and sisters for her to look after and schooling was a luxury. Her father has been in and out of prison all his life, so she says, and I can well believe her, and her mother has been so worn down by children and poverty that Lizzie has had to do most of the work for her. Now it is her earnings that keep the family going. It is little short of a scandal and a dreadful waste of her undoubted talent.’

  The long weeks passed slowly. But eventually she was serving her last few days and the punishment was nearly over.

  ‘I believe in the rightness of our cause,’ she wrote in her bold, firm hand, ‘more passionately now than I did on the day I was arrested, and nothing that is done or said to me in this place will change my mind in the slightest degree. Enduring things makes me aware that I am living to some purpose and that is a splendid thing because it is what I have always wanted to do. The more of us who are sent to prison the stronger we shall be. Now it is truly a fight and a fight for what is just and right. Eventually, no matter what is happening to us now, the government will have to give in and accede to our demands, just as earlier governments gave in to the Chartists. The longer I sit here on my own and think about it, the more obvious it seems to me. I wonder they can’t see it too. Their opposition to us is cruel but it is also foolish. They are a House full of King Canutes trying to bully the incoming tide.

  ‘I am well, or as well as I can be, and I think of you and Mama fondly and often. Your letters are a great strength to me. I wait for them impatiently. It will not be much longer now. In four more days I can walk across the heath and breathe clean air again. Please reassure Mama and tell her that I am not changed by being labelled criminal and that I love her more than ever.

  ‘Your ever loving daughter,

  ‘Tavy.’

  She was released ten days before Christmas and her father was waiting for at the prison gate with a cab ready to take her home. He was horrified to see how pale and thin she was.

  ‘We must build you up again, little one,’ he said, holding her hand as they sat side by side in the cab. ‘You must be fit and well for Christmas.’ He was distressed to see that tears were falling down her cheeks.

  It was the most special Christmas he could devise with the richest food, the best wines and the biggest family party they’d ever held. But it was the Christmas cards that pleased Octavia most. Details of her imprisonment had been published in the suffragette newspaper, along with all the others, and she had cards from all over the country, praising her for her courage and thanking her for what she’d done. And among them, most unexpectedly, was a card f
rom Tommy Meriton.

  ‘I had to write and tell you how much I admire the stand you are taking,’ he wrote. ‘I take my hat off to you. You are a brave woman.’ And he added a postscript. ‘PS. Perhaps I shall see you at Cyril’s twenty-first.’

  Good heavens, she thought. Fancy him writing like that. Maybe there’s some good in him after all.

  ‘Well, that’s nice,’ her mother said when she read the card. ‘It will be nice to see him at the party. I only wish Maud and Ralph weren’t making such a fuss over it. You’d think nobody had ever come of age before, the way they’re going on. They didn’t fuss like that over Emmeline.’

  ‘She had a big wedding,’ J-J pointed out.

  ‘And quite right too,’ Amy said. ‘She was getting married and marriage can be hard work. I’m sure it is in her case. Very hard work. Whereas Cyril never seems to work at all. He just gets sillier every year. And he never visits poor Emmeline and he really should.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Cyril’s twenty-first birthday was just after his finals and it was a grand occasion, just as Amy had predicted. To be fair to him, he did his best to be blasé about it because he was uncomfortably aware that Emmeline’s twenty-first hadn’t been anywhere near so splendid and because it wasn’t the done thing to show excitement. He was a stickler for doing the done thing, although it was actually quite difficult because the pater had organised a frightfully grand supper with dancing and champagne and everything, and invited all his friends down from Oxford, which was rather sporting of him, so he had to be the man of the hour whether he wanted to or not – and, of course, he did want to, very much indeed. But privately, of course.

  Tommy Meriton had come of age in January and said it was ‘all a fearful bore, old thing,’ but it had to be done, which steadied him. A real chum, Tommy Meriton. Always knew the right thing to say.

  At that moment, the two of them were sitting in the conservatory among palms and ferns, underneath the grape vine and the frangipani, waiting for the guests to arrive, smoking cheroots like the men of the world they were and lounging in the new rattan chairs with their long legs spread before them. In his three years at Oxford Cyril had developed from a gangly – and often spotty – youth to a self-possessed and really quite handsome young man, sporting a silky moustache and wearing evening dress as to the manor born. Tommy Meriton was as handsome as ever and invariably looked the style in everything he wore, and he had a splendid moustache curving over his mouth like two blonde wings. But then he’d always been someone special, rowing blue and president of the union and everybody saying he’d take a double first and all that. A dashed fine chap, Cyril thought, admiring him.

  At that moment the two friends were discussing the extraordinary behaviour of Miss Octavia Smith. ‘I never thought she’d actually go and do it,’ Cyril said, flicking the ash from his cheroot with his middle finger in the elegantly correct way. ‘Dash it all, Tommy. I mean to say, a chap could be compromised by something like this. Bad enough all that marching about she would do and carrying banners and everything. But chaining herself to the railings! It’s not done. And now she says she’s going to do it again.’

  ‘I think it’s top hole,’ Tommy said.

  ‘You’re not related to her,’ Cyril told him. ‘It’s no joke having a jailbird for a cousin.’

  ‘You make her sound like a burglar,’ Tommy said, laughing at him. ‘Actually, I sent her a Christmas card.’

  ‘Really?’ Cyril said, amazed to hear it. ‘You are a goose, Tommy. What d’you want to go and do a thing like that for?’

  ‘To congratulate her,’ Tommy said. ‘Taking a stand and all that.’

  ‘Most unwise,’ Cyril said. ‘You’ll give her a swollen head and she’s bad enough without that.’ But he couldn’t say any more, which was just as well, because the door was opening and there was a rustle of silk skirts as Octavia herself came swooshing towards them between the palms and ferns with Emmeline close behind her.

  ‘We’ve been sent to find you,’ Emmeline said to her brother. ‘Your guests are starting to arrive. You’re to come into the drawing room and greet them.’ She looked and sounded extremely haughty in her fine new smoke blue dress, even though she was plump with her third pregnancy and secretly feeling rather uncomfortable – which was another reason to make Squirrel mind his manners. He might have come of age but she was a mother of two and soon to be a mother of three and he would always be her annoying little brother, no matter how old he was. Her own twenty-first birthday party had been very small compared to this one, and although a lot of her unmarried school friends had been invited tonight purportedly ‘to keep her company,’ she had a nasty suspicion they were actually here to provide dancing partners for his silly chums. Her mother would keep telling her what an opportunity it was for them. And that sharpened her manner towards him too.

  Cyril didn’t move from his seat. ‘Who’s come?’ he asked languidly.

  ‘Emma Henderson for a start,’ his sister said. Emma was one of her very best friends and should have been greeted properly.

  ‘Oh, she’s a good sort,’ Cyril said. ‘She won’t mind waiting. Tell the mater I’ll finish my smoke and then I’ll be along.’

  ‘Oh no, Squirrel,’ his sister said firmly. ‘That won’t do.’

  Octavia stood among the foliage and observed, partly because it amused her to watch the antagonism between Emmeline and her brother and partly because it gave her a chance to assess Tommy Meriton. She hadn’t seen him since his clumsy visit to her back in the summer but he had sent her that card, which was kind, in a way, and she was interested to see if he’d changed at all. He’s still very handsome, she thought, looking at the curve of his mouth under that luxurious moustache and the long pale fingers holding that cheroot.

  There was another swish of silk and Aunt Maud appeared, very stylish in a long swirling gown of grey chiffon over dark blue silk with a great deal of intricate embroidery across the bodice and round the hem. She wore dark blue gloves to her elbows and her usually untidy auburn hair was severely pinned in place, but she moved in her usual precipitous way and looked as though she expected to become dishevelled at any moment. ‘Cyril, my dear,’ she said, almost timidly, ‘your friends are in the hall.’

  ‘Right ho, Mater,’ Cyril said, making a face at his sister, and he stood up at once, stubbed out his cheroot, brushed invisible dust from the velvet lapels of his jacket, adjusted his bow tie and offered his mother his arm. Within seconds he and Aunt Maud and Emmeline had gone, and Octavia found herself alone in the musty half-light with Tommy Meriton, with the peppery scent of the palms filling her nose and the arriving guests buzzing in the drawing room behind her.

  ‘You won’t mind if I finish this, will you?’ he asked, holding up the cheroot for her permission. ‘He can manage without me for a minute or two, I daresay.’

  His self-assurance made her feel unsettled, so she sat down in the chair her cousin had been occupying and occupied herself in arranging her dress so that it didn’t crease. It was a pretty rose pink silk, which was a daring colour to wear with her gingery hair, and she was rather afraid the bodice was cut too low. There seemed to be far too much of her neck and bosom exposed to be proper. At the final fitting, two days ago, the dressmaker had assured her that it was cut in the latest style and that she had the perfect figure for it, but that could have been because there wasn’t time to make any alterations. It worried her quite a lot now that she was wearing it, especially as she couldn’t hoist it higher when she was in company.

  There was a long pause while she wondered whether she ought to speak first. After all, he was a guest and it was only common politeness to look after your guests. But she couldn’t think of anything to say, apart from wanting to scold him for the way he’d treated her, and she would have to choose her moment to do that. Lounging there in the half-light with all that burgeoning greenery around him, he was making her think of Greek gods again, and dryads and fauns. Eventually he spoke to her. ‘Did you get
my card?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, pushing the Greek gods from her mind. And then, since that sounded rather abrupt and she had to be polite, she added, ‘Thank you.’

  There was another pause. Then he ventured, ‘Are you well? You look well.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said again. What else could she say? She did look well. She’d lost her prison pallor within weeks of coming home.

  ‘Bully for you!’ he said, drawing on his cheroot. And when she looked at him, wondering what she could say in answer to that, he added, ‘I think you’re extremely plucky, damn if I don’t. I said so to Squirrel. I couldn’t have done the half of it.’

  ‘I do what has to be done,’ she told him seriously. ‘If a thing is right then you must do it.’

  He looked at her quizzically. ‘Always?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘No matter what the consequences?’

  ‘No matter what.’

  ‘My word, you’re a corker,’ he said, and there was no doubt about the admiration on his face. ‘I hope you’re sitting next to me at supper. Bags I the first dance, anyway.’

  The conversation was slipping out of her control. She hadn’t been anywhere near cold enough to him. They were talking as if they were still friends. ‘I’m sitting next to Emmeline,’ she said, trying to be discouraging.

  He wasn’t discouraged in the least. ‘Bags I the first waltz, then,’ he said.

  Oh dear, Octavia thought. Now what could she say? That she didn’t want to dance? No, she couldn’t say that. It would be a lie. That she didn’t want to dance with him? No, that wouldn’t be true either. Not if she were honest. She did want to dance with him. Oh, for heaven’s sake! What was the good of being able to read people’s expressions if you can’t think what to say to them?

  ‘That’s settled then,’ he said. ‘Now I’d better join poor old Squirrel. Moral support and all that.’ He stubbed out the remains of the cheroot in the nearest pot plant and stood up, giving her that odd courteous bow of his. ‘After you, Miss Smith.’