Hannah thought she had never seen anyone look so utterly thunderstruck. The pain in her shoulder notwithstanding she found herself spluttering with a laughter that was dangerously close to hysteria. She bit her lip, still giggling.
The portly policeman bent down and helped Sally to her feet. Sally rose with ridiculous grace, thanked him politely and demurely, a wicked sparkle in her one good eye. The younger of the two policemen grinned at her, obviously much entertained. ‘Well, ladies,’ he said cheerfully, ‘any chance that if we pat you on the head and send you home you’ll go, like good little girls?’
Sally and Hannah exchanged glances. ‘None,’ they said in unison.
He nodded equably. ‘That’s what I thought. In that case I’m very much afraid that you’ll have to come along with us—’
‘Hannah!’ It was Ralph, at the top of the steps, bruised and dishevelled, his glasses gone, eyes squinting myopically in the gathering dusk.
Hannah, her hand still clutching her shoulder, smiled at her policeman. ‘Would you give me a moment?’
‘Of course.’
She mounted the steps carefully, easing her shoulder.
‘Hannah – what’s happening?’
‘It would appear’, she said composedly, ‘that we’ve been arrested. Tell Pa, would you, and Ben? And tell Mrs Briggs we won’t be back for supper.’
Ralph blinked bemusedly. In that moment, her hair like Sally’s, wild about her face and shoulders, the colour of action and excitement in her face, the strong, blunt features alight and determined, she looked to his shortsighted eyes positively beautiful. He hesitated, took breath to tell her so.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, forestalling him. ‘It’s only my shoulder, nothing too desperate. Don’t worry. It’ll only be for a week or two. We’ll be home plaguing you all again in no time.’
Chapter Six
I
The long-bodied, springless and all but windowless van popularly – or perhaps unpopularly – known as the Black Maria lumbered and bumped over the uneven surface of the road. The fat wardress who sat at the end of the aisle separating the two rows of tiny barred cells inside the vehicle, swayed with the movement, her head nodding. Sally had noticed about her as she had ushered them into their cramped quarters a strong smell of gin. She snored gently. The only other inhabitant of the cells apart from Sally and Hannah – a small, rat-faced child of thirteen or so, convicted of prostitution and robbery – hummed quietly to herself, looking at no one.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Hannah hissed, one wary eye on the dozing wardress, finding a moment at last for a question she had been trying to ask from the moment the sentences had been handed down.
Sally lifted innocent brows. ‘What?’
‘Oh, Sal! You know very well what! That you’d – that you’d been—’ embarrassed Hannah could find no diplomatic way to express herself, ‘—that you weren’t a first-time offender,’ she hissed at last, fiercely.
Sally turned level eyes upon her. ‘Why should I have told you? What difference would it have made?’ There was a certain cool challenge in the words.
The exasperated Hannah missed the inference entirely. She shook her head angrily. ‘Of course it would have made a difference! You know it would! First offenders get a couple of weeks in the second division. But – Sally! A month! And in the third division!’ She stopped, flinching, her hand going to her shoulder as the van lurched around a corner.
Sally did not notice the gesture. Her own shoulders lifted in a shrug. She was still defensive, still not entirely sure that Hannah’s concern was for her and not for the good name of the cause, besmirched by the support of a convicted criminal. The judge had sanctimoniously, and she supposed predictably, made much of a childhood conviction for thieving from a market stall. He had not of course, as he much enjoyed pointing out, been surprised. What else could one expect from an ill-educated, working-class female hooligan? She turned her head to look out of the tiny window in the door of the Maria. An urchin was capering along behind the slow-moving van, poking his tongue out, showing off to his mates. She shifted a little, trying to find a more comfortable position. To call the narrow ledge on which the prisoners were forced to perch a seat – the ceiling being too low to allow them to stand – would have been to overdignify it. To prevent herself from being thrown off it entirely Sally’s legs were braced uncomfortably in front of her against the opposite wall of the tiny compartment.
‘I’d never have let you risk coming with me if I’d known!’ Hannah’s voice was miserable.
Sally turned her head, and suddenly a quick smile flashed in the gloom. ‘Right. And that’s why I didn’t tell you.’
The vehicle bumped and swayed again. Hannah bit her lip.
Sally frowned, watching her through the bars. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine. It’s just – my shoulder. It’s rather badly bruised I think.’
‘Has anyone looked at it?’
Hannah shook her head. Her face was very pale, and there were dark shadows beneath the brown, tired-looking eyes. The night they had spent in the cold and uncomfortable police cells – harbinger as she knew of many such nights to come – and the ordeal in the court that morning with her family sitting not six feet from her as the judge with vitriolic ill temper had lectured her on her preordained place in a society whose affairs were patently too complicated and important to be understood by women had been, despite her determination, a strain. Her badly swollen shoulder throbbed with every movement, and every so often an agonizing pain stabbed beneath her ribs. And now, the excitement was done and the price must be paid; two weeks shut away in an alien world, deprived of the sunshine and the fresh air, of any kind of absorbing occupation and of the company of those she loved. And for Sally – a month, and in the third and lowest division of prisoners, amongst the most hardened criminals, where the regime was harsher and even the few privileges accorded to second division prisoners were denied. ‘You should have told me!’ she whispered again.
The wardress stirred. ‘Quiet, you!’ she said threateningly.
Sally pulled a ferocious face. The child in the other cell sang softly, ignoring them all.
It was a long half hour in those stuffy, ill-smelling and uncomfortable conditions before the Black Maria pulled up at the great, menacing gates of Holloway Prison.
The fat woman stood. ‘Right, you lot. Out. An’ not a word – you ’ear me? Not a single soddin’ word exceptin’ when you’re spoken to.’
In single file they passed through the massive gates to find themselves in a long corridor divided into cubicles on either side. A woman officer in the same dark blue uniform as the fat woman, a dark blue bonnet upon her head and a huge bunch of keys jangling at her waist awaited them, a list in her hand.
‘Polly Dingle. Six months. Third division.’
The child smiled biddably.
‘In here.’ Impatiently the woman pushed her into a cubicle, slammed and locked the door.
‘Hannah Patten. Two weeks. Second division.’
‘Yes.’
‘In here.’
Hannah avoided the woman’s thrusting hand, stepped into the cubicle. It was perhaps four feet square and very dark. The metal walls were about six feet high beneath the vaulted space of the roof. The floor was stone, the whole place was cold as death. A narrow bench ran along one wall, and there was a bucket in the corner. Hannah almost gagged at the stench. The pain stabbed beneath her ribs again.
‘Sally Smith. One month. Third division.’
Hannah heard the door of the next door cubicle slam behind Sally. The wardress’s footsteps passed.
‘Dingle. Can you read?’
‘No, m’um.’
‘Write?’
‘No, m’um.’
‘You can sew, I take it?’ The voice was heavily sarcastic.
‘Yes, m’um.’
‘Religion?’
‘Don’t know, m’um.’
The spy hole in Hannah’s
door opened with a click. ‘Patten. Can you read?’
‘Yes.’
There was a small, somehow ominous silence. ‘Yes – ma’am,’ the woman said, very precisely.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Hannah agreed, stiff-lipped.
‘Write?’
‘Yes – ma’am.’
‘Sew?’
Hannah nodded.
‘Patten, I asked you a question.’
‘Yes – ma’am.’
‘Religion?’
‘Church of England, ma’am.’
The spy hole clicked shut and the woman moved on.
‘Smith. You read?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Sally’s voice was a caricature of servility. Hannah found herself suddenly having to suppress the rise of a small almost hysterical giggle.
‘Write?’
‘Oh yes, ma’am.’ Again the simpering, mocking show of deference.
The wardress peered suspiciously through the peephole. ‘Can you sew?’
‘Like the Virgin Mary herself, so I’ve been told, ma’am.’ Sally said, straight-faced, pure subversion in every word.
‘Smith,’ the wardress said with more restraint than Hannah had expected, ‘don’t come it. Or you’ll find yourself on bread and water in the punishment cells before you can say “knife”. Understood?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ There was a grin in Sally’s low voice.
The woman’s sharp footsteps echoed along the stone corridor and were gone. In the cold and empty silence her going left, Hannah groped her way gingerly to the narrow bench and sat down, holding her breath against pain. Her feet felt like blocks of ice on the stone floor.
‘You all right?’ Sally’s quiet voice reached her over the open top of the partition.
Hannah laughed a little shakily. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘It’ll get worse before it gets better.’ There was a grim humour in the words that was absurdly reassuring.
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’
They sat in silence for a while. Hannah hugged herself against the cold. Then, suddenly and surprisingly in the quiet she heard Sally’s voice lifted softly in song.
‘Arise, though pain or loss betide,
Grudge naught of Freedom’s toll—’
Delighted, quietly Hannah joined in this favourite marching song.
‘For what they loved the martyrs died,
Are we of meaner soul?’
Verse after verse they sang, their voices lifting carelessly louder, Sally beating time on the metal partition.
‘Quiet you two! Quiet I say!’
They ignored the angry order. The last verse rang to the gloomy roof.
‘To Freedom’s Cause to death
We swear our fealty.
March on! March on! Face to the dawn,
The dawn of Liberty!’
‘By God, I’ll—’
‘What’s going on here, Adams?’ A new voice, crisp and impatient.
‘Two of them there suffragettes, ma’am. Singing.’
‘Are they indeed? Well – I doubt they’ll find much to sing about here. The other van is arriving. Get them checked in as fast as you can, then get the lot of them up to the baths.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Sally echoed mockingly, very very quietly, ‘No, ma’am. Three bags full, ma’am.’
The great outer door swung open again. Hannah heard the shuffle of footsteps and hushed voices. A woman laughed harshly and was quickly hushed.
‘May Harris. Six months. Third division. In here.’
On it went as a dozen or so more prisoners were locked in the reception cubicles. Hannah had begun to shiver with cold and her shoulder hurt abominably. But the thought of Sally so close, the recollection of the quick, subversive grin, of the small defiance of their song warmed and cheered her. The new prisoners, locked into their tiny cubicles were calling to each other, shouting and laughing apparently oblivious of the angry protests of the wardresses, many of them obviously old acquaintances.
‘What – oh, Elsie – back in the old ’otel again, eh? What yer bin up to this time? Stole the crown jewels?’
‘I’ll swing fer that effin’ judge, I swear I will. A month ’e’s given me! A bloody month!’
‘Seen that feller of yours last week, Vi. Large as life an’ twice as ’ansome. With that little tart Bessie Shilton ’e was!’
‘Piss orf.’
The door to Hannah’s cubicle swung open. A wardress in the blue holland uniform, the strings of her bonnet dangling untidily, jerked her head. ‘Out.’
Stiffly Hannah came to her feet. In the corridor outside she found herself beside Sally at the head of a crocodile of women, two by two. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Doctor,’ Sally whispered.
‘Shut it, you two. Smith, Patten – by the left – follow me!’
They were marched at the head of the procession of women along a short corridor, then lined up against the wall outside a heavy metal door.
‘Get yerselves undone.’
Hannah, puzzled, glanced at Sally for enlightenment. Sally grinned encouragingly. ‘Buttons,’ she said, unbuttoning her own shirt.
‘Right – Smith – in you go.’
Sally stepped through the door. Hannah fumbled with frozen and not quite steady fingers with the small buttons of her blouse.
‘Patten.’
She looked up, surprised. Sally had reappeared, buttoning her shirt: it could hardly have been a full minute since she had left the line.
‘Patten! Jump to it!’
She hurried through the door. Every step she took jolted through her damaged shoulder and ribs like fire. A tired-looking man with the bloodshot eyes and too-bright complexion of the heavy drinker half leaned, half sat upon a heavy desk. A stethoscope dangled from its leads about his neck. Beside him two strapping wardresses in the already familiar uniform stood, arms crossed, observing the proceedings.
‘Are you all right?’ the doctor asked, flatly and with not the slightest sign of interest.
‘I – beg your pardon?’
Irritation flitted across the bad-tempered looking face. ‘I said, are you all right?’
‘I – yes – that is – I’ve hurt my shoulder, and—’
The mouth of the larger of the wardresses tightened. ‘Enough of your lip,’ the other one snapped.
The doctor jerked his head for her to approach, lifting the stethoscope. When she reached him he barely touched her chest with the instrument, dropped it, nodded. ‘She’s all right.’
The wardress nearest the door jerked her head. ‘Out.’
Bemusedly buttoning her blouse, Hannah obeyed. As she joined Sally in the line the other girl winked. ‘Next stop Harley Street, eh?’
In less than ten minutes the ludicrous medical examination was over and they were formed into their crocodile once more. ‘Where now?’ Hannah whispered as they set off down the dark corridor.
‘Bath,’ Sally said, succinctly and threw a small, slanting, oddly commiserative look at the other girl. ‘I hate to tell you this, but it’s not quite like home.’
Hannah never in her life forgot the hour that followed. Marched into the depths of the vast building, the prisoners found themselves in a great chill cavern of a room lined with shelves. A couple of wardresses patrolled the room and another three stood, faces forbidding, arms folded, behind a table upon which was piled what looked like nothing so much as a heap of grey dishcloths.
Sally nudged Hannah with the shadow of a grin. ‘Faith, Hope and Charity.’ she murmured, her eyes flickering to the three enormous, grim-faced women behind the table.
‘Quiet, there!’ roared Faith. Charity scowled. Hannah’s attempt to prevent nervous laughter hurt abominably.
‘Get these on an’ look lively.’
The old hands, knowing what was expected of them, shuffled to the table, took the bedraggled grey garments that were handed to them and then began, unconcernedly and in full view, to undress.
Hannah discovered that suddenly she had begun to shake, not violently but with a slight, relentless trembling that seemed rooted at the chill core of her body and was impossible to control. She gritted her teeth, tensing herself against it. ‘What’s happening?’
Sally had collected a short, rough-textured chemise from the table. ‘We have to strip off and put on one of these.’ The slight brusqueness of the tone was utterly belied by the acute sympathy in her eyes.
‘I—’ Hannah shook her head, bit her lip.
Sally put a firm hand on her arm. ‘Just do it, love. Take a deep breath and do it. Or they’ll do it for you. An’ that’s not funny.’
On shaking legs Hannah approached the table. The wardress barely glanced at her as she thrust the chemise into her hand. ‘Get a move on. We ’aven’t got all day to wait for you, you know.’
Clutching the chemise Hannah retreated to where Sally was calmly unpinning her hat, kicking off boots, stripping off shirt, skirt, petticoats, chemise, stockings and – to Hannah’s horror – drawers, all of which she folded neatly on the floor beside her before slipping her arms into the short chemise and pulling it over her head. Her slim, strong body was pale as milk and lean as a boy’s. The nipples of her small breasts stood erect and dark in the bitterly cold air. The ugly scar on her upper arm was still a raw red. ‘Hurry up!’ she hissed.
‘I can’t,’ Hannah said flatly.
‘You’ve got to!’
‘What’s goin’ on over ’ere?’ The wardress Sally had christened Faith approached, frowning suspiciously. ‘Patten, isn’t it? What the ’ell d’you think you’re up to? Look lively!’
Sally cast Hannah a fierce glance.
Without a word Hannah unpinned her hat and let it drop to the floor beside her. Then she ducked her head and, scarlet-faced and almost blinded with humiliation, she began to undress. In her whole adolescent and adult life she had never taken off so much as a shoe before the eyes of others. Whilst the extreme prudery that had undoubtedly been a part of the age had never found favour or expression in the Patten household, modesty and propriety certainly had. To stand thus in the open and to strip herself naked before the eyes of strangers was a torture it had never even occurred to her to contemplate. To her horror she felt the rise and sting of tears. Awkwardly she fumbled with buttons and tapes.
Tomorrow, Jerusalem Page 18
