The Children's Book

49

On Derby Day, June 4th, 1913, Herbert “Diamond” Jones rode the King’s horse, Anmer, in his silks with the royal colours. He was a national hero. The huge crowds applauded him. Emily Wilding Davison, wearing a tweed suit, high-collared blouse and unobtrusive hat stood by the rails at Tattenham Corner, where the horses wheeled round, flashing colours against the sky. Inside her sleeve was a flag with the suffragette tricolour, purple, white and green, and another was wrapped round her waist. When the heavy pounding of the hooves was heard, and she saw Anmer leading the galloping herd, she stepped out, in front of the horse, raised her arms, and grabbed at the bridle. They all came down, jockey, horse, screaming woman, on the bloodstained turf. “Diamond” Jones lay still: he was concussed, and his shoulder was hurt. The scene was filmed: Davison can be seen, crumpled and dragged, like a damaged puppet, her skirts awry. Her head was smashed. They wrapped it in a newspaper. She was taken to Epsom Hospital, where her fellows hung her bed like a bier with purple, white and green bunting. She died four days later.

The fallen horse had risen, and cantered away. King George wrote in his diary “Poor Herbert Jones and Anmer were sent flying. It was a most disappointing day.”

Queen Mary sent Jones a telegram, commiserating with him after his “sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal, lunatic woman.”

Jones said, much later, that he was “haunted by that woman’s face.” He had little success on the racecourse after this event.

Emily Davison was buried with ceremony by the WSPU. There were ten brass bands and six thousand marching women. They carried purple silk banners embroidered with Joan of Arc’s last words: “Fight on, and God will give the Victory.” Davison’s flag, stained with grass, mud and blood, was retrieved and became a relic. Some men, and some women, threw bricks at the coffin. Hedda Wellwood, who had sat up late at night embroidering and hemming the banners, marched with the women, and turned a white face, full of contempt, towards the hecklers. Her feet kept time, the music held the women together, they were a creature with a purpose.

The group held her: the strangeness of all this wild, inventive, dangerous activity by creatures who were expected to be docile, timid, domestic and loving. Hedda as a child had been a rebel. She had stood outside groups—the Wellwood family, girls at school, Fabians. She subverted structures, she found out awkward truths. She could not find a purpose. And then she found it in a community of rebels, an army with a cause, and a programme of destruction. She enjoyed marching, hip to hip, skirt to skirt, shoulder to shoulder with women who had subdued their own needs and movements to a larger cause. Group life held and perturbed her, for she was naturally claustrophobic. Every now and then she thought they would crowd and crush her, like the Red and White Queens and the flying jury in Alice.

An army needs a general, as well as a martyr. Emmeline Pankhurst was now fragile with suffering through hunger-strikes and force-feedings. When the campaign of increasing violence induced the press to report that she was a wicked old woman, she replied “We do not intend you should be pleased.” Yet the army was increasingly, and paradoxically, directed by pretty Christabel, tending her pretty dog in her pretty apartment in Paris, arguing that a leader must remain safe, and out of custody, to plan strategy. Like many absolute leaders, she quarrelled with people, with the Pethick-Lawrences, Frederick and Emmeline, who had paid, planned and suffered for the women’s cause, with her sister Sylvia, who lived amongst the poor, in the East End, and upheld her socialist principles, whilst Christabel courted the rich, the Tories, the coteries of the famous and “influential.” She issued diktats. On Bastille Day in 1912, Emmeline’s birthday, Sylvia had organised a spectacular display in Hyde Park, caps, banners, smaller flags, all decorated with scarlet dragons and decked with white fringe. It was a huge success.

Christabel telegraphed from Paris. Sylvia was to burn down Nottingham Castle.

She refused. She didn’t believe in burning things down, or destroying works of art.

But there were those who did.

They wrote each other coded telegrams. “Fluff, feathers, wax, tar violets poppies powder.” They bought and secreted cans of paraffin and petrol. They put cayenne pepper and molten lead through letter-boxes. They grew braver and wilder as 1913 became 1914. In the first seven months of that year 107 buildings were set on fire. They burned castles in Scotland and set about the inherited culture of solid Britain. In 1913 they ripped valuable paintings in Manchester and smashed the orchid hothouse in Kew Gardens. They blew up Lloyd George’s new house at Walton-on-the-Hill. They cut telephone wires and slid pebbles into railway connections, to derail trains. They showed less and less reverence—ancient churches were burned down, mediaeval Bibles mutilated, the Carnegie Library in Birmingham burned. Like the anarchists before them, they exploded a bomb in Westminster Abbey and flooded the great organ in the august Albert Hall. They themselves were bashed, bullied, defrocked by police and angry crowds. Their breasts were twisted, their hair torn out. They interrupted King and Prime Minister with determined harangues and the suffragette anthem, which was sung to the tune of the Marseillaise. Mary Richardson set out methodically to mutilate Velasquez’s self-regarding, elegantly fleshly Venus, a painting she disliked. She waited until the watching detectives took a lunch-break (one was merely hiding his eyes behind a newspaper) and rushed at the painted woman, and her protective glass, with an axe. She got in one blow. The detective looked instinctively at the skylight. The attendant skidded on the polished floor. Four more blows were struck. German tourists helped to bring Miss Richardson down, by aiming Baedekers accurately at the back of her neck. And then she was back in Holloway prison, facing force-feeding.

These stories were circulated, in shocked whispers, with wild laughter. Emily Davison’s sacrifice seemed to mean that all women were called to act. The idea of “doing something” crept insidiously into Hedda’s mind. Sewing was not enough, marching was not enough, posting pepper and glue through respectable doors, or spreading tin-tacks on office floors, was not enough. An act was required.

The problem was, she was afraid. At first, the problem was to think of an appropriate act, and then, one day, when there was discussion of Emily Davison’s life, the act rose in her brain, golden and gleaming, quite literally, in the dark.

Emily Davison—whose speeches had been long and rambling, whose presence had often been creepy and irritating—had become sainted. She had once had the very clever idea of hiding at night in the House of Commons, and springing out—on the day of the census—to claim that Place as her address. She had been found in the broom-cupboard by a kindly cleaner, and given tea and toast and sent out to make her way to her real home. She had found other ways of making sure of prison. In prison she had leaped like an acrobat from a balcony, to what would have been certain death, if she had not been saved by wire netting. Carried upstairs, she had leaped again. And again, dashing herself on the iron staircase.

There were tales of suffering in cages, of force-feeding that amounted to torture—wooden gags between the teeth, or metal clamps, breaking them, the terrible tube forced in, whilst the warders held the struggling woman, by the ears, by the breast, by the hair, by the hands and legs. And the snaking pipe might miss the surging target, might enter the lung, might rupture the bowel—all this was known, and recounted, the tales of the heroines, women who went into their captivity looking forty and came out looking seventy. Sylvia Pankhurst had refused to eat or to drink, and had been hosed with water and fed with the foul tube. She had walked. All day and all night and all day and all night. Her eyes, Hedda had been told, had become suffused with blood, entirely. Her legs had swollen to bolsters. At night Hedda dreamed of this gaunt red-eyed figure, walking, walking, and woke up in a sweat.

Because she knew what she had to do, she also knew that she had to do it, or it would not have come to her. It came out of the true tale she had been told as a child, of the boy who had hidden in the basement in South Kensington—a tale told by Tom, and by Philip himself, of the way in through the van-loading bay, and the watching plaster casts, and the tombs. A woman could hide down there, and come out with stones, when all was quiet, and smash the cases with the cold gold and silver, and smash the metals to chips and dust.

She didn’t have real friends. It must be done on her own.

There was no real need to smash anything.

There was an imperative call.

It was May 1914. She had sharp stones. She had gone on flint-collecting picnics with other WSPU women. Out of rage with her past life, which would now end, and the dreamy, comfortable, unsatisfactory muddled order of Todefright, she quite deliberately took a collection of stones—some of them rare, some of them collected from the endless shingle at Dungeness—old flints and chalk from the Weald (including one or two Stone Age knapped hammers), a chunk of Etna pumice (too light and springy to do any damage), a rugged chunk of the White Cliffs of Dover. These stones were in a big, stoneware bowl Philip Warren had made, which stood in Olive’s study in lieu of a bowl of fruit. In amongst them—put there apparently casually, to get lost amongst its semblances—was the Dungeness stone with a hole that had been found in Tom’s overcoat pocket on the beach. She took it deliberately, knowing that to take it would hurt Olive, and half-understanding that Tom had meant to—be revenged on Olive, evade Olive, free himself from Olive and being written about? Olive had been mildly in favour of the suffrage, as part of the atmosphere of Fabian lawns and Fabian firesides; she had not approved of the violent acts. She would take Olive’s stone with the hole and throw it at the golden bowl.

She did nothing more, for days. She was afraid. She did not know how afraid other suffragists had been. Her teeth ached with fear and she dreamed that they all fell out and stuck in her breakfast porridge, like bloody pebbles. She waited for a sign and knew she had it when she read that Sylvia Pankhurst had drawn, on a prison slate, an illustration to

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight.

She wasn’t well. When she breathed out, she could smell her breath. She knotted her hair grimly, packed her bag, which looked like an artist’s bag, and set off.

The way in was as Philip had described it, still accessible as it had been before Sir Aston Webb’s lovely new curves and clinical new spaces had been opened. She slid in behind two men wholly preoccupied by a heavy crate, straw-stuffed and unwieldy. She passed like a black spectre behind a white forest of plaster casts. She went on, and in, past tombrails and brass fenders and suddenly came on the Russian tomb where Philip had slept on the empty plinth, under the doves and acanthus leaves. Here she stopped and rearranged her possessions, the bag full of stones, the packet of buns. When Philip had hidden there, there was no electric lighting. Now, as the light died in the roundels of windows, she saw switches and systems of wires. She sat in the twilight, and then in the dark, letting her eyes grow used to it. She had bound her hair in a dark scarf. She looked around for the staircase with the iron rail, and did not see it. She waited. Night and silence spread. Cautiously she switched on a light and hid behind the tomb. Nothing stirred. The light, under a green shade, illuminated the white-tiled Gothic vaults. She needed a thread: she was lost in the labyrinth. She scuttled out of hiding, moving bent and hunched along corridors. She found the stone staircase and went up. At this point, she realised she had been idiotic. The door into the gallery was locked. Philip Warren had found and kept a key. She had not even thought about a key. She was like Alice for ever shut out of the garden, peering through the keyhole.

Because the act required her to do it, she looked around, seeking out the answer there must be. And there was. There was a panel on the wall of the tunnel at the foot of the stairs, with a whole jumble of keys and screwdrivers hanging on tarred string and hairy string, all lengths. They were not labelled. She tried one and then another and saw she needed a longer and larger one. She found it. The door ground open.

And there in the moonlight were the cases of gold and silver, gleaming and glinting. Hedda went up to them. There was the reliquary, there was the Gloucester Candlestick. There was no sign of any guardian of the treasure.

If the breaking of the glass was not too loud a crash, she would have time to wreak real damage on the things. She was sweating. She was cold. She took off her coat, and wrapped a large sharp flint in it, and swung, cautiously. The glass held. Hedda was filled with hatred, and swung with all her strength. The sides of the glass coffin splintered and fell in. The blow was muffled but the shards rang out on the tiled floor.

She took one of the Dungeness stones and brought it down on a little chalice, which was scraped, but held its form. Hedda was still alone in the high hall. She bashed a delicate spoon, silently enough, on a velvet mat which masked the noise. She turned her attention to the Candlestick.

There it stood, unique, mysterious, with its writhing, energetic dragons and imps and foliage and helmeted warriors. She was feeling very odd. She remembered Tom, reading Tennyson aloud, in the Tree House. This thing was like the gate of Camelot.

The dragon-boughts and elvish emblemings

Began to move, seethe, twine and curl: they called

To Gareth “Lord, the gateway is alive.”

And Hedda did see shape-shifting, climbing, flickering movement on the object. She must destroy it. Instead, foolishly, she launched Tom’s hole in a stone at it. That glanced off a beast which was being slaughtered by a gnome with a knife. Hedda sank to her knees, as the warders came rumbling and creaking, and pulled her up, not too gently.

She was shut up in a police station, and put on trial. She knew she exuded a stink of fear and stood upright in the dock, whilst tremors ran up and down her body as though she was giving birth to something. Some of the WSPU had come to support her, and their expectation of fearlessness was part of her torture. She had not asked to see her family. She was condemned to a year’s penal servitude for damaging government property and taken to Holloway Prison.

In the cell was a Bible, and a book called The Home Beautiful. This caused her brief amusement. She had had a hot bath, which she needed, and had been given some worn, ill-fitting clothes, which she also needed, for her own were drenched by her body’s terror.

She knew she must refuse to eat. She did not know if she had the courage to refuse to drink. She began to walk. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. The walls closed in on her and she began to sob, and went on walking. She decided she would refuse to drink, thinking confusedly that in that way she might die, which she appeared to want to do. She walked. She walked. She fell and picked herself up again.

They brought her, as they brought all the hunger-strikers, a tray with a little jar of Brand’s Essence of jellied beef, an apple, some fresh bread and butter, a glass of milk. She did not touch it. She walked.

• • •

They brought the tubes, the gags, the clotted fluid (Sanatogen, from Germany). She did not fight, because she was shaking too much, but subsequently vomited over a wardress, and was slapped like a baby, for dirtiness.

Once, which was the worst thing, she started thinking of the little jar of beef jelly as though it had the authority of the act she had performed. She must have the beef jelly. She must not. She must. She walked. To and fro, and then stopped and took up the spoon.

The taste was intense, through her furred tongue. She gulped down the whole jar, spoon after spoon. A woman came in and said—with what Hedda felt was contempt—“That will set you up a bit, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve seen you do.”

Hedda wept, retched and vomited, and was slapped. She knew now that she had disgraced herself and could not break her fast. She walked, the foul stuff was poured into her, she vomited, she walked. If you hold the funnel too high or too low the food is suffocatingly painful as it finds its way to places where it is not meant to go.

They let her out, in July, under the Cat and Mouse Act, to make herself well enough to be reimprisoned without danger of death.

There was a group of women, waiting for her. A group of suffragists who knew all about cleaning, and resting, and slowly feeding the recuperating martyrs. And her sister Dr. Dorothy Wellwood, who tried not to show her shock at Hedda’s cracking lips, blood-suffused eyes, sharp bones almost breaking the skin.

“You nearly killed yourself,” said Dorothy. “We must get you well.”

Hedda was muttering about beef jelly. Would she like some, said Dorothy. Hedda wept. She said Dorothy didn’t understand. “I messed it up.”

“Only if you die. And I’ll see you don’t.”