A Woman's Place (31 page)

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she burst out instantly and, for her own peace of mind, turned her thoughts to what Eveline had been saying.

She still felt she was right. Peaceful negotiations had to be the more sensible way. But she was learning to keep her opinions to herself with Eveline so set on militancy, although with a child to look after, Eveline didn’t dare join in the violence, risking being sent to prison again.

Though there’d been no more grand processions since last summer, there’d been plenty of action, some of it quite amusing. A group of women in Manchester had locked Labour Party delegates in their conference hall, others had disrupted party members’ speeches with catcalls. Some was not so funny – arson attacks, stone-throwing; in February Emmeline Pankhurst admitted responsibility for setting a bomb at Lloyd George’s villa at Walton Heath golf course. The thing had exploded only twenty minutes before workmen were due to arrive. Guerrilla warfare, she was calling it. Connie could only see it as irresponsible.

There’d been counter-violence from the public: women were spat on, rough-handled, their clothing torn. Connie wanted none of it. Not any more. She’d attend her benign little meeting in George Street, hand out leaflets, sell suffragette news-sheets and even speak on street corners, but not resort to violence.

It was hopeless trying to air her views to Eveline, and perhaps it was just as well that they had their families to think about now, keeping them away from the more aggressive side to these campaigns.

But she did realise how deep Eveline’s feelings went over this Cat and Mouse Act, as it was being called, when hunger strikers released from prison to recover their strength for a few days were taken back into custody with no remission of sentence. She’d felt more or less the same way over a recent episode when one of their foremost activists, Miss Dudley-Cambourne, a middle-aged spinster, recently released from prison while on hunger strike, came to speak to them. The woman had looked so pale and weak, having pushed herself to attend the meeting, and had been hailed a hero. She was rearrested even as she left that meeting, having to be helped gently down the steps to the street by a fellow member.

Connie remembered how appalled and sickened she’d felt seeing her conducted away, a small figure held up between two burly policemen, hardly able to stand much less walk at their pace.

She’d cringed to think of that poor woman again going through that ordeal, knowing the brave woman would never give in; an indomitable spirit burned in that frail body. Although the ordeal would stop short of ending her life – the last thing the authorities wanted was to be vilified by the press – it could cause irrevocable harm for the rest of her days, even shorten them.

Of course Connie felt as strongly about these cat and mouse tactics as anyone, but to her secret shame could only guess what it must be like while Eveline, having had a taste, had never forgotten it and to this day remained touched by it. But she did miss those spectacular marches. She told Eveline so as they walked their daughters to Victoria Park that first Sunday in June.

‘I still think it was the only way to really impress the government.’

‘I don’t!’ Eveline said. ‘We’re no further on than we ever were, still pleading to be taken seriously, still taken for silly women making trouble.’

Connie wanted to snap back that violence wasn’t helping either, but held her tongue for the sake of friendship and walked on silently beside her.

With no response from Connie to her comment, Eveline lifted her gaze to the tranquil blue sky, her thoughts turning to how well she felt with the world lately. She’d found a new status – her nice flat, a few bits of new furniture instead of shabby second-hand stuff. Admittedly they were having to pay weekly for it so it wasn’t exactly theirs but it felt like it. She now had sunlight pouring into her new home, making her feel she could breathe at last.

She’d invited Mum and Dad; Mum had looked around approvingly, and had even played with Helena, as any good grandmother should, if only for a moment or two.

Most of all she felt more on a par with Connie; the old jealousies were now dying away. She looked at their two toddlers a little way ahead, holding hands and laughing at whatever two-to-three-year-olds laugh about. They’d become such close companions they could easily have been sisters, both of them with fair hair though Helena’s was the darker by a shade or two.

Eveline lifted her chin proudly, pleased to note that her daughter was just as nicely dressed these days as Connie’s, her strong little legs peeping out from beneath the pale blue frock, her pretty face framed by a frilled bonnet bought from a proper shop rather than from a second-hand stall.

She too could now dress as well as Connie, as far as money allowed. Her well-fitting brown tweed skirt and fully lined Jap-silk blouse with its pleated yoke and high neck and turn-back cuffs may not have been from the best shop in the world, but one could ape the wealthy well enough these days. The blouse had cost six shillings and nine pence and the tweed skirt ten shillings. They were for Sunday best only or when she and Connie took their children for an airing in the park. A bit extravagant on Albert’s wages maybe, but worth it.

She’d not told him how much it had cost. He’d thought she’d got it all off a Petticoat Lane stall and marvelled that she’d found something so nice and apparently so cheap. But a white lie did no harm and she’d seen that he hadn’t gone short on good meals, although she herself had done without for a while. And she felt justified in having such a nice outfit that pleased him.

Wednesday evening George looked up from reading the
Evening Standard
to glance across from his armchair to Connie sitting in hers, busily knitting a cardigan for Rebecca. ‘I’ve just been reading that one of your suffragettes tried to kill herself today.’

The click of Connie’s knitting needles came to an abrupt stop and she looked sharply up at him. ‘What?’

‘It says here,’ he glanced again at the paragraph and began to quote, ‘“At today’s Derby a young woman ran on to the course and fell under the King’s horse Anmer, sustaining an injury to her head and was taken to hospital.” They’ve a picture of it here.’

Connie let her knitting fall on to her lap as he handed the paper to her. Apart from a blurred photo there was little more to read except that the woman’s name was quoted as Emily Wilding Davison. It was a dramatic picture, horse and jockey lying on the ground, the woman’s curled body nearby. Connie just hoped she hadn’t been too hurt.

The rest of the week she glanced through George’s newspaper but nothing more was said and she guessed the woman must have recovered. But on the Sunday they learned that Emily Davison had died of a fractured skull without having recovered consciousness.

Apparently she had told no one of her intention, but it was obvious she had meant to do what she did by running straight out in front of an oncoming horse racing towards her at top speed. In her jacket were found two folded WSPU flags. It could only have been an act of martyrdom and Saturday the fourteenth of June was already being set aside for a huge funeral procession for her.

As with every branch across the country, the one in George Street convened a special meeting. Everyone wanted to represent their branch and Connie and Eveline were no exception. It was important to everyone to show respect to a brave young woman. Though the government saw it as a mere suicide – Emily Davison was reported to have apparently attempted suicide the year before by jumping from a balcony in Holloway prison – to everyone else it was the ultimate sacrifice to bring women’s fight for freedom to public attention. To them all it was martyrdom. Her name would live on for ever.

With only so many to be chosen from each branch for the cortege, neither Connie nor Eveline were included. Eveline was especially put out and Connie knew why. As an ex-prisoner she’d expected to be picked. That she wasn’t made Connie feel not smug but relieved, not having to go through the humiliating experience yet again of being excluded from the prisoners’ group.

They were told that only those with no family commitments would be there, keeping the numbers down and the cortege sober and unostentatious, for this would be no procession of protest with bands and banners but a solemn farewell to a brave and honourable comrade.

‘We can still go and watch it pass,’ Connie consoled, feeling sensitive.

She saw Eveline hesitate for a moment then shrug, and was relieved to see her finally nod her agreement.

It was a funeral procession as never before seen except perhaps for royalty, the crowds that had come to watch the cortege pass also as large as any there would have been for royalty.

Sometime after two o’clock that Saturday, Eveline and Connie stood among a subdued crowd as the procession came into sight, led by the white figure of Charlotte Marsh carrying a huge gold cross. Silent masses parted as she made her way, men even doffing headwear as the cortege passed along its route to St George’s Church in Bloomsbury.

A contingent of ex-hunger strikers walked beside Mrs Pankhurst’s empty carriage – with insensitive ill-timing she had been rearrested as she left in deep mourning to join the cortege. With Christabel Pankhurst exiled in France, only Sylvia Pankhurst was left to do honour,

As the hunger strikers passed, Connie saw Eveline’s face become tight at not having been included, but it was obvious that only a handful could be selected from all those who’d suffered, not once like her, but many times. The look soon faded as tears filled her eyes at the sight of the coffin, draped with purple velvet embroidered with silver arrows, looking so lonely on its open carriage drawn by four black horses with their black-clad grooms. Beside it women in their white dresses and black sashes, carrying madonna lilies, stood out starkly. Some way behind came several carriages and taxicabs holding wreaths and flower tributes from all over the world.

Connie heard a tremulous sigh come from Eveline at the sight of close friends and family walking mournfully behind, faces inscrutable in grief, the dead woman’s half-brother Captain Davison with bowed head.

‘Oh, the poor things,’ she heard Eveline whisper and knew that she thought no more of the honour it would have been to be included there today.

It was a bigger procession than expected with hundreds of women, not all of them in white, carrying madonna lilies or laurel leaves. There was a purple banner with the words of Joan of Arc:

FIGHT ON AND GOD WILL GIVE THEE VICTORY!

Some were in black or purple, some held bright red peonies; later the
Daily News
spoke of crimson being for sacrifice, purple for loyalty and white for purity, which seemed fair comment. But the bands were a surprise. Despite playing solemn and muffled tunes, they were a splash of colour in all this sombreness, a military band in scarlet and yellow and another in scarlet, as well as the red and blue robes of women graduates, their hoods silver and gold or blue and purple.

Following were columns of the Woman’s Freedom League, Church Leagues, the Men’s Leagues, even representatives of the Gas Workers’ and Dockers’ Union, the General Labourers’ Union, and several other unions.

‘I didn’t realise how well we were supported or that we were so well thought of,’ Eveline said with awe as the cortege moved on out of sight and the crowds began quietly to disperse.

It hadn’t all been quiet. A woman not far from where Connie and Eveline stood had rushed out from the crowd shouting, ‘Down with votes for women!’

Trying to grab at a banner she’d been apprehended for breach of the peace – ironic when many of those she’d tried to attack had themselves been arrested for the same thing. Another incident they heard later of one man calling out, ‘Keep your hats on!’ but it seemed few had taken notice of him.

Eveline was quiet with her own thoughts as they left. In an odd way she was almost glad not having been asked to walk with the hunger strikers. In comparison to what she had endured, these women who had faced it time and time again and never flinched were beginning to put her paltry few days of defiance to shame. In fact she rather wanted to forget it. It was a long time ago. And being singled out to walk with them whenever there was a procession was beginning to come between her and Connie.

The next time they asked her to join a prisoners’ pageant she would decline. Continuing friendship with Connie was far more important.

There didn’t look like being a next time, however. As summer passed and the year progressed it seemed the steam had gone out of the suffrage campaign. No processions had been planned, though in July there had been what was called the Women’s Pilgrimage organised by the NUWSS, with large numbers of women following eight routes spread across England, but while many looked to complete an entire route, others joined only for a certain distance before leaving. Some of the old excitement and pageantry had been lacking. Newspapers giving sketchy accounts of it published pictures of women with sun-browned faces, wearing stout walking shoes, sensible clothing and haversacks. Very dull, Eveline thought.

‘We couldn’t have found the time anyway,’ she remarked to Connie in September. It was the tenth, Rebecca’s birthday. She was three and Connie had given a little party for her.

Having spread a two-month old copy of the
Women’s Weekly
on the table to catch the cake crumbs she was brushing on to it, she’d become engrossed in a Swan & Edgar advert depicting that summer’s slimmer style of women’s wear: narrow, button-through skirts and jackets with vertical stripes, small bowler-type hats and low-crowned toques, straight blouses with no bust to speak of. A few years ago the full bosom was a feature of womanly pride. Figures were beginning to have no shape at all.

Carefully she folded the magazine over its debris of cake and bread crumbs – very little, with most children around here ready to eat the tablecloth itself, brought up as they were in near poverty with every crumb of food precious. Eveline knew from a life spent around here that to them even the small spread Connie had provided for Rebecca’s third birthday was a feast. But apart from scoffing everything in sight, though it consisted of just a few tinned salmon sandwiches, jelly and the small iced cake Connie had made, they’d behaved very well.