A Petrol Scented Spring (2 page)

I was seventy-nine last birthday. I feel it in the knees mostly, and in the mirror. My neighbour's daughter calls me the leopard lady. She's doing the Victorians at school. Her mother sends her round to ask about chimney sweeps and long dresses. I tell her, when I was her age the little boys dressed just like little girls, and she laughs. But when I say ‘Inside, I don't feel any older than you', she looks embarrassed for me.

I give her a biscuit and send her home. Perhaps she'll come back one day when she's old enough to sit and listen without her knee jiggling up and down. I tell her mother I've a fund of stories about the suffragettes.

‘You
were a suffragette?'

‘No, but my first husband had a lot to do with them.'

In a little while, I shall tell you how I met him. How the very first time I saw him, in the garden, he seemed plucked from my dreams. How else could I have felt that recognition? Five months later, when he stood at the altar and looked me in the eye, I thought
ah yes, my love, my fate
. Well, I was right, and wrong, about that. He was drawn to me, but if I retrace the path that brought us together, taking it back to the very beginning, I find myself unknown, undreamt of, quite superfluous.

If you want to hear my story, we must start with a drama in which I played no part.

 

I think of her as I saw her that day in Kensington, while Bill stopped Hilda from using the hammer she had brought.

That swan-like beauty. Serene amidst shattering glass.

Have you ever really looked at a swan? Curiously self-conscious. They hold their lovely necks so stiff it makes my shoulders ache. But if you rile them and they go for you with their stabbing beaks, they're not so elegant.

I can't be certain it was her. But this is
my
story, and hers was the face that floated into my head when I finally put two and two – or should I say, two and one – together. Hers or another's, it doesn't really matter. She'll have felt the same blend of terror and elation. The suddenly-dilating capillaries. A kick-start from the adrenal gland. I went through something similar ten years later, the first time I performed an amputation, so I know how it feels to bluff your way through the unthinkable. And afterwards, to look in the glass and see the self you always hoped you'd become.

How could he not fall for her?

How can I not imagine myself in her shoes?

 

Arabella Scott.

Second sister in a brood of female brainboxes (with one petted baby brother) but, unlike so many other ambitious, intelligent Scotswomen, not a doctor. She can't have been squeamish about gore, given what she put herself through, so why follow the more conventionally feminine path of teaching? Why else but ego? All those young hearts in love with her. Or am I being unfair?

She was used to taking a lead. That was the difference between us. The whole country was her classroom. She would instruct, and so improve, us all. What a marvellous chance she was given: to shout and smash and insult and burn in the name of high principle. All the petty irritations, the boredom – and God knows, it was boring, being a young woman then – all of it rolled up into a great yell of injustice. She saw the opportunity, and grasped it, while I went about coveting other women's hats, and drinking myself lightheaded on Darjeeling, and flirting with young nincompoops, thinking myself quite the heartbreaker.

 

It starts at university. The old story. A new self. New friends. No one to pull you down, recalling that time the minister caught you watching his spaniel mounting Mrs Lawrie's pug. If you want to be the very embodiment of high-minded intellect, who is to gainsay you? Then there's the way your footsteps echo in the Old College courtyard, the freshness of your complexion against the grey stone, your crisp white blouse, the easy sway of your uncorseted gait, your waist so sweetly narrow in the cinch of your not-quite-ankle-length skirt. A bluestocking! A wholly new kind of woman – well, apart from lady novelists and Renaissance queens. The intellectual equal of any man, as rational and purposeful and far-sighted, but with an extra soulfulness. Born to show both sexes how far they fall short.

She has never given a thought to the vote, but now that it's been mentioned, of course she must have it. And the women who come to speak at the Suffrage Society are so much the sort of women she would like to be. So assured and passionate and imperious. And it's such fun, getting all dressed up to carry the banner, making speeches on a soapbox, heckling members of parliament.

It helps that she has her sister beside her. Dear Muriel. Clever, but not quite as clever. Courageous, but not in the same reckless way. She can't remember a time when Muriel was not looking up at her with that admiring gaze. And part of what dear, loyal Muriel so admires is her big sister's beauty. There's no getting away from it: a beautiful woman can do things a plain woman had better not attempt. If it's injustice that galls you, there's injustice. Why should one pair of eyes, one nose, one mouth, be more pleasing than another? And not just pleasing: more aloof and unknowingly voluptuous, more like a ripe plum weighting down the branch.

Muriel is a solid little thing, her lips a little thinner, her eyes a little more bulbous. Touching in her true-heartedness, but not a beauty. They share rooms while studying at Edinburgh University. They walk to lectures together. They whip each other into a frenzy of indignation over the iniquities of our so-called democratic system. They admire the English heroines who get themselves arrested and starve in gaol, but their own roles are no less necessary. Chalking on pavements, handing out membership forms, waving placards at by-election meetings. In 1909 they travel to London to deliver a petition to the Prime Minister and are arrested for obstruction and sentenced to twenty-one days in Holloway Gaol, where they refuse to eat.

When they are released, they pour black dye into a postbox. Or rather, Arabella does the pouring and Muriel keeps watch. Postbox spoiling, window smashing, gouging holes out of bowling greens and golf courses. Since they are criminals now, in the eyes of the law, why not?

The newspapers call it wanton destruction, but there are rules. No person, however vile, is to be hurt. Humiliated, yes. Pelted with eggs, or flour, or pepper to make them sneeze, but not physically harmed. There must always be a clear message in the action. If possible, a witty one. So cricket pitches and other sporting places are chosen because the government is not ‘playing the game'. A mansion in Perthshire owned by a prominent anti-suffragist is gutted by fire. (The Chancellor of the Exchequer is expected in Scotland. A postcard, found near the blaze, bears the words
A warm welcome
to Lloyd George
.) When two women are interrupted in the act of trying to blow up Rabbie Burns' cottage, anyone with a head on her shoulders understands that their true target is popular hypocrisy. Why should Scotland celebrate the egalitarian principles of its national bard while denying women the vote?

That happens in 1914, when everyone has become so much angrier. In 1913 it requires no small amount of courage for Arabella, Edith Hudson and the elderly Thomson sisters to take their paraffin cans to Kelso racecourse. Muriel stays behind. After that spell in Holloway, their mother made them promise they would not be arrested together again.

The Kelso escapade is a disaster. The old ladies are game but not up to sprinting away from the fire. Arabella and Edith leave them in the taxi, with Donald MacEwan, a gardener sympathetic to the cause. Arabella insists on walking every inch of the stand to make sure it holds no sleeping cat or tramp sheltering from the weather. Valuable time is lost. When they start to pour the paraffin, it spills on their clothes. Stupid, stupid! Should they undress? No time. And think of the scandal: suffragettes arrested in undergarments. The best they can do is stand some distance from the cotton wadding they have soaked with fuel. The lit matches they throw at it extinguish in mid-air. Arabella lights one of the suffragette newspapers brought as calling cards. How quickly the flame races along the paper. She shrieks (more stupidity) and tosses it towards the wadding. Her aim is wide. It burns out on the wooden floor. Edith takes another, folding the cheap paper over and over. Her aim is better, but the paraffin seems to have missed that corner of the wadding. At long last, the cotton starts to smoulder. And now they face a dilemma: to run, or stay and make sure the fire catches, chancing a sudden blaze and the flames leaping towards their reeking skirts?

They run. Who is to say it is the wrong decision? But the fire does not take hold. Beyond a scorch mark on the floor no damage is done, and before they reach the taxi all five are caught. The case against Agnes Thomson is found not proven, but her sixty-five-year-old sister is sentenced to three months in gaol. Arabella, Edith and Donald MacEwan get nine months each, in his case for doing nothing more than ordering the taxi. Arabella learns her lesson. No more half measures. If she's in this game, she is in it to win.

Sent to Calton Gaol, she refuses to eat or drink and is out in five days, released under the Cat and Mouse Act, having agreed to return and serve the rest of her sentence once she gets her strength back. Of course, the mouse goes on the run. Visited by a supporter, she changes clothes with her and drives off in the other woman's car, under the noses of the constables standing outside. Sometimes the police get wind of her whereabouts, requiring hide-and-seek in busy streets and chases down railway station platforms. She has the most tremendous fun.

Re-arrested, she starves herself to weakness, and is released. This time, when the police track her down, she dons a false beard and her brother William's clothes and slips out of a back window. Again she is arrested, again released. She moves to Brighton and becomes a campaign organiser. For eight months she makes mischief there. They drag her back to Edinburgh. Once more she goes on hunger and thirst strike. This time they have to kick her out. She sits on the pavement, demanding that they let her back in to serve the remainder of her sentence. She has learned the great secret of political protest. None more frightening to the authorities than one without fear. The truth is, the government is quite happy to have her elude their grasp, as long as she keeps out of sight. Realising this, Arabella parades in her suffragette colours at a by-election meeting in Ipswich, under the eyes of at least a dozen policemen. Her placard reads ‘Here is the Mouse. Where is the Cat?'

By now, she's a Scottish heroine. They hold a party for her at the New Café in Edinburgh. A female piper serenades her. A hundred women in white dresses cheer her to the rafters. She gives a speech and they stand rapt, eyes shining, wanting to be her. Oh yes, she knows how to move a crowd. How to balance her indignation with mockery, brandishing the metal cell number she took as a souvenir of her stay in Calton Gaol, leaving them in no doubt that right and a certain aplomb will prevail. But the political situation is changing. The prisons are under increasing pressure to force-feed hunger strikers. Nobody in Scotland wants it, least of all the prison doctors. Call it chivalry, or Calvinist scruple, or deference to their social betters (as so many imprisoned suffragettes are): whatever the reason, they won't do it.

But there's a new medical officer they're transferring from Peterhead Gaol to Perth. Hugh Ferguson Watson. Ambitious chap: an asylum doctor by training, farming background on the west coast. Not quite one of us, you know. He's willing. And this Margaret Morrison or Edith Johnston or Ethel Moorhead, or whatever her real name is, has caused us such trouble. Refusing to pay her taxes. Smashing the glass in the Wallace Monument. Taking a dogwhip to a young teacher who strong-armed her out of a Liberal Party meeting. We're fairly sure she had a hand in the burning of those three Perthshire mansions . . .

This Watson fellow is brought to Edinburgh to feed her by stomach tube. Some of the milk goes down the wrong way, into her lungs. She gets pneumonia. Still, it's no less than the bitch deserves, eh what? And the message has gone out: the gloves are off. This happens in February 1914. Arabella is re-arrested in June.

 

She fights them all the way from London to Scotland, making them drag her, hanging on to lamp posts, smashing her head against door jambs and walls. Yelling at the unfortunate hansom driver ‘
Don't take me, cabman.
They are taking me to prison to murder me'
. Two policemen and a prison wardress, three to one, and that one in handcuffs, and still she frightens them, going for eyes and testicles. In the train compartment, they lay her along the seat, holding her hands and feet, and still she almost hurls herself out of the window. She's so violent – they've never seen anything like it. But even as she's screaming, her brain is racing ahead, spotting the next opportunity. It's a twelve-hour journey, you'd think she'd exhaust herself, but she's still roaring as they cross the border, and when they leave Edinburgh without letting her off, a new extremity colours her fury. For the first time she speaks to them.
Why
is she not being returned to Calton Gaol? It's as if everything so far has been according to a sort of plan and, even as she fought them, she was in control. But the news that they are bound for Perth shocks her. It's not hard to rally a crowd of supporters in Edinburgh or Glasgow, but Perth is many miles north. An out-of-the-way sort of place. Fanny Parker burned down their cricket pavilion last year, then held a public meeting to explain why she'd done it. Only the police saved her from a lynching. Not too many friends of women's suffrage in Perth.

They bring the cab on to the station platform and carry her across. It's not far to the prison. When they hear her bawling, the wretched inmates start up a charivari, knocking their tin cups on the stone sills of their cell windows. She is taken to the prison hospital. Eight beds, all empty. Eight wardresses. Before, she has always had a cell. They strip her and take away her clothes. Lay her on a bed, pinning her by the ankles, knees, hips and shoulders. A sheet is placed over her. Each time she struggles, it slips, revealing more of her nakedness. One of the wardresses says something she doesn't hear. They laugh.