Authors: Tim Vicary
But that was all in the future. For the moment she was safe here in Holloway. She could have no visitors at all for a month, not even her feeble husband. So until then, the girls and Mrs Burgoyne could continue to make money for him.
Every day. Every night. Greed profiting from respectability.
Ruth Harkness had not planned to become a prison wardress. As a child she had shown some promise at school and her father, an enterprising man with his own hansom cab, had expressed hopes that she might get a job in an office operating one of the new modern typewriting machines. If she did very well, she might even become a teacher. But when Ruth was nine her father was stabbed by a drunken passenger late at night. All hopes she and her sisters had had of higher education were buried with him in a graveyard in Hackney.
She left school at fourteen to work for four years in her uncle's bakery in the East End. Every morning at half past two she had to get up to clean out the ash from the big coal ovens and light fresh fires in them, and then make hundreds of little bread rolls for people to buy on the way to work. She stood in the shop then, until four or five o'clock in the afternoon, when nearly everything was sold. Then she was free to help her mother with her younger sisters until they all fell asleep exhausted in the single back room they shared above a tailor's shop.
In 1911, her uncle had a heart attack early one morning. He fell face forward into a stack of loaves in the oven which he was unloading, and by the time Ruth pulled him out he was dead, one side of his face singed raw by the oven wall. The bakery passed to a cousin who planned to run it with his wife, and Ruth was out of a job.
For a year she had various unsuccessful jobs as an office cleaner, scullery maid, and shop assistant, all of which she hated; and then one night, in a public house in Putney, she met a man who was to change her life. His name was George Smith.
George was an unusually tall and broad-shouldered young man with a face like a wrestler. He looked down expressionlessly on even the tallest men in the pub, whose heads only came up to his chin, and they all showed him respect. Women gazed up at him in awe, as though he were a giant out of a childhood story book. But Ruth was considerably larger and stronger than most girls, and she found, to her surprise, that this seemed to attract George almost as much as it had previously put off other men. He walked her home that night and they arranged to meet again. By the end of the month they were courting.
George was a police constable. He came from a poor family not unlike Ruth's and most of his wages went to support his widowed mother and his younger brothers and sisters. He had only recently joined the force and was determined to do well in it. To Ruth's surprise, his stolid, taciturn manner hid a relatively acute brain. As well as being determined, he was ambitious.
‘I couldn't offer a girl marriage at this stage, Ruthie,’ he confided to her solemnly one Sunday afternoon as they sat listening to a band playing in Hyde Park. ‘I couldn't afford to do it properly yet, it would just drag us both down. When I marry I want to have a decent house, security. A home I can be proud to bring up kids in. So I'll have to wait, and work, and save. I'd want a wife who knew how to work and save, too.’
It was then that they fell to discussing Ruth's string of unsatisfactory jobs, and how she loathed them and had always hoped for something better. George considered this gravely for a few minutes, and then suggested the prison service.
It had never occurred to Ruth that such jobs existed for women. And yet, the more she thought, the more sense it made. A prison wardress had a proper, relatively well-paid job, with regular wages and meals and a uniform — and none of the drawbacks of going into service. Perhaps because of her father's early ambitions for her, Ruth had always hated the idea of becoming a servant, all day at the beck and call of people who were richer than her by mere chance and no ability. She found it hard enough taking orders in shops from owners who were less intelligent than she was. But in a women's prison, she thought, the situation would be almost entirely reversed. The criminals would be there to receive orders from her!
George told her how to apply for the job and to her surprise she was accepted. From the beginning the work appealed to her. For the first time she had a position with some of the status her father had led her to hope for. The job was respectable, the rules were clear, and she was in charge of others. And since the criminals had not only been wicked enough to commit crimes but also stupid enough to get caught, it was clear that they richly deserved their fate.
After a month she was able to open a small account in a bank — the first savings she had ever had. And George's respect for her grew. After twelve months they became engaged.
She was thinking about this as she walked towards Holloway at five o'clock one morning. The streets were still grey in the early dawn, but already they were busy — barrow-boys heading towards Covent Garden to collect vegetables for the market, fishmongers going towards Billingsgate, street-cleaners and crossing-sweepers and lamplighters dowsing the gas lamps. Already I earn more than most of these people, she thought, and I am only twenty-two and the only woman going to work so early. What would father say if he could see me now? It was not what he planned but he would not be ashamed, either. He always taught me to earn my living and to know right from wrong, and that is what my work and George's is all about. Without us the city would be torn to shreds by criminals and anarchists.
She entered the great gloomy stone portals of Holloway, and gazed across the courtyard for a moment. Every window of the huge brick building in front of her was blockaded by iron bars. It was like a medieval castle, a fortress to contain evil and misery and to punish it.
Ruth knew there was misery as well as evil in those cells. But she had learnt early on to harden her heart to the sob stories the prisoners tried to tell. She nearly always cut them off automatically now before they had even begun. That was an important part of prison discipline, anyway — the rule that said prisoners should not speak unless spoken to. Prisoners should obey instructions instantly, and wardresses should never look them in the eye. It was a good, effective rule, Ruth thought; cruel on the surface but merciful after a while. It made the boundaries clear and did not create expectations. If that was part of the punishment, all well and good.
The one group of prisoners who troubled her were the suffragettes. Not because she agreed with them; she was quite definite about that. A crime was a crime whatever its motive. The problem was the women themselves. They were often well educated, articulate, independent — the sort of woman Ruth had hoped to become herself.
But they would not accept the rules.
They spoke when they were not spoken to, refused to eat, sang, protested, argued, blockaded themselves in their cells, and endlessly asked questions
. We are political prisoners
, they said
we are not criminals, these rules were not meant for us at all.
And so, to refute this argument and enforce the rules, Ruth and the other wardresses had to treat them more harshly than anyone else. By forcible feeding. Confinement to the punishment bloc. Leaving them manacled sometimes all night in their cells.
Ruth hated it. It made her unhappy in a job she was proud of. She hated it even more when George seemed to sympathise with them. He told her how sensible, even grateful, the suffragettes often were when arrested. He thought they had spirit and accepted that they would win the vote in the end. He had carried a little grandmother of about seventy all the way across Parliament Square in a suffragette demonstration one day. She had slapped his face to ensure she was arrested for assault and breach of the peace — and then complimented him for giving her the best piggy-back ride since her father took her to the wedding of Queen Victoria!
So why can't they behave decently in prison? Ruth thought. She scowled as she climbed the dark stone stairs inside the prison. Today she would have to deal with that woman Becket again. And Sarah Becket was the worst of all, because Ruth had begun to believe her . . .
Ruth was not sorry for the woman. The fact that Sarah Becket was rich and well-connected did not matter to her at all. Indeed, she rather enjoyed the fact that such women had to be washed and shampooed for nits like the others, carry their own slop buckets to the sluice, even be forcibly fed if necessary. That was common justice — proof that no one was above the law, wherever they were born.
But . . . Dr Armstrong said that Sarah Becket was insane. And while Ruth Harkness was not medically qualified, she did not believe that. She had met several madwomen in prison. One had claimed to be Mary, Mother of God; another had persisted in lifting her skirt and showing her drawers to anyone who opened the door of her cell; a third had screamed all night because she could see her dead child floating in the air in front of her; a fourth had sat, totally silent, with her face to the wall for three days.
Sarah Becket had done nothing like this. She had simply stated, in a clear, forceful, upper-class accent, that Dr Armstrong was a pimp.
Put baldly like that, Ruth admitted to herself, it did sound mad. Dr Armstrong was a respectable, prosperous doctor, a figure of authority in the prison; Sarah Becket was a convicted criminal, so unbalanced that she thought she could influence Parliament by slashing a famous picture with a meat knife. That was why Ruth had not yet voiced her suspicions to George. But . . .
Ruth had
been
there. She had seen the conviction with which Becket spoke, the shock, almost guilt, on the face of Dr Armstrong. And then, she had worked beside Dr Armstrong for some months . . .
It was irrational to feel revolted by a man who was always perfectly polite and professional, but . . . Ruth always kept as far away from him in a cell as she could. As though those great, stubby fingers of his might suddenly grab
her
instead of palpating the chest of a patient; as though the thick black hairs on the backs of his wrists could come alive like spiders, and crawl out of his sleeves in dozens.
She shuddered, as she hung up her coat and hat in the locker-room and put on her regulation apron. Of course such thoughts were nonsense, but — what if the story Becket told her was true? If this doctor, those
hands,
were really leading little girls out of the safety of a charitable institution into a life of prostitution, where men would pay to paw them before they were even old enough to . . . It did not bear thinking about! Ruth Harkness buckled a bunch of keys on to her belt and set off down the long grey corridor to her first duties of the day.
But it
had
to be thought about.
If what Becket said was true, then Dr Armstrong was not just a criminal but a serious, monstrous one. A bluebeard of a man who should be locked away for far longer than most women here. One of the fundamental beliefs that Ruth shared with her fiancé George was that the police and prison service were the soldiers of right in a war against wrong. They prayed, every night, that God would guide their hands in the cleansing of society, the crusade against evil. If she, Ruth, suspected Dr Armstrong of such a crime and did nothing about it she would be a traitor to God.
But if she did something about it and it proved to be untrue, she would almost certainly lose her job.
All morning Ruth Harkness went about her duties in a foul mood. She cursed Sarah Becket for ever coming to Holloway at all, and she cursed herself for listening to the woman and getting drawn into a discussion with her. She was still angry when, at two o'clock, she received a summons to go to Dr Armstrong's consulting room.
Surprised, she left the main cell block, climbed two flights of stairs, and knocked on his door.
‘Come!’
She entered, and strode quietly into the centre of the room. It was peaceful here, civilised in comparison to the rest of the prison. A carpet on the floor, a fire in the grate, no bars in the windows. Dr Armstrong sat with his back to the window, writing at a large wooden desk. He had a pipe in his mouth and, as he wrote, he puffed and grunted to himself. After a moment he blotted the paper, sat back in his chair, and smiled.
‘Ah. Miss — er — Harkness, is it not?’
‘Yes, Doctor. You sent for me.’
‘I did indeed. It was good of you to come.’ He hesitated, and the ingratiating smile faded, to be replaced by a frown of portentous solemnity. ‘It was, er, about an unfortunate scene that you were forced to witness the other day. I realise that you must witness very many unpleasant things in the course of your job, but I thought perhaps that this event was peculiarly distressing.’
‘What scene was that then, Doctor?’ Ruth kept her face wooden, to force him to say it. Already she felt anxious, thinking how easy it would be to lose her job, how important it was to her. And there was something else, less tangible, to do with the man himself. He folded his fleshy fingers under his chin.
‘Surely you remember, Miss Harkness? The outburst of the prisoner Becket, when only you and I were in her cell. She made some most distressing and slanderous allegations. You remember that?’
‘Yeah.’ He glanced at her sharply, as though suspecting insolence in the flat monosyllabic answer.
‘Well, Mrs Becket is a distinguished lady of a certain social class that we would not normally expect to find in Holloway, and I appreciate how hard it must be for yourself and your colleagues to control such women. Particularly when they make appalling allegations that you might be tempted to believe. So …’
He hesitated, cold grey eyes watching her carefully from under thick bushy eyebrows. The fingers writhed thoughtfully under the chin.
‘. . . so I have decided to take the unusual step of reassuring you about the nature of her illness. Mrs Becket is, I regret to say, suffering from a depressive illness which can lead to paranoid delusions about those who care for her. I am acquainted with her family doctor and am told that she has suffered from this for some time. It leads to precisely the sort of fantastic outburst we heard yesterday, which can be most upsetting for all who have to deal with her. Including her husband, poor man, from what I hear.’