Authors: Tim Vicary
‘What is it?’ Sarah glanced at Ruth and the other prisoner, stunned, then stepped towards the door. It was like a dream. Perhaps she would not need to escape anyway. Suffragettes were taking over the prison!
‘Just a minute, Becket,’ Ruth said. Her voice was loud, overbearing. ‘Ignore that row, whatever it is. Just get over there and 'elp fasten these down, will you?’
‘But . . . it's suffragettes . . .’
‘I said ignore it, Becket!’ Ruth stared at Sarah insistently, forcing her to meet her eyes. ‘Just get over 'ere now and 'elp me, will yer? Now!’
The other prisoner in the room, a young, healthy girl with a pinched, disrespectful face, glanced at Sarah, clicked her tongue, and rolled her eyes upwards to indicate how deeply stupid any order from a wardress was. Then she made a movement as though to help Ruth herself. Ruth scowled.
‘Is your name Becket?’
‘No, but I thought . . .’
‘You ain't in ‘Olloway to think, Raikes, you're in 'ere to do what yer told and be punished. Now git off up them stairs smartish!’
‘Charmed, I'm sure!’
The young woman ducked the ghost of a curtsey, then flounced briskly out of the door before anything could happen. Ruth glanced out after her. Several wardresses were hurrying towards the landing where the noise was still going on. Mrs Canning was striding determinedly in the same direction, keys clanking at her hip. There was another prisoner at the top of another flight of stairs with a bundle of linen in her arms, but she was staring open-mouthed at the row, with no sign of moving. Ruth turned briskly back into the room and took Sarah firmly by the arm.
‘All clear. This one — now!’
‘But what is it? What's that noise?’
Ruth grinned. ‘Your friends, ain't it? That Mrs Watson of yours gave me a note to take to 'em, telling 'em to make a hell of a row at nine-thirty this morning, and by God they have! She promised 'em if they did they'd have something to crow about later, so we'd better make sure that's right, 'adn't we? Come on, get in, quick!’
The laundry baskets were large, about five feet long by three feet wide, and three feet deep, too — that was Sarah's problem. The one they had chosen was about three-quarters full, with its lid propped open against the wall behind. But this time Sarah had more energy. She leaned against Ruth with one arm round her neck, lifted one leg over, then stopped. The long prison skirt impeded her. Something caught, held her back. The song on the landing ended. There were shouts, screams.
‘What's the matter?’
‘It's my skirt — I can't move.’
‘Hold still. It's snagged on this buckle.’ Conscious all the time of the need for haste, Ruth wrenched, ripped it free. ‘There! Get in now. Bury yourself under them clothes!’
‘But if I can't breathe?’
‘Make a place for your head.
Hurry!’
Ruth snatched a sheet from another basket and flung it on top of Sarah. Then another, while Sarah hunched herself into a ball, her arms around her face to hold the clothes back. Wide, scared eyes — footsteps on the stairs outside. Ruth seized the lid, dragged it swiftly down, ignoring the hand that Sarah raised feebly to prevent her . . .
‘Wait!’
But there was no time. Ruth had the lid down, one leather strap through the buckle, heaving it tight against the creak of the wickerwork. She looked round, a fine mist of sweat prickling on her forehead, under her arms.
No one.
The row upstairs was still going on. Cell doors were slamming, buckets clattering, women screaming. She could hear Mrs Canning's loud voice shouting orders. I must get up there and help before it's over, Ruth thought. People must remember I was up there, not down here.
She fastened the second strap. A prisoner walked in with a bundle of sheets in her arms. Without looking at Ruth, she marched straight to the last empty basket and threw them in. Ruth hurried past her, ran along the corridor and up the landing towards the noise of screams and bangs.
As she went, she glanced at the big clock on the wall in the hall.
Nine thirty-six.
In another quarter of an hour, if all went well, the laundry van would arrive. If Sarah's departure hadn't been noticed by then, the van men would come, carry her out, and she would be free.
And, with luck, they won't discover there's just a rolled-up blanket on that bed in her cell for another two hours. By which time she'll be out of the laundry.
But if they find out I was alone with her down in the laundry room while this riot was going on, it won't be just a rolled-up blanket that takes her place in that cell.
It'll be me.
If I can't breathe . . .
For the first few minutes in the basket Sarah thought of nothing else. Her pulse raced, her breath came short and fast, there was a singing in her ears. She writhed and twisted among the linen, trying to get her head in a freer position where she could see light through the wickerwork, ignoring the creak of the basket around her. She moved her hand to try to push the lid, and a fold of old smelly sheet came with it, wrapping itself over her nose and mouth like seaweed. Dear God, I will die in here! She dragged her hand free and shoved hard against the lid but nothing moved, the straps outside held it firm. Sarah thought she would scream.
‘Over there, and be quick about it. The van'll be 'ere soon, and this lot's not 'alf full.’
A strange wardress's voice came to her and somehow in a moment the panic was gone. The calm bullying certainty of it — I don't want to return to that, she thought. That and the foul medicine of that doctor. I have to take this chance — if Ruth Harkness is right, I'm lucky to be still alive.
Further away, she could hear shouting and banging from the landing upstairs and she thought: those brave women will be punished for this if I call out now and the escape is discovered. And Ruth Harkness will be locked up, too. I will have betrayed someone who's risked everything for me — and let down all those who are waiting outside, just because I can't bear half an hour or so in a basket. Look, I can breathe, it's easy. There's air coming through these gaps. I can even see a little — is that dark shape a woman's dress?
For a moment she stared but she could see nothing distinct, and it made her eyes ache, so she gave up and closed them. It was not uncomfortable here, among the bundled sheets and dresses, when she got used to it and wriggled free from the hard lumps that one or two had tangled themselves into. Her legs were bent awkwardly, but she had her arms in front of her, humping a bundle of cloth under her head like a pillow. For a while she listened intently, taking in every nuance of sound from outside. The noise upstairs carried on for a while, grew louder and then stopped. A couple more prisoners came into the room — she heard the slither and slop of their ill-fitting shoes across the floor, the flop of the sheets as they threw them into the other baskets, the creak as those baskets were closed and strapped tight. Then silence.
She was alone.
Sarah was so tired . . . The laundry room was warmer than any she had been in for days, the sheets softer than her bed at home. Without intending to or even realising it, she fell asleep.
It was the longest morning of Ruth's life.
The riot on the upper landing went on for nearly quarter of an hour. Ruth had passed Mrs Watson's message to only two suffragette prisoners, but they — bless them, she thought now — had managed to pass it on to three more. These five women, all of whose cells were open for the change of linen, had seized sluice buckets, cups, brooms and mops, and marched up and down the landing banging and shouting out songs and slogans as loud as they could. The other prisoners, startled and amused, egged them on, and Mrs Canning and her warders found their way obstructed by women carrying piles of linen and offering to help in the most useless way possible.
When Ruth arrived on the landing, the five suffragettes had not only linked arms across the corridor, but thrust two broom handles behind their backs, which they gripped with their elbows while they clasped hands in front. This had the effect of making them into a completely solid straight line which stretched right across the corridor. No one woman could be moved in any direction unless all the other five went that way, too — and this they resolutely refused to do.
Singing and chanting slogans all the way, they backed slowly along the corridor towards the sluice, and jammed themselves across its doorway. All the wardresses were in front of them; there was only one elderly prisoner behind in the sluice itself, and she sat there on an upturned bucket, cackling helplessly with laughter.
Eventually, by dint of much pushing and slapping and punching, the five women were disentangled and locked into their cells. Ruth was quite prominent in the struggle, and frogmarched one of the ringleaders, Mary Lethwaite, along the corridor past Mrs Canning, who was outraged.
‘Shameless baggage!’ Mrs Canning yelled. ‘You ain't fit to be in a decent prison like Holloway. You ought to be whipped!’
‘Votes for Women!’ Mary Lethwaite yelled back. ‘Set us free, then, if you don't like us here. We'll get out anyway, so save yourself the trouble! Wait till this afternoon, fat cow!’
For a terrible moment Ruth thought that Mary, carried away by the excitement, might give the game away. Ruth swung her roughly by the arm so that she cried out with pain, and then, when she had slammed the door behind them in Mary's cell, said breathlessly: ‘Sorry if I 'urt you. Thanks. It was magnificent!’
Mary rubbed her arm, grinning ruefully. ‘It was fun! But did it work? Did she get out?’
‘Don't know yet. Keep your trap shut for another couple of hours, whatever you do. Then you can claim it was all your own work.’
‘Without knowing how we did it, eh?’ Mary said.
‘Yes. Best way.’ Ruth turned quickly, went out of the door and locked it. Mary and the other woman had been asked to make a disturbance to cover Sarah's escape, but they had not been told how she was going to get out. It was best like that, Ruth thought, and Alice Watson had agreed. She and Mrs Watson had discussed the plan two nights ago, slowly and painstakingly going through every detail. Now they would see if those plans would work out.
On the landing Mrs Canning was hot, red-faced, angry.
‘Shut the whole lot of them up in their cells for an hour and let them cool down. Blasted suffragettes!’ she muttered furiously. ‘Has that laundry gone yet?’
That was what Ruth wanted to know, but she dared not go down to find out. Instead, she went across to her own landing, where Sarah's cell lay quiet, the door closed, one blanket rolled into a sausage with another spread over it, in the hope that a casual observer might think the prisoner was asleep. She locked the door and went along the corridor to where a window looked out towards the main gates. They were just closing. Did that mean the laundry van had just gone out? She couldn't see, but she hoped so.
For the next half hour nothing unusual happened. Ruth let out one or two of her trusty prisoners and set them to cleaning the floor. The noise in the prison died down. Ruth began to breathe more easily.
It was Alice Watson who convinced me to do this, she thought. I was impressed by Sarah Becket, of course I was, but I wouldn't have done it for her alone. That Mrs Watson has persuaded me to change my life.
She had sat with Alice Watson for hours in the little upstairs office in Clements Inn, and afterwards had accompanied her home. Mrs Watson lived in a small top-floor flat in Blackfriars. It was neat, comfortable, unpretentious, with soft green curtains, faded brown carpets, and photographs on the walls of groups of young women in white dresses and pinafores with high white bonnets with badges on. In the middle of each group sat a proud, younger version of Alice Watson.
Ruth had been nearly right when she thought Mrs Watson was a headmistress. In fact she had once trained nurses in hospital. She had probably been very good at it, Ruth thought. Certainly she found the woman easier to talk to than any other middle-aged lady she had met for years.
To her surprise, Ruth learned that Alice Watson had come from an unpretentious lower middle-class background, little better than her own. Her parents had not wanted her to become a nurse; that had been a struggle. But, like Ruth, she had a strong sense of right and wrong.
‘They used to think nurses were prostitutes, too — do you know that?’ she had said, as they sat drinking tea at the little table in her window, looking down on the tops of trams and drays in the street below. ‘Men thought they could do what they liked with them, especially the doctors. That's why the uniform was so important. It marked us out, made it clear we were doing something decent and clean for society. I can understand you felt something of the same for the prison service.’
‘Not any more.’ Ruth had told her of her childhood struggle to get a decent job, the pride she felt in her own little flat, her hopes of a decent life with her fiancé, George Smith. ‘If I help you now,’ she said. ‘I'll lose all that.’
‘It's possible, certainly,’ Alice said. ‘And I've no right to ask you to take that risk. I'm just grateful for what you've done already. If you decided to do no more, I couldn't complain.’ She paused, looking at Ruth calmly through her round spectacles. Waiting perhaps for me to get up and walk out, Ruth thought later.
But she hadn't. So Alice had poured her some more tea and said: ‘If you go on, then of course we'd welcome you and there'd be a lot of companionship. But it's not easy. You should be clear in your mind that what you're doing is right.’
That, for Ruth, was the crux of the matter. She was a very moral young woman. She had gone into the prison service not just because it was a secure, respectable job, but because she had believed she would be on the side of right against wrong. Of Christian against Apollyon. Now, with a man like Martin Armstrong in authority over her, she felt that was not true. Either she kept her job and served the devil, or left it, and served God.
Alice Watson had listened to her explanation, and smiled. Then she reached out and patted Ruth's hand.
‘You are a brave young woman,’ she said. ‘I am proud to have met you. It is not easy, what you are doing, but let us not despair too soon. If everything we have planned works out as I hope, there will be no reason for anyone to point a finger at you. They will blame the suffragette movement, which is too big to arrest and imprison all at once, however hard they try.’