Women of Courage (32 page)

‘Treatment!’ she said. ‘You’re a torturer. You live in the Middle Ages.’

Martin tried to keep the smile on his face. ‘It is that I have come to see you about. None of us like having to treat prisoners like that. If you would only co-operate it wouldn’t be necessary.’

‘Co-operate? With you?’ Sarah tried to laugh, but her throat hurt too much where the tube had rubbed it raw. Instead she stood up and turned to face the wall, with her back to him.

Martin sighed. He felt an urge to seize the silly woman and shake her until her teeth rattled, but that would do no good. He said, as reasonably as he could: ‘If you would eat, you wouldn’t have to be fed.’

‘If men would treat women as human beings, I wouldn’t need to be in here at all!’

This was not what Martin had come to talk about. He waited for a moment, collecting his thoughts. There was a clatter outside in the corridor as a wardress went past with a trolley.

‘Yesterday, Mrs Becket, you made a number of accusations against me. I have come to talk about those.’

Silence. She did not turn round.

‘In the first place, you appear to believe I keep a — what is the word? — a brothel in the flats above my consulting rooms. Is that right? Did I understand you correctly?’

She turned round to face him. Arms folded, she leaned against the wall under the high barred window. Her hair was hidden under the regulation mob cap and there was a mocking, sardonic smile on her bruised lips.

‘You understand perfectly, Dr Armstrong, because it’s true.’

‘And what proof do you imagine you have?’

‘I saw my husband go into your consulting rooms and stay there when you came out. Later, I saw another man go in with a prostitute on his arm.’

Martin laughed. It was a fairly good effort, he thought. He hoped it shook her confidence.

‘Then you did not understand what you saw. Whatever woman went into the flats she could not have been a prostitute. And your husband often stays behind after I have left. He receives . . . therapy and medical advice from a young colleague of mine.’

‘For three hours?’

Sarah watched Dr Armstrong’s eyes and saw a shadow of fear flicker in them. In fact she had no idea how long she had waited outside the consulting rooms. It might have been three hours, or one, or five. The pain of the discovery had made it seem interminable. But Martin did not know how long she had been there, either.

‘The place also has a back door. Perhaps he left by that.’

‘I shall ask him then, when I get out. Jonathan is an even worse liar than you are.’

Martin coughed, awkwardly, and his hands squeezed each other between his knees. He wanted to slap the wretched woman’s face but it would not do. The point of this interview was to gather information, not lose his temper.

‘Please do. Ask him whatever you like. Though you will have to wait a while, I fear. But you made another accusation, a rather worse one. You seem to believe that I own yet more houses of ill repute. In different areas. What possible proof can you have of that?’

Annoyance flitted across Sarah’s face. The women in the collecting cell; they would probably deny everything, even if I could find them — I never knew their names. The only other real proof I have is the letter warning me to stay away from Dr Armstrong because even my husband visited his prostitutes. I stuffed it into the back of my desk, but it’s no use telling this man that. For all I know he might tell Jonathan to get it out and burn it.
Oh Jonathan, Jonathan! How could you?

She confronted the smug ugly slob of a man in front of her —
Jonathan’s friend!
— and said: ‘I’m not going to tell you what proof I have. You can wait and find out later. But I know it’s not just ordinary prostitutes you rent those rooms to. You take children there too, don’t you? Little girls thirteen or fourteen years old, for men to deflower. You make me ill!’

Martin stood up. The strain of sitting quietly was too much for him. Sarah saw the big, hairy hands flexing by his sides and flinched. But he did not touch her.

With an effort, he kept his voice calm. ‘You have no proof because these things don’t happen. You are suffering from a mental delusion. But, just out of interest, Mrs Becket, let us pursue this line a little further. When you have completed your six months’ sentence in here . . .’

‘I shall be out before that!’

‘. . . what do you propose to do with this supposed information about my activities?’

It was the crucial question. Sarah savoured it. For the first time in Holloway, she felt that the balance of power had swung in her direction. She said, sweetly: ‘You will just have to wait and see, won’t you, Dr Armstrong? But I imagine that the press will be interested. And the police too, perhaps. Doctors who abuse women and young girls do not usually rise to the summit of their profession, do they?’

‘And your husband, Mrs Becket? Will you drag him down in the mire as well? His reputation and career will be ruined, if you make these accusations. Even if they are untrue.’

Sarah’s sense of triumph faded. Rage flared in its place.
Jonathan did this!
He betrayed me — he sent this man here to taunt me. On his own head be it! Beneath the rage burned a grim, hard determination. I owe this to all women — the children, the young women who are exploited, the suffragettes who are tortured in here with me. Whatever the consequences, this man is evil. I have to expose him!

‘My husband can look after himself. My concern is the rights of women, Dr Armstrong.’

Martin stared at her impotently. Such a slender, pale creature in the drab shapeless prison dress. The cheekbones seemed unnaturally high in the sunken hungry face, the eyes unusually bright. A martyr, he thought, with that cut-glass high society accent of frigid respectability. No wonder Jonathan Becket had to go to a whore; her thighs must be sharp as razors!

With an effort, he raised an eyebrow superciliously.

‘In that case, you will make fools of both him and yourself, Mrs Becket, when you discover that your accusations are untrue. But in the meantime, if you will not eat, I regret that your treatment for self-inflicted starvation must continue.’

The fear in her eyes pleased him. He turned to open the door. And to avoid too many more kicking and screaming matches like we had last night, he thought, the woman had better be drugged. I will feed her a measure of bromide tonight, before her meal. That way, she’ll keep more of it down.

He strode away along the corridor, smiling grimly to himself. From what Sarah Becket had said, he didn’t believe she had much proof. It was a nuisance, but long before she was released from Holloway, he would have closed all the flats down and moved the girls on to other, more secret premises. If the police raided the addresses she knew of, they would find nothing.

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.