Chapter Six

Infamy! Infamy!

I woke slowly and in great pain. I was lying on something hard. As a child I had learned, from a particularly poisonous little girl who attended my father’s Sunday School, not to open my eyes the moment I woke. Surprisingly it is a knack I have found useful in many situations. Having no idea where I was, but assuming I had been attacked and possibly kidnapped, I attempted to push aside the throbbing pain in my head and focus my attention on listening.

I have been concussed before and that fact I knew I was again allowed me to hope that my senses were not too addled. Still, it took a while for me to distinguish the sounds around me. Chiefly, I was aware of the scents of perspiration, dirt or dust – a strange grimy smell – and lastly the smell of a variety of perfumes, all conflicting horribly. Voices murmured around me. The words were indistinct, but they sounded to be all female. The inside of my head beat its nasty rhythm as I tried to understand how I came to be with many females. How were we all shut up together. Although my immediate memory was proving unhelpful, my mind provided me with an unpleasant flashback to the time I had almost become the inmate of an asylum.¹⁶ I felt my body begin to tremble at the thought, but then I realised there was no sharp smell of cleaning fluid or other medicinal smell. So, I could not be there. There was also no smell of pigs, I thought. And then the memory of being shut in a pigsty awaiting execution with Fitzroy flooded back – but we had got out of that …

‘Oh for heaven’s sake Euphemia, Wake Up!’ cried the all too piercing voice of Richenda Stapleford. I opened my eyes. In front of me I saw bars, such as one might find in a police cell. I was lying on a dirty, wooden floor. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a row of women’s skirts. I pushed myself up using one hand, pausing half way as nausea almost overcame me.

Richenda Stapleford’s face loomed over me. ‘Gosh, you look like a dead fish,’ she opined. ‘Try not to be sick. I doubt anyone would come and clear it up.’ I waited for a moment, catching my breath. ‘Where are we?’

‘In jail,’ responded Richenda with a grim smile. She raised her voice. ‘It seems the King’s police force now consider it their duty to attack and detain defenceless women.’ She put her arm under my mine and helped me up. I staggered against her, but Richenda’s fondness for cake has made her sturdy. She helped me across to a wooden bench where two other women at once made way for me to sit.

As she said it my memory flooded back. ‘Richenda,’ I exclaimed, ‘how could you have tricked me into coming on a suffragette march? Hans will be furious.’

Richenda’s face set in a more than usually mulish expression. ‘Let him be! This was a peaceful protest. Do you realise since we have been put in here none of us have received medical attention. We have been given neither food nor water. We have been treated like animals.’

‘Did they take your names?’ I asked.

‘Yes, though some people gave obviously false ones.’

‘Did you?’

‘Of course not. I want out of here as soon as possible. Marching and listening to speeches is one thing, but being attacked and thrown into jail is quite another. I can’t even repeat the words the guard said to me when I asked him for a small slice of cake. You would have thought I was asking to be crowned queen. I memorised the number on his uniform. I shall tell Hans how badly I have been treated.’

I reached up and gently touched the back of my head. ‘By being refused cake?’

Richenda had the grace to blush slightly. ‘Yes, I know you were injured … but honestly, Euphemia, you must have been fighting!’

I looked around. There were around twenty women crowded into a cell clearly meant for less. Their ages varied from an old crone, who was sitting on the floor picking at the edge of her skirt, to a young maid, who could have been no more than fourteen, who sat on the edge of the wooden bench, her face tear streaked, but her expression wooden. All the women were dishevelled and some had marks of blood on their clothes or their person.

‘Don’t worry as soon as Hans hears about this he’ll have us out of this terrible place,’ said Richenda more kindly. ‘He’s an important man in the City. That will count for a lot.’

‘Yeah, and I’m royalty,’ said the crone, ‘Cockney royalty. And if I’m not mistaken, that one over there,’ she pointed to a woman with long blonde hair that flowed unhindered over her shoulders, sitting with her hands neatly in her lap as if she was awaiting a train, ‘is a ladyship. Ain’t going to do any of good. Coppers want to haul us all into court. Make an example of us. Show that we’re wild hysterical women!’ She laughed loudly, showing cracked and broken teeth. ‘I’m not saying that in my day I didn’t get involved in a scrape or two, but this time! This time I was sitting quiet as you like on the edge of the square selling me flowers as usual and this copper drags me away from my pitch. Oi! I tells him. That’s my livelihood you’re leaving on the street. Then one of his mates kicked my buckets over with his big plates of meat. That was it. That was when I belted the one holding me with my stick.’ She sighed, and looked suddenly deflated, like a pile of rags on the floor. ‘Took me stick away, they did. Probably broke it or burnt it. Bastards. Can’t get up without it.’ A spark of malice flickered in her eyes, ‘Reckon some of you fine folks are finally going to find out what it’s like to be poor. To be treated like dirt. They ain’t going to let any of you off. None of you at all. You mark my words. Stupid wenches trying to prove you’re the equal of your men folk. Didn’t you work out years ago that any one woman’s worth three blokes – five? None of you have got the sense God gave you.’

The cell had hushed to listen to this extra-ordinary outburst.

Someone began to applaud. It was the young woman who had been sitting so neatly. ‘There is much truth in what you say, madam,’ she said in a soft, well-spoken voice. ‘What we lack is an influence in the laws that govern the country. In law we are regarded as no more than chattels and that is an offence against every woman who has ever lived or shall ever be born. That is why we must protest. That is why we must win.’

‘If yer don’t know how to influence your man by now, lass, I doubt there is any hope for you,’ said the old woman crudely, but without malice.

At this conversation that had been naturally stilled by the frightening nature of our surrounding broke loose once more. Debate raged and the atmosphere in the room lifted. Beyond the bars lay a long corridor that faced only a brick wall that had perhaps once been white washed. Richenda saw where I was looking. ‘I pressed my face against the bars. There is nothing to see.’

‘But what if we wish to use – the facilities,’ I blushed.

Richenda nodded at a bucket in the corner. ‘They are treating us like animals.’

‘Good God!’ I said shocked. ‘That must be some cruel joke. There is no privacy. Not simply from each other, but from any policeman who might choose to walk along that corridor. As if summoned by my prediction a police guard appeared at one edge of the bar. He wore a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. His face was worn, and the veins in his nose clearly widened and split by drink. He regarded us with the same loathing a child might a particularly ugly specimen in the zoological gardens. Then he rang his baton along the bars. ‘Shut up, you whores!’ he shouted.

As one the women quietened. And then almost at once they began to shout out and decry his foul accusation. Two more policemen appeared. They also ran their batons along the bars. The noise echoed in the close confines of the prison and was as intimidating as it was intended to be. Then on policeman pointed his baton at the young maid I had noticed earlier. ‘She’ll do.’

A fourth man appeared with keys at his belt. The three men entered, pushing back the other women with batons raised and dragged the screaming girl out.

‘You cannot do this!’ I screamed. ‘This is the King’s England.’

The guard who had called us such foul names pointed at me. ‘You, Euphemia St John, you’re next!’

All faces turned to me. He knew my name. Of the thousands of women on that march they knew my name!

¹⁶ See my journal A Death in the Asylum.