They gave me sherry beaten up with eggs and milk. They dressed me in a long white dress I’d never seen before, and white silk stockings that were soft against my legs. Rosa put rouge upon my cheeks, they were so pale. All rouged and dressed in white, I was taken downstairs by Rosa. She was wearing a large hat filled with roses, and a watch upon a chain given her by Father. They said I was to have one, too, if I did all they told me on the Common. I did not want a watch, or care about time. I stood there in the hall with Sully and Frink and Rosa until the carriage drove up to the house. Yelping followed Father as he opened the door of the animals’ room and came to join us. They half carried me into the closed carriage. Now I knew there was no escape for me and I’d got to go through with this thing.
We drove up Lavender Hill, past closed shops and people wearing Sunday clothes. We bowled along in silence – except for Sully, who pushed his flabby face close to mine and said, ‘Keep calm, Missy; but remember, we are depending on you.’
I turned away from him and looked out of the windows at the great grey houses of Cedars Road. Father impatiently pulled the blinds down. I could tell he was nervous, because his face was drenched in sweat; and Sully wasn’t feeling happy either: his great baby face was all twitching. Only Frink sat still and remote. Rosa was uneasily fidgeting with her feather boa and looking from one to the other of the men, bewildered by their silence. She had never seen me float and I don’t think she believed I really did this thing; it was just some trick of my father’s that was going to make us all rich. Now the tense atmosphere of that hearse-like carriage made her uneasy.
We left the carriage on the north side of the Common, near the old church with the blue-faced clock. Slowly we walked over the grass, where every now and then there was a dandelion in flower. Rosa held my arm and, as if in a dream, I walked beside her, the three bowler-hatted men following and arguing about exactly where this fearful thing was to take place.
It must have been raining earlier in the day because the grass was very wet. Now the sky was a lit-up silver, and there was a soft west wind. We must have been a strange group because people kept turning to glance at us and some said we were a wedding-party and I was the bride, dressed in white as I was, and there were flowers in my hair. Grown men and boys were flying kites, and I feared that perhaps later on I would become entangled in their strings. We came to the green-domed bandstand, and heard the orators’ shouting voices blowing towards us on the wind.
‘Too many trees here,’ Father said to Frink.
We walked past the park-keepers’ bothy and the old men playing chess in the shelter; the same old men seemed to have been playing the same game of chess there all the years I could remember, in winter and summer. We left these things behind and came into the open again. I could see the two great grey mansions against the silver sky. When I was a child, I thought they were something holy from the Bible – ‘In my Father’s house there are many mansions.’ Now, although I knew they were not holy, the huge and familiar greyness of them comforted me.
Rosa suddenly pinched my arm. I turned to her and saw it was her sad clown’s face she was wearing, all pinched and with the powder standing out on it.
‘’Ere,’ she said, and her voice was a thin, Cockney whine that I’d never heard her use before. ‘’Ere, all this is giving me the pip. Let’s go ’ome. I don’t like it.’ She loosened her hold on my arm and turned to Father. ‘Euan Rowlands,’ she wailed, ‘take us ’ome; this is ’orrible!’
Father ignored her and turned to Sully and Frink. ‘This will do,’ he said, in a low voice, and we all stood still. ‘Yes, this will do,’ they agreed. ‘It’s away from the trees and near enough to the speakers. Yes, this will do.’ And Frink, in his guttural voice, muttered, ‘Not too many people – we don’t want a stampede.’
They made me lie down on the grass, although it was all wet and dirty.
‘My dress,’ I whispered, ‘my long white dress, it won’t be white any more.’
‘Never mind about that,’ Father snarled at me. ‘Just lie there and relax.’
So I lay there in my despair and humiliation. People who saw me thought I’d fainted and gathered round; I was so conspicuous in my white dress. More people, from the outskirts of the crowd by the orators, hurried over the grass towards me. It was like when drops of water seem to magnetise each other and draw together. Rosa was crying, her back turned to me and her thin shoulders under the feather boa vibrating. Sully and Frink had drawn away, to be able to escape quickly if things went wrong. Only Father was close to me, and his face was terrible. He almost screamed at me, ‘Go on, do it now! For Christ’s sake, don’t let us down! Hurry!’
Someone was bending down to help me and I could have saved myself, but Father’s terrible face was before me, and I made a frantic effort simply to escape the horror of my father. I went up quite straight, about ten feet into the air, and then a little higher. I stayed quite still up there, and there was a dreadful silence. All those people – it was as if they were dead, so still they were, and I could hear a whizzing bee. The silence only lasted an instant, then a great roar came, and screams and cries – animal noises. I looked below and there they were, not animals but hundreds of milling people. Some were shouting and pointing upwards at me, and others were on their knees, praying. A few were running away, not straight but in circles.
Then I caught sight of two rather stout figures hurrying towards the crowd. Their anguished faces were turned up towards me and I recognised Mrs Churchill and Blinkers, Blinkers no longer wearing a black diamond now, but dressed in complete blackness, like a parson. My two stout friends – too late to save me! On the outskirts of the crowd I thought I saw Lucy’s gentle face, and a lolling baby in her arms.
Waves of tiredness passed through me, and I descended a few feet. Grabbing hands stretched towards me, but I willed myself to rise higher because I was so afraid of falling on the people. I did manage for a little to float horizontally away from the crowd; but, when I next looked down, they were all below me again. I was so exhausted I knew I could not stay above them much longer. Soon I’d be down amongst them. I felt I was gradually losing consciousness and tried to signal with one hand that I was coming down.
I could hear Father’s voice shouting, ‘Make way!’ and, as I sailed down, although my eyes were closed, I could feel the crowd had opened and there was a clearing below me.
I came down amongst the people. Although we were out of doors the air was stuffy and sickening. When I opened my eyes, all I could see was feet and cloth-encased legs. Then the shouting started again, and the feet and legs commenced to sway and jostle, and there were angry exclamations and cries of pain. The space around me began to close. The people from behind pushed and shoved and the feet came nearer. Suddenly I saw a man with a ginger moustache staring at me with a terrified expression on his face. I tried to smile at him because I felt he needed pity, poor man – and I’d seen him before. But in a moment he was pushed to the ground, the advancing crowd falling over his body. I tried to leave the ground, and caught at Rosa’s skirt. Poor thing! she was standing there screaming, with her hands over her face. They must have seen the white of my dress because a cry of ‘There she is!’ from many voices, sounding like one great voice, poured into my ears. As they pressed forward, Rosa lost her balance and, still screaming, fell across me. I thought I could distinguish Father’s voice as he tried to keep them back, but still they pressed forward, the ones in front unable to help themselves. I managed to turn my face to one side, but I was pinned down by Rosa’s body and couldn’t free my hands to protect my face.
The terrible feet came, and no air at all could reach me. I could still hear Rosa screaming as they trampled and fell on me, and there was the indescribable pain. Then I could feel nothing. I simply thought, ‘This is it; this is how one dies.’ Rosa had ceased to scream, and for the first time in my life I was not afraid.
The following newspaper report – one among many that appeared at the time – refers to the incident described at the end of this book:
The inquest was held today on the three people recently trampled to death by a crowd on Clapham Common. The victims were Alice Rowlands and Rosa Fisher, both of Battersea, and a man so far unidentified.
From the evidence, it appears that Alice Rowlands pretended to be able to levitate herself and the accident occurred when a crowd watching a performance of the trick got out of control. The girl appeared on the Common dressed as a bride, and several witnesses insisted that she had raised herself to a considerable height above the ground.
The police stated that they had been unable to obtain any information from the girl’s father, who had been seriously ill since witnessing the occurrence.