Affinity (4 page)

Here she smiled, but very sourly. Her cheek is white and even, like lard or wax, and her eyes are pale, with heavy lash-less lids. Her hands, I noticed, are kept very clean and smooth—I should say she takes a pumice-stone to them. Her nails are clipped neatly, quite to the quick.

She didn’t speak to me again until we reached the wards—that is, until we arrived at a set of bars, which admitted us to a long, chill, silent, cloister-like passage, that held the cells. This passage was, I think, about six feet wide. There was sand upon the floor of it and, upon the walls and ceiling, more lime-wash. High on the left—too high even for me to gaze from—there was a row of windows, barred and thickly glassed; and all along the opposite wall were doorways: doorway after doorway after doorway, all just the same, like the dark, identical doorways one sometimes has to choose between in terrible dreams. The doorways let a little light into the passage, but also something of an odour. The odour—I had caught it at once, in the outer corridors, and I smell it even now, as I write this!—it is vague, but terrible. It is the stifled reek of what they call there ‘nuisance-buckets’, and the lingering exhalations I suppose of many ill-washed mouths and limbs.

This was the first ward, Ward A, Miss Ridley told me. There are six wards altogether—two to each floor. Ward A houses the newest set of women, that they term Third Class.

She led me then into the first of the empty cells, gesturing as she did so to the two doors fixed at the mouth of it. One of these was of wood, with bolts upon it; the other was an iron gate, with a lock. They keep the gates fastened during the days, and have the wooden doors thrown back: ‘That lets us see the women as we walk,’ said Miss Ridley, ‘and keeps the air of the cells less foul.’ As she spoke, she pushed both doors closed, and the room at once grew darker and seemed to shrink. She put her hands upon her hips, and gazed about her. These were very decent cells, she said: good-sized, and ‘built quite solid’, with a double layer of brick between them. ‘That stops a woman from calling to her neighbour . . .’

I turned away from her. The cell, though dim, was white and very harsh upon the eye, and so bare that, if I close my own eyes now, I find I see again all that was in it, very clearly. There was a single small high window, made of wire and yellow glass—this was one of the windows, of course, that I had gazed at with Mr Shillitoe from Miss Haxby’s tower. Beside the door was an enamel plaque bearing a list of ‘Notices to Convicts’ and a ‘Convicts’ Prayer’. Upon a bare wood shelf there was a mug, a trencher, a box of salt, a Bible and a religious book:
The Prisoner’s Companion
. There was a chair and table and a folded hammock and, beside the hammock, a tray of canvas sacks and scarlet threads, and a ‘nuisance-bucket’ with a chipped enamel lid. Upon the narrow window-sill there was a prison comb, its ancient teeth worn down or splintered, and snagged with curling hairs and crumbs of scalp.

The comb, it turned out, was all there was to distinguish that cell from the ones about it. The women may keep nothing with them of their own, and what they are issued with—the mugs and plates and Bibles—must be kept very neat, and laid out in line with a prison pattern. Walking the length of the ground-floor wards with Miss Ridley, gazing in at all those bleak and featureless chambers, was very miserable; I found I was made giddy, too, by the geometry of the place. For the wards, of course, follow the pentagon’s exterior walls, and are queerly segmented: each time we arrived at the end of one white and monotonous passage, it was to find ourselves at the beginning of another just the same, only stretching off at an unnatural angle. Where two corridors meet there is a spiral staircase. At the junction of the wards there is a tower, where the matron of each floor has a little chamber of her own.

All the time we walked there came, from beyond the windows of the cells, the steady
tramp
,
tramp
of the women in the prison yards. Now, as we reached the furthest arm of the second ground-floor ward, I heard another ringing of the prison bell, that made the marching rhythm slow, then grow uneven; and after a moment there came the banging of a door, the rattling of bars, and then the sound of boots again, crunching on sand this time, and echoing. I looked at Miss Ridley. ‘Here come the women,’ she said, without excitement; and we stood and listened as the sound grew loud, then louder, then louder still. It seemed, at last, impossibly loud—for we of course had turned three angles of the floor and, though the women were near, we could not see them. I said, ‘They might be ghosts!’—I remembered how there are said to be legions of Roman soldiers that can be heard passing, sometimes, through the cellars of the houses of the City. I think the grounds at Millbank might echo like that, in the centuries when the prison no longer stands there.

But Miss Ridley had turned to me. ‘Ghosts!’ she said, studying me queerly. And as she spoke, the prisoners turned the angle of the ward; and then they were suddenly terribly real—not ghosts, not dolls or beads on a string, as they had seemed before, but coarse-faced, slouching women and girls. Their heads went up when they saw us standing there, and when they recognised Miss Ridley their expressions grew meek. Me, however, they seemed to study quite frankly.

They looked, but went neatly to their cells, and then sat. And behind them came their matron, locking the gates on them.

This matron’s name, I think, is Miss Manning. ‘Miss Prior is making her first visit here,’ Miss Ridley said to her, and the matron nodded, saying, they had been told to expect me. She smiled. I had taken on a pretty task, she said, calling on
their
girls! And should I like to speak with one of them now?—I said I might as well. She led me to a cell she had not fastened yet, and beckoned to the woman that had entered it. ‘Here, Pilling,’ she said. ‘Here is the new Lady Visitor, come to take a bit of interest in you. Up, and let her see you. Come on, look slippy!’

The prisoner came to me and made a curtsey. Her cheek was flushed and her lip slightly gleaming from her brisk circling of the yard. Miss Manning said, ‘Say who you are and why you are here’, and the woman said at once—though stumbling slightly, over the pronunciation of it—‘Susan Pilling, m’m. Here for thieving.’

Miss Manning showed me then an enamel tablet that hung from a chain beside the entrance to the cell: this gave the woman’s prison number and class, her crime, and the date she was due to be released. I said, ‘How long have you been at Millbank, Pilling?’—She told me, seven months. I nodded. And what age was she? I thought she might be two or three years short of forty. She said, however, that she was twenty-two; and I hesitated at that, then nodded again. How, I asked next, did she care for the life there?

She replied that she liked it well enough; and that Miss Manning was kind to her.

I said, ‘I am sure she is.’

Then there was a silence. I saw the woman gazing at me, and think the matrons also had their eyes upon me. I thought suddenly of Mother, scolding me when I was two-and-twenty, saying I must talk more when we went calling. I must ask the ladies after the health of their children; or after the pleasant places they had visited; or the work they had painted or sewn. I might admire the cut of a lady’s gown . . .

I looked at Susan Pilling’s mud-brown dress; and then I said, how did she like the costume she must wear? What was it—was it serge, or linsey? Here Miss Ridley stepped forward, and caught hold of the skirt and lifted it a little. The gown was of linsey, she said. The stockings—these were blue with a crimson stripe, and very coarse—were of wool. There was one under-skirt of flannel, and another of serge. The shoes, I could see, were stout ones: the men made those, she told me, in the prison shop.

The woman stood stiff as a mannequin as the matron counted off these items, and I felt myself obliged to stoop to a fold in her frock and pinch it. It smelt—well, it smelt as a linsey frock
would
smell when worn all day, in such a place, by one perspiring woman; so that what I next asked was, how often were the dresses changed?—They are changed, the matrons told me, once a month. The petticoats, under-vests and stockings they change once a fortnight.

‘And how often are you allowed to bathe?’ I asked the prisoner herself.

‘We are allowed it, m’m, as often as we like; only, not exceeding two times every month.’

I saw then that her hands, which she kept before her, were pocked with scars; and I wondered how often she was used to bathing, before they sent her to Millbank.

I wondered, too, what in the world we would discuss, if I was put in a cell with her and left alone. What I said, however, was: ‘Well, perhaps I will visit you again, and you can tell me more about how you pass your days here. Should you like that?’

She should like it very much, she said promptly. Then: did I mean to tell them stories, from the Scripture?

Miss Ridley told me then that there is another Lady Visitor who comes on Wednesdays, who reads the Bible to the women and later questions them upon the text. I told Pilling that, no, I would not read to them, but only listen to them and perhaps hear
their
stories. She looked at me then, and said nothing. Miss Manning stepped forward, and sent her back into her cell and locked the gate.

When we left that ward it was to climb another winding staircase to the next floor, to Wards D and E. Here they keep the women of the penal class, the troublesome women or incorrigibles, who have made mischief at Millbank or been passed on or returned from other institutions for making mischief there. In these wards, all the doors are bolted up; the passage-ways, in consequence, are rather darker than the ones below, and the air is more rank. The matron of this floor is a stout, heavy-browed woman named—of all names!—Mrs Pretty. She walked ahead of Miss Ridley and me and, with a sort of dull relish, like the curator of a wax museum, paused before the cell doors of the worst or most interesting characters to tell me of their crimes, such as—

‘Jane Hoy, ma’am: child-murderer. Vicious as a needle.

‘Phœbe Jacobs: thief. Set fire to her cell.

‘Deborah Griffiths: pickpocket. Here for spitting at the chaplain.

‘Jane Samson: suicide—’

‘
Suicide
,’ I said. Mrs Pretty blinked. ‘Took laudanum,’ she said. ‘Took it seven times, and the last time a policeman saved her. They sent her here, as being a nuisance to the public good.’

I heard that, and stood gazing at the shut door, saying nothing. After a moment the matron tilted her head. ‘You are thinking,’ she said confidentially, ‘how do we know she ain’t in there now, with her hands at her own throat?’—though I was not, of course, thinking that. ‘Look here,’ she went on. She showed me how, at the side of each gate, there is a vertical iron flap which can be opened any time the matron pleases, and the prisoner viewed: they call this the ‘inspection’; the women term it
the eye
. I leaned to look at it, and then moved closer; when Mrs Pretty saw me do that, however, she checked me, saying that she oughtn’t to let me put my face to it. The women were that cunning, she said, and they had had matrons blinded in the past. ‘One girl worked at her supper-spoon until the wood was sharp and—’ I blinked, and stepped hurriedly back. But then she smiled, and gently pressed the flap of iron open. ‘I daresay Samson shan’t harm
you
,’ she said. ‘You might just take a peep, if you are careful . . .’

This room had iron louvres across its window and so was darker than the cells below, and instead of a hammock it had a hard wood bed. On this the woman—Jane Samson—was seated, her fingers plucking at a shallow basket that she had placed across her lap, that was heaped with coir. She had unpicked perhaps a quarter of the bundle; and there was another, larger, basket of the stuff beside the bed, for her to work on later. A bit of sun struggled through the bars across her window. Its beams were so clotted with brown fibre and with swirling particles of dust, she might, I thought, have been a character in a fairy-tale—a princess, humbled, set to work at some impossible labour at the bottom of a pond.

She looked up once as I observed her, then blinked, and rubbed at her eyes where the coir-dust prickled them; and then I let the inspection close, and stepped away. I had begun to wonder, after all, whether she might not try to gesture to me, or call out.

I had Miss Ridley take me away from that ward then, and we climbed to the third and highest floor there and met its matron. She proved to be a dark-eyed, kind-faced, earnest woman named Mrs Jelf. ‘Have you come to look at my poor charges?’ she said to me, when Miss Ridley took me to her. Her prisoners are mainly what are termed there Second Class, First Class and Star Class women: they are permitted to have their doors fixed open as they work, like the women on Wards A and B; but their work is easier, they sit knitting stockings or sewing shirts, and they are allowed scissors and needles and pins—this is considered, there, a great gesture of trust. Their cells, when I saw them, had the morning sun in them, and so were very bright and almost cheerful. Their occupants rose and curtseyed when we passed by them, and again seemed to study me very frankly. At last I realised that, just as I looked for the details of their hair and frocks and bonnets, so they looked for the particulars of mine. I suppose that even a gown in mourning colours is a novel one, at Millbank.

Many of the prisoners on this ward are those long-servers about whom Miss Haxby had spoken so well. Mrs Jelf now also praised them, saying they were the quietest women in the gaol. Most, she said, would go on from there, before their time, to Fulham Prison, where the routines were a little lighter. ‘They are like lambs to us, aren’t they, Miss Ridley?’

Miss Ridley agreed that they were not like some of the trash they kept on C and D.

‘They are not. We have one here—killed her husband, that was cruel to her—as nicely-bred a woman as you could ever hope to meet.’ The matron nodded into a cell, where a lean-faced prisoner sat patiently teasing at a tangled ball of yarn. ‘Why, we have had ladies here,’ she went on. ‘
Ladies
, miss, quite like yourself.’