Affinity (6 page)

They look at me, and then at Mother. How, they ask, can she bear to have me go there? And Mother, of course, answers then: ‘Margaret does just as she pleases, she always has. I have told her, if she wants for employment there is work that she might do at home. There are her father’s letters—very handsome letters—to be collected and arranged . . .’

I have said I plan to work upon the letters, in time; but that for now, I should like to try this other thing, and at least see how I do at it. I said this to Mother’s friend Mrs Wallace, and she looked at me a little speculatively; I wondered then how much she knows or guesses about my illness and its causes, for she answered, ‘Well, there’s not a better tonic for dismal spirits than charity-work—I heard a doctor say that. But a prison ward—oh! only think of the air! The place must be a breeding-ground, for every kind of illness and disease!’

I thought again of the white monotonous passage-ways and the bare, bare cells. I said, on the contrary, the wards were very clean and orderly; and my sister said then that, if they were clean and orderly, why did the women in them need sympathy from me? Mrs Wallace smiled. She has always liked Priscilla, she thinks her more handsome even than Helen. She said, ‘Perhaps
you
will think of charity-visiting, my dear, when you are married to Mr Barclay. Have they prisons, in Warwickshire? To think of your dear face amongst those convict women’s—what a study
that
would make! There is an epigram for it, what is it? Margaret,
you
will know it: the poet’s words, about women and heaven and hell.’

She meant:

For men at most differ as Heaven and Earth,
But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell

and when I said it she cried, There! how clever I was! If she had been put to read all the books that I had, she would have to be a thousand years old at the least.

Mother said it was certainly true, what Tennyson said about women . . .

That was this morning, when Mrs Wallace came to breakfast with us. After that she and Mother took Pris for her first sitting for a portrait. Mr Barclay has commissioned it, he wants a picture of her hanging in the drawing-room at Marishes for their arrival there after the honeymoon. He has found a man to do the work, who has a studio at Kensington. Mother asked me, Would I go and sit with them?—Pris saying that, if anyone should like to look at paintings, I should. She said it with her face before the glass, passing one gloved fingertip across her brow. She had made the brow a little darker with a pencil, for the portrait’s sake, and wore a light blue gown beneath her dark coat. Mother said it might as well be blue as grey, since no-one was to see it save the artist, Mr Cornwallis.

I did not go with them. I went to Millbank, to begin my proper visits to the women in their cells.

It was not so frightening as I had thought it might be, to be led, alone, into the female gaol: I think my dreams of the prison had made its walls higher and grimmer, its passage-ways narrower, than they really are. Mr Shillitoe advises me to make a weekly trip there, but lets me choose the day and hour of it: he says that it will help me understand the women’s lives if I see all the places and habits they must keep to. Having gone there very early last week, to-day I went later. I arrived at the gate at a quarter-to-one, and was passed over, as before, to dour Miss Ridley. I found her just about to supervise the delivery of the prison dinners; and so I walked with her, until this was completed.

It was an impressive thing to see. As I had arrived there had come a tolling of the prison bell: when the matrons of the wards hear that they must each take four women from their cells and walk with them to the prison kitchen. We found them gathered at its door when we went up to them: Miss Manning, Mrs Pretty, Mrs Jelf and twelve pale prisoners, the prisoners with their eyes upon the floor and their hands before them. The women’s building has no kitchen of its own, but takes its dinners from the men’s gaol. Since the male and female wards are kept quite separate, the women are obliged to wait very quietly until the men have taken their soup and the kitchen is cleared. Miss Ridley explained this to me. ‘They must not see the men,’ she said. ‘Those are the rules.’ As she spoke there came, from behind the bolted kitchen door, the slither of heavy-booted feet, and murmurs—and I had a sudden vision then of the men as
goblin
men, with snouts and tails and whiskers . . .

Then the sounds grew less, and Miss Ridley lifted her keys to give a knock upon the wood: ‘All clear, Mr Lawrence?’ The answer came—‘All clear!’—and the door was unfastened, to let the prisoners file through. The warder-cook stood by with his arms folded, watching the women and sucking at his cheek.

The kitchen seemed vast to me, and terribly warm after the chill, dark passage. Its air was thick, the scents on it not wonderful; they have sand upon the floor, and this was dark and clogged with fallen fluid. Down the centre of the room were ranged three broad tables, and on these were placed the women’s cans of soup and meat and trays of loaves. Miss Ridley waved the prisoners forward, two by two, and each seized the can or the tray for her ward, and staggered away with it. I walked back with Miss Manning’s women. We found the prisoners of the ground-floor cells all ready at their gates, holding their tin mugs and their trenchers, and while the soup was ladled out the matron called a prayer—‘
God-bless-our-meat-and-make-us-worthy-of-it!
’ or some rough thing like that—the women seemed to me almost entirely to ignore her. They only stood very quietly and pressed their faces to their gates, in an attempt to catch the progress of their dinners down the ward. When the dinners came they turned and carried them to their tables, then daintily sprinkled salt upon them from the boxes on their shelves.

They were given a meat soup with potatoes, and a six-ounce loaf—all of it horrible: the loaves coarse and brown and over-baked as little bricks, the potatoes boiled in their skins and streaked with black. The soup was cloudy, and had a layer of grease upon the top that thickened and whitened as the cans grew cool. The meat was pale, and too gristly for the women’s dull-edged knives to leave much mark upon it: I saw many prisoners tearing at their mutton with their teeth, solemn as savages.

They stood and took it readily enough, however; some only seemed to gaze rather mournfully at the soup as it was ladled out, others to finger their meat as if with suspicion. ‘Don’t you care for your dinner?’ I asked one woman I saw handling her mutton like this. She answered that she didn’t care to think whose hands might have been upon it, in the men’s gaol.

‘They handles filthy things,’ she said, ‘then jiggles their fingers in our soup, for sport . . .’

She said this two or three times, then would not talk to me. I left her mumbling into her mug, and joined the matrons at the entrance to the ward.

I talked a little with Miss Ridley then, about the women’s diet and the variations that are made in it—there being always fish served on a Friday, for example, on account of the large number of Roman Catholic prisoners; and on a Sunday, suet pudding. I said, Had they any Jewesses? and she answered that there were always a number of Jewesses, and they liked to make ‘a particular trouble’ over the preparation of their dishes. She had encountered that sort of behaviour, amongst the Jewesses, at other prisons.

‘You do find, however,’ she said to me, ‘that nonsense like that falls away in time. At least, in
my
gaol it does.’

When I describe Miss Ridley to my brother and to Helen, they smile. Helen said once, ‘You are exaggerating, Margaret!’, but Stephen shook his head. He said he sees police matrons like Miss Ridley all the time, at the courts. ‘They are a horrible breed,’ he said, ‘born to tyranny, born with the chains already swinging at their hips. Their mothers give them iron keys to suck, to make their teeth come.’

He bared his own teeth—which are straight, like Priscilla’s, where mine are rather crooked. Helen gazed at him and laughed.

I said then, ‘I am not sure. Suppose she wasn’t born to it, but rather sweats and labours to perfect the role. Suppose she has a secret album, cuttings from the Newgate Calendar. I am sure she has a book like that. She has put a label on it,
Notorious Prison Martinets
, and she takes it out and sighs over it, in the small dark hours of the Millbank night—like a clergyman’s daughter, with a fashion paper.’ That made Helen laugh louder, until her blue eyes brimmed with water and her lashes grew very dark.

But I remembered her laughter to-day, and thought of how Miss Ridley would gaze at me, if she knew how I used her to make my sister-in-law smile—the thought made me shudder. For on the wards at Millbank, of course, Miss Ridley is not comical at all.

Then again, I suppose that the matrons’ lives—even hers, even Miss Haxby’s—must be very miserable. They are kept as close to the gaol, almost, as if they were inmates there themselves. Their hours, Miss Manning assured me to-day, are the hours of scullery-maids: they are given rooms in the prison in which to rest, but are often too exhausted from their day’s patrolling of the wards to do anything in their leisure time but fall upon their beds and sleep. Their meals are prepared in the prison kitchen, just like the women’s; and their duties are hard ones. ‘You ask to see Miss Craven’s arm,’ they said to me. ‘She is bruised from her shoulder to her wrist, where a girl caught her a blow, last week, in the prison laundry.’ But Miss Craven herself, when I did encounter her a little later, seemed almost as coarse as the women she must guard. They were all ‘as rough as rats’, she said, and she was disgusted with the sight of them. When I asked her would the work ever be so hard as to drive her to some other occupation? she looked bitter. ‘I should like to know,’ she said, ‘what else I am fit for, after eleven years at Millbank!’ No, she will be walking the wards, she supposes, until she drops down dead.

Only Mrs Jelf, the matron of the highest wards, seems to me to be really kind, and half-way gentle. She is desperately pale and careworn, might be any age between twenty-five and forty; but she had no complaint to make of prison life, except to say that many of the stories she must hear, upon the wards, were very tragic.

I went up to her floor at the end of the dinner-hour, just as the bell was sounding that sends the women back to their work. I said, ‘I must begin really to be a Visitor to-day, Mrs Jelf, and I hope you will help me do it, for I am rather nervous.’ I should never have admitted such a thing at Cheyne Walk.

She said, ‘I will be happy to advise you, miss’, and she took me to a prisoner she said she knew would be glad to have me go to her. This proved to be an elderly woman—the oldest woman in the gaol, indeed—a Star-Class prisoner named Ellen Power. When I went into her cell she rose, and offered me her chair. I said of course that she must keep it, but she would not sit before me—in the end both of us stood. Mrs Jelf watched us, then stepped away and nodded. ‘I must lock the gate on you, miss,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But when you are ready to move on, you must call me.’ She said a matron can hear a calling woman, wherever she is upon the ward. Then she turned and drew closed the gate behind her; and then she fastened it, I stood and watched the key turn in the lock.

I remembered then that it was she who had had the keeping of me in my frightening dreams of Millbank, last week.

When I gazed at Power, I found her smiling. She has been three years at the gaol, and is due for release in four months’ time; she was imprisoned there for managing a bawdy-house. When she told me this, however, she tossed her head. ‘Bawdy-house!’ she said. ‘It was a parlour only; boys and girls would sometimes like to come and kiss in it, that’s all. Why, I had my own grand-daughter running in and out of there, keeping it tidy, and there was always flowers, fresh flowers in a vase. Bawdy-house! The boys must have somewhere to take their sweethearts, mustn’t they?—else, they must kiss them in the very road. And if they was to hand me a shilling when they went out, for the kindness, and the flowers—well, is
that
a crime?’

It didn’t sound like much of one, when put like that; but I remembered all the matrons’ cautions, and said that sentencing of course was something I could have no opinion on. She lifted her hand, which I saw was very swollen at the knuckle. She answered: Yes, she knew it. It was ‘a subject for the men’.

I stayed with her for half an hour. Once or twice she drew me back again towards the niceties of bawdiness; at last, however, I nudged her to less controversial topics. I remembered drab Susan Pilling, the prisoner I had spoken with on Miss Manning’s ward. How, I asked Power, did
she
like Millbank routines, and the Millbank costume? She looked thoughtful for a second, then tossed her head. ‘The routines I cannot answer for,’ she said, ‘as never having been inside another gaol; but I imagine they are harsh enough—you may write that down’ (I had my note-book with me), ‘I don’t care who reads that. The costume, I will say right out, is very nasty.’ She said it bothers her that they send their suits to the prison laundry, and never get the same set back a second time—‘and some come very stained, miss, yet we must wear them or go cold. Then again, the flannel under-things are awful
rough
, and tend to scratch; and they are that washed and beaten that they ain’t like flannel at all, but like some awful thin stuff, what don’t
warm
you but, as I say, only makes you
scratch
. The shoes I have no quarrel with; but the want of stays, if you’ll pardon my saying it, is a trial to some of the younger women. It don’t bother an aged creature like me so much, but the little girls—well I should say they do feel the want of stays, miss, rather bad . . .’

She went on like this, and seemed to like to talk to me; and yet, too, talking was troublesome to her. Her speech was halting. She sometimes hesitated, and often licked her lips or passed her hand across them, and sometimes coughed. I thought at first that she did this out of some sort of consideration to me—who stood before her, now and then setting her conversation down, long-hand, upon the pages of my book. But then, the pauses came so queerly, and I thought again of Susan Pilling, who had also stammered and coughed and seemed to grope for ordinary words, and whom I had guessed to be only rather simple-minded . . . At last, as I moved to the gate and wished Power farewell, and as she again stumbled over some common word of blessing, she placed her swollen hand against her cheek and shook her head.