Women of Courage (7 page)

‘Look at us all here now! How many of you would be in prison at all if you were paid a decent wage by men instead of half what they get? If you had a proper education, if there were women lawyers as well as men — if the laws were made by women? If women had the V . . .’

‘Sal would!’

‘What?’ Sarah shook her head, confused, as the fat woman’s laughter interrupted her. She was pointing at one of the two women sitting beside Sarah — a slim woman in a blue print dress, handsomer than most of the others, who might have been pretty if it were not for a certain hard strength to her chin, and the plucked eyebrows which Sarah loathed.

‘Sal likes doing it, lady! Can’t get enough! She’d be ‘ere whoever made the laws — wouldn’t yer, Sal?’

‘You shut your mouth, you old pissbag! If I had a decent flat of me own I wouldn’t need to be ‘ere at all, ‘course I wouldn’t! Just because no one but a blind drunk beggar’s been near you in the last . . .’

The two women got up, facing each other, and in a moment the cell erupted into conflict, which lasted until two large policemen waded in to restore order. Quite how serious the turmoil had been Sarah was not sure, but it was obvious no one was prepared to listen to her arguments any more. She relapsed into silence, and desultory conversation resumed all around her. After a while she became aware that the two women beside her were discussing children. Sal, the woman next to her, was advising her friend about her daughter.

‘I told you, didn’t I? They’ll look after her. She’s a looker, ain’t she?’

‘I know that, but not yet. She can show it off if she wants to, but she’s just a kid. Thirteen next July. I wanted something better.’

‘Like what? Look, face it. She’s got six months now to fend for herself without you — what’s the choice? She could go into service and get up at five every morning shovellin’ ash out of grates, and then scrubbing floors and polishing silver all day till eight or nine at night — would that make her happy? Or she could get a job wearing the skin off her fingers stuffin’ bristles into brushes ten hours a day for one and six a week — is that what you want?’

‘It’s straight, in’ it?’

‘Yeah, it’s straight. Straight way to death by exhaustion, I say. I know, I done it, dearie. Look, if Mavis has come and asked you already, your kid must be a looker, mustn’t she? It’s her chance, ain’t it — are you going to stand in her way? That Mavis, she may look like a pig but she gets some of the best clients in the business, she does. Listen, there’s a kid I know, Rachel Hargreaves. Mavis took her on a couple of years ago. Found her in that charity hostel when her ma was in Holloway — Lord knows what Mavis was doing there. Anyhow, she started her out at that place in Hackney, Red Lion Street, the one that doctor owns, Armstrong. Just like your little one she was, couldn’t have been more’n thirteen then, and now I swear she earns more’n I do. In demand all over the place, top hotels, Kensington, the lot — sends her old ma four or five quid a week, never mind the rest.’

The other woman wavered. ‘I could do with that, God’s truth I could. And my Linda would send it to me, she’s a good girl, she is.’

‘Well, there you are then. Play your cards right and you never need work again.
And
you’ll get a good bonus for her being pure.’

The other woman sighed. ‘I know, I know. I just wish it could wait a year or so, that’s all.’

‘Well, it would have waited, if you hadn’t quarrelled with your Dan and got forced out on the street again. But you’re getting on, dearie, we all are, you got to look out for number one. At least this way your kid has a good lie in, keeps her looks, and has a
chance
of going somewhere . . .’

The cell door opened, three more women came in, and Sarah lost the rest of the conversation as she had to move up along the bench. But she had heard enough. There could be no misunderstanding what the two women had been talking about. They were talking about selling a young girl into prostitution through the services of some woman called Mavis. And they had even mentioned a doctor called Armstrong — where was the place he owned? Red Lion Street, Hackney. Could there be two doctors involved in this with the same name? Surely not! It was too much of a coincidence to be a mistake.

I suppose this is the evidence Alice Watson wanted, Sarah thought. If we could just produce those two women in court, get them to swear on oath what I have just heard them saying, then the scandal would be proven. Or even just tell Alice the name of the street in Hackney and the fact that Martin Armstrong owns a — a brothel there. If it is him . . . All we would need then would be the names of the men who are actually paying to seduce — is that the word?

Paying to deflower — to destroy — to ruin
thirteen year old girls!

Oh Jonathan, Jonathan! In the overcrowded cell Sarah felt herself trembling, sweating, scarcely able to breathe. She tried to imagine what would happen in a bedroom in that house in Kensington when a man — a mature man, bearded perhaps, distinguished, socially secure, thirty-eight years of age perhaps,
my husband
! — came into a bedroom with a thirteen-year-old girl. A child who might be his daughter . . .

It can’t happen.

It does. Those women were talking about it, just now. Men pay extra because the girl is pure, a child, a virgin. Some of these men must be fathers, with daughters of their own. As that woman is a mother, who is selling her girl.

Not my Jonathan. Please God, let it not be him.

Let there be some mistake. Oh dear Father in heaven —
why is God a father, would He have done this too?

My father did . . .

Sarah sat very still, trembling, her hands clasped so tightly in her lap that her fingers were white and bloodless. She closed her eyes and tried to pray, not knowing what she believed in any more.

Certain only that hell was all around her . . .

At four o’clock they were marched out, thirty women together, to the Black Maria. Sarah had been arrested twice before, but for some reason she had always been taken to prison in a cab, never in one of these until now. The Black Maria was a motor coach, a little longer than an omnibus, but with a single deck and no windows. One by one, two policemen ushered the women in through the doors at the back.

When it came to Sarah’s turn, panic seized her. There was no room inside! The door at the back opened into a long narrow corridor, almost entirely filled by the bulk of the policeman crouching in it. His head was bent because of the low roof, and he was holding open the door to a small cubicle, a cupboard, on the right.

‘Here you are, Ma’am. First class passengers step this way!’

‘But — I can’t!’ She began to back out. It was too small, too cramped!

‘Here, George, catch her back! This one’s leery!’

The policeman behind caught her waist, and between the two of them they manhandled her through the little door into the cupboard, like grooms dealing with a skittish horse. ‘It’s all right, dear, you’ll get used to it!’

‘But I can’t! I can’t breathe! I . . .’

The door closed in front of her. They had sat her on a small plank, facing the closed door and the corridor she could no longer see. She had to sit, there was no choice. The cubicle was not high enough for her to stand up, or wide enough for her to turn round in. Her knees touched the door in front of her. And it was quite dark. She heard the door at the back of the vehicle slam shut, and total darkness enveloped her.

There were women all around her, in other cubicles, but she could not see them. One or two were cursing and crying, but several called out mockingly to each other. They have been here before, they are not afraid, Sarah thought. If they can bear it I can — I must. I can’t set out to battle for women’s rights and then not be able to bear what a common streetwalker can.

It was the darkness that saved her. After a moment’s panic she found it relaxing, comforting even. Do nothing, she thought. Feel nothing, don’t move. And then, as her eyes grew accustomed to it, she saw a marvellous thing.

On the back of the door in front of her, an image appeared. Very faint at first, a blur of light where there had been utter blackness before, but then it grew clearer. It was round, about the size of her hand, and there were shapes moving in it. As she felt the Black Maria lurch out of the gates of the police station into the street, the shapes of the images in front of her changed, growing one minute dark, then lighter again, and with little blurs of different colours moving this way and that.

It fascinated her, and she forgot to be afraid. What could it be? The images seemed to be moving along the top of the picture, while the lower part was brown or red, like the upper stories of buildings. Very like . . . In fact, they even had square shapes like windows which moved across them. And below, something blue, like a streak of sky — except that it was right at the bottom of the picture instead of at the top!

Then something clicked in her memory and she realised what she was looking at. She had seen something like this before, as a child. Her father had taken her and her little sister Deborah to an exhibition of photography, and there had been something — what was it called? A
camera obscura
— that was it! She had sat inside one with Deborah, he had drawn the curtain, and when their eyes had become accustomed to the darkness the same thing had grown on the wall in front of them — a picture of the world outside, but upside down, because the light came in through a pinhole in the wall behind them and changed places somehow.

Sarah laughed, and the panic drained out of her like bathwater. She felt clear, clean, relaxed. That was it — the little figures moving busily across the top of the picture were people on the pavement, and there were vehicles bustling past them, upside down! For a while she watched them, entranced, smiling to herself in relief. The discovery had released her from fear, like a children’s story at the edge of night.

But it was like childhood in another way too. It came back to her now, with the pain of a memory that had not been released for over twenty years, what it had been like in that
camera obscura
. At first she and Deborah had been fascinated by the tiny figures; but just as now, they had been blurred, difficult to make out clearly. And when you did make them out, they were only ordinary people in the street, after all. So she and Deborah had started to talk, in hushed whispers, about a secret they had learnt about their father.

What was it, that secret? The memory came back to her with such painful clarity — she could even feel the print dress with ruffled sleeves she had worn, feel the way her feet only just touched the floor from the high seat. How old had she been? Eleven? Yes, she had had her birthday a few days before and Deborah had given her the butterfly brooch she was wearing. She could see it now, so painfully clear! And outside the booth, her father, in tweed coat and flannels, for it was a holiday, and he was trying to be jolly. She could even smell his cigar.

But what was the secret they had talked of?

The Black Maria lurched over a bump in the road, and the picture on the back of the door in front of her changed. They were going over the river, Sarah realised. She could see ships. But for the moment it didn’t matter. Her mind made this memory seem immensely important.

Deborah had . . . met someone, that was it! A woman — the two girls had been watching a woman in the pinhole picture inside the
camera obscura
, going along upside down in front of them, and she had been wearing a purple coat — that was what had reminded Deborah of it. Deborah had seen this woman a week or so before, and she had been totally mad. Deborah hadn’t actually spoken to the woman — she had been playing with a hoop in the park at the time — but she had seen the woman come up to their father and speak to him. She was rather a poor woman, Deborah could see that, but she had been wearing this gaudy purple coat which made her stand out. And she had called her father by his Christian name — George — just like that, as though she knew him! She had even put her arm through his, tried to walk down the path with him; it was terribly funny!

And all the time Deborah had been bowling her hoop along between the trees, watching, and seen their father go awfully red, because of course it made him look ever so silly. Then he had given the woman some money and spoken sharply to her, to make her go away. When Deborah had asked him about it he had said she was a poor madwoman, who didn’t know who she was, and ought to be in hospital.

Yes, that was it! It came back to Sarah now, all in a rush. She remembered Deborah telling her about it in the
camera obscura
, and the two of them had started giggling. Their father had pulled back the curtain to ask what was so funny and they had danced out, still giggling, linked his arms, one on each side, and dragged him away to the ice-cream stall. They were both pretending to be that silly woman, without letting their father know. What a strange daddy he was! All you had to do was come up to him, link his arm, call him George, and he would give you money. Or ice-cream.

It was an exquisitely painful memory. Sarah could even see her father — young, as he had been then, with brown hair and slim waist instead of the paunch and bald head he developed later. No sign of that embarrassing rash on his neck which he had covered up with a scarf as he grew older.

The rash that was the first visible symptom of the syphilis that killed him when she was nineteen . . . The shock had turned her mother into a permanent hypochondriac who always wore black and hardly ever left the house until she died too, nine years later. It had made Sarah fear and distrust all men, until she had met Jonathan.

The most painful thing of all, was how she had once loved her father. So long ago; she had been so innocent. He had been a jolly man who bought them ice-creams and swung them up on his shoulders and made them laugh, and never looked worried or tired or ill as their mother often did. That was before she had learned what men were really like. Before she had learned what he had done to her mother . . .