London - Edward Rutherfurd [578]
Henry had come to see her then. A week later – dear God, she would remember that to her dying day – they had gone on hunger strike. She had never known what real hunger could feel like. And then the awful force-feeding: the powerful hands dragging open her clenched jaw; the threats to break her teeth. That cruel tube rammed down her throat, the awful searing agony, her throttled screams, the raw, burning pain that remained in her throat, hour after hour, until they came to do it again. The third time she fainted.
It had come as a shock, when she finally emerged, physically broken, to realize that the country was drifting towards war. After all, Germany might be an imperial rival to Britain now, but the two countries had always seemed to be natural friends. The king and the German Kaiser were cousins. Germany might be jealous and aggressive, the politics of Central Europe might be a tinder box, but somehow things would be patched up. Who could have foreseen that in a welter of botched diplomacy and misunderstanding the powers of Europe would get themselves into a position where they were forced to declare a war that none of them wanted? And who could have realized that after a skirmish or two the whole silly business would not have been over in a few months?
It had been the end of July 1914, just a week before war was declared. Henry had been due to go up to Oxford that autumn and even then none of them could believe that a war would prevent it. Within the family there had been a truce since Violet’s release. Her father was really very old now, shocked by her treatment in prison and desiring only to see his family living in peace. They had all been reunited at Bocton and for some months she had made only a few trips to London. On one of these she had decided to take all three children to the British Museum. As usual she had led them up to its grand portals – only to be refused admission.
“I’m sorry, madam,” the doorman explained, “but no ladies are being allowed in. It’s those terrible suffragettes,” he confided. “We’re afraid they’ll set fire to the place or start smashing the glass cases.”
“I will take responsibility for this lady,” Henry had offered, and so, after some hesitation, the doorman had let them in.
“By the way, mother,” he had whispered, as soon as they were inside, “which glass case do you want to smash first?”
Dear Henry: a month later he had volunteered and was in uniform.
She had discovered what mustard gas could do when he had finally been invalided home after Ypres in 1915. “I suppose I should be glad to be alive,” he told her wryly. Indeed, had he been older, he probably would have died. “These very young men have hearts that will take almost anything,” the doctor told her. But he was a shadow, grey and almost lifeless all the same. And so he had stayed all through the long years of the Great War, while others were dying in the huge futility of trench warfare. By the end, Violet scarcely knew a single family who had not lost someone.
The war brought one other great change. So severe was the shortage of men at home that women stepped in to do their jobs – and were welcomed. They worked in the munitions factories and on the railways, they served behind counters, worked the telephones, toiled and dug. The Suffragettes had given up their campaign for the duration of the war; their service, it soon appeared, made their case for them. As people saw what women were doing, even the most stalwart conservatives found their own opposition to women’s votes melting away. Violet knew her cause had finally triumphed when old Edward who had been taken ill and had to spend a few days in hospital told her: “The whole place was run by women, Violet! Porters, ambulance drivers, everything except the doctors. Very well run too.”
In 1917, with hardly a murmur against it, Asquith, the Prime Minister, gave women the vote, declaring: “They have earned it.”
The following year the Great War ended – and with it, Violet had supposed, the terrible loss of life.
Whether