The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [288]
40
In February 1907, Hedda Wellwood was seventeen. She was again at home in Todefright, having left Bedales School with a reasonable, but not scintillating, set of exam passes. She did not know what to do, and both Humphry and Olive were too preoccupied to help her. Humphry was deeply, and deliciously, embroiled in the crisis in the Fabian Society, brought on by the imperious ambition of H. G. Wells. He was also in love with the telephone—one had been installed in the offices of the Fabian Society, and he was seriously thinking of installing a private line in Todefright. Women were now a quarter of the Fabian membership, and Humphry suggested to Hedda that she attend meetings of the Nursery, which was more revolutionary and anarchical than its parent group. Olive, writing as she had never written—and writing in collaboration with Steyning and the Sterns—said vaguely that she had supposed Hedda would be applying to Newnham, or the LSE. Hedda frowned, and said she had a right to a bit of time to think. Violet said that she could make herself useful whilst she was thinking, like Phyllis. Hedda put on her coat and hat and said she was going up to London to see some friends.
Hedda’s friends were workers devoted to Votes for Women. She had discovered the Women’s Social and Political Union, and went to their new headquarters in Clements’ Inn, off the Strand, where she helped with letter-writing, poster-making and fund-raising. Olive, like many successful women at that time, despite her Fabian membership, did not pay much attention to the agitation for the Vote, though, unlike Beatrice Webb, she had never been silly enough to support the petitions against the Vote organised by Mrs. Humphry Ward and other ladies. Dorothy, Griselda and Florence wanted women to be able to study and work as they chose, but did not see the Vote as representing an automatic open gate to intellectual and financial freedom. Hedda was named for an Ibsen heroine whose savage life was sacrificed to meaninglessness. She had a capacity for indignation, and, as was later to be discovered, by her and by others, for rage. The women agitators knew who they were, and knew what mattered. This mattered to Hedda.
The WSPU had organised marches on Parliament in 1906, when it was learned that there was nothing in the King’s Speech about female enfranchisement. One hundred women invaded the House of Commons, and fought, with umbrellas and boots, to gain admittance to the Chamber. They were fought back by the police—with considerable roughness—and carried away dishevelled, leaving a trail of hatpins, hairpins and bonnets. Ten women were arrested, and refused to pay fines. They were imprisoned. When they came out, they were feasted by the other women. Hedda was intensely moved by all this. Here was something that mattered, a fight, a cause, a way to make oneself into a single-minded speeding arrow.
At first, she only helped in the office. On February 9th, 1907, the non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies organised a mass march from a Parliament of Women to the Houses of Parliament. There was a large gathering of women, composed of forty suffrage societies, including many who had come from the North and the Midlands. There were many fashionable ladies, in landaus and motor cars. They were dressed in black and carried banners.
The weather was foul. Heavy rain poured and swirled in a slapping, chill wind. The skirts of the women, rich and poor, were soaked and draggled. Their cheeks and noses burned as the cold sleet bit. Mud in the parks, mud in the gutters, mud liquefying the dung in the roads, sucked at them. They went on, in their thousands. Mounted police were used against them. They rode down the women on the footpaths, jostled them and shoved them under the hooves and wheels. The women went on.
Hedda felt as she felt, walking in the countryside, when the weather turned wild. First, you put your head down, and try to protect the dry places inside your damp garments. Then, as damp becomes