The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [334]
Having suffered greatly yourself, I expect you don’t want anyone else to suffer, and this is what makes you a socialist. It is also my point of view, but I am only a woman. I don’t like to see my husband suffer in his longing to be fair, just and kind to both sides in this tragic quarrel.
The letter continues on the same note, which William Trotter would have been able to identify as a making of human moral structures into tangible Things, where they are not. She received no answer. The strikes went on.
So did the suffrage protests. Miss Emily Davison was arrested in Parliament Street holding a piece of linen, saturated with paraffin, burning brightly, which she was inserting into the pillar box of the Post Office. The Prime Minister and a gathering of friends and family, returning from a Scottish holiday, were jostled at Charing Cross by a crowd of shouting suffragettes. The party fought back: Violet Asquith “had the satisfaction of crunching the fingers of one of the hussies.” It was Violet, wielding a golf club, who had driven off a group of women attempting to strip the Prime Minister of his clothes at Lossiemouth Golf Course. Asquith wrote in a letter that he himself resembled St. Paul at Ephesus “fighting with beasts—Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras dire—as Milton says somewhere.”
In April, that year, the City was snared in the invisible strands of the wireless. There were posters everywhere announcing that the new, invincible wonder-ship, the Titanic, had struck an iceberg in mid-ocean. The ship sent radio messages to the land, which after a time became confused and fragmentary and then ceased. A rumour began that the passengers were saved and the ship being towed into Halifax. The City went to bed quite cheerful, and woke to disaster in the morning. Among the drowned was W. T. Stead, the crusading journalist, who had so long ago purchased a young girl for sex, and exposed a business of procuration and abuse.
The Webbs returned from their global journey and took in the changing world. The Committee for Reform of the Poor Law was wound up, and replaced by the New Fabian Research Bureau. The Society moved closer to the Independent Labour Party and campaigned for a national minimum wage. Ameliorating the condition of the poor was changing to a syndicalist ideal of revolt.
Individuals were in odd states of mind. Rupert Brooke had taken Ka Cox to Munich and ended his heterosexual virginity, which he was convinced was causing a nervous breakdown. They returned—Ka pregnant, nervously exhausted, Rupert on the edge of madness. Madness was cured by a drug to repress sexual desire and by a regime of immobility and “stuffing”—lamb cutlets, beef, bread, potatoes. Rupert wrote wild letters of anti-Semitic nausea to his friends, and told Virginia Woolf, also enduring a breakdown, also being “stuffed,” the tale of a Rugby choir where
Two fourteen-year-old choirboys arranged a plan during the Choral Service. At the end they skipped round and watched the children enter. They picked out the one whose looks pleased them best, a youth of ten. They waited in seclusion till the end of the Children’s Service. They pounced on their victim, as he came out, took him, each by a hand, and led him to the vestry. There while the Service for Men Only proceeded, they removed the lower parts of his clothing and buggered him, turn by turn. His protestations were drowned by the Organ pealing out whatever hymns are suitable to men only. Subsequently they let him go. He has been in bed ever since with a rupture. They were arrested and flung, presumably, into a Reformatory. He may live.
The tone of this is not quite the insouciant tone of the Bloomsbury/ Apostles school of buggery chatter. And it was written to a woman temporarily mad. To his neo-Pagan friends he was writing diatribes against Lytton Strachey’s filth and prurience, not unlike D. H. Lawrence