The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [337]
Christabel telegraphed from Paris. Sylvia was to burn down Nottingham Castle.
She refused. She didn’t believe in burning things down, or destroying works of art.
But there were those who did.
They wrote each other coded telegrams. “Fluff, feathers, wax, tar violets poppies powder.” They bought and secreted cans of paraffin and petrol. They put cayenne pepper and molten lead through letter-boxes. They grew braver and wilder as 1913 became 1914. In the first seven months of that year 107 buildings were set on fire. They burned castles in Scotland and set about the inherited culture of solid Britain. In 1913 they ripped valuable paintings in Manchester and smashed the orchid hothouse in Kew Gardens. They blew up Lloyd George’s new house at Walton-on-the-Hill. They cut telephone wires and slid pebbles into railway connections, to derail trains. They showed less and less reverence—ancient churches were burned down, mediaeval Bibles mutilated, the Carnegie Library in Birmingham burned. Like the anarchists before them, they exploded a bomb in Westminster Abbey and flooded the great organ in the august Albert Hall. They themselves were bashed, bullied, defrocked by police and angry crowds. Their breasts were twisted, their hair torn out. They interrupted King and Prime Minister with determined harangues and the suffragette anthem, which was sung to the tune of the Marseillaise. Mary Richardson set out methodically to mutilate Velasquez’s self-regarding, elegantly fleshly Venus, a painting she disliked. She waited until the watching detectives took a lunch-break (one was merely hiding his eyes behind a newspaper) and rushed at the painted woman, and her protective glass, with an axe. She got in one blow. The detective looked instinctively at the skylight. The attendant skidded on the polished floor. Four more blows were struck. German tourists helped to bring Miss Richardson down, by aiming Baedekers accurately at the back of her neck. And then she was back in Holloway prison, facing force-feeding.
These stories were circulated, in shocked whispers, with wild laughter. Emily Davison’s sacrifice seemed to mean that all women were called to act. The idea of “doing something” crept insidiously into Hedda’s mind. Sewing was not enough, marching was not enough, posting pepper and glue through respectable doors, or spreading tin-tacks on office floors, was not enough. An act was required.
The problem was, she was afraid. At first, the problem was to think of an appropriate act, and then, one day, when there was discussion of Emily Davison’s life, the act rose in her brain, golden and gleaming, quite literally, in the dark.
Emily Davison—whose speeches had been long and rambling, whose presence had often been creepy and irritating—had become sainted. She had once had the very clever idea of hiding at night in the House of Commons, and springing out—on the day of the census—to claim that Place as her address. She had been found in the broom-cupboard by a kindly cleaner, and given tea and toast and sent out to make her way to her real home. She had found other ways of making sure of prison. In prison she had leaped like an acrobat from a balcony, to what would have been certain death, if she had not been saved by wire netting. Carried upstairs, she had leaped again. And again, dashing herself on the iron staircase.
There were tales of suffering in cages, of force-feeding that amounted to torture—wooden gags between the teeth, or metal clamps, breaking them, the terrible tube forced in, whilst the warders held the struggling woman, by the ears, by the breast, by the hair, by the hands and legs. And the