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Morel sewed canvas mailbags in a dust-filled room and wove rope into hammocks and mats for the navy. Sometimes he had to carry 100-pound slabs of jute to the workshop. The U-boat toll on Britain's food imports led to a cutback in prison rations, which, for hard-labor convicts, were minimal to begin with. With coal in short supply, little was diverted to heat prisons. Supper at Pentonville, eaten alone in one's cell, was, Morel wrote, "a piece of bread, half-a-pint of coldish porridge at the bottom of a tin which earlier in the day may have contained red-herrings and still bears traces of them, and a pint of hot, greasy cocoa which one learns to regard as a veritable nectar of the gods, especially in cold weather." At night you could expect only "the cold of a cold cell—like nothing on earth. Nothing seems proof against it."

Morel was a powerfully built man of 44, but prison broke his health. "I saw E. D. Morel yesterday for the first time since he came out," Bertrand Russell wrote to a friend the following year, "and was impressed by the seriousness of a six months sentence.... He collapsed completely, physically and mentally, largely as the result of insufficient food. He says one only gets three quarters of an hour for reading in the whole day—the rest of the time is spent on prison work."

Although the food and working conditions were no better for COs, they at least were imprisoned together and could furtively communicate. (The underground newspaper that circulated in Winchester Prison was called the Whisperer.) "My first experience of the prison technique for overcoming the silence rule was in chapel," Fenner Brockway wrote. "We were singing one of the chants. Instead of the words of the Prayer Book, I heard these:—

"Welcome, Fenner boy,

When did you get here?

How did you like the skilly [gruel] this morn?

Lord have mercy upon us!"

The key during chapel, Brockway learned, was to sing or chant a message to the person next to you without turning your head or giving any sign of recognition that could draw the guards' attention. Prisoners smuggled books to each other in the mailbags they sewed, and even played chess; at one point more than half the COs in Maidstone Prison took part in a chess tournament. When a move might be whispered to your opponent only once a day, games could last a month or more. But punishment for infractions was severe: Brockway was put on bread and water for six days when the authorities discovered his toilet-paper newspaper. (He had by then managed to publish more than 100 issues, including a special memorial number on the second anniversary of the death of his mentor, Keir Hardie.) In one prison he was in, there were periodic executions of common criminals. "The place was deadly silent, each man listening for the opening of the door of the condemned cell, for the sound of the steps to the gallows, and then for the striking of the fatal hour on neighbouring clocks and the sound of the tolling bell which told that it was all over."

Also behind bars this grim autumn were Alice Wheeldon and her daughter and son-in-law. Alice was doing her hard-labor sentence in the Aylesbury Gaol, where the peephole on every cell door was at the center of a painted eye, complete with lash, brow, and pupil, eternally staring at the prisoner. The prospect of ten years in such conditions made her furious; she swore at the guards and disobeyed orders not to talk to other prisoners. She was also indignant at being strip-searched, and at the way Winnie's prison work assignment, as well as her own, was changed from the garden to the laundry, to avoid what officials called "undesirable association" with other prisoners. She called the prison governor, a guard dutifully noted, a "flaming vampire." Several times she went on hunger strikes, as did Winnie and Alf Mason; Alice knocked a cup out of a doctor's hand and broke it when he tried to feed her. But beneath the anger and defiance was despair: warders heard her weeping at night.

On December 21, 1917, she embarked