Knowing that we had yet a long day before us, we in turns took advantage of the lavatory end of the cell, the others mounting guard in a group round the grating to ensure privacy. This was my first experience of the publicity attending this process throughout prison life. It is, without doubt, one of the greatest trials to the better-educated prisoner; my sympathy went out especially to the younger members of our Deputation and to all young prisoners.
At about 2.30 there came a jangling of keys, rattling of bolts, and the cell doors were thrown open. We came out and lined up in the passage outside, and our names were called out in the order of our arrest. There were again some delays and waiting in different passages. One seemed to be dealt with much like goods at a custom house, certain facts about one being recurringly inquired after, investigated, noted in a book, and the goods then passed on for the same process to take place elsewhere. Eventually we filed out into a courtyard where the prison van, “Black Maria,” as the hull of a great dead ship, awaited her cargo. The grim appearance of that celebrated vehicle had always been a signal to me, when passing it in the street, for having to repress an instinct to follow it, an awed reverence for the distressful plight of those inside it, an almost maddening craving to know what had been the cause of their law-breaking, the nature of their crimes, how far their present degradation could morally uplift them, what was happening to their human belongings, what would happen to themselves when they were once more free, whether indignation, revolt, dull indifference, remorse, or the harrowingly abject penitence so frequent in suffering beings was uppermost in their minds. Now I myself was one of the criminals. I should know the sensations from actual experience, literally from within. Of course I in no sense regarded myself as a criminal, and was aware of a detached spectator’s commentary running through my mind all the while. It suddenly struck me, perhaps, after all, this is a sensation common to many criminals. A good number of them no doubt either know they have not, or think they have not, committed the offence for which they are condemned. Many, while admitting their acts, probably have a moral standard with regard to them quite different from that which controls the law. Others, perhaps, like myself, think their acts were entirely justified and right; some, again, would feel consciously and aggressively at war with all recognised standards.
I had several times seen men arrested and male prisoners in the streets, travelling, outside prisons and police courts, but I had never seen any women prisoners. Suddenly the picture of them and of women’s crimes came into my mind with a rush. Who were the women who, day by day, trod the very stones on which my feet now stood, whose eyes would look up, a few minutes after mine, to the terrifying form of Black Maria? How and why had they broken the law, in what way were they enemies of Society? The impress of their feet seemed to be one with mine, and up from that criminals’ pavement their mind seemed to get into my own. Child-burdened women who were left without money, without the means or opportunity or physical power to earn it, who had stolen in order to save their lives and that of their children,—thieves! Women who from their childhood had been trained to physical shame, women who at their first adolescence had borne children by their own fathers under circumstances when resistance was inconceivable. Women who had been seduced by their employers. Women deceived and deserted by their friends and lovers. Women employed by their own parents for wage-earning prostitution. Women reduced to cruelty after being for years the unconsulted churning mills for producing in degradation and want and physical suffering the incessant annual babies of an undesired family. Women who had been stolen in their bloom and imprisoned for purposes of immoral gain. If amongst such women, such criminals, there are many who are professionally thieves, prostitutes “by choice,” immoral “past redemption” as it is called, sodden with drink, undermined by drug taking, their maternity transformed into cruelty, their brains worn to madness, what cause is there for surprise or reproach, and what hope is there of cure by imprisonment? Before they took to these muddy lanes have they not been driven out from the fair road? What was their training, what their choice from the start? Are not the doors of the professions and many trades still barred to them? Their right to work, a fair value for their work, is it not denied to them? When they undertake the burdensome but joyous labour of maternity, is there any security to them of physical respect and choice, of economic security, of rewardful honour and social influence? Where is the recognition of the woman’s great service, how is she helped to render it suitably and efficiently; does the State, the race, the family, the individual, see to it that she has her reward?
I moved forward after the others. Black Maria looked like a sort of hearse with elephantiasis—warranted to carry many coffins concealed in her body and to bear them to as many graves. She fairly set one shuddering. To get inside her seemed a sort of living death, certainly, most literally, entry into another world. For a moment I hesitated and thought, “Suppose I refuse to get in?” The mere notion called up the forces arrayed against one and made me realise my utter helplessness. The gates, the bolts, locks and chains, the cells we had just left, the court and magistrate, the high walls all around, the enormous policemen on every hand. The one who stood at the open door of the van said, “Come along, please.” His words were civil enough and linked one back to the normal outer world, but his voice and beckoning gesture were authoritative and the sense of physical power seemed to wedge one in. It was clear that henceforth all one’s actions would be initiated and carried out without choice, solely by necessity of obedience.
The policeman who had special charge of us for the journey was a man of jovial disposition, and he cracked witticisms as he played his ’bus-conductor’s part. We readily responded to his mood. An antidote was needed to the grimness of the proceedings, but the merriment was by no means all forced. As soon as I laid aside the remembrance of the real prisoners and limited the outlook to that of our own immediate experience, the comic element was rampant and seemed to dig one in the ribs, making me laugh with heartiness. We were all, it seemed, playing some ludicrous, babyish game, unsuited to our years, but all the more absurd for that. The ’bus-conductor-policeman got inside; we followed him one by one into the narrow central gangway that forms the spinal marrow of Black Maria. On either side are tiny separate cells, like the compartments of a cupboard, the doors of which when opened completely obstruct the passage so that only one prisoner at a time can be admitted or released. On first getting in it seems quite dark, and the sensation of being rapidly pushed into a very small hole, squeezed back, the door shut and locked to the accompanying sound of banging and much jangling and turning of keys, is extremely disagreeable. The cell contains a seat and is ventilated by a grating in the door, by groups of small holes on either side, in the floor at one’s feet, and by a wire-netted ventilator running under the roof of the van, as in a ’bus. The cell was so small that my legs, which are long, had to be tucked up almost under my chin; I could imagine that in hot weather the want of air would be oppressive, but though the sense of being so closely confined was disagreeable, the draughts from the ventilators seemed to play upon one almost excessively and I felt very cold. When the cells were all filled the passage was duly packed with prisoners, standing one against the other like tinned sardines. As the van was not high enough to admit of standing upright, this must have been a most tiring position. Presently there was a final shutting and locking of the outer door, in which was a small grating window, as we know it from the outside. Then followed a rumbling jerk and Black Maria’s great overcharged body began her long, jolting drive to Holloway. The sensation reminded me of a bathing machine when it sets out for the sea, but the noise and jolting and darkness were all greater in degree. We tried to communicate with each other, to find out who was in which cell and who was standing in the passage. We started singing the Women’s Marseillaise and other of our songs. Those in the passage managed to put a scarf with our colours through the ventilator under the coachman’s seat, others passed a scarf through the grating window of the door at the opposite end. These feats were, of course, communicated to the whole Maria-full of us, and the news that the police were allowing the scarves to remain was greeted with much cheering. Possibly, the driver was unconscious of his magnanimous action, since the scarf end, I expect, flowed out somewhere near his feet. The colours every now and then were seen and loudly cheered by friends in the street. This woke in me an appreciation of the colours and understanding of their meaning in a way I had not grasped before. There is so little need for symbolism in these days of print, newspapers, advertisements, etc., but our movement has had to combat all the conditions of an era of darkness, ignorance, and barbaric repression. When newspapers will not accept, publishers will not print, and booksellers will not sell the true facts concerning us, then a rapid means of irrepressible communication had to be sought through the symbolism of colours, purple, white and green—justice, purity, hope. Wherever you see them you know we are there, and you know our meaning.
I joined in the songs for as long as I could and in the counter-cheering whenever we had a cheer from the streets, but I soon withdrew into the luxury of my solitude. I was exhilarated and happy in mind, but my physical exhaustion was considerable. The physical tax of the Deputation and the nervous tax of the trial proceedings had strained my powers to their uttermost. At last I was alone with myself. The sense of release from the necessity of keeping up appearances, of having to put on a good front, was great. I wondered how often the occupants of my cell in that black hive must have felt the same after the anguish, suspense, complication of fears, connected with their trial. I noticed that if for a moment I entertained the idea of initiative, action, the wish to touch normal existence, to be and behave like an ordinary being, then the sense of subjection, of being buried alive was all but insufferable and might quickly drive one to the verge of insanity. But the physical exhaustion which leads to the craving for inanition, for solitude and privacy, turned that locked-up slice of the van into a welcome sanctuary.
After a long drive, for seemingly the better part of an hour, the sounds changed and Black Maria quivered over a courtyard pavement, filling us with expectations of arrival. The jolting and noise ceased, the doors were unlocked, one by one as we had been packed in we emerged again and were quickly ushered into Holloway Prison, through what seemed a back door in a yard surrounded by high walls. It made no particular impression upon me. It might have been another police court, less dingy and more clean.