Women of Courage by Tim Vicary Page A

curiously, taking in her fine, good quality clothes, the plain gold ring on her finger.
    ‘Lady, are yer?’
    ‘Yes. I’m a suffragette.’
    The fat woman on the other side of the cell laughed, a deep, throaty, suggestive chuckle. ‘Not just any suffragette, neither! She slashed the picture in the National Gallery, she did! You mind your manners, Sal — we got a top-notch dafty ‘ere!’
    ‘You may think it’s crazy, but I did it out of principle. You ought to understand.’
    ‘Oh yeah? Go on, tell us, then.’
    For a while Sarah tried to explain. The oppression of women, the low wages, the exploitation, the futility of their lives, the way the whole of society worked to the advantage of men. She was not a great orator, and had only spoken in public once or twice before, but here in the crowded airless cell she provided a welcome distraction. Her audience was captive, but sullen, frightened and cynical too.
    ‘Look at us all here now! How many of you would be in prison at all if you were paid a decent wage by men instead of half what they get? If you had a proper education, if there were women lawyers as well as men — if the laws were made by women? If women had the V . . .’
    ‘Sal would!’
    ‘What?’ Sarah shook her head, confused, as the fat woman’s laughter interrupted her. She was pointing at one of the two women sitting beside Sarah — a slim woman in a blue print dress, handsomer than most of the others, who might have been pretty if it were not for a certain hard strength to her chin, and the plucked eyebrows which Sarah loathed.
    ‘Sal likes doing it, lady! Can’t get enough! She’d be ‘ere whoever made the laws — wouldn’t yer, Sal?’
    ‘You shut your mouth, you old pissbag! If I had a decent flat of me own I wouldn’t need to be ‘ere at all, ‘course I wouldn’t! Just because no one but a blind drunk beggar’s been near you in the last . . .’
    The two women got up, facing each other, and in a moment the cell erupted into conflict, which lasted until two large policemen waded in to restore order. Quite how serious the turmoil had been Sarah was not sure, but it was obvious no one was prepared to listen to her arguments any more. She relapsed into silence, and desultory conversation resumed all around her. After a while she became aware that the two women beside her were discussing children. Sal, the woman next to her, was advising her friend about her daughter.
    ‘I told you, didn’t I? They’ll look after her. She’s a looker, ain’t she?’
    ‘I know that, but not yet. She can show it off if she wants to, but she’s just a kid. Thirteen next July. I wanted something better.’
    ‘Like what? Look, face it. She’s got six months now to fend for herself without you — what’s the choice? She could go into service and get up at five every morning shovellin’ ash out of grates, and then scrubbing floors and polishing silver all day till eight or nine at night — would that make her happy? Or she could get a job wearing the skin off her fingers stuffin’ bristles into brushes ten hours a day for one and six a week — is that what you want?’
    ‘It’s straight, in’ it?’
    ‘Yeah, it’s straight. Straight way to death by exhaustion, I say. I know, I done it, dearie. Look, if Mavis has come and asked you already, your kid must be a looker, mustn’t she? It’s her chance, ain’t it — are you going to stand in her way? That Mavis, she may look like a pig but she gets some of the best clients in the business, she does. Listen, there’s a kid I know, Rachel Hargreaves. Mavis took her on a couple of years ago. Found her in that charity hostel when her ma was in Holloway — Lord knows what Mavis was doing there. Anyhow, she started her out at that place in Hackney, Red Lion Street, the one that doctor owns, Armstrong. Just like your little one she was, couldn’t have been more’n thirteen then, and now I swear she earns more’n I do. In demand all over the