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Dear God...I never saw a woman look so wistfully.

                        

Published by Ether Books 2016

Image result for old dark prison cell
                   I NEVER SAW A WOMAN LOOK SO WISTFULLYImage result for prison cell



If you were permitted to enter the mind of James Bunstone Bunning, architect to the City of London, who began building Holloway Prison in 1849 and completed it in 1852, one might have been privy to thoughts like these:
“One had to draw on one’s imagination for the building of it, for it was not the main prison for the City of London at the time. As to the cost?  Wait for it, well, the princely sum of £91,547, 10s 8d. I will let you gather yourself at that astounding sum.
“Now, if truth were known, I had an exhilarating time planning it all. Let’s see, 436 cells, 283 for males, 60 for females, 62 for juveniles, 18 refractory cells, 14 reception cells and 14 workrooms. How symmetrical, how perfect, and land for extension, which had me, Mr. Bunstone Bunning bursting with civic pride. Ah yes, forward thinking, indeed something I am sure you would appreciate with your ‘going forward’ parlance.
“And I haven’t told you yet about our most - our most famous, well most infamous inmate of all; dwarfing even the stature of that confused young woman Ruth Ellis now in the condemned cell, waiting to be hanged. Yes our most famous inmate, none other than yer man himself; yes, Oscar Wilde. Yes, he was imprisoned here, he was.”
So exclaimed the atoms of Bunstone Bunning in that here-and-there at the same time way. Oscar Wilde, yes Oscar no less, was sent to Holloway as a remand prisoner before being taken to Reading Jail to complete his sentence and his ballad.
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red
His step seemed light and gay;
Oh, you know, don’t yeh? - all that love that dare not speak its name.

“Female suffragettes were also imprisoned in Holloway,” Bunstone Bunning intoned from nowhere and everywhere. “The prison was known locally as ‘Camden Castle’. You see, the closure of Newgate Prison necessitated more places for female prisoners and so Holloway was refurbished and became a purely female prison from 1903. In this format it had capacity to deal with women prisoners sentenced to death in London. For previously, London’s female executions had been carried out at Newgate. Well, I better be off.”

“Don’t let Ruth Ellis hang!” you would have heard if you had been outside Holloway Prison in that year of our Lord 1955.  A winter had just passed with its ‘peasouper’ smog which had killed hundreds of Londoners. Suffragettes had been raising their voices since winter, the breath from their cries piercing the smog.  And if you had been outside Holloway prison in July 1955 you may have seen a scrawny line of visitors queuing disconsolately to see their loved one in a procession of misery that rivalled Dickens’ at his bleakest. These visitors edging along, so pasty and badly shorn, so worn down by the travailles of life that if Bunstone Bunning had conjured himself up from a London smog, he would have had to hang his head in shame at the sight of such abject misery.

Kate Redmond was in a cell in the first landing, called B11 wing. She had two cellmates, Noreen Smith, a prostitute, like Kate in for theft, and Molly ‘Cutpurse’, infamous for cutting people’s purses off their shoulders and in for aggravated assault. The two residents had greeted the arrival of this young Irish woman with some trepidation which quickly turned to relief when they saw the new inmate wasn’t a butch heavy. But they remained puzzled that such a fine-looking woman was in here in the first place. Still, it takes all types.
Noreen was kindness itself. “Which one do you want? You can have the bottom bunk, I don’t mind, I’ll move up to the top bunk.” Kate looked puzzled, standing there, holding her world of toiletries in her hand.  “I’ll take the top,” said Noreen chirpily. “Don’t worry, I don’t suffer from nose bleeds nor nuffink.”                                                                                              Molly ‘Cutpurse’ looked on, like the lifelong criminal she was. She had seen it all before, heard it all before.  But she hadn’t seen one thing before.
Ever since Kate had arrived, all the talk on the landings was of Ruthy and her day for the chop.
 “Cathy and Billy are the screws looking after her.”
“Yeah, looking after her, they is. There’s someone wiv her twenty four hours a day. Sitting there, watching her…”
Yes, they sit and watch her night and day
In their suits of shabby grey;
Why do they do that then?
…lest she should rob
 Their scaffold of its prey                                                                                            
 “Where is it?”                                                                                                                       
“End of C Wing.”                                                                                                                “How big is it?”
“It’s big, about the size of four of our cells. Got her own visiting room and everyfing. And its own kaazi.”                                                                                                                         “Well, I never.”

And the guttural laugh, which staved away their terror, broke out from the inmates of Holloway prison in this queuing for their food.
“Billy says the lights are on all the time, 24 hours a day.”
“Why’s that then? In case she tops herself?”
“Who’s the screws that’s with her, did yer say?”
these silent types
  Who watch her night and day;
Who watch her when she tries to weep,
  And when she tries to pray.
Who watch her lest she should rob
 The prison of its prey.

“Poor woman, thought Kate, how does she ever sleep, for God’s sake what can her state of mind be?"                                                                                                 
She sleeps like all these women in this hellish place, with one eye open and with mouths ajar, as if they are about to drink a last glimpse of the sun. Now, despite their bravado and enforced camaraderie, these inmates all knew one of their kind would soon thirst no more.
“Yeah, Billy and Cathy guard her through the night. Billy says there’s this execution chamber, yeah, and that it’s built over an empty cell. That’s why they do it on the first floor, so as the empty cell is for the drop; when they...”
Drop her feet foremost through the floor
 Into an empty place
“When is this… all going to happen?” Kate asked timidly. 
“Next Wednesday… always nine in the morning.”
“When you’se slopping out.”
“My Frank tells me they’re all demonstrating outside. And it says on the news that there’s demonstration in these other countries as well.”
“Where’s they going to bury her?”
“Some unmarked grave, no priest or nuffink.”
”I saw her, you know.”
“You never did. No one can see her, unless you’re for the chop yourself, that’s the only way you would see her.”
“Did, when… when I was coming out of the kitchens.”
“Liar. Porky pier.”
“Don’t you call me a bleeding liar, you bitch.”
“Oi, Oi, put that bleeding thing down.”
And Kate was nearly knocked down by the bullish warders barging in to separate the combatants. 
And so the talk of Ruthy went on unabated.
“Look, I’ll give you a leg up, go on. There, can you see it?”
“Where?”
“To your right.”
Kate strained to peer through the tiny aperture to see the execution area. But she was doing it to please Noreen. She wasn’t interested in that poor woman. But once with a view through this little window there was… oh, what a roofless world. Can you see it?
Kate, now held aloft like some child peeping over a fence, looked out at the sky: she could see a small aircraft circling in this sky without mantle, where the white cotton wool clouds scudded along in slow majesty. So she watched with gaze of dull amaze that small plane disappear. That sky, those clouds. While Noreen continued supporting her legs she clasped the bars on the tiny window and continued to gaze in wonder at the careless clouds that in their freedom drifted by.
“Can you see it?”
“Yes, I can see it. Yes, I can see it now.”
Oh, I never saw a woman, who looked, with such a wistful eye,
upon that little tent of blue
We prisoners call the sky.
“Going to let you down now, darling, me arms are getting tired now. All right, sweetheart.”

Half an hour later at teatime. A ‘trusty’ ran a spoon across the bars, as she pushed along the tea trolley. “It’s next Wednesday. Ruthy’s for the chop next Wednesday.”
When a voice behind me whispered low
that girl is going to swing.
And in that wait a certain silence fell on those women prisoners locked up with the condemned Ruth Ellis in Holloway Prison. Who dawdled through their ‘time’. Now there would be pauses in the manufactured bravado and their strained bonhomie. In the conversations there would be involuntary lulls, for sometimes they had no words to say as they silently went about their duties of scrubbing floors
and shining rails
as they mutely clattered with their pails.
Then they would sew their sacks and bawl their hymns.
But then, when it got closer they dared to bang their tin cups on irons bars, until cowed into silence by the burly screws. And now as the moment neared, as it neared now, they would tramp across the concrete and mud of the exercise yard, and look at the ground as if the very mud cried out for blood. There would be few if any as they tramped that yard who thought of their former inmate, Oscar Wilde, succinctly versing this forthcoming transition from life to death.
Oh, it is sweet to dance to violins
 When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
 is delicate and rare:
But God, it is not sweet with nimble feet
 To dance upon the air

As the hour neared, and the true and the worthy, continued to debate the fate of Ruth Ellis,
“Don’t let Ruth Ellis die!”
“Stop hanging! Don’t let Ruth Ellis hang!” came the shouts from the placard holders gathered outside the prison.
“But now, the hangman with his gardener's gloves
 Slips through the padded door
And binds her, then...

A teenager holding a placard for her mother piteously asked, “Is that woman going to be killed, Mum?”
Oh God, it is too awful. But this woman had killed, killed the thing she loved. And as 9am neared on that morning, the crowd outside the prison had swelled so much that the traffic on the Holloway Road had stopped.
As the seconds ticked towards nine, a portion of the crowd ran towards the prison gates and started hammering at them. Too late! It is 9am.
Dear Christ! Did you hear that? I swear, the very prison walls, suddenly seemed to reel.

So the sky above their heads became
casques of scorching steel;

All made so lame by who to blame
Their pain they could feel.

Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be executed in Britain when she was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Holloway Prison on Wednesday, the 13th of July 1955, for the murder of her boyfriend, David Blakely. He had refused to see her over the Easter holiday, so she lay in wait for him outside the Magdala pub and when he came out, shot him five times with a revolver on the Easter Sunday evening. She was arrested immediately by an off-duty policeman and equally quickly convicted by the Old Bailey jury. Her execution caused great public controversy, both in the UK and abroad.



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