The next day, Saturday, November 25, I felt ill in the morning. The prison was scarce of food--at least, there were no vegetables; they gave me bread and butter and a pudding for luncheon. The Governor came, Dr. Scott, and he was amiability itself, I was only to take care of myself. Since all was made easy, I stayed in bed that day.
The girl who was let in to wash my floor was fair-haired, with a most pleasant and intelligent face. I longed to know about her, but a wardress stood at the door looking on at her work all the time, and I did not once catch her eye. On Sunday, November 26, I felt no better and again stayed in bed. The second doctor, a new man, who was pleasant in his manner, came to see me. In the morning when I had been let out to the sink, the little prisoner who washed my floor met me coming out. My back was turned for a moment; she patted my shoulder and said, in a tone of voice of utmost comfort, “Cheer up!” By the time I looked round she was off somewhere else and no one would have supposed that she had communicated with me. After that I was determined to get some snatch conversation with her when she was in my cell. When she washed out that morning, I said to her--it was always the first thing--“How long have you got?” “Three years,” was the answer. This greatly surprised me, for Holloway was not the place for long sentences, but I could not ask her then, there was not time to tell, only time for bare questions and answers. I asked, “What was it for?” “Stealing my mother’s skirt,” she said. This was more startling than ever. Where was the mother’s skirt one could “steal”? But the wardress looked in and we were obliged to stop. On another occasion she told me that she had been very ill on first coming to Holloway, and that was why she had been kept there. Another time she slipped this notice under the door, and signalled to me by opening the gas-jet glass from the passage. On one side of the little torn bit of paper was written, “Z-- A--, Boardstil Institution, Hailsbray”; on the other side, “I shall be glad to hear from you because I have no friends at all and it will cheer me up.” I longed to speak to her, but I did not see her again after this. It was my last morning in prison when she put this paper under the door. After I came out I, of course, wrote to her, thanked her for her cheering words to me, asked if I might go and see her, and sent her a little 3_d._ book of extracts from my father’s poems. I sent these to the chaplain at Aylesbury and asked him if he would deliver them. He sent my letter back, saying that he would not be allowed to give it, for she had already chosen as her correspondent her grandmother or some old lady. I do not know anything of her, of her failings or virtues; I only know that there was no loosening the net that clung round her so tightly for three years.