My sister took me to their house in Bloomsbury Square, which we reached at about 8.30 p.m. There was our friend, Mr. Chapman, to whom I gave a brief account of my imprisonment. He went off with it the next day to the Home Office Prison Department, and returned with the news that the officials would be grateful to me if I would make a statement on paper, whereupon they would have it investigated. There were reasons why they would be very glad to have an open inquiry at Walton Gaol.
All that night I woke off and on with cold, and also with terror at the forcible feeding. My sister was most kind to me; she reheated my hot-bottles and at last came and slept with me. I stayed in bed the next morning (Monday, January 24). In the afternoon I saw some of my friends--Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and Christabel Pankhurst. Some days after, when she returned to London, I saw Mrs. Pankhurst. They were all of them content with what I had done and the way I had done it. This was a most tremendous joy and relief to me.
I managed to write a letter to the _Times_ and an article for _Votes for Women_. I could only do everything so slowly that I had not finished these until eight o’clock the next morning, after writing all night. I stayed in bed the whole of that day, Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday (26th and 27th) I stayed in bed in the morning, but led a more or less normal life after. These days I could hardly sit in a chair, because my emaciated condition rendered it very painful; I ate my meals, very often, kneeling down at the table on a cushion.
On Tuesday, January 25, I wrote to Mr. Gladstone, the Home Secretary, to explain that it was not as the newspapers said, to play a practical joke upon him, that I had gone to prison in disguise. It was because of the totally different category of treatment meted out to one set of people from another, and the object of my disguise was to expose this for the sake of bringing such a state of things to an end.
On Monday, January 31, I woke with a blistered heel. I spoke at the meeting at the Queen’s Hall, and it was heart-filling to meet all my friends again; the whole audience seemed to understand. I stood for an hour on one foot. On coming home I had to wait about to get a statement finished and typewritten. I had written very carefully for the Home Office of what happened to me in prison. After that I went to bed and stopped there for six weeks. The next day, Tuesday, February 1, the blister on my heel was much worse and my sister wished to send for a doctor. I had always been ill in the country and did not know of one. My sister called in Dr. Marion Vaughan, who from that moment was my doctor, and after she had been to see me I had a nurse. This is her report:--