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.