Emmeline was due to return to Holloway on 23 June, but did not do so.
Knowing that she could be rearrested at any time, she tried to calm her nerves
by writing to that network of feminist friends and colleagues who helped to
sustain her. On 24 June, she expressed concern to Elizabeth Robins about the
ex-actress’s ill health and low spirits. ‘This saddens me for although I am very
weak & have various troubles (digestive & otherwise) my spirits are excellent.
Let me know when you can come.’^48 The women who had been arrested in the
raid of the WSPU offices were now being released, and on 25 June, Emmeline
sent warm wishes to the freed Agnes Lake, the business manager, since she felt
that her case was a particularly hard one where the ‘injustice & wickedness’ of
the prosecution were glaring. ‘I hope you have not suffered very much & that
you are regaining strength quickly.’^49 By the end of June, Emmeline was again
in contact with Elizabeth Robins. She was feeling very upset since she had been
followed by the police in a taxi when she had been out for a drive that after-
noon:
Today the drive has not done me much good because of the nervous
agitation caused by not knowing whether or not I should be arrested.
Now however that I have won the right to get some outdoor exercise I
shall improve. I thought you would be glad to know.
Please send me particulars of the Normandy cure when you can for I
am quite eager to know about it. C is at Deauville. A friend who saw
her last Saturday gives me an excellent account of her health.^50Emmeline’s two other daughters were continuing their different paths and
giving her cause for concern. Without telling her mother, Adela had given up
her gardening job at Road Manor and was with the Archdales in Europe. Not
wishing to bother Emmeline, Adela had not told her how hard and exhausting
the experience had been. For the sum of 35 shillings per week, Adela had
worked from six in the morning to six at night, finishing at four o’clock in the
afternoon on Saturdays; often she was so weary by the weekend that she lay in
the fields until she had enough strength to stagger home. The cottage where
she had boarded in a nearby village had defective drains and the landlady’s
cooking had been so appalling that Adela could eat nothing but eggs, which
made her bilious. Adela told Maud Joachim, a WSPU member who came to
visit, about one disastrous day when thirty peacocks invaded the gardens she
tended and ate all the cabbages, leaving none for her to deliver to the house;
Maud Joachim told the story to Sylvia who then repeated it to Emmeline.
‘Sylvia was as hot against me as all the rest’, recollected bitterly the youngest
Pankhurst daughter some twenty years after the event, ‘she repeated the
offending words to mother in order to make her angry with me.’ Emmeline
scolded her youngest daughter for complaining about her lot so that Adela felt
she had been disloyal to her mother. For the unhappy young woman it seemed
best to escape by following up secretly a possibility she had raised with
PRISONER OF THE CAT AND MOUSE ACT