A life lived is a family saga of an unjustly executed woman.
'This novel is deeply moving'
Professor René Weis, vice dean for arts and humanities at University College London and author of Criminal Justice.
This is an unusual piece of fiction, best described as counterfactual. It stems from my unalterable belief in the evil of taking a life whether for personal or state approved reasons. This is not the place though to pull on that ball of string. A Life Lived is based on the true and tragic events, which occurred during 1922-1923 and ended in the deaths of two men and a woman. The Thompson and Bywaters Case. So outrageous and awful was the woman's execution that her name was mentioned in parliament decades later. The ordeal she was forced to endure still evokes disgust even today, some eighty seven years later.
Once a year I attend a service for her at the church where Edith and Percy married and because the government will not grant her a posthumous pardon, I felt drawn to do something. Anything. This book is the result. It is a place where Edith lives. A place where her life was not stolen from her. It is how her life may have continued had she not become involved in the tragedy that was to shame british justice. A Life Lived is the most emotional project on which I've worked. My own parents knew Edith's family through that very same church, and therefore had been aware of the tragedy since childhood.
My working of this idea is somewhat of a departure from the usual structure, which comprises the realistic modern novel. Not to denigrate that form, I did not feel that elevating the subject matter (Edith) in favour of the commonplace would assist me in the challenge of bringing the characters to life. For these are not larger than life characters as one would uncover in a standard work of fiction.
A Life Lived is, in the beginning, about an ordinary family attempting to forget a specific horrific event whilst trying to get on with their daily lives as best they can. We are surrounded by such people day by day. Mostly, these people are not newsworthy. Mostly, they lead solid, unremarkable and unpretentious lives, hardly worthy of a novel, yet I maintain that in Edith Thompson's case, her life, or rather her death, could enable us to witness a threshold should we wish to see it. A door to a greater reality.
Usually a realistic novel is structured around an opening mystery, which upsets the status quo. Primarily, the consequence of this event is upsetting, the world is turned 'upside down' and suspicion and paranoia rule, and it is the job of the author to wield events in such a way as for harmony to be restored. However, the story always moves inexorably towards closure as it must do, and only in this feature have I adopted and exploited it.
However, for all this highbrow talk about form, realism and structure, I prefer to think of the story as a simplistic home-spun drama, most possibly inspired by the classic film of 1944, This Happy Breed, an intelligent and amusing play about the simple lives of a lower-middle-class family striving to live between the wars in London.
There is certainly drama and tension in that quality film but it tells the lives of people in a way that is pleasing and straight. I only hope the same can be said for, A Life Lived. Edith Thompson died. That is a fact. I hope I have simply extended her life and memory.
Taken from the preface
In retrospect, I offer up my sincerest gratitude to Edith Thompson. For while investigating her pitifully short life and even more tragic death, I was lead to places within myself, about which, I had no previous understanding. It would not be too great an exaggeration to report that in the time I spent investigating her death, I tramped about various dark, empty yet terrifying landscapes that had been invisible to me before.
My reasons for writing this fictional account, this counterfactual drama, I expose in the introduction. After the novel was completed, I was satisfied that I had done my best to honour her memory and I emotionally moved on. I had visited her new place of rest at Brookwood Cemetery, her place of birth and her parent’s house, the streets where she had played as a child, her school, the church where her marriage took place, the position of her work on Aldersgate, her own home in Ilford, the site of the murder-a few hundred meters away, the local police station-Stratford's Magistrate's Court (where thirty-eight years later, I too stood in the same dock but for a misdemeanor), The Old Bailey and eventually, to stand outside the new Holloway prison, with the trail disappearing behind a wall composed of more than bricks.
However, she remained with me, as if she were looking over my shoulder and direful thoughts often filled my waking hours. Simple thoughts such as, when did she last see the sun? What was the last piece of music she heard? When did rain last touch her hair, her face? Did she clean her teeth on the day of her execution? Or wash her face? When was the last time she was allowed to use the toilet? Mundane examples of actions we are allowed to do-in private if we wish. For it is only asking questions such as these that Edith Thompson ceases to be a tragic figure existing some eighty years in the past and becomes as real as the male convict languishing in a hell-hole in China or a woman locked away but about to be stoned to death in Iraqi.
So overpowering were these ruminations, not only because they applied to Edith but, dimly as I began to appreciate, because they also applied to every soul under sentence of death in those countries of the world today that still carries a sentence of death, that in order to cleanse myself, I initiated an investigation into the dark nerve of the Ninth of January 1923 at nine o'clock in the morning at Holloway Jail.
As an abecedarian, I approached Holloway Prison itself, The National Archives, The Borough of Islington's library and the London School of Economics, the London Metropolitan Archives, The Corporation of London, English Heritage and the Museum of London to name a few of our great institutions but at every turn my efforts to gain a greater understanding about the events of that day were thwarted. The World Wide Web threw up nothing of specific, official or professional value.
It was only after some persistence that evidential cracks began to appear and a limited amount of information filtered through. A great deal of difficulty appeared to rest on the fact that the prison I was interested in, Holloway's House of Correction had been demolished in the very early part of 1970 but even finding information about that 120 year old substantial building of London proved difficult. A block ground map of the drains and water supply was eventually uncovered from the Victorian era and that representation along with a fifty year old photograph taken from the air and a lithographic drawing from the 1860's became the most commonly used documents I used to recreate the building inside a computer in a greater effort to understand the mechanics of legalized killing.
This is not the stage to explore that field though. My exploits and conclusions may form the basis of a harangue some time in the future but for now, I am content with some of the disturbing sentiments I have uncovered such as the amount of national guilt running through our corrective system and the engine of retribution. Irregular judgments and opinions ranging from the humblest clerk to the highest politician. A protective covering of secrecy with few willing to express an opinion about legalized murder, especially about one woman generally recognized to be innocent such as Edith Thompson almost certainly was.
Within Holloway prison, (as I assume in all other prisons where the executed still lay and where it is assumed Home Office rules and regulations still apply despite the Abolition of the death penalty in the United Kingdom) even the position of the graves were a secret known only to the Governor and the Home Office (and the grave-diggers presumably)
I have uncovered no written records of events and no documents describing the funding of the executions. My conclusions are singular. The modern notion of an execution is an embarrassment, an indictment of public and private shame. When one stands apart from the aroused feelings that evil tends to burn up in us, (at least in the 'civilised' countries), there exists a state of ignominy in wishing to kill a fellow human being, despite whatever wickedness they have committed. As a Christian country, England’s fundamentally unconscious guilt about this matter is almost too terrible to confront.
Is it too great a leap of words to use the concept of bullying to describe what nations do to individuals? Instruct me as to the fundamental difference between twelve boys punching and kicking a single youth in a school playground or yobs at a football match and the twelve men who surrounded an incapacitated and confined helpless woman as they, 'switched her off'? Twelve against one. Terminal bullying. Or a hoard of hundreds of chanting third-world villagers whipped into frenzy by a local judge, priest or executioner?
Eventually I discovered photographs of the prison, dozens and dozens of them. But none shows the brutal side of the building. Pictures of canteens and libraries, individual cells, landings and stairs. Vistas showing the architecture and gardens. But none shows the condemned cell. None shows the previous burial site. None shows the hanging shed or place of execution. Not of Holloway prison at least. Killing men is one thing but killing women, the place where life itself originates, is another matter. Death is a disturbing concept if one thinks about it enough and the UK government has done an excellent job of removing the stain that its executions have left on our society. However, I maintain this attitude only leads us into a position of complacency and ignorance while enabling us to ignore the suffering of our fellow human beings around the globe.
Edith Thompson has become a martyr then to me. Her awful and unwarranted end has, finally, in my humble opinion, taken on and conquered the limited purpose Judge Montague Sherman and William Bridgeman (the Home Secretary at the time) had in mind for her.
I have chosen to look through the collective particulars of her death and found a rare flower. One certainly that she herself did not intend to become but now she is here none-the-less. Her last moments should make us weep. She stands unfettered now for the thousands who are in the same position at this very moment.