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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.
'A thought provoking story of Britain's worse miscarriage of justice'
Michelle Edwards
This is an unusual piece of fiction, best described as counterfactual. It stems from Molly's 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 came up in parliament decades later. The ordeal she was forced to endure still evokes disgust even today, some 82 years later. Once a year Molly attends a service for her at the church where Edith and Percy married and because the government will not grant her a posthumous pardon, some years ago, she 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 come to pass had she not become involved in the tragedy that was to shame British justice. A Life Lived is the most emotional project Molly admits to ever having worked on. Her own parents knew Edith's family through that very same church and therefore had been aware of the tragedy since childhood.
Molly's working of this idea is somewhat of a departure from the usual structure, which comprises the realistic modern novel. Not to denigrate that form, she did not feel that elevating the subject matter (Edith) in favour of the commonplace would assist her 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 Molly maintains 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 has Molly adopted and exploited it.
However, for all this highbrow talk about form, realism and structure, Molly prefers to think of her 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. Molly only hopes the same can be said for, A Life Lived. Edith Thompson died. That is a fact. Molly hopes she has simply extended her life and memory somewhat.
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A second film about Holloway Prison -The House of Correction. North London. Where Edith was imprisoned and executed.
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For more information about this unusual short film and a little more about the prison, please use this link.
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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.
Here are two short passages:
It was now 8:59 and Edith's time had run out. Injected with so many different drugs to keep her tranquil, she was, to all intents and purposes, unconscious. They were going to hang an insentient and innocent young woman.
Abruptly, Ellis and his team crashed into the cell and all hell broke loose. There was bedlam from scuffling and shouting as Edith was manhandled and dragged to her feet even though she could not stand and her skirt and legs were tied together. Ellis pinned her arms around her back as the two wardresses looked on aghast.
One of the assistants spoke to her. "Come on mate, It'll soon be over." Despite the small crowd of witnesses that were allowed to attend, no mercy came from them. None that could stop the proceedings anyway.
The wardress’s now began weeping profusely as the living bundle was carried out of the cell as two men might carry a sack of potatoes. The Chaplin, too stunned at first to say anything, recovered enough for him to resume his duty although his voice was not something anyone present wished to hear.
The brick shed was only yards away but the cold outside air had a slight effect on Edith who now moaned as she became conscious again for a few seconds before she lapsed, mercifully back into her unconscious state. They secretly reached the shed, attached to the end of B wing, their movements shielded from the outside world by a hastily and recently erected fence and within seconds, the rope and a white cotton hood was placed over her head and Ellis stared at Morton.
"Let's do it." He loudly muttered between his teeth as everyone heard a distant telephone ring.
The throng which had gathered into the shed to witness the hanging was supervised by Morton the governor and with only seconds to go, Ellis impatiently moved towards the lever which was to end Edith's life.
"No." Morton shouted. "We wait. It will be seconds. Who was that? Who phoned?" He shouted at the opened door.
Edith then came around once more and started to scream uncontrollably, her voice muffled slightly by the hood.
"Oh sweet Jesus Almighty." Cried Gowan. "For pities sake."
It was Larkhill who had answered the telephone and now she positively and completely unprofessionally burst into the chamber.
"Reprieved!” She almost screamed. "Take her down. They've both been reprieved."
After the straps were hastily undone, and the hood removed from her head, Gowan helped pull Edith away from the trapdoor area and the room seemed still with the shock of the moment as the noose was gently slipped off back over her head.
Despite the drugs, Edith was aware what had happened but she was too much in a state of shock, too disappeared into a condition of temporary insanity to fully take anything in. Her pure white glistening face shook with intensity as tears swept down it and she dribbled uncontrollably making the observers feel too wretched for words.
The Chaplin carried on muttering giving thanks to God for answering his prayers but Ellis looked hard at Morton.
"I'm still claiming my expenses."
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Dr. Pastoreau was a man quick to take advantage of a situation but he was also a tolerant one. The moment Edith showed the slightest interest in learning how the water colours that he used to paint his intensely beautiful landscapes worked, how they flowed together to produce the pictures that he created, he cleverly turned that interest around and began to teach her how to paint.
"Oui. The blue is softer here. You must add more white."
"I'll never be as good as you Paul."
"You must practice Edith. You have the skill."
"I don't expect miracles but after five days I thought I might have...well, I wasn't bad at sketching when I was a girl but I can't seem to see what you see."
"It is a practice oui? You will see. You have the flowing hand and I see in your eyes, the patience.”
"Patience? Well, yes, I guess that could be true."
"A little more water there... Oui."
She caught the faint, sharp but not unpleasant odour of his aftershave as his bare arm brushed against her shoulder and she felt something which embarrassed her, certainly because it had been a long time since she had felt any such feeling.
"Paul? Are you flirting with me?"
"Me? Non. Most certainly not Madam."
Nevertheless, his eyes, when they focused away from the dreamy blue and white landscape of the sea and the cliff top where they had perched their easels, when they wondered lazily over Edith's sun-tanned face, declared differently.
"I thought we might eat on the beach tonight." He suggested.
"My! Now that is continental! Whatever would my daughter say?"
"She might say, like mine would, have a bon dinner."
"Paul. You have a daughter? You're not...?"
"I am, like yourself Edith, a window."
Edith smiled and stopped what she was doing for fear of smudging. "No Paul. Non. Not a window! A widow, or in your case a widower."
"Ah Oui. Of course."
"May I ask when she died?"
"July 24 1944 at eight in the morning. She was one of eighteen woman chosen by the Nazis to be shot for, is it the right word? Reprisals?"
"Yes, that's right." She answered softly. "Oh I'm so sorry."
"I was in Poitiers that summer. When I came home... well, it was a long time ago now."
A moment existed then which linked them both. It was silent but extraordinarily powerful; all prevailing, like the intense sun that beat down upon the absurdly large hats they were wearing. He knew she was staring at him and he allowed her to with no impoliteness on his part, his strong, sun-beaten features with his small nose and sparse graying hair and those sensitive eyes, apparently concentrating out to sea. Out far away, where the white mist swallowed the horizon.
"Use the yellow to bring out...not too much now. Oui. Like a breeze has touched the paper. You are doing well. And now madam, you will tell me your sad story."
Edith was jerked back to the present and realized that she had been painting with yellow.
"Oh there isn't much to tell Paul. No sadness."
"Edith, a woman's life is never empty or ever, not sad. Tell me. What was his name?"
"I can't possibly paint and tell you things at the same time Paul."
He lifted up a flask and silently poured coffee, hot and black into two glass cups and then offered her one, which Edith took gladly.
"It will not hurt to let the paint dry. We can return to it. Come Edith, tell me. Put down your brush because, for some, the painting is all but for us, the painting exists only as a means for us. Oui?"
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The actual entry log for Edith's admittance to Holloway-House Of Correction (modified) The last aseptic entry has been described as obscene.
The day I visited Holloway Prison.