After breakfast we cleared the table, the gate of the ward was unlocked and we carried the crockery to baskets on the floor in the passage. From there the 3rd Division prisoners took them and washed them out in the bath room cell next door. The hospital wardress had to stand at the gate all the time that we were doing this. Some wardresses allowed us sometimes to come and go freely; others, or the same wardresses on different days, would allow only one of us out of the ward at a time. This and all other rules of the kind would hardly ever be told to us in so many words, but suddenly the wardress would step out and block the way, laying her hand upon us without a word as if we were animals. This being handled when there is no occasion for it seems very insulting. Like all these prison methods, it seemed curious and interesting when first done to oneself, but aroused a feeling of indignation when one saw it being done to others. It gave one the feeling of belonging to a race apart, something degraded and imbecile, despised not only for the particular crime one had committed but as an all-round inferior being. The moral influence of this kind of treatment is rubbed in afresh through every hour of prison life and has a bad moral influence on both prisoners and wardresses. It seemed, moreover, quite unnecessary.
After breakfast the chief wardress who had reproved us for not lifting up the movable section of the beds, beckoned me to her--“Take off your slippers. Bring your shoes; you have to go before the Senior Medical Officer.” This made me anxious. I knew quite well that I was not in a state of ill-health to cause the release of an ordinary prisoner; I knew, too, that many suffrage prisoners had been kept in prison when much more seriously ill than I was. But I remembered the specially constructed rule which had sanctioned a letter being delivered to me, and I was on the look-out for more privileges of the kind. The wish was strong in me to have personal experience of the inflictions which a Liberal Government thought suitable to woman Suffragists, to share every incident of the treatment which my leaders and friends had suffered in our cause and to gain some experience of prison life from within for the sake of one day being equipped to work for prison reforms.