The Courage Game

The Genesis of The Courage Game

This is how it began. I took my father, Peter Waterfield, to the film Suffragette which had just come out. Afterwards we went to his favourite Italian restaurant in Falmouth, near where I live. He ate his meal quietly, in itself unusual since my Dad was always a talker. Then he put his fork down and wiped his mouth carefully. His eyes looked vulnerable.

‘Aunt did that,’ he announced.

I eyed him in disbelief. Aunt was the lady who brought him up. She actually was his aunt, because Dad’s mother, her sister, was drowned when he was only two years old. Aunt was what the whole family knew her as, though she was more of a kind of grand-mother figure for me and my siblings. ‘You mean she was a suffragette?’ I asked in disbelief, trying to see the frail old woman I knew as anything but – well – just old. She’d died when I was nine years old.

He nodded.

I conjured up the details of the film in my mind. ‘You mean that she hunger-struck and … and other things … went on marches?’ I finished limply.

‘Exactly.’ And then he explained that he remembered as a little boy being shown her medals but they hadn’t meant much. Now, because of the film, he was thinking of some of the horrors perpetrated on the suffragette women and he felt rather sick. He’d had no idea that his beloved mother-figure, always gentle and kind, had been a fiery soldier in defence of women’s rights nor that she’d been through such torments.

Meanwhile, the meal was forgotten. I was fizzing with excitement. There were a few things about Aunt that I’d always treasured – her poetry for instance that, as a teenager I’d been obsessed with. I knew already that I wanted to write her story. ‘Dad, Aunt was a writer. Writers write! They can’t help themselves. You were her only heir. Somewhere in your house there’ll be things she wrote down about her time as a suffragette.’

That night I’d gone to bed, still fizzing gently, when at two o’clock in the morning the phone rang. It was Dad, his voice an octave higher than usual with excitement. ‘I found some notes she’d written,’ he bellowed. [Being somewhat hard of hearing by this time, in his eighties, Dad always imagined that the distance between people speaking on the telephone had to be compensated for by shouting.] ‘Some stuff about Holloway prison and the forcible feeding. And other bits and bobs.’

By now I was thoroughly awake. I could hardly wait till I could get my hands on them. But that was not to be – at least not for a while.

So excited, Dad blurted to everyone he met about his find. The local paper got hold of it and, after interviewing him, gave it quite a spread. Then the Sunday Telegraph got hold of it, awarding it an even greater spread. The headline read The Forgotten Suffragette. For Aunt, after the suffragette days were over, never talked about it. Google her name Gladys Mary Hazel and all that comes up is a list of those who hunger struck on which she is just one name. No detail. Nothing. It was even more important to read the sheaf of papers Dad had found.

An Oxford don had read the article in the Sunday Telegraph and contacted Dad, telling him that he was writing a book about the suffragettes and would really value seeing what she’d written. Now Dad was an Oxford man with a profound admiration for donnish scholarship. Without further thought, he sent off the package of notes he’d found.

It was almost two years before I prevailed on the Oxford don to send it on to me.

How did I fill those years? With research. I read every book I could find on the subject of suffrage in general and on the suffragettes in particular. I was ashamed that, as a woman, I knew so little about the struggle. By the end of two years, six months of which had been spent trawling through hundreds of Votes for Women, the suffragette weekly newspaper most of which are conveniently on line, I was armed with many more facts. I knew that Gladys had been a teacher in Birmingham, so I looked for anything about Birmingham and, of course, for any mention of her by name. That’s how I found most of my factual material: I could place Gladys at particular events both in Birmingham and nationally through these papers.

And eventually I did receive her own notes: two pages about her childhood, which included the details of the Courage Game invented by her elder brother, Jim, one or two jottings about Birmingham slums and her horror at how the poor had to live and, by far the biggest quantity of notes, about her imprisonment in the Royal Holloway.

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Why a ‘Novelised Biography’?

Because despite all that research there still were things I could not find out. Two pages about her childhood is not enough. I was in touch with Jim’s daughter Janet Hazel, who gave me factual details about dates and names of the other children and some of the things they did with their lives but what those children were like I had to imagine.

I re-read Gladys’s poetry looking for clues. From it I deduced that she had loved someone but for some reason that love was forbidden. From that small nugget I built a whole imagined love story. Some of my cousins were convinced that she was in a relationship with the lady doctor with whom she lived after WWI, but many women after that terrible war which wiped out most of a whole generation of young men lived together for companionship and, when I asked my Dad, he said he would have noticed if there’d been more than companionship – after all he lived with them both from the age of two.

There’s a lot of difference between a straight biography which, if it’s well done, will have notes, cross-references and a list of primary and secondary resources. Characters in a biography are read from the outside – their letters, diaries, recorded statements plus what is on record as what they did with their lives – while characters in a novel are understood through their thoughts as much as how these thoughts translated into actions. I have used the first person throughout for the character of Gladys. Perhaps that is my actor training. I wanted to slip into her skin, to ‘be’ her, to feel her life emotionally.

Read an Excerpt from The Courage Game…