Edith Thompson
2002-03-23 || 4:56 p.m.

Haven't updated for days. Just as soon as I got rid of one illness; I got another! Ridiculous really. I'm either unlucky or seriously unhealthy.

Anyway, my odd fainting fits have passed; the salmonella test won't be back until Monday and I have a cold. Seriously snotty. Mind you, I feel quite good today. I've had a nice day doing nothing. I decided to put a face pack on, something I don't often do. I'm still really pale and face packs make you go very pink. It did and I looked healthy for a brief moment. Then, feeling quite good I ironed my big jeans and put them on with a black sort of peasant blouse but its not baggy and with my DM's and punkyfish jacket I'm just trying to decide whether to go out somewhere.

I started thinking about book characters earlier. Do other people get very attached to certain books and certain characters? When I was young I really fell in love with Will Heron in 'And Then There Were Five'. I think it was because he was an outsider. An orphan. I can't remember the plot details but the family in the book were the Saturdays - Mona, Rush, Randy and Oliver and Will Heron somehow came to live with them in this book. He was older and had obviously experienced a life they had not, the others being quite sheltered, even tho' for some reason they did not have a mother. I think I liked him also because he was very in tune with nature. He was a bit aloof, a bit sensitive yet practical and mysterious. An unknown quantity. I can't remember what happened to him. I don't know if he was in the next book in the series - 'A Spiderweb for Two' which was when Mona and Rush had gone away to school leaving Randy and Oliver with a creative, fun, yet challenging treasure hunt to solve (right!). It's mean of me to knock it, I liked it at the time. The ending was really soppy though. The 'treasure' was their friends and family. I think I felt a bit cheated at the time. Being a kid, treasure was presents - things in wrapping paper - not family. The books went out of print over here years ago. I finally got hold of them when I was in New York, I bought the whole series and the Gone Away books too. Strangely, at the time I didn't like the Gone Away books as much yet when I re-read them as an adult, the Gone Away books were way better.

Dickon was another guy I loved. The way he could charm animals and again he knew all about the countryside. I always hoped that somewhere, where fiction is real and we are fiction, Mary married Dickon. But I don't reckon she did.

I once explained my fiction theory to Mat. I said that I thought all fiction was fact really and it was just being 'remembered' or 'tapped into' by authors. I mean, are we fiction or fact really? Mat thought it was brilliant that maybe Star Trek was true.

When I said this to Rebecca, she said she'd just write a book saying the theory was wrong!

The other day I said that adult books have never affected me in the same way as childhood books. Well, I did remember a book that did affect me in a big way, 'A Pin to See the Peepshow'. This book was one of the Virago range. A feminist press that prints books either by contemporary women writers or long out of print books to redress the gender balance in fiction. Well this book was one of their reprints and it was a fictionalised account of the Thompson/Bywaters murder case of the 1930's. Basically this woman Edith Thompson was well clever for her class and time and very frustrated. She was a shop worker and had married young to a 'nice' middle class older guy with a safe bank type job. Through her sister she was introduced to Freddie Bywaters who was a bit of a pratt really. Edith however began fantasising about him without really knowing him and made him into something he wasn't. Eventually they had an affair and the fantasies got wilder and were now a joint thing. They wrote loads of letters to each other, instigated mainly by Edith who also insisted that they burn them after reading them. To cut a long story short, many of the letters fantasised about them killing Edith's husband in many different ways and to keep the illusion going Edith would describe ways she had tried and failed to do this. She was well known as a dreamer and teller of tall tales. One night Edith and her husband Percy had been to the theatre, on their way home an assailant jumped out and coshed Percy one and beat him until he was dead. Edith was totally shocked and even more so the next day when both she and Freddie were arrested. The police searched their homes and in Freddie's found copies of all the letters Edith had written. (Edith had of course burned Freddie's as they agreed). These were damning evidence and both Edith and Freddie were sentenced to hang. (Freddie had actually murdered Percy and freely admitted it. He also always declared that Edith had not been in on it and did not know he was going to do it). There is some confusion over the state of Edith's health but it seems that she was probably pregnant when they hung her. Apparently she haemorrhaged at the moment of death. Stupidly if it had been known she was pregnant she would never have gone to the gallows. (Capital punishment - now there's a subject for another day). Anyway, horrifically, in England after that, all women were put into leather knickers before they were hung. Yeah, much better than just letting a doctor check them over to see if they are pregnant. I mean even in the days before pregnancy tests a doctor could tell because your cervix goes blue.

Well the fictionalised account of Edith Thompson's last night in prison before her death really did traumatise me. I was depressed for about two weeks after; I couldn't eat or sleep. I think what really got me was that I couldn't get the thought out of my head that she was hung really not for the murder (there was no hard evidence - only the silly letters). She was hung because she was a woman who dared to have sex and actually enjoyed it. I bet they really enjoyed reading those parts of the letters out in an English court room in the 1930's.

Its shit isn't it? If they ever reintroduce capital punishment to this country I shall move - far away.