Some of the experiences which I have to record are of so unusual a character that I think it will help to a better understanding on the part of my readers if I briefly outline the drift of my existence before I became aware of the women’s movement, and in touch with that section of it known as the “Militant Suffragettes.”

My father had been dead fifteen years and I was thirty-nine years old in 1906, when my narrative begins. I lived with my mother in the country. Two sisters and two brothers had left the home when they were young—the sisters to marry, the brothers to train for and enter their professions. I assumed, as did all my friends and relations, that, being past the age when marriage was likely, I should always remain at home. In my early girlhood I had a yearning to take up music professionally; again, after father’s death, when unexpected financial misfortunes caused my mother great anxiety, I had longed to try my hand at journalism; and once more, a few years later, I had the same ambition. But these wishes, finding no favour, had in each case eventually to be repressed, and in 1906 I had neither equipment, training nor inclination for an independent life.

I had been more or less of a chronic invalid through the greater part of my youth. An overmastering laziness and a fatalistic submission to events as they befell were guiding factors in my existence. I was passionately fond of animals and of children, music was a great delight to me; otherwise I was not given to intellectual pursuits. So far as I know, I was an average ordinary human being, except perhaps for an exaggerated dislike of society and of publicity in any form. I had many intimate friends, both men and women, and also children. Such mental training as I have known was chiefly due to intercourse with them. I owed to them, as well as to my mother and many members of my family, a happy life, in spite of considerable physical suffering.

In 1896 and successive years I had given secretarial help to my aunt, Mrs. C. W. Earle, in the writing of her wonderfully delightful books, beginning with “Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden.” She insisted that, in return for my small and mostly mechanical services, we should share the profits of the sale. The book ran into many editions, and she held to her bargain, but I never felt as if I had a right to the money. Her widely sympathetic and stimulating companionship had a great influence on my mind. Thanks to her investigations in theories of diet, I became a strict vegetarian. My health gained in all directions and I gradually freed myself from the so-called “constitutional” rheumatism from which I had suffered since my infancy. I realised, too, that all these years I had caused untold suffering that I might be fed, and determined that in future the unnatural death of an animal should not be necessary to make up my bill of fare. My vitality increased, but the notion of a vocation apart from my family and home remained as foreign to my ideas as it was then to the average British spinster of my class.

In the year 1906 my godmother, Lady Bloomfield, died. She had shown me much kindness and I had never found an opportunity to serve her in any way, the generosity had been all on her side; yet, at her death, she left me some money, without any conditions as to how I should spend it. It gave me a strange new feeling of power and exhilaration. I look back upon this event as being spiritually the starting point in my new life, of which this book will tell, although, from the practical point of view, it seems only by a series of coincidences that my after experiences were evolved from it.

I looked about me with a view to spending the money. I had a fancy to put it to some public use. The commonly accepted channels of philanthropy did not appeal to me. I shifted my inquiries in other directions. I remember that at this time I was chiefly occupied with the idea that reformers were for the most part town dwellers, their philosophy and schemes attuned to those surroundings. There seemed to me need for a counteracting influence to attempt reform and regeneration on behalf of country dwellers. The noiseless revolution which had been worked in a few decades by the system of compulsory education seemed to me tainted throughout by the ideals of townsfolk. The influence of teachers and clergy, of public authorities in general, sets before the nation’s children and their parents ideals which mould them into townsfolk. Country craft and country lore grow less, and are less honoured in every decade. There is no room for them in the national curriculum. This tendency, nevertheless, seems unnatural, imposed by a species of force on a reluctant though inarticulate people. Some temperaments cannot acclimatise themselves to town dwelling. The life of cities will always appear to them artificial, repellent from the physical conditions it imposes and the mental outlook resulting from these. Rain, earth and air are better scavengers than any municipal corporation. The ceaseless cleansing, yet never making clean, of town existence has from my childhood fretted my imagination and produced a sense of incarceration. In towns, the earth is laid over with tombstones, metalled roads or floors of wood. Avenues of bricks and mortar shut out a great part of the sky, limiting into a mere ceiling the heavens which should be our surrounding. A town had always seemed to me a “deterrent” workhouse at best, and often a punitive prison besides.

The monster of industrialism, which followed in the wake of the discovery of steam and the dethroning of handicraft by artificially-propelled machinery, may one day be bridled and controlled so as to be a servant of humanity, a fellow worker in the day-to-day glory of creation; but for the present it is still a wild beast, a dragon at large, dealing pestilence and death with its fiery breath, combated in panic, its evils evaded rather than faced, its power a nightmare breeding fear and subjection. Instead of harnessing this new force to every branch of our existence, ordering it to serve us at our command, we have cringed before it, left our normal lives and drained our energies to congregate in its grimy temples and worship at its shrine. Poor, blind force that it is, we are determined to make it an idol, and for sake of the return in money which its mechanical rotations produce, we have been willing to sacrifice the interests both of the human beings which should control it and of the soil, the land, which alone can produce the raw material for its task.

How to transform this Moloch from a tyrannous master to a helpful, submissive friend, that was the problem which seemed to cry out for solution above all others. I looked around to see how the needs of country folk were able to express themselves, and everywhere there was presented to my inquiries a complicated machinery of administration both national and local—voting rights for election of parliamentary, municipal, county, district and parish councils. But this machinery was apparently born and bred of urban conditions, super-imposed upon the rural districts, in no way native to them, not of spontaneous growth. This succession of councils, instituted with the apparent purpose of watching one another, and, if necessary, bringing pressure to bear upon one another, were for the most part lifeless formalities, having no organic life, no breath of reality to set them in motion. The only function which gives them any tangible vitality is their power of imposing taxation and levying rates. You find in the country districts that members of these different bodies are the same individuals. The parish councillor who is expected to bring pressure to bear on the district councillor, who again must appeal, if need be, to the county councillor, is one and the same person who, as likely as not, is also the representative of the district on the board of guardians, and he is sure to be selected again to work the administrative machinery of every new device that comes along for the amelioration of social evils. In other words, the elective principle is a farce in rural districts. The electorate are dead both to their powers and their duties. They live, in fact, under a system which is anything but representative. They live rather, under the devitalised husk of the feudal system, the poorer members of the community dependent, in the worst sense, upon those who are their social superiors, but no longer receiving from them any security of well-being, and neither class extending to the other, with rare exceptions, either the loyalty or devotion which seem to have been bound up with the feudal traditions of our forefathers. Was it possible to wake up this inert mass, so that they should co-operate with one another, and thus be strong enough to grasp the present machinery of national Government, and either utilise it or alter it to one better suited to their needs?

Each of my inquiries in turn led me back to the individuals concerned, to the human beings themselves. What were their homes, their ambitions, thoughts, beliefs? What guidance do they give to those who wish to serve them? I groped my way blindly and acquired knowledge only in a negative sense by a series of failures. I gleaned two general precepts from my investigations. They were these: It is useless to try and help the lives of a community without consulting the individuals whom you hope to benefit, and that to benefit the life conditions of men does not necessarily benefit the life conditions of women, although their interests may be apparently identical as to social grade, locality, religious and other beliefs.

After a series of barren experiments, I stumbled by chance on a piece of social radium, a regenerative agency that bore good fruit and that contained an element of spontaneous joy most refreshing compared to the oppressive straight-jackets of national or private philanthropists. I heard of the revival of folk songs and dances. I went to see and hear them. The first performance opened the door for me into a new paradise. The Esperance Club of working girls had been the means of bringing to life researches of antiquarian musical students. This club had evidently been for many years an unusually successful social enterprise, but the discovery of a lost treasure in the shape of traditional songs and dances gave it a new inspiration. Both words and tunes of the songs have come, generation after generation, from the heart of the English folk. Each generation, each individual who has sung them, has added or omitted some little touch, so that in these songs, which have been mostly collected from old men and women over eighty years of age, is expressed the very soul of English national sentiment. The same with the dances. They were traditional in families or localities, they had been handed down from father to son, and were as truly folk dances as the songs were folk songs. Songs and dances alike are full of life on the land and love of the land, of flowers, animals and crops, of the daily lives of men, women and children. Dramatic, tragic and comic incidents find spontaneous expression, and every one of them tells of a vigorous and mainly joyous existence. The girls of this club learnt the Morris dance first from two Oxfordshire countrymen. Both the dances and songs were acquired easily “by a sort of spiritual sixth sense,” as if the rhythm and meaning of them were latent in their being and were easily re-awakened. The girls not only learnt quickly, but were inspired to teach others, young girls of seventeen and eighteen showing an amazing facility and power of organisation in this matter. One of these came, at my eager request, to teach in our village, and, after one week, men, women and children were alive with these friendly, joy-giving, native arts. The following year a girl teacher came to us again with renewed success.

In the autumn, 1908, I was invited by the secretary of the club, Miss Mary Neal, herself a wonderful organiser, to share a seaside holiday with her girls. In those days I never left home save for family reasons, or for some very exceptional matter. I, therefore, refused the invitation. I happened to mention the proposal the next day to my mother. She said: “Why don’t you go?” I immediately went, little realising that this visit would lead to a most unexpected series of experiences.