NOVEL COCKTAIL PARTY.

Waipawa Mail, Volume LXII, Issue 96, 31 July 1935, Page 1

NOVEL COCKTAIL PARTY.

PRISONERS ENTERTAINED. In a luxurious West End flat, visited daily by dozens of influential people, a titled woman, surrounded by every comfort, has written probably the most remarkable and intimate book on the underworld ever published. For, despite her title, this woman, Lady Edmee Owen, has a knowledge of the underworld of Paris, Berlin, and other European capitals which is unsurpassed, says the “Sunday Express.”

“You see,’’ she told an interviewer, “I lived among these people. I suffered with them in prison when I was sentenced to five years for shooting at the wife of the man I loved. To learn the secrets of these underworld denizens one must share their lives as I did. No one in England can conceive the horrors of French prisons. “When they took me to Versailles I found myself forced to share living quarters with the very dregs of humanity.—l who had lived in the lap of luxury, a petted idol of society. I had for my companions the hardest bitten apache women. Some were suffering from dreadful diseases; some were hags whose whole lives had been one long horror; some were young girls apt in thieving, who looked upon every despised bourgeoisie as legitimate prey.

“Yet I soon found that every one of these women had a great vital spark of human sympathy buried deep down in her heart. It was a sympathy which could be won only by fearlessness and kindness. Had I shrunk from these people my life in prison would have been made absolutely unbearable; bad as it was. But I had no desire to shrink from them. I wanted to help them. I was sorry for them.

“One woman had a little baby hoy with her. It is the usual thing for children born in prison to remain with their mothers. She was a poor, sick creature, dying on her feet. I took the wretched little baby and gave it my love. I nursed it, and lavished upon it the affection and attention its own mother was unable to provide. The mother died while I was there, and the child remained as my charge. I nursed it as if it were my own, but it, too, had contracted disease, and it died in my arms. “My effort seemed to have been wasted. But it won for me the everlasting friendship of these women of the underworld. They gave me the key to their hearts, told me their stories, and sought my sympathy and advice.

“When I left them, to be transferred to St. Lazare, they wept—and so did I. I felt as though I had parted with my best friends. “Yet some of these women would cheerfully have committed murder for a dab of powder on their noses. They missed the rouge and powder-puff more, I think, than they missed the finer food and comforts of the outside world. Whenever my friends came to see me it was always for powder and rouge that these poor creatures pleaded. “At St. Lazare, Fresne, and Haquenan prisons, where I served most of my term, conditions were not so vile as at Versailles. Still, I mixed with and made friends of drag peddlers, thieves, murderesses, and every manner of delinquent known to the underworld of Paris. “One woman whose little girl was born and reared in prison, spent almost all her time teaching the child how to become a thief. “When I remonstrated with her she was amazed. ‘Well,’ she said, 1 she will have to face the world some day. She must have a trade.’ “I had to try the tricks of these women if I was to have the things I wanted. Powder and rouge were not allowed or available. “But there were soldiers who passed on sentry duty outside the walls. Sometimes a note would be thrown over, praying for the finder to throw back some powder or rouge. If these soldiers knew how we blessed them for their kindness they would surely have got more. “I was given two weeks’ solitary confinement on bread and water because I refused to tell where I had got some rouga. “At Fresne I strove to make light of my miserj r . I had office work to do there and this gave me more liberties. One day my friends smuggled me in some wines—wonderful champagne, vermouth, and other cocktail ingredients, as well as some money to go with them. “With the money I bribed a wardress to get special food, which we had a right to buy. “Then and there I gathered all my prison friends together in my cell —I may say at this time we were allowed considerable freedom—and we started the strangest cocktail party you have ever heard of—a cocktail party in gaol. “By the time our keepers had realised what was happening we were all singing happily. There was a terrible row about it, but I took the blame and so again won the hearts of these women of the underworld. “So when, after two years and a half, my sentence was reduced, I think I left more really true friends in prison than I left in the outside world when I entered Versailles’ dreaded cells.”