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lunch. The woman in grey returned to Room 17 and walked slowly over towards Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, which hung on the north wall on the right-hand side. Purchased for £45,000 by public subscription eight years earlier, the painting drew large numbers of visitors and was the artist’s only surviving nude. On the plush seat in front of her, two large men with broad shoulders sat staring ahead.
    The woman started to sketch. One of the men rose from his seat and wandered out. The other crossed his legs and raised a newspaper to his face. This very paper, across whose front page her name would be emblazoned the following day, conveniently hid her from view.
    The first blow shattered the thick protective panel. She was experienced in the shattering of glass, mostly in the way of shop windows, but marvelled at how easily it yielded. The plate, one third of an inch thick, cracked in all directions. At first, the seated man—a detective assigned, with his colleague, precisely because of the suffragette threat—thought it was the skylight, which was being repaired that morning, and rushed to where a ladder had been left propped against the wall. From the opposite end of the room a warder, alerted to the drama at hand, started to rush over but slipped on the polished wooden floor and, as is often the way in history, this slowed him down for a few critical seconds.
    The next six or seven blows were to the canvas itself. With her meat cleaver the young woman started at the nape of Venus’s neck, then on to the spot between her creamy white shoulders, then downwards, aiming wherever her wrist felt pulled. She kept plunging and plunging, continually amazed at the efficiency of this small instrument she had bought with her last shillings at the ironmonger’s on Theobald’s Road. Fastened inside her sleeve with a chain of safety pins, a light tap to the last pin was all it had taken to release it.
    Two Baedekers, perfectly aimed, came crashing against her own nape. She turned and saw two angry German tourists. People came at her from all directions. Hands grabbed her, dragged her, pulled and held her down. The floor was covered in fragments of glass. But it was too late. With her cleaver she had attacked flesh far more treasured than any slab of meat, and that was the point, she later said, to destroy the most beautiful woman in mythology in order to protest the imprisonment of another ‘beautiful’ woman, Emmeline Pankhurst, a fellow suffragette.
    The angry crowd became a confused heap. It tumbled out of the room, into the stairwell, down the stairs, creating pandemonium all around, while back in Room 17, immune to the commotion, a torn Venus continued to repose in her satin boudoir while Cupid held a mirror up to her tranquil face.
    The account in
The Times
the next day was extravagantly anatomical:
a cruel wound in the neck, for three or four inches it runs almost vertically, and spreads out an inch wide; another severe cut aggravated apparently by the chopper’s having been twisted a little as it withdrew for the next blow; a broad laceration starting near the left shoulder and roughly forming, with two or three cuts, the letter N; two of the limbs of that letter are six or eight inches long, and the third is a gash extending right beyond the body and some inches through the drapery below it; the other cuts are cleanly made in the region of the waist . . . downwards nothing remains of the glass except splintered fragments filling the base of the frame and spreading out in front
 . . . 
    Each time Ted told the story I would listen enraptured as he described the way in which from one second to the next a small, nervous figure in grey, the grey of an overcast day, had morphed into an arrow of fury and begun hacking away at the nude woman on the wall. He had been the very warder assigned to Room 17 in those days before rotation.
    Startled by the shattering glass and the frenzied movements of the detective, who until then