Far, garden, Henry, Ilford, jam and kick

More of the alphabet exercise – thoughts from Sarah’s point of view.

F is for far. Far, far away, that’s how the old life seemed to her now, not just the thousands of miles and months of sailing far away, but far in the distant past, blurry and fragmented like memories of her childhood. Wellington was all about the here and now, young and brash and fresh, everyone broken out of the moulds of the past and bent on making something new.

I know there was some fairly keen gardening going on later in William and Sarah’s lives – the image of the Blenheim house that heads this page is evidence of that. But I’m not so sure about the early days. It’s unlikely that Sarah grew up in a house with a garden; William might have spent some time around gardens, but having their own vegetable and fruit gardens would probably have been a new experience for them, as for many of the other settlers from urban backgrounds. The New Zealand Company was quick to organise the formation of the Wellington Horticultural Society to encourage settlers to take up gardening, and the first horticultural exhibition was held in January 1842. Sarah’s view of gardening below probably owes more to my brown-thumbed approach than anything else, but you can be sure that William would have taken a highly scientific route! With none of the environmental protection controls that we have nowadays, all sorts of seeds were sent out from England, with mixed results. Some quite innocuous English hedge-row plants adapted rather enthusiastically to the New Zealand climate and are now treated as noxious pests.

G is for garden. The garden was William’s latest project. Neither of them knew the first thing about gardening, but it was the expected thing here, to start your own garden as soon as you had a bit of land you could call your own. People were getting seeds sent out from home, and she was always being offered them, or cuttings or bulbs. William took a very scientific approach, with labels, and notes in a small book, but she just did what she was told and followed whatever instructions she was given. She doubted the survival of the funny little things and waited without much hope, but with a willingness to be surprised when something green pushed its way through the soil towards the light.

Sarah’s younger brother Henry was born when she was 14, so she would have played a major role in caring for him when he was young. He was always referred to as her little blind brother. The 1851 census has a column for listing whether each individual is “blind, or deaf and dumb” – Henry is not marked as such. However in the 1871 census, where the choices are “deaf-and-dumb; blind; imbecile or idiot; or lunatic” a note against Henry’s name says “blind from small boy”. In an 1844 letter, Sarah’s mother says “Poor Henry is trying to improve that he may be capable of writing to you himself before long and then he has a deal to say”, which suggests that while his sight may be poor, he is not completely blind. Henry then adds a few sloping lines of his own to the bottom of the letter. Many years later, Sarah’s father tells of how Henry preaches in the market-place in Barking from his book of “Moon’s raised type”. He goes on to say, “Oh Sarah, if you could see him standing up declaring the Gospel to falling men – only to think a few years back you watched over him in bed diseased with a loathsome disease”. The most likely of the loathsome diseases that could have caused blindness in a child at that time was measles.

H is for Henry. She missed him dreadfully, her little brother Henry. He was the dearest of all her brothers and sisters. When she and William married, they hadn’t wanted a big fuss, and so Henry had been her only family at the church. He had been five then, and afterwards, he had cried because he didn’t want his big sister to go away. They had both cried a lot more when the passage to New Zealand had been confirmed. She had wanted to take Henry with them, but her parents and William had persuaded her that New Zealand would be no place for a blind boy. If anything happened to them, he wouldn’t be able to manage on his
own, and who would there be to take him in? She knew they were right, but his absence was always with her, like the gap between two of her back teeth. Her tongue would always seek out the hole, looking for the tooth that had once been there. Her mind was like that with Henry, always prodding at the gap where he had been in her life. And every time she asked herself, was it something that she did, or didn’t do, when she was nursing him through the illness, that caused the damage to his eyes?

I remembered Sarah’s father mentioning in a letter that she had been born in London, so I went back to the letter and checked. In fact, it was Dorset Street in Spitalfields, so I Googled it and discovered it was pretty much the worst street in London. I’m waiting on an interloan from the library of a book about the street, which is actually called The Worst Street in London. Among other things, long after Sarah’s time, Jack the Ripper murdered one of his victims in an alley off Dorset Street! Anyway, this piece of information asks more questions than it answers – like why were Sarah’s parents living there? Why did they move to Ilford?

I is for Ilford. She had thought that she would spend her whole life in Ilford, or at least nearby. She hadn’t been born there; she was born in one of the worst streets in London, not that she remembered life amongst the immigrants and doss-houses. She had imagined marriage and a family of her own, but always there, with her own family close at hand, not on the other side of the world. Would she ever see Ilford and her family again?

"Jam" is about all the things the early settlers didn’t have…

J is for jam. She missed jam. And honey. And marmalade. There wasn’t enough fruit yet for any but the earliest of the settlers to be making jam, and there were no bees for honey. All those lovely jars and jars of jam that had filled her larder at home – plum, raspberry, strawberry – she had given them all to her mother when they packed for New Zealand, not wanting to risk the extra weight and possible breakage. Now jam was an imported luxury, an occasional purchase when she had spare house-keeping money, kept for special occasions. She craved
the taste of something sweet.

Another imagined episode from Sarah’s pregnancy with Oscar.

K is for kick. Dear heaven, how this baby could kick. It seemed to be doing it for its own amusement. Rubbing her stomach just made it worse, as if it was trying to reach through to her hand. The other night, she had rested her saucer on the bulge while she drank her tea, thinking it safe, the baby dormant. It was just lurking in wait though, and with one almighty kick, sent the saucer flying. Fortunately it didn’t break – she didn’t have china to spare, and when William asked for a repeat performance because he didn’t quite believe it, she had told him rather tartly to fetch one of the tin plates they had used on the ship. He had placed it quite gingerly on the bump, and was rewarded a minute or so later with a satisfying clatter as the plate sprang up and slid to the floor.

More of Sarah's alphabet

Here are some more letters from the alphabet exercise I've been working on over the last week or two. Wellington is almost a character in itself in some of these. Sometimes I'm so immersed in Wellington as it was in 1841 and 1842 that I get a nasty shock when I find myself in the present. Then there was the morning on the train, coming round the harbour, when past and present blurred together and Sarah's view and my view were suddenly the same.

B is for bowl. The harbour was like an enormous bowl with water in the bottom of it. The sides of the bowl rose away bush-clad and steep, and the town grasped at whatever land it could at the edge of the water. Sometimes in a roaring southerly, with the sea rising and pushing at the town, it seemed that the bowl would fill with water and cover them all. She knew it couldn’t really happen, but sometimes she imagined them living under water in the bottom of the bowl, the great kahikatea trees as slippery and supple as seaweed, fish swimming down Lambton Quay amongst the carts and horses and women with shopping baskets.

A lot of the letters of the alphabet picked up on Sarah's thoughts and feelings about her second pregnancy - Oscar - in 1842.

C is for confinement. Needlework freed her mind to wander, and it always seemed to wander to her greatest worry, her impending confinement. She was dreading it, not looking forward at all to the inevitable pain, when the baby took over and seemingly began to tear and batter its way out while she fought it for her own life. At the same time she was anxious for it to be over and both of them safe, God willing. Her mother had been the same every time, but at least she had Sarah, had the comfort of knowing that if God took her, Sarah would be there to look after the other children. When Ovid came, having Mother there had been a big comfort, knowing that if it all went wrong, she would take care of the baby. Here in New Zealand, with no family, her fears worried at her. She wanted to be practical, tell William that if she did not survive he should marry again as soon as possible, to provide a mother for Ovid, and the child if it survived her. But she couldn’t bear the thought that she might have to leave her dear William and Ovid, and when the tiny stitches blurred and tears fell into the fine cotton she wasn’t sure whether she was grieving for herself or for them.

D is for daughter. She hoped this baby would be a girl. William wanted another son, but she wanted a daughter this time. Men didn’t seem to value daughters in the same way as women did. Daughters were useful, of course, to help with cooking and housework and the smaller children; but really, a daughter was another chance, someone who could be a better version of herself, prettier, more accomplished perhaps.

Earthquakes were always going to make an appearance - can't live around here without them.

E is for earthquake. That last one had been a real rattler – it seemed to go on for an eternity while the china clattered on the shelves and the table rocked and swayed as she crouched under it, clutching Ovid for dear life. Her heart was still pounding as hard as if she had been running. Would she ever get used to these earthquakes? Did anyone? The Maori children from Pipitea Pa would run out calling “ru, ru”, giggling and laughing like it was something they enjoyed. But how could you enjoy it when the solid and dependable earth beneath your feet suddenly started to ripple and shake so that you couldn’t stand up, and you had no idea how long it would last, or what would come tumbling down?

Apples

I’ve been working on a writing exercise called the Character Alphabet, where you take a letter of the alphabet, let your character pick a word that starts with it, and write a short scene from their point-of-view. I knew straight away that for Sarah, A is for “apple” – which does have a certain clichéd children’s alphabet feel about it, I know. But I’d been thinking about apples. The last of the peaches and nectarines have disappeared from the supermarkets, so this week’s lunchtime fruit for me will be juicy, crunchy, Pacific Rose apples. And I’d been writing about William, Sarah and Ovid visiting the Horticultural Exhibition on Wellington Anniversary Day 1842, where the first apples grown in the region were exhibited.

The apples were grown by the Baron Alzdorf in the Hutt Valley. He put four of them into the exhibition and they received a special prize and a mention in the newspaper reports. They must have been a bit small and confused, those apples, it being January at the time. For new arrivals like the Norgroves, they were probably the first apples they had seen in almost a year, having left England at the height of summer, and arrived in New Zealand at the end of spring. New Zealand’s only indigenous fruits were berries, and there wouldn’t have been many about since William and Sarah arrived – and anyway, how would they have known which ones were safe to eat?

So, knowing I was going to write about Alzdorf’s four apples and Sarah’s reaction to them, I needed to do a little apple research. After all, I don’t want any accidental anachronisms – I don’t mean having her bite into a Pacific Rose, which is a late twentieth-century apple – but if I needed to describe an apple’s colour, texture and taste, it had better be an apple that she might be familiar with. This led to a fantastic voyage around the internet to discover that there are a heck of a lot of varieties of apples out there, with some weird and wonderful names. Ashmead’s Kernel, anyone? Or how about a Flower of Kent or a hefty Peasgood’s Nonsuch? By the time I got to the Cornish Gilliflower, I was drooling into the keyboard, and had to stop for a Pacific Rose of my own.

I wanted to know what sort of apples William and Sarah had been familiar with back in England, which is how I ended up reading Mrs Beeton (loads of apple recipes, but she’s not particular about the varieties to be used) and The Whole Art of Husbandry, written in 1716 by J. Mortimer, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who was rather more helpful, if colourfully descriptive : “The Aromatick or golden-russetting hath no compare, it being of a Gold-colour’d Coat under a Russett Hair, hath some Warts on it, its Flesh of a yellow colour, its form of a flattish round…” Mmmm?

I decided William and Sarah were probably familiar with the Blenheim Orange; the Decio, which dates back to Roman times and looks like the great-grandmother of all apples; the Golden Reinette (or Golden Rennet, according to the spelling of J. Mortimer above); Ashmead’s Kernel; Fearns Pippin; and the White Pearmain, which had been grown in England since about 1200AD. And it was the Pearmain that seemed the most likely candidate for Baron Alzdorf’s first apple trees, being a self-fertilising type, not reliant on other fruits for pollination. At this point, I had to stop myself from diverting down the research path of finding out how the early settlers got their first fruits, vegetables and flowers going without bees for pollination, a topic for future enquiry. Back to the story at hand – here is how “A is for apple” played out.

At the Horticultural Exhibition, Wellington, January 1842

A is for apple.
The next table had only one display, a white china plate holding a pyramid of small green-and-red apples. When had she last seen apples? Certainly not since they had been in New Zealand. In fact, the last time she could remember eating apples was early in her pregnancy with Ovid.

She hadn’t even been sure that she was pregnant; they had only been married a few months, after all. William and Mr Allardice had gone to work on the roof of a house on the outskirts of Ilford. The men were told they could take windfalls from the orchard, and William came home with his lunch-cloth bulging with russety golden rennets. He held them out to show her, and she snatched one up and crunched into it as if it was the only food in the world. Which it was, for her, for the few minutes it took her to gobble it, pips and all. She was licking the juice from her fingers when she saw William’s expression, surprised, but oddly pleased.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted, suddenly conscious of her greed. “I don’t know why…….I just wanted it so badly.”

“Maybe it wasn’t you who wanted it,” he had said, with a meaningful look at her waist that had made her blush deeply, still a little shy with him about the unexpected pleasures of marriage.

He had been right, though. She looked at them both now, as Ovid reached out for the shiny fruit, and William caught him up and held him so that the apples were out of his reach. He looked at her over the top of Ovid’s head, and smiled.

“He still wants apples, then”, William said, winking at her.