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.