Going with the flow

People sometimes experience moments where something appears in their creative work that seems to come from beyond them – for writers, a character appears fully-formed from nowhere, or a character says something that you know you didn’t think up yourself. Some people think it’s the hand of God at work. William Blake said, “I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me.” As far as Puccini was concerned, Madame Butterfly was dictated to him by God : “I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public”. Sometimes it does feel like that – those are my fingers on the computer keyboard, but it’s just flowing through me from somewhere else altogether. I think flow is an explanation which removes the spiritual element which some people find off-putting –flow is just the state where we’re so in the groove with what we’re doing, everything just comes together. You lose track of time and the world around you and it’s like magic!

Last week I had one of those experiences, resulting in a research side-track and some interesting questions. I’ve been working on writing William and Sarah’s last night on the Gertrude – the immigrants are a bit stunned and disappointed by what they have seen of Wellington. They’re feeling a bit misled by the New Zealand Company’s claims about the place, and there is a lot of talk going on in the steerage compartment instead of the usual quiet getting ready for bed. Here it is, still very much messy First Draft :

Below deck, it was noisy chaos instead of the usual quiet bed-time preparations. The curtains were still open in most of the bunks, and somewhere she could hear a woman weeping. The men were clustered around the tables between the berths, several vigorous discussions taking place at once. A small child’s wail rose above the din, and the sudden tightening of her nipples made her realise that she had been so caught up in her own worries that she had forgotten Ovid. Where was he? They had left him sleeping in their bunk, watched over by the neighbouring Plimmers. She was too small to see the far end of the compartment over her thronging ship-mates. She began to work her way past the benches, struggling past backs and elbows and sea-bags, stubbing her toes as she pushed and excused herself. She glanced up to get her bearings in the shadowy sea of dark coats, and found she could see the pale moon of Ovid’s face peering from their bunk. She reached for him, hands quickly checking over his small body as he wrapped his legs around her waist and pushed his face into her neck. “Mama’s here now,” she murmured to him, “Mama’s here”. Over the hubbub, she heard a gruff voice call out their name from the other side of the table.

“Norgrove! You’ve looked longer on this so-called town of Wellington than the rest of us tonight. What say you about the New Zealand Company’s promises now?”

The muttering voices quieted as benches creaked, men turning to see William as he followed Sarah through the crowd. She heard him sigh, and felt his hand on her shoulder, a brief squeeze that sent warmth and tingling quite unexpectedly through her. She leaned into his solid warmth as he turned to look at the expectant faces.

“Well, certainly it’s not a town or city as we know them back in England,” he began.

“Far from it,” came a voice from near the hatch, as other voices called out, and fists thumped the table.

“Friends,” William shouted. “Friends, that is not why we took this journey! If you wanted the familiar, the towns and cities of England, why then are you here? Why did you bring your wives and children on this dangerous voyage if you wanted a world like the one we left behind?”

“Hear, hear!” came a voice from below and to the right of her. Bodies shifted around Sarah as John Plimmer extracted himself from his family’s bunk and stood up. “Norgrove has the right attitude. This place is full of opportunity for us all!”

Immediately, the uproar broke out again, and William broke away from her to move closer to the table. Men shifted to allow him through and she lost her balance, pushed back against the bunks and almost falling into someone’s bed. A tug at her skirt made her look down, and she saw Eliza Plimmer beckoning her down to join her family in the lower bunk. She squirmed between a ship-mate and her own hanging sea-bag and gratefully sat down on the edge of the bunk as Eliza pulled six-year old Isaac onto her lap to make room. “You stayed on deck a long time.” Eliza leaned over and spoke directly into Sarah’s ear to make herself heard. “Does it look any better for looking at it longer?”

“No,” Sarah said, “not in the slightest.” She tried unsuccessfully to hitch her skirt into a cushion without jolting Ovid, or disturbing Eliza’s two younger children, who were nested in blankets at the back of the bunk. The raised edges of the bunks stopped bedding from sliding out, but made for uncomfortable seats, especially since five months of use had reduced the straw stuffing in the mattresses almost to dust. In the end, she did what Eliza had done, and swung her feet up onto the bunk and leaned her back against the rough boards dividing it from the next bunk. They sat toe to toe, unable to talk without raising their voices, and unable to see anything of what was going on through a solid wall of men’s coats. Sarah let Ovid slide down onto the mattress with his head pillowed on her stomach, and twitched the end of a blanket over him. She thought she saw Eliza rolling her eyes in the gloom as outside, their husbands argued the opportunities and benefits of their wild new Eden against those who despaired.

She stroked Ovid’s fine blond hair – it had lightened in the sun since they had crossed the equator. It really needed cutting, but she wasn’t going near him with a pair of scissors in a ship rolling around at sea. It would have to wait till they got ashore, and then she would barber William as well if she got a chance. Who knew? This time tomorrow night, they would probably be sleeping on the shallow beach she had seen from the deck, or somewhere in a forest under one of those towering trees. She didn’t want to think about it – she wanted to be doing something. No wonder the men were ranting and storming, but none of the women seemed inclined to join in, and she wasn’t going to be the first to speak. Eliza seemed to have come to the same conclusion; she had reached around Isaac for work-basket and was digging through it for something to do. Sarah leaned towards her. “You won’t be able to see to sew in this light.” Eliza pulled out a thick skein of grey wool. “No,” she said, “but we may as well finish rolling the wool while we’re stuck in here.” She picked out the end of the yarn, and held the rest for Sarah to take. Sarah tucked her hands inside the skein and then pulled them apart to hold the loops taut. Eliza started to roll the wool around her fingers, forming a squarish lump that slowly took on the shape of a ball as she wound the wool around it. Sarah’s hands moved automatically, easing the wool off the skein. She focused on it in the dim light as they settled into a rhythm, concentrating on the wool and her hands so that individual words from the men’s discussion blurred into a loud hum.

They were just starting on the second skein when Eliza abruptly stopped winding and leaned out of the bunk to look at something. Although the men nearest them were still talking hard, the noise seemed to be dying down, and Sarah thought it was probably the ship’s surgeon, come on his nightly rounds. She was proved right when Dr Garrett’s voice called out above the noise. “What’s this then, a Chartist meeting?” The silence that followed was so sudden and tense that she realised a good number of her fellow passengers must have been more involved in the Chartist actions than merely signing a petition.

© Helen McNaught

I stopped writing in complete surprise when Dr Garrett spoke, because where in the world did “a Chartist meeting” come from?? It’s not something I ever studied in a formal history class, but I knew I had run across it somewhere. Eventually, I tracked it back to the Nelson Examiner’s report on a public meeting held in 1856 to discuss the Education Act. In speaking in favour of the Act, our William “remembered attending a Chartist meeting about 25 years ago, at which one of the great reasons urged for the passing of the people’s charter was that the Government did not make proper provision for the education of the people”.

The rest of his speech is quite fascinating, but I’ll come back to it at another time. I took off into an exploration of Chartism, starting with Wikipedia, and ending up in some fairly scholarly articles. I haven’t quite finished yet – am still wondering if anyone has written a thesis on the links between Chartism and emigration to New Zealand – because obviously there has to be a link.

Just as interesting, though, is whether great-great grandpa was a Chartist, and does it matter anyway? I’ll come back to this in my next blog entry, because this one is already enormous!