Читать книгу Snowy - Tim Harris - Страница 10

Elizabeth married John Rolfe on 30 April 1861, just 71 days after Susan’s death, when she was 34 and John was 48. I Walked by Night describes Fred’s father as a difficult, bigoted man, so one wonders what the attraction was. Did she marry him to keep a roof over her head, because life as a widow with a daughter to care for was a terrible struggle? Perhaps Mary Ann did not want to continue living at home with her peppery father, so he needed a housekeeper, for men in those days did not fend for themselves.

The author Flora Thompson (1876–1947) wrote in her book, Lark Rise to Candleford:

Patty was not a native of these parts but had come there only a few years before as housekeeper to an elderly man whose wife had died. As was the custom when no relative was available, he applied to the board of Guardians for a housekeeper, and Patty had been selected as the most suitable inmate of the Workhouse at the time.

In Arcady for Better or Worse, a book written by a clergyman, Augustus Jessopp, about rural Norfolk in the late nineteenth century, the following tale is related:

An habitual drunk, Dick’s first wife died and left him with two children, the eldest three years old. Dick had such a bad character that no one would be his housekeeper, the neighbours ‘did for the children’. Within ten days of his wife’s death Dick’s patience was exhausted. Off he walked to the Workhouse, got admission on some pretext to the women’s ward, and gave out that he wanted a wife and wouldn’t go until he got one. An eager crowd of females offered themselves. He picked out the prettiest.

“What’s your name?”

“Polly Beck.”

“How many children?”

“Three!”

“Who’s the father?”

“Don’t know! I had two by Jack the butcher, they died. T’other three ain’t so big.”

In less than an hour Dick, Polly and the three little ones marched out together happily. At the Registrars office, within a month, Polly became Mrs Styles and turned out not such a bad wife.

Whatever their reasons, John and Elizabeth married, and ten months later Fred was born. The children of John’s first marriage were almost off his hands. James is listed in the 1861 census as a 16-year-agricultural labourer and would probably have been on half wages as a half man, but he would still have been bringing money in. With only Fred and Maria to bring up, the family would have been better off than most.

In the mid-1800s village life in England was hard, the average wage being 10/- (about 50p) and the well fed bought about a stone of flour for two each week, each stone costing 2/6d. The principal groceries were cheese, yeast, sugar, paraffin wax candles (used from mid-1800s), tea, tobacco for the head of the household, with a few coppers left over for beer. Groceries were purchased from John Sare, the Pentney grocer, or from the post office, which also served as a butchers and general shop. Meat was rarely eaten, while herrings and fat bacon (when families could afford them) were saved for father and any working boys so they had the strength to work, as it was imperative to keep the wage earners well. Prosperity was seen as the ability to have one meal that included meat a day.

In 1880 a loaf weighing a pound cost 1d, milk was a penny a pint (skimmed, a farthing). Tea was an expensive luxury, coal cost 25/- a ton, sheep’s heads were a penny and doctor’s fees ranged between 2/- and 6/6d. The average number of children in a family was between five and six. They survived largely on bread and dripping, porridge and root crops boiled into a stew.

Sadly, any happiness the Rolfes shared must have been short-lived, for while Fred was a toddler, his step-brother James died in King’s Lynn Hospital on 19 December 1863 of General Deposit of Tubercular Exhaustion.

Known as the ‘White Plague’, tuberculosis killed almost everyone who caught it. It was found in the bones of Egyptian mummies and there was no hope of a cure until the germ was identified in 1882. The disease reached epidemic proportions in the 1600s when one in five died of it and there was a real fear it would wipe out whole cities.

1. The Old Lodge, West Bilney, in 2009.

2. The Bridge over the Nar at Pentney Mill, by Walter Dexter R.B.A. (1878-1958).

3. Grimston Court House built in 1881, where Fred often found himself.

4. Grey’s Cottage, where Fred and his family were living in the 1881 census. This photograph was taken in 1911.

5. Norwich Prison while it was still located in the castle, as it would have looked when Fred served his first term of imprisonment.

6. Record of Fred’s first offence (top entry) from Docking Court Record, Grimston Court being in the Docking division.

7. The Oak tree in Narborough Park where Fred hanged his dog.

8. The Lodge in West Bilney, taken by Mr Arthur Taylor on 10 May 1892.

9. George Edwards, preaching from a wagon in East Rudham in 1918.

10. The isolated Freebridge Union Workhouse in Gayton.

11. Stibbard Memorial Cross, with the cottages where Fred lived with his family on the left. This photograph was taken in the 1920s.

12. Fred Rolfe (right) as Regimental Rat Catcher, holding a ratting stick and gin trap.

13. Roy Bulman and Emily Rolfe on their wedding day, 3 April 1919, at All Saints Church, Battersea.

14. David Rolfe, taken when he entered Barnardo’s on 20 April, 1920.

15. Bertha Rolfe, Fred’s granddaughter, who lived with Fred and Kitty from birth.

16. Shipmeadow Workhouse, where Kitty died in 1925. It is now apartments.

17. Bridge Street in Bungay, as it would have been in Fred’s time. His home at no. 7 is just behind the van at the end of the street. Nethergate Street is immediately to the right of the van.

18. 7 Bridge Street; the yellow cottage where the family lived in the 1920s.

19. Mrs Jessie Redgrave.

20. Clark’s Yard, as it would have been when Fred lived there with Mrs Redgrave after Kitty’s death.

21. Fred’s home at Grammers Green, Mettingham. He lived in the lean-to with the tall chimney, originally the brew house, when he left Mrs Redgrave’s home in the early 1930s. Painted by John Reeve.

22. Lilias Rider Haggard (left) with her sister Angela.

23. The first page of Fred’s book, I Walked by Night.

24. Frederick Rolfe in 1935, when he was about 73.

25. Frederick Rolfe. This was probably taken as a publicity photograph when the book was first published.

26. The letter which accompanied Emily’s book about Kitty’s life.

27. 1 Nethergate Street, Bungay. Fred died here on Wednesday 23 March, 1938.

28. Some of Bungay’s Best Snares.

29. Les Knowles, who came across Fred’s body, standing with the author in front of the restored 1 Nethergate Street.

30. The document which Lilias Rider Haggard drew up for Fred to sign, giving him £20 in lieu of royalties.

31. Reverend Francis Kahn.

32. Author with David Rolfe, Fred’s great-grandson, and his granddaughter Holly.

Following an outbreak of cholera in 1833, the good men of King’s Lynn decided the town must have a hospital and so they purchased Gallows Pasture, a meadow where criminals and pirates had been hanged in the 1600s. King’s Lynn Hospital was opened in 1835 and extended twice more, due to the generosity of two local benefactors, so by the time poor James arrived, there were beds for fifty-two patients. The downstairs wards were reserved for patients who had had accidents, a common occurrence in a rural port. This was to spare them the ordeal of the stairs. Upstairs, the acute surgical and medical wards were mixed. Every care and comfort was given. Great importance was attached to the need for lots of fresh air – ‘bad air’ was thought to harbour germs. The wards were heated with open fires, which must have made cleaning difficult, for everything was scrubbed each day. It was not at all Spartan, though: there were fresh flowers and pictures on the walls, plus toys for child patients.

In 1863, the year James died, the hospital admitted 344, mostly accidents, with a high rate of recovery after surgery. A year later, B.W. Richardson, MA MD, an authority on pulmonary tuberculosis, came to King’s Lynn. He found a ‘fine hospital giving free treatment to the poor’. The locals dug deep into their pockets and gave generously to support the hospital and feed good nourishing food to the patients. Richardson’s only criticism was of the food – too much carbohydrate and not enough protein (he made no mention of the need for fruit and vegetables).

There is no record of how long James Rolfe was a patient, but it is doubtful he would have had many visitors. The ten miles into King’s Lynn was a long way to walk, particularly in winter, even if the family could afford a day off work, assuming their employer would allow this. Trains would have been expensive and presumably they did not know how long James would linger. Postal services had been running for about twenty years (Robinson Crusoe was Postmaster at Lynn). Would someone from the hospital have written or used the Telegraph system, which began in 1845, to send a telegram to John and Elizabeth to tell them the sad news? As neither could read, who would have read it out to them?

However his parents received the news, James’s body must have been borne back to the village by train or over the muddy roads by cart in the late December half-light. What followed must have been a pitiful but common sight as the little funeral procession made its way to Pentney churchyard, either on foot as a ‘walking funeral’, or possibly in a cart lent by a generous farmer, washed down and filled with straw. James and his father are both listed in the census as agricultural workers, but it is not known on which farms. Not for James the plumed horses, the family dressed in black, the draped crepe, the mutes and all the outward signs of grief beloved by the Victorians.

James’s funeral would have been very much as described in Candleford Green by Flora Thompson:

The women would follow the coffin, in decent if shabby and unfashionable mourning often borrowed in parts from neighbours, and men with black crepe bands around their hats and sleeves. The village carpenter, who had made the coffin, acted as undertaker, but £3 or £4 was covered by life insurance. Flowers were often placed inside the coffin, but there were seldom wreaths, the fashion for those came later.

A meal to follow the funeral was almost certainly provided, and the food then consumed was the best the bereaved could obtain. These funeral meals for the poor have been much misunderstood and misrepresented. By the country poor and probably for the majority of the poor in towns they were not provided in any spirit of ostentation, but because it was an urgent necessity that a meal should be partaken of by the mourners as soon as possible after a funeral. Very little food could be eaten in a tiny cottage while the dead remained there; evidence of human mortality would be too near and too pervasive. Married children and other relatives coming from a distance might have eaten nothing since breakfast. So a ham or part of a ham was provided, not in order to be able to boast ‘we buried ’im with ’am’, but because it was a ready prepared dish which was both easily obtained and appetising.

These funeral meals have appeared to some more pathetic than amusing. The return of the mourners after the final parting and their immediate outbursts of pent-up grief, then, as they grew calmer, the gentle persuasion of those less afflicted than the widow or widower or the bereaved parents, for the sake of the living still left to them, should take some nourishment. Then their gradual revival as they ate and drank. Tears would still be wiped away furtively, but a few sad smiles would break through, until, at the table a sober cheerfulness would prevail.

For John and Elizabeth this sad tableau would have been enacted all too frequently, both their spouses having made the final journey to the churchyard at Pentney within recent years.

As a child Fred loved to spend time with his maternal grandparents, who lived close by:

They were a dear old cupple, and I was verry fond of them and they of me, and would never hear any thing rong of me.

. . . and I used to sit and listen by the hour. I never herd any thing like that at home from my Father, even if he knew any thing. He would never tell me a tale except about religon, I got plenty of that – much good it done.

Wen my Father got to hear that he was tellen me those tales he forbid me goen to see the Old People, but I always managed to get to them some way or another.

. . . I used to hear a lot about the horrors of tranceportation. I often think that the old People of the Eighteen Centuary, used the tales of tranceportation as a Bogey man to frighten there sons. The young generationn now would not even know what it means to be tranceported.

I had an Uncle tranceported some where round about that time for Sheep Stealing, and Grandfather have told me many a time about it. He was a Shepperd and lived at West Acre. It was the time that Amerricca was asken for Emergrants to go out, and he stole the sheep to get the money to go there. They told me he got twenty years sentence, and was sent as a convict to Australia.

After a few years of working for the Government, Fred’s uncle was released. He was then free to work where he liked, so long as he did not leave the country. I Walked by Night goes on to describe how he carried on his trade as a shepherd, saved money, married and settled. When he died, he owned eleven square miles of land, and 40,000 sheep. Certainly, he was able to send money home to his parents. Lilias Rider Haggard added a footnote to the book to say Transportation was looked on as a terrible fate, mainly because the lack of communication and very isolated nature of English villages made the distance even more terrifying.

She also recorded that a bottle of the prisoner’s urine was corked securely and hung up in his old home, then anyone would know how he was getting on. If the urine got cloudy, he was ill; if it wasted, he was dead and the family went into mourning.

Prisons at that time were not for holding convicted prisoners and periods of imprisonment were not a sentencing option; they were used solely to hold those on remand. Once their case was heard, either they were sent to the gallows, transported, whipped, pilloried, put in the stocks or fined. There were Houses of Correction, such as the Bridewell at Walsingham that housed tramps and vagabonds, if they were not considered to be the deserving poor. Originally intended to train inmates to lead useful lives and learn a trade, they became prisons in all but name. Magistrates decided whether the tramps should be aided or punished, and punishment was harsh: they would do the most unpleasant of tasks to earn food, and could be whipped or be pierced through the ears with a red-hot iron.

Juries were beginning to feel uncomfortable about passing the death sentence for less serious offences and so fewer verdicts of guilty were passed. One way round this was to offer a pardon to criminals if they agreed to enter the Army or Navy, or to order transportation.

When transportation to America ceased in 1776, serious overcrowding in prisons led to the use of hulks as floating prisons. To ease this problem, a fleet of convict ships left for New South Wales in 1787. The first ships were desperately overcrowded and the prisoner treatment and conditions appalling; many died on the journey. Inhumane treatment continued while they served their sentence but once free, they could carve out new lives for themselves, or find a way to return home.

With the introduction of punishment by imprisonment in 1853, transportations lessened and by 1868 it had ceased altogether. Between 1787 and 1868, 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia. Four thousand were from Norfolk and most of these were held in Norwich Castle until they left. Men and women were not segregated. While in prison, Henry Cabell and Susannah Holmes had a child. Sadly, by the time the baby was born the rules were tightened and the sexes separated, so Henry rarely saw his child, though he was said to have developed a remarkable fondness for it. Eventually transported in the first fleet to go to Australia, all three were reunited and became one of the colony’s founding families.

Fred’s grandparents also told him tales of smugglers, who like poachers worked as a defiance and a necessity. His Grandfather recalled boats coming in from Holland and Germany with cargoes of spirits and silks. Large quantities of contraband were moved under the cover of darkness. In November 1829, a 39 ft galley was captured at Breydon, with a cargo of 283 half ambers of proof brandy and about 6,000 lb tobacco. November 1832 saw 5,565 lb tobacco and about 650 gallons brandy and geneva (gin) seized from a large tub-boat and lodged in the Custom House at Wells next-the Sea.

These boats were met by luggers out in the Wash and some of the contraband brought across Terrington Marshes to Marham Fen, where the goods were hidden until they could be moved on down the Green roads for dispersal. Undoubtedly, these tales must have coloured Fred’s views on breaking the law.

In 1871, Rebecca, John’s second daughter and Fred’s stepsister, left her employment at Church Farm, Pentney as she was pregnant. John George was born on 2 November 1871 in Gayton, possibly at the Workhouse. On 17 September 1872, the baby died of chronic diarrhoea and exhaustion. Hustler Shaftoe was present at his death. Another illegitimate child and another infant death, it was common at that time but nonetheless very sad.

It may be that Rebecca went home to her father and Elizabeth to have her baby because in the 1871 census they were living in Back Street, Gayton, where John’s occupation is listed as farm bailiff, although Fred recounts in I Walked by Night that his father:

worked forty year on one farm as a Labourer, and never got any higher.

There does not appear to be anyone farming in both Pentney and Gayton, so why was John there, and why, ten years later on the 1881 census, was he back in Greys Cottages, Pentney, listed as an agricultural labourer? At every census John and Elizabeth had moved, so presumably John was not in tied accommodation.

The Census Act was passed in 1800 and the first official census held on 10 March 1801. Held every ten years since, except in 1941 when World War II was taking place, it was the first recording of the English population since the Doomsday Book in 1086. The census becomes open for public perusal after 100 years.

This country had previously resisted a formal count with churchgoers believing it to be sacrilegious, quoting the terrible plague that struck in Biblical times when a census was ordered by King David.

An 1827 map of Gayton shows that the layout of the cottages and the shape of the village are surprisingly similar to how the village is now, but it is not possible to work out which cottage might have been John and Elizabeth’s, as the census does not appear to run logically. Also, as recently as 1906, half of Back Street was called Willow Lane.

Interestingly, Harrods Directory notes that in 1871 a Petty Sessions was held in the Crown Inn on the first Monday of every month. Presumably this ceased when the courthouse in Grimston, the next village, was built in 1881 – a place with which 9-year-old Fred would later become familiar. In those days, he would almost certainly have attended the school in Gayton that was built in 1851, although his name does not appear in the Minutes or Punishment Book.

Sadly, the records for Pentney School are missing for the period when Fred was there, after the family returned, but he recounts in I Walked by Night how he was always up to mischief as a child:

So one day we turned the Master out of school and locked him out. The School was maniged by two of the Farmers and the Clergyman. They came down and stood outside, and promised to lett us off and forgiv us if we would come out. We would not at first, but of cors we had to come out in the end to go home, and wen we did they began on us and we on them. We had aranged to get out by the back way, so we got to the road befor they knew that we were there. There were plenty of stones in the Road, and we verry sone shewed that we could throw them all rite.

Well the end of that was that they turned about six of the worst of us out of school for good, and forbid us to go there anymore, so that was the end of my lerning. A lot we cared as there was plenty of work for Boys in them days.

1870 saw the first legislation about school attendance. At the time, all children were forced to go school, but it was not free. The 1880 School Act compelled education until 14 unless pupils could pass the Labour certificate earlier, proving they had reached an acceptable standard of education. Sadly this meant that bright children who would have enjoyed and benefited from school left early, leaving their duller friends to struggle on until 14.

The introduction of the Act placed schoolteachers in a terrible dilemma. Farmers, who were often on the Board of Managers at the school, were keen to pay low wages because of the Agricultural Depression and this they could do to children, who were capable of stone picking, beet thinning, bird scaring, potato planting, etc. Parents were desperately poor, so they were eager for their children to work and so the schoolmaster had to allow the law to be broken. After the harvest, parents also kept the children home for gleaning (the gathering of stray ears of corn) and what they collected became an important supplement to the winter larder. Children also stayed at home to pick acorns, which they sold to the gamekeeper as feed for his pheasants. Girls particularly were kept at home to look after younger siblings while their mother had yet more, or went out to work to supplement the family income.

In I Walked by Night Fred tells of a young vicar who came to the parish and took a great interest in the village lads, organising a night school and games to keep them occupied. He himself was reluctant to go, fearing he might be preached at:

But I did go in the end and I do not think he ever gave me a word of that sort, just treated me kindly. True he wold some times talk to me for my good, and some People thought I was getten better and quieter, but I am sorry to say I was some thing like the Smugglers and the Self rightus People; I was working in the dark as much as possible.

The vicar was John Samuel Broad, MA, who took over from the Revd. St John Mitchell in 1875, when Fred would have been 13. A new man, full of zeal to win over his flock, it was with his encouragement that Fred gained a love of reading and writing.

Fred’s first job at the age of 13 was with farmer Thomas Paul, of Ashwood Lodge, Pentney, as the ‘copper hole Jack’ or ‘back’ us [back house] boy’. Paul owned 850 acres and employed twenty-six labourers and nine boys on the land. Fred’s role was to light fires, carry wood and generally run errands issued from the back door. Paul was churchwarden at Pentney for fifty-six years; his wife and daughters were regular worshippers and pillars of the community. Fred was sure he got the job (perhaps the vicar asked Paul and his family to take him under their wing?), so they could keep an eye on him, but mostly his eyes were elsewhere.

He had been poaching since the age of 9. Despite a flogging from his father when he showed him a hare that he had snared, he had caught the bug. Now he poached whenever he could, selling hares to the fish hawker, who took them through to Lynn Market that he attended twice a week.

But Fred was unable to settle to the life that many of his fellow villagers were content with, staying all their lives in the same place with one job, marrying locally and perhaps venturing to King’s Lynn only once or twice a year. He wanted excitement and soon tired of being under the watchful eyes of Farmer Paul’s spinster daughters, so he took a job as pageboy to a shepherd. This was much more to his liking, for there he could poach to his heart’s content. During times when he was not required by the shepherd, he was put to work cutting turnips and working in the fields; there he watched and listened, and perfected the art of poaching. Whether he became cocksure or careless is debatable, but inevitably the long arm of the law eventually caught up with him.