Babbicam

by Rod Madocks

  Spool Two

  Gasking’s Race

  Babbacombe August 1884

  Doctor Kaiser: Good to go, Mister Lee.

  —Don’t know what to say today. Keep thinking of the ole dumman. I tried to keep in with Miss Keyse that last summer even though I didn’t realize that my life was like a ball of string about to come all undone. I went to St Mary’s with her for Sunday services and fussed over her special in the house. She was never satisfied whatever I did. The harder I worked the more she wanted me to do. I remember particular I had to dance attendance on her right through the summer sea races. They were the high point of the year at Babbicam. The Regatta they called it. Gasking used to arrange it. There was no end of the pies he had his fingers in. A lot of craft came and filled the bay. The bandstand on the Downs got a lick of paint, a greasy pole was put up for games and flags were flying along the tops.

  I had just harnessed the dog cart to take Miss Keyse up to join the gentry in the viewing stands when the screaming started. A woman calling out for ‘Johnny’. I could see at once it was Mary Ann Fey.

  Doctor Kaiser: One of the two sisters you mentioned?

  —Ess, crazy she were. The Missis asked who the woman was, ‘n I told her it was a mad woman and whipped up the dog cart to get through the crowds. Miss Keyse was frit about us toppling over on the steep road and it looked like Mary Ann was gaining on us for a while. I caught a sight of a man in a naval jacket and cap who jumped into the crowd and got hold of Mary Ann. She gave out a hell of a shriek then was pulled away behind the Cary Arms. I cracked the whip again and the dog cart dashed away with Miss Keyse hanging on. Things calmed down after that and I put the ole dumman down by a viewing stand along by the bandstand. I could see the Mount-Temples were there and Colonel McLean and the Missis’ sister. And Doctor Chilcote, bless him. Thank the Lord the Brownlows weren’t there. I had a job with the hoss because of all the racket—brass band playing, fire brigade bell ringing and that shouting crowd. I was also worriting that Mary Ann might pop up again. Presently, Harrington and Lizzie came. Harrington told me that if I lay with a mad woman then I would beget a harpy. He seemed to find it funny. I realized that it was him that had grabbed the Fey girl, so I asked him what he had done with her and he said that the mazy finch wouldn’t sing for a while. You could never get anything from him straight. When I pressed him he said that he’d saved me again but next time I was going to save him.

  The racket moiled on, drunken fellows attempted to go up a greasy pole. The Marychurch fool was made to sing and dance for gangs of chillern. A big fat girl they called ‘The Maid of Babbacombe’ stood on the rock above Lovers Leap and started the race by waving a yellow scarf. The whole bay was spread out with boats—navy steam cutters, fishing ketches, the Avon—a training ship for boys, schooners, yawls and dinghies. The big money was on the six-oared seiners, owned by Gasking, the Stigings and Thomas of Anstey’s Cove, all smugglers in one way or another. I let Lizzie stand in the dog cart to get a better view. I don’t remember who won. Most of them were related to Gaskin so the prize money likely went back to him.

  I had to walk the pony back to the Glen through the thick crowds. Miss Keyse liked to wave back at the tradesmen and other locals that were greeting her. We were blocked at the top of Beach Road by a figure coming through the crowds. It was Gasking being carried like a king on a chair on the shoulders of fishermen. He passed Miss Keyse and turned his brown face to glare at her as he passed. Some of his gang began to boo and hiss at her and shout things like, “Old crow! Old crow!” and, “Not dead yet? You old biddle.”

  I could see that Miss Keyse was crying. She said something to Lizzie about how sad to have lived there so long and not to be loved. Later I went down to Grafton Terrace to see Katie. There were rockets going off above St Marychurch. All of a sudden Katie decided I could take her in her bed. I remember all the time I was with her that night her mother kept knocking on the wall with her stick. I thought in my foolishness that at last I was treading a smooth road.

  Real Life

  I’ve been looking at most of the stuff on an online British newspaper archive but the real buzz was getting the A1 size paper copies in a big brown envelope carrying English stamps. The stamps had colorful images of butterflies. The types were written on the stamps ‘White Admiral’ and ‘Chalkhill Blue’. There was something so non-American about those names and those stamps. They seemed like emblems from another world that confirmed me as a true seeker. I’d ordered copies of journals like ‘The Torquay Times and South Devon Advertiser’ for 1884. My eye greedily caught on to all sorts of stuff about the times my characters lived through. I have to pick my way carefully. I don’t even have a drop of English blood to help me. No ancestor vibes. I’m German with a dab of Norwegian just like the blood line of Ed Gein—or Jeffrey Dahmer’s probably for that matter!

  Once I got to look through the Torquay newspaper stuff I particularly dug the adverts like: ‘Chlorodyne, it assuages pain of every kind’ and ‘Try Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, The Mother’s Friend’. I’d got the idea somehow from the movies or the History Channel that once you put Jack the Ripper to one side then the English Victorian times were a settled sunlit time of peace and prosperity but the papers seem actually full of a jittery sense of threat. There are weekly references to how many people were dying in Torquay. In August 1884 it was 9.6 per thousand, the death rate ebbing a little due to the cholera being under control. Fear seemed to move in Torquay in many ways. You can feel it through the flow of events as you flick the pages. Prisoner John Bray escaped from Dartmoor Gaol running south, last seen at Lustleigh. The public were warned to be on their guard. Yet other unseen dangers were lurking. Lee mentions somewhere that Miss Keyse read the papers a lot and got her servants to read out bits to her. I tried to imagine what she must have made of all the stuff that was in the courts each day. Harriet Brimmicombe, fisherwoman, found lying dead drunk in St Marychurch, William Rouncevel, labourer, charged with wounding his wife ‘by incising her neck with a penknife’, Rebecca Loveridge, Infanticide, drowned her baby in the Teign, ‘her dead baby found by gypsies’, PC Meech found a donkey and cart abandoned on Babbacombe Road, no explanation as to its vanished owner. There certainly seemed to be a notion that something bad was just around the corner. Sheep scab was on the rise, deaths recorded for all sorts of reasons from a stroke in the street or a carriage accident to a tree falling on a passer-by. The inhabitants seemed awful keen to cut throats, their own or others. The paper reported a veteran of Waterloo, 85 years old, killed himself with a knife because he feared he was going blind. There were also long articles about milk being a source of disease and instructions to buy ‘Rough on Rats’ poison to prevent being overrun with pests. They recorded that Dr Chilcote was given extra parish monies to build an isolation ward for infectious cases among the poor.

  As I went through all this stuff the same names that Lee mentions on the wire recorder kept bobbing up and that gave me confidence that his strange ramblings were not plain fantasy.

  Spool Two

  Two Deaths and a New Life

  Babbacombe, October/November 1884

  —Kisler, Keeseler, Kissler, that Frenchie bastard, however you said his name. He used to call me “charlatan”. I didn’t know what it meant but nothing good I’d bet. Lizzie had to hold me back when we bumped into him on Fore Street. I’d have belted him with my knob stick if Lizzie hadn’t dragged me off. It got hard to be anywhere in that place without trouble.

  Doctor Kaiser: You have not mentioned this man before

  —I’m sure I must have, doc. He and Harrington got me six months prison time. It’s hard to explain it all but I’ll get to it. At the time I had no end of other troubles. Down on the beach the fishermen snapped at me as the creeping servant of that old toad, Miss Keyse. And at Grafton Katie had cooled a bit. That, or she was too worn out caring for her Ma. I also thought that she’d grown fed up with me ranting on about the Missis or about Kisler. She made excuses and
kept her arms hanging by her side when I tried to hold her. The Missis bore down on me, alles groaning on about grease spots on my jacket and checking on me and chivvying. She sent me to the post three times a day and found no end of pointless jobs for me to do. She said how even that rough stupid Sam Bartlet who had so strangely disappeared was a better servant than me. She was not content with any of us, kept sending her meals back to be done again, complaining about her linen, hinting that she could do without me and all of them and would soon go to live with her sister at Compton House. Later I would hear her crying and she’d try to creep into my room as if to make amends. She told me that she was sad to think of the grand parties and the life she once had there. Said that her brother St John was quite a blade. He had blue eyes just like mine according to the ole dumman.

  I asked Jane Neck about this brother of the Missis. Jane told me she was often sad in the autumn as it was the anniversary of her mother’s passing. She’d had many deaths, Miss Keyse. She never knew her father, he died afore her birth. Her other father Mr Whitehead was long dead. He was cruel to her. And her Ma was also dead many a year. All her other sisters gone except for Amelia married to a reverend in Hereford, and her half-blood, Mary, at Compton. The one she grieved most for was her brother, St John. Jane pronounced it ‘sin jen’. They used to call him ‘Jack’, just like me. There is a mystery there. He went to Canady as a young man, got married then came back to Babbicam all on his own, then cleared off with Annie Bennet, a local girl. A bit of a bad ’un was Jack Keyse. The mistress still cried for him. Some say he was killed in the South Seas ten year before. A seaman had brought news that he had been murdered by a native though the Missis would never speak of it. She still talked to his portrait as if he was alive. I had no time for her woes but I wanted to understand why she kept me on.

  Doctor Kaiser: Let me get this straight. You say that Miss Keyse’s brother Jack was murdered?

  —That’s the size of it, doc. There was all sorts going on in that house once you started looking under stones. Take Lizzie for example. The leaves were on the turn in the cliff woods when I first began to notice that there was something wrong with Lizzie. She seemed unsteady and fearful, ringing her hands and not saying what troubled her. I kept finding her looking out the kitchen window up at the tangled cliffs. When I asked her what was the matter her eyes filled up. I heard the Necks whispering about it, about when women have troubles ’twas a man that had sent them. On top of worrying about Lizzie I had the Missis even more on my back. She wanted the Glen to look more presentable and she had me at half a dozen jobs a day: leaf sweeping, watering the music room ferns, painting the doors to the coach house. Little George Russell the chimney sweep came down with his bags and brushes to clear out the Glen’s chimneys. He was stretching out his canvas covers over the dining room carpets when Miss Keyse came nipping at him with orders to keep the place clean. After she had gone, he said that the old bird was sparky. I told him I’d stuff her sparkiness down her throat or some such. I was fed up with her on my back all day, the crow.

  Doctor Kaiser: Had Katie dropped out the picture then?

  —Katie was all tied up with her Ma being so sick. She was took really bad. Miss Keyse was angry at me for taking time away to go down and see her. Katie’s Ma asked to see me on her sick bed. The room stank like death. She asked me particular to make sure I looked after Katie when she was gone. I promised her I would. I had to be careful coming back from Grafton as Mary Ann Fey was often on the prowl. She’d be waiting for me and she’d jump out, saying I had destroyed her peace and I was a liar and a cheat. She said she’d tell Miss Keyse that I’d seduced her with strong drink. I’d scream at her to be off but in my mind I wondered what was ever going to stop her. We buried Mrs Farmer at the new cemetery at Hele Road in early October. There was a small gathering. I walked with Katie arm in arm down the chapel steps and told her we are free now. She cried her eyes out.

  Doctor Kaiser: Did you intend to settle down with her?

  —The poor girl was probably crying not only for her Ma but also for how unsteady I was. To tell the truth the troubles at the Glen got to be bigger than any worries about Katie.

  Us servants were in a right bobbery. There were so many coming and goings. There was Templer and Carter the legal men, there were commercial men who looked about the place. The Necks spotted Tregaskis, a hard-bit local dealer and bully-boy walking up and down the quay, sizing up the place. One day Jane Neck held up Miss Keyse’s copy of The Torquay Times. It had a big hole cut out of the Notices page. “Why would the Missis do that? ’Tis strange,” she said. I ran and got a late edition from one of the Ellacombe shops and there it was, an advertisement for Bonds the auctioneers. The Glen was for sale and all that went with it. Jane wondered what will become of us. My Lizzie said that we’d be going down the road with our notices.

  Lizzie had written to Millie and she came down to see Lizzie at our Aunt’s house. I went out to visit Katie at the same time. We quarreled. I accused her of making up to gentlemen customers in the millinery shop and shouted that I would leave her and leave Torquay. This frit her and she tried to soothe me but I felt all riled. Later on I walked Millie back to Torre Station. She told me Lizzie was with child and Lizzie would not say who the father was. She was sure Lizzie would lose her situation when Miss Keyse found out about the babby. Millie thought it best I came home. I said I would last out a while. Millie went on about being frit of something happening. I could not fathom this news about Lizzie’s baby. I got another knock about then when Miss Keyse told me she was not satisfied with me and I would now get only two shillings a week. I told her I could not manage on that. She said that we all must cut our coats according to our cloth. That really put me in a rage.

  That’s when I ran into Bill Richards. He used to call out to me as he cycled down the Beach Road to deliver the post. I’d known him since I were a napper. He liked to talk, old Bill. Little did I know how our words would be used against me. It was in early November, I was slomicking about, flicking at the leaves with my knob cane while we had a chat. I was moaning about the Missis. Said I was tired of it, felt like putting an end to it or some such. Bill liked my stick and tried to buy it off me. I said I needed it to crack heads. He laughed and told me to mind I stayed out of trouble saying things like that.

  Everything began to pile up after then. They brought in a fisherman onto the beach at about this time. He had fallen into the nets at sea, got caught up and drowned. PC Meech and Sergeant Nott were down there bent over the body with their notebooks out. Harrington told me that the Stigings had pushed him in and drowned him because he’d gone a-blabbing to the coastguard. He told me to guard myself and that he might need my help soon. I was still seeing Eliza Maile up in the cliff woods. I’d ask if she was frit of me. “Should I be?” she kept asking. She laughed all nervous-like. She used to let me feel her bubs but nothing else. Said that I had to prove myself if I wanted more. I don’t know if I wanted to have a clearer run at Eliza or if I just wanted to keep poor Katie out of the mess of my life. Whatever it was, I ended up writing that stupid letter about then. Telling Katie that I wanted to end our engagement. I worked a long time on it and posted it quick before I had second thoughts. Mary Ann continued to harry at me. She’d fix me with her mad spider eyes and try to get me to lie with her in the tallett loft above the wood shed. Even though I’d freed myself from Katie I would not dream of touching Mary Ann again. How she used to curse me when I shook her off.

  The Glen was no refuge either. The house almost cracked with the strain although the usual jobs ran on. Miss Keyse still did not mention the coming sale. Lizzie was stopper-mouth quiet but I could see she was considering something. I couldn’t help but keep staring at her belly. Jane Neck kept dropping things and bursting into tears.

  Doctor Kaiser: You wrote to Katie ending your engagement?

  —Ess, that’s correct.

  Doctor Kaiser: How did she take it?

  —I got her reply by return pretty
much. I could not bear to look it at once and saved it to read in a private place down along the sea shore past the Stigings’ cottages. It shamed me to read her words and I no longer really wanted to be free of her. Hell, I didn’t really know what I wanted by then.

  Letters

  These are the original letters in full, preserved in the archives and much published at the time. It’s so weird how literate and formal they are when everything was on the brink of such savagery. I’ve hardly ever written a letter myself except some email pitches to poetry publishers. Lee’s written voice as a young man seems different from the mature world-weary voice on the spool but occasionally there is prefiguring. Some of his wording is unexpected. Did he get someone else to pen it?

  Here’s Lee—

  My dearest Katie,

  I am very unsettled in what I am going to do in my future life. I am tired of service and am going to look out for something else and to do something which may not be to your liking. And my dear don’t let me keep you from going anywhere where it will be for your good. You may get a better chance by going away and we might not always be the same as we are now. My dear, I implore you, if you think we shall not come together let us break off our engagement before it is too late. I am beginning to love you so much it will break my heart if we should leave in time to come. Do let us break off at once. My dearest let what we have gone by die out of our thoughts but our love never can. My dearest you have been the kindest I have ever met with in love and all things. I shall ever love you the same and I shall leave the town as soon as possible. I shall feel it very much my love. If I had kept your company when first I had seen you I would have married you and made you happy. I am unsettled now and don’t know what my fate will be. My own love.