Bad Penny Blues

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘I’m going to open a new file,’ she remarked as we sat ploughing through the letters one evening. ‘I’m going to call it “Freckles”. Listen to this — “Dear Sheila, I saw your picture in the magazine at my supermarket and I just love your freckles. Where did you get them?” It sounds as if he wants to buy some!’

  ‘Where did you get them?’ I asked. ‘I read somewhere that freckles are a left-over from the Anglo-Saxon invasion, or the Vikings, or both, like red hair and Bure’s Disease.’

  ‘What’s Bure’s Disease?’

  ‘It’s a horrible disease that the Vikings left behind them when they came raping and pillaging up the River Bure. It still crops up in the villages in that area.’

  ‘What about this,’ she said, picking up another letter. ‘“Dear Miss McKenna, I am still at school, but I am very interested in history and when I saw your picture in the papers and read about your interesting research I wondered if there was any way that I could help you.” It’s a posh school, too,’ and she showed me the headed notepaper.

  ‘Oh, very posh,’ I said. ‘Just the partner for a well-brought-up young lady, product of a sound religious education in Adelaide.’

  ‘He just wants to help,’ she said.

  ‘He,’ I said, ‘lives for nine months of the year in a communal dormitory with a dozen other sweaty little sex-maniacs, whose greatest desire is to be let out so that they can outclass the Vikings.’

  ‘You’re a cynic,’ she complained.

  She read a couple more letters, then laughed. ‘We really are pulling a better class of punter today. Look at this.’

  The letter was on cream paper, headed with the green portcullis logo of the House of Commons, and had been passed on by the BBC in Birmingham. It said:

  Dear Dr McKenna,

  I happened to hear you on Carl Chinn’s programme on Radio WM while in the West Midlands, telling the interesting story of your research. I am virtually certain that I can help you with the history of the man called Somers, who was one of my forebears. I live at Wilstock in the Cotswolds, and if you wish to make arrangements with my secretary I would be pleased to meet you and show the material I have on the dark secrets of my family.

  Yours sincerely …

  I laughed out loud at the signature.

  ‘What’s funny?’ she demanded.

  ‘He’s a nutter,’ I said. ‘John Carton, MP, as he signs himself, is better known to the tabloids as “Mad Jack”.’

  ‘What does he specialise in?’

  ‘He’s a right-wing loony of some kind. Very vocal on race and immigration, champion of the rights of the “common man” but vigorously anti-trade unions, thinks strikers should be jailed and homosexuals put in training camps, wants social security benefits cut, hates the European Union, detests the Euro, thinks the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly are nests of traitors who will cause the break-up of the Kingdom, loves the Royal Family but feels free to comment loudly and often on their morals, and has a huge and solid majority in an East Midlands constituency.’

  ‘Sounds fun,’ she said, ‘but at least he seems to be up front about the skeletons in his closet. So he doesn’t sound like the kind of loony who murdered poor Buggalugs.’

  ‘Who knows what kind of loonies you get in the House of Commons,’ I said. ‘Apart from plain old English corruption for money, we’ve had a member who lost his seat through a penchant for caning young lads, one round here who pretended he’d been eaten by sharks and ran off to Australia — he must have been barmy — a guy who got involved in a mysterious happening on Clapham Common, a bloke with a taste for soldiers, all the way back to a War Minister who slept with a girl who shared his favours with the Russian Defence Attaché.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘A representative cross-section of the British public. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to be?’

  ‘They’re supposed to be elected because they’re smarter and better than the rest of us.’

  ‘Huh!’ she said. ‘I shall phone his secretary tomorrow, and if you want to come with me you’d better be on your best behaviour.’

  ‘Oh, I’m coming with you,’ I said. ‘I’m not having you disappear into some Cotswold dungeon to become the plaything of a foaming nutter dressed in skin-tight pink rubber with swastikas, who whips you three times before breakfast.’

  ‘You make it sound real fun,’ she said. ‘I know it’s a long time since breakfast and you can leave out the swastikas, but how about trying the rest of it?’

  Which meant it was late morning before she phoned Garton’s secretary but arrangements were duly made to visit Wilstock on the following Saturday.

  *

  Garton had sent his son, an amiable round-faced twenty-five-year-old, to meet us at the station and drive us to Wilstock. Perhaps because of being a social historian Sheila has a strong tourist strain, and as the car wove deeper into the Cotswolds she was breathless at the countryside and the little villages through which we passed.

  ‘Wait till you see Wilstock, Dr McKenna,’ young Garton told us, and he was right.

  Wilstock, when we reached it, was a village green with a pool surrounded by ancient cottages and backed by an ancient church. Our driver slowed as we passed through the centre.

  ‘Wow!’ Sheila said. ‘I really didn’t believe there was anything like this left in England. We thought you’d torn it all down to build airports and supermarkets.’

  ‘Not with Dad around we won’t,’ said young Garton. ‘He’s a great believer in preserving England’s green and pleasant land. That’s why he lives here. It’s inconvenient for his political work but he says he’s got to keep an eye on it.’

  We passed through the village and into a narrow lane that wound a couple of times before we stopped before a pair of wrought iron gates on stone pillars. Our driver pressed a button on the dash and the gates swung silently open.

  ‘Dracula’s castle stuff!’ Sheila commented.

  ‘Infra-red security,’ Garton said. ‘During the day they’re on automatic for cars with the button. Anyone else has to use the gate phone to call the house. At night they’re locked.’

  ‘Your father values his privacy,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not so much that, but he does seem to have a knack for upsetting nutters. Almost every time he appears on the telly we get shoals of mail and some of it is really nasty. He laughs about it, but it wouldn’t be sensible to ignore the possibilities, would it?’

  ‘I sympathise with him,’ said Sheila.

  ‘You’ve had that kind of experience?’

  ‘Let’s say if I’d known the response that my photos in newspapers would produce, I might have gone about my research a bit more discreetly.’

  We had passed through the gates and come to a halt. On one side an array of flower beds flanked us, but on the left was a low, old, stone house — one of those easy, rambling houses that seem to have lain down to rest in a corner of English countryside and decided to stay there for three hundred years of so. I noted the leaded windows were the genuine article and thought how jealous Mrs Wainwright would be.

  David Garton showed us in and as we looked around us at the low, timbered hall with its flagged floor, a door opened and a voice called from behind it.

  ‘David! Take Dr McKenna and Mr Tyroll out the back and pour some drinks into them. I’ll be with you in two shakes.’

  In a couple of minutes we were sitting on the lawn at the rear of the house, under a cedar tree that seemed as old as the house, sipping our drinks. A door banged across the lawn and our host strode towards us. There was no mistaking the short, square figure, with bright, dark eyes and thick curls, still black despite his age.

  ‘Dr McKenna!’ he hailed her. ‘How nice to see you. I’m so glad that my schedule permitted us to get together so quickly. Usually constituency business and the House mean that anything I want to do has to be delayed or cancelled.’

  Having shaken Sheila warmly by the hand he turned to me. ‘And Mr Tyroll — the re
doubtable champion of the allegedly downtrodden in the West Midlands,’ he said as he took my hand.

  ‘I’m honoured that you know the name,’ I said, only slightly sarcastically and more surprised actually.

  ‘It’s a politician’s business to know everything about everyone,’ he said. ‘Or at least, to give the impression he does. You forget that there’s more of your profession at Westminster than any other and they gossip like old women. When Dr McKenna told me who she was bringing along, I just dropped your name to a few Labour colleagues. They told me how much of a nuisance you were, so I thought you couldn’t be so bad.’

  We all grinned and he sat down. ‘David,’ he told his son, ‘be a good chap and find out how long lunch is going to be while Dr McKenna and I share the dark secrets of your ancestry.’

  As the young man walked away across the lawn, Garton explained. ‘Wife’s away in the States, so I’m dependent on the staff and on David to keep them in order. Now then, Dr McKenna, what have you got on my ancestor Jerry Somers?’

  ‘First,’ she said, ‘it’s Sheila for preference. Secondly, I’ve got his convict file,’ and she delved into her bag for it.

  ‘In that case, I’m Jack,’ said Garton. ‘I always thought Australia had it right about Christian names. And are you Chris or Christopher?’ he asked me.

  ‘Oh, definitely Chris — entirely egalitarian, me.’

  Sheila shot me a glance of warning that said quite plainly, ‘Don’t be funny!’ and laid her copy of the Somers file on the table.

  Garton bent over it and pulled a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘when I looked into the family past it never occurred to me that old Jerry Somers’ file would still exist.’

  ‘It doesn’t occur to a lot of people,’ said Sheila. ‘But nearly all of the convict files are still available.’

  He turned back to the papers, reading them out loud:

  GERRY SOMERS No 48781

  arrived Fremantle Barracks March 1866.

  Born 19th October 1840

  Trade: Clerk

  Height: 5 ft. 8 in.

  Complexn: Dark

  Head: Large

  Hair: Black

  Whiskers: Sides

  Visage: Round

  Forehead: High

  Eyebrows: Black

  Eyes: Black

  Nose: Broad

  Mouth: Wide

  Chin: Rounded

  Remarks: Well-spoken

  Convict 7 years’ transportation

  Tried at Oxford, transported for riotous assembly

  Character: Bad

  He laughed when he reached the end. ‘Well’, he said, ‘it’s not a very flattering description, but I dare say it’s accurate enough. In fact it might have fitted me when I was his age. The trade isn’t quite right — he wasn’t a clerk in the ordinary sense. He was a curate.’

  ‘A curate!’ Sheila exclaimed. ‘You do mean a clergyman?’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. Gerald Somers was a curate. But they got the description of his conduct right. They would have thought him very bad.’

  ‘But if he was an educated clergyman, they probably put him down as a clerk because that was what they intended to use him as,’ said Sheila. ‘I noticed when I read his file that he’d got a long punishment record, and I couldn’t understand it for a clerk. They usually got the soft options and were well treated but he wasn’t.’

  Garton shook his head. ‘No. He certainly wasn’t,’ he said. ‘Look at this — “misbehaviour in church”, “refusal to obey an officer”, “unmannerly conduct”, “singing in cells”, “seditious conversation”, “treasonable songs” — what were “treasonable songs”, Sheila?’

  ‘Anything the authorities didn’t like — ballads about bushrangers, Irish freedom songs, convict songs generally perhaps.’

  Garton went on. ‘“Refusal to work” … ’

  I couldn’t resist it. ‘A striker?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Garton quickly, ‘and they gave him twenty-five lashes for it.’ Sheila shot me an ‘I warned you’ smirk.

  ‘It goes on and on, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sheila. ‘He was in trouble almost every month he was there. He served his full seven years and more as a prisoner and when he was released into the Colony his movements were restricted. He seems to have been quite a handful for a young clergyman.’

  Garton grinned. ‘Oh, he was,’ he said. ‘From anything I’ve ever learnt about him, he was.’

  David came back and announced lunch in fifteen minutes.

  ‘No hurry,’ Garton told us. ‘We’ll take it out here if you don’t mind. It’s a beautiful day, far too hot to eat indoors.’

  Over a lunch of cold meats and an excellent salad, Garton began to tell us about his unlucky ancestor.

  ‘Jerrold Albert Somers, to give him his full name, was the fourth son of a family who’d been around here for generations. There’s umpteen of us buried in the church up the road and one of us built this house. He wasn’t terribly respectable, either. Edward Somers was a shipmaster, a privateer if you were polite — more truthfully a pirate. He built this house out of the profits of getting away with it, where Kidd and Co ended up at Execution Dock.’

  ‘Where did he operate?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘Just about anywhere, I gather — the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic. Old Edward didn’t mind so long as there were trading routes to keep him busy. Then when he’d built up a suitable retirement fund, he came home to England, sold his ships, bought some land, built himself a house, took a wife and set about being a country squire.’

  ‘You sound like you admire him,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Well, I do. At least he did something a bit interesting. Old Edward and young Jerry are about the only two interesting ancestors I’ve got, and Jerry wasn’t really my ancestor.’

  ‘I thought he couldn’t really be a direct ancestor, unless he came home,’ said Sheila.

  Garton shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He never came home, so far as I know, and if he had he wouldn’t have been acknowledged by the family. After Edward we settled down to being landed gentry, magistrates and so on. You can look that lot up in Burke’s Landed Gentry, Somerses and Gartons. Jerry shook the family after generations of being dull and worthy.’

  ‘I thought you approved of traditional English country life,’ I said. Tour son was telling us on the way how keen you are to protect the countryside.’

  ‘I am,’ he said, ‘I am, but I don’t want to turn it into a museum any more than I want the people in it to be stuffed dummies. Never forget that the blokes who made Britain great were mostly countrymen — Drake and Sidney, Raleigh, Frobisher, Hawkins, all that lot. They had their country houses but it didn’t stop them ranging the seas. The men who went with them — they lived in cottages and when they weren’t at sea they raised sheep and cows. You said you thought I admired Jerry Somers, Sheila, and I do. I might not have agreed with him if we’d met, but he got up and tried to do something about what he believed. That’s a considerable virtue, so far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘What did he do?’ I asked. There can’t have been many clergymen nicked for riot in his day.’

  He laughed. ‘No’, he said, ‘I don’t suppose there were. It’d be quite unremarkable nowadays, wouldn’t it? You have to have a few clergy to have a good demonstration nowadays, don’t you? Anti-roads, anti-airports, animal rights, immigration, strikes, there’s always a couple of them, and if they do get arrested, they get bound over, probably. And that’s all that Jerry Somers did, really.’

  ‘Took part in a demo?’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. Church of England clergy seemed to have three choices in his day — turn Catholic, turn Socialist or get on with their job.’

  ‘There weren’t any Socialists in his day,’ Sheila interjected.

  ‘See — they really were good old days,’ he joked. ‘No, you’re right, but ever since the Chartists, twenty-five yea
rs before, there’d been clergymen who got involved with radical movements and Jerry, in his day, became one of them.’

  He pointed across the garden. ‘His dad got him a curacy at Lower Barton — you can see the church spire from here. Thought he’d be able to keep an eye on him, I suppose, but it didn’t work. His boss, Reverend Fanshawe, left Somers in charge of the little church with the poor people, while he preached to the nobs at St James’ in Great Barton. Well, times got hard in the cloth trade and Jerry’s parishioners were mostly weavers and blanket-makers. He’d always been a bit of a lefty at Oxford. His father had to get him out of a scrape or two there and stop him being slung out of college on more than one occasion.’

  He looked thoughtfully at the distant spire beyond the garden. ‘I suppose he believed that he was doing the Lord’s work,’ he went on. ‘First he wrote letters to the papers, trying to draw attention to the plight of the people on his patch. That didn’t do a lot of good, they just didn’t print them. He went about tapping up the local big-wigs, persuading them to put a few quid in the kitty. That did a bit better, some of them had a conscience, but it wasn’t enough. At least, it wasn’t enough for young Jerry. He decided on a bit of action.’

  ‘What did he do?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘He held a march. Nothing at all nowadays. Every rag, tag and bobtail who thinks he’s got a grievance gets up a march and nobody turns a hair, but back then people were easily frightened. Anyone over thirty could recall the Chartists, how they burned Stoke-on-Trent and seized a town up your way and held it for a fortnight, and they weren’t having that in Oxford.’

  ‘He marched in Oxford?’ I said.

  ‘He did, him and all his parishioners. He led the march and he made a speech. Well, if it had just been him and his flock there mightn’t have been so much trouble, but he’d got some of his old pals at the university involved and a load of students joined in and things got out of hand. The city called the militia in to clear the streets and the police nicked everyone they could catch — that was Jerry and a few of his mob. The students had vanished.’

  He broke off. ‘David,’ he said to his son, ‘pop across to my study, will you, and bring me the box file marked “Rev. Somers”?’