by Mary Hoban
Julia’s first years were lived in the family home in New Town. She was an energetic, engaging child, full of abundant love for everything around her: dogs, horses, flowers — it mattered not. And she loved the clatter and chatter when the large family — her mother was one of eighteen children — would gather at her grandfather Kemp’s big mansion, Mount Vernon, outside Hobart. When the nursery in New Town witnessed the addition of Augusta in 1829 and Ada in 1830, Julia spent more time with her gentle, loving father who continued to marvel at his good fortune in meeting and marrying the beautiful, vivacious Elizabeth. The nursery expanded further when Julia’s younger brothers were born, Percy, in 1831, and then William in 1834, but by that time this stable, joyful world was beginning to dissolve.
Julia’s mother was young, beautiful, and a force. She had inherited her father’s energy and his temper, and, soon after little William’s birth, she fell into a fretful humour. Elizabeth was bored with her children and bored with her quiet, sensible husband who was content with his work, his family, and his life in the colony. She was bored too with the small world of Hobart. She wanted to escape. Young, beautiful, fierce, and now restless. It was a dangerous combination.
Elizabeth’s ennui began to evaporate when she met Major George Deare of the 21st Fusiliers, who arrived in Hobart in 1833. In his scarlet coat and with his adventurous tales, he was a vivid contrast to the staid and reserved William. The fiery Elizabeth fell in love with him while the spirited, impressionable Julia, a keen observer of her world, watched. She saw the glances they exchanged, their heads close together, their lingering touches. And she listened, too. Children have an instinct for emotional truth, even if they cannot understand its import. It was no coincidence that Elizabeth decided it was time to send Julia to boarding school.
Ellinthorp Hall was the most fashionable school in the colony, and there Julia began learning French, writing, arithmetic, and geography, useful and ornamental needlework, drawing, dancing, and, for an additional charge of six pounds and six shillings, music. This extra fee was not wasted on her, for music would become an abiding passion of Julia’s. She made friends very easily at Ellinthorp — her engaging, animated nature ensured this — but she missed her younger brothers and sisters, and she missed her father. She wished she could return home, and take all her friends with her.
When she realised that would not happen, she adapted herself to the pulse of her new life until that day in 1838 when the school was attacked by a small band of bushrangers. There was just enough time for the teachers and girls to pile heavy furniture against the doors and to block up the windows with mattresses, pillows, and cushions, leaving only apertures for the gun barrels, before they sat waiting, silently and fearfully, trying to interpret the sounds of the attack — the scrambling, the running, the gunshots, and finally the silence as their attackers turned and disappeared into the bush. If Julia had hoped a bushrangers’ attack might cause her mother to bring her home, she was to be disappointed.
Back in Hobart, Elizabeth Sorell was not thinking about her daughter at all, and she certainly did not want her nearby. Her affair with George Deare had intensified, and when he received notice that his regiment was being posted to India, together they began plotting Elizabeth’s escape. It was no easy matter. As a married woman, she would need a satisfactory motive for leaving, she would need her husband’s approval, and she would need his money. Adroitly, she worked on William. It was time, she said to him, that their children, particularly their daughters, saw something of the world, as she had when young. Of course, she understood that William would not be able to leave his work, but surely she could take the children? Framed in such a way, William could not refuse her. Elizabeth booked her passage, and that of their children, to England.
Julia was summoned home and, while she watched her mother dress for the ball to farewell George’s regiment, she was told of the planned journey to Europe. Excitement fought with unhappiness. She was deeply unsettled. The next day, in between hearing her mother’s description of the ball — Lieutenant-Governor and Lady Franklin in attendance, rooms wonderfully illuminated, tables spread with a sumptuous supper, a profusion of wines and toasts — Julia sought answers to all the questions bubbling inside her. Why wasn’t her darling father coming with them? How long would she be away for? Would she ever go back to Ellinthorp Hall? Couldn’t she return there before they sailed to say a proper goodbye to all her friends? There were no answers, only more talk of the ball.
Julia’s unease rose further when, amidst the packing and the farewells, she came to understand that not everyone supported her mother’s scheme. The thick Georgian walls of her grandfather Kemp’s mansion could not shroud his anger for there was no moderation in his condemnation of his daughter for going, or of William for allowing her to go.
On 3 February 1839, as the Auriga, a 232-ton barque under Captain Chalmers, sailed down the Derwent River, Julia watched her father’s figure disappear from sight. She was too young to understand that lives are swept along by those very ordinary moments when one decision is made rather than another, when a moment’s action renders consequences that reverberate down through the years. All she knew was that she had been ripped from her father, her friends, and her school.
The voyage was a long one, but Julia found life on board absorbing. After the excitement and the confusion of departure, when cargo was stowed here and there, cabins allocated, hatches closed, sails raised, and ropes unfurled, her days assumed a rhythmic pattern. On that small vessel, a dot on a great expanse of water, only the present mattered. As an upper-deck passenger Julia was spared the grim fare served to the steerage passengers — the hard brown biscuits, tasting like sawdust and alive with weevils, and the repulsive-smelling pea soup, so thick a spoon could stand in it — but the rotten food and the cramped conditions did nothing to dent her envy of them. Song and laughter abounded below deck and when she could escape her mother, she sought to join them, to watch, as they did, the flights of the Cape pigeons and albatrosses, or to observe the men and boys fishing for dolphin or shark. And when they sang at night, she would creep onto the deck to listen, staring wide-eyed at the black cloth sprinkled with clusters of small diamonds that sparkled in the void above her.
When the weather prevented her from going on deck, Julia would amuse her younger sisters and brothers with stories from her boarding school. They never tired of hearing about the day the bushrangers attacked, and the boys, keen for their own adventure, would pester her with questions. Would pirates soon appear on the horizon? And if they did, would the Captain give orders for all the muskets and cutlasses to be brought up and put in readiness for an attack? And when the pirates were captured, would the Captain make them walk the plank? Would they be able to watch? Julia tried to share their enthusiasm, but she remembered her fear during that attack on the school. It was like a hard grip on the throat. She never wished to struggle for breath again.
On a glorious day in May 1839, the Auriga finally docked in England. Julia thought it one of the loveliest days that it was possible to conceive and would remember that, and her feet first touching English soil, for years to come. She watched with excitement as the movement and noise around her took shape, storing it up to tell her father in her next letter, but there was no time for writing. London was not her mother’s destination, and, within a day, Julia and her brothers and sisters were shepherded onto a steamboat going to Antwerp. From there, a train took them to Brussels, where their grandfather, the former Governor Sorell, and Mrs Kent were now living. Julia did not know it, but her mother’s ruthless campaign was nearly done. Elizabeth Sorell settled her children with their grandfather and disappeared. She had a rendezvous to keep with Major Deare. Once reunited, the couple fled Brussels immediately to join Deare’s regiment stationed in India.
Julia did not understand at first what had happened. Her grandfather kept asking her questions about her mother’s plans. Had she spoken of where else they might be go
ing? Had her mother met any friends in London or on the boat? Days later, he summoned her to his study, where he told her that her mother would not be returning to Brussels and that she and her brothers and sisters would be staying with him until he could return them to their father. Julia did not know the words to speak. Nor did she understand how that moment would change her, how she would come to loathe those who lied to her or who broke her trust in them. And she had no inkling then that she would never see her mother again. How could she ever find the words to explain any of this to Percy and little William? Gussie and Ada might understand some of what she had to tell them, but not the little boys. She could only hold them close.
Brussels in the late 1830s was one of Europe’s most intriguing cities. It was no accident that Thackeray’s heroine Becky Sharp found a home in Brussels, a haven for radicals and bohemians full of second-rate dandies and roués, widow-ladies who always have a lawsuit and very simple English folks who fancy they see ‘Continental society’. More than two thousand British residents lived there, many among them fleeing from creditors or seeking to escape the rigidities of the moral and class systems that prevailed in England. It was no accident, either, that the former Governor Sorell and Mrs Kent lived there. It was one city where the unmarried couple were accepted.
In their grandfather’s house, surrounded by strangers in a strange city, this small band of children — twelve-year-old Julia, ten-year-old Gussie, Ada at nine, Percy eight, and the baby William, just five years old — drew closer together. In the face of their mother’s abandonment, the younger ones turned to Julia, and, disguising her own bewilderment and anger, she sought to comfort them. There was no explanation, simply its effects. They heard the raised voices behind closed doors, the broken-off sentences, but the silence seemed even louder. While Julia waited and dreamed of being rescued, of returning to her father and to her old life in Van Diemen’s Land, she felt a hard, dark thing settle inside her.
She began to grow up quickly in this raffish city, with its never-ending cavalry parades, its bustling alleyways, its parks full of chestnut trees, and always the sound of church bells. She excelled at French, picked up a little German and some Dutch, mothered her younger brothers and sisters, and tried to make friends, but it was difficult in that school where, as an English-speaker and a non-Catholic, she was always an outsider. And then when the blood began pouring from her, she thought it was punishment for hating her mother, for hating the girls who despised her, for hating Brussels, a place where she believed hypocrisy flourished. Here in Brussels, she acquired a visceral hatred of Catholicism and she grew to despise its attitudes towards women.
Julia’s anti-Catholicism was felt rather than thought, taking hold when she was at her most vulnerable and unhappiest, in a state of shock still from her mother’s desertion, living among people she did not know or understand, and unable to comprehend or articulate her emotions. An outsider, a stranger, among those schoolgirls of Brussels, Julia hated their whispering condescension. She scorned them for their beliefs, their lies, and their spite. Behaviour mattered to her, not prayers, not words. Her contempt for Catholicism and its symbols, the rosary beads and the statues, which she saw as pagan idolatry, was only fuelled by her grandfather’s stories about the Sorells — French Protestants, known as Huguenots, who had fled to England in 1685 after recurring waves of persecution and, sometimes, slaughter by their Catholic compatriots.
She was not alone in her reaction to Catholicism. In 1842, just as Julia was leaving Brussels, Charlotte Brontë arrived to teach. She echoed Julia’s feelings when she described the girls she taught:
Whenever a lie was necessary for their occasions, they brought it out with a careless ease and breadth altogether untroubled by the rebuke of conscience … If they had missed going to mass, or read a chapter of a novel, that was another thing: these were crimes whereof rebuke and penance were the unfailing meed.
When, more than one hundred years later, the adolescent Dorothy Strachey was sent away to a small finishing school outside Paris, she, too, found the Catholic environment overwhelming with its incessant talk about our Saviour’s blood, the dreadful necessity of saving one’s soul, the frightful abysses into which one might fall at any moment.
But alongside her contempt, Julia was also developing an abundant compassion. Hating her position as an outsider, she grew to empathise with those who were different, who were shy, who were ill at ease. As for those who denied their background, who became what she saw as hypocrites, there could be nothing but loathing. Even in this dark time, though, her innate optimism, her fierce mothering of her siblings, and each small act of kindness she made worked their balm. Within the intimacy of her grandfather’s house and the military circles in which he moved, Julia absorbed social and moral attitudes, she noted the roles of women, the various ways in which they reflected the men around them, and she observed the codes of femininity, the modes of fashionable dress, and the arts of social intercourse that prevailed. The result — a cosmopolitan vivacity, a quickness, a decisiveness — marked her, like her anti-Catholicism, for the rest of her life.
It took more than two years for her grandfather to arrange their passage back to Hobart, so anxious was he that they sail with Captain Chalmers, the same man who had captained the vessel that had brought them to Europe. The Captain was a delightful man, universally liked and regularly entertained by many of the old colonists who had sailed with him, and the former governor wanted to hand his grandchildren over to such a man. During that long voyage home, Julia grew to love the Captain — after he retired from the sea, she would sometimes stay with him and his family, and when she married, she took her husband to meet him. He, in turn, was utterly charmed by her. Many of the passengers knew Julia’s story, and if at first they were drawn to her out of curiosity, it was not long before they, too, succumbed to her particular charm. She was interested in people. She had a decisiveness about her that inspired confidence. She had the gift of optimism, of looking ahead, never behind. And she had the gift of movement, always dancing from one person to another, never resting, always talking and laughing. Her gaiety and chatter, enhanced by the eloquent use of her hands — another characteristic she had picked up in Brussels — were infectious. She sparkled.
Julia loved being on the sea again. Each day placed a greater distance between her and those strained years in Brussels. She began to believe that once reunited with her father, no further disasters could possibly befall her. And then, on the very last day of the voyage, her eye had been caught by those two blackened bodies and she was immediately transported back to Brussels, standing before Mrs Kent. The woman was telling her that once she had returned home, it would be her duty to marry as soon as she could. That was what respectable young women did, she had said. But how could Julia be respectable when her mother had run off, and when even her grandfather and Mrs Kent weren’t married? With such scandal clothing her, who would want to marry her? And her father — what would he expect of her? Would he, like Mrs Kent, want her to marry quickly and then find husbands for her younger sisters?
As the wind picked up and the bodies receded, Julia was seized with a sudden desire to turn the ship around, to sail on, to never dock, for on that little vessel, perched between her past and her future, there had been no expectations and no disappointments. Instead, the ship anchored, and Julia Sorell stepped straight into her father’s arms and her new life. She was fifteen years of age, ignorant, yet strangely knowing, full of love and hate, skittish with excitement and energy, and always a lingering fear.
2
Entering Society
Sitting high on her father’s carriage, Julia could barely recognise her home town. Yes, it felt quaint and primitive compared to the bustle of Brussels, but it had lost that bush feel that she had known. Its English trees were reaching as high as the church steeples and its soft-stone buildings were beginning to mellow. When the carriage turned towards the central area, Julia realised they w
ere not returning to their old home in New Town. Instead, her father was taking them to a pretty, well-furnished cottage, in a strip of orchards and gardens along Sandy Bay. He had, he told her, moved house soon after they had sailed from Hobart. And he confessed that he had sold off most of the furniture, including the rosewood card tables, the carpets and rugs, the children’s bedsteads, a small library of valuable books, and, to Julia’s dismay, the square Broadwood pianoforte she had so loved playing. But it was not the time to argue with him. The house in Sandy Bay would be a new beginning for the reunited family. The piano could wait.
Julia remembered many of the places she passed on the journey along Macquarie Street. Government House was still standing behind its stretch of white fence and thick row of gums and there, too, was the high brick wall of the gaol. It was a stark reminder that Hobart was no ordinary town. It was still a gaol for England, or as she remembered her grandfather Kemp roaring, it was a dumping ground for home rubbish.
Just as the carriage reached the gaol, a chain gang, dressed in hideous leather caps and distinctive yellow pepper-and-salt clothing, shuffled its way with clanking chains across the street in front of them. Julia recalled such sights — so many of Hobart’s population were convicts after all — but for the younger children, to see men chained was strange. And standing high above the gaol wall was the platform where prisoners were executed in full view of an assembled crowd. She had never attended an execution, but she remembered one of her cousins describing how he and his friend had played leapfrog and marbles while they waited for the execution to take place. It was no wonder that cruelty, like a darkening cloud, hung over the town.