The service dragged on as it always did, the half-hearted singing of a thousand bored children echoing off the ancient walls. Has there ever been a less spiritually uplifting sound created in a place of worship than that dreary collective muttering? The teacher’s efforts were proportional to their proximity to the headmaster whose booming voice carried over everything else. When we had given suitable reverence, we were released back to school to collect our coats and bags and disperse to the first lessons of the term.
My first lesson was history. I liked history because it was quite easy. Usually a term would be spent on the Romans or the World Wars, the English civil war or the Great Reform Act. There is so much history in the world that you couldn’t explore it all in a hundred lifetimes. History lessons at school however have a very narrow focus on big events. Partly because there isn’t time to do everything but mostly because it’s easier for the teachers to only learn about a few events. Of course, there are millions of intricacies of a big event, like a world war, and the teacher wouldn’t know all of them. Consequently, it was quite easy to seem like you really know about the subject by simply learning one fact that the teacher didn’t know. For example, I knew that my grandfather had been part of the First Royal Tank Regiment that, four days after the Italian declaration of war, had crossed from Egypt into Libya and captured Fort Capuzzo from the Italians on 14th June 1940. All I had to do was wait for the part of the lesson about when certain countries entered the war. I would then ask a question about why it took Britain four days to go into Libya and take Fort Capuzzo. The teacher wouldn’t know why, would skate around the issue, give a vague answer and move on. The result was I had cemented in his brain that I was not to be asked any questions because I clearly knew my stuff and I would be left in peace for the rest of the term.
So, that day I collected my things from my tutor room and crossed the corridor to classroom T10 for history. Mr Eveleigh was already there and had set a pile of books at the end of each row of desks. I wondered what it was to be this term. Henry the Eighth? The French Revolution? I sat in the middle of the front row between my friends. I had observed at some point in the last year that the back row was not the place to be. Most teachers are aware of those in his or her class that will cause trouble. Contrary to popular belief they will often be happy to have them sit in the back row. The kids think they are being hard and getting away with stuff but the teacher knows differently. From the desk at the front of the class it is easy to watch the back row and gives the opportunity to shout louder when discipline is needed, having the welcome effect of showing dominance and power. The front row is hiding in plain sight and takes a certain confidence. We sat down and got our exercise books out. The text books were handed along the row. I raised my eyebrows in surprise when I saw the subject. I had never been taught about it before, probably because the subject matter wasn’t suitable for younger children. The text book had a red cover and a picture of a ship moving across a map of the Atlantic towards the Americas. Other than the author’s name there was only one word on the cover. Slavery.
CHAPTER TEN
That word hit me between the eyes like a paperclip fired from an elastic band finger catapult. My head spun as my mind tried to process all the thoughts flooding my brain. A black girl at a window in Coombe Dingle. A death that didn’t exist. No evidence that anyone other than the man and his wife lived in that house. A missing carpet. The business card with that address – Blackboy Hill. Could it be that simple? It all seemed to fit. She was a slave! The girl at the window was a slave! In Coombe Dingle! In 1985! Could that really be it? It seemed so preposterous but the clues fitted. Mr Eveleigh was beginning the lesson, telling us that Bristol had a murky past as a slave trading port. Over the next term we would explore the roots of this horrible part of the city’s past and place it within the wider picture of the international slave trade of the 1700’s. I opened my text book to the index at the back and ran my finger down the page until I found the page references for Bristol. I quickly flipped to the pages in the book and read. Bristol had always been a port city, the Roman harbour at Sea Mills was evidence of that. The river Avon carried trade to and from the Bristol Channel which spilled into the Atlantic Ocean. From there all the world was accessible. Past the bottom of Ireland and out towards the Americas, south to Africa and India and beyond to Asia and Australia. North between Wales and Ireland to Scotland and the Baltic states or east to mainland Europe and the Mediterranean.
Bristol merchants took every opportunity to turn a profit, there was evidence from as early as the 1100’s of children being sent to Ireland as slaves from Bristol. Until 1698 slave trade from the African colonies had been under the monopoly of The Royal African Company. Bristol merchants successfully petitioned King William III to allow them to participate in this lucrative business and they quickly took full advantage. Between 1698 and the abolition of slavery in 1807 over two thousand ships set sail to Africa from Bristol. In that one hundred and nine-year period Bristol traders accounted for over half a million slaves, though that was only about a fifth of the total number of souls carried into slavery by the British Empire. Bristol was Britain’s leading slave trade port during the 1730’s and 1740’s and The Society of Merchant Venturers, which still exists today, held great sway in the city. During the slave trade years sixteen ship owners served as sheriff of Bristol, ten served as aldermen and eleven as mayor.
I couldn’t believe I was reading all of this about the city I lived in. I had never heard any of this before. How could I not know about people being bought and sold here only one hundred and seventy years ago? That wasn’t ancient history, that was recent. But wait. It was history, it was abolished in 1807. Ok so the slaves who were in servitude weren’t freed until 1833 but there was no slave trade in Bristol nowadays. There were no ships setting out for Africa to be filled with unfortunates. There were no public auctions, no parading of emaciated black bodies. This was 1985, there was no slave trade anymore. How could the girl at the window have been a slave? I thought the address on the business card might be a clue. Didn’t it sound like a slave trade address, Black Boy Hill? As I read further however I learnt that it had no relation to slavery. Blackboy Hill had been named for the Blackboy inn that stood there, named after King Charles II who was so nicknamed for his long black hair.
It seemed ridiculous to think she was a slave but somehow the thought wouldn’t leave me alone. The circumstances and evidence all pointed to it, even if the timeline was way out. But what did the Sons of Charlemagne have to do with it. I poured over the index again but found no reference to Charlemagne or his sons. I didn’t even know who this Charlemagne was. If he had been involved in the slave trade though maybe Mr Eveleigh would know. I had been reading for the whole lesson, paying no attention to what was happening or what Mr Eveleigh was saying. I only noticed the class was over because everyone around me was standing up. I quickly packed away my things, shoved the slavery text book into my rucksack and stood. I waited for everyone else to file out of the room. Mr Eveleigh was sat at his desk sorting through some notes about The War of the Roses for his next class. I stopped in front of it and he addressed me without looking up.
“What can I do for you Mr Harper?”
“Do you know who Charlemagne is sir?”
I must have piqued his interest because he put his papers to one side and slowly looked up at me.
“Charlemagne was the ruler of the Carolingian Empire. He is considered to be the father of modern Europe. Why?”
“Was he alive when the slave trade was going on?”
A short laugh. “Charlemagne died in 814. The slave trade that we are studying was about a thousand years too late for him. He would have had slaves of course, prisoners of war and peoples from conquered lands, that sort of thing. Why are you interested in Charlemagne?”
I paused. I didn’t want to give anything away. I didn’t want to sound stupid.
“My grandad said something about him and slavery once. I was ju
st wondering that’s all. Thanks sir.”
I turned to leave but before I got to the door Mr Eveleigh spoke again. He had gone back to his notes but said almost absentmindedly “If you have time after your school work you could try the central library. The school library doesn’t have anything on Charlemagne but the central library should do. And good to see you engaging with history.”
I thanked him again and went on my way. I would need to go to the central library. There had to be a connection between a king from the eighth century, the slave trade of the eighteenth and a dead girl in 1985.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I went to the central library as Mr Eveleigh had suggested. I didn’t want to wait until after school. That would have meant being late home from school and the inevitable questions about what I had done wrong to get a detention. Neither of my parents would believe I was at the library studying, nor in fairness did they have any reason or evidence to do so. One of the advantages of attending such a large school was that anonymity in a crowd was easily achieved. I had the further advantage of having an art teacher, Mrs Wheeler, who had little interest in her pupils. She was a broken hero of the sixties, or at least she saw herself that way. Overweight but with face drawn and pale from years of self-medication with white wine, French cigarettes and pain pills, she wore the faded uniform of a free-spirited artist. Twenty years ago, when the colours in her scarfs and long, flowing skirts would have been fresh and vibrant she’d have been right at home in London or New York. Her dusty yellow hair was unkempt and chopped to resemble a storm ravaged hay stack on a Dorset hillside but there was a memory of bouncing blonde locks. Her thin and slightly upturned nose was a ridiculous outcrop on the greying pudginess of her face but on a thinner, younger her it must have been an intriguing feature. On her brighter days, of which there were clearly fewer and fewer with each year, she still moved with the grace of a contented hippy girl twirling through fields in spring. Now and again she would smile and in that moment, she seemed to disappear, to be replaced briefly with the innocently erotic pixie she may have once been. She had wanted to be an artist. She had wanted to live in a community, or commune, or a collective. Anywhere that ideas and creativity were praised above wealth or personal hygiene. She had wanted to have her art hailed as brave, challenging, brilliant if for no other reason than that few people understood or liked it. Unfortunately for her she was born and raised in Taunton to a violent Baker and his sickly wife. She had made it as far as the Bristol art college but never to London, New York or Berlin. Needing to make money to send home to Taunton she had accepted a teaching job straight from college and there she had stayed. She had swapped the dope for wine, kept the cigarettes. A slip on some errant clay a careless boy had left on the classroom floor in 1976 had resulted in a broken ankle. It had healed well and left no physical impairment but she had kept the pain pills, sourcing them nowadays from Skinny George, the dealer in her local.
It wasn’t hard to get away with not going to art class. Even the most rudimentary reason for absence was good enough for Mrs Wheeler. On that Monday I had double art in the afternoon so if I could get away at lunchtime I would have three hours before the regular bus home would be passing through the centre of town. I asked my friend Darren to tell Mrs Wheeler I had an orthodontist appointment. He asked if I did. I lied and said yes, I did. I didn’t need the hassle of explaining myself to him. So, when the lunchtime bell rang and we gladly made our way out of our geography class I told Darren I’d see him on the bus later and quickly made my way. Pupils could leave school premises at lunchtime so I joined the throng of kids hurriedly making their way to the shops for sweets and fizzy drinks. At the shops, I kept on walking.
Just over a mile later I was at the central library. Built by some Bristol philanthropist or other it sat next to the cathedral, two crumbling landmarks of the old Bristol. Being close to three private schools and the university it was busy. Every time I went there after that day it always smelt the same. It’s amazing how libraries retain their unique smell regardless of the osmosis of people coming and going. I would have thought the smell of the outside world, the buses and trucks, the sandwich shops, cigarette smoke and hair spray, fresh cut grass or the dampness of autumn rain, would permeate that place through the heavy doors that seemed in constant use. There was never any smell other than books in that place. It was a smell so alien to me that first day, so painful with memory to me now. Fact and fiction both accorded their place, both equal in their merit. Both worthy of this temple to the word. The musty aromas of a thousand years of human progress clung to everything. Was it the heavy blanket bringing warmth through escapism? Was it the chainmail of knowledge bringing power? For every soul that made use of that place it was a different stop on a different journey. For me it was revelation. Like the country kid striking out into the world and finding themselves at Grand Central Station the library was huge with possibilities. There were so many destinations awaiting me. So many journeys I could take. The world had opened up in front of me and I felt a strike of anxiety at the enormity of it all. How was I going to navigate through the towering pillars before me? I had no idea where I needed to go, where to start even. I was starting to sink into the quicksand of self-doubt, my rapid turning to this aisle or that dragging me down further. I was about to run. I would find another way. I couldn’t do this. Then a voice over my shoulder.
“Difficult to know where to start isn’t it?”
I don’t remember what I said in reply. I don’t remember much about my first conversation with Sally. I’ve tried to remember. I’ve run the scenarios through my mind a million times or more. Could I have ignored her? What if I’d just left? Should I have told her everything? Would she still be alive if I hadn’t told her, given her a chance to walk away from that boy in the library? The bottom line is she did help me that day, she is dead and it was my fault. I didn’t push her from the Sea Walls but I led her to him. Sometimes I dream I am on an old 1930’s train, the kind you always see in a Miss Marple tv show. As I sit in the carriage by myself the train stops on a barren stretch of countryside. As I wonder about the cause of the stoppage I gaze across the landscape. In the kitchen window of a lonely farmhouse on the horizon I suddenly see Sally and the girl. I sit bolt upright and squint in an effort to see further. It is them, they are laughing about something. At that moment the bright summer sun is blotted by dark cloud. As I strain to quickly adjust my eyes to the faded light two men appear. The man on the driveway and the Son of Charlemagne. They fix me with wide grins and move towards the farmhouse. I try to move but am lashed to the seat with vines. I struggle against the tightening grip of the thorny fingers but cannot move. They move freely. For some reason I never look away, I always see the murders. I see the blood spray against the kitchen window. I see the men drag the bodies outside. I see them burn. I smell the flesh. I hear the crackling flame. I feel the tears rolling down my face and the raw tearing on my throat of the guttural wail I let out. I wake in a sweat with real tears on my face. It doesn’t take a genius to figure the meaning of the dream. It didn’t take me long to accept that I deserved it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Difficult to know where to start isn’t it?”
I must have said something about Charlemagne because I found myself in a section crammed with books about medieval European history. There were more books than space on the shelves so volumes lay in untidy horizontal stacks atop neat vertical lines of others. I scanned the shelves but in truth I wasn’t taking in the book titles. I was overwhelmed with the task in front of me. There were so many books, I couldn’t possibly read them all. How did I know which one had the information I needed? There must be a way to narrow it down, a library was only a physical representation of a logic algorithm after all. If I could find the key to the code I could navigate the maze. I was already in the section I needed so I could eliminate ninety percent of the library’s content as superfluous to my needs. The woman, the librarian, who had steered me here, she could help
me narrow it down further surely? I set off back towards the desk to find her.
I took a wrong turn into military history and got lost in quantum physics but I found my way through molecular chemistry towards the desk. As I rounded the corner at the end of a section on polymer synthesis I saw the librarian who had helped me. She was quite young for a librarian, or at least my idea of one. I had always imagined librarians to be old women with bent backs and thinning hair pulled into a bun. Sally, as I noticed her name badge declare as I approached, was altogether different. She wasn’t wearing tweed, she didn’t have a bun, she didn’t wear glasses and wasn’t older than my granny. Sally’s jet-black hair was flowing over her shoulders in waves, drawing the eye towards the top three buttons undone on the men’s shirt she wore. Her natural face, devoid of any makeup, turned up towards me and her lips moved to make a smile. Her bright, green eyes seemed to smile too as she leant her head slightly to one side. She reminded me of Linda Carter, a woman whom I had spent a lot of time with in my own head.
“Did you find what you were looking for Hun?”
“Um, no, well, um,” She was American, which did nothing to get Linda Carter out of my head, “I, um, I wanted to, I need, um, sons or, um, descendants of Charlemagne?”
Those who broke the boy: The Sons of Charlemagne Book One Page 6