The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  Beneath Tobacco Warehouse, and the stacks of the South Quay, lurks a labyrinthine complex of stone cellars. From their unventilated depths, the fermentation of wine mingles with a fungal smell, the dry rot that coats their ceilings black.

  Brippoki lingers over the threshold, at the lip. In the same instant that he is repulsed, he finds himself further attracted – just as it is with the city as a whole.

  From east to west the wind switches direction, turning brisk. Brippoki puts his face into it. Progressing eastwards, he covers good ground, in that desolation before dawn. Only the occasional guard dog rouses itself as he pads past, to deliver a desultory bark. Rats and cats interrupt their pitched battles, startled by his silent approach. Everywhere is bare of human life.

  He seems quite alone.

  The Museum library’s manuscript collection was extensive, rare, and in nearly every subject could be declared exceptional. Confident of her claim on the Memoirs, Sarah spent the first part of the morning delving into the relevant catalogues. She stood, almost at the centre of the Reading-room, within the innermost circle of the three concentric stands, where ranged the Cotton, Harley, Sloane, and Lansdowne collections. Moderately familiar with their contents – most especially the writings on Scripture – she had, by the same token, never needed to search for anything so specific.

  There were in excess of 25,000 manuscripts catalogued, to date. Without knowing the year in which a work might have been presented, Sarah would be obliged to go through them all. Assuming such presentation where Bruce’s manuscript was concerned, the posited event might conceivably have taken place at any time since its completion in 1819.

  It rather looked as if she would be required to renew her contact with Lieutenant Dilkes Loveless.

  Sarah continued to trawl through the various subject-headings that seemed the most appropriate – Navy; Travels; Voyages, &c. (Journals of Voyages and Travels) – but had to concede this was searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack exceeding large.

  Never before had she wanted to lay her hands on a book so urgently.

  Turning about, Sarah faced key members of library staff. They sat arranged at stations along both sides of the central dais. Business proceeded quietly beneath the watchful eye of George Bullen, superintendent of the room. Keeper of the Department of Manuscripts was Edward Augustus Bond, the Egerton Librarian; in spite of all her years in dealing with him, or perhaps because of them, Sarah was not overly fond of the man. She coughed politely, before directing her enquiry towards the nearest of his senior assistants, Harry Ward.

  Ward ceased to make notes, and squinted at her. He met her even gaze crookedly, with every air of a man not relishing the interruption. With his pen, he pointed towards the folio volumes she had just that minute abandoned.

  ‘On these two stands the catalogues must be referred to,’ he said, the advice perfunctory, delivered by rote, ‘and the tickets, of which there is a plentiful supply, made out for the works required.’

  ‘Yes…yes, I know,’ Sarah patiently explained. ‘I’ve tried the main catalogues, and those for the Additional and Hand – ’

  She cut herself short. ‘Without success,’ she said. ‘I was wondering if you might…’

  Ward’s one good eye swivelled in its socket. He threw a withering look at one of his juniors, eavesdropping further along the platform, and then back to her. His mouth was set. Sarah could appreciate his annoyance: every day she overheard other readers make the most outrageous and ignorant of demands. She changed tack, trying not to sound so vague.

  Look confident. State the facts.

  ‘The title of the book – the manuscript,’ she did not say ‘perhaps’, ‘is The Life of a Greenwich Pensioner, and the author was Bruce, George Bruce. It would have arrived in the form of a bequest from the Royal Naval Hospital, at Greenwich…but I don’t know the year.’

  The senior assistant had returned to his writing. She stared at his bald crown.

  He spoke once more, with weary but firm finality. ‘Readers must conduct their own searches,’ he said, ‘for which the catalogues are provided. Staff are unable to undertake a search on behalf of a reader.’

  He deigned to look up, briefly, thereby declaring a conclusion.

  ‘If we were to do that,’ he said, ‘nothing would ever get done.’

  Eyes dull with disappointment, Sarah moved away.

  Turning a corner in relative quiet, Brippoki faces, head on, a ship bearing down in full sail. Conjured as if from air, countless small craft busily crowd the riverfront. They weave back and forth, criss-crossing each other’s passage, a thousand collisions every minute only narrowly avoided.

  Running along the riverside, Brippoki seeks the glimmer of dark waters, through tangles of chain, rope and crane, else covered over with spars and gangplanks. A heavy barrel swings at head-height, almost dashing out his brains. Only nimble reflexes save him. He stops to watch as it is winched aloft. High overhead, numerous bridges run warehouse to warehouse, spanning the narrow lane in which he stands. The air is filled with barrels, bales, and boxes, creaking and swaying all about – the larder of a giant jungle-spider. Hungry black mouths piercing walls either side are served gobbets by wheezing windlasses.

  London, it appears, is being fed.

  ‘You cannot,’ said the junior assistant. ‘It is in use.’

  ‘In use?’ said Sarah. ‘But it was reserved to me!’

  The library staff seemed suddenly determined to frustrate her every effort. She brandished articles relating to the ‘Greenwich Pensioner’ from the previous day’s investigations. ‘I didn’t want these again,’ she whined. ‘Not these ones. That was the book I wanted.’

  ‘Madam, please…’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  A senior assistant took an interest. Sarah laid down the wrong books and hung her head while Dorset Eccles, the junior, explained. She had sounded more petulant than she had intended.

  ‘The book is in use, miss,’ the man confirmed.

  ‘Yes, I thank you, Mr Graves,’ Sarah snapped. ‘The book was in use to me. I had asked that it be reserved, but these were reserved in its stead.’

  She touched the small pile on the desk before them. Uncertain whether she had dealt the day before with Dorset or his brother Gregory, she couldn’t accuse them of any wrongdoing, and it was anyway not in her nature.

  ‘There has been,’ Sarah stated, ‘a misunderstanding.’

  ‘I see,’ said the senior assistant.

  It did not help that in any dispute one’s face was level with a man’s midriff: Sarah felt like a small child scolded, or a criminal brought before the judge. The volume of Tracts containing the Memoirs was doubtless wending its way back into the bowels of safekeeping. She would have to re-apply for it again, later.

  The two men regarded her steadfastly, and without pity, until she backed away.

  Sarah had no other choice but to return to her notes from the previous day, locating, without too much trouble, a bound copy of the periodical cited in Bruce’s narrative, the Literary Panorama for May 1810. ‘A review of books, register of events, magazine of varieties, etc.’, the octavo bound volume presented a comfy handful in neat brown binding.

  ‘Turning with easy eye thou may’sdt behold… All nations.’

  In every number of the Literary Panorama, the frontispiece was the same. Sarah thought she recognised the epigraph as a quote from Milton – Paradise Regained, or perhaps Paradise Lost.

  The article therein reproduced the very same text as in the Memoirs. Ironically, it stopped short at around the same point reached by her transcript. Half as much again, again denied her; Sarah’s groan of frustration caused a couple of nearby readers to look up.

  Written in the third person, the Panorama entry had been accredited partial source for the Memoirs, and so must have appeared first. Who else could have written it, if not Bruce?

  A short preface to the article was suggestive from any number of angles. ‘Of the follo
wing narrative we have seen two accounts, differing in some trivial particulars. We have chosen the present, as being the most perspicuous and copious, with less of crimination than the other. We have added a few incidents, from equal authority.’

  Taking up her transcript, Sarah made a closer comparison of the two texts. An additional fact immediately leapt off the page – the name of George Bruce’s father! ‘George Bruce, son of John Bruce, foreman and clerk to Mr Wood, distiller at Limehouse, was born in the parish of Ratcliff in 1779.’

  Sarah double-checked her transcript: the detail was absent from the Memoirs. ‘John Bruce’. She made a separate note of the father’s name and underscored it.

  Interposed after a constellation of asterisks, the same article ended with a further editorial aside. ‘We have not seen Capt. Dalrymple’s statement of events; and therefore deem it justice to suggest the propriety of not determining on his conduct, which appears to have been both unwarrantable and cruel, till that officer has been heard in his justification.’

  ‘Miss Larkin?’

  Benjamin J. Jeffery, another of the junior assistants, hovered beside her desk. She had noticed him before, his hair a vertical shock, and he boggle-eyed, or so she thought, at ungracious Mr Ward, who had no right to treat her as if she were a foolish novice.

  Young Mr Jeffery held out a book.

  ‘I think…’ he began. ‘I couldn’t help hearing before. I think this may be the manuscript you were looking for? The Life…’ uncertain, he checked the item ‘The Life of a Greenwich Pensioner?’

  Sarah’s free hand flew to her throat. She laid down her pen and turned in her seat, nearly knocking over the ink bottle.

  He held a plain sort of a notebook, as one would find in any stationer’s, the right-hand corners at both top and bottom quite battered and worn away. She read the grubby label on the front.

  The Life of a

  Greenwich Pensioner

  1778 to …….

  Presented to John Dyer Esq.

  Secretary to Greenw’h Hospital

  From the worn cover she looked up into the freckled face of the young clerk. He smiled awkwardly.

  She reached out for the notebook and, trembling, took possession of it. The birth date was right – well, close enough. The details were right. She turned it around and around in her hands, hardly daring to open it up.

  ‘How…?’ she said. ‘I mean, wherever did you find it?’

  Circumspect, the junior assistant glanced around, so pale and awkward, he couldn’t even stare at his own oversized feet with composure. ‘It was – um – it was among the manuscripts that had been filed incorrectly?’ he said. ‘There are a number without their correct details, and this was among the pile.’

  Benjamin J. Jeffery finally managed to look up.

  ‘It’s not a big pile,’ he said in earnest.

  Three times a year, the library was closed for a week in order that it might be thoroughly cleaned. Such opportunities were taken to check and update the book stock: always a number of items had been misplaced, or gone astray.

  ‘Some of the entries lose their numbers and have to be checked individually?’ said the junior assistant. His voice often rose at the end of his sentences, as if doubting even of itself. ‘That is,’ he said, ‘if it isn’t immediately clear where they should go. We are each of us given a few to check through, when we have a spare moment. When I overheard you repeat the – uh – title to Mr Ward, it sounded familiar. It was in my…in my pile, but I hadn’t got around to looking at it just yet.’

  Benjamin J. Jeffery flapped his long hands in her general direction.

  ‘You can…you can read it for me.’ His sheepish grin indicated a joke. With a fearful twist his head suddenly jerked around, and back again. ‘Don’t tell Mr Ward! Or Old Bullen,’ he urged. ‘Please, miss. I shouldn’t really be giving out the book, not until it’s been located within the catalogue.’

  Sarah was only half listening. He veered away. She turned the slim notebook over in her hand, feeling a little queasy. Had she ever found the correct entry, somewhere in the catalogues, the book itself, misplaced, might still have eluded her grasp.

  She turned over the first page and began to read.

  Sailors slung over the sides of ships apply fresh coats of paint. Others work high in the rigging. The outlines of human figurines are reduced to a smudge, to a blur, lost in shadow or motion. The cranes swing, and on every side more labourers trudge to and fro, backs bent and heavy-laden. In raucous crews, smocked and hatted, the dock-workers of the great Port of London labour hard to unload enormous merchant vessels. The quayside swarms – men with red faces, yellow, brown, and black faces; even men with blue faces.

  Brippoki cannot get used to the deafening levels of noise. Emptied barrels, rolled across cobbles, emit a deep bass rumble. The hammers clank as coopers fashion brand new casks. Greased lengths of chain, let out link by link, clink clink in steady repetition. Their loads cast loose, they whizz free, rattling in a manner most alarming. Long ropes, freed, drop down into the waiting water with a satisfying plash.

  A ship’s captain cups both hands to his mouth, voice suitably amplified to relay his orders.

  ‘Whippers,’ he cries, ‘tackle them barges! Ballast, to the colliers they’ve emptied! Attend to that cranky one first. Fill the hold good and fast. It’s pitching like a proper lushington!’

  On his command each team scurries forward, toting great sacks of gravel.

  Brippoki looks away to an upper level, where sweating workers slug on clay bottles of beer. They gather close and shifty around the pedlar. Nearby, another man dips his long brass beak into a cask of spirits, a hummingbird at a flower.

  More ships arrive, groaning, full bellies submerged, flags of many colours flying from their masts. Quayside crowds clamber down to the decks on long ladders, to begin the unloading. Bales of goods emerge, unreadable scripts and symbols classifying their contents: camphor and cocoa, hardwood and jacaranda; jute, molasses and tin; spices from Java; ice from Norway; tobacco, timber, rice, and rum.

  A long open shed spans the waterside, waiting to receive these discharged cargoes. Here, under cover, coopers, weighers and measurers beetle forward to meet them, and attend to their several departments. In weighing stations positioned beside each loading bay, the large beam scales tilt back and forth. From the riggers to the dockers a polyglot chorus is spoken and sung, but in these check cabins, no one speaks except in numbers.

  Cranes hoist the valued goods up and out of sight. Dwarfed by the huge blocks of intricate machinery, their operators have to work hard and fast, just to keep up. The machines set the pace, not the men.

  Idly, Brippoki looks across the surface of the waters, stained a dark rainbow: black with coal dust; blue with indigo dye; purple with wine; white with flour; and brown with tobacco. Contents disgorged, the ships rise up, their decks now high above the quay.

  Brippoki sees a pair of mounted constables advancing in his direction. They carry guns. Men like these he associates with the cruelties of the Native Police. Casting around in alarm, he turns aside, abruptly disappearing into the depths of the nearest warehouse.

  The floor is sticky underfoot, the cavernous interior thick with a hanging mesh of knotted rope and strangling chain. Crossbeams and wooden planks recede into forbidding depths of shadow. The chaotic black space echoes with cries: a hurly-burly jumble of orders, cautions, and yankee-nigger songs, blending into one monotonous drone. He can just about make out the bodies of men, tugging and straining at their bonds.

  A square of daylight extends inward from the open entrance. At its furthest edge, a crooked line-up stands before an array of heaving trays. Ancient old men prop themselves up against the edges of the long work-tables; their elderly faces haggard, empty as skulls.

  ‘Where the hell is he?’

  In a righteous fury, Charles Lawrence flung aside an empty chair.

  ‘Catching Captain Boycott at slip like that,’ said Bill Hayman. ‘Is
that what gave their game away?’

  No sooner had Lawrence cast off one set of chains than he would set to work forging new ones: Hayman sought to distract his colleague from brooding.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘Cole is a fine player. But he was never that sharp!’

  Their latest engagement had returned the touring cricketers to Gravesend, their first port of call, playing against Kent.

  In spite of their sudden straits, Lawrence smiled wryly. ‘You know what it was?’ he said. ‘I could hear Tuppenny grinding his teeth at the bat.’ His face fell. ‘That’s when I thought to look under the cap.’

  ‘Ha! I just thought he’d put a bit of weight on!’ said Hayman, a touch too eagerly.

  Lawrence regarded him sourly, face red with shame enough to share. He looked down and away.

  ‘It’s not like it’s a new problem, Charley, this absenteeism, or whatever you want to call it,’ continued Hayman. ‘Their clearing off without a word of warning, it’s the plague o’ the sheep stations and the welfare both. One day you’ll see them happily working the herds, and the next, poof, vanished, without a trace. It can be anything up to a year later and they’ll return, nary a word of explanation, and acting as if nothing has happened.’

  Or never to return at all; Hayman dreaded to think it, let alone make mention.

  ‘One has to remember,’ he persevered, ‘they’re not like us. Not, by nature, given to sitting around.’

  ‘This does, I think, present a new problem,’ said Lawrence, darkly.

  ‘What I mean is, they’re nomads, wanderers,’ said Hayman. ‘That’s their lifestyle. Stick them in one place too long and their spirits flag. They’ll soon get restless, if not sick, in their longing for a change of scene.’

  Introducing games of cricket to the Wallace yards had been of great benefit, going some way towards countering the Aborigines’ temperamental depression, and the problems arising. They were no longer so tempted to stray off into the Bush, for one.