by Rhian Ivory
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I was writing the first draft of Boy I kept my eye out for a strange village name to set the story in. I came across Sible Hedingham and for some reason it jumped out at me so in it went. Once I’d finished the first draft I did a bit of research to make sure that Sible Hedingham village fitted my story and that’s when I found out about Dummy and the real history of the village.
The last recorded case of swimming witches in England occurred in the village of Sible Hedingham, Essex in 1863 when an elderly Frenchman, known locally by the name of Dummy was dragged from the taproom in The Swan public house to a nearby brook. The man gained a living by telling fortunes and was a figure of curiosity in the village. He was accused of bewitching Emma Smith. After Dummy refused to ‘remove the curse’, Smith struck him ‘several times’ with a stick and pushed him into the brook to ‘swim him’, encouraged by other villagers, in particular master carpenter Samuel Stammers. Dummy died a few days later in Halstead Workhouse from shock and pneumonia caused by the constant immersion and ill-treatment. Both Smith and Stammers were sentenced to six months’ hard labour. Although no longer a working pub, The Swan Inn still stands and the stream in which Dummy was swum flows nearby.
I was shocked and spooked by the fact that a person much like Blaze existed and lived in the very village which I’d randomly picked for my setting, but it felt right and I’m a great believer in fate and destiny.
I spent a lot of time in two National Trust properties during the second and third drafts of Boy and found the atmosphere in both places incredibly helpful and stimulating when writing the scenes in the workhouse and in the tunnels. The workhouse at Southwell, Nottinghamshire is a strange place and I hope I’ve respectfully captured some of that strangeness in Blaze’s chapters. I’ve visited a lot of National Trust properties through my role as an NT Writer in Residence, but I’ve never felt such a heavy presence and sensation in any of them as I did when I walked into the workhouse. I have to admit to feeling quite ill as I walked down the stone steps into the kitchens and thought about all those souls forced to walk through those gates and give up all their rights. The dormitories in particular were filled with a heavy atmosphere and strong sense of sadness lingering in the air. The building itself is a formidable testament to Victorian Britain and an extraordinary place to visit, one that I know I’ll return to again.
The workhouse at Southwell doesn’t have any tunnels (or at least not ones open to the public) so I’ve taken some liberties with Calke Abbey and their brewery tunnels and for the purposes of my novel placed them under my Halstead Workhouse. There was a workhouse at Halstead (there were over 700 workhouses in England during the Victorian era) but it no longer exists. Luckily for me, Southwell Workhouse does and has been impressively preserved.
I knew that many workhouses had tunnels underneath them and did a lot of research about workhouses in general, which led me to the horrific corpse tunnels and what happened to paupers in the workhouse once they died. The Anatomy Act of 1832 stipulated that paupers could be charged with the crime of poverty. Before this the Murder Act of 1752 stated that only the corpses of executed murderers could be used for dissection. After 1832, bodies could be dissected as a way to repay welfare debt unless family members could pay to reclaim the body. As you can imagine, most workhouse inmates didn’t have the means to buy bodies back.
The brewery tunnels at Calke Abbey are very long, dark and quite creepy. They fitted the purposes of my book beautifully and became my corpse tunnels. What happened to Noah and Beth down there was inspired by something that happened to me on my first and last visit to Calke Abbey tunnels, but that’s another story.
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/workhouse-southwell/
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/calke-abbey/
The real Colchester Earthquake happened in 1884 not 1865, as I have suggested in the newspaper article in this novel.
YoungMinds – YoungMinds is the UK’s leading charity committed to improving the emotional wellbeing and mental health of children and young people. Details about their art therapy courses can be found on their website – http://www.youngminds.org.uk/about
First published in 2015
by Firefly Press
25 Gabalfa Road, Llandaff North, Cardiff, CF14 2JJ
www.fireflypress.co.uk
Copyright © Rhian Ivory
The author asserts her moral right to be identified as author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781910080269
ebook ISBN 9781910080276
Cover artwork by Guy Manning
Cover design by Isabella Ashford
Typeset by Elaine Sharples