by Barbara Vine
My father. Those long rather gaunt faces – they used to call it ‘lantern-jawed’ – are my father’s face, and maybe Alexander’s too if I remember rightly. The looks of the women Nanther men marry don’t seem to affect the offspring – not until my father married my mother, that is. All Nanther children got from their mothers till then was fair hair and sometimes blue eyes. If Laura and Janet resemble my father, they must also look like Henry. Ergo, they are not Len Dawson’s descendants but Henry’s, just as I am?
5
This morning I went to the Family Records Centre in Islington where the records are kept to add to the rather pathetic family tree I’ve made. There I carefully noted that of Henry’s daughters the first, Elizabeth, married James Kirkford in 1906 but the second, Mary, waited another sixteen years before marrying Matthew Craddock. Elizabeth had a son, Kenneth, and two daughters, while Mary had two daughters, Patricia and Diana. Finding out all this takes quite a long time and I still had to track down Jimmy Ashworth and her family. I knew enough about her to make this easy. Her daughter Mary was born in February 1884, four months after her mother’s marriage to Leonard Dawson. A child born in wedlock is presumed to be her mother’s husband’s (Quern nuptiae demonstrant pater est), which was no doubt why Henry was anxious to get Jimmy and Len married as soon as possible. But Mary was his daughter, I’m certain.
I wanted to talk to Jude about all this last night. I found a photograph of Henry, taken when he was about the age Janet is now, and the resemblance was even more striking than I’d thought. The shape of the forehead, the rather high-bridged nose, the straight eyebrows, the long upper lip, they were all there. Henry’s, my father’s, Laura’s, Janet’s. Could you see it in me? I scrutinized my face in the mirror. But, no, I look more like my mother. It’s a strange feeling you get when you discover some unexpected offshoot of your family, exciting and slightly distasteful. I told myself I was as bad as Laura, trying to whitewash a forebear I’d never known and probably wouldn’t have liked. But it wasn’t quite that which disturbed me, rather the feeling that I shared my genetic inheritance with strangers, almost alien people. It was a kind of sick joke. I’d disliked what the doorkeeper said when he’d politely implied that any guests of mine must be beyond reproach and suggested that Laura and Janet were my relations. But they were, all the time they were.
For half an hour I’d come closer to liking Henry. For his generosity, his determination to look after the woman he was deserting. Since then my feelings had once more taken an about turn. What had it been like for Jimmy Ashworth, obliged by the man whose child she was carrying to marry a man provided for her, someone she cared nothing for and who was not that child’s father? And for Len Dawson? Could anything be more humiliating? Sally and I had often got on badly, especially towards the end of our marriage, but I can remember the tenderness I felt for her when she was pregnant with Paul, the pride I took in the changes her body underwent and in walking down the street with her holding my arm. My child. None of that for Len Dawson. Could they ever have discussed it? Talked about the coming baby and its paternity? I imagine rather Dawson saying, perhaps on the eve of his wedding, ‘We’re never going to say another word about it,’ and even, ‘Sir Henry’s fixed up things comfortable for us, we’re grateful and we’ve no cause to mention it again.’
I’d like to know more about Jimmy Ashworth, not just her parentage, the date of her marriage and that she was twenty-eight when she married Len Dawson. Both her parents were alive at the time of the marriage, and living in Somers Town, not all that far away. Of their circumstances I know nothing. Did Jimmy on leaving school, at a no doubt very early age, work long ill-paid hours in a sweatshop somewhere? Was she in danger of losing her sight or poisoning herself with white lead? And was this why she went on the streets, after the fashion of many poor Victorian girls? If she did. I don’t know who her first ‘protector’ was or even if it was he who introduced her to Henry. I’d like to know if she loved him. I’m sure he didn’t love her. Then there’s the baby, conceived after nine years. It may be, of course, that others were conceived and Jimmy aborted them. Does that mean she wanted this baby? That she even thought Henry might marry her if she was pregnant with his child? I shall never know. Henry left nothing to go on except a five-pointed star signifying he’d paid a visit to his mistress that day.
I can’t repeat any of this to Jude. I’m not going too far when I say anyone’s baby would do for her. Someone else’s eggs and someone else’s sperm, if you like, other people’s blood, DNA, it wouldn’t matter. She asked me after the second miscarriage if I’d find a surrogate mother to have my child for her. I hated saying no, I always hate saying no to her, but I had to. If I’m indifferent to the possibility of a child, I positively hate the idea of having one with someone else. Len Dawson was involved in a sort of surrogacy and I don’t suppose he liked the idea any more than I did. So instead of telling her about this, I content myself with recounting the story of the Tay Bridge disaster, but first I said a few things about Laura and Janet and our tea party. Instead of mentioning the resemblance between them and my father I said that Jude looks a bit like the Famous Beauty Jimmy Ashworth.
‘And therefore Olivia Batho,’ she said.
‘And Olivia Batho.’
‘Why on earth didn’t Henry marry her?’ she wants to know, and then she asks the same question about Caroline Hamilton and did Caroline look like the other two. I don’t know the answers to these questions, and unless I come across more letters, I never shall. So I leave the subject of Jimmy and her descendants, go back some few years into the eighteen seventies and show Jude the photocopied extracts from The Times of 30 December 1879. The typeface is very small and the text hasn’t come out very well. She says it’s too hard to read, she’ll need a magnifying glass, and why don’t I just tell her the story of Henry and the ill-fated train? She’d like that much better and she takes my hand and kisses it. Our thing. Our special thing, I think, as I kiss her thin very smooth fingers.
‘Henry’s father was far from disapproving of any marriage he might have made,’ I tell her. ‘He died in 1873. His mother still lived at Godby Hall. She had two nurses, paid for by Henry. He was dutiful and correct if not particularly affectionate. She was eighty and senile. I suppose we’d call what she had Alzheimer’s. In a letter to Couch written ten years later he writes that she no longer knew who he was, she’d an almost total memory loss. Couch was some sort of specialist in geriatrics and Henry describes his mother’s condition to him.’
‘This was all ten years later?’
‘That’s right. Before she became senile Henry had been in the habit of going to Godby for Christmas. Presumably he thought there was no longer any point in going once she no longer recognized him. Anyway, in that year, 1879, he was invited by Richard Hamilton to Hamilton’s parents’ home in Newport-on-Tay in Fife. It was a little place then. I believe it’s quite a big town now.’
After Christmas Richard and Henry were to join a houseparty at Luloch Castle. I imagine that the prospect of this had a good deal to do with Henry’s enthusiasm. It would have meant far more to him than a quiet Christmas with an elderly couple in a Scottish village. He was a snob, though a strangely intermittent one. In order to reach Dundee from the Kingdom of Fife it’s necessary to cross the Firth of Tay and at one time this could be done only by ferry. The first railway bridge to span the firth was begun in 1871 and completed seven years later. It was opened on 1 June 1878 and after nineteen months, collapsed into the waters of the firth, taking a train and its passengers with it.
Jude wants to know why. ‘It took seven years to build and in the first bad storm it fell down?’
‘It was all finished and painted by February 1878. Some general inspected it, I don’t know who he was or why he was chosen. They coupled six locomotives together, each one weighing seventy-three tons, and drove them over the bridge at forty miles an hour. I’m quoting now from the report of the inquiry into the disaster, “The behaviour of the b
ridge under these tests appears to have been satisfactory, there having been only a moderate deflection in the girders, a small degree of tremor, and no indication of looseness in the cross-bracing.” On the fifth of March the general said he saw no reason why the bridge shouldn’t be used for passenger traffic but that, “it would not be desirable that trains should run over the bridge at a high rate of speed”. Twenty-five miles an hour was what he recommended. It was the longest bridge in the world at the time, two miles long, taken in eighty-five spans of iron and concrete, the middle part a hundred and thirty feet above the high water mark.’
‘So what happened?’
I tell her we have to go back to Henry. Since 23 December he’d been staying with the Hamiltons in Newport. He and Richard had decided to take the train from Edinburgh, not an express but a train which stopped at numerous small stations and, having crossed the bridge, was due to reach Dundee at 7.15 in the evening. It was Sunday 28 December, and during the day a great storm had come up with a gale-force wind and driving sleet. Still, the two men saw no reason to postpone their journey. The arrangements were that they would be met by Lord Hamilton’s carriage at the Tay Bridge station.
About an hour before they were due to leave the house where the Hamilton parents lived a telegram was delivered to Henry. It was from the housekeeper at Godby Hall and it told him his mother was sinking fast and he should come as soon as he could if he wanted to see her alive. We don’t know what Henry thought about this. He was looking forward to his visit to Luloch Castle and he seems to have preferred the company of Richard Hamilton above all other. His mother wouldn’t know him and, in any case, would very likely be dead before he reached Yorkshire.
‘Did he go?’
‘To Godby? He tried to. He gave up the idea of Luloch Castle.’
‘I bet he only gave it up because the others had seen the telegram,’ says Jude. ‘If he’d been alone and no one had seen the telegraph boy he’d have screwed it up and pretended it had never come. I know him.’
‘He’d have screwed up the order of release if he had. Once on that train and he’d have been a dead man.’
‘And you’d not be here,’ she says, taking my hand. ‘I’m glad he got the telegram.’
I say that so am I, and maybe he wasn’t quite as callous as she thinks. No doubt, he’d loved his mother and he knew his duty. The two men went to the station together, Henry to catch a southbound train and Richard to go north. In the event, of course, Henry’s train never came. He waited, the train failed to come, no doubt he enquired what was wrong, and was told telegraphic communication between the Fife side and Dundee had ceased, the equipment also having been damaged by the storm. What became of him for the hours and a few days after that isn’t known. Presumably, he could have gone back to the Hamiltons’ house and stayed there. Perhaps he waited on the station in the hope another train would come. Certainly he would have attempted to find out what had happened to the train crossing the Tay Bridge. He may have stayed up all night, for remember his great friendship for Richard Hamilton, even perhaps his love for Hamilton. He’d have been very anxious, he wouldn’t have been able to rest, but he may eventually have found himself somewhere to spend the hours before morning. During that night his mother died.
‘How do you know all this?’ Jude wants to know. ‘I’ll never believe Henry put it in his diary.’
‘It’s the subject of a very long letter Caroline Hamilton Seaton wrote to her cousin in Leuchars.’
Meanwhile, Richard Hamilton had boarded the train among about ninety other people. The storm was, if anything, worse. There’s no reason to think the driver of the train exceeded the prescribed twenty-five miles an hour. Since no one lived to relate what happened there are no eye-witness accounts of how it felt to be in that train, the severity of the storm or whether passengers were afraid. Jude, the publisher, tells me at this point she’s just remembered that the novelist A.J. Cronin wrote an account of it through a passenger’s eyes in a novel called Hatter’s Castle, published in 1931.
‘But he can’t have really known,’ she says.
No one can really know. A man called Lawson of Windsor Place, Dundee (this is according to The Times of 29 December 1879) went out with a friend just after seven on the evening of the disaster. The two men talked about the fury of the gale which was blowing from the south-west and wondered if, on such a night, the Edinburgh train would venture on to the bridge. They followed with their eyes the line of lights along the lower spans and into the high girders and were transfixed by a sudden tremendous flash. This flash, like a shower of fire, descended into the water, a falling mass of flame, and the lights along the span went down with it.
An eye-witness – I don’t know his name but he had a great sense of drama – said, ‘I was seated by my fireside last night, listening to the clamour of the storm without, when a blast of wind more furious than before caught the chimneys of a house opposite and brought them down to the ground with a crash that startled every one of us to our feet. Stepping over to the casement, I gazed out upon the street and just then a blaze of moonlight lighted up the broad expanse of the Tay down below, and the long white sinuous line of the bridge came into view… I instinctively took out my watch. It was exactly seven o’clock. “The Edinburgh train will be due immediately,” I exclaimed to my wife. “Come and let us see if it will attempt to cross on such a night.”
So saying we turned down the gas in the parlour, and with many expressions of thankfulness that no friends of ours, so far as we knew, had to cross the river at that time, prepared to await the appearance of the expected train. The light by this time had become most fitful, masses of cloud were scouring across the expanse of the heavens, at times totally obscuring the light of the full moon. “There she comes,” cried one of my children, and at that moment the slowly moving lights of the Edinburgh train could be seen rounding the curve at Wormit. Then it passed the signal box at the south side, and entered on the long straight line of that portion of the bridge. Once on the bridge it seemed to move with great swiftness along, and when the engine entered the tunnel-like cloisters of the great girders, my little girl exactly described the effect of the lights as seen through lattice work when she exclaimed, “Look, Papa. Isn’t that like lightning?”
‘All this takes some time to write, but to the eye it seemed almost simultaneous with the entrance of the train upon the bridge, a comet like a burst of fiery sparks rang out, as if forcibly ejected into the darkness from the engine. In a long visible trail the streak of fire was seen till quenched in the stormy water below. Then there was absolute darkness on the bridge…’
‘In consequence of this,’ says The Times, ‘loud appeals were made from the Esplanade to the signalman.’ He said that the train was signalled to him from the southern side at nine minutes past seven and at fourteen minutes past it entered the bridge. From his box he had watched for the train but had seen nothing. He tried to telegraph to the signalman on the south side of the bridge but between 7.14 and 7.17 ‘the means of communication had been interrupted’. The news spread, as such news does, and a crowd gathered at Tay Bridge station. Tickets had been sold for the southbound train but it remained at a standstill in the station.
‘That was Henry’s train?’ asks Jude.
‘That was the train he’d have taken.’
It’s clear that no one knew what to do next. The violence of the gale was so great that at first no one dared set foot on the bridge. Then two men attempted it. They were a railway superintendent and the stationmaster at Tay Bridge. They clung on to the rails, cutting their hands, it must have been appalling. Imagine the wind and the wet sleet driving in their faces as they hung on to the slippery ironwork. They got far enough to see that the middle part of the bridge had disappeared and the high girders were gone. But first they saw clouds of spray coming from the pipe that ran along the bridge and carried the water supply for Newport and they knew it had broken when the bridge went down.
The moon was brigh
t but frequently covered by clouds tearing across its face and it was impossible to see the extent of the destruction. They made their way back to Dundee and ‘confirmed the worst fears of the crowds’. Quite a lot of people still believed that though the bridge had gone down the train had not and was waiting unscathed in Fife. They clung to this hope until mail bags from the train were picked up at Broughty Ferry on the other side. The gale was still blowing fiercely. At ten o’clock the ferry steamer The Dundee came in but brought no news from Newport. The Provost of Dundee with railway officials boarded the steamer at Craig Pier and it set off again, making considerable headway as the storm began to die. When the vessel approached the ruins of the bridge they saw that the whole stretch of the high girders, 3,000 feet in length, had been swept away.
One ghastly result of the watchers’ horror and the fluctuating moonlight was that they fancied they saw human beings clinging to the piers, an illusion brought about by the strange shapes the ironwork took when portions of it were torn away. Thirteen huge girders had been wrenched off by the force of the wind, yet no sound had been heard in the town of this enormous mass of iron falling. The roar of the storm had deadened all other noises. They soon saw that it would have been hazardous to approach nearer to the ruined bridge. The harbourmaster took the helm and they pulled away into the darkness, peering down at the water but seeing nothing of the girders nor the train.
First of all they thought there had been three hundred passengers aboard. Estimates of the numbers killed in disasters are always greater than they turn out to be and the total was finally fixed at ninety. Diving operations began next morning. The only body to be recovered, that of an elderly woman was washed ashore at about the same time.