by Carmel Bird
Mama has explained to us (at great length and in some detail) that there is a shortage of servants and also of wives within the society of the Colony, and that these young women, who have applied for free passage at the expense of the Trust, are generally without family or marriage portion, and are seeking a respectable future for themselves within the Colony where they will be welcomed by the Hobart-Town Chapter of the Ladies’ Committee. Sarah and I have imagined that the same young women must be truly courageous and adventurous, and we were most keenly interested to meet them and to observe them at close quarters.
We met first of all Aunt Georgiana and Mrs Jamieson (who is a most imposing lady, not a little terrifying—Sarah became very subdued which is of course an unusual state of affairs, causing Mama to look at her once or twice with concern) in a little courtyard beneath two enormous chestnut trees that darkened the afternoon at once and made us long for the open air and freedom and sunshine of Carrickvale. Then before much time had passed we found ourselves inside a gloomy building, composed it seemed to me of narrow corridors and hundreds of imposing doors with big brass handles, all closed. I had the feeling that behind those doors was a kind of beehive of busy activity, clerks with piles of important (Sarah said unimportant) documents, sorting and scratching away with their pens and ink, bent over their work with spectacles on their noses, dead moths in their hair, and worn slippers on their tapping feet. If we could but open the doors we would discover a whole world of industry. We hurried on, flowing in a line of rustling silk and bobbing bonnets behind Mrs Jamieson, whose figure is substantial, until we arrived at the Interview Chamber down in the deepest recesses of the edifice, far far away from the hum and buzz of London, in a world all its own, in a dark cocoon of Discussion and Interview and Sorting and Sifting of Persons Destined for the Colonies.
The air was hushed down there, hushed and somehow empty, not dreaming, not waiting, but stilled. There was an aroma of bitter oranges. I grew a little afraid and clung to Sarah as we entered the Interview Chamber proper and took our seats along a green bench that stretched the length of a mahogany table. On the wall before us hung a clock, large and round with a brass frame that had not been cleaned, I believe, for a very long time. It offered a maritime aspect, and it ticked most audibly, most mournfully, in the sad and silent air, as one by one the women entered through another doorway, a dark low door which cut the corner at an angle, and led, Sarah told me, to stairs which wound down into the cellar where (who knows how many?) hopeful women wait in expectation of being called up for the Interview. We saw six of these women in our morning, and the differences between them were most striking.
All the women were inmates of the Workhouse, for Mama had quite firmly decreed that Sarah and myself were not to be witness to Interviews with those Unfortunates who originated at the Female Penitentiary. I confess a secret desire to see some of these latter women, as it is almost impossible for me to imagine Creatures of God’s Earth more marked by woes and cares than the six women who came before us this very morning. The oldest one was twenty-five years of age, the very age of my cousin Alexandra who has so recently married Mr Davenport. The contrast between dear Alexandra, whose complexion is so fine that it is remarked upon by all who meet her, and whose hair is indeed the glory of our whole family, and Mary Ann Fiske was most astonishing to me. For Fiske was suffering from a twisting of the spine, and showed hands and countenance of such grimy, crinkled and withered aspect it was difficult to look at her without asking her first to dip her face and hands in the rain-tub. Mrs Jamieson, in fact, made a note to speak to the Forewoman in charge requesting greater attention be paid to the washing of face and hands before Interview. Her eyes were sad. I would not have wished Mary Ann Fiske for my servant, although I confess her voice was gentle enough, and her abilities with needle and thread appeared to be very satisfactory. She wore a dress of dark stuff, the rips and tatters of which had been most carefully mended and restored. Her bonnet appeared to be quite new, and my aunt commented later that she was of the opinion this had been acquired by means other than honest. I wondered how one would perhaps steal a bonnet. We, of course, Sarah and myself, were not called upon to comment at all. We were simply to observe and later to pray for the wellbeing of the women who passed before our company. I understand that Fiske was given a Stamp of Approval by the Committee, and I do hope and trust that she may find a happier life in Van Diemen’s Land. I am certain that she will, since that place is famously noted for the freshness of the air and the abundance of fruits and fishes to be had, as well as useful work, and, who knows? perhaps a suitable husband in the Colony. I do hope so. I will pray when next we go to Church. Sarah always shudders at the idea of the dangerous journey by sea, and by the vast distances to be crossed, and by the strangeness of places far away, the strangeness of strange peoples, but I am of a more optimistic turn of mind, and I see all as an adventure, nourished as I am in the imagination by the wonderful romance of fairytales and legends. I also see the practical application of the enterprise, since there is nothing but pain and suffering for women such as this in the London Workhouse.
The youngest woman was she who most drew my interest and attention, perhaps because she was one year younger than myself, being fifteen. Her name is Margaret Coffey.
She was tiny and slender, barefoot, bareheaded. Her hair was thick, long, untidy and black, and tied up with a rough piece of chartreuse ribbon which was feathered and frayed from age and use. Although some of her teeth were darkened, and one was broken, her smile was truly most beguiling, and her face and hands were small, soft and perfectly clean. I tried to imagine how she would look in a pink cotton gown and a snow-white pinafore, and I decided that she would offer a quite charming appearance—for even in her dark woollen skirt and shawl she did not look ungraceful. She spoke briefly, holding her head steady and looking Mama and the other Ladies in the eye, by turns. Her own eyes were a clear pale grey, I do confess I have not often seen such pretty eyes. She is, she explained, an orphan, with no prospects whatsoever, her only hope, she says, of making her way in the world as a Christian woman is to travel to the Colonies and take up a position, and hope to find a good husband among the new countrymen. I had a vision of a tiny stone Church in an avenue of apple trees, and Margaret was the blushing bride in delicate lace and satin ribbons with a posy of bright flowers picked from the lanes on her way to the Church. Her husband was a soldier in scarlet coat and feathered cap. I think it was, in fact, partly my memory of a picture in one of my books, a romantic idyll where a poor country girl finds and weds the good soldier of her dreams.
Are you quite sure, the Ladies asked her, that you are prepared in full to leave the places and the people you know and to cross the seas to an unknown future where life will no doubt be strange and fraught with difficulties?—for even they, stern matrons as they may be, were touched by the fragile youthfulness of Margaret Coffey, and feared for her safety and happiness. She replied: ‘The people I know would wish me ill, and the place I live is the Workhouse.’ It was Aunt Charlotte who, after the Interviews, said: ‘What hope is there, after all, for the poor little thing in the Streets of London?’ And I thought to myself, what hope indeed. And so I was persuaded that it was the right and proper thing for Margaret Coffey to join Mary Ann Fiske and the other four women as a Female Passenger on board the Princess Royal when she sails for Van Diemen’s Land some time in April.
Two
The Thoughts of Margaret Coffey, As she Goes From the Interview to the Journey to the Arrival in Van Diemen’s Land
Up from the cellar, into the Room of Interview. Sunlight bright in the window. I am feeling brave and I speak out for myself. Coo, coo from my shy cocoon. Behind the dark bench three ladies and two girls. Yellow bonnets, pink cheeks, cherry lips, the girls are staring, the girls are smirking. Black bonnets, beady eyes, lips like the beaks of blackbirds, the women. Soft silky gowns of pale-blue cloud, the girls are softly whispering. Crackle and cackle and big mulberry capes, edged wit
h rustling taffeta, dark blue, deep wine, the ladies, midnight green, with lockets of gold and silver and bracelets and rings and heavy, heavy timepieces. Tick tock ticker ticker tocker. What time is it, what day is it, what world is this? What is your name and how old are you and where did you live and who is your father and why do you want to go to Hobart-Town? Are you healthy? Do you sew? Do you cook, sweep, dust, polish, carry coals and water? How old? Fifteen? You must be an orphan. You may get in line and be listed and tagged and bundled and bullied and bruised and boxed on board the floating palace for brides-in-waiting, servants in disguise. The Princess Royal will be sailing soon, billowing, sailing away across the horizon, across the world, across the waters, the oceans, the seas. Dangerous journey. The bottom of the ocean is a long long way, way, way down at the bottom with the fishes. To find a situation. To find a husband. To find something good in the world. What world is this? The ship moves out from the known world into the unknown world, an unknown world floating on an unknown world-sea. My head spins round, my guts spill out, my legs are weak, I cannot see the land. In my mind I run and run like a mouse in an attic, flittering, searching for crumbs, for crumblets, for warmth, for comfort, for safety. The sailors run at me, eyes wild, their arms around me. In the daylight, in the dark. I run and I run and I run from the sailors, from the Surgeon. I run to the Matron. I hide behind her. She drags me out. She hands me to the Surgeon like a parcel of washing, like a cottage pie, like a bundle of rags. I am a bundle of rags. The Surgeon uses me like a bundle of rags. I scream and the ship rolls and I scream and I run and I fly. I am flying along, rags fluttering, flapping, a broken insect limping on the deck where the high waves break in the roaring darkness and the Surgeon gives me to the sailors and the sailors use me like a broken insect in a bundle of rags and I weep in the darkness as the ship rolls on, as the sails billow salt in the afternoon breeze, and hundreds of flying fish leap in the light. Look, look, the sailors cry, look at the flying fish. They are a good omen. Look, they say, this one, this girl, she’s our figurehead, and they throw me up, up, a broken stick in a bundle of rags in the afternoon sunlight, and I fall like a stone on the deck. Slipping and sliding. Salt, sea, sun, tears, blood, loud laughter and a great shouting in my ears. But the wounds heal. I am whole and astonished and sad. And on dry Van Diemen’s Land I meet again the self-same ladies in the self-same bonnets and capes of mulberry rustling and bustling and who are you and what is your name and what is your age and why are you such a little whore and how could it be that you are so bad and we have decided to tip you out and turn you loose and give you the freedom of the streets to beg your way and whore your way and find your way and may God have mercy on your soul and we are most highly disappointed in this cargo of lewd and lopsided women with the limping legs and the sloping backs and the broken wings of crumpled crazy crackpot moth-faced butterfly wishbone sluts. What time is it, what day is it, what world is this? What world is this?
The Woodpecker Toy Fact
The magpie is the scandalmonger of the woods. The verb ‘to mag’ meaning ‘to gossip’ derives from magpie.
My mother was a magger.
A paling fence divided our garden from the garden next door and over the back fence lived Mrs Back-Fence. My mother and Mrs Back-Fence might have been posing for a cartoonist as they stood on either side of the fence, magging. Behind each woman was a rotary clothes line. We had striped tea-towels, white sheets, woollen singlets, pink pants and knitted socks all hanging from dolly pegs. Some things were patched and darned, the mending being more obvious when the clothes were wet. It was unsafe to hang anything damaged but unmended on the line, for this would be noted by other maggers as a sign of degeneration in the family. And once, when a torn, unmended nightdress had got through the washing and as far as the line, our rabbit attacked it and shredded it so that it had to be thrown out. My mother and Mrs Back-Fence had floral aprons, and often their hair was set with metal butterfly clips, covered by a chiffon scarf knotted at the front. They did not wear fluffy slippers. Instead, they nearly always wore rather thick stockings and brown lace-up shoes, like nurses.
Over the back fence these maggers passed hot scones wrapped in tea-towels, cups of sugar, bowls of stewed plums, and a continuous ribbon of talk. They sifted through the details of everything they heard and saw and thought, and arranged them into art. Children under the age of ten, considered to lack the ability to understand the narrative, were allowed to listen, provided they were still and quiet. (Today, magging usually takes place on the telephone, I think, and so a child listener becomes restless because there is only one side to the conversation.) The Crusaders took from the Arabian Desert the seeds of the wild flowers, which later became the glory of English gardens. The maggers scoured the lives of their relations and neighbours, and sometimes the lives of famous people, to shake out the seeds from which would grow undulating plains of exotic grasses and flowers giving colour and perfume.
One of the most hypnotic habits of the maggers was the constant use of possessive pronouns and parentheses. They constructed sentences which could go on all day in dizzy convolutions, as one relative clause after another was added.
‘Edna and Joe (his brother was Colin who married Betty Trethewey who later divorced him which was when he had his breakdown over the Kelly girl so that it was no wonder the business went downhill) were having their twenty-fifth anniversary which was just before Easter which was early that year, and Pam (she’s the daughter, you realise) was there with her fiancé who was Bruce French (his father had the hardware next to the Royal Park) when it turned out that Joe was electrocuted in the cellar which was where he kept the wine (they drank a terrible lot of wine in those days) and it wasn’t long after that that Edna turned round and married Bruce, and Pam went and lived next door to them (this was fifteen years ago now) and she hasn’t spoken to them since which is very hard on the daughter, Susan, who doesn’t even know that Bruce is her father, not that Bruce can be certain himself really, but of course Edna knows and she has never forgiven Pam for not telling her she was going to have Susan when she was engaged to Bruce.’
As a child I never saw any Marx Brothers films. When I did see them, I was surprised to hear Groucho Marx using my mother’s phrases. Trapped in her language, like fish in a net, were snatches and snippets from the Marx Brothers’ scripts. Inserted into the magging of two women in a Tasmanian coastal town of the 1940s, the expressions of Groucho Marx had a curious lifelessness, and their meaning was elusive. But I, as a child, accepted the words at face value, in faith, expecting to have their meaning revealed in good time. It took many years for things to fall into place. Perhaps the child who called his bear Gladly after Gladly the cross-eyed bear is an apocryphal child, but the story has a nice ring of truth. Harold be thy name. I applied the same unblinking acceptance to the name of the local toyshop. The end of the sign had fallen off and so it was called ‘The Woodpecker Toy Fact’. I even accepted the name of the toymaker as an ordinary name, and now I don’t know whether it was his real name or not. He was called Jack Frost. At Christmas, he used to make wooden peepshows of the crib. You closed one eye and looked through a hole in a box. Inside, in an unearthly light, were first the shepherds, then the animals, and, further back, the baby like a sugar mouse in his mother’s arms. The angels were in the far distance; wings sharp like the wings of swallows. And Jack Frost carved our rocking horse. Even the name of the horse, Dapple Grey, I failed to see as descriptive, and thought of as Christian name and surname. I must have existed in a blurry blue mist where I waited for the words to acquire meaning. Something that I always connected with the verb ‘to mag’ was some stuff called ‘Milk of Mag’. This was a thick, white, slightly aniseed, shudderingly horrible laxative medicine, the ‘Mag’ being short for magnesia.
I tried to join in some magging once. I made the mistake of thinking that if I introduced some fabulous fact, I would be included in the discussion. So I said that Jack Frost had told me he had made the original statue of the
Infant Jesus of Prague. Nobody took any notice of me at all. Or so I thought. But after a while I realised that terribly silly lies were being referred to as woodpecker toy facts.
‘And then she tried to tell me the baby was premature. A woodpecker toy fact if ever I heard one. It is no mystery to me that he weighed nine-and-a-half pounds. Nine-and-a-half pounds! I ask you.’
There was a special quality to a toy fact. There was a desperation—either to attract or to deflect attention. And a toy fact only became a toy fact after it had passed through the special sifting process of the maggers, and had received from them a blessing.
I had generated a term, which had drifted into the net of the maggers. Little did I know (as a magger would say) that the spirit of my words was being given the same weight as that accorded the words of Groucho Marx.