The Lady in the Cellar
Page 29
Matilda Hacker, now trying to free herself from the maid’s strong grip, shouts that she will let everyone know what sort of a girl she is; and Hannah now simply staring at the old lady, very suddenly lets her go; and equally suddenly shoves her hard towards the bed and the desk, so that she falls, catching the back of her head against the sharp edge of the table. Matilda Hacker screams.
Perhaps it is this that is unendurable to the maid; for now, she lowers herself, and sits heavily upon Matilda Hacker and jams her hands hard up against the old lady’s mouth and nose to stop her making any more noise. The old lady’s eyes continue to flicker with anger; nothing registers in the gaze of Hannah Dobbs. Matilda Hacker tries in vain to move her head, and her face now becomes redder; Hannah Dobbs simply increases the pressure. The old lady’s anger turns completely to fear; but she is helpless.
The suffocation is slow; and in the meantime, the skin that was broken on the back of her head against that sharp table edge is bleeding with great profusion, as even the shallowest head-wounds do. The blood is seeping out across the green carpet as Hannah Dobbs, her expression perfectly featureless, does not let up the pressure from her hands on Matilda Hacker’s nose and mouth until the old woman is unconscious.
All of this is a possibility if we see Hannah Dobbs’ behaviour patterns as forming a portrait of sociopathy.
The curious pattern of self-sabotage in her career – thefts that she seemingly could not help committing, lies that she could not resist telling – spoke of a wider lack of empathy. When she was on trial for her life, the newspapers might have admired her composure, and her attention to appearance; similarly, they might have also noted her extraordinary lack of fear when facing the possibility of the death sentence. Certainly there were moments when she appeared under stress, as the verdict was brought in; but there was an innate showiness, even a flavour of inauthenticity, about this and her subsequent public appearances, either leaving prison or testifying against Severin Bastendorff.
Equally certainly, Hannah had been in a furious fight for survival; but this was a struggle in which any fellow feeling that she might have once had for the family she lived with was completely eliminated. The carnival of untruths she presented for the delighted ghost writers of that pamphlet went beyond simply ensuring her own safety, and instead spoke of an almost clinical destructiveness. Nor was it inspired by hate or rage; she very simply lied because she could not help herself. Her greatest need was for the world to accept the narrative that she herself was writing of her life.
So we might see that the prospect of Matilda Hacker revealing her squalid secrets would trigger in Hannah Dobbs not murderousness, exactly, but more an impulse to ensure that her version of the truth remained; the old woman literally had to be silenced. This was how.
So we must imagine that dark quiet house, the lamps as yet unlit, on that autumn afternoon in 1877; the suggestion of laughter from the rafters above as Peter encourages the children’s games. Hannah now standing and gazing down at the old woman. Of course, there must be no possibility that anyone must know of this; Hannah Dobbs is going to pretend that Matilda Hacker has gone away.
And so it is that she quite methodically goes to the cellar to pick up a length of oilcloth; takes it back upstairs and lifts the fat old woman on to it. Perhaps Hannah Dobbs has noted that despite Matilda Hacker’s unconsciousness, there seems to be fitful breathing. She knows she has to be quick.
The old lady and her bleeding head has now become simply a mass wrapped in oilcloth, which Hannah Dobbs is dragging through the door, and down the stairs. Again, anyone else doing this might have been quivering with fright at all the possibilities – people returning to the house, the old lady roaring back into life – but for a sociopath, all that would matter would be the objective: getting this mass out through the scullery and through to the coal cellar. The oilcloth has absorbed the blood from the head wound.
And, in the glittering darkness of that coal cellar, Hannah Dobbs would have known just how far over the line she was; and what she would now have to do. She remembers that spare length of washing line; hurries to fetch it.
The strangling does not seem to take long; the old lady has never recovered consciousness and so there is no resistance. Hannah Dobbs drags the body into the furthest corner of the cellar.
Then, the shovel; moving a pile of coals to make room for the body in the oilcloth; the body then moved into the space; then the coals moved back on top of it.
There, Hannah Dobbs might think to herself. She has gone away.
The effort to clear the blood and the broken glass from the old woman’s room is more strenuous; and now, with the children distracted once more, Hannah must enlist the help of Peter. Is he too naïve to see in her eye what has happened? Is he the first person that she tells that the old lady has left?
Is there perhaps a hideous thrill for the young man that his lover has acted so decisively?
It is his job to pack some of Matilda Hacker’s belongings in her wicker trunk; and to take that trunk to the attic. Perhaps Hannah has told him that the old lady has left in such a rage that she could not be bothered to take her goods.
And so it is that even when Francis Riggenbach returns later that afternoon from his calls on friends, there is nothing in the house that suggests that violence has taken place. The children have now been brought downstairs; and Peter Bastendorff has already, discreetly, left, to return to his own lodgings around the corner. Hannah Dobbs, in the meantime, is perfectly calm, as she lets the children try to pick out tunes on the piano in the front room.
27
The Stain That Would Not Go
Even back in 1879, after Hannah Dobbs’ trial and acquittal, the residents of Euston Square had been horrified by the noisy attention that it was attracting; and by the time of Severin Bastendorff’s trial for perjury, horror was mixed in with squalor; here was a story that suggested that the neighbourhood was low. The gawping public might imagine each of these houses filled with lodgers and servants, transients all, living lives of sexual promiscuity and betrayal. Worse though than the ghoul-tourists who were marching up and down the pavements, peering over the edge of the railings of number 4, Euston Square down into the front basement area, was the possibility that this lurid case might also affect the value of all the neighbouring properties.
Partly this was the concern of an association of Euston Square residents who petitioned the authorities (from the parish council onwards) to change the name of the square. The new suggestion was ‘Endsleigh Gardens’. But they were not – immediately – to be granted that wish. They made representations to the St Pancras Vestry (the local council). The following year, on the south side of Euston Square, the name was changed. Endsleigh Gardens remains on the street signs to this day.
But the reputation of the house lingered. In 1906, newspapers were serialising a new fiction by best-selling novelist Charles Pearce called ‘The Hidden Hand’. In one passage, two women are walking in the area:
She walked by Angela’s side keeping very close, disagreeably so, the girl thought. ‘You’ll excuse me my dear, but I always feel awfully creepy when I pass this spot.’
[It was Euston Square.]
‘Why?’ asked Angela.
‘There was a murder committed in that house,’ said the woman, dropping her voice and pointing across Angela. ‘The body of a woman was found in the coal cellar and it was never discovered who murdered her. She was lying there about two years. Her name was Matilda Hacker. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?’1
By the 1920s, the rumours that the house was horribly haunted began. These were picked up (and amplified greatly) by the great ‘true’ ghost story anthologist Eliot O’Donnell. This prolific author made the perfectly unverifiable claim, in the 1930s, that his aunt had known Matilda Hacker – hence his unusual interest in the terrifying things that were said to have happened in her room years after the murder.
For a start, it was said that the bloodstain that Mrs Bastendorff
had found on the carpet had soaked through to the boards – and no matter how hard and how repeatedly they were scrubbed, nothing would make the stain go. Added to this, the bloodstain was one of the focuses of ‘super-physical’ manifestations.
‘At around the same time every night,’ O’Donnell wrote, ‘the most awful sounds were heard proceeding from the room, the climax being reached when a piercing, blood-curdling scream, suggestive of untold terror and pain, rang out, followed by a heavy thud and sounds like the opening and shutting of the room and the dragging of some heavy body across the landing and down the staircase to the hall.’2
Other manifestations of haunting: people witnessing the door handle of Miss Hacker’s room twisting violently on its own. There were also bad dreams: claims from those who slept in the room of troubled nights. The theme was always the same: the room’s cupboard door creaking slowly open in the darkness and of something ‘very uncanny’ emerging.
In addition to all this, dogs refused to go into the room; and even passing it on the landing would make them cry piteously.
There came a point, in the 1920s and 1930s, when many such boarding houses around Euston and St Pancras and King’s Cross sank into what seemed like irredeemable frowsiness: this was the seedy world depicted by novelist Patrick Hamilton in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and by Jean Rhys in After Leaving Mr McKenzie; yellowing lightbulbs, peeling wallpaper, and dreams of happiness or even simply security that would never come close to being fulfilled.
Because of University College London, and all its attendant departments, the large contingent of students in the area meant that it never sank quite as low as Agar Town, or Maiden Lane. But to seek out lodgings in the area of Euston Square come the middle of the twentieth century meant that perhaps not all of life’s plans had come to fruition.
The heavy-handed vandalism of 1960s city planners and British Rail architects swept all memories and traces from the north end of Euston Square in 1960. The classical railway station – and the stone arch that framed its entrance – was obliterated. The replacement station concourse, a construction of concrete and glass, had the modern suggestion of an airport. Number 4, Euston Square, together with all the other houses in that terrace, which had escaped the attentions of the Luftwaffe in the Blitz (not so Endsleigh Gardens and Drummond Street) was flattened to make way for a swish new black-paned office development and a bus stand.
And the streets around – all those great lines of nineteenth-century boarding houses – became progressively seedier in the 1970s and the 1980s. One hundred years beforehand, there had been some concern about such houses proving fertile ground for immorality; by the second half of the twentieth century, the areas of north eastern Bloomsbury, Somers Town and Battle Bridge, were notorious for drugs and prostitution.
Yet in recent years, change has come once more; and the Bastendorffs, if they could see, might be intrigued by the renovated houses that now play host to eager travellers from the Continent, who have arrived at St Pancras on the Eurostar railway lines. The German Gymnasium is no longer a gymnasium – it is instead a thriving and very smart restaurant noted for its breakfasts. Meanwhile, the streets in which Mary Bastendorff’s relatives lived, near St Pancras Old Church, gleam with fresh paint. But there is still a sense in the wider area around the railway stations – in all those estates and tenements – that it is a place where new arrivals try to gain a foothold, hoping to prosper in the impossibly rich city.
The horror and the tragedy that overwhelmed Severin and Mary Bastendorff and their children was, in part, a hideous collision of different people who had sought to mould new lives and identities for themselves in the streets of London. But those streets then – and now – also had a blankly pitiless quality.
It was also, in part, a fable of modern city life, which is precisely why it attracted so much attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Publications such as The Spectator may have jocularly dismissed any notions that people living in London’s boarding houses should be alarmed; but it rather callously ignored the point that so many of these people were women, sometimes of a certain age, who felt vulnerable. This was a story not just about fear of crime, but also a certain economic fear too; that the only way one might afford to live in the city would be to live among strangers.
At a time when London’s population is once more expanding enormously, it is an idea that finds a curiously modern currency; the city on first glance might appear to be a market of entirely self-enclosed houses and apartments, where bathrooms and kitchens are private.
Yet in many areas, this is very far from being the case; in suburbs from Kingsbury to Barking, so many houses are not merely ‘multi-residency’ with shared facilities but are in fact packed with tenants, sleeping in bunk-beds, on mattresses, in ill-ventilated basements.
To live in such a city, in such a way, requires a hundred daily negotiations and understandings. For the Bastendorffs, it meant having strangers in the family home; and for their tenants, it meant having trust that one’s fellow residents were essentially benign.
Matilda Hacker has recently been commemorated in a rather unexpected way: becoming the subject of a play that was staged in her home city of Canterbury.3 For the other remarkable aspect of her story, the one that still resonates today, is one woman’s determination to live outside of all social conventions, blithely stepping away from any kind of responsibility. As well as the horror, there is also a curious element of liberation in her story.
For Hannah Dobbs, however, no such freedom was available; she might have imagined, as she gazed on pictures of London society and became hypnotised by the clothes and the jewellery, that it was possible for a woman with no means to attain such a life. London of the 1870s allowed for her sense of adventure but little else. What sort of a world did she and young Peter Bastendorff inhabit as they lay in bed side by side?
Meanwhile, Severin Bastendorff was ultimately devoured by the city; not merely the suspicion of murder, but the utterly remorseless cynicism that went into proving (or not quite proving) his affair with Hannah Dobbs. To have ended being cared for in an institution such as Colney Hatch suggests that Bastendorff may have had mental health problems all his life; it is certainly without question, whenever the first symptoms showed, that the chain of events following the discovery of the body were more than sufficient to destabilise his delicate balance.
Even today, the act of taking in lodgers is a remarkable act of trust in an otherwise wholly anonymous urban world. The lodger trusts that he or she will be safe and secure under the roof of the landlord to whom they are paying rent; and equally, the landlord will have to trust that he has not admitted into his household someone of anti-social or frightening tendencies.
Even more pressingly, though: there are prospective tenants from around the world who will be looking and hoping to find not atomised loneliness in such a home but instead the warmth of a surrogate family.
Back in the 1870s, what was never pointed out at the time of the Euston Square tragedy was that countless thousands upon thousands of newcomers to London had found exactly that.
Notes
Preface
1 – An 1876 lease for 6, Euston Square, in the same terrace, contains wonderfully evocative descriptions. The original document is held at the London Metropolitan Archives. Ref: 0/462/011
2 – The interview appeared on 5 January 1879. A reproduction of it can be found (among other places) at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/media/marx/
Chapter 1
1 – Severin (sometimes spelled ‘Sewerin’) Bastendorff’s naturalisation certificate is at the National Archives. Reference HO 334/8/2587
Chapter 2
1 – These and other minute details of the discovery in the cellar and the movements of all parties concerned emerged on the first day of the inquest two weeks later. All national (and, indeed, local) newspapers reported on the proceedings, with very slight variations of quotes. A report can be found in The Times, 22 May 1879.
3 – As above
4 – As above
5 – As above
6 – As above
7 – As above
8 – As above
9 – The account of the medical examination was reported in The Times on 22 May 1879
10 – As above
11 – As above
Chapter 3
1 – As reported in the North London News, 17 May 1873
2 – As reported in Reynolds Paper, 23 December 1877
3 – As above
Chapter 5
1 – Correspondents from a variety of newspapers across the country were sent to Bideford. There were pooled reports too. This featured in Dublin newspaper The Advertiser on 15 May 1879.
2 – As above
3 – Detail featured in the Western Morning News, 15 May 1879
4 – Details relayed by the Press Association to all newspapers, 16 May 1879
5 – Detail featured in Birmingham Daily Post, 16 May 1879
6 – Details relayed via telegram to all newspapers by the Press Association, 16 May 1879
7 – Report of inquest proceedings from The Times, 17 May 1879
8 – As above
9 – As above
10 – As above
11 – As above
12 – As above