by Ruth Rendell
August 2nd, 1914
How glad I am that my sons are too young to fight. By the time they are old enough to be soldiers it will certainly all be over—if it starts. But it looks as if it will start.
Germany has declared war. Her object, it seems, is to sweep down and conquer France, the ally of Russia, before Russia can make a counter-stroke. These matters are always very complicated. The British Empire hasn’t seemed much concerned in all of it but it may be different now, especially if Kaiser Wilhelm is going to challenge our sea power. Funny, I wrote ‘our’, though I think of myself as every inch a Dane.
Rasmus talks of nothing but war. To distract myself I’ve started reading those books Tante Frederikke left me. I’ve had them for a year and never bothered to look into them till now. The one I’ve started is called A Christmas Carol.
September 7th, 1914
Hansine is in great distress of mind because her Cropper has joined the army. He is a bit younger than she, no more than thirty-one or thirty-two, so by no means too old to enlist. In floods of tears, she told me they were engaged, were saving up to get married and had been planning to do so next year. I must say, I think she might have said something about this before.
He’s a very handsome man. It will be a crying shame if he gets himself killed.
I meant to chronicle everything that happens in the war in this diary but it’s impossible, there’s so much of it, it’s so complicated and happening in so many places. One thing is for certain, it isn’t going to be quickly over. The wounded, coming back from Mons, all tell stories of German cowardice and treachery. One said, ‘If you stand up in the firing-line they cannot hit you. They do not aim with the rifle and will not face the bayonet. They are afraid of cold steel.’ Well, who wouldn’t be? I can believe any Teuton is treacherous but if they’re such cowards and bad soldiers why couldn’t we drive them out of Belgium?
It’s once again a very good thing I write in Danish because if anyone here could read this I don’t know what they’d do to me. One has to be very patriotic, say all the British are saintly heroes and the Germans cowardly rats. There’s no middle way.
There was a photograph in The War Illustrated of a painting of Belgrade—as it used to be. ‘The beautiful white city’, they called it. Since the Austrian bombardment it’s become a desolate stretch of ruins. I’m glad I’m not Servian and my children aren’t. They say Belgium is full of beautiful age-old churches. I wonder how long they’ll remain standing?
I took Marie to tea with Mrs Housman at her house in Hampstead, at Frognal. Swanny was at school. There were six other ladies there and two more children, so no chance for conversation, only chat and small talk. You wouldn’t have believed there was a war on.
January 21st, 1915
Mogens was seventeen yesterday. We have to face the fact that he isn’t clever, he’s just a very kind nice boy. I wonder where he gets it from? I can’t think of anybody you could call nice in my family that I’ve ever known. My mother was always ill throughout my childhood, so you can’t count her. Who could be nice when they’re always in pain? My father was very strict and stern, famous for his moral character, but that didn’t stop him offering me to the first taker in need of hard cash. As to Tante Frederikke and her sons, they were a fault-finding, humourless, dour bunch of people. So there’s no knowing where Mogens gets his niceness from. Happy, laughing, sweet-natured Rasmus maybe and his family of brutish peasants.
Mogens wants to leave school in the summer and Rasmus says in his sour way that there’s no point in paying school fees for someone who can’t pass exams, or won’t try. I don’t know what Mogens will do, go into Rasmus’s business perhaps, if that’s possible. Rasmus says his only intellectual exercise is collecting numbers of The War Illustrated which he intends having bound into volumes. That will make depressing reading in the future.
Zeppelins crossed the North Sea last night and bombarded the coast of Norfolk. People were wounded in King’s Lynn and Yarmouth and a woman was killed while her husband was away fighting at the front. What an irony! The newspaper called the Germans ‘loathsome blood-mad fiends’ whose war methods are more savage than those of ‘the lowest races known to anthropology’. That made me laugh. What would Mrs Housman say if she could read Danish? The paper said we should be able to take reprisals. Up till now our airmen have flown over German cities but dropped no bombs.
Mrs Housman’s brother has joined the army.
March 1st, 1915
Mr H. G. Wells must be much cleverer than I am, otherwise he wouldn’t be in the position he is in, famous and listened-to and honoured by everyone. But sometimes when I read what he writes I can’t help thinking, what a fool! Doesn’t he know better than to think people change, that a whole nation can change more or less overnight? Here is an example, he is writing of what will happen to the Englishman when the war is over: ‘All the old pre-war habits will have gone. He will, as chemists say, be “nascent”, unsubmissive, critical … He will be impatient with a Government that “fools about”, he will want to go on doing things. So that I do not see that the old forensic party game is likely to return to British political life with the ending of the war …’ Ah, well.
Anyway, the war isn’t over yet and not likely to be for a long time. I have taught Swanny to knit and she is really very good for a child not yet ten. She is making khaki socks for soldiers. Her kind father’s comment: ‘I pity the poor fellow who has to feel all those lumps and knots in his boots.’
She is growing very tall for her age. I try not to worry about it. If she were a boy I suppose I should be delighted. She is nearly as tall as Emily and Emily is a full-grown woman, though a small one. Rasmus never hesitates to rub it in and says very tall women don’t find husbands.
‘Would that be so bad if she didn’t?’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Where would you be without one, old girl?’ he said, and he’s right. A woman has to have a husband or be a useless laughing-stock, but there’s something wrong with that somewhere, it can’t be the proper way for things to be organized.
I am reading The Old Curiosity Shop. I didn’t know reading stories could be such a pleasure. It’s funny but I seem to get right inside the characters and be them, which makes me care about what happens to them and get quite impatient to be back with my book.
March 30th, 1915
Mrs Housman’s brother has been killed in Flanders, three weeks after he joined up.
Of all the women I meet who’ve lost men at the front none ever seems to expect they might get killed. It’s the others who will die, theirs have charmed lives. Does it make the shock and the pain worse, I wonder? Perhaps not, because I’ve noticed you can’t prepare yourself for death. You may know it’s inevitable and tell yourself so day after day but when it comes it’s the same, as if you never expected it but thought the person would live for ever.
Mrs Housman kept saying, why him? Why me? Why did it have to happen to him? As if it wasn’t happening to hundreds, thousands. And what does she mean? That it should have happened to other men but not to this man because he was hers?
The French have published a list which shows three million German casualties but our list of our men lost at the Dardanelles shows just twenty-three dead, twenty-eight wounded and three missing. I don’t believe in these figures, they can’t be right.
July 28th, 1915
Swanny’s birthday and Mogens’ last day at school. He is going to start straightaway in the motor car sales business with Rasmus. I suppose he will do a clerk’s job because I’m sure he knows nothing about motor cars. I’m never told much but I can tell business isn’t good at present, I don’t suppose it could be with this war going on. It’s more than a year and a half since Rasmus made that New Year Resolution and he’s not a millionaire yet!
For her birthday we gave Swanny Greek dancing lessons, every Friday night from now till next spring. I found a wonderful word for her in my dictionary, we never have words like that in Danish: terpsichorean.
I told her we should expect her to be proficient in the terpsichorean art.
Hansine’s Cropper has been reported missing in the Dardanelles. She is hoping—we are all hoping—he is a prisoner of war. Because they aren’t officially engaged, she is just his sweetheart not his fiancée, she had to hear the news from his sister who came round in secret yesterday to tell her. His mother is jealous as a tigress and won’t acknowledge Hansine’s position, calls her ‘that foreign slavey’. Then today poor Hansine got a letter from Cropper, weeks old of course, dated before the evacuation of West Gallipoli. I don’t think he knows she can’t read or he wouldn’t bother to write. He can’t want me to read out the private things he says to her, all the endearments and lovey-dovey bits. And really that’s all there is because although he wrote more, most of it is slashed out by the censor. For all we know he’s dead. Strange reading the cheerful and hopeful words of a dead man.
March 14th, 1916
Mrs Evans, who lived next door to us in Ravensdale Road, came to tea and brought her brood of ugly children with her. This was supposed to be all in aid of her second son, a fat spotty boy called Arthur, playing with Marie on her birthday. Only one way and another it was put off, first because one child had a cold, then another, then Mrs Evans herself got the shingles of all things. Today wasn’t much of a success. The boy hit Marie who screamed so loudly that her father heard her from his workshop down the garden and came running in threatening to thrash Arthur and causing a fearful commotion. Somehow I don’t think we’ll be seeing Mrs Evans again!
We were sitting in the drawing room this evening, Rasmus and I. I was reading A Tale of Two Cities and he was puffing away at a cigarette while devouring The War Illustrated, when suddenly he looked up and said he was going to make Marie a doll’s house.
‘You’re too late for her birthday,’ I said, not very interested, ‘it’ll have to be for Christmas.’
‘Oh, I won’t finish by Christmas,’ he said, ‘this’ll take me years, maybe two years. I’m going to make a copy of this house. I’m going to make her Padanaram.’
‘What, for a child of five?’ I said.
‘She’ll be seven by the time I’ve finished. You might give a fellow a bit more encouragement, old girl. There are some women who’d think themselves pretty lucky having a husband who can do what I can.’
‘Why Marie?’ I said. ‘Why not Swanny? I thought you were supposed to love all your children equally.’
‘She’s too old. The rate she’s growing she’ll be six feet tall by the time it’s finished.’
‘Well, don’t think I’m going to help,’ I said. ‘If you want carpets and curtains and cushions and what-not you can get Hansine to do them. You know what a magnificent needlewoman she is. Just don’t come asking me.’
March 26th, 1916
Swanny and Marie both have the chicken-pox. Swanny came down with it yesterday and Marie was all over spots this morning. I’ve heard it said children can catch it from a grown-up with the shingles and though I don’t usually believe tales like that, old wives’ tales mostly, it certainly looks as if there’s something in this one. We joke about it and call it Mrs Evans’s revenge for the way Rasmus shouted at Arthur, but I’m worried about their faces scarring. Swanny is good and obedient and has promised not to scratch but that little monkey Marie, I don’t know what to do with her, I’ve threatened to tie her hands behind her back and I will too if I see her nails at her face again.
Sam Cropper is a prisoner in German hands. I don’t know how they can be sure but his sister came round this afternoon to tell Hansine and she has been laughing and singing ever since.
Rasmus began the doll’s house this evening. That is, he began making drawings. I will say for him, he draws magnificently, the sketches he makes remind me of photographs I’ve seen of drawings by Leonardo. Swanny asked him, ‘Why are you drawing our house, Far?’ and he said in his surly way, and in English, he’s proud of sayings like this he knows in English, ‘Ask no questions and you’ll get no lies.’
I’ve bought a new dress, old-rose taffeta with white polka dots, and a matching turban in old rose embroidered with white beads.
May 7th, 1916
I don’t know how I can write it. Perhaps I can because I can’t believe it’s true. I want to wake up and have that wonderful feeling you do after a nightmare: it didn’t happen, it wasn’t real.
But this is real. Mogens came home this evening to tell us he has enlisted. He is now a private in the 3rd London Battalion, the Rifle Brigade.
12
ON TOP OF THE papers Cary had given me were two photographs. I don’t know why they interested me, for neither Lizzie Roper nor her husband was good-looking, nor, if these pictures were anything to go by, intelligent or sensitive people. She looked coarse and he looked hag-ridden. But still there was something about each of them that caught my imagination. Besides, Asta had known them or at least known of them, she had seen Mrs Roper in her fashionable clothes and big feathered hat.
Few of us much enjoy reading anything that isn’t a book, a newspaper or a magazine. I’ve had to read too many photocopies of book pages, not to mention manuscripts, typed and handwritten, to want the experience again. I looked at the books first. One was a green Penguin paperback in the Famous Trials series, a shabby, much-thumbed copy, the other looked as if it had been privately published. It was a very slim volume. There was no jacket, no title on the front cover and that on the spine was no longer decipherable. Inside, on the flyleaf, was printed A Victorian Family by Arthur Roper and the date in Roman numerals, MCMXXVI.
A piece of paper fell out. It was a note from Cary. ‘Read the Ward-Carpenter piece first, then the paperback. You can probably miss out on Arthur’s memoir.’ The Ward-Carpenter turned out to be the stack of rather crooked, black-smudged photocopying. Still, by now I wanted to know more about Roper. But before beginning I looked him up in an encyclopedia of true crime my historical detective writer had edited.
Not much space was devoted to him: Alfred Eighteen Roper b. 1872, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk; d. 1925, Cambridge. Charged with the murder of his wife Elizabeth Louisa Roper in Hackney, London, in July 1905. The trial was at the Central Criminal Court, London, in October 1905, and distinguished by the spectacular performance of Howard de Filippis K C, for the Defence.
That was all. There was nothing to show on the photocopy where the extract had come from, but no doubt some collection of true crime. Handwritten across the top of the first page was the date 1934.
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF A PHARMACIST
by Francis Ward-Carpenter, M.A., J.P.
Much of the interest and terror induced by great crimes is due, not to their abnormal content, but to that in them which is normal. Huge things happen to little men and they happen, not in mansions or palaces, but in poor houses in mean streets. The trivial is aggrandized by them and the sordid given a horrific cast, so that the crime, albeit briefly, elevates the petty, the squalid and the base to heights of tragedy.
The Roper Case was no exception to this. Indeed, with its principal players teetering on the lowest edge of the lower middle class, its London suburban setting, and the portrait its principal actors give of family life, it might be said to exemplify it. Here in the dismal backwater of a great city the men and women drawn together by typical circumstances reacted to them with atypical vice, violence and a flouting of civilization’s rules.
Alfred Eighteen Roper was not, however, a London man by birth and upbringing. His singular second name derived from his mother who bore it before her marriage to Thomas Edward Roper in 1868. Eighteen is a Suffolk surname and it was in Suffolk, in the pretty little town of Bury St Edmunds on the River Lark, that Alfred was born four years later. By this time his parents already had two daughters, Beatrice and Maud, but Alfred was the firstborn son and heir. Two more sons were later born to the Ropers, Arthur and Joseph, and another daughter who seems to have lived only for a few weeks.
Thomas Roper was an assistant in Morl
ey’s, a druggist’s shop in the Butter Market, or perhaps something more than that. It appears he had men under him and today we would call him the pharmacist or manager of the shop. He must have been in a fair way of doing, for he could afford to dispense with the labour of his sons, sending all three to the free Grammar School, and although Thomas’s mother and his own wife had both been sent out into service there never appears to have been any question of this in the case of the Roper girls. It was apparently a happy family, respectable and reasonably prosperous, the boys at least with ideas for the future above the station in which Providence had placed them.
Much of this came to an end when Thomas died of an apoplexy, probably a subarachnoid haemorrhage, at the age of forty-four when Alfred was sixteen. The druggist made the family an offer it would have been highly imprudent to refuse. A position in the shop could be Alfred’s if he so desired.
Alfred is said to have told his brother he hoped to win an Exhibition, of which the Grammar School appointed four each year to be held for four years, and which would send him to the University of Cambridge. However, this was not to be. He left school and went into the shop, starting there on the lowest rung of the ladder, but earning money, enough to support his mother and keep his brothers from the necessity of leaving school. One of his sisters was already married and the other due to marry in the following year.
Alfred remained at Morley’s for some years, during which he rose to the position his father had formerly held, that of pharmacist. He was dutiful and industrious, a quiet home-loving young man who, according to his brother Arthur, had few friends and no acquaintance at all with the opposite sex.
In 1926 Arthur Roper, a schoolmaster in Beccles, wrote and privately published a memoir of the Ropers. Its title was A Victorian Family but its only interest to us today lies in the information it gives about Arthur’s brother Alfred. The sole claim to fame or notoriety the Roper family ever had derives from Alfred Roper’s trial for the murder of his wife, the circumstances which led up to that trial, and its outcome, yet Arthur has not a word to say about any of it. His brother features prominently in this short book, has no fewer than 250 lines devoted exclusively to him; the illustrations include two photographs of him, one a studio portrait, the other with his wife and children, but that he was tried for murder is never mentioned. He is referred to as marrying Elizabeth Louisa Hyde in 1898, and a son being born to them in 1899 and a daughter in 1904.