Cowards Die Many Times

by Peter Hey

  As Jane struggled to maintain her composure, Guy intervened. ‘Don’t mind my wife, Jane. She’s Dutch. They speak their mind.’ It was more well-rehearsed justification than apology.

  Jane wasn’t convinced barefaced rudeness was a national trait but managed to force a limp smile.

  Polly didn’t reciprocate and turned back to her husband. ‘She’s the one you’ll be paying to trace back the Ramsbottoms, I suppose. I told you, it's a common peasant’s name. If English isn’t your first language you translate it literally – male sheep’s arse. Thank God I kept Van der Bijl.’

  ‘As I’ve explained before,’ said Guy patiently, ‘there’s a town called Ramsbottom in the north of England. And when, and if, I get my knighthood for services to medicine, you’ll happily call yourself Lady Ramsbottom. Silly little stable girls will always know who you are then.’

  As the couple bickered, Jane felt justified in mentally dissecting Polly’s appearance. She was at least ten years younger than Guy, three inches taller and looked like she might once have been willowy and, perhaps, beautiful. Now she was noticeably broad about the hips and wore glasses that were unattractively functional. Jane got the impression that she would have let herself go as an act of deliberate spite.

  When Polly had left them and marched off into the house, Jane was sufficiently calm to resume quizzing Guy about what he knew of his family background. He brought out a laptop and they looked through the information he had so far unearthed. He took a pragmatic attitude when Jane explained she couldn’t guarantee to find the financial source of his great-grandfather’s medical training but would check the accuracy of his family tree and take it back as far as she could.

  Jane climbed back into her car feeling optimistic and excited. The commission was interesting and, hopefully, well within her capabilities. Her mood dropped slightly when she realised she was boxed in by a very large white 4X4. It took some very careful manoeuvring to effect her escape. She didn’t think Guy would forgive her if she dented his Maserati. And Polly would probably demand a new one if the Range Rover got scratched. Jane was tempted nonetheless.

  The minister’s wife

  In London it had just been announced that Queen Victoria had given birth again. Far away in the northern county of Lancashire, the industrial revolution was driving a dramatic rise in population, and the dioceses were subdividing parishes and building new churches to accommodate the growing number of souls potentially lost to secularism or dissent. Some funding was provided by a Westminster parliament who saw the moral guidance of the established church as a bulwark against the bloody revolts that had occurred on the other side of the channel. In more remote areas, the Anglicans had also responded to competition from the non-conformists who had built their own houses of God closer to the new communities serving the mills, quarries and mines in the moorland hills. Accordingly, St Michael’s had been constructed above the narrow, winding road that had once led through isolated farmsteads, but was now lined with industrial sheds and cramped housing. In the early Norman style with a squat square tower adorned by circular turret housing the stairwell, its fresh stonework betrayed its lack of age, but it would soon darken and take on the appearance of timeworn permanence. The living was not generous and could not attract a university-educated clergyman. The vicar was therefore not from the southern gentry but a schoolmaster’s son raised in the city of Manchester. Reverend Ralph Kershaw was slightly built and softly spoken, and sought gravitas through long side whiskers that some of the less respectful villagers likened to spaniel’s ears hanging besides his otherwise clean-shaven face. One of his main challenges was to prevent further attrition to the nearby Baptist chapel which had stood for nearly 50 years and was already straining at the seams of its more prosaic architecture. Despite his youthful enthusiasm, he was having only limited success. Often he would be obliged to carry out the legal formalities of marriage, but the newly wedded couples would not return to his pews or bring their children to be christened at his font.

  Harry Richards was an altogether more dignified-looking man, straight backed, tall and greying at the temples. To northern ears his Somerset accent sounded commanding and aristocratic, but his own humble origins were betrayed by the occasional rural note. His father had once been a garden labourer before establishing a successful business bottling ale and liquor. The profits funded a modest schooling for the young Harry, but his later conversion to teetotalism meant it was not something he chose to relate. Finding work as an apprentice bookbinder, his dedication to his local church led to his being recommended for a place at the Bristol Baptist College, where the aim was to supply ‘a succession of able and evangelical ministers’ for ‘destitute’ congregations. His studies included Hebrew, Latin, Greek and mathematics, as his tutors sought to transform enthusiastic and committed preachers into scholars on a par with their brethren in other denominations. After four years, Harry was deemed ready to be sent out and was allocated a church in the wilds of the Pennine hills. It was not a mission he intended to take alone. He had already found a wife, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer who owned land on the outskirts of the city. She was devout, literate and with a great love of music and the arts. That she was plain was of little consequence. And her headstrong nature was something he thought he could tame.

  Unlike his Anglican counterpart, Harry Richards did not enjoy a spacious vicarage next to his church, but was accommodated in a terraced cottage overlooking the small river that flowed through the village. The house was only slightly larger than the average, but he and his wife were able to employ a general servant who lived in. After ten years of marriage, Elizabeth Richards remained childless but devoted her energies to her husband’s ministry, in particular to the Sunday school that provided the only education available to most local children. It was a source of great pride to the couple and had helped attract many parents to the Baptist congregation.

  ‘I think it’s going to be a fine day. I may do some sketching later. Do you think my little apprentice will be able to come?’ shouted Elizabeth as she gazed out of the window onto the moors beyond.

  Her husband did not respond initially, but waited until he had joined her in the front parlour. ‘Elizabeth, my dear, his father will need him to work. You know that.’

  ‘But he’s such a gifted boy. He shouldn’t be pushing tubs of coal around, or whatever it is that dreadful man will have him doing. He’s got such fine, elegant hands—'

  ‘Elizabeth. Listen to yourself. His father is a simple man trying to keep a roof over his family’s head.’

  ‘But the boy’s so young!’

  Harry Richards softly placed his hands on his wife’s shoulders. ‘Please, my love. These people are among the poorest of Christ’s flock. Toil is their lot in life. Their reward awaits them in paradise.’

  ‘But when I was his age—'

  ‘When you were his age, your father indulged you. You were the apple of his eye.’ Harry squeezed her shoulders with an affection that was, in itself, largely paternal. ‘He wanted you to be a fine young lady, to play piano, to read poetry, to sew. He saw you had a talent for painting and drawing and encouraged it. He could afford to, and to him, it was a source of pride and pleasure. The people who live in these hills have little time for pleasure. And they must take their pride in their work and in their devotion to the Lord. They must know their place in His great scheme.’

  Elizabeth had been staring into her husband’s face, but now dropped her gaze. ‘You’re sermonising again,’ she said, somewhat sullenly.

  He placed two fingers under her chin and raised it gently. ‘That’s my lot in life,’ he replied.

  Elizabeth slipped her head away and returned her focus to the window. ‘The stream’s looking wild. I hear it broke its banks down in the valley. Flooded the track of the new railway.’

  A threatening storm seemed to have passed and Harry smiled. ‘We’ve suffered some heavy rain these last weeks. The cotton likes it wet, of course, and the sheep don’t seem
to mind. Though when it’s coming at you sideways on the wind, it’s as if you’re immersed in Noah’s flood itself,’ he laughed.

  Elizabeth watched a distant hawk hovering in the sky before it darted down into the hillside. ‘Do you think we’ll ever be able to move back home?’ she mused. ‘It gets so bleak here. And I could be a great help to my mother now she’s on her own.’

  ‘Again, you know the answer to that, my love. We go where we are needed. And that, for now, is here. It is these good people that we must help.’

  Elizabeth turned back sharply towards her husband, her earlier notion swamping her thoughts again and causing her emotions to flare. ‘But the boy can do so much more than digging out stupid rocks, or tending to those infernal mechanisms in the mill!’ She raised a hand apologetically but persisted in a quieter, pleading voice. ‘He reads and writes so beautifully. Numbers came so easily to him. And he draws like an angel. He’ll just end up married to an ugly local girl and grind himself to death providing for a houseful of children. He deserves more.’

  Harry sighed. ‘Why is he singled out and not the rest of the young lads in your schoolroom? Be truthful now. In your heart of hearts, is it not because his handsome features have won you over and hold your affections as if he were your own son?’

  ‘That’s not fair!’ burst out Elizabeth, as tears began to well in her eyes. ‘Please do not hold my own barrenness against me, husband. I have tried to be a true and proper wife—'

  ‘You have been a fine wife,’ confirmed Harry quickly. ‘And if the good Lord has chosen not to bless us with child, ours is not to question His wisdom.’

  ‘Why do we bother teaching them to read and write if they are just going to labour like their fathers?’ Elizabeth snapped, her hurt seeking deflection.

  ‘Come now,’ said Harry evenly. ‘We have discussed this often enough. It is so they can study the scriptures, and gain enlightenment and comfort from the word of the Lord.’

  ‘But in this case, given his God-given gifts, could we not seek to intervene, to help him find a better life. The other boys bully him because he is different anyway.’

  Harry’s eyes looked up at the ceiling as if seeking divine guidance. ‘You are making him soft in a world where he needs to be hard.’

  ‘That stupid Hargreaves girl has set her eyes on him. Her father is a nasty, brute of a man. Is that the kind of hard you had in mind?’ responded Elizabeth defiantly.

  Harry’s patience had expired. ‘Enough!’ he shouted, before lowering his voice if not his temper. ‘I forbid you to interfere with the Ramsbottom boy any further. You are giving him false hopes. Expectations that will be dashed and cause him nothing but pain. Let him be bullied! It will make a man of him. Let him marry an ignorant, ugly girl! She, at least, might be obedient. Let him work himself to death! It will take him sooner to paradise.’ Harry paused and then spoke his final words slowly and forcibly. ‘Let him be.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ interrupted another voice nervously.

  Reverend Harry Richards turned his head to see a thin young woman standing by the parlour door. ‘What is it, child?’ he said calmly.

  ‘Apologies, sir, but it’s gone two o’clock. You asked me to remind you of the burial this afternoon.’

  ‘Indeed. Thank you. You may leave us now.’

  The maidservant obediently made her way back towards the scullery, and Harry addressed his wife once more. ‘I trust you will be attending the service, my love?’

  Elizabeth faintly shook her head. ‘Forgive me if I don’t. I’m not sure if I can bear the funeral of yet another poor infant. I might not be able to retain my composure. I know you wouldn’t want that.’

  ‘Quite so. I will make your apologies. This time at least.’

  Harry thought about taking his wife’s hand as a gesture of comfort and consolation, but decided distance was the better policy. He left the room.

  The boy who was born twice

  Back home in Nottingham, Jane was going through the small mountain of post that had built up over just a couple of days. As she suspected, there was nothing of any great interest. Her shredder had packed up, and she was reduced to tearing her personal details out of any correspondence not addressed to ‘The Householder’ or ‘The Occupant’ before dumping it in her recycling. She vaguely recalled someone on TV once promising that technology would deliver a paperless society. Somehow the information revolution seemed to have had the opposite effect.

  Admin completed, she opened her laptop and turned her thoughts to Guy Ramsbottom’s family background.

  Guy had known his paternal grandfather and recalled many details of his life, including his date and place of birth. Guy’s personal knowledge of his great-grandfather was limited to his name, George Ramsbottom, and the fact that he had been a GP with a practice based in Manchester. Guy had one photograph of George, depicting a successful, confident man in late middle age, dressed like an Edwardian gentleman complete with fine moustache. He was markedly more handsome than his great-grandson, though the gene for a receding hairline was starting to make an appearance. There was nothing in his face or demeanour that suggested he’d had to battle his way up from the lower orders.

  Jane found the online family tree that had been created by Guy’s cousin. It included over 2,000 people, branching out widely and reaching back into the 17th century. It had evidently been worked on over a number of years. Jane homed in on the Ramsbottoms and found George being born in 1872 and dying in 1945. On the 1911 census, he was established as a doctor of medicine with a young family and two servants. His then home still stood and Internet images showed it to be an imposing Victorian villa now slightly run down and divided into flats.

  George’s earliest appearance on the ten-yearly census records was in 1881. He was an eight-year-old scholar with five older siblings, most of whom had occupations Jane recognised as being associated with the cotton industry. George’s youngest brother was listed as an 11-year-old ‘doffer’. That was new to Jane, but a quick search established it involved changing the bobbins on a spinning frame, presumably the lowest unskilled work in a mill. Head of the household was mother, Sarah Ramsbottom, a widow aged 48.

  Along with others, they were living in a property called Father Richard Barn. Jane found an online copy of a contemporaneous Ordnance Survey 25 inch map which provided sufficient detail to identify its specific location. It was on a narrow lane outside the village of Blackwell Holme in the Lancashire moors. On the hillside above the so-called barn was a small coal mine and almost directly below was a cotton mill. Switching to a modern satellite image, there was still some kind of building on the site of the Ramsbottoms’ home, but the mine and mill were long gone, leaving ghostly traces on the landscape that could only be interpreted through reference to the old map.

  When Jane looked back ten years to the 1871 census, she found the family already living in the same place. The head then was given as Thomas Ramsbottom, age 35, an ‘Eng. Ast. (Cotton Mill)’, a title she struggled to interpret. One glaring anomaly was the re-appearance of George Ramsbottom, somehow aged 14. Guy’s great-grandfather wasn’t even supposed to be born in 1871. Could his birth date be wrong? Could he really have been much older than he later claimed?

  Jane checked the records and the confusion was quickly resolved. There turned out to have been two brothers called George. The elder had died early in 1872. When another boy was born later the same year, his grieving parents chose the same name for their youngest and final offspring. It was something that might be considered rather inappropriate today, but Jane had seen the practice before with Victorian families. It was a time when high childhood mortality forced different sensibilities on the remembrance of those who had been lost.

  Loss was something Sarah Ramsbottom was to become familiar with. Having buried her eldest son in 1872, her husband followed the year after. Oddly, Thomas Ramsbottom’s death had been registered in a town some eight miles distant. Jane wondered why he had been away from home, but there
were several possible explanations from work to hospitalisation and she let it go for the time being. Another slight inconsistency with Thomas was a switch in his career. On earlier censuses his occupation was given as coal miner, not the mysterious Eng. Ast. of a cotton mill.

  At first sight, the records corroborated the story Guy had related to Jane. His great-grandfather, George, had been born into a poor family where children were obliged to do low-paying work from the age of 11, if not before. George’s father, Thomas, had been a miner turned millworker who died at 37, leaving behind a widow, Sarah, with six children including a young baby. In 1881 George was described as a ‘scholar’, but Jane knew that was just the standard census term for a school-age child. Moving forward ten years to 1891, Sarah was still an unmarried widow living at the same address, the intriguingly named Father Richard Barn, but George was not with his mother by then, certainly not on the night of the census. He re-emerged in 1901 as a young doctor residing in the home of a more senior colleague. So how had his transformation been financed? There appeared to be no money anywhere in his wider family. He came from a background of manual labourers, miners and mill workers, all earning a subsistence living in the harsh, unforgiving world of 19th-century industrialised England. There was no evidence of social mobility in the later occupations of his siblings. Jane could see nothing to say George’s mother had ever been a charwoman as suggested by Guy, but she was described as a housekeeper on the last census before her death. Sarah Ramsbottom had lived to her mid-sixties, probably long enough to see her son qualify as a doctor, but not to enjoy any share in his success.