Gum Nuts and Weeping Willows

Karen Ritchie-Legallais

Description

Gum Nuts and Weeping Willows is a fictionalised story based on extraordinary true events, starting with the author's great grandparents' sea journey from London to Australia in the 1800s, and follows the life of the Jack family.Set against the tremendous opportunities opened up by the industrial revolution, with its new technologies and associated social changes, the book explores issues of poverty, workers' conditions and the status of women. The story also delves into issues surrounding migration as the Jack family prepare to embrace a new culture and put down new roots, even if life doesn't always go in their favour. A touching story in which the Jack family not only act against a historical back-drop, but are formed by it.

Sujets

• London
• Grand Londres
• Australia
• Greater London
• Historical fiction
• Gran Londres

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 30 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838596941
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 Karen Ritchie-Legallais

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 9781838596941

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For my grandchildren, Lily, Noémie, Alexander and Clara



Contents
Prologue Hobart, Tasmania, 1906

Chapter One Poplar, London, 1858
Chapter Two London City, 1872
Chapter Three Southwark, London, 1874
Chapter Four Social Reform and the New Unions
Chapter Five Alice
Chapter Six A Visit to Hoxton
Chapter Seven The Wedding
Chapter Eight Life in Southwark
Chapter Nine A Home Visit
Chapter Ten Two Babies and a Piano
Chapter Eleven A Fragile Life
Chapter Twelve A Slow Recovery
Chapter Thirteen Hard Times
Chapter Fourteen The Boot Company
Chapter Fifteen The Journey
Chapter Sixteen Southward Ho!
Chapter Seventeen Aboard the Coptic, January 23, 1889
Chapter Eighteen After the Storm
Chapter Nineteen The Burial
Chapter Twenty Tasmania, January 26, 1889
Chapter Twenty-One News from Home
Chapter Twenty-Two Gold
Chapter Twenty-Three The Wake
Chapter Twenty-Four Flight
Chapter Twenty-Five The Great War
Chapter Twenty-Six Ypres, 1917
Chapter Twenty-Seven Hobart, 1918
Chapter Twenty-Eight Lewisham Military Hospital, 1918

Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Prologue Hobart, Tasmania, 1906
A single moment in a single life may impact cruelly on future generations, spreading out to touch subsequent events like the fragments in a kaleidoscope; seemingly random, yet connected by complex rules of physics, biology and human behaviour.
In the port of Hobart town, once a modest penal colony and now on July 12, 1906 a hive of small commerce and shipbuilding, a woman in her forty-sixth year stands by a public bench on Constitution Dock. The winter sun reflects on a gold wedding band with pale green peridots. She is wearing a brown wool skirt and long coat over a pin-tucked lavender blouse which matches the colour of her eyes. A still attractive oval face with a slightly pointed chin. A wide-brimmed felt hat decorated with a blue bird’s feather covers dark blond curls, prematurely greying. She flinches as a spark of pain darts up her neck to the roots of her hair.
Had you seen her you would say she was entranced by the criss-crossing masts, the threads of afternoon light on the water. A tender gaze which might have attracted company had she not seemed so distracted, melancholic. She touches a locket on a gold chain around her neck in which wisps of baby hair are coiled like chick down.
At Waterman’s dock long wooden fishing boats line up like dried brown peapods on the timber slip leading into the water. Ten-year-old Tom Reynolds, giving school a miss for the day, sits on a mooring bollard, hooking a worm from a Swallow’s biscuit tin onto a fishing line. Nearby, two fishermen are gutting flounder in a well-weathered rowing boat, rough hands speckled silver with fish scales.
Further along the wharf Archie Taylor in the Ordnance store, supervising a delivery of military arms, shouts to his mate Jim Cearns, unloading planks from a horse-drawn cart in Risby Brothers’ woodyard.
“Get a move on, yer lazy bugger too many ’arfs last night.”
“Yer a cat-lapper, Archie. Go back and sit on yer arse.”
“See ya tonight at Shippies?” 1
“Na. Not up ter dick. Done me back in.”
Archie laughs, bending over just in time to catch a crate of 3.03 rifles toppling off the back of the cart.
“That’d be right, Archie, blow us all up.”
At this same moment, junior nurse Dorothy Pearson, dog-tired from a busy night shift, leaves the Hobart General Hospital and walks down Elizabeth Street towards the wharves. Elizabeth Street is a two-mile ribbon of dust or mud (depending on the season) descending from the north of the city down to the docks. The newborn electric tram, first in the southern hemisphere, slips along on its dainty wire through an endless clatter of bicyclists, horse-drawn cabs and carts. Telegraph poles, joined by thick ropes of electric cabling, run down both sides of the street past Victorian sandstone buildings with decorated facades, domes and columns. Side-by-side colourful shops advertising Robur tea, Beecham’s powders, Davis Ironmongery are overhung by filigree iron verandahs sheltering pedestrians from rain, sun and the spattering of circling seagulls.
Like chessmen each character lives within the square of their separate lives, until the first move of the principal player pulls them together, as the random scratches in a windowpane are drawn into concentric circles around a light held to the glass.
The woman lays her umbrella on the bench next to the feathered hat and removes her grey kid gloves, hesitates then pulls them back over her hands. She walks gravely around the edge of the dock, stopping only to stare at the young boy with the fishing line. Young Tom, seeing in her face the cold gaze of his stepmother coming for him with the horsewhip, gives a startled cry.
“Hoy!”
The cry awakes the buried memory of a freckle-faced lad with a broken tooth who had fallen to his death before her on the ship. She runs towards the end of the dock and the wilder waters of the Derwent estuary. The fishermen, seeing her fast approaching the edge, drop their half-gutted fish, hoisting themselves up onto the pier, but too late to block her path.
The woman throws herself over the edge of the pier. Her dress billows briefly on the surface like the winter cumulus clouds above her, then collapses into the black water. The weight of layers of wet garments pulls her under, then caught by a current, she is dragged into the estuary. The fishermen free the dinghy from the jetty and jamming the oars into the locks, push off into the river. An oar catches the edge of a petticoat, and winds it around like a shroud. Both men pull together and drag the woman upwards towards the side of the boat.
The wet face is motionless. She makes no attempt to help herself and the petticoats slip away from the oar as the current drags her further along the river. One of the fishermen throws off his shoes and jumps overboard, but the other man grips his shirt, pulling on his oar to steady the boat. The woman has disappeared.
“No use, Dan, she’s gone. The river’s got ’er.”
Dorothy Pearson pulls her red nurse’s cape closely around her against the rising westerly wind. Her hands still smell of hospital disinfectant. Arriving at the dock she stops briefly to watch two fishermen talking loudly to a young boy with a fishing line, who seems to be crying. Buying battered scallops and chips at Elizabeth Street Pier, she sees her friend Julia Hill. A fleeting kiss between two cold cheeks.
“Julia Hill! Now it’s been too long since we had a talk and I’ve got some gossip for you. Come back home and I’ll make us tea.”
Julia smiles and touches her arm.
“Better be a good hot one, this wind is freezing me to death.”
The two women walk on clutching newspaper parcels of hot fish against their bodies for warmth. The grease-sodden pieces of newspaper announce ‘Bad weather in Queenstown… Mrs J Kelly first prize at the Launceston Canary Show… French workers get day of rest.’ Life ambles on, defined by a multitude of trivia.
They continue together past the stone warehouses of Salamanca Place with their smells of oil and grain. Too cold now to talk, they hurry on past the Ordnance store to Kelly’s steps, a steep and narrow corridor of stairs carved into the cliffs at the end of the wharves and rising above the timber yards to Battery Point.
This old southern part of the town, perched high above the wharves, is a mix of shipbuilders’ weatherboard cottages and elegant Victorian mansions with stained-glass windows and manicured English lawns. Dorothy rents a room in a comfortable but dark semi-detached house in nearby Davey Street from an elderly surgeon’s widow. A stern but generous woman who made no concessions on rent but often leaves a cup of cocoa in her room to greet her on return from a winter work shift.
As they turn from the water’s edge to the stone alley leading to the steps, Dorothy glances towards the dark water where the incoming tide bears a mass of swirling fabric.
“Julia, look! I think it’s a woman in the water.”
Moving closer they see a ghostly figure; her hair, loosened by the current, entangles dead eucalyptus and willow leaves, feathery seaweed forming a crown around her pale face. Her dress, engorged by water, clings to the upper part of her body with the skirts trailing behind like the tail of a mermaid.
Hailing the men from the timber-yard