The fire worm, p.7
The Fire Worm, page 7
My namesake John Cunningham was born in Dublin in 1729. His father coopered wine barrels for a living. Being unlucky enough to win a lottery — an earlier incarnation of the Irish Sweepstake — Cunningham Senior promptly set himself up as a full-blown wine merchant, and quite soon went bankrupt. Young John was hauled back home from his new grammar school half-educated and with no prospects. He hung around the Dublin theatre, and out of his soul at the tender age of seventeen there blossomed a play calledLove in a Mist. This went down great guns in Dublin, and on tour in Newcastle too.
John was fired with a craze to be an actor. This, despite his absolute lack of acting talent — and of physical grace. His face, with its cow’s eyes, horse’s nose, and mouth of a parrot, could have curdled milk. His voice resembled a corncrake’s.
Nevertheless he joined a company of players who specialized in touring the North of England. The only roles he ever played with any success were comic cranky Frenchmen. However! While acting on the Edinburgh fringe in the early 1760s the ugly duckling began to publish swan-like verse.
A London bookseller offered to sponsor him. John rushed to London, to find that the bookseller had suddenly gone bankrupt. Back in Edinburgh again, John enjoyed better fortune with the actor-manager of the Theatre Royal, Mr. Digges. Digges commissioned prologues and epilogues to be recited by himself and by the lovely Miss Bellaney.
Perhaps certain rhapsodies which John penned in praise of Miss Bellaney’s charms began to irk Mr. Digges? At any rate, John removed himself to Newcastle, scene of early triumph, a town for which he had always felt a soft spot. He scraped a living by acting, supplemented by minor commissions from the amiable then-owner of theNewcastle Chronicle , Thomas Slack. Wealthy local admirers of John’s melodious poetry chipped in.
1766,annus mirabilis ! John’s collected poems were published by subscription. So instead of taking the advice of every sensible friend and dedicating the volume to his most generous local patroness, Mrs. Montagu of Denton, John inscribed the book instead to the country’s greatest actor, David Garrick, hoping that a suitably flattered Garrick would make the awkward corncrake into a star of the London stage.
John had a copy of his poems sumptuously bound and walked all the way to London to lay it at Garrick’s feet. Garrick gave John the bum’s rush. He treated him almost like a beggar, and in lordly style sent the poet packing with a couple of guineas.
John trudged back to Newcastle, and spent the money drowning his sorrows. Mrs. Slack boxed John’s ears for not tossing the guineas back in Garrick’s face.
Downhill from there on! Depression, premature ageing, and too much Newcastle beer. John still managed to do a spot of acting and write some verse, and the Slacks always loyally supported him. They even housed him; and Mrs. Slack would empty his pockets before letting him out of the door in case he gave away the pittance that he had, either to someone in worse distress or else to a barman.
One Sunday a portly churchman surprised John fishing in a tributary of the Wear, and harangued him for fishing on the Lord’s Day. With gentle inoffensiveness John begged pardon, since his only chance of a dinner lay at the bottom of that pool.
Being so extremely ugly, John had always resisted having a portrait made. A few days before the poet’s death, however, Bewick the engraver spotted him shambling along a Newcastle street clutching a scrap of handkerchief with a herring in it. By guilefully overtaking and loitering and overtaking, Bewick succeeded in sketching dying bard with fish.
I read:
“ ‘Why call us to revoltless doom?’
With grief the opening buds reply;
‘Not suffer’d to extend our bloom —
Scarce born, alas! before we die.’ ”
That was the last poem John Cunningham wrote. AIDS, I thought. The lovelost generation.
“But we live again,” said Mother, “don’t we?”
“Mmm,” I said.
“So that’s all right.”
Chapter Nine
Harriet did not enjoy a happy childhood in Norwich, where her father manufactured cloth during the first decades of the nineteenth century.
Mainly the misery was of Harriet’s own making. Although the early onset of ever-worsening deafness hardly helped her morale, Harriet convinced herself quite falsely that she was despised compared with the other children of the family. She was sixth in a complement of eight. She became sullenly petulant.
For years on end she failed to protest at this non-existent assessment of herself — or even to mention or query it. If she had done so, the mirage might have vanished. In actual fact she was given a far better education than most girls of her time.
For years she wished ill-health upon herself — not in order to gain attention, which obviously she didn’t merit, but merely masochistically.
At times she seemed almost pathologically alienated, for not only was she disconnected from human voices by her ear trouble, but often she couldn’t even see what other people were pointing out to her in plain view. She enjoyed exceptional eyesight, quite unimpaired by any amount of close needlework and book learning, yet she developed her own strange (and mortifying) species of blind spot.
At the age of seven, on a family visit to far-off Tynemouth, she could not for minutes on end perceive the vast surging sea at the foot of the very slope where her family were gathered, gazing admiringly.
At the age of nine, she completely failed to be able to spot the great comet of 1811 which everyone else was goggling at night after night through the big windows at the top of her father’s warehouse.
Was this done in order to cheat herself of pleasure? Or to rob her family of enjoyment? Maybe not! Maybe it was a defense against anything unusual and remarkable.
As an even younger child the oddest things could terrify Harriet. The Martineau children would frequently be sent to walk on Castle Hill in Norwich. From there they could watch the local residents beating their feather beds down in the vista below. There was always a tiny, inexplicable gap in time between the sight of a blow with a stick and the dull thud of sound (she wasn’t deaf yet). This gap horrified Harriet, as though the world was coming unstrung. Yet it never occurred to her to ask about it. She never thought of mentioning her fear and hatred of that walk. Thus she could silently reproach her parents with lacking the kindness and the sympathy to guess the circumstances that persecuted her — provoking her to so much illness and ill temper.
But no matter. Up by her own bootlaces! As a girl she had struggled to codify the principles of the Bible, and to tabulate these into a set of moral theorems worthy of Euclid. She developed an obsessively methodical streak. When the family business collapsed and her father died, ill health obviously forbade Harriet from becoming a governess like her sisters. So she pitched into local journalism to save the family home.
She allied method to imagination. Now that her imagination was given a playground, and a workshop, she became much more amiable, sweeter, and more considerate — though never anyone’s fool.
Hey presto, Harriet was winning not one, not two, but all three prizes in a Unitarian competition for essays on how best to convert Catholics and Jews and Moslems by reasoned argument to Unitarianism.
Hey presto again, she was best-selling author of a monthly series of semi-fictional booklets with settings from Demerara to Siberia expounding all the principles of political economy.
She was famous, she was lionized by grinning idiots (something which she disliked). Her friends and acquaintances were a roll-call of reformers and authors and thinkers: Malthus, Robert Owen, Carlyle, Babbage, Darwin … Government ministers pressed blue books of statistics on her, begging her to propagandize.
At the age of twenty-four Harriet might have married, but her fiancé — John Hugh Worthington — suddenly went insane and died mad within a few months. Thereafter, Harriet was happy not to have been married. She rejoiced in her emotionally unencumbered life and her clear mind; not that she ever saw eye to eye with Mary Wollstonecraft, self-proclaimed champion of women. Miss Wollstonecraft raised such a furor about how she, as a female, was a social victim — when really she was the victim of her own noisy, hectic, self-centredness in Harriet’s opinion.
Harriet’s industry multiplied, accompanied by a puttering “liver” complaint. In 1834 she sailed to tour America for two years. She grew so involved in the anti-slavery cause that she might have emigrated permanently to America, had it not been for her illness of 1838. This affliction crept up on Harriet amidst much political and social bustle, including her American travel book, her first novel, and further traveling in Scotland and Europe. She was sure that the illness was due to a tumour of the kind that generally originates from mental suffering; that was her diagnosis and she stuck to it for years.
Harriet collapsed in Venice and was quickly repatriated to the house of her brother-in-law, Dr Greenhow, in Newcastle. Thomas Greenhow was surgeon to Newcastle Infirmary. He cared for Harriet in his home for six months, but then she was transferred away from the grime and bustle of the city to the seaside. She took up residence in Mrs. Halliday’s boarding house, where she was to lie on a sofa for more than five years.
And to sit, too, with her telescope as a peephole on the world. And accompanied by her books, especially of travel. (Little did Harriet realize that thanks to mesmerism she would later be hiking vigorously through the Lake District in the depths of winter, and touring Egypt!) And consoled by her framed print of Scheffer’sChristus Consolator , a gift from actress Adelaide Kemble who visited Tynemouth and sang “Auld Robin Gray” by Harriet’s couch. (But Harriet was already well along the road from her early primitive Unitarianism toward eventual, comfortable free-thought and Comtian positivism.)
And of course she was attended by poor orphan Jane, Mrs. Halliday’s long-suffering and much-bullied niece.
One spring morning after a night of severe pain, through her sitting-room window raised high on its sashes the invalid saw …
Lo, sunshine flooded through the ancient, empty window-holes in the ruins of the Priory. The sun danced diamonds on the harbour mouth, and lit the yellow sands across the Tyne.
Hands on hips, neighbour Mrs. Bell strolled complacently down to the bottom of her garden to feed her pigs and milk her cows. Next Mrs. Bell would let the cattle out of their shed to graze upon the furrowed downland which rose, emerald as Ireland, to the Spanish Battery ridge overlooking the Black Midden rocks.
Harriet still had occasional nightmares about her mother walking off that precipice into the invisible sea … but wine and laudanum eased such fantasies.
To the eastward the ridge dipped steeply into Prior’s Haven with its chimneyed bathhouse. The only minor interruption to the view was a solitary sycamore, stunted by winter storms and exposure. Not another tree to be seen until those on the uplands beyond the southern shore! Yet she could exchange the beauty of trees for that of the sea. Her chosen lodging place offered a fine segment instead of a whole horizon vast with glaring, eye-stunning ocean.That would have been excessive, and numbing to the spirit.
Panning her telescope upward from the southern shore, she gazed at heath where gangs of boys often flew kites, where young men and women would saunter a-courting, where gossipy washerwomen would mount the lanes toward the houses of the gentry with great white bundles perched on their heads. At this early moment only one solitary sportsman was abroad, with gun and dog.
A puffing billy came careering along the railway line beyond, past hedges and trees. The engine panted steam as it laboured upward and away between hills. Mr. Stephenson’s vindication! How the sophisticates of London laughed at the uneducated Stephenson when he first addressed them in his uncouth accent. Oh, they had hooted and split their sides. Now hundreds of miles of new railway were being opened, and George Stephenson took his well-deserved ease at Tapton, growing melons and tropical flowers and winning prizes for his giant marrows; while Harriet, becalmed, watched his brainchild bustle out of sight.
She angled the telescope higher still. On the heights of the hills were paddocks, yards, and dairies of several farms. A windmill. A lime kiln in a rock-strewn field. A church tower. And a colliery where driverless wagons rolled along their elevated, sloping tracks under the guidance of gravity.
Topmost of all was the tip of Pensher Hill. Soon that little peak would be graced by a suitably noble monument to poor, honest Lord Durham — so tragically broken by political treachery and insult. The Masonic lodges of England were raising a private subscription.
And now Mrs. Bell was heading back, bearing two pails of frothing milk. She paused to cast a proprietorial eye over the rows where her son Harry had sown their radishes.
Abruptly a pair of twittering redbreasts alighted amongst the hyacinths in the flower box outside Harriet’s window. The birds squabbled fiercely, scarcely heeding her. Mrs. Bell glanced up and saw Harriet watching. Forcing a smile in spite of her pain — which had indeed faded considerably — Harriet withdrew. She walked through the sitting room with all its pots of blooming tulips and narcissi, back to the darkened bedroom at the front.
There, she parted the curtains upon Front Street — to catch sight of the penny-postman … and of that officious busybody, Sir William Elwes.
Elwes! It was he,he — presuming on his title of noble breeding, when he was no better than a common informer! — who had scented a profitable game at Harriet’s expense. It was he who had set the tattling, double-dealing Mrs. Blagdon to thrust herself upon Harriet in the delicate matter of the testimonial fund which friends were raising on Harriet’s behalf.
The intrusion was so energetic that Harriet’s two dear aunts had to come expressly, to lodge close by. One or other aunt must constantly be available for summons by Jane, should Mrs. Blagdon call. The aunt would hurry on the instant to Mrs. Halliday’s to forbid mention of the fund, and to bear witness that Harriet remained quite innocent of the progress of the scheme, far from being its initiator and grey eminence.
Did Elwes hope to catch the postman in breach of some petty regulation? He was scanning a sheet of paper as though it was a letter he had discovered lying in the gutter.
Was he covertly studying Mrs. Halliday’s? Elwes did indeed glance across the street to where Harriet kept watch; but then he directed a long gaze down Front Street toward the Castle, while thoughtfully he rubbed his chin.
Elwes suddenly thrust the paper into his pocket and strode the opposite way. That would lead him soon enough past Mrs. Blagdon’s door.
Harriet spotted Harry Bell hurry across the wide street. The lad ducked into the doorway of the confectioner’s, from which he peeped out after Elwes. Harry began tofollow the man. So it looked, at any rate.
Harriet pulled the knob on the wall to jangle a bell and summon Jane.
Poor Jane. She had sat up late the previous night to occupy Harriet in her wretched discomfort. If the girl was dozy this morning, one must hope that her aunt wasn’t treating her sourly and savagely, as so often. Young Jane was a treasure: truthful, ingenuous, without a grain of dishonesty or tarnish in her soul. Mrs. Halliday abused and scolded Jane unmercifully, all of which the girl bore with sweet cheerfulness. Sometimes Harriet’s heart bled.
True, Jane was forever a mess: face dirty, hair a mop. And Harriet’s rooms lacked for proper dusting and tidying. Yet the girl’s eyesight hardly allowed her to perceive a cobweb or a smut on her own brow. Those rheumy, sickly eyes — the irises seeming to be covered in tissue paper — were Jane’s other cross in addition to her ignorant and selfish aunt.
Jane arrived, blear-eyed, in a rumpled dress.
“Wey, good mornin’, Mistress! How are ye feelin’? Shall Aa pull the curtains? Here’s the post an’ the paper for ye.”
Jane held out a tray. Upon it, last night’sNewcastle Chronicle , a trio of letters, and handbill.
“Yes, do open the curtains, dear Jane, or we’ll neither of us see what we’re doing.”
That handbill … surely it was the same piece of paper that Elwes had been scanning with such apparent interest?
Harriet read:
THE WORLD-FAMOUS LION TAMER!
Van Amburgh of Kentucky
WHO CAN TAME ANY KNOWN CREATURE
Will soon visit Sunderland, Newcastle,
South Shields, North Shields, Blyth,
Morpeth, Alnwick, and Berwick, et cetera
Accompanied by Titus’s Magnificent Menagerie!
Comprising Fierce Lions & Lionesses,
A Royal Bengal Tiger, a savage Black
Tiger, two Panthers, et cetera.
There was more in small print.
The postman had been delivering these bills and he ought not to have been. A boy should have done the job, instead of a public employee accepting the shiny shilling. Now Elwes would likely be off to the post office to report on the man, supposing there was a share in a fine.
So perhaps Elwes wouldn’t be paying a call on Mrs. Blagdon to further the annoying conspiracy …
Had Harry Bell set out in pursuit of Elwes so that he could run back and forewarn … Jane? Harriet was puzzled.
Laying the handbill on the mantelshelf, she took her letters and theChronicle through to the other room. Jane remained, to tidy a bed disordered by Harriet’s tossings and turnings, laudanum notwithstanding; and to tend the hearth, doubtless smutting her fingers and face.
Sinking on to the sofa, Harriet scanned the return addresses. One letter was from the ever amusing Sydney Smith, now alas old and failing. Another was from deaf Bulwer Lytton. A third, from Thomas Carlyle. But first Harriet opened theChronicle , that excellent publication of the liberal Hodgsons in Union Street.
“Ah!” she cried.
Jane hurried through. “Ma’am?”
“Fine news! It is as I hoped. There is to be a petition to Parliament against Mr. Bright’s failure at Durham. We must trust this will lead to Lord Dungannon’s election being declared void!”
“Mr. Bright is the gen’leman again’ the Corn Laws?”
“Yes. He and Mr. Cobden. You recall how Mr. Cobden visited us here in February, together with Colonel Thompson?”
