These Irish girls take me by surprise by being content with Mr and Mrs Matron’s old tricks – the boiling down of the beef into a soup so we cannot measure what we have eaten. Tricks of short-weighting with the baked loaves. The reddish women tell me Mr and Mrs Matron supply some beef and baked rolls to hotels and a dining house in the town of Parramatta. Perhaps the Governor dining out in his solitude as a widower eats our bread at his table. But the Pallmires remain so forward and confident about their crimes – it is as if they were free of inquiry.
Why do I not now want you to come here and yet at the same time wish it? I do not want it since you are too lovely. Though I am pained to think that similar things might occur in your asylum on the river. Wrongs might be done there without any hope of complaint or redemption – for how easy it is to discount the wrongs of the mad.
There has been a recent night when after dinner and the locking of the Tory Mrs Matron let herself in again with a key. She peers about amused and her plump features look roundish and kind. She sits on the end of the bed of the large brick-red woman who has always guyed me and begins chatting with the girls about. Her voice is low – as if she doesn’t want infants woken. Some of the women rise and go looking for pannikins for Mrs Pallmire brings forth from under her petticoats a stone flagon of rum. She begins pouring the rum for this and that woman – the little mother too – and all the time she is saying I hope you are well ladies. And they joke back boldly. As well as you let us be Mrs Matron. Mrs Pallmire murmurs: Don’t be saying that girls for you’ll have me and my big man in strife. She pours a very heavy pannikin and offers it to me. A quarter as much might have been to my taste and good health. But so timid does the convict state leave all but the best that I meekly resolve to take that much and then to offer the other half to the Irish girl or to an ill old woman – Annie Hamilton at the end of the Tory. For you know I am not a drinker. I remember a Passover at my father’s uncle’s little hovel in Manchester when they had Jewish wine at the table. I was a little girl and before me this glass of wine which I drank not as the uncle told me but as one might cherry water. Now I also had to hide this small piece of the unleavened bread – the Afikoman I think it was called – the youngest at the board is meant to take and hide it. And my great uncle was crying out: Who has the Afikoman? Who has the Afikoman? He had a penny in his hand to pay me for it – such is the Israelite custom. So I walked towards him hiding the bread in my hand and before getting to him I vomited from the wine. Oh she is no Gentile they laughing told my father. She cannot drink wine!
Hence now I am willing to give away this killing dosage of rum to the Irish who are good at it. I rise to do it and Mrs Matron cries out to me to hold hard and where do I think I am going? I tell her to Annie Hamilton to give her a sip or two. Mrs Matron says: That woman is a malingerer! That woman Hamilton would be happy to give me and my big man an evil repute.
But I know Annie has no malice – her mess prefect who is a London woman gives her less than a ration. Annie has limped to the nurse and the nurse told her: If you go into the hospital you will have solely liquid rations. This Annie – Yorkshire and a very simple woman – did not want liquid rations being hungry enough on full. So Annie stays wasting in the Tory.
Mrs Matron Pallmire orders me to drink the lot up and I stare at the dark syrup surface of that Indian rum and stare and stare. I think if I swallow this then I have no watchfulness left. Some of the Irish girls start laughing. Worst of all some turn their heads as if for pity. It seems all at once that they are not for all their talk bosom souls to Mrs Matron but that they know that they are without power and shrink from her.
Giddy and choking I drink the burning mug at her urging and am pleased to be done with it. I feel it like a hand in my vital organs and a hand across my sight but at least it is done. But she tells me: Have some more, and she pours it full again for me though not for any of the other women who are about. There you are – she says – you have no jollity. We will get you back to the jollity you had in your patch at home with your husband the soldier. So she knows my husband McWhirter was a soldier. So she has studied me when earlier I thought she had not noticed me. Excellent Jamaica says the big red woman Connolly who wishes she could be in the same relation to the full pannikin as I am. They have all finished drinking in quick order. It is true these Gentiles I see have a great facility with liquors.
Then the women go back to their business – the talking and packing of pipes with tobacco and the coddling of babies. The little mother Carty is crazed with rummy affection and kisses her baby with great flourishes not two yards from where I sit though she might as well be in another room. Mrs Pallmire considers me as I choke the stuff down and get silly. It is nothing like your suffering dear Alice but her gleaming eye which is now to my view tiny and fierce as a parrot’s is awful. I know it has no love for me and I am afraid.
She says to me: You are a learned little troll aren’t you and dark as a gipsy. Are you an Assyrian or some such or are you a Jewess? So this McWhirter of yours? Uncircumcised? That must have been in the nature of a novelty for a Jewess.
I must stop this account for the moment – I write it in the corner of our misgrown Factory garden with women looking at me sideways for writing fluent. It is as if my quick writing backs up all the ill they might have heard of me.
I have taken six days of misery to write this far on the paper Sean Long gave me and soon I shall need to start using the pages I tear from between the covers of tracts left by the Reverend Arnett. Just now Mrs Matron can be heard from the Tory again but without a bottle. She is ordering women to set out the cots at proper distances for the Visiting Surgeon. Good order she cries. And proper space. And cleanliness.
At this point Sarah Bernard clearly ceased writing for a time, but soon resumed.
I continue my awful news – Alice – addressed to you but kept a secret to myself. For if you think of the Factory as a harbour to be reached and if you knew it was not you might in your hut and mad dormitory at Tarban lose all hope.
As related I was under the urging and pouring and pouring and urging of Mrs Matron Pallmire to drink pannikins of tar black spirit. Soon I suffer that prickling kind and unsureness which I most hate in the bottle and which best ensures I am no toper. The other women have left the awful merrymaking and swung away to other conversations and here we are a drinking party of two – private in a crowded loud place.
She tells me: I must have someone to set the table. Her table–I had never seen it – is in a stone apartment of two floors away from the Tory but reached by covered walks. The floor below is their offices and a dry store. Some women have been there to the Pallmires to work and sew and do not seem to like it on reflection. The Irish point them out and nod with that old knowingness they all at least pretend to! These women who have worked in the Pallmire apartment are treated with respect and distance but it seems they have been returned here to enjoy less of a future than ordinary girls of the Tories. Hence there’s a quandary knotted between the eyes of such women. Where to now?
I wonder now if when Mrs Pallmire urges me to swallow more and then more tarry spirit I obey her from a weak and lost souls desire to cloak oneself in unknowing? I cannot say. Imprisonment clogs up all the usual exercises of the spirit. So when I believe I have reached the limit where I cannot safely stand she stands up with her bottle still in hand and in a way signalling that I am to follow her which I do and go out a door she unlocks for me with perhaps every woman in the crowded Tory knowing she is leading me out but no woman turning her eyes to us. She pushes me out the door in the Tory and into open air which turns me giddier still. Then one more door is unlocked and up the steps and over the bridge to her home above the store. In the dining room with three windows I begin to set the table and she tells me to lay places for three. She tells me as I stumble and drop things that I am well-trained and it is good to see. Some Irish and the Scots she says have not seen so much as a spoon before. When the table is ready in the best Tib Stree
t Manchester form – and she does not have bad china but very good – we sit down at it and she pours more rum for herself and me but does not touch hers. I can scarce remember the entry of Steward Pallmire her husband. He has his strong shoulders and wide throat. And this short but very burly fellow comes up the stairs yelling: Dove who have we got from the Tories?
He smiles at us both as he sits down at the table where rum and water have already been set. I am taken to the kitchen where a pot of split pea soup sits on the fire. I am to serve it even to my own place at table. Such a disordered world is that of the Pallmires and the Factory that a meal I would dream of as a meal in a thousand can only be taken in a fuddled state and in a mad scene where I am server and guest of these two very strange souls. If I am to pour and serve soup then why must I be tipsy? I bend to lift the soup pot. The heat of my fear meets its heat. In serving I make many slopping errors which do not cause them anger but laughter. They have eight hundred women to wash their tablecloth and scrub their board. There were Kings of Poland who did not live like them.
I have no memory of the serving of beef and potatoes. I awoke in near naked disarray in the half light – in a great blazing pain of head and limb and yet colder than a corpse. This is in the corner of a room. A bed sits like a bark high above me and I struggle up and find Mr Pallmire neat as an old Greek under opossum skin rugs. I can hear from another room Mrs Matron Pallmire snorting in sleep and I know that they have a madness in place of a scale which I have no experience of. Not only all my joints are so hard put upon by the bare boards but I have a sore memory as well. I remember his strength on top of me but it was not the strength of a hero – it could have been pushed away I believe. I did not push him away. I thought: Oh be quiet and let him be done. I am dumb earth that lets itself be taken and trespassed on. I think: Oh this madness of the Pallmires piled on top of their power without limit – this is too much to fight against. I remember he called me a dry Puritan. Now of course I want the hour back to fight in. Yet it contained all that was of bad order and all I least wanted to look at.
I pick myself up as the bile surges up my burnt throat onto my tongue. I say something within my narrow power to Mr Pallmire’s sleeping form. I cry: Next time do not make me drink fire! But the Steward Pallmire has the appalling hide not to notice but to sleep on. So I gather myself. I do not wish to return to the Tory but I do not wish to stay here. At least in the Tory I could read the outline of what I’ve been through in the way other women will look at me in jealousy and spite. But then they could not know that I have yielded in awe of what was happening and that to yield in awe is the most awful laziness of spirit. I stand a time in the Pallmire’s kitchen. Will I wait here – good servant forever – for Mrs Pallmire? But then I start to move and a big night constable I meet on the bridgeway moves to open a door and let me back into the Tory where women are stirring for the day. I tell you before the God both of Jews and Christians that I would have pitched frenzied head first off that bridge to lumpy paving beneath it but for one thought which is the thought of you Alice in your deeper peril. And once inside I am helped by the kind presence of the little freckled mother Carty. For I find my cot with its two slices of blanket and there is the little mother sitting up on her cot in the dawn holding her baby and without the big red creature to overshadow her – Connolly is perhaps at the jakes at the end of the Tory. Carty stares at me with just one speck of sister mercy in her weary eye. She says: That Mrs Matron likes to pick the ones who will not give Mr Matron the pox. What a thumping great blackguard that fellow is! She is reaching out a little red hand but then sneezes and her baby daughter cries. And to her that is as large a matter as a woman – myself – who has been used evilly and consents as a coward to evil usage in this world of the Pallmire Factory.
But I now too feel I have the knot on the forehead and a pale look. In one I am ice and I am fire. I near despair of the ambition to get you to this place since I have until now thought it the lesser Sheol – the gentler Hell. But now though yearning I do not want to see you here for this is the madhouse worse than Tarban Creek.
But the thought comes: If next time I determine not to be rendered so drunk then I can be gritty and watchful. Or at the least your faithful
Sarah
Dimp kept working energetically through the record of Bettany’s early Nugan Ganway career, which she determined Prim would receive and respond to. With this history calling to her, Prim was surely less likely to remain in Sudan. For Prim’s choice of life there was, Dimp believed, what ninteenth-century people called a ‘notion’, a conceit of which she could be cured by a wholesome genealogical interest. Dimp had a poor understanding of how profoundly placed her sister was in Africa. As much as Prim tried to convince her, Dimp seemed never to believe that the Sudan was more than a random, self-punishing fancy of her sister.
WE STOCK NUGAN GANWAY
I made excellent time to the orderly little town of Liverpool by harrying Hobbes along so fast that I needed to leave him in Narellan to graze in the care of a ticket-of-leave man, and hire a mare to get me the rest of the way. I took the road north then for the saleyards. I would happily have camped by them, wishing to temper my body for its years of joyous hardship, but a letter from my father, which I had collected in Goulburn, mentioned that his old friend, a surgeon named Dr Peter Strope, presently stationed at Parramatta, had been a little aggrieved that I had not visited him on my way inland. Strope had helped my father on his ship and, upon arrival, extricated him quickly from the convict depot, sending him to join the household of the Batchelors. Clearly he should not have to tolerate this offence.
So instead of a quick transit to the saleyards, I called into the Strope household, a little stone cottage which lay nearly in the shadow of the men’s gaol in Parramatta. Dr Strope’s stone house came to him as part of his post as Visiting Surgeon to the Parramatta orphanages and to the Female Factory. Small in the body and narrow in the shoulders, with a pinched little face, he struck me as a very plain saviour.
Looked at in himself Strope was the kind of man not uncommon in the penal colonies. His eyes had grown hooded, his mouth a thin gash. It was as if he knew one or two things more than were comfortable. A man of middling talent, a farmer by disposition, he had a few hundred acres a little to the west.
‘Mrs Strope does not like it here,’ he confessed to me early in the evening. ‘In a town half free and half bond, who can really be called free?’
But chiefly – over the lamb, that antipodean staple – he was interested in what my plans were. ‘This is not a time to delay. In fact even in the outer regions some of the best country is already taken.’ He forced the corners of his mouth back into a grimace of approval. ‘These Limits of Location, these Nineteen Counties beyond which no man is meant by government to tread … your generation has too much spirit not to violate them. But the further you go, the more you will need a splendid overseer.’
I thought of Goldspink, Mr Treloar’s canny but un-admirable overseer. I wanted someone better. I wanted a fellow pilgrim.
‘Yes,’ I confessed, ‘I mean to speak to the magistrate here about that.’
‘But I know the fellow you want. It’s a former convict constable named Long who goes to the magistrate every morning to inquire whether he has been applied for. In a place of abysmal servants, he would make an excellent one. We will see him in the morning, if you like.’
I said I would like it very much, and the topic turned to his work. It weighed on him, he said, the demands government made of him. ‘Once a week I need to ride to Blacktown to inspect the sable brethren there.’ Tuesday it is the Catholic orphanage, the next day the State orphanage. On Thursdays I am permitted to receive polite patients, and on Fridays I visit the Female Factory. Whenever I make an inspection of the general arrangements of that place, I seem to cause amusement amongst the Irish women who make extensive commentaries on my behaviour in what I can only call their ungainly language. I am often sorry that I ever left Van Diemen’s
Land where, despite everything, I think society has achieved a higher average urbanity than in New South Wales.’
I uttered the customary condolences, but reflected that I would be far from corruption and urbanity in my deep wing of the bush.
Strope lowered his voice, to a level at which I had to lean forward. ‘The problem as in all these systems is that the women are not the greatest criminals, as repulsive as many of them might be. The Factory Steward and his wife the Matron are amongst the two most abominable people I know, and in New South Wales this is a description indeed. The Matron and her husband, you see, know the system and run the Factory in a manner which presents an undisturbed surface to the public eye. It is the habit of higher officials than myself to overlook the sins of Matron and Steward, and so I must overlook them too. Thus the Steward has begun to be emboldened. He now takes convict women to the inns in town, and drinks with them. I shudder to speculate what happens thereafter, what his pleasure might be. I know that should I report him he would have an explanation which would suit the Colonial Secretary, who prefers not to think about the Factory. And so, what am I to do?’