by Anna Hope
He felt he should not sit beside her, so he stood instead, a little way to her left. ‘I saw you,’ he said.
She turned to him, startled. ‘When?’
‘Yesterday. In the town. With your … husband and your child.’
She nodded. ‘Yes. We’re here on our holidays.’
‘That’s grand.’
‘He’s a schoolmaster. I am a teacher. Or I was before I married.’
‘That’s grand,’ he said again, and then fell silent. He felt slow before this woman. Her mind quick. He could feel it landing on him, taking flight, landing again. ‘How old is your little one then?’ he asked.
‘Two.’
‘Ah.’
She put her tea to the side and pulled off her gloves. Threaded her hands in front of her belly. ‘He told me not to come,’ she said quietly. ‘My husband. He doesn’t know I’m here.’
He nodded. ‘I see.’ His mouth tacky suddenly. ‘And … why is it that you are here?’
She looked up at him. And it was her looking at him, Ella – twenty years ago. And he wanted to get to his knees before her and beg her forgiveness. And yet he saw the young woman in the yellow dress draw back, afraid, perhaps, at whatever she had caught on his face.
She stood and looked around her. ‘It’s a lovely place you have here. Have you lived here long?’
‘A year,’ he said, gathering himself. ‘No more.’
She nodded. ‘And before that?’
‘I was at sea.’
‘And before that?’
‘When are you thinking of?’
‘Twenty-three years ago.’ Her face tight.
He swallowed. ‘Would you sit down?’
She shook her head. Hands in fists at her side. She looked younger now. Scarcely more than a child. ‘I have to know. Where were you then?’
‘Yorkshire,’ he said. He had nothing more to offer her than the truth. ‘A place called Sharston.’
She put the heels of her hands to her eyes and gave a small sound.
‘Do you know me?’ she said, lifting her face to his. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Aye,’ he said to her, softly. ‘I believe I do.’
She nodded. ‘I looked for you,’ she said. ‘I looked for you for so long.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Did you look for us? If you didn’t, I’ll go. And I’ll never see you again. I promise you. But if you did, I have to know.’
‘Please. Don’t upset yourself. Sit yourself down. Your tea’s getting cold.’
She sat again, but her eyes did not leave his. He saw her stubbornness and was proud.
He touched his hand to his heart. ‘I looked,’ he said to her. ‘I looked for years. I looked until looking became …’
‘What?’ Her white face. ‘What did looking become? Tell me,’ she said. ‘I want to know.’
‘I came to feel I should never find you by looking,’ he said.
There was silence for a moment, then, ‘Where is she?’ he asked.
Her face contracted. ‘She’s dead. She died three years ago.’
He nodded. He had known it somehow. Still, he felt the knowledge burrow its way into a soft, waiting place. He stored the pain till later. ‘How?’
‘She was ill. For a while. And then it seemed she was getting better. But then, quite quickly, she died.’
Beneath his feet, a flower. Tiny. He leant down and plucked it. Turned it in his palm.
A sound came from beside him. The young woman was bent over herself now, her back shuddering. He wanted to reach out and touch her, soothe her, but he knew he did not have the right. So he waited until the shuddering was past.
The young woman lifted her head. ‘I knew my mother had gone there once, to the asylum to search for you. Whenever I asked, she said that there had been nothing of you there to find. But I didn’t believe her. So after she died,’ she said, ‘I went there myself. They said there was no record of you. No forwarding address. They said that you had just dis-appeared.
‘My husband was furious. He never said so before my mother, but in private he’d said you were not worth the finding. Any man that would leave a woman like that—’
John stayed silent.
‘But that was not how she had spoken of you,’ she said.
‘And how did she speak of me?’
‘She loved you.’
The words, simple enough, entered him, a salve in them.
‘All I knew was your name and that you were Irish.’ She was speaking rapidly now. ‘My husband is Irish. We come here every year, every summer, to visit his family in Galway. I knew you were from the west, and so I began asking. I would ask for a John Mulligan wherever we went. There are lots of John Mulligans, you know,’ she said, half accusingly.
‘Aye.’ He nodded, a small smile. ‘Plenty enough.’
‘I took to asking everywhere. If we were in a village, I would go to the church. Look at the gravestones. See if there were Mulligans. It became … something I did. And then we arrived here, last week. And I asked, as I always do, in the post office, and I was told there was a John Mulligan living alone out here. And I knew. I just … knew. I knew I had to come.’
Her face. The pale fierceness of it pierced him. So much of her mother was in it.
‘Wait.’
His heart was hammering as he went into the cool interior of the cottage. He bent and brought out a small suitcase from beneath his bed. Inside were papers, documents, the small collected stuff of his life: his merchant seaman’s licence. His passport. A small sheaf of letters at the bottom. He lifted them, passing them through his hands until he found what he was looking for and took it back out into the sun.
‘Here.’
She took it from him. ‘It’s for her,’ she said.
‘But you can open it.’
She opened it.
He closed his eyes as she read. He knew what was written there.
Dear Ella,
It has been ten years now since I saw you for the last time. That last time in the ballroom. I remember your face.
I have written a letter to you every year on this day.
I do not know where you are, or what has become of you, and so I cannot send them. I will keep them till such time as I see you once more.
I am newly in England again. Today I will go to Bradford and then to Leeds and look for you. I think of you every day. Of you and of the child. Was the child born? Did the child live? The thought of a child growing up without a father or with a father that is not its own is more than a pain to me.
I am sorry I did not stay in that place. I can only picture you sending word – as I asked you to – and receiving nothing back.
But I had to run.
And when I ran I thought of you. That first day I saw you. Of your freedom. How you had given me that.
You are strong you have always been strong and if I think of you I feel you are alive. I hope still we might one day be a family. Wherever you are I send you my love. I work on the ships but I always return.
Yours,
Always,
John
The young woman looked up to him. Her face different now. She began to cry softly, the tears falling freely.
‘Hush,’ he said to her. And he brought her to him. ‘All is well,’ he said. ‘All is well.’
The next day he shaved. Put on his finest shirt. He baked fresh bread.
The morning light was the colour of lemons.
They arrived as arranged at three. His daughter, Clemency, first, holding her daughter by the hand. He watched them as they came up the lane, the little girl a sturdy thing with a shock of brown hair. The husband behind. Tall, reticent, but calm. When they shook hands, John saw that behind his spectacles his eyes were wary but kind.
They sat, and drank tea, and ate bread and cake. The little girl played at their feet.
When they had eaten, he showed them the way to the beach. They walked the path through the meadow, rampant with buttercups, a
nd emerged on to the strand, where the little girl shouted at the sight of the water.
‘You can paddle,’ he said to her. ‘If you like.’
The girl looked to her mother, who nodded and bent to take off her daughter’s socks and shoes. ‘Why don’t you hold her hand?’ she said to John.
He hesitated, but his daughter smiled. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘it’s all right.’
He reached down, and the little girl stared up at him. For a long moment she paused, as though weighing him up, until she slipped her hand in his and let him lead her to the water’s edge.
The tide was in, covering the inlets, and small, fizzing waves broke on the beach. Gently, he lifted her into the shallows. She laughed as the bubbling water covered her feet, and he felt the small, certain life of her beneath his hands.
They stayed there a while, as the water pulled back and then returned again, and again, undaunted by anything it found in its way.
Author’s Note
Anyone who knows the West Riding of Yorkshire is likely to recognize the asylum in which The Ballroom takes place; it lies on the outskirts of the village of Menston and is known locally as Menston Asylum. The building opened in 1888 and was originally called the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, later West Riding Mental Hospital, then in 1963 it became High Royds Hospital, eventually closing its doors in 2003.
My great-great-grandfather, John Mullarkey, an Irishman from Mayo, was a patient there from 1909, when he was transferred to the asylum from the workhouse. I found the discovery of his story to be almost unbearably moving. His notes describe a ‘depressed’ man who ‘has had to work very hard and has worried over his work’. At the time of his admission, he was ‘very emaciated and poorly nourished’. He never recovered, and died there at the age of fifty-six in 1918, while his son was fighting on the Western Front. This book is dedicated to his memory.
I researched extensively for this book, but I want to stress that, while the asylum provided the inspiration for my work, The Ballroom is a novel and is in no way meant to be an accurate representation of life or events at High Royds. For this reason, I have called my asylum Sharston, and it is a place crafted as much from the imagination as the historical record. John, Ella and Charles are wholly fictional characters.
Anyone wishing to know more about the history of the asylum could do no better than to start with local historian and photographer Mark Davies’s online archive at www.highroydshospital.com. It was here that I first saw photographs of the ruined, spectacular ballroom at the asylum’s heart, and knew I had to write about it. It was here, too, that I learned of the graveyard at Buckle Lane – Mantle Lane in The Ballroom – whose shared graves so terrify the patients in my novel. Mark has written two books on the history of the asylum, The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum Through Time and Voices from the Asylum. He has also worked to restore the chapel at Buckle Lane as a memorial to those who lie in those unmarked graves.
Anyone who knows the West Riding may be surprised to encounter a working-class mill girl speaking Standard English. For the purposes of clarity I have chosen not to represent what would undoubtedly have been fairly thick dialect in the speech of Ella and the other Yorkshire characters. I have, however, used dialect words throughout, to which Arnold Kellett’s A Yorkshire Dictionary was an invaluable guide.
Surprisingly little seems to be known about the history of eugenics in Britain. I was shocked and disturbed to learn of Home Secretary Churchill’s enthusiasm for the sterilization of significant numbers of the British people. It was not just Churchill, though: the support for eugenics ran deep and across the political spectrum. Marie Stopes, the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw were all keen supporters of the eugenics movement. For those wishing to delve deeper, the Eugenics Review, held on the open shelves at the Wellcome Collection, is a fascinating and troubling place to start. Britain was by no means alone in her enthusiasm for eugenics, however, and anyone wishing to read an overview of the period might begin with the chapter ‘Questions of Breeding’ in Philip Blom’s excellent book The Vertigo Years.
Again, while my research was extensive, I have taken liberties with the historical record. Churchill, despite being an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of sterilization for the ‘unfit’, never, to my knowledge, wrote a letter like the one in the book. Neither, to my knowledge, did Karl Pearson or Leonard Darwin write letters to a doctor such as Charles. All of the quoted texts, however, from Tredgold’s Eugenics and Future Human Progress, to the passages from the Eugenics Review, to the extracts from Leonard Darwin’s lecture, are accurate.
The Feeble-Minded Bill was eventually passed in modified form in 1913 as the Mental Deficiency Act, which allowed for the segregation of the ‘feeble-minded’ without the crucial clause that would have enabled forced sterilization. The Bill had cross-party support, but there were a couple of prominent voices raised against it: the writer G. K. Chesterton, and within parliament the MP Josiah Wedgewood, both waged a campaign to modify the legislation. That Churchill’s favoured policy was not in the eventual Act was a measured victory for human rights and can perhaps be put at the door of these campaigners. The Act as it stood was hardly admirable though, stating, for instance, that any woman giving birth to an illegitimate child while in receipt of poor relief was to be seen as ‘feeble-minded’ and would thus be liable for compulsory institutionalization. I wonder whether the dropping of the sterilization clause might also have come about because by late 1911 Churchill had moved to the Admiralty and by 1912 had his eye trained on very different horizons.
Acknowledgements
Of the many books I read while researching The Ballroom, I found the following most helpful:
Juliet Nicholson’s The Perfect Summer, John Murray, 2006, offers an overview of that turbulent heatwave summer of 1911.
Maggie Newbery’s vivid Picking Up Threads, Bradford Libraries, 1993, was one of the few accounts I could find of a working-class mill girl in Bradford in the 1910s.
Mark Davis and Marina Kidd’s Voices from the Asylum, Amberley, 2013, is a moving record of those patients at Menston Asylum who ended their lives in unmarked graves.
Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady, Virago, 1987, gives an important account of the medical establishment’s attitude to female patients at the time.
Arnold Kellet’s The Yorkshire Dictionary, Smith Settle, 1994, was an invaluable guide to dialect.
Repeated visits to the Wellcome Collection, and to the asylum archives, which are held in Wakefield in West Yorkshire, were also vital for my research.
I owe thanks to many – but to these people in particular:
To Caroline Wood and Jane Lawson, my wonderful agent and editor, both of whom were patient, careful and enthusiastic midwives for the book.
To the teams at Felicity Bryan and Transworld Publishers, but primarily my publicist Alison Barrow, whose care for her authors and passion for the wider world of books and readers is remarkable.
To my writers’ group, the Unwriteables, still going strong after almost eight years. They read this book in chapter form over its two-and-a-half-year gestation and their intelligent responses are woven into the text.
To Thea Bennett, Philip Makatrewicz, Josh Raymond and David Savill, all of whom read the book at crucial periods and offered honest and invaluable criticism and support.
To Pamela Hope, always a key reader for me, who read this book swiftly, twice, when I most needed her help.
To Tony Hope, who accompanied me on a brilliant research mission to Bradford.
To my family and friends, without whose love and support the solitary work of a writer would be impossible.
And to Dave, always, for his love, laughter and light.
Thank you.
About the Author
Anna Hope was born in Manchester and educated at Oxford University and RADA. She is the author of the acclaimed debut Wake (‘A masterclass in historical fiction’, Observer) which was shortlisted for the Nationa
l Book Awards. The Ballroom is her second novel, and is inspired by the true story of her Irish great-great-grandfather. You can follow Anna on Twitter: @Anna_Hope.
Also by Anna Hope
Wake
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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Doubleday
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Copyright © Anna Hope 2016
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