‘How long are you doing?’ he suddenly inquired.
Parr shrugged. ‘I’ve bought fourteen penn’orth, lad. What about you?’
Fourteen years! Trying not to sound thankful, Hugh said, ‘I’ve bought ten.’
There was a long pause and then he asked again, ‘What did you get yours for?’
‘What do you think?’
Parr was a kind man, that was already obvious. He was not a psychopath or a street villain like so many of the others who lay sleeping, snoring or grinding their teeth and crying out in their dreams, around them. He was also a man of some learning and during their long hours of enforced companionship he had been trying to teach Hugh to read and write.
‘Poaching?’ Hugh hazarded a guess.
‘No, not that, though I’ve done my bit in my time.’
‘Stealing?’
Parr sounded annoyed. ‘I’ve never taken a thing that belonged to another man except for fish or fowl, and I believe that they were put on the earth by the Lord for all men.’
‘What did you do then?’
Parr’s voice was angry and resentful. ‘I tried to form a trade union. I tried to get some labourers like myself to unite in order to better their conditions. They’ve sent me away from my wife and children for fourteen years for that!’
‘They’re all bastards,’ said Hugh.
‘Aye, I suppose they are. Even the men I tried to help are bastards. One of them shopped me, one of my friends who I thought I could trust. He informed on us. And what did they give him? They gave him five guineas and sent him home to drink it.’
Parr, Hugh already knew, was a teetotaller and a deeply religious man, at least he had been both of these things when their voyage started but recently he had begun to question the kindness of his God. Hugh, with his sceptical and irreligious background, had not so many illusions to be so painfully broken as his friend.
‘What will you do in Australia?’ he whispered. ‘Will you try to get home again?’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever see my family again. I told my wife to try to find a kind man who’d look after her. I told her to bring up the chil’ren with love and make sure that none of them grow up wanting to change things… They should stick to the paths of righteousness and leave improvement to others. It was trying to help others that got me here.’
‘I’m going back when I’ve done my time. Come what may, Parr, I’m going back for Aylie.’
‘They all say that. Oh aye, they all say that but Australia’s a long way away, lad, and ten years is a long time…’
It took one hundred days before the Eden came in sight of Sydney Bay in December 1841. Sydney was the first convict settlement and already a high proportion of the population had descended from convicts or were convicts who had done their time and become free citizens. Some of them, remembering their own suffering, were prepared to look kindly on other convicts but there were others who scorned the new arrivals and saw them only as a source of cheap labour to be exploited to the full. The brutal rigours of life in Sydney outweighed the beauty of the landscape with its strange trees and plants, the azure-coloured sea and vast hinterlands – a land of mystery, full of aboriginal tribes and strange animals.
When they landed Parr and Hugh were separated but before they took farewell of each other, the older man offered to write a letter to Aylie for Hugh.
It said: ‘Believe me my heart I love you and long for you. I have landed in Australia but I will come back, wait for me.’
This letter was entrusted to a sympathetic sailor from the Eden who took it to England and posted it from Woolwich. Exactly a year after it was written, Aylie read the painfully scrawled words with tears flowing down her cheeks. She cherished every scrape of the pen, folded and refolded the paper and slept with it next to her heart so that she could always feel its folds against her skin.
Hugh’s first work was making roads in a chain gang of labourers, all sweating in white suits painted with broad yellow arrows that set them apart from the other people passing along the road. His pride had always been strong, and it was agony to be so marked out and sneered at; to be lumped together with men who had stolen or pimped, cheated or lied, men whom even he, a convict, despised.
They were not all hardened criminals however, and he soon discovered that really bad men did not get transported because most of them ended their careers of crime on the gallows at home. It was the middle-ranking criminal who ended up in Australia, and some of them were only children. Transportees’ crimes varied from the trivial – the theft of a stamp or a shilling – to the political like Parr’s. Political prisoners were most hated by the guards and the sufferings they had to endure were terrible. Even the best of them were gradually worn down and brutalized by the system in which they found themselves, for to lie and cheat was the only way to survive.
‘I’ve not been an angel in my life but I’ve found out some tricks out here that I never knew about before,’ said an old man sent to Sydney for stealing a horse.
Like Hugh he was of gypsy stock, though unlike him, not pure Romany, and they talked together in their own language which gave them a kind of kinship. The old man had already been ten years in Sydney and he helped the newcomer to learn the ropes of convict life.
Hugh learned the necessity of wearing two faces – one for the officers and jailers who guarded them and another for his fellow convicts. He learned to keep his own counsel; he listened and applied what he heard to making sure his own circumstances were made easier. He learned that there was no justice for convicts. The men who tried to keep on the right side of the authorities were as liable to end up with a flogging as the troublemakers. The first time he was tied to the triangle and awarded fifty lashes it was for looking arrogant when an officer passed by. As the lash descended on his back he knew he must not cry out, no matter how terrible the pain. His silence throughout the ordeal ensured him the reputation of being a hard man, one the others would respect. If he had allowed even one whimper to escape his lips he would have been marked down as a ‘sandstone’ or a ‘crumbier’ and singled out for more ill treatment by his peers. So he became a hard man; he learned to step cockily away from the flogging post and swill down the drink of rum laced with tobacco that convicts used to kill the pain.
He learned to sing the convict songs; to bully the weak and join in with the powerful. He learned the solace of getting blind drunk on the rum that was so readily available to the convicts – and on more than one occasion he learned that a hard man enhanced his reputation by grabbing a convict woman and having his way with her. Men who used women, even in the most perfunctory way, were not suspected of being homosexual and therefore not as likely to have homosexual attentions forced on them. The harder your reputation, the more inviolate you became.
He was a strong man; he was a bold man; because he looked both of those things the authorities punished him mercilessly. By the time two years had passed his back was criss-crossed with scar tissue, a badge of acceptability among the other convicts.
But all the time he nurtured his memory of Aylie though he spoke of her to no one, for he felt that allowing her name to pass his lips in the hell of convict life would sully her.
Some convicts attempted to escape but if they took off into the wildness of the country beyond Sydney, they were either recaptured fairly quickly or they died. Some tried to stow away on returning ships but they were usually discovered and the punishment meted out to them was brutal even for that debased place.
Being a realist, Hugh realized that to be sure of seeing his wife again, he would have to serve his time and earn enough money to pay his passage home.
His nickname in the gang was Romany Jem and one day he was approached by a hard-eyed young Londoner who said, ‘We’re taking off soon, Jem. The big Paddy’s coming with me and we’re going bushranging. Do you want to come with us?’
There were plenty of tales about runaways who bushrangers and harried the up-country settlers. These men earned themse
lves Robin Hood reputations and there were songs and poems written about them which glamorized their doings and glossed over the fact that they were often brutal murderers.
‘I’m tempted,’ Hugh said, ‘I’m very tempted but if I stick it out here for another eighteen months, I’ll get a place as an assigned labourer and then I’ll be able to save some money.’
‘You’d get plenty of money with us,’ said the would-be bushranger.
‘But it wouldn’t be any good to me, would it? I wouldn’t be able to buy myself a passage home.’
‘What do you want to go back there for? This is a big, wild country. This is the place to be, a man can roam around here free as air. Back there nothing’ll have changed. You’d be back at the bottom of the dunghill.’
‘I’ve got to go back.’ Hugh was not prepared to explain why.
‘And I thought you were a hard man! You’re nothing but a sandstone like the rest. They’ve broken you, just give up now.’ The Londoner was scathing and his scorn burned Hugh’s pride but still he would not explain himself. ‘I’m going back, that’s all,’ he said.
The Londoner and his Irish companion got away easily enough but a few months later their bodies were swinging from the gallows beside the prison block as an example to anyone else who thought going bushranging was a way to win permanent freedom.
Hugh won his assigned place and was sent to a farm about ten miles inland where the owner was a freed convict, a brutal man who drove his labourers hard but who appreciated Hugh’s skill with animals and the strength that had not yet deserted him in spite of the privations of convict life.
‘You stay with me and I’ll see you all right,’ the boss told him frequently, and his affability lasted as long as Hugh was unable to leave. When he applied for a ticket to live as a freeman, the affability disappeared.
Then every day the boss taunted him, jeered at him, deliberately goaded him.
The other convicts, watching what was happening, were on Hugh’s side. ‘Don’t rise, Jem, he wants you to fight back. He’s trying to make you hit him so that he can have you flogged. That way, they won’t give you a ticket of leave at the end of the year.’
The strain was terrible for the ex-convict knew very well how to make a proud man’s hackles rise. He accused Hugh of homosexuality; he accused him of stealing; he criticized his work; he jeered at his impotent state. Work was piled on to him so that he was often too tired to stagger into the sleeping shed and fell asleep on the ground where he had been working. Food was cut off from him and only scraps passed to him by other convicts prevented his collapse. His strong body became skeletal and there were many times when he was afraid his mind would crack under the strain. He no longer dreamed about Aylie for his nights were full of thoughts of strangling the boss; he could feel his fingers tightening round the man’s throat, see his hated eyes pop and listen with relish to the death rattle, but when he awoke he had to bear the insults and injuries without reaction.
The boss beat him without cause until the blood ran down his back, and the more he stood silently enduring the lash, the more the brute laid it on. Of course it had to end, and one day, when the sun was at its highest and men were dropping like flies from exhaustion, Hugh was sent out to the fields to stand in the glare and pick stones out of the soil.
‘I’m not going,’ he told the leering boss.
‘I’m ordering you to go.’
‘But I’m not going.’ His tone was flat and calm as if he were making an innocuous comment.
The whip was raised and cracked over his head, its tail cutting his cheek.
‘You go, you dirty gypsy, when I tell you to go.’
Hugh’s fist connected with the man’s cheek in a satisfying thud and the boss fell pole-axed, so still that the other convicts thought he was dead and some took the chance to run away. But he was not dead. His jaw was broken but he lived, and when he was on his feet again he jubilantly marched Hugh ten miles on a rope’s end to the nearest magistrate with a request that he be returned to the chain gang and flogged.
The magistrate, an unusually enlightened man for that place, looked at the jeering face of the ex-convict and the slumped figure of his roped victim. He knew that the same man had played this trick before. When a good man was about to come up for ticket of leave, he played every dirty trick to prevent him leaving.
The magistrate decided to give Hugh Kennedy a chance and though he returned him to the chain gang it was only to get him away from an employer whom he could not otherwise have left. The chain gang was a respite and when the ticket of leave application came up, it was granted. Hugh Kennedy still had two years of his sentence to serve but he was now able to earn money that would eventually pay his passage home. The trouble was that, after all he had suffered, he seemed to have forgotten what home was like. His cherished memories, the memories that had kept him going through such awful times, were fading.
Aylie, 1844
‘I’m getting out of this place. I’m going to London.’ Rosie looked defiantly at the faces of her two friends as they were walking back from the turnip field one night.
May paused in the middle of the hedge-lined lane.
‘London? Who do you know in London?’ The idea of a trip to the metropolis seemed an impossible undertaking.
‘Nobody, but a bondager from the farm place my sister works at went down last year and she’s doing fine. I’m going to stay with her,’ Rosie replied.
‘But you’ll never get a job in London. Girls never get hired down there if they’ve been bondagers, they want lassies who’ve been in service for years, who’ve got references, letters from ministers and people like that.’ Aylie was worried about her friend’s rash decision. They had been working together for almost five years now and had grown very close.
‘I’m not going to do housework.’ Rosie sounded quite definite.
‘What else is there to do?’
‘My friend lives in Chelsea near the barracks. She’ll help me.’
Aylie was determined to get to the bottom of it. ‘Doing what?’
‘I’m going on the streets.’
The two others turned on Rosie.
‘You’re mad, you’ll get some awful disease. You’ll get murdered. You’ll go to Hell.’ The last threat came from May, a regular church attender who turned up for worship twice on Sundays in her best clothes and sang the hymns loudly.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said an unworried Rosie, ‘I’m no virgin. I reckoned it was about time I was getting some money for it, that’s all, and the soldiers pay well. I’ve got to get down there while I’ve still got some looks left, so don’t try to stop me, I’m going.’
When she went, running away in the middle of her bondage, Aylie’s only friend left was May, but she too was about to disappear because she was on the verge of marrying a shepherd from a nearby farm. With her friends, especially with the high-spirited Rosie, Aylie had been able to enjoy the girlish pleasures which had not been part of her life as a teenager.
At May’s wedding Aylie felt sure that she was the only guest feeling sad. Sitting in the church pew, watching her friend exchanging vows with her steady, reliable shepherd, she thought of Hugh and remembered her own wedding. In her hat she had stuck the white satin roses he had given her then but they were yellowing now and their once tightly curled petals were limp. How long was it since he bought them for her? Wrinkling her brow she counted back – eight years! Sometimes it seemed an eternity and at other times it was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. Tears stung her eyes as she thought of him so far away and of herself, so lonely and so unfulfilled. May had openly admitted she was marrying because she was pregnant. Soon she would have another child to hold in her arms but Aylie had nothing and, in spite of her innate optimism, it too often seemed she never would.
On her own, she started going to the protest meetings again. They were still arguing about the same things, nothing had been resolved. One night however, in a hall near Galashiels, the chief guest was a
woman – tall, thin, white-faced and austere in a high-necked grey dress – who was introduced as Mrs Williamson from Galashiels, the wife of a Church of Scotland minister. She, the audience were told, had worked as a bondager herself before she was married.
Aylie sat forward in her seat, eager with anticipation. Surely at last this would be someone who could appreciate the hardships of a bondager’s lot, surely a woman would speak for them.
Mrs Williamson was a good, clear speaker who advocated abolition of the system of the bondage in unequivocal terms. At each pause in her speech, Aylie clapped enthusiastically, but as the burden of the remarks unwound she was disappointed to realize what were Mrs Williamson’s reasons for disapproval. She was on the side of the hinds. In passionate tones she recounted the disadvantages of the bondage from a man’s point of view – they had the trouble of always finding a woman to work with them or a farmer would never give them a job; their wives and children had to put up with a strange woman in their home, often when money and food were short for the family itself; bondagers were notoriously flighty and fickle, they spent their money on finery which caused resentment with hinds’ wives who had no money to spare for themselves. In lowered tones, Mrs Williamson went on, bondagers were often women of low morals… their presence in a man’s household was a temptation to him, a temptation which many of them could not resist. For reasons of morality and Christianity, the bondage system ought to be done away with.
She sat down to a storm of applause but Aylie slumped back on her bench, bitter disappointment filling her heart. Over the feet stamping and hand clapping of the crowd, she heard the chairman ask if there were any questions from the floor and without knowing what she was about to say Aylie stood up, raising her hand to attract his attention.
He beamed paternally at her and invited her to speak. She swallowed nervously and then something inside her made her eloquent, some deep-rooted resentment brought the words to her mouth.
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