Would Adah Flint forgive me, I wonder? I have taken the bare bones of her life, and turned them into something she would barely recognize. Would she be outraged at my fictions, or might she be just a little pleased that I have brought her long-forgotten existence back into the light of memory, or at least of imagination? Of course, I have not rescued her from the tides of oblivion, because my words too are just as much at the mercy of those tides. All I have done is to shine one more fleeting moment of memory into the unimaginably vast expanse of forgetting.
I once read an essay in which an expert on issues of identity remarked that the one thing we can never invent is our own grandparents. But we do, of course. We invent our parents, our grandparents and all who came before them, reimagining and creating their lives and emotions in our own likenesses.
To the left lies Blossom Street, where Adah Flint moved her family when, after a prolonged battle with the trustees of Norton Folgate, they were evicted from their home above the courthouse. Its pavement is cobbled, and even today there is a dank feel about it which makes it easy to imagine the crowded tenements that once lined either side.
It is the unreachable reality of these lives that tantalizes and disturbs. Adah must have walked this street hundreds of times. Her children played here. What has become of the universe of their days and nights, their hopes and fears? With all our scientific wonders, we are not one step nearer to knowing the answer to that question.
Back in Folgate Street, I join a group of tourists walking in utter silence around number eighteen, the Georgian building beautifully preserved and recreated by the late American novelist and collector Dennis Severs. We begin in the basement kitchen, down a dark flight of wooden stairs, where the air is heavy with the smell of woodsmoke from the iron stove, baskets around the walls are filled with vegetables, and a yellowing cone of sugar sits amongst the tea cups on the kitchen table. From there we move gradually upwards through the house, hearing the clamour of church bells and the clop of horses’ hooves on the pavement outside, and seeing the clothes hung up to dry and the papers still spread on the parlour table, waiting to be signed. This is, of course, as much a fiction as my story – an act of imagination. We move from one century to another as we climb the stairs. But I find myself drawn into Dennis Severs’s illusion, my fiction mingling with his. Might Adah Flint have listened to these sounds and smelled these smells? My canvas is your imagination, wrote Dennis Severs.
Just a few minutes’ walk away, in Sun Street, the new London has engulfed the old. Fluorescent lights gleam in the vast expanse of open plan offices where some small corner of the world’s financial fate is being determined. Red plastic bollards fence off the area next to Starbucks, where the next retail, residential and office development is about to take shape. It was to this street, on 14 October 1814, that a woman named Sarah Stone returned, carrying in her arms the baby to whom she claimed to have given birth in a room off Rosemary Lane. Six weeks later, on a ship in the Thames, she was arrested for kidnapping by officers from the Lambeth-Street Magistrates Office, who removed the infant girl from Sarah’s arms and gave her to Catherine Creamer.
The kidnapping was a sensation in London. There had been moral outrage over an earlier crime, which had led to the recent passing of the first law to criminalize child-stealing. One of Catherine Creamer’s baby twins had certainly been stolen on 14 October 1814, and Catherine was sure that the child in Sarah’s arms was hers. In January 1815, Sarah Stone was found guilty of child theft at the Old Bailey, and was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. By this time, the child at the centre of the case was already dead. Sarah Stone became one of the first convicts to be confined in the newly constructed Millbank Penitentiary. There is no record of what happened to her after that.
Did the lives of the real Adah Flint and the real Sarah Stone ever intersect? Probably not, though they might have done. Adah Flint would surely have heard something about the famous kidnapping, alleged to have occurred so close to the place where she lived. At this distance in time, it is impossible to be say for certain whether Sarah Stone was innocent or guilty. But reading the multiple records of her trial, it seems extraordinary that she should ever have been convicted on the basis of the contradictory chaos of rumour, innuendo and omission presented to the court.
The prosecution, it is recorded, had been funded by public subscription, but Sarah Stone had no legal assistance. She could not have afforded it. It would probably never even have occurred to her to seek it. The man with whom she lived and the mother who shared the house with them were both convinced that she had been pregnant, and that the child she bore was her own. No-one challenged the evidence of twelve-year-old Martha Cadwell, who testified that she had been paid to draw Sarah’s excess milk; no-one questioned the story of the woman who called herself Elizabeth Fisher, although, when first approached by the officers, she had answered to the name of Brown. A sharp-eyed neighbour testified at the trial that Sarah Stone had appeared to be pregnant ‘for ten months’: a remark that provoked guffaws of laughter in the crowd of onlookers who thronged the court. But the same witness admitted that she had never spoken to Sarah personally, and Sarah, it seems, had only been living in Sun Street for three months or less. No-one paid attention to these contradictions.
Surely no present day trial would convict the accused on such weak and inconsistent evidence. Surely not – but then again, can we be sure?
And what if she was innocent? If she was innocent, the child who died in Catherine Creamer’s arms was Sarah Stone’s infant daughter. And what happened then to the child who was kidnapped – the child who did not die? Are her descendants too still walking the streets of this city?
The next day I am back again at Liverpool Street Station, catching a taxi to Tower Hamlets Local History Library, housed in a fine Victorian building on the campus of Queen Mary University of London. The route to the library cuts through the heart of Whitechapel, past the betting shops and the clothing manufacturers’ and the billboards saying Double your Donation this Ramadan. The weather has cleared, and in the library, the sunlight streams through the tall arched windows and illuminates the ornate stucco ceiling.
The librarian provides me with clean white gloves and brings two great leather-bound tomes, one fastened shut with brass clasps – the minute books of the Norton Folgate Trust. Inside is an amazing profusion of every day detail, written out in a meticulous hand. Here is an order from 1783 that William’s father, Richard Flint, newly appointed Beadle of the Liberty, should receive the coat and hat passed down from his recently deceased predecessor; and here is the resolution allowing Richard Flint and his family to live above the courthouse, rent free. Richard somehow secures the appointment of his son William to the position of Beadle (though the post is not meant to be hereditary). William Flint receives his pay, makes his rounds and is exhorted to attend particularly to the indecent behaviour and language of the various disorderly persons who assemble in the High Street on the Sabbath day, offensive to the inhabitants and disgraceful to the Liberty. Other pages record the payments made to Mr Ruffy the lamplighter and to Mrs Yandall the scavenger, and detail debates on the installation of the new gaslights in the Liberty.
Then suddenly and without explanation, William Flint is dead, at the age of 45. A new beadle, Benjamin Beavis, is hastily elected, and William’s widow Adah is appointed a Searcher of the Liberty of Norton Folgate. A few pages later, there is even an inventory of Adah’s furniture, made when (with one dissenting voice) the trustees of the Liberty vote to expel her and her children from the courthouse so that it can be occupied by the new beadle.
After that, Adah Flint fades from the scene, except for one small entry. On 6 June 1826, a committee was established on the order of the Trustees of the Liberty of Norton Folgate to investigate the truth or falsehood of the Rumours in circulation, concerning Mrs Flint’s Daughter. Some weeks later, when the investigation was complete, Adah Flint’s salary as Searcher was halved, though she was not dismis
sed from her position.
What were the rumours? I turn the thick pages of the minute book again and again, scanning their curling brown-ink script for the answer. But there is only silence. The story has not been recorded. Or rather, it must surely have been recorded somewhere, but the record has been lost forever.
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