Cowards Die Many Times

by Peter Hey

  ‘How do you think you’re staring at?’ snarled the woman.

  ‘Sorry, I thought I recognised you,’ replied Jane, somewhat disingenuously.

  ‘Oh, you recognised me, alright. What were you expecting – a few more scars? From when you kicked my head in?’

  Jane turned squarely towards the other woman. She was not going to be intimidated, not by present hostility or by its echo in the past.

  ‘Christine, I didn’t kick you, I punched you. Rather too hard and a few too many times, but you’d been picking on me for months.’

  ‘That’s because you were a right stuck-up bitch. You and your, what was it, tennis or summat? Right Miss La-di-dah. “Oh, I don’t want to wear makeup, I want to look after my complexion.” Stuck-up cow!’

  Jane noticed that, despite the vitriol, her old, bullying classmate was keeping her distance.

  ‘Christine, it was a long time ago. We were 15. You pushed me, over and over again, and I finally reacted. I got expelled for it. I’m sure you didn’t suffer any permanent damage.’

  ‘Didn’t suffer damage? The right side of my face was swollen for weeks.’ Christine’s accent was as hard as it had ever been, but she managed to stop herself shouting, opting instead for the threatening, spitting whisper favoured by hard men in East End soap opera. ‘You could have blinded me,’ she continued. ‘I’d have got compensation these days. And you’d have been locked up. You were barmy, that’s what you were.’

  ‘Christine, look—'

  ‘Don’t you Christine me! You always thought you were better than us. Well, I’ve done alright for myself. Look at that.’ She thrust her left hand forward, revealing talon-like manicured nails and a large diamond solitaire alongside a wedding ring. ‘My other half’s got his own roofing business. Doing very nicely, thank you very much. You’re not married, I see.’

  ‘No, I’m not married.’ Jane almost added ‘anymore’ but decided this woman didn’t need to know her life story.

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Christine smiled smugly. ‘Too full of yourself. But you see, I know who… what you really are.’

  Jane closed her eyes briefly and sighed. ‘What am I?’ she asked, impatiently shaking her head.

  ‘Criminal trash. I told my mum to get the police on you. She said your dad had been some kind of local gangster. He’d buggered off to London with some tart, but we didn’t want to risk him coming—'

  ‘You knew my dad was in London?’ cut in Jane, her tone now more aggressive.

  Christine’s smile broadened as she realised she’d hit a nerve. ‘My mum’s boyfriend had some dealings with him. He was an unpleasant so-and-so, by all accounts. Bit like his daughter.’

  Jane felt an old rage building up inside her. This stupid, common, ugly woman who had been a stupid, common, ugly girl, who had tormented her at school and made her life hell… This stupid, mocking, grinning woman had known for years what Jane didn’t, what she had just found out in the last few weeks, that her father was only in London, by choice and with a cheap bit of skirt, not remorsefully exiled thousands of miles away on another continent.

  Jane felt herself beginning to shake as she struggled to retain her composure, desperate to bottle up the inner demon screaming at her to hit, to hurt, to punish. She walked round her trolley and stood directly in front of her tauntress. A head taller, Jane lowered her face so it was inches away from Christine’s now unconvincing smile.

  Jane spoke quietly and slowly, but her hair trigger was betrayed by the tremor in her voice. ‘Christine, please understand something. And this really isn’t a threat. That... what was it? That barmy teenager you bullied and teased and goaded hasn’t gone away. I keep her locked in her own little room, but every once in a while she kicks down the door and there she is, lashing out uncontrollably. She’s almost been my downfall more than once. I don’t want her to come out again. And nor do you, trust me. One of your piss-common nails might get broken. Or maybe I’ll give you that scar you wanted.’

  Jane raised her left hand and ran two fingers down Christine’s now deadpan face, smearing the mascara on both sides of her right eye.

  The tension was broken by a cough.

  ‘Ahem. Excuse me, ladies. ’A nervous-looking supermarket manager in an ill-fitting black suit had joined them next to the wine shelves. ‘Is everything alright here?’

  Jane stared into Christine’s eyes, challenging her to cry foul and ask for help. But the rules of the playground, and the street – never grass, never snitch – still held.

  Christine nodded rapidly. ‘Yes, we’re fine. Just old school friends catching up, reliving old times.’

  The manager looked relieved. Jane wordlessly turned away and resumed her search for the second-cheapest sauvignon.

  Half an hour later, she was unloading her shopping bags from her car, angry at herself for nearly losing control, but trying to take comfort from the fact that she hadn’t, even under the shock of a deep wound being cruelly re-opened.

  From the window across the road, the same gaze that had watched her leave made careful note of her return. The conflict in her head was not apparent in her expression. She still looked like sex on a stick.

  Victorians

  Jane sought distraction through work and re-read Tommy’s email and its comment on the economic climate when Thomas Ramsbottom had arrived in America. She had never heard of this earlier Great Depression, but Wikipedia soon provided illumination. Now sometimes called the Long Depression, it began with an event known as the Panic of 1873. It was the first worldwide financial crisis and its causes were rooted in an economist’s glossary of banking house failures, unsalable bond issues, contracting money supply, deflation, destabilised business investment, gold standards and stock market bubbles. Much of the terminology seemed familiar from more recent crashes, but Jane didn’t try too hard to understand it. She was more interested in its impact on jobs, particularly for new immigrants.

  Thomas Ramsbottom had docked in New York in March. After a period of growth following the end of the American Civil War eight years before, financial panic arrived in the USA on a Black Thursday that September. Thousands of businesses failed and there were a million unemployed across the country, with one in four New York labourers out of work that first winter. Immigration rates were reduced to a trickle. Thomas seemed to have timed his life-changing flight at almost the worst possible moment.

  So was destitution Thomas’s fate? Did he die broke, frozen and unknown down some New York back alley on an icy December or January night? It was a possible explanation, but overall the downturn’s impact on ordinary people seemed less catastrophic than the 1930s and Jane’s intuition told her Thomas was a survivor. She began to wonder what a 36-year-old coal miner cum cotton weaver might turn his hand to, should he be sufficiently desperate. The idea of him joining the army occurred to her. It was a time of conflict with Native Americans and she was briefly sidetracked by the fantasy of him being hacked to pieces by Sioux at Custer’s Last Stand in 1876. She quickly dragged herself back to plausibility but not before checking the names of those who fell at the Little Bighorn.

  Having established little more than Thomas could have faced unexpected challenges soon after his arrival, Jane focused her attention on Tommy’s suggestion that most emigrants didn’t travel alone or might already have relatives in America. The latter rang true to her. Her great-great-aunt had won a 1920s local newspaper competition paying for young single women to sail to Australia, on the expectation they would work in service. The girl’s heartbroken father had only let 21-year-old Myrtle go because one of his brothers had moved to Sydney in the aftermath of the First World War.

  Jane worked her way through all of Thomas Ramsbottom’s siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. There were one or two inevitable gaps, but the evidence was that the family stayed put in Lancashire. Uncle George broke the mould, joining the 17th Regiment of Foot and fighting in the First Anglo-Afghan War, but he was discharged at the age of 46, just before his comrades
were despatched to the Crimea, and appeared on the later censuses as a Chelsea Pensioner living back home with his relatively exotic wife from Kent.

  At one stage, Jane held out high hopes for Thomas’s brother Benjamin, who seemed to disappear from the records a few years before Thomas boarded his ship in Liverpool. Having buried his first wife after six years of childless marriage, miner Benjamin moved to the next village and married a widow with three children. They had two girls together but by the next census she appeared to be on her own again. Eventually, Jane found Benjamin hidden by a poor transcription of particularly bad handwriting. He was a boarder in a house a few streets away. Evidently the marriage had not worked out. Digging deeper, Jane exposed what had to pass for the complete story. In the days before divorce, the wife ended up living with a wealthy grocer. Benjamin stayed on his own and worked as a collier until he was 74 when his leg was broken, crushed between coal tubs. Presumably estranged from his daughters and their families, he died in the workhouse. As ever with genealogy, it was a complex life encapsulated in a mere handful of dates and events. It seemed sad for Benjamin, but there were no doubt nuances that would colour one’s sympathies. Perhaps Benjamin was a drunken abuser, or perhaps he simply didn’t live up to his predecessor in his second wife’s affections and expectations. Such details were probably lost forever, but it seemed Benjamin could be ruled out as a candidate for co-conspirator in his brother’s escape across the Atlantic.

  Having found no clues in the Ramsbottom family tree, Jane tried a different tack. Looking at the manifest of RMS Algeria, the passenger names seemed in no obvious order, other than steerage being separated from the more well-heeled ‘cabin’ occupants. There was no attempt to sort names alphabetically, or by nationality, through individual families were grouped together. On that basis, it seemed likely that travelling companions would be side by side on the list. Ahead of Thomas was Henry Pickup, a 42-year-old labourer from England. Following were Wilhelm and Peter Schmitt, two men in their twenties from newly unified Germany, presumably brothers. They too had the catch-all occupation of labourer. For the first time Jane noticed the column headed ‘Died on the Voyage’. Paging through all 500 passengers, she found it completed only once. A one-year-old male infant, the only child of a young Polish couple, had survived the long journey across Europe, the North Sea and northern England, to die only three days out of Liverpool. His future prospects could have been the spur that pushed his parents to leave their divided and annexed homeland, but he had been sacrificed in the attempt.

  Assuming Thomas did not have an unlikely friendship with a pair of German brothers, Henry Pickup seemed the most probable candidate for further research. There was no indication where in England he was from, but a website showing the distribution of surnames in Victorian England suggested the Pickups were concentrated in the same area of Lancashire as Thomas’s family.

  General searches for Henry Pickups living in Lancashire threw up several inconclusive matches, so Jane decided to focus on the 1871 census, taken just two years before a man of that name boarded RMS Algeria. Unfortunately, she could find no-one who had any obvious associations with Thomas Ramsbottom. Having seen people missed by transcription errors, she decided to work through the scanned census records page by page. The district where Thomas lived was recorded across 49 sheets. The forms were completed by hand by the census enumerator, in this case a certain John Piccope. Jane noted that his title, Mr, had been pre-printed. Mrs or Miss Piccope need not apply for the role. Mr John Piccope wrote clearly and legibly, and Jane was able to work through the 200 or so households relatively quickly. As she did, she followed her progress on a contemporaneous map, imagining the enumerator walking from door to door on a damp April day nearly 150 years earlier. Henry Pickup still evaded her, but Jane noticed that one cluster of buildings, not far from where Thomas lived, seemed to have been omitted from the survey. On closer inspection, some kind of historic parish boundary swept down to cut off that section of the hillside. Jane identified the adjacent census district and found she had been there before. She was back with the barely legible handwriting that had caused her problems locating Benjamin Ramsbottom when he had been the focus of her research.

  The writing was bad, but some of the transcriber’s errors were unforgivable. Many people were supposedly born in a place called Lane which turned out to be Lancs, the common shortened form of Lancashire. One woman was apparently called Ake, but zooming in her name was clearly Alice. Jane could only assume the transcription had been offshored to someone who was being paid by the page and had the barest knowledge of British geography and people.

  Again guided by the map, Jane soon found the properties she was looking for. And there, widowed and living with his mother, was a 40-year-old coal miner Henry Rickup. Jane upped the magnification and studied the first letter of his surname. It certainly looked like an R, but it could also be a P. She quickly searched the birth indexes to see how many Rickups had been born in Victorian England. There was one solitary girl, registered in Manchester in the 1840s. Rickup was an even more obscure surname than Jane had suspected. So obscure that she felt certain this man could only be called Pickup. Everything now depended on what the records said he did next. Unfortunately, he continued to maintain his low profile.

  His mother, Drusilla, was still alive in 1881 but was now living on her own at the same address. Drusillas were helpfully rare and from her there was a link to another researcher’s tree. Unfortunately it was marked as private, meaning Jane wouldn’t be able to access it without the owner’s permission. Judging by the numbers of sources and citations attached it was well researched and documented, so Jane sent off a brief message expressing her interest. She didn’t expect a reply for a day or two, at best, but to her surprise the response was almost immediate, if decidedly brusque.

  Hi

  Online right now. Prefer not to grant access. Please justify.

  Tjharvey3

  Hi

  Thanks for coming back so quickly.

  I’m trying to find out what happened to an ancestor named Thomas Ramsbottom who emigrated from the UK to New York aboard RMS Algeria in 1873. I have reason to believe his travelling companion was Henry Pickup, born 1831. Henry was a coal miner from Blackwell Holme in Lancashire. Thomas was his near neighbour and had also been a miner. I assume they were therefore ex-workmates and friends. The trail goes cold after they arrived in the States. I can see your tree is very detailed and it looks like you’ve done some work on the Pickups, certainly on Henry’s mother, Drusilla. I would be very grateful for any help you can give me.

  Obviously, if there is anything I can offer in return, please ask. I am based in the UK, not that far from Lancashire, and will probably be visiting Blackwell Holme in the near future. I’m not sure where you are yourself, but am happy to provide local input if I can.

  Many thanks in advance

  Jane Madden

  Hi Jane Madden

  This is a summary of what I have on Henry Pickup. What you can’t find from basic research comes from a letter kept in a family bible now held by one of my cousins in Canada. Your reference to a travelling companion makes sense and his identity adds value to my own tree.

  ● Henry Pickup 1831-1873.

  ● Coal miner, Blackwell Colliery.

  ● Widowed in 1870. No children.

  ● Aunt and uncle already living in mining community in Nelsonville, Ohio.

  ● Henry emigrates to join them in 1873. Arrives Ohio but dies of “ship’s fever” shortly after.

  Google will tell you ship’s fever is typhus, not to be confused with typhoid. It’s transferred by lice, though they didn’t know that then. It was more prevalent in days of sail because of longer journey times in cramped holds. I assume it took Henry longer to show symptoms – maybe he caught it later than or, indeed, from Thomas Ramsbottom. It was obviously a fatal strain, hence your finding no further record of either man.

  I am in Omaha City. I do not have a photograph of the Pi
ckup family grave in the old Baptist cemetery in Blackwell Holme. When you do make your journey there, please supply.

  I have attached a transcription of the letter.

  Regards

  Taylor J Harvey

  The letter

  My dearest sister,

  It is with the heaviest of hearts that I communicate to you this day. I should have written sooner but was awaiting a happier outcome than the one I am obliged to report. Indeed, I was hoping another would have words for you rather than I.

  Your Henry arrived with us near two weeks since, having been delayed in New York owing to the sickness of his confederate and who was moved to one of the State Hospitals on the City’s islands. There, the doctors diagnosed Ship’s Fever, though that is now much less known since the speedy passage of the steamers replaced the arduous crossings under power of sail. Henry stayed with his friend until hope and his moneys ran out and he had only enough for his journey to us here in Ohio. He had full intention of returning to see to the necessary arrangements, but he, too, began to ail. He had grown into a full strong man since last we saw him, but Reuben and I could both see all was not well. Your Henry would not have it at first, but very soon took to his bed. We got him what medical care we could, but this is not a great City like New York, and even in their fine hospitals Miracles cannot always be trusted upon.

  I have not yet spoken the words, but you will have read them already. Your Henry passed into the care of the Lord yesterday evening. On Tuesday last, he had seemed to rally from the Fever and spoke so fondly of you, and commented he could see your face in mine such that it gave him great solace.

  This letter’s scribe is our minister and good friend, Reverend Atkins. We have knelt and prayed together for Henry and for you, dear sister. I have no more words in me other than to hope you are in good health and can bear this sorry news with fortitude.

  Ever your loving sister,