Snowy. Tim Harris

32. Author with David Rolfe, Fred’s great-grandson, and his granddaughter Holly.

      Following an outbreak of cholera in 1833, the good men of King’s Lynn decided the town must have a hospital and so they purchased Gallows Pasture, a meadow where criminals and pirates had been hanged in the 1600s. King’s Lynn Hospital was opened in 1835 and extended twice more, due to the generosity of two local benefactors, so by the time poor James arrived, there were beds for fifty-two patients. The downstairs wards were reserved for patients who had had accidents, a common occurrence in a rural port. This was to spare them the ordeal of the stairs. Upstairs, the acute surgical and medical wards were mixed. Every care and comfort was given. Great importance was attached to the need for lots of fresh air – ‘bad air’ was thought to harbour germs. The wards were heated with open fires, which must have made cleaning difficult, for everything was scrubbed each day. It was not at all Spartan, though: there were fresh flowers and pictures on the walls, plus toys for child patients.

      In 1863, the year James died, the hospital admitted 344, mostly accidents, with a high rate of recovery after surgery. A year later, B.W. Richardson, MA MD, an authority on pulmonary tuberculosis, came to King’s Lynn. He found a ‘fine hospital giving free treatment to the poor’. The locals dug deep into their pockets and gave generously to support the hospital and feed good nourishing food to the patients. Richardson’s only criticism was of the food – too much carbohydrate and not enough protein (he made no mention of the need for fruit and vegetables).

      There is no record of how long James Rolfe was a patient, but it is doubtful he would have had many visitors. The ten miles into King’s Lynn was a long way to walk, particularly in winter, even if the family could afford a day off work, assuming their employer would allow this. Trains would have been expensive and presumably they did not know how long James would linger. Postal services had been running for about twenty years (Robinson Crusoe was Postmaster at Lynn). Would someone from the hospital have written or used the Telegraph system, which began in 1845, to send a telegram to John and Elizabeth to tell them the sad news? As neither could read, who would have read it out to them?

      However his parents received the news, James’s body must have been borne back to the village by train or over the muddy roads by cart in the late December half-light. What followed must have been a pitiful but common sight as the little funeral procession made its way to Pentney churchyard, either on foot as a ‘walking funeral’, or possibly in a cart lent by a generous farmer, washed down and filled with straw. James and his father are both listed in the census as agricultural workers, but it is not known on which farms. Not for James the plumed horses, the family dressed in black, the draped crepe, the mutes and all the outward signs of grief beloved by the Victorians.

      James’s funeral would have been very much as described in Candleford Green by Flora Thompson:

       The women would follow the coffin, in decent if shabby and unfashionable mourning often borrowed in parts from neighbours, and men with black crepe bands around their hats and sleeves. The village carpenter, who had made the coffin, acted as undertaker, but £3 or £4 was covered by life insurance. Flowers were often placed inside the coffin, but there were seldom wreaths, the fashion for those came later.

       A meal to follow the funeral was almost certainly provided, and the food then consumed was the best the bereaved could obtain. These funeral meals for the poor have been much misunderstood and misrepresented. By the country poor and probably for the majority of the poor in towns they were not provided in any spirit of ostentation, but because it was an urgent necessity that a meal should be partaken of by the mourners as soon as possible after a funeral. Very little food could be eaten in a tiny cottage while the dead remained there; evidence of human mortality would be too near and too pervasive. Married children and other relatives coming from a distance might have eaten nothing since breakfast. So a ham or part of a ham was provided, not in order to be able to boast ‘we buried ’im with ’am’, but because it was a ready prepared dish which was both easily obtained and appetising.

       These funeral meals have appeared to some more pathetic than amusing. The return of the mourners after the final parting and their immediate outbursts of pent-up grief, then, as they grew calmer, the gentle persuasion of those less afflicted than the widow or widower or the bereaved parents, for the sake of the living still left to them, should take some nourishment. Then their gradual revival as they ate and drank. Tears would still be wiped away furtively, but a few sad smiles would break through, until, at the table a sober cheerfulness would prevail.

      For John and Elizabeth this sad tableau would have been enacted all too frequently, both their spouses having made the final journey to the churchyard at Pentney within recent years.

      As a child Fred loved to spend time with his maternal grandparents, who lived close by:

      They were a dear old cupple, and I was verry fond of them and they of me, and would never hear any thing rong of me.

      . . . and I used to sit and listen by the hour. I never herd any thing like that at home from my Father, even if he knew any thing. He would never tell me a tale except about religon, I got plenty of that – much good it done.

      Wen my Father got to hear that he was tellen me those tales he forbid me goen to see the Old People, but I always managed to get to them some way or another.

      . . . I used to hear a lot about the horrors of tranceportation. I often think that the old People of the Eighteen Centuary, used the tales of tranceportation as a Bogey man to frighten there sons. The young generationn now would not even know what it means to be tranceported.

      I had an Uncle tranceported some where round about that time for Sheep Stealing, and Grandfather have told me many a time about it. He was a Shepperd and lived at West Acre. It was the time that Amerricca was asken for Emergrants to go out, and he stole

Скачать книгу