With Lucy, my mother’s reluctant and not necessarily reliable recollections come into play, along with the faint tug of my remote consanguinity with Matthew. For it was Lucy’s daughter, Alice, who in the early years of the century married the talented but ill-starred surgeon, George Rawlinson, inventor of the Rawlinson Forceps, and thus became herself the recipient of the clock. The fact that Lucy chose to pass it on suggests that her own marriage, of which I know very little, may have been a happy affair. All Lucy’s woes, perhaps, lay in the memory of her suddenly blighted childhood and in the tribulations that her own daughter, seemingly so well set up, would bring her. It is strange to think that “little Lucy,” she of the evening gig rides with her father, died only some dozen years before I was born, living long enough to contend with the surgical catastrophe that ended her son-in-law’s career and the ensuing marital débâcle. In fact, it was probably these things that finished her off.
My mother decried her father’s hubristic ambition. But George, perhaps, was only a man who made mistakes. One was that dreadful slip of the scalpel. Another, so it proved, was to have married, in his middle years, a woman substantially younger than himself, with a robust will of her own. It was Lucy’s daughter, Alice, possessor of the nuptial clock, who responded to her husband’s ruin by rapid and brazen flight to the arms of another man — a Latin lover, no less, called Salvatore. Whether this was the expedient of the hour or whether something had been going on for some time already is anybody’s guess. I think my mother’s somewhat unfilial guess would have been for the latter. Poor George really had it coming to him.
We seem to have been this way before. This butterfly love. January and May. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! I do not say that history repeats itself. Or that my mother learnt from her mother’s example. I do not say that the beneficent clock was fast becoming a curse. My grandmother hung on to it, as part of the spoils of divorce, following which event, my mother’s relations with her mother were understandably tenuous. We are moving into that vexed period when my mother (discovering her gift of song) and her brother became unhappy dependants upon my great-uncle Ratty’s grudging and tortuous whims — while my unrepentant grandmother seemed to be having a high old time, much of it cheerfully out of the country, in such places as Monte Carlo and Capri. Remarkably, my mother seems never to have held this against her. Perhaps it secretly inspired her. And, indeed, the runaway Alice showed up, at least, for her daughter’s wedding (to the consternation, I can imagine, of the stiff and military bridegroom) — which is how my mother became the next proprietor of the clock.
As for the Notebooks, I don’t know if they came from Lucy to my mother via George (and/or Ratty) or via my grandmother. In any case, it’s plain that they were simultaneously preserved and overlooked. I can’t imagine they would have been of vital interest to Alice, while Uncle Ratty would have dismissed them as having nothing to do with the Ralegh hypothesis. But I can envisage my grandfather, man of science, after all, grey-matter specialist, being strangely drawn in his last, lonely, woebegone years (what am I saying?) to Matthew’s sceptical lucubrations.
I don’t know if my grandmother turned up also for my christening (that dubious ceremony). I suspect not. At any rate, she was never to be a presence in my life. Two years after my birth and only some two years before my uncle Jim met his end (yes, death sometimes comes a-knocking with a vengeance), she and her erstwhile lover, now husband of some years, died simultaneously in a car accident on the corniche road of the Cote d’Azur (“Tragic, sweetie, but a stylish way to go”). One should resist the thought that my grandfather may then have settled more easily in his own grave. One should resist these poetic pay-offs, these dramatic strokes and flourishes. Life isn’t a theatre, is it? Life is a back-stage business. A struggle for existence.
But to return to the West Country and the mid-1860s. It is clear from Matthew’s farewell letter from Plymouth that the days of the “Kingdom of Copper” were numbered. Matthew had been right. Neale should have hedged his commercial bets. It seems that scarcely had the Pearce brothers been co-opted into the mining business by their stepfather than the copper market, booming for some twenty years, fell crashing around them. Neale never bought back his arsenic licence and, having pushed the boat out to impress and provide for his new wife (I imagine some white-fronted villa, a gravel sweep, a backdrop of dark, shielding trees), must have thrown himself on Benson’s mercy. Benson, we may take it, weathered the interruption of the American Civil War, which, while it reduced the human population, presumably allowed boll-weevils to thrive. He must have looked smugly yet pityingly on Neale. What saved them all, as it saved many an ailing copper mine, must have been arsenic. They were kept alive by poison.
I know little of the subsequent history of the Wheal Talbot mine. My mother, speaking out of the dim recesses of family lore, never used that name and only referred to it contemptuously — as if her great-uncles, Lucy’s brothers, were never more than doomed adherents to a lost cause (crazed, unshaven prospectors) — as “some wretched little tin mine in Cornwall.” My mother was capable of getting facts wrong. But I like to think that in that confusion of metals there was a degree of truth. That the brothers recalled their father’s insistence that tin deposits almost certainly lay beneath the Wheal Talbot copper and that Neale should dig for it while he could. Did they miss their father — his sound surveyor’s advice, his nose for geology, his feel for the secrets of the earth?
But if they found tin they would not have enjoyed its benefit for long. Tin was to crash in the early Nineties. Even arsenic slumped at the turn of the century. Wheal Talbot was abandoned. Elizabeth Neale, formerly Pearce, née Hunt, and by this time a widow, died in 1906, unaided by poison, but assisted, quite possibly, by the gall of memory: those days at Burlford; those days of honey and constancy, when this world, this other world of deceitful metal, lay all beyond the hill.
And the Rector? The would-be missionary who had come to a quiet Devon valley, seen the village, the church and the rectory and seen that they were good, and seen as the only shadow upon a comfortable living the onus of being an Anglican cleric in Methodist-infiltrated territory, could little have guessed at the changes he would witness in these seemingly unchangeable surroundings. That the little nearby town of Tavistock would become, depending on how you looked at it, a modern Eldorado, a satanic gambling-den in which the stakes were dividends and miners’ bellies — a crowded enclave of avid, abused humanity. That in his old age it would be part of his pastoral charge — the would-be missionary indeed — to visit the dismal hovels of the starving and cholera-ridden.
Did his fears persist of that undermined world, waiting to collapse into infernal darkness? Did he have thoughts akin to Matthew’s?
19th March 1856:
These toiling masses of our mine-workers trouble me. Because in the habitat of their workplace they do indeed appear as so many termites labouring in the dark and occupying a literal subexistence, we convert the appearance into substance. But by what perverted definition of common humanity do we pronounce that they are brutes and not we?