pollyglot · 02/10/2024 23:18
What a sample of my babies?
(Ahem) Not waiting to be asked, like Mary Bennet at her piano...
The quayside at the Pool of London from where their transport, HMS Arabella was to depart was filled with a crush of humanity. The blue coats of the Royal Artillery and the bright scarlet of the 65th Regiment of Foot created a cheerful picture, not reflected in the faces of the men themselves. Nor in most of the women, whose tear-streaked cheeks indicated that they had not been selected by the ballot to accompany their men on the voyage. The names of the fortunate ten per cent of wives who were permitted to sail were announced this very morning, thereby preventing any last-minute desertion. The wretched women whose husbands were to depart alone embraced their men, weeping in despair. To their skirts clung children, wailing in fear at the general air of misery. Just as Ellen had done, so many years before, they had travelled with hope to the port of departure. And just as Ellen, again, they had to return to their homes or to the villages of their relatives who might support them through the anxious separation, and very possible bereavement. They knew well the toll that overseas posting took on the soldiers. And for many of the women, without family or friends, the separation meant penury, starvation or death.
The fortunate women, carrying babies, bags and boxes, small cages with cackling chickens, even cages containing a cat, climbed the gangplank with joyful steps. Whatever hardship their men would face, they would face also. Some of them appeared to be at an alarmingly late stage of pregnancy, and Susanna wondered however they would survive a difficult birth on board, should such an event occur. Others were evidently the poorest of the poor, mothers with small children clad in thin, ragged clothing, with almost no baggage. What would be their fate during the winter in Newfoundland? How would they survive the conditions with so little protection from the cold? Just now, though, the winter was something abstract, not a reality. They had no concept of the extreme conditions. They believed simply that they were the lucky ones who were accompanying their men. For them, what could ever go wrong when they had their protector?
The loading of the consigned goods now being completed, HMS Arabella was ready to sail on the next tide. The men voyaging without their wives and children leaned as far as possible over the ship’s side, clinging to their wives’ hands for as long as they were able. The women wept profusely, and even the stoic men were seen to be wiping their eyes. Many would never meet again. The fortunate ones watched from the deck as the ship slipped out on the sunset tide, bound for the west and who knew what, all in the name of duty.
Definitely want to read that book! 😊 Love historical fiction.
Thing is, @SapphireSeptember, it's not historical fiction! It's the true story of my 4x gt grandmother, Susanna Fearnley, from Yorkshire, who went to America with her husband during the Revolution. It's the story, really, of all the military wives and children who have no voice in the records. They are simply colateral damage in the pursuit of Empire. Nameless, voiceless, innocent victims. Such tragedy, such a waste.
such as this:
There had also been a birth, a tiny premature baby, born during the same terrifying storm. The mother had laboured for days on the wooden deck of the married men’s mess, the only privacy being a screen of shawls and blankets held aloft by the other women. It did not deaden her agonised screams. Too weak to cope with the torture of an obstructed birth and the force of the storm which struck as the mother’s strength had all but gone, the young woman had died of exhaustion following the delivery of a stillborn female child. The military surgeon had no training in childbirth, and Ellen and Susanna, together with several of the other experienced mothers, had done their best to help the girl. Ellen’s skills, learned by aiding her sisters’ births and the techniques used by Dr Hey, were of no use. She was beyond help. The girl’s husband had been inconsolable, and despite his military discipline would have followed her body into the sea, had he not been restrained by his comrades.
There had been another birth, easy and successful, in the married quarters. The mother was a sturdy woman in her late thirties, who had already given birth to ten children, of whom four were living. The father was unconcerned about his wife’s labour and did not even raise his eyes from his hand of cards when told that he had another son. Let the women get on with it, it’s what they were there for. The old soldiers, veterans of many campaigns, were inured to pain and hardship, their own and others’. The 65th Regiment of Foot had served abroad in the West Indies during the Seven Years’ War, and this doughty woman had borne two live children and miscarried a third in the five years she had spent with the regiment in that fever- and mosquito-ridden, benighted part of the world. Neither of the two children born alive and healthy had seen their second birthday.
Susanna had wondered at the conditions these brave women accepted as the price of not being separated from their men. The hours spent in assisting the doomed girl in her labour in the overpoweringly fetid air in the cramped married men’s mess, where whole families lived and involuntarily shared the most intimate moments of their lives, had opened a whole new world of understanding for her. The smell of unwashed human bodies, the wailing of small babies, the muffled sounds of marital intimacy, the occasional unrestrained quarrel; these all combined to create something resembling a scene from hell. Yet, it was the fabric from which Britain’s emerging greatness was created. These people, and especially the stalwart women, lived, endured, overcame, and built one of the greatest empires ever known.