Bottom of the Barrel

The Census happens every ten years. It’s a complex commercial concern these days. Started by Victorians to find out how many people lived within this land, it grew and details were added about where they were born, what they did for a living, which church they worshipped at (RC or CE?). Enumerators were encouraged to be accurate when recording ages and places and occupations. The spelling of names stayed a risky business for some time, while it still relied on the enumerator hearing correctly and knowing the name. Better that we’re now all literate and can write our own names down, get the details right.

But all this information gathering, all the variety of descriptions and questions and data, it made people suspicious. The powers that be increased the laws, and rights were protected, so that not just anybody could get their hands on the information. Not for a hundred years, and not without some effort.

It’s an effort she’s making now, sitting huddled in her jacket in the air conditioned atmosphere of a chilly archive reading room. Seated at one of the microfilm readers, whirring through the pages of reversed polarity script, searching for a name. A group of names. Working backwards through the links, putting names in order, drawing the lines that connect them in her head.

She’s trying to discover who she is.

The machines are full, and she’s booked on for a day. She doesn’t know that she can stick a day of this, but she knows there are people around her, eyeing her machine. They know she isn’t one of them. She doesn’t have the index cards, the notebooks, the air of manic determination and obsession.

She’s just trying to find out where she comes from. No proof sought for the person she could have been if some feckless ancestor hadn’t been cheated of his fortune. Just the simple fact of who she is.

It’s not that she doesn’t know anything about herself. She knows plenty. She’s not the trusted friend, for example. She’s not the perfect daughter, not the person someone chooses over all others. She’s the fractured nothing who puts on a good show and reels people in, only to disappoint when they see that she is nobody. Drifting, and trying to convince herself as much as anyone else that she knows what the game is.

She doesn’t even know what started this. Something did, but she doesn’t remember. Some half-hint at something, a word from the past, a name, a face in a photograph looking out at her with the same expression as the one she wears. And who was she, that girl in the photograph? Nobody knew. Her parents never met her, she was long gone before they arrived, and now everyone who might have known her is dead and you can’t ask questions of the dead.

No scraps of paper, no diaries, no family Bible with a list of names. Just a photograph, and a hollow-eyed look that is tired and angry and frustrated and flinty. Eyes that are so sad and so resigned. You wouldn’t think that eyes could be all these things at once, those mirrors of the soul. But those eyes are, captured in a moment, in the flash of powder, unblinking, staring out across the years. The photograph is like a mirror.

She started this journey at home, paying for access to that online version of the films she’s whirring through now. And she found a name. Polly. Thirty three in 1901, married to a man three years younger. Two children with her, one farmed out to a wealthy sister in Hull. The youngest child would be farmed out later, to another sister in Wolverhampton. The eldest child, the son, would leave for Canada shortly after this snapshot was taken.

The one in Hull is the grandmother she has never known, but her mother tells her that when she was born, it was Sarah looking back at her. Polly her great grandmother, then. The drunk. The incapable mother. Her husband, Charles, the labourer who played piano round the pubs, who gradually went blind, leaving his family destitute. Sarah and Doris brought back, aged twelve, to work in the mills, to pay for their mother’s drinking. Sarah resentful of the life she was taken from. Doris more sanguine, who never married, but dedicated her life to work and to part time volunteering with the St John’s Ambulance Brigade.

Polly, though, who looks more like her than Sarah, although Sarah has those eyes as well. Polly whose name her mother didn’t know until she rang her and told her, who only knew that this nameless grandmother of hers was a drunk and the cause of her own mother’s disappointment in life.

She searches through these lists. Millions of names that spread across the country, across England and Wales. Lives mapped out as anonymous statistics. Names, personal details, all there, but mere data encrypted until someone comes looking and tries, too late, to make you real.

She wonders why she’s doing it, what else she can hope to learn. All she will end up with are bald facts. She knows more from that sentence, “She was a drunk, and your gran and great aunty had to come back to work in the mills when they were 12,” than she’ll learn from seeing Polly grow younger on filmed sheets of paper. In 1901, aged 33, she had three children under the age of five. Her occupation was unspecified. And what if in 1891, aged 23, she is recorded as a cotton operative, what else will that say about her? That she had no definable skill, that she was one of the thousands in that town who went to work for King Cotton, that she had no hope of ever being anything else. Ten years earlier, she was probably noted down as having just started on that path, a child of thirteen, employed in a cotton mill, working her way towards alcoholism and a blind husband, and a resentful middle daughter who was the progenitor of the woman sitting here now. Sitting here, trying to find out who she is. Hoping Polly might have the answers. Knowing that there aren’t any answers.

She’s who she is. No alcoholic great grandmother made her this way. No resentful grandmother, no martyred mother, no-one but herself.

And there the truth yawns. She’s no-one. She’s herself.

© J R Hargreaves 2006