Elijah’s Mermaid (52 page)

There is also a charming story that when Huxley’s five-year-old grandson saw this illustration, he wrote the following letter

Dear Grandpater – Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Could I see it some day? – Your loving Julian

To which his grandfather wrote this reply:

My dear Julian – I could never make sure about that Water Baby
.

I have seen Babies in water and Babies in bottles; the Baby in the water was not in a bottle and the Baby in the bottle was not in water. My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did – There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things
.

When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers, and see things more wonderful than the Water Babies where other folks can see nothing
.

How wise and how very charming!

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN AND
‘
THE LITTLE MERMAID
’

Hans Christian Andersen was an author of Victorian fairy tales, among them beloved classics such as ‘The Snow Queen’, ‘Thumbelina’, ‘The Little Match Girl’, ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and also ‘The Little Mermaid’. His work was immensely popular, and when on a visit to England he was invited to stay at the home of the author Charles Dickens. But he long outstayed his welcome, and when he had finally gone his host pinned a note to the bedroom wall that said: ‘
Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks – which seemed to the family AGES
’.

The lanky, gauche and effeminate writer had little luck with friends and cultured strange ‘love triangles’ where his wooing of a sister often hid desire for the brother, as in the case of Riborg Voigt – a letter from whom was found in a pouch on Andersen’s chest when he died. But it was Andersen’s lifelong love for a man called Edvard Collins (whose sister he also courted) that inspired ‘The Little Mermaid’ – a story of obsessive longing and pain, inspired by the intense desire to be physically ‘transformed’ as expressed in one of his letters – ‘
I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench . . . my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery
.’

In
Elijah’s Mermaid
I have taken many themes from the tale of ‘The Little Mermaid’, not only to echo Osborne’s obsession but also his muse’s longing for love. There are some physical allusions too, such as Pearl’s feet being webbed and then wounded, causing her enormous pain, much as the Little Mermaid felt when, with every step on dry land, she felt as if she was walking on knives.

The Real Places Which Have Influenced The Settings For
Elijah’s Mermaid

Burlington Row, where Frederick Hall resides and where his publishing firm is based, is an entirely fictional street, though hopefully it is indicative of the large brick-built houses in London’s Bloomsbury, an area historically linked with the production of literature – and which is also very near to where the Foundling Hospital once stood.

THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL

The Foundling Hospital plays a small but significant part at the start of
Elijah’s Mermaid
, when Lily and Elijah Lamb are discovered before their adoption.

The orphanage was founded in 1741 when a philanthropic sea captain by the name of Thomas Coram wished to do something to help the abandoned children he often saw when walking through London’s streets.

The institution has now been demolished but there is a fascinating museum where some replica rooms have been made up, reconstructed with the original fittings – such as the Committee Room, the Picture Gallery and the Rococo Courtroom. There is a Hogarth portrait of Captain Thomas Coram – alongside works by Gainsborough and Reynolds, all of whom donated to a gallery to lure in wealthy patrons who helped to pay for the children’s care.

The museum also houses the Gerald Coke Handel Collection – Handel being an original benefactor, with many productions of his work taking place within the orphanage walls.

And then, there is the Foundling Collection – over four centuries’ worth of paintings, sculpture, prints, manuscripts, photographs and other ephemera, such as the tokens given by mothers who left their babes in the hospital’s care as a means of identification should they ever return to reclaim them. However, in the nineteenth century – which is when
Elijah’s Mermaid
is set – the hospital gave out paper receipts, such as those alluded to in the case of Elijah and Lily Lamb. And just as with my sibling twins, the infants were at first farmed out to wet nurses in the countryside until they were four or five years old, when their education could begin. At fourteen, for the boys, and sixteen for the girls, they would then be released to the outside world, apprenticed into domestic work, general trade or the military.

CHEYNE WALK AND THE HOUSE OF THE MERMAIDS

Cheyne Walk in Chelsea (Chelsea meaning chalk wharf or shelf of sand) is now fronted by the Embankment, constructed in the nineteenth century to create an adequate sewerage system and thus divert such waste from the Thames. But before that engineering feat the Walk’s many grand old houses fronted directly on to the river. And this is how I have pictured them in
Elijah’s Mermaid
, with the looming carcass of Battersea Bridge – the last wooden bridge to span the Thames – appearing just as it would have back then before, in 1885, it was demolished and rebuilt.

At the time of Pearl’s ‘finding’ in the Thames she is taken to the House of the Mermaids, an establishment very much like the old illustrations and photographs of Numbers 4 and 16 Cheyne Walk; the latter once belonging to the Pre-Raphaelite artist Rossetti.

Entirely imaginary are the murals of mermaids upon the walls, for which I referred to the wonderfully sensual artwork of John William Waterhouse, a Victorian painter who worked
somewhat later and was not an actual Pre-Raphaelite, but his images of mermaids and nymphs were in my mind consistently when thinking of Osborne painting Pearl.

Number 4, Cheyne Walk

When it comes to Osborne’s automaton, there was indeed a famed French artisan by the name of Phalibois who constructed such clockwork wonders, uncannily realistic to see. However, I have no idea whether he ever made a mermaid.

CREMORNE GARDENS

The Chelsea pleasure gardens once had entrance gates upon the King’s Road and also the river at Cremorne Pier. The artist Whistler, who also lived on Cheyne Walk, depicted some of the night-time scenes in his stunning ‘Nocturne’ paintings.

In 1877, the resort was closed to the public, having become notorious for prostitutes haunting every path. But before that sorry end it hosted a plethora of restaurants, a Hermit’s Cave with a fortune teller, a Fairy Bower and a maze, not to mention a theatre with marionettes. Visitors could dance around the exotic Pagoda to the strains of an open-air orchestra, or rise up in the air in a hot-air balloon with fireworks exploding all around. The walkways were notoriously lined with sideshows
of many different kinds, not to mention performing monkeys and dogs – and as far as Professor Beckwith goes, well, he really did exist and often presented the Beckwith Frogs – the human seals who performed in an enormous glass aquarium.

COVENT GARDEN MARKET

In Victorian times Covent Garden was a thriving fruit and vegetable market with more than 1,000 porters employed. The market and its public square were constructed in the 1600s on ground that had formally belonged to Westminster Abbey. The Floral Hall, designed by E. M. Barry, was added in the mid-1800s and must have been spectacular when filled with flowers and plants.

CHISWICK HOUSE

Of other London buildings, the Royal Academy does exist, as indeed does Claridge’s Hotel. However, Dolphin House does not, though I have loosely based the Thames Mall address upon the real Chiswick Mall, where some more fine residences overlook the Thames, among them Walpole House, once the home to Barbara Villiers, a mistress of Charles II, and later converted into a school attended by W. M. Thackeray – who used that setting in his novel
Vanity Fair
.

Situated near by is Chiswick House – which is open to the public – with acres of glorious gardens, which surround the grand Italianate villa built by the third Earl of Burlington (l694–1753).

The earl, whom Horace Walpole called the ‘Apollo of the Arts’, constructed the house in the neo-Palladian style, being an ardent admirer of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio, as well as his follower Inigo Jones. But rather than being an actual home Chiswick House was primarily used as a centre for entertainment, with many lavish parties held during the hotter summer months when guests could escape from London’s
‘stink’ and admire their host’s collection of art, or play hide and seek in the ha-ha, or wander across the arched stone bridge, where an artificial river flowed with banks all surrounded by informal planting, the lushness of which was balanced by classical statues, obelisks and columns, and even an Ionic temple which overlooks a small round lake – the very setting where Osborne Black paints Pearl reclining as a nymph.

The house was often visited by Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. It was during the Victorian era that Georgiana’s son, the ‘Bachelor’ Duke, filled the grounds with a menagerie that included an elephant and an elk, emus and some kangaroos, and also a sacred Indian bull.

However, Chiswick House was not always the scene of such glamour. By the end of the nineteenth century it was leased out for medical use – more specifically as an asylum for wealthy male and female patients, with the mad most probably being confined in additional wings built on to the house in the late 1700s. In
Elijah’s Mermaid
I have reimagined those wings (even though they no longer exist, demolished in the 1950s) and my inmates are all female, with no characters involved with their care having any factual source at all – although treatments described in the novel, from the use of cold baths to surgery, were genuine methods used at the time for the ‘curing’ of nervous symptoms, such as female ‘hysteria’ or those classed with nymphomania. It is also true that in very many cases women with no sign of madness at all could be all too easily ‘put away’ if their husbands or families were so inclined.

KINGSLAND HOUSE

The house described in
Elijah’s Mermaid
with its ivy-smothered windows and walls was once the rectory in the village of Kingsland in Herefordshire. Nowadays it is privately owned, but you can walk the narrow path that leads along one side of its grounds and from there through the field with the iron gate that enters the village churchyard. The pretty little grey stone
church does indeed have a Volka Chapel, situated just to the left of the porch, and in that there is an open tomb in which Lily poses for a photograph while thinking of the story she’d heard about the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross (at the time of the Wars of the Roses) when a parhelion or ‘sun dog’ was seen in the sky – a story which is recorded as having been quite factual.

Another local story which may or may not be true pertains to the old rectory again, and the little stream almost concealed by thick-growing shrubs and low branches of trees which forms a natural boundary at the very end of its gardens. The tale of a haunting stems back to the time when a rector and his daughter lived quite alone in the house, when the local gossips would have it that the girl appeared to be with child and all manner of aspersions were cast as to who the father might happen to be. However, no child was ever seen, and the scandalmongers’ tongues were stilled – until the night when a poacher heard the cries of a mewling babe and discovered a tiny corpse hidden at the water’s edge. In the tradition of these things, it is said that to this very day if you happen to pass on certain nights you might also hear the wailing cry of the child left there to freeze or drown.

The stream in
Elijah’s Mermaid
is larger than the real one, and the ferns that grow upon its banks provide a recurring theme in the novel; again an allusion to Kingsley and his coining of the word Pteridomania – or fern madness – a craze which affected much of the nation with enthusiasts travelling for miles around in search of the latest specimens, and sometimes with fatal results when overzealous adventurers scaled the faces of dangerous cliffs and fell to their deaths on the rocks below. For those who preferred a gentler chase, there were nurseries that supplied the plants, and public gardens where grottos were built: grottos with pools, even waterfalls, and walls created from rough-hewn rock to give a natural sense of romance – but a lighter, warmer, airier world than that created by Osborne Black in his secret grotto in Dolphin House.