Sisters in the Wilderness (3 page)

Thomas Strickland's decision to move to a bucolic county north of London and reinvent himself as a country squire was typical of his age—although it probably didn't seem so to him. In 1803, the country was simmering uncomfortably under George
III
, the third inadequate Hanoverian monarch in a row. It was also fighting one of the greatest enemies it had ever faced: France's Napoleon Bonaparte, whose forces challenged the Duke of Wellington on land and Admiral Horatio Nelson at sea. But the preceding century had seen changes in Britain that had shaken the traditions of centuries. Brilliant prime ministers such as Robert Walpole and William Pitt had successfully transferred power from hereditary aristocrats to elected representatives; demand for an extension of the franchise beyond wealthy landowners was starting to build. Robert Clive's victories in India had established British rule there,
and the American War of Independence had eliminated British control of thirteen colonies. There had been a rush of inventions, such as Richard Arkwright's water-powered spinning machine and James Watt's steam engine. In 1785
The Times
was established; in 1802, the English physicist John Dalton introduced atomic theory into chemistry. As Britain embarked on the new century, it was alive with new thinking, new intellectual movements and a new sense of possibility. It was on the brink of the Industrial Revolution, which would make Britain the wealthiest nation in the world. The social strata were shifting, and there was new room for upward mobility.

In Suffolk, there was a surprising turnover of estates at the top of the social hierarchy as members of a new class—nouveaux riches—bought up old manor houses. The industrialist John Crowley, who owned England's largest ironworks, in County Durham, two hundred miles north of London, had set himself up in a mansion in the sleepy old Suffolk village of Barking. One of London's richest malt distillers, Samuel Kent, had settled into a stately hall on the River Lark at Fornham St. Genevieve. The district in which Thomas Strickland decided to set himself up was the Waveney Valley in eastern Suffolk. By late 1803, he was renting Stowe House, a Georgian manor on a hill overlooking the town of Bungay.

Suffolk was attractive to people like Thomas Strickland because the comfortably rounded bulge of land jutting into the North Sea has always been one of the most beautiful corners of England. Suffolk shares with Norfolk, its northern neighbour, vistas of flat fields, scattered villages and meandering streams. The gentle features and wide skies of Suffolk at the time of the Stricklands are best captured on the canvases of two of England's greatest landscape painters, John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. Curlews endlessly wheel round in the sky; silvery light slants onto still water; yellow fields are spangled with the brilliant vermilion of poppies. In 1803, the county's most dramatic features were man-made and on a human scale. Inland, there were medieval flint-and-stone churches, and brick windmills with creaking sails. Along
the coastline, there were lighthouses to warn North Sea fishing fleets and collier brigs of the shifting sandbanks on the East Anglian shore. Even today, little has changed—Suffolk prides itself on the way it ambles through history, at least a century behind the rest of England.

Five of the Strickland daughters were born by the time the family moved to Suffolk, and Susanna arrived within the first few months. In later years, Catharine was to recall Stowe House as “our Eden,” and to compress memories of every season and childhood delight into her ecstatic descriptions of the house and grounds. “The banks of the stream were lined with sweet purple violets, primroses, and the little sun-bright celandine: from this slender streamlet we children drank the most delicious draughts from Nature's own chalice, the hollow of our hands, or sipped its pure waters, like the fairies we read of, from the acorn cups that strewed the grass… . Later on there was a good store of wild strawberries, which we gathered and strung upon a stalk of grass to carry home to our mother as a peace-offering for torn frocks and soiled pinafores.”

During the years at Stowe House the children were happily enclosed in two overlapping but self-contained worlds—their own close-knit family, and the timeless routines of rural Suffolk. During the mornings, they congregated in the brick-paved parlour for lessons. The elder children acted out scenes from Shakespeare, or studied Greek and Latin under their father's supervision, while the younger children were taught to read by their mother. Elizabeth and Thomas were strict parents who insisted that their children's education be well grounded in history, geography, mathematics and the theology and morality of the Church of England. Disobedience was punished by solitary confinement, without dinner. Thomas wanted his daughters as well as his sons to be self-reliant. His fourth daughter, Jane, never forgot his lessons. “‘Persevere and you must succeed,' was one of his maxims,” she recalled years later. “‘God helps those who help themselves.' When his right hand was disabled by gout, he used his left hand to write with—such was our father.”

After their mornings in the schoolroom, the Stricklands spent the
afternoons around the garden and farmland, or accompanied their parents on local errands. With their mother, they would visit Bungay, a market town with a romantic ruined castle on the hill above it. Every Thursday, there was a lively market in the cobbled square by the seventeenth-century Butter Cross, a local stone monument. The town had a full complement of artisans who kept the local economy going, and whose workshops were irresistible draws for curious children. Harness-makers, wheelwrights, brick-makers, potters, basket-weavers, coopers, blacksmiths and farriers—the young Stricklands could watch their carriage horses being shod, or their cooking pots repaired, by men who had learned their skills from their fathers. They could eavesdrop on the old men who gathered in the sunshine for a “mardle” (as a casual chat was known locally) or count the grain sacks being unloaded for grinding in one of the local windmills.

With their father and his manservant, Lockwood, the children might set off on fishing expeditions along the River Waveney. The Waveney, which loops lazily around the town of Bungay and is still the haunt of otters, snipe and duck, was a favourite destination two hundred years ago for local eel-fishers. Their method of catching their prey was called “eelbabbing” and was unique to this little pocket of England. Worms spiced with a tasty mixture of dung were threaded onto a special kind of wool. The wool line was then fixed to a rod and dropped in the Waveney's shallow waters, where an eel might snatch at the worm and get the wool caught in its teeth. Practised babbers swore by this technique, which saved them the slimy, frustrating job of removing a hook from the eel's mouth. Thomas Strickland and his children would walk down to the Waveney in the late evening to watch the babbers at work. But Thomas himself was a rod-and-fly gentleman, whose fishing bible was Isaac Walton's
The Compleat Angler
. He would read aloud passages to Catharine when he took her fishing, and his first-edition copy of Walton's classic would become one of her most treasured possessions.

Thomas was often incapacitated by gout, and his wife would be too busy nursing him to pursue her children's education. Then the girls had
to amuse themselves. “In the long winter evenings we gathered around the fire and the elder ones would tell long stories bearing upon some point of history but embellished according to the invisible genius of their fertile minds,” Catharine recalled years later. “These improvised histories were continued night after night. New characters introduced and new events. And often this amusement gave place to the reading aloud [of] Shakespeare's tragedies …” As the logs flamed in the stone fireplace and kept at bay the darkness beyond the hearth, Agnes Strickland—who, though the second eldest, was the dominant and by far the most theatrical of the brood—kept her five sisters enthralled as she recited from memory Hamlet's soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” or John of Gaunt's stirring invocation from
Richard II
: “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle …” Or else she stage-managed a whole production, with herself—tall and deep-voiced—as male lead and Sarah, the prettiest of the sisters, as Ophelia, Juliet or Viola.

It was an extraordinarily intense family of literary youngsters: they spent far more time with each other than with any other children and had all read more by the age of ten than most girls of their era and class read in a lifetime. Of the six sisters, five would become published authors. In later years, Catharine found the comparison of the Stricklands with another literary sisterhood of the nineteenth century irresistible. “Began reading for the second time the life of Charlotte Bronte,” she wrote in her journal when she was fifty-eight. “There is so much in this book that reminds me of our own early years—were I to write a history of the childhood of the Strickland family …how many things there would be that would remind the reader of the early days of the Brontes.”

During these years, Thomas Strickland's investments continued to prosper. He still owned property in Rotherhithe which yielded some income, and he had also entered into a partnership with a coach-maker in Norwich, the chief city in Norfolk. He bought a townhouse within the city walls, on a cobbled street near the lovely medieval church of St. Giles. And in 1808 he purchased a gentleman's residence eighteen
miles southeast of Bungay, about a mile from the Suffolk coast. During a particularly cold spell in January, the Stricklands left Bungay and moved to Reydon Hall.

The girls revelled in the well-stocked library and dusty attics of Reydon Hall, Suffolk.

Reydon Hall is a solid brick manor still considered one of the most attractive houses in the county. Built in 1682, it has mullioned windows, fancy curved Dutch gables on its third floor and rambling grounds. At the front of the house during the Stricklands' ownership was a broad sweep of driveway hidden from the road by a thick stand of oak, chestnut and ash trees; to the rear, extensive lawns dotted with old sycamore trees gave way to the Reydon woods, owned by the Earl of Stradbroke. Inside the Hall there were three spacious reception rooms, several bedrooms, a stone-flagged kitchen and servants' quarters. The writing desk of General Wolfe, hero of the Plains of Abraham, took pride of place in the drawing room; how Thomas had acquired this treasure is uncertain. In the best tradition of noble mansions, the Hall even boasted a third-floor garret reputed to house a ghost called “Old Martin.” The bedrooms were low-ceilinged and pokey, and there were constant problems with a leaky roof. Nonetheless, its old brick glowed with warmth, and even
today, after countless additions and renovations, its beautiful scalloped gables and elaborate double chimneys lend Reydon Hall considerable grace. The house affirmed that Thomas Strickland had arrived in Suffolk society.

Thomas and Elizabeth now divided their time between Reydon Hall and Norwich, where their two sons went to the fee-paying Norwich Grammar School. They frequently took their two oldest girls with them, leaving the younger ones at home in the charge of the servants. “Reading was our chief resource,” Catharine would recall in later years. “We ransacked the library for books, we dipped into old magazines of the last century…. We tried history, the drama, voyages and travels, of which latter there was a huge folio. We even tried ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.' We wanted to be very learned…” They combed through back numbers of the
Astrologer's Magazine
for tales of witchcraft and ghosts, which they then retold with great relish to the cook and housemaid until the latter were convinced they would meet Old Martin on the stairs. To relieve the boredom of dull, dark winter days, the two youngest girls decided to write a novel for children. Careless of old Martin's ghost, in the dusty attic they unearthed a supply of paper in a chest with massive brass hinges and locks—left behind, according to family legend, by a young Indian prince who had been sent to England as an ambassador to the Royal Court.

Susanna's interest in the novel flagged. But even as a youngster, Catharine was the kind of person who liked to finish anything she began. She plodded on with the story entitled “The Swiss Herd-boy and his Alpine Marmot,” which enthralled Susanna and Sarah. However, Mrs. Strickland and Eliza—the bad-tempered eldest sister who always regarded herself as a third parent to the youngest children—discovered Catharine's manuscript one day when they had returned from Norwich. They were horrified that Catharine was “scribbling such trash” and confiscated it. Susanna, who was far too headstrong to accept rebuke meekly, was outraged. Catharine, a much more easygoing child, made less of a fuss—and was allowed to keep her manuscript when she promised to use it for curling papers.