The Disgrace of Kitty Grey (23 page)

 

I woke to find Betsy shaking my arm and begging me to
please
wake up. I opened my eyes a little, but it was an effort.

‘I am very,
very
hungry,' Betsy said. ‘When will we get our bread?'

My eyelids drooped again. I felt stiff and bruised. My head ached with the lack of fresh air and the tarry smell was making me nauseous.

‘Don't go back to sleep!' Betsy lifted my lids and held them open, then said in my ear, ‘Are we in Australia yet?'

With many a groan and a sigh, I shifted myself into a sitting position. ‘No, I'm very much afraid we are not – we haven't even started our journey.' Her lip wobbled at this. ‘But soon we are going all the way down the river to the sea!' I said, trying to make it sound exciting.

‘The sea.' She thought about this for some moments. ‘But it's very large, and if we go there, however will my brother know how to find us?'

She hadn't spoken about Will for some time, so I wasn't expecting it and had to turn away so she wouldn't see the tears in my eyes. ‘I'm not sure,' I said. After a moment, when I could trust my voice, I added, ‘Maybe . . . maybe you and I will have to manage without him.'

‘But I don't want to!' she said. ‘You said we would find him if we came to London!'

‘I know I did,' I said helplessly, and would have just dissolved into useless tears again but Cassandra, the mother of the only other child amongst us, asked Betsy if she wouldn't mind looking after her baby for a moment.

Betsy, more used to being looked after herself, was at first surprised and then took the child, who was about a year old, sat him on her hip and locked her arms around him as if she had been doing it all her life. For the moment, the question of Will was forgotten.

When a sailor appeared, rolling in a small barrel of fresh water for us, the girl called Jane spoke up loudly to demand the previous day's ration of meat, which she said was ours by rights. ‘We surely should have had roast meat on Christmas Day!' she said indignantly. ‘God knows we have little enough vittles the rest of the year.'

The sailor, a pigtailed man in baggy grey trousers, linen smock and neckerchief, stood looking at her, amused.

‘I suppose you had the extra portions yourself,' she went on. ‘You certainly look as if you have.'

I froze, thinking that she would be struck for her insolence, but to my surprise he roared with laughter. ‘They said you were a bunch of disorderly wenches and you surely are!'

‘Never mind that!' Jane said. ‘Just enquire about our meat ration.'

‘Yes, please do,' said the older woman, who gave her name as Margaret. ‘And would you tell the captain that I am a lady born and bred, and there are certain privileges I should be allowed on board.'

I hid a gasp, thinking she was going to be hauled out for her rudeness, but the sailor just grinned. In due course, a smartly uniformed man appeared, telling us he was a warrant officer, and from him we learned everything that was going to happen, which struck us as very civil – and quite unlike how we had been treated by the turnkeys in Newgate.

He said that we would be moored on the River Thames past Woolwich – for that was where we were, and I had never heard of it – for several days while other girls sentenced to leave our shores came from nearby prisons. Once everyone was on board, the
Juanita
would sail down the Thames on the tide, go past the coast of Kent and around to Portsmouth Harbour to collect more women and provisions. After that, our final stop would be at Plymouth to collect girls from prisons at Exeter, Bristol and Taunton and take on livestock and fresh water before setting out for Botany Bay. This, apparently, was the place in Australia we were destined for.

‘Although we will stop at several places to buy local foodstuffs and water,' the officer finished.

No one asked what these places were, and I certainly did not, for I hardly knew the names of the places in England, and the names of foreign countries would have meant little to me.

‘If you all behave yourselves, we should have a fair journey,' he said. ‘Our captain is a decent man and a gentleman, and there will be a surgeon and his assistant on board should anyone need medical attention.'

‘What about telling our families where we've gone?' someone asked. ‘What about our children? I had to leave three little ones in the care of my sister.'

‘If you come and see me, we can make arrangements for letters to be sent,' said the officer. ‘And if anyone's immediate family want to come and say goodbye, then a private cabin will be made available to them.'

Momentarily, I thought of my ma and pa getting my letter and of them trying to find me. They had no money for the journey to London, had never been on a coach, much less been to London, and they had no travelling clothes or bags. Even if they got as far as Charing Cross, how could they possibly find me, stuck on a ship they didn't know the name of, in the middle of nowhere, halfway to the sea?

‘How many women will be sailing altogether?' Margaret asked.

‘We will start with near two hundred,' he answered, and there were some gasps and shrieks at this, ‘and it is our intention, with good care and fair conditions, to lose as few of you as possible. You are a valuable cargo.'

‘Two hundred women!' someone said in shock. ‘Surely there's not enough room.'

‘The
Juanita
is a large vessel,' he said, ‘and many of you can be accommodated on the orlop.' He must have seen our mystified faces, for he added, ‘The orlop is the bottom deck, below the waterline, where you'll have your quarters. And I'd be obliged if you could learn some of the language of the ship: starboard, port, aft and bow and so forth.'

‘But what about when we get there?' I enquired fearfully. ‘What will happen to us then?'

‘Are there wild animals?' someone else asked.

‘None that you should worry about,' he said. ‘It's a very beautiful country with wonderful mountains and lakes – and Botany Bay is a colony in dire need of women. You'll find yourselves much in demand.'

‘I'm in demand every night on the Whitechapel Road!' Jane said and, though a few women laughed, I felt a chill run through me. It was surely going to be as Mrs Goodwin had predicted: we were being sent out there to marry the first man who propositioned us and bear his children whether we wanted to or not!

‘But first things first,' he went on. ‘Regulations state that you must all wash and disinfect yourselves, for there are several cases of gaol fever at Newgate and we must ensure that it's not brought on board.' He looked us over, one by one. ‘Are there any of you who feel feverish or sick?'

We all shook our heads. ‘Just damned hungry!' said Jane.

We were brought breakfast, which was not bread, but something called ship's biscuit: a dry disc made from flour and water and completely tasteless. After we'd eaten (and it proved near impossible to swallow more than two biscuits each), we were taken on deck, where someone had set up a blacksmith's anvil to sever the chains which held us together. We had to continue to wear the individual heavy shackles which locked around our calves, at least for the time being.

‘These will be taken off when we're at sea, when there's no chance of you escaping,' the blacksmith told us.

In the daylight I could see the
Juanita
properly. The night before, in the darkness, it had been no more than shadows and shapes. But looking about me then I saw that it had three massive masts, each taller than the tallest tree I'd ever seen, and was altogether a miracle of ropes and rigging, each coil of rigging joined to the next and the whole seeming to be a gigantic puzzle. The sails were huge expanses of canvas that, just then, were rolled up and tied, but everyone said that open and filled with wind, they would be a magnificent sight. Magnificent they might be, I thought, but I didn't want to see them that way, for that would mean the ship had set sail and we were on our way to Botany Bay.

Not being chained together gave us a little more freedom – although we had precious little privacy to go with it, for the latrines we had to use during the day were merely planks with round holes cut in them, placed on each side of the deck so that the user could relieve herself directly into the sea. Most of us preferred this fresh air method to using the buckets supplied overnight.

The greatest treat for most of us was to be allowed to wash our hair and ourselves and to put on clean clothes and, it being high tide when we did so, we were permitted to use as much water as we liked. This was a mixture of sea-meets-the-river water pulled up in barrels and was probably not very clean – its only merit lay in the fact that there was plenty of it. A hard carbolic soap was provided, but I had to wash Betsy's hair four times before the water ran clean, and she did not hesitate to scream like a bantam all the while, so that I felt exhausted by the time I'd finished.

Our previous night's accommodation turned out to have been just a holding area for, once bathed and reasonably clean, we were taken to the orlop where, to our great surprise, there were already girls from other prisons and several children.

Things were a little awkward at first, for those who had been on the ship the longest seemed to think they had superiority over the rest of us, and had already taken the best positions on the sleeping shelves, as close as possible to a stove yet not too far from the hatches. They had set their possessions out and also begun to form their own little community, so it took a day or so of politeness on our part for there to begin to be the slightest thaw in their attitude.

How would it be, I wondered, once there were two hundred of us packed in nose to tail? At least at Newgate the population had been fluid: new girls had come in while others had gone out (or died) every day. Here, though, we would all be held together for a year or more; how long would it take for us all to be at each other's throats?

 

Over the next few days we began to get the feel of the ship and learned where we could and couldn't go. We were told that bare feet were safest for walking on the deck, but it was so icy that not many of us followed this advice. My feet were always aching with cold, but I'd managed to find two pieces of cardboard which, placed in the bottom of my shoes, covered up the holes in the soles and improved things slightly.

More worryingly, I discovered that I hated being shut in the orlop. It was underground – or, to be more precise,
underwater
– and there was no access to fresh air. Once you were inside it with the hatches closed there was a dreadful feeling of confinement. This didn't worry many of the girls, but I found it quite terrifying. It would be better once the ship was under way, we were told, for then we would be assigned jobs. We would help with the cleaning, cooking and washing, be responsible for the airing and care of our blankets and bedrolls, undertake the repairing of nets and sails, and scrub the decks. We learned most of this information from Margaret, who was not in the least bit afraid of our guards. She was the only one of us who had ever been on a ship before, for as a young woman she'd sailed to the Americas with her husband, an officer.

‘Of course, I was in a very different position in those days,' she said. ‘As the wife of one of the officers I ate at the captain's table.'

‘But now you are down in the orlop with us!' Jane said bluntly. ‘How did you come to fall so far?'

Margaret fluttered her hands. ‘When my husband died, I had four young children to keep and no money. I was desperate. My children had not eaten for several days and so, after being contacted by a coiner, I passed on two gold sovereigns which had been tampered with. I was caught and served my time in prison, but learned a good deal there. When I came out, I formed a shoplifting partnership with another woman.'

‘How did this work?' I asked.

‘Well, my friend and I specialised in stealing expensive drapery,' she replied. ‘We would dress up very fine, go to one of the big shops and ask to see some brocade or embroidered fabric. I would remark that a titled lady I knew had recommended the shop, and this pleased the assistants and allayed their fears. We'd then purchase a small sample of the material, and when the assistant went to wrap it, take a bale off the shelf and throw it into a large pocket I had especially made in my petticoats. Of course, it was the devil of a job to walk with such a bulky amount of fabric banging against my legs, but I only had to take it as far as the nearest pawnbroker's.' We laughed. ‘Of course, the change in fashions rather hindered our exploits. Believe me when I say that it's impossible to hide a bale of linen under a straight slip of muslin.'

‘So was this the end of your shoplifting?' someone asked.

Margaret shook her head. ‘We merely adapted our methods. We would take a bale of material to the light in order to see the colour better, and I would distract the assistant while my friend slipped out of the door with it. We worked around the Kentish towns for a year or more like this.'

‘But how did you get caught?' I asked.

‘Ah,' she said, ‘on the final occasion my friend and I worked together, she was seen and pursued down the road by the manager. She threw the material over the nearest wall and it went straight into an ornamental pond.' She rolled her eyes. ‘What a to-do it caused: the fabric was eighteen shillings a yard and we caused twenty-seven yards to be ruined!'