The Potato Factory (81 page)

From the outset it became apparent that they would be quite differently sized. Tommo, considering his gigantic parents, was small boned and delicate in appearance, though not in the least sickly, and Hawk was large and seemed to grow bigger each day. As a baby Tommo seemed content with the single breast of his wet nurse, while Hawk would take all he could extract from his own and then greedily feed on the remaining breast of the woman who suckled his brother.

Jessamy Hawkins had grown into a pretty young lady, much sought after by young men. But she was of a sensible and independent mind, quick witted and with a laconic humour, and she doted on the two infants. She called Hawk 'Dark Thought', and Tommo 'After Thought'.

Tommo seemed the more adventurous of the twins. He was always into some sort of mischief and, more often than not, Hawk would be the one caught with his fingers deep in the jam pot after being led there by Tommo. But Hawk questioned everything and, even as a small child, would not be put off by an incomplete answer.

Throughout their childhood they refused to be separated and Hawk sensed the need to protect the smaller Tommo against all-comers, dogs or other children who might want to harm him. Even if Mary grew angry with Tommo for some mischief and he fled from her, Hawk would stand in her way until, impatient and frustrated, she would slap him. The moment she did so, Hawk would stand firm and grin up at her. 'That's for Tommo, Mama!' he'd declare. 'He be punished now!'

Ikey, to his great surprise, confessed to being most fond of Mary's brats, but had nonetheless made Mary pay him ten pounds for each before he agreed to perjure himself by swearing he was their father. He protested that, as the world had never before heard of a black Jew, but with Hawk and Tommo given the name of Solomon, it was not appropriate that they be gentiles. Nevertheless, his conscience would be assuaged, he assured Mary, if she gave a donation of fifteen pounds to a fund created by Mr Louis Nathan to establish a synagogue for the four hundred and fifty Jews known to live in the colony. Ikey was getting older and increasingly he gave thought to his immortal soul. He thought it worthwhile to be in good standing within his faith. The remaining five pounds he wanted for an addition to Sperm Whale Sally's headstone.

Mary had paid for the burial of Marybelle Firkin, alias Sperm Whale Sally, who now rested among the respectable dead in St David's burial ground with both her names on her marble headstone, but she soon enough recouped the money.

Michael O'Flaherty, the proprietor of the Whale Fishery, had opened a fund for this purpose, and every whaleman who entered the port of Hobart in the year that followed had willingly given something towards Sperm Whale Sally's funeral expenses.

Sufficient money was raised to repay Mary and also to erect a handsome headstone made from expensive pure white marble imported from England. In fact, so grand was the headstone that it caused a furore among the church elders and the congregation, who felt it unbefitting that a whore should have a more impressive tombstone than the respectable and pious merchant John Rutkin who had been buried on the very same day.

There were even some who tried to insist that Sperm Whale Sally's grave be moved from consecrated ground, and there was talk of a petition to Governor Franklin, who had replaced Colonel Arthur.

But in the end the vicar, in a stirring sermon, pointed out that within his churchyard lay villains far greater than the giant whore, and that Mary Magdalene had herself been a scarlet women and had received the love and compassion of Jesus Christ. This had silenced the hotheads and, at the same time, caused a better quality of headstone to appear in the churchyard, the respectable classes not able to bear the shame of sealing their dead beneath a less imposing stone.

But despite the grandness of the memorial to Sperm Whale Sally, Ikey, in a rare display of sentiment, expressed his displeasure. He persuaded the stone mason who created the tombstone to procure a slab of rare bluestone and to carve from it the shape of a great sperm whale, and to inlay this onto the face of the existing white marble. Beneath this he caused to be engraved the words:

So take up your doxy and drink your own ale

And dance a fine jig to a fine fishy tale

We'll fly the Blue Sally wherever we sail

And drink to the health o' the great sperm whale!

It pleased Ikey greatly to know that the Blue Sally would forever fly above Sperm Whale Sally's grave and Mary was happy enough to meet the bill. Apart from Ikey's renewed religious scruples, she understood his sentimental desire to perpetuate in stone the spirit of the great sperm whale so that it might guard the grave of the mother of her two adopted sons.

And so yet another myth was born. At the beginning of the winter whaling season, for as long as men hunted the whale in the South Seas and came into port at Hobart Town, the captains and men of the great fully rigged brigantines and barques and the smaller local bay whalers would gather together at St David's church for a blessing of the whale fleet. After the blessing the ships' masters would pay for a barrel of rum to be consumed at the grave of Sperm Whale Sally. Each whaleman present would take a glass of rum and drink what became known as 'A Sally Salute', a tribute to the spirit of the great sperm whale. Then they would link arms, the Yankees and the British, Swedes, French, Portuguese and the islanders, and form a circle around the grave of sperm Whale Sally and sing the Blue Sally shanty. This they sang with a great deal more gusto than the dreary rendition of The Sailor's Hymn they had earlier been required to render within the church. It was claimed that there were whalemen who spoke no English but who could sing this elegy to the whale perfectly, having learned it by rote from some old tar during the lonely nights at sea.

Mary nurtured only one great anxiety during the first two years of raising Tommo and Hawk, which sprang from the damning words of Mr Emmett.
'Mary my dear, listen to me. They be scum! They will grow to be idiots!'
She watched them intently in the cradle to see if their eyes followed her or whether they might be made to grab for some object she held or respond to some loving nonsensical sound she made to show a growing awareness. Her fears proved groundless. Tommo and Hawk cried and laughed, slept and ate and fell and walked and played like any other happy, healthy infants.

Mary left nothing to chance, though, and as soon as they could comprehend in the slightest she began reading to them. At four years old they could recite a host of nursery rhymes, the one closest to Mary's heart being Little Jack Horner, for it contained the two things she was most determined to give her children, good food and an education.

Little Jack Horner,

Sat in the corner,

Eating a Christmas pie;

He put in his thumb,

And pulled out a plum,

And said, 'What a good boy am I!'

He was feasting away,

And 'twas late in the day;

When his mother, who made it a rule

Her children should ever

Be learned and clever,

Came in to prepare him for school.

Mary was also determined that their morals should be of the strictest rectitude and they would be most severely punished should they not tell the truth. She had sent to England for a book with the rather long title,
The Good Child's Delight; or, the road to knowledge. In short, entertaining lessons of one or two syllables; Nursery morals; chiefly in monosyllables.
This she read to them so many times that Hawk, at the age of five, could recite the entire book. Others she bought from the Hobart Town Circulating Library, where she drove the stern-faced Mrs Deane quite mad with her requests for children's books. One of the boys' favourites, for they cried at each reading, was
The Happy Courtship, Merry Marriage, and Pic Nic Dinner, of Cock Robin, and Jenny Wren. To which is added, alas! the doleful death of the bridegroom.

On their cots Mary constructed strings of wooden beads in the same configuration as an abacus, so that their earliest memories would be of the rattle and touch of the red and black beads in their tiny hands.

At five both children were well acquainted with the alphabet and could read well and write simple words upon their slates. Tommo was clever enough but would quickly become impatient, while Hawk seemed much more interested. At the age of seven, when Mary took them to Mrs Tibbett's primary school, an establishment which took the young children of the tradesmen rank, both Tommo and Hawk proved well in advance of other children in their class. Hawk was not only the largest child among his age group, he also stood out as the most intelligent.

Though children are not concerned with colour, their parents soon enough perceived the presence of Hawk and it did not take them long to complain about the black child. Mary was asked by Mrs Tibbett to remove Hawk and Tommo from the school.

It was a fight Mary knew she could not win, and she saw no point in venting her spleen on the hapless Mrs Tibbett, who seemed genuinely distressed that she was forced to make the demand. Besides, Mary felt that the school was holding back her children for the benefit of other children less well prepared.

So she determined that she would continue as she had begun and personally attend to the education of her two children. In this she had elicited Ikey's most reluctant assistance, particularly as she required that he teach them nothing in the way of dishonest practices. Ikey protested that he knew of no other way to teach an urchin, and that if he should be forbidden to teach Tommo and Hawk the gentle art of picking a pocket, or show them how to palm a card or otherwise cheat at cribbage, pick a simple lock, short change a customer, successfully enter a house though it be securely locked, or doctor a stolen watch, there was nothing contained in his lexicon of knowledge which he believed could be useful to them.

'You will teach them of human nature! They must grow up able to read a man or woman the way you do. How they stand or use their hands or smile or protest, how to know the fool from the villain and the good from the bad. Who to trust and who should be avoided. The manner o' the confidence man and the language o' the cheat and the liar. That is what I want them to know, Ikey Solomon!'

Ikey laughed. 'They are not Jews, my dear, they are not the raw material it has taken a thousand years and more to breed, so that this kind of wisdom is ingested without the need to think.'

'You must teach them, Ikey. Hawk most of all, for I fear greatly for him in this world where the dark people suffer even though they commit no crime, where the lowest wretch thinks himself superior to a black skin. You must teach Hawk to be a good reader of human nature.'

Ikey soon discovered that children with full bellies who are surrounded by love and attention make poor observers of human nature. Children learn the lessons in life by being thrown into life, and so he decided to take Hawk and Tommo to the races each Saturday. But first he taught them a new language. He found that both boys enjoyed the finger and hand actions which comprise the ancient silent language used among the traders in Petticoat Lane, Rosemary Lane, Whitechapel, Covent Garden and the other London markets. It is said that it is a language used by the Jews since the fall of the great temple of Solomon. That the Jews brought it to England in the Middle Ages and it became a language used in English prisons and had been brought to Port Arthur, where prisoners were not permitted to talk to each other. It was also most useful at the race track, where bookmakers talked to each other, setting the odds and laying of bets across the paddocks, and there it was commonly known as tic-tac.

Tommo and Hawk, like all young children, quickly learned the rudiments of this language and it did not take long before they added some of their own unique signs and devices, which meant they could silently communicate to each other on any subject.

Ikey was delighted with their progress, and when they were seven he would take them to the races, where they would move from one on-course bookmaker to the other sending back the odds to Ikey so that he was seldom caught short or 'holding the bundle' as it is known in racing parlance. In exposing them to the myriad people to be found at the Hobart races he was able to begin teaching Tommo and Hawk the lessons Mary wanted them to learn. Ikey taught them how to look at a crowd and break it into its various components.

'If you knows what you're looking for in a crowd, my dear, then you can read it like a book.' He looked down at Hawk. 'A crowd be composed o' what, Mr Dark Thought?'

Hawk looked at Ikey with his big serious eyes. 'Folks?'

'Folks! That be a right and splendid answer, very clever indeed!'

'What sort o' folks, Mr After Thought?' he asked Tommo.

'Very ugly ones what stinks!' Tommo replied, waiting for the giggle to come from Hawk.

'Well, well, well and we are the pretty ones what smells perfect are we then?' Ikey said. 'I stinks meself and I am not very pretty I admits. So be the crowd all like me? Like Ikey Solomon?'

'All sorts of different folks,' Hawk replied for Tommo.

'Yes! With all sorts o' different needs and deeds,' Ikey replied. 'Needs and deeds, that be what you have to learn, my dears. If you knows what folks needs, you can begin to understand their deeds.'

Ikey would patiently teach them how to spot the pickpocket, and to listen to the chatter of a tout, to notice the gestures and the patterns of speech of the confidence trickster, how to know when a man was a liar or a cheat. How body language was almost always the first way to judge a man.