BB-80004 The Wisteria Club
The Wisteria Club
Blueboy Library
BB-80004
Peter Tuesday Hughes
$2.25
Introduction
A Starting Point
You may not want to believe what I write in this Journal when I tell you the names used are pseudonyms (including my own) and the places described are as airy-fairy and ephemeral as clouds—with the exception of certain historical sites and street names known to anyone who has ever visited the city of London. These I could not justifiably disguise.
When events I shall tell you about took place in 1880, I was a lad of sixteen, somewhat bewildered and vulnerable. And with good reason: My parents, beautiful and American, whom I adored, were drowned in a trans-Atlantic crossing the spring of that year; why I was allowed to live remains a mystery. As my friend the good Bishop of Chichister says (much too often!) “God works in wondrous ways.” That may or may not be true. In any case, I was cast up on the Dorset coast of England with a sailor from the ship who, it would seem, had also been chosen by the Bishop’s God to escape a watery death; and, though poor Willie vanished from my life quickly, I owe him the debt of it.
In the year 1880, Queen Victoria was sixty-one, and already a fat, blowsy little person, rather like a dumpy suet pudding. Some of the friends I will describe for your amusement claimed they remembered her when she was lithe, radiant and full of love for her Albert, the Prince Consort.
Victoria, they told me—these friends who cannot be called friends!—did not even love her own children overly much and she concentrated all this motherly love on her dear Albert. This is history and would be boring for me to go into further.
Perhaps, Victoria’s indifference to what went on around her, the general debauchery (even at Court!) and the crime that took place in the city of London and the poverty, makes Our Queen responsible for what happened to me in this Journal so long delayed—in fact, delayed until most of the characters in it are dead. If another kind of Personage had been on the throne of England, I wonder what my life would have been: Would it have been altered?
Blaming Victoria is a comforting thought. Why not? Historians blame the poor woman for most of England’s subsequent problems: Loss of Empire and World prestige.
At this distance in time, London in 1880 seems a paradise, a place of wonder and excitement, the Hub of the Universe. A view in retrospect, of course. When I first saw London, after that dreadful sea voyage, I was terrified, to say the least. The police claimed I’d either lost my mind or was faking! But today, and the world with all its complexities, its wars, its social upheavals and discontent, in contrast seems a hell. I’ve discussed this with my friend the Bishop and, to my astonishment, he agrees; however, he did not live through what I have, although he did have his share of war.
Somehow, poor Willie and I wandered along the Dorset roads and into London, foot-sore, hungry, and without a friend. I do not recall too clearly what happened or in which sequence, but I think Willie attempted to steal some food from a vender’s cart in Covent Garden, and the constables arrested both of us.
Old Bailey is an abominable place, full of ghosts and the moans of prisoners in solitary; there will be more about this prison later, for this was not to be the last time I saw its grim interior. By English law, at sixteen, I was an adult, fit to work or be put to work as a slave for complicity in a crime. (Read Dickens.) But, perhaps again by the intervention of the Bishop’s God, this was not to be my fate: I was sent to a worse place, though not, I’m certain, without compassion by the panel of judges, a home for wayward children and orphans called MRS FREDERICK’S HOME FOR UNCLAIMED CHILDREN. The name, alone, must give you an idea of what it was like?
Althea Frederick was a widow, had been rich at one time before the death of her husband, and her house on Swains Way had been a grand mansion years before, rooms still large and sumptuously decorated, those we children did not use or were not permitted to enter. Money for our food and board was provided by the Crown from the Queen’s Privy Purse. I presume most of that largesse went to Mrs. Frederick’s fondness of clothes and gee-gaws fashionable in the period—and for drink: Champagne was this woman’s obsession.
The “unclaimed children” received meager dollops from this Purse, though we were not exactly mistreated, nothing, at least, that could be identified as mistreatment, no scars nor bruises for inspectors from the Court to complain about—if they chose to complain. But I pray I never have to eat another bowl of fishhead gruel in my lifetime!
There were parties, or what Althea Frederick called “Thrilling Occasions”. I even have an impression of one “occasion” when a frosty little lady dressed completely in black—black veils, black gloves, black high-buttoned shoes and whispering black taffeta gown—sat in a regal-looking purple velvet chair, tiny eyes inspecting us with odd intensity from folds of crinkled flesh. This memory may be distorted somewhat because it seems to me this Appearance was only a day or two after my arrival; I had not yet learned to feign indifference and disdain as the other children had learned, those who had been at the Home for years (and some were no longer “children”) On other “Occasions” we were permitted cake and ices supplied by a local tea-shop as a charitable contribution; the owner of this shop, Mister Harold Fountain, shall appear later in this Journal.
And we boys were squeezed into clean, pressed, tight suits of blue wool serge, hot and clammy, and instructed to keep our fingers out of our mouths and don’t lick ice from a spoon. The girls wore starched cotton, usually white, their hair tied in ribbons of various colors; and woe to the poor wretch who spilled food on her dress! No dinner for two nights and a locked door to her room!
We would stand around, though Madame insisted we act “natural” (“Smile, you little idiots! or I’ll take a brush to your bottoms!”) while the guests looked us over. These guests were usually young gentlemen. I recall my awe upon first seeing the way they were clothed and the way they spoke, affecting mannerisms that amazed a “cloddish American” (Mrs. Frederick’s term!) Very soon, in this Journal, you shall see how easily I slipped into this blithe, languid pose myself, and, I must confess, some of the attire I wore later outshone any of the young “fops” just described.
I soon learned the purpose of these visits by the foppish young men, the reason for these “thrilling occasions”. I will not pretend I was naive at sixteen, but the ways of London during and after the Regency were unfamiliar except in history books which, God knows, do not tell the true story.
Now may be the time to relate my own ancestry: You must know by now that I am American. What I’ve not told you is that I am, also, part American Indian. To be exact, my great-grandmother was a Mahican, daughter of a chief of Algonquin-speaking tribes in the Hudson River valley. My mother always insisted this ancestor had been a “princess”, and Tsquanto, my great-grandmother, sailed to England,
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