The willow family is large, embracing more than 300 species, and through the boughs of each the wind sings a special song. The osiers along the rivers sometimes sing of sorrow, but not for long. Theirs are ‘short swallow flights of song that dip their wings in tears and skim away’. Perhaps the most popular are the pussy-foot willows, whose soft silver catkins delight us in springtime. When the gleaming silver buds begin to push their way above the close, red sheaths, we know that the time of the singing of birds is at hand. A week or two longer, when the ‘pussy-feet’ are half out of their protecting bracts, we may cut the twigs to adorn our homes. If these are put in bowls without water they will remain in exactly the same condition for years. The little red bracts may fall, but the development of the silky catkin has been effectually arrested, to be an unfailing reminder of spring until she comes again . . .
Stand beneath a pussy-willow on a warm, sunshiny day, when the air is full of scent and the murmur of browsing bees. A glance at the heavily laden visitors tells how faithfully they are carrying out their part of the work. Later try to visit the flowers of the mother tree, growing in some nearby watercourse. Shake a branch and a cloud of seeds, each fitted with a parachute of silky hairs, sails away on its mission of finding new lands to settle. The bees have done their work well . . .
Chapter 3
SHIPS THAT PASS
‘Before me as I write are some almost perfect roses, buds half-awake, gathered with dew on them . . . They are sweetly scented, yet already they are half-forgotten names. Tomorrow we shall mourn their passing.’
August 1887
Thirteen-year-old Edith looks through the coach window across waves of human activity that sweep the paved and stony surfaces of the great city of London. Towers and spires float high in the haze. Great rivers of traffic flow around them, converging and merging in narrow gutters between the buildings. Dark-clad figures duck and weave between carts, carriages and cabs, filling every available space in the street. London is just as Richard Jefferies had described it.
‘The vans almost float on human beings,’ he’d written. ‘Now the streams slacken, and now they rush again, but never cease, dark waves are always rolling down the incline opposite, waves swell out from the side rivers, all London converges into this focus. There is an indistinguishable noise, it is not clatter, hum, or roar, it is not resolvable, made up of a thousand thousand footsteps, from a thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels, of haste, and shuffle, and quick movements, and ponderous loads, no attention can resolve it into a fixed sound.’
It is unimaginably different from their quiet country life in Guildford. Even George is lost for words, bewildered by all the sights and sounds of this new world that surrounds them. It feels like they are dislocated and drifting, grieving for a lost past and anxious for an uncertain future.
Just four months ago they buried Harriett in a quiet corner of the Mount Cemetery and now here they all are in London, their lives packed up and ready to follow Harry all the way to Australia. Harry said that Melbourne was booming and there was abundant demand for builders like their father. The climate would be warmer: safer for all of them. Harriett’s sudden death had shocked them into action.
They spent last night with Uncle Arthur and Alfred in Addlestone. Now they are all in a coach together, Henry and his family, his two brothers and theirs, to wave them all off.
Susan, Edith’s cousin, suddenly cries out. ‘Look, there’s Big Ben!’
‘Hush,’ chides Uncle Alfred. ‘You can see it again, but they won’t!’
The coach is silent until they reach the docks.
They bundle out into a scene of chaos and catastrophe.
Pyramids of luggage, baskets, boxes and cases are piled everywhere, along with beds and bedding, water cans, pannikins, hookpots and baths. It looks as if someone has emptied a shop’s warehouse onto the waterfront. The Harms’ luggage is piled up too, their life’s possessions carefully stacked into the allowable space of 40 cubic feet. They cannot afford to pay any excess. Most of the other passengers clearly can and the squeezing, crowding, pushing confusion to get on board is something fearful.
By the time Edith has helped her sisters and parents organise their goods in their third-class cabins on the lower deck, the ship is already underway. It is late afternoon on 11 August 1887. The four-masted steamer Ionic is towed out of ‘The Old Dart’ stern-first from Gravesend. Sailing backwards to an upside-down land on the other side of the world. Hervey and George are standing on the forepeak and waving their caps to a stocky chap in a yachtsman’s cap seated in the stern of a pinnace.
‘Goodbye, Captain!’ they shout cheekily.
The man responds with a cheerful wave of his cigar as the band on deck strikes up ‘God Save the Queen’.
‘That’s the Prince of Wales,’ says one of the crew as he passes by, nearly tripping over Edith. ‘Careful, miss, I didn’t see you there.’
The ship soon passes into open waters, bow-first under her own steam and, beneath the cliffs of Dover, they eat their last meal in English waters – Irish stew – before the seas rise and even George is confined to his bunk with seasickness.
MY SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER has returned from music camp tired and with a sore throat. It’s not just from too much singing. I feel her forehead, quiz her about bright lights, an aching
