Trouble at Mill

As well as being a rattling good read, Sabine Baring-Gould’s bloodstained historical romance Cheap Jack Zita is full of coincidences that make me feel rather possessive about it. It’s set in Ely for one thing, and so am I – admittedly not quite the Ely of 1816, though reading the book, it’s surprising to see how little the place has changed in the past 200 years.

Zita, the cheapjack of the title, is a pedlar, and I’m a licensed street trader myself. As the story opens, she is crying her wares at the annual Etheldreda Fair outside the cathedral – something I do every year, up against the railings of the Bishop’s Palace, between Mr Tilly’s coconut shy and the thrills and spills of Roll-a-Coin. But while Zita is a chestnut-haired temptress of 17, armed with a wooden flail to deter the local lads from mounting the tailboard of her waggon and claiming kisses, with her sick father lying curled up inside, my partner Nora and I tend to lean against our leaky stall armed with nothing more lethal than bacon sandwiches, wondering how much we dare to ask for a retro Fifties teapot. Sabine Baring-Gould, the wealthy and eccentric parson and polymath who wrote this period page-turner with a social conscience, was born at Exeter in 1834, near to where he died ninety years later. Chronologically as well as literarily he bridges the gap between the death of Sir Walter Scott and the first flowering of P.G. Wodehouse. His novels, histories and other works (including The Lives of the Saints, 3,600 of them) are scarcely real today, though some of his hymns such as ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ are still stars on Sundays, and at one time he had more titles in the British Museum library catalogue than any other living English writer. While serving his curacy at Horbury in Yorkshire, at the age of 30 Baring-Gould met and fell in love with Grace Taylor, a slip of a girl sixteen years younger than himself who worked in a local mill. He spent the next four years of their courtship educating her before they were finally married in 1868, which is said to have provided his young friend George Bernard Shaw with the models for Professor Higgins and Eliza in Pygmalion. The marriage was long and happy: their fifteenth child was born in 1891, the same year that his eldest daughter got married. An absent-minded man at the best of times, at a children’s party in his Devonshire manor-house he once bent down to pat one of the guests on the head and enquired kindly, ‘Whose little girl might you be?’ ‘Yours, Papa,’ wailed the child. Baring-Gould’s first and best-known novel Mehalah was written during an unhappy decade spent as rector in a desolate parish on Mersea Island among the gloomy Essex flats, and the book’s darkstained air of despair and oppression led Swinburne to compare it to Jane Eyre. Cheap Jack Zita – written after he had inherited the family estate of Lew Trenchard in Devon, where he spent the rest of his life, becoming rector in 1881 – is no less wild and vivid than Mehalah but more positive in tone, perhaps because written in happier times. When winter comes to the Fens with terrible ferocity, Zita finds herself trapped in the barnyard of the villainous Hezekiah Drownlands, who has given her shelter (her ailing father having breathed his last on the night following the Fair). Hezekiah is one of that breed of rough and uncompromising peasant farmers, known locally as Fen Tigers, who were granted land when it first appeared out of the drainings in the seventeenth century, and whose descendants can be seen hereabouts to this day. Baring-Gould uses the harsh weather to underline the bitterness of the times: in 1816 the seeds of unrest were springing up among the underclass throughout the country. In fact one of the few comforts that had kept them quiet up until then was opium, a common domestic crop in Fenland cottage gardens. But now the peasants are talking of re volt, though they speak of it only fearfully and in whispers for fear of vicious reprisals in the form of flogging, imprisonment, transportation or even death. Ely and nearby Littleport are about to explode into twenty-four hours of anarchic rioting, as a result of which five men will hang. As the water level rises in the Fens, tension mounts with it. Zita is horrified to discover that the man giving her shelter is the murderer of his old enemy Jake Runham.Worse, he has fallen in love with her, while the young farmer, Runham’s son Mark, to whom Zita in turn has taken a shine, is forever away with a fiery Fenland character named Kerenheppuch who works the lonely Red Wings Mill. The climax of the novel comes with the eruption of the notorious Ely and Littleport riots which, though awesome enough at the time, proved to be little more than a wet night’s looting and drunkenness in the taverns of the town. The ensuing trial scene is a marvelous tour de force, high drama edged with sharp comedy as the author has great sport with the stupidity and self-regard of the officers of the law in a set-piece of which Dickens himself would have been proud. In the denouement Zita is forced to set fire to the Red Wings Mill to save Kerenheppuch and the handsome young Mark from drowning beneath the ice in the cut, having finally promised herself to the brute Drownlands in return for their rescue. In a brilliantly orchestrated midnight scene the villain perishes horribly, and confusions are straightened out: the good end happily, the bad unhappily. And that, as Miss Prism so rightly observed, is what fiction means.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 3 © Clive Unger-Hamilton 2004