Searching For The Secret River. Kate Grenville

Would rather walk for miles, getting more and more lost, than stand on a street corner with a map in my hand. My day was made if someone mistook me for a local and asked me the way.

      I eked out my visa with all kinds of casual jobs: I wrote captions for the illustrations in textbooks, edited documentary films, worked as a typist for companies that made soft drinks, computer printers, sheet music. I wasn’t looking forward to the day my visa would run out and I’d have to go back to Australia.

      Eventually, though, I came home. I’d changed, but so had Australia. Migration from all around the world had transformed an outpost of Britain into something more complex. The national anthem no longer began ‘God save our gracious Queen’ but ‘Australians all, let us rejoice’. We were writing books, making music and doing paintings that were something other than imitations of what was happening in Britain. No one seemed to have heard of Biggles any more.

      I was glad to be part of this new thing that was happening. I got on with work and family and made a good life. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

      So being back in London after a quarter of a century was an odd and complicated feeling. I met my earlier self around every corner—that person who’d felt like a stranger in her own country, who wouldn’t acknowledge that she was really a foreigner here, in England.

      I’d told Melissa about this feeling and said that I was planning to do some research into family history while I was here. After our conversation, it felt even more important to find out more about that shadowy man, Solomon Wiseman.

       5

       The Society of Genealogists

      I imagined that this family history business would be tidy: a matter of stepping from one fact to another. I had an idea of myself as an orderly researcher, with index cards and colour-coded folders. The past could be put together like a jigsaw puzzle, I thought: take enough time, have enough patience, collect enough facts, and it would all make a picture.

      The logical place to start was at the beginning. Where was Wiseman born, and when?

      Like so many London addresses, the Society of Genealogists was a kind of intelligence test. When next day I finally found the street called Charterhouse Buildings—a cul-de-sac full of rubbish bins somewhere up beyond St Paul’s—I felt pretty cocky. I was an old London hand, after all.

      It was a tall thin building and, being so tall and thin, inside it seemed to be mostly narrow, lino-covered stairs that strained and popped as people went up and down, pressing themselves into the corner of the landing to let each other pass. The Births, Deaths and Marriages Room on the second floor was busy. Behind the counter, elderly gentlemen in tweed—volunteer genealogists, I discovered—were helping the customers.

      Someone had unfolded a long scroll of sticky-taped paper with an endless family tree tracking down page after page and was poring over it with one of the tweedy gentlemen. A woman like me, with too many coats and bags over her arm, kept saying, ‘No, it’s the distaff line I want, d’you see? The distaff line.’ A tremulous old man was trying to use the equally ancient photocopier in the corner. A volunteer was explaining, ‘It costs 20p, but you put 10p in and give me 10p, cos it doesn’t take 20p.’ The old man turned over the coins in his palm, first one way, then the other.

      When it was my turn, I thought it would be plain sailing. I had brought my seven Solomon Wisemans with me to London. The most likely seemed to be the one born in 1776 and baptised at St Mary Mounthaw. My plan was to ask for the registers of the church.

      But my gentleman—a scholarly fellow with leather elbow-patches—frowned as if at news of a death. ‘St Mary Who?’

      I repeated the name.

      ‘Never heard of it,’ he announced, and that was going to be that, but I was able to bring forth from my shabby bag the printout from the Mormon website.

      He frowned over it for some time, even turning it over to see the back, which wasn’t much help as I’d been recycling my paper and the back announced Ms Ford’s Year Six Farewell Please Bring A Plate. Finally he consulted another, sterner man.

      In front of me across the counter they compared abstruse names. ‘Have you looked in so-and-so?’ ‘Yes, and I tried the Register of such-and-such too.’ At last in a small shabby book, they found it.

      No one had ever heard of St Mary Mounthaw because the church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. Its parish was later joined with St Mary Somerset—another name from the Mormon records. Where were the parish records for St Mary Somerset? More consulting obscure books, more riffling through indices and cross-references.

      St Mary Somerset, it turned out, was also destroyed in the Great Fire. It was rebuilt by Wren soon after, but was demolished in 1872 and the parish united with St Nicholas Cole Abbey.

      I seemed to be getting a long way from Solomon Wiseman.

      St Nicholas Cole Abbey was gutted by a firebomb in May 1941. Uh oh, I thought, there go the parish registers.

      The search was no longer mine, however. There were now no fewer than four gentlemen activated by my enquiry. Between them all, they performed some little bit of genealogical legerdemain and directed me to the proceedings of the Harleian Society, Volume 58, Shelf MX/R58.

      I sat down at one of the big brown lino-covered tables, along with the other searchers burdened with raincoats and bags, and took a deep breath.

      Volume 58 of the Proceedings of the Harleian Society consisted of lists of baptisms, births and deaths for St Mary Mounthaw. Feeling on the edge of some momentous discovery, I turned the pages.

      Suddenly there he was, in the christenings for 1776: May 26, Solomon, s. of Richard and Jane Wiseman, Rector James Jones.

      I stared at the words, straining after feeling. None came. This wasn’t Solomon Wiseman. These were marks on a page, nothing more. I copied them into my notebook, just the same, and stared, wanting them to split open and reveal the person behind the name: a red-faced baby, crying at the cold touch of water from the baptismal font, the mother ready to spring forward in case James Jones dropped her son, the father shifting from foot to foot, impatient to get back to his afternoon with…no, I was making it all up.

      I flipped backwards and forwards, looking for other Wisemans, and found plenty.

      1772, May 15, Mary, daughter of Richard and Jane Wiseman.

      1767, April 26, Elizabeth, daughter of Richard and Jane Wiseman.

      Were these the sisters of Solomon? Elizabeth, eleven years old, suddenly popped into the picture around the font, wearing…what did they wear? Beside her, Mary, aged four, held the edge of her sister’s dress with one hand and picked her nose with the other. Did the sisters make a pet of the new baby, carrying him on their hips, arguing about whose turn it was to push him in the pram? Did they have prams? Or were they the other kind of big sister, the secretive hair-pulling and ear-pinching kind?

      Outside the window, the low grey sky had decided to let out some rain. The building site next door speckled and darkened and I could see people on the street two floors below pointlessly turning up their coat collars. I was in no hurry to go out into the rain, so I opened more of the proceedings of the Harleian Society.

      I tried the baptismal registers of St Mary Somerset, which swallowed up the parish of St Mary Mounthaw. It had a whole string of Wisemans.

      1749, February 4, Robert, son of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.

      1751, December 8, Sarah, daughter of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.

      1753, December 23, Solomon, son of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.

      1756, March 7, John, son of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.