Land of Heart's Desire

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas; Victorian Romance

Synopsis

Iestyn Mortymer was sentenced to twenty-one years transportation to the colonies for his part in the Chartist Rebellion of 1839. But three years on, he escaped during the massacre of the British Army in Afghanistan, and returned to Wales under a false identity. His beautiful Afghan lover Durrani, granddaughter of Dost Mahommed, the King of Kabul, having been banished from her country because of her relationship with Iestyn, joins him with their son, Suresh, to begin a new life in West Wales, farming at Cae White, near Carmarthen. However, Durrani's grandfather has other ideas. His kingship is under threat from Akbar Khan, his traitorous warrior son. To prevent Akbar from seizing the throne, Dost Mahommed changes his mind about his granddaughter's banishment and now seeks to have young Suresh returned to Kabul, in order for the child to take the throne, with his mother as Queen regent. The Dost's insistent command finds little welcome among the residents of Cae White Farm, however, and Iestyn prepares for battle...

Release date: September 4, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 256

Sample

Little has been written by modern historians on the condition and labour of children working in the mines and ironworks of nineteenth-century Britain; indeed, such history was virtually undiscovered until recently: the result of this dilution of historical fact is that claim and counterclaim as to the veracity of modern statements were invariably challenged. Establishment historians have lied by omission.

Testimony of Phillip Phillips, aged nine years (his face badly scarred as a result of an explosion). Questioned by the Inspector of Mines, Mr H.W. Jones, he said: I started work when I was seven. I get very tired sitting in the dark by the door [ventilating door] so I go to sleep. Nearly a year ago there was an accident and most of us were burned. It hurt very much because all the skin was burnt off my face, and I couldn’t work for six months. I have seven brothers and sisters, but only five of us can find work; none of us have ever been to school.

Testimony of Mary Davis, aged six. She said, when found asleep: I went to sleep because my lamp had gone out for want of oil. I was frightened, for someone had stolen my bread and cheese, I think it was the rats.

Susan Reece, also aged six and a doorkeeper, said: I’ve been below six or eight months and don’t like it much. I come here at six and leave at six at night … I haven’t been hurt yet.

Such young doorkeepers often rolled on to the line in sleep, and were run over by oncoming coal wagons.

Testimony of John Fuge, aged eleven: I began work when I was seven, cutting slates in Cornwall; came to Wales two years ago. This is a very wet mine, our feet are never dry. Pumping is hard work, so we only work eight hours at a time. Sometimes I get so tired I don’t care about eating. When I’m thirsty I drink the mine water, and I earn thirty pence a week; I work every day, so I can’t go to Sunday school.

Richard Richards, aged seven, told the Inspector: I was six when I first came below. I work for about ten hours a day with my father; sometimes he lets me cut coal in his stall.

William Richards, working underground, appears to have been a character; he said: I don’t know how old I am, but I’ve been below about three years. When I first came down I couldn’t keep me eyes open, but now I sits by the door and smokes my pipe. I smokes about 2 ounces a week, and it costs me twopence. I don’t know what tobacco is made of.

Another lad, the son of a clergyman, working in the same colliery, said: My name’s Josiah Jenkins, and I’m seven. Been down eighteen months and get threepence a day, but I haven’t been hurt yet; and Jeremiah Jerimiah, aged ten. His father was dead and he had a badly disfigured face, caused by an explosion when he was five, and his friend, William Skidmore, aged eight, had a badly crushed hand – caused by a roof fall.

Ben Thomas, aged eight, hauling skips of coal – a ‘very pitiful little fellow’ said the Inspector, and Ben said: I’ve been down here a year helping my brother to haul skips [sledge carts] of coal. Sometimes I get oatmeal broth before work, which is very hard and I am running all day. None of the boys in this pit wears shoes – and Edward Edwards, who was aged nine, described how … I’ve been working down here three months dragging carts loaded with coal from the coal face to the main road underground; there are no wheels to the carts [skips again]. It is not so well to drag them as the cart sometimes is dragged on to us, and we get crushed often. I have often hurt my hands and fingers and had to stay home.

One of the doorkeepers was Zelophila Llewelyn, aged nine, who told the Inspector: I eat bread and cheese down there. I don’t often lose my food to the rats, but they do sometimes steal the bags of bread and cheese from other lads.

Finally, Tom Jenkins and his tram partner in the hauling, John Hugh, told the official: We have no dinner time underground; I eat when I can; sometimes I get into the tram while my butty is hauling, and eat in there; he does the same when I push. My father is dead and my mother has seven children; one of these is aged seven and drives a horse. The trammers beat him and the others with whips when they do not mind to get the coal out quickly.

Commissioner’s note:

The boys are called Carters. Their occupation is to drag the carts or skips of coal from the working place to the main road underground. In this mode of labour the leather girdle passes round the body and the chain is between the legs, attached to the cart, and the lads drag on all fours.

This is the history that has been side-stepped in our time by 90 per cent of our Establishment historians; it is to be wondered if the crimes committed against the children of the Industrial Revolution are not being repeated, in a different guise, against the bodies of the children today.

Had I known the fatal outcome to my family, I would not have visited the city of Carmarthen that day.

The March day was splendid, with just enough nip in the estuary wind to freeze a baby’s bubble, and Wales was all over green and russet brown, spring having just booted wailing winter out of it; and Dai Dando, our coachman, was in fine voice, bawling his bass oratorio over the rears of the big, brown horses, his words drowned in the clattering of the wheels.

All this I later recorded in my Diary of Events, for a new life is not worth living, said my father, unless it is meticulously set down in a man’s own hand, as had earlier been done, apparently, by a chap called Samuel Pepys, and what he put down was enough to make your hair curl.

Therefore, soon after my mother, the Princess Durrani, brought me to Wales from Afghanistan, I began this diary by writing in the front of it in English (much corrected as I got older):

This is a diary of events recording the life and times of Tom Mortymer, aged six, not to be confused with Suresh Ali Fusta Mahommed, known otherwise as heir to the throne of the House of Barakzai in Afghanistan. So please understand, all who read this, that my name is Tom and that, although my mother is an Afghan princess, I am the son of Iestyn Mortymer of Cae White Farm in the Welsh County of Carmarthenshire; therefore I am Welsh, and have no intention of sitting on the Afghan throne in Kabul or any other foreign place.

That having been made clear to the world, I sat nibbling the end of the quill and staring out of the broad window of my father’s study to the sunlit acres stretching out to the banks of the River Towey.

A shadow fell over the doorway.

“Are ye comin’, youngster?” demanded Dai Dando, our bruiser, “or are ye sittin’ there moonin’? Your ma and pa are outside in the coach, waitin’ for the off.”

“Don’t you order me about,” I said, “or I’ll show you the four corners of the room!”

“Aw, come on, Maister!” and he raised a gnarled fist at me.

Old now, he was once a mountain fighter, this one, with five guineas of a gentry purse every Saturday night in the yard of the Black Boar tavern, he told me, and I didn’t know a right cross from a left hook until old Dai came into my life.

Because I moved slowly, he swore at me in Welsh, a language I didn’t understand, and he added, prodding me out into the shippon, “Stop playin’ games and move your backside, or your mam will get her rag out and throw one of her tantrums.”

I did not reply to this; silence always came over me when my mother was mentioned.

“One day,” she said, as I got into the coach and sat between her and Dada, “you will learn the virtue of punctuality, one observed in Afghanistan, but non-existent in this appalling country.”

A word about Mother while on the subject.

Four years ago back in Afghanistan, the courtiers there called her “The Pearl of the Age”, and I can well believe it.

Black was her hair, lying like a wreath either side of her dark and lovely face, then falling in tight ringlets over her shoulders; she was small, only coming up to my father’s ears, and her figure had been most beautifully designed by the God who made ladies; her limbs (for once, by chance, I saw her in the bath) were delicately proportioned, and when she danced for the dirty old viziers in the foreign courts, their wrinkled eyes rolled in their sun-black faces. Possessing eyes that slanted seductively at strangers, but not my father, hers held the tenderness of a young fawn’s, until something upset her, and then they were the eyes of a bitch, said Old Bid, our cook, “and a common young bitch an’ all,” she added, “so don’t talk to me about the Mistress, for I’m ’aving no truck wi’ the likes of her, for all her fancy airs and graces, and ye can tell her that to her face. Can ye hear me?”

“Woman, they can hear you back in County Cork, so stop your palaver,” said Dai Dando as I came into the kitchen.

Now the pair of them looking at the floor, mainly Biddy.

“Biddy O’Shea,” I said to her. “Please do not call my mother a bitch.”

“It weren’t for your young ears, Maister,” said she.

“Nor for my father’s. Supposing he had heard you?”

And she warmed to me, sniffing and snuffling. “Forgive me. It’s just that I’m so sorry for your pa, that’s all …”

“Do not worry about my father, he can take care of himself.”

We stood in silence, and I added, “And another thing. My mother may be your mistress, but my father is the master here.”

“That’s what he thinks,” murmured Dai.

But that was then, and this was now – sitting between my parents in the coach swaying along the road to Carmarthen for our meeting with the County Commissioners, the representatives of the Home Secretary in London.

“They tell me that the important one will be the one in the middle,” said my father, “and that he is a very unpleasant piece of work.”

“But he is not your God Almighty,” replied my mother, and from the coach window there came a little gust of wind, bringing to me her perfume, a scent of musk, and she added, “Did you mention, in passing, that I happen to be the Princess Durrani?”

“The cure of all ills?” asked my father, and she did not reply to this. “Frankly, I doubt if it will impress him in the least.”

Dai took the coach into the middle of the city, tethered the horses, got an urchin by the ear with the promise of a penny to mind them, and handed my parents out on to the cobbles.

Here is a sight for sore eyes, this Carmarthen!

Almost instantly we were surrounded by pleading beggars, the ragged community of Welsh poor: soldiers in faded red jackets, still clutching at unhealed wounds, were there in scores; legs off, arms off, their empty sleeves and trousers tied up with string, they beset us with fierce cries for alms; this, the refuse of Victoria’s Colonial wars, from Waterloo to the Crimea, jigged and jogged and pulled at us; some down upon their spindly knees begging for bread. She, our noble Queen, said my father, who promised before her coronation, “I will try to be good”, had become the perpetrator of an evil ambition and the massacre of national innocence that would stand to the end of Time. My father was a man of few words, which befits true manhood, but his was a very high horse when it came to God bless our noble Queen; “for I have been in the thick of it,” he told me, “and have seen men die cursing her name.”

In the middle of the beggars he stood now, the tallest there, emptying his pockets of coins into their grimy hands; something he always did, I noticed, when we came into a beggar town. And Dai Dando, when each had had his share, handled them gently aside with the indulgence he showed when dealing with people of lesser intellect, although he himself was solid rock between the ears.

While this was going on, my mother stood in her lace and finery like a sunlit goddess of beauty, shrinking away from the grasping hands, and the beggar women in their rags touched the hem of her skirt with awe and whispered exclamations.

Mind, it do always beat me how many moulds God uses when making people; in His workshop He must have racks and racks of them, each one numbered and designed, male and female; to suit the needs of the population at the time, I suppose. And apart from the special mould He uses for the Welsh, Iberian or Brythonic (such being special for very special people, says Dada), some moulds, especially for females as beautiful as my mother, have to be of classical lines: silk-lined, I expect, for royalty and aristocrats; yellow moulds for Chinese, black ones for Africans, and white for the likes of my father; but for the likes of my mother and I, I expect He has a few moulds coffee-coloured, which He leaves in the midday sun until He cooks them right.

Beyond the fringe of the beggars a girl was standing; about my age was she, and did not beg, but stood there gripping her mam’s skirt and staring in my direction.

It was her eyes! Large and bright they were, like jewels in her dark-skinned cheeks: indeed, it was because she was the same colour as me that I continued to stare back at her. Her mam, tall and slim in the body, was possessed of long black hair: proof that she was of gipsy blood, her plaits were tied with red ribbons.

“Damn me,” exclaimed Dai, steering me out of the crowd, “there’s a beauty!” and he elbowed me in the ribs to bring me back to life.

Pushing a path through the crowd he led us along the quay.

“Did you see the Romanies, Tom?” asked my father, and I noticed the unusual glance of recognition he gave to the gipsy mother, the meaning of which was to become clear later in my life.

I nodded, still looking at the girl, and at that moment she lifted her chin in a small petulance, turned, and walked away. But still I looked, following her movements.

“Little Jenny Wildflower’s taken ye legs with her, has she?” whispered Dai into my ear.

“Who?” I asked.

“Jen Wildflower, the Romany!”

“Come on, come on,” said my mother, pulling at me. “You can always stoop to pick up nothing.”

“Nothing?” Dada gripped my hand. “They are the aristocrats of the gipsy tribes – red bows in their hair, Tom, remember?”

Yes, it was her eyes. And I think I knew in that moment, that at some time, now or later, this girl would become a part of my life.

“This way, sir,” said Dai, and ushered us up the steps of the Immigration Office.

Jenny Wildflower … eh?

It was like the name of her soul.

The great hall in which we were interviewed was lofty with pillars, a marble floor and echoing Corinthian columns tinted with gold, yet a blue-bottle, buzzing desultorily against a high-paned window, held me with fixed interest; flies on walls, I thought, must surely hold the plans of the Universe, so stuffed are they with the secrets of Man.

My bottom already ached on the mahogany chair and my high-buttoned boots were killing me. Three aged Immigration Commissioners sat opposite us behind a polished desk; I sat between my parents, already dozing in the blue-bottle’s song.

“Your name,” asked one of the three, “is Iestyn Mortymer, sir?”

My father smiled a reply.

“And you reside, it says here, at Cae White Farm, in the County?”

“I do,” said Dada.

“With your wife and son, the boy sitting here?”

“Correct.”

“Not quite correct,” interjected my mother. “I am his common-law wife here: in my country, which is more advanced, I am his wife through the joining of hands; it is as Allah wills it.”

“Let me make something clear, madam,” said one of the commissioners wearily. “The laws of Man are the only authority here. As a token it may appear of small importance; as a fact it is the law which here applies. When one is in Rome, madam …”

“Please continue, sir,” said Dada.

A commissioner rustled papers. “Doubtless you are aware, Mr Mortymer, that now peace has been restored between our country and Afghanistan, our Ambassador is now again in residence in Kabul?”

“Of course.”

“And this Ambassador, representing the Crown, has, upon the instruction of your King, madam …” and here he bowed, “interceded upon your behalf and obtained from our Home Secretary a pardon which absolves you, Mr Mortymer, from continuing with your prison sentence here, which normally …”

He faltered, and my father added, “Which normally would have caused my arrest and further detention in this country. Yes, I know it, and am deeply obliged to the Ambassador.”

Another said, “The tragedy of the ‘Afghan Promenade’, as it is called here in military circles, is still with us, Mr Mortymer. Any who survived it are entitled to the understanding of the nation.”

My mother again interjected, “Would it not be more accurate, sir, to assume that had not my King intervened upon my behalf and sent me to join my husband here, he would by now have been arrested, tried and sentenced as a deserter, if unjustly. Enough of this bumbledum!”

“Durrani,” whispered my father, “for God’s sake …!”

A commissioner raised a pale, lined face to her. “Possibly, my lady, but it will do little to advance the reason for your visit to this Court, which is for us to give consideration to your husband’s application for your son, here present, to be granted British citizenship. Is that not the case?”

“It is,” answered Dada.

Adjusting his pince-nez spectacles, the man said, “Since it would appear that your King, lady, the Dost Mahommed, is so concerned with the welfare of your family … I am a little surprised to receive from the office of the Home Secretary the following message which has recently arrived from Kabul.” He raised his eyes to us. “I fear you will find the content displeasing.”

“What message?” demanded my mother.

“Shall I read it to you, sir?” This to my father.

“Please do.”

Picking up a paper, he read, “‘Be aware, at local and diplomatic level, that while political circles at the Court of Kabul emphasise the need for the family of the Princess Durrani to enjoy the protection of the British Crown, the King of Afghanistan refuses to sanction the granting of British citizenship to any male issue of the Princess, either now or later, she being of the Royal House of Barakzai. Instruct the applicants accordingly.’”

My mother shouted, getting to her feet, “That is insulting! More than that, I shall not acknowledge my grandfather’s authority! This is my son, and I shall order what nationality I like for him!”

“Alas, madam, that is not so,” said a commissioner wearily.

“You mean that you accept the jurisdiction of Barakzai without objection?”

Another opened his hands at us. “We have no alternative. The Foreign Office has no power to intervene in what is so evidently an Afghan matter.”

“But on what grounds does the Dost object?” asked my father.

“On grounds that your son, like his mother, is an Afghan national.”

“But are there not other cases of our nationals requesting British status?”

“Naturally, when normal restrictions are adequately met, such status is granted. A most friendly state now exists between our countries. But this is a Royal intervention.”

Moving away, my mother said vehemently, “Understand this, I shall not accept this interference without the most indignant protest to your Home Secretary. When I return to the Kabul Court, I shall do so unencumbered by a son who is recognised neither here nor at home; to be stateless in this world is a living death. Inform your superiors that I shall raise the matter with your own Royal family.”

“In which we wish you profitable success,” came the cold reply.

“So what happens in the meantime?”

“I suggest we all go home,” said my father.

In the coach, my mother asked, more placidly, “What can it mean, this Afghan intervention – God, we have been over three years resident in this damned country!”

Dada did not reply to this, but put his arm about me.

Later, coming into my bedroom with a lamp to wish me good night, he said, “Do not worry. I care little if you are granted British citizenship or not.”

“Mother cares,” I replied.

“Nor does she, in reality. It is simply that, being Durrani, she insists on being perverse. Do you understand?”

I shrugged, and he added, “Princesses, you see, are rather different from ordinary folk; one has to make allowances.”

I suppose, looking back on it, Old Bid, our cook-housekeeper, had supplanted my mother in my affection; for whereas Mam was cold and stiff in her affections, Bid was soft in all the places where a woman ought to be for a boy, and had a breast for weeping on.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone in fancying her, for Dai Dando wasn’t behind the door when Biddy Flannigan of County Cork was loose and mirthful, which was often: brown hair bunned at the back was she, and like a ship in full sail when off to Whitland market, with a cameo brooch pinned on her front like a gargoyle and a behind on her like the Mountains of Mourne. Which appeared to send Dai Dando demented, for he was never the same come Monday after Biddy had shown him the door on Sunday.

“It ain’t a question of knock twice and ask for Bid Flannigan,” said Dozie Annie, our new maid, “for she’s her own woman is that one, an’ a maiden lady, too, and twice to Church Feast Days and Michaelmas, being Church of England Irish.”

This new maid of ours, too, was a sight for a young man’s fancy, for what she lacked in the top storey she made up for in other directions; and since she was too young for Dai and too old for me, I naturally took to her like a duck to water; being prepared to sacrifice myself on the altar of womanhood the moment I turned fi. . .