The Poet and The Paupers

V.023

Headborough, Constable, six children, the eldest already nearly 13, an adequate supply of pupils for his school – 1820 began hopefully for Richard and Mary. Then Fate – or God or smallpox or blind chance or whatever it is that determines the end of a human life – played a cruel trick on Richard. After Jemima’s birth he had begun a picture of his family symbolised as a tree growing out of the seed of the parents, with each branch symbolising one of their children. This picture, which has now passed to his great-great-grandchildren, was clearly conceived as an artistic whole, as a mature fully grown tree with now room for further branches, which suggests that after Jemima, Richard and Mary did not expect to have any more children. Mary, now 39 years old, had already borne ten. Enough was enough.

On the ground around the tree’s roots Richard printed the legend “O GOD OF HOSTS LOOK DOWN FROM HEAVEN AND BEHOLD AND VISIT THIS VINE.”, and in amongst them drew profiles of Mary and himself in romantically overlapping hearts. Modestly he placed Mary in front so that she obscured his own face, but the quill pen projecting from behind his ear indicated his still undiminished ambition to be a writer. The branches extended on either side of a strong, gnarled trunk. The first three, alas, and the fifth had to be drawn withered, for Selina, Phillis, Ebonezer and Alfred Ebenezer were already dead but the fourth could be made alive and vigorous and bearing fruit, for this was Martha Oxley. The “fruit” was an oval profile portrait of his eldest daughter, whilst above her, in two elongated “leaves” Richard printed her full name and full date of birth. So, too, for the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth branches: strong boughs, fruit-bearing, with portraits of Simon Peter, Mark Antony, Joseph and Mary, each with his or her full name and date of birth in the leaves above. To sustain the symbolism, each successive portrait diminished in accordance with the lesser age of the child represented. Finally among the leaves at the top of the tree he drew a cradle containing the latest baby and above that two elongated “leaves” to take the words “JEMIMA” and “JULY 2^nd 1819”. And then…

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