The Mourning Emporium (41 page)

The Scilla

There really was a floating orphanage in Venice called the Scilla.

The philanthropist David Levi Morenos came up with the idea of “converting a warship into a peaceful shelter for the orphaned sons of seafarers and to educate them in the traditional profession of their family.” I took the liberty of setting my story a few years earlier than the real foundation date of June 1906.

The original Scilla was an old gray-painted sailing ship. Boys were usually taken in at the age of seven, and “graduated” when they had learned all the skills necessary to gain employment as merchant sailors, naval mechanics or fishermen.

The first intake was just half a dozen. By 1922, there were 102 boys living on board, while seventy-two younger children were housed in dormitories on shore at San Raffaele, not far from the Zattere, where the Scilla was originally moored.

Aboard, the young sailors slept in double rows of hammocks hung from metal frames and poles. They rose at five-thirty a.m., winter and summer. They tidied up their hammocks and washed ten at a time in big tubs (so in reality Teo would have had problems concealing her identity!). The boys then washed their underwear in the same water.

By day they learned practical skills, such as how to climb the masts and riggings, how to unfurl and refold the sails, and how to keep watch. Or they went to the classrooms at San Raffaele for the more conventional aspects of their education.

Breakfast was bread and milk, but boys who had misbehaved were deprived of one or the other: they were allowed to choose. Lunch was served in metal mess tins, and consisted of pasta or soup and some meat. Dinner was polenta, beans and dried cod. The only drink served was water. There was no heating.

By 1920, the Scilla had become too dilapidated for service. She was broken up and another vessel was commissioned to replace her.

For much of the information about the Scilla, I am indebted to an excellent and beautifully illustrated book, La Scuola del Mare, edited by Samuele Costantini and published by l’Assessorato all’Educazione e all’Edilizia scolastica, Provincia di Venezia, 2009.

Nestle Tripe

Nestle Tripe or nestle-tripe is an old slang expression for the weakest fledgling in the nest; it has also been applied to human children, usually to the last-born or weakest sibling.

Queen Victoria’s Life and Death

Queen Victoria was born on May 24, 1819, and died on January 22, 1901. The last few weeks of her life were very much as described in this book, although I have telescoped certain events. In fact, the first day Queen Victoria did not leave her bed at all was probably January 16, 1901.

For the purposes of this story I have overemphasized the Queen’s snobbishness. No doubt Queen Victoria was once a little girl with imaginings and fears like any other. Her childhood was curtailed by the responsibilities of being a princess, which she took very seriously. And the joy went out of her life with the death of her adored husband, Albert. Queen Victoria certainly did not regard all her foreign subjects as savages. She even learned Hindustani and apparently enjoyed curry.

Queen Victoria withdrew totally from public life for only around four years after Albert’s death. In 1866, she opened Parliament and thereafter attended quite a few public functions. But she loved best of all to live in retirement at Balmoral or Osborne.

Each royal residence was a knicknackatorium of funereal ornaments. The Queen would not inhabit any room without a crepe-draped portrait or somber marble bust of her darling Albert. She kept a large hand-colored photograph of his corpse above her bed wherever she slept.

The Pretender

It is true that there are people other than the current royal family with claims to the British throne. The rules of succession state that the crown must pass to a “legitimate” heir: born when his or her parents were legally married to one another.

Recently, a historian has claimed that historical documents show that Edward IV was not in fact legitimate. By that reasoning, the current claimant to the throne is Michael Abney-Hastings, fourteenth Earl of Loudoun, who emigrated to Australia in 1960. He is related to Lady Flora Hastings, a girl badly treated by Queen Victoria and those close to her, who wrongly accused the unmarried lady-in-waiting of a secret pregnancy. Flora Hastings died soon afterward of cancer. The public was enraged at the court’s slander of the innocent girl, and this led to an assassination attempt upon the Queen.

However, the Earl of Loudoun has specifically stated that he has no wish to pursue his claims. And, of course, the events of this story, including the Ghost-Convicts, the island of Hooroo and the whole Pretender plot against London and the British throne, are completely fictitious. Transportation of convicts to Australia had stopped by 1868.

Hemophilia

Hemophilia is a serious disease in which blood fails to clot; a wound will bleed without stopping. Consequently, sufferers can bleed to death from internal injuries caused by a very tiny impact.

Hemophilia is passed down through a family. Normally only boys inherit the disease—a mother can carry it in her blood but not actually become ill. Very rarely is a girl severely affected, and only then if both parents carry the disease in their blood.

Queen Victoria was a carrier. One of her sons, Leopold, was a hemophiliac. Three of her grandsons and six of her great-grandsons also suffered from the disease.

In 1900, hemophilia was untreatable. Early blood transfusions were dangerous, especially for children, because scientists had not yet discovered how to separate out the component that aids the clotting of the blood. Large infusions of blood easily overloaded the systems of patients and were sometimes fatal. Only in the 1960s was a means found to separate the missing hemophilia factor (known as Factor VIII) from frozen blood plasma. Within ten years, this Factor VIII concentrate was being used to treat hemophiliacs all over the world.

Heavy Winters and Floods in Venice

The Grand Canal has frozen over quite a few times. In the eighteenth century, horse races and festivals were held on the ice. The best-documented modern freeze in Venice is probably that of 1929, of which there are many photographs and even a short film (on www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFz9a66f010).

On December 1, 2008, a disastrously high tide of 160 centimeters was pushed deep into the city by a sirocco. Every part of Venice was underwater that day. People waded around San Marco in water up to their thighs. But the famous flood of 1966 came thirty centimeters higher than that and stayed longer.

The Comune of Venice has set up a website with hundreds of photographs of the terrible flood of 1966. Go to www.albumdivenezia.it and click on L’album privato dell’alluvione. Then click on Sfoglia l’album (which means “Browse the album”).

Mediterranean Monk Seal

These beautiful animals are now very rare: probably just five hundred still exist in the world, in tiny scattered colonies on the coasts of Greece, Croatia, Turkey and North Africa. But once upon a time they could be found in large colonies from North Africa to the Black Sea. The largest of this breed grows to about two meters in length. They are brown or brownish-gray with lighter fur on their bellies.

Food and Drink

Some of the recipes—like Antispasmodic Tea—are adapted from A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes by Charles Elmé Francatelli, first published in 1852. Others I improvised, using old Italian recipe books. The Australian cake known as the Lamington is named after Charles Wallace Alexander Napier Cochrane-Baillie, second Baron Lamington, who was Governor of Queensland between 1896 and 1901.

A. Hoadley & Company opened a factory in Melbourne in 1889, making jams, jellies and candied peel. I would have loved to include my own childhood favorite, Hoadley’s Violet Crumble Bars, in this book, but this chocolate-dipped honeycomb confection was not invented until 1913.

The Name Ongania

I chose this name for Teo because there used to be a very famous bookshop called Libreria Ongania in Venice. It published and sold excellent guidebooks about Venice.

Gold Earrings

A single gold earring was often sported by superstitious sailors in past times. It was thought to improve the eyesight, to prevent rheumatism, to make the bearer lively and to prevent drowning. It was once law in Scotland that every fisherman had to wear a gold earring, which would be used to pay for the cost of his funeral expenses if he drowned and his body was washed up far from his native shores.

The “Cat”

The cat-o’-nine-tails was a whip made of rope. If the rope tails were knotted, it was known as a thieves’ cat. The whip was stored in a baize bag, so to “let the cat out of the bag” meant that someone was about to be flogged.

Nautical Knots

Anyone who is interested in knots will enjoy a visit to netknots.com, where clever animations show you how to tie most of the knots mentioned in this book.

Giant Squid

Rumors of giant squid were rife for centuries. The creatures featured in maritime legends and novels—such as Jules Verne’s classic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

The first documented sighting of a giant squid was not until 1861. And the squid’s existence was not scientifically confirmed until the twentieth century. Even now, very few examples have ever been caught. A ten-meter (thirty-four-foot) squid was found in 2007 near Antarctica. The colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, was frozen for dissection.

Colossal squid are about the same length as giant squid, Architeuthis dux, but are much more substantial. They have eight arms with toothed suckers for grasping and two longer tentacles for catching prey.

Mourning Emporia

Tristesse & Ganorus’s Mansion Dolorous is invented, but it is very like two real London magasins de deuil, or mourning warehouses. Jay’s London General Mourning Warehouse opened at 247 and 249 Regent Street in 1841. Peter Robinson’s Court and General Mourning Warehouse was founded in the same street in the 1850s. Harrods too had a large mourning department, including coffins, gravestones and every possible item of funerary fashion.

The rules of mourning were strictly observed in society. Briefly, a widow was expected to wear mourning for two years; the mother of a dead child, or a bereaved child, twelve months. A dead sibling required six months’ mourning. But the etiquette and society magazines argued obsessively about the minor details of even these matters.

Naturally, Queen Victoria’s death provoked a final run on the mourning emporia. On the days after her funeral, many people wore black. On the day of the funeral itself, it was hard to see anyone not dressed in mourning “weeds” among the crowds in London and Windsor. Queen Victoria herself, however, had specified funeral decorations in purple and white.

Quack Medicines for Ladies

It’s hard to believe, but the names of all the medicines used by the London mermaids were actual preparations on the market in Victorian times or earlier. The claims and catchphrases that accompanied them were also used by their manufacturers.

Dangerous drugs were often the core ingredients of medicines with innocent and picturesque names. The hazardous substances were disguised with sugar. Many people became addicted to these medicines without having the least idea that they contained intoxicating drugs or large amounts of alcohol.

Chameleon oil was advertised exactly as the London mermaids describe it, and was for sale by post from an address in London at the beginning of the twentieth century. Analysis by the British Medical Association showed that it contained oils of turpentine, camphor, mustard, pimento and spearmint in a solution of alcohol and water. No chameleons.

Corsets

Each age has contrived tortures to “improve” the natural lines of the female body. Victorian women were supposed to be shaped like hourglasses, a form painfully achieved by the use of corsets. Some quack doctors saw an opportunity for marketing corsets with “healing” properties at a higher price. The Harness Constrictive belts worn by the London mermaids in this book were actual products called Electropathic Corsets, and were extensively advertised.

Treadmills

Treadmills were banned in Great Britain by an act of Parliament in 1898.

Tower Bridge

This structure, despite its Gothic appearance, opened only in 1894. So many tall-masted ships went under it during that period that it was forced to open up 655 times in the first month, allowing tall-masted vessels into the so-called Pool of London, between Tower and London Bridges. (St. Mary Overie Dock is on the other side of the relatively low London Bridge, so technically it would have been impossible for a masted ship like the Scilla to get there, even with the damage she sustains. However, the Scilla does many things that ordinary vessels could not, so I considered this a valid liberty to take.)

Venetian Pumpkin-Sellers in London

Hot sliced pumpkin was a traditional Venetian street snack. I invented the Venetian pumpkin-sellers in London. But at the time this book is set, Londoners were accustomed to the sight of Italian street musicians, acrobats and vendors of hot potatoes, chestnuts and particularly ice cream.

The first Italians arrived in Britain in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they had settled in large communities in London, as well as in major Scottish cities.

In London, the two biggest clusters of Italians were to be found in Soho, where they worked in the food trades, and in the Hatton Garden/Saffron Hill area around Holborn. Here Italians rented houses that they sublet to their countrymen, cramming in as many people as possible. And it was here that the padroni brought the young boys and girls they recruited from the poor areas of Italy. These children came principally from Emilia and Tuscany in the early part of the Victorian period, and later, from farther south.

The most visible (and audible) occupation of the London Italians was as itinerant musicians: of the two thousand living in London in 1860, six hundred worked as organ-grinders. They strolled the streets playing hand organs, violins and harps. Some rented performing animals from their padroni in exchange for their day’s takings. Writers recorded seeing small Italian boys with white mice, squirrels, monkeys, dancing dogs in costumes and even a porcupine.