queue to get my Reader’s Number.
It was a long queue and it wasn’t moving quickly, and after my experience at the entrance desk, and with the women with the dangling glasses, I wasn’t confident I was in the right place.
‘Is this where I get a Reader’s Number?’ I asked the man in front of me.
‘Indeed it is,’ he said. With the slowness of the queue we got chatting. He had white hair, a red face, a vaguely sailorish kind of beard. ‘It used to be just dusty scholars here,’ he said. ‘Now everyone’s interested in medals and family history or they’re Australians and New Zealanders looking up their ancestors.’ He gave me a look: a twinkle-in-the-eye sort of look, an I’ve-got-you-worked-out sort of look.
I was irritated at this smug sailor-man, annoyed that he’d stereotyped me as that comic cliche, the middle-aged Australian lady looking up her ancestors, probably in search of a duke.
HO 17/423 consisted of a brown cardboard box tied up like a Christmas present with pink tape and embossed with a crest and ‘Supplied for the Public Service’: old-fashioned, austere. Someone out of Dickens might have had a box like this.
Inside was a leather-bound volume, a little bigger than foolscap size, not a book so much as a folder, with original documents, all different shapes and sizes and weights of paper bound into it. This wasn’t exactly ‘leather-bound’. That was a familiar concept of tooled volumes with the titles in gilt and marbling on the endpapers. At the fund-raising fete for the children’s school, someone occasionally donated a leather-bound book to the secondhand bookstall. It was always snapped up early by one of the dealers.
This was not like that. This was something a good deal more earthy. You could still see the pores of whatever animal it was, the places where hair had grown. This was not so much leather as skin.
Inside, the first sheet of paper said, ‘There is no doubt that this is the first register of Criminal Petitions in the Home Office.’ Then a signature and the date: 1894.
I liked that tone. As I turned the page I had a fleeting picture: there they were in 1894, a whole lot of dusty clerks in some high-ceilinged room in the Home Office, slanting sunlight coming in from high windows, the rods of light floating with dust. The head clerk had a box on the table in front of him—no, a tin trunk. He’d blown an inch of old dust off the lid and prised it open. Inside was a jumble of documents, higgledy-piggledy, some torn, some speckled with damp, some in bundles tied with pink tape.
‘Now then,’ he said, or words to that effect. ‘We’re going to sort this lot out. You, Wiggins, put them in date order. The first hundred will be the first volume. Here, this will be the first page.’ Drawing a piece of paper towards him and dipping his long nib into the inkwell, he wrote, ‘There is no doubt that this is the first register of Criminal Petitions in the Home Office.’ As all the clerks watched, their long pale unhealthy faces expressionless, he signed it and added the date: 1894.
As I turned through the pages I realised that these were petitions all right, but not for clemency. I wanted to stop and read them, but I had to get on.
Yet another box. Who last undid this string? Inside, a big book with a hard white cover like plastic, scored and deeply scratched as if bricks had been grated across the surface. Perhaps this book went through the Blitz. Even the folder of historical documents had a history.
These were petitions for clemency. I could feel my heart thudding.
I turned through the documents scanning the impossible old spidery writing for dates and names. Some were in beautiful clerk’s copperplate, every word a minor calligraphic masterpiece. In some, the salient words were written in red ink, with summaries in the margin, the whole finished with a blob of sealing wax. Others were in unreadable scrawls like a doctor’s prescription: you could spend a week deciphering it. These came as a shock, they seemed so modern. On some, the ink was still black and emphatic; others had faded to the palest brown. Some were written on flimsy paper, sometimes only a half-sheet with a few lines scrawled in the middle. Others were on thicker material: could this be parchment, one of those words I’d spent my life reading without ever coming across the object? A few were written on some stiff and glassy-surfaced substance that I guessed might have been vellum.
All were bound together in whatever way they fitted, right way up or sideways, and folded where necessary to fit within the cover. They were in very approximate date order.
As a system of appeal, it looked pretty haphazard. The appeal for one John Allen, for example, seemed to rely on the fact that ‘he is a fine tall handsome young man’. But the key to success seemed to be who you knew, not who you were.
By late afternoon I was tired and my eyes were aching and dry. I hadn’t found any petitions on behalf of Solomon Wiseman. I had a nasty flat feeling of having wasted a whole day and given myself a headache for nothing.
The place didn’t close for another hour, though, and I’d never be back here again. I opened the book at random, flipped through a few. I found one the right way up and in an easy hand. An intensity of horror came flaming off the page at me:
My deare and loveing wife I write this hart brakeing letter to inform you the shameful and scandalous distress I have brought upon you and my poore unhappy children wich I am afraid in a few Days will be Fatherless and you a poor Unhappey Distressed Widdow by the unhappey death I am likely to bring upon myself; had I takin youre advice on the Sunday night not to go with Groombridge to Crawley Faire this shame would not have happened but now I must bare the Eshew of it be what it will the judge cast five for Deth out of Eight as went to Lewes from Horsham Gaol but repreived three before he left the town and left Groombridge and myself for execution and not to look for any mercy I should wish you to see Gen Watson witch I think by Petition I may git a Pardon and be comfortable with Family once more and as to my confinement & distress of mind will bring me to my Right Understanding so in the sum of looking upon it as Troubles I shall account it as given from the God above as a scourge for my past offences and after you have seen Gen Wattson and advised with him I make no doubt but he will give you a Coppy of a Petition I trust Gen Wattson to be my ondly friend to do his utmost as he knows more of distress than any man liveing I trust to him to be my friend in the name of the Lord I am to die I should wish to see you once to take my unhappy farewelle of you and my deare children if you can git Halls horse and Cart git Roles to come down with you and Jane the coach here is 6 or 7 shillings down so I think hors and Cart will be cheapest when you come down go to the Sine of the Crown W Howes and he will come to the gaol with you and can sleep that Night at Mr Howes If we are to be executed it will be on next Saturday fortnight My best wishes to G Wattson and his Family and all who ask after me From your unhappy distressed but loveing Husband
Wm Boon
This is wrote with allmost a broken hart so don’t mind the badness of Writeing But now I think of it you not see W. Ives til after the Assizes Go to see the Gen first but see W. Ives for he may be a friend this being my first offince.
Send me a answer by the return of post
Horsham Gaol
Sussex
As I copied out William Boon’s letter with one of my many pencils, it seemed I was re-living his anguish. The poor man’s thoughts were all over the place, from God to the price of a horse and cart in the same moment. I could hear the sweaty terror of what was happening, the panic to end this bad dream, the desperate effort to think clearly.
Boon’s letter was followed in the book by one from General Watson, appealing on Boon’s behalf to Lord Hawkesbury. Then some minion of Lord Hawkesbury forwarded the general’s letter to the original trial judge, who replied: ‘I have perused the petition of William Boon, and the other papers left therewith: and I am humbly of opinion that he is in no wise the proper object of the Royal Mercy.’
A wave of grief overwhelmed me there at the quiet desk in the Public Record Office. William Boon’s letter had lain there for two hundred years. He was dead, his wife and children were dead, General Watson was dead. And yet William Boon himself was more real