My time in London was nearly over, and I was filled with panic at the idea of leaving without learning everything I could. Each new piece of information led to another, and the more I was finding out, the more I wanted to know.
The day after the visit to the Guildhall Library I asked the hotel for a wake-up call. By seven o’clock I was on the Tube with the other early risers, on my way to Aldgate East and Christ Church Spitalfields. According to the Mormon website, Wiseman had married there in 1799. He was twenty-one. His bride was Jane Middleton, age unknown, described as ‘a spinster of the parish of Stepney Spitalfields Christ Church London’. That entry might not be accurate, but in the absence of other information—and the time to find it—I was going to act as though it was.
Christ Church Spitalfields was on page 87 of my now dog-eared London A to Z. Whitechapel Road, familiar from the Monopoly board of my childhood, was around the corner. The church was made of white limestone, the blurred creamy stone piled up in blocks and arches and columns, a child’s building-block tower. Inside, gloomy grandeur; columns going up and up and vanishing into a high dimness. A splendid marble floor. Altar steps broad and gracious. Everything on a palatial scale.
I’d done some reading in my guidebook about Spitalfields. When the Wisemans wed there (if they did), it was the centre of the highly skilled silk-weaving trade, and was relatively affluent. Marriage to Jane Middleton might have been a small step up in the world for Wiseman, as the family story suggested. Perhaps it wasn’t a love match, but a cold-blooded bit of self-improvement.
It might make sense of a wife being pushed down the stairs thirty years later.
In the year 2000 it looked as though prosperity had come and gone in Spitalfields several times. In some streets it was on its way back. Narrow old houses with wooden shutters and many-paned windows were being gentrified, front doors gleaming with fresh paint.
But in other streets there were glimpses of squalor. Crooked cobbled alleys where the light from the sky didn’t reach the ground. The slots of houses all pushed together. How cold the light must be in their small mean rooms. Everywhere I looked I saw windows mended with cardboard, piles of rubbish, black fibrous muck heaped against walls.
This wasn’t tourist territory. These poky streets were jammed with trucks loading and unloading, Indian men standing outside shops, teenage boys slim in tunic and pants trotting along the footpaths with clothes on hangers. Where workers once went blind weaving silk, the sweatshops of the garment trade now churned out cheap clothes for the markets in Brick Lane.
I was feeling conspicuous. Men in doorways wearing Nehru jackets and Astrakhan caps stared. A boy pulling a rack of gaudy dresses across the road watched me all the way to the other side, his head turning so he wouldn’t lose sight of me. Was I the only woman out on the street?
Up ahead of me I saw a pale stunted man, his face mauled by some kind of blistered rash, sidle up to a big black man. As I passed I glimpsed the gold watch laid out on the pale man’s palm.
‘What you looking at, man?’ I heard the black man ask.
The man with the rash came back quick as a whip. ‘Seven quid.’
Under the viaduct of the railway, the arched vaults were crammed with piles of stuff: broken toilet-pans, mattress-springs, seatless chairs, car steering-wheels. Everything was worn-out, broken, dirty, unrecognisable as a useful object, compacted into a dense mass: no longer individual items but essence of rubbish.
Yet a man stood there selling things, watching as people picked over the piles, as if they might steal something. Taking money for a handful of rusted nails, giving change out of a leather bag hanging from his belt.
In the romantically named Cygnet Lane—a rubbish-strewn passageway between dark weeping brick walls—worn women in saris held out packets of cigarettes. They were listless, hopeless, their skins chalky, their faces blank. One slumped on a milk crate, the packet of cigarettes dangling from her hand, staring at the gutter, too worn out even to try to make a sale.
Or were the cigarettes a front, a code—were these women prostitutes?
This was nothing picturesque. This was real, grinding, fearful poverty. These back lanes of Spitalfields were a living museum of the world Wiseman would have known, a world in which a handful of rusty nails was a saleable commodity. This—the ugly face of the first generation of migrants clinging to a big city—was teaching me more about Wiseman than any amount of dawdling about on the banks of the Thames picking up pieces of roof tile.
Next day I made another early start and went south of the river instead of north. Wiseman had married in Spitalfields, but according to the Mormons his son had been baptised at the church of St Mary Magdalene in Bermondsey, and the address of the parents was Butler’s Buildings.
I took the Tube to London Bridge and walked down Borough High Street, past cobbled alleyways and courtyards and along the side of the high brick wall of Marshalsea Prison, where Dickens’ father was incarcerated for debt. Right beside that wall was the Southwark Local History Library. I was hoping someone there could locate Butler’s Buildings for me.
They couldn’t, but they found me a copy of an eighteenth-century map and a magnifying glass. Eventually I located Butler’s Buildings, a long thin street with a kink halfway down. The map showed the buildings, too: nineteen houses in an unbroken row down one side of the street, seventeen on the other. On one side of the street, the houses backed straight onto those in the next street over.
Peering at the map, I was starting to smell the Bermondsey of Wiseman’s time. ‘Mr Choubert’s Tannery.’ ‘Mr Pott’s Glue Manufactory.’ ‘White’s Fellmongers.’
How did they breathe?
Putting my A to Z alongside the old map, I worked out that Butler’s Buildings was now a street called Brunswick Court, a five-minute walk from the river.
By the time the map had given up its secrets I was looking anxiously at my watch. The group of writers had to talk to journalists in the afternoon, and then we were to do a reading at the South Bank. I needed to get back to the hotel. I was cutting things fine. But I was determined to see Brunswick Court.
It had turned into a sultry day by this time, the sunlight grey and unpleasantly hot. Brunswick Court began as a spooky archway under the railway, scabs of black ooze hardened on the bricks. There was nothing old here—Bermondsey was comprehensively bombed during the Blitz—but nothing had really changed either. What had once been Butler’s Buildings was still a mean little street, barely wide enough for a car. Where the boxes of terraced houses had lined up next to each other in the eighteenth century there were still small identical houses—though of postwar stained pale brick—squashed up together. On one side the looming brick bulk of Jones Maltings filled the sky and cut off the sun. The sweet reek of the brewery filled the street. The cramped houses on one side, the towering walls of the brewery on the other, pressed in on me.
If Wiseman had been an honest waterman, or a better thief, some genetic variant of me would have grown up somewhere like this, breathing the stink of the brewery in my dreams.
The other end of the street, where the old map showed Bermondsey Workhouse, was now a triangle of park with worn-out grass, and a bit further along was the church of St Mary Magdalene, where the first child of Solomon and Jane Wiseman had perhaps been baptised.
The church was locked. So was the rectory next door, but my eye was caught by a sign on the front door: ‘PLEASE DO NOT RING THE DOOR BELL for food before you have read the notice in the window on the right.’ The notice in the window on the right read: ‘Sorry, no food parcels available until further notice.’
As at Spitalfields, I was in another world, where people were hopelessly, unfixably poor. Wiseman’s world.
St Mary Magdalene, all those christenings—but, with that name, wasn’t he Jewish? The family story said nothing about it, so I’d always wondered. But people had always looked at me strangely when I tried to voice my doubts. She’s wondering if Solomon Wiseman is Jewish? I’d see them think. Is the Pope Catholic?
Back at the hotel I was getting ready for the reading—the blue or the black? the jacket or the shawl?—when the phone rang. It was a researcher from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, whom I’d asked earlier for information about Solomon Wiseman, born 1777. They had no record of him, and the researcher thought he probably wasn’t Jewish. He explained that an English Jew called Wiseman would have been descended from German Jews called Weissmann, and most German Jews didn’t arrive in England until the early nineteenth century.
‘He was probably from Essex originally,’ the researcher suggested. ‘Essex is full of Wisemans. English Wisemans,’ he emphasised. ‘The name comes from wyse mann.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Thank you. You’ve been very thorough. Much appreciated.’
I hung up and sat on the bed. I was disappointed. Why? Part of my image of Wiseman, and of myself, had always been coloured by the possibility of Jewishness. Now something was having to shift. Why was I resisting it?
We did the readings, we did the interviews, we had our photographs taken for the paper. The Centenary of Federation was properly celebrated. Then it was all over. One by one the writers and musicians and dancers trundled their suitcases out of the hotel and headed home.
Melissa and I had breakfast together on the last morning.
‘So what have you found out about your ancestor?’ she asked.
Not much, was one kind of answer. I’d seen the street where he lived, stood on the spot where he was caught stealing. But I still didn’t know who he was—what kind of person he might have been. I didn’t know whether he stole out of hunger or greed, whether he married for love or money.
Everything, was another kind of answer. What I knew now was simple but important: how inadequate the story about him was. Over the last two weeks he’d burst right out of the membrane of that family tale. I knew him now as a human being, complicated and contradictory. He’d stood and walked and talked, been cold and wet, warm and dry, hungry and full. I couldn’t see him, didn’t know him, but that didn’t matter: what I knew was that he was real. Much more real than Solomon Wiseman was born in London and worked on the docks.
A real man had sailed up the Hawkesbury and picked out a hundred acres for himself. A real man had taken up, or taken, a piece of someone else’s place. Not just a story. Something that had really happened.
I was finding it hard to put into words, but I gave Melissa some kind of answer.
She nodded. ‘So did he turn out to be Jewish in the end?’
‘Ah well,’ I said, and explained. ‘I’m a bit disappointed,’ I added, and heard myself laugh. ‘Don’t know why.’
‘Well,’ Melissa said. ‘If he was Jewish, that would make him just that much less white.’
As the jumbo heeled in the sky over London, pointing towards home, I rested my forehead against the window and stared down. There was the Thames, drawing its wandering line. There were the hazy spires and roofs, the streets and parks. Wiseman had known them, and I knew them too now.
What I’d discovered here wasn’t so much my roots, but the feeling of having roots to discover. It had taken this foreign place—London—to show me the power of belonging. Here, as never before, I could think: this is where my family was from.
But I knew I hadn’t finished with my great-great-great grandfather. I’d felt him in Christ Church Spitalfields and I’d felt him in Brunswick Court, Bermondsey. Now I needed to feel him in the place that was home. I had to make the connection: his life, my life, and the place where they came together.