Wednesday 23rd: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

Mathilde’s family had done their bit in the old days of the Empire, too: Uncle Jan goes without saying, of course, with his years in the Imperial Service, and there was great-granddad Thomas (seen by Mathilde only in a single picture), who worked in the engine room of one of the long-distance steam ships at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, working the Far East route; every [what’s their bloody surname?] household has a fragment of Thomas’s life from those days – delicately inlaid wooden boxes, tiny ivory carvings of animals with garnet eyes, and the ubiquitous willow pattern plates.

Then there are the other uncles of the Eastern war generation: there are four or five of them left, their averaged grey hair thinning now and turning white [they still use yellowish hair oil, as that generation tend to do], and they always end up clustering together at funerals and wedding receptions, pint mugs in hands, bitching about the officers who led them and the vindictive NCOs who made their barrack lives miserable. For them, the Eastern War wasn’t about good against evil, or a battle for civilisation against a ‘barely human’ Eastern horde: it was the opportunity to wangle yourself an easy life, to profit as much as possible, to take the piss out of authority and prick the pompous, and to come out with the upper hand in every encounter with your supposed superiors. In this story, wit, laziness and cunning were to be admired, and victory was achieved by the involuntary sacrifices of the salt of the earth masses, almost in spite of their efforts; and yet, despite this solid body of cynicism and blather, there was also a rigid pride in what they had done, and what it meant to the history of the country – ‘their finest hour’. These men could morph in a moment from open-mouthed guffaws to fixed-jawed, sombre nodding as they considered (i) the time when Billy [x]’s eyebrows were burnt off when he stood too close to the door of the church he was petrol-bombing, and (ii) Billy’s stupid death, late in the war, when he fell under the wheels of one of his own unit’s trucks. [How their war was about the continuation of their class experiences, and the solidarity of their little subculture…stratifications of class, geography etc…the unofficial story].

The barge has passed through the ring of warehouses and into the channel that skirts the Central Square, where the cathedral and the other great buildings of state flank the vast flag stoned area, which is thronged with tourists and market stalls, and edged with café awnings. The children are scheduled to alight here for a tour of the historic square: this is where Mathilde thinks the teachers will have the most trouble maintaining the party’s cohesion and interest.
They start with the slave market. [remember to introduce some of the Schamaesque colour, atmosphere and enthusiasm that she craves, but which she can’t deliver for the children herself…]

“The stone steps you just climbed up are the same ones that generations of slaves would have climbed up when they arrived from the lands in the East. They would have travelled by ship along the Baltic coast, and then travelled down the river and canal on littler boats until they reached the dockside here. The slaves came here mostly between 1650 and 1850 – about 5 million people in all.”

“Were there children, miss?” asks Natacha (who is the child always guaranteed to supply Mathilde with some interaction or stimulus: she’s the student that every teacher craves – the one who breaks the silence and opens up the possibility of dialogue.

“Yes, the slaves were men, women and children – all kinds of people – even children younger than you are now. Children of your age were especially sought after by the slave traders, as they were usually fit, and healthy, and easy to train for different jobs. When we get to the museum later, you’ll be able to see some of the things that the slaves brought with them from their homelands – clothes, shoes, toys, things to adorn themselves with, all sorts of things.
“The slaves would be tied or chained together so that they couldn’t run away, so they’d have to walk slowly and carefully up the steps and then across the square to the slave market, which used to stand just over there – where that long brick wall runs now. The market was as big as four football fields, and there were many merchants who had ordered the slaves from the eastern lands. They would line up their groups of slaves in their little pens and people would come to look at them and choose which ones they wanted to buy.”

The old slave market, she knows from her reading, was a place of unparalleled misery, where the sick and the injured would lie in their own excrement on a scattering of straw while the slave merchants concentrated on touting their more saleable goods to their punters. The market place would have been dirty, crowded and noisy, pungent with the smells of piss and shit, vomit, decaying meat, frying onions, spilt milk and beer, wood smoke and fish – all the thousands of smells of the burgeoning proto-capitalist economy and its material outputs. It must have been terrifying for some poor easterner who’d only ever known their distant rural village and who had never seen buildings the size of the (old) cathedral or the (new) town hall.

[…?? NB – prefigurations of the racist assumptions and stereotypes that fed this society over hundreds of years, informing the development of the militarist, racially hierarchical superiority that permeated the Empire at its height…]

There’s a story [apocryphal?] told of the (nineteen year old) Princess Louise in the 17th century. She’d take a daily walk from the Royal Palace (on the far side of the wide green gardens beyond the Stock Exchange) with her entourage of ladies in waiting and opulently-uniformed (slashed breeches of purple and yellow…) royal guards. She’d make her way around the fringes of the market, paying particular attention to the slave market precinct, where she would examine the slaves, always on the look-out for exotic or disfigured new arrivals that she could to her own retinue, which she liked to leaven with ‘curiosities and grotesques’ for the entertainment of her family, friends and visiting [dignitaries]. There was a real menagerie next to the slave market, where wild exotic creatures from the Empire’s far corners could be seen and bought – parrots, monkeys, slow-moving fat mammals that clung to branches, glamorous equine and bovine quadrupeds, and big cats.

“The Princess Louise was examining a new slave that she wanted to bring to work for her in the palace, and she was waving her arm as she told her friends about the duties she thought this new slave would be able to perform in her household. Unfortunately, her long sleeve of rich red silk caught on the bars of one of the zoo cages and, before her servants could untangle it, the leopard in the cage had seen it caught there, and it came across and grabbed hold of it. The cat was powerful enough to drag the poor Princess Louise to the ground, and drag her arm inside the cage. Unfortunately the poor Princess Louise could not free herself, even though her people struck out at the creature with their sticks and cried out for the zoo keeper to come and help her. By the time the creature was beaten off, the Princess Louise was badly injured, and her beautiful young face was mauled and scarred by the creature’s claws. But, as she was carried away to the doctors at the palace, she insisted that the wild creature must not be harmed – “I am to blame, spare the vicious beast.”

(c 1300 words)