Chapter 1

This is the honest-truth story of Mr Harvey Bolling, esquire, as told to and embellished by subsequent generations:

My earliest memory is sitting on the handcart, my legs dangling over the back, as my parents pushed it down the avenue away from the big plantation house. I must have been just three or five or so years of age at the time. Looking back up the drive I saw the lady of the house standing still and tall, and the path lined with all the workers from the estate, waving goodbye and wishing us well. My parents must have represented hope to those poor people, for very few indentures ever reached their release and that both my parents had, had to be the most amazing luck.

My parents had both come over in an early ship. My father came from a poor, mining part of England and my mother had been a waif in London. My father came over indentured to work the fields and my mother to work in the house. The sexes were kept separate on the ships but, somehow, my parents were hurriedly married by the captain before landfall and I was born shortly thereafter.

We can speculate that marrying my pa wasn’t what ma had in mind when she signed up to enter service. Women were in short supply in the colony and those that came were typically hoping to marry above their station and progress in the New World. This much I gleaned slowly from what was said – and wasn’t said – by my parents when they thought us children were not listening.

Don’t get me wrong, my parents loved each other. And they loved their children. Except, perhaps, they loved me slightly less. Perhaps they blamed me for forcing their happy marriage upon them?

My father’s indenture delivered him fifty acres of farmland, but this farmland was up on the frontier, away from the fertile soils of the lowlands. Much of our allotted land was a bit too steep and thin soiled to be farmed effectively. Eventually we’d gather a dozen cattle to graze on the understory of the lightly wooded slopes we couldn’t plant.

Apart from leaving the plantation, I have no other early memories except of the farm. For me, my life seems to have started on the farm. I remember running, feeling free and care-free for the first time, in the woods and dells as my father slowly cleared more land. Soon enough though, I was expected to help him, and so I spent all my days – right up until majority – bent double in the fields, tending the crop.

My mother seemed always with child in those early years – I have no recollection of her not waddling and gripping her bloated tummy grimly until I was ten – and soon enough I had four siblings. Oldest was my sister Eliza, perhaps three or four years younger than me. Then came Johnathon, a couple of years after that, and then finally the twins Simon and Judy. That mother didn’t seem to not be pregnant in the times between makes me think now that we lost some, as is very common. But it was never discussed with us children and I am unsure ... I spent my days in the fields even when pa and the midwives were up at the house and it amazes me now how much I didn’t pay attention.

Any which how, Little Eliza was the apple of my parents’ eyes, and mine. She spread a happy joy wherever she went. And she saw to it to come visit me, bringing me food and drink when I was out in the fields on a hot day. And we played and yakked by the fireside in the evenings, too.

Johnathon was a spoiled boy, living a much more charmed life than me, and worked only half as hard and half as long in the fields. He took after father in looks, who was a slight man of wiry strength, whereas I was broader shouldered and older and expected to bear more of the harder work. Johnathon reveled in his easier path and did keep needling me when our parents couldn’t hear, and that did make Eliza even angrier than it did me. He knew how to provoke a reaction, is all I can say!

The twins were so much younger and sweet and innocent and Eliza doted on them and did much of the rearing. Sweet Eliza.

Indians were a constant in those years on the farm. But not the Indian problems you’ll be imagining, that all came later!

Near the farm was an Indian village and these were good, Praying Indians – converted to Christianity – and friendly to us. Often the boys from the village would play games with me, creeping up on me as I worked the fields, waiting for me to feel the hairs the the back of my neck rise, telling me I could sense I was being watched. I’d glance around, trying not to be seen searching, looking for a sight of their white feathers poking up in the long grass. Then, once I’d spotted them, those feathers would disappear and I’d know that if I rushed to grab them I’d find nothing but flattened grass!

Our farmhouse was a small, log cabin, a single room, with a stone and mortar chimney up the outside of the end wall. There were no windows, and the inside was whitewashed to better give back some light from the flicker of the fire. The fire end was for winter cooking and for sitting around in the evening as the boys whittled new tools from wood, the girls knitted and we all talked. At the other end were two small pallets, one for ma and pa to sleep on and another for us kids. In the winter it was cold and when there was snow on the ground outside, pa would drag the pallets nearer the fire.

Slowly we built barns around the yard, and these barns were much bigger than the house. Cooking was done outside in summer, and we had a generous porch to sit under and work in the evenings, too. The chickens and pigs ran loose in the yard and there were fences around the fields to keep them – and the game – out. We had no sheep ourselves, but a neighbor did and sometimes the flock would be found grazing our fields in the morning and strong words were said on more than one occasion. Either our fences weren’t sheep-proof or, as my pa insisted in dark moments, our neighbor was letting them in deliberately!

Our farm was one of the first – and one of the last – of the indentured grants. Families started coming straight over from England to settle and farm around us. Slowly the bush became tilled. Our nearest neighbor, Derek Montague, had been a publican in the Nottingham and had not the first idea how to plough a field or hitch a cart! But he watched us carefully and sowed what we sowed when we sowed it and waited for us to harvest and such and so survived and slowly prospered with us. He and his wife soon had children and our twins often raced off to play with them after chores.

Until I was about ten The Reverend would visit a different farm each Sunday and all would congregate there. It was a fearsome thing, for our home farm to have our turn hosting Church! Apart from providing food for everyone, some who’d come miles, you risked being tested on scripture. After the sermon the Reverend Jarvis did like to make someone read the bible aloud, and to test people, including the children. It put the fear of god into paying attention in the evenings when pa read us the gospels.

And then, as I neared, ten, we built the church. It had the first glass window I ever saw, and a loud bell on the gable.

The church was built to impress the lady coming from England to become the Reverend Jarvis’s wife. She was a special lady, let me tell you! She was tall and kind and earnest and everything our Reverend was not.

I think my parents and like-minded neighbors had worried she’d take one look at our Reverend and turn tail if we hadn’t built her an impressive church and rectory. For all her community spirit they never did have any children, and much was whispered that she was barren; but now I rather think that she was rightly just not impressed with the Reverend, but she felt unable to abandon us and go back to England. She didn’t completely curtail his trips into town where there were beer and cards and woman of negotiable affection to be had, and so they seemed to reach some kind of truce from an early stage.

And having a church and rectory reflected on our congregation, too, and we were catching up with the other villages forming along the frontier.

The thieving bands that roam the frontier were not a thing back then, and the only time of tension in those early years was when the weather was bad and the crops at risk – and when the bailiff came around to collect the taxes. The bailiff was a brute of a man, always rapping his cudgel against the leather flank of his saddle to hurry us up as he waited, mounted, in the yard. He was the only man I ever saw everyone fear, and with good reason, I guess.

Now that we had a church, we had a Sunday School after services, too. Mrs Jarvis was a good teacher and quickly snatched us children away from our farms for the whole afternoon, which was welcome relief. The children from the Indian Village also came, and sometimes their parents, too, would join our services, although they sat separately.

At first we couldn’t take our eyes off one another. I thought the Indians terribly handsome! The boys all lithe and the girls with their long, black, plaited hair and their mischievous dark eyes twinkling as they watched me right back intently along the pews.

It didn’t take long for Eliza and me to begin playing with the Indian children who came to our Sunday School, although the other English children our age mostly kept their distance. There must have been many more Indian children in the village, too, but only those with the better grasp of English came, so there was only a half-dozen.

At breaks, a boy called Ahanu would teach me to wrestle, a boy called Walla would threaten to tell on us and a girl called Matoaka would keep watch for fear of Mrs Jarvis catching us. At first, – I was tumbled every time but slowly I learned to direct my strength and deflect his and I fared better. Many an afternoon was spent wrestling every chance we got and Mrs Jarvis did despair at the dust we rolled in.

Matoaka began visiting Eliza during the weekdays and helping her with her chores. Pa joked that we should employ her, as several other Indians had taken English names and found employment with our neighbors. She seemed to find me annoying, though, so I wasn’t too keen to have her work for us too much.

Eliza’s chores went three times faster with Matoaka for company, because they hurried up so as to be free to go play with Eliza’s dolls or for Matoaka to parade about in Eliza’s best dress. It was a happy time indeed, when they brought me out extra scraps of whatever they had been baking, but they did make me feel little with their refined manners and commenting on how I ate with my hands when they hadn’t even brought any cutlery out to eat with. They did like to tease me.