The Low Road
Norfolk, 1813: Hannah, a small child, witnesses her mother’s burial, staked through the heart as a suicide, following arrest for the apparent infanticide of a second illegitimate child. Quarmby evokes the hard-scrabble of agricultural life at the time of the Peninsular War; Hannah was milking at age five. There are some kindnesses, as of the gentle clergyman who ran the parish school, replaced however by the bigoted cruelty of a holier-than-thou cleric with a particular animus towards “base-born” children.
Quarmby gives a lyrical description of the Norfolk landscape, stained though by the suffering of destitute families sent to the workhouse, maimed men returning from Spain and the lingering fear of witches. Threshing machines are destroyed by men fearful of losing their livelihood; protesters are hanged.
The Low Road is a tough read, paradoxically, because of the empathy with which Quarmby tells her story; tougher, too, because it is based on true events. Hannah’s trajectory in life is almost inevitable. She accelerates it by pilfering, but the reasons for her thefts are pitifully human. Sent to a refuge in London, she meets Annie, who is to be the love of her life, but both of them end up in a nightmarish Newgate prison, leavened only by the presence of Elizabeth Fry. The ultimate destination for the two women, though separately, is transportation, to an Australia as lush in colour and birdsong as London was bleak.
Quarmby’s imagery is vivid: “…another uniform. It felt damp to the touch, as if everything on board oozed a kind of despair”. Occasionally Hannah tells her story in a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory fugue, as happens with extremes of cold or hunger. The novel is almost a “progress” but closer to Hogarth than Smollett or Cleland; the otherwise voiceless Hannah is granted her place in history at last.
