How do you write about people whose voices were unheard in their lifetime? Acclaimed journalist and author Katharine Quarmby describes the process of raising lost voices from paper, and offers advice for writers who want to tell their own stories of the unheard.
I came across the true story that lies at the root of my debut historical novel, The Low Road, when I was looking for a new family walk near my hometown, Harleston, in rural Norfolk.
We had moved to Norfolk when I was seven, moving around from my father’s home county of Yorkshire, to Lancashire and then Leicestershire, in the Midlands. As a small child the Midlands was still mining country, with collieries nearby. Settling in East Anglia, in a rural and watery landscape which I grew to know from the river up, as we spent so much time in kayaks and in the water, seemed to be a move to a quiet and apolitical part of the world. But as I was to discover when I found the story of Mary Tyrrell, this tranquil landscape belied a more turbulent past. This was the inciting incident that inspired me to write The Low Road.
There was a brief reference in this book of walks to an area at the end of town called Lush Bush, where a woman had been buried just beyond the parish boundary in 1813. She had been staked through her heart, after she had taken poison, having been questioned repeatedly about a suspected infanticide. I wanted to find out more, and so the first thing I did was look at local papers. I turned up this, in the Norfolk Chronicle, published on 24 April that year.
Child Murder. —The circumstance of a child having been found in Vipond’s pond, at Harleston, Norfolk, has led to a very melancholy and impressive catastrophe. Every exertion was made, on the part of the Coroner’s Jury, and also on that of the Rev. Archdeacon Oldershaw, the magistrate, to effect discovery; not withstanding which, the only verdict that could be returned, was that of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown – Against Mary Turrel, however, one of the four women who had been examined, very strong suspicion still existed. She was in consequence taken before Mr Oldershaw three or four times afterwards, but to no effect. Still the circumstances of the case, and the general feeling, were so strong against her, that the magistrate could not rest satisfied without further investigation and a day was accordingly appointed for that purpose. But the object of the appointment was defeated. The unhappy wretch took poison early on the morning of Saturday, and died in the
