![]() ![]() Their father, Charles Brown, is bankrupt. Their names are Elsie and Ruby Brown, ages 3 and 12. Most jumpers are men, but the two children are girls. Newspaper reports suggested she’d boasted to the porter that she could do better than him. The doctors keep them apart, but fifteen years later, aged almost 40, she marries someone else. She and her beau, a railway porter, perhaps reconcile she begs for him. Her father is offered a fortune to turn her into a popular entertainment, a freak show. Recovering in hospital, our fallen woman receives proposals, not only of marriage. All around, Brutalist buildings are being torn down. Bristol, too, is built on money from the slave trade, but all you hear about are pirates: Bristol is obsessed with its glorious history. ![]() I grew up in a small suburban town outside Washington, DC, that had been home to the country’s biggest slave traders, but no one ever mentioned that. I look at Bristol - where I’m a tourist, where I have no past, only a present - and read the past everywhere, like an overlay: two maps, two cities, past and present. This is a ghost story full of doublings and hauntings. They lurk in cracks in the sidewalk, hinting at histories that have long been ignored. They are contained in the things we walk past every day: the roots growing from the plane tree into the pavement, the string wound round a metal fence, the cement traffic barriers lined up to stop cars driving down a lane that doesn’t exist. Their picture is in a locket Sarah owns when she dies, in 1948.Ĭities are full of ghosts. Two of that number are children, who plummet over the side, together, a decade later. She is one of only four over the next hundred years to fall from Clifton Suspension Bridge and survive. The year is 1885, and she has quarrelled with her lover. She is Sarah Ann Henley, of 30 Twinnell Road, Bristol. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |