tipped his head upon her and said, ‘But I believe you are.’ Just that. Two times he said it, before leaning down to assist her so she might rise from the ground. ‘I believe you are.’ As this man touched July’s arm, she shooed him from it. But without sign of misgiving, the man raised his hat to her and said, ‘My name is Thomas Kinsman. Do you know me?’
Perhaps if his face had creased to yell like a mewling baby, she may have known him. Perhaps if he had talked to her of a moonless night, a stony trail and a red kerchief tied at a pickney’s head, she would have begun to think him familiar. Perhaps if he had conjured an ill-begotten black pickaninny abandoned upon a stone, and talked of a Baptist manse, of James Kinsman and of his good-goodly wife Jane, her memory would have been roused. And then, perhaps, if he had seated himself beside her to commence the tale of a small negro foundling taken from Jamaica upon the ship called the Apolline to start a new life in England, July may have recognised this Thomas Kinsman as her son.
And his chronicle might have begun with lengthy, excited description of a sea voyage; with men dangling high from the ship’s masts; a raging deep-blue ocean drenching foaming water over all aboard; his shivering body encrusted with a fine layer of salt. But probably not. For Thomas Kinsman would want you first to know the name of the parish where the Kinsman family finally rested when they arrived in England. So he would commence his tale with the word Hornsey (that being the parish), before moving on to give you the name and the precise location (perhaps with the aid of some map) of the village of Crouch End.
Then would come the depiction of a small house upon a street named Maynard. (Sometimes he will call this street Mayfield and frown upon his listener for believing it called anything other than this—but then, within the next telling, Maynard would once again appear.) He will want you to understand that this house was much smaller than the one the Kinsmans had occupied in Jamaica, and that its kitchen was set under the same roof as the house. But no servants did scurry and run there; for Jane Kinsman, good-goodly woman that she was, did perform all the duties required for a minister’s household with very little help.
There was a fire kept lit within a grange and pots and pans did bubble and boil upon that stove all day long. While within a room called a front room, there was a coal fire. Yes, an open fire within a room where all the sitting and eating, and talking and reading, of his family was done. Sometimes the flames of this fire burned blue, owing to the gas that was given off from the mineral. But any listener would be wise to move Thomas Kinsman away from this fine detail, for his knowledge of coal stuffs could weary you before he has told you of bedtime in this little house. How the three boys—James, Henry and Thomas—every evening did run up the stairs to jump into a cold press-bed, where six fidgeting feet, elbows and knees tussled for warmth before nestling down to lock in sleep.
‘Jim, Henry, Black Tom, come out, come out,’ Thomas Kinsman will want you to hear—for this was yelled each morning by the ragged gang of children that lived within the rundown houses—the windows blackened with soot—that sat close to their dwelling across the street. He will then have you run with them to ascend a high hill to the road of Mount Pleasant from where you will watch the farm boys ploughing the fields below and follow the line of trees that seemed to stretch out across a dim-dark London to the cathedral of St Paul’s.
He will have you strolling with him over to the Crouch Hall estate to walk quietly within the park; to view the wildfowl nesting upon the island in the large lake and sit beneath a drooping willow tree where the water running under the bridge fell frothing for thirty feet; or have you crack the ice upon Cholmeley brook to free the ducks to slip-slide across its surface.
And you will watch him fight the bully-boy, John Smith, and feel him pushing his grimacing face down into the icy snow for calling Thomas Kinsman a savage; and the blood