The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1808 by Angharad Copyright © 2012 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

We trouped out of the car and into the museum, Trish had her notebook with her and also her iPad. We talked to one of the staff about what we wanted and she went off to a room behind reception.

We chatted as we waited, about ten minutes, before the museum receptionist returned. “All we’ve got is a list of properties and their owners, I’m afraid.”

“Oh well, at least we might learn the name of the squire who owned the house,” I suggested and the girls were keen to continue.

It took about another ten minutes before we found the house and the year. “Here we are,” said Pattie, the museum assistant, “Squire Joseph Francis.”

“You don’t have anything more on him then?”

She trotted off to the backroom again. She returned with a piece of paper, “He died in eighteen ninety, during an influenza epidemic at age forty nine and is buried in the municipal cemetery.”

Trish made a note of this on her iPad but I still accepted the scrap of paper from Pattie. She suggested we try the library. So that was where we went next.

“We’re trying to find what happened to a maid who lived and worked at our house back in the eighteen seventies?” I said to the library assistant and just like Pattie, she was pleased to help. I gave her the details and I also offered what I believed was the maid’s name.

“It’s difficult unless she got herself married or some other brush with the law because they were the only ones who kept records.” She did a search for Hannah Smith and one for Squire Francis. “Nothing much–hang on, Hannah Smith, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Eighteen seventy nine–here y’go.” She turned round the computer so we could see it.
‘November 6th 1879, police were notified by Squire Joseph Francis that one Hannah Smith, a housemaid lately in his employ had decamped and taken one of his gold half hunter watches with her. It is thought she might have gone to see her sister in Altringham.’

She did us a print out and suggested we went to the records office at Winchester for anything else. The girls wanted to go but I didn’t feel up to it and suggested we do a computer scan of their records instead. We went home and after lunch, we went down to my den and I contacted the records office. For a nominal fee, I was able to do a data base search for Hannah Smith and Squire Francis.

All it turned up were Hannah’s birth and baptismal records, and we were able to download them, and Francis’ death certificate and his will. He still left two gold half hunter watches, and the house which we lived in plus two suits and a set of silver tableware. He left his widow the right to live in his dwelling until she died or no longer wished to reside there. He left her his bedding and the carpet in the drawing room.

To his son and heir, he left his library of forty books, and the rest of his estate, except twenty pounds which he left to his daughter, Josephine. It seemed strange that in those days women didn’t hold property if they were married and didn’t have the vote–both things we take for granted these days. In fact, in those days women and children were seen as chattels, the property of men–reduced to objects. Sound familiar, only now one needs to put sex in front of it.

Trish, Livvie and I filled in Stella, David and Jacquie with what we’d discovered–not a great deal. The local newspaper had written a short report of the fireworks paid for by Squire Francis in that year and held in his orchard for the children of the parish, giving the adults a glass of mulled wine and the children sarsaparilla.

I surmised that what had happened was she’d probably told him she was pregnant and may or may not have threatened him. He might have rendered her unconscious before shooting her during the firework display, dumping the body in the cellar possibly under a pile of sacks and later on having the cellar bricked up thus hiding the body. He also tried to lay a false scent by accusing her of doing a bunk with one of his gold watches.

“The shit,” exclaimed Stella making the younger ones giggle, “fancy killing her and then trying to make out she was some sort of criminal.”

“Having got her up the duff to begin with,” I added which made the girls fall about laughing. I was sure they had no idea what they were laughing at.

“Talk about a man’s world,” she sighed, “we don’t know we’re born, do we?”

“Not by comparison,” I agreed.

“I wonder what would have happened in your situation, about the vote I mean?”

“I wouldn’t have got it.” I replied.

“Why not–officially you’d still have been a male.”

“Yeah, but they’d have stuck me in prison or hanged me.”

“What for dressing as a woman?”

“For homosexuality.”

“But you’re not gay?” she gasped.

“Only because I believe I’m female and love a man as a woman does.”

“Exactly,” she said without seeing what I was trying to say.

“My physical and legal status has changed. In the old days it wouldn’t have. There weren’t any hormones or surgery available and the legal status would have been that of pariah, as happens in some countries now.”

“That’s disgraceful,” offered Jacquie, “it’s a medical condition.”

“I’m not sure even that is correct, I think it’s a variation on the norm which needs to become medicalised in order to change things. It’s arguable that the distress which can go with acute gender dysphoria can make people ill, but the critics say we should be changing perceptions, not bodies, so they can live with themselves.”

“Just how are they supposed to do that?” Stella enquired looking quite determined to attack any suggestion I made.

“Psychotherapy of some sort, I suppose.” I shrugged.

“The main reason they fund surgery in the NHS is because no one seriously believes you can change the mind like that, so they change the body and providing they get their assessments right, people are happier. It’s an organic thing, you lot have female brains, like gay women have masculine ones.”

“I really don’t give a toss about any of that, providing surgery is still available for those who need it. I don’t need to know what caused it. In my case I’m cured, I’m female–I have therefore changed sex as far as the law is concerned and that’s all I set out to do.”

“That you’ve got children and married a titled man–is irrelevant, is it?” Stella teased.

“No, it’s the icing on the cake only made possible because of the former, that I was allowed to change sex. Tony Blair is slated for loads of things but he did introduce the Gender Recognition Act–mind you only because the European Court forced him to do so.”

“So wickle Caffy’s all legit then, thanks to Tony Blair?” Stella joked.

“Not entirely, it was because several people were prepared to throw themselves upon the barricades of the European Court, supported by the European Commission and several top legal beagles who worked for little or no fees, including that one who was pushed under a train last year.”

“That was tragic,” said Stella, “Hey, what about this shooting in France then?”