Written c. 1995
I slipped a disc on Friday, and have been hobbling since then, leaning on a walking stick. The walking stick is a family heirlooom, a piece of sugar cane cut in the 1820s in Tortola, in the West Indies. My grandfather told me he used to suck the head of the cane as a child to extract the sweetness.
The cane was cut by his grandfather, Henry Gent, who first went to Tortola in 1816 to join his older brother John who was amassing a fortune there as a doctor, ministering to the plantation owners and their slaves. Henry came back to England to study himself as a doctor. John died suddenly in 1819, and Henry was sent out to sort out his affairs. John's
early death meant that dreams of great wealth were not realised, and my family always blamed his misfortune for the arrest of the family's rise.
John and Henry's father was another John Gent, son of a yeoman farmer of Leek, Staffordshire, who married Mary Turner, the vicar's daughter. It was their son John who
married the gentle but rather old Sarah Booth for her dowry. They had several children, all extremely close to their mother, but distant and mistrustful with regards to their father, who had a drink problem. The children connived with their mother at outwitting him, and seemed to sneer at his lowly, unsophisticated background as a farmer.
It took Henry a while to get back to Tortola to sort out his older brother's will and estate, not least because travel was so slow, and news of his death took a long while to reach Cheshire. Henry didn't spend long in Tortola. He appointed agents to deal with the sale of his brother's estate, and soon set sail for America, hoping to make his own fortune.
As a child, the island was by then a legend, no longer a reality. Not only the sugar cane walking stick remained as evidence. In the bottom drawer of the mahogany chest was a bag of exotic sea shells collected from Tortola's beach, playthings for small children. They ended their life, after 150 years, in my goldfish tank, eventually scattered in the garden. Grandpa's sister, Auntie Dora, sometimes came to stay, and told me stories of an island John had owned, made of guano, which would have made us millionaires, if only we hadn't been cheated by Belisario, the agent. The legend was economical with the truth, there wasn't any cheating, only a bigger world where slavery and sugar were losing their sway, but Auntie Dora was cheated of a lot in her life, not least of happiness and fulfilment, and I'll forgive her even if her comments about Abraham Belisario were antisemitic.
I did find other evidence later on. In the bureau were old letters and papers, hoarded by my great grandfather, Henry's son. Auntie Dora gave me more letters before she died, mostly Henry Gent's correspondence from his American period, recorded, along with poems and prescriptions, in his commonplace book. These pieced together more of the story, and gave glimpses of the personalities—pompous, ambitious John, Henry's lack of self-confidence, thwarted Mary for whom no suitor could be good enough—who have indeed helped to shape the kind of people I and my family are today. Good material for family therapy here, the lack of male role model, the fact that the five children were Mammy's boys, none of them marrying except for Henry in his old age. Oh dear. John junior as the eldest took on the father role till his death. He was so arrogant and overbearing in his attitude to Henry and Mary, interfering from afar, trying to rule their lives. No wonder Henry ran away to America for a while.
John Gent married Sarah Booth in April, 1786. John Gent, according to his family, 'was an erratic man, fond of self-indulgence, and averse to the cares and anxieties of a money-making life. He was a captain in the Yeomanry, and seems to have preferred life's pleasures to its cares.' Perhaps he did not start his life like this. Third of five children, and eldest son, he was born October 4th, 1761, almost certainly at Middlehulme, the family farm, near Leek in Staffordshire. He had a good hand, at least from his signature, and he was probably educated by one of his Turner cousins, all clerics who ran private schools in the area. He did own books, not least a copy of The Complete Farmer, in which he later inscribed details of his children. His marriage with Sarah Booth was arranged in April, 1786, when he was twenty four and
she was thirty five.
she was thirty five.
