Asta's Book (21 page)

March 14th, 1916

Mrs Evans, who lived next door to us in Ravensdale Road, came to tea and brought her brood of ugly children with her. This was supposed to be all in aid of her second son, a fat spotty boy called Arthur, playing with Marie on her birthday. Only one way and another it was put off, first because one child had a cold, then another, then Mrs Evans herself got the shingles of all things. Today wasn’t much of a success. The boy hit Marie who screamed so loudly that her father heard her from his workshop down the garden and came running in threatening to thrash Arthur and causing a fearful commotion. Somehow I don’t think we’ll be seeing Mrs Evans again!

We were sitting in the drawing room this evening, Rasmus and I. I was reading
A Tale of Two Cities
and he was puffing away at a cigarette while
devouring The War Illustrated
, when suddenly he looked up and said he was going to make Marie a doll’s house.

‘You’re too late for her birthday,’ I said, not very interested, ‘it’ll have to be for Christmas.’

‘Oh, I won’t finish by Christmas,’ he said, ‘this’ll take me years, maybe two years. I’m going to make a copy of this house. I’m going to make her Padanaram.’

‘What, for a child of five?’ I said.

‘She’ll be seven by the time I’ve finished. You might give a fellow a bit more encouragement, old girl. There are some women who’d think themselves pretty lucky having a husband who can do what I can.’

‘Why Marie?’ I said. ‘Why not Swanny? I thought you were supposed to love all your children equally.’

‘She’s too old. The rate she’s growing she’ll be six feet tall by the time it’s finished.’

‘Well, don’t think I’m going to help,’ I said. ‘If you want carpets and curtains and cushions and what-not you can get Hansine to do them. You know what a magnificent needlewoman she is. Just don’t come asking me.’

March 26th, 1916

Swanny and Marie both have the chicken-pox. Swanny came down with it yesterday and Marie was all over spots this morning. I’ve heard it said children can catch it from a grown-up with the shingles and though I don’t usually believe tales like that, old wives’ tales mostly, it certainly looks as if there’s something in this one. We joke about it and call it Mrs Evans’s revenge for the way Rasmus shouted at Arthur, but I’m worried about their faces scarring. Swanny is good and obedient and has promised not to scratch but that little monkey Marie, I don’t know what to do with her, I’ve threatened to tie her hands behind her back and I will too if I see her nails at her face again.

Sam Cropper is a prisoner in German hands. I don’t know how they can be sure but his sister came round this afternoon to tell Hansine and she has been laughing and singing ever since.

Rasmus began the doll’s house this evening. That is, he began making drawings. I will say for him, he draws magnificently, the sketches he makes remind me of photographs I’ve seen of drawings by Leonardo. Swanny asked him, ‘Why are you drawing our house, Far?’ and he said in his surly way, and in English, he’s proud of sayings like this he knows in English, ‘Ask no questions and you’ll get no lies.’

I’ve bought a new dress, old-rose taffeta with white polka dots, and a matching turban in old rose embroidered with white beads.

May 7th, 1916

I don’t know how I can write it. Perhaps I can because I can’t believe it’s true. I want to wake up and have that wonderful feeling you do after a nightmare: it didn’t happen, it wasn’t real.

But this is real. Mogens came home this evening to tell us he has enlisted. He is now a private in the 3rd London Battalion, the Rifle Brigade.

12

ON TOP OF THE
papers Cary had given me were two photographs. I don’t know why they interested me, for neither Lizzie Roper nor her husband was good-looking, nor, if these pictures were anything to go by, intelligent or sensitive people. She looked coarse and he looked hag-ridden. But still there was something about each of them that caught my imagination. Besides, Asta had known them or at least known of them, she had seen Mrs Roper in her fashionable clothes and big feathered hat.

Few of us much enjoy reading anything that isn’t a book, a newspaper or a magazine. I’ve had to read too many photocopies of book pages, not to mention manuscripts, typed and handwritten, to want the experience again. I looked at the books first. One was a green Penguin paperback in the
Famous Trials
series, a shabby, much-thumbed copy, the other looked as if it had been privately published. It was a very slim volume. There was no jacket, no title on the front cover and that on the spine was no longer decipherable. Inside, on the flyleaf, was printed
A Victorian Family
by Arthur Roper and the date in Roman numerals, MCMXXVI.

A piece of paper fell out. It was a note from Cary. ‘Read the Ward-Carpenter piece first, then the paperback. You can probably miss out on Arthur’s memoir.’ The Ward-Carpenter turned out to be the stack of rather crooked, black-smudged photocopying. Still, by now I wanted to know more about Roper. But before beginning I looked him up in an encyclopedia of true crime my historical detective writer had edited.

Not much space was devoted to him: Alfred Eighteen Roper b. 1872, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk; d. 1925, Cambridge. Charged with the murder of his wife Elizabeth Louisa Roper in Hackney, London, in July 1905. The trial was at the Central Criminal Court, London, in October 1905, and distinguished by the spectacular performance of Howard de Filippis
K C
, for the Defence.

That was all. There was nothing to show on the photocopy where the extract had come from, but no doubt some collection of true crime. Handwritten across the top of the first page was the date 1934.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF A PHARMACIST

by Francis Ward-Carpenter, M.A., J.P.

Much of the interest and terror induced by great crimes is due, not to their abnormal content, but to that in them which is normal. Huge things happen to little men and they happen, not in mansions or palaces, but in poor houses in mean streets. The trivial is aggrandized by them and the sordid given a horrific cast, so that the crime, albeit briefly, elevates the petty, the squalid and the base to heights of tragedy.

The Roper Case was no exception to this. Indeed, with its principal players teetering on the lowest edge of the lower middle class, its London suburban setting, and the portrait its principal actors give of family life, it might be said to exemplify it. Here in the dismal backwater of a great city the men and women drawn together by typical circumstances reacted to them with atypical vice, violence and a flouting of civilization’s rules.

Alfred Eighteen Roper was not, however, a London man by birth and upbringing. His singular second name derived from his mother who bore it before her marriage to Thomas Edward Roper in 1868. Eighteen is a Suffolk surname and it was in Suffolk, in the pretty little town of Bury St Edmunds on the River Lark, that Alfred was born four years later. By this time his parents already had two daughters, Beatrice and Maud, but Alfred was the firstborn son and heir. Two more sons were later born to the Ropers, Arthur and Joseph, and another daughter who seems to have lived only for a few weeks.

Thomas Roper was an assistant in Morley’s, a druggist’s shop in the Butter Market, or perhaps something more than that. It appears he had men under him and today we would call him the pharmacist or manager of the shop. He must have been in a fair way of doing, for he could afford to dispense with the labour of his sons, sending all three to the free Grammar School, and although Thomas’s mother and his own wife had both been sent out into service there never appears to have been any question of this in the case of the Roper girls. It was apparently a happy family, respectable and reasonably prosperous, the boys at least with ideas for the future above the station in which Providence had placed them.

Much of this came to an end when Thomas died of an apoplexy, probably a subarachnoid haemorrhage, at the age of forty-four when Alfred was sixteen. The druggist made the family an offer it would have been highly imprudent to refuse. A position in the shop could be Alfred’s if he so desired.

Alfred is said to have told his brother he hoped to win an Exhibition, of which the Grammar School appointed four each year to be held for four years, and which would send him to the University of Cambridge. However, this was not to be. He left school and went into the shop, starting there on the lowest rung of the ladder, but earning money, enough to support his mother and keep his brothers from the necessity of leaving school. One of his sisters was already married and the other due to marry in the following year.

Alfred remained at Morley’s for some years, during which he rose to the position his father had formerly held, that of pharmacist. He was dutiful and industrious, a quiet home-loving young man who, according to his brother Arthur, had few friends and no acquaintance at all with the opposite sex.

In 1926 Arthur Roper, a schoolmaster in Beccles, wrote and privately published a memoir of the Ropers. Its title was
A Victorian Family
but its only interest to us today lies in the information it gives about Arthur’s brother Alfred. The sole claim to fame or notoriety the Roper family ever had derives from Alfred Roper’s trial for the murder of his wife, the circumstances which led up to that trial, and its outcome, yet Arthur has not a word to say about any of it. His brother features prominently in this short book, has no fewer than 250 lines devoted exclusively to him; the illustrations include two photographs of him, one a studio portrait, the other with his wife and children, but that he was tried for murder is never mentioned. He is referred to as marrying Elizabeth Louisa Hyde in 1898, and a son being born to them in 1899 and a daughter in 1904.

All Arthur’s comments on his family members are so eulogistic that we are obliged to take what he says with a grain of salt. Some of this determination to aggrandize what was, after all, a very ordinary and on the whole respectable family, has led to obvious inaccuracies. He writes, for instance, of his grandfather Samuel Roper as superintendent of the Botanic Gardens in Bury St Edmunds in 1830 while in fact N. S. H. Hodson, the Gardens’ founder, held that office. Samuel was probably one of the gardeners employed there. Arthur’s maternal grandfather William Eighteen may have been employed by the Post Office but was not the Bury St Edmunds Postmaster in 1844. This position, at the Post Office in Hatter Street, according to
White’s Suffolk
, was held at the date he mentions by John Deck.

His brother Alfred he describes as a thoughtful and inquiring man, even something of an intellectual, an enthusiastic member of the Public Library and also a user of the large library at the Bury Mechanics’ Institute. While living with his mother and brother Joseph at the family home in Southgate Street, he spent his evenings reading, often reading aloud to his mother whose sight had begun to fail and who seems to have depended on him for this and many more attentions. Without formal training in his trade of pharmacist, he was interested, according to Arthur, in all forms of ‘chemistry’ and in his own room in Southgate Street, conducted experiments of an exploratory nature. He also built model steam engines, which he set puffing furiously away on the burners of his mother’s gas stove.

Arthur gives us no description of Alfred’s appearance beyond stating that, like all the male members of his family, his brother was very tall, something over six feet. From the photographs we have of him it can be seen that he was correspondingly thin with narrow shoulders and a frame which does not appear robust. His hair was dark and already starting to recede from the forehead when the portrait photograph was taken in July 1898, just prior to his marriage. His features were regular, he was clean-shaven, and his eyes were dark, though of what colour is not known. A faint darker mark on the bridge of his nose suggests that he may habitually have worn spectacles, which he removed for the purpose of having his picture taken.

It was some years after he became manager at Morley’s in the Butter Market—Arthur does not say how many but we know it to have been about six—that Alfred encountered Robert Maddox, a visitor to the town putting up at the Angel Inn on Angel Hill. Mr Maddox came into Morley’s, asking for a specific for a bad finger, and was attended to by Alfred Roper. Instead of supplying a placebo, Alfred lanced the whitlow himself and dressed the finger so expertly that Maddox returned on the following day to thank him and to ask if the pharmacist could prescribe a remedy for the nasal catarrh from which he was a chronic sufferer. This Alfred did and Maddox expressed himself delighted with the results.

Exactly why these actions on Alfred’s part should have fitted him to become under-manager of a patent medicine advertising company is not known. At least, Arthur does not say why and Arthur’s account of these events is almost all we have on which to base our knowledge of his brother’s early life. Probably Robert Maddox simply took a fancy to him. By their very quietness and serious demeanour, men of Alfred Roper’s type very often make an impression which is quite at odds with their actual abilities. At any rate, the offer of this position with the Supreme Remedy Company in High Holborn, London, of which Maddox was part-owner, was made to him and was accepted.

Had old Mrs Roper not died some four weeks previously, it is doubtful whether Alfred would have considered this post. He would not, indeed would have felt he could not, have left her. In the latter years he had been doing much of the work of the house as well as carrying his mother up and down stairs and often preparing her meals. Now his brother Joseph was about to be married and intended to bring his bride home to Southgate Street where Arthur was also living. Reading between the lines of Arthur’s memoir, we may believe that Alfred was relieved to have the opportunity of making his escape and, perhaps, his fortune.

In London he appears to have put up temporarily at a commercial hotel in the Gray’s Inn Road and to have set about immediately looking for more permanent lodgings. At his trial it was stated by a witness, John Smart, a fellow employee at the Supreme Remedy Company, that he, Smart, suggested to Alfred over supper in a chop house that Fulham might be a suitable place for him to seek accommodation. Indeed, Smart himself lived in Fulham and believed there was a vacancy in the house where he had rooms. Travel was easy, a fifteen-minute train journey from Walham Green to Charing Cross on the District Line of the Underground, followed by a walk across the Strand and through Covent Garden.