My name is Mary Arlett. I was Mary Cooper, but when I married at nineteen, I took my husband William’s name. And I was that proud to be his wife. He was lovely. He had more hair on his shoulders than on his head. Didn’t bother me. He made me laugh all day long.

We set up home. We kept a couple of sheep and a cow on the Green outside our cottage. William was a labourer on the farms during the summer, and in winter, he mended tools and did the odd bit of carpenting for neighbours and the like.

‘Poor, but happy, Mary’, he’d say to me. And we were. We had our babies, Harriet and Sarah. And a lad, but he was took Winter of ‘97. He wasn’t the only one. A big sickness ran through Hampshire at that time. Took a lot of little ones.

William passed before the bad harvest of ‘29. I had to go to the Parish for relief. And one Magistrate – curse his bones – said I wasn’t due as much as other families because I had one less mouth to feed. And not only that, but we as we were a house of women we needed less than a labouring man. Thankfully Sarah was a good little seamstress and helped out with the mending at the Big House. Harriet was married to Charles by then. He was but 20 and she was 17. He kept her, so me and Sarah got by, but I lost my animals ‘coz the enclosures took away the grazing.

Without a doubt, recent times have been tough. We’ve gone hungry. The harvests failed in ‘29, and we held our breath and prayed, but next year, 1830, was worse. People muttered and gathered. Riots, and burning hay ricks, and mobs confronting the Magistrates and landowners. Even our vicar was threatened by an angry crowd and he was that frighted he agreed to cut the tithes. Labourers was wanting their money to be two and six a day. Nine shillings a week weren’t enough to keep a family. Not just here, neither, we heard it was happening all over. Kent to Somerset.

Charles was always a hot head and he didn’t just get mixed up in the gangs, he led a big mob; three hundred of ‘em, to Tasker’s foundry in Andover. ‘What’s a foundry got to do with anything?’ I asked our Harriet. ‘Oh mother’, she said, ‘The foundries is what makes the parts for the machines. The machines what thresh the crops and take the money meant for our men. It’s immoral, according to Charles’. Well, I’ll tell what’s immoral, is not sending for your wife when you’ve promised.

Charles was transported to Van Diemen’s Land for leading the attack on the foundry, and lucky not to be hanged ‘coz over a thousand pounds of damage were done.

We waited him to send for his family once he was settled. We heard of other convicts doing so. Plenty of them. And we had heard from others he’d came clever there. Harriet couldn’t understand it, poor lass, he could have written anywhen. She’d walk miles to visit any person who got a letter from one of their husbands or brothers in case they mentioned Charles. But no, no news. Like he’d vanished.

It was a miserable time for us. She’d sit to a meal and talk only of Charles and then she’d lie in bed and cry, and pray to God to take her out of this life. And didn’t The Lord answer her sooner than Charles did?

Charles had been gone two years before we had a bare word. A short letter. But too late for poor Harriet. She had died of a broken heart many months before it arrived. And that was down to his neglect. The Doctor himself declared it so.

It took me a sum of days to settle my soul to reply. I was that angry.

‘March 21st, 1833

My dear son-in-law I received your welcome letter after so long a silence. All of us was happy. We all thought you was dead for all as went away have sent home.
But you so faithful as you promised your wife as you should send for her. To think she was so soon out of your mind.’

Should I have written that? I wrote as mildly as I could, but by God I wanted him to know what his selfishness has done to her and to us. And he has done worse in my view and in God’s to break his promise to her and cause her death then smash up some blasted machines.

He did ask for news of her. So I gave it to him:

‘I am sorry to inform you that she is no more in this Life, she departed on the second of May. The Minister was with her when she died and he asked her if anything troubled her mind. Now you lay her answer to heart.’

Ha! If he has a heart. I have yet to tell you the worst he has done, but more on that later.

‘She said “Nothing, Sir, but my poor dear fellow.” I believe it was the last word she spoke for her heart was broke.’
‘My son-on-law I took it very unfeeling of you not to send to her’.

And not just us. I wanted to let him know about his ma and da. Some might say I was stirring guilt in him, and what could he do, the other side of the world? But I am beyond care of what others think.

‘Your parents would be very happy to see you once more if it was in their power to do it. Your poor old mother would come to you, if she could come, but she is not able to get about. She often cries about you.’

I want him to send a longer letter, full of particulars of where he is living and what animals they have and how the weather treats him and suchlike. I don’t care to read it; it is for the sake of his Mother and Father.

I told him,

‘I showed your short letter to a Gentleman and he said it is your good behaviour as will get your liberty sooner than any one thing. So if you behaves well and keep a Good Character you won’t be there seven years.’

And if that happens then Charles may come home. And he should, because he left Harriet when she had just had a baby and now he has the prettiest child who is but two years old. I told him about him, hoping to stir his Christian conscience.

‘Charles, you have got a good child and a pretty little boy he is. He have got the dimples in his cheek same as you. He’s now two years and 3 months old. He goes to school he can tell all his letters and he says his prayers every night and morning. And when he says “my daddy has gone to fight the Blacks and my mummy is in the pit hole”, he is such pretty company.’

He should know his son thinks and prays for him, and I’d be curious to know what thought Charles has of him as he walks around that new world, staring at the giant rabbit creatures they have there, while at home he has so many missing him and thinking of him always.

‘If you could just see your dear child you would be proud of him so out your trust in God and keep up your spirits. He is the best friend to fly to.’

Five years have now passed since I sent the letter and got no reply, so hard is his heart, such lack of feeling for his family, his son.

Charles Faye has made a life there, and I know he never looks to return, in spite of having having been given a free pardon. I knows this because his friend James Mann who was sent at the same time wrote his parents to say that Charles has married an English woman. She was transported for pawning. And a lawyer used my letter to him to show the Principle Superintendent of Convicts that his first wife – my beautiful Harriet – had died and he was free to marry again.