The Girk Who Lived On Air Read online

  A walking devil is gone

  To look at his little snug farm of the world

  And see how his stock went on…

  Robert Southey: The Devil’s Walk

  The story begins with a place and a way of life. In 1867, Evan and Hannah Jacob worked a farm of around 120 acres in the parish of Llanfihangel-ar-Arth. Their situation was tenant farmers, and their place was large by the standards of the time. The family had a servant, and there were seven children, so labour would be plentiful as time went on. The biting edge of the modern world of change and hard business had not come much into their lives; in 1860 the planned Carmarthen and Cardigan railway was a subject of hot debate, and one writer of the time noted that to the farmers within twenty miles of the line it would be vitally important, mainly because it would reduce the cost of obtaining lime locally by four shillings a ton.

  Twenty years earlier, in the time of the infamous Blue Books on education in Wales, when there was a commotion about how the Welsh working classes were ever going to learn more English, one report had described the Jacobs’ village as chaotic in terms of learning: ‘This parish is a most extensive one. The two day schools which I found in it are situated at its two extremities… In this parish the number of Sunday Schools returned exceeds the population considerably… I found no books of attendance registers kept and the statements were taken orally from the superintendents…’. But that did not prevent the Jacob children from reading in both English and Welsh. In 1846 less than a quarter of the parish children were attending a day school. It was the old story – the family were needed on the land.

  As to the land itself, in 1880, a Mr Doyle visited Wales to conduct a full survey of farming conditions and work on behalf of the government. His account of the men who ran the small farms differs greatly from what we know of Evan Jacob, as he did very well, paying his £61 a year rent to the landlords, and never seemingly having any trouble in finding the cash. Mr Doyle found that generally in South Wales, ‘The farming is poor, unskilful and slovenly; farm buildings, where they exist at all, are insufficient and makeshift. The quality of the stock reared on these small farms is notoriously inferior…’ He also noted that an informant in Carmarthen had told him that the labourer was better off than the small farmer who paid between £10 and £20, adding that the small farmer tenant lived ‘harder than the inmates of the workhouse.’ That was not Evan Jacob.

  The farm at Lletherneuadd was quite different. The heart of their life was in the family home, a traditional Welsh long house, a ty hir, whose basic concept entails the need for man and cattle to exist together under the same roof. There was almost always, as one writer put it in a report, ‘merely a wooden partition between the cow house and the house.’ The general pattern of design and use was that this was a single-storey home, with a hearth in a central position, bedrooms at one end and beasts at the other. A house at Llandeilo, for instance, was 75 feet long, with a pig-sty at one end, cows and feeding area in the centre, and the living and sleeping quarters at the other end. Another Carmarthen long house, at Cwmeilath, had a dairy centrally close to the hearth and living room.

  The Jacobs’ place similarly had a cow house at one end and the bedrooms at the other. But the back kitchen and dairy were close together, added on to the main structure at the centre. It was a life of intimacy with nature, in every sense. Evan and Hannah had the resources of their large family to call on, attended the Congregational Chapel, placed high value on learning, and worked long hours, with their long house at the very core of their sensual and very earthy lives, packed tight next to their land and animals. Every day would begin and end with the smells of the food and sweat of their proximity to the beasts they depended on for their livelihood.

  It was also removed from the local village: a walk of over a mile was needed to get from Pencader to Lletherneuadd. It was a life that demanded robust health and a sturdy body to cope with the hard and long hours of physical work. The one physical account we have of Evan and Hannah, from their criminal record, tells us that Evan was short (5 feet 6), and was born in 1831. He could read and write only ‘imperfectly’ which will be important later when considering Sarah’s book-learning. There are also official photographs of the pair. Evan’s picture shows a strong, long and bony face: tight-lipped resolve shows in his expression and he communicates a toughness as muscled and determined as a farmer has to be. Hannah, in contrast, is bonneted, looking downwards, her face offering no clue to character or mood.

  Illness in rural Wales was something to be shouldered, contained, until it was too burdensome and had to be somehow dealt with. Sometimes, it was a scourge, like the arrival of scarlet fever at the long house in early 1866. The parents knew what it was and so they had no medical costs to worry them. The infection affected the family for a few weeks, after which they all carried on with their normal lives. But those bare facts contain matters of interest here. Scarlet fever has a period of intensity lasting six weeks; it is common where there is overcrowding, and it is a disease which is often carried by milk. The family ‘carried on’ – Sarah was back at school after two weeks. Although the most painful period in the action of the infection is a week or so, there are risks in a condition in which the sufferer has no proper care and attention in the recovery period. The little girl must have felt very ill even as she carried on with normal life, still in the throes of the fever and its aftermath.

  From one point of view, a long period of illness for a child was normal, and so was the way of coping. Children in the Victorian countryside had a slightly better chance of surviving serious illness then their urban counterparts, but all children from poor families were open to the contraction of harmful bacteria through elements of their lifestyle: hygiene was not meticulously adhered to and popular treatments (often opium in various forms) might be administered in dangerous dosages. There were also many ‘cures’ practised through ignorance, such as the belief in some counties that eating a mouse would cure whooping cough. As historian Pamela Horn has written, ‘It was only when various home remedies had failed that… the doctor was called upon. To many country children, he was an awe-inspiring figure and one whom they saw but rarely.’

  In Sarah’s case, when the scarlet fever struck the family down, all the usual business would be followed: rest, comforting food and plenty of demonstrations of affection and reassurance from parents who had seen it all before, and who had of course, in most cases, experienced the common illnesses themselves as children. But when unknown, persistent and perplexing suffering descended, it was a very different matter.

  A year after the scarlet fever, Sarah began to be ill with something far more mysterious and troublesome: the malaise was not familiar to Mam and Dad and a potentially serious problem was upon them. The strange and frightening illness began to show itself in February 1867; Sarah had four days of distressing symptoms, including blood in her mouth and a pain in her stomach. This was worrying enough to send for the doctor, and Henry Davies from Llandysul was called in. What developed then, most noticeably, was the emergence of ‘fits’. These muscular spasms were very disturbing, and Sarah did not eat much at all for the next month. She was very thin and pale by mid-March. Dr Davies was puzzled and could offer no explanation other than to turn to religion and comment ruefully that ‘Dr Mawr’ was the one needed now – God of course, ‘the great doctor in the sky’ as it were.

  Other medical men came and were equally defeated by the girl’s condition. One doctor simply said that her brain was inflamed. Treatment included an enema and a placebo pill. But as the year moved through summer to autumn, Sarah ate less and less. Her left leg was virtually paralysed and she still had the ‘fits’ which began to be felt when any food at all was offered. She took only milk and small amounts of dairy-based bwyd llwy or ‘spoon food’ – possibly a version of cawl without the meat. Then, in October, the turning point came: she took no food at all. The ‘fasting girl’ was established.

  As the fast went into its first phase, in the w
inter and spring of 1867-68, what seems most striking now is that the notion of ‘hysteria’ was not expressed. They would (or should) have been familiar with the term, but other ideas about the illness prevailed. The application of ‘hysteria’ as a diagnosis was to come later. The emphasis was all on physiological condition, and as that increasingly presented an enigma to the experts, a religious angle on matters inevitably grew. The feature of most interest is surely Evan and Hannah’s determination to stand back and be obedient to all their daughter’s requests when it came to keeping her comfortable and avoiding extremes of pain and discomfort.

  Sarah’s almost daily actions included a ‘fit’, as Evan called it. This was arguably not much more than a shudder of revulsion when food was offered. She also had the stiff leg and as one doctor described, ‘one part of her belly was hard’. What happened was that the spiritual and miraculous took over, and before she was a ‘sensation’ Sarah was at first some kind of ‘wonder.’ The instigator of the first dash of myth and superstition in the reports of the media was the vicar of Llanfihangel-ar-Arth, the Rev. Evan Jones. He saw that a normal little girl who does not eat at all should be emaciated, but there was Sarah, apparently still with flesh, reading and remaining in her bed all day and night, even writing poems and being altogether rather saintly, in a medieval sense. He may or may not have been aware that there was such a thing as anorexia mirabilis, something stretching back several centuries to people such as Catherine of Siena (died in 1380) whose life exemplified the fasting regime of holiness. More familiar may have been the long tradition of hermits and recluses, such as the phenomenon of the anchorhold, in which a hermit resided in a den close by the everyday traffic of people in their working lives, a man who fasted and reminded folk of saintly acts and attitudes. Whatever things Rev. Jones knew about, he decided that there was a ‘wonder’ in his own parish and he wrote to The Welshman to tell them all about Sarah.

  His letter contained these sentences: ‘Allow me to invite the attention of your readers to a most extraordinary case. Sarah Jacob, a little girl of twelve years of age… has not partaken of a single grain of any kind of food whatever during the last sixteen months’. Also there was a challenge: ‘Would it not be worth their while for medical men to make an investigation into this strange case?’ If ever a man wanted to stir the rational base of Victorian society then it was the Rev. Jones, and the tone of his letter suggests someone who has had his fill of facts and investigations, Darwinian and geological proofs, and wants to remind his contemporaries that there are such things as wonders. After all, the Romantic generation of poets and thinkers, mountain walkers and freethinkers had insisted that there was a divine working of mystery through nature, one we should accept as a wonder rather than as something to be defined, explained and analysed.

  The Rev. Jones must also have noted the abundance of doctors in and around Carmarthen. Twenty years before Sarah’s case, issues related to public health had brought all the medical minds of the region into play. In the decade before Rev. Jones wrote his letter, the area had pointed to the distinction between established surgeons whose qualifications were slightly obscure and uncertain, and the new men, like John Hughes, who had two highly esteemed qualifications. The vicar would have been keenly aware of the most recent generation of doctors, those now treating Sarah, and their greater reliance on more modern ideas than the previous group. The letter to The Welshman had the desired effect. Jones knew Sarah, who was born on 12 May, 1857, and of course he would have seen and spoken to her at Sunday School and other events; it was clear to him that she was intelligent and had an enquiring mind. She read both Welsh and English, and she had a creative, individual streak running through her personality.

  But as the story seeped across to other places and was placed before other readers, well beyond Carmarthenshire, it met with folk who had long memories who recalled the infamous cheat Ann Moore, the ‘Fasting Woman of Tutbury’ who, in 1809, refused food and had convulsions like Sarah. Ann had become a sensation in the print media, and she became very rich as she attained the status of a public spectacle, collecting the then huge sum of £400 according to some sources.

  Ann Moore’s condition had attracted many medical men, and they all passed their opinions, ranging from consumption to loss of appetite with insanity. Five years after her first supposed self-starvation, there was a decision to study her closely, to ascertain the validity of the case. Her physical state declined severely and she was thought to be near death when she made a declaration: ‘I declare that I have used no deception, and that for six years I have taken nothing but once, the inside of a few blackcurrants, for the last four years and a half, nothing at all.’

  Then, in 1813, after one watcher saw the bed wet with urine, it was discovered that Ann had been taking food from her daughter’s lips as they kissed. The deception was exposed, and she was forced to state publicly that she was a fraud. Doctors and other professional men were aware of her name long after the fraud was out, and she was mentioned in popular works of medicine. There is no doubt that, in 1868, when readers across the land began to know Sarah Jacob’s story, they thought of the cheat of Tutbury.

  Yet, for the time being in early 1868, the girl had her advocate in the Rev. Jones, and naturally, his letter and his conversation disseminated the story as if it were a miraculous event. He had given it time of course. After several months of the girl being confined to bed with a mystery illness, of course people talked. They would meet at church or at the market, and speak of her. The gossip would spread to Carmarthen and Pencader, and after some time, when there was nothing extraordinary about a sick child stumping the doctor and being given no cure, matters moved into a period when it was becoming very odd indeed. By the middle months of 1867 Sarah’s condition was worth commenting on; then by the end of that year it would take centre stage as the one topic of conversation that had to be addressed.

  The Rev. Jones wanted to express concern and a certain amount of disbelief: Hannah Jacob began to make Sarah’s bed into something resembling a shrine. Ritual crept in, and the churchmen were naturally wary of such things as ribbons, flowers and items suggesting the garish quality of supposed Popish practice.

  Then came the first written and public statement by a medical man: Dr Davies, who had treated Sarah from the beginning, decided to tell the press as well. He wrote to Seren Cymru, a Welsh-language newspaper established in Carmarthen in 1851, giving a balance of the rational view and the necessity of being defeated by the case’s inexplicable elements. He wrote, on the one hand, with the confidence of a man who can label and so counteract the illness: ‘Much commotion is created in the papers… concerning a farmer’s daughter at Lletherneuadd, near Pencader, a patient of mine, who suffers from catalepsy…’. This was seen as a purely nervous disease. But he then added, ‘The following May [1867] I gave up visiting her, knowing medical aid was of no avail.’ He then describes her condition and the report from Evan that she was living, and on practically no nutrients at all. He refused to believe that this was all a scheme to make money, following Ann Moore, and finished with: ‘The readers may earnestly wish to know my unflinching opinion. I really and truly am perplexed, well knowing that nothing is impossible in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of all mankind.’

  The scene was set for the believers in the centrality of objective and rational scientific knowledge to stand opposed to those who were prepared to believe that ‘there were more things in heaven and earth’ than observed fact and documented biological conditions. At the core of this was the question as to whether a human being could live on drops of water and tiny bits of apple juice for eighteen months and then not only still live, but still have flesh, rather than skin covering very prominent bones.

  Could one individual cause a blockage in that great and powerful river of Progress and Enlightenment? In the society of the time, knowledge was organised in such a way that there was an increasing marginalization of anything smacking of ‘folk belief,’ yet nevertheless
, that element in the life of a great number of the general populace was so powerful that it could never be totally ignored.

  2

  Knowledge Torn Apart: Science and Popular Belief

  Now what I want is facts… Facts alone are wanted in life.

  Charles Dickens: Hard Times

  At that time, in early 1869, when the Rev. Jones wrote his letter, medical science, confronted with a whole gamut of female ailments, generally liked to apply the concept of hysteria. Today, we see that word through the lens of Sigmund Freud, who learned about it as a student, under the guidance of the influential French doctor, Jean-Martin Charcot, who worked on ‘hysterics’ at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris. Although Freud took the illness and developed a sexual basis for much of the neurasthenia supposedly related to it, the condition was familiar to the medical world in 1869, but in a different context.

  Students of Freud reading about Sarah Jacob might soon run off to their sources to look for some kind of early sexual experience in Sarah’s life that might explain the illness, aligning what we know with the women in Charcot and Freud’s charge. That would be utterly wrong-headed, and in any case, there is no source available on Sarah’s early life. She was, after all, only ten at the onset of the illness.

  What is of particular interest is why her father spoke about and described his daughter having a ‘fit’ if food were offered her, and the symptoms of her illness, expressed in the rigidity of one limb, lack of appetite, mucous emitted and the bowels being apparently motionless. There was also very little urine for most of the period, although later, in 1869, urine was found soaking the bed at one point.

  This description is interesting because it compares closely with what was known about in relation to hysteria in the generation before Sarah. In the records of the Edinburgh Infirmary, for instance, for the years 1770-1800, notebooks and reports have shown that what was then called hysteria could be any one of several illnesses. Yet gradually, a certain range of symptoms, with a supposed pattern of development, tended to confirm the view of the time, as expressed by physician John Gregory, that hysteria was linked to ‘female softness and delicacy with a correspondent delicacy of constitution.’ Medical knowledge at that time, as one anonymous writer put it with regard to women, viewed that gender as being fragile, ‘rendering her the most amiable object in the universe’ who had an ‘infinite number of maladies to which every man is a stranger.’