Set in the 1820 or 1830s, in the Black Country (West Midlands of the UK, previously a coal mining region) this book is about ‘the noble art’ of fisticuffs, or pugilism, or as we know it today, boxing. Most unusually, our protagonist is Annie, a female boxer, and a Romi (gypsy). The book begins with the tragic tale of how Annie’s mother, Keziah Loveridge, fell into poverty after her beloved husband died, with 6 children and another one on the way. After losing their pony and vardo (caravan), the little family are reduced to destitution, and although loving and close-knit, Keziah has her eldest son take 9 year old Annie to a fair, to sell her for 5 guineas so that her family can buy a new pony and vardo, with which to survive. Bill Perry, a once famous boxer known as The Slasher, and also someone who tows coal barges, buys Annie for 6 guineas and treats her as a daughter.
This is no tale of abuse and woe, though there is plenty of hardship and poverty in it. It is, rather, a very charmingly told tale of Annie’s growing up, her boxing exploits, the people she learns to love as a replacement family, and the oppression of the poor and working classes in that era. A lot of the charm comes from the way it is written, in Annie’s distinctive voice, vocabulary and accent:
When I was a babby I spoke Black Country and I dint speak much neither. Then nor now. They said I was a moody mare and I was always scowling and I walked slow and heavy and leaning like I was a Punch barge-hauling coal (p6).
The narrative is so well set in its locale that it immediately conjures up that place and time of intense industrialisation:
Before that walk, in the years my people roamed and wandered them lanes and fields in that country all over, from the towns and villages to the moor top and woodlings, we watched the copses going for pit props and railway beds and the rivers getting the bends taken out. There were the pit heaps and brickworks and the canals snaking through the green pastures like hedges do in proper country, And new brick buildings going up by the basin where the canals all met the river and it was all sludge when they had the new locks closed and men were bricking up the culverts and run-offs” (p6-7).
The terms, the names, the changes to the landscape, are all so evocatively conjured up in Annie’s observant description and clear memories.
The story moves along swiftly, with Annie growing up, learning to box, boxing in a ring against any ‘challengers’ to make prize or reward money, with which to bail Bill Perry out of debts and try to keep everyone she loves out of the workhouse and out of prison. Annie is a singular little girl; at 9 years old, just as she is sold, she misses her mother and siblings acutely, but takes the initiative to clean Bill Perry’s barge from top to bottom with industry and innovation. She also does it because she has a innate sense of fairness:
And I weren’t doing all that just for kindness, but because I had to live on that barge and I wanted it nice and I dint forget the 6 guineas Bill paid for me and I thought it was fair dos to him to get his money’s worth now Mammy would have her new cardo and pony (p40).
Although Annie’s life is full of hard work, and full of risks too, because seemingly all people work for can be taken away from them in an instant, at the whim of law, authorities, aristocrats, on one pretext or another. She is never down for long, seemingly, and bounces back from the ropes like the boxer she is, fists up and jabbing again. There is a streak of genteelness however, in the forms of Miss Esther and Miss Judith, daughters of the Reverend, who set up a school, called Poor School, to teach literacy children of the poor. One cannot help but think how in these days of euphemisms, no one would ever dream of giving a school such a name, even if it says exactly what it is on the tin.
Annie learns not only to read, but learns to love poetry, and novels, and it gives her spirit and mind a refinement and also grist to her mill in a way which makes her so much more than a fighter and a bar keeper. She uses her literacy to educate herself and is so much more equipped to cope with her world as a result. It is a touching illustration of how teaching someone to read can empower them in so many aspects of their lives. That said, it is clear Annie is no average girl or woman, and her indomitable spirit powers this book. A highly readable and delightful rendering of Black Country communities and industries of the mid 19th century.
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