One Small Thing: Essie Fox

My one small thing is an object that brings me joy - but also sadness. It's something I inherited from my great grandmother, Annie Thomas, and it's a locket she once owned, having - so the story goes - saved up with her own money which she made from selling geese. I always thought that seemed to be a somewhat fanciful account. The wrinkled and arthritic nonagenarian I knew lived in the centre of a town, and she could not have been much further from my idea of any farmer.

Since she died when I was seven (as did both sets of my maternal and paternal grandparents) there are so many things about their lives I'll never know. I've often wished I'd had the chance to talk to Annie more, to ask about the geese - about the fact that she would often tell my mother that her childhood was ruined by a wicked stepmother who didn't want her in the house and sent her off to boarding school.

It sounds just like a fairy tale. People assumed she'd made it up.

More recently, I did embark on some online investigation and found that Annie had indeed been born upon a farm. She appears in census records as a new-born baby girl, but then from the age of three there is no mention of her name. What is clear from all the records is that her father had remarried, the date of that then coinciding with his daughter's disappearance. After that Annie is lost from any records I can find, only later re-emerging when she's old enough to marry - when her husband made his living selling agricultural feedstuff, so I suppose there would have been ample seed to feed her geese!

But when it comes to Annie's locket, that holds another mystery. It contains a curling lock of very fine brown hair, and the grainy photograph of a serious-faced woman who looks to be Victorian. Was this Annie's real mother, my own great-great-grandmother? It's something I will never know. But in a way Annie's resolve to treat herself to something precious when she'd been treated very badly in her youth came to inspire me when I wrote my debut novel.

The Somnambulist is not based on Annie's story. But my imagined heroine also has a childhood built on family deceptions, with the truth about her past eventually revealed through a curling lock of hair that has been hidden in a locket. Perhaps, during this quiet and reflective time of lockdown, it's to think of Annie more - to open up her gift and imagine what it means. To try and bring her past to life?

You can find out more about Essie's work here.

Stay well, stay safe, stay home x