Two boys played under a tree in front of the house. Diana Roser watched them through the window until a shower of rain sent them scurrying home. Diana turned back into the room reluctantly, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, straining to focus on the bed. She saw that Sarah was still now, free from the convulsions that had twisted her body and made her cry out in pain for hours. The doctor had given her antidotes for the poison and a small dose of laudanum for the pain but it wasn’t enough. It was too late for a cure and the laudanum barely took the edge from the pain. But now she lay motionless and Diana sensed why. She moved slowly to the bed and looked down at Sarah’s face, still contorted from the violent spasms but still showing her young, smooth skin. Diana placed her palm on Sarah’s forehead and could tell that she had gone.
The next day, an April Monday in 1840, an inquest into Sarah Stringer’s death was held at the Crown.1 It heard that Sarah, the 19-year-old servant of farmer John Turner, had discovered that she was pregnant and decided to end her life when the father refused to support her. This would have been her second child and, with no family of her own, she could not provide for herself and another child. She therefore consumed a spoonful of arsenic, killing herself and her unborn child. Diana was called as a witness and described how she was asked to minister to Sarah in her final hours. Sarah had spoken to her about Downard, the father of the unborn child, and how he had first asked her to say that the child belonged to someone else. When she refused and said she was going to commit suicide, Downard said he did not care.
The verdict of the inquest was insanity. Sarah was found to be of unsound mind and unable to make a rational decision. Sarah’s decision could not have been more rational. Weighing up her future and that of her children she chose to end her life and make sure that the infant was not born into a life of poverty and misery.
When Diana left the Crown she must have been numb from the stress of giving evidence and from the memory of nursing a young woman whose life had ended in hopelessness. It was typical of towns like East Grinstead, places with little hope for the poor. She must also have thought of her own family, of her husband William, fortunate though he was to have a job, who barely made enough to feed their family. They had five young children and the future looked bleak where they lived in the depressed south-east of rural England. Perhaps it was time to talk about giving their children a better chance than Sarah. Perhaps it was time to talk about Australia.
- ‘Inquests in Sussex’, Sussex Advertiser, 6 April 1840, p 2. ↩︎
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