QI The Book of the Dead

wallpaper, immediately brushed all doubts aside. The incisions on the back of her head could only be the work of oriental surgeons and her language was, of course, Rejang, a dialect of Sumatra.
    A delighted Worrall encouraged Dr Wilkinson to publish his findings in full in the local paper, and this proved to be the Princess’s undoing. Mrs Neale, a landlady from Bristol, identified her as a former lodger who had entertained the household by recitinga made-up language. When confronted with the news, the Princess broke down and confessed the truth to Mrs Worrall: she was really Mary Baker, a cobbler’s daughter from Titheridge in Devon.
    The Worralls (and the ludicrous Dr Wilkinson) became a laughing-stock, but they decided that punishing the girl would only make things worse. It would be less embarrassing if she just disappeared, so they put her aboard a ship sailing for Philadelphia. Worrall’s bank collapsed soon afterwards, forcing him to resign as Town Clerk. For a few months Mary made theatrical appearances in America and wrote letters to Mrs Worrall, keeping her up-to-date with her progress as a minor celebrity. By the year’s end the letters stopped coming. Nothing more was heard of her until ‘Princess Caraboo’ suddenly reappeared in Bond Street in London. Later she toured other European countries, but the shows were not a success and she returned to Bristol where she got married (oddly enough, to a man called Baker) and gave birth to a daughter.
    The details of her life before she became Princess Caraboo are sadly typical of many poor women of her time. She had contracted rheumatic fever as a child after which, her father said, she had ‘never been right in the head’. Worn out by spells as a farm labourer and a domestic maid, but always a tomboy, she left home at nineteen and set off on the road, living rough. Half-starved and depressed, she tried to hang herself, but stopped at the last minute, afraid of committing a mortal sin. When she reached London she was seriously ill – the scars on the back of her head that Dr Wilkinson had found were in fact the result of a clumsy operation in a poor-house hospital.
    Mary had many other adventures during her five-or six-year absence from the West Country. She was briefly admitted to Magdalen hospital, a home for fallen women, but was asked to leave when it became clear she hadn’t ever actually worked as a prostitute. When asked why she had come there in the first place, she said simply that she’d liked the look of the brown dresses and straw hats the inmates wore. Once, walking over Salisbury plain, disguised as a man for safety, she was captured and imprisoned by a band of highwaymen. On another occasion, she became pregnant, identifying the father as an Exeter bricklayer called John Baker, or else a Frenchman she had met in a bookshop. The child didn’t live long and Mary was on her way once more. She fell in step with a group of Romanies, who may have inspired her to invent her ‘Javasu’ language, and worked as a cook for a Jewish family, whose religious rituals possibly provided material for her own arcane incantations.
    Just before appearing from nowhere as Princess Caraboo, she was sacked as a children’s nanny by a Mr and Mrs Starling of Islington, for frightening the young Starlings with hair-raising tales of being born in the ‘East Indies’. Mrs Starling declared her anecdotes so wild she could ‘not even begin to recollect a quarter of the girl’s vagaries’. Mary had also set fire to two beds in a week.
    A contemporary account of Princess Caraboo’s life noted her remarkable ability to maintain her story in the face of repeated questioning and called her performance ‘an instance of consummate art and duplicity’. On arriving in Bristol from London, Mary noticed the Breton beggar girls, and copied their dress by adopting a turban. She pretended to be French, but when questioned by a French official, she said she was Spanish. When the inevitable Spaniard was produced she improvised her own ‘lingo’ out of her own head.

    It now seems clear that her great deception began only to avoid being locked up for the night for vagrancy. Finding herself believed by so many of the good folk of Almondsbury, the temptation to avoid, by any means, a return to her degrading and aimless past must have been impossible to resist. What she lacked in formal education she more than made up for in imagination, quick thinking and an excellent