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plentiful coal-black beard and moustache. Tussy’s announcement that she was double-brained was coincident with the time of her first conscious memory: My earliest recollection . . . is when I was about three years old and Mohr . . . was carrying me on his shoulders round our small garden in Grafton Terrace, and putting convolvulus flowers in my brown curls. Mohr was admittedly a splendid horse.29
Putting Marx in harness was a family tradition. Tussy ‘heard tell’ that at Dean Street, Jenny, Laura and her dead brother Edgar would yoke Mohr to chairs which the three of them mounted as their carriage, and make him pull. As the youngest and a later arrival, Tussy got her own mount and his dedicated attention: Personally – perhaps because I had no sisters of my own age – I preferred Mohr as a riding-horse. Seated on his shoulder holding tight by his great mane of hair, then black, but with a hint of grey, I have had magnificent rides round our little garden and over the fields . . . that surrounded our house at Grafton Terrace.30
Severe whooping cough in the winter of 1858 gave Tussy opportunity to assume dominion of the household: ‘The whole family became my bond slaves and I have heard that as usual in slavery there was general demoralisation.’31 The year started badly, without coal or cash to pay the rental arrears. Whilst Tussy took advantage of being ill to insist on open house for every street child in the neighbourhood to keep her company, her father sent to Engels an itemised account of his debts, lamenting his inability to pay them, ‘even if I were to reduce my expenses to the utmost by, for example, removing the children from school, going to live in a strictly working-class dwelling, dismissing the servants and living on potatoes’.32 The Marxes’ immediate neighbours, a respectably petit-bourgeois master-baker and a builder, were more financially stable than the notorious local philosopher whose finances were so bad that by 1859 he was served with a county court summons at his front door and
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