Part 1: Meshak, Otis & the Coram Men
Part 1: The Coram Men
The first part of Coram Boy introduces two worlds that could not be more different: the dark, wandering life of Otis Gardiner and his son Meshak, and the privileged Ashbrook household in Gloucestershire. Gavin uses parallel narratives to build dramatic tension and explore how children’s fates are determined by the adults around them.
Otis Gardiner: The Villain
Otis Gardiner travels the English countryside posing as a ‘Coram man’ — someone who collects babies on behalf of the Foundling Hospital. Desperate mothers, often unmarried women facing social ruin, pay Otis to take their babies to safety. But Otis has no connection to the Foundling Hospital. He pockets the money and orders his son Meshak to bury the babies in fields and ditches along the road.
Otis Gardiner exploits both the mothers and the babies. He represents a society where the most vulnerable are treated as commodities — their lives have a price but no value. Gavin presents Otis as a product of a system that abandons its weakest members.
Gavin does not present Otis as a cartoonish villain. He is calculating, manipulative and utterly without remorse. His cruelty is made more disturbing by its ordinariness — he treats child trafficking as a business, no different from selling goods at market. This banality of evil is one of the novel’s most powerful features. Otis controls every aspect of Meshak’s life through fear and intimidation, exploiting his son’s disability and dependence. The father-son relationship between Otis and Meshak is a dark inversion of the parent-child bonds that the novel elsewhere celebrates.
Meshak: Innocence Trapped
Meshak is Otis’s son, a young man with a learning disability who is entirely dependent on his father. He is terrified of Otis and haunted by the babies he has been forced to bury. Gavin presents Meshak with great sympathy — he is gentle, loving and deeply moral, but trapped in a situation he cannot escape. His innocence makes Otis’s crimes even more horrifying, because the reader sees them through Meshak’s bewildered, grief-stricken eyes.
When Meshak discovers the baby born to Melissa and Alexander, he sees the child as an angel — beautiful and precious. Instead of burying this baby as Otis commands, Meshak secretly saves the child, taking him to the Foundling Hospital. This act of defiance is the turning point of the novel. Meshak’s decision to save Aaron shows that goodness can exist even within a system of terrible evil. Gavin uses Meshak to argue that moral courage is not linked to intelligence or status — Meshak, the character society would dismiss as worthless, is the one who saves a life.
Alexander Ashbrook and Melissa
Alexander Ashbrook is the son of Sir William Ashbrook, a wealthy Gloucestershire landowner. Alexander is passionate about music and dreams of studying under Handel in London, but his father insists he follow a respectable career. This conflict between duty and passion drives Alexander’s storyline. Alexander falls in love with Melissa, and their secret relationship produces a baby. When Melissa’s family discover the pregnancy, the baby is given to Otis — unwittingly condemning the child to what should be death.
Alexander and Melissa’s baby is the child Meshak saves — the baby who becomes Aaron at the Foundling Hospital. This connection between the Ashbrook family and the foundling world is hidden from the characters but visible to the reader, creating powerful dramatic irony.
The scenes where Meshak buries babies are written in a Gothic style — dark landscapes, nighttime, isolation and horror. Gavin uses Gothic imagery to force the reader to confront what is happening rather than look away. The earth itself seems to reject the crime: Meshak hears the babies crying in his mind long after they are buried. These hauntings blur the line between psychological trauma and the supernatural, adding a layer of unease that runs through the entire novel.
The Role of Part 1 in the Novel’s Structure
Part 1 establishes the novel’s central tension: the collision between a world of privilege and a world of exploitation, connected by the fate of one child. Gavin shows that these two worlds are not separate — they depend on each other, because the comfort of the wealthy is built on the suffering of the poor.
Structurally, Part 1 plants the seeds of every major conflict that will unfold later. Alexander’s passion for music will reappear through Aaron’s singing voice. Meshak’s secret act of defiance will have consequences that echo across decades. Otis’s crimes will eventually be exposed. Every key event in Part 2 has its origin here, making Part 1 essential to understanding the novel as a whole. In the exam, being able to trace these connections across the text demonstrates the kind of structural awareness that earns high AO1 marks.