It wasn’t quite thought through yet but the germ of an idea was planted in her mind, and now it was slowly beginning to blossom. Suddenly, Rosie’s face broke into a smile. ‘That’s it, Rosie gal!’ she cried, thumping her fist against the mantelpiece. ‘Buy the coal from the sidings and build up a little round of your own, why don’t you?’
Staggered by the measure of her ambitions, she fell into the chair and for a long time gazed into the red raw heat of the fire. Excited and daunted all at the same time, she made herself be calm. ‘Think it through,’ she murmured. ‘There must be dozens of folk like you… folk who can’t afford a full bag of coal, and who have to cart the smaller bags on their back from the corner shops. On top of that they’re made to pay the earth for it.’ Now the idea was really beginning to take shape. ‘The regular merchants won’t split a bag in two. Nor are they too willing to take half payment one week, and the rest the next.’ She was on her feet now, eyes glowing as bright as the coals and her heart going ten to the dozen. ‘Do it, Rosie!’ she whispered harshly. ‘Get together every penny you can, and give it a go. You’ve got nothing to lose.’ She chuckled. ‘Well, happen the few pounds I put by for a rainy day. But the rainy day is here now. The Welfare won’t help, so the money will be gone soon enough. Why not put it where it might reap rewards?’
Thrilled, she even did a little jig on the spot. After that she went to the sideboard and took out an old tea-caddy. Taking off the lid, she tipped it upside down on the table. A small bundle of notes fell out, together with some loose coins. ‘How much have you got then, Rosie, gal?’ she asked herself. A quick count produced twelve pounds and eighteen shillings. ‘Will it be enough to carry us over?’ she wondered. Only time would tell.
Carefully, she replaced the tin and went upstairs. Danny was fast and hard asleep. ‘We’re going into business, sunshine,’ she told the sleeping form. ‘What do you think to that, eh? Rosie and son… coal-merchants.’ She smiled a soft and secret smile. ‘Sounds good, don’t it, eh?’ she murmured. At the door she turned. ‘You and me, we’re off to see the man at the sidings tomorrow.’ It was something to look forward to. At long last she had a real reason for rising from her bed. It was a good feeling.
* * *
Excited by her new enterprise, Rosie hardly slept a wink. Consequently, when she sat opposite Danny at the breakfast table the next morning, her head was thumping like an old steam engine and she had no appetite. ‘If you don’t want your cornflakes, I don’t want mine either,’ Danny declared. And because she wanted him to set out with a full belly that morning, she forced every mouthful down her throat.
First stop was the rag and bone man, ‘A pram, you say?’ he repeated, rubbing the stubble on his face. ‘There’s a couple down the yard, I reckon, but one’s got a wheel missing, and the other ain’t got no bottom to it. You can have the pair on ’em for half a crown.’ He blew his nose through his fingers and regarded her with amusement. ‘It’s Doug Selby’s missus, ain’t it?’ he asked meaningfully. ‘Well now, I thought your old man were in prison? Been naughty, have you, eh?’ He winked at her and she was nauseated.
‘What I want the pram for is none of your concern,’ she said, putting him smartly in his place. ‘I’ll give you one and six for the both.’
‘There must be summat wrong with your ears. I said half a crown.’
‘If you know so much about me, you must also know there’s no money coming into my house.’ Meeting his leer with defiance, she said, ‘Two shillings. That’s my best offer. Take it or leave it.’
Spitting on his hand, he held it out. ‘Let’s shake on it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she replied, grimacing.
Roaring with laughter, he took her money and pointed the way to the corner where the prams were stacked. There was a black tatty one, and a navy blue thing with a great hole in the bottom. ‘We can’t get no coal in there,’ Danny said, getting down on his knees and peeping up at her through the pram bottom. ‘And that one’s only got three wheels.’
‘Then we’ll take a wheel off the one with no bottom, and put it on the other,’ Rosie declared. She lifted the prams one at a time and examined them. The one with only three wheels had a sound base, strong enough for her purpose, at least until she could buy a hand cart. But she was thinking ahead of herself. ‘One step at a time, Rosie gal,’ she cautioned.
‘Can you change the wheel, Mam?’ Mimicking her actions, Danny was pretending to examine the articles.
‘It’s not a big job.’ She tousled his hair. ‘But we’ll need a spanner.’
No sooner had she said it than he was running down the yard. A minute later he came back with the man in tow. ‘The hire of a spanner will cost you sixpence,’ he told her, handing it down.
‘Fair enough,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you sixpence, and you can give me a shilling.’
‘How do you make that out?’
‘Because I paid for two prams and I’m only taking the one.’
He coughed and stared and coughed again. All right,’ he grumbled. ‘Take the bloody spanner and we’ll call it quits.’
And I’ll need that hand-shovel.’ She pointed to a small black scoop lying on top of a scrap heap.
‘Take the bloody thing!’ he snarled. He stalked off, leaving Rosie very pleased with herself. ‘This spanner will come in handy,’ she told Danny. And he was never more proud of her.
The foreman at the sidings was astonished. ‘What! You’re telling me you mean to take that monstrosity round the streets and sell coal from it?’ He walked round and round the pram, grinning from ear to ear. ‘I’d rather you than me,’ he declared.
‘Nobody’s asking you to do it,’ Rosie reminded him. ‘All I want from you is a load of coal, enough to fill the pram to the very top.’
‘You’ve got some balls, I’ll give you that.’ He was standing before her, hands in his pockets and a look of admiration on his face as he glanced from her to the pram and back again.
‘I don’t know whether to take that as an insult or a compliment,’ Rosie returned. Impatient to be gone, she enquired, ‘How much will it cost me… to fill the pram right up to the brim?’ ‘All depends what grade coal you’re after.’
‘I want the best.’ Just in case he had it in mind to cheat her, Rosie reminded him, ‘And don’t forget I knew Ned Selby for a while, so I do know muck from gold.’
He laughed at that. ‘I’m sure you do,’ he confessed, ‘I’m sure you do.’
Satisfied that Rosie and the boy were following, he strode to the far end of the yard. ‘You’ll not get better than that,’ he pointed out, indicating the pile of shiny black nuggets piled high in the bay. He watched her go over and take a piece in her hand. He saw her expression fall, and knew she wasn’t fooled. ‘Is there a problem?’ He winked at Danny, who gave him a withering look.
‘I said I wanted the “best”,’ she retaliated angrily. ‘This is too scaly. It’ll spit and fizz and be gone in minutes.’
‘Well now, you do know your coal, don’t you?’ he said with renewed interest. ‘I’m impressed, lady.’
‘I don’t want you impressed. I want my pram filled. How much will it cost me?’
‘Let’s see now.’ He scrutinised the pram, weighing up the contents in his mind. ‘Three shilling… happen a bit more.’
Rosie stared at him in disbelief. ‘Try again.’
He knew he’d met his match, ‘All right, pay what you can afford. Wheel the thing over here. I’m a busy man with a yard to run, so the quicker we get it done the better.’ He had enjoyed his fun. Now it was a nuisance. ‘We don’t normally trade this way, with folk just coming in off the streets,’ he advised her. ‘What’s more the merchants wouldn’t like it.’ He again winked at Danny, who surprised and amused him by winking back.
He stood at the door to his office as Rosie and the boy trundled off with the coal-laden pram. ‘Good luck to you,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘You’re a trier, I’ll give you that. I’m buggered if you don
’t deserve to do all right.’
As he went back into the warmth of his office, he wondered whether he’d see her again. In fact, so successful did she become that Rosie was destined to return to his yard again and again.
First stop was Albert Street. Mrs Lewis couldn’t believe her eyes. ‘You’re a godsend,’ she declared; a wizened little thing with poor eyesight, she was virtually housebound. ‘Our Katie in Bolton, well now, she has a lovely coal-merchant by the name of Anstee. It’s a pity the ones round here aren’t like him. The one I’ve got is such a surly devil. He’ll not split a bag, you see, and he won’t give credit. Being on a small income, I find it very hard to pay the price of a full bag all at once.’
‘You can have as much or as little as you like from me,’ Rosie explained. ‘And I’m not against giving credit if needed.’ Realising she had to earn this week to pay for her next load, she warned, ‘I’m only just starting up, so I can’t carry debt beyond a week.’
‘Oh, I can pay for what I have,’ came the answer. ‘I don’t burn much more than a couple of shovelfuls a week… have to ration myself, do you see?’ Peering into the pram, she asked, ‘Good stuff, is it? Long-burning?’ Rosie reassured her and so her next question was, ‘How much a shovelful… heaped up, mind?’ Rosie had already calculated she would need to charge two shillings a shovelful if she was to make a profit. ‘Can’t really do it for less,’ she apologised. After all, she had to find food and pay the rent the same as anyone else.
Mrs Lewis was delighted. ‘If I were you, I’d call on Mr Runcorn at number four. He and the coalman had one blister of a row last week. Since then he’s been without coal.’
Mr Runcorn had three shovelfuls. The next-door neighbour had two. And by the time Rosie got to the end of the street she was sold out. ‘I can’t believe it!’ she laughed, hugging Danny, the two of them covered in coal-dust. ‘We’ve sold out! Do you know what that means?’
‘Are we rich?’ Danny’s big eyes shone like candles out of his smutty face.
Rosie was choked. She looked into that small dirty face, and her heart was full to bursting. ‘What say we sit right here on the kerbside and count our earnings, eh?’
And that was just what they did. Spreading the shiny coins over Danny’s grubby little palms, Rosie reckoned they had got their money back, plus a small profit. Taking the shillings which she had paid for the coal, she dropped it into her purse. ‘See that, son?’ she said, pointing to the remaining coins. ‘That’s our reward for working hard.’
His reply was to lift her own small hand and touch the blisters there. ‘Your hands are bleeding, Mam,’ he murmured, ‘I don’t like that.’
She looked at him as though seeing him for the first time, and her love for that little man almost broke her heart. Wrapping her arms around him, she tugged him into an embrace. ‘If we want to be rewarded in life, we must work hard,’ she whispered. ‘We haven’t made a fortune today, but it’s a start. That’s all we need. The rest is up to us.’ As she held him close, Rosie was unaware that the tears were running down her face to create tiny rivulets through the coal-dust. ‘There’s no shame, in hard work, son. Always remember that.’
‘Yes, Mam.’
‘Hungry?’
‘Yes, Mam.’
Rosie smiled. ‘Do you reckon we’ve earned a treat from the fish and chip shop?’
Danny leaped high in the air. ‘I want a great big fish with a tail that hangs right out of the newspapers!’
‘So do I!’ she announced. And it was quick march to the fish and chip shop. ‘Good Lord above! Have you been up the chimney?’ asked fat Mrs Heeney as they went in.
‘We’ve been working hard,’ Danny told her proudly. ‘And we’ve earned our reward.’ At that everyone laughed, and he got an extra big fish, with an extra long tail.
‘That’ll put hairs on your chest,’ said the man at the end of the queue. Danny told him he didn’t want hairs on his chest. When he and Rosie left, the laughter followed them all the way down the street.
‘Do you know what, Mam?’ Danny asked, stuffing a coal- smeared chip into his mouth.
‘No, but you can tell me.’
‘If we had two prams, we’d have been twice as rich.’
The very same idea had crossed Rosie’s mind. ‘Or if we had a hand cart, son. Now, that would take three times as much coal as this old pram. What’s more we only went down one street. There are hundreds of others yet.’
‘Thousands!’ He dropped a chip on the pavement and would have picked it up if Rosie hadn’t stopped him.
By the time they got home, both she and her son were bone-tired. Their clothes were stripped off and put into soak. Danny was bathed and put to bed; no sooner had his head touched the pillow than he was fast asleep. A few moments later, Rosie too bathed then fell thankfully in between the clean white sheets.
But she couldn’t sleep. ‘Today is just the beginning,’ she told herself. ‘Before the month’s out, I mean to have a hand cart, and a sign written on it with the name ROSIE AND SON.’ The idea grew and grew, until she realised that nothing less would do. ‘Carting coal is what I know best,’ she whispered into the darkened room.
She wondered what Adam would think of her enterprise, and smiled. Then she thought of Doug, and the smile slid away. ‘Oh, Adam, if only we could turn the clock back,’ she sighed. But the years had ticked away. There was no going back. Only forward. That was her path now, and she must travel it; however daunting it might be.
* * *
Doug watched the warden out of the corner of his shifty eye. He was nervous, anxious that all would not work to plan. But he wasn’t reckless. Oh no! He had waited for this moment a long time. He could wait just another few minutes, long enough to make certain that everything was in place.
The big man with the rough face moved nearer. It was unbearably hot in the kitchens. The sweat ran down his face, glistening on his chin stubble and meandering along his neck in slow-moving, jerky rivulets. ‘Now, Doug?’ he grinned childishly, displaying an uneven row of yellow teeth. His great fists gripped the handles of the cauldron; it was a huge iron thing, blackened by use and weighing upwards of twenty pounds. ‘Look!’ He inclined his head towards the warden. There was another man with him now, distracting his attention, ‘Taylor’s there. I’ll do it now.’ He grew excited, edging towards Doug, the sweat pouring down his face as he begged, ‘Please, Doug. Let me do it now!’
Glancing up, Doug satisfied himself that the warden’s attention was taken by the third man, a slim figure, a ‘trustee’ lately in Doug’s pay. ‘I knew we could count on Taylor,’ he muttered. He grinned as the big man moved in.
In that moment, Doug Selby showed the madness that had overwhelmed him. Suddenly, his broad grin became an expression of fear as the big man raised the cauldron. A moment’s hesitation, then: ‘For Christ’s sake, get on with it!’ Out of his mind with hatred and the thought of revenge, he could see nothing beyond that. Nothing else mattered.
When the cauldron came smashing down to slice off his toes, his cry of agony echoed across the kitchens and beyond, bouncing off the prison walls. Then he slithered to the floor, and all Hell was let loose. ‘He needs surgery of a kind we can’t do here,’ the doctor said. ‘He’ll have to be taken to an outside hospital.’
Drifting between sense and unconsciousness, he heard every word. It was exactly what he’d wanted to hear. Everything was going to plan. They gave him an injection to put him to sleep, and out of his misery. But he couldn’t rest. For the umpteenth time he dreamed of his mother, of the hatred she had always felt for Rosie. He remembered how she had wanted to kill the boy. It wakened a thirst in him. She was right. She had always been right. And he had not seen it until it was almost too late. Oh, but it wasn’t too late yet. Not yet. Not until Rosie and the boy had been punished.
Only then could he rest. When he had carried out his mother’s wishes, like the good son he was.
Chapter Twenty-One
On Friday 2 March,
Rosie collected Danny from school. All the way home he chatted about how he had: ‘Got two stars for helping to put the ink-pots away.’ He related how he and Bob Marcus had made friends again, after having several tiffs over the last few days, and Rosie told him how pleased she was at his good news.
She, however, had some good news of her own, and found it really hard to keep the secret. When they got off the bus, she almost ran him all the way home. ‘How much coal did you sell today, Mam?’ he asked, puffing and panting as they went at a fast pace up the street.
‘More than yesterday,’ she answered, with a twinkle in her brown eyes. ‘And a lot more than the day before.’ She too was puffing and panting. After having been at work all day, and now with a surprisingly warm sun beating down on her back, she suddenly felt exhausted. At the same time she was exhilarated by what had taken place only two hours earlier.
As they neared the house, Rosie slowed the pace. Glancing down, she watched the boy’s expression turn from astonishment to curiosity. ‘Look, Mam!’ he cried. ‘Somebody’s left a hand-cart outside our house.’ Breaking free from her, he ran towards it. The cart was quite small, not much longer than a pram in fact. But it was deep and cavernous, with sturdy wooden sides and huge spoked wheels. Painted white, with blue along the carved rim, it was a thing of joy. The shaft was not too long, but, being sturdy and wide, was big enough to house a small horse or donkey. But the most exciting thing of all was the name emblazoned on the side in large gold lettering… ‘ROSIE AND SON’ it read ‘COAL MERCHANTS’.
‘It’s ours, sweetheart,’ Rosie murmured, watching her son’s eyes widen with disbelief as he carefully read the letters out loud.
‘Ours?’ Swinging round, he stared at her, his whole face open with surprise. ‘Where’d you get it, Mam?’
‘Well, you know the wheel on the pram was beginning to wobble?’ He nodded so she went on, ‘I took it down to the rag’a’bone man, to see if I could buy some other wheels.’ She pointed to the handcart. ‘I saw this and fell in love with it.’
More Than Riches Page 37