[Poppy Denby 05] - The Art Fiasco

by Fiona Veitch Smith

  She spotted Jeremy’s dark head bowing into the pigeon coop at the top of the vegetable allotment backing onto their house. One of his birds had won top prize at the last community gala, coming first in the race from Morpeth to Ashington. It was only five miles, but he was dead proud of it.

  Agnes smiled. Jeremy was a clever lad. And a gentle soul. Too good for the pit. But what choice did he have? What choice did any of them have?

  She turned the corner into Eleventh Row and startled the neighbour’s cat, stalking a rat down the middle of the railway track. Each row of terraces – ninety-six houses per street – was separated by a rail line which, every morning, carried in coal for heating and carried out night soil from the outside toilets, known as netties. There was one netty for every two houses. The Robsons were a family of six. Their neighbours, eight. The cat hissed at Agnes. Agnes hissed back.

  She opened the little gate, passed the coal shed, and pushed open the kitchen door. And there before her was the scene she had just imagined when talking to Mrs Denby: her mam was peeling potatoes while her four-year-old brother, Frank, clung to her pinny, and the baby – Emma – cried in the crib.

  Her mother looked up, her eyes bone weary. “The babby needs a new nappy. Thought you’d never get back. What took you so long?”

  Agnes made a point of putting some money into the tea caddy on the shelf then turned to pick up her baby sister. The stench hit her like the whiff of a slop bucket.

  “I was talking to Mrs Denby. The reverend’s wife.”

  “The Methodist?”

  “Aye. She was askin’ if I was coming to Sunday School on the morra.”

  Mrs Robson sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “I’ll need ya at home.”

  “Aye. That’s what I told her.”

  Agnes put a towel on the proggy mat in front of the fire where the cauldron of water was boiling for her da’s bath. The tin tub would be unhooked from its peg on the wall when her da was ready for it. She lay down her wriggling baby sister and unhooked the nappy pins.

  The child had produced a good-sized stool. She wiped the bottom clean, rolled up the old nappy to be emptied later into the netty, and put a fresh one on. Clean, warm, and finally getting some attention, the baby grabbed at Agnes’ pigtail that swung tantalizingly across the child’s face. Agnes smiled and tickled her tummy, eliciting a delightful giggle from the youngest member of the family. Worried that he would be missing out on the fun, the four-year-old also made his way to the mat and threw his arms around his older sister’s neck. “Can we play pit ponies, Aggie?”

  “Aye pet, after tea. All reet? I need to help our mam first.”

  Mrs Robson smiled. “Thanks pet. When ya’ve finished there, get the bacon oot the larder, will ya?”

  “Aye mam.”

  Mrs Robson suddenly stopped and looked intently at her eldest daughter kneeling on the floor. “What’s that on the back of ya pinafore?”

  Agnes looked over her shoulder, trying to see what her mother was referring to.

  “There on the hem.” Her mother put down the potato knife and walked over to the hearth. She bent down and ran her finger along the hem of Agnes’ skirt. She stood up straight, her lips pursed, her finger erect and accusing.

  Agnes swallowed hard. Her mother’s finger was coated in bright ochre oil paint. The same colour she had used to change the foliage on her painting from summer to autumn.

  “Have you been gannin behind me back?”

  “What? Whatya mean?”

  “Don’t play coy with me, missy. You’ve been gannin to that art place instead of workin’. When I told you not to.”

  “I haven’t! I put four shillings in the caddy. Mrs Madsen gave me the full amount. Check for ya self if ya don’t believe me!”

  Mrs Robson pulled back her hand and slapped her daughter across the face.

  “Don’t use that tone of voice with me, lass!”

  Agnes fought hard to hold back her tears. Then she walked to the caddy and emptied it onto the table, flicking out the four shillings she had just put in. “See, it’s all there. Count it ya self if the money’s all ya care aboot.”

  Her mother’s face softened and she reached out her hand and patted her daughter’s shoulder. “No pet. The money’s not all I care aboot. And I’m sorry I hit ya. But…,” she cupped Agnes’ chin in her hand and stroked her cheek with her thumb, trying to wipe away the redness of the slap, “… I’ve been hearing things. Aboot that posh bloke who comes up from the Toon. He never tried anything when ya was there, did he?”

  Agnes pulled away from her mother, making a show of putting the money back into the caddy. “Whatya mean, try anything?”

  “Don’t be coy, lass. Ya know.”

  Agnes sighed and put the lid back on the caddy. Her face was still stinging from her mother’s slap. “Aye, I do. But no. He didna try anything when I was there.”

  “Ya swear?”

  “Aye Mam. I swear.”

  The Morpeth Herald

  14th October 1897

  BODY FOUND IN ASHINGTON PIT

  ASHINGTON COLLIERY – the body of a man has been found at the bottom of Ashington Pit. The dead man was discovered last Sunday morning (the 7th) at the change of shift. It is believed his neck was broken.

  The man has been identified as Mr Michael Brownley (28) of Newcastle upon Tyne. Mr Brownley, who was a lecturer at the Newcastle School of Art at the University College, ran free art classes for the children of pitmen in Ashington and Hirst. He had been running the classes at St John’s Church in Hirst most Saturdays since June 1897.

  It is unclear how Mr Brownley came to be near the pit, which is over a mile from the church and not in the vicinity of the railway station. The miners who found the body at the bottom of a shaft, temporarily shut for maintenance, say they smelled alcohol on his breath and that his clothes were muddy and dishevelled.

  Police said that Mr Brownley was last seen at the Kicking Cuddy public house having a drink. They speculate that he may have been intoxicated and become disorientated on his way back to the train station.

  Police are asking for any witnesses who may have seen Mr Brownley leaving the Kicking Cuddy around eight o’clock to contact them.

  Mr Brownley is survived by his widow who is expecting their first child.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  MONDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 1924, NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE

  The Flying Scotsman chugged – rather than flew – over the King Edward VII Bridge spanning the River Tyne, slowing to walking pace before jolting to a stop under the Victorian vaults of Newcastle Central Railway Station. Poppy Denby gathered her suitcase from the luggage rack and stepped out onto the smoke-filled platform. The coal dust caught in her throat and she coughed, looking forward to exiting the station onto the sunny expanse of Neville Street. It was an Indian summer in the North East of England and Poppy counted her blessings. London, where she now lived, was usually a few degrees warmer than her native Northumberland and she had packed her warmest winter coat in anticipation. But today she didn’t need it, and she cut a smart figure in her red Chanel suit, cloche hat, Mary Jane shoes, and swish white silk scarf, tied, most tastefully, in a fashionable knot at her neck.

  It had been four and a half years since she had first made the journey in the other direction, from the provincial northern city to the nation’s capital. During that time she had launched herself into a rewarding career as a journalist on a leading London tabloid and improved her fashion sense immensely. She had also become one of the city’s most famous amateur sleuths, working with the team at The Daily Globe to solve murders and scoop the paper’s rivals. But up here in Newcastle she hoped to have a break from all that, looking forward to a couple of weeks’ holiday visiting family and friends.

  It was her father’s sixtieth birthday and there was going to be a party up the Great North Road in Morpeth next Saturday. However, at the invitation of her Aunt Dot, she had decided to come up five days early to s
ee her eccentric aunt’s latest project, and to support her friend Delilah who was starring in a play at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal. Poppy smiled to herself, thinking about the time she and “the gang” had previously been on tour together – to New York! Golly, that had been quite an adventure. She didn’t expect anything as dangerous or exciting to happen to her here in Newcastle.

  She stepped out of the station’s ostentatious portico onto the concourse where motorized and horse-drawn taxis lined up to meet commuters off the London to Edinburgh train. She looked left along Neville Street towards St Mary’s Cathedral, then right towards the George Stephenson Monument as a tram trundled past. Then, she spotted what she was looking for: a bright yellow Rolls Royce zipping towards her from the direction of the Mining Institute on Westgate Road. The motor drew appreciative looks from the row of male taxi drivers, which transformed into utter shock as it double-parked alongside them, the window wound down, and a woman in motoring leathers barked out: “In you get, Poppy. I don’t want to bother with parking!” Poppy grinned, slipped through the gap between two dull black taxis, opened the back door of the Rolls, and tossed in her suitcase. Then she opened the passenger door and climbed in beside her aunt’s companion, Grace Wilson.

  The 55-year-old gave Poppy a quick nod, then stuck her arm out the window to indicate she was pulling out. She did a deft U-turn, ignoring the hoots of oncoming traffic, and cut across the tramline within a hair’s breadth of a jam-packed omnibus.

  “Golly, Grace, you’re not taking any prisoners!”

  “Sorry Poppy,” she said as she completed her manoeuvre. “I don’t want to leave your aunt alone too long.”

  “Oh? Why’s that? Is something wrong?”

  “Not physically, no, but left to her own devices she will spend every last penny we’ve got! The decorator is due this afternoon and I don’t want Dot making decisions without me.”

  Poppy braced herself as Grace swerved to avoid a man on a bicycle, with a basket of bread tied to the handlebars.

  “Damned fool!” shouted Grace.

  Golly, thought Poppy, what’s happened to the quiet and mild-mannered bookkeeper? She gave Grace a furtive glance and noted dark lines under her eyes and an even paler cast than usual to her normally inexpressive face. “Are you all right, Grace?”

  Grace let out an exasperated sigh as she was forced to slow down at the pedestrian crossing leading to the Literary and Philosophical Society. Her gloved fingers tapped out an impatient tattoo on the steering wheel.

  “Did you know that your aunt has invited Agnes Robson to stay with us for a week?”

  Poppy smiled at a little girl, holding tightly to a rag doll as she crossed the road with her mother. “The artist Agnes Robson? The one who has just had the exhibition at the Tate?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. You covered that exhibition, didn’t you?”

  “I did, yes. And Aunt Dot came with me to the press showing, if you recall. It’s when you were off visiting your mother in Margate.”

  With the pedestrian crossing clear, Grace let out the clutch and pressed the accelerator, steering the Rolls onto the Georgian grandeur of Collingwood Street. “That’s right. Well, apparently Dot told Agnes that she’d inherited the house in Heaton and that we were planning on coming up to renovate it into rooms to rent. Turns out our trip up here coincides with an exhibition Agnes is having at the Laing. And she’s gone and invited herself to stay with us.”

  “Invited herself? I thought you said Aunt Dot invited her.”

  Grace pursed her lips, driving the Rolls through the Grey Street intersection at a snail’s pace, as a horse and cart clopped ahead of her. Then she prepared to turn left into Pilgrim Street. “The exact sequence of events is unclear – I believe Dot had had a couple of glasses of bubbly at the time – but someone invited someone and Agnes, apparently, is going to be arriving tomorrow evening.”

  “Oh dear,” said Poppy. “It’s going to be a bit of a full house, then, isn’t it? If it’s a problem I can stay in a hotel… or go up early to Morpeth?”

  “You will do nothing of the sort! You’re family. And so is Delilah… well almost.”

  As the Rolls drove past Shakespeare Street Poppy cast a quick glance towards the rear entrance of the Theatre Royal. “Has she arrived yet?”

  “Last week. But we’ve hardly seen her. Final dress rehearsals are in full swing.”

  Grace stuck out her hand, indicating a right turn into New Bridge Street, heading towards the Free Library and the Laing Art Gallery. “Don’t worry, Poppy, we have plenty of space for you and Delilah – if you don’t mind rooming with your old chum – but we haven’t got all the rooms sorted yet and somehow we’ve got to find a place for Agnes.”

  Poppy gave her honorary aunt a sympathetic smile. She had suspected when she first heard of the plan to renovate the house that it might be a fractious affair. Although Grace and Dot had been friends for fourteen years – and were devoted to one another – they were chalk and cheese in their attitudes towards money. Take for instance the yellow Rolls Royce they were driving. Dot had taken the opportunity to buy it when Grace was in prison (an eighteen-month sentence for withholding information from the police) to replace an old but serviceable Model T Ford. When Grace was released she was heartened that her old friend welcomed her back with no recriminations, but appalled that Dot had been spending money like the Sultan of Zanzibar.

  Grace, who had been the bookkeeper for a militant cell of suffragettes before the war, had been managing Dot’s financial affairs since they first met. The former doyenne of the West End stage was the first to admit she didn’t have a clue about money. So when Dot inherited the house up in Newcastle, Poppy expected the two women to have very different ideas on what to do with it. Grace wanted to renovate the seven-bedroomed home and sell it at an inflated price. However, Dot was reluctant to sell, feeling she owed it to her dearly departed relative to keep it in the family. So they came to the compromise arrangement of renovating the property and then renting out the rooms to ladies of a professional standing – and installing a caretaker for when they went back to London. Apparently they already had a waiting list of women who worked as lecturers at Armstrong College, as well as some teachers and a couple of secretarial assistants. There was not that much respectable supervised accommodation for single ladies of status in the northern city, so Grace and Dot felt they were on to a money-spinner.

  The Laing Art Gallery – with its distinctive tower – was coming up on the left. Poppy noted that a sign was already up for the Robson exhibition: “Memories and Mementoes: Agnes Robson, daughter of the North”. Poppy nodded to the sign. “Is this the first time Agnes has done an exhibition up here, do you think?”

  Grace rolled her eyes behind her driving goggles. “Apparently.”

  Not much love lost between those two then, thought Poppy. Is there something Grace isn’t telling me?

  But she decided not to interrogate her chauffeur any further. The woman seemed stressed enough. And so they sat in silence as they made their way out of Newcastle proper and over the Byker Bridge, spanning the Ouseburn Valley. Below them the coal barges wound their way towards the Port of Tyne, from where their precious cargo of black gold would be shipped to every corner of the world.

  Soon the expensive motor vehicle was powering its way up Shields Road – eliciting appreciative glances from pedestrians on the busy shopping street – and then turning into Heaton Road. As they went over the railway bridge Poppy slapped her forehead. “Golly Grace, I forgot there’s a station here. I should have booked my ticket to here and saved you driving into town.”

  Grace gave a tired smile. “That’s all right, Poppy. You weren’t to know. Have you ever been to Heaton? It’s a very small station and not all the north-bound trains stop here.”

  Poppy admitted that she had – but only when she was very little – to visit the eccentric Aunt Mabel from whom Dot had inherited the house. “I remember it being very grand compared to our house in Mo
rpeth. And it had a beautiful view of the park. But that’s about all I remember. And I’d forgotten that we’d come on the train.”

  “Yes, Aunt Mabel was very eccentric indeed. Now we know where Dot inherited it from.” Grace laughed, and Poppy was relieved to see that her mood had lightened.

  They drove past the Baptist church on the right and the ramshackle Heaton Hall on the left before finally pulling up outside a row of genteel white brick terraced villas, overlooking beautiful parkland. And there, in the small front garden, in her wicker wheelchair, was Poppy’s Aunt Dot, talking to a man holding a roll of luxurious wallpaper..

  “Good Heavens,” muttered Grace, “I wonder how much that’s going to cost?”

  “And this, finally, is the attic suite. Just look at that view!” Aunt Dot – a plump woman in her mid-fifties, with spectacularly coiffed blonde curls – wheeled her way over to the recessed window. It had been a bit of an effort getting the wheelchair up the narrow stairs while Dot used the newly installed stairlift, but Grace and Poppy managed it between them. Now comfortably back in her chair, Dot gestured to the sloping treelined paths of Armstrong Park, meandering down the valley to Jesmond Vale. In the foreground was a medieval ruin.

  “Isn’t that King John’s Palace?” asked Poppy. “I remember Christopher and I playing knights and dragons there when we came to visit Aunt Mabel.”

  Aunt Dot laughed, her bluebell eyes twinkling through heavy make-up. “Yes, that’s where you used to play. But it’s not a palace and it never belonged to King John.”

  “Oh really? That’s what Aunt Mabel told us.”

  “It’s what it’s commonly known as around here. Your Aunt Mabel always enjoyed a good yarn. Did she ever tell you about the time she travelled on camelback from Bucharest to Baghdad?”