The Slow Awakening

by Catherine Cookson (Catherine Marchant)

  Bob, who had been sitting thoughtfully picking at a scab on the thin calf of his leg, glanced up at Kirsten as he asked, ‘Have you got a piece, Kirsten?’ And her voice full of impatience now, she cried at him, ‘You know fine well I haven’t got a piece, an’ you won’t get one until you get back, so hold your whisht.’

  They all held their whisht; they sat like a group of old men and women, waiting, for what none of them knew.

  The sun had dropped into the sea and the long twilight had begun when Kirsten, carrying Annie, and the others hobbling behind her, came to the edge of the town and to the lane that led to Ma Bradley’s cottage. She had just entered between its high hedges when she heard the voice that had sent her spinning into flight earlier in the afternoon; and not only that particular voice but others, all loud and threatening and coming from the direction of the cottage.

  She stood for a moment rooted; then turning about and hitching Annie under one arm, she hustled the rest of them out of the lane again and through a gap in the hedge and into a ditch, where she cautioned them to sit quiet. As always, with the exception of Johnnie, they obeyed her, and over his mouth she had to press her hand until the men, still shouting and talking, passed within feet of them and went down the road back towards the town.

  She did not take the children onto the road again but led them over the rutted field, which was pockmarked with the remnants of gypsies’ fires, and towards the gap in the stone wall that edged the cottage garden. Here she was again brought to a halt by the sound of Ma Bradley’s voice screaming from inside the cottage; then, her eyes slewing to the side, she saw four pairs of beckoning hands waving to her from behind the pigsty which was situated a few yards from the back door. Putting Annie down among the others now, she whispered, ‘Sit tight,’ then sidled along the wall towards the sty and there, crouching down and looking into the four dirty and grease-smeared faces, she whispered, ‘What did they say?’

  Nellie, the tallest girl, aged twelve, pushed her sharp face forward and whispered, ‘She’s for your hide, Kirsten.’ And the youngest, Millie, aged seven, added in a whisper, ‘They say you’ve got to go, Kirsten; Joe Bennett and Peter Turnbull, they say you’ve got to go.’

  As she stared down at Millie, Nellie said again, ‘They’ve given her till the morrow an’ then they’re gona burn her out.’

  Nine-year-old Cissie and Peggy, of the same age, caught hold of the girl’s hand now, and their eyes pleaded, ‘Don’t go. Don’t go,’ even as Nellie said, ‘They mean it this time. There was six of them an’ one threatened to bring the Justice along. That scared her more; you know that she’s afeared of the Justice.’

  The four sweat and dirt-begrimed faces stared at her in silence now, and she at them, until Millie suddenly pressed her head into Kirsten’s thin waist and began to whimper loudly.

  As she patted Millie’s head Kirsten slowly raised her own and looked about her as if searching for some outlet along which to run. Her eyes in their moving passed over Hop Fuller’s cart, horseless now. The yellow-painted shafts were down, resting on the dirt yard; the kettles and tea cans and baskets suspended by hooks from under the cart looked, from this angle, as if they had been frozen midway in their sliding to the ground; the cart, like a farm cart, had high wooden sides and over it a canopy of canvas. Her flying thoughts stayed on the cart for a second. If only she had something like that, and a horse, she would gallop away to the far ends of the earth where no-one would look at her, and she could always hold her head up straight.

  Ma Bradley’s voice startled her, startled them all now. ‘Where is she! Where is she this minute! Come out you unlucky sod you! Come out!’

  As Kirsten moved slowly forward Ma Bradley came round the corner of the cottage and stopped, then stared at the thin figure dressed in a trailing skirt that had once been black but was now mostly green and brown, and a bodice that had hardly any of the original material left in it, so patched was it. But Ma Bradley’s eyes were not on the girl’s clothes, they were on her face, on her eyes; one eye large and brown, rimmed by a thick fringe of dark lashes, stared straight at her, the other eye, equally large and brown and equally framed, seemed to direct its gaze to the nose that lay between them, for the dark pupil was lying in the corner of the eye socket.

  ‘You cockeyed swab, you!’ Ma Bradley moved slowly forward, her two hands extended before her; the fingers, stretched wide and curved as if throttling the air, trembled, as did her voice when she went on, ‘I’ve told you. I’ve told you scores of times, keep away from the fishers. Three times this year you’ve made them lose a day, three times. Well, it’s the end. You’ll see. You’re for the House, if they’ll let you in. But I should say they’ve got enough bad luck without takin’ you on.’

  She advanced another step, her body bent forward, her hands still extended outwards. But Kirsten didn’t move; she knew Ma Bradley herself would never lay a hand on her, she never had, she was afraid of the curse. Her good eye did not blink when Ma Bradley cried, ‘You Nellie, you Peg, get them.’

  Nellie now emerged from behind the pigsty followed by Peggy. Then the taller girl protested wearily, ‘Aw, Ma, I’m tired. It’s been a bugger of a day. I’m sweatin’ candle grease.’

  ‘You’ll sweat blood if you don’t go and get them this minute.’

  The girls now went slowly round the corner of the cottage, and when they returned they each held a strip of bamboo, one end of which was shredded and hung loose. Standing one each side of Kirsten, they looked at her. But she stared at Ma Bradley, and when the woman’s voice bellowed, ‘Well! Get on with it!’ they raised the flays and brought them down without very much force around Kirsten’s back.

  ‘Put a bit more life into it!’ Ma Bradley’s voice was a scream now. ‘Higher! Up higher.’

  Slowly they aimed their blows higher, and although the ends just flicked Kirsten’s neck they stung her and brought her head down onto her chest and her face buried in the crook of her arm; and she turned and threw herself against the wall of the cottage, and when the gentle flaying stopped she remained where she was with Ma Bradley’s voice searing her mind more than the whipping had her skin. ‘You, Cissie, an’ Millie, get those others in there and give them their bite an’ get them to bed. Quick now. I said quick. This one’s finished. Have the roof taken from over me head she would.’

  When Kirsten turned her face from the wall the yard was empty. The tears were running down her cheeks, her buttocks were pressing her joined hands against the rough stone and her eyes were looking towards the sky.

  She’d have to go. But hadn’t she always wanted to go, to leave this filthy cottage and Ma Bradley? But…but there were the bairns. She was the only one who could manage the bairns, she was the only one they had for comfort. What would they do? Annie, whose legs were too thin ever to bear her, and Bob and Florrie and Mary and Ada; Johnnie would be all right; his legs were straight, he would go to work in the factory with Nellie, Peggy, Cissie and Millie. She wasn’t worried about the older ones, well not so much. But they needed her too; perhaps not Nellie any more, but the others still did.

  She brought her hands from behind her and placed her fingers tightly over her mouth. She didn’t want to go to the House, but where would she go? Nobody would take her in, she was bad luck. And this had been proved even to herself last May when Jimmy Bennett, Joe Bennett’s son, had spoken to her and within a fortnight he was dead.

  The day was fine, they said, when he went out, a spring day, not a ripple on the water, the fish running well; and then that freak storm. The last they had seen of Jimmy was him signalling the catch was good, very good. Twenty minutes later when the wind went down and the rain stopped, there was neither hilt nor hair of him. The boat, him, everything gone. The only evidence that he had ever been there was the dead fish floating on the surface of the water. It was after his death that somebody remembered he had spoken to her.

  She recalled the look on his face when he had stopped her and said, ‘Hello.’ It was the left side
of her face that drew people to her, but it was the right side that sent them skittering off. But when he had looked her full in the face his eyes hadn’t blinked and he had still smiled at her, and his voice had been kind as he said, ‘It’s a grand day.’

  Too stupefied to answer him she had merely nodded her head. And then he had said, ‘You’ve got your hands full with that lot.’ He had glanced to where the children were tethered. Again she had nodded. Then, the smile slipping from his face, he had spoken the only kind words she could ever remember having heard from the townsfolk. ‘You needn’t be afraid of me,’ he said; ‘people are ignorant.’ And at this she had bowed her head and turned away because his kindness had burst something inside her and the whole of it was blocking her throat and she was wanting to throw herself down on the beach and get release. But she couldn’t in front of him, so she had run back to the children. A fortnight later he was dead.

  Nellie came sidling round the corner of the house now and up to her. ‘I’m sorry, Kirsten, I am. God, I am that.’

  She looked down at Nellie. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’

  ‘Would you come? I can’t do nothin’ with Annie; she’s raisin’ hell and that bloody Johnnie is at it again, he won’t stop for me. Messin’ on the floor he is.’

  Kirsten turned and walked slowly towards the back of the cottage, through a small littered scullery and into one of the two downstairs rooms. On the floor were three small pallet beds and children were sitting one at the foot, one at the head of each of them, each munching away at a dark brown piece of bread. Cissie was cleaning up Johnnie’s dirt from the floor, while Millie was trying to feed Annie from a pewter jug, the spout of which was covered with the finger from an old glove acting as a makeshift teat.

  Lowering herself onto the small pallet bed, Kirsten took the whinging child from Millie and saying to her, ‘Give them their drinks,’ she nodded towards the bucket of fly-infested skimmed milk; then rocking the child gently, she held the jug to its mouth until it began to suck, though without much vigour.

  When the sparse meal was finished. Kirsten, her nose wrinkling just the slightest, said heavily to Nellie, ‘We’ll have to lug some water, they need washin’.’

  Before Nellie could agree with or protest against this added chore, on top of her twelve-hour day’s work, Cissie put in, ‘She mightn’t let you,’ and at this they all stared at Kirsten, and she looked from one to the other as she said softly, ‘I’ll go on till she stops me.’

  She went on, she went on until ten o’clock, and Ma Bradley didn’t stop her. There was no need, she had arranged her future.

  Hop Fuller was forty-nine years of age, but he looked sixty or more; he was stocky with a small head set deep in his shoulders which gave him the appearance, from the front, of being a hunchback. But he had no hump; what he had, however, was a short leg, and he was known from Maryport, where he had been born, to the top of South Shields where it touched on the North Sea, as Hop Fuller.

  Although he had been born in Maryport he wasn’t of the town, for his people had, for four generations, been roving tinkers and, among other things, basket makers, fortune-tellers, horse dealers, and petty thieves.

  He sat now, one leg stretched out, his short leg held rakishly across his knee, his hands behind his head; he looked completely at ease, as indeed he was. The only thrill he ever got out of life was the thrill of a good bargain, and he knew he was on the point of making one. He stared up at the smoke-begrimed ceiling as he said, ‘I’m having second thoughts about it; she’ll be bad for business I’m thinkin’.’

  Ma Bradley was about to raise a mug of beer to her lips; she stayed it in mid-air and stared at him as she muttered, ‘But you said, you said you would take her. Two pounds you said you’d give for her.’

  ‘Aye, I know. But how am I t’know you’re speakin’ the truth?’ He wagged his finger at her. ‘You and me know each other, Ma, don’t we?’

  ‘Before God, Hop’—she was bending across the table towards him—‘I’m tellin’ you there’s not one been near her; the men in the town wouldn’t go within a bargepole distance of her. I tell you they’d run.’

  ‘Fourteen you’re saying’, an’ she’s never been broken. You want me to believe that?’

  ‘It’s God’s honest. He’s me judge; it’s true. With her looks, except for the eye, she could have made a packet. There’s Nellie gets three pence a time an’ as many as she can take on on fair days. But that one, she’s a dead loss. Always has been…except mind—’ She jerked her head. ‘As I said afore, she’s been a marvel with the bairns an’ if she goes I’ll have to have help; I’ll have to keep Cissie or Millie back ’cos I can’t manage this bloody lot. There’s only six young ’uns in now but I can get as many as fifteen. An’ mind’—her head wagged slowly now—‘not all from the waterfront or the backstairs. Oh no. Johnnie there.’ She lifted her chin. ‘He was born atween scented sheets or I’m a Dutchman. The one that brought him, servant she might have been but her nose was as long as me arm.’ She leaned farther forward now and, her voice a whisper, she ended, ‘Twenty pounds a year I get for that one, twenty…pounds…a year.’

  ‘By, aye! Twenty pounds. You must be pretty warm, Ma.’

  ‘Pretty warm you say!’ She was on the defensive now. ‘If I get it from one I have to give out on t’other. There’s that Mary in there. Her mother’s three months overdue. In service she is, Carlisle way; comes once a year, and two pounds is all I get from her. Two pounds! Warm you say?’

  ‘Well, that’s likely as much as she gets.’

  ‘It’s no business of mine how much she gets, only what she’s got to pay for her brat. I’ll give her another month and then it’s into the House with her fly-blow. The butler’s it was; she told me. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’s been dropped again. Bloody daft bitches all of ’em.’

  Hop Fuller took his short leg from his knee now and pushed his buttocks back into the chair before he asked, ‘How did you come by her…cockeye?’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Ma Bradley pressed her lips together. ‘Unluckiest bloody day of me life that, when I met up with her. Midwife I was. They came for me as far away as Wigton; sent their traps they did, the farmers, an’ when I delivered a boy they loaded me down with stuff. Then came the year when the fever struck. It levelled half this part of the country. I was on me feet night and day, an’ Joe Merlin, him that used to keep The Beadle on the high road, he sends for me. “Come and lay out two folk,” he says. Well, I goes. An’ there was this man and woman, youngish, going stiff, an’ sitting looking at them…her. Staring she was, her eyes as big as saucers, an’ believe me or not, this is God’s truth, they were as straight as mine, her eyes I mean. Joe said they had landed there three days afore; very respectable like they were. They were on their way to Hexham, but had left the coach ’cos they were feeling bad. He cursed his charity for lettin’ ’em stay ’cos now he was down with it himsel’. He told me all this from the bed where he croaked two days on. There wasn’t a soul in the inn, they’d scampered away like rats. The one that had brought the message for me to go there hadn’t told me how things really was, else I’m tellin’ you they wouldn’t have got me inside that door. But I was always lucky that way, never picked things up, neither the cholera nor the typhoid. Anyway, what could I do? I couldn’t leave her there, she was but a child, one of God’s bairns, so I brought her back home with me. An’ then she takes bad, but only measles she had. I tell you I had me hands full.’

  ‘It was kind of you, kind indeed…Did they have any bits and pieces?’ The question ended on a high note, which was emphasised by the raising of his thick greying eyebrows.

  ‘Oh; some clothes and the like, an’ a few sovereigns in his pocket, nothing to speak of. I tell you it was an act of charity.’

  ‘Aye, yes, I can see that, Ma, aw aye…How old was she then?’

  ‘Six gone she told me.’

  ‘Did she know where they were goin’, and why?’

  ‘All she knew wa
s they were on their way to Hexham. She said her da was a doctor, but he was going to Hexham for a rest ’cos he’d caught a chill. He caught a chill all right.’

  ‘Did you ever try to find out who they were making for in Hexham?’

  ‘Find out! All the way to Hexham an’ people dyin’ like flies all about! She was lucky to be alive.’

  ‘Well, how did she come by her cockeye?’

  ‘You can ask me that again and the answer’ll be, I don’t know. But one day she was sittin’ over there.’ She pointed. ‘She could go on for days, weeks, and not open her mouth. She sat lookin’ at me this time, an’ begod! there it was, the eye cockin’ into the corner. Not as bad as it is now, but on its way. An’ you know somethin’?’ She leant towards him. ‘There are times even yet when I’ve looked at her and there’s never been a sight of it. I happened to glance into the room one night.’ She pointed her thumb over her shoulder. ‘The bairns were asleep, an’ there she was sittin’ by the window, an’ she turns towards me without seeing me for a minute, an’ begod, as true as I’m sittin’ here there wasn’t a sign of it! An’ then bang, it dropped. You know somethin’? I think she can work it.’

  ‘Aye, do you now?’ He moved forward on his chair and smiled, his twisted smile that showed his black baccy-chewing teeth, and as he listened to her continued ranting his mind worked independently. He could see he was on to a good thing there; people would pay to have the evil eye kept from them. He could hear himself already: ‘She can ruin a crop quicker ’n a swarm of locusts. Aw, missis, if I let her put her eyes on your bairn it’ll never be straight on its feet until you bury it, an’ then end up.’ Or again, standing at the back door of a big house pushing his wares: ‘If I let her lay eyes on you never one of you’ll sleep with a ring on your finger, an’ that’s God’s gospel.’

  But he wasn’t going to pay two pounds for her, aw no, not when Ma Bradley wanted to be rid of her in such a hurry. Anyway, who but a fool would pay two pounds for a cockeyed piece of ill-omen?