Luckpenny Land

by Freda Lightfoot

  ‘Right, take your dogs round that knob. Remember, some of the ewes will be hiding in t’bracken. So see your dogs don’t just slink about. They should speak up and tell you if they find one.’

  ‘They will,’ Meg assured him, feeling her confidence strengthening bit by bit as Dan issued his instructions. Even so her gaze took in the enormity of the task. All the sheep seemed to have disappeared, or were distant blobs on the horizon.

  Tess and her son Ben were more used to Lanky’s commands and were only slowly getting used to hers. Meg could only hope that she’d remember what the signals were that Lanky had taught her. She gave two quiet whistles and at once the dogs moved softly forward, eyes bright, ears alert. Meg’s nervousness instantly began to ease. She could do it. She would show her father that a woman could make a good shepherd.

  It had been a long, hard, wet day and Meg was dropping on her feet. The weather, if anything, had worsened. Grey clouds were lying heavily over the peaks, rolling slowly down after them, gobbling up the heaf almost faster than the sheep could move across it. The whistles seemed to come from all directions as the dogs gathered the flock ready for the main drive down.

  One ewe broke away and Meg gave a slow rounded whistle. Rust, who hardly needed to wait for the signals now, got there almost before she’d made a sound.

  ‘Good boy.’ She liked to praise him, to show her appreciation. The sheep started to move forward with Rust at one side, Ben at the other and Tess behind, stalking them. Not too close, keeping wide.

  The drive down was not as straightforward as she’d expected. Meg constantly had to urge the dogs to correct the wandering line as the animals persistently sought any gap to dash through. Sometimes a whole bunch would break free then a dog would be sent off to run wide and round them up to bring them back, adding miles to the journey.

  Up, down, right, left, forward, stop, forward again. Sometimes Meg wondered if they were making any progress at all. But the challenge was fascinating, engrossing her completely.

  Ahead of them in the valley below was the enclosure. Getting the sheep through the open gate and into the field would be the easiest part of the manoeuvre. The sheep knew well that the grass beyond was always better and more lush than that they’d left behind. They’d learned this when they were in-by at lambing time and never forgot it.

  Meg stepped out purposefully, for she knew what needed to be done and was proud to be a part of it.

  Afterwards there would be a soak in a hot tub and supper by a blazing fire. She felt exhilarated, alight with an inner glow at having accomplished so difficult a task. Her dogs had more than pulled their weight in gathering the ewes today. And Dan, perhaps even Joe, seemed to have accepted her as a useful part of the team which added to her sense of satisfaction. Of course Joe had shouted at her from time to time, and Dan had shown scant patience, but they hadn’t packed her off home which she’d been half afraid they would do.

  Then suddenly she saw it was all about to go wrong. She looked in dire danger of blotting her copy book good and proper.

  Maybe she’d given the wrong signal, or perhaps Rust had been a touch over enthusiastic. Whatever the reason, he had three sheep pinned out on a ledge and there seemed no way of getting round him to fetch them on to safe ground. They stood hesitant, poised to run if Rust came at them too fast or made one wrong move. If they fell, they would slide down the lethally slippery slope of stony scree, bounce off jagged rocks and not stop till they reached the valley bottom, several hundred feet below.

  Meg tried edging forward, but every time she moved the sheep panicked, compacted closer together and backed right to the lip of the precipice.

  ‘Wait, boy. Steady, steady.’

  She chewed on her lower lip, agonising over how best to deal with the problem. Meg could almost read the dog’s thoughts, as frustrated as herself. High above them on the fells, coming closer every minute, were her father and Dan, ready to see her mistake and judge her.

  A buzzard swept past, the wind whistling through its outstretched wings. Leave the sheep here too long and the crows and ravens would peck their eyes out where they stood.

  Then suddenly Rust was away, running up the fellside away from the ledge. Meg watched him reach the top of the knob overlooking the crag where he stopped and lay down in the bracken. Following his lead, Meg moved quietly away too. Several achingly long moments later the sheep jostled each other, looked about them, then seeing the way was clear, darted forward, struggled through a narrow gap in the rocks and pelted off down the hillside to join their companions.

  Meg laughed out loud. ‘Well done, boy. Well done! You did it. You’ve taught me a lesson there.’

  ‘Daft dog. Didn’t I say you’d make nowt of him?’ The figure of Dan loomed suddenly above them. ‘Too eager. He could have killed them ewes.’ And lashing out with his feet, he kicked at the dog. Rust yelped, failing to avoid the toe of that great boot.

  ‘No!’ Meg cried, and leapt forward just too late to stop Rust slithering right over the edge of the precipice.

  Kath tugged at the sheet to drape it over the huge rollers, sweat pouring from her. Why had she ever complained about the old mangle at Southview Villas? The steaming hot rollers of this one were a thousand times worse.

  Polly, who was the nearest she had to a friend at Greenlawns, urged caution, as always. ‘Take your time. You can’t hurry.’

  Kath recklessly yanked at the wet sagging cloth which had wrapped itself into a proper tangle. ‘Drat the thing.’ But her efforts only made the situation worse.

  There was the most terrible grinding sound as gears locked and then oil was spurting out, soaking a treacherous, sticky path over the white cloth.

  Both girls struggled to free the fabric, glancing fearfully over their shoulders, anticipating trouble. They were not mistaken. Bearing down upon them came Miss Blake, her expression so sour you’d think she’d been sucking lemons.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ warned Polly. ‘Leave it to me.’

  Polly had been put in Greenlawns for stealing a loaf of bread. The fact that she had been starving at the time because her mother had abandoned her was not taken into account. She was fourteen years old and considered herself lucky that she hadn’t been sent to prison. Kath had no such consolation. In her estimation she had done nothing wrong and it was perfectly ludicrous for her to be here at all. A Home for Wayward Girls indeed?

  But then Polly was an exception. Most of the other girls were in Greenlawns for the same reason Kath was. Yet others, simply because they might become pregnant. Their crime, since that was how it was viewed, had been to ‘entice’ some young man into an ‘immoral act’, or even the threat of one.

  At first she had protested vigorously at the very idea of Katherine Ellis, darling daughter of Larkrigg Hall, being incarcerated in such a place.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ she’d said, over and over. ‘There is absolutely no reason for my being here.’ Not that anyone listened, and those that did only laughed.

  ‘Do you mean that bump isn’t a baby growing in your belly?’ asked one particularly coarse warden, making even Kath blush.

  ‘I don’t see that has anything to do with you. I’m leaving this very minute.’ But all the doors were locked. And remained so, morning and night.

  ‘There’s no way out, once you’re in,’ one old hag told her. ‘I came in as a girl for the same reason you’ve been sent here. By my loving, caring family. Ashamed of me they were, as yours are of you. That was so long ago now I can scarcely remember when it was.’

  Kath stared in horror at the grey bedraggled locks of hair and the wrinkled skin. ‘I don’t believe it. My family have no idea where I am. It’s a mistake, I tell you. I thought I’d come here for a job.’

  The old hag had cackled with laughter as if Kath had made a joke.

  The most humiliating part had been the shockingly intimate examination she’d been subjected to on the day she was admitted. For venereal disease, the wardens had told her
. If she’d been infected she wouldn’t have been accepted. Kath had wondered since if that would have been so terrible.

  Gradually her panic and temper were forced to subside as the awful reality that dear Aunt Ruby had known exactly what was wrong with her niece, and where she was sending her. But Kath refused to believe that her mother knew of her fate. Let alone her lovely, kind, adoring daddy. She refused to believe that they would ever condone locking her in such a place.

  ‘I shall write home at once and they’ll come for me, you’ll see.’

  She had indeed written, countless times. Rules permitted one letter home per week, though all were carefully vetted. Any sign of criticism and the letter was instantly destroyed. Kath made that mistake only once. The letter had been destroyed and she wasn’t permitted to send any more for the next two weeks.

  Nevertheless Christmas had come and gone, treated as any ordinary work day with no sign of a celebration. Up at six, work all day, watched the entire time by the sharp-eyed wardens. The midday meal taken at one. Stew, always stew. Half an hour was allowed for this followed by a walk around the cold yard then back to work. A similar walk was permitted in the evening but there was no hope of escape. The walls were high, the great iron gates kept permanently locked. Nobody outside knew what lay behind them, nor bothered to ask.

  ‘This is as bad as a Victorian workhouse,’ Kath protested, half in disbelief, half in fear.

  ‘Aye,’ Polly agreed. ‘Only worse, because you generally died quicker in them days.’

  January passed in an agony of bitter weather, getting colder as the snows filled the February skies, with still no sign of release, no reply to her letters. She was trapped, abandoned by those who claimed to love her, for the sin of carrying a child that would be born with the dreadful label of illegitimate, using one of the kinder words for it.

  The pregnancy grew daily into a heavier burden.

  To think that not so long ago she had refused Richard Harper and turned her nose up at the very idea of marrying Jack Lawson. The thought made Kath feel ill.

  Sometimes, on a Sunday after church, they were permitted to read books. Kath had fallen upon this small pleasure with relief at first, until she found that so many sentences were blacked out, even whole pages removed, that the story was rendered senseless. Or they might be shown a film only to find that that too had been given the same treatment. The wardens considered some passages inflammatory to a young girl’s passions, be it only a simple kiss or word of affection, they were obliterated.

  Knitting socks for servicemen, chopping and tying up bundles of firewood and endless mending were the only recreations considered safe.

  The regime at Greenlawns must, in Kath’s hotly held opinion, be far worse than any soldier’s at the front.

  ‘What is it you’ve done this time, madam?’ Miss Blake was eyeing the ruined fabric, glaring fiercely at Kath.

  ‘Bit of an accident, Miss Blake,’ explained the cheerful Polly. ‘My fault, not hers.’

  ‘Don’t you argue with me, you little brat.’

  ‘I didn’t, I only said.. .’

  ‘Silence.’ Grabbing hold of the girl’s arm, Blake twisted it painfully behind her back, making Polly gasp and sink to her knees. Tears filled the girl’s eyes as the arm, looking as if it might come off if it were moved another half inch, was held in a merciless grip by Miss Blake, the familiar smirk upon her face.

  ‘Very well, if you wish to take the blame, you can spend your recreation time this evening scrubbing that sheet until it is as white as snow. See that you show it to me before you go to bed. Is that clear? I’ll teach you to recklessly ruin perfectly good linen.’ She gave the arm a final tweak before dropping it. Polly fell to the ground on a low moan.

  Kath was incensed. ‘For God’s sake, we don’t finish work till gone eight and we have to eat the loathsome stew you give us after that. How will she have time to wash your damn sheet? It’ll need to soak all night at least. It’s stupid to expect otherwise.’

  There was the most awful silence, the only sound that of the swish and grind of the rollers, the thump of wet fabric being scrubbed and beaten clean, scouring away the sins of the wicked, or so the girls were told.

  Not a soul in the laundry glanced in their direction. No one moved to lift the sobbing Polly, whose arm hung at a dreadful angle. Kath understood everyone’s desire not to get involved in case worse trouble should fall upon them, but it infuriated her all the same.

  ‘What did you say, girl?’

  ‘I said, leave her alone, you great bully,’ Kath repeated, and pushed at Miss Blake with the flat of her two hands. Perhaps she used more force than she intended, or the woman’s heels caught on something, but she fell backwards on to the giant rollers.

  The hem of her skirt got caught between the chewing rollers, winding her in like a rag doll. The breadth of her flat hips soon brought it to a halt but not before the flailing fingers of her right hand had been crushed to pulp.

  The machine was switched off instantly by a quick-thinking girl but Miss Blake’s screams echoed on and on.

  Kath was marched off into solitary confinement. She went quietly enough, her moment of rebellion spent, frightened by the consequences of her temper. There she remained for seven days and seven nights on nothing but bread and water.

  The fingers, except for the tip of one which had to be removed, were saved, though they would never grip a girl’s arm quite so savagely again, nor knit another pair of socks. Kath couldn’t help but hope that the disability would be a constant reminder to Miss Blake of her lack of charity.

  Polly was ‘removed’ to another home. Friendships were not encouraged in Greenlawns and Kath’s days seemed longer as a result. By the end of March she was close to her time and exhausted. The callous treatment and the loss of Polly, the unrelieved treadmill of work, brought a grinding ache to her lower back which seemed never to leave her. The inadequate diet and the sense of hopelessness that permeated the place had quenched even Kath’s sense of rebellion. And still there had been no letter from home.

  She longed for the day when her baby would be born. ‘Then I can leave,’ she insisted, refusing to heed the dour words of the old hag, that there were a hundred other girls in Greenlawns who had already given birth and remained, for their own ‘safety’, locked up.

  Their babies were sent for adoption or to the orphanage, name and identity quickly changed to avoid the lifetime’s stigma that accompanied such a birth.

  ‘That won’t happen to me,’ Kath insisted. ‘My family will come for me any day. You’ll see.’

  She went into labour on a freezing morning at the end of March. ‘I want Meg,’ Kath cried as the full impact of the first pain seared its scorching path across her back. Nobody took the slightest notice. Miss Blake’s leering face grinned down at her, her whining voice grating in Kath’s ear.

  ‘Don’t waste any sympathy on this one. Hard-hearted little madam she is, and a troublemaker to boot.’

  They put her in an empty room and left her to get on with it.

  Tam O’Cleary was not normally one to make a fuss, let alone get involved with other people. He’d left a perfectly good home at the age of sixteen when he’d realised that America was not the land of milk and honey his family had hoped for. An Irishman living in the Bronx in New York did not have an easy time of it. Tam didn’t want to struggle, as his father had done for years, trying to find work to feed a growing family. Besides, much as Tam loved his family, and there was no doubt that he did, every last one of them, he was young and could feel the blood pulsing through his veins, telling him to get out there and discover whatever there was to be discovered about life.

  He’d packed his bags and gone off to seek his own fortune, not wishing to be a burden to anyone.

  Since then he’d had more jobs than he cared to count, spent years exploring Europe at a time when it was safe to do so. Considered himself, at twenty-seven, a man of reasonable intelligence, a raconteur and wit even, on his be
tter days. He’d come to enjoy his footloose existence and considered possessions and people an unnecessary encumbrance. Keep himself to himself, that was Tam O’Cleary’s motto.

  Hadn’t he once tried to save a fellow traveller from certain death as he’d hung over the edge of a schooner? Only to have the man beat the living daylights out of him for his trouble. How was Tam to know the man had wanted to die anyway because of some broken love affair? People. You never knew where you were with them, unlike horses.

  He’d nursed two broken ribs and a sore jaw for weeks as a result of that good deed, and vowed never to be involved in other people’s problems ever again.

  Nor was wartime the moment to change that philosophy. He was Irish. His old country, and his new, were both neutral, and that was the way he liked to live his life, safe behind a screen of neutrality.

  Yet here he was, breaking all those principles, over one young girl. Katherine Ellis was not even his type, and he’d known her only a few weeks. Yet he couldn’t help thinking how his own mother would react if Mary or Jo or Sarah got into similar trouble. She’d open her heart and her home to them with no recriminations. Tam believed that Kath’s family had failed her when she needed them most.

  So how could he, her only friend, fail her too? He knocked again, louder this time.

  It was the thought of that unwanted baby she carried, and the fact that she had disappeared, without warning, without even a goodbye. He’d thought nothing of it at first, but as the weeks passed by it had struck him as odd. He was not the melodramatic sort, never had been. But Katherine Ellis seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.

  For no reason he could justify to himself, he started hanging about outside Southview Villas, and seen no sign of her. Now, quite against his better judgement, he’d walked up the scrubbed path and lifted the polished door knocker.

  A plain-faced girl of about fifteen came to the door. He raised his cap.

  ‘Good morning to ye. I wonder if I could be speaking with Miss Ellis? The name is O’Cleary, would you tell her?’