Daisy's Wars

by Meg Henderson

  While Michael retold the old stories to his daughter, across the continent an odd-looking little Austrian was working himself into a simmering rage because Germany had lost WW1. Daisy had no way of knowing it, but it would take the little Austrian’s ambitions to present her with that opportunity to move on when she was eighteen years old.

  2

  When Bernard Sheridan and the other 149 Seaham Scabs took over the forcibly vacated homes of English miners, his work would make him and his family itinerants, moving from colliery to colliery, wherever he was needed to open up a new pit. Sinkers dug through the earth to where unworked coal seams were to be found, creating new work for miners and increased profits for the owners. It was back-breaking and dangerous work, but there would never be a safe job as long as the mining industry existed, and in time he picked up the special skills needed from his fellow sinkers.

  They worked in teams of up to six, digging the soft earth on the surface by hand to open up a hole measuring ten feet by fifteen. As they dug deeper, a reinforcing framework of wood was constructed to stop the walls of the trench falling inwards and burying them alive. Gradually the wood was replaced with brick and stone, and at the same time wooden shafts would be sunk through the soft earth to the rock beneath. To get through this layer, hammers, chisels and sometimes explosives were used to clear a path to the coal seam below. The hole would run straight down for a hundred feet or more, with the men being lowered down to work and hauled back up by steam-powered sinking engines.

  It went without saying that accidents were frequent. It was not a safety conscious era, and Lord Londonderry was no different from other mine owners in caring not a toss for his workers, as he had already proved. If some protested about the conditions, there were always others willing or desperate enough to take their place.

  Danger came not just from the explosives they used, but from boulders falling down on the sinkers working below, and it wasn’t unknown for a man to fall into a deepening pit. Other risks came from the earth itself, at a time when geology wasn’t understood. Encountering a sudden rush of water not only weakened the sides of the dig, but risked drowning men before they could be hauled back up. Suddenly finding quicksand had the same effect, and, occasionally, they would hit gas, always a danger, even with ventilation shafts installed. The job of the sinker teams was a skilled one that took time to master, but it suited Bernard in one way, because he had been used to the open land all his life and the thought of being completely underground, huddled in a dark, wet, three-foot-high seam, hulking coal all day, scared him. In other ways it suited him less, precisely because he was a country boy and he hated the increasing darkness as he descended from ground level, the lack of space and air. But it was still better than that three-foot seam, and if you looked up you could see the sky above.

  As a sinker he would work till the coal seam was reached, sink the shafts to support it, leave the actual coal-digging to others, then move on to the next village where his skills were needed. It wasn’t uncommon for each child in a sinker’s family to be born in a different village because home was wherever their father happened to be working at the time, with the boys going down the pits and the girls into service or to work on farms.

  As fate would have it, though, Bernard would work in the Newcastle coalfields for only fourteen years, before an unlikely scenario brought his time to an end.

  ‘I never knew my grandfather,’ Michael would say, ‘but I heard so much about him that to this day I can almost see him. He was a small, stocky man, well-muscled because of the work, with brown hair and grey eyes; quiet, so they say, and cheerful. He didn’t draw attention to himself and his only ambition was to save enough to take his family back to Ireland one day, though he wasn’t the only one who was doing that. He missed the open air and the space, and in his mind he thought he could go back home, buy a farm and start his life over again. He had to work as a sinker, but his heart wasn’t in it, and when he had a few hours off, he walked.

  ‘My father told me he would go off on one of his walks and just disappear for hours at a time, then come back and get ready for work again in his quiet way.’

  Daisy could almost see Bernard through Michael’s eyes, just as Michael saw him through his own father’s, and she wondered if he was ever aware that he was describing Granda Paddy and himself as he talked about Bernard. She never tired of Michael’s stories; even if she was never sure how true they were, because each time she heard them it was as if she was seeing her past a bit more clearly, and feeling a sense of herself that much stronger.

  ‘He liked the sea, I think it was that space thing again. You know how you can stretch your eyes when you look across the sea?’

  Daisy nodded.

  ‘And it reminded him of Ireland, of course, because his home wasn’t far from the sea and he was used to boats. He liked to spend time where fisherfolk were to be found, to walk by the riverside and down the lanes, Dark Chare, Blue Anchor Chare and Peppercorn Chare. And that’s what he was doing on that October day in 1854,’ Michael said with a sigh, ‘walking along the Tyne by Guildford, looking at the fishing boats landing their catches and the wherries taking loads to bigger ships lying down river. Then there was the big explosion.’

  A fire had started in a worsted factory in Hillsgate, Gateshead, and quickly spread through the cramped riverside buildings to a warehouse containing thousands of tons of sulphur, saltpetre, turpentine and naphtha. As it exploded, stones and bricks were thrown across the Tyne, starting fires on the other side, and fifty-three of the crowd that had gathered to watch were killed, including Bernard Sheridan.

  ‘He’d been using explosives at work every day for years,’ Michael said, ‘and he died at the age of thirty-four in an explosion on his day off. Now isn’t that just plain unfair? And they talk about the luck of the Irish,’ he would finish bitterly, as though the whole world regularly conspired against them.

  Bernard’s wife, Niamh, left a widow at the age of thirty with six children to care for, briefly considered moving back to Ireland, an instinctive reaction to run for home in times of trouble. Niamh was made of sterner stuff, though, and she used the money Bernard had been saving ‘to go back home’ to rent a house in Byker, a working-class area far from the coalfields, and became a landlady. She was small, as all malnourished people were in that era, with dark blue eyes, her fine fairish hair in a bun that never quite contained the strands, and she had a bustling air about her. She was a feisty woman who had opinions and voiced them freely in a way that Bernard never would have. She resented the anti-Irish feeling she and her children faced every day, and remarks that blamed the Irish for being poor, uneducated and dirty.

  Newcastle was a busy port and, like all ports, the constant traffic of foreigners brought diseases like typhus and cholera to the city, particularly when there were many people crammed into little space. The native Geordies always blamed this, as everything else, on ‘the Irish’. Whenever she met with this kind of bias, Niamh would point out that if the Irish were kept in low-paid jobs they could only afford the worst housing. So it was from necessity, not choice, that they lived in over-populated tenements with no sewers or drains, and was it any wonder some of them drank out of despair and became even more maudlin about ‘home’?

  Secretly, though, Niamh disapproved of drink. She thought it a great failing of the Irish, particularly the males, and she had no time for the false sentiment it brought out in them, though she would never have admitted it outside her own four walls. Her own father in Ireland had been a case in point. He drank to escape his circumstances but he drank his wife and children out of any hopes they had of improving their situation.

  Niamh had never forgotten that: it was partly why she had seen moving to Newcastle as a step away from that attitude all those years ago. She soon learned that it didn’t matter where they lived, though. The Irish saw themselves as defeated victims wherever they were, and turning to the bottle was too often their only response to their problems. It wouldn’t
happen to her children, she decided. She would make sure they understood they had to help themselves; and the way to do that was through learning. ‘Now, her I do remember, her I will never forget,’ Michael said with a smile. ‘My, now, there was a busy woman for you. No time for slackers, no time for complainers, she believed in getting on by helping herself. “Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” she used to say. “Make something of yourself instead.” And all her children learned to read and write, including my father, her youngest. I don’t know if you remember your Granda Paddy, Daisy, but he always had a book about him, didn’t matter what it was or how many hands it had gone through before his had touched it. He always had a book.’

  ‘Your Granny Niamh called him her “wee sponge”, didn’t she?’ Daisy replied right on cue, knowing how her father liked to talk about his family.

  Michael nodded, smiling at the memory. ‘Because he read everything he could get his hands on, he just soaked everything up. She was a wonderful woman, you know. She fought for everything she had, every inch of progress her family made was down to her. And she only took in Irish lodgers, that was her way of fighting back.’

  ‘Well, they were the most needy, weren’t they?’ Daisy said, like a response to the priest at Mass. ‘If she didn’t take them in and provide decent lodgings, who would?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Michael replied. ‘She was helping men coming over from the ould country like her husband had, and keeping her family fed while she was doing it.’

  So that’s where the practical but helpful and straight-talking gene had come from, Daisy would think. Not from the Sheridans at all, but from Granny Niamh, who had named her Daisy.

  The old woman hadn’t been dying of any disease. She was simply worn out, and the newborn child had been taken to her on her deathbed, where Niamh had insisted on sitting up and holding her.

  ‘My, look at that wee face,’ the old woman had said as she looked at her new great-granddaughter, ‘as bright and fresh as a daisy.’

  Those were the last words Niamh ever spoke. Shortly after holding the newest arrival she lapsed into unconsciousness and died two days later, and so the child had been named Daisy Niamh in her honour.

  If Daisy had chosen her own name it would’ve been something glamorous, like Kay, perhaps, who had been named for their mother, Kathleen; but as it had come from Great-Granny Niamh she had decided long ago that she could put up with it. The fact was that Kay suited her sister. It sounded feminine, bright and sparkling somehow, just as she was on stage. Or perhaps because of her act her name had been touched by an invisible magic wand that had left some sparkle dust behind. Kay was like Kathleen, so said Michael Sheridan – same dark red hair, bright blue eyes and beautiful voice – and Daisy would smile, though she couldn’t imagine her mother ever looking like that.

  Granda Paddy had had ambitions for his children, Michael always maintained. He’d wanted to keep them out of the pits just as much as his mother had her children. ‘He was crushed at having to betray his mother,’ Michael said, ‘and he never got over it.’ The fact was that the times were against great leaps forward by the Irish Geordies. In the late 1800s the Irish were still confined to the most menial jobs or the ones no one else wanted, even if ‘native’ Geordies did complain that the incomers were depriving them of work. And incomers they still were, though they had been born there. Old Niamh’s sons had few opportunities in life, it was true, but what they did have were contacts in certain parts of the mining industry from previous generations, so that was where they found work. They became colliers in nearby Washington, in the solidly Irish-Catholic Usworth pit, where wet, dangerous conditions were acknowledged as among the worst in the industry. Even so, no Irish Catholic would have accepted a job in the better working environment of the equally solid Newcastle Protestant C Pit, even if one was ever offered, which it wasn’t.

  Michael always became sad when he talked of his father, who was, he said, a clever man.

  ‘He had the heart and soul of a poet,’ he would say, ‘and always a thirst for learning; but he didn’t have a chance, he spent his entire life digging coal. If ever there was an injustice,’ and he’d shake his head and look away. ‘I think it broke Granny Niamh’s heart that he had to go down the mines.’

  Daisy had never thought that. She knew instinctively without knowing how that Granny Niamh had been a realist, that she had been fully aware that it would take more than one generation for her family to get on, up and out. She looked after the exiled Irish who came to her door, and cared for them well, so there was no great fortune to be made out of her lodgers. What profit she made did no more than supplement the meagre wages of her children when they were old enough to work, keeping a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, food in their bellies and – it was an important ‘and’ – enough to buy books and the will to do so.

  Niamh was under no illusions. She knew the way out was through learning and she was giving them a respect for it, laying the foundations for those who would come after her and hoping they would be able to afford to continue to learn. Even as a small child Daisy knew her father didn’t understand this. Indeed, there were times when she felt that she had been born older than him, and in many ways she probably was. She was coming to the conclusion that most men never really grew up and the Irish variety grew up least. Their childlike natures were part of their charm, but as she was exposed to it early she was immune to it, so having Michael as her father, exasperating as it often was, had been a bonus. Daisy had been cut from Niamh’s side of the cloth, and she recognised in her father all the characteristics of the Irish: nostalgia, sentimentality and the childish fun that could turn to maudlin at the opening bars of a song from ‘home’, especially when accompanied by a drink or two. She would inwardly shake her own head as she listened to him. Much as she loved her father, she knew he was a man who lived on his emotions, heart over head every time, but it was a false heart, driven by that familiar and disabling melancholy. Ingrained in Michael, as in so many Irishmen, was the conviction that nothing would ever work out for him or his, simply because they were Irish. It was as though they were born to be losers.

  With the First World War looming the pits had worked flat out in 1913, producing huge stockpiles of coal, only to be rewarded in 1914 with working only two or three days a fortnight; and the Irish, as usual, were first to be laid off. Unemployment was high when General Kitchener made his call in March 1914 for 100,000 men aged between nineteen and thirty years to join the army.

  The miners, believing it would all be over by Christmas, decided to have a paid holiday on the state rather than see their families starve. The local regiments were the Northumberland Fusiliers, the Durham Light Infantry and the Green Howards, and, thinking the Howards was a Catholic regiment because of the ‘Green’ in the title, it became the target of the Irish. When they discovered their mistake they founded their own regiment, the Tyneside Irish, though most of them had been English for at least two generations by that time.

  Michael Sheridan, being just over the upper age limit, continued to toil in the mine while others marched off to years of conflict, if death didn’t get them first. For some reason he felt aggrieved that he had been stopped from going to war, while maintaining that the whole thing had been fixed to ensure that there were more Irishmen fighting for the British Crown than Englishmen.

  Even though she was a child as she listened to these stories, Daisy knew they were all the proof she needed that the average Irish male was, well, at best illogical. Michael’s voice, usually lubricated by a drink or three, would soar with anger and indignation as he embellished this strange, double-edged example of bias, and Daisy would turn away so that he didn’t notice her laughter.

  Poor Granny Niamh, strong woman that she was – it couldn’t have been easy to cope with all that, Daisy thought, sensing that her great-grandfather and her grandfather had been exactly the same as Michael and his brothers. It was a family trait, a male family trait. Michael blamed his inability to m
ove up in the world, as he did everything in life, on anti-Irish prejudice, and his escape was in telling his stories, wonderful and entertaining as they were. His father, Paddy, had kept his nose in books as his escape, and Bernard had walked off into the distance on his own whenever he could, as a means of dealing with life, even if it had ironically brought him an early death. The Irish had been pre-destined not to be allowed to succeed; it wasn’t their fault, it was the fault of the English, or the world, or maybe even the God they said their rosaries to. And if they were bound to be defeated then what was the point in trying?

  Not that you could blame Granda Paddy too much. His adult life hadn’t been any easier than his mother’s had been, though she had dealt with her lot better then he did. His wife had died giving birth to Michael, so there was no adult woman to push him or the five older sons she left behind. And it was always the women who pushed, they were the backbone of every family.

  Their daughter, Clare, was the eldest, so in the way of things in their culture she took over the running of the house and family at the age of twelve. The only help she ever got was from older women in the family, all of whom had more than enough work with their own families. Besides, she was a female and, in the eyes of others in the family, she was doing what she should and therefore she would cope. She wasn’t the first child obliged to suddenly become an adult, after all.

  Though she had never set eyes on her Aunt Clare, Daisy had a soft spot for her and longed to find her one day, when she was grown up. Clare had brought up her six brothers, cared for her father and run the home for more than twenty years, missing out on any life of her own; but though no one suspected it, Clare was making plans.