The Railway Girls

by Leah Fleming

  The battle was overseen by our bold vicar in short cotton pants to the knee and thick striped stockings. I could see him dashing from one end to the other, running through the teams blowing his whistle at any infringements and trying to control the passions of the spectators as they roared abuse at him from both teams.

  Once this game got underway only a thunderbolt from the Almighty would have stopped them in their tracks, such was the intensity of play. It was a revelation to me how grown men and some women could be so partisan in their support and get so hot under the collar by the mere kicking of a ball into a net bag, calling their opinions to the umpire in terms no lady would like to overhear.

  Resolving to make these observations part of my local education as to customs and traditions, I stood faithfully at my own vantage post feeling the dampness creep up my stockings and into my skirts as the mizzle soaked my hat and veil and outer jacket. My umbrella was frequently challenged for holding up someone’s view so I kept it folded and the rain dripped upon us relentlessly.

  In fact the mist got so thick that we could no longer see how things proceeded at either end of the pitch but it did not deter the battle. As they seemed to change ends after a short interval, I was thoroughly confused but stayed fast.

  Apparently there was some incident which required one village man to kick the ball straight into the bag with one navvy standing firm against him, like David against Goliath, to win the game. David was no match for the tall Mr MacLachlan who towered over his posts and saved the penalty kick, much to the relief of Paradise and calls of foul play from Scarsbeck.

  Mr Sunter Lund took up the ball and ran with it in a sulk, chased by the umpire and the Scotsman, and the teams collided into a pile of bodies kicking and fighting, throwing the ball to each other across the field. Now that was more exciting as a game and then the crowd seemed to want to join in. I saw Miss Ellen getting upset at the fate of her navvy friend and the poor parson was nowhere to be seen. There was no point calling in the constable as Mr Firth was stuck with the village team somewhere under the pile. Reverend Hardy scrambled out with a bloodied nose and blew his whistle to no avail but one by one the teams untangled themselves, leaving only the Scotsman and Mr Lund battling on.

  The fight turned ugly with the redhead navvy screaming, ‘I’ll see you in hell afore long!’ which had Miss Ellen in tears. I don’t think any of this was in Mr Hardy’s rule book but the mist was so thick that the match was abandoned and the teams, mud-splattered, bruised and battered, staggered into the Fleece to quench their thirsts. I beat a hasty retreat to the schoolhouse to beg a cup of tea from the Bulstrodes before my sodden trek back to the farm. Cora admitted me only when I stripped off my wet outer garments so I shivered by her meagre fire. I am sure she was watching from behind the safety of her net curtains, Mr Bulstrode having retreated to the church to play the organ. Miss Cora explained that any physical displays give him a headache.

  I enquired about my star pupil only to be told that he was making satisfactory progress towards the December examination. Walking back to Middle Butts we were overtaken by the vicar in his horse and trap and he offered us a welcome lift back home. We were in no position to refuse this kindness and we all chatted amiably along the stone track completely surrounded by swirling mist and mizzle. Ellen was upset about the public fighting. Our vicar was disappointed that the match had not had the reconciling effect he planned. He says he will persevere with other activities over the winter and perhaps organise a Christmas show which he hopes will involve both camp and village in the season of goodwill. I said I hoped this activity would be more peaceful than the rehearsal for Armageddon I’d witnessed on the village green and everyone laughed.

  I was feeling quite exhausted by the afternoon’s end and Mistress Annie took one look at me, insisting I steam my head over a bowl of balsam oil to clear it. She reprimanded me severely for standing on wet grass and poured a glass of elderberry syrup down my throat to cure all or kill me, she laughed. I was sat down before a huge plate on which was the largest Yorkshire pudding, the size of a dessert plate, golden, crisp and light, into which she poured a jug of hot thick gravy full of goodness and bits and stood over me until my plate was emptied.

  They set great store by producing these puddings made of batter, oven-roasted but light to the touch. Poor Ellen cannot get hers to rise at all and they collapse on the plate like soggy dishcloths. Within a few days I felt so feverish I could not stand upright and was shoved into bed and dosed with all sorts of herbs and potions. I think I had a sick visit from the vicar, chaperoned by Merciful. He seemed concerned about the deterioration of my health. I took one look at him standing there in his black cassock, not the cheeriest of sights is the woozy sight of a cassock and prayer book. I think I thought he was preparing me for Kingdom Come and went all weepy, so Mercy informed me later. He held my hand and said I would soon be on the mend but I have no recall of this event. I must have looked a fright with my red nose streaming and my hair all a mess. If I am not careful I shall have to reconsider my opinion of the ever-late Mr Hardy. He is trying to get more involved in his parish at last. I am told he is quite well-connected in the district, being a distant cousin of Sir Edward Dacre, a Hardy from Pickering, and his sister, Dorothy, is married to Lord Howard’s nephew. I am still not sure of his spiritual condition but it seems to have taken a turn for the better since that shameful episode of forgetting the burials.

  Poor Mary Ann has left Paradise and gone to Batty Green. I will always put flowers by the smallpox plot to remember Janey. I am rambling on incoherently as if there is a lot to straighten in my own mind. I think I have been guilty of taking so firm a stance on things religious as to quite put people off my views. Perhaps our established church is no worse than most and has bumbled along for centuries so who am I to be so severe a critic of clergy and congregation alike?

  That verse: ‘In my father’s house are many mansions’ troubles me. Does it mean that Heaven is full of different rooms? When I joined the Pastoral Aid Mission I was assured that there was only one room and everyone must be squashed in tight. Now I am thinking it means that there are lots of rooms for different points of view. When my turn comes I’d like to be in the same room as the Birketts and the Pringles and Mr Cleghorn and all the other kindly people I have met here. I feel as if I have lived here for months with a veil over my face and that somehow now the veil is lifted and I can see clearer. Does this make any sense?

  On a fine day this dale is as close as you can get to paradise; but a sort of paradise flawed. In contrast Paradise camp is a festering sore, an ugly boil of a place. Mr Tiplady and his Bradford mission do their best to provide comforts but their efforts are as plain as their mission hut, which is serviceable, bare, cold and Spartan. I thought I could abandon all my old practices and join wholeheartedly with them. Yet I yearn for the prayer book and quiet peace of St Oswy’s. I like the seasons of our church’s year, Easter, Whitsun, Harvest and Christmas each rolling round as the year turns. Now it is almost All Hallows’ Eve and we remember saints past and present united over the ages. Do they too have their own mansions, customs and opinions which might be strange today? Then there are the future saints yet to be born. So you see I am questioning everything.

  It will be hard to leave Scarsbeck when my term finishes. Once the families move on up the line I will be expected to go with them to help set up more schoolrooms. I am assured there will be many years of work here on the line but am no longer sure if Zillah Herbert will be the right person to continue the task. My Mission journal lies neglected and I have logged only two sick visits; both have been to me. This letter will have to be logged in as a spiritual conversation. They are very concerned to inspect my outreach work.

  I find it so hard to work alongside Ezra Bulstrode. He is the most distracting little man, nervous and twitchy, and his sister startles at the slightest noise. He places so much store on the scholastic achievement of a few to the detriment of all, I fear. It seems to be affecting
his health. I trust it was God’s will for me to coerce young Billy to compete in their arena?

  Bulstrode is a man driven by demons and subjected to a sister who displays such malice of the soul as that ancient mystic once said. I do not like to malign my own sex but her malice is so biting in its effect and so much worse in a woman. Had I stayed at the schoolhouse I would long ago have returned to your fireside.

  It is hard to recall that it is only six months since I made my snowy entrance into this dale with a trunk full of dreams and schemes. Now I cannot foresee my being able to return to Nottingham until the festive season.

  Papa will have gone to sleep in reading this long epistle but the fog in my head is clearing and my stomach gurgles with hunger once more. No doubt Nanny would consider that a good sign. I do not wish to be a burden to my hosts and will drag myself up ere long. Mercy checks on my progress, peeping round the door to see if I have passed over and she can whip away all my bonnets and shawls for her dressing-up box. The minx thinks I have no idea that she creeps into my closet and rummages through my clothing. I have a good mind to take some clothes and dunk them in butcher’s blood and hide them with a dagger to teach her a lesson!

  I shall write to you with another chapter of my adventures in ‘Paradise flawed’ as soon as possible.

  Yours penitentially,

  Zillah Jane

  P.S. Mercy Birkett whispers I am called ‘Sherbert’ by my pupils. I hope that is because I fizz sweetly in water and not because I am acid and sharp!

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Mally Widdup peered into the boiling copper boiler in the Paradise communal bakehouse, her red face scalding from the steam. All the cloth puddings tied with string were bubbling away except one which bounced on the surface stubbornly. That one blessed pudding bobbed up and down and every attempt to drown it failed. Something must be wrong. Stay down, yer bugger, you’ve got two pounds of best beef and a thick coat of suet dumpling inside, what’s wrong with yer?

  Tizzy and her mates stood around looking puzzled. ‘We’re starving . . . when’s tea?’ Tizzy whined.

  ‘I don’t know, do I, not with this here playing me up. I hope it hasn’t gone funny. I paid good money out to that butcher from Scarsbeck for this cut, if he’s diddled me with rubbish I’ll send Wobbly Bob and his gang to sort him out. As if I haven’t enough to do but stand over a stupid pudding all night. Here, pull out the string and I’ll have a sken.’ Mally yanked on the string tie to draw out the dumpling onto the table. Then she saw Tizzy and the nippers sniggering, and she peered more closely at her catch. ‘What the blood and stomach pills!’ As she picked at the scalding muslin cloth, a firm leathery football was revealed underneath. ‘You little divils! No wonder I’ll never get that to sink down. Who did this?’ She tried to hide the laughter in her voice.

  ‘Gotcha! It’s Mischief Night. Remember, remember the fourth of November,’ Tizzy teased triumphantly.

  ‘Tizzy Widdup. How am I to get my work done when I get mithered by a bunch of nippers?’

  ‘Who calls you Tizzy?’ said one of her gang.

  ‘Only Mally, a nickname ’cos I gets her in a tizz,’ answered Tizzy quick as a flash, glaring at her sister for almost blowing away her secret. Not that she didn’t wish the game was over and done all together but Tizzy was sunk in too deep to bob out like their Mischief pudding. It was her idea to beg the football from Fancy Mac as a memento of his heroic deed. Saving a penalty from that horrible Lund tyke had given her something to gloat on. Yet all too often, a fed-up-of-being-a-lad mood came over her. She hated getting up at dawn for the early shift, shivering in the wet dewy grass and mud, collecting, delivering, running at the gang’s beck and call like a skivvy maid. She might as well join Mally doing washing and cleaning. Then she was expected to clean up for the school cart and start her lessons and then some more. Standing for inspection at the schoolhouse door while Miss High and Mighty Patabully fussed. She had to sit all proper at the kitchen table and learn manners, but whatever they were she didn’t have them. Elbows off the table, sit up straight, spoon to the mouth, chew twenty times on crumbs and fiddly bits. Sometimes Susan gave her titbits and she felt as grateful as Stumper who nosed around the navvy hut sniffing up the droppings.

  Sometimes Tizzy was so tired during lessons that she felt like nodding off but the eggsandwichstation was only a few weeks away and she was stuck watching the mantelpiece clock as Bulstrode placed timed problems and sums in front of her as a practice run.

  ‘If a train a hundred yards long travelling at sixty miles an hour passes another train, one hundred and fifty yards long, travelling at the same speed, how long would it take for them to pass each other?’

  ‘Easy, peasy!’ Her arithmetic was on target for the Fawcett but what then? Trains would never go that fast.

  Tonight she would not be thinking about any of that. It was Mischief Night and every Yorkshire lad would be out on the streets heaving gates off posts, playing tricks with shaving soap and tar and feathers; a chance to pay back old scores. A gang of nippers would be roaming over the camp and if there was time, they would sneak down to Scarsbeck to do over the village school. Tizzy planned to keep out of that one if she could. Still, there was no harm in egging them on.

  Two days ago Miss Herbert had donated a pile of soul cakes to pass round the class when she talked in the Scripture lesson about holy saints in glory to the whole school. She had made them up in the farmhouse under Mercy’s mother’s instructions and they tasted like little gingernuts full of treacle and oatmeal like Mally’s chewy parkin. Sherbert’s efforts were thicker and gooey and stuck to the roof of yer mouth. Mercy Birkett was that puffed up Tizzy had to trip her up in the play yard and she ran crying to the headmaster who gave them both the stick across their palms. So now she hoped the schoolhouse would get well and truly plastered with tar and feathers tonight.

  They were going to have a busy evening emptying rubbish, fetching all the tools and wheelbarrows on site into a pile or decorating bushes with hammers and brushes, cans and buckets. Under cover of a starlit November sky they crept around unguarded huts with Stumper hopping behind them, setting other dogs barking, geese hissing and poultry pens squawking. ‘Gertcha!’ yelled the workmen who had long ago forgotten what it was to go Mischief hunting.

  ‘Away or we’ll tan yer backsides,’ said Granda Widdup as he and his cronies pushed the night soil cart from midden to midden on their rounds, unaware that his grandchild was in the thick of it.

  No one took any persuading to take the track down to the village, to give the local kids a run for their money. Tizzy scampered ahead, glad of a night away from studies in the noisy hut with navvies arguing or snoring around her. This was going to be the best of Mischief Nights.

  At Middle Butts Farm, Mercy was screaming in a paddy of rage at not being allowed to join in the fun and tricks down in the village among the scholars. ‘ ’Snot fair! I can never do anything stuck up here. Why can’t I take the lantern and the dog and go off? Ellie can call for me later in the cart. She won’t mind,’ she ordered.

  ‘You, madam, have mending to darn, a Scripture verse to learn for your confirmation class and bed to go to soon enough. If I hear no more, you can help me bake some more oatcakes and throw them over the pulley like stockings. You like doing that.’ Mother was trying to distract the child from her tantrum but Mercy was not so easily smoothed these days. Since Jim died there was always a sullen edge to her tongue.

  ‘I’m not a babby. I want to go outside and do Mischief. ’Snot fair! Ellie can come then.’ She looked to her sister for support but Ellie shook her head vehemently.

  ‘I am not harnessing the horse up just to please you.’

  ‘Why not? You’re a pig and go with navvies. Everyone says that, snotface.’

  ‘One more word out of you, Merciful, and you go straight upstairs with no candle. I never heard such talkback from a girl of ten.’

  ‘Eleven next month.’ Mercy was unrepentant.

&nbs
p; ‘That’s as may be but no daughter of mine wanders out in the dead of night unescorted. Not with a heathen camp on our doorstep and thieves abroad, stealing sheep and beef cattle. There’s plenty to occupy you here. So there’s an end on it,’ snapped Annie Birkett as she sifted the oatmeal in the bowl.

  Ellie watched the brass hand of the grandmother clock creep like a snail towards the appointed hour. She was trying to stay casual and not tremble. Upstairs lay a small wicker valise containing a few toiletries, her Bible, a change of smalls and her best blouse.

  Soon she would creep upstairs to change into her Sunday skirt and jacket under her workaday cloak and her best blue bonnet.

  Ellie composed a letter of explanation and assurance which would be left on her bed. Mother would have to understand that love cannot wait for permission. Not when it was as strong as Ellie’s. At nineteen, nearly, she was old enough to know her own mind. The first cut would be the deepest for Mother. Then she would realise that they were doing her a favour running away. It would mean no wedding feast and fancy clothes, no expenses on all the fuss of a wedding party. She rehearsed her exit carefully. Just by going to check the yard and retire early she could slip her bag into the shippon. Then she would sneak out the front of the house down the wide staircase, change once more and make her way on foot to Scarsbeck Cross for nine o’clock. The stone stood at the crossroads of all the trackways on the moor. A safe place to meet. By this time tomorrow or the day after, at the latest, she would be a happily married woman.

  Cora Bulstrode stood sentinel behind the hall curtains watching shadows dart hither and thither across the green. She knew what they were up to, the evil ones planning to destroy the school and all Ezra’s work. Since that letter arrived on the mat the house was filled with gloom leaving Cora sleepless, pacing around her bedposts each night. Now there was more mischief abroad and the village was conspiring against them. How could the stars shine so brightly, Orion torching in the sky?