by Marie Joseph
The evening air was still and warm, unusually heavy for that part of Lancashire, a promise of the long hot summer to come. Libby, without stopping to think, unbuttoned her long fawn duster-coat and laid it over the still figure.
‘He must be kept covered. Warm. For the shock,’ she whispered, then turned startled eyes as the policeman blew his whistle in a long, piercing blast.
He nodded. ‘Everything is being taken care of, miss. Now don’t you fash yourself.’ He licked the point of his pencil. ‘May I have your own name and address, miss? I take it you was a witness to the assault.’
Libby was controlling her impatience with great difficulty. If the policman did not put his flamin’ notebook away now, this very minute, she would snatch it from his red hand and throw it as far as she could. But she gave him the information he wanted, unaware of the raised eyebrows as it was taken down neatly on a flipped-over page. She lifted her head and saw with surprise that the market square was now completely deserted. The large crowd had disappeared, the £5 fine for disturbing the peace a deterrent to even the most aggressive.
‘What about the ambulance?’ Libby’s voice was sharp, but the policeman merely held up a hand as if directing the traffic.
‘On its way, miss. We had it stationed down the bottom end of Victoria Street. The motor ambulance, miss,’ he said, his voice tinged with more than a touch of pride as the newly acquired petrol-driven van chugged over the pavement and across the cobblestones.
‘Thank God for that.’ Libby got to her feet and watched as the unconscious man was wrapped in a red blanket and laid on a stretcher.
‘You coming with him, miss?’
She accepted her blood-stained coat from an outstretched hand, and shook her head. ‘No. He’s in good hands now, and I don’t know him personally . . . it was just that – just that . . .’
But the doors were being slammed and the policeman was waving the ambulance away, directing it over the empty square with as much concentration as if streams of traffic converged from every direction.
‘Wait!’ Libby bent down and picked up a small leather-backed book. ‘This must have fallen out of his pocket.’
She held it out in front of her, but the ambulance was already back on the road, and the policeman, his duty done to the letter, walking stolidly away in the opposite direction.
‘Ah, well . . .’ Libby shook her head. Then, as she pushed the book down into the deep patch-pocket of the coat over her arm, she turned and saw a familiar figure striding towards her – Harry Brandwood, the man she was to marry.
‘Oh, Harry!’ She tried to smile as she almost ran towards him. ‘Oh, thank you for coming to find me. You’ve no idea! They were like wild animals . . . oh, if only you’d been a few minutes earlier, you could have done something!’ She clutched his arm. ‘And that policeman! He took my name and address. You don’t think they’ll get in touch with my father? If my father even finds out I’ve been down the town, he’ll go mad. But I had to come.’
Her brown eyes were full of tears, her hair half hanging down her back, and her blood-stained coat trailing on the cobblestones. Dr Harry Brandwood loved this wayward girl with all his being, but she angered him at times with her impulsiveness, her intense way of identifying with matters beyond her experience. Had he been a violent man, he would have taken her across his knee and given her a good beating. He took Libby’s hand and started to walk quickly across the square, his face set into stern lines.
He had often told himself that Carrie Peel was the twin he should be marrying. Carrie, with her softness, her gentle smile, her understanding. But Carrie was milk and water to Libby’s full-bodied red glowing wine. Mirror images of each other they might be, but Libby’s mirror was clear and sparkling where Carrie’s was soft mother-of-pearl.
Already the crowd was gathering again, eager for more words, more action. The overturned platform was set right way up, and two men fought for the privilege of being the first to put his point of view.
Angrily, Harry hurried Libby along.
‘I’ve got the car over there, down King William Street past the shops.’ He was taking such long strides that Libby was forced to make small running steps to keep up with him. Now they were in for one of their frequent quarrels, and this time he didn’t care. This time she had gone just too far.
‘I don’t suppose there’s much point in asking you what you were thinking about coming down town on your own at a time like this, is there?’ He opened the car door and half pushed her inside. ‘And I don’t want to listen to any more nonsense about you having to be there. You could have listened to the wireless like any other normal woman, or read the bulletins.’ He ran round the car to climb in behind the wheel. ‘Have you any idea of what might have happened?’
He started the car and fought the gears in a fury of frustation. ‘When Carrie told me where you’d gone, I could not believe it.’
Libby scrubbed at the bloodstain on her coat, making no impression at all. ‘It means less than nothing to Carrie that the whole country is on the brink of revolution.’
‘Revolution?’ Harry’s pleasant face darkened. ‘What kind of Bolshie talk is that?’
‘Harry Brandwood! You might have the reputation of a good doctor – for the rich of course – but you walk about with your eyes and ears closed.’ Libby raised both arms to try to pin the long fall of hair back into place. ‘Damn this hair! I’ll have it bobbed. This week! Tomorrow!’ She jammed the hat on again. ‘Do you realize that in this town alone, and almost every other town in the north, come to think of it, there is a choice of three jobs for the boys coming up to school-leaving age? They can go in the mills to work for someone like my father, or they can go as railway clerks or porters, or be apprenticed if they’re lucky – or they can go down the mines.’
She dropped a hairpin and scrabbled for it on the floor of the car. ‘Do you know, Harry, the brightest lad in my class went as a pony drawer out Burnley way just before the lock-out? He was asthmatic and yet down he went, breathing coal dust into his lungs and crawling on his belly like a mole. You have no idea! I heard that if there’s a fall the owners want the ponies out before the men. It’s true!’ Her eyes blazed. ‘There was a girl in the top class at school – Nellie Sharp – and sharp was the right word for her. She had a mind like a razor, and yet because the money was needed at home, do you know what she is doing now? Standing by the belt at the mine and picking the coal over! I saw her once and she showed me her hands, full of blisters and going septic. She told me she has to walk to work across the fields, and it takes her half an hour each way, an’ if she gets soaked then she has to stay in the same clothes all day! For seven shillings a week, Harry! And you shy away from the word revolution? You must be blind!’
Harry was bone tired. He had spent forty minutes since a hastily snatched dinner trying to convince a pampered woman there was nothing wrong with her. And above all he was a reasonable man. Struggling to keep his voice low and even, he said, ‘Stop and think, darling. How can going on strike help in the long run? People like your father won’t suffer, not on a day-to-day life or death basis, but his workers will. I know there is exploitation, and there always has been. But conditions have changed, and will go on changing. But not this way!’
Libby was still trying to rub at the stain on the coat held on her lap, her small face scarlet with fury. ‘Oh, Harry! Can’t you even begin to see? If the parents got living wages, then there would be no need for them to send their children out to work, any work, the very day they leave school. It’s a vicious circle. You won’t face up to reality, Harry. You never have.’
Even the patience of a man as much in love as Harry Brandwood could exhaust itself. Driving away from the centre of the town now, he turned the car into a quiet street off the main Preston road, and switched off the engine.
‘But I was facing up to reality ten years ago, wasn’t I, Libby?’ His hands left the wheel to hold her fidgeting fingers tightly in a grip that made it impossible fo
r her to break away. He spoke softly and calmly. ‘I’ve never been one for talking overmuch about what I went through or saw out there in France, but believe you me, I saw enough of what you call reality to last me a lifetime.’
His mouth set in a grim line as, just for a moment, he was back at the front again. Captain Harry Brandwood, mentioned in dispatches, twice wounded and twice returned to the front line . . . In that quiet street of respectable terraced houses, he was back in the aftermath of battle as he knelt in the Flanders mud trying to ease the last dying moments of soldiers, some of them barely old enough to be called men. Lads from his Lancashire regiment screaming for their mothers through shattered lips. In his mind he felt his feet slip from the duckboards, saw a man’s open mouth as he disappeared beneath the sticky stinking mud, weighted down by the pack he had carried for two days without sleep.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said grimly. ‘I’ve had my share of reality, Libby Peel.’
Libby frowned, not liking her thunder stolen in that way. She tried another tactic. ‘Then why don’t you take a practice in the town where folks need your help? Wouldn’t that make more sense than blindly moving into your father’s shoes when he retires? Didn’t the war make you want to come home and fight for the men who were forced to return to nothing? Some of them daren’t call a doctor in because they know they can’t afford the shilling a week they would have to pay the doctor’s man every Friday night.’
Harry let go of her hands then to stare unblinking through the windscreen. He loved this girl sitting by his side so much that he was preapred to accept the hurtful things she said. She loved him too, he knew that, but sometimes he suspected that she used him as a personal sounding board for her own ideas and emotions. Just as he needed her to shake him from his own admitted and sometimes deliberately self-induced complacency.
Libby was strong in both mind and body, and when they married at Christmas she would be a doctor’s wife to be proud of. Once he had got her away from that mixed infants’ school with its asphalt playground, once he had got her away from her friend Margaret Bottomley with her half-baked socialist ideas, Libby would conform.
Or would she? Harry sighed. ‘Remember, Libby, love. The world is made up of winners and losers, and always will be.’ He started the car. ‘And another thing. The rich can suffer too.’ They were on the main road again now. ‘This morning I stood by the bed of a child dying of diptheria. I was helpless to do more than watch.’ His face crumpled in sadness. ‘That child’s father owns enough shops to line the Arcade twice over. But no power on earth and no medicine we know could have prevented that child choking to death on its own spittle. So don’t get too carried away, Libby. I do sometimes come face to face with what you call realism. Even if my patients do pay through the nose for the privilege of seeing their loved ones die.’
Libby had nothing more to say for the moment. Now that they were getting nearer to home she was forgetting wider issues for the time being. At Westerley her father was waiting. Somehow he would be sure to have found out where she had been. Libby chewed at her bottom lip. Her father could sit at his desk in the billiard room all evening, and still know exactly what was going on everywhere else in the house.
And oh, dear God, if he had drunk too much whisky then his anger could leap and crackle like a fire out of control. Libby closed her eyes, seeing it all . . .
Her mother would cry and clutch her heart, but Carrie would defend her twin even if her body shook with terror. It was all so petty, so shameful, so degrading to have to stand there like a child instead of a grown woman of twenty-two, listening to her father’s bigoted, sarcastic flow of invective that made her suspect at times that he might be going mad. Like his sister before him, ending her days in a private clinic, plucking with nervous fingers at the bedclothes as she tried in vain to remember who she was.
Libby sat up straight, tilting her chin defiantly, and when Harry risked a sideways glance he saw that her eyes were as bleak and hard as moorland stones.
‘Let’s hope the maister has drunk enough whisky to soak up most of his temper,’ she said without much hope.
Oliver Peel had been born in 1862. His grandfather had built Bridge Mill, a four-storey building with a vast weaving shed. A self-made man rather than an established landowner, Abraham Peel had been a weaver himself, had stood at his looms with the noise deafening him, vowing that someday he would move on to what he called ‘better things’.
He had achieve this by marrying into money, and from then it was all plain sailing. A fair-minded man, he had given birth to a fair-minded son, Benjamin, who in his turn had fathered Oliver. But with the death of Willie Peel, Oliver’s only son, in France, the fair-mindedness had ended.
Westerley was built in Georgian style. There were five wide steps up to the front door leading into a mosaic tiled hall. In the dining room hung an enormous crystal candelabra, and the lounge at the front was liberally dotted with potted ferns. On the first floor were the main bedrooms, with boxlike rooms for the servants at the top of the house, and though Libby on entering the house glanced longingly at the wide staircase, Harry urged her towards the drawing room door.
‘You may not have been missed,’ he whispered, but in that first glance Libby knew the worst had happened.
Her mother, Ettie Peel, cowered like a small pale ghost in the corner of the chesterfield, with Sarah Batt, Ettie’s maid and companion, positioned behind her mistress, hands clasped together beneath her high pouter-pigeon bosom. Carrie stood over by the window, her brown eyes wide and anxious as she tried to send out a message of unspoken sympathy and apology for giving the game away. And last but not, dear God, least, Oliver.
He stood in front of the fireplace, legs straddled wide apart, black eyebrows drawn together over the high ridge of the distinctive Peel nose, his glance sliding over Libby as if she did not exist.
‘Ah, Harry, lad.’ He nodded into the fold of his treble chin. ‘There’s been a message for you. Over the telephone. Urgent. It was a Mr Bebbington.’
‘Oh Lord, I know what that means.’ Harry took an instinctive step backwards. ‘But her baby’s not due until the end of the month.’
Oliver nodded. ‘So he said. But it seems her time’s come on sudden like, and she won’t see nobody but you, not even your father.’ His loud voice boomed in anger as he shot a venomous glance at Libby. ‘And if you hadn’t had to go traipsing after that one there you’d have been here to take the message a good half hour ago. As it is you’d best be off.’
Libby swivelled her eyes sideways and saw the expression on her fiancé’s face – a farmer’s face, she often thought. It was a mixture of indecision, anxiety and a professional obedience to his calling. ‘I have to go,’ the expression said. ‘Please try to understand, sweetheart.’
‘Yes, you must go at once, Harry.’ Libby made no move to go into the hall with him as, reddening uncomfortably, he made his excuses and left, leaving behind him a silence that grew and lengthened, lasting until the sound of the car’s wheels on the gravel path outside died away.
And all the time Oliver’s dark eyes never left his daughter’s face. He was drunk enough to sound sober, but too drunk to sound reasonable, Libby calculated. Trying hard to meet his gaze, she felt her legs tremble and her heart begin to race and she despised herself for her weakness.
She was twenty-two years old, she reminded herself silently. A qualified teacher, engaged to be married to the son of the town’s most distinguished doctor. She could walk out of this house and never come back, without taking a thing with her. Harry would marry her next week if she asked him to. They could be married quietly, and his mother and father could retire to their bungalow waiting for them at Lytham St Annes. And she need never set eyes on her father again.
Libby held her head up high, as the silence in the room grew even more menacing. Oh, no, she would never do that, not to her little mother sitting there quietly, nor to Carrie, the sister who was more than a sister. She would stay and stand her ground.
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At last Oliver spoke. ‘All right then. Now tell me where you’ve been. Take it slowly, then I can take it in, because when your mother told me I couldn’t rightly believe it.’
‘He got it out of me love.’ Ettie’s voice was a whimper. ‘And don’t go blaming Carrie. She only told me to set my mind at rest.’
‘You know where I’ve been.’ Libby heard the tinkle of a hairpin as it escaped her slipping bun to fall on the polished surround where she stood by the door.
‘I would like to hear it from your own mouth.’ Oliver was using his voice now to full dramatic advantage, so that it hissed like a whiplash.
Suddenly Libby could bear it no more. ‘Oh, Father!’ she burst out. ‘Please don’t make such an issue out of nothing. I only went down the town to see for myself what was going on. I knew there would be speakers on the market place, and I wanted to hear what they had to say. Father! They were decent, hard-working men in the main, and they are fighting for their very existence. I’m a teacher, for heaven’s sake. Isn’t it right that a teacher should know both sides of things?’ She glanced round her wildly. ‘All I see here, in this house, is one side, and I’ve got to see both. Can’t you understand?’
‘The miners should have learned their lesson five years ago. Or last year, come to that, when Baldwin settled things down.’ Oliver’s face was now dangerously quiet. ‘What I want to know is, were there any of my weavers there? Because if there were . . .’ He rolled his big head from side to side. ‘They don’t know which side their bread’s buttered on. It only needs one man, one ignorant bother-maker to shout the odds, and they’ll all be following him, like sheep. There’s only half of them turned up today, and tomorrow, if I know owt, I’ll be faced with idle looms, and three bloody contracts unfulfilled. I could tell you summat about strikes, lass, if you asked me. And about the unions. Do you know how much the union spent way back in 1896 to keep that strike going?’ Clasping the lapels of his smoking jacket with both hands he rose up on to his toes. ‘Eight hundred and fifty pounds a week! So how much do you think they’ve got in the kitty now?’ He snorted. ‘Enough to put me out of business if it goes on long enough, and you, you have the effrontery to creep from the house to side with them!’