The Iron Road

by Jane Jackson

  The Iron Road

  Jane Jackson

  Published by Accent Press Ltd – 2012

  ISBN 9781909335172

  Copyright © Jane Jackson 2012

  The right of Jane Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The stories contained within this book are works of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High St, Bedlinog, Mid-Glamorgan, CF46 6RY

  Chapter One

  Local dignitaries were unanimous. The facts were plain. Navvies and decent society didn’t mix. They might be necessary to build the line, but no one – certainly not fathers, husbands, or brothers – wanted them living too close. They were like a marauding army with their drinking and brawling. They caused trouble wherever they went. And no woman was safe from their lascivious attentions.

  But they had to live somewhere while they were building the new Helston to Penryn line. After intense discussions, agreement was reached. The best place for the shanty village would be out near Trewan. After all, it was reasoned, Sir Gerald Radclyff must have made a packet out of selling land to the Railway Company. It wasn’t as if the shacks and huts would be visible from his house or the surrounding park. Yes, unfortunately, this site was five miles from the railhead and supply depot, but as the line progressed, moving closer to their encampment, the navvies wouldn’t have to travel quite so far to begin the day’s work.

  So the squalid shacks huddled in a fold between two hills out of sight of all except the navvies who lived in them, and their women. The aldermen and councillors congratulated themselves. All things considered, the chosen location, a few hundred yards from the route the line woul d take, was ideal. The river at the bottom of the valley offered an abundant supply of fresh water. True, the paths down to it were steep and lined with gorse and brambles, but in autumn blackberries were free for the picking and would surely make a welcome addition to whatever it was such people usually ate.

  Of course, one couldn ’t stop them coming into town. On pay-days when they had money they spent freely, mostly on beer. However, if local innkeepers were prepared to accept the risks in return for the extra cash who could blame them? Business was business.

  None of them knew or cared what went on in the shanty village, or what life might be like for an eighteen-year-old girl alone in the world.

  Veryan Polmear lifted the wet cloth and looked at the bloody welts on the back of the eight-year-old boy lying face down on her narrow bed. Swallowing a rage that threatened to choke her, she blinked hard. She had no right to weep. He hadn’t made a sound. He had huddled in the shadowed doorway of her hut, waiting for her to come. When at last she’d arrived, bone-weary from the day’s work and desperate for sleep, he had struggled painfully to his feet. Just for an instant she’d been tempted to send him away. Where to? No one else would take him in. She certainly couldn’t send him home. William Thomas might by now have sunk into his nightly drunken stupor, but if he hadn’t, Davy would get another beating.

  So, she had held out her hand to him. Sliding his grubby little paw into it, he had turned his head away, not wanting her to see his tears as his shoulders heaved soundlessly. Now he lay on her rough grey blankets, trembling with delayed shock.

  She lifted a plate from off the top of a basin by her feet. Taking a large piece of flannel from a jug of steaming water she wrung it out, opened it on her lap, scooped handfuls of soaked bread from the basin and spread it evenly over the centre of the cloth. Then, folding the edges over, she laid it gently on the broken skin, biting her lip as he flinched.

  ‘It’ll feel better very soon, Davy. A bread poultice is magic. It sucks out all the pain.’

  He lay there, pale and unmoving. She stroked the skinny bare calf that poked out from his ragged trousers. They were far too big: hand-me-downs hacked off at the knee and left to fray by a mother too often drunk to finish any job properly. Veryan wanted to hate Bessie Thomas for her cowardice in allowing this treatment of her son. But it was difficult to hate a woman whose own bruises barely had time to fade before fresh ones replaced them.

  ‘Can you feel it working?’

  He shifted car efully, and glanced sideways at her. ‘Did your pa ever beat you?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I was lucky. My father was a kind man.’ She remembered his laughing eyes; his rust-coloured hair several shades lighter than her own thick curls. He had swung her high in the air and called her his treasure, and she had felt warm and loved and safe.

  ‘Why did you run away then?’

  ‘What makes you think I ran away, Davy?’ He started to shrug, and his small young-old face screwed up in pain. He sniffed. ‘Dunno. I heard it somewhere. They said you must’ve run away, else what was someone like you doing on the works?’

  ‘My father was a soldier. He went away to fight in a place called the Crimea.’ She had missed him and longed impatiently for his return. To recall the sound of his voice and bring him closer she had read for herself the books he used to read to her: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Last of the Mohicans, Rob Roy: exciting stories, full of adventure, that he had brought to vivid life in her mind. Reading had been her only escape from her mother’s strange moods. Now books were her only friends, apart from young Davy.

  Yet it hadn ’t always been like this. She could remember a different life. Not clearly, for she had been very young, Davey’s age. But she could still recall a large house, with gleaming furniture and pictures and ornaments, and a garden with towering trees, drifts of fragrant flowers, and grass like bright green velvet. There had been servants too, a cook and maids, and a gardener and groom.

  ‘Did he kill lots of people?’

  ‘I don’t know, Davy. He didn’t come back. A lot of the soldiers became very ill and died before they could fight anyone.’ Her mother’s grief and rage had frightened her. Then they had left the house. So many moves. Each place poorer and dirtier than the last. So much she was unable – could not bear -to remember.

  He searched her face, his eyes large and full of fear. ‘You won’t die, will you?’ he whispered.

  Aching for all the hurt he ’d already endured in his short life, she widened her mouth in a reassuring smile and smoothed the tangled hair back from his dirty face. ‘No, Davy. I won’t die, I promise. Now, is the magic working? Does your back feel a little bit better?’

  He thought for a moment then nodded. As she continued to smooth his forehead his eyelids flickered and closed. Gazing at the small boy, she felt as if she was being torn in half. She was despe rate to leave the works. But if she went, what would happen to Davy? She couldn’t take him with her, nor could she abandon him to his father’s brutality. He wasn’t her responsibility. So how was she to cut him out of her heart?

  The following morning Veryan replaced one flatiron on the stand beside the fire and, after wrapping the holder around the handle, lifted the other. Licking her finger she touched the black surface to test the heat and turned back to the table and the last shirt. Please don’t let it rain again, not tonight. It was pay-day, and if the men couldn’t get into town there would be trouble.

  She had lived on five different lines and on each one public response had been the same. Initially, local inhabitants had t alked of the new railway with a mixture of amazement and apprehension. But once they becam
e used to the earthworks and the sight of the little engine trundling along the newly laid line towing flat-bed wagons loaded with rails, sleepers, and ballast, their attitude had changed.

  Though some apprehension remained it was joined by excitement as they began looking ahead to the day a proper train would arrive, a huge black locomotive hissing clouds of steam as it thundered through the countryside carrying people and goods at speeds undreamed of.

  Recognized as a necessary evil, the navvies were tolerated. They had money and enjoyed spending it. A lso it was grudgingly admitted that they were more likely to fight amongst themselves than with the locals. But for navvy women it was a different story. They were treated like vermin, refused service in shops, their children chased away.

  In all fairness, Veryan admitted, some deserved it. But what of the others? The ones struggling against impossible odds to live decent, orderly lives? They didn ’t deserve such scornful contempt. The injustice fuelled Veryan’s deep anger, increasing her determination to escape. She didn’t belong here.

  ‘Dear life, girl,’ Queenie huffed irritably from her sagging, dirt-encrusted armchair, eyeing the flatiron. ‘Why don’t you just spit on it?’

  ‘She wouldn’t do that,’ Bessie Thomas jeered. ‘She isn’t like the rest of us.’ Emerging muffled from her cut and swollen mouth, the words held hopeless envy.

  Glancing at the woman whose careworn face was distorted with the livid bruises of last night ’s beating, Veryan bent her head, saying nothing as she pushed the iron over the coarse material.

  ‘You got a drop of something to put in this tea, Queenie?’ Bessie wheedled. ‘Help keep out the cold?’

  ‘Never mind the bleddy cold, I can see you’re hurting.’ Queenie shook her head. ‘Dear life, Bess, whatever did you do to get William so riled up?’

  ‘I dunno. I don’t reckon he need a reason.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t stand for it, I tell you that for nothing.’

  ‘I know, Queen.’ Bessie gave a shamefaced shrug. ‘But I aren’t you. C’mon, you must have a drop you can spare.’

  Veryan glanced at Queenie, hoping, willing her to say she didn’t have any. After the last riot, local magistrates had forbidden whisky on the works. Although he had complained bitterly about the loss of revenue, Horace Pascoe, the contractor, had reluctantly obeyed the ruling. But the previous day, when the brewer’s carts had braved the deeply rutted muddy track to bring up fresh barrels, Veryan had noticed among them several smaller kegs, improbably marked paraffin. Anxiety had slithered between her ribs and settled in cold heavy coils in the pit of her stomach.

  Queenie rummaged among the cushions at her back then hitched herself forward. Pulling the cork out with a grunt, she tipped the smeary bottle over the two steaming mugs.

  ‘Does Pascoe know?’ Veryan asked uneasily.

  The old woman squinted round at her. ‘Know what?’

  ‘About the whisky.’

  ‘Daft question. Of course he does. Nothing comes on the works without that man knowing about it and taking his cut. He wouldn’t let me have more’n one keg. I had to pay over the odds for that. But if it comes in wet again tonight,’ she grinned, ‘I’ll get my money back and make a tidy profit.’ She re-corked the bottle. ‘Here, stir that fire up a bit. My joints is paining me something awful today.’

  Setting the iron down, Veryan shovelled coal onto the glowing embers. The tongues of flame and sharp smell of whisky jolted her memory. Her mind flew back four years to another shanty on another works. She saw men hot-eyed with lust and alcohol, and her mother, equally drunk and laughing insanely as she was pawed and tossed from one to another.

  Hiding in the shadows, too frightened to move, she had watched her mother – a woman of breeding and education and self-destructive wildness – stagger about then, arms flailing, stumble backward over the fire. The flames had licked hungrily at her whisky-soaked skirts. Before Veryan could utter a sound, the flames had leapt, blossoming with eye-searing brilliance into a huge flaring ball. They had swallowed her once-pretty mother and spat out a shrivelled, blackened thing.

  ‘You going to stand there all day?’ Queenie demanded. ‘The fire won’t burn no hotter with you staring at it.’

  Veryan turned the shirt. The iron clattered as she picked it up. It couldn’t ruin. It mustn’t.

  Queenie’s chair was positioned close to the beer barrels. The keys were chained to a man’s broad leather belt she wore over a brown serge skirt stiff with food and beer stains. Her grubby blouse was covered by a man’s shirt over which she had draped a tattered shawl. She had worn the same clothes for a fortnight. Beneath stringy, greying hair scraped into an untidy bun, her greasy skin shone. A wide mouth and heavy jowls increased her resemblance to a fat, pale toad. But her small eyes were as sharp and bright as a bird’s.

  She slurped the strong tea and sighed with satisfaction. ‘Warms the cockles that does.’ She frowned at her companion. ‘So what made him mad this time?’

  Bessie sipped car efully, wincing. ‘Pascoe’s been going on to the gangers and they been pushing the men. But William says they can’t work no faster. All this rain have made it a mud bath down there.’

  ‘The word is a new engineer’s coming,’ Queenie announced. ‘Pascoe isn’t going to like that. I don’t think the other one have set foot on the works more’n a couple of times in the last twelve months.’ She looked over her shoulder at Veryan. ‘You’d better shift yourself, girl. The men will be steaming if their dinner isn’t there when the hooter goes.’

  Veryan had been up since six, tackling the endless washing produced by nine men returning every night drenched to the skin and caked in mud. ‘I’ve only got one pair of hands.’

  ‘I’ll have less of your lip, miss. Just remember who took you in, who fed and clothed you –’

  ‘As if I could ever forget,’ Veryan muttered.

  ‘See what I have to put up with, Bessie? Is that gratitude? After all I’ve done for her?’

  ‘That temper matches her hair. You know what’s wrong with her?’ Bessie confided. ‘She need a man.’

  Veryan would have laughed only there was nothing funny about the battered woman ’s unquestioning acceptance that this was the only way a woman could live.

  ‘No I don’t,’ she replied firmly.

  Bessie ignored her. ‘Both my girls had a man and a couple of kiddies by the time they was her age.’

  Setting the iron on the hearth, Veryan quickly folded the last of the shirts. ‘I’ll never be a navvy woman.’

  ‘Oooh, listen to you, Miss airs-and-graces,’ Bessie mocked, adding spitefully, ‘Your mother wasn’t so fussy.’

  Veryan’s head jerked up, anger and still-sharp grief bringing a torrent of scathing words to her lips. But at the sight of the bruised face, hunched shoulders, and shaking hands desperately clutching the whisky-spiked tea, she bit them back, unable to kick someone already so far down, even if they did deserve it.

  ‘I’m not my mother and I won’t live like that.’ Or die the may she did. Making room for the shirt on one of the slats she hauled on the rope. The pulley creaked as she hoisted the heavily loaded clothes rack above the glowing coals. Then, crossing to the rickety dresser, she picked up a large wicker basket.

  ‘What have you put up for them?’ Queenie demanded.

  ‘Bread, cold meat, cheese, and a jar of pickled onions.’

  ‘Don’t forget their beer.’ Queenie pointed to a cask. ‘You turn up without that and there’ll be hell to go.’

  ‘I heard the boy Edyvean moved in with Maisie Mitchell yesterday,’ Bessie said, tentatively pushing her mug forward, trading information for the deadening effects of alcohol. ‘Old enough to be his mother she is. And her chap not even cold in ‘is grave. Maisie isn’t one to go hungry. If you get my meaning.’ She flashed Queenie a loaded glance.

  Tying the ends of her woollen shawl behind her back, Veryan tucked the cask under one arm. With the basket on the other she walked out into the pale March
sunshine.

  After the long wet winter everyone had been hoping the change of season would bring respite. At long last this morning had dawned fine and clear. If it would just stay dry for twenty-four hours: long enough for the men to get paid, get changed, und get into town. But as she glanced at the filmy sky, screwing up her eyes against the sun’s glassy brilliance, anxiety pricked like a thorn.

  Rarely used before the na vvies arrived, the path had been widened and churned into deep soft, water-filled ruts by hundreds of feet tramping to and from the line. The clay-like mud built up on the soles of her boots and with the awkward weight of basket and cask, Veryan found it hard to keep her balance. The path joined another winding through the wooded valley. Layers of leaf-mould made the mud even deeper, and dense undergrowth between the trees shut out the light making the path feel like a ravine. She heard a drumming sound and stopped, looking uncertainly around.

  The sound grew louder, bouncing and echoing off the trunks so it was impossible to tell which direction it was coming from. She tried to run, to reach the open ground beyond the trees. Stinking mud spurted up her legs and splashed over her skirt. But with a ground-shaking rumble half-a-dozen riders rounded the bend behind her.

  ‘Get out of the way, you stupid girl,’ the leader, a bulky man in a top hat, bellowed. A thin beam of sunlight flashed off his spectacles.

  How? There was nowhere to go. Stumbling and skidding to the edge of the path, she flinched away from the panting, foam-flecked animals that filled the path, the deafening tumult of hooves, creaking leather, and jingling harness. A couple of the other men shouted too, angry that her unexpected presence might scare the horses. She had seen them once or twice before, on the works. Well dressed, well fed, arrogant men: directors of the Railway Company.

  She turned away, making herself as small as possible, trying to protect the precious food. One rider’s boot caught her hard on the shoulder. She staggered, dropping the cask, and fell to her knees, still desperately hanging onto the basket as they hurtled past.