Yes, Mama

by Helen Forrester

  When she had heard Billy through to the end, she leaned forward and shovelled a small pile of damp, slack coal over the little fire, to keep it burning slowly without having to use larger lumps. Then she sat back in her wooden rocking-chair and thoughtfully stroked her chin, which was as thickly covered with white hairs as that of an old man.

  After a minute or two, during which Billy watched her nervously, she suddenly asked, ‘You a Methody or a Catholic? I were never sure.’

  Billy was nonplussed. He had never been to any kind of church. Caught between a harried Roman Catholic mother and a father who was an oddity who went to open air Wesleyan meetings, and living in a court not very often visited by clerics of any persuasion, he had no idea what he was. His mother had once taught him how to say a rosary; his father had been firm that one must pray directly to God, though, mostly, he had assured Billy, prayers were not answered. For himself, as a toddler in the court, Billy had learned that it was essential for survival to join the solidly Roman Catholic male population in ambushing and beating up Protestants on Orange Day – and to duck participation in Roman Catholic Processions on Saints’ Days if he did not want a pummelling from Protestant lads.

  Nonplussed by Kitty’s query regarding his religious affiliations, he muttered, ‘I dunno.’ He did not dare to take a chance on settling upon one or the other religion, in case it turned out to be the wrong answer to give a witch.

  ‘Well, if you was a Methody, now, that Holy Joe wot come to see your Dad, he might help you.’ Her toothless mouth spread in a wry grin. She considered herself a Roman Catholic, but she knew that if she asked a local priest to help Billy, the boy would probably end up in the Kirkdale Industrial Home or some similar institution, which in her opinion would be like condemning him to hell everlasting. She said aloud, ‘And I don’t want you to end up in the Workie either.’

  The mention of the Workhouse was enough to make Billy begin to blench. ‘Oh, no, Auntie! Can’t I stay with you?’

  She looked at him not unkindly. ‘It’s whether I can stay with you, duck. I ’aven’t got that long.’ She was silent while she considered the increasing swelling of her stomach, the fierce ache in her back, her sticklike thinness, and the opium she bought from Vietnamese sailors to ease her pain. No, she had not long. But she, too, was determined to stay out of the Workhouse by never going near the Dispensary, never mind a Workhouse doctor. She would die in this very room, she was determined of that, and in her mattress lay enough silver coins to pay for a decent funeral.

  Billy stared at her. His heart raced with a fear of the ruthless discipline of charitable Homes and the semi-starvation in the Workhouse, of the beatings, the confinement, the bullying and misuse of him by other inmates, the toil of grinding bones or breaking stones. Holy God, preserve him from such places! He had heard that in the Workie you were kept so hungry that it was a relief to eat the rotting marrow out of the bones before you crushed them for fertilizer.

  Like everyone else, he was terrified of crossing the path of a Workhouse Master. Better to go to gaol, any day – at least there, you eventually came to the end of your sentence and were let out.

  ‘Let me stay, Auntie,’ he pleaded. ‘If you want to move to another room, I could help you. I’m strong.’

  ‘You can’t help me where I’m goin’,’ she replied drily. She sucked her toothless gums and poured herself another cup of black, stewed tea. Then, with shaking fingers, she managed to pull the cork out of the whisky bottle and splashed some of the contents into her cup.

  She rammed the cork back into the bottle, and said to Billy, ‘’Ere, put this back into cupboard for me, before a neighbour comes in and spots it.’ A decent display of abject poverty was, she had always felt, necessary to her personal safety.

  As Billy obeyed, she continued the line of conversation. ‘If I were to send you to live with anybody we knows, the same thing would happen as ‘as happened at Mary’s – the man wouldn’t want you around – particularly as you grows bigger. You could work your heart out and give ’em everything you earned, without keeping a meg for yourself – but soon they’d get fed up with yez – and out you’d go. And you’d have no place – and that could mean the Workie.’ She sipped her laced tea thoughtfully, as Billy’s heart sank ever lower.

  She noted his expression, and grinned at him. ‘It int that bad, duck. The more I think about it the more I think you’d better be a Methody – after all, your Dad was – and I think we’ll do it. Tomorrer we’ll go down to the chapel and see the Holy Joe wot came after your Mam died. He might have some new idea – and we can always say No, if we don’t like it.’

  Chapter Twelve

  On the last day of September 1896, as the rays of the evening sun gleamed softly over the smoking chimney pots, Billy Tyson eased open the Woodmans’ alley door and crept quietly down the path towards the kitchen.

  ‘What do you want?’ inquired a disembodied female voice.

  Billy whirled round. He could see no one. He glanced nervously up at the house windows above him; they were empty of people.

  There was a chuckle from high in the apple tree to his left. He turned and looked up. A pair of long, black-stockinged legs topped by divided drawers swung suddenly down to a lower branch. Then Alicia jumped in a flurry of spreading calico pinafore and pleated serge skirt. He caught an embarrassing glimpse of the prettiest little white bottom, as she landed on all fours, bringing with her a shower of small green apples and loose leaves. She picked herself up and rubbed her hands free of bits of damp grass.

  Though Alicia had accepted him with almost the same ease that she did Mr Bittle, Billy was aware of the big social gap between them. He whipped off his cap and waited cautiously for her to speak.

  ‘How are you, Billy?’ she asked cordially.

  ‘I’m all right, thank you, Miss.’ Then, unable to contain his excitement, he burst out, ‘I got some good news for our Polly.’

  ‘She’s clearing up dinner, but I can get her for you, if you like.’

  He blushed and glanced uneasily away from her, and then answered, ‘If you would, Miss for a minute, like.’

  She noticed his change of colour under the heavy grime, and she smiled. She flitted across the grass and down the steps to the kitchen door, her silver-fair hair, for once unplaited, flowing softly behind her. He watched her, fascinated, as she lifted the latch and went indoors; she was so white, unlike the young girls in the courts.

  When Alicia entered the kitchen she found Polly unloading the dirty dishes from the dumb-waiter. On hearing that Billy wanted to speak to her, she left her work and hurried anxiously into the brick area and up the stone steps towards him.

  When Billy saw her worried face, he laughed and shouted to her, ‘I’m going to Canada, Pol. Day after tomorrow – to work on a farm.’ He ignored Alicia, who had followed behind her.

  Polly paused at the top of the steps. Her mouth fell open. Then she gasped, ‘To Canada? Holy Mother save us! How come, luv?’

  He persuaded her to sit down on one of the steps, while he explained to her about Great-aunt Kitty’s and his visit to the Methodist minister.

  ‘I’m going proper quick ’cos I’m taking the place of a boy what died last week; the Methody is fixin’ it. Ordinary, like, they don’t send kids out at this time – they send ’em at the beginning of summer. But they got so many that they’re sending this lot special through the Kirkdale Home.’

  Polly was appalled. For her brother to be delivered to the untender mercies of the Kirkdale Industrial School, even for a few days, was shocking enough to her; to be sent to Canada was like being tipped over the edge of the earth.

  Billy was babbling on about the Methodist minister. ‘He says I’ll get a farm of me own one day, if I work. A farm, Pol!’

  ‘You’ll never come back, our kid,’ Polly wailed. ‘People go there – and that’s the last you ever hear of them.’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ he promised earnestly. ‘I’ll come and fetch you when I got a farm.
’

  Polly’s eyes glistened with tears and she twisted the ends of her apron with agitated hands. Alicia had crouched at her nanny’s feet while she listened. Now she put her hand on Polly’s knee, and said, ‘Don’t cry, Polly, dear. Billy’ll write to you, won’t you, Billy?’

  ‘’Course, I will, Miss. I’m not that good at me letters, but I know enough to write – don’t you fret, our Polly,’ he reassured his sister. ‘Anyways, when I work on a farm, the farmer has to send me to school. The Methody promised.’

  Alicia looked up at Polly. ‘There, you see. You don’t have to worry.’

  Polly nodded her head hopelessly. ‘But it snows all the time there – and there’s the Red Indians and the Frogs – I mean the French – it int safe.’ All the novels that Polly had read about the American West came to the fore of her mind.

  ‘I’m goin’ to get warm clothes given me,’ Billy assured her. ‘And I’m not going where the French are.’

  ‘Where are you going, Billy?’ Alicia asked.

  ‘I don’t know exactly, Miss. It depends where the farmer is who wants me. I have to write home and say where I am, soon as I get settled.’ He turned to Polly. ‘Cheer up, Pol. There’s lots of us going – all orphans, like me.’

  ‘It’s dangerous, chook. It’s too dangerous.’ She wiped her damp face with her apron.

  ‘It’s not – they wouldn’t send us if it was. I’ll save me wages and I’ll buy a farm.’ He sighed blissfully. ‘What a chance, Polly! Dad would’ve jumped at it.’ He leaped up and spread out his arms to encompass the pretty garden. ‘When I got a farm, you can come and make a garden like this for yourself.’

  Polly threw her apron over her head and began to keen. ‘It’ll take ages. How will I go on without you? There’ll only be Mary and me.’

  ‘And me,’ interjected Alicia softly, suddenly shaken by the idea that Polly could leave her.

  Though Billy was still young, he had all the common sense of his mother. But for the moment he was far away, dreaming wildly of a little house on land as big as Sefton Park, a house with apple trees around it. Flitting in his mind’s eye was a little creature living there with him, a creature with long fair hair and a wicked chuckle who liked climbing apple trees. After the destruction of his way of life that sad September, he had suddenly been handed a little hope and it was almost too much for him to cope with.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I

  The winter came to Liverpool with gales howling in from the Atlantic. Rain pelted on the burgeoning city, swirled in the filthy courts, flooding the latrines and spreading stomach ailments amongst the sodden inhabitants. Hardly strong enough to creep across the yard to the privy, Great-aunt Kitty took to her bed, swallowed a large dose of a drug bought some time back from a Thai stoker, and died alone.

  It was two days before the tenant of the house noticed her absence, and it was only when Polly went to visit her three weeks later, on one of her afternoons off, that the family learned of her death. By then, the room was occupied by someone else, and the landlord said that all the old lady’s possessions had been thrown in the midden in case she had died of something catching.

  Through her tears, Polly upbraided the man for not sending for Mary or Mrs Fox. ‘You knew where to find them, you lousy bugger,’ she shouted at him. But in her heart she knew that the room had been picked clean by him and he had then reported the death to the Medical Officer as being that of a destitute old woman. Like her niece, Bridie Tyson, Great-aunt Kitty had had a pauper’s funeral.

  Polly had seen it happen before. Boiling with anger but unable to prove any misdoing, she went away to see Mary and to grieve with her for the death of a wise old woman. She did not mention her loss to Alicia.

  II

  One day in January, as Alicia sat at the nursery table carefully sketching into her botany exercise book the root system of a piece of Shepherd’s Purse, Polly looked up from her mending, and said, ‘You know, I’m that raddled with worry about our Billy. Three months and no word from him.’

  ‘You could go to see the Reverend Whoever-he-is at the Methodist Chapel, and ask if he’s any news.’

  ‘I already done it on me Sunday off. He were proper nice and he said the children reached the Home in Toronto safely. He says, though, that each kid is supposed to write home to say his exact address, ’cos they get sent all over.’

  ‘I suppose he can write, Polly?’

  ‘Aye, he can a bit. Me Mam sent ’im to dame school, same as me. ’Course, I never learned me letters proper – it were Master Charles wot really taught me.’ She bit her cotton off with her teeth, and then said, ‘But he’s smart enough to get someone to help ’im, if he needed to.’

  Alicia leaned back from her drawing and put her pencil down on the table. ‘Perhaps Canadian stamps are too expensive for him,’ she suggested.

  ‘Well, I dunno. Surely wherever he’s workin’, they’d give ’im one stamp, so as he could write home?’

  III

  Alicia was right. Everything is too expensive to those who have nothing. Even if Billy had been free to go to the Metis village some twenty miles from the tiny sod hut in which he found himself, he had no money to buy a piece of paper, a pencil or a stamp.

  To a street arab like Billy, though used to the discipline of work, the Canadian Children’s Home which was his first destination felt like a prison. With the sixty other children who had travelled with him, he endured it for a week, while he was supplied with warm clothing, new boots and a Bible to put in the almost empty tin trunk given to him by the Kirkie. He then said a cheerful goodbye to the other children and was put on an immigrant train travelling westward, in the care of the conductor.

  For twenty-four hours, the train chugged its way through what appeared to be endless forest and gradually his spirits fell. The immigrant families in the train spoke other languages and ignored him. He ate the two slices of bread given to him by the Home.

  In the chilly, early morning hours, the train stopped at a wayside halt, and the conductor let him down on to the tiny wooden platform. There was no sign of any building or people and he could not see anything which indicated the name of the place.

  As the conductor helped the boy lift his small trunk down from the train, he said cheerfully, ‘I’ve no doubt somebody’ll be along to collect you as soon as it’s light.’

  As he blew his whistle for the train to proceed, he looked down at the thin, small figure in its shabby secondhand overcoat and cloth cap standing forlornly by the tin trunk, and he thought with compassion, ‘Another poor little bastard, God help him.’

  As the train vanished into the forest, Billy looked around him and absolute terror began to grip him. Beyond the end of the tiny platform huge pine trees, black in the dawn light, pressed in upon him. The eery silence was broken only by the soughing of the wind through the wall of evergreens.

  Where was he?

  He wanted to scream in terror, and run – run anywhere. He looked along the shiny track of the railway lines over which he had travelled. It had been like this – just trees – all day yesterday, with only tiny settlements in clearings by halts like this or a solitary Indian watching the train pass.

  He sat down on his trunk and clasped his arms round his knees and tucked his head down. His breath came in quick gasps, making a small cloud in the cool air.

  ‘Holy Jaysus, send somebody,’ he prayed. ‘Anybody!’

  There was a rustle in the undergrowth and stories of bears rushed into his head. He screamed, and clutched himself tighter.

  ‘You William?’ a voice inquired.

  At first the question did not penetrate his paralysed mind, but when it was repeated, he slowly looked up.

  What he saw was not reassuring. A strangely garmented man with a dark face framed by black plaits down either side loomed in the half light.

  The boy took a moment to find his voice. Then he quavered, ‘Yes. I’m Billy Tyson.’ He got slowly to his feet.

  ‘Come.’<
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  Billy looked uncertainly down at his trunk. The man bent down to take hold of the handle at one end and gestured to Billy to take the other end. Watching the stranger all the time, Billy did as he was bidden. The man smelled strongly of wood smoke, and his coarse, woollen coat was heavily stained at the front. His trousers, tucked into knee-high laced boots, seemed to be made of skin and were equally dirty.

  Without a further word, the man led him down a narrow, slatted slope at one end of the wooden platform and along an almost invisible track through the trees.

  The path led into a cleared circle in the centre of which were huddled several log cabins. Smoke curled from stone chimneys. A dog barked at their approach and was joined by a chorus of yapping from numerous other tethered canines, all with big fluffy tails and heavy coats.

  As they came towards the cabins, the wind brought another odour besides that of burning wood, an odour all too familiar to Billy from his work in dockside warehouses, the sickening smell of untanned or partially tanned hides.

  They put down the trunk at the threshold of one of the cabins. The man opened the door and preceded him inside.