The Lock-Keeper's Son

by Nancy Carson

  Outside in the warm early evening air, Algie blew out his lips, perplexed, which hurt the fragile split that he’d acquired last night. As he cocked his leg over his bicycle to ride away, feeling ever so humble, he gently touched the wound and looked at his fingers circumspectly to see whether there was blood on them. There was, and he rode away, nursing it.

  How in God’s name had the Meeses found out that he had been with Marigold last night? News travels fast in communities like Brierley Hill, but surely never that fast. It would never have occurred to Algie that his own sister was the culprit.

  Anyway, he had better things to contemplate. He had Marigold to see. He wondered if the Binghams had passed through Buckpool yet, or whether they were still stuck in Kidderminster. Either way, he would ride along the canal’s towpaths till he found her. And he would wallow in her warm, newly won affection …

  Chapter 6

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Algie complained to his mother when he returned home. ‘Is tea ready?’

  ‘Your tea won’t be ready for another half hour,’ Clara replied, peering into the oven. Its cast-iron door closed with a reassuring clang, but the aroma of roasting cheese and onion had seeped out long before and filled the cottage with a tantalising aroma, making Algie feel even hungrier. Clara regarded him quizzically. ‘What’ve you done to your lip?’

  ‘My lip? Oh … I did it at work.’

  ‘It looks as though you’ve been fighting.’

  ‘Me, fighting? No, I walked into a brass rod somebody was carrying.’

  ‘You want to be more careful. You could’ve poked your eye out.’

  ‘How long’s my tea gunna be, Mother?’ he asked again, anxious to divert her from the topic lest he dig himself into a hole and let slip some clue that might reveal the sordid truth of how he’d really acquired his injury.

  Clara began slicing a cabbage at the table. ‘It won’t get served till your father comes back from mending a lock gate by the dry dock.’

  ‘What’s up with it, then?’

  ‘Winding gear’s broken, he said. Why don’t you go and see if you can help him?’

  ‘But I’m starving hungry.’

  ‘Then have one of those jam tarts.’ She nodded at the tray on the table. ‘I’ve already given a few to Marigold.’

  ‘Marigold?’ He picked one out and took a bite. ‘She’s been here?’

  ‘She called to say they’d be moored up just beyond the Parkhead Locks.’

  Algie beamed. ‘Good. That’s all I wanted to know.’

  Clara gave him a knowing look. ‘Just mind what you’m up to with that young girl,’ she said.

  ‘Course I will,’ he said. ‘What d’you think I’m gunna do?’

  ‘I’m just afeared she might get too attached to you, and I wouldn’t want you to hurt her.’

  ‘Hurt her?’ he queried.

  ‘Yes, hurt her,’ Clara replied. ‘I wasn’t too keen on you seeing her at first, our Algie, but she’s won me over good and proper. She’s a lovely girl. Now … if you’re going to start seeing her regular, just be kind to her.’

  What a strange thing for his mother to suggest, as if he was capable of being unkind. He shrugged at her apparent lack of understanding. ‘I don’t intend to hurt her, Mother. I think the world of her. I really like her. Can I have another jam tart?’

  ‘Help yourself.’ He turned around and took another. ‘What I mean is, Algie, Marigold has it hard enough on the cut. So does her mother, who was never brought up to live life on a narrowboat. It ain’t like living in a nice comfortable house with a warm hearth, soft feather beds and running water laid on, ’specially when that’s what you’ve been used to.’

  ‘Did you know Marigold’s mother?’ Algie asked, his curiosity roused. ‘Afore she lived on the cut, I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I knew her. Not well, mind. But I knew of her.’ Clara transferred the cabbage to a pan containing cold water and immersed the shreds.

  ‘Marigold told me her mother came from round here. So I suppose you could’ve known her before, eh, Mother?’

  ‘Not that well, like I say.’

  Algie took another bite out of his jam tart. ‘So what brought her living on the cut in a narrowboat?’

  ‘Because she wed a boatman, I suppose,’ Clara answered dismissively. ‘I ain’t so sure I would’ve done, but she did.’

  ‘There’s good families on the cut, Mother,’ he commented, more in defence of Marigold than anybody else. ‘Old Seth Bingham’s all right. He’s a decent bloke.’

  ‘I’m not saying he isn’t. And I’m sure Hannah must’ve thought so to marry him …’

  He shrugged as if it was of no consequence. ‘As long as she’s content, I say. She seems content. So does Marigold.’

  ‘’Tis to be hoped she is. ’Tis to be hoped they all are. So does this mean you’ve given up Harriet?’ Clara lifted the pan of cabbage onto the hob. The coals in the fire shifted and a flurry of sparks flitted up the chimney.

  ‘Yes …’ He took a last bite of jam tart.

  ‘Shame …’ Clara sighed. ‘She’s a nice respectable girl.’

  ‘I know she is.’

  ‘Have you told her yet?’

  He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘I’ve tried. I called to see her on my way home tonight, but old Eli wouldn’t let me. He told me to clear off. Says he’s forbid her to see me ever again. He already knew somehow as I’d been with Marigold yesterday. How d’you reckon he found that out, eh? He knew almost as quick as I knew it meself.’

  ‘Oh, I bet your name’s mud,’ Clara said, with some conviction. ‘Word travels fast in a place like this. Everybody knows everybody else’s business.’

  ‘But it made me look as though I hadn’t considered Harriet at all, and I had. I had, Mother, honest. I wanted to be straight with her … Oh, well …’ He shrugged, and turned to go. ‘I think I’ll go and see if my dad wants any help. If not, I’ll clean my bike. It could do with an oiling after its dunking in the cut yesterday.’

  ‘Go on, then, and I’ll give you a shout.’

  ‘Is our Kate back yet?’

  ‘She’s upstairs, a-changing.’

  ‘Changing?’ he queried disdainfully. ‘Let’s hope she changes for the better.’

  The implication was lost on his mother, as he knew it would be.

  Algie lumbered outside. Out of curiosity he decided to inspect the far side of the shed, where he’d witnessed Kate and Reggie Hodgetts up to their antics, to see if there was any evidence of what had happened. He kicked over the traces and noticed a small footprint in the line of sandy earth where his father’s potatoes were planted, obviously that of a woman – Kate’s, of course. He kicked over that too, else his father was bound to see it and wonder what a woman had been doing there, and under what circumstances, trampling his precious produce. Despite Kate’s unsavoury wantonness, he still had to protect her; she was his sister, after all.

  After that, he passed through the gate, clambered over the lock gates and onto the towpath, heading towards the dry dock, where they repaired ailing narrowboats. Will Stokes was bolting a new cast-iron pinion wheel and brake to the lock’s winding gear. Narrowboats from both directions waited in the basins above and below while he completed the job, so they could continue their journeys. Meanwhile, the boatmen gathered around him watching, enjoying good-natured banter and swapping gossip with the workers from the dry dock, who lived in the row of cottages on the other side of a little cast-iron bridge.

  ‘Hello, Son,’ Will greeted.

  ‘Did you see the Binghams pass through earlier?’

  ‘Aye, just before I started work on the lock.’

  ‘I’ve come to see if you need any help.’

  ‘It’s the time to come now I’ve nearly finished,’ Will quipped with a grin. ‘Just gotta tighten these bolts, check the alignment and grease it. You can pass me that tub o’ blackjack, though, our Algie.’ Will pointed with a huge spanner to the pail of thick, black bitumen grease.

  ‘Will
it want warming up?’ Algie queried as he went to fetch it from the towpath where it was standing along with Will’s thick canvas toolbag.

  ‘No, it’ll be a bit on the stiff side, but in this warm weather it should be workable.’

  Algie picked it up and took it over to his father. ‘I read today in the newssheet at work that Lord Sheffield’s eleven took a beating by the Australians.’

  ‘Did they?’ A look of disappointment clouded Will’s face as he looked up from his work. He was a keen follower of cricket and liked to keep abreast of all the first class matches. ‘I never heard. What was the score?’

  ‘The Aussies won by an innings and thirty-four runs.’

  ‘Damn! Was W. G. Grace playing?’

  ‘Yes, but he only scored twenty in the first innings and nine in the second. I reckon he ain’t half as good as what he’s made out to be.’

  ‘Wait till the test match in July. He’ll show ’em who’s the best batsman in the world.’

  ‘Pooh, I doubt it, Dad,’ Algie argued. ‘Not on his showing this week.’

  A discussion ensued, also involving all the men gathered around, about the merits or otherwise of the world famous W. G. Grace. It seemed to go on for ages, by which time Will finished his task and collected his tools together. Father and son walked back to the cottage, but Algie removed himself to the shed, to tend to his precious bike.

  Algie was so proud of his Swift bicycle with its pneumatic tyres. It was in desperate need of a thorough clean after its unscheduled dip in the cut, so he set about polishing it up. When it was gleaming again, he picked up the oil can and oiled the wheel hubs and the brake linkages, then trickled a few spots over the chain. Rust was the arch enemy of the conscientious cyclist, especially when the machine had cost twelve pounds of hard-earned and hard-saved money.

  As he applied the oil, he became interested for the first time in the engineering that had gone into the bicycle’s manufacture. It struck him that with the proper jigs and fixtures at his disposal he could make a machine like this. It was hardly like building a complicated steam engine. His research into bicycles, before making his purchase, had revealed that the frames of some were made from bamboo, for lightness. But bamboo would not do for him. He would prefer to sacrifice that inherent lightness for the durability of steel. And so would most other folk who had to save hard and long to be able to afford a bicycle. They wouldn’t want to see their bamboo frame warp and split. The only obstacle he foresaw to building a machine like his would be making the wheels – all those spokes. A wheel seemed like a perfect work of art; so precise, so finely balanced. If only he had enough money to start a business making bikes … maybe he could even buy the wheels already finished from another firm. He would start designing bikes anyway. They were all the rage. Everybody was mad about bikes.

  Such enterprising thoughts eclipsed the immediate guilt he felt about Harriet Meese. However, it niggled him to realise that Eli, the grumpy old devil, had prevented him from seeing her when Algie believed he had a perfect right. He’d been anxious to explain to Harriet how he felt; that he honestly believed she would be better off released from any obligations of loyalty to himself. Their courtship, however apathetic on his part, had left him with a great deal of respect and admiration for her. Perhaps he should write to her, explaining his side of the story.

  The ride along the towpath towards the Parkhead Locks took Algie through the most squalid, intensively industrialised landscape on the face of the earth. From the lock-keeper’s cottage at Buckpool the canal followed the contour around the hill, meandering first between a tile works, a small ironworks, workshops, and several collieries. Some of the collieries were still active, others defunct, but all had their forbidding black spoil encroaching everywhere. There were gas works, brick and firebrick works with their attendant clay pits, generally filling up with dangerously murky water. Huge red-brick cones loomed, presiding over the bottle works and potteries to which they were attached. And all this before the area’s industry got to be really densely packed.

  Algie rode up the incline at the Nine Locks, keen to see the fresh, new girl in his life, not minding the visual blight which so much heavy manufacturing had engendered. Rather he wondered at it, when he bothered to contemplate it at all, as a symbol of a richer life; it brought relative prosperity, giving folk some opportunity to pick and choose what work they did; it sucked up like a sponge the young men from the countryside who came in search of their fortunes, as well as country girls who sought excitement, husbands, more lucrative work in factories, or the guarantee of ample food and a clean bed that working in service offered.

  At Round Oak it was overwhelming. The vast ironworks owned by the Earl of Dudley, and known to all as ‘The Earl’s’, surrounded him on every side. Its massive furnaces released roaring pillars of flame that would redden the midnight sky like a storm at dawn. The canal here vied for space not only with the furnaces, the rolling mills and vast travelling cranes, but with the network of internal railways and their clanking, hissing locomotives. Chimney stacks pricked the sooty sky; a haphazard array of obelisks erected in celebration of man’s daring enterprise. Beam engines dipped and withdrew their gigantic arms, pumping water out of deep mines, where night and day were ever one, and work never ceased. There were lesser ironworks, another glut of collieries with huge circling wheels atop their tall headgear. Glowing slag laced the tops of black spoil banks like the flame-licked soot at the back of a fire grate. The stoke-holes of brick kilns glimmered through their own smoke, and fountains of fiery sparks spat from under black-roofed workshops with sides open to the elements. Forges, where monstrous thudding hammers shook the earth, crudely smote and shaped yellow-hot metal into preordained designs.

  Algie reached Parkhead, spanned as it was by an impressive viaduct that bore the Great Western Railway between Oxford and Wolverhampton, and all points between. At last he spotted Seth Bingham’s highly decorated narrowboats moored abreast, at the basin near the entrance to the canal tunnel. Hannah was pushing some garment or other through the cast-iron mangle, while Marigold was amid the flutter of drying skirts and shirts, pegged out on a line which stretched from the chimney pipe to the front of their butty, and propped in the middle.

  ‘Marigold!’ Algie called, as he pulled up alongside and dismounted.

  She turned to greet him with a perky smile. ‘Hello, Algie. Your mother gave you the message then?’

  He nodded and grinned. ‘Course she did.’

  ‘I won’t be a minute. I’ve just gotta hang these last few things.’

  ‘What time did you go past our house?’ he enquired.

  ‘About four, I think. Your mom gave me some of her jam tarts.’

  ‘Nice, aren’t they? I had a couple meself.’

  She nodded. ‘Beautiful. Shan’t be a minute,’ she said, and disappeared into the cabin.

  While he waited, Algie chatted affably with Hannah, who was wiping down the mangle. Seth appeared from inside the Sultan and passed the time of day while he emptied the dolly tub in the long grass that lined the towpath. He was still talking as he carried it off and stored it in what they called the laid-hole. Soon, Marigold re-emerged, and stepped off the Odyssey onto the towpath. She took his arm affectionately and they began walking away.

  ‘You didn’t have to stay in Kidderminster last night then?’ Algie commented.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘When we got to the carpet factory, Jack was there. I told him straight away as I didn’t see any point in us seeing one another anymore. I told him it was because I never knowed when I was gunna be there.’

  Algie smiled with relief at this news. ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘That I’d been taking him too serious, and that it was nice just to see me when we did go to Kidder, even if it wasn’t all the time. Anyroad, we was offloaded in no time.’ She chuckled at that. ‘Just goes to show, I’m sure he used to fix it that we couldn’t get offloaded, just so as he could see me of a night time, just like you said. Lo
rd knows how much that cost me dad, losing time like that, but I ain’t said nothing.’

  They walked past the locks, towards the bridge that would lead them away from the canal. Three canals met at this point and, in whichever direction the couple went, there were collieries and wharfs. There seemed no escape from the sights, sounds and smells of industry.

  ‘If we go up this way, we get to Scott’s Green,’ he told her, wheeling his bicycle beside him. ‘Beyond that there’s some fields. We could sit on the grass there.’

  She smiled at him admiringly.

  ‘Where’re you bound for tomorrow then?’ Algie asked.

  ‘Wolverhampton. But we gotta go through the tunnel first, loaded with iron bars … And Victoria don’t like the tunnel’s blackness. He can hardly see where he’s going, poor horse.’

  ‘So who’ll lead him?’

  ‘Our Charlie. He always does … Anyway, what’ve you done to your lip? It looks ever so sore.’ Marigold peered at it with evident concern.

  ‘I walked into a brass rod at work,’ he said glibly, repeating the excuse he’d given his mother. ‘It’s much better now. It won’t stop me kissing you.’

  ‘Ooh, I ain’t so sure as I want to kiss that,’ she said squeamishly, scrutinising it with a little more zeal as they strolled. ‘Are you sure you walked into a brass rod? It looks more like you’ve been fighting.’

  ‘That’s what my mother said.’

  He had no particular wish to expose Kate’s disgracefully immoral behaviour, yet neither did he see any point in concealing it from Marigold. He felt he could confide in her, so he confessed that he’d had a scuffle with Reggie Hodgetts and what it was over.

  ‘That slime?’ Marigold commented. ‘What does she see in him? My dad hates the whole family of ’em. Troublemakers, they are. Thankfully, we don’t see ’em that often.’

  ‘I just hope he hasn’t put her in the family way, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, that would be terrible,’ Marigold agreed.

  ‘Anyway, they must have moored up somewhere close to our house last night. Let’s hope they’re miles away by now.’