Tuppenny Times

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘Out in this cold all hours?’

  ‘Warm as toast. On the move,’ he urged. ‘If you’ll allow, mum, I’ll prove it to yer.’

  ‘Go on then. Prove it. If you can.’

  So Pepperpot was reined in, and a gliding child enticed from the pond with the promise that he could ‘earn hisself a farthin’ if he done as he was told’ and Nan was prevailed upon to lean down from the trap and feel how warm the urchin’s hands were even inside extremely ragged mittens.

  ‘’E ain’t wrapped up all that well neither,’ Thiss said, standing beside the child and looking up at her hopefully. ‘Warm as toast, ain’tcher?’

  ‘Yes, mum,’ the child said, ‘D’yer want ter feel me face an’ all?’

  Nan declined the offer, his face being even dirtier than his grime-dark hands. But Thiss had made his point.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘You may hire skates for all of us and a sledge for Annie. Now let us ride home, or ’tis my lungs will be affected.’

  ‘And you, mum?’ Thiss asked, as he climbed aboard and clicked Pepperpot into motion.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Shall I hire some skates for you an’ all?’

  ‘’Course,’ she said.

  It was a great success. For the children it was a sudden and extraordinary adventure, and the sight of their mother gliding across the ice so elegantly was a revelation, for Nan was gratified to discover that she could still skate quite passably even though the last time she’d done such a thing had been back in the Yarmouth days when she was working as a lady’s maid to Mrs Howkins. What a long time ago it seemed. And now here she was, the owner of six newswalks that between them covered nearly half the vast city of London. ‘A. Easter, Newsagent.’ She skated happily, turning out her toes to right and left in a steady satisfactory rhythm, avoiding the bodies hurtling towards her, keeping a careful eye on her convalescent daughter, in control of her feet and her life.

  For Bessie and Thiss the fact that they were allowed out to play, in that tingling air, with no chores, for an entire afternoon, was a freedom they’d never known before. They spent the first half hour hauling the boys along between them, while Annie sat huddled in her rugs in the sledge and watched. And they were all astounded at how quickly the two children learned the entirely new art of sliding along on pieces of bone. Bessie declared that young Johnnie was soon skating better than he walked, which was true enough, for his walk was still something of a stagger. And Billy loved every minute of it, whether he was standing up, or gliding along, or rolling about on the ice, fat as a puppy in his padded clothes.

  On that first afternoon Annie was content to sit warmly wrapped in her sledge and watch, but on the following day she ventured out onto the ice, and found to her great delight that skating was easier than it looked, and that the motion of it brought warmth to her cheeks and made her feel really well again. By the third day, all three children were really quite proficient, and could glide along with the best, following their mother or holding her hands and singing as they sped.

  All of which delighted Thiss, for now he could skate at speed with Bessie, and that gave him the chance he’d been scheming for ever since the ice first froze, to put his arm round her nice, tempting waist and hold her cuddled up close to his side. Breath streamed from their open mouths and was parted by the speed of their movement to flow behind them on either side of their faces, like foam parted by the bows of a ship; their skates hissed; her cloak flicked and billowed like a sail; and he fancied he could feel the curve of her breast even through the layers of thick clothing she’d piled on against the cold. What sport!

  And of course it wasn’t very long before she slipped and fell and then they were able to roll over and over on the ice, thigh to thigh, giggling and squealing and very much aware of one another. And after that one or the other of them contrived to fall over every few minutes or so, and it took longer and longer to disentangle their limbs, and they needed more and more time to lie on top of one another and recover their breath. Or lose it.

  And watching them Nan felt a pang of jealousy, for they were such an obvious pair and so happy in each other’s company. The whole world goes two by two, she thought, and wondered whether she ought to take a lover, just for the sake of company.

  On Sunday the itinerant street-sellers converged upon the park with hot potatoes and roast chestnuts and set up their stalls alongside the Serpentine to tempt the skaters and the hungry congregations that had come to take the chill air after Sunday service. The pond was crowded with skaters and tumblers so they did a good trade, particularly to Billy and Johnnie.

  ‘My heart alive, this ol’ skating do give ’ee appetite,’ Nan said, tossing a chestnut from hand to hand to cool it. ‘Just so soon as spring comes around and trade picks up again, I shall hire me a good cook, so I shall.’ Old Mrs Dibkin’s cooking was getting worse and worse.

  But that day Mrs Dibkins produced an excellent dish of stewed mutton and followed it with apple dumplings and sugar syrup, so they were all well fed and well pleased.

  ‘I hope the ice goes on an’ on an’ on,’ Billy said. ‘I like ’katin’, Mama.’

  ‘On an’ on an’ on an’ on,’ Johnnie echoed, trailing the syrup from his plate to his mouth in a long, sticky thread.

  ‘Shall we go skatin’ again tomorrow?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Like enough,’ Nan said. ‘’Tis a healthy sport in all conscience. Eat properly, Johnnie.’

  But the thaw came much quicker than any of them could have imagined. On Friday afternoon the Serpentine was frozen as hard as it had ever been and the sky was white with cold. Overnight the wind changed direction and there was a steady warming drizzle. By eight o’clock the next morning, the dawn sky was pale blue and the ice visibly cracking. Soon regular customers were blinking onto the streets again like bears after a long hibernation. ‘Spring is on its way at last,’ they said, and were happy to buy a paper, ‘to see how the world wags after such a winter. What news of the war, eh?’

  ‘I shall rent another shop,’ Nan told her family, when profits had been high for the third week in succession.

  But Annie looked worried. ‘Will it be another roof Mama?’ she asked.

  ‘Another roof?’

  ‘On the shop, Mama. For you to keep on.’

  ‘Why bless the child, what’s she talking about?’ Nan said, looking at Bessie for elucidation.

  ‘You know, Ba,’ Annie appealed. ‘What you said.’

  By now Nan was remembering all those frantic ravings when the child had been delirious. They’d been about a roof too. ‘Tell me what Ba said,’ she urged, taking the child onto her knee.

  ‘I’m to be a good girl an’ help Mama,’ Annie remembered, ‘’cause Mama works so hard to keep the roof on over our heads.’ And she was startled when the adults began to laugh. But Mama was cuddling her so it was all right.

  ‘’Tis a way of talking,’ Mama explained. ‘A way of talking. That means I work hard to earn enough money for your food and this pretty gown you’re wearing and new brooms for Mr Dibkins and hay for Pepperpot and such like. Did you think the roof would fall off, is that what ’twas?’

  Tearful nodding.

  ‘There’s no fear of that, lovey,’ Nan said, suddenly tugged with pity. How children suffer, she thought, and all so unnecessarily. That’s a worry could have been stopped before it had a chance to begin, if only I’d known of it. And she hastened to reassure. ‘I never known a stronger roof, nor a better house. And a new shop will bring us prettier clothes and even better food. So don’t you go a-worrying your head about un.’

  So the second shop was rented and while she was in the City Nan went to an agency and hired four new servants, a plain cook, a pastry cook, and two scullery maids. ‘They start work on Monday,’ she told the rest of her household when she returned well pleased with her morning’s work. ‘The cooks live out, the maids live in. They can have the back attic. More hands, less work eh?’ Then she went off to the drapers to order pink
cotton for the scullery maids.

  But if she expected her servants to be pleased with their new assistants she was very much mistaken. Mrs Dibkins was devastated. ‘Ho my lor!’ she said, when Nan had left. ‘What she want to go an’ do a thing like that for? I cooks well enough, Horrie. Ho, we shall never get on, you mark my words. Ho! Ho my lor!’

  ‘Don’t take on so, Mother,’ Mr Dibkins said, patting her shoulder with clumsy affection. ‘Don’t let’s cross our bridges, eh?’

  ‘Ho, she’s a tartar,’ Mrs Dibkins wept, chins wobbling. ‘To hire new servants. We shall be on the streets come nightfall Monday, you mark my words.’

  And at that Bessie caught Mrs Dibkin’s panic and wept until her nose was pinched like a beak and her cheeks were blotchy as measles. ‘What she have ter go an’ do a thing like that for?’ she wailed to Thiss. ‘We was all right as we was. Oh, why does everything have ter change? Why can’t we all stay the same?’

  The sight of that pinched nose roused a tender pity in young Thiss that he couldn’t distinguish from love. ‘Don’t cry, goosie,’ he said, taking his God-sent opportunity to cuddle her openly. ‘Things’ve got ter change. That’s the way a’ the world. T’ain’t all bad.’

  ‘Oh Thiss, I’m sorry ter cry.’

  ‘You cry as long as yer like,’ he said, grinning at her, ‘jest so long as you understands what’s what. ’Cause the more you cries the more I shall ’ave ter kiss yer.’

  ‘Will yer?’ she said, thrilled by the idea.

  ‘Won’t I jest?’ he said, suiting the action to the word.

  For the rest of that week the atmosphere in Cheyne Row was taut as stretched wire as Mrs Dibkins went about her duties tight-lipped with disapproval and distress, and Nan felt guilty to have upset her so much and did her best to pretend to all of them that she hadn’t noticed anything was wrong. It was galling to her to think she’d made such a bad mistake with the servants, particularly when she was treating her children so much better. Not for the first time she wished she could have been more like Mr Easter, who’d always known exactly the right way to treat everybody.

  But when Monday arrived the cooks turned out to be quite amiable people after all. Mrs Jorris, the plain cook, told Mrs Dibkins her kitchen was a joy to work in. ‘’Tain’t everyone can keep a place so lovely, Mrs Dibkins. I hopes you’ll lend a hand now an’ then when there’s a rush on. I can see we shall get on like a house a-fire.’

  And the food they cooked between them was mouth-watering. And nobody got the sack. And Annie, having had her private fear finally and comfortably dispersed, was quite well again. And Bessie got kissed every day, night and morning. So perhaps it was all for the best, after all.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The arrival of the year 1797 had no sooner been celebrated, with masques and suppers and all manner of pleasant occasions, when, to Nan’s irritation, Mr Pitt’s wretched government voted to increase the stamp duty on newspapers yet again.

  ‘Oh I see how ’tis,’ she said to Thiss and Matthew as they were sorting the papers in the shop ready to deliver them to the walks. ‘’Tis a mortal high duty meant to squeeze out the cheap press that he don’t like.’

  ‘They’re a scurrilous lot, mum,’ Thiss said, tying up the first completed bundle. ‘You should see some a’ the things they say about the Prince a’ Wales and that there Mrs Fitzherbert. Enough to bring a blush to a seasoned trooper.’

  ‘Tha’s a fact, Mrs Easter,’ Matthew said earnestly. ‘A fact as ever is.’ He hadn’t read any of the penny papers, but he always supported Thiss in any opinion, being he was such a live wire and certain to be right.

  ‘He don’t consider honest traders,’ Nan grumbled, counting out a score of Advertisers, flick flick flick. Now she would have to charge sixpence for the old tuppenny Times. It was an exhorbitant sum and would be sure to deter custom, but there was no way she could avoid it. And just as she’d got the new walk established too.

  The firm of A. Easter, Newsagents was now selling newspapers, morning and evening, in every walk in London except two, and it took a great deal of time to get all her papers down to Somerset House to be stamped. ‘Dratted man!’ she said. ‘There’s the first two batches ready, Matthew. Off you go!’

  Her life was certainly full these days, and for most of the time her newspaper business was doing well, sometimes exceptionally well. There was always plenty of entertainment in the busy capital and although she hadn’t found the lover she dreamed of, she was never short of company. She now employed nearly fifty people in one capacity or another, and had a houseful of servants and a comfortable bank account.

  From time to time she still worried about Annie, who was ill every winter with coughs and agues and rheums, and hardly seemed to be growing at all. She was seven years old and would be eight in July and yet she was half a head shorter than Billy, who wasn’t yet six. But she was a good child and seemed happy enough, even when she was suffering from the rheum.

  Billy had grown into a harum-scarum creature, it was true, but with a pleasant cheerfulness about him that was very endearing. But Johnnie! Ah me! It made her sigh just to think of Johnnie. At four-and-a-half he was still nothing more or less than a wretch, still given to hideous tantrums and massive sulks, a dark-haired, swarthy, unpredictable little monster, who brooded about the house, hunch-shouldered and secretive when he wasn’t screaming the place down. She hadn’t understood him or liked him when he was born and she didn’t understand him or like him now, try as she might. No matter how furiously he was scolded or how fiercely he was whipped, he didn’t improve. Sometimes she was at her wits’ end with him and wondered how on earth she’d ever come to produce such a creature. And there were days when it was a relief to leave the house and get on with her work and forget him.

  ‘There!’ she said to Matthew as he returned with the first batch stamped and ready, ‘that’s the sorting done. What we need now is a good piece of news to bolster our profits.’

  ‘We could do with a victory in this ol’ war,’ Thiss said. ‘That ’ud bolster every one of us.’

  England had been at war with France for four years now but nothing much seemed to have happened. The government had passed a law making it a crime to criticize the king, and another making it a crime for more than three working men to meet and talk together. The price of food had risen alarmingly, there were bread shortages and bread riots, and more soldiers to be seen strutting about in their bright uniforms, especially near the Chelsea barracks; but the war was a long way away, and being fought between Frenchmen and Dutchmen and Austrians and such. And even though the French were outflanked and outnumbered by an alliance of enemies, they seemed to be winning most of their battles, largely, so people said, because their armies were commanded by a brilliant young man called Napoleon Bonaparte, who seemed to have set out to conquer the world single-handed. He’d just defeated the Spanish and made them sign a treaty, which, so Mr Walter of the Times declared, would mean that England would have the Spanish fleet to contend with in addition to the French and could bring the possibility of invasion a deal closer.

  So it came as quite a shock that spring when there was a mutiny among the men of the Channel Fleet who chose that moment to announce that they had put up with bad food and poor pay and appalling conditions below decks for just too long, and were refusing to leave Spithead and put out to sea until something was done about it. The dreaded penny press listed their demands and pronounced them reasonable, recalling the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, and writing in glowing terms of liberty, equality and fraternity. But the established press thundered against them as ‘traitors in our hour of need’, although the sixpenny Times maintained that they had much to be aggrieved about and urged conciliation. Which after several days and much debate was what the government decided upon as the most appropriate line of action. For at a time when invasion was more and more likely, it wouldn’t have done to have no warships available to defend the southern coastline. So pay was increa
sed and a Royal pardon issued and the fleet finally set to sea.

  Three weeks later there was a second mutiny, this time among the men of the North Sea Fleet based at the Nore. But this one wasn’t news, so it was savagely put down and the ringleader hanged. And it wasn’t news because the papers were full of the marvellous tidings that England had won a victory and found a hero.

  There had been a sea battle on St Valentine’s day at a Cape called St Vincent somewhere off the south coast of Portugal. The Spanish fleet had been sent into the Mediterranean to support the French, just as Mr Walter had predicted, and Admiral Jervis had gone out to oppose them. During the battle the two divisions of the Spanish Fleet had drifted apart and for nearly half an hour, a British squadron, led by a young commodore called Horatio Nelson, had valiantly withstood the entire force of the Spanish van and so turned the battle in England’s favour. What heroism! Then not content with simply saving the hour, Commodore Nelson had apparently boarded two Spanish men-o’-war and taken them as prizes. What daring! He was the darling of the hour. The papers were full of his exploits, with calls for an instant reward for such a hero. It was all splendidly exciting and sold marvellously. Especially when he was awarded the cross of the Bath and promoted to rear-admiral.

  Soon St Vincent parties were being held in great houses up and down the country and the Ranelagh gardens organized a ‘grand firework display and spectacle’. The long pond in front of the Chinese pavilion was filled with two fleets of model warships lit from within like floating lanterns and lined up for the battle of St Vincent, which so the tickets proclaimed was due to commence at seven of the clock and would be ‘the greatest wonder of the age’ with real gunfire and ‘all the sounds and smoke of battle properly simulated for the delectation of the audience’.

  Nan took her entire household to see it, and although it didn’t live up to its publicity it was certainly an unusual entertainment. The sounds of battle turned out to be half-a-dozen urchins screeching and caterwauling from beneath a covered stage set in front of the pavilion, the cannon puffed a deal of white smoke into the audience, and three of the valiant warships caught fire, long before battle commenced. From then on, their charred skeletons impeded every formation and finally sank after the third volley of popping gunfire, dragging most of the English fleet down with them, which was hardly surprising since they were all linked together on long wires, but which made rather a nonsense of the great British victory.