The Urchin's Song

by Rita Bradshaw

  The woman blinked rapidly but she didn’t deny it. She did not answer straight away, and when she did speak it was just a whisper. ‘Aye, aye it’s me.’

  Josie heard Gertie’s quick intake of breath behind her but as far as she knew her sister did not move; certainly she did not speak, not even when Josie moved forward and gripped her eldest sister’s arms saying, ‘Oh, Ada. Ada. I can’t believe it,’ through the pounding of her heart and the blood rushing in her ears. ‘Oh this is wonderful, incredible. But if you knew who I was and that I was here, in London, why didn’t you contact me?’ And then, without waiting for an answer, she hugged Ada to her.

  For a moment or two Ada remained stiff in her embrace, and then Josie felt the big body relax and as her sister’s arms went round her for the first time Josie could remember, Ada’s voice was thick when she admitted, ‘We weren’t sure if you’d want to know us, lass. Me an’ Dora, we’re respectable now. This is our own place an’ we take in lodgers - women lodgers, you know?’ This last was defensive. ‘Dora works at the box-making factory an’ with what she earns an’ the lodgers bring in, we get by. We don’t . . . We’re not . . .’

  Josie drew away slightly in order to look into her sister’s face. Ada must be a relatively young woman of twenty-seven, but she looked forty years old if a day. Compared to her two elder sisters, Josie had had it easy. ‘Hear me right when I say this, lass,’ she said softly, her voice dropping naturally into the broad idiom of the north. ‘I don’t care about anything but the fact you and Dora are our sisters.’ She included Gertie in the statement although Gertie had said nothing. ‘What happened wasn’t your fault. Da was after sending Gertie down the same road, and he’d got the lads thieving as soon as they could walk. Him and Patrick Duffy.’

  ‘Patrick Duffy.’ Ada moved her head slowly. ‘It’s bin years since I heard that name. Are . . . are Mam an’ Da still . . . ?’ And when Josie shook her head, Ada said, ‘I can’t pretend to feel sorry, lass, not after what they did to me an’ Dora.’ And for the first time since Josie had seen her, Ada looked hard and bitter. ‘I’ve wished ’em all in hell’s flames more times than I can remember, I tell you straight.’

  ‘Oh Ada, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Aye, well, there’s them that’d say me an’ Dora are no better than we should be, but at least we did something about getting out of what Da put us into. We knew with Duffy’s contacts we had to get right away from the north, an’ when we left we’d only got the train fare so for the first few years we did the only work we’d bin used to, I admit it. Then we got enough to get this place ’cos it was all but falling down, an’ we got a couple of our customers to pay in kind by doing the roof an’ other bits. We could easily have turned it into a bawdy house an’ made a bob or two, but we wanted . . . Well, you know what we wanted I imagine, lass. We wanted to be able to hold our heads up an’ look any blighter in the eye and tell ’em we were as good as them. And so we finished with the other for good.’

  ‘You were always as good as anyone else, Ada.’

  Ada stepped back a pace. ‘You mean that?’

  ‘With all my heart.’

  ‘We don’t want a handout, don’t think that, lass. No, we’re all right, me an’ Dora. Ask nowt of no one and you won’t be disappointed, that’s our motto. We look after each other and to hell with the rest. But . . . but I just wanted to see you once, proper like, you an’ the little ’un. I’ve seen the posters an’ such but it’s not the same. Mind, Dora knows nowt about this and to tell you the truth, Lottie didn’t neither. Me an’ Dora had agreed, once we’d realised it was you, to let sleeping dogs lie. You’ve got your life an’ we’ve got ours, that’s what we said. But for the whole time Lottie’s bin lodging with us, the thought was there in the back of me mind, once I’d heard what you do for some of the old-timers. An’ I was wondering about the lads an’ all; they were nowt but babbies when we skedaddled. So when Lottie got real sick I thought if I didn’t take me chance it’d be gone--’

  Ada stopped abruptly as though she’d suddenly become aware how much she was gabbling. ‘An’ you?’ She looked past Josie to Gertie, her face hard again. As Josie followed Ada’s gaze she saw Gertie was still standing as though she was frozen, apparently immobilised by the amazing turn of events. ‘What about you? You ashamed of us then? Wishin’ I’d kept me big mouth shut, are you?’

  Gertie’s small head moved as if in a shudder and then she spoke for the first time. ‘Why didn’t you take us?’ She hadn’t planned to say it; she hadn’t even known it was what she was thinking until she had said it, but once said she knew it had been there at the back of her mind since for ever. ‘Why did you leave us there with him, knowing what he was like?’

  ‘We was bairns, lass, nowt but bairns, an’ we didn’t even know if we could get away ourselves. You don’t run away from the sort of people we run away from, not unless you want to end up in a back alley somewhere with your throat cut, that is. We knew we were goin’ to have to live on the streets and do the same work for a while once we got away; how could we have two little bairns with us?’

  ‘You should’ve took us.’

  ‘I told you.’

  Josie watched her sisters glaring at each other and inside she was praying, Please, please, God, make it all right. Please make it all right. Make them love one another.

  And then Ada sat down suddenly on a straight-backed chair, which, like everything else in the room, was battered but spotlessly clean, and she gulped twice before she said, ‘You’re right, we should have took you. I should have took you. I’ve never regretted goin’, not for a minute, but for the fact that I left the rest of you with him. But . . . you can’t imagine how it was. Me an’ Dora, we thought about killin’ him, or ourselves, or . . . Oh, lots of things. But we was little bairns, that’s all. Little bairns.’

  Ada’s head swayed from one side to the other following the motion of her big body and the sight was more distressing than any loud wailing or tears. The lump in Josie’s throat was threatening to choke her and she reached Ada the same time as Gertie did, the two of them bending over the enormously fat figure in the chair that bore no resemblance to the little child still trapped within the adult body. How long the three of them remained entwined Josie didn’t know, it was unimportant, but by the time she and Gertie straightened all their faces were wet.

  ‘You couldn’t have taken us. I know that really, I do.’ Gertie sank down to her knees, holding Ada’s fleshy arm in her hands. ‘But it was after you’d gone he started knocking me about all the time. I used to wet me drawers just when I heard his voice . . .’

  ‘He . . . he didn’t give you two to Duffy?’

  ‘No, no.’ It was Josie who spoke, Gertie’s head now resting on Ada’s lap. ‘I could earn more for him with my singing, and when he tried the same game as with you and Dora for Gertie, we made a run for it. Vera, one of Mam’s old friends, helped us. We lodged with her sister in Newcastle for a while, and then I went on the halls.’

  ‘And the lads?’

  ‘Working for Duffy now.’ Josie’s voice had the catch of tears in it but she couldn’t help it. Never, in all her wildest dreams, had she hoped to see Ada and Dora again, but in a way this had brought all her buried fears for Hubert to the surface again. She wouldn’t have believed it was possible to feel such elation and such despair at the same time.

  ‘Something tells me we could all do with a nice cup of tea.’ Lily had been standing in the doorway to the kitchen but now she pushed past the three sisters and walked over to the blackleaded range, reaching for a big iron kettle and, after checking to make sure it was full, pushing it to the centre of the glowing coals. ‘Nothing like a cup of tea when you don’t know if you’re on your arse or your elbow,’ she added conversationally.

  Josie saw Ada start slightly, her sister’s eyes widening as Ada turned her head to look at Lily who was grinning at them all from her place in front of the open fire, and then as Lily said, ‘Nice to meet you, lass, although I’
ve never seen three sisters look more different if you don’t mind me saying so,’ she saw Ada’s lips turn upwards.

  Thank You, Lord, for Lily, Josie prayed silently. If anyone had the knack of putting everything on a level footing again, it was her old friend.

  The next hour was spent at the kitchen table over two pots of tea and a plateful of teacakes and drop scones. There were several times during the course of this hour that Josie wanted to throw her arms round Ada again and hug her hard, but the more Ada talked the more Josie knew her sister wouldn’t like it. Her sister’s experiences at the hands of Patrick Duffy and men like him had made her extremely chary of any show of physical affection, be it from man or woman. Ada’s comfort was in eating, and from the amount she packed away it was no surprise her weight had ballooned so excessively.

  It was also clear, from what Ada revealed, that she rarely left the sanctuary of her four walls. She showed them the front room which she and Dora shared, and which had two narrow iron beds with bright bedspreads and two comfortable chairs among other furniture, and also the three rooms upstairs which were taken by lodgers - two women who worked alongside Dora in the box-making factory in one room, two more who worked in a draper’s shop in another, and a tiny box room with just enough space for a pallet bed and chest of drawers which had been the late Lottie’s quarters.

  All the floorboards were devoid of even the thinnest of clippy mats, there were paper blinds at the windows and no signs of any creature comforts, but like the downstairs of the house, the walls were whitewashed and free of bugs, the floors scrubbed and swept, and an almost clinical cleanliness prevailed throughout.

  In view of the fact that Ada’s house was obviously her whole world, Josie was all the more touched when it emerged that her sister had visited the theatre office herself to leave the message concerning Lottie. ‘Me an’ Dora can’t read or write, lass, an’ you couldn’t trust anyone round here to deliver a message right, so it was shanks’s pony or nowt,’ Ada said matter-of-factly as she stood at a small side table in the kitchen stripping out the cartilage and gristle from some lambs’ hearts she was going to stuff for the household’s evening meal. She opened out the cavities, filled them with forcemeat and skewered them closed before placing the hearts in a big oven dish, saying the while, ‘If you hadn’t tumbled I wasn’t going to say nowt, but it’s bin eating away at me, knowin’ who you were an’ that you and Gertie were so close. They say blood’s thicker than water an’ mebbe they’re right at that. What say you, lass?’

  ‘We’ve got to try and see the lads again.’

  It was an answer in itself and Ada recognised it as such, but now she shook her head of thick brown hair, saying, ‘Don’t be daft,’ and her voice was flat. ‘They’re with Duffy, you said so yourself.’

  ‘Which is all the more reason for getting them away.’ Josie turned to Gertie who was sitting next to her at the kitchen table eating her third drop scone. ‘Don’t you see?’

  ‘Look, lass, I know you think you’ve had your own run-ins with Duffy but believe me, you don’t know the half,’ Ada said before Gertie could respond. ‘What you said earlier about thinking he did Da in? I wouldn’t be surprised; not at anything would I be surprised where that perverted, sadistic so-an’-so is concerned. His word is law in some quarters an’ he knows it, aye, an’ plays on it. I was barely ten when Da sold me to him . . .’ Her voice trailed away and she lowered her head, leaning heavily on the small table for a moment or two. Then she stretched her neck and moved her fat chins from side to side. ‘No one could imagine, lass, no one ’cept Dora ’cos she went through the same. He’s not human. On me second night with him he brought some pals in . . .’ Ada raised her eyes and looked straight at her sister. ‘Don’t think he won’t know what you’re about ’cos he will, and you bein’ a favourite of the halls won’t protect you neither.’

  Josie rose from her seat, walking across to this sister with whom she had only been reunited for a couple of hours, and yet who she felt had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. ‘He destroyed our family, Ada. Him and Da,’ she said quietly, her voice vibrating with the depth of her feeling. ‘He hurt you and Dora more than I can imagine,’ she reached out and grasped Ada’s hand and Ada’s fingers wound tightly round hers, ‘and he did his level best to hurt me and Gertie too, and he still has the lads. Oh, I know from what Hubert said that Jimmy might be willing, but not Hubert. I know he wanted to get away; he was just too frightened to do it.’

  ‘And with good reason, lass. With good reason.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘You won’t stop her.’ Gertie had joined them, and now she looked across at Lily who was watching them all with a slightly bemused expression on her face; the revelations of the last two hours had knocked even this old veteran of life for six. ‘Will she, Lily?’ Gertie said. ‘I think it’s barmy to try and find the lads, but if Josie’s made up her mind . . .’

  ‘The Archangel Gabriel himself couldn’t change it, not even with a holy visitation involving most of the heavenly host,’ Lily finished for her. ‘But from what’s been said, I agree with these two, for what it’s worth. This Patrick Duffy sounds like a right nasty piece of work to me, and once you start something with his type it’s never finished until it’s done.’

  Josie nodded. ‘Just so, Lily. You’ve hit the nail on the head. And it was started long ago and not by me.’

  ‘But you said earlier that this man, this bloke up in Sunderland that you hired, he couldn’t find the lads.’ Ada had pulled away and was adding a chopped onion, carrots and turnip to the stock in the dish. ‘What makes you think he’ll have any more luck now?’

  ‘He probably wouldn’t,’ Josie agreed. ‘But Hubert found us once before; he could do so again. You and Dora could come with us, Ada. The four of us will go. Any of the theatres would be glad to have me’ - this was said without any vestige of pride but as a statement of fact - ‘and I could let it be known in the Sunderland Echo that I’m visiting with my sisters, two of whom I’ve only just been reunited with. That’ll draw Hubert out, I know it will.’

  ‘Me and Dora go back? Not on your nellie. Wild horses couldn’t drag me back up there, lass. No, we’re all right here; we’ve got a nice little goin’ on and I’m not spoilin’ everything to jaunt up to Sunderland for a visit I don’t want to make. I’m sorry, lass, but that’s how it is. Dora’ll say the same.’

  Josie nodded. It was probably asking too much of Ada and Dora to do what she had suggested, but now she had made up her mind she wondered how she could have waited so long before going home. ‘I understand, and you and Dora must do what seems best to you, but I have to try and see Hubert again, and this is the only way I can think of.’

  ‘What about Oliver?’ said Gertie flatly. Over the last hour she had been considering her brother-in-law’s reaction to the news about Ada and Dora - and likewise Anthony’s. This last idea of Josie’s would be sure to send Oliver into a frenzy, and she knew exactly how Anthony and his mother would view their going off on some wild goose-chase to Sunderland. Oliver was already in one of his sulks because of their visit to the East End that morning, and when he was like that it made things so difficult for Anthony at the office. Anthony . . . She had glossed over much of her life before she had come down to London with Josie; he had no idea that her sisters had been prostitutes. The word reverberated in her head. She couldn’t tell him, she just couldn’t, and his mother would be horrified. They had always known her as the sister of a successful and wealthy music-hall star.

  ‘Oliver?’ Josie shrugged off-handedly as though she hadn’t also been considering how her husband would react. ‘He will probably disagree, but after four years I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to have a spell working up north. It need only be for a few weeks. Lots of the stars work the provinces now and again, and there are some excellent music halls in other places but London.’

  Whether Oliver agreed or not she was going to stick to her guns over th
is. She was grateful for the way Oliver had helped to further her career, and she knew he had opened doors with his connections which would have remained closed a lot longer without him, but he’d done all right out of her success. What would Gertie say if she told her what Oliver lost in the gambling dens he frequented? She felt it disloyal to discuss such things, even with Gertie, and especially now her sister was so involved with Oliver’s right-hand man at the agency. She was aware Gertie had assumed Oliver’s bad temper that morning had been due to this visit, but in reality they’d fought half the night when she’d told him she was going to seek a solicitor’s advice about the possibility of her earnings being paid into a new and separate bank account from their joint one.

  Maybe she should have done it years ago, but she hadn’t wanted that sort of marriage and she’d felt it would belittle Oliver. She didn’t feel like that any more. In fact, she didn’t know how she felt about a lot of things . . .

  Upon discovering Ada’s identity, Josie had asked the driver of the horse-drawn cab they’d travelled to the East End in to return to the house at midday, but when the cheery-faced man put in an appearance it was only Lily who left.

  Dora wouldn’t return to the house until just after four o’clock from her job at the box-making factory a couple of streets away, having started work at six that morning, and Josie couldn’t bear to leave before she’d seen her other sister.

  The driver declared himself more than happy to return for them at five o’clock - ‘You’re paying the fare, missus, and I always say the customer is right’ - and so Josie and Gertie spent a very pleasant afternoon getting to know Ada again. Josie thought Gertie was a little subdued, but in view of the surprise which had been sprung on them she couldn’t blame her youngest sister for being bowled over.