A Sovereign for a Song

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘Well, this is a bit awkward, like, but I’ll have to ask our new lodger to go into the front room and hide her head under the covers ’til I get my pit clothes off and get a bath,’ said Martin.

  ‘Oh, don’t bother, Martin. I’ve seen our John in the bath before today,’ she assured him.

  ‘Aye, well, you haven’t seen me in the bath, and you’re not going to. Find her something to do in there, Mam, and shut the door.’

  Seeing that protest would be useless, Ginny retired to the front room with a couple of pairs of socks to darn. Half an hour later Martin looked a different person, every trace of lamp oil and coal dust scrubbed from his fair hair and pale skin. She was shocked at the sight of Mam Smith sitting comfortably in the armchair, while he scooped the bathwater into an enamel pail and emptied it down the sink. That was a woman’s job, and Ginny was quick to get the fact established.

  ‘I’ll do that, Martin.’

  He brushed aside her offers of help and carried the bath outside to empty the last dregs down the drain and hang the bath on its hook outside the door. Ginny’s mother followed him in.

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed Ginny at the sight of the swollen, purple face.

  ‘I know.’ Her mother was hardly able to move her mouth. ‘I think he’s broken my cheekbone. It’s so painful, and I can feel a sort of grating whenever I move it.’

  ‘That bugger wants a horsewhipping, but don’t tell him I said so,’ said Mam Smith.

  ‘I can’t stay. The bairns’ll be home soon. But I think he’ll kill Ginny when he gets his hands on her. I don’t want to bring you any trouble, but will you keep her here for a few days, leave a bit of time for his temper to cool?’

  ‘I might cool it for him if I do come back. He might be the one that ends up stone cold. If I don’t get away from here I might do for him in the end,’ said Ginny, the light of battle in her eyes, ‘so I think I’d better do what John did, and get a job somewhere else.’

  Her mother groaned, looking really ill. ‘Come on, Martin,’ Mam Smith said, in alarm, ‘let’s get her back home. You’d better go and get the doctor and I’ll put her to bed and see to the bairns ’til he gets back from the pit. He won’t touch me, and if he does, I’ll get him locked up.’

  Chapter 11

  It was heaven. No moods, no having to be careful what she said, no hushing Philip, or quieting their own talk when Martin was reading a paper or a book borrowed from the reading room, or dozing in the chair. It was a house of gentle mourning and mutual comfort, a shrine to the best wife, daughter and mother that ever lived, whose shoelaces few others were fit to tie. In spite of the pall of tranquil gloom, the atmosphere was one Ginny could breathe and blossom in, and express her own ideas without fear of criticism or ridicule, or being ‘taken down a peg or two’. The three adults discussed the idea of a living-in job seriously together.

  ‘I’ve heard of none round here, not for lasses anyway,’ said Martin. ‘I think there’s a groom wanted up at Nobs Hall, but that’s no use to you.’

  ‘Lend me a pair of trousers. I’ll chop my hair off, and crack on I’m a lad.’

  He scanned her up and down, his gaze frank and open and resting for a moment or two on her swelling hips and burgeoning breasts. For a fleeting moment an ironical smile lifted the droop at the corners of his mouth. Ginny’s pulse quickened. She would have given a lot to keep that smile on his lips, that light of laughter in his eyes as he looked at her.

  ‘Aye, and you’ll get away with it – if they’re all blind,’ he said, his face again assuming its habitual melancholy expression.

  ‘I’d forgotten what a nice smile you’ve got, Martin. You used to laugh at me sometimes when I was a bairn.’

  ‘You were enough to make a cat laugh, the pranks you got up to sometimes.’

  She sighed. ‘Well, if there’s no jobs round here, maybe there’s jobs further afield.’

  He frowned. ‘You’re not educated enough to be a governess, and you haven’t got the education or the temperament to be a nurse. There are below-stairs jobs in great houses that get you a life of drudgery and rob you of the chance of a home of your own. And you might end up a sight worse off than if you’d stayed at home.’

  ‘Aye, it’s a poor look-out for a young lass on her own. Some are just lambs to the slaughter, especially if they’re good-looking,’ said Mam Smith.

  ‘Well, I can’t live off you, and me father’s not going to let this go on much longer without dragging me back by the hair. You see if he doesn’t. I think I’ll run off and join a circus, be a lion tamer. I’m qualified for that, after living with him.’

  ‘Stay here for now, where you’re safe and comfortable. He’ll see sense in the end,’ said Martin.

  Ginny caught a look of apprehension in Mam Smith’s eyes, and returned another. Neither had much hope of that.

  To see a grown man take an occasional hand with the washing-up, or take a child to bed and read him a story was something Ginny marvelled at, not that she gave Martin much chance to make himself busy with ‘women’s jobs’. Mam Smith’s house had been clean when she arrived but was pristine whilst she stayed. Apprehension about what her father might do and how her life might have to change to escape him filled her so full of nervous energy that she couldn’t keep still. The expected assault came almost as a relief.

  ‘My God, what’s that?’ Mam Smith, her grey hair in Saturday-night curl papers, sat bolt upright in bed. Ginny jumped out and twitched the bedroom curtain aside. Her father looked up, caught sight of her at the window and roared at the top of his lungs, ‘Come out, you. I want you back home where you ought to be, helping your mother. This lot’s gone on long enough. Come out here, you clever little bugger, and I’ll show you how bloody clever you are. Come out, afore I come in and fetch you.’ He banged and rattled the door. Face white and heart thumping, Ginny let the curtain drop.

  ‘Hey, you, open this door before I boot it in. Keeping a man’s daughter away from her own home. Open up!’

  ‘Don’t let him in, Martin,’ Ginny shrieked, flying from the bedroom in her nightgown. ‘If you open the door somebody’ll get murdered!’ She got downstairs and wedged her foot against the front door just in time to prevent Martin from opening it.

  ‘I’ll have to face him sometime, Ginny.’

  ‘Another day. The mood he’s in now, he’ll kill you. I’ve seen him like this before and he’ll have to take it out on somebody.’

  ‘You’d rather it was your mother or the bairns then?’ asked Martin, pulling his trousers on. ‘Never bother, he’s not going to get in the house. I’ll go out by the back and you can bolt the door after me.’

  Martin was a strapping young hewer with muscles like iron, but gentle as a nursemaid and completely lacking her father’s killer instinct. Still, he was fitter to stand his punishments than a downtrodden woman still recovering from the last beating.

  She’d hardly slid the bolt home when she heard the sound of splintering glass and a scream from Mam Smith followed by her father’s shouting. She got to the broken front window and looked out on a clear moonlit night. Martin was trying to reason with her father, keeping at arm’s length from him. Her father would have none of it and finally they began trading punch for punch. Philip appeared at the bottom of the stairs, eyes wide and round.

  ‘Back to bed, hinny,’ said Mam Smith, turning him round and trying to push him back up the stairs. ‘Don’t come in here, you’ll get your feet cut.’

  ‘I want to thee what’th happening,’ the child insisted.

  ‘Get back up to bed, before you feel the back of my hand.’ Fear and anger gave an unaccustomed sharp edge to Mam Smith’s voice. Philip looked at her as if she had struck him and disappeared up the stairs without another word.

  ‘Come by, Ginny. Let me get that lot swept up, before somebody gets cut on it.’

  ‘Wait a bit,’ said Ginny, heart in her mouth as she watched the two men exchange punches until her father lost patience with the pantomime. He close
d in, took hold of a good handful of hair and in one sudden movement pulled Martin’s head down and jerked his own knee up into violent contact with his face. Martin sank to the ground with a groan.

  Her father bent over him and laughed. ‘There you are. That’s what you get for interfering in my family, and good enough for you. Think yourself lucky I’m too much of a sportsman to put the boot in while you’re down or you’d get your bloody head kicked in. Send that lass of mine home tomorrow, or there’s plenty more where that came from.’ He looked towards the shattered window where the women stood watching, hands pressed against their mouths and shouted, ‘You’ve caused some trouble for your kind friends tonight, so if you don’t want to cause any more, you’d better get your backside home by tomorrow, and don’t you forget it.’ He turned and swaggered away down the road.

  They ran out of the house towards the motionless figure on the ground, rolled him on to his back, and peered anxiously into his face.

  ‘Well, thank God he’s breathing,’ said Mam Smith.

  ‘Let’s get him into the house,’ said Ginny, heaving him to his feet. ‘That’s it, get his arm over your shoulder.’

  Half walking and half carried, Martin finally lay on the bed in the front room. His nose and upper lip were bruised and bleeding.

  ‘You bugger,’ he said, speech slurred, ‘I’ve heard tell o’ people seeing stars, but I really did.’

  ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard you swear,’ said Ginny.

  ‘I think the bugger’s broken my nose, and my teeth feel loose.’ He rolled off the bed and staggered into the kitchen where he knelt on the floor and vomited into a pail. When the retching stopped, he stood by the sink to wash his face and rinse his mouth. ‘I’ll have to get to bed. I’d better lie down before I fall down.’

  They helped him back to bed. He closed his eyes and lay apparently oblivious of everything around him, his face drained of colour save that caused by his injury.

  ‘I hope he’ll be all right,’ Ginny whispered.

  ‘Aye, and so do I,’ said Mam Smith, in a tone which seemed to say, ‘And whose fault will it be if he’s not?’

  ‘Shall I sit with you?’

  Mam Smith sighed, ‘No, you go up to bed and get to sleep. You can look after the bairn tomorrow while I sleep. I hope his dad’ll be all right by morning.’

  Upstairs, Philip was awake. ‘What happened to my daddy?’ he demanded.

  ‘He’ll be all right.’ She got into bed beside him. An hour later she looked at him, expecting him to be asleep, but his eyes were still wide open, staring at the ceiling. She shivered and turned over. Martin, Mam Smith’s one surviving substitute son, Philip’s only parent, looked half dead. There’d be no peace in this house as long as she was in it. It wasn’t fair to cause any more trouble for them. She couldn’t stay, but how she dreaded to go back home.

  ‘I’ll brazen it out. I’ll warn him I’ll get the bobby on him if he touches me. He’s had more than one night in the lock-up and he can go again if he starts.’ The brave words belied her feelings. Her heart was pounding fit to burst her chest at the mere thought of confronting her father.

  ‘I don’t envy you, lass,’ said Mam Smith, who looked weary after a night spent watching. ‘I’d be terrified myself.’ She paused, but didn’t add the words Ginny hoped for – ‘Don’t go.’

  Ginny laughed, to mask a pang of disappointment. ‘You don’t show any weakness to Arthur Wilde.’

  ‘I’ll remember that in future,’ said Martin from his chair, face swollen and mottled purple and blue. ‘But you’re no match for him, so you stay here. He’ll not catch me off guard like that again. I had a handicap last night – I didn’t really want a fight. Next time I will, so it’ll be more of an even contest, like.’

  She knew he really meant it. Swamped by relief and elation she opened her mouth to thank him, but Philip, face twisted and near to tears, ran and hugged his father’s knees. ‘Don’t have any more fights, Daddy.’

  The sight of them together brought hope crashing to the floor. She paused and took one of Martin’s calloused hands in hers, looking at the raw knuckles.

  ‘If he comes again today it’ll be no even contest with you in this state. So there’s going to be nothing to fight about. I’m going to chapel this morning. That’s the one place I can be sure of not bumping into him, and the minister knows a few well-off people. He might know of a job for me somewhere.’

  He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘You go to chapel, then mind you come back where you’ll be safe.’

  Her father straightened himself up from his planting and looked her slowly up and down as she walked through the gate, heart thumping, but head erect and back straight.

  ‘By God, Lady Muck’s got naught on you. You think yourself no cat shit. Has he come round yet?’

  She looked him full in the face but passed on into the house without giving him a reply. Up in the bedroom, she put everything she owned into a bag, and stowed it under the bed.

  Back downstairs; her mother was serving the dinner. They ate in the familiar wary silence until her father said, ‘Well, I’ve done enough Sabbath breaking working in the garden for one Sunday, so you’re safe for the time being.’

  ‘So when can I expect the reckoning, like?’ The rest of the family looked intently at their plates.

  Her father eyed her as a cat might look at a mouse it had trapped to sport with later. ‘Maybe tomorrow, or maybe the day after, or next week. It’ll come soon enough for you, never fear.’

  ‘And what might it entail?’

  He gave her a malevolent stare, then suddenly lifted the end of the table and crashed it to the floor, clattering pots and cutlery and making everybody flinch except Ginny, who, expecting the outburst, remained outwardly unperturbed.

  ‘I’d like to cripple you,’ he said, leaning threateningly towards her, ‘except it would spoil you for work. So I’ll have to be satisfied with giving you a first-class belting.’

  The following day, she was out with her bag while he was still in bed. She called by Mam Smith’s with an address written on a piece of paper. For a moment she thought of raising her hand to knock, to ask Martin to help her, to take her in again, to protect her from her father and from her fear of the unknown she was walking into. The sight of the shattered window and the certain knowledge that she could bring him nothing but trouble checked the impulse. She scribbled a note under the address.

  ‘This is where I’ll be, if anybody wants me. I’ve got a job in London and I’m going. Tell Mam I’m sorry but it’s for the best. I’ll write as soon as I get the chance and send her some money. Tell my father I’m sorry to disappoint him. I think he was looking forward to having a bit of fun.’

  She pushed it through the door before walking on to the station in a light rain, which had become a deluge by the time she arrived on the platform. Jumpy as a cat, she looked fearfully round now and then, half expecting to see her father at the back of her. A sigh of relief escaped her when the train drew in, but before the doors had opened and the few passengers alighted, she heard the sound of a man’s boots rattling on the paving stones. Panic seized her and she leapt aboard, ignoring protests from the disembarking passengers.

  ‘Ginny, wait, wait.’

  The voice was not her father’s. She hung out of the carriage window after all the disgruntled passengers were off, and saw Martin, hair dripping, with something in his hands.

  ‘I saw your note. I’m glad I’m not too late. Take these. You’d better have them. Maria wanted you to.’

  ‘I know, but you said nobody was going to wear them but her. You were going to take her to the races in them.’

  ‘I meant it too, but I couldn’t make it true. It’s taken me these three months to realize that. She’s past wearing them or anything else, so they’d better do you some good. You haven’t got much luggage, bonny lass. The minister put you on to a job then, did he?’ Martin asked, the rain running down his face.

  ‘I’ve got an ad
dress, and a shilling or two to put me on. There are hundreds of jobs for housemaids in big London houses, and if I can work here for what Mrs Vine pays, I can just as well work there for more.’

  He grimaced. ‘From what I’ve heard about London, it’s a rum place Ginny. I wish you wouldn’t go. You’re only a bairn. You’re not old enough to be let out on your own.’

  The train began to pull out of the station. She looked him full in his bruised and blackened face, and felt some comfort at the thought that whatever happened, she couldn’t be the cause of any more injury to him. ‘I’ll have to grow up quick, then. Martin, you’re drenched. Get away home before you get your death.’

  ‘Oh, Ginny, if only . . .’ he said, and she heard no more. She lost sight of him as the train sped round a curve in the track, and felt as though her entrails had been wrenched out.

  Chapter 12

  Ginny sat apart at a small table in a large room full of other small tables, finishing tea and toast alone in a crowd of people whose customs and manners were alien to her. People who went to bed late, and got up in the afternoon, whose accents and patterns of speech she could hardly understand, and who soon gave up trying to understand hers. She wrote three letters in the first three days to tell the people at home she was well and was sure to find a job soon, but the more she thought of home the more homesick she felt. She looked round forlornly at parties of music hall artistes, all concerned only with their own business, and thought she would die of loneliness.

  It was Sunday morning in the theatrical digs Mr Vine had directed her to a couple of weeks previously. Most of the other lodgers had finished breakfast and their trunks were waiting in the hallway. Through the open door she could see the landlady, a sharp little woman with goldrimmed spectacles balanced on a beaky nose, standing at a tiny desk, making sure all settled their accounts before they left. Ginny saw one or two of them nudge each other when they read the bill.

  ‘A shilling for the cruet, missus? That’s a bit steep, ain’t it?’ asked one jocular chap.