by Ann Thwaite
Emma Rimmer was Frances’ first swineherd, and, as well as knowing about pigs, she had the advantage of not having been banned by Mrs Hodgson, as had the tollgate-keeper’s daughter, who was said to be a “rude little girl”. Emma was not rude, but it was through Emma that Frances committed her first “crime”. The girls were playing together when Frances suddenly felt hungry.
It happened that Mrs Rimmer displayed a cardboard notice in her cottage window:
Pop. A penny a bottle
Ginger beer.
Sold here.
Also nettle beer.
There were glass bottles of raspberry drops, bulls’ eyes and humbugs. There were real Eccles cakes at a penny each and pieces of parkin for a halfpenny.
“I wish I had a halfpenny,” said Frances. “If I had a halfpenny, I would get a halfpenny parkin.”
Emma stopped jumping. “Why does’na tha go an’ get a parkin on trust?” she said. “My mither’d trust thee for a ha’p’ny. Tha could just get thy parkin an’ pay next toime tha had a ha’p’ny. A moit of people does that way. I’ll go an’ ax Mither fur thee now.”
To Frances, imbued with the idea that debt was dishonourable, the suggestion was far from respectable. “Mamma would be angry,” she said.
“Tha needn’t say nowt about it,” said Emma. She went for the parkin.
After the first bite, the enormity of what she had done struck Frances. What if she never had a halfpenny and her family were involved in her dishonour. She could not eat the parkin. Nor could she return it to Mrs Rimmer with a semi-circular piece taken out of its roundness and the marks of her teeth on the edge. What should she do with the evidence of her guilt? In later years she said she knew exactly what a murderer felt like with a body to dispose of. Again she could not sleep at nights, this time for worrying about the parkin, which, for some reason, she had hidden in the dining-room sideboard. In desperation she confided in seven-year-old John George. Fortunately he possessed a penny. He went to Mrs Rimmer’s cottage and paid for the parkin. Frances breathed again.
This story, like the Keep off the Grass one, makes Frances sound excessively law-abiding. But it was her lively imagination, not a lack of spirit, that made her suffer. As she read more and more, her whole life became coloured by drama.
Storytelling was not part of the pattern of her life. Her mother was too busy. The young nurse was busy too with Edith and Edwina, and she lacked imagination—though it was she who first sang “Alice Benbolt” to Frances with its mournful last verse:
In the little churchyard in the valley Benbolt
In a corner obscure and alone
They have fitted a slab of the granite so grey
And sweet Alice lies under the stone.
Betty Mottram knew nothing more, of course, than the words she had learned. She did not know nor care why sweet Alice died. But Frances worried and puzzled over it. One day she buried a doll, though she was not called Alice, under a slab of cardboard and strewed flowers over the grave. She never dug it up. The song, like the gardens, was with her for the rest of her life, cropping up again and again in her books. But Betty Mottram was useless as a storyteller.
Grandmamma at least encouraged an interest in the Bible. Frances recalled standing at her knee, picking out the words “When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea”, when she was only three. It was probably her grandmother who told Frances the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, the first story which made much impression on her. “A little illustrated scripture history afforded a picture of Jewish mothers rushing madly down broad stone stairways, clasping babies to their breasts, of others, huddling under the shadow of high walls, clutching their little ones and of fierce men slashing with swords.”
The dolls belonging to Frances were up till this time mere things stuffed with sawdust. In later years she lamented the lack of realism in the dolls of her childhood and envied her grandchildren. Her first doll had a black skull-cap with two ringlets attached, instead of real hair. Her eyes were staring, with painted eyebrows and eyelashes. Her mouth was carved and her teeth painted on. Her limbs were rag things, hanging, and her skin was white calico.
It was only when Frances could read to herself that the poor dolls came to life. Then they became involved in every sort of battle, murder and sudden death. No sedate tea-parties for them. If they were not being slaughtered as innocents, they were being executed as Mary, Queen of Scots, shipwrecked in the Pacific, or pursued by tribes of Red Indians. It was in Islington Square, Salford, that most of these games were played. But it was while the Hodgsons were still at Seedley Grove that Frances first went to school.
The school belonged to the Misses Mary and Alice Hague, the daughters of a clergyman. Twenty years earlier, the Manchester Statistical Society had reported the fact that a third of all Manchester children received no education whatsoever. It also lamented the fact that the majority of children who attended dame schools “derived little or no benefit from their attendance”. The Miss Hagues’ school was certainly a dame school—and so was the Miss Hadfields’ in Islington Square. But Frances was lucky in her schools.
Not, of course, that the Miss Hagues had much belief in the educational benefits of fiction. When Frances was to have a reward “for politeness and good behaviour”, they were fortunately in rather a hurry. They picked up Granny’s Wonderful Chair in the bookshop without looking at it very carefully. “I’m afraid,” they told Frances, “it is a very silly book. It is all about fairies.” Frances felt a thrill of guilty joy. The landscape of this book, like that of the garden at Seedley Grove, became a permanent part of her mental furniture. There was “a broad pasture where violets grew thick in the grass and thousands of snow-white sheep were feeding”, there were rose-trees and nightingales and lilies, and the inhabitants fed on deer’s milk and cakes of nut-flour.
In 1855, with her head full of roses and nightingales, Frances looked out of new windows on to a different view. Mrs Hodgson had found the house they were to live in for the next nine years—16 Islington Square, Salford, across the River Irwell, the coal-black, foul-smelling River Irwell. For the next nine years, the real flowers Frances saw were “the daisies and buttercups of the public park, always slightly soiled with a soft drift of smuts”. Even the park was some distance away. The story went that the sooty square had once been an ornamental lake with swans and lilies, but it seemed impossible.
Islington Square, like the Hodgsons, had seen better days. It was a closed square, shut in by a large and quite imposing iron gateway. Only these gates separated the Square people from the Backstreet people. The Square retained an atmosphere of faded gentility. The houses were mostly occupied “by widowed ladies with small incomes and unwidowed gentlemen with large families”. Several of the houses were empty and those that were not were generally let out in rooms or had a dilapidated air. The lodgers at Number 21, for instance, included a railway porter, and a prison warder—it was not far from New Bailey Prison—called Ezekiel Gilbody.
They were the sort of houses that needed large numbers of servants to run them easily, but the sort of people who could afford large numbers of servants no longer lived in Islington Square, with the back-to-back houses of the mill-workers, twenty-five to the acre, crowding in on every side—those hovels and huts that even Engels said “defied description”. There was a dirty and violent world just beyond the iron gates. Frances could see it from the windows of the nursery.
If at Seedley Grove it had always seemed to be sunny, so in Islington Square “it seemed always to be raining on stone pavements and slate roofs, shining with wet”. The backyards of the houses of the Square were divided by a long flagged passage from the backyards of some Backstreet houses. It was a sad grey sight. What Frances saw from her windows had a profound effect on her whole life. It was the nearness of squalor, of dire poverty. At one time, when she was sleeping at the back of the house, she woke to see, by a trick of light, people in the house behind reflected on her ceiling. It was four o’clock in th
e morning and the man and woman were getting themselves a bite to eat before leaving for their day’s work. “There are Backstreet people on our ceiling,” Frances said to Edith, waking her to see them. The man might have been the rag-gatherer, the twister-in of cotton or the spade labourer, who all lived in that backstreet. They were so near, the poor. They were there, just beyond the windows, even on the ceiling. The only thing that kept squalor away was money. Mrs Hodgson did not talk about money. But Frances already knew that this was so.
In Cheetham Hill and Pendleton, the Hodgson children had been protected from the poor. Now they were rather poor themselves but rich compared with those around them. Mrs Gaskell’s great “prevailing thought”—“the seeming injustice of the inequalities of fortune”—was already evident to the small Frances. Mrs Hodgson kept her business worries from her children. Frances still had ankle-strap shoes and a party-frock and Peter Parley’s Annual for Christmas and as much as she wanted to eat. Outside, beyond the windows, many of the children went barefoot, even in the snow. In one street there was ‘only one privy for three hundred and eighty inhabitants’. Pigs rooted among the putrescent garbage in the streets. It was normal for workers in the mills to toil from five in the morning until seven or eight in the evening, although, since the Ten Hours Bill of 1847, children’s working hours had been restricted.
Things were improving. More roads were paved; more sewers constructed. The building of back-to-back houses had stopped in 1844. In 1858 better provision was to be made for the burial of the dead. The water supply, which had been largely blamed for the high mortality rate, was safer. Public health was the main preoccupation of Manchester in the 1850s. Too many people were dying. Nearly half the children died before they were five.
It was not only the barefoot children who died. Frances had vivid memories of the deaths of children in her own school. Alfie Burns was the first dead child she saw. His death was not unexpected. He had bluish-purple lips; he was said to have heart disease. Frances had once given him a new slate pencil because she had been told he might die suddenly. And he did. It was difficult to imagine him surrounded by walls of chalcedony and sardonyx, chrysolite and beryl. It was difficult to believe that Alfie Burns had overnight exchanged a world of inkstands and copy-books for one full of horses with the heads of lions and breast-plates of fire and jacinth and brimstone. Grandmamma had been reading Revelations to her. What is interesting, Frances thought years later, is that we know no more about it all when we are seventy than Frances knew at seven.
Frances was taken to see the body of Alfie Burns by Annie Hadfield, who lived at 19 Islington Square. (Frances was always taken. Her strength was in a certain steadiness of purpose, in a care and concern for everything she saw. But she never led the way.) It was the custom to visit the dead. Death was not something to keep out of sight. Frances was sad that Alfie was not transformed. “This is only dust,” she kept telling herself. “Alfie has gone to heaven. He is an angel.” But he did not look like an angel in his frilled muslin nightcap. Frances put out her hand and touched his cheek. It was the thing to do. If you touched the dead one, you did not dream about it. “As cold as death!” It was a soft chill which held no possibility of ever being warmed. “Poor little Alfie,” Annie Hadfield said, “I’m very sorry for him, but he’s better off.” This was the general opinion and Frances did not question it.
But she did question Mrs Alexander’s adage—or at least her mother’s interpretation of it. Mrs Hodgson believed that the rich man in his castle—or rather, the genteel in Islington Square—should keep their distance from the poor at the gate. Mrs Hodgson worried about her children’s accents, as many mothers have worried since. If she could not protect them entirely from glimpses of “the most disgusting and loathsome forms of destitution” (which appalled the American visitor, Henry Colman in 1845), at least she would try to see that they spoke nicely. Was it really true that the pronunciation of the word “I” alone could settle the whole question of a man’s rank and education? It seemed very like it.
But Frances loved the Backstreet children and the strange way they spoke. She had loved the way Emma Rimmer spoke. To stray into a forbidden backstreet and lure a dirty little factory-child into conversation was a real delight. And she and her friends would stand at the iron gateway of the Square and listen to the factory people as they streamed past at twelve o’clock for their brief midday break.
The little girls, their heads pressed against the iron bars, watched the women with their aprons tied back and shawls over their heads and the men and boys in their corduroys, great throngs of them clattering past in their wooden clogs, gossiping and swearing, with bold, unwashed faces.
One day when Frances was sitting at a window, supposed to be learning her lessons for the next day, she was surprised to see half a dozen factory-girls gathered about the lamp-post in the middle of the Square. Frances had proprietorial feelings about this lamp-post. It was directly opposite Number 16 and when she lay in bed at night—in the big crimson-draped four-poster bed she often shared with her mother—the gaslight made a bright patch on the wall and kept her company. Moreover the lamp-post had a solid base of stone, on which Frances and her friends used to sit. It was their property. And, anyway, what were the factory-girls doing in the Square? It was not a thoroughfare.
They were talking loudly, pushing each other, glad to be free. But there was one who was not fooling around. She was knitting a coarse blue worsted stocking. There was something strong and special about her. Frances could not explain it. As she watched, a man came into the Square—a tough-looking man with a moleskin cap pulled over his brow.
“Here’s thy feyther!” one of the girls exclaimed. The group stopped laughing and broke up. But the girl who was knitting went on knitting. When the man swore at her and bullied her and threatened her with his fist, she went on knitting but started to walk slowly out of the Square.
“Dom tha brazent impidence!” Frances heard him say. Frances never forgot this girl. Fifteen years later, changed into a pit-girl, she was the heroine of Frances’ first novel, That Lass O’ Lowrie’s. Up till this moment, heroines in Frances’ eyes had worn diamonds and silks. They had “luxuriant ringlets, brows of ivory, pink ears like ocean shells and the tiniest feet in the world”. Many later heroines would too. But this one was different.
Frances learnt to speak the dialect as well as anyone, though Mrs Hodgson did not realize it. Frances and her friends used to speak it when they were alone. There was a small boy called Tommy, whose family lived rent-free as caretakers in one of the big empty houses. “Eh,” he would say, “tha should heer my Grandfeyther sweer when he’s drunk. Tha never heard nothing loike it—tha didn’t.” When Frances’ curiosity was sufficiently aroused, he would oblige with a repetition of his grandfather’s choicest phrases. Frances was no longer the innocent small girl she had once been. Fighting was no longer something she read about in books. It was there on the streets, just beyond the iron gates. Black eyes, beer jugs broken over heads, they were common. “A row in Islington Court!” “There’s a man beating his wife in Back Sydney Street!” The cry would go up and the little girls would hover by the iron gates, hoping to see a policeman march by with somebody in custody. Occasionally they would see, as they stood at the gates, a stretcher party going by—carrying a weaver, caught and crushed by a loom as Frances’ hero, Surly Tim, was to be crushed years later.
But the outside world was not so exciting that it kept Frances away from books. She read voraciously, often getting into trouble for reading when they had visitors, for wanting—dreadful thought—to read at meals, for reading when out visiting. She discovered, in a desperate search for stories, the contents of her mother’s secretaire. On one occasion, she called this discovery of shelves full of books that were “not too old to read . . . the greatest event of her entire life”. Some of the books annoyed her intensely—gift books of verses called The Keepsake and The Final Tribute, with engravings of smooth-shouldered ladies with “sno
wy bosoms” and “ruby lips”. The phrases might come in useful but there were no stories there. She felt like kicking The Keepsake all over the room. The pretty binding was a cheat. But there were stories in some of the books of poetry. She found The Ancient Mariner and The Eve of St Agnes and Don Juan. She read Shakespeare and Scott. But it was Dickens and Thackeray who impressed her more, and they were the writers most often quoted and referred to in her own books.
And she used them all as fuel in her private games. She was conscious that other people thought her odd for talking to herself, and she normally whispered as she played and kept to an inconspicuous corner of the nursery, stopping in mid-sentence if she thought Edwina and Edith were listening. It was only later she developed her taste for an audience. But one day she was playing in the hall as she badly needed the candelabra stand at the bottom of the stairs—a product of the family firm—as a prop. She tied a black gutta-percha doll to the iron stand and lashed it with one of her brother’s toy whips. Her mother, the kind and gentle woman, was dismayed to come down the stairs and see the violent and furious child.
“I was only playing,” Frances said. “I was only pretending something.”
“It really quite distressed me,” her mother said afterwards to a friend, “I don’t think she is really a cruel child. I always thought her rather kind-hearted, but she was lashing that poor black doll and talking to herself like a little fury. She looked quite wicked. She said she was ‘pretending’. You know that is her way of playing. She does not play as Edith and Edwina do. She pretends her doll is somebody out of a story and she is somebody else. She is very romantic.”
It was only years later that Mrs Hodgson discovered that the black doll was Uncle Tom and that the violent Frances was the godless and cruel Simon Legree. Frances had been reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published the year she was three. It was her first impression of America and she became a fervent abolitionist. If the lot of the Backstreet children was a sad one, how much worse off were the Negroes of the South. At least “the English labourer is not sold, traded, parted from his family, whipped”. But the Negroes were far away. Frances had no idea she would ever see them. The Backstreet people were outside the iron gates, beyond the windows, even on the ceiling of her room. They could not be ignored.