Field of Dust

by Angela Jean Young

  Flossie and Jessie had meanwhile made their way over to the ponies that were being tended by some of the boys in blue. Assisted onto their mounts, they were supported in their seats by one lad, while another made the ponies trot.

  ‘Oh, we are having such a lovely gallop,’ Jessie squealed coquettishly, tossing her abundant hair back and fluttering her eyelashes at her groom. ‘Can we go faster?’

  Flossie shot her a look of dismay. She already felt she was on a fairground dobby ride and certainly had no desire to increase her speed. Jessie dug her heels into the pony’s sides and went off at a canter over the brow of the hill. As the boys ran to catch up, Flossie realised that something was wrong when she heard one of them shout. Jessie’s pony had stopped short of some trees. Within seconds they reached the spot to find her lying on a patch of soft turf. Her white face had a little trickle of blood coming from her nose, but she seemed otherwise unhurt. ‘The silly pony threw me,’ she simpered as a boy with dark hair and green eyes lifted her gently up and held on to her hand. ‘I think I need to sit here awhile.’

  Flossie watched in amazement at the ease with which her friend chatted to the young man. It was obvious she liked him, and he clearly liked her.

  ‘The other training ship, downriver, is the Worcester,’ he told her, ‘for boys whose parents can pay. They end up being officers on the great merchant vessels. But our lives are a bit different.’

  Jessie nodded, wide-eyed, as he continued.

  ‘We can get the birch now we’re fourteen. There are strict rules, though, and only the captain can do it. You get ten cuts for stealing and twelve for absconding.’

  ‘Oh my goodness, how shocking,’ said Jessie, sounding quite different to the girl Flossie knew.

  ‘Worst crime is immoral behaviour, that’s twenty-four cuts and dismissal with disgrace. None of us would take the risk of getting thrown out of the old Arethusa, though.’

  His name was Silas, not that Jessie was aware of it as she stared into his green eyes. Nor was she taking in the additional facts he imparted about the Arethusa being a warship with fifty-three guns, having bombarded Odessa during the Crimean War six-and-twenty years ago. But Flossie did, and breathed a sigh of relief when the church bells indicated it was time for tea.

  As they made their way back up the slope with the ponies, Jessie bid a lingering goodbye to Silas and re-joined her friend, who was already scouring the lines of infants opposite the catering tent to see what had happened to Lottie. Luckily she found her smiling and laughing, which brought her great relief. Before the band struck up again they all sat patiently waiting while Reverend Southgate said grace, then with a loud ‘amen’ made a beeline for the cakes and buns.

  With the light fading, the meadow dimmed to a dark green and the final part of the special day got underway. The verger busied himself setting up a magic lantern show while some choirboys shinned up two adjoining trees and hung a large white sheet between them. With the younger children having gone home, all the rest grouped together on the grass in eager anticipation. Alone in London and Overland to India weren’t much fun, but The Pied Piper of Hamelin was suitably gruesome and thoroughly entertaining.

  Much revelry followed as Pied Piper Henry and his assistant Albert chased the girls from The Creek along the Undershore before bolting off somewhere. Stopping to get their breath back, Flossie and Jess gazed in awe at the bright lights appearing on the Essex bank and the blue lamps of the numerous ships lying at anchor on the shimmering steel-grey belt of the river.

  It had been a lovely day, but the end of the school treat meant the end of the school year and Jessie’s last days of freedom. Nell Larkin had wasted no time in securing her daughter a position the moment she turned twelve. Jess, who was almost a year older than Flossie, was soon to start as a scullery maid at number 16 Burch Road, the home of Mr Dunlop, master of Rosherville Pier. The girls had already walked past the house a few times and stared in at the finery.

  ‘I wonder how many fires there are?’ Jess groaned as they stood at the bottom of the flight of white marble steps leading up to the glass-panelled front door. ‘I’ve been told I’ll have to get up at five to light them all.’

  Too sad for idle conversation, they took each other’s hands and walked home, listening to the lapping of the water and the swishing sails of the tall ships leaving on the evening tide. Flossie wondered where Mary would find her a scullery-maid’s job, and hoped that her one afternoon off would coincide with Jess’.

  Having finished her chores at home, Flossie was only too pleased to accompany old Annie Devonshire on an afternoon walk to Gravesend. Annie’s stiff legs made the going slow, so there needed to be frequent rests to look at the scenery and chat. Once past the noisiest of the cement works, they stopped at Ben Woods Old Wharf where Humber coal was being unloaded from a picturesque Yorkshire Billy-Boy schooner. It was a clear day and they could see that the construction of the new docks at Tilbury was moving along fast.

  On passing two impressive properties that had the London Portland Cement Works sandwiched in between them, Annie sighed. ‘It looked very pleasant here until the factories came,’ she said wistfully. ‘Look at that monstrosity stuck between Cliff House and Howard House! Just like Orme House in The Creek. That was beautiful too until they knocked it down, just before you moved here.’

  Continuing on, Flossie felt like they were walking in a wild garden, through flowering brambles that spread up the steep chalk escarpment. So many years had passed since the chalk had been dug out that the huge, desolate pits now resembled a prehistoric valley.

  ‘Everyone around here suffered from the whiteness at the time. Some of the older women wore thick veils to protect them from the reflection in the sunlight,’ remembered Annie.

  As they continued through the overgrown wasteland, the noise of the factories began to recede and they found themselves at Pitcher’s deserted dockyard. Entering though a castellated gateway, discoloured by weather and years, both stopped to observe the forlorn remains of the castle, once the residence of the shipyard owner.

  ‘Supposed to have been built using stone from the old London Bridge,’ Annie said, resting against a tree stump. ‘Pitcher’s was respected the world over. Even the imperial Russian fleet was refitted here. In fact, they were here so long that midshipman Rimsky-Korsakov had time to compose his first symphony.’

  Flossie’s eyes widened in amazement.

  ‘I can remember when the East India Company had their ships built here, the place was so busy. The noise of a thousand workmen pounding hammers all day long was tremendous, my father being one of them. People round here used to love the sound of the hammers. Meant that food was going to be on their tables. But after they had built gunboats for the Crimea, the yard closed and all the men were thrown out of work. That’s until the cement factories came, of course, then the jobs returned.’

  Annie signalled to Flossie to help her up. She straightened her neat bonnet, linked arms with her young companion and the pair shuffled off down Dock Row, built by Pitcher for his workers, to the edge of the river. Looking out towards the estuary, Annie became very quiet. Sensing she was deep in thought, Flossie moved away slightly and, picking up a few stones, threw some into the water, watching the circular ripples as they skimmed the surface. Eventually Annie called Flossie over.

  ‘My Joseph’s been gone seven years now. Just been working it out. Did I ever tell you what happened to him?’

  Flossie shook her head. She knew from Mary that Annie’s husband had drowned, but not how.

  ‘He was on the Northfleet when it sank. Two hundred and ninety-one were drowned. He’d only been on board nine days, heading for Tasmania.’ Annie wiped her eyes with her handkerchief and took a deep breath. ‘My father helped build that ship twenty years ago and Joe had been all over the place – Australia, India, China, you name it. Then he goes and drowns in the English Channel. What makes matters w
orse, the steamer that rammed her reversed engines and left without doing anything to help. Didn’t even signal to others. Terrible shock, it all was.’

  The Northfleet was a full rigged ship, chartered for three months to carry 376 assisted emigrants, mostly navvies and their families; forty crew members and a cargo of 450 tons of iron rails and equipment to build a railway line in Tasmania. After leaving Gravesend, bad weather forced the ship to drop anchor two miles offshore from Dungeness. During the night, a large, outward-bound steamer travelling at full speed struck the Northfleet amidships, making a clean breach in her timbers beneath the waterline. The ship went down in three quarters of an hour. Eighty-five people were saved, but of all the rest, only six bodies were ever found, four of them never identified. The Spanish iron-hulled steamer Murillo was named as the vessel responsible. When the undamaged ship docked at Cadiz, the watch crew were arrested, but they were never tried, there being no extradition treaty between the two countries.

  ‘The only thing I have to console me is a letter sent from the pilot in charge, who had taken to the mizzen topmast and was rescued. He wrote that he last saw my Joe manning the pumps below, sticking at it till the bitter end, even though it was pointless. Did me good knowing that because the newspapers said the crew were out to save themselves first. The captain had to draw his revolver and shoot one of them in the leg when they defied his orders to put the women and children in the lifeboats first. Even then, only one woman and two children were rescued. The City of London picked up one little girl about your age. Nobody knew who she was, or what to do with her, as both her parents had perished. It was hard to live that down, I can tell you.’

  It was all too shocking. Flossie held on to Annie’s hand tightly as they continued silently in the shade of the cliffs on an ever-widening path that eventually joined the smart Clifton Marine Parade. Deciding that she could go no further without a cooling drink, Annie went into The Hit and Miss for two glasses of ginger beer, while Flossie gazed in awe at the multitude of pure-white sails circling around the Royal Thames Yacht Club and the shimmering domes and minarets of the exotic Clifton Baths.

  ‘Joe always said how they made it look like the buildings he’d seen in India,’ Annie said as she handed Flossie her drink on her return. ‘Inside there’s one pool for men and another for women, and hot, cold and vapour baths for the languid. Never fancied it meself, but I’ve made use of the old bathing machines on the foreshore to take a dip in the river.’

  Reaching the town pier, they paid the penny entrance and descended the steps at the end to the landing stage. If the ships and steamers looked large passing Northfleet, they appeared gigantic here, riding at anchor. Flossie gasped as one of the great steamships of the Orient line swept by on her way to the docks. It was as close as she’d ever been to one of these leviathans, and it took her breath away.

  ‘There was as many as three thousand tall-masted ships in the river on any one day,’ Annie continued with a sweep of the hand. ‘That’s why they tried building a tunnel from Rotherhithe to Wapping to get cargo across without having to stop the ships. Brunel came up with a way to dig it out and used our Roman cement, but it was the worst job in the world. Six men drowned and Brunel himself barely escaped with his life.’

  Flossie vaguely remembered Sam trying to tell her about the tunnel debacle, but she had been too young to take it in.

  ‘Took a while to finish and in the end, it was only used by pedestrians. The money ran out before they could build the ramps for the cargo. Mind you, on the first day, fifty thousand people paid a penny to walk through it and by the end of three months, a million had done it. They called it the Eighth Wonder of the World.’

  ‘Did you go?’ Flossie was now utterly engrossed in the story.

  ‘Certainly I did. Couldn’t go down all those marble steps today, but I was younger then and, besides, the walls were full of pictures and statues to take your mind off being underwater. What’s more, when we stopped to rest on the first platform, someone was playing a huge organ. At the bottom there were some fifty arches lit with gas burners that made them as bright as the sun. I’ve never seen shops like it – polished marble counters and gilded shelves full of fancy wares and curiosities. And there were all sorts of contrivances to make you spend your money, from Egyptian necromancers to dancing monkeys.’

  ‘Gracious!’ Flossie exclaimed. ‘I wish I could have seen it.’

  ‘Very different now, my girl. About ten years ago steam trains started to run through the tunnel. Some say it’s terrible down there now for the drivers and firemen – no ventilation shafts under the river.’

  As the sun started to weaken, Annie declared she was too tired to walk all the way home. So, after buying a pint of brown shrimps for her supper, they made their way back up Bath Street, to St. James’ Church. Mr Jennings, of The Wheatsheaf Tavern opposite, had recently started a horse-drawn omnibus service between the church and Huggens College.

  ‘If we make out we are ladies of reduced means from the alms houses, we might get on for half price,’ Annie joked.

  Riding back in comfort, the old lady slept with her latest penny dreadful unopened on her lap. Flossie mused over all the things she had seen and heard on their long walk. Annie had experienced so much during her long life – some wonderful things, some very cruel – yet she had managed to rise above it all and survive. Flossie had great admiration for her.

  8

  ‘Can you hear the voices? Must be more than half a dozen of them, poor souls.’

  Sam was perched right on the end of the slipway, desperately trying to peer through the dense fog. Everyone was quiet, listening for the faint cries of help coming from the freezing water. Unfortunately, surrounding vessels were sounding their foghorns, which only made the situation worse. It was hopeless.

  ‘Get the children back indoors. Nothing good’s going to come of this,’ Sam shouted.

  Flossie couldn’t make out where her father was in the murk, despite him being only a few feet away. The cold, wet, cement-ridden air was hurting her lungs and her clothes were soaked through.

  From somewhere Mary emerged, ghostlike, her sodden hair falling limply about her shoulders. ‘Go find Tom Handley,’ she rasped, grabbing hold of her daughter’s arm, ‘and fetch him here. Go on, girl…’

  Sam had seen Tom tie his fishing boat up earlier, so with it being Christmas Day, he was likely to be at home. Pushing her eldest daughter off into the greyness, Mary located Kate Bailey’s boys and, forming a human chain, they made their way slowly back to the safety of their house.

  It was a terrible end to what had been a wonderful day in The Creek. The Grants and their lodgers had been welcomed into the Baileys’ warm, bright parlour while nine sailors from a ship moored in the estuary had rowed over to enjoy the hospitality provided by The Hope Inn. Come the evening, the men finally dragged themselves away from the warmth of the bar to make their return. Several minutes later, as Patrick Delaney opened The Hope’s privy door, he heard a commotion which he immediately recognised as the sound of their boat overturning. Raising the alarm, Creek residents arrived en masse with as many lamps as they could muster and lined the shore to create a beacon of light. But there was nothing to be seen through the impenetrable fog, and it soon became clear that the men were lost.

  As Flossie ran along Grove Road on her mission, she became aware of footsteps close on her heels.

  ‘I’m not chasing you, just think I can get there faster than you,’ a voice rang out from behind her. It was a young man running at breakneck speed in the direction of Park Place. As it was obvious he was going to get to Tom’s house before her, she decided to turn back.

  By the time Tom and his messenger arrived at the slipway, there was just one eerie cry sounding far out from the shore, and soon, it too was no more.

  Sam’s voice eventually broke the silence. ‘Thanks for coming, Tom, but there’s nothing you can do,’
he said forlornly. ‘They are all lost. Best get back here as soon as the fog lifts, I expect it’ll be five bob a body, like usual.’

  As the crowds started to disperse, Flossie felt a tap on her shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry if I startled you earlier.’

  Swivelling round, she found herself staring into the eyes of the young man who had raced past her.

  ‘I hoped we might get to the men in time. I wonder if anyone is left aboard their ship?’

  Taken aback, it took a few seconds before she realised she’d seen him before, standing by the large gun, a Crimean War trophy, in front of Grove House. He had looked important in his blue steel spectacles with papers under his arm and, close up, he was very different from the other boys she knew. For one thing, his cap and coat looked sturdy and warm and obviously not second-hand. His fingernails had no trace of dirt under them and his fair skin wasn’t rough. He was of slight build with no sign of ugly muscles, and every inch of him looked well-scrubbed. Florence Grant was intrigued, if not a little smitten.

  ‘I’m Sydney, Sydney Gibbons,’ he said, removing his cap.