Flossie’s head jerked as rapturous applause greeted Lady Darnley’s tribute. With no sign of it stopping, Jessie grabbed Flossie’s hand and gestured towards the gates. She had to get back to Tilbury before dark, so they had already planned to catch a tram from Wellington Street back to Rosherville. Thankfully it wasn’t long before they were well on their way.
As they were deciding what to tell Annie about her hero’s memorial garden, the girls became aware of a commotion going on around them. They seemed to be slowing down. A large group of boys had decided to race the tram horse along the long stretch of the Overcliffe and were getting too close to the tram.
‘Urchins!’ the conductor yelled as the raucous tribe weaved from one side to the other. ‘You’ll be for it!’
‘General Gordon’s boys wouldn’t have done that,’ whispered Jess.
Both girls laughed guiltily as they descended from the tram and rushed off down Pier Road.
Kissing one another on the cheek, they barely had time to say goodbye before the horn sounded and the ferry headed off across the river. Flossie waved frantically until she could see her friend no more. It had been wonderful see each other again, and they had already made plans for another get-together. As she turned to walk back towards The Creek, it didn’t take long before thoughts of Sam returned. Mulling things over, it was clear to her that she couldn’t put it off any longer. She had to find him and face up to the inevitable revelations that were bound to come.
13
It was Joe Ollerenshaw who opened the door of number 17 Lawn Road. He didn’t recognise Flossie at first, which was hardly surprising, being distracted as he was by a bunch of small children hanging on to his legs. Two more were pulling him backwards into the hall by his braces. Every time he attempted to swat them off, they came springing straight back.
‘Oh my goodness, it’s young Flossie, isn’t it?’ he said with a surprised look on his face. Flossie was amused that he obviously still saw her as a twelve-year-old girl in pigtails.
‘Whoa, Neddy!’ a child shrieked from behind, at which point Joe’s braces were pulled so hard that he and his appendages all fell backwards onto the floor. Fearing that the smallest child would be crushed under Joe’s legs, Flossie jumped to the rescue and, with help from all the others, hauled him upright again.
‘Thanks.’ He grinned, picking up a squealing girl and tucking her under his arm. ‘You’d better come in.’
As she squeezed past him the whole group lurched into the chaotic kitchen. There was nowhere to sit. Clothes lay everywhere, some damp, some dirty. Tidying was evidently one task Joe couldn’t manage. Seeing Flossie’s eyes darting from child to child, he scratched his head, weighing up what he thought he should say.
‘They’re not all mine. Been laid off. Moved to Crown but they fell on hard times, just my luck. So I’m lumbered looking after the kids while me wife goes out charring.’
Flossie nodded, studying the faces of the assembled brood carefully. Realising he had to say something, Joe grabbed three of the children and thrust them forward.
‘These here are Sam’s. I’m minding them today as well, while Lizzie’s washing pots in The Red Lion.’
One was just a baby, a few months at best; the next a boy who looked about two; and then an older girl.
‘I’m Henrietta Gant and I’m four,’ the rosy-cheeked child with long ringlets piped up. ‘Do you know my pa?’
‘Yes.’ Flossie smiled, touching her chestnut hair. ‘But I haven’t seen him in a while.’
‘He’s on late shift, but Ma’ll be back soon. Do you know her too?’
‘No,’ I haven’t met your ma,’ Flossie replied with an anxious look. ‘But I’m sure she’s very nice.’ The thought of meeting Sam’s wife like this alarmed her.
Moving towards the door, she fluttered her fingers at the gaggle of children. ‘I must be going. I’ll come back another time.’
The little girl followed her out, with Joe holding on to her ringlets.
‘I kept my nose out of what was going on when Mary took you away,’ he half-whispered as he opened the front door. ‘So I can only speak as I find. Sam cares for these bairns just like he did you and Lottie, and he’s got a good heart. He’s let me and the wife live here for nothing, till I gets another job.’
Flossie had to lift her skirts up high as she picked her way through debris and muck to the top of Lawn Road. Like many other roads in the area, it had been taken up by the gas company whilst laying the main and left in poor repair. Grateful to reach the hill with its new concrete pavements with deep kerbs, she smiled on seeing that the same family were running the post and telegraph office. Purchasing a stamp for her next letter to Lottie, she made for a seat on the green outside the church. Somewhere in the distance, probably at the entrance to the gardens, she could hear the familiar strains of the Webb Family Band. Her mind was racing – if Henrietta was four, Mary must have found out that Sam had made another woman pregnant. That’s why she left.
Early the next morning, there was a knock at the Baileys’ front door.
‘Do you want me to answer it?’ Kate said, both of them suspecting who it might be.
Flossie nodded, bracing herself for the moment she had longed for, yet dreaded.
‘Go into the parlour, I’ll keep the young ’uns busy in the kitchen.’
‘Is she here?’ a man’s voice echoed from outside. There was no mistaking that voice. It was Sam.
Kate let him into the parlour where Flossie stood nervously, tears stinging the backs of her eyes. He looked smaller somehow, cap in hand, running his fingers through his thick hair as he spoke.
‘Oh, my darling daughter, I am so pleased to see you.’ He moved towards her with his arms outstretched and, despite her reservations, she let him hug her. They clung to one another for a long minute, the familiar smells of tobacco and cement dust reminding her of her childhood. But it was she who broke free first, her eyes flashing and anger in her voice.
‘You dare to call me your daughter? If you believe that to be true, why didn’t you come looking for me?’
Sam blanched and lowered his head, allowing Flossie to vent her rage.
‘Not once in all those years did that question ever leave me. You must have known my mother would go back to Henry again, so you could have followed. Why didn’t you? Do you expect me to forgive you for this?’
At that point she broke down, unable to hold back the tears any more. Sam wanted to comfort her, but she turned away, wiping her eyes.
‘I have no excuses, Flossie, and no answers that will satisfy you,’ he said wearily. ‘I was simply worn out by it all. Mary had told me so many times in her drunken rages that that profligate Henry Oxer had fathered you as well as Lottie; it was easiest to believe it in the end. Easiest to think it was better for you to be with your rightful parents, who she seemed to think were destined to be together. Not like she and I were, with no contentment from the very beginning. I thought about you often, but I told myself that your mother would drink less if she was happier, and that could only be better for you girls.’
Pulling a grey handkerchief out of his waistcoat pocket, Sam placed his hands on her arms and turned her around to face him, gently wiping her eyes.
‘You have to believe me, Flossie. I loved you girls and, had things worked out different, we might still be together. Now look at you – you’ve turned out to be a real beauty, lass. I hoped and prayed I’d made the right decision to leave well alone. Reckon I did.’
Flossie looked at him carefully, suspicious that he had done nothing more than what was convenient for him, and decided this was not the time to enlighten him as to what really happened, nor to confront him about his other family. There would be opportunity enough to inform him that Mary had never intended to include her daughters in her reunion with her husband, no doubt to spare them witnessing the Oxers’ life of drunkenness,
thieving and violence in Ipswich. If fate had decreed that the girls were to be left in the hands of Dr Barnardo, maybe that had been for the best, though Lottie would need a lot of convincing about that.
Two weeks later, Henrietta, Samuel George and Alfred James Gant were all baptised together at St. Botolph’s Church. Flossie thought it churlish not to attend, but asked Jessie to come along for moral support. It was a somewhat unruly affair with so many around the small font, but Sam and Lizzie laughed and smiled as they juggled their children. Flossie was embarrassed to feel a pang of jealousy as she watched their obvious mutual devotion. It wasn’t hard to see what Sam saw in this comely young woman with fair hair and clear skin. Her sparkling eyes were so alive, so very different from Mary’s.
Heading for The Dorset Arms afterwards, Lizzie took Flossie’s arm and held her back slightly from the rest of the party. ‘I can see you are ill at ease being here,’ she said, now so close that Flossie could feel her large bosom pushing into her side. ‘I understand why you think badly of him, but men are weak, leastways that’s what my mam always says. You can’t expect anything else after the way Mary treated him.’
Lizzie stopped walking and turned to face Flossie squarely. ‘It has to be said, I know she’s your mother, but she near broke him. He turned to me for comfort and then cried like a baby himself when he heard I was carrying his child.’
Flossie suddenly became aware of just how young Sam’s wife was as she watched the tears pour down her rosy cheeks, Sunday best bonnet all askew.
‘I was worried sick whether he’d do right by me and Henrietta, but just look at him.’
Flossie turned to see Sam and Joe Ollerenshaw on the other side of the road by the old chalk pit, balancing perilously on the edge, pretending to throw a screaming Jessie over. All the children were jumping up and down excitedly as the men clowned about, causing as much mayhem as possible.
‘See what I mean?’ Lizzie said to Flossie.
Flossie couldn’t deny Sam looked the perfect father, but it did nothing to relieve her own feelings of abandonment by him.
By the time Jessie had finished straightening her skirts and ticking the men off for their foolishness, everyone was in much need of refreshment. Turning into Dorset Close, a safe cul-de-sac where the older children could be left in charge of the babies, Sam bought them some fruit pastilles and chocolate beans from a confectioner’s cart before heading into the pub with the adults.
Through Lizzie, Flossie came to learn that when Sam and Mary first arrived in Milton, Sam got a job as a coal porter with Lizzie’s father. The Davies family lived in Crooked Lane, and after Mary went back to Ipswich the first time they invited Sam into their home and did their best to console him. Lizzie was still young then, but by the time her father died, she was seventeen and working as a domestic servant. Sam returned the support given to him all those years before by helping Sarah Ann Davies and her four children when, almost penniless, they were forced to move into Brewhouse Yard. It was here that Sam started a relationship with Lizzie, and here that she gave birth to Henrietta in 1882, six months after Mary left Flossie and Lottie at Dr Barnardo’s. Sam subsequently moved in and made Lizzie his real wife at Holy Trinity Church, Milton in February the following year.
As Sam raised his glass to his freshly baptised family, Flossie had to smile at the irony of the situation. Albeit with a new wife and different children, Samuel Gant was firmly back in Northfleet.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Lizzie said a bit later, ‘it’s too lovely a day to be stuck in here. Let’s go up Windmill Hill.’
‘Be full of Londoners off the steamers, seeing as it’s a Sunday,’ Sam replied uncertainly.
‘Nothing like as many as used to come. Do let’s, it’ll make a lovely end to the day.’ Lizzie had clearly made up her mind, and was already putting the baby back into his pram.
‘You’ll come too Floss, won’t you? And you Jess? Sam added almost pleadingly. I promise we’ll be back in time for your ferry.’
Jessie and Flossie looked at one another knowing they couldn’t refuse.
Strolling up Windmill Street an hour or so later, it wasn’t hard to see why it was one of the most prominent and frequented streets in Gravesend. Set back from the road, the cottages and villas had extensive frontages with lime and flowering laburnum trees bending gracefully in the breeze. Out of breath climbing the hill, the adults were overtaken by the children, who had spotted some donkeys. Sam and Joe chased after them, ferreting in their pockets for pennies. Flossie thought the windmill, which was well over a hundred years old, was looking a bit frail, but she joined Lizzie and Jess in the queue to climb the twenty feet to the viewing balcony. With its sails no longer turning, it was now being used as an observatory and camera obscura. Flossie lifted her skirts to mount the rickety steps, holding on tightly to the rail at the summit. There was no denying that the view was splendid. Wheat fields, orchards and arable lands stretched out as far as the eye could see.
‘I told you it would be perfect,’ sighed Lizzie. ‘Hardly a cloud in the sky and no cement dust in your lungs. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could hang your washing out up here?’
The girls roared with laughter as Lizzie pictured Sam’s combinations and her bloomers circling on the sails of the windmill. Despite her initial misgivings, Flossie found herself warming to Sam’s wife. She was a straightforward, down-to-earth woman who was doing her best to welcome Flossie into her family.
A passenger liner, the size of which Flossie had never seen before on the Thames, suddenly caught her attention. It was undertaking some deft manoeuvring into Tilbury Dock.
‘That’s the RMS Ormuz, destined for Australia,’ Jessie said proudly. ‘The Orient Pacific Line has just transferred its business here from Liverpool.’
Excited by what they had seen, the group descended the windmill, Sam and Joe heading for The Belle-View hostelry while the women enjoyed a welcome cup of tea at a kiosk. Refreshed, they took a short cut down Shrubbery Hill, a beautiful, natural wilderness that proved hard going, tangling their stockings in the wild brambles and catching the wheels of the pram in the undergrowth. Confronted by a stagnant pond, Sam and Joe rolled up their trousers and waded in, forming a human chain to allow the children to be carried across to Lizzie. Each delivery soaked her best skirt with foul water, but it didn’t bother her in the least. Looking at all their beaming, happy faces Flossie realised what she had missed out on. Sam was a different person with Lizzie.
Further on, the terrain became crumbly and unstable. The children loved it. For them it was a great adventure – akin to Livingstone and Stanley in deepest Africa – which they re-enacted all the way to the pier.
Having bid farewell to Jess, they treated themselves to a much-needed tram ride home, despite it costing tuppence each. Exhausted, Flossie slumped into her makeshift bed at Kate’s and had the best night’s sleep she’d had in ages. She had no inkling then that within a very short time, she would find herself back in church, this time on a less joyful occasion.
Still holding the letter from Fred Oxer, she stepped off the train in Ipswich, heart in mouth, barely able to believe it had been just a few short weeks since she’d left.
With no time to spare, she took the horse-drawn tramway from the railway station to Cornhill, in the town centre. Counting the passengers to take her mind off her destination, it struck her how strong the single horse must be to pull twenty-three people and a heavy tram. Soon she would see another single horse leaving St. John’s Home, the children’s branch of the Great Whip Workhouse, this time bearing a far lighter load.
It had taken some time for Bessie Turner to pass on the scribbled note sent to Flossie at Sam’s last known address. There was nothing much in it, just the barest details surrounding the death and impending funeral of little Henry George. It seemed that constant diarrhoea had left him too weak to survive in the workhouse where he’d been put shortly a
fter Flossie had left.
There had been little time to make arrangements, but Flossie knew she had to attend. Now, standing around the grave in the freezing air, grief overcame her. The circumstances of his death were bad enough, but seeing that her mother was not amongst the mourners was too much to bear. Fortunately, Henry Senior had been released from gaol on compassionate grounds and so was able to place his son’s tiny coffin into the ground – paid for by the Union. This was Flossie’s first encounter with him. As they listened to the service, she fixed her gaze upon his fair, wavy hair, so similar to Lottie’s and so unlike her own. He had dulled, sunken eyes, no doubt the result of the demon drink.
The sombre gathering headed for The Lion and Lamb, where, with a tot of rum warming her insides, she watched Henry slowly drown his sorrows before starting a rant against Mary and her family.
‘Of course you wouldn’t know this,’ he spat at Flossie, spilling his beer as he swayed to and fro, ‘but why would you? It all began when we lived in Dove Lane with her mother, Fanny Allen. It was she who looked after you and Lottie all day while my esteemed wife was in the alehouse. Trouble was, she kept arguing. Right nasty, she could be. Started hitting me one day, so I told her to sling her hook. Our Mary didn’t like that, not that it stopped her drinking, and she still left you children on your own. So I gets cross and hits her for it, but she tells the coppers I’d hit her for complaining about not having any money for food!’
Flossie just stared at him, his indignation lost on her. Irresistible as he might be to her mother, all she could see was a feckless, weasel-faced, small-framed wastrel who bragged constantly about who he was going to fight next. Having taken an immediate dislike to the man, there was no way she was ever going to believe that he was her father.
Field of Dust Page 15