Maggie Craig

by Marie Joseph

  Little Amos Smith was buried in the churchyard a few days later with all the village in attendance. Mr Jarvis, the undertaker, could always be relied upon to give a dignified performance, and the sight of his long thin face set into lines of professional suffering, held Maggie spellbound. Funerals fascinated her, and she often wondered who would bury Mr Jarvis when his turn came to die? Who would arrange for six men of equal height to carry the coffins, sometimes for miles, over rough unmade roads, over moorland and across streams, to the little churchyard? It never occurred to her that Mr Jarvis was merely doing a job; to Maggie he was the sole instrument of God, the middle-man between this world and the next.

  Hannah saw nothing wrong in having her four children lined up at the edge of the newly dug grave, heads suitably bowed, bunches of wild flowers in their hands. Thomas was not quite so sure, but his wife told him firmly that death was a part of living.

  ‘No good pretending it doesn’t happen. That’s what makes folks grow up frightened of it.’

  Thomas was to remember her words, when just two weeks later Hannah died of the undiagnosed diphtheria that had killed little Amos Smith.

  Hannah was afraid of dying. It showed in her eyes, and it showed in the desperate way she clung to his hands, and in the rasp of her tortured throat as she made him promise to keep the family together.

  ‘I promise,’ Thomas said, but he had no idea what it was she had asked him to promise. He was stunned. He was numbed. He could not and would not believe that his Hannah would leave him.

  She was his joy and his strength; he had the intelligence to realize that. He might be the one with the book-learning, but she was the one with the commonsense, the one with her feet on the ground. Without her he was nothing, nothing at all.

  Doctor Bates had been angry and amazed, when called to the School House. He had found Hannah already too far gone for him to do much more than demand to know why he had not been called out before?

  A choleric gentleman, with a nose that looked as if it might burst like a ripe plum at any minute, he shook his big head sadly when Thomas told how his wife had gone on working in the house, keeping to her rigid day-to-day timetable, even pretending to eat with them at table.

  ‘She swore she was just coming on with a cold, then when she was forced to take to her bed, I found a hunk of bread crumbled in her apron pocket. She must have dropped it in there so we would not notice. . . . Oh, God! What am I going to do?’

  ‘Why should God want to punish us like this?’ he cried, when Teddy followed his mother to the grave a week later, choked with his own spittle.

  ‘You’ve still got me, Dada,’ Maggie said, standing by his chair, solemn-eyed with the awfulness of it all.

  ‘And us,’ the twins added in unison.

  Thomas looked at them as if he did not know them; almost as if he had never seen them in his life before.

  For the rest of that summer, into the mists of autumn, on into the freezing winds of winter, Thomas Craig turned his back on life, teaching with automatic practice during the day, and leaving his three children to the kindly but intermittent care of the village women.

  The nights he read away, refusing to go up to the room he had shared with Hannah; dozing in his chair by the fire.

  At times Maggie would be awakened by the sound of wood being thrown on to the fire, and creeping downstairs, a matronly little figure in her long nightgown, she would find her father asleep, his arm trailing to the floor where a book had slipped from a listless hand. At seven years old, she accepted the fact that she would never see her mother again; an acceptance that Thomas, it seemed, would never acknowledge.

  The house grew dirty, with a layer of kitchen grease adhering to the pans that were seldom used; the children climbed in and out of unmade beds, and when one day Miss Hepinstall held her tongue from telling Maggie that potatoes could be grown in the tidemark round her neck, she decided the time had come to act.

  Leaving her mother settled down for the night, as comfortable as the old woman’s aching joints would ever let her be, she rammed her hat down over the black bun on top of her small head, skewered it into place with a pearl-handled hat-pin, buttoned her coat over her one-piece bosom, and heedless of the biting wind, set off for the School House.

  The door was on the latch, and after two brisk raps with the knocker, and getting no reply, she marched inside. From his customary seat by the fire, Thomas raised his head from his book and glared at her.

  Expecting the look and ignoring it, Miss Hepinstall wrinkled her nose at the smell of neglect, averted her spinsterly eyes from a pile of intimate washing spilling out from a tub in the corner, and sat herself down. Because she had come on an errand of mercy, she did so without wiping the seat of her chair first with her handkerchief. It would never do, she decided, to antagonize Thomas before she had even opened her mouth.

  He closed his eyes rudely, and willed her to go away. Since Hannah’s death he had as little to do with women as possible, hating them because they were alive and his wife was not. Besides, Miss Hepinstall was sitting in Hannah’s chair, as angular, dark and hard, as Hannah had been curved, brown of hair, and soft. Even the mask of kindness sat on the teacher’s face like a grimace. She leaned forward, resting gloved hands on her tall umbrella.

  ‘What I’ve come to say won’t take a minute, Mr Craig, but it’s got to be said; there’s nothing more certain than that.’

  The lift of Thomas’s eyebrows was an insult that a lesser woman would have flinched from, but used to her mother’s black looks and bitter tongue, Miss Hepinstall said in her loud penetrating voice:

  ‘How long are you going to sit there feeling sorry for yourself, Mr Craig? Your wife is not coming back, you know.’

  The words, as sudden as they were unexpected, hit Thomas like a blast of hot air from the carelessly opened door of a furnace. He actually rose from his seat, and for a moment Miss Hepinstall thought he was going to step forward and strike her. Then, with his fingers gripping the arms of his chair, he sank back again.

  The long umbrella was pointed directly at his face, as she went on with the saying of her piece:

  ‘If you carry on like this, the children will be taken from you, and you will end up in the Union Poorhouse. I’ve held my tongue for long enough, Mr Craig, and what I’m saying is only for your own good. I’ve never been one to mince my words, you know that.’ She took a necessary breath. ‘I’ve seen you standing up in front of your class with half your dinner spilt down your front, and I don’t mean just one day’s dinner neither. The discipline in the school has gone to pot, and your Maggie’s neck is that mucky I’ve a job to tell whether she’s taken her scarf off or not. Why, when your wife was alive, that child’s hair shone like the sun on a copper warming-pan. I would not be surprised to find that it’s alive with nits.’

  It was, it must have been, the mention of Maggie’s hair that did it. Shining like the sun on a copper warming-pan . . . like Hannah’s own hair, thick, long, clean-smelling hair, washed every week without fail with green soft soap.

  Thomas opened his mouth as if gasping for air. How often had she sat on the floor between his knees whilst he dried it for her? Hair that cascaded over his hands when he sometimes took the pins out for her at night, a tender prelude to their love-making. Upswept hair, with tiny curling tendrils wisping down into the soft hollow at the back of her neck. . . .

  Miss Hepinstall watched his mouth working with a kind of detached sympathy, already forming in her mind the wording of the suggestions of practical help she had in mind. She was totally unprepared for what happened next, and embarrassed to the point of panic when it did.

  With a great shout of anguish, an animal howl of grief, Thomas abandoned himself to the agony of loss multiplying silently inside him. With mouth wide open, and tears streaming down his face, he sobbed his torment, quite oblivious to the fact that Miss Hepinstall had crept away.

  Shocked and dismayed she walked back down the lane in the rain, the umbrella h
eld over her head but unopened and unfurled.

  And although neither of them made any reference to the visit, from that day onwards, things began to improve a little. Thomas took on a woman from the village, a forty-year-old widow, with faded hair drawn back so tightly that her expression was one of perpetual surprise.

  He would not have her about the house when he was there, so the minute he came in from school in the afternoon, she knew that was her signal to go. With no more than a nod in Thomas’s direction, she would fold up her print apron, lift the kettle from the fire and fill the teapot already warming in the hearth.

  ‘There’s your teas ready,’ she’d say, and Maggie would sit in Hannah’s old place at the table, pouring the tea into blue-edged cups. With two cushions on the chair to raise her up, she would slice a loaf into man-sized wedges for the boys, her pink tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘She’ll cut her fingers off one of these fine days,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Why does she have to do everything so fast?’ Benjamin wondered.

  ‘Because I’ll never get through if I don’t,’ said Maggie, crimson with importance.

  Thomas noticed nothing, and at the end of another drifting year, with only a token resistance from their father, the boys started work at the Quarries.

  They walked the five miles there and back, working mornings one week, and afternoons the next. Their job was to wheel the drilled-out stony rubbish away on four-wheeled bogies to the tip.

  ‘Hannah Craig would come back and haunt that husband of hers if she knew them two lads had gone as muck-chuckers,’ the village women said. ‘You’d have thought their father would have wanted something better for them.’

  But Jonathan and Benjamin grew tall and strong. They sang as they walked up the fell together, happy to be released for half a day from the tedium of book learning, and the closed-in boredom of their father’s classroom.

  In the mid-nineties, when Maggie was twelve years old, and there was talk of the Quarry being shut down, the two boys walked off together to the nearest recruiting centre and joined the army.

  They were jubilant from the moment of entering the Barracks, excited at the prospect of what promised to be a life of adventure, weaned completely and at once from the travesty of what had been a happy home.

  At the end of their first year of soldiery, with merely a handful of letters to remind Thomas that once he had two sons, the still heart-broken man had a stroke.

  Barely aware that anything had happened, he tried to talk to Maggie when she came downstairs, but the words he spoke were a meaningless jumble.

  Maggie was petrified.

  ‘Sit there, Dada,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘You’re poorly. Sit there and I’ll go and tell Doctor Bates.’ Fear made her heart flutter in her breast, and running helter-skelter down the lane she stopped first at Miss Hepinstall’s cottage.

  ‘Me father can’t talk,’ she said. ‘And his face looks funny.’

  ‘Daisy?’ Miss Hepinstall’s mother’s voice spiralled downstairs, and even in the middle of her bewildering anxiety, Maggie felt a twinge of surprise. Whoever would have thought that anyone as unflower-like as Miss could possibly be called Daisy?

  There was a short cut to the doctor’s house, and Maggie knew she would have to take it, in spite of the bull that had a nasty habit of running down the hill with its tail stuck up in the air, trying to jump the wall when anyone passed by in the lane; in spite of the fact that the lane itself was supposed to be haunted by a coach driven by a headless driver, she knew she had to go that way.

  She was solely responsible for her father now, just as Miss was responsible for her awful mother, and bulls with their tails stuck up in the air, and headless drivers of ghostly coaches were as nothing compared to the importance of that.

  With her face set into a determined mask, Maggie ran on, praying that God would save her if anything untoward happened.

  Thomas Craig never taught again after that day. Believing that he might find a mundane job in a factory, Doctor Bates somehow made the time to find them a terraced house to let in a cobbled street in the nearby cotton town, and another teacher and his family moved into the School House.

  The mill was no more than a stone’s throw from the back door of the little house at the bottom end of Foundry Street, and on the day after they moved in Maggie walked across the bridge over the canal to see the overlooker.

  He was a man with small eyes as hard as moorland stones, and he took Maggie on as a doffer. She started work at six o’clock in the morning, and spent her day running round the weaving shed with the bobbins. Her task was to fill the big basket skips, then, standing on a piece of wood because she was too small to reach the looms, she would put the bobbins on the machines, climb down, wheel the skip along the damp floor, and start all over again.

  Working without a break she ran home at dinner-time to make sure her father had a bite to eat, and if she was late back the overlooker would swear at her.

  ‘The old skinflint’s docked me money again,’ she would tell Thomas, and he would look at her as if it was her own fault.

  In the evenings there was the food for the following day to be seen to. There was the washing, the baking, the ironing, everything done to a set routine, just the way her mother had done it.

  Thomas, shrivelled into a tiny gnome of a man, followed her around, mumbling in the strange language that had got only minimally better since his stroke. ‘To think we should come to this,’ was what he was trying to say. ‘Oh why should the good Lord punish us like this?’ he would ask, but Maggie was usually too busy to listen.

  Because she was young and strong, the work got done somehow, but she was only twelve and a half years old, and after a long day in the mill, followed by an evening spent cleaning and cooking, she would fall into bed and feel as if she was dropping sheer away, down through the feather mattress into a sleep so deep it was a kind of dying.

  Her father’s face seemed to alter in bone structure as he complained in his hesitant speech of one cause of discontent after another. His eyes and cheeks sank into hollows, and he developed a nervous habit of rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, as if he were rolling a piece of bread into crumbs.

  At the end of a sultry July afternoon, Maggie came home from the mill with her cotton blouse sticking to her back with sweat. It ran uncomfortably down her sides, and stood out in glistening beads on her rounded forehead.

  There was nowhere to wash at the mill, and as she stood at the slopstone and splashed cold water over her face and arms, Thomas sat with his back decently turned, grumbling in his stuttering monotone:

  ‘I left the back door open today to catch what bit of air I could. I swear the noise of the looms shivered the ornaments on the mantelpiece. How you stick it I don’t know. Your mother would turn in her grave if she knew that you’d gone in the mill. You know she was set on you being a teacher, don’t you?’

  ‘Now how could I have gone to be a teacher and left you? Perhaps when you’re better and I’m older,’ Maggie said vaguely, soothing him, as she wiped herself dry on the coarse roller towel hanging behind the back door.

  The soap she had washed herself with was the same mottled soap she used for scrubbing the floor and the washing, but her skin was as petal soft as the wild roses in the hedges bisecting the fields of her country home. Smoothing her hair down with still damp hands she went to stand in front of Thomas, challenging him to meet her eyes.

  But her father never looked anyone straight in the face nowadays.

  ‘Look at me, Father!’ Maggie ordered. ‘Come on! I’m going to give you a bit of a telling off.’

  Thomas’s eyes slid away, indicating that he was not interested in anything she might have to say, but Maggie persevered.

  ‘There’s nothing to stop you walking up to the park now, is there? I know you walk slow, but you’ve all day to get there and back. I’ll make you a bite to take with you if you like.’ Exasperated, she put both hands o
n her hips.

  ‘Father! Listen to me! It’s not doing you any good just sitting here in the house. You’re going to start growing into that chair if you’re not careful.’

  Thomas’s eyes were dreamy. ‘How like your mother you are when you get your paddy up. You grow more like her every day.’

  ‘The park,’ Maggie repeated.

  Thomas nodded, as if the meaning of the word had just become clear to him.

  ‘Oh, yes, the park.’ His words became jumbled as he went on. ‘Well, I admit I did like going there once or twice, when we came here at first.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Just to see a glimpse of green, but it’s not the green we used to know, Maggie. That green is mucky green. The grime in the air has filtered down and coated the grass with a film of soot. It has, Maggie.’ He held both hands idle on his lap and began to roll the fingers and thumbs together. ‘I picked a blade and pulled it through my fingers, and do you know what? They were coated with filth. No, I’m better off staying in.’

  ‘But you can’t stay in for the rest of your life!’

  Maggie pulled a clean blouse over her head. ‘You can turn round now, Father.’

  But he had said his say, and was gone from her again, staring at nothing, wishing back a life that would never be again.

  At the end of that year, he walked no further than the row of shops at the top of the street, making his laborious way, shuffling his feet, his eyes downcast, like an old man searching for his last halfpenny.

  ‘I can’t seem to cheer him up at all,’ Maggie wrote to her brothers, posting it off to their regimental address with the feeling that she might as well be posting it into a tree.

  Doctor Bates surprised her one Saturday afternoon, riding out from the village in a hill farmer’s high trap which was delivering eggs to the market stalls.

  ‘I’ve to be back there to meet him in under the hour,’ he said. ‘Is your father upstairs, Maggie?’

  She was down on her knees polishing the fire-brasses when he came down again, wrapping them in an old sheet to keep them clean and shining for Sunday, the way her mother had always done. But as soon as she saw the doctor she stood up and stared at him, anxiety creasing her forehead like a roll of corrugated cardboard.