An Orphan's Secret

by Maggie Hope

  ‘Where’s Da?’ Meg asked at last, thinking how he would hate the pit. He was even nervous of being in the pantry if the door was shut. Poor Da didn’t like to be shut in.

  ‘He’s gone to see the carrier. He can’t go traipsing about the country with a handcart nowadays, there’s too much stuff for that. And your da and you can ride with the carrier. That’ll save the fares on the train, any road.’

  ‘We’re not going tonight?’ Alarm rose in Meg. ‘What about my job at the lighthouse?’

  ‘Oh, aye, you’ll have to run along and tell them. You’ll mebbe lose a day’s pay, but it can’t be helped. If we go, you have to come with us.’

  ‘We’re going tonight!’ Meg couldn’t believe it. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before? Are we doing a flit?’

  ‘No, we’re not going tonight – tomorrow we’re going. An’ we’ll pay the rent an’ all, we’ll leave no debt behind us. Not like that lot down the street who did a flit. Now, hadaway with you to the lighthouse and take the bairn with you. It’ll keep him out of my feet.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

  Hannah bit her lip. ‘Eeh, lass, we didn’t want to upset you, not till we heard from our Phoebe that it was all right. But mind, you’ll like it there. Phoebe says she’s got us a grand house with a backyard and a garden. Howay now, there’s a lot to do, I’m telling you.’

  Meg wiped most of the coal dust from Miley’s chubby cheeks and settled him on her hip. Then she walked along to the lighthouse, to see the keeper. At least he was understanding when she stood before him and told him she was leaving.

  ‘Me da’s got a job inland,’ she mumbled, still hardly believing it herself yet. ‘Can I have the day’s pay?’

  The lighthouse keeper regarded the sturdy young girl with her brother straddling one hip and sighed regretfully.

  ‘Aye, well, if you have to go, you have to,’ he said philosophically. And he handed her the day’s pay she was owed. After all, there were plenty of young lasses who would jump at the work. But would he find another worker like Meg?

  She loitered a little on her way home with the pennies clutched in her hand. By, Mam would be pleased she’d got her money after all. She felt a rush of affection for the kindly lighthouse keeper. He didn’t have to pay her, she knew, not when he’d had no notice.

  Walking slowly home, with Miles holding on to her hand and toddling unsteadily beside her, Meg took a good look round at the place where she’d been happy. The bright sea now shimmered in the evening sunlight, calmly rolled in on the soft sands, made the barest splashing on the rocks. She passed the school where she had learned to write in an elegant copperplate and read the religious primers, all for threepence a week. The money had been hard to find but Hannah, who could neither read nor write, was determined that her children would get the chance.

  Meg stared up at the grim stone building, remembering the rapped knuckles she had often received from the master, mostly for talking and laughing in class; the list of rules pinned up in the entrance.

  ‘Children must be punctual and attend some place of worship on the Lord’s day,’ had been the first and most important.

  So Meg and Jack Boy and later Alice had attended the Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School every Sunday morning, promptly at ten o’clock. She would miss the friends she’d made there, Meg thought sadly. But never mind, she would make new friends at Winton Colliery. For that was where Uncle Tot and Auntie Phoebe were living now, Uncle Tot with a grand job in the pit there.

  Miles started to whimper for his tea and Meg lifted him up and settled him on her hip again. ‘Whisht, babby,’ she said, and dropped a kiss on the fine, baby hair on top of his head. ‘We’ll soon be home now.’

  In the overcrowded kitchen of the cottage which had been the family home for the last five years, she found the meal was already begun. The shrimps were cooked and piled on a plate in the middle of the table, liberally seasoned with salt and vinegar. For Da there was a slice of cod, bought from the fisher boats at South Bents and fried over the open fire so that the smell filled the room and spilled over into the rest of the house.

  ‘I got paid, Mam.’

  Meg grinned in triumph as she handed over the money to her mother before sitting down at the table with Miles still on her lap. She began spooning shrimps on to her plate. Hannah was cutting thick wedges of bread. Meg watched as she buttered the loaf before holding it to her clean apron to cut it. There was a mug of milk for Miles, and for the other children weak tea with a spoonful of condensed milk stirred into it.

  ‘Thank God for that any road,’ said Hannah wearily, slumping down into her chair. She looked tired, thought Meg, and there was still a lot of work to be done and the tiring journey tomorrow.

  ‘Here, I’ll take the bairn.’ Hannah held out her arms for Miles. ‘You get your tea, Meg, I’m not very hungry.’ She thickened a crust with butter and put it in the child’s hands. He sucked it, absorbed in the taste.

  Meg stared at her mother in quick concern. Hannah’s not being hungry meant only one thing, she had discovered very early in her young life. Oh, she had guessed that there was a new baby on the way, but usually the sickness and lack of appetite had gone after the first few weeks. Except those times when Mam had lost a baby . . . Eeh, she thought, feeling a little fluttering of fear for her mother, why do mothers have to be always having bairns?

  Meg looked across the table at Da who was quietly eating his meal, sitting with them but somehow apart from them, taking little notice of the others. Jack Maddison had aged in the last five years. There was a defeated look about him too. Lines had appeared on his forehead and down his cheeks, and he had developed a stoop.

  Poor Da! He would hate it down the pit. He must have felt her eyes on him for he looked up and half-smiled at her.

  ‘Well, pet, we’re on our way again. You’ll have to help your mam as much as you can. But there, I know you will, you’re a good bairn.’

  ‘I will an’all, Da, I will,’ put in Jack Boy. At six years old he was a thin, wiry boy with an open, freckled face and hair so fair it was almost white.

  Jack smiled at them both, feeling impelled to lighten their earnest sympathy. ‘It’ll be all right, it will, I’m telling you. An’ plenty of lads have had to go down the pit whether they wanted to or not, let alone a man grown like me. I’m not the first by a long chalk. Now eat your tea and get the little ’uns to bed, we have a lot on the night. The carrier’s coming at eight the morn.’

  At eight o’clock sharp the carrier was indeed by the door and by nine the cart was loaded and on its way. Meg and her father were riding with the carrier but Hannah and the younger children caught the Marsden Flyer to Sunderland, where they changed for Bishop Auckland. Hannah should be at the new house fairly fresh from the train ride rather than bumping along in the cart. A letter had come just before they left Marsden, reassuring them that a job was waiting for Jack and a house, right next-door to Auntie Phoebe’s.

  ‘A good house, it is, Hannah,’ she wrote, ‘two bedrooms and a room besides the kitchen downstairs. And a copper setpot in the yard, and a good garden at the front.’

  Jack had read it out to them all to cheer everyone up. And it did, so that the children were happy and excited, looking forward to going on the train, and not just one train, but two.

  Meg had mixed feelings, though, as she and Da set out on the carrier’s cart. Jack sat in front with the driver, a garrulous man who spoke continually around his clay pipe which he never seemed to take out of his mouth. Meg was fascinated but couldn’t understand a word he said though Da seemed to make sense of it which was just as well. It was a good long journey to have to go trying to answer someone when you hadn’t understood the question, she thought.

  She herself was sitting behind, snug between boxes of clothes and Grannie’s rocking-chair. She’d wanted to sit in the chair but Da said it wasn’t safe, she might fall off, and if they were travelling at any speed she would hurt herself and how would he face Mam if s
he did that? Meg had looked doubtfully at the placid cart-horse. He wasn’t going to travel very fast, she thought, but she knew better than to argue with Da and so had climbed into her niche obediently.

  They soon left the coast behind and were travelling across country to Winton Colliery. The way was hilly and often Meg and the two men had to climb down and walk beside the cart while the driver talked encouragingly to the horse.

  ‘Howay then, lad, giddy up, giddy up. Come away then, Benny, we’ll have a bit of a blow when we get up t’d top and then there’s a nice easy road down. Howay, Benny lad, I’ve a bag of oats ready for thoo, just keep on, lad.’ And he would take his pipe out of his mouth to talk to the horse as they both puffed and panted up the hill.

  True to his word, he would slip the nosebag on Benny for a while when the top was crested and they would all have a rest and a bite to eat and cold water out of a lemonade bottle.

  It was already evening and the light beginning to fade when Da shook Meg gently to waken her from her tired dozing so that she could get off the cart and begin the walk up the last hill.

  ‘Will we be long now, Da?’ she asked as she plodded up the steep gradient to the accompaniment of the carrier’s soft voice as he talked to his horse. Her feet felt like lead weights and it was getting more difficult to put one foot in front of the other all the time.

  Jack glanced at her. Her face was pale and drawn and there were dark patches under her eyes. She shivered as they passed under the shadow of a great winding wheel, briskly turning as it brought its load to the surface. It was no different to many another they had passed on the way but Meg was sensitive to her da’s feelings and saw when his glance slid from her to the pithead buildings. She tucked her small hand in his with an instinctive need to comfort him and he squeezed it with his own, the skin rough and dry with working the magnesium limestone of Marsden Quarry.

  ‘No lass,’ he said, ‘just up this bank and down the other side. We’ll be home before dark.’

  Home! How could this place ever be home? They reached the top and gazed down at the straggling pit village with its pit yard at one end. An aerial flight was strung out across the field to a towering mountain of a slag heap and the air was heavy with coal dust. There was coal dust in the air at Marsden but not like this. A sad longing for the tang of sea air beset her, or maybe the sight of the kittiwakes wheeling over the cliffs.

  A cold wind rattled round the houses as they reached the colliery rows. They were all recently built with dirt roads bare of tarmac but footpaths paved with flagstones and yards opening on to the back lanes. They turned into the last row, the only one with gardens to the front, a row with a larger house on the end where Uncle Tot and Auntie Phoebe lived, for he was a colliery overman.

  ‘Eeh, there you are, we were wondering where you’d got to.’

  Auntie Phoebe must have been on the look-out for them for she came rushing out of the house and down the garden path to the road. ‘An’ this is our Meg. By, what a big lass you are now. An’ I bet you’re a good girl an’ help your mam? Eeh, it’s good to see you, Jack, an’ all. Howay in then, I’ve got a nice knuckle of ham and fresh pot of pease pudding all ready for you. An’ you an’ all, Mr Carrier, I know you’ll be ready for it.’

  Meg was dazed by this time, what with tiredness and Auntie Phoebe’s overwhelming questions which didn’t seem to need any answers. She mumbled a greeting and followed her aunt up the path.

  ‘I’ve put the bairns to bed upstairs for now, Jack, that’ll give you a chance to see to things next-door. Howay in then, what’re you waiting for?’ This last was addressed to the carrier who was quietly unharnessing his horse.

  ‘Oh, aye, the galloway. You can stake him out in the garden next-door, man, it’s not turned over yet and he’ll find a bit of grazing there. He’ll be right as rain. No need to pay livery stables, there’s not.’

  Jack breathed a sigh of relief when the carrier agreed to this. That would be a sizeable chunk off the bill and the horse would be fine, the grass was fresh and the night mild enough.

  ‘Run round next-door for your mam. She’s been scrubbing the floors before the furniture came,’ Phoebe said to Meg, and obediently she went and there was Hannah, just throwing a bucket of dirty water out into the garden. She looked up when Meg came through the gate and the girl was shocked to see the violet shadows under her eyes and the weariness etched into her face. Her own tiredness was forgotten.

  ‘Have you finished, Mam? Auntie Phoebe said to go for our supper. I can finish for you if you like?’

  Hannah smiled wanly and put down her bucket and brush. ‘Aye, I’m coming, pet,’ she said. ‘There’s no need for you to do anything, I’m about done. Howay, I’m fair clemmed and you must be famished an’ all.’

  She put an arm around Meg’s shoulders. ‘It’ll be grand here, pet, see if it’s not. Look, a good flagged floor in here and a wooden one in the other room. And two big bedrooms – we’ve plenty of room. An’ we can grow a few taties and leeks in the garden, mebbe a few flowers. I mind the smell of the stocks and roses at the Hall, they were grand of an evening. Oh, aye, we’ll be fine.’

  She looked down at Meg and saw the doubt in her eyes. ‘You’ll be thinking about your da. He’ll be fine an’ all, you’ll see. When he gets used to it, like.’

  ‘Aye, Mam, he will,’ said Meg, but in her heart she wondered. They closed the door behind them and went down the path by the quietly munching horse to the gate, and turned in to Auntie Phoebe’s garden. And the thought ran through both their minds, at least they had kin near now. Phoebe might just be a cousin but she was kin, and kin was security.

  As they went into the kitchen, the smell of boiled bacon and pease pudding and fresh-baked bread filled the air, and Meg felt her stomach rumble. By, she was starved. Even though it was a warm summer’s evening the fire was lit and a large black iron kettle simmered on the hob. Jack and the carrier were already sitting at the table and Phoebe was standing with a loaf in her hand, cutting thick slices of bread and butter. Meg watched as she spread the thick, creamy butter and cut, spread and cut, spread and cut. Her mouth watered as she watched.

  ‘Howay in an’ sit you down. I was only waiting for you before I mashed the tea. Now don’t be shy, help yourselves, there’s plenty.’

  Auntie Phoebe, plumper and older than Meg remembered her, picked up a large tea caddy with a picture of Whitley Bay on the lid and spooned the tea into the large brown pot warming on the fender. She looked happy and excited as though she was enjoying herself hugely. She paid special attention to Meg, filling up her plate and giving her real milk in her tea. Meg didn’t like to say she didn’t care for it, she’d got used to condensed milk.

  ‘Tot’s on the night shift, filling in like, he won’t be back before midnight. But he’s looking forward to meeting you all, aye he is.’

  The bread was crispy on the outside and still warm on the inside so that the butter melted into it, and Auntie Phoebe was liberal with the butter. And the milk. ‘Farm milk, fresh from the farm like the butter,’ she said. Luxury to the family from the coast.

  Meg tucked in, relishing the taste of the hot pease pudding and ham and swallowing the milky tea manfully. But her head began to droop after a while and she could hardly lift the food from her plate to her mouth. Dimly, she heard the chatter of the grown-ups but everything was fading from her consciousness.

  ‘Will you look at the bairn!’ Auntie Phoebe cried suddenly. ‘She’s already asleep, poor pet. Will I take her up and put her in with the little ’uns?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Jack, and picked Meg up bodily. Though she protested sleepily she really enjoyed being treated like a child again. Even though she was nearly ten and old enough to earn a living.

  ‘It’s up the loft for you, my bairn,’ said Jack, and pushed aside the curtain which cloaked the bottom of the stairs and took her up and laid her on the shakey-down bed which already held Jack Boy and Alice and Miles. Meg woke up enough to slip out of her dress
but she went to sleep in her petticoat to the sound of Auntie Phoebe’s voice floating up the stairs.

  ‘Did I tell you about Ralph Grizedale? Eeh, what goings-on there is! Well—’

  Ralph Grizedale, Meg thought as she drifted on the edge of the sleep. She knew him, didn’t she?

  Five

  In the kitchen, Phoebe was continuing her tale without noticing that both Hannah and Jack had taken on guarded expressions when she spoke of Ralph Grizedale.

  Hannah did not in fact hear what was being said at first. At the mention of her hated brother-in-law’s name she was lost in bitter memories. The day of the evictions at Eldon, the look of terror in Meg’s eyes that day, a look a mother could never forget. But, worse, there was the memory of the cruel pain Ralph had inflicted on her sister Nell.

  Poor Nell. She had been so determined to marry him, she could hardly believe her good fortune when she did so. Anything Hannah said to discourage her was discounted as merely envy at a younger sister netting a rich husband. Hannah still blamed herself for not being more convincing in her arguments. And so Nell had suffered years of pain and degradation at the hands of Ralph, for her first two babies were stillborn. And then there was that terrible day he had beaten her half to death when she was seven months pregnant. Jonty had come soon because of it and Nell had died. Her lovely, lovely Nell.

  Dragging her thoughts back to the reality of sitting round the supper table in Cousin Phoebe’s house, Hannah pushed back her bitter feelings before they could engulf her. She lifted her eyes from her plate and saw that Phoebe and Jack were looking at her expectantly as though they were waiting for her to answer a question.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She looked at Jack and then at Phoebe, not even sure which one had been speaking to her. ‘What was that? I was dreaming. Tired, I think.’

  ‘Not very nice dreams an’ all,’ commented Phoebe. ‘Not judging by the look on your face. No, I was telling you about Ralph Grizedale, your poor Nell’s man. Eeh, if anybody deserves their come-uppance it’s that one. Why, man, there’s poor little Jenny Mitchell, her from the bottom row. She went to the Hall to work six months since and now she’s back with a big belly. An’ she’s not the first. Jenny wouldn’t have gone there else, but her mam needed the money, she was desperate.’ Phoebe pursed her lips in disapproval and sat back in her chair with her arms folded over her ample bosom.