by Maggie Hope
‘It’ll likely snow soon,’ observed Dick as they came over the railway bridge by the station and walked along the dirt road to the stone building which housed the register office. And as if in response a few white flakes fell on to the front of Meg’s costume, gleaming against the deep blue. She watched them dumbly as they melted and the soft whiteness became simply damp black patches.
No one was waiting by the gate of the register office and no one was in the doorway either. Secretly, Meg had hoped that her brothers would come and maybe Auntie Phoebe would bring Bella. She desperately wanted some of her own family round her. Now her hopes were dashed. Of course, they wouldn’t want to upset Da, that was it. With a feeling of inevitability she followed the men into the building, not even looking at the group huddled in the far corner of the entrance hall round a smoking fire.
‘Why, Meg, are you not even going to speak to us?’
The voice, so like her own, made her jerk her head up in disbelief. Alice? And it was, it was Alice, looking older and thinner and with her hair up on top of her head and buttoned boots on her feet, but it was Alice all the same coming towards her with outstretched hands and a beaming smile on her face. And behind Alice there was Auntie Phoebe and Uncle Tot and Bella, with a bright pink ribbon in her hair. And Meg went forward and into Alice’s arms and sobbed on her shoulder.
‘Hey, man, our Meg, what are you blubbing for?’ Alice was saying as she kissed her and held her away. ‘Let’s have a look at you then. Eeh, what a lovely costume. It suits you it does, Meg. Now, howay, pull yourself together, man, you don’t want to get wed with your eyes all red, do you?’
And Bella was dancing up and down and laughing because of the success of their surprise, and Auntie Phoebe and Uncle Tot were crowding round her, and Uncle Tot offered his red spotted handkerchief for her to dry her eyes and Alice a comb to tidy her hair.
Wesley and Dick stood to one side watching. Wesley was frowning. But for the moment Meg had forgotten her bridegroom altogether. Until, that is, someone came to call them and they were ushered into the presence of the registrar.
The actual ceremony, brief and formal, was over in minutes. They made their vows, Wesley put the ring on her finger, and it was over. It almost seemed like an irrelevance to Meg as she found herself back outside clutching her certificate with the snow coming down in earnest now and already lying on the path to the gate and speckling the low hedge. A lone urchin was hanging hopefully about outside the gate. He must have been the only one to notice them.
‘Shabby wedding!’ he called, and Uncle Tot threw him a penny. It was a poor parody of the traditional ‘hoy out’ of coppers to local children.
‘We’ve hired a trap, Meg, are you coming back with us? All of you, I mean, Dick an’ all?’ asked Uncle Tot.
‘Aye, I thought I’d do a few pies and things. You can’t have a wedding without a bit of celebration,’ said Auntie Phoebe. But Wesley stepped forward and took Meg’s arm.
‘Nay, I’m sorry, Mrs Lowther,’ he said, drawing Meg away from the family group, ‘me mam’s made us a bite and we have to get back.’
‘Wesley!’
She was shaken out of her happiness at seeing Alice again and talking to her own folk. But Wesley was firm.
‘And there’s not really room for us all on the trap, is there? No, me and Meg and Dick, we’ll go back the way we came. Me mam’ll be waiting.’
‘But it’s snowing, you’ll get wet,’ Uncle Tot objected. Wesley ignored him. His grip on Meg’s arm was like steel. She was pulled away, leaving Auntie Phoebe and the others staring open-mouthed after them.
‘I’ll come and see you the morn,’ Alice called after her, and Meg only had time to nod before she was swept round the corner and down on to the entrance of the path which led back to Badger Wood.
‘What did you do that for?’ she demanded. ‘I want to go back with them, I wanted to have a talk with Alice . . .’
‘You’re wed to me, now,’ said Wesley gruffly. ‘I’m your family now. Didn’t your da show you he didn’t want you near?’
‘But—’
‘Now you’re my wife, you’ll have more pride than to go round there.’
Meg stopped protesting, she could see she was getting nowhere. Through her sudden tears, she saw Dick Adamson redden with embarrassment and slow down, letting them get well ahead of him on their walk home through the snow. He must think it was a queer sort of a wedding, she thought miserably.
It took them almost an hour to walk back to Winton Colliery. By the time they got to George Row the snow was falling fast, blanketing everything and swirling round their heads so that their ears and noses were blue with cold. Meg’s skirt was drenched up to mid-thigh and the weight of it dragged against her every step. She would never be able to get it back into shape, she mused. She would be lucky if it didn’t shrink.
The welcome inside the house was almost as cold as the weather outside. The kitchen fire was low, the kettle not singing on the hob, and there was no sign of any meal ready for their return.
‘I was going to go up to the store and get something,’ said Jane Cornish, ‘but the weather was so bad, I knew you wouldn’t want me to go out in it, son. And any road, Meg can soon make you something now, it’s her place to.’
Seventeen
Meg eased herself out of the bed she shared with Wesley, her usually deft movements slowed and awkward because of her advanced pregnancy. Wesley moved restlessly and she paused, looking apprehensively at his bulk under the blankets. But he turned over on to his side and slept on, for which she was thankful. If he had woken he would have insisted that she got back into bed with him. Sometimes she thought his appetite for the sexual act was insatiable.
Quietly, she pulled on her clothes, shivering in the icy cold air of the bedroom. Picking up her boots, she tiptoed down the stairs to the kitchen before sitting down and putting them on. She grimaced slightly and gingerly felt her left breast, feeling the imprint of Wesley’s fingers on a place which had already been sore.
He was on night shift, the shift which went down from three in the afternoon until twelve midnight, but he had gone for a beer with his marras afterwards and hadn’t come home till three o’clock in the morning, falling heavily into bed beside her and demanding his rights.
‘No, Wesley,’ she had protested. ‘The babby, man. It’s almost due, you’ll hurt it.’
‘Hadaway wi’ you,’ was all that Wesley had answered. And the baby had kicked and turned as he climbed on top of her, almost as if it was fighting back.
Meg sighed as she thought of it. The baby was quiet now at least. She picked up the iron coal rake from the hearth and raked away at the ash in the grate, looking to see if there was any life left in the fire. One or two cinders glowed and sparked and she drew them to one side and laid thin shavings of wood on top of them. There were sticks chopped from the ends cut off pit props in the bottom of the oven drying out, and she criss-crossed these across the shavings. She soon had these alight, and after pulling down coal from the fire back, put up the tin blazer, standing back in satisfaction as the flames roared up the chimney.
Jane had come into the room as Meg was settling the kettle on the coals. She had a shawl wound tightly round her thin frame. Her bony shoulders jutted out through the wool.
‘You’re late with the tea this morning,’ she grumbled by way of a greeting.
‘It won’t be a minute,’ answered Meg, ‘the kettle’s singing already.’ She moved away from the fire, giving place to her mother-in-law. Jane Cornish hadn’t been well since Christmas. What had started off as a feverish cold had settled into a racking cough which plagued her day and night.
‘How are you feeling the day?’ Meg asked as she got out the loaf and cut slices from it.
‘None the better for you asking,’ snapped Jane peevishly, but Meg took no notice, she was used to it by now. She stuck a slice of bread on the end of a toasting fork and handed it to Jane to hold against the bars of the grate. But a sudd
en bout of coughing made the older woman shake so much, the bread fell from the fork into the still unemptied ash box.
Meg rushed to pick it out, but it was no good, it was smeared with coal dust beside ash. They could ill afford any waste, she thought distractedly, not since the pit was put on a four-day week last month and the hewers had to take a five per cent reduction in pay besides.
The thought was only fleeting, however, Jane’s coughing fit was not easing at all. Meg put an arm round the painfully thin shoulders, holding her steady, supporting her as the spasms rocked her.
‘I’ll get the doctor today,’ she said. ‘You’re not getting any better.’
‘No,’ gasped Jane, ‘just get me a bottle from the chemist’s. I’ll be all right once I get a cup of tea.’ And indeed the spasms were lessening as she struggled to control them.
Meg poured a cup for her and she grasped it in both hands, drinking it down hot and sweet. Sitting at the table, Meg ate her own slice of bread and dripping and sipped at her tea. She watched her mother-in-law surreptitiously. Jane definitely looked worse. There was a hectic flush of red on her cheeks, and a pulse in her neck throbbed plain to see. But the cough was quiet for the moment. Maybe the warm air which was now filling the kitchen was doing some good.
Meg’s mind wandered back over the few months of her marriage. At the beginning she had thought that it was Jane she had to beware of, Jane who would make her life difficult. Wesley was the one who would defend her, watch out for her. The reality had been different.
Jane, as her illness progressed, had lost most of her former antagonism. Oh, sometimes she was waspish and flashes of her old self would show through, but on the whole she was pathetically dependent on Meg who had taken over all the housekeeping. Jane’s sudden decline worried Meg who wished she could talk it over with someone. But there was only Wesley, and he’d soon lost interest in talking of his mother’s ills.
All he was interested in were his marras and drinking beer. And bed. Oh, yes, when he did finally come home, he was always interested in mauling her in bed, and that’s all it was, you couldn’t call it love. Meg had got into the habit of trying to keep her mind free and independent of what was happening to her body when Wesley took it. It was a question of survival.
Meg moved uncomfortably. There was an ache in her lower back today which was steadily becoming more insistent. She sipped her tea, feeling the warmth of it coursing down her throat. Here it was almost the end of March and still there was snow in the hedgebacks and ice in the buckets. The tap on the end of the row was usually frozen up and it was midday before she could refill the buckets.
Alice now, Alice was her lifeline, calling in to see her on her way to the store, giving her news of Da and the lads. But she always had to come when Wesley was out of the way, either down the pit or safely asleep in bed. He didn’t like Alice coming, had taken against all of Meg’s family.
A spasm of coughing began to shake Jane and she leant forward and put her cup down on the fender, gasping and coughing and straining for air as badly as any pitman with the dust disease. The older woman was swaying in her chair and Meg jumped up in alarm just in time to catch her as she toppled forward, her mouth a gaping hole in her drawn blue face.
‘Wesley! Wesley!’ Meg shouted, feeling her arms were being torn out of their sockets by the unexpected dead weight of the unconscious Jane. She fought to get her over to the settle by the wall, dragging her along the floor, up the proddy mat and tripping over it herself so that it took a superhuman effort to save herself from going down with Jane. Meg screamed in despair. Was Wesley never going to hear?
‘Eeh, what’s the matter, Meg? Is it the babby?’
It was not Wesley who came but Mrs Bates, the young wife from next-door. A woman as skinny as Jane, nevertheless she sized up the situation at once and helped Meg lift her mother-in-law on to the settle, propping her up against the hard horsehair-covered end where she promptly slithered down again, head lolling and eyes wide open.
‘Go and get Wesley, Meg,’ Dolly Bates said quietly. ‘I think she’s gone, pet.’
Meg had to climb the stairs to the bedroom to rouse him. He had slept serenely on through all the commotion. She even had to shake his shoulder before he lifted his head, grumbling loudly.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you? Can you not leave a man alone when he has to go on shift in a few hours?’
‘It’s your mam, Wes, your mam. She’s . . .’ Meg halted, hardly knowing how to say it.
‘Me mam’s what? Have you two been fighting, like? Can you not hold your peace between the two of you?’
‘She’s passed out, Wes, I think she’s dead,’ Meg blurted. ‘You’ll have to get up and fetch the doctor.’ She watched him jump out of bed and pull on his trousers, the ache in her back deepening to a cramping pain which travelled down her thighs and threatened to cut her in half. Gasping, she collapsed on to the bed so recently vacated by her husband.
‘Dolly!’ she cried.
‘Pneumonia,’ declared Doctor Brown, ‘aggravated by malnutrition. Her heart failed too, couldn’t stand the strain.’
‘She was fed, there’s food in the house.’ Wesley glared at the doctor. How dare he say his mother hadn’t had enough to eat?
‘Hmm. Well, she hadn’t been feeding herself properly then,’ said Doctor Brown, and snapped his Gladstone bag firmly shut. ‘If you come up to the surgery I’ll give you the death certificate. You’ll be wanting it for the insurance.’ He did not ask why he had not been called earlier. He knew the answer. There was talk in the village of the miners clubbing together to pay a doctor to see to them and their families, but nothing had come of it yet. He looked hard at the young miner. On his own with his dead mother, Wesley looked very young and vulnerable, unsure what to do.
‘You can see to the undertaker at the same time,’ the doctor prompted, then gave a puzzled frown. ‘Is there not a neighbour to come in to lay – to see to your mother?’
Wesley was spared the need to answer this as a piercing scream rang out from the bedroom upstairs. Doctor Brown lifted startled eyes to the floor above.
‘The wife,’ said Wesley, dully. ‘She’s started the bairn.’
‘I’ll go up and see her.’ The doctor walked towards the staircase.
‘Aw, no, you won’t,’ Wesley sprang in front of him, his vulnerable expression disappearing. ‘She doesn’t need a doctor. The midwife’s coming and she has Dolly Bates up there with her.’
‘If it’s the money you’re worried about, I won’t send a bill,’ protested Doctor Brown, sounding frustrated. ‘You have enough to think about now, let me see to your wife.’
‘No.’ Wesley stuck out his chin. ‘What does she want with a man there? I tell you, the midwife is coming and Dolly can manage till she does. Meg’ll be fine.’
‘But—’
‘I’ve told you. What do you want to be messing about with women for? It’s not decent. Well, you’re not going to mess with my woman, I’m telling you. Now, I’ll be up for the death certificate as soon as the babby comes.’
Doctor Brown had no choice but to leave, cursing the ignorance of the pitmen as he went, the cries from upstairs, though muffled now, ringing in his ears.
Thomas Cornish, named for his mother’s Uncle Tot, was born two days later, 28 March 1893, after a long and protracted labour. The midwife, a superstitious old woman who was sure the trouble was caused because there was a corpse in the house, could do little to help. She had a long-standing feud with the doctor but even she had been about to give up and insist on his coming.
Not that she would have persuaded Wesley, Meg thought, when she was again capable of rational thinking. Wesley knew perfectly well that women didn’t need doctors to have babies. He’d told her so. Hadn’t they been born for centuries without doctors? Doctors were just carnal men who liked to get their hands on other men’s women. Wesley confidently asserted this as fact. Hadn’t other miners told him so?
In the end the b
aby came in a rush, bawling his defiance at being expelled from the warm security of the womb even before the midwife held him up by the heels to clear his lungs. She wrapped him in a bit of flannel and showed him to Meg who was lying so exhausted she could hardly open her eyes long enough to see him. She had a brief impression of a mop of coppery hair and a bloodstained face, twisted up in rage, before sinking into a deep, healing sleep.
‘I told you Meg didn’t need a doctor,’ said Wesley smugly when Dolly showed him his son, freshly bathed and only his red face showing between his flannel cap and shawl. ‘He’s a bit little like, isn’t he?’
‘He’s a grand bairn,’ declared Dolly Bates. ‘Now, I’ll leave him in his cradle. You’ll have to keep an eye to him and his mam, I’ve to go and see to me own.’
‘Me?’ Wesley was alarmed. ‘I cannot do nothing, man, I don’t know what to do. Any road, I’m going on shift soon.’
‘You’re not going on shift the day, Wes. It’s a four-day week, man, you’ve finished for the week.’
He had the grace to look sheepish. ‘Oh, aye, I forgot,’ he muttered. ‘Can you not take the bairn upstairs to Meg? She’ll see to him.’
Dolly had no choice in the end, she had to do just that, and when she returned downstairs, Wesley had taken off. She shook her head. Well, she’d done her best. Now she had to get back to her own bairns, even if it did mean leaving Meg lying upstairs with the baby and that poor dead woman in the coffin in the front room. Maybe she would call in to see the wife next door but one. She was getting on a bit but she was a canny body, and would likely give a hand if she was asked.