An Orphan's Secret

by Maggie Hope

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said, closing his account book and going over to the sofa. He sat down by her side and took her hand in his and they lapsed into silence for a while, simply happy to sit there together.

  ‘Jonty, I have something else to tell you,’ she said, not without a flutter of anxiety. He had enough troubles at the moment without her adding to them, she thought. Yet he had to be told, she had put it off long enough.

  ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  She heard the words echoing round the room and bent her gaze to her lap, biting her lip. But the next moment she was gathered up in his arms and he was kissing her joyously and her apprehension dropped away as though it had never been.

  ‘We’ll get married,’ he stated, very positive about it.

  ‘But Jonty, how can we?’

  ‘You can get a divorce.’

  Divorce? What was he talking about? Divorces cost money, no one in the coal field got divorced, it was unheard of. Meg’s brow furrowed as she looked up at him.

  ‘Don’t worry, my love, of course you can get a divorce.’ Jonty was a new man. He was sure he could make everything all right for them now. ‘I may not have much left, but I can afford to pay for a solicitor, and pay Wesley off too if need be. But you have grounds for a divorce. Hasn’t he lived with Sally Hawkins all these years? I’m sure Sally would like to be married, don’t you think so?’

  Meg had to agree. Sally would love to be married. And there was no doubt as to who wore the trousers in that household!

  Her thoughts went back to the awful day when it happened, remembering the rage and horror she had felt as she saw Ralph with the pillow in his hand as he stood over his mother. And somehow it stirred another, older memory, something that happened so long ago she thought perhaps her memory was playing tricks on her.

  But no, she had seen Ralph holding a pillow in just the same way, and in just the same place. When was it? It must have been before she and her family left the railway cottages, she was sure she had not been to the Hall after that. She probed the elusive memory in her mind, almost like probing an aching tooth for the source of the pain. And suddenly it clicked into place.

  ‘Jonty?’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘Jonty, I think I know why your father took you away from us and blackballed Da so that we had to leave the district. Thinking of your poor grandmother, I remembered.’

  Slowly, haltingly, frowning in concentration, Meg told him of the day they had been playing hide-and-seek upstairs in the Hall.

  ‘Do you remember, we were hiding in some sort of cupboard?’

  But Jonty shook his head, he couldn’t remember at all.

  ‘We were, though,’ Meg insisted, ‘and your grandfather was in bed. Your father came in and he picked up the pillow and he . . . he put it over his father’s face.’

  Meg stopped. Had she really seen that happen all those years ago and not realised what Ralph Grizedale was doing? Or was it just in her imagination?

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We fell out of the cupboard, Jonty, and we ran and ran, we were so frightened.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I think I do remember,’ he cried. He had always been frightened of his father, he could remember that well enough. He had feared his father’s hard hand, his scathing contempt. The fear had been a hard, physical reality, a deep pain in the gut.

  They sat stunned by the horror of that old, shared memory.

  ‘It was my fault,’ Meg whispered, and Jonty put his arm around her.

  ‘Oh, Meg, how could it have been your fault?’

  ‘No. It was because of me that your father hounded us away. If I hadn’t been there that day, Da would still be working on the railway, and me and you, Jonty, we would never have lost each other.’ She felt a great sadness at the thought of what might have been, but Jonty soon drew her out of it.

  ‘Oh, Meg, Meg, we’re together now, we love each other, we have the boys. And soon we’ll have another, will we not?’ And once more he drew her into his arms and they were lost to the world.

  Thirty-One

  Mrs Grizedale passed away peacefully in her sleep a few weeks later. She did not live to see Grizedale Hall sold. She was happy in those last few weeks, though, she and Meg becoming firm friends, and without the worry of what her son might do next her health seemed to improve. But she was an old lady and in the end her heart gave out.

  Meg was sad to see her go. She had herself become genuinely fond of Jonty’s grandmother and grieved with him.

  ‘She was the only one who showed me love while I was at Grizedale Hall,’ commented Jonty sadly on the evening after the funeral. ‘But I’m glad she didn’t have to face the upheaval of moving away from here. And it was right for her to be buried alongside Grandfather in Shildon.’

  Meg took his hand in hers and lifted it to her cheek. She did not need to say anything, the empathy between her and Jonty grew stronger every day. Within her, she felt the first trembling movement of the baby. She waited, not even breathing, and there it was again.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Jonty.

  ‘The baby . . . the baby moved,’ she whispered, and held his hand over her stomach. But of course the movement was not yet strong enough for him to feel. Meg lapsed into a dreaming half-consciousness. Oh, she was happy, so happy. The divorce proceedings were already started. It had been as Jonty had said it would be. Though Wesley blustered at first, Sally soon put him right about whether he was willing to let Meg divorce him.

  ‘You’ll make me an honest woman, Wesley Cornish,’ she had shrilled, and he had caved in immediately. Jonty had given them a hundred pounds on condition Wesley waived any claim to the boys.

  ‘And only right an’ all,’ Sally had declared, ‘after the way you and Meg were carrying on.’

  She had shut up abruptly when she saw the expression on Jonty’s face, but he was glad Meg had not come with him to see Wesley and his mistress. She might not have been content with giving Sally a withering look.

  ‘It’s a pity we can’t get married before the baby is born, though,’ Jonty said now.

  ‘We are married. We are as married as we’ll ever be,’ Meg said stoutly. ‘Any road, what will it matter in the end? We won’t be living here, no one will know us, wherever we’re going.’

  Epilogue

  Meg walked along the sandy shore, her fair hair blowing loose from its pins and her dress dragging against her legs in the stiff north-easter coming in off the sea. She paused to watch a string of colliers ploughing slowly along past Marsden Rock to the mouth of the Tyne, where they would pick up their load of coal, bound for the south of England. They were ugly, squat little vessels, but they always caught her imagination. They went up and down the coast, stopping only to load and unload, the pit ponies of the sea.

  Oh, how she loved the sea, she thought. The cries of the seabirds, the tall cliffs with Marsden Colliery village perched on the top and the Souter lighthouse alongside. She thought of the steps inside the lighthouse, how she had scrubbed them as a child, how proud she had been to take her pay home to her mam.

  ‘Mam! Mam! See what I’ve found.’

  Meg turned at the sound of her daughter’s voice, high and squeaky with excitement as she held out her shrimping pail to show her mother half a dozen shrimps in the bottom.

  ‘They’re grand, Hope, I’ll cook them for your tea,’ Meg said, smiling down at Hope’s flushed face, the dark eyes so like Jonty’s, yet her hair as fair and abundantly curly as Meg’s own.

  ‘No, for Daddy’s tea, I’ve got them for Daddy.’

  ‘For Daddy then,’ Meg agreed. ‘Now we must get back, or we’ll be too late to cook them for tea.’

  She took Hope’s hand to help her up the steep cliff path which led up to Whitworth village and on towards their farm. But Hope shook herself free.

  ‘I can get up myself, Mam,’ she said decisively.

  ‘Well, be careful, you don’t want to drop your pail,’ answered Meg. Hope, ever since she had been old en
ough to sit up and demand what she wanted, had ruled not only Jonty but Kit and Tucker, both of whom were her willing slaves. It was Meg who had to discipline her for she was the only one who could resist the charm of those dark eyes.

  But Hope was not a bad child, she had a healthy sense of fair play and was not given to tantrums, Meg thought to herself as she followed her daughter up the cliff. She remembered the day when Hope was born, three years ago now. They had decided on the name for not only was it the maiden name of Meg’s and Jonty’s common grandmother, but somehow the coming of the child symbolized their own hopes for the future.

  And they had done well, thought Meg, pausing to catch her breath as they got to the top of the cliff. Seagulls were swirling and swooping about the sky before going to roost for the night in the crevices of the cliffs, calling raucously to one another as they did so. The money from Mrs Grizedale’s railway shares had enabled them to buy the farm and Jonty had worked hard to improve it. Now they were earning a comfortable living.

  ‘Come on, Mam, I’m hungry,’ said Hope, looking back impatiently at her mother.

  ‘I’m coming,’ said Meg, and they hurried to the gate of the farmyard, where Kit was leading a horse across to the stable for the night after a day spent ploughing. He whistled as he went. Though he was only just gone ten, he was proud of his skill with horses and liked to show his mother he could do a man’s work.

  Inside the house, Tucker was standing before the range in the kitchen waiting for them. He was just fourteen but already almost six feet tall, his shoulders broad and powerful.

  He’s so like Wesley, Meg thought. It could almost have been him standing there. Wesley at fourteen, proud and strong. But Tucker was not wild, he had a lot of his mother in him too. He was hard-working and considerate and fond of little Hope.

  It was as the family sat round the table for tea that he dropped his bombshell.

  ‘Da,’ he said, addressing Jonty. Both boys had called Jonty Da for years now. ‘I’m going down the pit. You’ve got Granda to help now and Kit’s big enough to help you an’ all and I want to be a pitman.’

  ‘Tucker!’

  Meg was horrified. How could Tucker want to be a pitman when he had a good job on the farm, in the open air? When he had seen what the pits did to his grandfather? She glanced across to the doorway where her own father was sitting with a tray on his knees, eating his tea.

  They had got Jack Maddison out of Sedgefield only last year. He was very much better in that he was rational and continent in his habits, though still liked to stay by the door, no matter what the weather. But even in the short time he had been on the farm, Meg could see how the open air life was working on him, bringing him back to his former self.

  Jonty put a hand over hers. ‘If that’s what the boy wants, Meg,’ he said.

  ‘I do, I want to be a miner,’ asserted Tucker. ‘An’ they’re wanting putters at Horden, I could start on Monday.’

  So it wasn’t a whim, Tucker had really thought this out. Meg felt sad. He was growing up. Jonty was right, the boy had a right to decide for himself. And hadn’t his father and grandfather been pitmen?

  ‘Don’t be hasty, our Tucker,’ said a crisp voice from the doorway and the family looked across at Alice, just coming in with her Gladstone bag in her hand. Alice was wearing a severely tailored costume and had her hair drawn back tightly in a bun. But she could do nothing about the curly tendrils which escaped to frame her white forehead above the piercing blue eyes. Now she walked into the kitchen and threw her bag into a corner.

  ‘Have you left me some tea?’

  Hope rushed at her and flung herself into her arms, laughing and talking excitedly.

  ‘Have you come for a holiday, Auntie Alice? Our Tucker wants to go down the pit, did you hear?’

  ‘No, I’m just here for the weekend. I have to be back at University on Monday. And, yes, I did hear Tucker,’ Alice said calmly. She sat down at the table and Meg poured her tea, smiling proudly at the young sister who had managed against all the odds to win a bursary to Durham to study English. Oh, she had done well, Meg thought, she had. And Jackie had too for he was now working for his under-manager’s ticket.

  ‘I’m not being hasty,’ said Tucker, picking up Alice’s remark.

  ‘Well, you haven’t thought it out, have you?’ she demanded. ‘You’ve got brains in your head, why don’t you use them? If you must go down the pit, you could study surveying or even mining engineering, do the job properly.’

  ‘I want to start now,’ insisted Tucker, and Alice began to reason with him, using her now considerable debating skills to try to change his mind.

  Meg listened. Alice stood a much better chance of changing Tucker’s mind than she did. He had always been especially fond of Alice. But Tucker was adamant.

  ‘I want to go down Horden, I’m going to start as a putter,’ he said stubbornly.

  Later, in the privacy of their own bedroom, Jonty took Meg in his arms.

  ‘Don’t worry, Meg,’ he whispered. ‘Tucker will be fine.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Meg, Meg,’ said Jonty. ‘We each have our own lives. My grandfather made a fortune when the railway came. He rose from humble farmer to gentleman and built Grizedale Hall. And Father threw it all away, and here am I, a humble farmer again. But we’re happy, Meg. We are, aren’t we?’

  She put her arms around his neck and held his face against hers, the depth of her love welling up in her. She thought of Jonty’s da, the candyman of her nightmares. She hadn’t thought of him for a long time. And she thought of her own da, at last achieving some sort of peace in his old age. They had won in the end, she and her da, the candyman was defeated. She looked down at the broad wedding band on her finger, still shiny and new after only a year of wear.

  ‘I’m happy, Jonty,’ she said.

  Read on for an extract from:

  The Coal Miner’s Daughter

  Also by Maggie Hope

  Available now from Ebury Press

  Chapter One

  Hannah crouched in the kitchen, her younger brother and sister clutched tightly to her.

  ‘Aah, aah, aah, Nora, Nora – ’

  The tortured voice coming from the front room rose higher and higher and Jane and Harry buried their faces in Hannah’s skirts, their hands covering their ears and their bodies racked with sobbing. Hannah stared unseeingly out of the window, desperate to get away from the sound of Da’s pain. But Betty had told her to keep the young ones in the kitchen, ‘out of the way’, she had said. Betty was twelve and she was in the front room with Mam, in case she was needed for anything when the doctor came.

  There was another voice in the front room now – the doctor, that was whose voice it was, Hannah realised, and she looked down at the heads in her lap.

  ‘Whisht now,’ she said softly. ‘Whisht. The doctor’s here, he’ll make Da better, he will, you’ll see.’ But suddenly there was a scream from the front room worse than anything that had gone before and Harry wrenched himself away from Hannah’s grasp and ran to the back door and out of the yard.

  ‘Harry, Harry!’ she called, releasing Jane and racing after him, and even though he was only four years old and she was ten, she didn’t manage to catch him until he was halfway down the row.

  ‘Harry! I told you you had to stay with me!’ she cried, pulling him roughly to her and then Jane was there, hanging on to her skirt and shrieking with terror. ‘You left me, you left me!’ Jane cried and she and Harry set up such a bawling they could be heard all along the pit rows.

  ‘Howay in along of me, hinnies.’

  The calm, sympathetic voice caused all three children to look up. It was Mrs Holmes who lived in the end house, the official’s house; she was picking Harry up in her arms and cuddling him into her, not caring that his tears were staining her white pinafore.

  ‘That’s right, Phoebe, take them in. Just until the ambulance goes, anyroad.’

  Hannah looked round and saw that a cluster of
women had gathered round them, all clucking in sympathy.

  ‘Your da will be all right, you’ll see,’ said one. ‘Go on along of Mrs Holmes now, Hannah, take the bairns inside, that’ll be best.’

  In the distance there was the clanging of a bell, getting nearer and nearer. Hannah knew what it was: the Union ambulance, coming to take Da. She watched the end of the back alley and sure enough the green-painted ambulance went by, slowing as it turned into the front row.

  ‘Howay, pet,’ she said to Jane, and, taking the smaller girl’s hand, she followed Mrs Holmes and Harry into the kitchen of the end house.

  Mr Holmes was sitting in front of the fire, still black from the pit. The sight of him made Hannah close her eyes tightly but she couldn’t cut out the vivid picture she had of her da, lying on a board on a flat cart as his marras, as miners called their workmates, brought him home from the pit, with Mr Holmes, the shift overman, walking in front of the pony as he tried to pick out a path which avoided any potholes.

  ‘Now then,’ said Mrs Holmes, ‘sit ye down. I’d wager you haven’t had your dinners yet, have you? Now I have a nice pan of broth on the bar keeping hot, you shall have a bowlful each.’

  The children looked at her with round eyes, even Hannah. The broth smelled really meaty and they hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. Harry’s stomach rumbled; he glanced up at Hannah anxiously and Mrs Holmes noticed it.

  ‘Howay, Harry, your mam won’t mind you having something to eat in our house,’ she encouraged him. ‘I’ll put a cushion on this chair so you can reach the table comfortably. Now, lasses, sit on the form at that side. Don’t worry, I tell you, your mam won’t mind. And after, I’ll give you a can of broth to take home for the others. That’ll help your mam out, like.’

  The children sat round the table, Harry balanced on a fat, round cushion filched from Mr Holmes’s chair, and soon they were tucking into bowls of Mrs Holmes’s broth. At least, Harry and Jane were tucking in; Hannah’s throat had closed in, she found she couldn’t swallow after the first mouthful. She stared at the yellow globules of fat floating on the top but she wasn’t really seeing them. Instead she was listening for the ambulance bell starting up again, taking Da away.