Return to Jarrow

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

‘Miss Hearn’s had breakfast.’ The woman spoke in a slow, deliberate way, as if she used words sparingly. ‘Assistants eat first, then the officers. The mistress wants to see you straight after chapel.’

  They passed a dormitory of iron beds with coarse grey blankets where two women were mopping the floor. Yellow light filtered in through dusty screens at the high-up windows and Catherine wondered why they were needed. They turned down another long corridor that overlooked a bare yard. Three old women in faded blue overalls sat on a bench contemplating the worn flagstones.

  ‘Airing yard for the old females,’ Mrs Atter said. ‘Next one’s for girls.’

  Catherine stared in surprise as they reached the far end and looked down into an identical yard where a group of young girls was running around in a mass game of skipping. It was the first real sound of life she had heard in this echoing labyrinth of wards and yards.

  ‘Don’t they have a separate home for the children? Their own school and that.’

  Mrs Atter shook her head. ‘Girls this end, boys the other. Idiots go to the asylum at Colchester.’

  Breakfast was porridge and tea, but Catherine’s stomach was so knotted with apprehension, that she hardly touched hers. She felt she had stepped back fifty years in one night.

  Mrs Atter noticed her lack of appetite. ‘We get sausages for breakfast twice a week now since inspector came round. And roast dinners Sunday and Thursday.’

  Catherine smiled weakly, wondering what they got the rest of the week. At least at Harton they had been well fed. She filed into chapel with the others, too overawed to protest her Catholicism. It smelt pleasantly of polished wood, and someone had put a vase of pink carnations and sweet peas by the vestry door. The chaplain gave a hasty service of prayers and a hymn, then dismissed them to their day’s work. She was able only to flash a quick smile of encouragement at Lily as her friend was led away by the relieving officer.

  Mrs Stanway was waiting for Catherine. She was a tall, handsome, middle-aged woman with a quick walk, who talked over her shoulder as she hurried out of the building and across a large cobbled drying ground.

  ‘Wash house, drying rooms, laundry.’ She pointed at a row of buildings opposite. ‘You’ve met your assistant already, I see.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Mrs Atter.’

  ‘Oh, she didn’t say,’ Catherine exclaimed.

  ‘She’s very experienced - been here since the eighties, when the Kettlewells ran the place - they were the original overseers. Can’t say things have changed very much since. But as Mr Stanway says, “If it isn’t broken, don’t mend it”. That’s the view of our Board anyway. Inspector shook them up a couple of years back, but things change very slowly in this part of the world.’

  ‘Aren’t the County Council responsible for running the institution now?’ Catherine asked. ‘At home, the guardians are being replaced - since the new law’s come in.’

  Mrs Stanway gave a snort of laughter. ‘As I said, things take time.’ She turned in the doorway and gave Catherine a good look over. ‘I must say, you’re a lot younger than I thought you’d be. You’re just a slip of a thing.’

  Catherine bristled. ‘I’ve been assistant head laundress for two years in a large city laundry and I’m as strong as an ox.’

  The mistress laughed again. ‘Good, I like that. You certainly came with a spotless reference. Though it defeats me why you’d want to leave the city for a backwater like this. Why have you come?’

  Catherine was taken aback at her directness. ‘I - er - wanted a change - to get on - see a bit of the world.’

  Mrs Stanway pulled a face. ‘A bit is all you’ll see.’ She saw her dismay. ‘Don’t listen to me. I come from London and nowhere measures up after you’ve lived there.’

  She showed Catherine into the laundry and introduced her to the staff. It was suffocatingly hot, even that early in the day.

  As she was leaving, the mistress turned and asked, ‘Is there anything you wish to ask?’

  Catherine mustered her courage. ‘Is there a Catholic church in the area? I can’t miss Mass on a Sunday and I like to make me confession regularly.’

  Mrs Stanway said, ‘There’s a priest in Great Bentley, I believe. But I can’t promise to get you there. Won’t our chapel do?’

  Catherine could just imagine old John fulminating at such a suggestion. ‘Lily and I don’t mind walking,’ she answered.

  Her superior gave a dismissive wave. ‘I suppose you could borrow the bicycles.’

  Catherine felt a flush of relief.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ Mrs Stanway added as an afterthought, ‘I’ll need to see your birth certificate. Just for the paperwork.’

  Catherine froze. ‘I -I haven’t got one -I mean -I haven’t got it with me - didn’t bring it.’ She was burning under the woman’s scrutinising look.

  ‘Well, perhaps you could write home and ask your family to send it. You do have family?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Catherine stammered. ‘Ka— me mother will send it.’

  Mrs Stanway stared at her a moment longer, then nodded. ‘Good.’

  Catherine was left, heart hammering, trying to compose herself enough to listen to Mrs Atter’s slow voice over the din of the laundry. The woman must have thought her dim-witted, for she could not concentrate on anything except the thought that she could not produce a birth certificate.

  She had never been asked for one until now, and had never wanted to question Kate about it. Did illegitimate offspring have them? Probably not. And if one did exist, what would it say? Father unknown? Born out of wedlock? Or would it give John and Rose’s names as her parents, and contradict the information on her application about Kate McDermott being her next of kin? Why had she never asked Kate before?

  Catherine was engulfed by waves of panic. She had taken this huge step to escape the shame of her past and start afresh, only to find it catching her up before her new job had even begun. Familiar nausea rose from the pit of her stomach. What was she going to do?

  Chapter 23

  Catherine dealt with the mistress’s request for a birth certificate by ignoring it. From time to time, Mrs Stanway would raise the issue and Catherine would act as if it had totally slipped her mind.

  ‘I’ll mention it the next time I write home,’ she promised. ‘I’ve been that busy.’

  And she had. The workhouse laundry was large and antiquated, the machinery constantly breaking down and needing repair. She tried to befriend her workers, but they were sullenly suspicious of her openness. A mix of country girls who knew nothing of the world beyond the adjacent villages, and the elderly infirm who had lived there half their lives, they struggled to comprehend her northern accent. So used were the old women to institutional life that they never ventured beyond its walls and talked about ‘the Queen’ as if Victoria had not been dead for nearly thirty years.

  Mrs Atter, with whom she clashed daily over how things should be done, did not approve of her attempts at familiarity either.

  ‘They need to know who’s boss,’ she scolded. ‘Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a yard. Mrs Kettlewell was never one for mixing the classes.’

  Her talk depressed Catherine, for she had grown up with old John’s belligerent maxim that no one was any better than the next, no matter to which class they were born. But was that not what she wanted - to be taken for a middle-class woman of standing with a job people looked up to? It was the path she had chosen and she was not going to backtrack now.

  Lily had been assigned to the relieving officer, the promised job of checker never materialising. Although Catherine saw little of Lily during the day, they managed to meet up in the evening in the sewing room for a chat over their darning, or a walk around the workhouse gardens if the weather was fine. Lily assisted the relieving officer with the endless stream of
unemployed men who came seeking outdoor relief. She wrote their names in the ledger and issued them with tickets that gave them a meal and a night’s rest in the casual wards.

  In the mornings when the gates swung open, a group of them trudged off down the road to work as labourers for the drainage board, digging ditches and repairing dykes until sundown.

  ‘Come from all over,’ Lily told Catherine, ‘not just the farm lads from round here. Had one man used to play the organ at the flicks - but the talkies put him out of work. And then you get the lads who haven’t had a full week’s work since they came back from Flanders.’

  It surprised Catherine that there should be so much hardship in the rural south as well as the industrial north. She had imagined the region to be full of picturesque thatched cottages, well-stocked gardens and wealthy country houses; not the drab, crumbling houses with pinched-faced women at their doors she had glimpsed on her day off.

  ‘Flanders,’ Catherine sighed, ‘and the war’s been over ten years or more. Wonder if our Jack would’ve ended up like that - an out-of-work soldier?’

  ‘Talking of soldiers,’ Lily brightened, ‘we get next Saturday off. Why don’t we meet them lads from the barracks?’

  Catherine pulled a face.

  ‘Oh, haway, Kitty,’ Lily implored. ‘We’ve not been more than five miles from Tendring in a month. I’m sick of riding round the lanes on the Stanways’ old boneshakers. The summer’s nearly over. Let’s gan to Colchester or Clacton, please!’

  ‘Do we have to meet them lads?’ Catherine was reluctant. ‘Why can’t we go on our own? I wouldn’t mind seeing if I could join the library at Colchester.’

  ‘Kitty man, we need a bit fun.’ Lily was impatient. ‘There’s no harm in it if we stick together.’

  ‘What will we tell the Stanways?’

  ‘Nowt,’ said Lily. ‘Why should they stick their noses in? It’s our day off. We’re not prisoners.’

  At that moment, they heard the jarring clang of the gates banging shut for the night and the jangle of keys in the giant lock. Catherine shivered.

  ‘All right,’ she relented, ‘you write to that lad Bob. But don’t go blabbing it about. That Mrs Atter’s always asking sly little questions about me background and that. I don’t trust her not to make a song and dance to the mistress.’

  Lily was dismissive. ‘She’s as batty as an old hen, that one.’

  ‘Still,’ Catherine warned, ‘you could tell her two’s two, and she’d make six out of it.’

  On the Friday, Lily got a note from Bob in Colchester that he and his mate Alf would meet them on the prom in Clacton-on-Sea at one o’clock, by the bandstand. They borrowed the workhouse bicycles, Lily declaring with a straight face that they were going to visit St Oswald’s Priory and look for the headless ghost.

  ‘It’s St Osyth,’ Catherine snorted in amusement as they cycled out of the gates. ‘St Oswald’s a northern saint.’

  ‘Same difference,’ Lily said. ‘The master was too busy giving us the history to notice. We’ll just pretend we’ve been to the priory, of course.’

  ‘Lily Hearn,’ Catherine laughed, ‘you’re going straight to Purgatory for that one!’

  ‘Well, let’s hope the day’s ganin’ to be worth fibbing over,’ Lily laughed back, and pedalled faster.

  They got lost twice along the maze of lanes, although they could see the coast in the distance like a tempting mirage. A warm southerly breeze buffeted them and butterflies darted out of the swaying grass, while curlews called high above in the dazzling white clouds. They arrived late, hot and breathless.

  ‘We’ll never find them in all these crowds,’ Lily fretted.

  The promenade stretched far along the low crumbling cliffs, looking down on a crowded beach and gaily painted bathing huts.

  ‘Yes we will,’ Catherine said, squinting short-sightedly into the distance. ‘Look, there’s the bandstand.’

  Lily smiled quickly, smoothed down her hair and hurried ahead, pushing her bicycle past hordes of day-trippers. Bob grinned when he saw them and stubbed out a cigarette. He was wearing an open-necked shirt, while Alf looked awkward, perspiring in a jacket and tie.

  Bob steered them to a cafe overlooking the front and paid a boy to mind the bicycles for the afternoon. They had ice-cream sodas, and began to relax in the festive air of the small seaside town. Afterwards they strolled along the promenade and watched Harlequin and Columbine performing to the crowds. Bob challenged them to kick off their shoes and stockings and paddle in the sea. Alf looked wary, but when the women raced into the shallow waves, he rolled up his well-pressed trousers and followed.

  ‘Not used to the sea,’ he confessed to Catherine. ‘Come from Warwickshire.’

  Lily shrieked as Bob began to splash them. The women retaliated and soon they were all soaked.

  ‘If old Atter could see you now, Kitty,’ Lily giggled.

  ‘She’d need smelling salts to bring her round,’ Catherine laughed.

  ‘Who’s Atter?’ Bob asked, swinging an arm round Lily.

  ‘Holy old wife at Tendring. Thinks we’re daughters of the Devil for not ganin’ to chapel. We’re Catholic, see,’ Lily explained. ‘Have to cycle to the priest in Great Bentley for confession - and to Mass on Sundays.’

  Catherine tensed, waiting for their expressions to change. She had grown up with street fights between Catholics and Protestants. Her grandfather cuffed anyone who spoke favourably of Dissenters. During the war, when rebellion broke out in Ireland, she had been spat at and called a Fenian traitor on her way to church simply for carrying a rosary.

  But Bob just laughed and kissed Lily on the cheek. ‘What good girls you are,’ he teased. ‘That halo’s blinding me.’

  Catherine slid Alf a look. He gave a bashful smile. ‘I’m Christian Scientist.’

  Bob rolled his eyes. ‘Blimey, surrounded by a bunch of Holy Joes. Don’t suppose I can tempt any of you to a drink?’

  They laughed and Catherine’s tension melted. In the end they went for tea and then fish and chips before reclaiming their bicycles.

  ‘Can we see you again?’ Bob asked, holding on to Lily’s hand.

  ‘Course,’ she answered at once. He kissed her on the cheek and made arrangements to see them in a fortnight’s time.

  Catherine and Alf exchanged looks and an awkward handshake. She liked his gentle seriousness, but experience had made her cautious. He was probably married. She was not going to make a fool of herself or allow herself to be hurt again. Alf would be kept at arm’s length.

  The warm weather of late summer continued into September. The four met up in Colchester on the next day off, then Wivenhoe at the mouth of the River Colne, a place of boat-building. Crossing the muddy creek in a punt pulled on a rope by a retired mariner, they took a picnic to Mersea Island. Catherine was entranced by the flotilla of houseboats and small yachts that nestled in the lee of the hilly island, and the pewits that scurried across the mudflats.

  After the picnic, Bob and Lily went off for a walk and Catherine lay back among the sea lavender, chewing on a long grass, while Alf talked about his family. An older brother had survived the Great War and come back convinced prayer had saved him.

  ‘Doctor said he wouldn’t last the night - lost that much blood. Delirious, he was. Had a vision of this figure dressed in a coarse white robe, picked him up and carried him home. Laid him on the bed in our house. Next thing he knows, he’s waking up in the field hospital babbling about seeing an angel. Nurses couldn’t believe he’d lasted the night. Two days later he’s well enough to be moved and on a ship back to England. That’s why he became a Christian Scientist. So I did too - always looked up to him.’

  Catherine sat up and shaded her eyes from the blinding light that bounced off the sea. A heron rose silently from the reeds.

  ‘Suppo
se you find the story hard to believe,’ Alf said apologetically.

  ‘No,’ she assured him. ‘When my grandmother was dying, she thought I was her dead daughter come back to her. Kept calling me her angel child. It worried me at the time, but now I see how it must’ve comforted her.’ She looked at Alf. ‘Maybe your brother mistook one of the nurses in his fever. But what matters is it gave him the strength to fight back and live. That’s still the power of prayer.’

  Alf stretched out his hand and covered Catherine’s. He left it resting there, warming hers, while they gazed at the rippling ocean and listened to the chittering of reed warblers. She had rarely felt so at peace as in that moment. He did not try to kiss her or spoil the silence between them and she marvelled that it could be like this with a man. The men she had known were demanding, taking from her like leeches - whether it was her grandfather, the men who courted her or the shadowy monster of her childhood with his jade-green eyes and predatory hands.

  Catherine shivered and suppressed the memory again, but Alf withdrew his hand, thinking she was warning him off.

  ‘Let’s go for a plodge,’ she suggested.

  He followed her down to the muddy beach and they paddled in the shallows. They emerged with legs dyed blue with the mud and Alf produced a spotless handkerchief to rub them down. Bob and Lily found them laughing and sand-smeared. Catherine scrutinised her friend. She looked flushed and windblown, and firmly hand in hand with Bob. Catherine felt a twinge of uneasiness at what they might have been doing.

  They lingered too long over a meal of pie and chips in Wivenhoe and were late back. It was almost dark and they had to rattle the gates for Vines to come and let them in. He grumbled loudly and the next day saw them hauled in front of the mistress to explain their lateness. Catherine discovered the woman had a temper when crossed.

  ‘We have rules for a purpose. If our staff break them, then what sort of example does that set for the inmates?’

  ‘It won’t happen again, miss.’ Lily was contrite.

  ‘No it won’t,’ Mrs Stanway snapped, ‘because we’ll not lend you our bicycles again. At least not for the rest of the month, until you’ve learnt your lesson.’