by Ruth Sutton
John hadn’t heard from Jessie; there’d been no reply to his letter. He tried not to think about her, and any expectation of warmth had cooled long ago. Instead he took pleasure in the present. He could smell the sea and salt that carried on the wind. Reaching a gap in the hedge to his right, he looked across as he always did to the hills, but there was little of the familiar skyline to see today. Instead of blowing away on the westerly wind, the cloud simply renewed itself and held a stubborn line that blotted out the peaks.
As he reached the outskirts of Kells the streets were quiet: too early for the children heading to school, and too late for anyone on the first shift. It wasn’t just his starting time that distinguished John from most of the workers at the pit, his work clothes were different, too. John wore shoes, not clogs, a hat rather than a cap, a jacket and tie. His hands were smooth, not hardened and scarred. His strength came from the rock climbing that was his passion, not from hewing and hauling coal.
John kept himself to himself. He could afford to live alone, in a house of his own choosing, only because Enid and Arthur Pharaoh, his adopted parents, had died and left him their savings and a house to sell. The Sandwith cottage was just far enough away from his work to keep the two separate, and he could pay for it outright. The village wondered about that, but he didn’t care what they thought. He’d always felt himself an outsider, even in his own family. His climbing friends were all the company he wanted, and women had always worried him, except Hannah, who was old enough to be his mother. He’d often wished that Hannah was his mother, rather than his Enid who’d adopted him and lied about it, or Jessie, who’d given birth to him, and lied about it ever since. His life was built on lies, and the pretence wearied him.
At the Haig John managed the wages office, but last week Arthur Curran, his boss, had given him charge of the Bevin Boys too, young men conscripted into the mines in a desperate attempt to keep the pits running for the war effort. They worked in the screen shed, where John had never even set foot. He was afraid that the dust in there would make him cough.
‘Why me, Mr Curran?’ he’d asked. ‘Isn’t there someone who knows more about it?’
‘Not much to do, lad. They’ll be gone soon, when we can spare them,’ Arthur had said. ‘You’ve made a grand start ’ere, and Bevin lads’ gaffer has gone off again, so you can do it. Just keep an eye on ’em. They’re pretty useless, just need keeping out of t’way. Screen lasses tell ’em what to do. You just ’ave show your face every now and then. I’ve told Geordie Flett you’ll be over there today.’
It was not what he wanted to do, but he hadn’t been in this job long enough to object. The screen shed would be cold and dirty, and full of noisy women who were shunned by most folk. He left it as long as he could, and then put on his coat and walked across the yard.
Inside, when his eyes adjusted to the light, John found Geordie Flett, the gaffer, standing on an iron gantry in the draughty shed. John’s height and the low ceiling didn’t allow him to stand straight, and he rested his elbows on the rusting rail in front of him, looking down.
Below, standing in groups around the long tables, were about twenty women, and the lads he’d come to find. Each woman’s face was framed by a scarf like a nun’s wimple holding back her hair, topped off with a beret. There were gaps in the windows and the floor of the shed, and the air was chilled by wind straight off the sea. Each strong body was shrouded by a heavy coat pulled tight against the cold and the dirt. Coal dust started to blacken John’s pale face, catching the back of his throat and making his lungs itch. The noise was deafening.
Geordie was trying to tell him something. Some of the words fell victim to the noise in the shed, until John moved closer, bending his head so that Geordie could shout into his ear.
‘Yon Bevin lads are driving a clear,’ said Geordie, pointing down at two men wielding large shovels, ‘They shovel waste down t’chute so the lasses have space to work. One o’ the lads fell down th’hole last week, silly bugger. We ’ad to pull ’im out by ’is feet. Lasses thought it were grand!’
There was a rumble and the gantry vibrated beneath them.
‘Load coming in,’ said Geordie without turning his head. ‘Can you feel it? Big stuff goes on yon table and gets smashed up. ’Ave to get rid of slate so it don’t spit sparks all over t’place.’
‘Who smashes it up?’
‘Screen lasses. That’s what we pay ’em for.’
‘How do they do it?’ said John, standing up to avoid the cloud of coal dust, and scraping his head on the low ceiling.
‘They’re bloody strong, them lasses,’ Geordie shouted back. ‘Share the work, help each other, like men down in’t tunnels. Women used to work underground, tha knows. Parliament stopped it, the women wanted to carry on. So they ended up ’ere, doing men’s work, but up top.’
As if to reinforce the point, two of the women picked up hammers and spikes, swinging at the great lumps of coal on the table.
‘Proper miners didn’a trust the Bevin lads,’ Geordie shouted. ‘Thought they were conshies, like, trying to get out of fighting. Gave ’em a hard time, so bosses put the lads to work in ’ere.’
John thought about his war work. He’d wanted a uniform and action in the navy but he hadn’t been allowed to sign up. Instead he was in a reserved occupation, which meant staying where he was, keeping the pits going. He looked around: the noise, the dust, the cold. He couldn’t imagine working in a place like this, hour after hour, day after day. John told Geordie who had sent him and why, and got out as quickly as he could.
Back at his desk an hour later, a sudden silence made him stop, pen poised over the page. He sat quite still, his head cocked like a blackbird listening for the scratch of a worm under its feet. Arthur Curran put his head round the door, a sandwich in his hand.
‘Screens have stopped, but wheel’s still turning. Just started me bait.’ He waved the sandwich. ‘Get back over there and see what’s what. I ’ate it when things go quiet. Allus means trouble.’
Back John went across the cobbled yard, breathing the salty air off Saltom Beach far below, filling his lungs before the dust hit them. When he opened the door of the screen shed, blackened faces turned towards him.
‘Ush up,’ cried one of the women. ‘Listen.’
Everyone stood motionless. They heard a faint scratching, and another sound, like a baby crying in a distant room.
‘It’s an animal,’ said a voice.
‘A cat?’
‘Nay, a dog, or a fox mebbe.’
‘Where?’
‘God knows. Under t’floor somewhere. ’Ush up again,’
They waited, scarcely breathing. Around them the dust settled slowly. A few long seconds passed. The same sounds, but louder now, and longer.
‘It’s moved! Under Maggie’s table.’
John watched as one of the women dropped to her knees, cleared away some of the waste and put her ear to the bare floor, holding her other hand high to prolong the silence in the shed. She shuffled forward and to the side, clearing a path for herself as she went, then pressed her ear to the floor again.
‘I can ’ear it. Sounds like a dog.’
Maggie Lowery got to her feet, looking up at the gantry where Geordie was standing.
‘What’s under t’floor, Geordie?’ she called.
‘Nowt. Rock. Shed were just put on’t ground, and that were rough like, up and down. Mebbe a drainage tunnel. Daft bloody dog must have pushed in and can’t get out. Tek a while to die under there.’
‘Who says it’ll die? We can get it out.’
‘Nay lass, we’re not shutting th’ole bloody line down for a bloody dog, or whatever it is. Once we’re going again you won’t even ’ear it.’
A furious noise greeted this announcement, a cacophony of swearing that John struggled to decipher.
Geordie looked sideways at him, for support from a fellow gaffer, or protection from the furies below.
John hesitated. ‘How long would it t
ake to get it out?’
‘God knows,’ said Geordie. ‘Depends where it is.’
The screen lasses didn’t wait for bosses to make up their minds. They were already moving the tables to one side when they heard the rumble and vibration, signalling the imminent arrival of another load of coal.
‘Fuck,’ muttered Geordie, pushing past John to the door at the far end of the gantry. ‘Wait!’ he shouted, waving his arms at the men about to tip the load of coal onto the screens. They stopped just in time, before the load crashed through onto the heads of women and lads now systematically tearing up the floor.
‘Wait,’ echoed Maggie, assuming leadership of the operation. ‘Shut up, all o’ you.’ She put her head down to the hole in the floor.
‘Over there more,’ she cried, and they responded immediately.
By now the screen shed was filling up with onlookers as the early shift came up, crowding onto what remained of the floor. Word got round about what was happening. More men surrounded the outside of the shed, pulling at rocks and weeds with their bare hands. John did the same, overcome with a sudden urge to be part of it, not to stand aside as he did sometimes, watching life happen around him.
More than two hours later, after part of the railway and fifty feet of drains had been dug up, they found the dog, wedged into the end of a pipe, its back legs scrabbling ineffectually as one of the Bevin lads pulled it gently free.
The crowd cheered. John and Geordie the gaffer slapped each other on the back. Women hugged. Men shook hands. After years of war and struggle, it felt like a real victory, a happy ending. Maggie wiped a tear and smudged white across her face.
John cried too, surprising and embarrassing himself. It was only a dog, he told himself. Lost, and now found and comforted, likely to be taken home and fed, cared for, loved.
CHAPTER 5
MAGGIE LOWERY HAD BEEN WATCHING the new man all day, as he came and went on the gantry above the screens, and then as he worked alongside them to free the dog. He must be new, or she’d have noticed him before. Wages office, they said. Good with money then. Might even be honest. Looked a bit spindly, too tall to be a miner. Most of the men she knew worked down the pits. They were strong as bulls, short and broad, like her dad before his accident, but now you’d never know how strong he’d been. Even when they lifted him out of the wheelchair his legs were too weak to hold him up.
‘Who’s big lad, next to gaffer?’ she asked Gladys who was working alongside her.
‘New, likely. Not seen ’im before.’
‘Ask your Eric tonight, ’e might know.’
‘Fancy ’im then?’
‘I like tall men.’
‘Your Isaac wasn’t tall.’
‘I know,’ said Maggie.
Stopping the line to find the dog made it a very unusual day in the screen shed. When the excitement was over, the lasses sat round the stove in the bait room where they took their break and talked about lost dogs. There was an air of satisfaction verging on triumph about their success in finding this one, but what pleased them most was their success in stopping the line when the boss had said ‘No’. Just this once, they had made something happen.
‘If we’d not said ’owt, Geordie would have kept us going. Poor little bugger would’ve starved to death, right under us feet.’
‘E’s scared of us, that Geordie, allus ’as been. Stands up there looking at us, but he’s scared to come down ’ere.’
‘In case we eat ’im,’ said Annie, taking a large bite of pie. ‘That tall new lad up there today. E’d be a mouthful,’ she went on, pastry crumbs dropping onto her coal-sodden coat. ‘Start at ’is big feet and keep going. Tek a while but might be worth it.’
They all laughed, the Bevin Boys loudest of all because talk of man-eating made them nervous. Not far away, across the yard, John Pharaoh was sitting quietly at his desk holding a carefully made sandwich in his long clean fingers, mercifully unaware of the discussion in the screen shed.
Even after three years on the screens, every muscle in Maggie’s back and shoulders ached as she walked home with her mother at the end of their shift. She’d started the job for the money, which was more than in the laundry or the canteen, but now it wasn’t just the money that kept her going. There was something about the screens and the women who worked there. They were special; ‘dirty clothes, dirty minds’ some said, but she’d never been around a group of women who laughed so much. Could be cruel, vicious even, if someone didn’t fit in. She remembered how they’d tested her out when she started, and was glad her mother had been around to keep a check on things. She’d heard all sorts of stories about the screen lasses, and they were mostly true.
‘Your turn or mine?’ she said to her mother as they turned the corner into North Row, and walked down the hill towards the sea.
‘Nay, you go first, Maggie love. Your reward for getting that dog out. You’ll be ganging down t’street later?’
‘Nay, not tonight,’ said her daughter. ‘Want to finish that book. Anyway I’m buggered. All that crawling around on t’floor. Look at me ’ands. Worse than ever.’
Maggie looked hard at her wretched hands, ingrained with dirt, calloused and scarred. That was a sure sign of a screen lass; you had to wear gloves when you were out or people might guess, and turn their backs.
The McSherry’s house was on West Row, overlooking the Irish Sea, where the terraced houses stood close to the cliff top, each with a small garden in front, then a strip of field and a steep drop to the wide tumbling sea that washed the rocks below. Nothing much grew, buffeted and burned by the salty air, but when most food was rationed and scarce anything you could grow was a bonus. Potatoes and beets and onions, they all helped to eke out the miserable portions from the butcher, and you could rear a few chickens if the fox or some hungry kids didn’t get them. It was more work for the two women, but they enjoyed it. Maggie loved the feeling of air and sky above her head, and the sea so close. She would stand sometimes, just watching, noticing the movement of the water below, the colours and light, constantly changing. Some days she could see the coast of Scotland to the north-west, Galloway and Kintyre. To the south the top of St Bees lighthouse peeped above the cliff. At night the flash of that lighthouse, and others across the Solway, would pierce the darkness for an instant, disappear and then come again, a slow rhythm warning of rocks and danger.
The routine when Maggie and Violet arrived home was well-established. One or the other would get first go at the big bowl of hot water that had been warming on the range for them, leaving just enough for the second. They bathed in the privacy and quiet of the kitchen, easier now that Judith was older and didn’t need watching. These days she was out most of the time after school, playing among the flapping washing lines on the green behind the houses, or up and down the narrow streets with the other kids, watched by whoever happened to be close by, or no one at all.
Maggie unwrapped herself in front of the range, standing on newspaper to catch the worst of the coal dust that infested her clothes. She took off everything except her underwear, leaving her hair till last, and finally let the auburn curls fall to her shoulders before wrapping them up again in an old cloth. Later she would brush long and hard until her hair gleamed. Short hair would be easier, she knew, but she loved her hair just as it was. It was part of her disguise away from the pit: no one would guess that she was a screen lass, not with hair like that.
She washed herself with a bit of precious soap and a cloth, putting one foot at a time into the big bowl, to rinse her pale feet and legs. The water darkened. When she had to wash after her mother, sometimes she wondered if she was dirtier after she finished than before she started, but it was ‘good, honest muck,’ as her dad said. It always felt wonderful to let the warm water sluice down, taking with it some of the ache of the day.
She’d grown stronger over the years, no question. Maybe the stronger body helped to fade the faint stretch marks at the side of her breasts and above her hips. Her breasts were
fuller than before Judith, but the rest of her was much as it had always been. Not bad. Isaac had liked it, but then he was mostly in too much of a rush to have a good look. The recollection of him was beginning to fade, like the stretch marks. It was years since he went off to North Africa with the army and never came home again. Killed at El Alamein. They never found his body.
She had missed him for a while, but not now. They were too young when they married, both of them. Maggie knew by the end of a brief honeymoon that Isaac was just a lad who had no idea about women, or anything else much except rugby, drinking and his mates. They got married because that’s what you did. The best thing in the whole dismal business was Judith; once she arrived Maggie didn’t really care about the rest. Now that her friends’ husbands, those who survived, were coming home from the war, she acknowledged an inescapable relief that Isaac wouldn’t barge back into her life. But she kept that to herself.
Judith knocked at the kitchen door.
‘Are you done, Mam? Granny’s moaning. She says she’ll take off her clothes out here unless you hurry up.’
‘Tell her I’m done,’ said Maggie, wrapping an old green dressing gown around her. ‘Don’t let her take her clothes off or we’ll all be turned to stone.’
Frank McSherry was sitting in the small front room with the paper. His bed was against the wall, and the wheelchair in which he sat was pushed hard against it, leaving just enough space for the door to be opened.
‘We ’ave to do summat about this door, Dad,’ Maggie said as she had done many times before, since the front room became her father’s bedroom. ‘It needs to open outwards, into the passage. That’d work better.’
‘Aye, mebbe,’ said her father, ‘but that was my job, so who’ll do it now? No McSherry man pays someone to re-hang a door, and folk have better things to do.’
‘You can tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. Women can do things like that, think what they did in t’war.’
Frank looked at his daughter in her green dressing gown, her flaming hair wrapped under a grey cloth. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘If you held your arms out and put a fairy on your ’ead you’d look like a Christmas tree. And if we ’ad another man in t’family, that’d help. You’re a good-looking lass, Maggie. Been a widow long enough now. Judith needs a dad and you need a proper ’ome, not lodging with your mam and me.’