She must be made to accept her responsibilities, Hannah declared but there was a growing feeling in Blenheim Lane that not much could be expected in the way of responsibility from the second Mrs Aycliffe. And when tiny Cecilia began to vomit and whine and grow tinier than ever, it was Hannah who lay in wait for the wet nurse and caught her ruining her milk by swigging gin; Hannah who spared Morgan Aycliffe the unpleasantness of dismissing the woman – who was drunk and abusive – by doing it herself; Hannah who found a healthy replacement and had her safely in the Aycliffe nursery before the next feeding time.
‘What an entertainment we have had this afternoon,’ Elinor told her husband on his return, ‘for the wet nurse was drunk, and there was such a set-to – such a deal of huffing and puffing that I had to get up and watch the fun.’
But his reply was no more than a gradual tightening of his features, that look of thin disdain so habitual with him, and, as her voice began to ebb away and her gaiety with it; he merely said, ‘I am appalled.’ And I couldn’t tell if his contempt were directed solely at the nurse, at Elinor, or at himself.
The days of his enraptured gazing – the days of strawberries and champagne – were so totally at an end that even their memory, I think, distressed and amazed him. And if he could not forgive himself for the sensual impulse that had led him to propose, to the pretty young sister instead of the sensible older one, he could not forgive Elinor – it seemed – for inspiring it. The difference in their ages alone did not disturb him too much, for Hannah was herself very much his junior and, in a world where women were apt to die young anyway, in childbed or from the strain of raising large families, a man could be forgiven for taking one who could be expected to last. It was simply that, his passion having cooled, Elinor had nothing else to offer him but a vivacity he found unseemly and a fertility that filled him with dread. He had fallen victim to lust, he had been tempted and had succumbed, and now, saddled forever with this prattling child, he felt he had been cheated. Lust, it seemed, was not splendid, as he had hoped, but untidy. It was a clutter of knitting needles and medicine bottles in his drawing room; a drunken country girl, her breasts swollen with sour milk, stumbling across his threshold; it was a nursery full of little girls who, one day, would surely escape their place of confinement and lay sticky fingers on his porcelain, who would defile his Wedgwood and his Coalport, his dignity and his purse. And because Elinor was lust, who had played him this foul trick, had lost him his son and failed to provide him with another, he chose to turn his thoughts in other directions to the parliamentary career which would enable him, more than ever, to avoid her.
‘You may inform Mrs Aycliffe I will not be dining at home this evening,’ he would tell his housekeeper as she presided over his solitary breakfast, and Elinor, much relieved, would plan her day around her own whims and fancies, her callers and her growing number of aches and pains.
‘I am not quite well this morning. No, no, I really don’t know what ails me – a little dizziness, a slight pain behind the eyes. I could get up, but it hardly seems worth it since I shall only go back to bed again. And, I ask you, what is there to get up for? They can all manage splendidly without me. When I make the effort and go downstairs in the evenings I can do nothing right, for my husband has been so morose since Crispin left. And was that my fault? I suppose it was. Just as I am to blame for having girls instead of boys.’
Crispin. Although at the command of good sense I decided not to think of him, only the surface of my mind obeyed. I continued, as I had always done, walking my dogs every morning on the moorland road above the mill, taking tea with Emma-Jane and Lucy, submerging myself in the life of my household, the lives of my children, inviting my husband’s friends to dine. I engaged a nursery governess on Hannah’s recommendation: a well-starched Mrs Paget to supplement the services of my nursemaid, Liza. I taught my six-year-old son Blaize to read, and was astonished – and made much of it to Emma-Jane and Lucy – when I discovered my five-year-old Nicholas had some how taught himself. I brushed my daughter’s hair at bedtime, enchanted by its fragrant, sable coils, and told her the stories my old Marth-Ellen had once told me, rejecting the new books of moral fables given to me by Hannah.
I promised Caroline a kitten for her birthday that year – a gift my father had once made to me – and took her, hand in hand, down a country lane in search of the old woman who kept white cats and usually had a litter to dispose of. Although all through the bumpy drive, jumping up and down beside me in the carriage, she had talked of a white, fluffy kitten – ‘Snowy,’ she’d said, calling out to the passersby. ‘We’re going to fetch Snowy’ – when we finally located the low stone cottage and found a basket alive with all the colours of a casual feline mating, she had been so enchanted by deep tiger stripings, a little black-and-white patchwork body, a pair of transparent eyes saucily winking from a head the texture of grey velvet, that I, enchanted with her, had understood the impossibility of making a final selection and had allowed myself to be convinced that if she had a kitten, then Blaize and Nicholas should have one too. And giving way to her pleas of ‘It’s only fair, Mamma,’ and her very plausible fears that if we left them behind their wizened owner would be more than likely to drown them, I had come away with the striped tabby for Caroline, the grey for Nicholas, the black-and-white for Blaize, arriving home to a frozen welcome from Hannah, to a sharp reminder that Mrs Paget, the governess, was averse to animals in her nursery; to Nicholas, who demanded the black-and-white cat because Blaize had it, to Blaize, who, privately not caring much for cats at all, hung on to it because Nicholas wanted it; while Caroline, cutting through their dispute with an imperious hand, declared that since they did not know how to behave, she would have all three.
‘They’ll be mine,’ I told them, ‘every one, before the month’s out, unless you learn to care for them properly.’
‘Oh, I’ll look after mine all right,’ Blaize said.
‘And so will I,’ Caroline told me. ‘Better than him.’
Yet by the end of that first month, after a great deal of boasting from Blaize that his cat would soon be big enough to eat the other two, after a great deal of petting and ribbon tying from Caroline, who considered hers the prettiest, I found only Nicholas beside me when I put out the daily saucers of milk, the fish scraps and meat scraps; only Nicholas to concern himself and go hunting with me whenever one of the mischievous trio could not be found. And, as so often before, my heart bled for him when, having accepted their food from his steady hand, the fickle creatures stalked away to jump, purring and flirtatious, on the lap of my other son, the careless and charming Blaize.
I found peace in the smooth unwinding of my days. I drove to Patterswick to visit my mother, sorted linen, made potpourri with Mrs Stevens, ordered new clothes, and experienced pleasure, sometimes, when my husband made love to me – sometimes not – and irritation whenever he reached out that cousinly hand to pinch my chin. And when, from time to time, it seemed that my last meeting with Crispin Aycliffe had been the only real thing that had ever happened to me, I closed my eyes to it, closed my mind to it, and hurriedly went about my daily tasks.
It would have been easier, of course, had he gone away altogether, but Mr Richard Oastler’s letter to the Leeds Mercury had created a mighty stir in our community, and by so publicly associating himself with it, Crispin had become involved. He had gone from his father’s house to spend a few days at Fixby Hall, where Richard Oastler was employed as steward by its owner, Squire Thornhill, and where, Mr Oastler having diverted his considerable energies from the slave, trade to the cause of oppression nearer at home, Crispin was introduced to the Huddersfield Short Time Committee, headed by Mr Oastler and dedicated to the shortening of the industrial working day.
And instead of going on from Fixby Hall to London or to his uncle, on whose favour he must now depend, he had come back to Cullingford, where a Short Time Committee of our own was forming, and had taken lodgings at the Red Gin, a public house of ill repute
somewhere in Simon Street. He was often to be seen in the company of Mark Corey, an illegitimate son, rumour had it, of our gallant Colonel Corey of Blenheim Lane, who, unlike his supposed father, was a revolutionary, a ne’er-do-well, and owner of a scurrilous weekly newssheet, the Cullingford Star.
‘The Bill,’ then, ‘the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill.’ But to Richard Oastler and Mark Corey and Crispin
Aycliffe, and to a multitude of workingmen – and a multitude of other men who had no work – it was not the Reform Bill but the Ten Hours Bill that mattered. Since the masters would not reduce the working day voluntarily, they must be forced to do it. The factory children – and the women, too – must have legal protection. And although there had been Factory Acts before, which had made very little difference to anyone, at the mere hint of further legislation the manufacturers reacted very much as the Duke of Newcastle had done when, criticized for evicting tenants from one or other of his nine constituencies because they had not voted his way, he had replied, ‘Have I not the right to do what I like with mine own?’
It was not that all millmasters were the savage demons it suited the Cullingford Star to have us suppose, for, like any other breed, they varied from the very good to the very bad, with a great many in between who were sometimes one thing, sometimes another. There were men like Bradley Hobhouse, who, from indolence rather than any definite streak of cruelty, set a target of production for every day and allowed his overlookers to achieve it in any way they pleased. And since the time-honoured Law Valley method for keeping factory children awake was to strap them or duck their heads in a cistern of cold water – and since the accident rate at Nethercoats, from exhausted children falling into the machines and having their clothes, their hair, and sometimes their limbs torn off, was unusually high – Emma-Jane wore a very long face when the town, suddenly, became flooded with copies of Richard Oastler’s letter, one of which found its way into her carriage and one, wrapped around a stone, through her parlour window.
At the other end of the scale, there was Mr John Wood, the worsted manufacturer from Bradford, who had contributed £40,000 to Richard Oastler’s campaign and who, in his own mill, provided baths, and seats for his operatives to rest on, and allowed them half an hour for breakfast and a lordly forty minutes for dinner. And somewhere among them was Joel Barforth, expanding faster than anyone, still building larger premises that would need more hands, more women, more children, more overlookers greedy for their bonus if production was kept up and certain of their dismissal if it was not. And if these overlookers, who needed the money, worked little girls of eight and nine for seventeen hours a day to earn it, and strapped them to keep them on their feet, I knew that Joel, unlike Bradley Hobhouse – who preferred not to look – would be well aware of it.
‘I ask them to do nothing,’ he announced, when pressed, ‘that I have not done myself. I worked at Low Cross with my father from seven years of age, and when my mother set her mind on sending me to school I walked there, five miles, summer and winter, and back again, and then worked half the night when we were short handed. And I’ll tolerate no interference in my affairs. I’ll allow no spineless government official into my factories, telling me what I can and can’t do, any more than I’d allow him into my wife’s bed.’
And Emma-Jane Hobhouse, who was dining with us, rushed to agree. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘I believe this Richard Oastler is merely out to make mischief or to get his name in the newspapers again, now that the slave trade campaign seems almost over. Poor man, one could almost pity him, for he is only the steward of Fixby Hall, not the squire, and having been so idolized for his work for Abolition, is quite beyond his station; one can see that he doesn’t want to sink back into obscurity. But why should we be made to suffer for it? And I tell you this, if this horrid Ten Hours Bill ever came to pass, we should not be the only ones to grumble at it. Ten hours of work sounds very fine, but has, he stopped to wonder how people are to manage on ten hours’ wages? If we stopped our engine at the end of ten hours and sent everybody home, most of them would stand outside the gates and beg to be let in again. And if parents were unwilling to send their children to work, what on earth could we do to force them? They couldn’t manage without their children’s wages, that’s the truth of it – my word, we’ve all seen women dragging their children to work by the ear or chasing them into the yard with a possing stick. Really, Mr Oastler should confine himself to what he knows, like managing Squire Thornhill’s estate, for if he has all this time to spare for our affairs, one can only assume he neglects his own.’
But Emma-Jane was troubled in her conscience, and every morning, as I walked out with my dogs, I found myself pausing on the path above the Top House and looking down at the mill, enclosed by its high stone wall set with black iron spikes and a massive iron gate. I was never awake these days to hear those gates clang shut at half past five precisely, separating the early risers, who deserved their day’s pay, from the latecomers, who did not. But I would be on the path sometimes by half past eight, breakfast time, when the gates opened again for a quarter of an hour and the latecomers would be let in, reprimanded, fined, while others, who had already been at work a full three hours, would come out into the yard for a breath of soot-flecked air, a slice of bread and dripping, and to make water before the engine came on again, when they would need permission to leave their looms.
There would always be a line of children outside the gate, tiny girls five or six years old with bundles in their arms which could have been rag dolls but which were babies, coming to the mill to be fed. And, gradually, a woman would detach herself from the crowd, suckle her baby, hand it back to its five-year-old nursemaid, and go hurrying away, with two or three of her older children about her, to her labour. And although I wanted to deceive myself, my eyes refused to lie and I saw how small these children were, how crooked, how pale, how many threw one leg inwards as they walked, how many had one shoulder higher than the other or were bent at both knees from straining bones that were still soft.
Children had always worked in the mills, and I had never questioned it. My grandfather and my father both had employed them, and before that they had worked for their own parents, in the cottages, where the whole family, had laboured hard to produce their weekly piece. Country children went gleaning at harvest time and fed pigs and chickens on bitter winter mornings; city children cleaned crossings, made lace, swept chimneys, and were expected to fend for themselves as soon as they were able and were expected to leave home, in many cases, and go into service at twelve or younger to make room at the family table for new little ones. No one had ever told me that childhood was a time of idleness, for even I, as a little girl, had been required to mend linen, to help with pickles and preserves in season, to make myself generally of use. And at least, as Emma-Jane put it, the factory children were spared the burden of having to learn to read and write. But that troupe of pale dwarves filing listlessly into the mill – twisted bodies that, if they grew at all, could only become twisted men, scarred women – got into my dreams, lodged themselves somewhere behind my eyelids, so that they were never altogether out of view.
‘Naturally,’ Hannah said, ‘although Mr Oastler is guilty of gross exaggeration, there is abuse. The Hobhouse mill leaves a great deal to be desired. And Bradley Hobhouse should be made aware that if he allows young persons of both sexes to mingle together so freely, without adequate supervision, then promiscuity can be the only result. It has been brought to my notice that some of his overlookers are men of most unsavoury repute and since factory girls mature so rapidly – due to the heat in the sheds, one supposes – Well, I have heard of two cases of girls from respectable families in Ramsden Street who have been most vilely led astray by their employment at Nethercoats. Someone should-speak to Emma-Jane before the Cullingford Star gets to hear of it and we are all made to suffer.’
But the flaunting factory queens of Hannah’s imaginings never crossed my path, while the sad-eyed, crook-shouldered boy
s and girls I did encounter showed no signs of the energy required for seduction. They were, quite simply, too-weary, and it seemed to me that the scorching heat of the sheds instead of maturing them would be far more likely to wither their vital impulses away.
Yet how could I, the wife of Joel Barforth, protest? How could I do more than keep silent when, in that glorious Reform year of 1831, Mr Michael Sadler, the member for Newark and formerly an importer of Irish linens in Leeds, lay before the House his bill for the protection of young persons in factories and for the regulation of the working day? If the bill became law it would be illegal to employ anyone under the age of nine, although in the absence of any official registration of births, this would be difficult to enforce and the old Law Valley attitude – ‘if they’re big enough, they’re old enough’ – would still apply. Young persons between nine and eighteen would be permitted to work no more than ten hours a day from Monday to Friday and a mere eight hours on Saturdays.
And, in the general protest, I kept a determined silence. When the proposals of Sadler’s bill were issued in pamphlet form by Crispin Aycliffe – firmly established now at the Cullingford Star – and distributed throughout the mills, my silence deepened and extended itself, so far as possible, to my mind.
‘Don’t think for one moment that Crispin Aycliffe cares, about the factory children,’ Hannah said hotly. ‘That young man has joined Oastler’s campaign merely to annoy his father. He knows perfectly well that when Cullingford is enfranchised Mr Morgan Aycliffe will stand for election, and his aim now is to embarrass him. That young man is not an idealist. He is simply malicious.’
And when, one afternoon, we met Crispin Aycliffe face to face as we were crossing Market Square and he was coming perhaps from the Red Gin, Hannah refused to acknowledge his bow, stared through him, and seemed ready to walk through him had he not stepped aside, her hand gripping my elbow like a vice, so that I was bound to follow. And that night, plagued by the memory of his smile that had said, ‘Don’t worry. I know you have to pretend to hate me,’ I looked closely, cruelly, in my mind’s eye, and admitted that every morning when I set out with my dogs I longed to see him coming towards me through the mist. And, terrified by the intensity of that longing, I decided I would walk my dogs on the moorland path – in the place where he knew he could find me – no more.
The Clouded Hills Page 25