The Glass Virgin

by Catherine Cookson

  His father had said, ‘Get yerself away from around this quarter where the women not only want brass but a refined twang. Go into Cumberland or Durham; set up there, an’ kill two birds wi’ one stone: Find thaself a wife; she needn’t have a shift but see she’s got a bit class, an’ at the same time keep th’ eyes skinned for small firms hard pushed for cash. Buy up as many as you can; make George Boston and Son, manufacturers of needles, scissors and knives, not forgetting pins, a firm to be reckoned with.’

  His father had met Lagrange once and thought him a man of breeding. He would have spat on him if he’d really known what he was like.

  Breeding! He snorted inwardly and the snort covered the whole family, including the white-faced boy. The boy was looking at him as if summing him up. He said to him in a manner he imagined was superior, ‘And what school are you goin’ to?’

  ‘Eton, Sir.’

  ‘Eton!’ His chin went up; there was derision in the action. ‘And what are you going to do when you leave Eton?’

  ‘I hope to go to Oxford, Sir.’

  Now he repeated the word ‘Oxford!’ his chin again making an upward movement. ‘And from there, what? Prime Minister?’ He laughed now jovially, but the boy was straight-faced as he answered coolly, ‘I don’t aspire to that, Sir, merely to becoming a barrister.’

  He had the urge to take his hand and skelp the young snot across the lug. Eton, Oxford, and then a barrister.

  ‘Have you a glass works, Sir?’

  ‘What?’ The question had come from Annabella, and for a moment he was taken aback and in the pause before he answered Edmund Lagrange put in on a high laugh, ‘No, my dear; he hasn’t a glass works but he has every other type of works. You name them, George Boston has them.’

  The two men smiled at each other.

  The carriage turned out of the drive and on to the rutted road; the bumping disturbed Rosina but delighted Annabella. She looked first to one side and then the other, and everywhere the land rolled away in open fells, showing great sweeps of purple, brown and green. Then of a sudden, into her view came a huddle of makeshift shelters constructed from what looked like pieces of furniture, and scattered about them were a number of children who, on the approach of the carriage, ran towards the road.

  ‘Oh, Mama, look! the poor children.’

  ‘Sit back, dear,’ said Rosina calmly.

  Annabella sat back but she could still see the children running along the high bank keeping apace of the carriage. They were all barefoot, and like the three distant children in her memory they were dirty and gaunt and none of them were laughing.

  Edmund Lagrange now shouted to his coachman, ‘Speed her up there!’ Then in an undertone to Boston he said, ‘Rosier’s rabble; another strike. It took the militia to get that lot out; he’s filled the village with Irish. There’ll be serious trouble one day, mark my words. He can’t handle the men, never could, neither he nor his father.’ He spoke as one who could handle men.

  Two miles further on they passed through Rosier’s village. The dust flew up from the horses’ hooves and smothered the women standing at the doors of the row of cottages.

  There were children here, too, standing at the side of the road and some of them waved and shouted, and Annabella had the desire to wave back, but she knew she mustn’t.

  Another two miles further on and they entered Jarrow, and Annabella was again sitting on the edge of the seat.

  In the past ten years Jarrow had emerged from a pit village and a small boat-building community into a bustling, overcrowded town in the making. Two men out of every three had an Irish brogue; fighting and drinking were the order of the day; and the reason for the prosperity that enabled working men to drink frequently was the birth of Palmer’s shipyard.

  In 1850 there had been between two hundred and fifty and three hundred houses in Jarrow; now in 1859 there were three thousand and builders were working like mad grabbing at the green fields to erect row on top of row of flat-faced single bricked dwellings.

  The carriage tour was to take in Palmer’s shipyard, so they emerged into Ellison Street, so named after a man who owned a great deal of the land thereabouts. And the horses going at a spanking pace along the street brought women from the communal taps at the corner ends, customers out of shops, and even turned men’s heads from their beer drinking to crowd at the public-house windows and ask, ‘Is it Palmer?’ and hear the reply, ‘No. Bloody gentry; bloody bloodsuckers.’

  When they reached the gate of the steelworks, Edmund Lagrange called a halt to the coachman; then standing by the side of the carriage door, he pointed out the great smoking chimneys, the mass of towering iron that was the gantries and cranes, the ships in the river hugging the staiths, and, of all things, a big, black-looking boat sailing down the river with the smoke pouring out of a funnel in the middle of her as if the whole erection was on fire.

  The wonder of it all struck Annabella dumb, but not pleasingly so. In her ten years the only place she had visited outside the perimeter of the grounds was Durham, and Durham was different from Jarrow; it had a wonderful cathedral standing on a rock towering over the river and it was very imposing and everything looked clean, except some of the men who were usually covered in coal dust and who, she understood, were miners. But this Jarrow, this was a different world; the great ships, the noise, the men scurrying about like ants, and the crowds in the streets all dressed in dark, drab clothes. She had noticed a dreadful thing outside one of the inns; she had actually seen a woman lying in the gutter. The sight had made her speechless for a moment and when she went to remark on it, her mama began speaking to Mr Boston, so of course she couldn’t interrupt.

  When Lagrange got back in the carriage he leant towards her and said, ‘Would you like to see how they make steel in the great furnaces?’ and when she replied, ‘I don’t know, Papa; it’s all so big and rather frightening,’ he put his head back and laughed; then, looking towards Rosina, he asked her politely, ‘Shall I make arrangements with Palmer to visit? Would you like that?’

  ‘Yes, thank you; it would be very interesting.’

  Her answer and the way in which it was delivered made George Boston think, She talks to him as if he were a mere acquaintance. She hates him. Aye! I think she hates him. But she loves that girl. Fancy a woman like her, as plain as a pikestaff, giving out something as pretty as that. He stared at the girl. She was pretty, unusually so; in a few years’ time when she thickened she’d be a sight to look at.

  The carriage had turned round and once more the horses were galloping down Ellison Street with children running on each side of the carriage now, shouting in what sounded like a foreign language.

  ‘Hoy a ha’penny oot!’

  When no money was forthcoming the words, still unintelligible, took on a derisive, offensive tone.

  ‘Gan on, ya big gob skites!’

  ‘Aal dressed up like farthin’ dolls.’

  ‘Sittin’ up a height like bloody stuffed dummies.’

  When Armorer’s whip licked along one side of the carriage the children shied away, except one who yelled up at him, ‘Go on, you fat-arsed lackey. Come doon offa that an’ Aa’ll rattle your canister for you. Go on, ya stink.’ The boy hung on to the door of the carriage now and yelled at the company, ‘Ya all stink; ya rift up me belly like a bad dinner.’

  All this while Edmund Lagrange had been talking to George Boston as if the carriage was running through open deserted country and Rosina sat straight-backed, her eyes directed towards the coachman; but Annabella and Stephen stared at the children, Stephen with an amused smile on his lips, and Annabella straight-faced and troubled, especially when Armorer kept using his whip.

  The carriage now passed the expanse of land where disused salt pans lined the banks of the River Don; it passed the church where St Bede had preached and taught; it crossed the riv
er by a stone bridge, then on past the Jarrow Slacks, and down the long country road with farms and fields on one side and the River Tyne on the other, and so into Tyne Dock, where on the third of March in that very year the new docks had been opened.

  Edmund Lagrange pointed derisively at the huge gates as they passed and remarked to George Boston, ‘A white elephant if ever there was one; a new dock and the river so silted up you can walk across to North Shields at low tide! It’s ludicrous, don’t you think? Then they grumble about Newcastle getting all the shipping. Ten years they’ve been making that dock; you would have thought the ’54 business would have deterred them, but no, somebody got an idea and they must carry it through.’

  Rosina looked at her husband as he talked. Anyone who didn’t know him would think that he had the town and its affairs at heart. His reference to ’54, which Mr Boston likely knew nothing about, was the terrible day when sixty-three ships which were seeking refuge in the river were wrecked and many, many lives lost, and all in sight of people standing on the shore. But Edmund didn’t really care if the town sank or swam; he talked to impress Mr Boston, and there could be only one reason why he wanted to impress this young man, for Mr Boston was a common man and ungainly in both manner and speech. She wondered to what extent her husband was in this young man’s debt and what hope Mr Boston held out of being repaid.

  Her eyes widened a little when her husband now directed the coachman away from the main road which led into South Shields and along by the river and through what she knew to be a most disreputable area which led to The Gut and finally to the market place. When he gave further instructions that Armorer should walk the horses she felt a protest rising in her but checked it before it escaped her lips. Annabella, she felt, had seen enough of sordid living for one day, but what she had witnessed in Jarrow would be nothing to what she would see if they went through Temple Town, which was obviously where Edmund was directing the carriage.

  Armorer, too, was obviously surprised at his master’s orders for he repeated, ‘Through Temple Town, Sir?’

  ‘Yes, yes; we’ll see more of the river that way, and the ships.’ He turned to Annabella. ‘You’d like to see the ships, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Papa.’

  But she didn’t see the ships for some time. What she saw were rough looking people, poor people, and lots of children, and mostly barefooted. The towns seemed full of poor children, the whole world seemed full of barefoot children. Of course the weather was warm; perhaps that was why they were without shoes or stockings.

  Sometimes she herself longed to take off her shoes and stockings and run in the grass with her feet bare, that is, when it was warm; but perhaps these children had no shoes and stockings on when it was cold, wet, snowing. She said to no-one in particular, ‘They have no shoes or stockings on,’ and her papa answered, ‘They don’t need them, my dear; the soles of their feet are like leather.’

  ‘Really!’ She moved her head from side to side and smiled slightly at her father. His answer was very reassuring.

  But the further the carriage went into the old town the more she became aware of the drabness, the dirt, the stench. All the people were odd looking. Perhaps, she surmised, they were from foreign lands. Then an awful thing happened; she saw a lady empty a chamber pot from an upstairs window and Armorer had to jerk the horses into a gallop to avoid the contents. She was amazed that the lady had aimed the filth at them and that she continued to laugh aloud.

  Looking at her mama after this incident she saw that her face was very white and her mouth tight, as when she was angry. Her father swore, but Mr Boston laughed and when she looked at Stephen she was surprised that he, too, was almost laughing.

  They now entered a street named Crane Street. It was facing the river and she didn’t know whether to look at the ships or towards the pavement for a lady was walking in step with the carriage. She was different from all the other ladies she had seen because she was wearing gay coloured clothes. The lady was looking at her, staring at her, and when they were some way down the street the lady smiled, and she smiled back at her; then her gaze was diverted from the lady to a high window where there were a lot of ladies, and they were hanging over the sill and shouting. All their faces looked merry and happy and she saw her papa look up at them and smile slightly, and so did Mr Boston. But her mama was looking at the lady who was walking by the carriage; but the lady wasn’t looking at her mama, she was looking at her. She had never seen a lady before with such a colourful face, her eyes were very dark and her lips and her cheeks were very red . . .

  Rosina’s heart was beating as if it was trying to escape from her body. He couldn’t! No! No! He wouldn’t be as vile as this. Yet this wanton walking by the carriage with her painted face under that frightful, befeathered hat, and her bare breasts almost pushing out of her gown . . . But no! it wasn’t possible. Yet stripped of the paint the resemblance could be there. She was tall and had a heart-shaped face, the bones good. But again, no! No! He wouldn’t subject her to this, surely not.

  When her glance flicked towards her husband’s face she saw his eyes were on the woman and she knew he had subjected her to this . . . And those hussies at the window, they hadn’t been there by chance, they had been waiting. Dear God! Dear God! Why? Why? What had she done that she must suffer such humiliation, such insult?

  Of a sudden she caught Annabella’s hand and, pulling it on to her lap, she gripped it tightly. Now the woman was looking at her, and her husband was looking at her, and quickly her glance flashed from one to the other and only years of training in self-control prevented her from screaming at them.

  Edmund Lagrange now gave the coachman a sharp order and the horses went into a trot. The woman tried to keep up with them for some way further, then she was left behind. The carriage went down the hill, into the market place, across it, down King Street and up another hill, towards the glass works.

  Annabella was always to remember her first sight of the glass works and she almost exclaimed aloud in her disappointment. What she saw was an open space containing one long, low building with a large cone-shaped chimney attached to the end, and three similar buildings of smaller size. At one side of the main building was a great mound of small coal, at the other side and near the last building a stack of wood set as to form an arch.

  There was no bustle or activity like that she had witnessed at Palmer’s shipyard, no noise of machinery, in fact the place seemed deserted except for one man who was carrying timber from a pile near the gate and laying it against the wooden arch.

  She had for the past three years, under Miss Howard’s guidance, read numbers of books dealing with the making of glass and when Miss Howard questioned she answered, parrot-fashion, what she had learned. Glass was composed of silicate, soda, potash, lime or chalk; there were various kinds of glass such as crown, bottle, sheet, plate and flint glass. She also knew that glass could be blown or thrown.

  She knew too that mostly Frenchmen were employed in glass-making in England and that there had been great trouble between them and their English masters because they would not share the secrets of their trade. The Italians, too, were fine artists in glass but they, also, guarded their secrets. She learned that the ingredients that went to make glass were universally known, but the secret lay in how they were used. Altogether she felt she had read a lot of books about something that was very simple. After all you took some sand and some of these other ingredients and you mixed them up, then put them in a pot inside a furnace and when they were melted together and forming a liquid you shaped them, either flat or round or indeed any shape you liked. And if you wanted coloured glass you just added copper for red and green glass and iron if you wanted blue.

  She had been longing for this moment when she’d show her papa how knowledgeable she was about their family business, and now she was standing inside the main glass house and she was struck dumb. She wa
s looking across a large room towards a dome-shaped structure with holes in its side. At some distance from it were troughs holding water. There were three men standing in front of the troughs blowing through long tubes and making great bubbles with glass. Other men were sitting in chair-like structures, spinning small quantities of glass on the ends of rods. The place was singularly quiet except for a slight hissing and grinding noise.

  A man, detaching himself from a group of men at the far side of the house, came quickly towards them, and Lagrange said airily, ‘Oh, there you are, Bignall. Everything in order?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’ The man touched his forehead.

  ‘Mr Atkinson about?’

  ‘Yes, Sir; he’s in the office.’

  ‘Kindly tell him we’ve arrived, will you?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  As the man went to pass the company he looked at Rosina and, touching his forehead again, he said, ‘Good day, Madam,’ and she answered, ‘Good day, Bignall. How are you?’

  ‘Very well, Madam.’

  ‘And your wife and family?’