Salem Street

by Anna Jacobs

  But she couldn’t help looking round and thinking about things as she rode with her son and her brother in a carriage behind the hearse. Even on a rainy day like this, the park looked pretty. How nice it would be to live in the older part of Bilsden! To see the green of trees around you and live among quiet people, who didn’t scream and shout and get drunk. She promised herself that one day in the not-too-distant future, one day, when she was sure that Tom could run the business successfully, they would move to a better part of the town and they would live among people who could afford to wear mourning and to rent nice houses and to send their children to good schools.

  This was just a temporary set-back, she vowed. Her dressmaking business was getting nicely established, but she still made more money from her second-hand clothes and from the junk. She had to be sure that Tom could keep her supplied with cast-off clothing and could manage the rest of the business. No, she decided, she couldn’t afford to take any risks until Tom was firmly established in Charlie’s place and the money was flowing in steadily again.

  There were quite a few people at the chapel. Emily and the children had walked there, as well as Kathy and Alice. There were a few older women too, members of the congregation who made a practice of going to funerals, goodness only knew why. And Dr Lewis also turned up, driven by Sam in the gig. This was as much a surprise to Annie as to the onlookers and she was not sure that it was a sensible thing to do. It was bound to cause gossip, for he wasn’t even a member of the congregation.

  “My dear Annie!” he said, coming over to take her hand.

  “Dr Lewis. How kind of you to remember Charlie!” she said, removing her hand quickly from his and taking her brother’s arm. She wished Jeremy hadn’t come. And calling her Annie in public, too!

  She was relieved when Pauline Hinchcliffe turned up as well, and came over to join them, because that made Jeremy’s presence seem less strange. Pauline behaved very affably to Tom, praised William’s appearance and took Jeremy Lewis to sit in a pew with her. Afterwards she insisted on driving Annie home in her carriage, while Tom and William walked – for Annie had not seen the necessity to waste good money on keeping the carriage to take them back to Salem Street when the funeral was over.

  Pauline didn’t beat about the bush. “Stupid of Jeremy Lewis to come to the funeral! It’s bound to cause talk. You mustn’t encourage him to hang around you now that your husband’s dead. Oh, it’s all right. I know you wouldn’t do anything stupid. But he might. He doesn’t get on with that wife of his and he’s too soft for his own good, that man. His patients trade on his kindness. It’s a good thing I was here to step in this time.”

  “I didn’t know Dr Lewis was coming,” protested Annie. “And I’ve done nothing to encourage him or to cause talk. He’s just a friend. How stupid people are sometimes!”

  “Well, stupid or not, that’s life. I’ll have a word with him myself. He must realise that his little calls at Number Eight have to stop, now that you’re a widow.” She rapped on the roof. “Drive round the park!” she called to her coachman. “Miserable day,” she added, turning back to Annie, “but I wanted to have a talk with you, and there’s always someone around in that little house of yours. What are your plans now?”

  “My brother is coming to live with me. He’ll take over Charlie’s rounds.”

  “Good. You’re too young and pretty to live on your own. But what about your move? I thought you were going to leave Salem Street.”

  “I’ve postponed that. I daren’t risk anything until I see how Tom shapes up.”

  Pauline laughed, a dry, disbelieving spurt of sound that made Annie flush. “Some would say that this was the ideal time to leave. I’m beginning to think that you’re afraid to move out – afraid to come to life again. But you’ll have to leave the Rows one day, my dear Annie.”

  “I will leave! I’m longing to leave. You know how I hate Salem Street!”

  “Do you?” Pauline asked coolly, taking Annie’s breath away. “I’m not so sure about that. I think you’re frightened to move.”

  “I’m not! I just – I can’t take any risks at the moment – not till I’ve seen how Tom goes on.”

  “Mmm. Well, you do have a point there. Perhaps this is not the most auspicious moment. But you’re not staying in Salem Street for ever. Make up your mind to that!”

  23

  August to October 1844

  Tom moved into Number Eight as soon as he and William got back from the funeral. The moving in was well under way by the time Annie arrived home. Tom let William help him to carry his things along from Widow Clegg’s and joked with his nephew as he rearranged the bedroom they were to share. Annie realised with a pang that her son was already transferring his allegiance from his dad to his uncle, and she wasn’t sure that she liked that. Not so soon.

  After he’d unpacked, Tom started poking into every corner of the house. He even walked into Annie’s bedroom, frightening Kathy, who now shared it and who was having a wash. She let out a little scream of fright and clutched the towel in front of herself, but he just grinned and walked out, tossing a “Sorry!” over his shoulder.

  He was the same downstairs, looking into drawers and cupboards, which he’d never dared do before, and moving things around till Annie got mad at him.

  “You can just stop that, Tom! This is my house and these are my things, and I’ll thank you to leave them alone!”

  “Just lookin’.” He was quite unabashed. “No harm in lookin’, is there? After all, I live here too, now, and I’m the man of the house.”

  “You live here, yes, and I’m not denying that I’ll be glad to have a man around, but you’re not taking over, Tom, not now, not ever. You’d better understand that from the start. You’re not my husband; you’re my partner. It’s still my house. And what’s more, it’s my ideas and my hard work that have made the business so profitable, so nothing, nothing at all is to be changed without my say-so!”

  Two pairs of eyes met challengingly across the table and William, sitting by the fire, waiting for his tea, looked anxiously from one to the other, upset by their tone and the tension he could feel in the air. Kathy kept her eyes on the pan she was stirring. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of Tom coming to live with them. She didn’t like young men. They shouted and fought and pestered you. If only all men were like Charlie. He hadn’t shouted. He’d been gentle and kind and she missed him greatly. A tear splashed on to her apron and a little hand stretched out to pat her arm.

  “Don’t cry, Kathy,” said William. “I’ll look after you now. Dad said I was to look after you and Mother.”

  The tension was dispelled as everyone smiled at the little boy’s words.

  Inevitably business slowed down when Tom first took over the collection and sorting of the stuff. He had thought he knew most of what was needed, but there was a surprising amount still to learn, and of course, he made one or two mistakes, though not as many as Annie had feared.

  In a few weeks business began to pick up again, as Tom grew more expert at wheedling rubbish out of farmers’ wives and out of the housekeepers and maidservants of the wealthier citizens, not to mention the women in the older part of the town. He gradually learned the values of each type of item and the profits began to rise again. And he went further afield than Charlie ever had, sometimes staying the night in some small inn or even a farmer’s barn.

  After a while he began to take on commissions for women in the outlying districts, making a penny here and a halfpenny there. Nothing likely to show a profit was too much trouble for Tom, who was revelling in the open air and the freedom to do as he pleased after the stifling years in the mill. Not that this was not hard work! It was. He was out from dawn to dusk most days and footsore when he returned, until his body grew used to the new routines. Even his face changed. He would never be good-looking, but he began to look more attractive as his face gained colour from the sun and his expression began to reflect his growing confidence and satisfaction with life.
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  Tom even did errands for some people for nothing, building up goodwill, he said to Annie, who was still keeping a careful eye on everything he did. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he had a soft spot for old people. He liked to get them talking about the old days, before the mills had grown so big, when families did a bit of weaving or spinning at home and most folk had their own patch of ground to grow a few greens and keep a pig. He would flirt shamelessly with toothless old women, leaving them convulsed with laughter, and he would slip a small packet of tobacco to the old men, who were dependent upon their families’ generosity. He was drunk with happiness himself those first few months and wanted to share it with the world.

  Gradually Tom began to make his own niche in Number Eight. He developed a friendly, no-nonsense relationship with Alice and he teased Kathy as if she were his younger sister, seeing even more clearly now that he lived there how useful she was to them all, for she was a good housekeeper and an excellent cook. It only increased his respect for Annie when he remembered the filthy waif she’d rescued from Polly Dykes and saw what she’d made of Kathy.

  William followed his uncle around whenever his mother would let him. His mother didn’t like him to play out with the dirty children from the Rows and his young uncles and aunts from Number Three rather despised him. Consequently, he was a lonely child, with no real friends. Tom’s liveliness and vigour seemed to fascinate him.

  Annie would have preferred not to let William go outside into the streets at all, but that wasn’t possible. There were many little errands he could run for her, and it would have been stupid to leave her sewing and do them herself. But she was so terrified of him growing up as roughly as Tom had that she discouraged him from fighting or getting himself dirty or from doing most of the things the other children of the Rows did.

  As a result, William Ashworth was regarded as an outsider by everyone, a stuck-up little mammy’s boy, who talked differently from them and who wore fancy-nancy clothes. When he did go out and there were no adults around, they pelted him with rubbish and taunted him with being a softie and barmy like his dad. He bore this stoically, hiding most of his hurts from his mother and cleaning himself up as best he could.

  One day, Tom turned the corner from Boston Street and startled a group of children yelling and struggling with someone in their midst. When they ran away, leaving a child doubled up on the ground in the back alley that ran between Salem and Boston Streets, he realised that it was William and hurried over. The boy was bruised and covered in filth, crying in a despairing way that upset his uncle.

  Tom bent down and offered him a handkerchief. “What happened, then, kid?”

  “They – they threw things at me.” William started scrubbing at the dirt.

  “They? Who’re they?”

  “The other children.”

  “Oh, fights, eh? And the other gang won.”

  William blinked up at his uncle. “Other gang?”

  “Yes. We used to have gangs too, when we were little ’uns. Whose gang are you in?”

  Tears welled up again in William’s eyes. “I’m not! They won’t have me!” He burst into noisy sobs and flung himself into his uncle’s arms. “They shout at me – an’ they throw things – an’ – an’ this time they hit me an’ kicked me. But I’m not a softie and I’m not barmy!”

  Tom patted the quivering little back. “Nay – shhh, now.” After a while the sobs stopped and William mopped his eyes with his uncle’s handkerchief. “I shouldn’t have gone along the back,” he stated bitterly, “but I wanted to see what they were doing. They were laughing.” He looked up, his face streaked with tears and dirt. “Don’t tell my mother. She doesn’t like me talking to the other children.”

  “She’ll not need telling, young fellow. You’re going to have a nice black eye there. Besides – she’ll have to know. We’ve got to do something about this. We can’t have people calling my nephew a softie, can we? I reckon I’d better teach you how to fight.”

  “Mother doesn’t want me to fight,” said William, in the bleak tones of one unjustly denied a treat.

  “Well, your mam’s wrong this time. Women don’t know about things like that.”

  Two greenish-brown eyes stared gravely up at Tom, as William struggled to digest the idea that his mother didn’t know everything. “My mother knows a’ awful lot,” he said dubiously.

  “Well, she don’t know about men an’ fightin’,” Tom insisted. “She’s a woman. They’re different from us men.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ll teach you a few tricks, show you how to fight, then you’ll have to get into a few fights for practice. You won’t win ’em all – you’re too little. But if you show ’em you’re not a softie, they’ll let you join one of the gangs. You’ll see.” He took hold of William’s hand. “Come on! We’d better go an’ face your mam before we do anything else.”

  Annie nearly went mad when she saw the state William was in. She went even madder when he informed her that his Uncle Tom was going to teach him how to fight.

  “You’ll not!” she threw at Tom. “I’m not having my William fighting. You leave him alone.”

  “He needs to learn,” said Tom flatly. “All kids have to learn how to stick up for themselves.”

  “William’s different.”

  “He’s not!”

  “I want to learn to fight,” said William, walking over to stand next to his uncle.

  “You be quiet! You’ll do as you’re told.”

  “I won’t! I won’t!” William burst into tears and clutched his uncle’s arm for support.

  Tom looked across at Annie. “He has to. You’re wrong about this, our Annie.”

  Kathy, sewing by the window, nerved herself to interfere. “They’ll keep on bashin’ him if he don’t learn to hit ’em back,” she said. “I’ve helped him clean hisself up a few times now, Annie, but I didn’t say owt about it. All kids fight. Didn’t you?”

  Annie’s resistance crumbled suddenly as a vivid memory of beating the ‘Bosties’ came back to her, a battle in which she had played a leading role.

  “They call him a softie, say he’s barmy like his dad,” Tom urged. “Do you want him to be called Barmy Willie?”

  Annie opened and shut her mouth, then collapsed into a chair and covered her face with her hands. “I didn’t want him to grow up like we did,” she faltered. “I was trying to make sure he had a better life. He doesn’t need to mix with dirty kids from the Rows.”

  “Doesn’t need to? He lives in the Rows!”

  “I should have moved out when Charlie died. I should have got away then.”

  “You know as well as I do that it wasn’t the right time to move. An’ it wouldn’t have made any difference to William’s problem,” said Tom. “You are trying to make him into a mammy’s boy and you’ll succeed if you go on like this. Wherever he lives, our William has to learn to stick up for himself, yes, and to take a beating without showing he’s afraid. Everybody fights. Some of ’em use fists, an’ some of ’em knives, an’ some use money, like Hallam, an’ some use words.”

  Annie stared at her brother, amazed at his perceptiveness. What he’d said made sense. She thought of Mrs Lewis – just look how that woman bullied everyone, even the doctor and Miss Marianne. She used words and airs and graces as her weapons. Annie looked at her brother with new respect. “All right,” she said in a tight voice. “All right, then. Teach him to fight, if you must. But don’t teach him to look for fights or to bully people, just to defend himself.”

  During the next two weeks William spent a lot of time with his Uncle Tom. He went out with him sometimes to collect junk, a rare treat, and he practised how to hit people and how to fall over, away from kicking feet. He lost his look of dewy-eyed innocence and Annie shed secret tears over the loss of her baby. For the first time it occurred to her that it might be nice to have other children. But that’d mean – no, she couldn’t! She was never going near a man again. She didn’t want to wind up like Em
ily, worn out and old before her time. That’s what getting married did for you.

  Unbidden, the image of Danny O’Connor rose before her. What on earth had made her think of him, great braggart that he was? And there was Jeremy Lewis. He’d said he cared for her, but he was already married. And she hadn’t seen much of him lately. Pauline Hinchcliffe must have had a word with him. Annie was missing him, missing not only his visits, but the books he’d lent her and the ideas he’d planted in her mind. If it hadn’t been for Pauline, she sometimes thought she’d have gone mad here.

  Her reverie was interrupted by a banging on the door. When she opened it, she found her half-brother, Mark, and two other filthy little boys supporting a bloody, but triumphant William.

  “What have you been doing?” she demanded angrily. “Just look at the mess you’re in!”

  “He fought Henry Jones, our Annie,” Mark volunteered. “Henry threw some muck at him an’ our Willie bashed him one.”

  “Oh, did he?”

  “’Course, he didn’t win, our Willie didn’t,” went on Mark.

  “William!” she corrected automatically.

  Mark shrugged. “William, then. That Henry’s eight an’ he’s big. But our Willie, I mean our William had a good try an’ he give Henry a few good belts.”

  “Well, don’t stand there dripping blood all over my clean doorstep, come in,” snapped Annie.

  Mark looked round to make sure his mother wasn’t out in the street to see him, then entered Number Eight. He liked visiting their Annie, when he could. You always got something to eat and her house smelled nice, too.