by Knight, Lynn
Unfortunately Miss West had other ways of asserting her authority, which Eva was equally determined to resist. Their war of nerves continued. Miss West insisted that Eva bring extra ingredients for the domestic science class – her mother had a shop: they could afford it. Flour, butter, sugar: quite a list. Eva said nothing to Betsy. She wanted to resolve this herself. It did not matter how often Miss West waved her cane, the request offended Eva’s sense of justice. This particular stand-off was eventually won by Eva continuing to bring the same quantities to the class as the other girls, but the cane was her teacher’s answer to most things. The intakes of breath my great-aunt produced when describing these stripes to me more than fifty years later showed how much they bit into her skin.
Not everything about school was purgatorial, however. Eva developed a strong sense of mischief. One especially vexing girl, conscious that her hair was her best feature, was constantly tossing her head. The ends of her long plaits repeatedly struck the edge of Eva’s desk, until Eva stopped that lark by tying the girl’s hair ribbons to her chair. Eva discovered she could run fast and win races. She also enjoyed recitations and declaiming aloud in class; one rhyme particularly appealed: ‘Curly locks, curly locks, wilt thou be mine?/Thou shalt not wash dishes nor yet feed the swine,/But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,/And feed upon strawberries and sugar and cream.’ It reminded Eva of Annie.
My grandma decided to stay on at Staveley Netherthorpe Grammar School and train as a pupil teacher (the option for those whose parents could not afford college fees). For three years, she combined taking classes in its Pupil-Teacher Centre with teaching at Brimington’s Princess Street Infants’ School. By now, Zoe had left Netherthorpe and was keeping her mam company at home, but Gwennie Peat, George Hardcastle and Maurice Unwin were still classmates, and all planned on teaching in elementary schools.
George was the kind of boy mothers described as ‘a nice young lad’. He had a way of looking at you as if uncertain how much space he should occupy, and of brushing his hand across his hair when he felt nervous. But he was clever and kind, and could be funny too, and he was certain about one thing – his feelings for Annie. One afternoon, George slid a picture-postcard on to her desk. On the back were scrawled four pencil words, ‘I love you Annie,’ sealed with a tentative kiss.
Annie was fond of George and enjoyed their conversations, but her school crush was Maurice Unwin, with his straight blond hair and slightly curling lip. He had a rather nice way with him, or so Annie thought, until she met Willie Thompson.
He was laughing the first time she saw him, his head thrown back as if taking a deep drink of laughter. That was the thing about Willie: he generally had a smile on his face. A baker at his brother’s firm on Whittington Moor, Willie did the occasional Saturday delivery, managing to hand Betsy her box of cakes as if conveying precious jewels across the counter.
There was something about Willie Thompson – an assurance, an ease – that immediately distinguished him from the other young men Annie knew. Her classmates were courteous and polite, and destined for positions of respect and authority. Already they were developing the quiet consideration and balanced views they’d be required to demonstrate in the future. Even Maurice Unwin, who liked to think himself debonair, talked to Annie as if he’d read up on how to do it. The Wheeldon Mill lads didn’t have much to say for themselves in front of Annie, although she’d known some since they were scab-kneed boys. Long before her education came between them, there was always an unspoken reserve. The fact that she was the shopkeeper’s daughter established a barrier; grammar school erected a high wall.
Willie Thompson was different. Everything about him seemed fresh, newly minted. He was not much of a reader, he’d admit, but he loved a good music-hall turn and seemed to know all the popular tunes. Annie heard him whistling them while he unpacked their bread. He was not daunted by her schooling either, but joked about lady teachers being bossy. Should he mind his Ps and Qs?
The corner shop was one of Willie’s last deliveries, so he and Annie generally found time to exchange a few words, though she had to walk at quite a clip to ensure she did not miss him when returning from her Saturday-morning class. Then just when she was becoming accustomed to her heart leaping at the sight of the baker’s horse and cart, Willie announced he was leaving. He had a passage booked for New York, Philadelphia, on to Pittsburgh. His brother Jim, the baker, was paying his fare.
Their older brother Harry had made his home in America, having sailed two years earlier: an expedient departure, if you believed what you heard. Several irate husbands were rumoured to be on Harry’s tail. Oh, he was doing fine now, in Pittsburgh: Harry always came up smelling of roses. And now young Willie was off to join him.
‘Is that it, then, lad?’ Dick asked when Willie delivered their Saturday cakes for the last time. America was the end of things, as far as my great-grandfather was concerned, the place where people disappeared off the map. ‘Who knows, Mr Nash?’ said Willie, answering Dick, but looking at Annie.
He sailed on 18 January 1911, a few days short of his eighteenth birthday, but gave his age as twenty-one. Sometimes, you had to tell a story to get by.
Will Willie write or won’t he? This question vexed my grandma; it also vexed her mother, who was none too keen on the thought of Willie Thompson writing from America. Betsy hoped Annie would forget him once the Atlantic Ocean was between them. Willie was not the young man she had in mind for her daughter, though Betsy knew better than to interfere. The lad’s gone now. Let it rest.
‘What Are Your Views? Do you think boys and girls ought to be stopped by their parents from talking to one another or corresponding?’ Annie cut this article from a newspaper and pasted it into her commonplace book. ‘Do you think a boy of 16 years ought to be stopped speaking to a girl of 16 years if there has been nothing said about their conduct? Don’t you think a father and mother of a girl ought to let her speak to boys if she be under 21?’
The editor asked his readers for their opinions on ‘this delicate subject’. Annie awaited their replies. ‘We don’t know much about the “ought” of the matter, but we should rather like to meet the parents who can.’ Snip, snip, snip went her scissors.
It was difficult to conceal correspondence when there were three posts a day and you were not in the habit of receiving letters. Whether Willie was forewarned of my great-grandma’s views and judged circumspection the best course, or was too busy enjoying America, he appears to have been silent for much of the time, but he did not want my grandma to forget him. One May morning, a picture-postcard of the Commonwealth Building, Pittsburgh, landed on the corner shop’s mat. Though addressed to Miss Annie Nash, it contained no greeting whatsoever, nor any indication of the sender, yet Willie’s silent postcard reads like a declaration of intent.
5
Turn and Turn-about
LIFE AT THE CORNER SHOP HAD SETTLED INTO A ROUTINE – the family woken by the sound of workmen’s boots striking cobbles on their way to early shifts at pit and foundry; deliveries from butcher, baker and wholesaler; the shunt and exhalation of trains pulling into the branch-line station, and the frequent rumble of passing trucks and coal carts. The rag-and-bone man and knife sharpener cried their wares from the top of the canal bridge, where the muffin man also stopped to ring his bell. A far less appealing sound was the lowing of cattle taking their last desperate stumble up to the slaughterhouse off Brimington High Street.
One of the more attractive sights to be seen from the sweet window was the bunting fluttering around the station for the Coronation of George V, and the neighbourhood parading its Sunday finest (and the power of Betsy’s laundry soap). More entertaining still were the crowds emerging from excursion trains on Race Days, the local station being the closest to the Chesterfield course.
As in years gone by, race-goers were a mixture of pleasure seekers and ne’er-do-wells, all parties dressed to the nines. These days, many more revellers travelled by train, and were as likely to
be lured by the swing boats, roundabouts and helter-skelter as the actual races. Theirs was a procession to watch. It was well worth kneeling on the box to glimpse the effusive confections some of the women wore on their heads, a profusion of feathers, bows, silk flowers and birds; sometimes, a whole nest. (‘Isn’t she the bobby dazzler. She must have raided Jenkins’ window.’)
There was a lot going on at the back door too. The family were seeing more of their neighbours via the house door as well as in the shop. There was always someone calling; if the shop was closed, they came round to the back. There were those who stood on the threshold, others who were invited into the room and a further select few, such as Mrs Graham, the publican’s wife, and Dick’s friend, colliery foreman Bob Britt, who were asked to sit down and talk.
No such hierarchy existed within the shop itself. Anyone could claim a seat on the box. Mildred Taylor was a frequent visitor. A hefty woman, whose bulk made Betsy fear for the sides of the crate, she walked to the shop via the canalside path and felt she’d earned a good chat when she got there. Her three sons were pit-pony drivers, whipping their charges along the underground road; a coveted job as well as a dangerous one, seven shillings and sixpence the weekly rate, though her lads did not say as much to her. They were becoming as close as their father, a collier himself, though too old for their daredevil game. Mildred’s was a house full of swagger, the three young drivers as proud and fiery as the ponies they subdued. Looking at them now, it was extraordinary to think she’d dandled each one on her knee.
For all their bravado, the young men of the neighbourhood were slower than their mothers to linger and talk to Betsy. Once they became accustomed to her, however, they were just as happy to stop and chat. Shorter working hours from 1908 meant young colliers had more time to themselves, a chance to kick a can or a football about outside (though, as often as not, their ball was screwed up paper). Some kept ferrets and liked to go ratting – 1d a tail – and describe their successes to Betsy. Slapping their hard-earned pennies on to the counter, they’d tell her about their day. Those buying cigarettes with their first wage handed over the coins with particular pleasure. Arnie Cresswell, Thomas Jobb, Isaac Dance and Joseph Braithwaite, friends since schooldays and now young foundrymen together, liked to share a packet of Woodbines and sit on the causey edge to divide them: one passed between the four while they sat talking, the remainder tucked behind their ears for safekeeping. Betsy heard them divvying up their spoils and making plans for the following day.
By 1911, my great-grandfather was foreman of the brickyard just below the Wheeldon Mill Plantation, with a motley crew of ten beneath him, men and boys; Dick, the collar-and-tie man with a watch chain spread across his chest, they, hoisting up their oldest clothes with leather belts or knotted rope. Come Tuesday evenings, a fresh collar was needed, plus braided cuffs and ceremonial apron. My great-grandfather’s ‘elevation’ to grocer (a silent title if ever there was one) led to him joining the Buffs. For more than forty years, Dick was a member of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, being admitted to the organisation shortly after leasing the shop. Tuesday night was Buffs’ night. Rain or shine, he picked up the attaché case containing his regalia and walked to his lodge meeting at the Angel Inn.
Sometimes, Annie and Eva accompanied him, on their way to see the latest extravaganza at the picture palace, Whittington Moor’s first. It was all a bit makeshift, really – literally, a hole in the corner affair – in the clubroom above the stables for the Queen’s Hotel. A bedroom held the projector, with a gap knocked through the wall into ‘the auditorium’, its rough and ready nature and flickering screen part of the excitement of the new. Until the cinema’s premier status was usurped by the Lyceum, Annie regularly took Eva (she eighteen to my great-aunt’s ten), the Nash girls clipping up the steps in their ankle boots, with their chosen sweets for the evening – a handful of mint humbugs, toffees, or whatever else they fancied from the shop. They chatted to the publican’s young son, Joe, who liked to assist the projectionist (an early exercise in hand-eye coordination that may have come in useful: Joe Davis was later World Snooker Champion.)
This new-fangled world was all very well, but Betsy much preferred Variety: frock coats, moleskin titfers and all that frothy colour; young girls strutting across the stage, or else picking their way daintily like cats. Some women claimed they only liked the ballads, but Betsy enjoyed the stronger numbers too: the Marie Lloyd imitators, hand on hip and winking – oh, the sauce they got away with in those songs.
It was a case of either muck or nettles for the corner shop in the years before the First World War: if there wasn’t a slump, there was a strike. Everyone in the neighbourhood suffered. Some strikes were more memorable than others, and in the hot sticky summer of 1911, with temperatures soaring higher than at any time during the previous century, one set of workers after another withdrew their labour: dockers, carters, miners; on and on…‘It Is War,’ the headline boomed when railwaymen stopped work in August. By the end of the month, the Derbyshire Courier had even stronger news to report: the Chesterfield Riot.
The Battle of Chesterfield, a brief but bitter skirmish, started when a Saturday-night crowd surged from the Market Square down to the town’s Midland Railway Station and overwhelmed the handful of policemen posted there in the aftermath of the strike. The shriek of police whistles and sound of truncheons cracking heads preceded the arrival of Mayor (and industrialist) Charles Paxton Markham to read the Riot Act to those hurling bottles, bricks and stones. Megaphone authority got him nowhere – Markham was forced to take cover behind a fence – and police reinforcements were helpless before a crowd of some 2,000 (5,000 according to one enthusiastic observer). The whole town was said to be in the grip of the mob. A crescendo of breaking glass all the way up Corporation Street and on to Stephenson Place announced the destruction of plate-glass windows in some of its department stores.
The fight was still raging at midnight, but, shortly after one a.m., the Courier’s reporter spotted ‘glints of steel’: fifty men from the Second West Yorkshire Regiment advancing on the crowd with fixed bayonets. The following week, in answer to Keir Hardie’s criticism of the Home Secretary positioning troops in strike districts, MP Sir Arthur Markham, who had accompanied his brother the Mayor to the scene, gave a vivid account to the House of Commons of the pandemonium outside the Midland Station.
The Battle of Chesterfield was discussed locally with relish as well as shock – at one point, the town’s main Great Central Station was also in possession of the mob: imagine if they’d taken the station at Wheeldon Mill? Strikes were much more than talking points and newspaper headlines, however. No work meant no food beyond the small amounts relief committees could organise. Without their husbands’ wages, Betsy’s customers could neither buy groceries nor settle their existing debts.
The following year brought another miners’ strike – even more working days were lost to industrial unrest during 1912 than in 1911. No coal: no cages lowered down pit shafts; no greedy raging furnaces; nearly everyone in the district was affected. Florrie Stokes, Nora Parks, Mildred Taylor… one after another, women came into the shop and shook their heads in disbelief. Never was a newspaper twist of tea or sugar, or a spoonful of jam more welcome. The Sheepbridge Company established a soup kitchen and issued tickets for groceries that could be repaid once the men were back at work. There was nothing to do but wait.
Some said they knew 1912 would be a bad ’un, given the wicked start to that year: the funerals of five young girls due to perform in a Christmas performance at the town’s Picture Palace. Waiting in the nearby cottage that served as a dressing room, one of the young performers threw something on to the fire. A spark leapt the fire guard and caught her dance dress. In terror and blind panic, she dashed about the room, igniting one gauzy Eskimo after another. Their burns were so bad that one father, hurrying to the cottage upon hearing of the fire, asked his own daughter, ‘Whose little girl are you?’
By 1912,
Annie was in her third year of training at the Princess Street Infants’ School and had much more to occupy her time than keeping an eye out for the postman. She loved teaching small children, but mere enjoyment was not enough: in order to obtain a good reference at the close of her apprenticeship, she needed to make a good impression on the headmistress, Mabel Doughty. Annie worked alongside Miss Doughty as a classroom assistant and was allowed to take charge of some lessons, with Miss Doughty observing her work: Composition one week, History the next, and so on, all the way through the lengthy syllabus. Each plan and scheme of work had to be submitted to the headmistress, and every faltering command and imprecise instruction dissected and discussed. When Annie looked about the room to take in her pupils’ faces, there was Miss Doughty, straight-backed, solemn-faced, an irritant in the corner of her eye. Night after night, Annie was tormented by the thought of her sharp observations and the way she had of saying, ‘I wonder, Miss Nash…’ before slicing into some new failure of hers.
There were also exams to revise for. In 1912, Annie passed the Oxford Local, enabling her to work in schools outside the borough. She could now teach Arithmetic, History, English Language and Literature, including Composition, Geography and Needlework. Betsy and Dick were delighted: another gilt frame for the wall.
Q.
What illustrious lady did [Queen] Elizabeth imprison?
A.
Her cousin Mary, Queen of Scotland, was kept many years in prison by Elizabeth.
Q.
What became of her?
A.
Elizabeth at last ordered her to be beheaded. This is one of the worst acts of her reign. Mary was very beautiful.
Q.
What great fleet was fitted out for the conquest of England in this reign?
A.
One was fitted out by Philip II of Spain, and it was blessed by the Pope, and called by the King the ‘Invincible Armada.’