by Maggie Hope
‘There’s nowt the matter with my hearing, you know. I heard you on about a doctor and I’m telling you I will say when I need Doctor Morley.’
‘Now, Mam, we’re only thinking of you.’
‘Aye, well I’m not a bairn an’ I’m not in my dotage neither,’ his mother replied.
‘Mebbe I should get Mrs Brown then,’ asked Lottie.
‘Nay, man, she has enough to do, I told you. Any road, what can she do? She’ll only give us some of that foxglove tea and I have plenty. No, I’m all right, I’m telling you. Now if you’ve finished your dinner you’d best get on with the washing. It might rain later on and you’ll have missed this fine drying weather. After you’ve seen to Harry’s bath, like.’
‘You get on,’ Harry advised Lottie. ‘I’ll fill me own bath.’
‘You’ll do nowt of the sort,’ Mary Anne said sharply. ‘It won’t take the lass but a minute. No, no lad of mine comes in after a shift in the pit and has to see to himself.’
So Lottie brought in the tin bath from its hook on the outside wall and put it before the fire and filled it from the iron kettle, and the bucket of water from the standpipe on the end of the row. There was a set-pot boiler in the corner of the yard and the water in that was heating nicely to refill the poss tub. Lottie could go out and get on with the washing, pumping the poss stick up and down and around rhythmically so that she almost hypnotized herself as she stared down at the movement of the clothes in the water.
She liked Harry, even though he had spoken harshly to her. After all, he had only been worried for his mother. Sometimes she caught him looking at her with a funny expression that made her cheeks redden. He looked away when he caught her eye, though. He reminded her a bit of little Mattie, who had clung to her after his mother died. Of course he was much older than Mattie; why, he would soon be a hewer making a lot of money of his own, she knew that. Hewers were the top men in the pit apart from the officials such as deputies and overmen. All the lasses would be after him, they would an’ all.
Mattie, she thought, little motherless Mattie. Was he all right? If she ever went back to Durham City, to Eliza’s house maybe, she would try to get to Sherburn and see for herself.
Lottie stopped possing the clothes and began lifting them out of the tub, wringing them out and tossing them into two basins ready for rinsing. This was done in the tin bath, though, and Harry was using the tin bath. She blushed as she thought of Harry kneeling in front of the tin bath, sluicing the coal dust from his arms and shoulders. On one shoulder there was a blue scar where coal dust had got under the skin of a cut. There were nobbly bits on his back where he had caught it on the roof of the low seams he pushed the tubs along. All the putters had those and the ponies an’ all. Sometimes she had the urge to touch Harry’s marks, though. How daft was that? He wouldn’t want a workhouse brat like her.
Lottie had her head and shoulders deep in the poss tub, bringing out the last of the wash, when Harry’s voice made her jump.
‘I’ve brought the bath out for you,’ he said. ‘I’ll empty it down the gulley.’ He did that, then emptied a pail of clean water from the standpipe into the bath for her to rinse the clothes. Embarrassed, Lottie bent right over the poss tub to get the last cloth.
‘Careful, pet,’ said Harry. ‘You’ll get a bath yourself if you fall in there.’ He caught hold of her and pulled her upright and she came up as red as a beetroot and panting.
‘Your mam will be mad if she catches you doing woman’s work,’ she said, when she had caught her breath.
‘Aye well, I had to do it when she was badly down at our Eliza’s, didn’t I?’
He went back into the house whistling cheerfully and for minutes after he had gone she could still feel the touch of his hands on her. And he had called her pet.
Chapter Eight
‘Our Albert’s courting heavy,’ said Harry. It was a Saturday, a Baff Saturday, and Harry and his father were broke, for the miners were paid once a fortnight and this wasn’t Pay Saturday. They were sitting in the house having a game of dominoes for the few halfpennies left in their pockets. Tommy was hoping to take Harry’s pennies to add to his own and so have enough for a pint of brown ale.
It was cosy by the fire now that the union had won the men a coal allowance and they didn’t have to scavenge the pit heap for small coal nor the hedgerows for wood. Though it was March, the beginning of spring, and the nights were getting lighter, still it was cold.
‘Enough to cut you in two, Mam,’ Harry had said as he came in from the pit. ‘I felt it coming out of the pit. It was hot down there all right.’
‘Ah, man, you’re that soft,’ Albert had said. ‘Like a lass you are.’
Harry pulled a face but didn’t rise to his brother’s remark. Albert was standing before the mirror in the press door combing his hair – still wet from his bath – to one side carefully before taking the comb to his moustache.
‘I don’t know where he’s going on a night like this with nowt but a few pence in his pocket,’ Tommy said grumpily. And that was when Harry dropped his bombshell.
‘Courting? What do you mean?’ his father asked.
‘I mean he’s going out with a lass,’ Harry replied patiently. He picked up the wooden dominoes, holding all seven easily in his calloused hand.
‘Don’t cheek your da,’ said Mary Anne sharply. She was sitting by the fire with wool and needles, knitting pit socks, and Lottie sat on the other side darning a pair.
‘Did he tell you?’ asked Tommy.
‘No, but it’s the talk of the rows, Da. His marras were joking about it.’
Mary Anne, sitting by the fire, didn’t look up but she was listening hard. Her heart began to beat painfully in her chest. If Albert was courting it meant that soon he would be getting wed and asking the manager for a house of his own and taking his pay with him. Albert brought the biggest pay into the house, he was a good hewer, oh yes he was.
There was food in the house and tea, enough for the coming week and a small amount of money for the herring man, but it was always a hard week with little to spare, especially since they had taken on Lottie. She looked across at the girl, and Lottie glanced up at her and smiled, but Mary Anne was aware that Lottie knew what she was thinking.
Tommy flung his last domino down triumphantly and rose to his feet. ‘Right then, me lad, my game it is.’ He picked up the few halfpennies on the table and put them in his pocket. ‘I’m away for a pint, I reckon.’
‘Aye, that’s right, you go for a pint. Never mind leaving your lad with nowt to last the week. You go,’ Mary Anne said.
‘I don’t mind, Mam.’ Harry looked surprised. ‘I’m not wanting out.’
‘No, an’ you shouldn’t be gambling neither. You nor your da, come to that. The minister wouldn’t like it. Can you not have a game of dominoes without betting on it?’
‘Mary Anne!’ cried Tommy. ‘It’s not really gambling, just for ha’pennies.’
‘Aye, an’ toss penny is just for pennies but many a family has had to go without because of men going down behind the pit heap to play it.’
‘Mary Anne,’ said Lottie gently, ‘you’ll give yourself a pain.’
‘Nay, lass, not me, it’s him that does that.’
‘I’m away, there’s no dealing with you when you’re in that mood,’ said Tommy. He wound his scarf around his neck and pulled on his cap. ‘I’ll not be late,’ he said, his hand on the sneck as he pulled the back door to after him.
‘Aye, go on, you’ll take no notice of me,’ said Mary Anne bitterly, but Tommy didn’t hear her. He was striding down the back street, jumping the puddles in the dirt road and feeling as good as he did when coming to bank after a shift. Released, that is.
‘Mam, it didn’t matter to me,’ said Harry. He glanced across at Lottie, who had her head bent over a sock with a wooden egg inside it. Carefully she threaded the needle across a hole and pulled the wool through and peered rather short-sightedly at her work. Her cheeks were
a becoming shade of rose as though she were blushing, or was it just the heat from the fire? He couldn’t tell.
‘Do you think it’s serious?’ Mary Anne asked, changing the subject.
‘What?’
‘Our Albert and this lass,’ said Mary Anne.
‘I don’t know. He tells me nowt,’ Harry replied. ‘Do you fancy a game of dominoes, Lottie?’
‘Indeed she does not!’ snapped Mary Anne. ‘Who is it, any road?’
‘Who is what? Lottie, howay, have a game.’
‘I don’t know how,’ said Lottie shyly. She had finished her darning and now she rolled up the sock with its twin and put the wooden egg in the sewing basket by her side.
‘I’ll show you,’ said Harry, then to his mother, ‘It won’t hurt if we’re not gambling, will it?’
‘Aw, go on then,’ Mary Anne replied. ‘The lass, who is the lass?’
‘You mean the lass our Albert is going out with? Why, it’s Dora Parkin. Her da’s the horseman at the Co-operative Society. Howay then, Lottie, let’s play.’
‘Just one game,’ said Mary Anne. ‘I’m wanting me bed.’
The two young people didn’t question that. Both knew there was no way Mary Anne would leave one of her sons on their own with Lottie at this time of the night. During the day it had to happen sometimes, but that was different. There would be no carrying on in her house, no there would not. Mary Anne did not say it aloud but she might as well have done. Not that she thought Lottie was that type of lass but human nature being what it was, well …
The lay preacher taking the service the following Sunday was master at the Wesleyan School. He was a middle-aged man who came from Durham City; he had come from a family converted to Methodism early in the century. His grandfather had been a hard-drinking, bad-tempered man who had rolled into a camp meeting more by accident than on purpose and offered to fight the preacher to show him how wrong he was. In his cups, Josiah Bateman was the sort of man who enjoyed a punch-up. He rarely made it down the pit on Mondays as a result of his riotous behaviour over the weekend. But Josiah left that meeting sober and having seen the light, something his long-suffering wife thanked God for every day.
Josiah Bateman the third was a very different sort of a man, for the family had risen steadily, being sober and industrious. He had attended the Methodist College and was an upstanding member of the burgeoning community built around West Stanley mine. He was in his late twenties and sported luxuriant sideburns a shade darker than his light brown hair.
‘I have decided, along with the committee, of course, to start an intermediate class for adult literacy,’ he said.
Lottie had been searching in her pocket for her penny, for the offering always came after the notices, but she stayed her hand and gazed up at Mr Bateman. She was not sure what intermediate might mean, but was it any good for her?
‘I know that most of you can read a little and sign your names even, but I want to be able to introduce you – or those of you who are, let’s say, disadvantaged in this way – to the world of literature. Anyone who wishes can come along at eight on Wednesday evening. To the schoolroom, that is. Er, for those who can afford it the cost will be one penny per week, the money to go to the Relief of Widows and Orphans Fund.’
Lottie stared at him as the plate was passed around by the stewards. He used a lot of words she was not sure of the meaning of, but she thought she had got the gist of what he was saying. This was her chance to learn to read a proper book.
‘Can lasses come as well as lads?’ she asked him as he shook her hand at the door. ‘I mean to the classes?’
‘Why, you will be very welcome,’ Mr Bateman beamed at her. ‘Can you read at all?’
‘A bit,’ said Lottie and blushed. She was ashamed of her lack of reading; in these modern times nearly everyone was learning to read. Why there was a National School in nearly every community.
‘Wednesday, eight o’clock, do not be late,’ he said and turned to the next person waiting to leave the chapel.
‘Can I have Wednesday night off?’ Lottie asked Mary Anne when she got back to Burns Row. ‘Only there’s a class at the schoolroom and it’s about books.’
Mary Anne rarely went to chapel these days. The minister visited her instead.
‘You can, pet. Only, I cannot pay you any more. You know how things are.’
‘No, no, I’ll manage, I will. I’m grateful for what you’ve done for me any road.’
‘We suit each other, Lottie. You’re one of the family now,’ said Mary Anne warmly.
Wednesday evening came around and Lottie made her way to the schoolroom in good time for the class. In fact, she was too early in her eagerness and had to wait by the chapel door for the steward to come and open up. When he did, she sat down on a form at the back, where she hoped Mr Bateman would not take too much notice of her. If he asked her to read anything aloud she would die of embarrassment, she was certain of that. She kept her head down. The forms were filling up and there was a buzz of conversation around her.
‘Do you mind if I sit here, Lottie?’
Harry’s voice close to her ear made Lottie look up in surprise. His shift at the pit had finished barely half an hour ago. He must have run home, had his meal and his bath and then come out to the chapel in that time. Automatically, Lottie shifted up on the form to make room for him.
‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were interested in liter … er, books.’
‘Well, I am,’ said Harry. His hair, still wet from his bath, glinted in the light from the hanging lamps above.
‘But you went to school, you can read,’ said Lottie.
He shook his head. ‘Not too well. I went down the pit when I was seven, so after that I didn’t have much schooling except for Sunday School.’
A hush descended on the schoolroom as Josiah Bateman climbed the few steps to the platform. He had a sheaf of papers and books under his arm and he spent some minutes arranging them on the lectern. The class watched him in silence, for there was not a person there who wasn’t a little in awe of him, despite his kindliness.
Lottie even forgot her shyness with Harry as she listened raptly to Josiah Bateman’s opening talk. She couldn’t see him too well as she was at the back of the class and he was on the platform, but she could hear him perfectly and by, he had a lovely voice, a voice that made you interested in what he was saying. He spoke for almost half an hour on the advantages of being able to read fluently enough that you did not have to spell out the longer words; something not very common in the rows.
‘This is an age of opportunity,’ he said, his voice so fired with enthusiasm that he carried everyone in the schoolroom along on its tide. ‘We must seize every chance for improvement. I will read a short piece from the work by Mr Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist. I believe everyone in the room will want to know what happened next, even if it means deciphering it for oneself.’
Lottie was enthralled to the extent that she even forgot who it was sitting by her side. Harry, though he was interested himself, could not help himself glancing sideways at her face, tilted so that she could peer at the platform and the man at the lectern reading so expressively from a large, leather-bound book.
Lottie was struck by the similarities between Oliver and herself. He was a workhouse lad; she was a workhouse lass. She burned with trepidation when he asked for more food, for she knew too well that was unheard of. He had been put out to work in the community and so had she. No one had considered the welfare of the young boy Oliver; he had had no one to turn to and neither had she had anyone to protect her from Alfred Green.
The evening was almost over. Mr Bateman was closing the book and Lottie desperately wanted to know what happened next. But she was no nearer to improving her reading, she realized. He had given out no tips on reading – none at all – he had simply read out the tale of the workhouse lad.
‘I’ll walk you home, Lottie,’ said Harry. ‘Did you enjoy it now?’
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‘I did, oh aye, I did,’ she replied fervently. There was a buzz of conversation as people began rising to their feet and putting on mantels and coats. They stilled as Josiah Bateman called from the platform.
‘If you want to know what happened next in Mr Dickens’s story, I have booklets with the next chapter at the door. They are free but when you have finished with them I want them back to pass on to others.’
Outside, the spring evening was turning cold. Frost sparkled from the ruts in the dirt road and the moon had a ring of white around it. Lottie pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders and folded her arms beneath it. The booklet, issued by the Institute for Adult Literacy, was clutched in her hand. She could hardly wait to get home so she could look at it.
The two people walked with a careful distance of about a foot between them. Even so, she was as aware of him as if they were actually touching. Harry was a canny lad, she thought; a canny lad and a bonnie one an’ all. But there was plenty of time for lads. She had little time to herself but she was determined she was going to improve on her reading so she could read a whole book like Oliver Twist. Up until now she had not realized that all she needed was practice: the more she tried to read the more she would be able to. At least that was what Mr Bateman had said. Oh, he was a lovely man, Mr Bateman. A man like her father might have been if he hadn’t died. Well, he could have been like Mr Bateman, couldn’t he?
‘Well, was it a good night?’ asked Mary Anne as they came into the warmth of the kitchen and Lottie shed her shawl, hanging it behind the back door.
‘Aye, it was,’ Harry replied. ‘The teacher read us a story by that Mr Dickens.’
‘But did you learn anything?’
‘Well, not really.’ Harry rubbed his hands together and walked around the tin bath, still standing on the floor before the fire with dirty water and floating coal dust in it. He held his hands out to the fire to warm them. ‘It’s a bit parky out there,’ he observed.
‘I’ll empty the bath and then make us cups of cocoa,’ said Lottie. She was brought down to earth by the fact that there were still jobs to be done before she could lie down on her makeshift bed on the sofa and dream of being able to write stories like Mr Charles Dickens. Or even of being able to write at all, anything.