by Maggie Hope
‘I will do it, I should have done it afore but I was in a hurry,’ said Harry. So once again his mother was scandalized by the sight of him doing what should have been done by a woman: emptying the bath and taking the water outside and the bath too, hanging it on the nail on the outside wall while Lottie spooned cocoa into mugs and poured in hot water. A dollop of condensed milk and the drink was ready.
‘What about you, lass, I can see you liked it by your face,’ said Mary Anne as they sipped their cocoa.
‘I did, oh yes, I did,’ Lottie said fervently. She thought of the booklet waiting for her. She would try to decipher it by the light of the fire as she waited for the time to come around when she had to wake Tommy for his fore shift.
Chapter Nine
1876
‘I want you to be my girl properly,’ said Harry. He carried on walking, not even looking in Lottie’s direction, but his face was suffused with red.
Lottie stopped walking and stared at him, biting her lip. ‘I don’t want to be anyone’s girl, Harry,’ she said. ‘Not really. We are friends, aren’t we? That’s enough. We have plenty of time.’
Harry finally looked at her properly. ‘I’m eighteen coming up, Lottie. Albert was courting when he was eighteen. Why shouldn’t we?’
‘And look at them, Harry,’ said Lottie. ‘Albert and Dora aren’t happy, are they? And there’s war on between the families, what with Dora having a bairn and them not wed yet. I don’t want to be courting seriously, Harry. I don’t want to have a bairn yet and I don’t want to get wed neither. Not for ages, years and years.’
‘All lasses want to get wed,’ said Harry. ‘What else can they do? Go and be someone else’s skivvy?’
Lottie began to walk on rapidly. ‘Like me, you mean?’ she called back to him over her shoulder.
‘Aw, Lottie, you know I didn’t mean it like that,’ said Harry, hurrying after her. ‘You’re not a skivvy, You’re … you’re …’
‘A skivvy,’ said Lottie.
‘No, nay. You’re one of the family,’ Harry protested.
Lottie relented and stopped walking. She turned to face him. ‘No, I know you didn’t mean it.’ She looked down at the book in her hand. It had been lent to her by Josiah Bateman. Jane Eyre, it was called – the story of an orphan girl.
‘I know you like this sort of story, Lottie,’ he had said to her. ‘And Charlotte Bronte was an excellent writer, though a trifle sensational.’ He bit his lip. Perhaps he should be encouraging her to read Charles Kingsley instead.
Harry was slightly jealous of Mr Bateman’s influence on Lottie. He didn’t like the way she gazed up at the older man with such rapt attention. He didn’t like it that Mr Bateman had taken Lottie in to Durham to be fitted with spectacles either. But he didn’t mind the happiness he saw on her face when she came back wearing them. Lottie had always had good near sight and could read now and do close work, stitching and mending. She could sew as fine a patch as his mother, if not better. But she had not been able to recognize anyone from only a few feet away before she got glasses.
She had come home from the oculist in Silver Street in Durham wearing the spectacles and exclaimed about everything she saw, not least the dust on the brown boards of the kitchen ceiling. She exclaimed over the sheep and lambs she saw on the hillside behind the village; she exclaimed at the beauty of the colours of the gases she saw rising from the coke ovens when they were at work.
‘Think about it, Lottie,’ Harry said now.
‘Think about what?’
They were turning into Burns Row. The sun had sunk behind the houses and there was a slight haze in the air as the colliery chimney belched out smoke.
‘Lottie!’
Lottie, who had been thinking of the pleasures to come, when all the family were in bed or at the pit and she could sit before the fire with a stub of candle and read from her book, heard the outrage in his voice and brought her mind back to the present and what Harry had been talking about.
‘I will,’ she said, then stopped before turning in at the back gate. ‘It would worry your mam. You know how bad she is these days. Albert will be moving out, it’s not right they should be living in separate houses, not when they have little Bertie. If we moved out, Tommy and Mary Anne would be left on their own.’
‘I didn’t say we should get wed,’ said Harry. He kicked at the wall by the gate with the steel cap of his pit boot. ‘I’m only eighteen yet. But I’m earning good money hewing. We could get wed when I’m twenty-one, but I’m just saying we could be courting now. Be my lass, Lottie.’
‘Aw, Harry,’ said Lottie, and hurried into the house before he could say any more.
‘Mind, you’re a bit past your time, aren’t you?’ demanded Albert as they went in. ‘I said I’d meet Dora at nine o’clock, she’s going to be mad.’
‘I told him to go,’ said Mary Anne tiredly. ‘Lord’s sake, I can be on my own for a few minutes. Any road, Tommy will be up soon.’
‘Mary Anne, I’m that sorry,’ said Lottie. ‘I didn’t realize it was so late.’ She put her book down on the table and took off her shawl. ‘We got talking.’
‘Talking, were you?’ Albert was already on his feet and pulling on his jacket. ‘Well, that’s all right then.’
‘Albert …’ Harry started to say, but stopped as he saw his mother’s face. Mary Anne’s eyes were ringed with a dark brown discolouration and her face and neck were puffy, as were her hands and feet. Her heart was failing, had been failing for a long time, but now the process seemed to be getting faster every day. She could no longer lie down in bed but had to be propped up to breathe. They were afraid to leave her on her own in the house.
‘You should be in bed, Mam,’ he went on. ‘Howay, I’ll carry you through and Lottie will undress you.’
‘I was trying to let Tommy sleep as long as he could,’ Mary Anne said, fighting for breath.
‘Aye well, it’s time now.’
Lottie looked in the oven to check on the bacon and potato panacklty. It was bubbling away fine, so she pushed the iron kettle from the bar on to the fire. Before long she and Harry had Tommy up and, dressed in his pit clothes, eating his supper, and Mary Anne safely tucked up in bed in the front room.
Albert was away to see his lass and bairn. The minister had been giving them a bad time, saying they should get married. Dora had been in tears about it last time he’d seen her.
‘Mam’s badly, Da,’ said Harry. ‘Real badly. What are we going to do?’
Tommy shook his head. ‘We’ve had the doctor and he did nowt. I thought he might have done. Bloody witch doctor, that’s what he is. I mean, there’s still smallpox about for all their talk of being able to stop it with this newfangled vaccination.’ Tommy shoved a forkful of bacon into his mouth.
‘Da, that’s got nowt to do with Mam and her heart. The dropsy’s getting worse, you must see that.’
Tommy pushed his plate away and sat down by the fire to lace up his pit boots. Harry and Lottie watched him, waiting for his response.
‘Da?’
Tommy straightened up. He pulled on his cap and tied his muffler around his neck. Then he spoke.
‘I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m away to Durham the morn and I’m going to fetch our Eliza back wi’ me. She’ll have to help out for the now.’
‘But … but what about your bed? You cannot walk all day and go down the pit on a night, man!’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ said Tommy stolidly. He picked up his stick, which was standing in the corner by the fire, and walked over to the door. ‘Good night to ye,’ he said and pulled the sneck to behind him.
‘Harry,’ Lottie began but Harry cut her short.
‘I’ll go meself,’ he said. ‘I’ll set off now. It’s nobbut a few miles, I’ve walked further down the pit. I’m not wasting money on the train.’
Lottie sighed. ‘At least get some supper into you first, Harry,’ she said. She did not argue with him. It was true that he was
in better shape to walk to Durham than his father and he would get some sleep before walking back in the early morning, in time for the back shift.
The doctor and medicine and a few extras to tempt Mary Anne’s appetite had taken all the spare money they had. Illness could be very dear, Lottie thought dismally as Harry’s pit boots rang on the stones as he walked down the yard to set off for Durham City. And at the pace Harry could walk, he could do the six or seven miles in an hour or very little more. But would Eliza be able to come? She was married to Peter Collier, the union man, and something almost unheard of, she still worked as a nurse in the pit villages around Durham.
The other thing was that Eliza had written to say she was having a bairn in a few months’ time. A call from the postman was a rare event in the miners’ houses, and especially in 35 Burns Row, but now Harry and Lottie were such good readers, they could read a letter to Mary Anne and Tommy.
Lottie cleared the supper things and hung Albert’s pit clothes by the fire to air, ready for him going on fore shift. She filled his bait tin with bread and bramble jam made from the fruit she had picked last autumn and made sure his metal water bottle was full. Then she checked on Mary Anne, who was propped up by pillows in the double bed in the corner of the front room, dozing fitfully. There was little coal in the bucket by the room fireplace so she took a shovelful from the fireback in the kitchen and banked up the fire with that. At last she was free to read her book for an hour or so before Albert came in.
The book had dropped on to her knee and she was dozing herself when she woke with a start. She was stiff and aching from sleeping in the chair and she put her hands to her back and stretched luxuriously. It was the sound of Albert’s pit boots coming down the yard that had woken her; a moment later he opened the door and came in.
‘I’m late,’ he said, and indeed the pit hooter was sounding down the rows, calling in the men on shift.
‘I’ll go in to bed,’ said Lottie. She had taken to sleeping on a shakey-down in the front room when Tommy wasn’t there. It allowed the lads some privacy to change in the warm kitchen. She lay for a while after Albert went out, running down the yard and up the row, catching up with the rest of the men converging on the pithead. She could hear the tramp of their feet on the stones and then there was quiet. Not total quiet: Mary Anne’s breathing was laboured and rasping and she kept muttering unintelligibly in her sleep.
The firelight flickered and played on the walls of the room, recently lime-washed on the orders of the mining agent, for there was cholera about in the county; mainly around Sunderland way it was true but it could sweep through the pit villages, with their midden heaps and lack of piped clean water.
Lottie watched the flickering light, seeing strange shapes in the shadows and weaving stories about them; fantastical stories, for she couldn’t get back to sleep. She lay and thought about Harry. Oh, he was a canny lad, he was. She was very fond of him. Most of the girls her age had already paired off with a lad. They were ‘walking out’, or some even courting, which in West Stanley was the equivalent of being engaged to be married. Even more, in spite of the minister’s disapproval. But what was a young couple to do? The wage a young hewer brought into the home was often vital when fathers were disabled in the pit or even just too old to hew. And the lasses now, they so often had to take on the running of the home when mothers were worn down and ill.
In the flickering firelight, Mary Anne moved restlessly as she laboured to breathe and Lottie got up to check on her. But Mary Anne settled down again and Lottie got back on to her shakey-down.
Aye, Harry was a nice lad and she didn’t want to cause him any grief. But he was a stay-at-home lad; all the books he got from the literacy class were enough for him. He had no wish to travel further than Durham and then only when there was something momentous on, like the opening of the Miners’ Hall in North Road. That was taking place in June and was all the talk in West Stanley.
Lottie turned on to her back and stared at the ceiling. She would settle down with Harry, she acknowledged to herself, but not yet. She was going to write, she was indeed. Only she had to be able to support herself. Just now, she did not really get a wage from Tommy and Mary Anne, for they simply didn’t have the money, but she had her keep. The boys gave her tuppence each for what she did for them, but that was the only actual cash she had.
She did not feel herself hard done by. It was nice living as part of a family. If only she could get on and do what she most wanted to do, she thought. She had a pile of exercise books, bought for a penny a time over the weeks from Mr Bateman, who bought them by the gross for a ha’penny each at Andrews and Co. in Durham City. The profits from this enterprise went towards the educating of the poorest children in the place, for even at the new National Schools the children were expected to pay threepence a week to learn reading and writing and adding up.
She had started to write stories in the books and she was almost ready to show them to Mr Bateman, but so far she had not been able to summon up the nerve to do so. And that way of thinking was not going to make her rich and famous, no it was not, she knew that. Lottie sighed and closed her eyes. Only supposing Mr Bateman told her she was wasting her time? Sleep overcame her.
Lottie woke to the sound of the back door opening and closing. Weak daylight was filtering through the curtain and Mary Anne was very quiet in the bed. Lottie scrambled to her feet and pulled on her old stuff dress, drawing the waist in by pulling the tapes threaded through and tying them at the back.
‘Are you decent, Lottie?’
It was Harry’s voice; he must be back from Durham already. The room was cold, the fire out. She combed her hair back from her face with her fingers and turned to the bed, at the same time calling out to Harry.
‘You can come in Harry.’
Dear God, Mary Anne was very quiet and very still. She reached a hand out and touched the older woman’s forehead. It was cold. Frantically she pulled the patchwork quilt up over Mary Anne’s chest and shoulders.
‘Fetch a shovelful of fire from the kitchen grate, Harry. Hurry!’
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Harry was behind her. He peered over her shoulder. ‘Pull back the curtain, Lottie,’ he cried and she ran to the window and let in more of the dawn light.
Mary Anne was gone, passed away during the night, during the short time that Lottie had slept, and she felt like a murderer.
‘I thought she was just cold, Harry. I thought she was asleep. It’s my fault, Harry, I should have been awake.’
‘Yes, you should have been,’ said Harry harshly. ‘It’s no good bringing in fire from the kitchen now, is it? She’s gone.’ He kept his eyes on his mother’s face for a few more moments, then turned away.
‘I’ll go for me da and our Albert,’ he said. He did not look at Lottie as he went out. ‘I reckon you were likely scribbling in that bloody book of yours,’ he said. His face was white and strained, but he did not weep. He was a man and a hewer and they did not weep.
Lottie did not blame him for what he said. She blamed herself. This was the second time this had happened when she was supposed to be looking after someone. She was no good, selfish, she told herself. Mechanically, she began to tidy the bed, pulling the quilt even closer around the still figure.
‘I’ve worked out what should be done,’ said Eliza. She had come over from Durham in her little tub trap. The trap was standing in the back street now, for the funeral was over and the family gathered in the kitchen. The minister had gone, along with all the neighbours who had been there for the funeral tea of ham and pease pudding and stotty cake; followed by funeral cake, a sort of light fruit cake.
Tommy, sitting by the fire and smoking his clay pipe, did not look up or take any interest in what was said.
‘Me da’s in a world of his own,’ Albert had commented to Harry and Dora.
Harry nodded, but in truth he too was taking little notice of what was being said.
‘Lottie cannot stay here, not on her own in
a house with three men.’
Lottie felt as though her heart had dropped into her boots. They were going to tell her to go. Well, she deserved it, for she had neglected Mary Anne when she was dying. She stared at her hands, red and chapped from so much immersion in soda water, and yet marked with a couple of blue scars where coal dust had got into the chaps when she dashed the pit clothes on the outside wall.
‘I reckon it’s time Albert and Dora were wed,’ Eliza went on. Everyone of the family looked up, apart from Tommy, who took the pipe from his mouth and spit coaly phlegm into the heart of the fire, where it hissed for a few seconds.
‘We cannot! Not so soon after Mam died,’ said Albert, and Dora began to tremble and clenched her hands together to stop it.
‘Well, you needn’t have a do,’ said Eliza. ‘A nice quiet wedding in the chapel with just the minister and the family. You would be all right with that, wouldn’t you, Dora?’
Dora gave her a quick glance and nodded.
‘Well then, I’m sure the agent will agree to Albert taking over this house. Only Tommy and Harry will have to stay.’
Nothing was said about where she was to go, thought Lottie and immediately felt even more guilty for thinking of herself again. She rose to her feet.
‘I’ll take a breath of fresh air,’ Lottie murmured and went out. No one said anything and she thought they hadn’t even noticed her but Eliza had watched her progress up the yard and saw her pause at the gate. She looked across to her husband, Peter Collier, the union man, and he nodded.
‘Lottie can come back to Durham with me,’ she said.
‘You’re right bossy, our Eliza,’ said Albert.
‘Can you think of anything else to do?’ demanded Eliza.
He shook his head. In fact, he was well pleased with the plan.