by Maggie Hope
Chapter Ten
Though Lottie had some bad memories of Durham, she loved the narrow streets of the ancient city, especially the busy shopping streets leading out of the marketplace. She looked forward to going for the ‘messages’ to Lockey’s, the tea dealer and family grocer, whose shop was at 14 Market Place and where exotic foods could be bought. Luxury items such as imperial plums in bottles and crystallized fruits and ginger and many different cheeses such as Cotherstone and Wensleydale and even Stilton.
Not that Lottie did much shopping at Lockey’s, as everyday shopping was done at the Durham Co-operative Society, which everyone was beginning to call the Store. Lottie took the order in weekly and it was delivered by the Store horse and cart the following day. But Eliza, being six months into her pregnancy, took some strange fancies, and Peter did his best to indulge her even if it was only a quarter pound of Cotherstone cheese from way up Teesdale.
Peter did not earn a great wage and of course Eliza could not work while she was expecting, that would have been a scandal. As far as possible, women stayed in seclusion when in a certain condition, at least in a town such as Durham. It was not a pit village. But he was a union man and in regular work now the union was legitimate and becoming stronger. So Lottie had instructions to buy a jar of imperial plums this day at the beginning of June. For tomorrow, 3 June, the new Miners’ Hall was to open officially and the family were coming in to witness it and Eliza wanted a special tea.
Plum pie and custard was very special, and there were cold cuts of pork from the Store and tomatoes, Spanish tomatoes that is, for even the forced tomatoes from Peter’s coal-heated greenhouse in the back garden were far from ready as yet. Though there were lettuces, also brought on in the greenhouse.
Lottie thought back over the few weeks she had been living in Durham as she walked along Saddler Street towards the marketplace. Everything had changed in her life. She hadn’t seen Harry since she had been here and she missed him, as well as Mr Bateman and the literacy class.
‘You must join one here, there must be one,’ Eliza had said. She had noticed Lottie’s exercise books and asked about them. Eliza was a woman who had forced her way up in the world; she had trained as a nurse against all odds and she had loads of self-confidence, for hadn’t she had Mary Anne for a mam and Tommy for a da? Whereas Lottie was shy of pushing herself forward. But she would, she told herself, sometimes she could, she would have to if she wanted to realize her ambitions.
Pausing before the window of Andrews and Co., the stationers in Saddler Street, Lottie read the advertisements in the newspaper stuck to the glass. By, it was good to be able to do that, she told herself. She should stand up and do things for herself, she must have a good mind or she wouldn’t have got so far, would she?
And Mr Bateman said she had a good mind and he should know, he was so clever himself.
GOVERNMENT EMIGRATION TO
NEW SOUTH WALES
Reduced Rates
Now, she knew where that was for hadn’t Mr Bateman told them about Captain James Cook, who had been born just over the Tees and had mapped out New South Wales? It was in a place called Australia, Mr Bateman had said. Maybe one day she would even travel to New South Wales, when she sold a book. Not that she had any idea how much she would get for writing a book, but surely it would be enough.
One evening, Mr Bateman had put on a slide show and there were pictures of the people who were native to New South Wales. They were as black as any man up from the pit and wore hardly any clothes, which Mr Bateman had said was because it was so hot. One day she might go there. She could do anything she put her mind to, even travelling the world. Lottie sighed. So long as she wasn’t too timid about it, she told herself.
There was an advertisement for Dr Gray concerning vaccination for smallpox. ‘Smallpox is raging,’ it stated. ‘Vaccination is the only way of preventing its spread.’
Lottie shivered. By, she didn’t want smallpox. Even if it didn’t kill you, it left a person badly scarred. She decided she would ask Eliza about vaccination, how much would it cost.
‘I’d best get on,’ she murmured to herself and turned away. She had taken no more than a couple of steps when she heard her name called.
‘Lottie! Lottie Lonsdale!’
It was a lad, a pit lad of about ten years old. He was in pit clothes and his face and hands were black. She didn’t recognize him as he ran up to her and he grinned and his white teeth gleamed whiter against the coal dust.
‘Noah?’ she asked hesitantly.
‘Nay, I’m Matthew. Can you not bring me to mind?’
‘Mattie! By, how you’ve grown,’ said Lottie. ‘You’re working down the pit now?’
‘I am,’ said Mattie proudly. ‘I’m on fore shift. I just came into Durham on a message for me da.’
A gentleman walking by with a lady took hold of her arm and pulled her to one side so that neither of them came within a foot of the black boy, which was the term used by the townspeople for the pit lads.
‘They shouldn’t be allowed on the streets with decent people,’ the woman said loudly. ‘It’s no wonder there are such awful diseases about.’
Lottie glared at her and her escort but they were hurrying away now. Frightened of contamination, no doubt. Mattie saw she was angry.
‘Take no notice, I don’t,’ said Mattie. ‘I should not have come in before I had me wash but Da was in a hurry.’
He must have been, thought Lottie. What was he thinking of, sending a lad on an errand when he’d been working down the pit all night? Counting in her head, she decided that Mattie could be no more than ten years old.
‘You went away and you never came back to see us,’ said Mattie suddenly. ‘Why?’
Lottie felt so guilty she didn’t know what to say. She stared at the young boy. He was tall for his age but pinched-looking and now she noticed how tired he looked beneath the grime. And thin: why, he hadn’t a picking on him.
‘You were all right, though, weren’t you, Mattie? I mean, your da would get someone else to take my place, didn’t he?’
‘Aye. But Betty’s not like you, Lottie. She’s a workhouse lass like you but she’s different.’
‘Betty? What’s her other name? I might know her.’
‘Bates, and she knows you. Why did you go away and not come back, Lottie?’
‘I had to, Mattie. I’m sorry. I’ll keep in touch now though, Mattie, I’ll write to you. I can read and write now. I couldn’t before, not properly.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise. I have to go now, I have messages to do and so have you,’ she reminded him.
She watched as he sped along Saddler Street to the bookie’s. Alf Green was still gambling then, she thought. He should have been in a comfortable position now, an overman at Sherburn Hill Colliery. His youngest lad should not have had to go down the pit so young. He could still have been at school, for Mattie was a bright boy.
As she went on her way to Lockey’s provisions shop she felt a small, nagging worry about Betty Bates, living and working in the same house as Alf Green. She would have to keep in touch with Mattie, ask him how Betty was. She might even go to see her. When Alf Green was safely at work, of course.
‘They’re back,’ said Eliza, coming into the kitchen of the house in Gilesgate which she and Peter had moved into when they married. ‘Push the kettles on to the fire, Lottie, please.’
Eliza had been sitting by the front window waiting for the men of the family to return from North Road, where the Miners’ Hall had been officially opened that very day, Saturday 3 June 1876. All the family were aware of the importance of the occasion. The Durham Miners’ Association had been meeting in the Market Hotel, but now they had their very own hall in North Road. Even little Bertie sat quietly on his mother Dora’s knee and stared solemnly around at the assembled family.
‘Here, let me help you with those, Lottie,’ said Eliza’s son Tot. He walked quickly over to the range to where Lottie was lifti
ng heavy iron kettles. ‘They’re too heavy for you.’
Lottie stood up straight from bending over the bar and gave him a startled glance, as did his mother and Dora. Males did not, as a rule, help with domestic chores; they rarely even noticed them.
‘I can manage,’ said Lottie. ‘I’m used to it.’
‘Nonsense, Lottie, I’ll do it,’ said Tot, and made a show of placing the kettles on the glowing coals. ‘There you are.’
Oh, he spoke lovely, thought Lottie. He was like a proper gentleman and he was so good-looking, with his dark wavy hair and the dimple on his chin.
‘You’re blushing,’ said Dora.
‘Nay, it’s just the heat of the fire,’ Lottie protested, but her cheeks flamed even more. Tot smiled at her and she began to feel strange, a bit light-headed. She hurried away to the front room where a large mahogany table was set with the best linen tablecloth and Sunderland chinaware. She began to rearrange the plates of ham, pease pudding and tomatoes and the dishes of plum pie and egg custard.
In the kitchen, Eliza and Dora smiled at each other in understanding. Eliza walked over to her son, her gait slightly awkward due to her late pregnancy.
‘Leave the lass alone,’ she said softly. ‘Unless you mean something by it.’
Harry scowled; he had watched the little byplay and felt a sudden onrush of jealousy. As soon as he had Master Thomas Mitchell-Howe on his own he would put him straight, he told himself savagely. Lottie was his lass and always had been.
‘What did I do?’ Tot was the picture of innocence.
‘You know well enough,’ said his mother. ‘Behave yourself or you’ll be on your way back to school with a flea in your ear.’
‘I haven’t to be back until Monday!’ said Tot, looking less of a young gallant and more of a schoolboy. He was sixteen, but suddenly he seemed much younger. Yet he had seemed so much a man of the world to Lottie a few moments earlier.
‘Well, mind what I say,’ warned Eliza, then the matter was forgotten as the men came into the house talking of the grand new hall. Some settled on the chairs in the front room, but a few of the miners were happier on their hunkers in the yard with their backs against the wall and their pipes in their hands. It would be soon enough to be indoors when the tea was ready.
‘Mind, who would have thought it?’ asked Tommy of no one in particular as he drew long and hard on the stem of his clay pipe.
‘What? Who would have thought what?’ asked Albert, a trifle impatiently.
‘I mean, the union with a grand hall in North Road and the Owners’ Association having to meet with our lads.’
‘Aw, Da, they had to do that in ’72 when we got rid of the yearly bond. And the Miners’ Hall was paid for fair and square by the lads themselves. We have some power now, man.’
There was much nodding of heads and a chorus of ‘Ayes’.
Too much power, thought Tot. At least that was what the general opinion was at school among both masters and boys. Then, as the talk among the pitmen turned to the state of the coalface and how wet some seams were ‘inbye’ and all the other parts of their work that pitmen found so fascinating to talk about, he wandered away from them, gravitating naturally towards where the women were finishing laying the table, moving between kitchen and front room. Dora had brought little Bertie out to his father, for the baby would not be laid down to sleep on an unfamiliar bed.
‘Albert, hold the bairn,’ she said and the men stopped talking shop and grinned at the young father.
‘Who’s the gaffer in your house then, Albert?’ a couple of them asked jokingly.
‘The bairn,’ said Albert ruefully, but he took Bertie willingly enough.
‘It’s always the same,’ Tommy observed. ‘If there’s a babby in the place, it gets all the attention.’ And so it did.
‘By you’re a big lad to still be at school, Tot,’ said Albert as they sat around the remains of the feast. Tommy was feeling in his waistcoat pocket for his tobacco pouch but he looked across at his eldest son.
‘Education is a marvellous thing,’ he said. ‘I only wish we’d had the chance of schooling when we were bairns.’ He smiled at his daughter’s son, Tot, who was a bit red in the face.
Tot was a weekly boarder at a school in Barnard Castle. He had an inheritance from his father’s family, who were business people in Northumberland, and this paid for his education.
‘I’m going to be a soldier,’ he said now. ‘I need a good education to get in.’
‘You do?’ said Albert, looking surprised. ‘There now, I thought all you had to do was hold out your hand and take the Queen’s shilling.’
‘Leave the lad alone,’ said Tommy. ‘You’re nowt but jealous.’
‘Nay, I’m not …’ Albert began but Peter Collier, Eliza’s man, cut in. ‘We’ll talk about something else, eh? On an important day like today we have a lot to celebrate, haven’t we? The union is going to go from strength to strength, I’m telling you. The owners have to listen to us now. Why, Mr Crawford says …’
Tot wandered out into the kitchen, uninterested in what the General Secretary of the DMA had to say. He was interested in Lottie, his mother’s maid of all work.
‘Are you wanting something, Tot?’
His mother was sitting at the head of the kitchen table with the women around it, Lottie included, for there was not space for them to be comfortable at the table with the men in the front room.
Lottie was telling them how she had met Mattie Green on the street outside Andrews the day before but she stopped as Tot came in.
‘Not really. I’m just fed up with mining talk. If it’s not how wet a seam is or the relative merits of a Stephenson and a Davy lamp it’s about getting one over on the owners. Don’t they know the owners give them their bread and butter?’
There was a sudden shocked silence. Dora found her voice first. ‘Is that what they learn you at that fancy school in Barney then?’ she asked. She had Bertie back from his father and he was sleeping in her arms supported by her shawl, while she ate and drank with her free hand.
‘You don’t think they earn their bread with their own sweat then, do you not?’ asked his mother. ‘If you don’t, then mebbe it’s time you left that school and went down the pit yourself.’ Though she spoke quietly enough she was seething with anger and there were red flags blazing on her cheeks.
Tot looked at her as though she had suddenly lost her senses. ‘I’ll not do that,’ he said positively. ‘No indeed, I will not.’
‘Well then?’
Tot considered his position; he was far from being slow.
‘Well, I know the men work hard. They have to but it’s the owners and management who do all the planning, risk their money.’
‘While the men risk serious injury or their very lives,’ said Eliza. She was remembering some of the men she had nursed over the years.
‘Sometimes …’ Tot had been going to say that often it was the men’s own carelessness but he bit back the words. Though that was often said in the newspapers when an accident happened.
‘There’s no such thing as an accident, there is always a cause,’ Mr Dunne, his form master would declare.
‘Well?’ prompted Eliza.
‘It takes both sides,’ mumbled Tot. ‘I’m just going for a walk.’ He passed Lottie, not even looking at her, and went out of the back door and up the yard. His feelings were very mixed up indeed.
Chapter Eleven
‘I do hope Tot is not going to make a fool of himself over Lottie,’ Eliza said to her husband as they sat down in the front room on opposite sides of the fireplace. It was ten o’clock in the evening and the room was darkening and becoming cooler, so Peter raked a few coals down on to the fire from the shelf at the back and it flickered into flame. He did not reply to Eliza immediately but sat back in his chair and gazed at her thoughtfully.
Eliza was looking tired; soon they would go upstairs to bed, but they were both enjoying these few minutes on their own after the bustle
of the day.
‘He’s nothing but a lad, Eliza, but he’s got his head screwed on aright,’ he said at last. ‘It’ll be years yet before he gets serious about a lass. Don’t make trouble till it comes. Any road, he’d do a lot worse than Lottie.’
‘She’s not the girl for him,’ Eliza insisted.
‘You mean she’s not good enough?’
‘No … She’s a lovely lass, I know she is, but …’
‘A workhouse lass?’
‘We don’t know who her parents are,’ said Eliza lamely and blushed as Peter stared at her. ‘Well, he’d be happier with someone else. He might meet someone who can talk to him …’
‘Oh, Eliza, I don’t know what you’re thinking of. They are both far too young to know what they want yet. Tot has his way to make in life and with the advantages he has, he should go far. And Lottie, well, I didn’t think you of all people would hold her poor beginning against her.’
‘I don’t, no, I don’t. Of course not.’
Yet in spite of her protestations, Eliza felt confused. She liked Lottie; she was fond of her even. Hadn’t she been good to the girl? Only she had such ambitions for her son. And the little one in her belly too. She put a hand over her waist as she felt the baby move vigorously.
Peter stood up and came over to help her out of her chair. ‘Bed for you,’ he said as he helped her to stand. ‘It’s has been a busy day. A tremendous day.’
It was a busy night as well – there was to be very little sleep for anyone, as Eliza’s baby came into the world. Lottie was roused at midnight by Peter knocking at her bedroom door.
‘Get up, Lottie, please. I want you to see to Eliza while I go for the midwife,’ he called.
Lottie jumped up and pulled on her clothes and ran down from her attic bedroom to the first floor. She could hear Eliza moaning softly, though she was not crying out. The baby was early, Lottie knew that; it was not due for another month. But babies came when they thought they would, she knew that too from her years helping out in the workhouse, where premature babies were common. They often died, which was something else she had experience of and she felt a pang of anxiety. Maybe today’s celebrations had been too much for Eliza.