by Maggie Hope
‘You run home, Alice,’ hissed Meg, ‘get Da.’ What had started out as a game on the part of the youngsters was turning into a nasty fight now that two of the fathers had taken over. Miles was only twelve, he’d get a hiding. He couldn’t defend himself, not against two men.
‘Aye, fetch your da. We’ll give him what for, an’ all.’
The men grinned at each other and allowed Alice to escape down the row. Miles lunged out at the nearest one and was knocked flat on his back for his pains. Meg screamed and ran to him but Miles was already getting to his feet again. She looked round wildly. Where was everybody? Usually there were women in the yards, gossiping over the walls to each other, but not one was in sight. The back doors were all firmly closed. Oh God, where was Da? Where were Jack Boy and Uncle Tot?
‘Leave the lass alone! And the lad an’ all.’
A man was coming down the row. Meg was practically weeping in relief as the miners turned away to see who it was.
‘Fighting with lasses now, are we?’ asked Wesley Cornish.
‘It’s the blackleg, man, we weren’t hurting the lass,’ Albert Pierce said, though his brother looked sheepish. He was a marra of Wesley’s and Wesley was something of a leader among the younger pitmen.
‘He’s only a lad, he’s had enough,’ Wesley growled. He stood by Miles and Meg with his legs apart and his hands on his hips, outstaring the Pierce brothers. Meg felt a rush of gratitude to him, already he had made her feel safe. Wesley was tall and strong and as hardened in the pit as the Pierce lads. The brothers were turning away now, muttering to themselves, it was true, but no longer threatening them.
‘Get away in the house!’ Albert Pierce shouted to his children, venting his anger on them. The youngsters scattered.
‘Did they hurt you, lass?’ asked Jack Maddison who came running up at that moment. ‘I was out the front talking to Tot, I didn’t hear what was going on till Alice came and told me.’
‘I’m all right, Da,’ said Meg, ‘Wesley stopped them doing anything much. But our Miles is a bit battered.’
‘Aye. Well, he shouldn’t be a blackleg, he’s too young to stick up for himself,’ said Wesley. ‘But don’t think I’m on your side, cos I’m not. Blacklegs is scum.’ He glowered at Jack. ‘An’ you want to look after your lot a bit better an’ all.’
Jack stared at him. ‘Aye. Well, I suppose I have you to thank. But it doesn’t matter much any more, the owners have padlocked the gates. The horses are up on bank an’ all. It’s a lockout, an’ it looks like they’re not in a hurry to open the pit up again. Tot Lowther’s just told me, he was up at the pit when they put the padlock on.’
* * *
‘We’re going to join the strike, Da,’ Jack Boy was standing before the kitchen fire shoulder to shoulder with Miles. ‘You can stay at work if you like, but me and Miles, we’re joining the men.’
Meg, following her father into the house, looked fearfully at Da. He was so dead against the strike. Why were men so stubborn? she wondered wearily. There was Miles, a great purple bruise disfiguring his head. She’d have to get some cold cloths on that the day. At least she was thankful for one thing: if there was a lockout, Da couldn’t go down the pit, he’d have to join the men.
‘Aye, well, it’s matterless now,’ he said. ‘It’s a lockout, we couldn’t go to the coal face if we wanted to. Do what you want, it won’t get you any strike pay, you’re too late.’
Meg hadn’t thought of that. What were they going to live on? Alice was still a pupil teacher, and brought nothing in. And there was no one among the miners’ wives lying in, no babies due. There’d be nothing there for her to earn herself. There was a bit put by but not much. Black despair engulfed Meg. How long would it last? And coal … the coal would stop too. It was only the end of February, how could they keep warm and cook without coal? Meg’s thoughts raced round and round, looking for answers. She was eighteen years old now. She’d thought that with the bairns grown, all except Bella, that is and she was living with Auntie Phoebe and Uncle Tot, things would be easier. But instead they were worse. Sighing she fetched a bowl of cold water in from the pump and got a flannel.
‘I’ll bathe that bruise for you, Miles,’ she said, but the boy shrugged her off impatiently.
‘Leave us alone, our Meg,’ he said, ‘I’m not a babby.’
She looked at him in surprise. It was the first time he had challenged her authority. He really was grown up, she thought, even if he was only twelve years old. Ah, well, no doubt the bruise would go down of its own accord in a day or two.
‘Look what we’ve got, our Meg.’
She was on her knees by the kitchen fire, trying to coax enough heat from a few broken branches of wood to boil the pan of soup she had made from the last of the potatoes and carrots and onions. She gasped with surprise when she saw inside the sack which Jack Boy and Miles had brought in. Round black balls of pitch were there, about half a hundredweight.
Jack Boy grinned in delight when he saw her face. ‘They’ll soon get the fire going,’ he said.
‘Where did you get them?’ Meg scrambled to her feet and pushed back a lock of fair hair which had fallen over her eyes.
‘Down by the coke ovens,’ Miles answered, grinning, his teeth showing white against a face as black as the balls of pitch.
‘You might have got caught!’
Meg was horrified. They could be jailed for that, she knew they could.
‘We didn’t, though,’ Jack Boy pointed out. ‘Howay, let’s get some on the fire, I’m fair starved.’
The fire did give out a lovely, satisfying heat, thought Meg half an hour later, and it had cooked the broth grand. She’d had a bit of dripping with browning left in the fat pot and had added that to the vegetables. It gave the broth a bit of taste. And Auntie Phoebe had given her a loaf of bread from her baking, it went lovely with the broth. Though it was the end of March the winter showed no sign of lifting. The weather was wet and windy and penetratingly cold so the warmth was heavensent.
The Maddisons had no strike pay. The rest of the men had five shillings a week from the union, but Jack and his sons didn’t qualify.
‘Is there any more?’ Miles asked hopefully as Meg dragged the iron pan on to the hob after she had served the boys. He was already mopping up the last of his broth with a slice of bread.
‘I want to save it for Da and Alice.’
Meg bit her lip as she saw his eager face. He was a growing lad and wasn’t getting enough food, she knew.
‘You can have mine, I’m not that hungry,’ she offered.
‘Don’t you touch that!’ snapped Jack Boy. ‘Don’t be so greedy, our Miles.’
‘I wasn’t going to take Meg’s,’ he said, sitting back in his chair, his face red.
Jack Boy looked at his younger brother. He was well aware that there hadn’t been enough for Miles just as there hadn’t been enough for himself. He got to his feet and reached for his jacket.
‘Howay, Miles,’ he said. ‘Let’s away up the bunny banks. Mebbe we can snare a rabbit. A bit of rabbit stew would be grand, wouldn’t it?’
‘Just you be careful,’ said Meg as the two boys went out. ‘Watch out you don’t get caught.’
The miners often caught rabbits to supplement their diet in ordinary times, but the local tenant farmer had strict instructions from the owners to prosecute any pitmen seen rabbiting during the lockout. Nevertheless, sometimes the farmers pretended not to see and it was a chance most of the miners took. But Meg was uneasy about the boys going to the rabbit warren.
She decided to wait and have her broth with Alice when she came in. She sat down in Da’s chair and stretched her toes across the steel fender, delighting in the warmth from the burning pitch balls. By, Da’s coal allowance was a big loss, it was, she mused. There wasn’t a nut left in the coal house. It had all been swept clean by the beginning of the week before.
The owners wouldn’t give in, why should they? her restless thoughts ran on. They would k
eep the men locked out, they could afford to. Coal was stockpiled still in the pit yard. Oh, they’d planned this all right, hanging on till the stocks were high, judging the right time to provoke a strike. The lockout would go on now till the men were on their knees and had to go back on the owners’ terms.
Meg jumped to her feet, forgetting about the strike as her father opened the door. She pushed the pan of broth back on to the fire to heat up for him. He must be cold and hungry, he’d been out all day. Jack Maddison didn’t speak as he hung his jacket on the hook behind the door, simply nodded to her as he approached the fire, but Meg was accustomed to his silence. She waited for him to ask who had got the pitch balls for the fire but though they provided the first real heat they had had for days, he didn’t question them or even seem to notice them.
‘I’ve got some broth saved for you, Da,’ she said, stirring the soup as it began to bubble in the pot.
‘I’m not hungry,’ he answered, sitting down in his chair and starting to unlace his boots.
‘But, Da—’
Meg was going to say he must be hungry, but seeing the dead look in his eyes, she stopped. She knew he had been out tramping the roads all day. That was all he seemed to do nowadays, walking restlessly on from one place to another, wearing out his shoe leather.
Da was a truly broken man now. She worried about him all the time. When Uncle Tot had offered him seed potatoes and cabbage plants from his greenhouse, Da hadn’t even dug over the ground in the garden to take them. In the end it had been Jack Boy who took over the gardening just as he was taking over all the other tasks which needed a man’s strength. Da had refused to join the strike and in the end it did him no good at all. He was locked out of the pit as effectively as any of the strikers. Meg sighed as she pulled the pan back from the flames and lifted it down to the hearth. Poor Da, he was never on the right side.
‘Meg, I’m going to place.’
Meg hadn’t noticed Alice’s approach up the yard and she looked up in surprise as her sister swung the door closed and fairly danced into the kitchen, her eyes bright in a face flushed both with cold and excitement.
‘What?’
Straightening up, Meg looked at Alice. What on earth was she talking about?
‘I’ve got work!’ Alice cried triumphantly. ‘I’m going to place in Manchester.’
‘Don’t talk soft, our Alice,’ Meg snapped, ‘you’ve got work, you’re a pupil teacher.’
Alice shook her head. ‘Not after the end of the month, I’m not,’ she declared. ‘I’ve got proper work, six pounds a year and all found. I’m to look after children and do light housework, that was what the letter said.’
‘The letter? What letter? There’s been no letters here.’
‘Well, our Meg, I knew you wouldn’t like it so me and Jane Thompson, you know, the other pupil teacher, we wrote from her house. The agency advertised in the Northern Echo and we wrote to it. And we’ve both to go, we’ve got jobs in the same street in Salford. I’ll be working for a Mr and Mrs Rutherford, looking after the bairns, like.’
‘You can’t go!’
‘I can, our Meg, I can. You can’t stop me. It’s a good chance, I’ll be earning money, be able to send some home for you. I’m fourteen, I’m old enough to go if I want to.’
Black despair filled Meg’s heart as she gazed at Alice’s excited face.
‘But you wanted to be a teacher,’ she blurted.
Alice shrugged impatiently. ‘Aye. Well, that’s all right for folk as can afford it. But we can’t, can we? I need to earn a bit of silver, our Meg, I do. Me and Jane are going together. We’ll be fine, we will.’
‘But are there no young lasses in Manchester, then? Why do they want to ’tice ours away for?’ Meg’s voice was bitter. Manchester was the other side of the country. She remembered the map on the wall at school in Marsden. Manchester was over the fell tops past Weardale, and halfway down the country an’ all. It was miles and miles, she knew it was.
‘They all work in the cotton mills, Jane says. They make more money.’
‘Da!’ In a last desperate attempt to stop Alice she appealed to her father for support.
Jack had been sitting staring into the fire, oblivious to the conversation going on over his head.
‘What?’
‘Our Alice wants to go to Manchester. She wants to go to place. Work as a servant in somebody else’s house. Da, she was going to be a teacher!’
Jack Maddison looked gravely at his eldest daughter, seeing the appeal in her blue eyes which were full of tears ready to shed; he had been letting the argument go over his head as though it had nothing to do with him. His face still expressed no interest.
‘Da?’
Jack shook his head. ‘If she wants to go, she’ll go,’ he said, and turned his eyes back to the fire.
Alice knew she had won and tried to be conciliatory.
‘You won’t have to feed me, Meg,’ she pointed out. ‘You know it would be a long time yet before I got a proper teacher’s wage. And this lockout, it could go on for ages yet. Once the summer comes and the warm weather, the coal trade’ll slacken.’
‘Not from this pit, it won’t.’ Jack Boy had returned with Miles. Triumphantly he handed a couple of rabbits to Meg. ‘This is coking coal for the iron mills, you know it is, our Alice. What’s this all about then?’
‘She’ll tell you,’ said Meg shortly, and picked up the rabbits. One was quite small and thin but the other seemed plump.
‘I’d better get these gutted and skinned then.’ She walked to the pantry door, her shoulders slumped and her head down. Picking up a knife, she felt the edge to see how sharp it was. The rest of the family watched her. Her lower lip was trembling, and her eyes bright with tears. She looked defeated. The boys glanced at each other unhappily.
‘I’ll sharpen the gully on the step for you, Meg,’ offered Miles.
‘I’ll do it meself,’ she snapped, and took the knife to the front step and ran it backwards and forwards with swift, savage strokes, as though venting her anger at the world. She couldn’t hear what was being said in the kitchen, she couldn’t bear to hear Alice talking about her new job again. Slap, scrape, slap, scrape, she went with the gully knife along the step, her vision blurred so that she could scarely see what she was doing, spending a long time on it, until the knife was as sharp as a razor.
When she went back in the kitchen Alice and Jack Boy were gone, the pan of broth forgotten on the hearth.
‘Can I have the broth that’s left?’ asked Miles eagerly. ‘Our Alice didn’t eat it.’
‘Aye, go on then.’
Meg stuck the knife in the largest rabbit, slitting it from breast bone to tail. And out tumbled tiny, blind, baby rabbits, bloody and slimey. Something snapped within her.
‘Did you have to catch a rabbit with babies inside her?’ she yelled at the startled Miles, who turned from the fire, pan in hand.
‘We didn’t know …’ he began, his eyes opening wide with shock at the sight of his sister, bloody knife in hand and tears streaming down her face.
‘Well, you damn’ well should have done! What do you expect at this time of the year? Aren’t they breeding?’ she screamed, her whole body shaking.
Miles turned back to the fire and carefully put the pan back on to the hearth before running to the back door and down the yard, his lips clamped tightly together, his face white and set.
Da looked across at her. ‘Don’t shout, our Meg.’
Meg stared at him but he had already forgotten about her and was once more gazing at the fire. She stopped crying abruptly and returned to her task of getting the rabbits ready for the pot, forcing her emotions back under control, making herself think about the job she was doing. Best make the stew tonight, while they had some fuel to cook it with, she thought dimly.
Meg and Bella went to the station with Alice to see her off on her journey to Manchester. Meg helped her carry her straw box with her spare clothes in it and Bella skipped alo
ng beside them.
‘Where are you going, Alice?’ she asked.
‘Manchester, I’m going to place,’ said Alice patiently, though she had told Bella a dozen times before.
Meg watched her sister closely. Alice looked white and strained now the time had come. She had clung to Jack Boy and Miles at the door of the house, though Miles had uttered an embarrassed, ‘Give over, our Alice!’ and walked out of the door.
‘You could still change your mind,’ she suggested.
‘I’m not going to though,’ said Alice quickly, casting a sideways glance at Meg. There was silence as they trudged along the path, a shortcut through Badger Wood.
They emerged into the town but a short walk from the station at Bishop Auckland, and there, already on the platform when they arrived, was Jane and her parents. Alice brightened up immediately as though the presence of her friend lent her courage.
‘Eeh, I thought you weren’t going to make it,’ greeted Jane.
‘There’s five minutes yet,’ Alice retorted. ‘We’ve plenty of time.’ But the train was already drawing in to the station.
‘You’ll write, won’t you, Alice?’ Meg hugged her sister, feeling her thin frame. A spasm of anxiety went through Meg.
‘Alice, you’ll be careful of your chest? Wrap up warm and keep out of the wind?’
‘Oh, Meg, I’m not a babby,’ she said, but she didn’t snap impatiently as she sometimes did if she thought Meg was fussing over much. She climbed on to the train and Meg handed her box up after her. Meg and Bella stood together and watched as the train began to move.
‘Our Alice is going to place,’ Bella said importantly to Mrs Thompson.
‘Aye, pet, I know,’ she answered, while she waved vigorously with her handkerchief.
Meg ran after the carriage a few steps. ‘Alice! Alice! You’ll come home if they make you do too much, won’t you? Alice, if you don’t like it …’
But the train was gone, steaming round the bend of Shildon. Meg took hold of Bella’s hand and led her out of the station. She felt a foreboding. The family was breaking up, she knew it. Oh, she was used now to Bella living next-door at Auntie Phoebe’s, but Alice wasn’t next-door. Soon she would be many miles away.