Workhouse Child

by Maggie Hope

  So it fell to Tommy and men like him to sweep up. The great dread of management and men alike was fire and if a spark from a stud in a pit boot ignited coal dust, or worse, if there was firedamp lurking, the result could be – well, it didn’t bear thinking about. So Tommy went in before the hewers and sometimes left after them and all for less pay, but at least he didn’t have to swing a pick for ten hours at a time as they did. Tommy got home about ten every morning except Sunday, which was his day of rest.

  ‘By,’ he said to Mary Anne one morning as he knelt before the tin bath in his pit hoggers (which were short trousers or underpants), washing the coal dust from his body, ‘I never thought the time would come when my lad would be a hewer and me good for nowt but sweeping up.’

  ‘Aye well,’ Mary Anne replied, ‘it’s better than not working, isn’t it?’

  Lottie, who was standing by the table washing up after his meal, smiled. She put the last pot on the tin tray to drain and picked up the tin bowl of water to empty outside. It was time for her to disappear discreetly out of the kitchen while Tommy removed the hoggers and finished his ablutions.

  She walked up the yard and emptied the dish in the gutter, then stood by the gate with the dish in her hands and looked about her. Children were playing in the back street, a narrow alley unpaved and with deep cart ruts running its length. They were playing kicky-off chock, a game that involved one boy kicking an old tin can as far as it would go and calling out a name. Any boy not in hiding by the time the second boy got the tin and brought it back to base was out. Even as she stood, a lad pushed past her and into the yard, diving behind the wall.

  ‘Hey, lad, watch it,’ said Lottie, but good-naturedly. When she was little in the workhouse, she mused, they hadn’t time for such games. She looked up the street to where a woman was standing on a chair and reaching up to string a washing line across from one side to another. It was Mrs Hutchins, a young woman who looked not much older than Lottie, but she already had three little bairns. By, it must be nice to look after your own man and bairns, she thought. Come the day, though, oh yes. Lottie took a deep breath of the air before she turned and walked up the yard and into the house. She could get another breath of fresh air when Tommy was in bed and before Harry came in from the pit. Only by that time of the day it would smell a bit sulphurous, as the coke ovens were opened. Still, folk said that was healthy, good for the lungs.

  Tommy was dressed and smoking his pipe by the fire. His braces dangled by his side and his stockinged feet were propped up on the new steel fender. Mary Anne was very proud of her fender; she had bought it with Tommy’s first pay at West Stanley pit. At least she had put a deposit down on it of two shillings and was paying it off at sixpence a week.

  ‘It’ll only take twenty-one weeks, there’s one week extra for the tallyman,’ she had said to Lottie who, despite her lack of education, knew that it only took twenty sixpenny payments plus two shillings to add up to the eleven shillings and eleven pence the fender had cost at the Co-op store. Plus a penny for the tallyman. Sixpence was a bit excessive, Lottie reckoned.

  ‘Howay then, Tommy, hadaway to your bed, Lottie has to get on with the work, man,’ Mary Anne said now. She hadn’t done much at all but she was already tired and besides, the smell from Tommy’s pipe made her chest feel tight even though most of the smoke went up the chimney.

  ‘Can I not have a pipe in peace now?’ he asked and coughed long and hard. ‘Now look, woman, you’ve set me off,’ he said when he could get his breath.

  ‘Nay, it’s the baccy as sets you off,’ Mary Anne replied tartly.

  ‘Aye well it clears me tubes.’

  Now he was sweeping, the coal and the stone dust got into his ‘tubes’ even more than it had before, and Mary Anne knew it. Still she chivvied him until he stood up, knocked out his pipe on the bar of the fire and set off for bed. At the foot of the narrow staircase that went up directly out of the kitchen to the bedroom upstairs, he paused to deliver a final shot.

  ‘One of these days, woman, I’ll take off me belt and show you who’s boss,’ he growled.

  ‘Aye, aye, I know,’ she replied. ‘Now away up the loft wi’ ye.’

  Albert and Harry had a chiffonier bed in the front room. When folded up it looked like a fine piece of mahogany furniture; only it was not often folded up, for the lads were on different shifts at the pit. Lottie slept on a horsehair sofa in the kitchen. It was not an ideal arrangement, Mary Anne knew that, but there was little choice. The house they had been allocated by the pit was a two-down and one-up, and the one-up had a small pane of glass in the roof to let in a little light. It was a typical miner’s cottage, though some owners were building two-bedroom and even three-bedroom houses now to attract experienced pitmen to newly opened pits. Tommy was experienced but too old now.

  Mary Anne pondered the situation as she sat by the fire and Lottie boiled water and carried it to the poss tub in the yard, grated soap and stood on a small stool called a cracket to agitate the clothes vigorously with a wooden poss stick. Mary Anne watched broodingly.

  It was becoming increasingly hard for her to climb the stairs to the bedroom. Sometimes the pain in her chest was more than she could bear. Mrs Brown, who was something of a wise woman, made her an infusion of foxgloves but it didn’t work as it had used to do. Soon she and Tommy would have to change bedrooms with the lads.

  ‘You’ll be fine, a lady of leisure when Lottie comes to work for you,’ Tommy had said. And most of the time Mary Anne could make out she was better than she had been; maybe was getting over whatever it was that ailed her. Sometimes, and these times were getting more frequent, she could not.

  She sat brooding on it when Harry turned into the gate and strolled up the yard, his bait tin swinging from his belt and his boots ringing on the stones. He had his helmet pushed back from his forehead and showing a white line above his black face and he grinned as he saw Lottie’s small figure standing on tiptoe on the cracket to lean over the poss tub. Harry was sixteen now and had a little finger shortened where he had trapped it between the tub and the side of the way, but it didn’t hamper him at all.

  The deputy overman had bound it up for him. ‘Now then, lad,’ he had said bracingly, ‘mind you don’t get something more important trapped, you’d best keep a better look out.’ Harry had even finished his shift as a putter.

  ‘I want to be a hewer like Albert and you, Da,’ he had said to Tommy.

  ‘Like I was, you mean,’ Tommy replied. ‘Just watch what you’re bloody well doing in future.’

  That had been a few months ago and Harry had been told he could start hewing on the following Monday. So he was full of himself as he walked up the yard.

  ‘Howay, Lottie, where’s me dinner?’ he cried. ‘I could eat a horse, man!’

  ‘Aye well, I cannot do everything at once,’ Lottie replied, her face emerging from the depths of the poss tub. ‘I’ll be in in a minute and fix you a bite. It’s washing day mind, I haven’t had time to do much.’

  Harry’s face fell for a moment, but nothing was going to dim this triumphant day for long. He went into the house and found his mother bending over the heavy iron frying pan.

  ‘Mam! What are you doing? I’ll do that,’ he cried, taking the pan from her hand and settling it on the bar. ‘Sit down, Mam, will you?’

  Mary Anne was only too happy to sit; she sank into the chair feeling as though she had been kicked in the chest.

  ‘Lottie!’ Harry shouted as he turned for the door to get the girl, but she was already on her way in, wiping her hands on her apron as she came. ‘Me mam’s badly,’ he went on, giving her a hard stare.

  ‘Nay, I’m all right,’ Mary Anne managed to say, and indeed the pain was receding as she sat back in the chair.

  ‘What are you doing, letting me mam lift the frying pan?’ Harry demanded, giving Lottie a black look. His mood was changed completely by the sight of his mother’s white face.

  ‘I didn’t, I …’ Lottie protested, but
she too was worried at how ill Mary Anne looked. ‘I was coming, Mary Anne,’ she said, ‘you should have left it. It won’t take but a minute.’

  ‘I’ll get Mrs Brown,’ said Harry, taking a step towards the door, but his mother stopped him.

  ‘No, don’t do that, I’m better now,’ said Mary Anne. ‘Don’t bother her, she’ll be busy, it’s washing day.’

  ‘I don’t care what day it is,’ Harry declared.

  ‘Don’t, do you hear me?’ Mary Anne’s voice was definitely stronger, and in fact she was looking a little better.

  Harry looked at her and turned back. ‘Well, don’t try to lift anything again.’

  Mary Anne briefly considered telling him not to tell her what to do, but didn’t have the energy.

  Lottie looked at her and smiled. ‘It’s my fault, I should have had the meal ready,’ she said. ‘But I just have to fry the taties and that. There’s cold mutton from yesterday and I made a dish of pickle.’

  Harry took off his jacket, hat and pit boots and put them in their usual corner, ready for Lottie to dash and scrape. He didn’t wash his hands, for everyone knew coal dust was black but clean, and he sat down at the table, waiting.

  ‘You’ll be starving, son,’ said Mary Anne. ‘But Lottie won’t be long now.’ Oh, he was a lovely, canny lad and handsome even in his black, she thought. He shouldn’t have to wait for his dinner, no indeed. They had done enough of that when the lads were on their own in Stanley. Though neighbours had been kind, and why wouldn’t they be to three lads like hers? No, two, there were only two now, her bonnie lad Miley was dead and gone. A familiar fog of depression hovered but she shook it off, refusing to dwell on her loss.

  Lottie put two plates of food on the table and one on a tin tray for Mary Anne to eat on her lap. Mary Anne was not hungry but she made an effort, spooning some mashed potato into her mouth. Lottie sat down at the table beside Harry.

  ‘You watch my mother, Lottie, won’t you?’ Harry said in a whisper.

  ‘I will,’ Lottie replied. ‘Mebbe she should have the doctor?’

  Doctors were not frequent visitors to the miners’ wives. The miners yes, because of the many accidents, but their wives lived their lives mostly without the benefit of medical help. The idea was new to Harry, even though when she had been staying with his sister Eliza, Mary Anne had seen the doctor often. But then, Eliza was a nursing sister, she had grown out of their ways.

  ‘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.

  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 m
arras 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.