‘Well in that case, Father, we’d better make tracks if you’re ready?’
Father Hedley had never been less ready for anything in his life, but he inclined his head, drawing in a long hard breath before following the constable out of the room.
Connie was surprised to be summoned to the matron’s office and not a little alarmed. The head laundress was in a foul mood and had already ripped strips off all the officers that morning, and as she walked the corridors with the inmate who had been sent to fetch her Connie wondered if she was in trouble for some misdemeanour or other. Nevertheless, she wasn’t altogether sorry to escape her glass-screened comer of the laundry. Moments before she had been sent for, the stench had become overpowering when linen from the isolation ward – a ward which frequently treated those suffering from venereal diseases as well as infectious ones – had arrived covered with pus and discharge.
The smell was still in her nostrils when she reached the matron’s office and knocked once, her heart pounding, before opening the door. And then, as her eyes went to the two men standing to one side of the matron’s desk, that same heart seemed to want to jump out of her chest.
‘Come in, child.’
The matron’s voice was very soft and low as she rose to her feet, and as Connie’s eyes flashed to her face before returning to Father Hedley’s she felt as though her fear was strangling her. ‘Is it me granny?’ She stepped fully into the room as she spoke, and her voice became urgent and rapid. ‘Is it, Father? Something’s happened to me granny? Where is she?’
‘Sit down, lass.’
It was the constable who spoke, but Connie didn’t even acknowledge his presence as she reached out to Father Hedley, and he, taking her hands between his own, said, ‘Connie, you’ve got to be brave. Very brave, lass.’
Oh no, no. Not her granny. And where was Larry? He’d be frantic without her or her granny. She must go to him . . .
‘Connie? Look at me, lass.’
She hadn’t been aware that her eyes had been moving wildly round the room, but now, at the sound of Father Hedley’s gentle voice, she became still, her lips mouthing, ‘Oh, Father, Father,’ but without any sound.
As he began to speak, the priest saw his words register like blows in the large azure eyes now fixed on his, and never had he so desired to take another human being’s pain and make it his own. But that wasn’t possible and he knew it, and then he had said it all, and there followed a silence so profound not one of the adults felt able to break it.
Connie’s head was buzzing. She wanted to speak – poor Father Hedley was looking so sad and holding on to her hands so tightly; she ought to speak, to show him she understood what he had been saying, but she couldn’t. If she spoke, if she acknowledged it, it became real and it mustn’t be real. Larry couldn’t be dead. Her grandmother she could have understood, her granny was old and frail and in pain all the time. But Larry? The screen of her mind was filled with their parting, the way her brother had clung to her, his arms tight around her neck. He had such baby hands still, dimples instead of knuckles . . .
‘Connie? Connie, sit down, dear.’ It was the matron, and Connie wasn’t to know that Matron Banks had just broken her cast-iron rule by addressing one of her officers by their Christian name. ‘This dreadful accident must be a terrible shock for you, and coming so soon after your mother’s demise . . .’
Her voice continued but Connie couldn’t hear it. The buzzing was steadily becoming a hammering that was filling her head. Larry was dead. And her granny. Burnt, they had been burnt. And she hadn’t been there; she had been lying in her bed, safe and secure in the officers’ quarters, while they had been dying. How could they have been dying and she hadn’t sensed something? She should have known . . .
‘Listen to me, lass.’ Connie found she was sitting on a chair although she had no recollection of seating herself, and Father Hedley was now kneeling in front of her, still with her hands clasped in his. ‘You’ll come through this. It might not seem like it now, but you will come through this.’
Connie blinked at him, and the priest found it difficult not to avert his eyes from the agony in her strained white face. She attempted to speak several times before she said, her voice very low, ‘They. . . they burnt, Father?’
‘No, no.’ He swallowed hard. ‘The smoke would have overcome them, I’m sure of it. They wouldn’t have known anything, Connie.’
She wanted to believe him. More than anything in the world she wanted to believe they had simply gone to sleep and not woken up, the alternative was too horrific to contemplate. ‘Are you sure, Father?’ she asked pitifully.
Father Hedley took a deep breath and lied like he hadn’t done since he was a wee bairn and in for a pasting from his father for stealing taffy from old Ma Blackett who ran the village shop. ‘Absolutely sure,’ he said firmly.
Connie slowly straightened her body, staring for some moments more into his worried face before she cast her eyes on the matron and the policeman, and then back to the priest. ‘Thank you, Father.’ She didn’t question whether she believed him or not, at the moment it was impossible for her to think clearly, but in the deepest recess of her mind there was a gnawing sense of futility for all their struggles over the last months and years, and that was adding to the bitterness of her grief.
Why couldn’t she cry? The thought sprang into her mind and challenged her dry eyes. They would think it odd, unfeeling that she didn’t cry. They would assume she didn’t care.
The priest and the other two occupants of the room did not think it odd, neither did they think the white, shocked young girl in front of them didn’t care, but each in their own way wished that the safety valve of weeping could be released. They continued to speak soothing words of comfort for some minutes more until, in the middle of a kind but weighty discourse from the constable, Connie rose abruptly to her feet. ‘I. . . I’d better get back.’
Her voice had been jerky and tight, and now it was the matron who said, very softly, ‘Why don’t you go and rest a while, dear? At least until lunchtime.’
‘No.’ And then more quietly, ‘No thank you, Matron Banks. Goodbye, Father,’ and with a nod at the constable, ‘Goodbye.’
It was for all the world as though Connie were the adult and the three watching her the children, and each grown-up was aware of this but at a loss to know what to do or say.
Once in the dismal, deserted corridor outside the matron’s office Connie realised she was shaking as if with a fit of the ague, but she took several deep breaths, her hands clenched fists at her sides, as she told herself she mustn’t think. It would be all right if she didn’t think. She would go back to the laundry and work, that’s what she’d do.
Once back behind the glass screen the smell that had been so obnoxious and overpowering earlier now barely registered on her consciousness. She went about her work automatically and her helpers, frightened by her white face and stiffness, said not a word, even to each other.
At twelve o’clock she sent the two inmates for their meal but continued working at her desk, and at ten past Mary walked round the partition and simply took her in her arms, but even then Connie didn’t cry. She simply stared at the other girl wordlessly as Mary murmured, over and over again, ‘Oh, lass, oh lass,’ before saying, ‘Come on, you’re comin’ for a bit of a lie down, lass. Old Banksy herself suggested it.’
It wasn’t until they reached Connie’s room and she saw, there on the bed where she had lovingly placed it that morning, Larry’s precious piece of rag, that her eyes sprang wide and she let out a long shuddering moan that rose and rose into a shrill cry.
It frightened Mary half to death but she didn’t show it, and when the storm of weeping came she held Connie close until the front of her uniform was soaked with tears. Mary herself couldn’t speak because of the enormous lump clogging her throat, but she made little noises, deep and soft, that needed no explanation.
It seemed aeons later when Connie spoke, and then the words were
dragged out of her. ‘How am I going to bear it? Me mam, an’ now me gran an’ Larry. He . . . he was only seven years old, Mary. How can that be fair? He hadn’t done anything to anybody, an’ me gran was a grand woman.’
‘Aye, I know, lass.’
‘We were happy, we were so happy before they came. Why couldn’t they have let us alone?’
Mary didn’t have the faintest idea what Connie was talking about but she nodded anyway. It was better if Connie talked. That’s what her own mam had said to her after – A door slammed in Mary’s mind. But you couldn’t always talk, not always, however much you wanted to. She, of all people, knew that. But Connie was talking now and that was good; the lass’d looked so bad when she’d first seen her.
‘I hate them, Mary.’
‘Who, lass?’
‘The. . . the Stewarts. The Stewart family, them that live in Ryhope Road.’
It wasn’t the time to ask the whys and the wherefores, but Mary made a mental note of the name before she said, ‘You think you could manage somethin’ to eat, lass?’
‘No, no, I don’t want anything.’ Connie gulped deep in her throat as she fought the flood of tears that was rising again. ‘I’d better get back to the laundry.’
‘All in good time, lass. All in good time.’ They were sitting on the edge of the narrow bed and now Mary rose to her feet saying, ‘Look, you stay here an’ I’ll go an’ see if there’s a bite of somethin’ in the mess room an’ bring it along, all right? No matter if you can’t eat it, it’ll keep till later. Some cake or somethin’.’
Connie nodded. She didn’t want anything, but Mary was trying to be kind and she appreciated the other girl’s concern.
Once she was alone again she rose slowly and walked across to the window, pulling up the paper blind and gazing out on to the brick wall in front of her. This room was now all the home she had. She shivered, turning and surveying the dingy surroundings with new eyes. But it wasn’t always going to be like this – by all that was holy it wasn’t. She was going to make something of herself – for her mam, her granny, and for Larry. Oh, oh . . . Larry. She was the only one left now, but the Stewarts weren’t going to have the satisfaction of winning, of destroying them all.
When they had crippled her Uncle Jacob that night it had started something, she couldn’t explain it, but things had never been right since. All the bad things that had happened had their roots in that night, in that family.
But she would see her day with them. She nodded to herself, the autocratic figure of Edith Stewart standing militantly outside the big house in Ryhope Road clear in her mind. And the leader of the brothers, John Stewart, he was horrible, but she would show him too. Aye, she would. She wasn’t going to let them beat her.
And the young lad, Dan? Immediately the thought came she pushed it away, angry that it had intruded this day of all days. But ever since he had rescued her from the snow she had found it difficult to banish his image from her mind, and it intruded at the oddest moments. He had helped them that day, given them food and logs and such, and paid for the doctor, but then all their trouble had been caused by his brothers so he should have, shouldn’t he? Connie couldn’t quite justify this conclusion and she brushed the confusion it brought to one side. He was a Stewart. And she hated all the Stewarts. End of story.
The tide of hate rose in her throat, seeming to choke her, and then she glanced down at the tatty piece of rag still clutched tight in her hand. They were gone and nothing could bring them back. She sank down on to the bed, the pain of her loss swamping her afresh and bringing a desolation so great it made her gasp at the air as though she were drowning.
Part Three
1913
New Beginnings
Chapter Ten
Connie had blossomed into a full-grown woman of unusual beauty in the last eight years, and as her grandmother had suspected many years before, her loveliness had even eclipsed that of her mother. At twenty years of age, she carried her five-foot five-inches very straight, and wore her thick, golden-blonde hair, which reached to her tiny waist when loose, high on the top of her head in a shining coil which made her appear taller than she really was. Her skin had the smoothness of warm cream, her lips were red and finely shaped, and her eyebrows curved naturally above the eye sockets and were of a delicate light brown. But it was her eyes – the deep blue of a violet shade and heavily fringed by brown lashes – that people really found arresting. They had just missed being too big for her face, although they still dominated it, and their liquid appeal was riveting.
But most of all Connie was determined and intelligent, two things which had proved – and were continuing to prove – a mixed blessing in the narrow confines in which she found herself living. The desire for knowledge which Sadie’s sacrifice in sending her daughter to school had engendered, had been satisfied in part over the years. But only in part. Connie was a frequent visitor to the library in the Extension Park just off Borough Road, at the rear of which was a large conservatory called the Winter Garden which housed tropical plants, cages of foreign birds and a pond well stocked with goldfish.
Until a couple of years ago she had had to consult a list to see which books were available for borrowing, but then ‘open access’ to the shelves commenced for Sunderland’s working class and she liked nothing better than to browse amongst the thousands of books and choose her quota, which would be eagerly devoured in the privacy of her little room at the workhouse, much to Mary’s frustration as she hadn’t the slightest inclination towards books or learning. Mary couldn’t understand Connie’s interest in current affairs either, or why her friend spent precious pennies each week on such boring items as newspapers when she could have spent them on little luxuries. And Connie’s avid following of the fortunes of the suffragette movement was quite beyond Mary.
This last passion of Connie’s had come into being not long after Larry and her grandmother had died. In the midst of those caustic days she had come across an old newspaper and read, for the first time, about the militant battles in the war to get women the vote. The article had stated that the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell, had advised a deputation of the Women’s Suffrage Societies that, ‘It is more likely you will succeed if you wait rather than act now in a pugnacious spirit’, to which a Miss Annie Kenney, wearing the stamp of working-class clogs and shawl and standing on a chair, had retorted, ‘We are not satisfied!’. She’d said that to the Prime Minister! Connie had been intrigued, especially when she’d read that on that same day the women’s leader, an Emmeline Pankhurst, had addressed a 6,000 strong crowd in Trafalgar Square and stated, ‘We have been patient too long. We will be patient no longer.’ It was fighting talk, and it touched something deep in Connie’s angry, troubled heart.
During the next few years Connie had been horrified when she’d read of the brutal force-feeding of the suffragettes in the prisons, and the way they were treated by those in authority, but it was in 1910, when the fight for the vote for women came to Sunderland, that Connie and many others realised the sheer animosity of those who were against giving women their rights. On the 14th of February of that year three women were addressing a crowd at the comer of John Street and High Street West and were being continually heckled by men in the assembly. When things began to get out of hand the suffragettes were chased by a mob, one escaping into the High Street whilst the other two took refuge in the Arcade at Broadbent’s Oyster Saloon. By this time the crowd had swelled to over 2,000, and although the women made their getaway at the St Thomas end of the Arcade they were badly shaken, and continued to suffer abuse and taunts from the mob before effecting their escape down Frederick Street.
It was a nasty incident, but far from intimidating Connie and other sympathisers when they read about it in the local paper the next day, it made them all the more passionate about the moral justice of the women’s cause.
Even Mary was impressed when in June of the following year 60,000 women from all walks of life and all classes – facto
ry girls and aristocrats, actresses and university graduates – marched through the streets of London in a five-mile-long procession dressed as Boadicea, Joan of Arc and other courageous women. And when Emmeline Pankhurst visited the Sunderland branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union for a meeting in the Victoria Hall in February, 1912, she accompanied Connie to hear Mrs Pankhurst appealing to the women of Sunderland to help the suffrage campaign, although most of the arguments went right over her head.
All she had to remember, Connie would explain patiently, was that with the vote women everywhere could start making a difference and the Government knew that and that’s why they were afraid of the challenge. The awful riots in London, when thousands of pounds’ worth of damage occurred in the East End and the windows of No. 10 Downing Street were shattered, would never have happened if the Movement hadn’t been driven to such extreme action by the Government not only refusing the demands of women but taunting them with the accusation of not expressing themselves forcibly enough.
Why not women solicitors and managing directors and members of parliament? Why not a woman prime minister one day?
‘A woman prime minister?’ Mary’s voice had been high when Connie had voiced that one. ‘Never, lass. Never. The men’d never allow it.’
‘Then women will have to make them,’ Connie had answered with a twinkle in her eye, which had faded somewhat as she’d continued, ‘Look at it like this, Mary. Can you see a woman prime minister refusing to accept the miners’ unions’ demands for a minimum of five shillings a day for men and two shillings for lads? Two shillings for young lads working in lethal gases and floods and fire in the pits. And would a woman send in the cavalry against men, women and children supporting striking miners like they did in Wales? And what about female shop assistants working ninety hours a week for a pittance, and all the women who bring bairns into the world in conditions that aren’t fit for animals? Look at how your own mam and da are forced to live.’
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