Ruby McBride

by Freda Lightfoot

  ‘He looks a fine boy, ma’am. His father must be proud of him.’ Then he turned smartly on his heel and strode away.

  Ruby found that she was shaking so much her knees buckled. She staggered to the low stone wall that ran along the quayside and slumped upon it. Perhaps she’d dreamed it. Perhaps it was simply her imagination playing tricks. How could it have been Bart? Bart was dead! They all knew that. She’d seen him fall in the canal with her own eyes.

  But what if he wasn’t? At the time she’d found difficulty in believing that he could simply vanish off the face of the earth. And his body had never been found. Since that terrible day the baron had become a legend. Many people were convinced he’d been murdered by political opponents who disapproved of his union activities, while others said that he’d gone back to his wealthy family some place when he’d failed to establish a union at Pickering’s Wharf.

  Ruby didn’t know what to think. She knew only that her world had changed forever on that dreadful day. When he fell from the tug she’d lost the one man she could ever love, for she loved him still. She’d loved him all along and hadn’t realised it until far too late. But had she lost him? If he was still alive...

  She jumped to her feet, shading her eyes against the sun as she scanned the jostling crowd, now dispersing with nothing having been settled. The dockers’ strike was spreading, involving thousands of seamen, firemen and miners as more and more men came out in sympathy with their fellow workers. Her own carrier business was in jeopardy with precious little in the way of orders coming in. No conclusions had been reached today, save to call another meeting, at some other time. Yet now her livelihood didn’t seem important as panic filled her breast. What had she been thinking of? Why hadn’t she run after him, grabbed him, fallen into his arms with a cry of joy? Oh, drat! Why did she always do the wrong thing?

  ‘Are you all right, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, love. I’m fine. It’s the heat, just give me a minute.’

  ‘I’m hot too, Mummy. Can we have an ice cream?’

  She smiled at her son. He was a good boy, her right hand man she called him. ‘Why not?’ She followed him, laughing, as he ran excitedly after the ice cream barrow. He jigged up and down beside her while she bought them each a licking dish of ice cream.

  ‘Here you are, darling. Strawberry, your favourite.’

  It probably hadn’t been him at all, just her fevered imagination. How many times since he’d disappeared had she thought that she’d seen him. No doubt it was simply a man who looked like him, no more than that.

  When they had finished their ice creams she wiped the rim of pink from his small mouth, took off the floppy beret and mopped the beads of perspiration from his brow, pushing back the tousled red-gold curls with her fingers. Then she replaced the hat, and once more the vibrant colour was banished from sight.

  What if it had been Bart, and he’d thought Tommy was Kit’s child? Had her son not been wearing the beret, it would have been all too plain that was not the case. Ruby began to laugh, even as tears rolled down her cheeks. She’d put on the hat to protect his head from the sun, had she as a result lost the only opportunity to be reunited with Bart? No, hadn’t she just decided it was the heat, and her own desperate longing to see him again that had conjured him up. But Barthram Stobbs was dead.

  ‘Forty thousand people idle.’ cried a passing paperboy. Ruby gave him a couple of pennies for an Evening News and quickly scanned the contents. It was now August, almost September, and the situation was growing worse by the day, with winter just around the corner. There was no coal, no fresh supplies, factories and shops were closing, and no manufactured goods were being transported. She screwed the newspaper up and struck out across the square.

  A few strike breakers, protected by police, were making an effort to shift some goods, coal and food mainly. A futile attempt as pickets created blockades. But what choice did they have? They weren’t asking for charity, only what was just and fair.

  But then who said that life was fair?

  She called to her dawdling son. ‘Hurry up, Tommy, love. We haven’t got all day.’

  ‘I want to watch the ships.’

  ‘Sadly, there are no ships going anywhere today, darling.’ Countless stood idle in docks the length and breadth of the land, including the Ship Canal. She went to take his hand and drag him away. ‘Come along, it’s time to go home.’ He looked crestfallen, as well he might. Didn’t all little boys love big ships?

  She remembered her brother Billy watching them on the day the Ship Canal had been officially opened. How long ago that seemed. Like another lifetime, a different world. Even at eleven Ruby had sensed the change in the air, knew something was about to happen, yet she’d held on to her dreams, her promise to Mam to care for her brother and sister. Too long perhaps.

  Ruby had no time these days for dreams. She was far too busy dealing with reality. The lack of orders had hit them hard. Jackdaw, Sparky and Aggie were suffering along with her but, much as she loved them as if they were her own family, how could she pay them money she didn’t have?

  But then things had been hard ever since the fire. Bart, being Bart, had indeed been far-thinking enough to take out insurance cover. Kit had been right about that, if wrong to predict that anyone would believe her capable of firing her own boats in order to claim it. Everyone knew Ruby McBride was incapable of such trickery. They’d had the boat rebuilt, held on to the business by the skin of their teeth. But she never forgot how much she owed Bart, nor how much she missed him. There wasn’t a day passed when she didn’t think of him, and yearn for him.

  ‘We’d rather have your dad here with us any day than his boats, wouldn’t we, love?’ she’d say to her son as she sang him to sleep each night. ‘But that’s what we’ve got, so we have to make the best of it, eh?’ And he’d nod, and look sad for a father he’d never known.

  Ruby wiped a tear from her cheek with the flat of her hand. What good did weeping do? She’d learned that too over the years; learned it even as a child, and at a hard school.

  Now, just when they’d been getting back on their feet again, they had the strike to contend with. Like many another, they were running up debt in order to recover and do whatever was necessary to survive. But then most people were living on t’tick, as they called it, till even the corner shops put up their shutters and said: ‘No more credit.’

  Other shopkeepers were more generous. Ruby had seen butchers doling out bowls of soup to a whole queue of women and children, grocers tossing stale loaves of bread into the street for the desperate to gather up. Most of these men had no union pay to help them through the strike.

  Everyone was expected to survive by their wits and they’d been hanging on for weeks, all through the long, hot summer. Many were growing perilously near to destitution, Ruby along with them. She’d been in this sorry state before so knew well enough what to expect. Coronation or no Coronation, people were more interested in bread to feed their children than frippery and penny bunting. It had been almost a relief when it had been ripped down, and the streets of Salford and Castlefield had again lapsed back into their more workaday sheen of dusty grey.

  Over the weeks, she’d watched the haunted expression creep over Aggie’s face. Miraculously now it was Sparky who kept their spirits high as he and Jackdaw spent hours scouring the docks and wharves, determined that if there was any work going, they would be the ones to find it.

  It had been Jackdaw who came to tell her that Giles Pickering was dead; that word was out he had a son somewhere and everyone was wondering who he was, and if he would take over the family business.

  Ruby had made no reply, knowing that Bart’s stubborn pride and determination to be one of the men and not classed as the enemy along with the father he so despised, had all been for nothing. How could he ever take his rightful place now? He was dead. She thought of the man she had seen on Salford docks the day after the coronation. He seemed like a mirage to her now, a touch of sun stroke. Aye, that was i
t. Too much sun. She’d quite convinced herself that he couldn’t have been Bart at all, simply a figment of her imagination, a resurrection of her longing for him, not the man himself.

  Aggie would say to her as they sat together in the Blackbird trying to make a watery cabbage soup stretch to six children, not forgetting a drop left over for themselves, ‘You should marry again. You can’t stay a widow forever.’

  Ruby would give a hard little laugh. ‘Who would have me?’

  ‘Plenty would. You’re still young, and a handsome woman. Time you took things a bit easier.’

  ‘Why, for heaven’s sake? I need to keep busy, don’t pension me off yet.’

  ‘I said you deserve someone else to do all the worrying, and all the labouring. You need a man to love, and to give you more childer.’

  ‘And pigs might grow little pink wings and fly.’ Ruby laughed, though there was an echo of sadness in the sound. She got to her feet, anxious suddenly to get back to work before any more unwelcome advice was given. Aggie saw her face, and gently touched her hand.

  ‘I only want what’s best for you, chuck. We all do.’

  ‘I know. But I couldn’t bring myself to marry again. It wouldn’t seem right somehow.’ Tipping the remains of her soup into Aggie’s near-empty bowl, she smiled. ‘Here, I’m not hungry.’ She put up a staying hand when she saw the beginnings of protest in the other woman’s face. ‘Don’t fret, I’ll have something later. And don’t worry about this strike. It won’t last forever. It’ll be settled soon, and we’ll win too, if only we hold on. Mark my words, even if the baron himself has to rise from the dead to see to it.’ And a voice at the back of her mind wondered if perhaps he had.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It was the following afternoon as she took a short cut down a back alley that she first sniffed trouble. Ruby had been to see one of the factory owners who had a standing order for her to transport his goods. This time the response had been no more than a sad shake of his head, but on the way back she heard of a load of cotton waste needing disposal and decided to go and investigate. It would be better than nothing. She was halfway down the alley when she caught sight of a crowd milling past, the clatter of their clogs loud in the late summer heat. Some broke away and started to run towards her.

  ‘Run for it!’ they yelled to her. ‘It’s the rozzers.’

  But Ruby didn’t run. She’d done with running away from trouble years ago, now she met it head on. Once out amongst the throng she was aghast by what she saw. There must have been thousands taking part in the procession, many of the women carrying babies in their arms.

  The demonstration, one of many during the course of that summer, reminded her very much of the one she’d experienced all those years ago, on Byrom Street, with Bart. Here again were the same grey faces, the weary bands of loyal women, the same placards bearing the same pleas for a living wage, and a more poignant Give Us Each Day Our Daily Bread. But numbers now were massive, the resolve of the strikers to win through stronger than ever. They’d suffered too much, for too long, to countenance the possibility of defeat.

  There were shouts and rousing cheers. Some women fainted in the heat while others starting singing ‘Hearts of Oak’, in tune with the brass band which was leading the procession. Police and infantry were everywhere. There seemed to be hundreds of them. A whole army of troops facing up not to the enemy in Africa or India, but to their own people: women and children, men like themselves who wanted only sufficient food to fill their bellies.

  The charges seemed to come out of nowhere. One minute all was peaceful and orderly, the next came the sound of those dreaded whistles that still had the power to chill Ruby’s blood. Batons were swung, clogs thrown, great lines of police linked arms and surged into the crowd, herding them together like cattle in the pitiless heat of the sun.

  Ruby couldn’t simply stand there and watch. All her rebellious spirit bubbled to the surface and she pitched in along with all the rest. Grown men cowered in doorways, desperate to protect themselves as their heads were hammered senseless by truncheons. She saw a woman knocked over, managing to catch her child as it fell from her arms, seconds before it hit the ground, thereby saving the infant from being trampled underfoot. Not till the dazed woman was on her feet again did she hand the child over and move on.

  It was a tragic day for Manchester. For Britain. Ruby thought she’d seen everything, witnessed the lowest a man could sink to, and then she spotted a dearly familiar figure. He stood in a doorway some distance away, and she could tell, even from this distance, that he was sorely afraid. She’d thought he was safe with Aggie, but he must have escaped in the mayhem, and come looking for her.

  ‘Tommy!’ she screamed, and then the crowd surged forward and he was gone from her sight.

  ‘Tommy!’ Ruby screamed his name again. She ran out into the crowd. Heedless of her own safety, she pummelled and fought her way through the throng, the frightened pounding of her heart loud in her ears, all other sounds fading away to nothing. She heard no other cries but her own, saw nothing and no one as a red mist of fear swam before her eyes. She would have been ploughed down underfoot had not a hand pulled her away from a line of baton-waving troops at the very last moment. She fought furiously against it. ‘Let me go! Let me go! I must reach my child. Tommy!’

  ‘It’s all right. Ruby. I have him. He’s safe.’

  And there her son was before her, looking suitably chastened and subdued after his fright. His knees were bloodied, his little shirt torn and he’d lost his beret. The red-gold hair shone like a blaze of sunshine in the dull, grey street.

  Bart looked down at it. and then at Ruby. ‘Is it be true? Could he possibly be…?’ He didn’t finish the sentence as he stared in wonder at his son.

  Ruby was struck speechless, unable to find any words at all, not even to chastise Tommy for running away from Aggie and venturing out into the thick of the demonstration against strict orders. She could only gaze up into Bart’s face, drink in the glorious sight of him standing there before her, so solid and normal, and alive! Or perhaps she had flown up to heaven and met him there. Ruby would not have been the least surprised were this the case, and did think, for a moment, that perhaps she had. But then he spoke again.

  ‘I’ve shocked you. I think perhaps we’d all better get out of this fracas, don’t you?’ He put one arm about the boy, tucked Ruby under the other and led them, under his protection, through the throng and down a side alley, to relative safety. He didn’t stop even then, but hustled them along till the shouts and cries and screams faded in the distance behind them. They turned a corner and Ruby recognised, through the mists of her confusion, that they were in Byrom Street.

  In no time it seemed a door had been opened, and Ruby and Tommy were led inside, ushered into a cool, shady parlour and offered refreshment.

  ‘There’s cold lemonade for the boy. Would you like a glass yourself, or something stronger?’

  ‘A double brandy might be more appropriate, ‘ceptin I don’t ever drink the stuff.’ She could feel herself starting to shake, a reaction no doubt to the shock.

  Bart addressed a young maid servant. ‘The child needs some attention given to his knee. Will you see to him, Mary? Then get him some lemonade and a plate of Cook’s best ginger biscuits.’

  Mary beamed at Tommy as his eyes lit up. ‘Don’t you worry, sir. I’ll look after the little lad.’

  When they’d gone, Bart settled Ruby in a comfy chair and poured her a small shot of whisky. ‘Get that down you. Medicinal purposes only. It’ll bring the colour back to your cheeks.’

  It did more than that. It made her weep. The tears rolled unchecked as she sat staring up at him, bemused, her mind a turmoil of unexpressed emotion and a million and one questions.

  Bart sat opposite her, a frown of concern on his face as he urged her to take another sip. ‘It’s so good to see you, Ruby. There was a time when I thought I might never see you again.’

  Any minute now he’d ask h
er how she’d been keeping, and she’d say that she was just fine and dandy, ta very much, save for the excessive heat. Just as if it were but a month or two since they last saw each other, and not nearly four years. Ruby couldn’t believe this was happening. She felt as if she had stepped outside of herself, and was watching this little scene played before her eyes while she hovered somewhere near the ceiling. Perhaps she had indeed snuffed it and this was what heaven was all about.

  ‘Is it really you?’ There, she’d said it.

  ‘Yes, Ruby. It’s really me.’

  ‘You’re not dead then?’

  The foolishness of the question brought not a flicker of a smile to his face, and she loved him for that. ‘No, Ruby, I’m not dead, though there were times during these long empty years when I’ve wished that I was, rather than suffer the pain of losing you.’

  ‘Why did you? Why did you leave? And why didn’t you tell me where you were or ever come to see me?’ Having now started to ask questions, she couldn’t seem able to stop.

  ‘Why did you take a lover? Why did you betray me?’

  ‘I didn’t! I told you that at the time.’

  ‘Oh, Ruby. Don’t lie to me again. Surely I deserve the truth after all this time.’

  ‘Kit Jarvis was never my lover. Not even after you were dead, or when we thought you were a goner.’

  He gave her a quizzical look, eves narrowing in that familiar, assessing way he had. ‘But he told me that you were.’

  ‘Huh, he’d lie on his own mother’s grave, that one!’

  ‘You wanted him to be your lover though, didn’t you? Which is almost as bad. Even though you bore my child - my son - at least I assume that he is mine, with such hair? Nothing I said or did could prevent you from loving Kit Jarvis, your childhood sweetheart, rather than me, your husband. It sent me out of my mind with jealousy.’

  Ruby gazed up at him, contrite. ‘That was all a bad mistake. I didn’t really love him at all. He was just a silly young girl’s fancy, part of a childhood dream when I’d no one in the world to care for me, not even a mother. Oh, Bart, I realised what a terrible mistake I’d made the minute I lost you. I’ve asked myself a million times since why did I have to lose you before I discovered it was really you that I love.’