The Stony Path

by Rita Bradshaw

  She hurried out, across the yard, where the night air was muggy and heavy and smelt of an imminent thunderstorm, and into the lavatory. Walter had cleaned it out that morning ready for their Sunday visitors and she had put a fresh load of ashes down the hole after lunch, so there were no bad smells as she shut the door and sat on the scrubbed wooden seat.

  Why hadn’t she seen something like this happening? She swayed backwards and forwards a few times before bringing herself stiff and straight. She mustn’t lose control or imagine the worst, not yet. They were still bairns, of course they were, she told herself silently, the thought one of desperation. In another few months Michael would be leaving school and joining the lads he thought of as his half-brothers down the pit, and that alone would bring about changes. He’d have to toughen up, get harder, and the appealingly winsome side of the lad that was so like Henry would be knocked out of him.

  Alice felt a momentary pang of guilt. She had been pressing Eva for months to let Michael stay above ground in some job or other, and now she couldn’t see him down the mine quick enough. She shook her head at her own fickleness. But she knew what it was that attracted Polly to the lad, and of necessity, if Michael was going to survive as a miner, that side of him would have to die. Maybe a stronger individual would be able to remain true to his real identity underground, but she sensed in Michael the same inherent weakness that always caused his father to take the line of least resistance. Neither of them was a fighter. Even if her two grandchildren hadn’t shared the same father, she still wouldn’t have wanted Michael for Polly. He was a sweet lad, gentle and kind, but she would have had to carry him the whole of her married life.

  Alice hunched her shoulders. It was a full moon outside, but inside the lavatory the darkness was complete, and in her hurry she had forgotten to bring a candle. But it didn’t matter; nothing mattered except Polly and Michael. It was ironic, when you thought about it, that of the two people she loved best, one had to be sacrificed for the sake of the other. Michael was Henry as a lad, but purer, sweeter than his father had ever been, but then Henry’s Achilles heel in the shape of his sister had meant her boy had never stood a chance.

  Somewhere nearby a fox barked its raucous cry, and Alice leant back wearily against the stone wall of the lavatory. Perhaps if she’d been kinder to Eva, shown her daughter some affection, none of this would have happened. And if Walter hadn’t tricked her into marriage in the first place but asked her proper—

  Here her thoughts were interrupted by a bang on the door that made Alice nearly jump out of her skin, followed by Walter’s voice, gruff and somewhat embarrassed, as though his show of concern was in some way unfitting, saying, ‘You all right, lass?’

  ‘Aye, aye, I’m fine. I’ll be in in a minute.’

  ‘It’s likely that milk you insisted on finishin’ up. I told you you should have thrown it out an’ had the same as the rest of us, but you won’t be told.’

  ‘No, well, I’ll know next time.’

  ‘I’ll sort out that bottle of stuff I fetched for Ruth when she had the skitters bad a while back, a drop of that’ll sort you out. You’ll be right as rain come mornin’.’

  Feelings were funny things. As Walter returned to the farmhouse Alice’s thoughts were with her husband. Thirty-four years she’d been wed, and the first twenty-two of them she had been hard pressed to tolerate Walter. And then their Polly had been born, and she’d expected him to be uninterested in the bairn, her being a little lassie and not the grandson she knew he’d been hoping for. But he’d loved her from the first, dangling the babby on his knee and showering her with affection in a way he’d never done with his own bairns. And with Hilda rejecting the child and then taking to her bed once Ruth was born, she and Walter had virtually brought both little lassies up – Henry being a loving but distant father.

  And somewhere along the line a strange thing had happened, because she’d found herself warming to Walter, and in turn that had seemed to release something in him he’d hitherto kept hidden. And she was right fond of him now – she balked at the word love, her contained, repressed upbringing inherent in her thinking – and he of her. Polly had brought a lot of joy into both their lives, and yet life was harder now than ever it had been. Strange that. But the bairn was special right enough. Alice’s eyes narrowed reflectively.

  And if Hilda’s stepbrother had got his eye on their lass then Alice wouldn’t be backwards in tipping Frederick the wink that she was for him. He might be considerably older than Polly but he was well set up and Polly would want for nothing. Her lass, mistress of Stone Farm! Aye, she’d certainly do all she could to steer Polly in that direction and pray God, aye, pray God He would cause this other thing to die while it was still in its embryo state. Walter would go mad, stark staring mad, if he got an inkling of it. She’d had to do battle to get him to agree to Eva and the lads visiting the farm once Eva was wed, and it was only the fact that they couldn’t have trusted Eva to keep her mouth shut if they’d cut her off altogether that had persuaded Walter. She knew Michael was a constant thorn in his grandfather’s side, and Walter had never taken to the lad like she had.

  Alice reached for a couple of the squares of newspaper hanging on a nail driven into the stone wall of the lavatory. She’d have to get back; she was feeling better now and she’d been daft to panic when there were still years before Polly would be ready to marry anyone. What was it the parson had said the last time they had got along to church? She’d found it comforting, sensible, at the time and had repeated it to herself until she’d got it off by heart. Oh, aye, she had it now. ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

  Part 2 – The Family 1906

  Chapter Six

  ‘Grandda says there’ll be a fresh fall of snow before nightfall, and he’s never wrong, so I wouldn’t go on one of your treks today, Miss Collins.’

  ‘Really?’ Gwendoline Collins wrinkled her long, aristocratic nose before nodding resignedly at Polly. ‘In that case I will have to concentrate on painting those sketches of catkins and common gorse I took a few days ago on Hasting Hill. It’s probably just as well I have a day by the fire; I walked as far as Seaham Harbour yesterday and I have to confess it was somewhat taxing in places in the snow. I wanted to see how they had fared with enlarging and rebuilding the South Dock from when I was in these parts seven years ago, and it is quite different now, Polly. The harbour I remember has all but disappeared save for the North Dock.’

  Polly smiled at the tall, thin woman in front of her but said nothing. She knew Seaham Harbour was one of the mushroom towns created by the nineteenth-century coal boom, because Frederick had been educating her in much of the local history, but she had never been there herself although it was only some four miles south-east of the farm.

  Indeed, it was only in the last two years that she had begun accompanying her father into the town of Bishopswearmouth on market days; a procedure that had come about of necessity due to her grandfather’s increasing ill health. This had begun one day after Walter had lifted a cart stacked with produce in order for his son to replace a broken wheel. The resulting seizure – which Walter insisted to referring to as ‘nowt but a funny turn’ – had put the old man in bed for a week, although he had refused – and still refused in spite of other attacks – to see a doctor.

  Polly was now approaching her sixteenth birthday, and she appeared a fully grown woman and a beautiful one at that. She was tall compared to most of her female contemporaries at five foot seven inches, and her slender figure and fine-boned frame belied her strong constitution.

  She had put her hair up the year before, although the thick chestnut curls were forever struggling to escape the bun on top of her head, and her eyes – which were of a deep violet blue and heavily lashed – seemed to carry an inward light which drew and held the onlooker. Her lips were red and full although her mouth was not large, and her teeth were
very white and evenly spaced.

  To Gwendoline Collins, whose plain face and sharp, angular body hid an acute appreciation of beauty in all forms, Polly was the perfect encapsulation of youth as it should be and the main reason she had taken one of the farm labourers’ cottages in the autumn of the previous year, some six months ago.

  Born late in life to wealthy upper-class parents who had doted on their only offspring, Gwendoline had inherited a considerable fortune at the relatively tender age of twenty. This had enabled her to follow her first love – that of painting – and combine it with her second – that of ardent naturalist – for the last eighteen years. She had travelled the country and made numerous trips abroad in spite of the raised eyebrows and horrified whispers her independence had called forth from her peers, and she had had a wonderful time, never staying in one place for more than a few months for fear of putting down roots.

  In her first few weeks at the farm she had followed Polly around and sketched her about her everyday chores, and in the process an unlikely friendship had formed between the formidable, blue-blooded lady and the young, ingenuous farm girl. Gwendoline was an eccentric but a fascinating one, although her fiercely feminist views had not endeared her to the menfolk at the farm, or Alice for that matter. Gwendoline, in her turn, considered that the only person worthy of an intelligent conversation was Polly, which meant she rarely visited the farmhouse.

  Polly attended to the cleaning of the two-roomed cottage Gwendoline was renting, and which – once Gwendoline had decided to stay for the winter – the older woman had had furnished by H. C. Askwith, cabinet maker, of 59 High Street West, Bishopswearmouth. Polly also brought the farm’s lodger a cooked meal each evening, and fresh bread, milk and other produce daily, along with a supply of logs and coal and clean water. The very generous sum of money Gwendoline paid on the first day of every month was sorely needed, but the extra work involved in having a permanent lodger in one of the cottages – not to mention a lady who required everything doing for her – tried Polly to the uttermost.

  Since Walter had been ailing it had become more apparent that Henry was no farmer and couldn’t manage, and so Polly had taken it upon herself to work outside; dealing with the milking, seeing to the pigs, hens and geese, working in the fields alongside her father when necessary and even tending to the horses some nights. Her granny and Ruth worked in the house and dairy, but the old woman and the sulky young girl frequently clashed, and it was not unusual for Polly to come in from outside when it began to get dark to find Ruth had stomped off somewhere or other in a paddy, leaving her granny coping alone. At those times Polly would force Ruth – often to be found in her mother’s room – back to the kitchen to finish her tasks, whereupon the fur would fly and Ruth and Hilda would label Polly a heartless tyrant amid much bitterness. Polly’s day started at four thirty in the morning and rarely ended before ten at night, and sometimes she was too tired to even undress when she fell into bed beside Ruth.

  But there were good times too, little nuggets of pure gold amongst the harsh daily grind which made life a joyous thing if only for a short time; not least Polly’s new closeness to her father.

  On the frequent occasions when her grandfather was too middling to do any work at all outside, Polly had found her father to be quite a different individual to the withdrawn, remote man she had always known. She had come to realise that her grandfather’s strong, taciturn nature caused her father to retreat into a shell of his own making. She had first discovered this through a less than happy incident which had occurred in the weeks after Walter’s first attack. A calf had been born to a cow that was a particular favourite of hers, the animal in question being a gentle, doe-eyed creature who never lunged out with her hoofs during milking as some were liable to do. The birth had been long and difficult and the cow had moaned and cried almost like a human as they had tried to help her along, and Henry had talked to her as though she was a person too. And then the calf was there on the straw in front of them, the wind moaning as it whipped round the open door of the byre and the night’s bitter chill seeping into their bones as they stared down at the perfectly formed, beautiful little creature. It was quite dead.

  And the cow had known, the sound coming from her throat grief-stricken as her long, coarse tongue had licked and licked at her tiny baby in an effort to make it draw breath. And her da had cried, as much for the cow as the calf. They had both sat on the straw watching the poor creature’s efforts and howled their eyes out. And then her da had sat and talked to the cow with the calf in his arms, for hours it seemed, explaining that she would have another chance, reassuring her as though she could understand what he was saying, petting her, and Polly had realised she was seeing a side to her father that he normally kept hidden when her grandfather was about. And she had loved him for it – for the compassion and understanding he had showed to the poor dumb creature. That had been the start of a new relationship between father and daughter.

  They enjoyed some right good cracks from day to day too, when they were partaking of their bread and tins of tea at their breaks. Old Bess and Patience would be standing by, swishing their long, thick tails to keep the flies off and relishing the brief respite from their equine labours as they waited for the morsels of bread which inevitably found their way into the horses’ gentle mouths.

  Polly found she liked her father as a person very much as well as loving him as her da, although she often wondered – especially after the incident with the cow and calf – how on earth a dreamy, impractical, quietly compassionate individual like her father had come to marry a woman like her mother.

  Frederick continued to call regularly, bringing an ever-changing supply of books and newspapers, some of which contained knowledge about places Polly had never even dreamed existed. Through her uncle she shared the excitement of the Wright brothers flying a curious-looking heavier-than-air machine over the beach at Kitty Hawk, far away in North Carolina in the United States of America. She learnt a little about the mystery of radioactivity when Madame Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for her work in that area of physics; and much, much more. And since Gwendoline had been living in the cottage and they had discussed such things as Mrs Pankhurst’s new militant movement to gain the vote for their sex, the Pope’s – Gwendoline was a lapsed Catholic – banning of low-cut evening gowns and any form of what he called provocative clothing for women, and the general views by a male-dominated society that women were put on earth solely to please and serve their ‘betters’ – namely men – Polly’s eyes were being opened wider and wider.

  She sometimes felt, after an evening when Frederick had called or a Sunday afternoon at the farm, or yet again after a conversation with Gwendoline – often when Polly was on her hands and knees cleaning out the ashes of the previous day’s fire and relighting a new one – that she was living in two worlds.

  One was a place she had always known, familiar, safe and monotonous, a place of hard daily grind and backbreaking work that, however, was not without its shafts of delight. Flowering grass, soft and shimmering in the evening light as the breeze ruffled it. Crops of wild strawberries amid dark leaves in the fields. The silver film caused by the morning dew when the fields were an enchanted sea of mist and a lark was calling high in a silent sky. Sunsets and sunrises, when the sky turned to fire and the birds sang a song of salutation to their Maker.

  And the other world, the place of adult awakening that her uncle’s – and lately Miss Collins’s – help with education was enhancing, that too was a delight, but more often disturbing to boot. Polly was finding within herself a deep well of questioning, even criticism of all the concepts and values she had imbibed as a child, and although Miss Collins assured her this was normal, that it was her time to become her own person, there were occasions when Polly wondered what that person would be like. She felt different from the rest of her family, and it wasn’t simply to do with age, as the older woman had suggested, because Ruth didn’t seem to challenge the
class system and social injustice and the rest.

  She liked listening to the men talk on a Sunday afternoon now, and more and more she found her views corresponded with those expressed by Luke. Why should Sunderland have the highest infant mortality rates in the country? Why should it be acceptable to those in governmental power that whole communities be forced to exist in unimaginable depths of squalor in the north-east, when huge investments in the south were readdressing such problems? When Luke got on his high horse the farm kitchen fairly buzzed, and more often than not Polly felt her Uncle Frederick was out of his depth with the younger man.

  ‘A hundred and twenty-four dead in the Glamorgan pit disaster last July, thirty-two in a pit in South Wales four months before that, accidents are happening all the time to a greater or lesser extent.’ Luke had been burning with anger a few Sundays ago. ‘The owners and viewers look on miners as expendable; there’s always plenty more when a few die, so why bother to spend money on making the mines safe? And the men know it, they know it all right, but they’ve no choice but to work death traps if they want to feed their families. It’s all very well for Lord Londonderry to spout that it’s the parental duty to feed bairns, and school meals and such are unnecessary ; what does he know about hunger and starvation, eh? When was he ever out of work? You answer me that, man.’