The Stony Path

by Rita Bradshaw

  ‘Take your hands off me.’

  ‘Don’t you take that tack!’

  ‘I said, take your hands off me.’ Her voice had been soft and low but of a quality that had seemed to nonplus him, because he had let his hand drop to his side. ‘Two things, Frederick,’ Polly had said quietly. ‘One, I have my own mind and I intend to use it, and not you or anyone else will tell me different. Two, as you have reminded me constantly over the last months, I am your wife, but that cuts both ways. I expect respect and consideration just as much as you expect it from me. I won’t be treated as a doormat or an imbecile when your friends are here or at any other time, I just won’t. And don’t keep calling me young all the time. I’m not young, not here in my head –’ she had tapped the side of her skull with a pointed finger – ‘and that’s partly because of the last thirteen months. Do I make myself clear?’ she’d asked with naked bitterness.

  Frederick had stared at her, his full lips slightly apart and his eyes narrowed. He was totally taken aback. This was not the reasonable young girl he had proposed to, who had promised him she would try to love him and be a good wife. Neither was it the strained but efficient spouse of daylight hours or the tense young lass who shared his bed each night. Over the last thirteen months a development had been taking place, he’d realised suddenly, and he’d only been aware of it in part. But now Polly’s antipathy was glaring out of her eyes, and it was the emotion of a woman, not the slip of the girl he’d married, however much her slender outward appearance gave lie to the fact.

  And when he had spluttered and blustered his leave of her – ostensibly to check on his red chestnut, which had had the misfortune to rip a flank that morning – they had both known a new stage of their marriage was beginning. But it was a marriage in which Polly would fight for equality, and there was no going back. And because she had seized equality, rather than having begged for it or coaxed and manoeuvred her way along, Frederick couldn’t forgive her.

  That had been four years ago.

  Now had come the August of 1911 and with it riots that were rocking Britain. Since June, when King George V had been crowned ‘King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the seas, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India’, a heatwave had steadily been mounting alongside bitter discontent among Britain’s workers. British ports had been paralysed by a shipping strike since the second week of June, and in Llanelli, in South Wales, in July nine people had been killed – three by soldiers’ bullets – during furious rioting which occurred as a climax to the railway strike which was bringing Britain to its knees. Now it was the middle of August, and fifty thousand troops were on duty as the nationwide strike by stevedores, railwaymen, carters, miners and others caused huge problems for the police, with over two hundred thousand angry workers taking to the streets daily.

  Keir Hardie’s advice to the strike’s leaders – ‘The masters show you no mercy. They starve you, they sweat you, they oppress you. Pay them back in their own coin’ – had caused fury in Parliament, and few were surprised when the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, dug his heels in and took an even tougher line against the strikers, saying they were endangering the country’s industrial wealth and other men’s jobs.

  However, the women of Britain’s working class were battling with an even more relentless enemy than the government. With temperatures soaring to record-breaking levels, the death rates in the overcrowded tenements in all the big cities were at a new high, with children at most risk. Two and a half thousand children had died in the heatwave in the capital alone, and in Sunderland – especially in the East End, which was a rabbit warren of wretchedness, filth and poverty with unimaginable depths of squalor – there was scarcely a family untouched by the grim reaper. Cholera and typhoid were rearing their ugly heads and causing the overworked medical fraternity to despair, and with the city living on its food reserves and the prices in the shops soaring, some strikers’ families were slowly starving.

  It was with this last fact in mind that Polly now turned to Emily, who was busy peeling taties in a bowl on the kitchen table, and said, ‘Is your mam going to her sister’s this afternoon, Emily?’

  ‘Aye, aye, she is, missus.’

  ‘I’ve got a few things for her.’ Polly pointed to a sack beside the door. ‘Take them across before she goes, and tell her’ – here Polly’s blue eyes flashed to Betsy’s for a moment – ‘tell her to see Croft about your uncle and his lads helping with the harvest next week. The pay won’t be much, but it’ll be something.’

  ‘Oh, ta, thanks, missus.’ Emily’s plain little face lit up. Her mam and da were worried sick about her mam’s sister and their family, she knew they were. Her uncle and his two eldest lads had been out on strike for ten weeks now, and with the remaining six bairns all being under eleven years old, things were dire. Her mam and da had done what they could, but it was the missus’s sacks that had kept her aunt’s family going the last month. ‘I’ll take it across now and tell her, shall I, while the master’s riding?’

  ‘Aye, you do that, Emily,’ said Polly quietly. Emily was just as aware as Betsy that the matter of the sacks was a sore point between the master and missus, along with other help Polly insisted on giving to the Silksworth strikers. The roof had nearly gone off the farmhouse a couple of times lately.

  ‘How did you get him to agree to having Emily’s uncle and the lads for the harvest?’ Betsy asked immediately the door had closed behind the kitchen maid, her tone saying quite clearly that wonders never ceased.

  ‘I didn’t.’ Polly grinned and shrugged her shoulders as she glanced round the huge kitchen, which held all a kitchen should hold. She brushed her hand down the side of one gleaming copper pan that was hanging with its companions on a row of wooden pegs at one side of the black-leaded range. ‘But May is beside herself with worry about her sister and the bairns. They’re starving, literally starving, so what could I say when she came to see me on the quiet?’

  ‘Oh, lass, lass.’ Any formality between the two women had long since been dropped when they were alone, although Betsy was always careful to give Polly her title of missus if Emily or one of the family was present. ‘He’ll go stark staring barmy if he cottons on.’

  ‘Croft’s the one who sets on any casual labourers for the harvest, and I’ve already seen him. He won’t let on.’

  Betsy nodded. No, Croft wouldn’t say a word. Did the master know how his young wife was regarded among both the inside and outside workers and their families? Likely not. He only saw what he wanted to see, Frederick Weatherburn, and it didn’t suit him to acknowledge that although he might have his employees’ loyalty up to a point, it was his wife who had their hearts. People weren’t daft, and they recognised that the missus went the extra mile – as in the matter of the food sacks for Emily’s auntie. Mind, there was one who was constantly pushing Polly’s good nature to the limit . . .

  Betsy’s hands stilled on the butcher’s block where she was boning a breast of lamb from the cold meat store at the side of the scullery, and her voice was low when she said, ‘What are you goin’ to do about Ruth, lass? He was here agen last night an’ she’s expectin’ him to ask Frederick soon, accordin’ to what Emily told me on the quiet. She was clearin’ out the fire in your mam’s bedroom an’ she heard the pair of ’em talkin’. They’ve got it all worked out. He’s goin’ to come here, that’s in their minds, as a manager or somethin’ similar.’

  ‘They’re mad.’ Polly’s voice was harsh. ‘Frederick would never allow it.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Betsy pressed her lips together and narrowed her eyes for a moment before she said, ‘But he’s wheedled his way in, lass, don’t forget that. Who would’ve thought he’d win your mam over with his blatherin’ but he’s got her eatin’ out of the palm of his hand with his butterin’ up an’ little presents an’ such. An’ he’s played it crafty with the master an’ all. Pretendin’ to see everythin’ his way now an’ actin’ as though the master’
s made him view things different. An’ Ruth’s forever presentin’ his case.’

  ‘She’s only interested in him because there’s no one else.’ Polly’s voice was emphatic. ‘She can’t really like him, not Arnold.’

  ‘Aye, I reckon you’re spot-on there, lass, but she’s only herself to blame. Young Cecil was clean gone on her, used to disappear up his own backside every time Ruth made an appearance, but your sister wouldn’t look the side he was on until it was too late an’ he’d taken up with young Mary from East Herrington. I’ve heard Ruth talk to that lad as though he was muck under her boots, an’ soft as clarts as he was about her, she pushed him too far. They’re expectin’ their first, Cecil an’ Mary. Did Emily tell you?’

  ‘Aye.’ Polly nodded briefly. She found any talk of babies painful, knowing she was now unlikely to be a mother, with the existing state of affairs between herself and Frederick so dire, but this situation between Arnold and Ruth – ostensibly begun twelve months ago but in reality six months earlier, at Christmas time, when a smiling Arnold had visited the farm with an armful of gifts – was a cause of even greater concern.

  Arnold was a hypocrite and a liar and that was the least of it. There was still something dark and menacing staring out of his eyes in the odd unguarded moment, but it seemed to Polly that she was the only member of her family to recognise it. Even her beloved grandfather, on the occasions when Arnold made a visit to his room and sat and talked with the frail old man, seemed pleased to see him and brighter for his company. She didn’t understand how they could all be so blind. She wished she could talk to Luke about it. She had thought when he and Katy Chapman had parted company in the spring that Luke might visit the farm a little more, especially as Arnold was coming so often, but if anything, his visits were more infrequent.

  A picture of the tall, dark miner came into her mind, and she dwelt on it for a second before pushing it aside sharply. Luke was the brother she had never had, she told herself for the hundredth time, as her heart began to beat a little faster. He looked on her as a sister and she on him as a brother, and that was fine. It was, it was fine and how things should be. She was a married woman and he had never expressed anything other than brotherly affection. They were worlds apart, and these feelings she had . . . She did not go on to explain to herself what the churning feelings embodied but instead turned quickly and walked across to the open kitchen window, leaning out for a moment as she looked up into the startlingly blue sky.

  How long could she go on like this? she asked herself silently. In this marriage that wasn’t a marriage? And the answer came as it always did – as long as you have to. Till death us do part. She had said that and meant it and that was the end of it. And Frederick had kept to his part of their unspoken agreement to some degree: he provided a roof over their heads and food on their plates for her family, and not grudgingly. No, he was kind to her grandparents and to her mother and Ruth; it was just his wife who saw that other side of him.

  She sighed deeply, her eyes on a lark high above as it swooped and glided with the sun on its wings. He hated her, she knew he hated her. He looked at her sometimes as though he wished her dead.

  ‘Not lettin’ up, this heat, is it?’ Betsy had joined her at the window and now her voice had a gurgle to it as she said, ‘Makes folk do funny things when it’s as hot as this. Croft told me –’ and here the housekeeper’s voice dropped even lower – ‘he told me that old Parson Casey at Ryhope, him that’s always preachin’ damnation an’ hellfire an’ the sins of the flesh, he went for a midnight dip down near Hole Rock as naked as the day he was born. Just unfortunate for the good parson that two of his parishioners were busy courtin’ down there an’ all. Croft said the parish was rockin’ for a week at the picture of the parson in the altogether stumblin’ across Biddy McBrodie an’ Len from the public house sportin’ in the moonlight. An’ she’s a big girl, Biddy. The parson would have got an eyeful all right.’

  ‘Oh, Betsy.’ Polly was shaking with laughter.

  ‘An’ accordin’ to Croft – an’ he got it from the horse’s mouth so to speak, bein’ on such friendly terms with Len since they were bairns – the parson leapt ten foot in the air an’ gave a whinny like a mare before boltin’ like the devil himself had stuck his pitchfork where he shouldn’t. Croft said Len didn’t know which’d given him the more pleasure, Biddy or the parson.’

  Betsy’s mirth was spilling over now and the two women leaned against each other for long moments before they drew apart, both of them wiping their streaming eyes with their aprons.

  What would she do without Betsy? Polly looked into the dear face of this friend who had been tried and tested over the last five years and found to be rock solid. But thank God, aye, thank God indeed that she didn’t have to do without her. ‘I suppose I’d better go and have a word with Ruth,’ said Polly as their smiles faded. ‘She should be down here by now anyway, preparing the vegetables for Grandda’s broth.’

  Betsy nodded. The day Ruth came downstairs to the kitchen after paying her morning call to her mother without being called at least three times would be a miracle, she thought grimly. If ever there was a lazy upstart, that little madam was one. Thought she was the cat’s whiskers and the tail an’ all, Ruth did. Betsy never ceased to wonder how two sisters could be so different. ‘Aye, all right, lass, an’ tell her to bring down your mam’s breakfast tray, would you? Once I’m finished here I’ll be in the dairy; them creampots have been standin’ for a week now, so they need churnin’.’

  As Betsy bustled back to her work, Polly left the kitchen by the door which led into the passage adjoining the hall, and after mounting the polished wooden staircase, she stopped for a moment and glanced about her. This was a beautiful house, large and well furnished, but she had never felt mistress of it, not deep down. She had visited what remained of her old home a few weeks ago, and it had saddened her to see the ruin it had become. Frederick had decided there was no point in repairing the roof once the extent of the damage had been clear, and as he wanted the forty acres for pasture, the farmhouse had been left to decay. But at least Buttercup had companions in her old age. Polly smiled to herself as she thought of the cow who now – owing to a promise Frederick had made Polly before their marnage – lived in queenly comfort in lush pasture with a host of other bovines and old Bess and Patience.

  Once on the wide landing with its deep stone windowsills and leaded windows, Polly walked along to her mother’s room, which was between Ruth’s and her grandparents’. She could hear voices from within but these stopped immediately she opened the door, and it was clear that the two occupants’ conversation had not been for her ears. This was a regular occurrence when Ruth and her mother were together, and it had ceased to bother Polly years ago. Polly looked across to the wide double bed in which her mother was lying and on which Ruth was perched, and her face was expressionless as she said, ‘Good morning, Mother.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve come to take her downstairs.’ Hilda’s voice was sharp and querulous. ‘She’s not well, you know, she’s had stomach ache this morning.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, given the size of the breakfast she ate,’ Polly said pleasantly. ‘What was it, Ruth? A bowl of porridge followed by two eggs, sausages and bacon?’

  Ruth wasn’t fooled by the amiable tone and she slid off the bed after one peevish ‘Huh.’

  ‘Bring Mother’s tray with you.’

  ‘She’s not a servant; let Betsy or that half-witted girl do it.’

  ‘Betsy is busy in the dairy, and even if she wasn’t I wouldn’t bother her to come and fetch your tray, as you well know,’ Polly said steadily, meeting the eyes of the thin-faced woman in the bed. ‘And Emily is far from half-witted.’

  ‘She doesn’t say boo to a goose.’

  ‘And if she was more outspoken, that would be wrong too.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ Hilda snapped testily. ‘Ruth never does.’

  Polly didn’t bother to answer, merely indicatin
g with a wave of her hand for Ruth – who was now holding her mother’s breakfast tray – to precede her out of the room. The tenor of the exchange was the same every morning, it was only the detail which varied.

  Once on the landing, with her mother’s bedroom door closed, Polly said quietly, ‘Just a moment, Ruth.’

  ‘What now?’ Ruth flounced round to face her sister, her face set in its perpetual scowl. ‘It’s not my fault if she keeps me in there half the morning.’

  ‘It’s not about that.’ Polly stared at the young woman in front of her. Ruth was now eighteen years of age and was slightly above middle height. Her hair did not have the rich chestnut tint which Polly’s had, but nevertheless the brown curls were thick and shiny and her skin was clear and finely textured. She could have been pretty – she ought to have been pretty – and certainly the blue muslin summer dress she was wearing had been chosen with a view to flattering her somewhat voluptuous figure, but the ill-temper which had become a permanent feature dominated her face. ‘I just wondered when Arnold is calling next?’