Tiger Bay Blues

by Catrin Collier

  Gulls screeched, a singularly mournful sound, as they swooped low over the breaking waves in search of prey. The tide was incoming, swirling fast, carrying a crust of seaweed, driftwood and shells that crowds of young boys, armed with nets and buckets, paddled through in search of fishy treasures. Edyth imagined a young Peter among them and, for some unaccountable reason, the image brought tears to her eyes.

  She made an effort to block out the raucous sounds of laughter and noise around her and concentrate on the natural beauty of the bay: the water that sucked and gurgled like a living being through the pebbles on the tide-line; the frothing of the dirty, grey foam, flecked with blacker streaks of coal dust, that topped the breakers dissolving on the shore; the peculiar tracks made by crabs scuttling sideways over compacted, wet sand.

  She stepped down on the rocks, spread her handkerchief on an outcrop and perched on it before opening her handbag and drawing out the letter she had received that morning. She had read it so often she could have quoted it line for line, but that didn’t deter her from reading it again.

  My dearest Edyth,

  I do hope you are well and in better spirits than when you wrote your last letter. Unfortunately, Reverend Richards continues in poor health and is unable to perform his ecclesiastical, administrative, or pastoral duties. At the Bishop’s suggestion, and in the absence of close family and friends, I have taken it upon myself to speak to his doctor. He believes Reverend Richards’s illness owes as much to his depressed spirits as a physical cause. The poor man lost heart when his wife died suddenly following a seizure before Christmas, and I only have to think of the effect that our present separation is having on my state of mind to understand a little of what he is suffering.

  Aside from weakness, loss of appetite, and trembling in his limbs, Reverend Richards has no medical condition his doctor can diagnose, but he is lethargic and has little interest in parish affairs, his parishioners or indeed life.

  The Bishop visited us yesterday. He spent the entire afternoon here, first talking to Reverend Richards, and then myself, before joining both of us for tea in the vicarage. As I have told you in my previous letters, our housekeeper’s culinary skills rival those of Mrs Price.

  She smiled at the reference that no one not acquainted with Reverend and Mrs Price would understand. It added an intimacy to her relationship with Peter. Already they shared secrets.

  The Bishop is arranging for the Reverend Richards to be taken to a retreat on Monday week. There, he will be cared for by a professional nurse employed by the Church. The Bishop and I prayed that care, rest and good food will restore him to his previous robust health, but given that Reverend Richards is sixty-four, the Bishop thinks it best to retire him now, so the years left to him can be spent in well-earned rest and quiet contemplation.

  This leaves the church with the problem of what to do with the Butetown parish. The Bishop told me that he was impressed with what I have achieved in the few short weeks since he appointed me curate here. I have resurrected the youth and temperance clubs and enrolled over twenty members in each. I have held an inaugural meeting of a drama group, although the people who turned up were more interested in music than theatre. I also arranged a picnic for the younger parishioners with the help of a few of the mothers and a local fruit merchant who loaned us his lorry to take the children to Leckwith Hill.

  However, despite this progress, the Bishop warned me that he will not countenance placing this particular parish in a bachelor’s keeping, however enthusiastic or dedicated the incumbent.

  He enquired after you. I hope you don’t mind but I confided in him and told him of your father’s opposition to our marriage. The Bishop kindly volunteered to approach your parents on our behalf. He thought a direct appeal might persuade Mr Evans to reconsider. I thanked him for his offer, but asked him not to do anything until I had written to you. Perhaps if you showed this letter to your parents they might consent to discuss the matter with us again, in the presence of the Bishop? Believe me, the Bishop is only thinking of our future and welfare.

  Please, dearest, write to me by return to let me know your thoughts.

  God keep and bless you,

  I am, and will always remain,

  Your Peter Slater

  Edyth returned the letter to its envelope, replaced it in her handbag and glanced at her wristwatch. Hopefully, her parents had reached the station in time to catch the six-thirty train. If they had missed it, there was another at seven-thirty and again at eight-thirty. To be on the safe side, she had decided that she should catch the eight-thirty. That gave her plenty of time to walk down towards the university buildings on the Mumbles Road, take the turning that led up the hill to the village of Uplands from where she could make her way through Cwmdonkin Park to the college.

  All she had to do was order a taxi to meet her outside the gates at a quarter to eight, and the bursar would do that for her, after she had related the story she had prepared. She would ask for a driver who would be prepared to carry her luggage to the car and also on to the train.

  She imagined the look on Peter’s face when he opened the door to the vicarage later that evening and saw her standing in front of him. Or would he open it? Perhaps the housekeeper would, and when she did, she’d call to Peter and he would come running from his study, the look of shock on his face turning to a smile when he saw her. He would sweep her off her feet but he wouldn’t kiss her. Not in front of the housekeeper. Perhaps later, when he showed her to the guest room that would hopefully be next door to his own bedroom, or just a few doors away on the landing.

  She recalled what Bella had said. But Peter was a clergyman, not an artist like Toby, so she might have to wait until their wedding night to find out what it was like to make love to a man. Peter had been right. They would be man and wife, just as soon as her father realised how determined she was and the lengths she was prepared to go, simply to be with the man she loved.

  Her father would have to give his consent to their marriage when he found out she had run away from college on the very day that he and her mother had taken her there. He would simply have to!

  Edyth sat back on one of the upholstered benches in the empty first-class carriage the porter had found for her, and scanned the copy of the Evening Post she had bought from a vendor at Swansea station. There was no good news. Twenty-four people had died as a result of the heat wave, the temperature in London had reached 94 degrees that day and, according to the experts, there was no sign of the weather cooling. More than two million people had registered unemployed at the beginning of August and there was little hope of improvement. The only ray of hope was that the Morris factory was producing a new car, but with the entire country locked into economic depression, she wondered who was going to buy it and what with.

  Then she realised that, angry as she was with her father, her reaction to the news was the direct result of the politics and sense of fair play he had instilled in her while she was growing up.

  She drove all thoughts of him and her mother from her mind. She had told the bursar that her brother’s wife was ill and she was needed at his farm in the Swansea Valley to look after her, and that on no account was the college to contact her parents, as they wanted to spare her father any worry because he had urgent parliamentary business in London. Fortunately for the flimsiness of her story, the bursar either didn’t know, or didn’t realise, that Parliament was in its summer recess.

  She folded the paper and looked out of the window. The sun was low on the horizon; a blood-red ball hovering above a copse of trees like an illustration in a child’s picture book. She picked up the paper and fanned herself. The guard had opened the narrow window, but the air in the carriage remained oppressive and uncomfortable.

  The train slowed, they drew into a station. ‘Bridgend’ hung on the sign above the platform; they had only covered half the distance to Cardiff. She checked the time. Ten past nine. According to the timetable, she should arrive in Cardiff at a quarter to ten. Door
s slammed along the length of the train, a whistle blew, the brakes hissed and they steamed forward.

  Just at the point when she braced herself for the train to gather speed, it juddered to a halt and she was jerked forward. She sat back in her seat and waited. Carriage doors opened, and people ran up and down the train. After a quarter of an hour had passed, she slid back her door and looked out. A guard was standing further down the corridor engulfed by a mob of irate passengers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he shouted above their heads, ‘a freight train has broken down on the tracks ahead. I am afraid there is going to be a delay.’

  ‘For how long?’ one man demanded, before Edyth had plucked up courage to ask the same question.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, ladies and gentlemen, but that is all I can tell you. Workmen and officials are doing all they can to free the line. I will keep you informed of progress. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to inform the passengers in the third-class carriages about the delay.’ The guard fought his way through the crowd and disappeared into the next carriage.

  Disgruntled, muttering vague threats about letters to the press and Great Western Rail Company the passengers dispersed. A middle-aged man gave Edyth a lecherous smile. She returned to her carriage and slammed the door. The sun had sunk lower. It was bound to be dark by the time they reached Cardiff. Tiger Bay was supposed to be too rough an area for a young girl to visit alone, although it had seemed remarkably quiet on her one excursion to Bute Street. What if she couldn’t find a taxi to take her there? What if she couldn’t find a taxi at all?

  Deciding the time to worry about that was when it happened, she pushed the thought from her mind. But no matter how she tried, the stories she had heard about Tiger Bay kept surfacing in her mind. And not the innocuous ones she had told her father and the members of the jazz band at her sister’s wedding, but stories of fights, knifings, and men attacking women.

  She pulled out the address of the vicarage in Church Street that she had tucked into her handbag. No taxi driver would refuse to take a respectable-looking woman to a vicarage. Would they?

  She rose to her feet and peered anxiously in the sliver of mirror above the seat opposite. Her hair was damp with perspiration and bedraggled beneath her straw hat. Her silk dress was creased and clung clammily to her body. She glanced at her trunk, suitcase and overnight bag on the rack above the seats, and resolved to leave everything except her overnight bag in left luggage at Cardiff station.

  Peter had written that the Reverend Richards had a housekeeper. She pictured a respectable spinster or widow who lived in, and would chaperone her while she slept at the vicarage. Peter would help her collect her luggage in the morning – and then? Then what? At that moment it dawned on her that she had thought no further than reaching Peter. They still wouldn’t be able to marry without her father’s written consent.

  She would ask Peter to telephone her father in the morning. Her parents would finally see sense and allow them to marry. If they didn’t, she would have made all this effort for nothing. No, not for nothing – her mouth curled into a smile. After the lies she had told the bursar, one thing was certain: the principal would not allow her back into the college.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘You’ve got to be joking. There’s no way I’m taking a young girl down Tiger Bay at this time of night,’ the taxi driver said vehemently. ‘The last thing I need is a copper flagging me down and asking questions about my involvement in the white slave trade.’

  ‘Come on, Stan,’ the porter coaxed. ‘The lady’s asking to taken to the vicarage, not a pub or one of the houses.’

  ‘She’s asking to be taken to Tiger Bay – and that’s enough for me. The coppers will take one look at her sitting in the back of my cab in Bute Street and pull me over. I can’t afford to lose time on the busiest night of the week.’

  ‘She’s a young girl. You’ve daughters of your own.’

  ‘Who look as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, just like Little Miss Muffet here, but I know what they’re like under those innocent expressions. Who’s to say where she’ll go after I drop her off in Church Street? The Glamorgan, The Peel, The Cardigan or Anna Hughes’s. Well, I’ll not be held responsible.’ The driver pointed to the row of taxis lined up behind his. ‘Ask one of the other boys if they fancy taking a young girl down the docks at this time of night.’

  ‘Please?’ Edyth added her plea to that of the porter. The driver was in his forties, looked trustworthy and reminded her of the miners who visited her father in their house.

  ‘Sorry, miss, you might be respectable and then again you might not. I like to sleep nights and I won’t if I drop you off in Tiger Bay after midnight on a Saturday night.’

  Edyth was hot, grubby, exhausted and exasperated. The train had been delayed outside Bridgend for over two hours and, as if that hadn’t been enough, they had been held up outside Cardiff station for another half an hour so the scheduled trains could keep to their timetables. All she wanted was to see Peter and soak in a cold bath before sleeping in a clean bed, and she was convinced all three waited for her at the vicarage. But that was little use if she couldn’t find anyone to take her there.

  The porter, who had miraculously found the key to the left luggage room so she could stow her trunk and suitcase there after it had officially closed for the night, had given up on Stan and was talking to the other drivers. Edyth watched him work his way down the line of cabs. He waved her forward when he reached the seventh in the queue.

  ‘Best I can do for you, miss. But Tom will charge double the usual fare. He can after midnight,’ he warned.

  ‘Thank you.’ Edyth was too grateful to argue.

  ‘Here you go then, miss.’ The porter opened the back door, lifted in her overnight case and looked expectantly at Edyth.

  ‘You have been very kind.’ She opened her handbag and pulled out her purse, Unable to see in the darkness, she moved closer to a gas lamp and extracted a shilling.

  She thought she was being generous but the porter merely pocketed the coin, touched his hat and walked off. She stepped into the taxi and closed the door. The driver opened the glass panel that separated him from the passengers.

  ‘The people at the vicarage in Church Street are expecting you, miss?’ he checked.

  ‘I know Reverend Slater,’ she replied cautiously.

  ‘The new curate?’

  ‘You know him, too?’ she asked in excitement.

  ‘My daughter goes to the church school. New curate’s already been there taking religious assembly. He’s keen by all accounts and full of new ideas. But he has the good sense to tread carefully and ask the locals what they want. The people in the Bay don’t like charity unless they’re the ones dishing it out. That’s where the Reverend Richards and his missus fell short. Still, mustn’t speak ill of the dead.’

  ‘Reverend Richards is dead?’ Edyth was shocked to think that the man Peter had written about only the day before had passed away.

  ‘No, his missus. She was too hoity-toity for the Bay by half. But there you are. Do-gooders are always poking around the docks, trying to “improve” the residents. Those who live there don’t like outsiders coming in and looking down their noses at them, but from what I’ve been told, they’ve taken to this new bloke. You been held up on the train coming in from Swansea?’

  ‘Yes.’ Elated by the driver’s verdict on Peter’s work, Edyth sat back in her seat and looked out of the window, eager to absorb every aspect of the place that she hoped would soon become her home.

  They drove out of station yard and along the main street before turning under a railway bridge and on to a wide road. Back streets that looked reassuringly familiar opened from it on both sides, reminding her of the terraced houses of Pontypridd and the Rhondda.

  The sky was a deep, dark navy above lamps that shed pools of light on to pavements, and beneath them, even at this hour, people were sitting on kitchen chairs that had been carried outside, presumably in search o
f cooler and fresher air. Elderly and middle-aged women were nursing small children and babies on their laps. Older children who still had the energy to run around were skipping with ropes or playing tag. She wondered why they weren’t in bed then remembered it was a Saturday night. Even so, her parents had always insisted on regular bedtimes, including the height of summer.

  Men had gathered in groups outside pubs that should have closed at ten o’clock, yet many were holding full glasses in their hands. A group was crouched low over playing cards spread on the ground. Gambling was illegal and so was drinking in public after hours, but if she closed her eyes she wouldn’t see it happening, then she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it.

  She leaned back and did just that … for a moment …

  ‘You wanted the vicarage, miss?’

  The taxi driver’s announcement, accompanied by the slam of brakes, catapulted Edyth into startled consciousness. She opened her eyes. He had parked alongside a church set behind railings in a wide, straight, lamp-lit street that stretched ahead as far as she could see. The man left his cab, walked to the back of the car, opened the door and lifted her overnight bag from the floor. ‘I’ll carry this to the porch for you, miss.’

  ‘How much do I owe you?’ She opened her handbag and felt for her purse.

  ‘It’s double after midnight.’

  ‘The porter warned me.’

  ‘That’ll be five bob.’

  ‘Five shillings!’ She squinted at her watch, holding it up to the window so she could read the face. ‘It’s less than a quarter of an hour since we left the station.’