The Railway Girls

by Leah Fleming

  Chapter Two

  At last a grand day for washing and a chance to crisp up the starched linen, smiled Ellen Birkett as she stood back to admire the line of whites billowing like flags in the breeze. Living high on Scarsdale tops had one advantage; washing dried quicker and cleaner far from the sooty smuts and chimneys of Scarsbeck village. Down in the valley she could see the smoke blow like bonfires across the rooftops and towards the slopes of Whernside and the farms at Paradise. Someone else would be getting the coal dust and gubbins on their smalls. Paradise fields might get a south view and afternoon sunshine but Middle Butts Farm boasted the soft rays of the setting sun, all the orange-pink tinges on rocks and boulders plus a stiff drying nor’westerly straight from Morecambe Bay.

  As the petticoats and pinafores danced on the line, the girl sighed at the absence of any shirt-tails and nightshirts alongside the female stuff. Since Father died and went to glory there were no thick woollen stockings, corduroy breeches or combinations to scrub and no brothers to ease her load.

  Ellen tested the cottons to see if they were ready to fold up and noticed the northern sky was thickening into a plump cushion of slate-grey clouds, full o’ feathers, Dad would have said. Surely not more snow at the end of April when the new crop of lambs was so far out on the fells?

  She turned back towards the farmhouse with pleasure at the sight of its soft grey stone peeping over the little walled herb garden which nestled under the window. She noted with relief that the small green shoots of spring were poking gingerly out of the loamy soil: clumps of lovage, thyme, sage and southernwood, gillyflowers and lemony primroses, ready to tuck themselves back down if the frosts returned, as they often did right to the end of May.

  Middle Butts farmhouse seemed moulded into the fellside, sheltered by a line of coppery trees and cushioned at the back by bracken banks rising to the hummocky fells, bordered by stone walls. It was hard to think that fierce Norsemen still left their mark on features of face and landscape here. It showed in the very shape of the house with long rooms linked one to another by stone passageways, attached sideways to the barns and animal quarters; this was once a Viking longhouse, snuggled into the hillside. On winter nights it was grand to know family and stock were all packed in tight within fire-warmed walls, over four feet thick, peering out through mullion-paned windows at the lanterns in the snow blinking across the valley, signalling all was well.

  Close to the farm ran the ancient stone track, winding over the moorland, straight and direct, built by the Roman armies on their way north to the borderlands. Wild storm winds roared over limestone pavements there and the gnarled trees rooted in the clefts of the rocks bowed in submission to the greater force.

  The stone lintel over the door was carved with intertwining initials, J, M, B, 1601, some of her own Birkett forebears who were tending these pastures when Good Queen Bessie was on the throne. That took you back a bit to think that perhaps they too kept the weathered oak farmhouse door open on all but the stormiest of days and they first wore smooth the stone-flagged hall passageway as they walked from the same panelled dining chamber, the oak polished to the colour of warm earth but still smelling damp and musty, to a sitting parlour used only when visitors came and for funeral sidings. How many of her ancestors had lain like Father, solemn in their Sunday suits before the final rest in St Oswy’s kirkyard? One minute he was stacking straw stooks on that hot August morning and in his burial box by teatime.

  Ellie scurried through to the houseplace, hearth of the home. Here Mother cooked on the fiery furnace of a cast-iron range – the range which Dad had burst his guts to give Annie Birkett so she could hold her head well above the other farmers’ wives in the district and be on nodding terms with the cook at Scarsbeck Hall to compare recipes. Their range had a hot-air oven and a boiler for hot water, all the latest features, even a separate bakestone to bake oaty bread and a crane contraption from which hung the kail pot over the fire. This contraption filled the whole of the old inglenook fireplace but Mother insisted it was black-leaded and brass-polished to the standard of a locomotive engine.

  For Ellen it held no delight, only the promise of more servitude and humiliation. That very morning she had been berated by Mother in front of the hired hands who were waiting nervously for their eight o’clock breakfast at the long oak table which straddled the large room, waiting for their chizzocks, curd and currant pastries, their warming tea, waiting in vain for the meal to be served. The grandmother clock ticked patiently in the corner of the kitchen and the men sitting on narrow benches, fingering their pewter bowls as they glinted in the firelight, watched Ellen struggle to roll out the pastry cases and stir the porridge.

  Mother stormed in just as the pan of milk bubbled and boiled over onto the hot plate. ‘Glory be, Ellie! I leave you five minutes and you ruin that pastry. You’ve warmed it into shreds. Look at it, like a patchwork quilt. How many times have I told you? Warm hands won’t roll it. Cold hands will. You manhandle it to death. I don’t know. Yer sister, Mercy, is nobbut a threepenny bit and she can do better than you. What’s got into you? These lads are starving.’

  Annie Birkett grabbed hold of the dough with arms as plump as a goose and doused it in flour. ‘Give it here and move over.’

  Ellie’s cheeks were burning like rosy apples shining with heat and embarrassment, watching the farm boys smirking and Sunter, her cousin, trying to look sympathetic, the wens on his spotty chin looking fit to burst. ‘You know I’m not cut out for housework . . .’ she whispered, hoping to redeem her failure, but Mother was on the warpath.

  ‘Not cut out! Whatever will yer cousin, here, think of a girl who can’t bake an apple pie without turning it into a cow pat,’ laughed Widow Birkett as she slapped the pastry onto a plate, sloshed on the curd tart mix and whizzed it into the oven, giving the door a satisfying slam.

  Ellie cleared away the baking stuff in a huff and a puff. She could not care less what Sunter Lund and his father, Uncle Warwick, thought about her culinary prowess. Let him bake his own pies. He turned her stomach with that stupid lovesick look on his face. He was always stalking her in the farmyard, peering from the stables, offering to carry her buckets but she couldn’t abide him within a kick’s distance. Dad was hardly cold in his grave before the Lunds came calling, as humble as that Uriah Heep in the penny reading magazine. They meant well enough but she knew that Middle Butts Farm was a much better proposition than their own at High Butts. The pastures were lusher by the beck and the farmhouse grander and the dairy herd a credit to Father’s canny eye for a good beast.

  Uncle Warwick having the only son and Ellie being of a marriageable age, what seemed more natural than to keep it all in the family! Ellie would have none of it.

  Mother followed her into the scullery to deliver the hard word. ‘You be nice to yer cousin. We need all the help we can get. It makes sense that my brother’s son should want to take over our tenancy one day.’

  ‘Over my dead body! Father worked hard to build up this farm and I’m not having that halfwit giving me orders,’ snapped Ellie, clanging the pots.

  ‘He’s not a halfwit. He nearly went to the grammar school. Mr Bulstrode coached him good and proper in the schoolhouse.’

  ‘And look where it got him. Nowhere. He’s as thick and lumpy as our Mercy’s porridge and bone idle. He is rough with the cows and careless with the sheep, I can shift just as much as he can any day. Let me go full-time on the farm and forget about this stuff,’ pleaded Ellie with her bright blue eyes blinking earnestly. Mother turned away to check the cheeses, stacked on shelves over the slate slabs in the dairy.

  ‘Don’t start that again. It’s indecent. If only yer father and I had managed a son! All that bulling and no blessings . . . just a wayward daughter and an afterthought: two ewes and no tups! God must have had His reasons to take yer father afore his time.’ Annie Birkett shook her head sadly, the wisps of grey straggles poking out of her mobcap, feeling every one of her forty-five years. The harsh winter had ta
ken its toll on her cheeks, rough and chapped by the weather; her body had shrunk and sagged and now she was cursed by that awful time of change whispered about at the sewing circle as a time of madness and heat.

  There had always been Birketts at Middle Butts, tall fair strapping men just like Jim. She had eyed him up for years knowing that he was just the man for her. They had struggled together to build up a decent dairy herd but their own breeding had been a disaster and no mistake. ‘If only poor William, Jimmy and Kester had lived we’d have a future here; three bairns born not the size of rabbits all buried in the kirkyard and what’s left? Two strapping lasses who can eat me out of house and home, one who can’t fry an egg without burning it and the other with her head stuck in books. Why were you born so awkward?’

  ‘Because I’d rather be out lambing, cowing, walling. That’s why!’

  ‘No man’ll wed you unless you shape up, lass. Who wants a woman as can’t cook?’ spat her mother, mopping her brow. There was silence between mother and daughter, a frosty silence chilling the air.

  ‘Is everything all right, Auntie Annie?’ Sunter simpered, cap in hand, peering round the door. ‘I’m going to wall up that gap on the far side. We’ve lost a few lambs up there and what with them navvy camps going up fast, you can’t be too careful. I’ll be back s’afternoon if you need me.’

  ‘Thank you, Sunter, yer a good lad to yer old aunt. Think on, Ellie, what I’ve been saying. You can’t afford to be picky at your age. Girls years younger than you are being snapped up like hot cakes at the village socials. The last thing we need is an old maid to feed and clothe.’

  All day Mother’s threats had rankled inside her head. She was only eighteen and there was no shortage of admirers when she sauntered down to Scarsbeck. Was it her fault if she towered over the village stockmen like a Viking princess in the story books? She was tall with sunbleached golden hair curling softly around her plump face, bonny and round with a strong frame and firm large breasts which seemed to end up pressed against the noses of the chapel swains when she swung them round in the dancing. Her boots were cobbled on a man’s last and all her skirts shrunk indecently above her ankles and needed lengthening each summer.

  Ellie stood just under six feet tall and sometimes tried to curl her shoulders to reduce her height. It never worked, though, and she ended up with a sore neck and backache from stooping. What she needed was a lad she could stare up to, whose arms would go round her waist when they danced, not clasp themselves around her thighs!

  When she looked over the other lumpen farmers’ sons, Ellie was not impressed by any of them. She’d biffed and bashed most of them at the dame school, fought over conkers with them on Scarsbeck playing green and had no desire to kiss any of them at the kiss and cushion dancing. She was fussy so she’d do without like Miss Cora Bulstrode, single for twenty years, a shadow behind her brother Mr Ezra Bulstrode, the headmaster. It was just like that poet in her Palgrave’s Golden Treasury said:

  Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

  And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

  Not that Miss Cora was all sweetness. She could cut you down to size with one of her haughty stares down her metal-rimmed spectacles as if you were a stolen fart. She hovered over the schoolhouse like a dog guarding the gates of hell. Only the scholarship boys, one by one, were admitted for extra lessons, poor sods! For twenty years Mr Bulstrode had striven to get Scarsbeck lads to jump through the scholarship hoop. He had managed only six. Six hopefuls who bettered themselves and never darkened the doors of church, school or chapel again.

  Uncle Warwick and Aunt Blaize had been right suited when Sunter got his chance but he fluffed it somehow. Now they were looking in her direction for a lift up the social ladder. She felt sorry that the other lads scoffed at him and gave him a wide berth. They thought him stupid, no doubt, to bother with book-learning when there were trees to climb, becks to dam up, lassies to chase or fish to be poached.

  As she folded up the day’s washing she had to admit that perhaps she and Sunter were two of a kind, for different reasons. He was a lone worker and so was she. Ellie had too many chores to perform on the farm, cows to milk, butter to churn, cheese to press, sheep to tend, lambs to gather in and wool to spin, to mess about with the village girls. It was church on Sunday, of course, Miss Bulstrode’s needlecraft evening class in the summer and a trip to the sheep fair, if she was lucky. In winter they were sealed off on the tops by blizzards and snowdrifts, cocooned in Middle Butts, carding wool, spinning yarn, knitting a crop of stockings and gloves for the market, watching Mother knit gossamer-soft shawls which could pass through a wedding ring they were that fine.

  Ellie carried the wicker basket through the house, her metal boot tips clacking on the milk-polished stone slabs. Mother was mending as usual, sitting on the high-backed settle, darning stockings while keeping her eye on a bubbling pan of vegetables and stock for the evening broth. She inspected the washing basket, sniffing up the windblown garments. ‘Smells fresh enough but is that soot I see on yon blouse?’

  ‘Must be the camp fire smoke across the valley,’ replied her daughter.

  ‘We never wanted that camp near us. It’s a good job there’s a meeting tonight in the village room. Trouble’s on the move and we’ve got to have our say. I heard there’ll be thousands and thousands camped around us. We’ll be besieged like the Israelites, besieged by hostile Philistines. Goliath and his hordes waiting to conquer, not safe in our beds of a night. They’ve been parading in the village, bold as brass. Cheek of them!’

  ‘Oh Mother, they’re only doing their job. The camp’s a mile away from Scarsbeck,’ argued Ellie.

  ‘Not three fields away from us!’ came the reply.

  ‘As the crow flies, Mother, come on, as the crow flies.’

  ‘Them navvy devils is more like swallows on a barn roof, sporting blue jackets, fancy white moleskins and red neckerchiefs. I’ve seen them bogtrotting past our bottom gate, all dolled up, fair-weather birds, that’s all. Here for the summer work and once the cold comes off they’ll flit, leaving all their mess behind. Why does Scarsbeck need a station halt? Trouble on the move, I reckon we’ll pay for it one way or the other. AND if I catch you as much as tweaking your curls in front of any one of them ragabashes . . . We all know where there’s men and maidens, mischief is soon afoot! By heck, just you start smiling in that direction and you’ll be up them stairs in yer room with not so much as a crumb for yer supper. I’m warning you, my lady.’

  ‘Oh Mother, honestly, I’m sure they’re not as bad as they’re made out. You know what Parson Hardy said last Sunday about being charitable to these poor wandering souls, “We must show forbearance and fortitude in our hour of trial . . . true Christian forbearance.” ’ Ellie mimicked the vicar’s plummy tones, making her mother smile and sink back onto the cushion.

  ‘Lass, I don’t know where you get it from, yer a caution. You can twist yer tongue to anything but think on, I mean every word I’ve said.’

  Chapter Three

  There was a steady stream of traffic on the turnpike road following the rough bleak track over Ribblehead Moor towards Dent and Hawes; a queue of draycarts and wagons loaded with wooden planks, coal carts and delivery traps with Dales ponies shining like black glass. On foot were a straggle of men and women pushing handcarts with babies and toddlers wedged between iron bedsteads, straw mattresses, birdcages, chickens poking out of baskets bobbing up and down, squawking in protest at the bumpy ride, tormented by the array of scruffy tethered dogs which snapped and snarled at strangers. Children gambolled and darted round covered in dust and dung, waving pots and pans in noisy chattering groups, with bundles on sticks over their shoulders, teasing and bantering with each other on the long journey northwards.

  One young navvy staggered into the brightness from the Gearstones Inn with barn-straw dust still on his shoulders, his mahogany eyes staring forward as if in a trance; a gigantic navvy in a huge moleskin monkey jacket, a loose bund
le slung over his shoulder. He looked the worse for his Saturday night’s spree, having drunk away his wages, his favourite waistcoat with pearl buttons, six flannel shirts, his best boots, three pairs of extra-thick knitted stockings and a silver watch with gilt chain. Now his head was throbbing and there was no choice but to tramp on to the next camp to earn a few more bob and top up his hangover with a hair of the dog.

  At the sight of this flame-haired giant, men parted in front of him like the Red Sea before Moses. His reputation walked before him, a reputation for having knocked several men to kingdom come at the fisticuff contests held after midnight, behind the pub, out of reach of the constables.

  ‘Nah then, Fancy, how do?’ one little workman said as he doffed his cap, smiling. ‘Coming to try yer luck in Paradise camp? I hear it’s a bit on the small side for a cock of a dock like you . . .’

  The tall traveller strode past groups of men, waving his hand in a grand gesture. ‘That’s Fancy, the Highland tiger, they say he’s just out of the correction house for braying three men to pulp . . . a one-man army when fired up wi’ whisky, snappy dresser but mind the missus when the wind’s in his direction,’ rumoured the men to each other down the line.

  Fancy strode on past the hawkers lugging bundles of wares on their backs, past packmen with mules laden with panniers, catching up with huge carthorses whose tails were gaily decorated with ribbons and tail plaits, their muscles glistening as they steamed and plodded uphill. In his nostrils was the warm tang of freshly dropped manure to clear his headache.

  The gaggles of women nodded approvingly as he sauntered past, admiring the jaunty angle of his forage cap, his gypsy-length copper curls, caught up in a pirate’s tail down his back, the way his broad shoulders tapered neatly into a firm round bum which emphasised his thick thighs and sturdy long limbs. Even from the back he stirred the senses with sinful possibilities.