by Maggie Hope
‘Don’t bloody worry, you damn’ tart,’ he hissed at her. ‘I wouldn’t touch you with a flaming barge pole. Captain Benson is welcome.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Elizabeth sweetly, recovering her equilibrium, and went on up the stairs. She put the tray down on the table outside Jack Benson’s room while she knocked.
‘Enter.’
Picking up the tray and going in, she was surprised to find him out of bed and already dressed in his hospital blues. He was actually standing at the table, looking down at a paper. She couldn’t help but glance at his feet, amazed that they should look so normal. He was even standing naturally. Of course, they were covered with socks and shoes, nothing to see of the wood and metal. He looked up and smiled at her, a frank, open smile which lifted her heart and made her want to sing. By, he was a lovely man, she thought, not for the first time. And not for the first time she half-wished Private Wilson was right about them.
‘Oh, it’s you, Lizzie,’ he said, and his voice was warm and welcoming. ‘Just put it down here, will you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
She poured his tea and took the cover from the kedgeree which was the standard fare for Tuesday morning breakfast. He watched her, concentrating as she did on what she was doing. Her bent head showed the white nape of her neck below her cap. How neatly she moved. Then she looked up and caught his eyes on her and for a moment, violet-blue eyes looked into hazel and he caught his breath at the glory of them. He couldn’t help himself, he reached out and covered her hand with his, feeling the roughened skin from the hard work it did, feeling a great urge to take her away from all this.
‘Good morning, Captain Benson, sir.’
Private Wilson was standing in the doorway, the suspicion of a smirk on his lips.
‘What the devil do you want, Wilson?’
Jack pulled his hand away quickly and glared at the orderly.
‘I wondered if you’ll be wanting me to help you down to the garden, sir? After breakfast, of course.’
‘Oh, get out, Wilson. If I want you, I’ll ring for you,’ said Jack and frowned. The mood of optimism which had been on him since he awoke dimmed. He had just about forgotten his disability until the orderly reminded him. He had just been a man with a pretty girl, one he was thinking about asking … No, he wasn’t, it was all pie in the sky. How could he ask any girl, the state he was in? As if to underline it he moved to sit down at the table and stumbled, reaching out to Elizabeth and knocking over the milk jug. Swiftly she put one arm around his waist and stood, rock-solid, so that he regained his balance.
‘It’s all right, Nurse, I can manage,’ he snapped, though for a minute or two he patently couldn’t. But he couldn’t bear to feel the outline of her body against his, even covered as it was by a starched dress and apron. Oh, God, what a fool he was.
‘I’m here to help,’ Elizabeth said reasonably.
‘Well, you have. Now go and help some other poor fool!’
Elizabeth withdrew her arm and stood back, watching as he lowered himself to the chair. Then she mopped up the milk with a napkin and picked up the jug.
‘I’ll go for more milk, sir,’ she said.
‘Send Wilson back with it, Nurse.’
Elizabeth went down to the kitchen and got the milk. Private Wilson was there, drinking an illicit cup of tea, so she gave him the jug. ‘Captain Wilson wants to see you,’ she said. There were people about, so he took the milk and went out. It was not his way to say or do anything untoward before others. After that, Elizabeth was unsettled all day – not because of the change in Captain Benson; she felt she could understand that and her heart ached for him. She hugged to herself those few moments when she had gone into his room that morning, seen his welcoming smile, not even noticing his scar, heard him call her Lizzie.
Ever since that awful day when her mother had died beside her in the turnip field, she had hated anyone to call her Lizzie. Lizzie was her mother’s name for her, no one else had the right to use it. And yet … on his lips how sweet it had sounded.
‘I think I’ll go to Morton Main on Sunday, Joan,’ she said to her friend as they walked round the Hall after the midday meal.
‘I thought you couldn’t afford to go anywhere?’ Joan commented.
‘I can walk to Morton Main. I’ve been thinking of Jimmy most of the day.’ It was true, his image had popped into her mind at odd intervals all through the dusting and sweeping and bed baths and dressing of sores which had filled the morning.
Joan glanced at her friend. She knew what that meant: Elizabeth thought something was wrong with her brother. And usually when she thought that she was right. What was it about her that she always knew if there was something wrong with any of her brothers or sisters? It was a mystery. Perhaps it was just as well that Joan herself was an only child, or at least, thought she was. She had been a foundling, left in the porch of the Home one night long ago.
‘The gaffer’s just taking advantage because the lads are orphans,’ declared Mrs Wearmouth. She stood, arms akimbo, before the black-leaded range in her kitchen, her face red with anger.
‘No, he’s not, we wanted to go down the pit,’ Jimmy protested, and Tommy nodded his head in agreement. ‘Anyroad, lads always used to go down when they were younger than us, didn’t they?’
‘Aye, they did, an’ look at the old ones that did now,’ said Mrs Wearmouth. ‘It stunts their growth, doesn’t it? These low seams are no good for lads.’
‘Mind, Jimmy, I wish you hadn’t agreed to go down,’ said Elizabeth, speaking for the first time. She gazed at her brother, his eyes rimmed with coal dust, tiny pockets of it in the folds of his ears. Sure marks of the new young miner who hadn’t learned how to wash it off properly and the cause of much hilarity among his older marras, or workmates. Tommy was just the same.
He, however, didn’t have the hangdog miserable expression of her brother. He was actually grinning at Elizabeth.
‘It’s all right, you know. An’ anyroad we’re making money, it’s grand. An’ it’s not too hard. The ponies take the corves the main of the way to the bottom of the shaft. I like it,’ he asserted. ‘I don’t know why you don’t, Jimmy.’
‘I do, really I do,’ said Jimmy, managing to sound wholly unconvincing.
‘Who’re you working with, lad? Who’s the main hewer?’ It was Mrs Wearmouth asking. A shrewd question, Elizabeth realised.
‘Ben Hoddle.’ Jimmy hung his head.
‘Ben Hoddle? Uncle Ben, you mean?’ He nodded.
‘Does he treat you right?’ demanded Mrs Wearmouth.
‘All right,’ Jimmy mumbled. He didn’t know how the putters were usually treated. He only knew that this last week he’d crawled along tunnels no more than two foot six high and dragged loaded corves after him and been snarled at and cursed at and yesterday … he put a hand upon his right shoulder where Uncle Ben had kicked out at him in a fit of temper when he hadn’t got back with an empty corf quick enough. The steel toecap of Uncle Ben’s boot had connected with the bony part of the joint.
‘Hey, Ben, don’t you kick the lad, he’s doing his best,’ one of the other men had said. ‘Gan canny, will you?’
‘You mind your own business, Jonty,’ Ben had snapped venomously. ‘He’s a lazy little sod, but he’ll learn to quicken up if I have the learning of him.’ He had laughed in Jimmy’s pain-twisted face. ‘Or I’ll know the reason why not,’ he’d snarled. The other men had looked at each other in the murky light of their lamps and muttered but in the end they had turned away and got on with the job of winning the coal. Time was money after all and this war had given them the chance to earn a bit more than they were used to. Though not much. Even Jonty had turned away, telling himself that they had all had to come through it when they started.
Trouble was, this lad was scared of the coal, Jonty could tell that. He was frightened of the noises it made, scared of the roof falling in. Well, he’d have to get over that if he was to make a pitman, Jonty reckoned.
&nbs
p; But coming out of the pit he had walked beside the lad. After all, he had no dad to watch out for him. ‘You tell me if things aren’t right, lad,’ he’d said as they hung up their tokens and handed their Davy lamps in to the lamp cabin. He’d pushed the helmet back from his forehead, showing a rim of startling white where it had rested. ‘You know what I mean.’
Jimmy remembered that now and felt better. He smiled at his sister. ‘I’m all right, Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘Leave us alone, will you? We’re men now, doing men’s jobs, aren’t we, Tommy?’
‘Aye.’
‘Well, I would have a word with your blooming Uncle Ben, Elizabeth,’ Mrs Wearmouth declared. ‘He’s a bully that one, I can see it in his face.’
‘No! you’re not going to do that, are you?’ shouted Jimmy. ‘Leave us alone. I said we’re all right!’
Elizabeth sighed. ‘I won’t, I won’t,’ she said. But there was more to it than Jimmy was letting on, she told herself as she walked back to the Hall in the near dark. And if Ben Hoddle was bullying her brother she knew how to spike his guns all right. A wave of disgust swept over her as she remembered that day, long ago, when he had tried to ‘get funny’ with her and she only being twelve at the time. Aye, she’d kept quiet all this while but if he didn’t behave himself she’d have a word in Auntie Betty’s ear, she would an’ all.
Chapter Ten
CHRISTMAS 1916, AND here he was, Jack thought, still in Newcomb Hall Convalescent Hospital. He’d have to go soon, though, whether his mother liked it or not. Now that more and more blind and injured men were filtering through from the front-line hospitals to those in Britain and on to convalescent hospitals such as the Hall, he couldn’t continue to take up a room when so many others were waiting.
Morosely, he stared at his legs, moved them against each other, felt the broken skin stinging against the padding.
‘You’ve been on them too much, Captain,’ Dr Hardy had announced that morning. ‘Best stay in your chair today at least.’
Nurse Middleham had dressed his feet and put on the pads yesterday, that was the trouble. If Lizzie had done them he would have been all right. Nurse Middleham? Ha, that was a laugh.
Using his hands to turn the wheels of his chair, he pushed himself out of his bedroom to the top of the stairs and looked down into the entrance hall of the old house. Lizzie and half a dozen others were decorating the Christmas tree with a box of glittering baubles they had found in the attic and which must have been decorating Christmas trees here since Prince Albert first made them popular.
‘No candles,’ Miss Rowland was saying. ‘We don’t want to chance setting the place alight.’
‘No, Matron,’ Lizzie replied. She was on the ladder, stretching to reach the top of the tree to put the shining star in place, her lissom body outlined against the tree.
‘Take care!’ Jack cried, but no one heard him from his place in the shadows at the top of the stairs. His hands clenched around the arms of the chair, but Lizzie pinned the star successfully and climbed down to look at it admiringly.
‘It’s grand, isn’t it?’ she asked as the gold star caught the light from the recently electrified chandelier and glistened. Jack watched her face, the rapt expression as she gazed up at the tree, and his pulse quickened.
He had plans for this Christmas when he went home for three days over the holidays. (‘I’ve got a girl in from the village, Jack,’ his mother had told him. ‘It’s scandalous what she’s charging … Why, I remember, not so long ago, when they were begging for jobs at the back door. Now, of course, they think the war will last forever, and the extra jobs it brings. Well, they’re in for a shock in a short time when it’s all over. They’ll wish they kept in with us then, you mark my words.’)
This Christmas he would speak seriously with his mother, tell her he was going to ask Lizzie to marry him, orphan girl though she might be and a miner’s child at that. If only he was back on his feet again … Could he tie a beautiful girl like Lizzie down to a helpless cripple? Self-doubt returned like a dark cloud. What a mess and a mix-up everything was. One minute his mother’s voice sounding in his head, telling him Lizzie was a homeless waif with no family, coming from God knows where; the next thinking Lizzie herself wouldn’t have him anyway, not a cripple like him. Sadly he pulled at the wheels of his chair, managed to turn it round and went back into his room where, not without difficulty, he banged the door shut behind him.
On Christmas Eve, Lizzie was allowed time to slip down to Morton Main with the presents she had bought for her family. A lot of the rooms in the Hall were empty as most of the patients who came from round about had gone home for the holiday. As she walked down the path, she was thinking of how her happiness had dimmed when she realised Jack Benson was going to be among those absent. It had been a shock to realise how much she was going to miss him. What a fool I am! she told herself crossly. He was a lovely man, it was true, but far above her. He would never consider marrying such as her, of course he wouldn’t. But she could dream, couldn’t she?
She was coming to the rows which made up Morton Main now and glanced in her basket with a smile, anticipating the look on Jimmy’s face when she gave him his gifts. She’d made him up a parcel. There were two pairs of pit stockings which she had laboriously knitted, going into Bishop Auckland especially for the wool. And a new tie, a blue one, to wear with the nearly-new suit he’d bought from the stall on the market. He had joined the choir at the Primitive Methodists. Jonty was the choir master there and it was he who’d discovered Jimmy had a voice. Not yet broken, it was true, but at the moment a pure alto. The suit had a Norfolk jacket and trousers which buttoned at the knee and it fitted Jimmy very well. It wasn’t worn out at all. He’d put it on and come up to the Hall especially to show her, proud as punch of it he was. Elizabeth had had to laugh thinking of him in the choir, scamp that he was.
‘Are you getting along better at work, Jimmy?’ she had asked when she’d recovered from the laughing fit. His smile had faded and he’d turned away quickly.
‘Aye.’
She had let it go at that though her heart ached for him.
There was a parcel for Kit containing a paint box and colouring book she’d bought on that same expedition to the town, and an embroidered card for Auntie Betty and Ben Hoddle. Elizabeth no longer thought of him as Uncle Ben. She made her first visit to them.
‘Oh, you needn’t have come, Elizabeth,’ was Auntie Betty’s greeting. ‘We’re all coming up to the Hall anyway. The Sunday School and choir are going to call in and sing carols. Christopher is singing, aren’t you, pet?’ She beamed at the boy who was looking into his sister’s basket.
‘Is there a parcel for me?’ he asked.
‘There might be. But it’s not to be opened until tomorrow,’ she answered.
‘Santa Claus is bringing me a lot because I’ve been a good lad, Mam says so,’ he asserted, looking at her as though he thought she might challenge it.
‘That’s nice,’ said Elizabeth. She still couldn’t stomach the way he called Auntie Betty ‘Mam’– had to bite her tongue to stop herself from correcting him. He soon lost interest in her and went off to play in the corner with a battered toy train. Auntie Betty carried on with the baking she had been doing when Elizabeth went in and she knew her aunt was waiting for her to go. She was dying to say something about Ben Hoddle’s behaviour to Jimmy, demand that Betty speak to him about it, the words trembling on her lips. But she had promised Jimmy she wouldn’t. Maybe she would just mention …
‘Jimmy is putting for Uncle Ben and his marras,’ she said at last.
‘Aye, I know,’ her aunt replied and frowned heavily. ‘Ben says …’ She noticed Elizabeth’s expression and changed what she had been going to say. ‘He says it’s a bad cavil, a thin seam.’ She rubbed her fingers clean of the dry pastry and picked up the water jug.
Elizabeth was silent for a moment or two, remembering she had promised Jimmy not to say anything. She watched as Auntie Betty rolled out the p
astry and lined a pie tin.
‘Jimmy’s too young for it,’ she said at last.
Auntie Betty didn’t look up. ‘Aye, well, there’s a war on,’ she replied. After a few minutes, Elizabeth rose and picked up her basket.
‘I’ll have to be going.’
‘Aye. Merry Christmas,’ said her aunt. Christopher didn’t look up from his game.
Jimmy and Tommy were in from work when Elizabeth got to Mrs Wearmouth’s in West Row. Perhaps it was the prospect of the Christmas holiday but Jimmy looked better, more cheerful. He had even managed to remove the coal dust from around his eyes, leaving only tiny specks in the corners.
She handed over the parcels, even a small tin of toffee for Tommy and another embroidered card for Mrs Wearmouth. Jimmy had a parcel for her too, tied elegantly with a piece of bright red ribbon.
‘Don’t open it until the morrow, our Elizabeth.’
‘Nor you neither.’
‘I’m going up to the Hall wi’ the choir.’
He was wearing his suit and his hair, still wet from his bath, was slicked back from his forehead. Elizabeth smiled. The sadness over her reception from Auntie Betty and Kit eased a little as she saw his happier mood.
‘Eeh, lass, when I see you both now, you looking so much like your poor mother …’ Mrs Wearmouth sank down on the rocking chair which stood by the fire. ‘You know, I miss having her next door, I do. That lot who live there now, well, the woman’s not the sort to make a friend of. Not like your mam. She’d do anything for you, would Jane Nelson.’
These unexpected words brought a sharp sense of renewed loss to Elizabeth. And she didn’t want that now. She felt like walking straight back out of the door.
‘Well, she’s gone,’ she managed to say.
‘Aye, an’ no need for it, that’s what I think,’ said Mrs Wearmouth. ‘That da of yours going off like that, then her trouble … who did that, I’d like to know? Who put—’
