A Mother's Courage

by Maggie Hope

  ‘Pack your bags, Mary, the ship comes in on Friday and there is now no reason why you shouldn’t be on it.’

  Mary and Eleanor looked at him in astonishment and he laughed.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you until I was absolutely certain, but the king has appointed me as his European advocate. I am to travel to London to speak for him.’

  ‘London?’ For a moment Eleanor couldn’t take it in. ‘But … what will we do if you go to London?’

  Francis smiled. ‘I have expressed myself badly. I must do better when I’m talking to Her Majesty’s Government in London, mustn’t I? No, my dear, what I meant to say was that we are all going to London.’

  ‘But … your work here, what about—’

  Francis was striding up and down in his exuberance; he couldn’t stay still. ‘It’s all worked out, my love, I have permission from the district, they are putting in a temporary man in my place. I have leave of absence for however long it takes.’

  Eleanor stared at him; he hadn’t breathed a word about all this, he must have been planning it for weeks. I can’t go, she thought, I’m not well enough. How can I get the children ready and everything packed, how can I go?

  ‘You’ll have to go without me,’ she said, forlorn. ‘I’m not well enough.’

  ‘Nonsense, the sea voyage will do you the world of good.’ Mary, who had stood in the kitchen doorway with her mouth open all this time, suddenly came to life. ‘All you have to do is walk up the gangplank and on to the ship. I will do everything else, packing, seeing to the children. It’s not so much after all.’ She was now as excited as Francis and desperate to tell someone, Prue in particular.

  ‘First I’ll just slip down to Prue’s house, I have to tell her. I won’t be long, there is so much to do. What a good thing the children are in school, I can get on without them getting in my way.’

  She put on a sun bonnet and hurried off down the street to her sister’s house.

  ‘You can manage it, Eleanor,’ said Francis when they were alone. ‘For if you don’t go, I won’t, and you know how disappointed I will be. It’s such an honour for the king to choose me.’ He looked sideways at his wife; he knew her too well. She wouldn’t be able to hold out against such an argument.

  Chapter Thirty

  Eleanor walked slowly round the deck of the Fair Maid of Perth on Francis’s arm. Francis held on to Edward’s leading reins as the boy strained to reach the rail and behind them walked Francis William and Ruth. Mary was sitting in a deck chair with a rug over her legs, for she was not travelling steerage this time, oh no. She and Ruth had a first-class cabin next to the Taits.

  She smiled as they passed her for the second time, her smile turning to amusement as she saw Francis William with Ruth hanging on to his arm in exactly the same way as his mother hung on to his father’s. As they passed the captain’s wife, Francis lifted his hat to her and Francis William copied the gesture exactly though his hat was imaginary. This time Mary couldn’t help herself; she burst out laughing and Francis turned and caught the children in the act.

  ‘Francis William, you are supposed to be studying,’ he said severely though his eyes danced. ‘You don’t want to be way behind the others when you go to school in England, do you?’

  ‘Yes, and you too, Ruth,’ said Mary, hiding her smile. She got out of her chair and took the girl’s hand. ‘Come on, I’ll come down to the cabin with you and hear your reading.’ Ruth was not yet five but both she and Francis William could read, so long as the words weren’t too lengthy and difficult. Just now, they were reading a heartrending story about a small orphan girl in London and how she came to be saved by a poor but Christian lamplighter.

  ‘I’m not going to school in England,’ the boy confided to Ruth as they followed Mary below deck. ‘I won’t be there long enough, I’m going back to Fiji.’

  Ruth began to cry. ‘I want to, I want to!’

  ‘Not if you don’t come,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll stay if you’re staying.’ Ruth smiled through her tears. Mary felt a twinge of foreboding – the time was coming when the two had to part; it was inevitable.

  ‘She’ll be all right when the time comes,’ said Eleanor when Mary confided her fears. ‘There’ll be so much else for her to think about.’ It was the same afternoon and they were sitting on deck. The sun cast a golden path on the water as it slowly descended and a fresh breeze began to quicken from the west, bringing colour to Eleanor’s pale cheeks. They were about halfway between Sydney and Capetown and already the voyage was working its magic on Eleanor; she felt better than she had been since before she took the fever.

  Mary wasn’t so sure that Ruth wouldn’t mind parting from Francis William but there was nothing else to say. The ship glided north through the water and she gazed up at the sails, filled with a wind blowing from the south.

  ‘The captain says we are making good time,’ she remarked. ‘We should be in England in plenty of time to shop for Christmas.’

  Eleanor watched her animated face, the hollows filling out after all these weeks away from Morgan West and the plantation.

  ‘You can’t wait, can you?’ she said and laughed. ‘You’re dying to get to the shops.’

  Francis came up and took a seat beside them. ‘London will be the best place, Mary,’ he said. ‘But I hope you’re not going to spend all of Ruth’s inheritance.’

  ‘It won’t cost so much for a few new dresses, I’m not so daft as to pay over the odds.’

  Mary gazed out over the water. Oh, she was grateful to Francis for all he had done for her and Ruth, but she sometimes wished he wouldn’t take it for granted that she couldn’t look after the money. She didn’t need him to tell her to be careful. But she’d been without too long not to enjoy spending a small part of the money at least.

  The voyage passed uneventfully; they touched on Capetown and waited impatiently for the ship to get under way again. There was a storm that lasted for two days after they set sail again, which meant the children had to be kept amused below decks and Eleanor was so seasick that she felt worse than she had when she was ill with dysentry. But just when they were beginning to think they would never get to England, there it was one morning, a dim grey line in the distance.

  They disembarked at Southampton on a day when the sun shone as brightly as it ever did in Fiji.

  ‘I don’t need a muffler, Mam,’ Ruth had protested as Mary dressed her to go ashore. ‘Look, it’s a sunny day, it will be warm.’ She pointed to the blue sky showing through the tiny porthole. But when she finally did stand on the dockside with the boys, waiting for their parents to sort out the luggage, all three of them began to shiver.

  ‘I don’t like it here, it’s too cold,’ Francis William said. ‘Why don’t we just go back home?’

  ‘Don’t be a baby,’ said John. ‘You know we can’t do that.’ But even John hunched his shoulders and thrust his hands deep inside his pockets and his nose gleamed red.

  The cold was forgotten when they boarded the train and it steamed and puffed its way out of the station and gathered speed for the journey to London. The children stared wide-eyed at the countryside, the neat fields and hedgerows, the villages with their stone and brick houses.

  ‘The roads look funny,’ pronounced Francis William as the railway ran across a bridge over a metalled road.

  ‘It’s tarmac so that the road doesn’t get ruts from all the carts,’ John told him. John had been reading all about England in school. ‘The surface is very hard, you see.’

  ‘Not even when the rains come?’

  Listening to the conversation, Eleanor was surprised by how little the children knew of England. But, after all, why should they know much, even John with his books. Reading about a place wasn’t the same as seeing it.

  Alighting at Waterloo Station, even the three adults were completely silenced, it was so long since they had been in such a hubbub. The crowds, the noise from the engines, the train whistles, people shouting at each other above the res
t of the racket; to people coming from a place such as Fiji, it was overwhelming, not to say deafening.

  Out on the street it was not much better, the horse buses and hansom cabs and water carts competing for space in the smelly, overcrowded street. The children clung to Francis, because he was the largest perhaps, the one most likely to protect them from the dangers they saw all around them. And they were right, of course, thought Mary as he found them a cab large enough to take them all and somehow the driver found his way to the Temperance Hotel in a quiet sidestreet near King’s Cross, where Francis had booked rooms through the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society.

  The children were tired and fretful by the time they got there and for once raised no objection to going to bed so Eleanor and Mary had an early night too.

  ‘I have a meeting at the Missionary Society at eight o’clock,’ said Francis. ‘You can manage, can’t you, dear?’

  Eleanor opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. What difference would it make whether she objected or not? She went to bed and, in spite of the noise, slept through until morning, not even waking when Francis came in.

  The next few days went by in a heady whirl, not just for Mary and Ruth, but Eleanor too. One morning at breakfast, Francis announced that he was taking the children out for the day.

  ‘You and Mary have a day to yourselves,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to be anywhere else today, so enjoy yourself, it may be a long time before we are back in London, or even England, again.’

  The women explored Oxford Street, exclaiming over the new fashions; dresses were straight at the front and with a bustle at the back, and they discovered that their bonnets were completely out of date and fit only to be consigned to the rubbish.

  ‘The hats, Eleanor, do you see the hats?’ asked Mary, turning about to look back at the ladies going by with hats of all shapes and sizes perched on top of their heads. ‘Mind, I don’t know how they keep them on, no ribbons or strings nor nothing.’

  They soon discovered the use of the hatpin, however, and both of them arrived back at the hotel that evening wearing examples of the new fashion. Eleanor felt a few qualms about the cost, but before Francis had left that morning he had handed her ten pounds.

  ‘For you to spend on yourself,’ he had said. ‘Not the children, mind, this is your day.’

  ‘But Francis, the money—’ she had exclaimed. Their stipend had to last until the beginning of the next quarter.

  ‘I had an allowance from the king to cover the expenses of travelling, etcetera,’ he explained and she wondered why she hadn’t queried how he had paid for everything before now, but she hadn’t.

  ‘The stipend is practically untouched,’ he added and grinned. ‘I don’t think we’ll starve yet a while, Eleanor.’

  Even so, the hat had cost a whole five pounds; it was terribly extravagant of her, she knew. She would have to confess. But somehow, when they got back to the hotel, the opportunity didn’t arise. The children were in great spirits and falling over each other to tell of the day they had had in a great house made of glass and afterwards how they had gone to the zoo.

  ‘And, Mam, it was awful,’ announced John. ‘Not the glass house and not all of the zoo, but do you know, they had some of our parakeets, orange ones and red ones and they were in cages and they could hardly fly anywhere. I wanted to let them out but Daddy said they would die, it’s too cold in England.’

  ‘They wouldn’t be our parakeets, John,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘Yes they were, Mam, it said on the label, parakeets from Fiji, wasn’t it awful? You know how they like to fly right to the tops of the trees and round about the bay and in there they couldn’t go anywhere.’

  ‘That’s enough, John, your mother can’t do anything about the birds. Let it be, now, we’ve heard about nothing else but the parakeets. Didn’t you like the rest of the day? The Crystal Palace, for instance?’

  ‘It was all right,’ the boy conceded and Eleanor could see that the plight of the caged birds had spoilt the day for him.

  ‘It’s no good crying over what we can’t help, John,’ she said. ‘Now take the other two up to wash for dinner, I’m sure you must be hungry. I’ll see to Edward.’

  On Sunday, they went to John Wesley’s chapel in City Road. And John was red with pride when his father was introduced to the congregation as a ‘brother returned from labouring for the Lord in foreign fields’ and he gazed fixedly at the carving of a descending dove at the top of one of the columns but it reminded him of the parakeets and he felt sad.

  ‘I have done my best to put King Thakembau’s case for being recognised as king of all Fiji,’ said Francis, the very next morning. ‘I intend to go to the station to purchase the tickets for Durham today. We will reserve a carriage, I think.’

  ‘But can we afford it?’

  Eleanor was startled; it sounded very grand to reserve a whole carriage. Yet it would be so nice to have plenty of room for the children to wriggle about as much as they liked and still allow the three grown-ups to sit in comfort.

  ‘The advocate of the King of Fiji should travel in style,’ said Francis, a trifle pompously she thought, until she glanced at him and saw he was wearing a mocking grin. Well, the King of Fiji did sound so grand; it was only if you knew that being a king on Bau wasn’t exactly the same as being a queen in London.

  The thought was reinforced when they hired a carriage and rode down the Mall to see Buckingham Palace and saw the Union Jack flying above and the red-coated soldiers on guard. The sight was enough to dazzle all of the children.

  ‘It’s good to relax, I feel I am entitled to a real holiday now,’ said Francis. ‘Now, where else do you want to go?’

  ‘Home,’ said Eleanor and Mary together and Francis laughed.

  ‘We’ll travel on Wednesday,’ he decided.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  ‘Durham, this is Durham,’ called the porter as he opened the door of the first-class carriage and the children jumped up and down in excitement.

  ‘Settle down, now, settle down,’ said Francis. ‘Come on now, everyone out, you don’t want to get left behind and go to Newcastle, do you?’

  There was a scramble for the door; the journey had been far too long for them as it was and they certainly didn’t want to go anywhere else, even if it was a castle.

  Eleanor’s eyes were suddenly damp as she walked along the platform and looked out over the small city with the ancient cathedral towering over the houses. Francis squeezed her hand, knowing exactly what she was feeling. She was not alone, Mary had to take out her handkerchief as the tears rolled down her face.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help it,’ she said as Francis looked concernedly at her and she blew her nose and sniffed. Little Ruth moved to stand close beside her in sympathy for she didn’t know what.

  ‘It has been a long time,’ said Eleanor. ‘It’s funny but in all these years, I’ve not felt half so homesick as I do now.’

  ‘Hello, Eleanor. Don’t you know me?’ said a voice and there was her younger brother James. Eleanor had written to him from London to say they were on their way but she had not really expected him to come. After all, they were practically strangers. She hadn’t even recognised him when she saw him on the platform and his greeting was formal, as though he hardly knew her either.

  Still, they were glad to climb on to the trap he had waiting outside the station rather than stand around while Francis hired a conveyance, and soon they were on their way through the narrow streets of Durham, the children dozy and leaning against their elders and the luggage piled behind them.

  ‘I booked rooms for you at the Colliery Inn, as you asked,’ said James. ‘I’ll drop you there and then I’d better be going back to Moorsley, I’m working tonight.’ And Eleanor felt guilty that perhaps she had got him up from his sleep when he was on night shift. How much she had forgotten of the routine of a pit village!

  They went down the hill and climbed up Silver Street on the other side, so narrow th
ere was hardly room for two carts to pass. But the road was paved with flagstones and cobbles and the trap made good progress as Silver Street widened out into the market place. They rumbled past Sherburn and out on to the open road.

  The light was beginning to fade as they came to the outskirts of Hetton-le-Hole and struggled along the High Street, which was unmade and full of ruts, to the Colliery Inn.

  ‘Ugh!’ said Francis William. ‘What’s that smell?’

  ‘Hush now,’ commanded Eleanor. ‘It’s the coke ovens; when you’ve been here a while you won’t find it so bad. People round here say it’s healthy.’

  ‘Healthy as rotten eggs!’ murmured Francis.

  ‘Ugh, rotten eggs, rotten eggs,’ shouted the sharp-eared Francis William. All the children had woken up properly as the trap bumped along Front Street.

  ‘I’ll be along to see you at the weekend,’ said James as he helped unload the luggage in front of the Colliery Inn. ‘And you’d be very welcome to visit us at Moorsley, any time.’

  But Eleanor knew that it could only be Saturday afternoons or Sundays if John was working the night shift and, of course, Francis was very particular about keeping Sunday as a day of rest.

  ‘Thank you, James, you’ve been so kind,’ she said and they all stood and watched as he climbed back on the trap.

  ‘Gee up, Betsy,’ he cried to the pony and lumbered away down the street.

  There was a smell of beer at the entrance of the Colliery Inn and through the open door that led to the bar they could see the men, some with pint pots in their hands, all staring curiously and unabashed until Francis bade them good evening.

  ‘Evenin’, Minister,’ they chorused and turned away. Francis and Eleanor exchanged a glance, well aware that the men were probably scandalised that a Wesleyan Methodist minister should be there in a public house. Yet where else could they go in Hetton? There was no other hotel. Eleanor thought sadly of the viewer’s house but Uncle John was retired now and gone to live in Marsden.

  The smell was sharp and sour, hardly better than the smell of the coke ovens to the teetotal Taits. But the landlady was bustling and welcoming, the rooms clean, the beds comfortable and the whole party was ready to fall into them.