The Jarrow Lass

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘We’re living on charity as it is,’ she said bitterly. ‘Or would you rather me and the bairns went out thieving next?’

  John did not answer her. But if looks could have struck her down, she would have been unconscious on the dirty brick floor of the McMullens’ kitchen. He stormed out of the cottage and did not speak to her for a week.

  So on some of those short, bleak days, when Rose feared there would be nothing to eat, she sent her two older daughters out to beg for food around the big houses of South Shields. She led them out of Jarrow, so there was little chance of them being recognised or bumping into their teachers or the priest. At the turnpike road she pushed them towards Shields.

  ‘Stay together,’ she ordered. ‘Be polite and steer clear of the police. Now off you gan.’

  Kate stood mutinously on the rutted road, her face as white as alabaster, her lips purple and pinched.

  ‘Mam, I don’t want to go,’ she whined, shivering in her grubby dress.

  ‘You’ll get nowt else to eat the day if you don’t!’ Rose scolded. ‘So don’t come back till you’ve some’at to show for it.’

  ‘Haway,’ Sarah encouraged, ‘it’s better than stopping at Granny’s all day.’ She pulled a moth-eaten blanket around both their shoulders and chivvied her sister towards the smoky outline of South Shields. Kate gave her mother one last reproachful look, then huddled into Sarah’s hold and limped away.

  Rose stood alone, watching her daughters disappear into the distance, their bare feet cracked and legs covered in sores. She fought off the desire to go with them, to protect them from hostile rejection and slamming doors. But she knew that they would stand a better chance of receiving charity on their own than if they begged with an adult, especially Kate with her crippled foot. Oh, she could not spare Kate! Who could not be stirred by pity at the sight of two young lasses hungry and frozen on their doorstep?

  Rose remembered children begging one Christmas at her own door in Raglan Street and how she had felt contempt and anger at the parents for having sunk so low. Now she was doing the same to her own flesh and blood. She felt total disgrace at having to subject the girls to such an ordeal. William would turn in his grave!

  The sight of her once-pretty daughters trudging on frozen feet to beg on the doorsteps of those still in work was seared into her heart for ever. As the grey, lowering sky pressed down on them, heavy and threatening with snow, Rose broke into loud, racking sobs. She would never forget it! Never forgive herself!

  Just when Rose thought they had sunk to the depths of shame, John returned one day with a terrible look on his face.

  ‘What is it?’ Rose asked.

  ‘I’ve got work,’ he said almost inaudibly.

  Rose’s stomach lurched. ‘Work? That’s grand—’

  ‘I’ve been to the parish,’ he cut her off. ‘I’ve ...’ He struggled to finish his sentence. ‘I’ve signed on at Harton.’

  Rose felt winded. ‘Harton?’ she gasped. ‘The workhouse?’

  His look was haggard. ‘Aye. Start the morra.’

  ‘How much?’ Rose whispered.

  ‘Shillin’ a day.’ His voice was leaden. ‘I told them Guardians you and the bairns were sick - so you didn’t have to sit and answer all their nosy questions.’

  Suddenly, the shame that Rose felt at the thought of them going begging to the parish turned to pity for her husband. She knew what a blow to his pride it must have been to be so humbled by strangers. There was no lower level to which they could sink, except imprisonment in the workhouse itself. Outdoor relief was one precarious move away from that. Rose shuddered at the horror.

  She stepped forward and touched his arm. ‘John thanks. I -’

  She was too overcome to tell him how at that moment she was proud of him. He had walked himself into the ground every day to try to find work to support them. She could see in his face how it gnawed away at his spirit to have to live under his parents’ roof again and go begging around the streets for work. Now he had put himself through the final indignity of going cap in hand to the Board of Guardians to plead for the chance to break rocks or some such hard labour usually reserved for convicts and criminals. It hurt to see him so bowed.

  But mixed with her pity was a surge of relief that he had not let himself be beaten. He would submit to this back-breaking work rather than see his family starve to death. She had half expected him to give up and kill himself with drink. But John was strong. He had spirit, she’d give him that. By God, he had spirit!

  Rose could not find the words to tell him so. They looked at each other for an instant with a flicker of the old affection. Then he grunted and turned from her, and the moment for speaking what was in her heart was gone.

  Chapter 40

  1895

  A year and a half later. Rose and John moved their family to Tyne Dock on the edge of South Shields. Number 25 Napier Street was a narrow terrace wedged between the railway station and the dock. It was noisy and gloomy under the permanent pall of smoke from the railway, but it was two rooms to call their own.

  How they had survived Rose could not tell. Prayers and bloody-mindedness most probably. Others had not. Both of John’s parents were dead, buried within five months of each other. Rose had wept for her brave, compassionate mother-in-law, but lit a candle in thanks to the Virgin for ending the exhausted woman’s misery in that hovel she had tried to make home for them all.

  The family had broken up, moved in with other brothers or disappeared from the area to try to seek work. As for her and John, they had come close to starvation. John had nearly worked himself into an early grave with the punishing, relentless rock-breaking. For his pains he had received a shilling a day, not in money but as a voucher to be exchanged for food at a local shop. At least he had not been able to drink a penny of it, Rose had been thankful.

  But it had taken its toll on them both. John had the stooped, skeletal figure of an old man. His hair and moustache had turned completely white in the past two years. Rose had stayed alive on a diet of bread and water, occasional gristly meat, dripping and burnt scrapings from the bottom of pans of barley soup. She had put herself at the end of the queue at every meal, watching that her children got fed before John’s brothers devoured the mean pickings.

  Her breasts sagged and the skin over her belly hung in withered folds. Her neck was scraggy and her eyes had shrunk back into dark sockets. Her monthly bleeds had stopped for a whole year. She had lived in a fever of anxiety about being pregnant, even though John had hardly touched her. Then with the move, the bleeding had started again, more heavy and painful than ever before. Compounding her discomfort, her legs were often large and swollen, puffy to the touch as if water had collected in them like rain barrels.

  It made it difficult to chase after Mary or Jack when they were up to some mischief. Her youngest two had been used to amusing themselves in the squalid lanes of the old pit cottages while the adults had grown listless with hunger and the fight for survival. They had become as independent and out of control as weeds. Rose was horrified to hear four-year-old Jack’s high-pitched voice spouting oaths like his father and uncles.

  ‘Wash your mouth out,’ she would scold, cuffing him.

  But he would stare back at her with large, hurt eyes, wondering what he had done wrong.

  Mary was the only one at school now, for Sarah had been living in as a general maid for an undertaker and his family since the summer of ‘93. His was one of the few businesses that had done well in Jarrow through the slump, his grim trade boosted by a flurry of smallpox victims that year. At twelve, Sarah’s wages had been paltry, but her employer had given her bed and board, which Rose looked upon as a gift from the saints. She delighted in seeing her daughter fill out again and the shine return to her hair and eyes.

  The following year, when Kate turned twelve, she too was sent into se
rvice. This coincided with the family’s move to Tyne Dock and she was sent to work for a butcher in nearby Stanhope Road. Rose turfed the girl out of bed at six in the morning and half an hour later she was starting her long stint of washing and cleaning for the butcher’s large household. Not only did she have all the family laundry to wash, bleach, rinse, wring, hang out and iron, there were the blood-stained aprons and overalls from the shop too.

  When Kate came home complaining she could not see over the large wooden washtub, Rose took her back and asked them to make a stool for her daughter to stand on. There was no question of Kate packing in the arduous job. She was lucky to have it and Rose needed every penny of the two shillings and sixpence she handed over at the end of the week.

  Rose knew how her daughter hated the work. She spent most of Sunday asleep, but on her half-day off a fortnight, Rose kept her busy with mending, for Kate was neat with her stitching and Rose’s eyesight was not as good as it had once been. But Kate never complained. Rose could not but admire the girl’s stoical nature, her ability to look on the bright side of life despite their poverty. Although Rose never said so, it was like a shaft of sunlight piercing the gloom of their bare home to have Kate walk in at the end of a long day, humming a popular tune she had picked up on the street.

  Rose found precious little to sing about amid the grime of Tyne Dock. For a long time they had orange boxes for chairs and mattresses made out of sacks of lumpy flock on the floor for beds. John was picking up casual work once more at the docks, but he was not as strong as he used to be and was sometimes passed over for younger men. This fuelled his temper, which these days was as quick to ignite as tinder. He picked arguments with anyone who glanced at him in the street. He shouted at the children, kicked dogs out of his way and made lewd comments at other men’s wives. Sometimes Rose wondered if the past hellish years had unhinged his mind.

  With wages in his pocket once more, John took to the drink like a fish who had been thrown back in the sea after too long on dry land. He could not get enough of it and it took little to get him roaring, cursing drunk, for he no longer had a head for holding his drink. With fire in his belly and a numb mist in his head, Rose knew he thought himself invincible. He was the Irish patriot, the war hero, the heroic fighting figure of Irish legend.

  He came home singing his head off and waking up the children in the dead of night.

  ‘Up! Gerrup the lot of you and face old Ireland across the sea!’

  If they ignored him, he would throw orange boxes around the kitchen and smash them against the walls. Mary would scream and Jack would wet himself as he clung to Rose and whimpered as quietly as possible.

  ‘I’ll teach you to respect me, you little buggers! Gerrup and sing!’

  ‘John, leave us alone, it’s the middle of the night,’ Rose would hiss, rising from the mattress they shared with Jack. ‘Come to bed, John.’

  But sometimes she could not pacify him and they had to stand to attention beside him. On one occasion he terrified Rose with his strange words and threatening gestures. He seemed to think he was General Roberts himself, waving the fire poker over their heads like a sword.

  ‘I’m the bloody general and you’ll march till I tell you to drop! You’re all on half-rations till we get to Kandahar. Now sing to keep your spirits up!’

  Rose clutched Jack tightly as he stared in sleepy-eyed confusion at his father. The small boy could not tell if this was some game of soldiers or the start of a fit of violence that would end with his mother’s pictures of the Virgin Mary and St Hilda being dashed from the wall. They marched on the spot, Mary and Kate shivering with cold in their petticoats while John shouted incoherently and sang snatches of army songs.

  Then abruptly, with spittle still on his chin from singing, his expression switched from belligerence to terror. He grabbed Mary by the arm.

  ‘They’re coming for us, can’t you see them?’ John peered fearfully into the shadows.

  ‘Who?’ Mary asked in alarm.

  ‘John, don’t be daft, there’s no one there,’ Rose protested, frightened by his staring look.

  ‘There! Behind there - waitin’ to cut our throats!’

  Rose was still not sure if he was play-acting and deliberately trying to scare them. Or was he quite mad? She felt helpless at the thought that her husband was losing his sanity.

  ‘Quick! Retreat,’ he gasped, pushing Mary towards the back door.

  They would all have been out in the cold if Kate had not intervened.

  ‘It’s all right, Father. They’ve gone now.’ Swiftly she took a stick of newspaper and lit it from the fire. She held it aloft. Briefly light flared, illuminating the dark corner beyond the range. It was empty. ‘Look, see?’

  Rose hardly dared breathe, let alone move. She feared Kate’s action might provoke him to violence, he was so unpredictable. But it broke the spell that seemed to have bewitched John.

  ‘I knew there was no one there,’ he growled. ‘D’you take me for a fool?’

  ‘No, Father,’ Kate said earnestly. ‘You were right to be careful.’

  He stared at her suspiciously, as if trying to weigh up if he was being mocked. Perhaps he could not remember what he had been doing this past half-hour, Rose wondered. But Kate’s words seemed to mollify him.

  ‘Aye, I was, wasn’t I?’ He let go of Mary and she escaped back to the mattress in the front room.

  By degrees, they persuaded him to go to bed. Finally he gave in. John stumbled through the open door and fell heavily on to the mattress. Within minutes he was uncon-scious. The girls helped Rose undress him, giggling now at his bizarre behaviour, dizzy with relief that the menacing moment was over.

  After that, it was Kate that Rose relied on to handle John when drunken madness took him over. Only Kate seemed able to calm him and coax him to lie down. She sang along with him, humouring his drunken delusions and stroking his head. During these night-time ordeals, Rose felt a rush of contempt for her husband. How could he behave like this in front of his stepdaughters? And what kind of example was he setting their only son? Jack was a sensitive lad, for all his foul-mouthed mimicking. He took things to heart and cried easily at Mary’s casual teasing or John’s ridicule.

  ‘You’ll turn him into a pansy-boy!’ his father would sneer if he caught Rose cuddling Jack and drying the boy’s tears. He would not let her pick him up if he fell and scraped his knees.

  ‘Leave him! He needs toughening up. A bit of blood and pain will make a man of him.’

  Sometimes Rose would defy him and go to Jack’s aid. ‘He’s still a baby,’ she would protest. But John only took it out on Jack the more, goading him for being a mammy’s pet.

  ‘Why don’t you put him in dresses? We’ve nowt but lasses in this house!’

  Rose wondered what had become of the man who had doted on their baby son and walked the floor with him cradled in his arms? She looked at John’s hard, unforgiving face and saw a stranger.

  Whatever affection the girls had once had for him Rose knew was wearing thin. Now and again, Mary would try to wheedle a halfpenny out of him for sweets, if she gauged her stepfather was in a good mood. She was the only one who could manage it, for he still seemed roughly affectionate towards her in sober spells.

  Sarah rarely came home, except to give her mother money, fearing her stepfather’s interrogation. By Christmas of that year, she had turned fifteen and had suddenly grown full breasts and hips. John appeared obsessed with her moral behaviour, threatening her with a beating and eternal damnation if she ‘got herself into trouble’.

  ‘She’s a good lass,’ Rose answered indignantly. ‘Our Sarah’s been brought up respectable, even when we had nowt to our name. She’ll not do anything daft.’

  ‘We don’t know the half of it,’ John said, eyeing the girl suspiciously, ‘living in Jarrow. We don’t know who she sees or
what she does.’

  Sarah rolled her eyes with impatience. ‘Chance would be a fine thing! I get no time off to meet anybody. And when I do, I come here, don’t I?’

  ‘Well, you keep it that way,’ John scowled. ‘I’ll have none of you lasses bringing shame on the McMullen name. You’ll be out on the street if you do.’

  Rose gave Sarah a warning glance that told her not to answer him back. It did no good. To argue only made him carry on longer with whatever petty obsession was worrying him.

  Often it was Kate who attracted John’s critical attention. Rose could not understand why as she was the most patient with him. He teased her about her crooked foot.

  ‘You’ll not get a husband if you can’t walk straight up the aisle.’

  At first Kate would laugh off his remarks, but this only encouraged him. He continued to bait her until he provoked her into anger or tears.

  ‘Still it’ll come in handy having a cripple if we have to beg on the streets again, won’t it, Kate?’

  This always brought a response. ‘Tell him to stop it, Mam!’

  Rose saw the girl’s eyes swimming with tears. Kate hated any allusion to her having begged on the streets. Rose knew the experience had scarred the girl deeply.

  ‘John, that’s enough,’ Rose remonstrated.

  John laughed at them. ‘Bloody women! Can’t take a little joke. Look at your long faces.’

  Rose’s defence was to ignore him until he tired of his name-calling, but Kate could not. Bafflingly, she attempted to win him round. Of all her children, it was Kate who continually tried to gain his approval. She was the one who sang songs or told jokes she had learned from the butcher’s sons to try to entertain John and make him laugh. If he gave her a grudging smile or a rare word of praise, her pretty face would beam with delight. Rose did not know why she bothered. Perhaps Kate, more than the others, missed having the father who was taken from her so abruptly. John was a poor substitute, but he was better than nothing.