With a shock, it struck Rose that John was giving up. He had the world-weary look of a defeated man. He no longer cared how they eked out the rest of their miserable existence or in what manner they died. He was merely going through the motions, biding his time. Rose realised that if anyone was going to save them from the hell of Straker Street it would have to be her.
That Sunday she dressed as best she could and took Kate and Mary to Mass. She prayed as hard as she had ever prayed in her life. Amid the smell of burning wax and musty bodies, she pleaded to the Virgin for Jack’s life as he lay listless on the bed at home.
‘You saved him once before - let him grow to be a man - please let him live!’
Rose prayed for deliverance for them all, a way out of the slow, suffocating death that was sapping their will to carry on.
On the way home, bowed down with her troubles and feeling no relief from the bout of frantic praying, Rose was surprised by Kate’s sudden suggestion.
‘Mam, let’s take a walk up Simonside - blow out the cobwebs.’
Rose resisted. ‘I haven’t the strength.’
‘We’ll take it steady,’ Kate replied, slipping an arm through her mother’s.
‘I should be gettin’ back to our Jack ...’
‘Father’s keeping an eye on him.’ Mary joined in the pressure, for she had no desire to hurry back to East Jarrow. ‘He’ll manage a bit longer.’
‘Haway, Mam,’ Kate smiled, and the two girls steered her away from the town.
Within minutes Rose was glad they had bullied her into the walk. The stiff breeze at their backs helped push them up the bank. At the top, the air tasted fresher than Rose had ever remembered it. Around them were small signs of spring - purple crocuses sprouting in a ditch, tight resinous buds forming on a straggle of trees. Up here a thrush was trilling noisily, drowning out the clangs and sighs from the riverside far below.
‘Look, Mam,’ Kate pointed, ‘Grandda’s old home.’
‘Aunt Maggie’s house,’ Mary corrected at once.
Rose looked up and squinted through the pearly light which dazzled after the greenish gloom of Straker Street. With sadness she saw that the old cottage stood forlorn, its roof fallen in and its door off its hinges. It was derelict. The once-cultivated field around it was a mass of bricks and planks and paraphernalia of the builder’s merchant who now used the plot. A dog ran to the fence and barked at them territorially.
‘It’s all gone,’ she sighed.
‘Let’s gan on,’ Kate said gently.
They skirted round the former smallholding and kept on walking, each of them wrapped in her own thoughts yet content with each other’s company. They followed a lane which petered out in a field, crossed it and found themselves beside the main railway line. In one direction it stretched all the way to Newcastle and in the other disappeared towards Tyne Dock and South Shields. A short distance away stood a signal box and across the track lay two short rows of railway cottages.
Someone had fashioned a crude bench out of a railway sleeper and placed it near the signal box. Who it was meant for Rose had no idea, but it beckoned her tired legs. Without a word she crossed the track and plonked herself down on the rough seat. With the bank at her back it was sheltered and warm in the weak spring sunshine and smelt not unpleasantly of grass and axle grease.
The girls sat down beside her, Kate closing her eyes and tilting her chin to the sun like a contented cat. Rose thought how bonny she had grown. At eighteen she was blooming into the prettiest of them all. She must not waste her life away in Jarrow! Rose felt a rush of conviction. She would see that Kate got away from the drudgery that had pulled her down like the muddy backwater of the Slake, drowning the potential that had been in her to better herself. Kate would do it instead.
As Rose wrestled with the problem of how, she suddenly thought of Lizzie. She would ask her sister to keep an ear out for any jobs at Ravensworth. There was slim chance that the aristocratic Liddells would take on a lass from Jarrow, but there was no harm in trying. Perhaps Kate should be sent to Lizzie’s for a while anyway - get her away from the unhealthy conditions of Straker Street and John’s critical comments. It might be the making of her, just as Rose herself might have flourished if she had stayed with her dear granny at Lamesley and not been brought back to Jarrow all too soon.
Rose’s musings were suddenly disturbed by the distant hoot of a train. Above them she heard a clank in the signal box. They all bent forward to look down the track. The rhythmic puffing of the steam engine could be heard long before it rattled into view round the bend. The passenger train thundered past them, covering them in a cloud of smoke. By the time it cleared, the train had vanished, whistling breathlessly down the line.
A tall, wiry man emerged from the signal box and walked towards them. He touched his cap.
‘Morning, ladies. Grand day,’ he greeted them.
Kate smiled back at once. ‘Aye, a grand day.’
‘You from Shields?’ he asked.
‘Jarrow,’ Kate told him. ‘Just taking the air.’
Mary sniggered. ‘Listen to you, all hoity-toity!’
Kate blushed but the signalman smiled. ‘Good on you.’ He was about to walk on when he looked closer at Rose. ‘Are you all right, missus?’
Rose’s pulse was fluttering and she felt breathless and faint all of a sudden. ‘It was the smoke - I feel a bit funny. Maybes a glass of water ... ?’
‘Haway with me,’ the man said quickly, ‘my missus’ll give you a cup of milk straight from the cow - that’ll settle your dizziness.’
Kate and Mary helped Rose to her feet and they followed the railwayman along to the first terrace of cottages. The front garden was neatly cultivated and the sweet smell of wood smoke drifted through the air. Inside it was dark at first, but as Rose grew accustomed to the dimness she saw a plain, well-kept kitchen with a lean dog stretched across the hearth asleep. She was ushered into a high-backed chair and a small, birdlike woman bustled over with a tin mug of milk.
‘Drink this, hinny,’ she urged. ‘It’s a long way to walk if you’re not used to it.’
The milk tasted warm and still had the faint earthy smell of the cow about it. Rose was transported back to her early days at Simonside and her mother standing over her watching in satisfaction as she drank the milk she had just squeezed from their cow. Rose felt a pang of longing for those simple far-off days when her mother had looked after them all. She nodded gratefully and listened to Kate chatting to the couple, telling them how they had once lived at Simonside.
It was only as they were going that the wife mentioned it.
‘Number One’s empty since old Matty Moore passed on. It’s in a bit of a state, mind you - birds nesting in the chimney and that - but it’s sound enough. These houses were standing here long before the railway came – old wagon way afore that - and they’ll be standing long after we’re gone, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Will you show us?’ Rose asked on impulse.
‘Happy to oblige,’ the railwayman offered.
The house on the end had a large overgrown patch of garden. Brown brambles grew up the side of the pitted brick wall like stubble on a pock-marked face. Rose peered through the windows but they were so filthy she could not see in. They went in cautiously. The doors inside creaked and something scuttled across the stone floor at her feet. Mary screamed, but the old railwayman laughed.
‘Only a field mouse. Bet you get them twice as big down by the river.’
There was a stone sink in the corner and a dusty black range with a round oven.
‘Have to draw water from the well,’ he told her. ‘But rent’s cheap - be half what you’re paying in the town.’ He followed her gaze up the loft stairs. ‘Two rooms up there - cosy as a nest in winter - heat from the chimney warms ‘em, see.’
They
emerged back into the sunlight. Kate watched her mother’s severe expression. She could see that she thought it unsuitable. There was too much work to be done and it would be too far from the docks for Father. Yet strangely, Kate felt at home here, for all it was primitive and neglected. She loved the countryside and did not mind its strange noises, smells and muck like Mary did. And she had warmed to the kind signalman and his friendly wife. She braced herself for disappointment.
Rose turned to the railwayman. ‘When could we move in?’
He smiled as if he had expected such an answer from her all along. ‘I’ll have a word with the foreman the morra. Soon as you want, I wouldn’t wonder.’
Kate cried with delight. ‘Can we, Mam? I don’t mind the walk up from Shields.’
‘Well, I do,’ Mary protested. ‘It’s a hovel.’
Rose stood and looked at the cottage. It was like coming home. It filled her with the same warmth and feeling of safety that Simonside once had. Jack would love it. John would hate it. Rose did not care. She would have it. She had had her fill of the town.
Rose turned to Kate and nodded. ‘Aye, we’ll take it.’ Kate linked arms and grinned. ‘Champion! Jack’ll be like a pig in muck up here.’
‘It’s horrible, it smells!’ Mary grumbled, screwing up her face in disgust. But Rose took no notice.
Two weeks later, they had shaken the miasma of Straker Street from their clothing and hair and moved into Number 1, Cleveland Place.
Chapter 46
1904
Rose prepared excitedly for the girls coming home for Christmas, or to be exact, Boxing Day. With the luxury of Jack’s new wages from the docks, she had bought a leg of pork from a local farmer and a bagful of vegetables from Harry Burn, the friendly railwayman at the end of the terrace. She had to be careful when she spoke to him, for ever since Mrs Burn had died the previous winter, John was suspicious of her conversing with the widower.
It amazed Rose that John could still be jealous over her. She had long ago stopped looking in the stained mirror that hung in the scullery where Mary used to preen every morning and apply her Pond’s cold cream. At forty-six, Rose knew her looks and figure were gone. She had the slow painful gait of a much older woman and had given up trying to mount the stairs to the loft a year after they had moved in. The marital bed stood in the corner of the low-ceilinged kitchen and Jack had the run of the loft, except when his sisters came home on rare holidays.
Rose felt her stomach lurch in anticipation. It was over a year since they had all been together. She had decorated the room with streamers of coloured paper and holly that Jack had helped her pick from along the railway cutting. She glanced at the clock yet again.
Sarah would be here first from Hebburn with the mince pies that she had promised, and to help her mother cook the festive dinner. Rose had not seen her eldest since she had turned twenty-four. Sarah was courting and happy; everyone knew except John.
‘When can I meet the lad?’ Rose had asked in the summer.
‘I’m not bringing him back here,’ Sarah had declared. ‘Father would kill me - or him.’
Rose had no answer. Sarah’s sweetheart was a miner and John thought them the lowest form of life. He was suspicious of men who chose to crawl underground for a living and never see daylight. He cursed them for their readiness to strike for better conditions, calling them lazy, whereas William would have blamed the pit owners. John only cared that the disruption in the coal supply could bring the mills and yards grinding to a standstill and make men like himself idle.
‘It’s the fault of the pitmen we have no work on the river,’ she had often heard him rail, whether there had been a strike or not. ‘They can’t be trusted.’
Once she might also have disapproved of Sarah being courted by a miner, thinking the match too lowly. They were a breed apart, rough and dirty and kept closely to themselves. Rose had grown up with such views. But Sarah’s stories of her pitman and his family were quite different. She spoke of kind, generous folk and a spotless kitchen despite the grime that the men tramped in. Besides, Rose had learnt from experience that you could not judge a man by his outward appearance. Her head had been turned by the sight of an army coat and a strong handsome face, and look where it had got her. She did not object but worried for Sarah if John should find out.
Rose had to accept that she could not offer hospitality to Sarah’s young man. Anyway, the romance might come to nothing so it was not worth riling John’s temper over the matter. For her husband’s ill humour had got no better over the three and a half years they had lived at Cleveland Place. His attempts at sobriety had not lasted long, and when in work he would often get no further than the pubs on Learn Lane, a stone’s throw from the dock gates, forgetting about his long walk home. Many were the times she had had to send Jack searching for him late in the evening, for she was too lame to go herself and would not have suffered the indignity of entering a public house.
Jack, a tall, wiry youth, was often repaid with a ‘smack in the gob’ for his efforts in trying to prise his belligerent father from the cosiness of some bar. John’s favourite haunt was the notorious Alexandria, known locally as The Twenty-Seven because it served as the next stop after the twenty-six staithes along the docks.
Rose would try to comfort her son after such bouts of violence. ‘Your day will come,’ she promised him. ‘He’ll not be the stronger one for ever.’ The saints forgive her, but she almost willed the moment to come when Jack would stand up to his father and give him a taste of his own medicine.
Sometimes Rose worried about Jack. He had become increasingly moody and withdrawn since his sisters had left home, especially Kate, who had always been openly affectionate with her half-brother. But faced with John’s constant criticism at his lack of hardness or teasing about girls, Jack kept to himself, disappearing on his own to trap rabbits or fish the streams. He would shadow the local farmer when he went out to shoot crows and once or twice the man had let Jack have a go with the gun. Jack seemed to gain more pleasure from this than any amount of socialising. The boy had a good aim and had once returned from a fair with four coconuts that Rose had not known what to do with. Rose often wondered if she had been right to bring the family out to their semi-rural retreat. Perhaps Jack needed more company; he was turning into a loner. But better that than a fighting, cussed drunk like his father. Not one day did Rose regret the move for her own sake. Even in the depths of winter when she had had to break the ice on the pail to get water for the kettle and struggle through the snow to search for tinder, she had thanked the saints for her primitive cottage.
Like an animal in hibernation she had rested her bruised spirit, slowly reawakening to the world with a new inner strength. She delighted in spring rain, summer birdsong and autumn sun as if she was experiencing them for the first time. While she tended her garden, the earth seemed to nurture her in return. During these solitary years when she had often been on her own for long hours at the cottage, Rose had rediscovered a sense of worth. She kept hens and grew giant rhubarb and strong onions. She exchanged these with her neighbours for jams, relish or firewood. She bartered produce with itinerant pedlars for buttons, hairpins and Emerson’s Bromo Seltzer, which she forced on John when he complained of sore head, stomach or bowels.
Rose would take Jack with her blackberry picking along the railway line and gather elderflower and wild mint for cordials. Her son would return from his wanderings with crab apples, nuts and the occasional rabbit or wood pigeon for the pot. On rare occasions, John would come home early and in a good mood, and they would eat together and walk out along the embankment to view the trains, and Rose wished life could always be that tranquil.
Certainly, it had been easier this last year without Mary in the house. At sixteen she had grown as sharp and quick with her tongue as her stepfather. Gone were the days when John would indulge the girl and defend her from her
mother’s censure. He found her as difficult and volatile as Rose did. Mary was as prickly as a briar and not afraid to speak her mind. Her job with the Simpsons had not lasted. Rose had hoped that her youngest daughter would be content to stay at home and help her, as she was finding heavy chores increasingly difficult. But Mary chafed at her confinement in the remote cottage and resented doing the back-breaking washing and water carrying.
‘I’ve been trained as a lady’s maid,’ she declared grandly to her mother. ‘This’ll ruin me hands.’
In desperation, Rose had begged her sisters and daughters to find employment for Mary as far away from home as possible. It was Kate who had saved the day. The inn at Ravensworth, close to where she was working, needed a chambermaid. When Mary heard that this was no common hostelry, but the hub of social life for the staff at the castle, she lost no time in boarding the train for Lamesley.
Rose glanced at the clock again. Kate and Mary might be at Lamesley station at this very moment, waiting for the train to take them to Gateshead and then on to South Shields. They would get off at Tyne Dock station and walk up the hill. Jack had gone down to meet them and carry their bags.
It had been one of the best decisions of her life to send Kate to Lizzie’s. Rose felt sure of it. Shortly after their move to the cottage, Kate had said a tearful goodbye to them all and gone to live with her aunt. It was not long before she had been noticed around the estate and put to employment. At first Kate had gone to work at Farnacre Hall on the estate. There her easy nature and willingness for hard work had been spotted by Lady Ravensworth herself and soon she was working in the castle. It was more than Rose could have wished. Kate had told Rose that the old earl himself took a passing interest in her because she came from Jarrow.
‘He spoke to me, Mam!’
‘He never!’
‘Aye, said a cousin of his used to be rector here - Canon Liddell,’ Kate told her on a visit home. ‘He spoke highly of him - says he worked himself into an early grave for the people of Jarrow.’
The Jarrow Lass Page 40
