“We’re going to be living in Beck-Side Street till kingdom come,” Noel said bitterly six months later as he and Nina walked morosely by the side of the Beck heading aimlessly in the general direction of Allerton. “The trouble is, Rose and Ma enjoy living cheek-by-jowl with the Wilkinsons and all the other friends they’ve made. I don’t. I find it utterly impossible. There’s no room to work. I’m trying to stretch a four-foot by five-foot canvas and it’s impossible in a room eight-foot by three, especially when there’s a bed in it into the bargain!”
Nina was sympathetic. She was also envious. Despite the unsatisfactory smallness of Noel’s room at least he didn’t have to share it. She had to share with her mother and Rose and when the three of them were all in the room together there wasn’t room to swing a cat. Nor was there an inch of space anywhere else in the house. Downstairs there was only one all-purpose room. Stone-flagged and, unlike most of the other houses in Beck-Side Street, carpeted, it had a door leading to the short, steeply curving flight of bedroom stairs, a door leading to the cellar-head and another door which led straight out on to the street. One wall was dominated by a vast black-leaded kitchen range containing both oven and fireplace. Their father’s bed took up a large amount of room beneath the only window, a hand sewing-machine was almost permanently in evidence on top of the table.
“Even if you had room to work, there wouldn’t be any peace and quiet to work in,” she said dryly, letting her fingers trail over the tips of high-growing grass. “If Jenny Wilkinson isn’t helping Rose do the laundry in the cellar-head sink, and laughing and chattering and slopping water all over the place as she does so, then her mother is on our doorstep gossiping with Mother or Albert Porritt is sitting chin-wagging with Father.”
Noel grunted. He didn’t object on any deep-down level to either Jenny Wilkinson and her mother, or Albert Porritt and young Micky, or any of the host of other neighbours who were always in and out of their house. It was just that he had never been accustomed to having his home treated as if it were an extension of the street. In Jesmond Avenue, friendliness had been restricted to chats on the pavement or in the local shops and when people had called at the house, they had knocked at the door first. No one knocked at doors in Beck-Side Street. In Beck-Side Street, doors were always off the latch and in good weather, nearly always ajar or wide open.
He said musingly, “It’s strange, isn’t it, how Ma, brought up in a house as vast as Crag-Side, has so easily adapted to taking in sewing and living in a mill cottage no bigger than a rabbit hutch.”
They’d reached a point on the Beck’s banks where a cluster of trees grew close to the water and Nina halted. This was as far as she intended walking. If Noel wanted to mooch on as far as Allerton he could do so on his own.
“Mother’s happy if Father’s happy,” she said perceptively, “and she knows that Father’s happier living in Beck-Side Street, and having you and me and Rose still at art school, than he would be living in Jesmond Avenue waiting for us to come home from the mill every day.”
Noel made no response. It was unlike Nina to be so prosaic but for once she had stated a truth there was no escaping from and she had also lobbed in a reminder of just why their present living conditions had to be endured. He plunged his hands even deeper into his flannels pockets and as he did so, a thought occurred to him, a thought that immediately seized all of his attention. Why, instead of merely enduring the living conditions of Beck-Side Street, didn’t he capitalize on them? Why didn’t he capture images of the street and its inhabitants in paint? And why didn’t he do so using Expressionist techniques?
“Oh for goodness sake! Are you listening to me or am I speaking to myself?” Nina said exasperatedly, having asked for the second time if he knew that their father’s replacement at Lutterworth’s had invited Rose up to the design offices for a look around.
Noel took his hands out of his pockets, excitement racing through him. He had a canvas already primed and he knew now what he was going to sketch out on it. “You’re speaking to yourself,” he said with brotherly bluntness. “I’m sorry about this, Neen, but I have to go.” He began backing away from her over the daisy-starred grass. “There’s something I have to do. There’s something I have to do immediately!” and without any further explanation he rounded on his heel, breaking into a run, sprinting back down the side of the Beck in the direction of Bull Royd.
Nina said a word she had heard Micky Porritt use when he hadn’t known he was being overheard, and plonked herself down on the grass with uncharacteristic gracelessness. It really was too bad. Although Noel didn’t enjoy living in Beck-Side Street, it didn’t truly trouble him. As long as he was able to paint, nothing truly troubled him.
As for Rose … She plucked moodily at a daisy. Rose was far happier in Beck-Side Street than she’d ever been in Jesmond Avenue. She and Jenny Wilkinson were well near inseparable and both of them were fast friends with Micky Porritt, though why they were was beyond her, she had never been able to get a word out of him. Rose’s ambition, too, was an ambition perfectly attainable even with a Beck-Side Street address. The designer who had stepped into their father’s shoes at Lutterworth’s was a man who had worked for their father for years and who had enormous respect for him. Via him, contact with Lutterworth’s had been maintained and the present invitation for Rose to visit the design offices was a strong indication she might be offered a position there when she left art school.
Lucky Rose. Not so lucky Nina. Tears of self-pity burned the backs of her eyes. Unlike Rose, she had no friends. She had abandoned all her previous friendships because she couldn’t, wouldn’t, endure the humiliation of those friends visiting her in Beck-Side Street. She had made no new friends for the same reason. And she had made no friends in Beck-Side Street because she had nothing in common with anyone who lived there and, even if she had, to have made friends with them would have seemed an admission that she now belonged there, and that was an admission she would never make. Not ever!
She circled her knees with her arms, hugging them to her chest. If Noel hadn’t dashed off so unceremoniously she had been going to tell him of how their cousins were, at this very moment, visiting London and enjoying a far, far different lifestyle. The Olympic Games were being held at the new White City stadium and according to the Bradford Observer, ‘Mr Caleb Rimmington and his grandchildren are in attendance at them.’
“Not all of his grandchildren,” she had thought when she had read this latest snippet of information about her estranged family’s activities. Glumly she had wondered where they would be staying. A smart hotel almost certainly. Very possibly even the Ritz.
“Bugger,” she said now, aching at the unfairness of it all and reduced to uttering an expletive that would have shocked even Micky. “Bugger, bugger, bugger!”
Gertie Graham, the massively built neighbour who lived directly opposite number twenty-six and who, on Lizzie’s first visit to Beck-Side Street, had informed her as to which house the Wilkinsons lived in, lowered her bulk into a chair that had once graced the tastefully furnished parlour in Jesmond Avenue.
“There’s nowt like a nice cup of tea,” she said to Laurence as Lizzie pushed the sewing she had been working on to one side and went into the cellar-head to fill the kettle. “And nowt like having a nice chin-wag while you’re supping it.” She looked round the pin-neat room. “And where’s my little ray of sunshine?” she asked, “Out laiking with Jenny Wilkinson and Micky Porritt?”
“Ro … ose is vi … sss … it … ing Lu … u … ter … worth’s,” Laurence said with difficulty.
Gertie never had the slightest trouble understanding Laurence’s impeded speech, though she did think he was daft still troubling to talk so hoity-toity. Visiting Lutterworth’s indeed! Why couldn’t he just say she was up at t’mill like anyone else would have done? And what the heck was she doing up there, anyhow?
As Lizzie walked back into the room to put the kettle on the hob, her vibrant blue dress as clean and pin-ne
at as the room, her hair glossily brushed and parted in the middle, waving symmetrically around her ears as low as the lobes and then gathered in a shining knot in the nape of her neck, Gertie shook her head in affectionate despair. Whatever it was young Rose was up to, it would be something arsey-fairy. Never, in all her life, had she come across a family with so many rum ideas.
“I’m going to be a dress designer,” Nina had once said to her loftily when she’d asked her why she wasn’t in one of the mills, earning some brass. “I’m going to be famous like Mr Worth and Madame Paquin and Monsieur Poiret and Lucile, of Maison Lucile in Hanover Square.”
Gertie had lived in Bradford all her life and had never heard of Hanover Square and she’d certainly never heard of the other fancy names Nina had spouted at her. “Go wash your mouth out with soap and water,” she had said to her tartly, adding for good measure, “Cheeky little baggage!”
They got all their fancy ideas from their mother, of course. Tea was never drunk from pint pots in the Sugden house, it was drunk from fiddly cups set on even fiddlier saucers. There were no clogs on their doorstep, either, and no shawls hanging on the peg behind the front door.
At the thought of Lizzie Sugden with a shawl over her head and shoulders, Gertie cackled. From the day the Sugdens had arrived in Beck-Side Street, Laurence Sugden riding like a crippled king in the back of the first motorcar to ever trundle over Beck-Side Street’s cobbles, Lizzie Sugden had worn a hat and gloves whenever venturing more than a few yards from her front door. “Lady Muck,” she’d been called by everyone but Polly Wilkinson. Then she’d let it be known that she took sewing in for very reasonable rates and gradually, as people got to know her and her family, the nickname had lost its sarcastic edge and become almost a pet name.
“So what’s Rose doing up at Lutterworth’s?” she asked now, determined not to remain in ignorance and knowing it was bound to be something fancy.
“Sh … ee’s lo … oo … king round the de … sign room,” Laurence said, an odd, almost wistful note permeating his voice. Gertie wasn’t aware of it, but Lizzie was. She looked across at him, her heart hurting with love. It should have been Laurence now accompanying Rose around the design room. It should have been Laurence, fit and strong and virile, proudly introducing their daughter to his working world.
Gertie grunted, not truly understanding what a design room was, but not wanting to show ignorance. As far as she was concerned mills had weaving and spinning sheds, and carding and combing sheds, and dyehouses. Unlike Lister’s, which was a silk and worsted mill, Lutterworth’s, like nearby Rimmington’s, was a worsted only mill. That somewhere in the process of producing a bolt of Lutterworth’s cloth a pattern had been designed for it, was a thought that had never previously occurred to her, and it had certainly never occurred to her, and still didn’t, that anyone she knew could possibly be responsible for such a task.
“It’s t’weaving shed she needs to be in,” she said practically as the kettle began to steam. “It’s weaving that brings in the brass and Rose’d make a grand little weaver. All she needs is someone to give her a proper bit of encouragement.”
Chapter Five
“You’ve certainly got an eye for colour,” Ted Rawlins, once her father’s most talented protege, said encouragingly to Rose as she fingered the swatch of cloth he had given her to examine. “The brown does need lifting. A more tan shade would make the check much more effective. Now what do you think of this?” This time the swatch he turned to was a heather mixture, the overall effect a soft, misty green.
Rose screwed up her eyes and focused intently on the cloth. It had never occurred to her before that straightforward worsted fabrics could be as interesting in shading and pattern as ornamental tapestries.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” The feel of the fine wool cloth sent ripples of pleasure down her spine. And it didn’t only look good and feel good. It smelt good too. “I like the hint of yellow in the weft,” she said, thinking of the avant-garde designs Nina could make for such lovely material.
Ted Rawlins grinned. How had she known there was yellow in the weft? How, never having been in a mill before, had she known which was the weft?
“Let’s have a mosey round the rest of the mill,” he said, heaving the heavy swatch book back onto a shelf. “Have you ever been in a twisting shed? Or a weaving shed?”
She shook her head, excitement tightening her tummy into knots. “No. If we’re going in the weaving will I have to pin my hair up?”
“You will if you don’t want to risk being scalped,” Ted Rawlins said cheerily, leading the way out of the cluttered design room and into a long, narrow, stone-floored corridor. “The overlooker will have a spare headscarf handy. Has your Dad warned you about the noise in there? It can be quite frightening if you’re unprepared for it.”
“I won’t be frightened.” Her eyes shone in happy anticipation. “I’ve always wanted to look around a mill.” She didn’t add that the mill she had always wanted to look around was Rimmington’s and that Lutterworth’s was merely a stepping stone to that ambition. “My friend, Jenny, works in the weaving. I hope we see her. It will give her the surprise of her life!”
“I nearly dropped dead with shock,” Jenny said, giggling. “Specially at the sight of you with your hair all turbanned up in a mucky headscarf!”
The mill hooter had shrilly sounded the end of the working day and they were walking across the mill yard, jostled on all sides by a crush of women, some young and some not-so-young, all eager for a breath of fresh air after being cooped up in the noisy weaving sheds all day.
Rose’s monkey-face split into a wide grin. The headscarf had made her feel like a proper mill girl. It had also made her head itch. “I hope whoever wore that headscarf before me didn’t have nits,” she said as, hemmed in on all sides, they streamed out through the mill gates and into the narrow street beyond.
“I think they had sum’at worse than nits,” Jenny said mischeviously. “If I remember rightly, the lass that wore that headscarf afore you had great round bald patches in her hair and her mam had painted them with iodine!”
Rose screamed and clutched at her ginger-red mane of hair and Jenny shrieked with laughter. “You’ll not get a fancy job in t’Design Room if you have purple-painted bald patches!” she gasped, holding her side she was laughing so much. “You’ll have to work with me in the weaving and wear a headscarf all day, every day!”
They were still laughing when they turned into the top end of Beck-Side Street.
“Blooming heck!” Jenny’s laughter died abruptly, her eyes widening in incredulity. “There’s a motorcar outside your house! And it isn’t the one that brought your dad to Beck-Side Street the day you moved in. It’s far posher than that. It’s blue-green, like something out of a fairy-tale! Have you ever seen anything like it afore in all your life?”
Rose stood stock-still, staring down the street. “Yes,” she said, sucking in her breath, her eyes feverishly bright. “Oh, yes! And the last time I saw it, it was outside Brown & Muffs! It’s my grandfather’s motorcar, Jenny! Grandfather Rimmington has come to visit Mother!”
It was a moment she had waited for as long as she could remember. A moment she had always hoped for and often prayed for.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Her face was ablaze with elation, the strength shock had robbed from her legs, fast returning. “Isn’t it marvellous?”
Without waiting for Jenny to answer she began to run, her feet flying over the paving stones and ringing out on the shallow cobbled indents that led to the covered passageways. Her grandfather wanted to be reconciled with her mother! For the first time in her life she would meet him face to face! And soon, perhaps, she would meet her Uncle Walter and her cousins! She ran as if there were wings on her heels. A bare-bottomed toddler scrambled hastily out of her way. Bonzo, the Porritts’Staffordshire Terrier, began racing along beside her, barking for all he was worth. A group of children playing hopscotch scattered in order not to slow down
her breakneck speed.
“Where’s the perishin’fire?” a wit called out to her as he lounged in an open doorway, his shirt collarless, his trousers bunching cumbersomely over the top of a broad leather belt, his clogged feet crossed at the ankles.
“You’re winning, lass!” a woman pegging washing on a line strung across the steet, called out jokingly. “There’s nobbut fresh air behind ye!”
Rose waved a hand in good-natured acknowledgement and kept on running, her heart feeling as if it was going to burst with happiness. How long had her grandfather been in Beck-Side Street? Did Noel and Nina know of his arrival? Were they in the house now, already introduced to him? Chatting to him? Perhaps being invited to visit William and Harry and Lottie at Crag-Side?
“Father’s dead,” Walter Rimmington said baldly to Lizzie, his tailored Savile Row, tweed suit making him look incongruously out of place in a room dominated by a black-lead kitchen range, a sick-bed, and a working-table crowded with a sewing-machine and pieces of cloth. “It happened last night. He was in London with the children. They weren’t with him when … when … He was asleep, Lizzie. He died in his sleep.”
Lizzie stood on the gaily-coloured, home-made rag-rug that fronted her hearth, staring at her brother almost catatonically. How could her father be dead? He and she were still estranged. He couldn’t have died without their estrangement finally being healed. He couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.
“A … re you all ri … ight, lo … over?” Laurence asked with difficulty. He had struggled to his feet when their unexpected visitor had arrived and with the aid of a walking-cane was standing shakily upright.
Yorkshire Rose Page 7
