Rich Girl, Poor Girl

by Eileen Ramsay

  Ma looked around at the shabby room that she had tried to keep clean and tidy through many years of bringing up her children on her own. ‘A lodger?’

  ‘We should hae done it when Frazer went tae the whaling or when . . . when pair Lindsay died.’ Like too many children in Dundee’s crowded tenements, Elsie’s oldest daughter had died two years before from tuberculosis. ‘Or we should definitely hae done it when Leslie got wed.’

  Leslie, the next girl, a mill-worker like her sister Lindsay, had married two months before. She was five months’ pregnant at the time, but there was no scorn or shame heaped upon their sinful heads for anticipating holy matrimony. It was the way of the world. It was cheaper to live separately and so young couples in love lived with their own families, or what passed for a family circle, until the imminent advent of their first child forced them to marry.

  ‘I cannae think why I never thought on it afore,’ Rosie went on, ‘but at least now you can start to take things easier. A nice country laddie, we’ll get, that’s come to work at Cox’s or Baxter’s. He’ll sleep wi’ oor Murray when Murray’s hame – and this year he’s been awa’ near as much as Frazer – and you’ll probably see the back of him on a Sunday.’

  ‘A nice laddie?’ Ma grinned wickedly and, by doing so, looked years younger. ‘A click for you, mair like. We’ll hae ye marrit, and then where will all your fine plans go?’

  Rose Nesbitt was not yet thirteen years of age, but in some ways she was already quite, quite old. ‘There’s no the laddie born that could turn me from my path, Ma, and I’ll certainly no throw myself away on some mill laddie. I’ve no interest in men and how could I tell Frazer and even auld Wishy that I was giving up? Years Nancy’s waited for Frazer and years Mr Wishart has spent coaching me. I’ll no throw it back in their faces, not for the Prince of Wales himself.’

  The thought of her daughter with Edward, Prince of Wales, was too much for Ma and even Rosie saw the funny side and they began to laugh. They stopped suddenly. Was it not just two months since the sad death of the prince’s oldest son, the young Duke of Clarence, from the fearsome influenza, this killer disease that weeded out both the low and the mighty?

  ‘You’re a real joy tae me, Rosie Nesbitt,’ said Ma at last. ‘I’ll think on a lodger; could be grand, but what about your studying? You’re aye throwing the weans oot.’

  ‘I’ll be a university student, Ma. I’ll do my studying at their grand library. Think on it. In nae time at all me, at the University of St Andrews!’

  ‘My mind willnae accept it, lassie. Goodness, I wis thinkin’ it wis a’ arranged and ye’ve years at the skill yet.’

  ‘Ach, Ma. Life’s like building a wall. Ye pit one brick on top o’ the next and ye dinnae think on it falling. Everything’s going tae be great.’ She stood up suddenly. ‘I’ve had a grand idea. We’ll go the first fine Sunday. We’ll take the weans and a piece. There’s sand there, Ma, and a ruined castle and buildings from books. Then when I’m there, every single day you’ll be able to picture me walking through the arches in my grand red goon. Wishy says it’s so rich and poor will look alike. Naebody kens that you’ve only the one skirt if it’s aye hidden by a grand red goon.’

  ‘Clever folk think on everything.’ Ma was overwhelmed.

  ‘I’ll shout the weans for their tea, Ma. Noo, no a word about the surprise. I’ll need tae find the money fer the train first, and the driver’ll need to be able to see the way across the bridge through this damned snow.’

  As with everything else Miss Nesbitt set her mind to, the weather began to improve. Rosie did without her lunch piece and so money was available for the train. Never had there been so much excitement in the Nesbitt household and even Nancy, Frazer’s fiancée, agreed to join them.

  ‘Whit a lot I’ll hae tae tell our Frazer,’ she said as she helped Elsie scrape dripping on the doorstep slices of bread. Nancy sighed a little, for she had popped in to see Leslie before coming into the next closie to join Frazer’s mother. Leslie’s swelling belly only reminded her that all she ever had of Frazer was kisses.

  Elsie understood the sigh and she hugged the girl in a quick gesture of affection. ‘It’ll be all the better for the waiting, hen. Frazer loves you dear, and soon you’ll wed and then you’ll no be quite sae jealous of our Leslie when it’s you having bairns like shelling peas, year after year. Where they come frae, I sometimes wonder.’

  ‘That’s what Frazer, well, that’s why he says . . . well, he’s an awfie guid man, Elsie.’

  ‘You’ve nae need tae tell me, lassie. Is he no spending a fortune on our Rosie’s education, books, exam fees, but she’ll mak it up tae the both of you, and free medical attention for a’body up the closie. So, noo let’s get wir pieces ready and off we go like toffs tae St Andrews.’

  It was a day none of them would ever forget. Donaldina and Granta, Elsie’s two youngest, were unable to talk for the excitement of being on the train but they made up for that as they rushed pell-mell, here and there, over the streets of the beautiful medieval city: Market Street, North Street, South Street, St Regulus’ Tower, St Rule’s, the castle with its horrifying tales of murder and mayhem and starvation in a bottle dungeon, the sands, the sands, the sands. Rosie and Elsie were content to touch the walls, to dream of the thousands of men and women who down the centuries had walked under these archways or through those doors or along this very beach. Nancy thought of her sweetheart somewhere on the ocean and dreamed of a honeymoon weekend with him here in this beautiful place that Rosie had shown her was easy, easy for anyone to reach and to enjoy. A train from Dundee rattles aross a bridge and through the kingdom of Fife and in two shakes of a ram’s tail, as Elsie kept saying, they were there.

  Never had bread and dripping tasted so good. Nancy had brought slices of dumpling and Rosie bought a bottle of lemonade and they all shared its sour refreshment. No one thought of shared germs, only of shared fellowship. Silently, in awe, they walked through the university buildings. Rosie taught the wee ones to avoid the sacred stones on which the student martyr, Patrick Hamilton, had breathed his last in the grip of cruel flame, and then, since she had scared them so much, she walked them, clinging tightly to her hands, along the walk where she told them every Sunday the red-gowned students would go.

  ‘You can picture me here on a Sunday morning,’ she said.

  ‘How can we when you’ll be at hame?’ said practical Donaldina.

  ‘I niver get out o’ ma bed on a Sunday, Rosie,’ confessed Granta. Granta was the silliest of all the silly names Elsie had given her children. Not one child, as far as she could judge, had the same father as another, and she punished the fathers by calling their children after them so that eveyone in the Hilltown knew who had fathered Elsie Nesbitt’s latest bairn. Elsie had never married. She had kept herself and her parents alive by selling herself on the crowded streets of her home, and she had raised a large family of clean and healthy children in a remarkably clean home. Elsie Nesbitt had integrity and pride and, as her daughter Rosie knew, she also had brains.

  Rosie looked at her mother now. She was a child, a grey-haired, wrinkled, stooping child, and very soon she would be a grandmother, and Rosie vowed that her future would not resemble Elsie’s past.

  Too soon it was time for the train.

  ‘You’ll be back loads of times, Ma,’ she said. ‘You’ll get tae ken St Andrews as weel as you ken the Hilltown.’

  ‘As long as you ken it, Rosie.’

  ‘I’d like fine tae come back wi Frazer, Elsie. Whit a place fir a holiday.’

  ‘Aye, Nancy. Ye ken, oor Rosie gets me that fired up I believe her grand thoughts. I wis ready tae believe she wis sterting at the university this year, but she’s years tae dae yet. But she will do whit she says and she will get the grants. Can you imagine somebody geein’ money jist so bairns can learn? There’s good folk in the world or ma name’s no Elsie Nesbitt, but whit I wis wantin’ tae say is that Frazer’ll no need tae worry aboot us and wi’ Leslie marrit
and Murray an apprentice and away most o’ the time, I could easy tak a lodger and then, jings, Nancy, I’ll be rollin’ in it and I’ll no need Frazer tae help.’

  ‘You mean?’

  ‘Aye, hen, there’s nothing tae stop you and Frazer being wed.’

  Nancy lay back in the questionable comfort of the Caledonian Railway’s third-class carriages and the little girls fell asleep on the train. When they got out Elsie carried Donaldina and Nancy carried Granta up as far as Reform Street where they almost dropped them.

  ‘That woke ye baith up,’ said Rosie, now again as broad in speech as the rest of the family. ‘They wis havin’ the pair o’ ye on. I’d hae left the baith o’ them on the train tae Eberdeen.’

  ‘Come on in by wi’ us, Nancy,’ suggested Elsie. ‘I’ve a stane o’ tatties waiting tae be fried up.’

  ‘No, I’ll no come in. I’ll awa hame and tell my mither and I’ll look in on Leslie. She was having a bit of bother this morning.’

  ‘Oh?’ Elsie, who had carried and delivered seven healthy children with the help of a few neighbours, was perfectly ready to see that childbirth was not easy for everyone.

  ‘She’s too fat,’ said twelve-year-old Rosie unkindly but truthfully. ‘Bert brings her sweeties and cakes on his way home from the works and she hasn’t washed a dish since the day they got married. He does everything.’

  ‘Frazer’ll be like that,’ sighed Nancy and went off to see the girl she hoped soon to be her sister-in-law.

  When they got home, Rosie and Elsie scrubbed the two small girls in front of the fire. It was a Saturday night and no matter what else happened in the Hilltown on a Saturday night, Elsie Nesbitt’s children had a bath and had their hair washed. Then Elsie fried the potatoes which she washed down with beer and the girls with hot strong tea.

  ‘I’m awae tae ma bed tae, Rosie. Dinnae you stay up late wi’ books. I don’t ken whit it is, but that day in St Andrews has fair tired me out.’

  Rosie agreed with her and so they were both sound asleep when Bert, Elsie’s eighteen-year-old son-in-law, came flying up the stairs and knocked furiously on the door with a knock loud enough to wake any of the neighbours who was already asleep. Leslie had gone into premature labour and there was something wrong.

  ‘Turn yer back, laddie, till I get my drawers on. There’s nothing wrong jist acause she’s a bit early, and hoo would you twa ken hoo early it is, onyway?’

  ‘There’s something wrang, Elsie, even ma mither says so.’ Bert’s mother was the best midwife in the area.

  ‘I’m coming.’

  They looked at the small figure in the big bed.

  ‘You’re no practising your doctoring on my wife, Rosie Nesbitt. You’re no decent, wanting tae come tae a lyin’-in.’

  ‘I jist want tae help.’

  ‘Stay here and look oot fir the wee wans, Rosie. You’re too wee and even had ye book learnin’, unborn bairns cannae read and it’s them that’s in charge.’

  Rosie was angry. Here was her first chance to witness a birth at first hand, her own sister, her own nephew or niece, and she was being kept away like a wee lassie.

  ‘I wouldn’t be feart,’ she told the fire as she sat beside it in her gown and made the first of many pots of tea. She was not conceited or foolish enough to think that she could be of any help, but there were so many things she might have learned. How did the baby get out? She had far too true an idea of how it got in.

  She was asleep when an exhausted and heart-broken Elsie let herself into the house.

  ‘Our Leslie’s deid,’ said Elsie as her daughter sat up in the chair.

  Rosie eased her mother into the chair and poured her a cup of the – by now, stewed – tea. Death. She had seen it before when Lindsay had coughed her lungs up in the big box-bed, when neighbours had died of age or infirmity, but death in childbirth? Oh, she heard of it often, too often, but not Leslie with her adoring young husband who gave her too many sweets.

  ‘But how? She was well, she was strong, well-fed; it’s two months since she did a day’s work. Did ye get the doctor?’

  ‘Oh aye, wan came eventually, along frae the infirmary, a nice laddie, seemed tae ken whit he was daein’, though hoo a man kens is beyond me. Tam, Nancy’s brither, is oot lookin’ for Bert. He went screamin oot o’ the hoos like a bogle. They wis jist bairns theresels.’

  ‘Whit went wrang, Ma? Did the doctor ken?’

  ‘Ach, lassie, whit questions. Well, all richt, if ye’ll jist get tae yir bed and let me be. A bairn’s supposed tae come oot heid first. Well, first a wee leg cam oot and they shoved it back in, and he put his airm in and tried tae turn the bairn, but its wee backside cam next and it wis too big and it ripped my wee lassie awful.’ She looked down at her skirt in horror. ‘That’s my wee lassie’s life’s-blood. A mammy shouldnae see that. Och, lassie, whit noo?’

  Poor Leslie. Poor Elsie. At 3.30 in the morning of Sunday the 22nd of March 1892, she cleaned up Rosie Nesbitt who had been violently ill for the first and last time in her medical career.

  There were two tragedies that night. Young Bert, maddened by the screams of his young wife – he had refused to do as every other man in the closie did and seek solace in the pub from the pangs of labour – had run shrieking from her deathbed and thrown himself into the Tay, the river that was often Dundee’s life-line and too often the source of death to the town’s miserable. Leslie was buried with her child in the local churchyard and her husband was buried in unhallowed ground.

  ‘That cannae be right,’ thought Rosie, but wisely said nothing.

  *

  She continued cutting her brilliant path through the Harris Academy and even saw the rector begin to consider Latin and Mathematics – in a limited way, naturally – for brighter girls. Already she had made a difference.

  Frazer never saw her win a combined university grant and bursary of twenty pounds per year. He never came back from his last voyage, never saw St Andrews, never married Nancy. His ship returned from its long voyage on May 20th 1893 and the captain had only letters, wages and consoling words to give his mother. Frazer’s letters were very different from the tone of the various articles that appeared in the local press after the voyage:

  Dear Mam,

  We left Dundee on September 6th and went south. We sailed for weeks with nout to do but play cards and nout to see but the sea and sometimes other ships.

  In three months we reached the Falklands. There’s nout there but sheep.

  It’s mid December and we have found ice. It’s now bluidy cold. We look for black whales.

  No whale but seals. We’ve killed thousands. It turned my stomach. They’re no feart. They havenae learnt tae fear and they lie and wait for the kickey. Their eyes follow me.

  The captain says we are congenially occupied. We’re killing penguins. We laughed at them, like funny wee men from London or grand places. They line up in rows and we walk atween them, whack, whack, whack. They taste good, like yon jugged hare I had one time at Nancy’s. You wouldnae believe the ice.

  I’ve been in the Brig. I wouldnae hit nae mair wee birds. If they’d fight us, snap, or bite. I havenae been eating. I couldnae eat penguin. We should sell them in Dundee, says the mate. They cost nout and they taste good, but when I eat, I see them standing waiting tae be killt. I’m rowing the boat because I want tae stay out of the Brig. The money’s grand for this voyage. 10/- extra the month. I dinnae like the ice. The sea goes twa roads at the same time and you have tae watch oot for ice slipping past . . .

  The captain gave Elsie her son’s letters and his bible; Frazer owned nothing else. He also gave her the full £45 the boy should have earned had he completed the nine-month voyage, and he told her of the accident. The rowing boats had been in a channel where two currents met. Frazer’s boat, heading south, had been grazed by an iceberg travelling north at three knots per hour. He had fallen overboard and his body had never been recovered.

  ‘He was a good man, Mrs Nesbitt,’ said the captain ser
iously. ‘The men tried desperately to find him.’ He did not add that it would have been useless even if they had found him, for he could not have survived in such temperatures.

  Nancy waited for him for two years. Every time a whaler came in to the harbour she ran down to the docks and watched the men disembark. In 1895, just as Rosie was preparing for her final year at the Harris Academy, and just as one Lucille Graham, BA, was graduating with her first medical qualifications, Nancy emigrated to New Zealand. She travelled with her sister Jean who had married Rosie’s other brother, Murray.

  ‘You’ll tell him where we are, Elsie. You’ll tell him I’ll never give up?’

  Elsie watched her last young son climb the gangplank. ‘I’ve lost four,’ she thought, ‘Four,’ for when would she ever see Murray again? And there was Nancy. Did that make five?

  At least for Elsie there was the dream of Rosie, the dream even Elsie was beginning to believe could come true. For Rosie was now a university student. She jumped out of bed every morning when the milkman arrived at 6.30 and just had time to wash, dress, grab a bap and eat it as she ran like a hare for the 7.10 train which would get her into St Andrews in time for a tutorial class in Maths, a condition of her acceptance, for Rosie, mainly self-taught in mathematics – another unsuitable subject for females – had done badly in the entrance examination. Often she cut her train-catching so fine that she had to be pulled into the luggage van by the guard, who would then proceed to air his views on education versus motherhood as a reward for not allowing her to miss the train.

  Rosie was content not to argue with him in her awakening state and, besides, he said the same things every morning.