The Narrowboat Girl

by Annie Murray

  But there was no reply. She laid Tiger on the floor and climbed up, somehow feeling she needed to tip-toe. Maybe Nanny Firkin was asleep.

  The old lady was lying in her bed. Maryann saw the little bump where her little feet were sticking up under the cover. The room smelt stale. When Maryann went over to her she saw in the dimming light from the window that her grandmother’s hair was down out of the pins and straggly round her face and her cheeks looked hollowed out. She was on her back with her eyes and mouth half open and she looked like a wizened doll. There was no movement from her, not a flicker.

  ‘Nan?’ Maryann whispered. She knew there would be no reply, that whatever it was that really made Nanny Firkin her Nan, was gone, but she couldn’t take it in. Nanny Firkin was always there like the sky, she was supposed to live for ever. This wasn’t really her any more, this body lying here. Maryann suddenly felt a prickle of terror pass through her, her whole body shuddered and she backed away, and ran back down the stairs. She left Tiger and ran all the way home again.

  ‘Mom! Mom!’

  Seven

  The lamplighters were round lighting up as they all ran back to Ledsam Street, Flo still in her apron, with Maryann, Tony and Billy. Flo told the boys to stay out and play in ‘Nanny’s yard’ and snapped at Tony when he tried to come into the house. A Mrs Price, one of Nanny Firkin’s neighbours, on hearing what had happened, asked if the boys would like to come into her house. She said she was sorry she hadn’t been in to see old Mrs Firkin, hadn’t had any idea how ill she was.

  At that, Flo poured out her own guilt.

  ‘I never realized myself,’ she said to the woman. ‘She weren’t so bad yesterday – just a bit of a cough like. I’d’ve come earlier, only with it being washday and that I’ve ’ardly ’ad a moment to spare.’ Maryann watched her mom as she spoke. She was full of grim, pounding emotion. Was it true what her mom was saying? How could Nanny Firkin have not seemed ill if she was poorly enough to die?

  She followed Flo back into the dark house. Flo lit a candle, her fingers trembling so much that she had difficulties handling the match, then, carrying the flickering light in front of them, they went up to Nanny Firkin’s bedroom.

  ‘Oh—’ Flo’s hand went up close to her mouth as she looked down at her mother. ‘Oh my word – fancy ’er going like that. ’Er heart must’ve given out. I’d never’ve thought . . .’ She looked across into Maryann’s reproachful eyes. ‘I ain’t stopped all day! I can’t be everywhere at once, yer know. I never knew she were this bad – anything like. She just ’ad a bit of a chest on ’er. I was only ’ere yesterday afternoon. You can’t say I neglected her – my own mother!’

  ‘I ain’t said a word,’ Maryann said stonily. ‘Did yer feed the cats yesterday, when yer come over?’

  She saw her mother’s brows pucker in the candlelight. ‘No – I never thought. I mean, she were in bed, but I thought she’d been up and about . . .’

  Clearly Nanny Firkin had been putting a brave face on things when Flo was there.

  ‘Anyroad – I’ve got more to worry about than sodding cats. Maryann – go and get the range lit and ask Mrs Price who’s nearest to lay ’er out . . . And Norman’ll ’ave to come . . .’

  Maryann found another candle downstairs. There was a small amount of coal and slack in the coal bucket and she stoked the range, as she had seen her mom and dad do on so many occasions, standing over it to check it was burning. Then she went across to Mrs Price’s house. She felt numb and strange, suddenly, as if she were moving through a dream.

  ‘Oh, it’s Eve Leadbetter you need,’ Mrs Price told her. She gave Maryann the address, directing her to another house further along Ledsam Street.

  Mrs Leadbetter was a strong, jolly-looking woman.

  ‘A death in the family, is it? Well, ’er won’t be going nowhere – give me an ’alf-hour and I’ll be over. Ask yer mom to ’ave some water ready.’ She looked down into Maryann’s solemn little face. ‘Yer nan is it, bab? I’m sorry for yer, that I am. Tell yer mom I’ll be over.’

  As Maryann walked back across the old, familiar yard, she saw the shape of the house she’d known as her nan’s all her life. Maryann stopped, the biting cold and smokiness of the air hurting inside her nose. The moon was rising, half full, casting a white sheen on the slates. There was still a candle burning in the upstairs window, and another where she had left it on the table downstairs. It looked as if Nanny Firkin was in, going about her normal evening’s jobs. But she wasn’t in. Nanny wasn’t there, despite the frail old body lying stiffly in the bed upstairs. She would never be there any more to go to for comfort, to tell her about school, about Tiger and his antics as he was growing up . . . With a terrible jolt she remembered the earlier events of the day. Tiger was lying there in Nanny’s house, at the bottom of the stairs! And soon Mrs Leadbetter would come, and Norman would come – she would be sent to fetch him. No – she couldn’t stand any more.

  The front door was ajar as she went quietly into the house. There was no sign of the cats, but the fusty, urine-soaked atmosphere in there persisted. Maryann picked up Tiger’s body, cradling him in her arms once more.

  ‘Mom,’ she called up to Flo. ‘There’s a Mrs Leadbetter coming. She said she’d be about ’alf an hour.’

  ‘Oh thank God yer back,’ Flo called down the stairs. Maryann heard her coming closer and she shrank back. ‘Now listen to me, wench – there’s a few jobs I need yer to do.’

  ‘What’s them, Mom?’ Maryann was creeping back through the downstairs room. As her mom descended the stairs, her feet loud on the boards, Maryann pushed the door open and slipped out. She was away and across the yard in seconds.

  She was running as if her life depended on it, as if by doing so she could escape the terrible events of that day. She still had the feeling of being in a dream.

  It’s not true, she thought. None of it. Please let it not be true.

  Clutching Tiger against her chest was making it hard to breathe and she stopped for a moment when she’d turned out of Ledsam Street and stood panting under a lamp. For the first time she tried to think where she might go. If she went home Norman would be there. Before, she’d have run to Sal to pour out everything that had happened, but Sal was so odd and shut off from her nowadays. And she could go to Nance’s. They’d be kind to her, but she couldn’t face being there tonight. The house was always so smelly and chaotic and you never knew what state Blackie might be in.

  Running on, she climbed through the gap in the fence and down into the cut, near to the bridge where the road passed over the canal. Down on the path, she was suddenly forced to stop. It was so dark! It felt as if a blanket had been thrown over her head and she couldn’t see where to take her next step on the muddy path. From under the bridge she could hear, magnified, the drip of water and behind her, in the distance, the clink of a horse’s harness. Thank God, someone was coming along – she wasn’t alone down here!

  She waited a few moments as it came closer, seeing the dim light from the oil lamp on the boat growing stronger, and the shadowy movement of the horse along the bank. She pressed back to let it pass, not wanting to attract attention to herself, then followed on behind. The boat was a joey, a long open cargo boat with a tiny cabin at the back, and a man was standing up at the back, steering it in towards the bank. The carrying area was filled with a dark, gleaming cargo of coal on its way to fuel a factory boiler-house in Birmingham. The horse was walking slowly, wearily, but at a steady pace. As the prow of the boat slid alongside the bank, another man, who Maryann hadn’t even noticed, jumped across on to the bank in front of her and reached for the horse’s harness.

  ‘Awright!’ he called out. ‘Come on,’ he said to the animal. ‘Let’s just get ’ome now.’

  Maryann was extremely glad of their presence. She knew that sooner or later something would have come along on this busy stretch of water, but the idea of walking along the path, edged by dark warehouses and wharves was very frightening. She soon realized, as
the joey continued its journey in front of her, that another boat was following not far behind. She waited for it to pass and saw it was a horse-drawn family boat, also laden down with coal. She couldn’t read what it said on the cabin in the darkness, but it looked the same sort of boat as the Esther Jane and she followed behind, holding Tiger, comforted by the leathery creak of the horse’s harness. They passed under bridges and between such a density of high buildings that even in the daytime the canal at that point was forever in shadow, and the only thing visible was the tiny light from the oil lamps on the boats. The joey had vanished ahead, and she followed the boat to the basin where the cargo was to be unloaded. There were other boats underway with the task, the sounds of shovels digging into the coal or scraping at the boards of an emptier vessel to gather up the last pieces into the waiting barrows to be trundled into the boiler storehouses. Maryann could hear voices and the hard breathing of men exerting themselves, men who had already worked for sixteen or so hours that day. The horse stopped and they found a place to tie up. There were gas lamps here, and she saw the breath unfurling from the animal’s nostrils. The lights of the basin jittered brokenly in the black water.

  Maryann stood on the edge of this activity, looking along the row of boats, her eyes searching in the dim light. Could it be – please God could it be that the Esther Jane was here, and Joel? She crept along peering into the gloom. Many of the boats were joeys, with a few family boats among them. Looking down into one she saw it was nearly empty and the man shovelling up into the barrow on the bank was having to lift each shovelful almost five feet in the air to get it into the barrow. Every time he lifted one he gave a loud grunt at the effort required. Small pieces of coal rattled back into the boat. Noticing her watching, he straightened up, expelling air loudly from his mouth and pressing a hand to the small of his back. He rested on the shovel, wiping the back of his arm over his forehead.

  ‘What’re yer after?’

  ‘I want to see a man called Joel Bartholomew,’ Maryann said. She was still holding tight on to Tiger and felt small and silly. She wondered if the man could see what it was she was carrying.

  ‘What ’d ’er say?’ The figure who had just approached behind the barrow, waiting to empty it, spoke up and to her shock, Maryann realized it was a woman.

  ‘’Er’s after some bloke, Joel what was it?’

  ‘Bartholomew.’

  The two of them were silent for a moment.

  ‘I dunno ’im,’ the man said. ‘’E work on the day boats, does ’e?’

  ‘No – ’e’s on a boat like that one—’ She pointed. ‘Called the Esther Jane.’

  ‘Oh well—’ The man bent over to start work again. ‘Sounds like one of the Number Ones. ’E could be anywhere, bab, if ’e’s a long distance . . . Needle in a bleeding ’aystack.’

  The woman stood braced by the barrow as the man started shovelling again.

  ‘Tell yer what,’ she shouted over the racket. ‘We’ll keep a look out for ’im, like. The Esther Jane did yer say?’ She called over to another man who was passing. ‘D’yer know the Esther Jane? One of the Number Ones I should think.’

  The man shrugged, seeming almost too exhausted to speak. ‘No. Can’t say I do.’

  ‘We’ll ask around for yer,’ the woman yelled across. ‘And who shall we say was asking for ’im?’

  ‘Maryann Nelson,’ she said, without hope. She wasn’t going to find him tonight and that was what mattered.

  ‘Awright then. Cheer up. Word gets about fast.’

  Maryann thanked her and turned back along the towpath. There were more joey boats, pulled by plodding horses and mules towards the city’s canal loops and basins from the Black Country coalfields, so it was not completely dark, the edges of things picked out by the glow from their lamps. The disappointment that Joel had not been there was an ache in her that cut through her numbness. She hardly knew the man, but he was kindness and warmth; she knew instinctively that he was someone who could help her bear all the feelings that were welling up in her. Of course Joel wasn’t just going to be there, like he had been the time before when she came down here by chance! How could she have been so stupid, as if she could just will him to appear? The horror of that afternoon came flooding back to her. First Tiger, then Nanny Firkin. And Sal had gone all funny and wouldn’t speak to her any more . . . If only there was someone she could run to . . .

  ‘Oh Tiger!’ She held him to her and brushed her cheek against his fur but it was wet and nasty and pent-up sobs began to shake her. She felt her way to the side of the path and laid Tiger in the undergrowth, covering his body as well as she could with grass and cold leaves, then she wiped her hands down the front of her coat.

  ‘Goodbye, Tiger,’ she sobbed. ‘I loved yer, that I did.’

  She walked back, still crying, beside the black water, towards home. Where else could she go? The cold sliced through her now, and under the bottomless winter sky she felt more alone and lost than ever in her life before.

  Eight

  May 1928

  ‘Where’re yer going? Oi come on – wait for me!’ Nance trotted imploringly along beside Maryann.

  ‘Down the cut.’

  ‘Can I come with yer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, sod yer.’ Nance stopped, hands clasped to her waist as Maryann strode off between the rows of terraced houses without even a glance back in her direction. Bloody charmed, I’m sure, Nance thought. What a pal she’d turned out to be. There was no getting near Maryann these days. Nance turned back towards home. She’d come out specially to see her friend after school. Now she’d be stuck playing with all her brothers again, if they’d have her.

  ‘Still – better than that mardy little cow any’ow.’ But she was hurt. She missed Maryann and the days when they’d been able to tell each other anything. Best pals they’d been, ever since they were knee high. But nowadays Maryann was just closed in on herself and they saw rather more of Sal at the house, hanging about, making eyes at Charlie. She’d never much taken to Sal though. She was older than Nance and she’d never been such a laugh as Maryann.

  Nance stopped for a moment, almost changing her mind and following Maryann down to the cut. She’d had a few things to tell her about Charlie and Sal and what they were getting up to. But her pride got the better of her again. She’d keep it to herself. She wasn’t going where she wasn’t wanted. Maryann could stew if that was the mood she was in.

  Kicking an old Woodbine packet irritably into the gutter, Nancy slouched back towards Garrett Street.

  Maryann climbed through the fence and down through the scrubby trees at the edge of the cut. The leaves were bright green, crumpled and newborn-looking and even with all the various pongs in the air from the factories – metallic, chemical, getting in your throat – down here just in this scrubby little patch you saw some green and got a whiff of spring, which lifted her spirits. She spent all the time she could down here now, drawn to the back-to-front magic of the canal, the way it felt like another world when you were down there, closed in from the rest of the city, somewhere where, for her, the normal troubles of life no longer existed. You saw everything from the other way round down here: the rear ends of buildings, the low level of the path making you look up at things, the watery veins of the canals flowing round and through and under the heart of Birmingham like its secret circulation. It smelled of the murky, bitter water and of the trees, it smelled of a root to the country and of freedom.

  ‘Did you know, children,’ Maryann’s teacher once told them, ‘that Birmingham has more canals running through it than Venice? By length that is, I assume.’ She had smiled. ‘That’s quite something, isn’t it, when you consider that Venice is built only on canals instead of roads.’

  ‘What’s Venice, miss?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Well, I was hoping you’d ask . . .’ She had grainy pictures of black and white poles edging canals in front of grey and black houses, gondolas tilting across expanses of dark water
towards churches.

  ‘Venice,’ she said. ‘Venezia.’

  ‘Bet our canals are a darn sight muckier,’ one of the boys said and the others laughed.

  ‘Well, perhaps. But they’re very dirty in Venice too, when you consider that everything gets tipped into them.’

  Everyone sniggered and made revolted noises. Venice didn’t really sound like a real place. Real life was contained in these streets of Ladywood, collecting pails of horse muck and jam jars to sell for pennies. Maryann found herself smiling as she reached the path. Only two years ago that had been. Happy days. At school, and her dad and Nanny and Tiger all still alive. The smile fell from her lips and her face took on the scowl it wore habitually now. People had commented for a while: teachers, Cathleen Black – ‘well, she don’t look any too ’appy nowadays’ – even her own mom. Now they’d just got used to it.

  ‘I don’t know what’s come over you two girls,’ Flo complained to them. ‘There’s Sal with a face like a wet Sunday and now you’re even worse. And your behaviour to Norman, Maryann – I didn’t know where to put myself.’

  She’d come back from the canal that night, leaving Tiger’s body with the cold companionship of the undergrowth and canal rats. They were all back by the time she got in. She had no idea how long she’d wandered in the cold but it must have been longer than she realized. She expected Flo to scream at her – the usual ‘where’ve you been?’ – but they barely seemed to notice when she walked in. They seemed only just to have got in themselves: Flo cooking, Norman Griffin sitting by the fire, feet up on the fender, his presence seeming to fill the room. Maryann slipped past and upstairs, where Sal was settling Tony and Billy. Tony was crying and without a word to each other the two sisters sat and tried to comfort him.

  ‘It’s awright, Tony,’ Maryann told him, starting to cry again herself. ‘Nanna’s going to heaven to see God and Jesus and all the angels – and our dad an’ all.’