A Mother's Promise

by Dilly Court

  Tom had taken off his shirt and he was attempting to dry his hair with it, even though the garment was sodden. ‘Well then, Hetty. What are you waiting for?’

  The few people who were still standing round staring at them murmured encouragement. ‘Go on, girl,’ said a costermonger in his pearl-studded Sunday finery. ‘Give him a smacker. He deserves it.’

  Hetty felt herself blushing and she shook her head.

  ‘Go on. Don’t be mean,’ shouted the coster’s wife. ‘If I wasn’t a happily married woman, I’d kiss him meself.’

  Glancing at Tom beneath her lashes, Hetty felt her heart give a little squeeze as she saw his muscular torso, glistening with droplets of water. She had never seen him bare-chested and she was suddenly ashamed of the feelings it aroused in her. She was about to turn away, but Tom seized her in his arms and kissed her soundly on the lips, much to the approval of those watching. Hetty placed her hands flat on his chest in an attempt to push him away, but the touch of his warm skin slicked with water was enough to take her breath away. She could feel his heart pounding away like a galloping horse, or was it her own blood hammering in her ears that she could feel through her fingertips? She did not know, but somehow she managed to wriggle free from his grasp. Covering her confusion, she turned to Eddie and swept him up in her arms. ‘You bad, bad boy. Don’t never do nothing like that again. D’you hear me?’ She burst into tears.

  Tom put his arm around her shoulders, leading her away from their audience. ‘Come on, boys,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Let’s get your sister home. She’s had a nasty shock, and you, young Eddie, need a change of clothes.’

  ‘But I ain’t got no change of clothes,’ Eddie whimpered.

  Tom chuckled. ‘Well, at least those ones have had a wash. Come on, Hetty, let’s get you home for a nice hot cup of tea. We can’t very well go to the refreshment rooms looking like shipwrecked mariners, now can we?’

  ‘N-no,’ Hetty said, sniffing. ‘But I’m all right, Tom. Really I am, and I don’t know how to thank you for what you done.’

  Tom gave her shoulders a squeeze. ‘Another kiss wouldn’t go amiss.’

  ‘You’ve got a cheek, Tom Crewe.’

  ‘Come on, just a little kiss,’ Tom said, stopping in the middle of the pathway and twisting her round to face him. His dark eyes twinkled mischievously. ‘A little kiss for the hero.’

  Hetty met his gaze and once again her heart thudded erratically inside her breast. She realised, in spite of the fact that Sammy was tugging at her sleeve and Eddie was complaining that he was cold, that she actually wanted Tom to kiss her again. The touch of his lips had lit a flame within her and she wanted more. She tossed her head. ‘Certainly not. You’re making a show of us, Tom.’ Her pulses were racing and she could not look him in the eye. She walked off without giving him a chance to reply.

  Seemingly no worse for his ordeal, Eddie ran on ahead with Sammy close on his heels. Hetty could hear Tom striding along behind, but she neither slowed down nor turned her head to look at him. She had no time for romance. If you let a bloke get close to you, the outcome was inevitable. Wasn’t Jane a fine example of that?

  Tom made no attempt to catch her up, and for a moment Hetty forgot all about him as she stopped behind a crowd that had gathered around a woman who was speaking from a soapbox. Hetty had heard the name of Bryant and May mentioned and she was suddenly curious. Could this be Mrs Besant, the woman who had been interrogating the girls at the match factory? Tom caught up with her but she brushed off his suggestion that they ought to head off home. ‘Leave me be, Tom. You go on home and get dry. I’ll only be a short while.’

  There was something compulsive about Annie Besant’s oratory, and Hetty listened intently to her scathing remarks about unscrupulous employers who put profit before the welfare of their workers. When she had finished speaking, Mrs Besant held up a newspaper. ‘If you wish to learn more about the plight of the matchgirls and their appalling treatment by their bosses, then read my article in The Link, which will appear next Saturday, the twenty-third of June. In it you will find all the shocking details of the way in which these women, girls and even children have been exploited.’

  ‘Come on home, Hetty,’ Tom said softly. ‘Let her talk, but don’t get involved. We can’t afford to listen to well-heeled, middle-class ladies like her. It’s all right to have principles if you’ve got food on the table and the rent money in your pocket. She ain’t got nothing to lose. We have.’

  Hetty had almost forgotten his presence, but she knew that he was speaking sense. It was all very well for Mrs Besant to spout off about justice and moral rights, but she wasn’t dirt poor like the workers in the factory. She turned to him with a reluctant smile and linked her hand through his arm. ‘You’re right, of course, and you’d best get home and into some dry clothes. We can’t have our hero catching pneumonia or the like. What would I do without you, Tom?’ She was rewarded by a broad grin, and she reached up to kiss him on the cheek. ‘You are a hero. I’ll never forget what you done today. Eddie would have drowned if you hadn’t gone in after him, and me and Sammy would have been stuck in the middle of the boating pond until kingdom come.’

  Tom fingered a strand of her hair which had escaped from the confines of a bun at the nape of her neck. ‘You are beautiful, Hetty, and I love you.’

  ‘Don’t talk soft.’

  ‘But you do like me, don’t you, Hetty?’

  ‘Of course I do, silly. But I ain’t thinking about love and all that, not for a very long time.’

  ‘I’ll wait, Hetty. I’ll wait until we’re old and grey if that’s what it takes.’

  ‘You won’t live to be old and grey unless you get out of them wet duds and into some dry ones. Come on, let’s go home.’

  On the following Saturday, Mrs Besant’s article appeared in the newspaper, attacking Bryant and May for what she dubbed ‘White Slavery in London’. Mrs Besant and a gentleman, who introduced himself as Mr Herbert Burrows, picketed the gates of the factory, distributing the article to the women. On Thursday, 5 July, the workers downed tools and went on strike.

  ‘How on earth will we manage?’ Jane demanded when Hetty came home on Friday to tell her that there was no work for them today or in the foreseeable future. ‘How will we live without any money coming in?’

  ‘I dunno, Jane, and that’s the truth.’ Hetty slumped down at the bare kitchen table. ‘We can pay old Clench and I’ve got the one and six for the rent, but that leaves us with about threepence for everything else.’

  Jane sank down on a stool, clutching her belly. ‘My baby, my baby. It will die if I don’t eat. We’ll both die.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Hetty said with more conviction than she was feeling. ‘We’ll manage, Jane. Mrs Besant said she would try to raise money for us all. She’s organised a meeting on Mile End Waste for Sunday, where she’ll champion our cause. You won’t die, neither will your baby.’

  Sammy tugged at Hetty’s apron strings. ‘If there’s no work today, Hetty, can we go out and play?’

  Hetty smiled and nodded. ‘Go on then, but keep out of trouble. Don’t get in no fights with them Dye House Lane kids.’ She watched them racing up the area steps, shouting and laughing as if nothing mattered. ‘They’re the lucky ones, Jane. They don’t have to worry.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Jane said with a wobbly smile. ‘My Nat will look after us all. He’ll just have to cough up some of that money he’s been saving for our wedding and the new lodgings. If the worst comes to the worst, we can all live here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hetty said doubtfully. ‘Of course.’ She was about to light the fire so that they could have a cup of tea, when she heard heavy footfalls coming down the steps to the front door. Someone hammered on it, calling out urgently. She looked at Jane and they exchanged worried glances. ‘That doesn’t sound like Clench,’ Hetty said, hurrying to open the door.

  It was not the tallyman who stood outside, but a stranger whose face and clothes were blackened with
soot. He dragged his cap off his head and his knuckles showed white as he clutched it tightly in his hands. ‘Are you Mrs Smith, ma’am?’

  ‘N-no, but my sister is engaged to Nat Smith.’ The bleak expression in his eyes frightened her, and Hetty stepped outside, closing the door behind her. ‘What is it, man? Tell me.’

  ‘It’s bad news, miss. Nat, well – there ain’t no easy way to tell you – I’m afraid there’s been an accident at the gasworks, miss. He’s a goner.’

  Chapter Four

  After her initial outpouring of grief, Jane lapsed into a state of prostration, which worried Hetty far more than weeping or hysteria. Jane took to her bed and lay there, staring at the cracks in the ceiling with unseeing eyes. Nothing seemed to rouse her from her semi-comatose state. She would neither eat nor speak, but if Hetty lifted her head she would sip water from a cup like an obedient child. Then she would simply lie back, mute and unreachable in some silent nightmare of her own. Sammy and Eddie moved about the room like two small ghosts, speaking in whispers and tiptoeing around, as if terrified of awakening Jane and hearing those heart-rending sobs that had sounded more like an animal bellowing in pain than the grief of a human being.

  Although Hetty had not previously known much about Nat’s past, she now learned from Tom that Nat had been abandoned as a baby and raised in an orphanage. He had no known relatives and few friends. Tom made the funeral arrangements, but Hetty decided that Jane was in no fit state to be told, and on the day of the interment in the City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery, she gave Jane just enough laudanum to make her sleep. They had used Nat’s meagre savings to pay the funeral expenses, but Hetty had insisted that this was only right and proper. At first, Tom said that the money ought, by rights, to go to Jane, but Hetty knew that when Jane came to herself she would agree that her beloved Nat should have had a decent Christian burial. She would not want his poor remains to have been flung in a pauper’s grave where they might be taken by body snatchers, and sold to a teaching hospital for the benefit of medical students. If Nat was to go to heaven he needed to be whole, or he would not be admitted through the pearly gates, of that Hetty was certain. She was not an ardent churchgoer; for one thing she had no Sunday best clothes, and she knew that the upper-class worthies would look down on her shabby, threadbare garments, as if she were not fit to walk into God’s house. Ma had always insisted that they attend Sunday school, and Hetty tried to live up to her mother’s strict moral code. She had no doubt that Ma had gone straight to heaven. She had been a good and kind woman, who did not deserve her agonising disease and premature death, but Hetty comforted herself with the belief that Ma was up there now, amongst the angels.

  The funeral was the simplest and cheapest to be had. Nat was buried in a communal grave with only Tom, Hetty, Sammy and Eddie as mourners, and nothing to mark his grave, not even a simple wooden cross. Except for the child that was growing in Jane’s womb, Nathanial Smith might never have existed at all, Hetty thought sadly as the vicar dropped a handful of earth onto the cheap pine coffin. She made him a silent promise that she would do everything in her power to look after his son or daughter, and to make certain that he or she had a better life than their poor, dead father.

  Tom touched her on the arm. ‘Are you all right, Hetty?’

  She swallowed hard and just managed a weak smile. ‘I was thinking of Jane and her baby.’

  He slipped his arm around her waist. ‘I know, girl. Best get on home then.’

  She nodded her head, unable to speak for fear of bursting into tears. Sammy took her hand in silent sympathy. Eddie was also unusually quiet as they left the cemetery and walked slowly back towards Autumn Road, but, after a while, he began to snivel and that made his nose run as if he had a cold. He tugged at Hetty’s arm, pointing mutely to his runny nose.

  ‘Wipe it on your sleeve, Eddie,’ Hetty said gently. ‘One day, we’ll be rich enough to have pocket handkerchiefs, just like the toffs. But until then, ducks, I’m afraid your sleeve will have to do.’

  This made both Eddie and Sammy giggle, and Tom gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Chin up, boys,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I reckon I got enough money to buy you a hot tater if we can find a bloke selling them this early in the season.’

  Hetty’s curiosity was instantly aroused. ‘Is there a season to selling murphies?’

  ‘There certainly is. I had a mate whose patch was outside Old Ford Station. Unfortunately he croaked last year from consumption, but he said he could make twelve to fifteen bob a week if he was lucky.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Hetty stored this bit of information in her head. With the strike still ongoing and no money coming in, she was going to have to do something drastic in the very near future, or they would end up in the workhouse. The mere thought of it sent a shudder down her spine. She was only too aware that the threat of that particular institution was a dark phantom which haunted the lives of the poor, filling their hearts with dread. To enter its grim portals was to abandon hope and endure a living hell.

  ‘What are you thinking, Hetty,’ Tom demanded. ‘I seen that faraway look on your face before. What’s going through your mind?’

  ‘I’ve got to get money from somewhere, Tom, or else we’ll end up on the streets. As it is I ain’t got the rent for this week, or the sixpence for that old bloodsucker, Clench. I suppose I could borrow some more off him, but he’d shove the interest rate up sky high, and I’d never manage to pay him off.’

  ‘Perhaps I can help.’ Tom pushed his cap to the back of his head as he always did when he was thinking. That was one of the little habits that Hetty had noticed about him. Sometimes, if he was really stumped, he would take it right off, scratch his head and then put his cap back in place, as if he had gained inspiration by that simple act.

  She squeezed his arm. ‘Ta, but I know how you’re placed at home. With your poor mum crippled and having lost her little bit of extra income from the match factory, you can’t afford to give us money, and I wouldn’t take it anyway. I got some pride left.’

  ‘You could take it if we was married, Hetty. Just say the word and I’ll marry you tomorrow. You could all move into our place in Dye House Lane. It ain’t a palace, God knows, but we got two rooms. We’d manage somehow.’

  ‘Marry him, Hetty,’ Sammy urged. ‘Then us can have hot baked taters every day, and trips to the park every Sunday.’

  ‘And ham sandwiches,’ Eddie chipped in, wiping his nose on his sleeve yet again. ‘I could eat a ham sandwich right now, as well as a tater.’

  Hetty laughed in spite of herself. ‘Now see what you’ve done, Tom.’

  ‘Is that a yes or a no?’ Tom chuckled, but there was a serious question in his eyes. ‘Will you, Hetty? Will you marry me?’

  ‘No, Tom. Don’t think I ain’t grateful for the offer, and I am very fond of you, so don’t feel bad about it, but it wouldn’t do, it really wouldn’t.’ Hetty quickened her pace. ‘Come on, I must get back to Jane and see if she’s all right. What with the baby and everything, I fear for her, I really do.’

  ‘Why won’t you marry me, Hetty? I know you like me, and I love you.’

  They had reached the end of Dye House Lane and Hetty stopped. She caressed Tom’s cheek with her fingertips. ‘I know you do. And, like I said, I’m very fond of you, but for one thing we got no money, and another thing, I couldn’t lumber you with me family. There’s Jane with a baby on the way, and these scamps, who need proper schooling to say nothing of food and clothes. It just wouldn’t be fair on you.’

  He grasped her hands in his, looking deeply into her eyes. ‘Let me be the judge of that, girl. I just want to take care of you, and if that means taking on your family, then that’s what I will do.’

  Sammy and Eddie shuffled their feet and Tom put his hand in his pocket and brought out two halfpennies. He pressed the coins into their hands. ‘Here, go and buy yourself a murphy from the baked potato man outside the station.’ He took out another halfpenny. ‘And get one for Hetty too. If s
he gets any thinner, she’ll fade away.’ He watched them running off with a smile on his lips. ‘I’d be proud to bring them two up as me own, Hetty. And that’s a fact.’

  ‘Don’t say no more, Tom. It might be fine for a while, but soon you’d be worn down with hard work and the problems of looking after a family that weren’t your own. It would come between us in the end. It can’t be. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is at present. I’ve got to sort this out for meself.’

  She was about to walk away, but he caught her by the hand. ‘I ain’t quite sure, but I think somewhere in there you might have meant that you care for me just a tiny bit.’

  ‘I do, of course I do. And if I was to marry, I can’t think of a better bloke to hitch meself to, but not at this present time. I’m sorry.’ She turned away from him and broke into a run towards Autumn Road.

  To her relief, Hetty found that Jane was still fast asleep. The laudanum had done the trick and rest was what Jane needed most, but Hetty knew she must look to the future. There would be none unless she acted very quickly indeed. She took the tin from the mantelshelf and tipped the coins out onto the tabletop. She had used one of the pennies to purchase a small bottle of laudanum, and that left fourpence three farthings, which would not go very far at all. Up above her, she could hear the Brinkmans moving round their cramped living space, but they seemed less lively than usual. She knew that the strike at the match factory must have affected the family badly. Sonia had worked there for some time and young Anna had started at Bryant and May just days before the strike began. Without their wages the family would have to survive on their father’s meagre income. Hetty sighed. The strike might be justified, but there were many who would go under for supporting it. She was not going to be one of them.

  Jane stirred and Hetty went over to her. ‘I’m here, Jane.’

  ‘I had such a lovely dream. I was walking up the aisle with Nat and I had on a new dress and a bonnet with pink ribbons. I had new shoes too and they didn’t pinch one bit.’ Jane’s face contorted with pain. ‘But it was just a dream. He’s gone, hasn’t he, Hetty? My Nat will never marry me, because he’s . . .’