by Maggie Hope
About the time that Cath was sitting in the Bridge Hotel with Jack, Annie was standing in the hall of Half Hidden Cottage staring fearfully up the stairs. Was there someone up there? She was sure she had heard a noise as she crossed over from the sitting room to the kitchen. Cath always said it was nothing, just the old timbers of the house settling, but Annie wasn’t sure. Anyway, she thought, she wasn’t going to go upstairs and look. Suppose it was a ghost?
She looked through the open door leading to the kitchen. The window was bigger in there but it had good strong curtains with a blackout lining left over from the war years and if she closed them, no one could look in and see that she was on her own.
Why didn’t Cath come home? Where was Mam? The questions ran round and round in her mind and her eyes filled with the hated tears. Mam thought she was a crybaby because she cried so easily but she couldn’t help it. No matter how hard she tried to control them, the tears still came and at the least thing they overflowed. Mam had no patience with her, and sometimes Cath didn’t have much.
The sun was sinking; shadows were creeping in from the corners. The best thing to do was go, she thought, though Mam would be annoyed with her. She would leave a note, she thought. Quickly she tore a piece of paper from her exercise book and wrote on it, ‘Gone to Dad’s house. Annie.’ She put it on the hall table then took her coat from the hook. There was a bus at half-six; if she ran she could catch it.
Annie rushed out of the house, banging the door closed behind her, and ran down the drive to the road. The tears came in earnest when she saw the bus disappearing towards Eden Hope.
‘Wait for me!’ she shouted after it and waved her arms, but the bus only gathered speed and went on its way. Oh, where was Cath? Desperately she caught hold of her fear. There was nothing, nothing at all to be frightened of, hadn’t Cath always said so? She would go down the path through the woods, it was a short cut and she had walked it many a time with her sister, hadn’t she?
She hurried along the road to the gap where a track led through a field and joined the footpath going to the colliery at Eden Hope. It would be properly dark by the time she got to the bottom of the path but the lights of the colliery would be on, wouldn’t they? If she got to the colliery it was easy to get from there to her dad’s house on the new site.
Once she was in the woods it was darker because the trees grew tall on either side and there was a lot of undergrowth. Some of it was rank and damp, left over from last year, and it smelled of mould. It was cold too; Annie shivered and hastened her pace.
She was well into the woods when she realised someone was following her. She looked back and saw it was Ronnie Robson. He was waving and shouting something she couldn’t understand.
‘Go away!’ she called and began to run, stumbling and picking herself up. Then round a bend she saw a grassy bit to the side. It was trodden down and there were wet patches but she thought if she got off the main footpath and hid in the bushes, Ronnie would go past her and she would be all right if she just waited until he had gone.
He didn’t go on though; he turned off after her and she was terror-stricken as he crashed about, stumbling and slipping on the mud. She crouched down behind a gorse bush, pressing into it and it prickled and scratched at her face and hands as though it was pushing her off. But Ronnie was past her; she could smell the male smell of him lingering behind him.
He cried out as he fell heavily; she heard the slurp of him slipping and the squishy sound as his bulk hit the mud. He cried out and this time she heard him plainly: ‘Gran! Gran!’
Annie stood up and looked down the bankside. Ronnie was right at the bottom in the little stream that ran there; he was wailing now. She didn’t wait to see if he was badly hurt, she just ran. Back up the bank to the footpath and along it and down towards the lights of Eden Hope Colliery, shining in the distance. She was almost through the trees and then it was an easy walk from there to the new houses. She stopped running, for she was panting for breath and had a stitch in her side. She bent over, taking great breaths of air, the pain tearing through her chest before slowly subsiding.
Her vision cleared and she realised there was someone before her; she could see his feet astride the narrrow path. Slowly she straightened and looked him in the face.
‘Come away, Mam, come away, leave the lad alone,’ said Cath, tugging at her mother’s jacket. Sadie pushed her violently away.
‘Come away? I most certainly will not, my girl, why should I? It’s my bairn that’s gone, and God only knows what’s happened to her. I want the truth out of him, the loony. I want the whole bloody truth and I want my bairn back.’
‘This isn’t going to help though, Mam,’ said Cath, rubbing her shoulder where Sadie had pushed her. Turning, she saw her father pushing his way through the crowd to them. ‘Dad, please, tell her, we have to go home. Annie might be there and we don’t know that Ronnie has done anything to her, do we?’
Alf was himself startled that things had got so out of hand. He had been carried along with the others; it was a kind of madness that had seized them. But still, if the girl was all right, where the hell was she? And Ronnie was in there somewhere, wasn’t he? Ronnie knew what had happened and he was going to tell them if he, Alf Raine, had to beat it out of him.
‘I don’t know, Cath, he’s done something to our Annie, he must have done. Everybody says so. We have to find out. Don’t you care what has happened to your little sister? If he’s done nowt, why then, she’ll be all right, won’t she? Who else could have done it but the loony?’
‘Move along there! Get away to your homes, you scum, or I’ll have the lot of you!’
A mounted policeman was urging his horse through the crowd to stand before the main door of the hospital and he was thunderously angry. ‘Ignorant bloody pitmen!’ he said not quite under his breath and those closest to him heard. They surged forward again and he held up his baton ready to brain the first one of them to touch either his horse or him. Their attention was diverted as a curtain was pulled aside for only a minute but it was enough, for the crowd had seen it and they had seen who was inside.
‘It’s him! Look, it’s him, it’s Ronnie Robson, the dirty sod,’ a man shouted. He was still black from the pit and his eyes shone bright with excitement. They rushed forward and flung themselves at the window and there was the ominous sound of breaking glass. Inside, people were screaming.
Next day, the pit village of Eden Hope was very quiet and Winton Colliery subdued. There were few people on the streets except for those who ventured out to buy a newspaper. Most people had the Northern Echo delivered to the door but the whole stock of national newspapers was sold out at Hetherington’s the newsagents on the corner of Main Street. It wasn’t often that the nationals took much notice of what happened in the mining villages or the town either, come to that. Unless there was a disaster in one of the pits, that is.
‘Aye well, I’d rather we hadn’t been in the papers over something like what happened yesterday,’ said Betty Lowe. ‘I don’t know what possessed you lot but I think it must have been the devil, I do indeed.’
Jack didn’t reply. He simply picked up his knife and fork and began eating the dinner she had set sharply down in front of him.
He had a copy of the Daily Herald beside his plate and he kept glancing at it and doing his best to ignore his wife. For the truth was, he was embarrassed and ashamed by what had happened the day before. Some of his marras had broken into a hospital, for pity’s sake! They must have been mad. Indeed, yes, indeed they had been mad, him and Alf an’ all the rest. They had even laid hands on a patient. Ronnie Robson was in a chair with his foot up on a stool and the plaster of Paris was still wet on his leg. He was whimpering and shrinking back into the chair when two men, who were not from Eden Hope but South Church, had taken hold of him and dragged him out. Jack could hear him now; he had heard it every time he fell into an exhausted sleep.
‘Gran,’ Ronnie had cried, ‘Gran, I didn’t do anything!’
His cry was almost drowned out by the shout from outside. The police had arrived in force.
There was the devil to pay. Alf and half a dozen others, the ones the police had said were the ringleaders, were in the lock-up on Fore Bondgate and due to go before the magistrates the morn. In fact, by the time the police had got there, most of the crowd had had wind of their coming and had disappeared like snow off an oven top. All those left had been hauled down to the police station and had been given times when they were to be summoned before the magistrates. His turn was Friday morning, ten o’clock, and it meant he had to take a shift off work and explain that to the gaffer an’ all. The gaffers were all the same, even though the pits had just been nationalised. You couldn’t tell them nowt. His thoughts were interrupted by his wife.
‘I don’t know why you’re sitting there in a sulk,’ she said tartly.
‘I’m not sulking.’
‘Well, I don’t know what you’re doing ’cause you’re not listening to me,’ she said. ‘That poor old Mrs Robson—’
Jack exploded to his feet. ‘Never mind her, what about the little lass? Where is she, can you tell me that?’
‘No, I cannot. But that was no reason to make a riot, this isn’t the Wild West,’ said Betty, who spent every Friday night at the picture house over the Working Men’s Club in Eldon Lane and knew what she was talking about. ‘This is England, this is, and we’re nowt if we’re not law-abiding.’
‘I’m off,’ said Jack. ‘We have to find little Annie, and with Alf in the lock-up I have to do all I can.’
‘Well, watch what you’re doing, man,’ said Betty.
Jack went out and strode up to the colliery yard. He still had an hour or two before he had to go on shift and he felt in need of fresh air. There was a breeze laden with the smell of coal and tainted with sulphur but he didn’t notice it, having known it all his life.
In his mind’s eye he could see the headlines in the papers. MINERS RUN RIOT OVER MISSING CHILD. And worse, MENTALLY HANDICAPPED BOY ATTACKED IN HOSPITAL. Jack shook his head to try to get rid of the images. He walked along the wagon way past the old workings towards Winton then turned back and cut through the woods towards Half Hidden Cottage.
Cath had drunk so many cups of tea her stomach felt sour and empty but she couldn’t eat anything. She had spent two hours in the police station and at the magistrates’ court with her mother, but the magistrate had allowed them to go home.
‘You have a missing child and are worried about her, I can understand that,’ the magistrate had said. ‘So I am allowing you to go home, on condition you don’t try to speak to or get in touch with Ronald Robson or his family. Do you understand that?’
‘We do, sir,’ said Cath. She was scarlet with embarrassment and shame and her voice was very low so that the magistrate asked her to repeat it.
‘We understand, sir,’ said Cath, too loudly this time, so that he looked at her over his spectacles.
‘It’s not fair, though,’ said Sadie. Her face was red too, but with anger. ‘What about my bairn? That daftie has done something—’
‘That’s enough!’ the magistrate roared. ‘Another word and I will put you in the cells, missing child or not.’
Cath had taken her mother’s arm and pulled her from the court into Fore Bondgate.
‘Let go of me,’ Sadie said grimly. ‘I’m going to ring Henry and tell him to come and pick us up. I have to look for Annie myself since no one else is bothering.’
Cath gasped. All her mam had thought about before now was getting to Ronnie. But there was no point in remonstrating with her. For herself, Cath had a deep dread sitting on her chest like a heavy weight. Something awful must have happened to Annie and it was all her fault. She should have been home and instead she was enjoying herself in that hotel with Jack Vaughan, who had then shown how he despised and hated her family only too clearly when he found out exactly who she was.
Henry had not come to pick them up in Auckland in spite of Sadie’s telephone call. Cath didn’t know what he had said to her mother but she had come out of the telephone box with a grim expression.
‘Howay,’ Sadie said. ‘We’ll get the bus. I’m dependent on nobody, me.’
Annie had been missing two nights now. Where was she? The question ran round and round in Cath’s tired brain. They were too far from the shops to buy a newspaper. Cath decided to walk up to the Hall to see if she could have a look round the outbuildings. If she approached it from the back perhaps it wouldn’t matter if Joseph saw her, so long as she avoided Henry and Jack. Joseph would tell her if there was anything in the newspaper too.
Her mother was still in bed. ‘I haven’t slept a wink all night, thinking of our Annie,’ she said. I’m worried out of my mind, I am, worried out of my mind. Fetch us a cup of tea, will you?’
So Cath had made the tea and taken a cup up to her mother and then slipped out of the house. As she did so she could hear her mother’s soft snoring from upstairs.
Getting close to the Hall, she saw a police car standing on the drive. She hid behind a tree as the front door of the house opened and two men came out and stood talking at the bottom of the imposing flight of steps. One was Henry Vaughan and the other looked like Sergeant Duffy. There were two other policemen in the car.
Of course, the police would have searched the surrounding buildings of the Hall, she thought. But still she would look for herself, satisfy herself. There were some old farm buildings with odd nooks and crannies. Cath began to circle round the Hall, making for the back.
She was in a clump of rhododendron bushes fairly close to the police car when she heard Henry’s voice clearly.
‘I didn’t know the family had something of a reputation when I let them have the cottage, Sergeant,’ he was saying, his voice booming loudly. ‘I would never have chanced it if I had. Up here we just don’t hear anything from the pit villages, you know. We were troubled with the miners poaching during the war but there is less of that now. Princely wages they get, or so I hear. After nationalisation, that is.’
The sergeant murmured something Cath couldn’t catch and turned towards the car.
‘Well, you’ve done your duty and looked for the child,’ said Henry. ‘Though as I said, she’s not so much of a child, is she? Nearly eleven, isn’t it? If the lad did do anything she probably led him on. Those miners’ girls grow up quickly, I’ve noticed. Well, goodbye, Sergeant. Let me know if you find anything.’
Cath thought of Annie, little Annie who was frightened of her own shadow … She had to restrain herself from jumping up and yelling at Mr high-and-mighty Vaughan. Instead, she clenched her teeth and continued to skirt round the Hall to the back and the stables and, behind them, the other outbuildings. Not that she expected to find anything, but she had to see for herself that Annie wasn’t and hadn’t been there.
The sound of the police car going back down the drive faded into the distance.
Chapter Sixteen
Cath sat down on a large stone that had fallen from a drystone wall leading out and up the hill behind the older outhouses. She was fairly well hidden from the house and the stables, for there was an old earth closet on one side and some sort of grain store on the other.
She stared at the door of the closet. It had an ancient brass sneck latch, which was green with verdigris and slightly bent so the door didn’t close properly, though there was an old padlock hanging open on the handle. Inside there were two wooden seats over the hole, one adult size and one for a child. There was even a string hanging on a nail on the wall and a couple of small pieces of newspaper on the string, where people had pulled off squares. The old people in the rows called this sort of closet a netty; tiredly, she wondered why. When she had seen it she had thought Annie might have sheltered there if she couldn’t find her way home. But there were no signs that she had.
Cath was light-headed and her stomach was empty too. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and very little then. Her head drooped until she h
eard a sound close by. She jerked up and hurried inside the closet, closing the door until whoever it was went by. Light came in a beam through the heart-shaped hole cut in the door and she put an eye to it. She jumped as a small dog stuck his nose through the opening at the bottom of the door and barked in excitement.
‘Come away from there, Tuppence!’
It was Jack, walking up by the hay barn and coming towards where she was. Cath held her breath. The last person she wanted to meet now was Jack. His contemptuous words to her rang again in her ears and she just didn’t feel up to it, oh no, she couldn’t face him, she really couldn’t.
‘Tuppence! Come away,’ Jack said again and the dog withdrew its nose. But it had been enough for Jack to stop. He pushed against the door and she moved behind it, hugging the wall. He lifted the sneck and glanced in and she held her breath. After a moment he closed the door and whistled for the dog. Cath breathed a sigh of relief. She waited for a few minutes then cautiously opened the door, stepped out and peered round the corner of the netty. There was no sign of Jack, thank goodness. She walked on towards another shed a few yards away. Only he was lying in wait for her at the back of the netty, holding the terrier in his arms to keep it quiet. He stepped out and faced her.
‘Oh! You’re here,’ she said.
‘I am, yes. But then, this is our land. What are you doing here?’ He spoke quietly enough, his tone neutral, but his eyes were as cold as the North Sea.
Cath lifted her chin. ‘I am looking for my little sister,’ she said.
‘You won’t find her here. These outbuildings have been searched by my men and the police.’
‘I know, but I thought I might see something, anything that might tell me she had been here.’
‘There is nothing. Go home, she’s not here. No doubt she will turn up when she’s ready. She’ll be like the rest of you, off with someone—’
‘She’s only ten! How dare you say that!’
He had the grace to look a little ashamed. ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t have but you make me angry. Now do as I say and get off this land.’
