The Most Precious Thing

by Bradshaw, Rita

  David had still not been taken on at the face and consequently was like a bear with a sore head. Matthew had only recently fully recovered from a cold which had made him fretful and miserable, and which had made Carrie’s quota of fireworks twice as difficult to achieve. And Lillian was living in a constant state of nerves, convinced that each time she saw Isaac, he was going to finish with her - something she called round daily to discuss with Carrie.

  The back lanes were a sea of mud which got traipsed into every house, the tall black chimneys of the factories and mines seemed taller and blacker, and the terraced streets surrounding the shipyards where the great hulls of ships rose above the houses were grey and windswept.

  All this Carrie could have coped with fairly easily if it hadn’t been for the fact that she knew David was very unhappy. Seeing Alec again had revived all the memories of the night of Matthew’s conception, and although she tried not to let it show, she was petrified David would soon insist on the consummation of their marriage and that she wouldn’t be able to bear it. She wanted to be a good wife to him, she told herself endlessly, but the act itself . . . They couldn’t carry on like this much longer, though, that was for sure. She knew he sensed how she shrank from any physical contact and it wasn’t fair on him, not when he was so kind and so good with the baby.

  Things were still as far away from being resolved as ever one morning in early April when David shook her gently awake, his hand on her shoulder. Carrie opened her eyes to find him standing at the side of the bed, fully dressed, and with Matthew wrapped up in his arms.

  ‘What is it?’ She jerked into a sitting position, her hands instinctively reaching out for the child. ‘Is something the matter with Matthew?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter with Matthew.’ He didn’t pass the sleeping baby to her; instead, his voice lighter than it had been in days, he said, ‘Get dressed. I want to take you somewhere and you’ll need to be well wrapped up. It’s the best day we’ve had so far but still nippy.’

  ‘David?’

  ‘Get dressed.’ He wouldn’t answer the question in her voice and turned away as he said, ‘We’ll wait for you outside. Don’t be long, all right?’

  What on earth . . . Carrie glanced at the window. It was still dark outside.

  She dressed rapidly, pulling on her heavy black boots last of all. David had sat all evening a couple of nights ago repairing them for her with some leather, nails and a wax end he’d bought. He had borrowed the iron last and a hammer from a pal he worked with, and had been as pleased as punch when he’d come home and shown her what he was about to do. Her heart gave a funny little lurch now as she thought of it, and the way he’d ignored the holes in the soles of his own boots.

  Outside, Carrie pulled her hat further down about her ears. Nippy, he’d said. It was freezing, but at least the morning was dry. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked as they began to walk.

  ‘Wait and see.’ He looked down at her and grinned. ‘Have a bit of patience, woman.’

  ‘Huh!’ She wriggled her shoulders in pretended irritation, but inwardly she was thankful he seemed so cheerful. She would have turned out of their warm bed and walked miles for that alone.

  Dawn was beginning to break as they neared Penshaw Hill, and now Carrie saw quite a few people were making their way to the top where the monument, modelled on the Temple of Theseus at Athens, had been built by public subscription as a tribute to John Lambton, the Earl of Durham, decades before. ‘David, what are we doing here?’ She tugged at his arm as she spoke but he didn’t pause.

  ‘Wait and see,’ he said again.

  They were passing a tinker’s covered cart, a little tent shaped like a segment of sausage, with a fire hissing at the door and the horse cropping at grass a few yards away, and Carrie’s mouth watered as the smell of cooking bacon wafted towards them. She was hungry, starving, and soon Matthew would be waking for his morning feed. What was David about?

  They reached the top of the hill just as the sun began to rise in the east. Grazing cattle mooed below them and the birds were singing. Carrie wasn’t asking any questions now. There was what she could only describe as a spirit of expectancy about the people gathered around her. Then, slowly, darkness came over all the land, as the moon came between the earth and the sun. The mooing and birdsong ceased, even the bairns who had been running about just minutes before were still and quiet, pressed into their mothers’ skirts. It was breathtaking, uncanny. Carrie found herself clutching David’s arm, her eyes wide and her breath shallow.

  A slight arc appeared around the edge of the sun, then slowly, very slowly, more and more of the sun’s rays hit the earth in a glorious display of the Creator’s power. A child clapped, a woman to the side of them gave a deep sigh, and then everything and everyone came to life again.

  It was a rebirth. Carrie gazed about her, her heart so full she didn’t know how to contain the feeling welling up inside her. And she would have missed it but for David.

  ‘A total eclipse of the sun.’ His voice was very soft beside her. ‘I thought you’d like to see it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  It was an inadequate response considering how it had affected her, but something in her face must have satisfied him because his smile was very sweet as he said, ‘You’re welcome, love.’

  Love. He had never voiced the endearment before but it had slipped out as naturally as if he often thought it.

  Matthew began to wake up as they walked down the hill. He struggled out of his blankets and put both hands on David’s shoulder, gazing at the trees and birds and cows. There were primroses and dog violets starring the grass here and there, and when David bent down with the baby and pointed to a delicate white daisy type flower saying, ‘That’s greater stitchwort, Matthew, or Stellaria holostea if you want the proper name,’ Carrie’s mouth dropped open.

  He saw her expression and grinned at her. ‘Surprised? Not quite the ignoramus you thought you were married to?’

  ‘I didn’t think you were an ignoramus,’ she protested vehemently, colour flooding her cheeks.

  ‘Good.’ He stood looking at her for a moment before he said, ‘You get more beautiful every day, lass.’ And then immediately changed the subject. ‘It used to be an interest of mine when I was a lad, flowers and birds and so on.’ His offhand voice told her he was slightly embarrassed about the disclosure. ‘I used to get books out of the library and come up here with them, seeing what I could find. Course, I don’t suppose I always get the pronunciation right.’

  ‘I bet you do.’ She stared at him, wondering what it cost him each day to leave this world of light and colour and go under the ground into blackness and filth.

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t matter one way or the other, does it? Don’t alter the beauty of ’em if you don’t say it right.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ She hesitated, and then said quietly, ‘Would you teach me? When we’ve time, I mean.’

  He was standing very still now, his eyes holding hers and seeming to draw her over the space between them, and it was a full ten seconds before he said, ‘Aye, I’ll teach you, lass.’

  David was on the late shift that day. Once Matthew had had his last feed and was tucked up and fast asleep in the crib Ned had made from a few orange boxes, Carrie made several journeys to the tap in the yard. After heating the water on the range she filled the tin bath half full, then stripped off her clothes and sat down in the warm water. She sat there for some time, thinking about what she was going to do, and then as panic began to take over she concentrated on the task in hand, washing herself all over with the hard blue-veined soap which never seemed to lather. Once she was squeaky clean she began to wash her hair, persevering until the soap gave in and there was foam beneath her fingers.

  When she was dry again, she spent some time rubbing her hair through her fingers, sitting in front of the glowing range wrapped in a blanket, wearing just her drawers and shift, her head bent towards the heat. After brushing the silky waves exactly
one hundred times, a habit from childhood, she left it loose about her face while she pulled on the rest of her clothes and emptied the now cold bath, bucket by bucketful.

  Once that was accomplished, she brought in more water for the shallow bath David had each night on returning home from the colliery. When the water was heated and the bath was ready, Carrie stood looking at it for a moment or two.

  What would folk say if they knew she’d been married for twelve months and had never once seen her husband naked? She always made sure David’s bath was ready when he walked in the door, but she would avert her eyes while he undressed and then gather up his work clothes and take them through to the backyard. She made sure she stayed outside beating the dust and grime out of them until he was dressed in his other pair of working trousers and shirt which they’d got out of pawn as soon as he was back in work. Well, that was going to change tonight. Her heart began to jump and race, and she shut her eyes tightly for a second.

  If this was a new start, a rebirth, it had to begin as it was going to continue, and her mam had always washed her da’s back for him.

  There was a pan of hodgepodge simmering on the hob, and she’d baked some stottie cake earlier to mop up the gravy with. The bread and butter pudding would be ready as they finished that. She nodded to herself, glancing round the room once again and smiling despite her nerves as Matthew made a little snuffling sound in his sleep.

  And then she heard the front door open and close, and knew he was here.

  ‘All right, lass?’ David’s voice was quizzical and Carrie belatedly realised she was standing to attention next to the tin bath as though she was on sentry duty.

  ‘Aye, yes.’ Her voice was a little high and she coughed, clearing her throat before she said, ‘Your bath’s ready.’

  ‘Aye.’ His eyes narrowed for a moment, and he put his bait tin on the little table next to the tin of freshly made fireworks before he said, ‘Somethin’ smells good.’

  ‘It’s hodgepodge.’ She knew the rich stew made with mutton, turnips, carrots, peas, onions, broad beans, lettuce and barley was David’s favourite. ‘And there’s bread and butter pudding for afters.’

  His eyebrows rose. ‘It’s not me birthday, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought for a minute we were celebrating something.’

  Oh, if only he knew! Would he think she was forward, brazen, if she followed through with her plan? She stared at him, desperately conscious of the height and breadth of him and the overall maleness of the strong compact body in front of her. Well, she couldn’t help it if he did. It was now or never, she would never be able to work up the courage again, which had first reared its head out on Penshaw Hill.

  She was aware he was standing as though slightly nonplussed, and following the normal procedure she now turned away, saying, ‘I’ll take your clothes through to the yard when you’re ready.’

  She waited until he had sat down in the bath before she turned round, and the water was still swishing when she croaked - momentarily poleaxed by the broad muscled shoulders and lean back on view - ‘Would you like me to wash your back?’

  He had been rubbing his legs with the soap before she spoke, but now he became absolutely still. All the ripples in the water died before he said, his voice sounding perfectly normal, ‘Aye, thanks, lass,’ and he stretched out the hand holding the soap.

  She performed the task almost mechanically, one half of her brain registering the small, blue-black indentations which the coal stamped on those who had the temerity to plunder it, and the other concentrating on thinking of nothing at all. And then she had finished. She handed him the soap and gathered up his pit clothes. ‘I won’t be long,’ she said and bolted for the door.

  He was fully dressed when she re-entered the room, and she could only admire his aplomb when he said, ‘I’ve cleared the table and the tea’s mashing, all right? You dish up and I’ll get rid of the bath water.’

  Her taut body relaxed a little as she went about the normal everyday task of lading out the stew and pouring the tea, cutting shives of stottie cake and putting them on a plate in the middle of the small table. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed. It had been a bone of contention between them when in the early days she had insisted that he have the armchair drawn close to the table and she sit on the bed for their evening meal. It was only when she had pointed out that he was taller and bigger than she was and much more suited to the armchair that he agreed to use it.

  When the meal was over and the dishes had been cleared away, she laid out the papers, pudding basin, paintbrush and blue touchpapers ready for morning. She watched David extinguish the oil lamp. When the room was dark she knew he would begin undressing, laying his clothes on the back of the armchair by feeling his way. He would don his nightshirt, and she her nightdress, and then they would climb into bed.

  And there the pattern would be broken. She swallowed. If she could bring herself to do this. She pressed her lips tightly together, closed her eyes and bowed her head. She was not going to back out now. She was not. David was not like Alec. They might be brothers but they couldn’t be more different.

  A dart of memory, carrying the pain her first introduction to sex had brought with it, caused her to tense. It wouldn’t be the same with David, it wouldn’t.

  She finished undressing, pulled on her nightdress and slipped under the covers a second before she heard him walk across the room and then climb in beside her. Again she repeated to herself, this was David. David. It would be different.

  It was different. It was different from the first moment she stretched out a trembling hand and touched him, murmuring, ‘David . . .’ and then found she just didn’t have the words to say anything more.

  But she didn’t need to. He turned towards her, slowly and firmly put his arms about her and drew her into him, stroking her hair for long minutes until she relaxed against him.

  She didn’t know quite what she had expected, she admitted to herself afterwards in the moments before she went to sleep in his arms, but it hadn’t been his tenderness and comfort, the way he had brought forth from her feelings she had never dreamed she was capable of. In fact, she didn’t know if it was right and proper to feel all that she had, for her body to be so . . . She couldn’t find a word for the pleasure she had experienced. And if she thought about some of the things he had done in the time before he had actually taken her, she would never be able to look him in the face again.

  But it had been nice. The word mocked her with its prim overtones, causing her to blush in the darkness. It had been very, very nice.

  Part 3

  An Uneasy Peace 1936

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face, Da. Can’t you see that? You have to play the owners and the government at their own game.’

  ‘Play ’em at their own game be damned!’ Ned Sutton glared at Walter before taking out his all too apparent bad temper on a hapless potato beneath his garden fork. ‘They’ve got us by the short an’ curlies. They put us on short time an’ then say we can’t claim benefit unless there’s been three consecutive days without employment, so what’s the bettin’ that on the third day we’re given a day’s work? The owners are in with the government, you know that as well as I do. An’ them cocky little upstarts from the means test take the biscuit. They were round at poor old Amos’s yesterday sayin’ him an’ his wife had to sell the clock, pillow cases an’ sheets, everythin’ that wasn’t nailed down, afore he’d get a penny. I’d like ten minutes in a dark alley with one of them, I tell you straight.’

  ‘Aye, well, it’s rough on Amos, I know that, but it don’t help no one you flying off the handle with the deputy this morning when he wouldn’t say you were on for tomorrow. There’s not much chance you’ll even be given the odd day after the mouthful you came out with.’

  ‘I’ve only had two days’ work in the last six.’

  ‘And if you don’t get any more?’

 
‘Aye, well, at least I’ll know where I stand then, won’t I?’

  ‘In the dole queue, man. That’s where you’ll be standing.’

  ‘If you’re tryin’ to be funny, you’ll be off home with a split lip, m’lad, big as you are.’

  ‘All right, that’s enough, the pair of you.’ David rose from where he had been perched on an orange box outside the door of the ramshackle hut on his father’s square of allotment. Or, to be more precise, Amos Proudfoot’s allotment, his father’s old friend who in the last few years had become too debilitated with the miners’ curse of pneumoconiosis to do more than sit in a chair and try to breathe.

  In return for a few fresh vegetables, Amos had turned the allotment over to Ned six years ago, and it was David’s private opinion that this act had saved his father’s sanity. It wasn’t just being able to work in the fresh air on a plot of ground that to all intents and purposes Ned could call his own that had been such a lifesaver, or being able to supplement the meagre diet they were forced to live on with fresh vegetables and fruit. It was more the fact that Ned could escape the house in James Armitage Street - or, to be blunt, the woman within - and come up here. Ned would sit for hours in the sunshine in the summer and autumn, and in the winter and spring he would huddle in front of a small fire enclosed in an ancient rusting brazier. Even when it was raining cats and dogs or snowing a blizzard, his father would find an excuse to be up here, sitting in the doubtful comfort of the hut made of corrugated iron, sacking swathed round him for warmth and the door propped open so he could survey his patch of land.