A Sovereign for a Song

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘Aye, that bugger makes his own luck, but his luck’ll run out the day he tampers with anybody belonging to me.’

  ‘If it’s Ginny’s money, she should keep it,’ said Emma, two bright spots of red in her cheeks as she contradicted her father for the first time in her life. ‘Nobody else has any right to it.’

  ‘You’ve certainly no right to it, and you won’t be getting any of it either, Miss Schoolteacher. You’ve a right to a bit back out of your earnings at the Cock, and that’s all, so settle your mind to it. And you,’ he turned again to Ginny, ‘don’t bother to take your coat off. Get your backside out of that door. We’re going to have a walk up to the manager’s house, to give your fancy man his money back.’

  Ginny stood her ground, chin tilted in defiance.

  ‘Open that door, Mary Ann,’ her father commanded. He took Ginny by the shoulders and turned her round bodily. A moment later his boot made contact with the small of her back, propelling her through the door and making her feel as if she’d been kicked by a mule.

  Almost weeping with anger and humiliation, she stumbled along, with an occasional powerful shove from him to keep her moving. He finally strode up to the manager’s front door and banged hard enough to knock the house down. When the manager opened the door, her mortification was complete.

  ‘I’ve something to say to your brother-in-law, Mr Vine. I want to see him, man to man, like.’

  Without a word, the manager retreated into the house. After what seemed like an eternity Charlie appeared in the doorway. Ginny heard his sister call, ‘What’s the matter, Charlie? What is it?’

  ‘Nothing that concerns you, Helen.’ He stepped out of the house and shut the door.

  ‘Well?’ His tone was curt, dismissive, but Ginny saw naked fear on his face when her father took hold of him by the lapels and lifted him off his feet. With his eyes about three inches from Charlie’s he spoke softly, but his words were clear in the stillness of the night.

  ‘I don’t know how you carry on in London, and I don’t ask, but I’ve heard it’s a loose sort of place, full of bawdy houses and bawdy women, where everything’s free and easy. That’s London, but this is Annsdale. There’s something you ought to know about Annsdale, and it’s this: there’s nothing free and easy here. The last feller that tampered with a lass he’d no intention of marrying got a good going over with a couple of pickaxe handles, and he’s never been the same since. He’s got a broken nose and a few teeth missing, and he’s scared to go out, like. That’s Annsdale. I don’t want that to happen to you, so I’ll tell you this: the best thing you can do while you’re here is keep yourself to yourself.’ He released Charlie and reached into his pocket. ‘Now this is yours. It’s not hers and she doesn’t want it.’ He turned to Ginny for confirmation. ‘You don’t want it, do you?’

  After a moment or two she murmured a sullen, ‘No.’

  ‘Well, there yer are then, you’d better hev it back,’ said her father, taking Charlie’s soft hand and cramming the money into it, then holding it for a moment or two between his own calloused, sinewy ones with a grip like a vice. Charlie winced.

  ‘So now she owes you nothing, does she?’

  ‘No.’ Charlie’s voice was tremulous; the habitual mocking smile was wiped off his lips, the look of amusement in his eyes displaced by one of stark fear. He seemed completely unnerved, and Ginny looked on him with something approaching contempt. He should have stood up to her father, upheld her claim to keep the money that he had said was hers. He didn’t have to live with her father. He had all the advantages over her father that money and influence could give, and yet he cowered before him. Even sixteen-year-old Jimmy Hood who had to labour down the pit for him and the other hewers had put up a better show.

  ‘So that’s it. You’ve got three choices. You can leave her alone, or I’ll be your father-in-law, or – well, better not talk about the last choice.’

  They turned and left, Ginny walking swiftly along in front, needing no encouragement to move on the return journey.

  ‘That bugger has no mence,’ her father called after her with a derisory laugh, ‘he wants his mammy with him. What any lass can see in that, I don’t know, it’s not a man. Don’t you bring any carroty-haired chips off that block to my door. I’ll drop ’em in a bucket if you do.’

  She lay awake for hours that night. She’d started the day rich, happy and full of hope, and ended it poor and disillusioned, with the knowledge of John’s safety her only consolation; and he’d done nothing more exciting than look at miles of ocean. Charlie, who she had thought so full of self-command and charm yesterday, today had revealed himself less of a man than wiry little Jimmy Hood. Charlie was lucky, certainly, but what else? Her father might come home filthy and spit in the fire, but at least he was a man. He had made it clear that he despised Charlie, and the more she thought of it, the more she saw Charlie through her father’s eyes.

  The following day at the manager’s house, Charlie was nowhere to be seen, but the hint of mocking amusement usually evident on his features seemed to have transferred itself to the manager’s face. He gave Ginny a sly satisfied smile before he left for work. Helen Vine’s manner towards her was colder and more distant than ever. At eleven o’clock she ordered the cook to take Charlie’s breakfast up to his room.

  ‘And you, Ginny, I’ll have a private word with you in the study.’

  Ginny followed her into the manager’s book-lined, mahogany-and-plush-furnished retreat where Helen turned on her angrily.

  ‘You’ve caused a good deal of trouble here, and you probably hope to cause more. Step out of your class and set your cap at my brother? How dare you? You think yourself so indispensable that you can’t be sacked, but I’ll show you. I’ll send to Sweden for a living-in girl if there’s any more of it, and you’ll be finished here and for miles around. So, when you’ve scrubbed the steps and cleaned out the bins, you can walk down to the station and get a first-class ticket for the London train tomorrow morning. Mr Parkinson will be going away for a while.’

  Chapter 10

  Ginny saw her mother cower back and raise her arms, defending herself from the hammer blows he began to land on her head and shoulders. He started dancing round her, looking for gaps in her defence and jabbing and punching hard when any appeared.

  ‘You’re no match for me, missus. You’ll never make a champion,’ he jeered. ‘Go on, have a go. See if you can land a one, then.’

  Eyes full of fear, her mother begged, ‘Leave me alone, Arthur. Leave me alone.’ She crumpled on to the floor and crouched there, shoulders hunched, protecting her face with her hands.

  Her father’s pit boots stood on a newspaper on the kitchen table, greased and ready for his shift, the bait tin and filled water bottle beside them. For a moment they were eclipsed by the haze of red that swam before Ginny’s eyes. She snatched up the bottle and hurled it at his head with all her strength.

  ‘Leave her alone, you bad old bugger!’

  He reeled back as it hit him full in the eye. Then he turned towards Ginny, for a long moment with blank incomprehension on his face. She lifted one of his boots and sent it after the bottle with all the force she could muster. It caught him on the mouth.

  ‘When I catch hold of you, I’ll kill you,’ he roared.

  ‘Aye, why, you’ll have to catch us first,’ she shouted, retreating hastily into the front room and out of the door. She slammed it shut and was down the path and out of the gate before it opened again. Seeing him appear in the doorway stuffing his unbuttoned shirt into his trousers before pulling his braces up, she stooped to fill her apron with a few large stones before chasing on, loose black hair flying behind her. Like an enraged bull he charged after her in stockinged feet. Bracing himself with a hand on the gatepost he vaulted it cleanly and might have caught her, but the stony road made him step more gingerly while Ginny flew on until she had put half the length of the street between them. Enid Jackson looked up from where she knelt donkey stoning her
doorstep and heaved herself to her feet.

  ‘You rotten old bugger!’ Ginny let fly with a stone that found its mark on her father’s forehead.

  Bolder women came to their doors, openly curious to see what the commotion was. The more timid peeped through windows.

  ‘That’s right, pelt the bugger, Ginny!’ shouted one impudent wife, often treated to a hiding herself and hugely enjoying seeing the tables turned.

  ‘Aye, give him what for, lass,’ another encouraged, starting to laugh as Ginny flew on, turning now and then to lob another stone at her father, who, half-dressed and shoeless, began to hobble painfully and to slow, before stopping altogether.

  ‘Wait ’til I get hold of you – I’ll bloody murder you!’ he shouted after her.

  Ginny, now laughing and exhilarated and much heartened by the cheering, laughing women, threw another couple of stones from her safe distance. They whistled past his ears, the narrowest of misses.

  ‘You’ve had your bit fun – and you’ve given ’em all something to laugh about, but you’ll have to come home sometime, and then I’ll give you something to laugh at. You’ll know about it then. I’ll make you wish you’d never been born,’ he vowed, and turned for home, jeered at and laughed to scorn by some of the women. As he put his hand on the gatepost, he was seized by a paroxysm of coughing which bent him double, and he leaned on the gate to splutter and spit, before opening it and striding determinedly down the garden path without another glance in Ginny’s direction.

  She watched Mam Smith down the street, then set the two flat irons on the trivets to heat.

  ‘Your dad hit your mammy, didn’t he, Ginny?’

  She looked down at Martin’s young son, taken aback. ‘Well aye, he did, Philip.’

  ‘He’th not going to hit Gran, ith he?’

  ‘No, course he’s not.’

  ‘He’th going to hit you, though, ithn’t he?’

  ‘That he’s not. Not if I can help it. See that little nightshirt of yours lying on top of the basket, Philip? Pass it here and I’ll get the creases out for you. Make you look a bonny lad when you’re scrubbed and ready for bed.’

  He handed her the shirt and she looked into a pair of thoughtful blue eyes, wondering at his having taken so much in while seeming to notice nothing.

  ‘Are you going to thtop here, Ginny?’

  She flattened the nightshirt carefully, before reaching for the iron. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, Philip,’ she answered slowly. ‘I really don’t know.’

  She paused, deep in thought for a moment or two, then tore into the ironing, looking up now and then to see Philip migrating between the clippy mat, where he was playing with his train, and the front window, where he watched for his grandma.

  ‘She’th a long time, Ginny.’

  He no sooner had the words out than Mam Smith burst through the front door, exclaiming with relief at reaching her own safe home.

  ‘My God, Ginny, I feel just like Daniel must have done when he got out of the lion’s den – surprised to be in one piece.’ She sat down suddenly without pausing to take her coat off.

  Ginny reached for the old caddy, ornamented with a picture of a youthful Queen Victoria, and put the leaves in the warmed teapot before drenching them with scalding water and stirring vigorously to speed up the infusion. She poured two cups and handed one to Mam Smith, whose hand shook as she took it. Philip sat on the clippy mat between them, concentrating on his toy, running it slowly backwards and forwards over the bright shredded rags.

  “Lucky for her I’ve half the pit in my lungs and no bloody shoes on, or she wouldn’t see tomorrow morning,’ is what he said to Enid before he went in the house. We went upstairs to watch for him through her back bedroom window, and we saw your mam give him a kiss before he set off to work.

  ‘When he was well out of the way, I went into your mam’s. ‘What are you thinking about, Mary Ann, kissing a man who’s done that to your face?’ I said. ‘You know what it is,’ she says, ‘settle your differences before they go down. They sometimes don’t come back again and I wouldn’t want it on my conscience.’ I knew what she meant, but if you saw the mess he’s made of her face!

  ‘She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She was crying over the good hiding, and the trouble you’ve got coming, but then a smile would keep breaking out at the thought of him coming in coughing and wheezing after letting a slip of a lass get the best of him, and all the women laughing. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her say a word against him,’ Mam Smith observed, pausing to take a long drink.

  ‘Aye, and it’s the first time I’ve heard tell of it,’ said Ginny, eyebrows raised in surprise at her mother’s disloyalty.

  ‘Well, we were sitting in the kitchen, and I heard something stir in the front room so your mam opened the door and I got the fright of my life when I saw your father standing there listening. He just smiled at me and said, ‘Well, Mam, and have you seen aught of our Ginny, like?’ I said no before I’d time to think. He said, ‘Well, she’s somewhere, isn’t she, and she’s not at work while Mrs Vine’s in London. So who’s looking after Philip?’ I said he was asleep in his cot and I’d just popped round to your mam’s to ask for the lend of a couple of eggs. He said, “It’s funny, but you’ve never done that before. Anyway, when you do see her, tell her to get on home. She’s wanted.”

  She shuddered. ‘It was his voice that made my hair stand on end. Smooth as silk. He cracked on he’d forgotten his bait, and had to come back for it, though why he should come round the front with all his pit togs on when he’d gone out the back, I don’t know. He’d left it by the kitchen door, so he picked it up and set off again by the back.’

  ‘I know him like the back of my hand. That’s why I didn’t want to go back straight away. He’d be hoping to find me there, sly old sod. He’ll have to be a lot craftier than that to take me in,’ said Ginny.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t sit comfortable after he’d gone for fear he’d come back and hear us whispering about him. I felt sorry for your mam, but I came away. She wants the doctor to that face, but she wouldn’t go and see him. And he intends doing worse to you if he gets the chance.’

  Ginny had a sudden thought. ‘Do you remember that time you came to see our Emma when she was three, when she was unconscious, and you told them to send for the doctor?’

  ‘I’ll never forget it, lass, to my dying day. I never believed that was your doing. There were red marks on her wrists when I saw her and they came out the day after into big black bruises, just as if somebody had taken hold of her by the wrists and thrown her. It could only have been him, but you’d never have got him to admit to it.’

  ‘I saw him do it. She wouldn’t stop crying, so he picked her up by the wrists and threw her across the yard. She hit the coalhouse and just fell into a heap, with blood coming down her nose. You’re the first person I’ve ever told. He warned me, and with everybody blaming me I really began to believe I had done it in the end.’

  ‘Well, your mam wouldn’t believe he’d done it. She didn’t want to believe it, and what could she have done if she had? Three bairns and nobody to put the bread in their mouths but him. So with him insisting it was you and her believing him, what could anybody else do?’

  The little boy laughed in delight as his sparkling blue eyes met a grime-encircled matching pair. Martin tossed him a couple of inches into the air and caught him in strong, coal-black hands.

  ‘Not at work today, Ginny?’ he asked, swinging Philip safely back on to his feet.

  ‘No. Mrs Vine told us to stay away until she gets back from London next week. She reckons the cook will be there for the manager’s meals, and what else there is to do will keep until she gets back.’

  ‘You’re going to lose a week’s wages then?’

  ‘I hope not. She told me to stay away – I didn’t ask.’

  ‘You’ll be doing well if that comes off, a week’s wages for no work. I wish her husband would do the same for us.’


  ‘Ginny’th going to thtop here now, Daddy,’ Philip volunteered.

  Martin looked enquiringly at Ginny, then at his mother-in-law. ‘Is she? Nobody told me.’

  ‘That’s because we haven’t had the chance, so nothing’s decided yet. Listen to what the lass has to say, then make your own mind up.’

  ‘I’m going to get a living-in job somewhere. There’s always jobs for housemaids in London, or so I’ve been told.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Martin, taking off his jacket and hanging it on the back door. ‘Start a bit further back. There must be something I’ve missed. Start at the beginning.’

  He crossed to the kitchen sink, to scrub his hands with yellow soap while Ginny told him the whole story. He listened without comment, and then caught hold of a rough towel to rub his hands dry.

  ‘I’m starving, Mam. I needn’t ask what’s for dinner. I could smell it halfway down the street.’

  Mam Smith opened the oven door and lifted the stew-pot lid, releasing a powerful mouth-watering aroma of oxtail and onion. She prodded the meat with a knife.

  ‘Get your feet under the table, bonny lass. If I know my mother-in-law, she’s made enough to feed a regiment, and she’ll be offended if you don’t eat your share.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ said Ginny, fearful of depriving them of an adequate meal.

  ‘There’s plenty for everybody, never bother,’ Mam Smith assured her, ladling steaming food on to sizzling plates. ‘Pull a chair up and get it down you.’

  ‘Your mother’s had another hammering then?’ Martin said, when the meal was almost over.

  ‘Aye, and this poor lass is going to be next,’ Mam Smith shuddered.

  They finished eating in silence, then Martin opened the kitchen door and lifted the galvanized bath off its hook on the outside wall.