Maggie Craig

by Marie Joseph

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service. She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a retired chartered Engineer, and they have two married daughters and eight grandchildren.

  Marie Joseph began her writing career as a short-story writer and she now uses her Northern background to enrich her bestselling novels. Down-to-earth characters bring a vivid authenticity to her stories, which are written with both humour and poignancy.

  Her novel A Better World Than This won the 1987 Romantic Novelist’s Association Major Award.

  Also by Marie Joseph

  When Love Was Like That

  Since He Went Away

  Marie Joseph Omnibus

  Ring A-Roses

  Footsteps in the Park

  A Leaf in the Wind

  Emma Sparrow

  Gemini Girls

  The Listening Silence

  Lisa Logan

  Polly Pilgrim

  The Clogger’s Child

  A Better World Than This

  A World Apart

  The Travelling Man

  Passing Strangers

  Maggie Craig

  Marie Joseph

  1

  MAGGIE CRAIG WAS just six years old when she took on Miss Hepinstall, Infant teacher at her father’s village school. She challenged that strict disciplinarian with such fury that the children, sitting upright in their scarred desks, felt their mouths drop open, and their eyes stand out like chapel hat-pegs.

  Teddy, the youngest of Maggie’s three brothers, an incurable chatter-box, had been told to stop talking twice. Twice when once should have been quite enough, and when Miss Hepinstall caught him bobbing his brown head towards a boy across the narrow aisle, her beetle brows drew together, and her mouth set into a tight, thin, angry line.

  So angry was she at having her authority flouted that it seemed to her startled class that the little top-knot skewered to the top of her head quivered as if it had a life of its own.

  ‘Come out to me, Teddy Craig!’ she shouted. ‘I warned you, and I will not warn you again. Out here! This very minute!’

  The children shuffled their feet, holding their respective breaths, some with fear, and some with a kind of shamed excitement, because once Miss had drawn blood. Last year, which was even better, Millie Hargreaves had fainted dead away, only coming to when her face had been fanned with the register. And the next day her mother had come to the school and had shaken her fist at Miss and threatened to report her to the School Board, but nothing had come of it.

  On the not infrequent occasions when Miss wielded the thin and flexible cane, it swished down through the air with a terrifying sound then landed with a thwack that felt its echo in the palms of the watchers, causing the more sensitive amongst them to close their eyes. Some were actually in tears at the remembrance of the stinging agony.

  Thomas Craig, Maggie’s father, in charge of the older children on the other side of the sliding doors dividing the two classrooms, also possessed a cane, but his was laid harmlessly across his desk next to the Bible. No one could ever remember it being used.

  ‘A good man, but too soft by half,’ Miss Hepinstall often told her mother, a hopeless cripple, gradually seizing up with the arthritis; an old woman with a tongue on her that would make a whiplash seem like a whisper of silk.

  ‘Me daughter makes a good teacher because she’s frustrated at never having had a man. It has to come out somewhere, even if it’s only on the childer’s hands at school,’ she had told the embarrassed minister from the Mission Hall one day. ‘It’s not natural for a woman not to have a man to boss her about, tha knows, Vicar.’

  In her daughter’s class the children sat at their desks as straight as if they’d been born with pokers for backbones, sometimes for half an hour at a time, with their hands on top of their heads. Miss’s word was law, and the fact that the eight-year-old boy approaching her desk now with dragging feet was the son of the schoolmaster, mattered less than nothing to Miss Hepinstall.

  Disobedience would not be tolerated, and must be punished with something far more telling than a reprimand.

  ‘Hold out your hand, Teddy Craig!’ she ordered. ‘Your hand, if you please!’

  Her arm was actually upraised to administer the first of the three strokes, when Maggie shot out from her desk in the front row with the force of a stone shot from a catapult.

  Pink cheeks reddened to fury, long hair flying free from its restraining ribbon, feet in boots too big for them, tripping over a crack in the floorboards, Maggie went into action.

  Throwing herself dramatically in front of her brother, she spread her arms wide, and glared into the face of the astonished teacher.

  ‘Don’t you dare hit our Teddy! He’s got a gathering on his thumb he has. Yes he has! It would have a bandage on it if me mother hadn’t said it had to have the air get to it. Don’t you dare hit him! Don’t you dare!’

  The shocked surprise on Miss’s face was so immense that it was comical to see. The fact that anyone so small would dare to question her methods stunned her into immobility at the child’s undoubted courage. For a moment she actually did not know what to do.

  ‘You will sit down at your desk, Maggie Craig,’ she said quietly, ‘and you will hold out your other hand, Teddy Craig,’ she said, even more quietly.

  But although the cane was raised three times, to swish down with venomous power on the boy’s left hand, Miss Hepinstall knew, and the class knew, that Maggie was the winner of that particular battle.

  ‘I told Miss she couldn’t hit our Teddy on his sore hand. I told her good and proper,’ Maggie announced to her mother after school was over for the day.

  She was sitting round the big scrubbed table in the living-room of the School House, eating her second slice of bread, still warm from the fire-oven and spread thinly with rum butter as a special treat.

  Hannah Craig looked at her four children eating stolidly; Teddy signalling to Maggie to keep quiet, with Benjamin and Jonathan, unidentical ten year-old-twins, nodding at their little sister with approval.

  Maggie’s brown eyes, the left one flecked with green, shone and sparkled with the triumph of the afternoon as she basked in the attention she was getting from her brothers.

  ‘As good as a boy any old day,’ they often said.

  ‘Trust our Maggie to stand up to old Miss,’ Jonathan said, and Maggie glowed.

  Hannah tried hard not to smile as she watched her little daughter showing off as she played to the appreciative audience. How bonny and sturdy she was, smiling round the table through a milk moustache, glorying in their obvious adulation.

  ‘She’s going to be the strongest lad in the family,’ Doctor Bates had said when she was born.

  ‘And the cheekiest,’ Thomas, her father, had said with an indulgent smile.

  But enough was enough.

  ‘Stop that, and get on with your tea,’ Hannah said, as carried away with her success, Maggie was brandishing a knife to give a near perfect imitation of Miss Hepinstall’s grim expression
as she wielded the cane.

  ‘You naughty boy, Teddy Craig!’ Maggie said, and able to keep her face straight no longer, Hannah joined in the laughter.

  As the mother of three rough sons, boys with permanently scarred knees, black finger-nails, and hair that grew straight up no matter how hard she tried to smooth it down, Hannah had been overjoyed when Maggie was born.

  Here at last was the girl child she had prayed for, the dainty little mite who would follow her around the house, lisping prettily in spotless white pinafores, sitting on a footstool at her mother’s knee, learning to knit and to sew.

  Instead of that Maggie preferred to be out with her brothers in the long summer evenings, fishing with a piece of string in the stream, climbing the low stone walls, working the pump at the well for the pails of clear cool water for the next day’s washing, cooking and cleaning.

  Only the summer before when Maggie was just five years old and the well was not full enough to keep the pump going, Hannah had caught her lying flat on the ground with her bloomers showing, dangling a bucket on a rope down into the murky depths, the great iron lid moved to one side.

  Maggie it was who collected the yard-sticks for the fire-oven, and Maggie who had been caught peering through the filthy window of the derelict cottage at the end of the village, trying to catch a glimpse of the two hermit bachelors who lived there in squalor. One of them had come out to chase her, brandishing an old violin above his head.

  ‘I’ll scalp thee alive if I catches thee again tha little varmint,’ he’d shouted, and Maggie had run home, skirts flying, tam-o’-shanter falling from her head, not to throw herself in her mother’s arms as she sobbed out her fright, but to ask exactly what a varmint happened to be.

  There was something fierce about her only daughter, Hannah often thought. Then she would think what a funny word fierce was to use in describing a little girl as pretty as Maggie. It was just that she was so protective of everyone, afraid of nothing, certainly not of Miss Hepinstall who in the weeks following the caning episode, picked on her unmercifully.

  ‘Every time I go through into the other classroom our Maggie seems to be standing in a corner facing the wall,’ Thomas told his wife. ‘There’s not much I can do about it either without being accused of favouritism.’ He rubbed the left side of his nose with his forefinger, the way he always did when worried. ‘It’s a tricky business having my own children in my own school.’

  Hannah smiled on him with love. ‘It’ll do our Maggie good to have some of the spots rubbed off her. She’s spoilt enough at home without being kowtowed to at school.’

  And you would not relish having to stand up to Miss Hepinstall, Hannah told herself, but silently, shaking her head at her husband as he stood before her, dark eyes anxious, neat well-formed head on one side as he waited to see what she thought about it all.

  She smiled on him with such love, this man of hers, this scholarly gentle man who had met and married her when she was in service, keeping house for three middle-aged unmarried sisters over at Todmorden.

  He had been on a walking trip, carrying his belongings around in a parcel looped over his shoulder with string, sleeping in barns, and meeting her one bright summer’s day as she carried a pail of warm frothy milk down the lane from the farm to the house where she worked.

  The ten years’ difference in their ages hadn’t seemed to matter at all, nor the fact that at seventeen she could barely read.

  ‘I will teach you,’ he said, and so he had, sitting with her in the downstairs living-room of the School House, holding her hand, and running her fingers over the words: kissing her when she stumbled over a long word.

  The village he taught in was spread over the outskirts of a cotton mill town, a part of the Pennines flanked to the east by the Yorkshire wool towns, and by the Lancashire cotton towns to the west.

  It was a straggling stark place, with grey stone houses set against sombre skies in winter, which even in summer still retained their greyness as if not even the sun could warm their stones to light. Originally a hamlet, the village was built across a tributary of a river, a river whose valleys were filled with factories, mills and sloping streets, the terraced houses packed close together, sometimes back to back and interlocking into each other.

  Thomas Craig did not visit the towns unless he had to, and even then he hurried back to his village as quickly as he could. He loved his village, and the moors behind it. With more money to spare for his education, he would have been a botanist, but as an amateur he walked for miles, bringing weeds home in his pockets and laying them on the kitchen table. Then he would search in his books of reference to find the names, and point out his treasure to Maggie.

  She was the child of his heart, and he would take her to a hill he knew, and they would lie in a hollow until the silence was broken by the song of a lark, or the call of a grouse. He would show her the shifting peat bogs, formless and menacing, and he would point out a hunk of tree-knot, and explain that once, many thousands of years ago, there had been a forest growing there.

  Thomas Craig was a small man, no more than five feet six inches tall, but the way he held himself gave the impression of height. It was from her father that Maggie inherited her direct glance, and her way of walking with her head held high. But it was from her mother she got her thick brown hair, and her practical way of assessing a problem, making a quick decision, then getting on with it.

  An ardent and practising Methodist was Thomas Craig, but although the doctrine of THOU SHALT NOT had been instilled in him from his childhood, Thomas wanted no truck with a being who could condemn any of his congregation to eternal damnation. When the paid minister was sent away from the Mission House for lack of funds, it was Thomas who led the prayers and read to the dwindling congregation of the gentle love of Jesus.

  When someone died in the village, it was Thomas who prayed over them, and Hannah who helped with the laying-out, washing them for the last time, and crossing pale hands over nice clean chests.

  She was called to help with a laying-out very early one morning, just a month after Maggie had stood up to Miss Hepinstall. . . .

  Little Amos Smith, a sickly child, the youngest in a family of eleven, had died of inflammation of the throat the night before, choking to death on a membrane his mother said was like a piece of tight muslin across the back of his throat.

  ‘It was the quinsies, Mrs Craig,’ she sobbed. ‘No matter how many vinegar poultices I put on him I could not bring the fever down.’ She lifted her apron and wiped her eyes. ‘Every spring regular as clockwork he got the quinsies. It was pitiful to see him, but this time he didn’t seem to have the strength to fight.’

  ‘For a shilling a week paid regular she could have brought Doctor Bates to that child,’ Hannah fretted to Thomas when she got back to the house. ‘Moses Smith works in the Quarries, so it’s not as if there’s no money coming in.’

  She unpinned her hat from her shining hair. ‘For one shilling a week the whole family could have benefited, with free medicine as well. Some folks don’t seem to have the sense they were born with.’

  Thomas hovered about, trying to help with the rushed breakfast, but doing no more than getting in the way.

  ‘That’s all right, love,’ he reminded her gently, ‘but a shilling a week is a shilling a week when there are eleven mouths to feed. It’s a fortune to Maria Smith, remember.’

  ‘Misplaced thriftiness,’ Hannah fumed, bustling round the room, long skirts swishing as she moved from fire to table, then from table to fire. ‘There’s some as never get their priorities right,’ she grumbled, setting a pan of milk to warm.

  The three boys, boot-laces trailing, shirts hanging out of their trousers, hair standing on end, got on with the important task of spreading honey as thickly as they dared on great wedges of bread. Maggie sat with knife poised, more interested in what was being said.

  ‘Who’s dead then?’ she asked, in a light conversational tone.

  Hannah snatched the pan of
milk from the fire, just catching it in time.

  ‘Little Amos Smith has gone to live with Jesus,’ she said.

  ‘Will he like it then? Living with Jesus? Amos Smith always had a candle coming down his nose. Will he not have one now that he’s gone to . . . ?’

  Hannah’s voice, more stern than Maggie had heard it for a long time, stopped her saying what she had intended to say.

  ‘Maggie Craig! If you don’t get down from that table and come here this minute, you’ll be late, and then what will Miss Hepinstall say?’

  ‘Late again, Maggie Craig!’

  Her little daughter’s pursed-up mouth was so like her teacher’s that Hannah smiled for the first time since coming into the house.

  ‘Come here then and have your rag pinned on,’ she said, and tweaked at the wings of the white pinafore in a vain effort to stop them slipping down the sleeves of Maggie’s dark green dress.

  The ritual of nose blowing insisted on by Miss Hepinstall before morning prayers meant that a clean rag had to be found every day, plus another for wiping the children’s slates.

  ‘That rag smells awful when I’ve been spitting on it all day,’ Maggie grumbled as she twitched away from her mother.

  ‘Then stop sniffing at it,’ Hannah said, standing at the door and waving as the four of them walked down the short lane to the school, waiting as usual until she had seen them turn into the playground: Maggie, first as always, tammy slipping to the side of her head, the thick weight of her hair already coming loose from its ribbon fastening, calling over her shoulder to her brothers, telling them to hurry up. Benjamin walking pigeon-toed and tripping over his own feet; Jonathan whistling and trailing a hand along the low stone wall, and Teddy bending down to pick up a stone and hurl it hopefully at a bird rising suddenly out of the hedge.

  Four of them, and each one as different as chalk from cheese, Hannah thought as she went inside. Then putting the nemory of the small dead face she had washed so carefully not an hour before, out of her mind, Hannah built up the fire with sticks, turning the room into a furnace. Wednesday was baking day, just as Monday was washing day even if the moors were awash with rain.