An Orphan's Secret

by Maggie Hope

  ‘Where did you get them?’ Meg scrambled to her feet and pushed back a lock of fair hair which had fallen over her eyes.

  ‘Down by the coke ovens,’ Miles answered, grinning, his teeth showing white against a face as black as the balls of pitch.

  ‘You might have got caught!’

  Meg was horrified. They could be jailed for that, she knew they could.

  ‘We didn’t, though,’ Jack Boy pointed out. ‘Howay, let’s get some on the fire, I’m fair starved.’

  The fire did give out a lovely, satisfying heat, thought Meg half an hour later, and it had cooked the broth grand. She’d had a bit of dripping with browning left in the fat pot and had added that to the vegetables. It gave the broth a bit of taste. And Auntie Phoebe had given her a loaf of bread from her baking, it went lovely with the broth. Though it was the end of March the winter showed no sign of lifting. The weather was wet and windy and penetratingly cold so the warmth was heavensent.

  The Maddisons had no strike pay. The rest of the men had five shillings a week from the union, but Jack and his sons didn’t qualify.

  ‘Is there any more?’ Miles asked hopefully as Meg dragged the iron pan on to the hob after she had served the boys. He was already mopping up the last of his broth with a slice of bread.

  ‘I want to save it for Da and Alice.’

  Meg bit her lip as she saw his eager face. He was a growing lad and wasn’t getting enough food, she knew.

  ‘You can have mine, I’m not that hungry,’ she offered.

  ‘Don’t you touch that!’ snapped Jack Boy. ‘Don’t be so greedy, our Miles.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to take Meg’s,’ he said, sitting back in his chair, his face red.

  Jack Boy looked at his younger brother. He was well aware that there hadn’t been enough for Miles just as there hadn’t been enough for himself. He got to his feet and reached for his jacket.

  ‘Howay, Miles,’ he said. ‘Let’s away up the bunny banks. Mebbe we can snare a rabbit. A bit of rabbit stew would be grand, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Just you be careful,’ said Meg as the two boys went out. ‘Watch out you don’t get caught.’

  The miners often caught rabbits to supplement their diet in ordinary times, but the local tenant farmer had strict instructions from the owners to prosecute any pitmen seen rabbiting during the lockout. Nevertheless, sometimes the farmers pretended not to see and it was a chance most of the miners took. But Meg was uneasy about the boys going to the rabbit warren.

  She decided to wait and have her broth with Alice when she came in. She sat down in Da’s chair and stretched her toes across the steel fender, delighting in the warmth from the burning pitch balls. By, Da’s coal allowance was a big loss, it was, she mused. There wasn’t a nut left in the coal house. It had all been swept clean by the beginning of the week before.

  The owners wouldn’t give in, why should they? her restless thoughts ran on. They would keep the men locked out, they could afford to. Coal was stockpiled still in the pit yard. Oh, they’d planned this all right, hanging on till the stocks were high, judging the right time to provoke a strike. The lockout would go on now till the men were on their knees and had to go back on the owners’ terms.

  Meg jumped to her feet, forgetting about the strike as her father opened the door. She pushed the pan of broth back on to the fire to heat up for him. He must be cold and hungry, he’d been out all day. Jack Maddison didn’t speak as he hung his jacket on the hook behind the door, simply nodded to her as he approached the fire, but Meg was accustomed to his silence. She waited for him to ask who had got the pitch balls for the fire but though they provided the first real heat they had had for days, he didn’t question them or even seem to notice them.

  ‘I’ve got some broth saved for you, Da,’ she said, stirring the soup as it began to bubble in the pot.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ he answered, sitting down in his chair and starting to unlace his boots.

  ‘But, Da—’

  Meg was going to say he must be hungry, but seeing the dead look in his eyes, she stopped. She knew he had been out tramping the roads all day. That was all he seemed to do nowadays, walking restlessly on from one place to another, wearing out his shoe leather.

  Da was a truly broken man now. She worried about him all the time. When Uncle Tot had offered him seed potatoes and cabbage plants from his greenhouse, Da hadn’t even dug over the ground in the garden to take them. In the end it had been Jack Boy who took over the gardening just as he was taking over all the other tasks which needed a man’s strength. Da had refused to join the strike and in the end it did him no good at all. He was locked out of the pit as effectively as any of the strikers. Meg sighed as she pulled the pan back from the flames and lifted it down to the hearth. Poor Da, he was never on the right side.

  ‘Meg, I’m going to place.’

  Meg hadn’t noticed Alice’s approach up the yard and she looked up in surprise as her sister swung the door closed and fairly danced into the kitchen, her eyes bright in a face flushed both with cold and excitement.

  ‘What?’

  Straightening up, Meg looked at Alice. What on earth was she talking about?

  ‘I’ve got work!’ Alice cried triumphantly. ‘I’m going to place in Manchester.’

  ‘Don’t talk soft, our Alice,’ Meg snapped, ‘you’ve got work, you’re a pupil teacher.’

  Alice shook her head. ‘Not after the end of the month, I’m not,’ she declared. ‘I’ve got proper work, six pounds a year and all found. I’m to look after children and do light housework, that was what the letter said.’

  ‘The letter? What letter? There’s been no letters here.’

  ‘Well, our Meg, I knew you wouldn’t like it so me and Jane Thompson, you know, the other pupil teacher, we wrote from her house. The agency advertised in the Northern Echo and we wrote to it. And we’ve both to go, we’ve got jobs in the same street in Salford. I’ll be working for a Mr and Mrs Rutherford, looking after the bairns, like.’

  ‘You can’t go!’

  ‘I can, our Meg, I can. You can’t stop me. It’s a good chance, I’ll be earning money, be able to send some home for you. I’m fourteen, I’m old enough to go if I want to.’

  Black despair filled Meg’s heart as she gazed at Alice’s excited face.

  ‘But you wanted to be a teacher,’ she blurted.

  Alice shrugged impatiently. ‘Aye. Well, that’s all right for folk as can afford it. But we can’t, can we? I need to earn a bit of silver, our Meg, I do. Me and Jane are going together. We’ll be fine, we will.’

  ‘But are there no young lasses in Manchester, then? Why do they want to ’tice ours away for?’ Meg’s voice was bitter. Manchester was the other side of the country. She remembered the map on the wall at school in Marsden. Manchester was over the fell tops past Weardale, and halfway down the country an’ all. It was miles and miles, she knew it was.

  ‘They all work in the cotton mills, Jane says. They make more money.’

  ‘Da!’ In a last desperate attempt to stop Alice she appealed to her father for support.

  Jack had been sitting staring into the fire, oblivious to the conversation going on over his head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Our Alice wants to go to Manchester. She wants to go to place. Work as a servant in somebody else’s house. Da, she was going to be a teacher!’

  Jack Maddison looked gravely at his eldest daughter, seeing the appeal in her blue eyes which were full of tears ready to shed; he had been letting the argument go over his head as though it had nothing to do with him. His face still expressed no interest.

  ‘Da?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘If she wants to go, she’ll go,’ he said, and turned his eyes back to the fire.

  Alice knew she had won and tried to be conciliatory.

  ‘You won’t have to feed me, Meg,’ she pointed out. ‘You know it would be a long time yet before I got a proper teacher’s wage. And this lockout, it could
go on for ages yet. Once the summer comes and the warm weather, the coal trade’ll slacken.’

  ‘Not from this pit, it won’t.’ Jack Boy had returned with Miles. Triumphantly he handed a couple of rabbits to Meg. ‘This is coking coal for the iron mills, you know it is, our Alice. What’s this all about then?’

  ‘She’ll tell you,’ said Meg shortly, and picked up the rabbits. One was quite small and thin but the other seemed plump.

  ‘I’d better get these gutted and skinned then.’ She walked to the pantry door, her shoulders slumped and her head down. Picking up a knife, she felt the edge to see how sharp it was. The rest of the family watched her. Her lower lip was trembling, and her eyes bright with tears. She looked defeated. The boys glanced at each other unhappily.

  ‘I’ll sharpen the gully on the step for you, Meg,’ offered Miles.

  ‘I’ll do it meself,’ she snapped, and took the knife to the front step and ran it backwards and forwards with swift, savage strokes, as though venting her anger at the world. She couldn’t hear what was being said in the kitchen, she couldn’t bear to hear Alice talking about her new job again. Slap, scrape, slap, scrape, she went with the gully knife along the step, her vision blurred so that she could scarely see what she was doing, spending a long time on it, until the knife was as sharp as a razor.

  When she went back in the kitchen Alice and Jack Boy were gone, the pan of broth forgotten on the hearth.

  ‘Can I have the broth that’s left?’ asked Miles eagerly. ‘Our Alice didn’t eat it.’

  ‘Aye, go on then.’

  Meg stuck the knife in the largest rabbit, slitting it from breast bone to tail. And out tumbled tiny, blind, baby rabbits, bloody and slimey. Something snapped within her.

  ‘Did you have to catch a rabbit with babies inside her?’ she yelled at the startled Miles, who turned from the fire, pan in hand.

  ‘We didn’t know . . .’ he began, his eyes opening wide with shock at the sight of his sister, bloody knife in hand and tears streaming down her face.

  ‘Well, you damn’ well should have done! What do you expect at this time of the year? Aren’t they breeding?’ she screamed, her whole body shaking.

  Miles turned back to the fire and carefully put the pan back on to the hearth before running to the back door and down the yard, his lips clamped tightly together, his face white and set.

  Da looked across at her. ‘Don’t shout, our Meg.’

  Meg stared at him but he had already forgotten about her and was once more gazing at the fire. She stopped crying abruptly and returned to her task of getting the rabbits ready for the pot, forcing her emotions back under control, making herself think about the job she was doing. Best make the stew tonight, while they had some fuel to cook it with, she thought dimly.

  Meg and Bella went to the station with Alice to see her off on her journey to Manchester. Meg helped her carry her straw box with her spare clothes in it and Bella skipped along beside them.

  ‘Where are you going, Alice?’ she asked.

  ‘Manchester, I’m going to place,’ said Alice patiently, though she had told Bella a dozen times before.

  Meg watched her sister closely. Alice looked white and strained now the time had come. She had clung to Jack Boy and Miles at the door of the house, though Miles had uttered an embarrassed, ‘Give over, our Alice!’ and walked out of the door.

  ‘You could still change your mind,’ she suggested.

  ‘I’m not going to though,’ said Alice quickly, casting a sideways glance at Meg. There was silence as they trudged along the path, a shortcut through Badger Wood.

  They emerged into the town but a short walk from the station at Bishop Auckland, and there, already on the platform when they arrived, was Jane and her parents. Alice brightened up immediately as though the presence of her friend lent her courage.

  ‘Eeh, I thought you weren’t going to make it,’ greeted Jane.

  ‘There’s five minutes yet,’ Alice retorted. ‘We’ve plenty of time.’ But the train was already drawing in to the station.

  ‘You’ll write, won’t you, Alice?’ Meg hugged her sister, feeling her thin frame. A spasm of anxiety went through Meg.

  ‘Alice, you’ll be careful of your chest? Wrap up warm and keep out of the wind?’

  ‘Oh, Meg, I’m not a babby,’ she said, but she didn’t snap impatiently as she sometimes did if she thought Meg was fussing over much. She climbed on to the train and Meg handed her box up after her. Meg and Bella stood together and watched as the train began to move.

  ‘Our Alice is going to place,’ Bella said importantly to Mrs Thompson.

  ‘Aye, pet, I know,’ she answered, while she waved vigorously with her handkerchief.

  Meg ran after the carriage a few steps. ‘Alice! Alice! You’ll come home if they make you do too much, won’t you? Alice, if you don’t like it . . .’

  But the train was gone, steaming round the bend of Shildon. Meg took hold of Bella’s hand and led her out of the station. She felt a foreboding. The family was breaking up, she knew it. Oh, she was used now to Bella living next-door at Auntie Phoebe’s, but Alice wasn’t next-door. Soon she would be many miles away.

  Twelve

  ‘I chased them, I did,’ Auntie Phoebe declared as she came into Meg’s kitchen, Bella sobbing and crying in tow.

  ‘You chased who, Auntie Phoebe?’

  Meg looked up from her ironing. She was still doing the washing and ironing for old Mrs Dobbs and wanted to take it to the old lady that evening. It was a lovely June day and she was looking forward to the walk.

  ‘Those ragamuffins from up the rows. Yelling at our Bella, they were, calling her dummy.’ Phoebe took Bella, big as she was, into her arms. ‘There, petal, never you mind, I’ll bray their backsides for them if I catch them. You’re no dummy, you’re not. You’re just a bit slow with having to miss so much school with your weak chest.’

  Meg watched them, the nine-year-old girl cuddled into Auntie Phoebe’s arms like a baby. She bit her lip. There was no denying Bella was a bit slow but she was a lovely bairn for all that, pretty and biddable and usually smiling. But not now. Now she was clinging to Auntie Phoebe, sobbing her heart out.

  ‘I’ve made some biscuits the day, Bella,’ she said. Bella loved her food and sweet biscuits in particular. But the child only clung the tighter to Auntie Phoebe.

  ‘Howay now, Bella, ginger biscuits they are. You like ginger biscuits, don’t you?’

  Bella’s sobs lessened. She lifted her head and watched as Meg brought the biscuit tin out of the pantry. Sitting up, she accepted the ginger biscuit offered by her sister.

  ‘What do you say, pet?’ asked Auntie Phoebe.

  ‘Thank you,’ Bella mumbled, through a mouthful of biscuit crumbs.

  ‘That’s a good lass.’ Auntie Phoebe rocked the little girl to and fro, her face troubled. ‘I think I’ll have a word with their mothers,’ she said, but without much hope that it would do any good.

  ‘We’ll have a cup of tea,’ suggested Meg, ‘these biscuits are nice when they’re fresh.’ The kettle was simmering on the fire and it wasn’t long before they were sipping tea and nibbling at biscuits.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ said Meg. ‘Only last month there wasn’t even enough bread, never mind biscuits.’

  ‘Aye,’ answered Phoebe, but neither of them looked happy about the change in their fortunes.

  The miners had been forced back to work in May; they had had no option but to go back at the reduced rates proposed by the owners. Still, it was no good dwelling on it, Meg thought, it was easy to become bitter.

  Da and Jack Boy and Miles were working now, and luckily the other miners seemed to have forgotten that the Maddisons hadn’t joined the strike at first. The lockout had been worse for them even than the other pitmen as they had had no strike pay, but at least it was over now. Everything was getting back to normal in Winton Colliery though the families had to live on reduced wages.

  Meg sipped her tea. S
he was filled with an uneasy restlessness. For the first time she was dissatisfied with her life, looking after Da and the boys, spending most of her time in the house working by herself or chatting with Auntie Phoebe. She was eighteen going on nineteen, and had her hair up now. And the only time she went out was when she went to the store or worked in other womens’ houses when they were having babies. There were no bairns in her house now. The only really bright spots in her life were the days a letter came from Alice and they didn’t come round very often. For a lass who had been wanting to be a teacher, Alice wasn’t a great letter writer.

  Auntie Phoebe took Bella home and Meg finished her ironing and started to prepare the meal for the menfolk coming home. Mooning about didn’t do any good, she told herself, she just had to get on with it.

  After tea, Meg set out on her visit to Old Pit Cottages and Mrs Dobbs. She had combed her hair and piled it on top of her head with pins so that only the shorter curls nestled at the nape of her neck and at her temples. The southerly breeze was warm and yet refreshing. She relished the feel of it on her neck and face. Her dress was a simple black serge but she had added a touch of crocheted lace at the collar and cuffs. Now she loosed the top button at her collar the better to enjoy the breeze.

  The months of the lockout had taken their toll and Meg was thinner by pounds than she had been at Christmas, but her slimmer shape suited her. She had a fine strong body, heavy-breasted and slim-hipped, and as she walked into the centre of the village and down the road by the Black Boy, there was many a head turned to watch her go.

  And one of them was the head of Wesley Cornish. She saw him have a quick word with his marras and fall into step behind her. Meg felt her colour rising. She tried to ignore him but was feeling so mixed up today. Wesley Cornish had always been sweet on her and suddenly she was thinking of him in a new light. He quickened his steps and jumped in front of her as she took the lane leading to Old Pit.

  ‘Get out of my way, Wesley Cornish,’ she said, as she had said often in the past when he was pestering her. But if Alice had been there she would have noticed that Meg didn’t use her ‘I mean it’ voice, nor did she make a great deal of effort to get round him. Meg’s face was flushed as she stared ahead at some point over his shoulder.