The Potter's Niece

by Randall, Rona

  Their silence spoke volumes. ‘What’s a young lady like you doing here? What are you up to? What’s your game? To spy on us, keep an eye on us, and report to the Master Potter? Why else would his niece be brought into the place?’

  Sam Walker, receiving her on arrival prompt at six o’clock that first morning, wasted no time in words. Nor did he show surprise, thus confirming that he expected her. Had Martin also instructed him to plunge her into a tough initiation on the canal wharf? Here barges unloaded their cargoes of clay after men with boxers’ muscles had hacked the raw material into sections down in the hold, for the quarry workers at the other end dumped it into the vessels in its massive state. After unloading on the wharfside, other men then hoisted the unwieldy material into waiting carts, manned by women clad in aprons of sacking.

  She was given the last cart of all. ‘Just follow the rest of ’em, and do wot they do,’ she was told. She obeyed, though driving a creaking vehicle over rough earth was more difficult than expected. More than once the weight of her load threatened to overturn the cart and herself with it, but awareness of the other women’s watchfulness spurred her determination until, after half a dozen trips, their scrutiny and their amusement eased a little.

  On reaching the open-fronted pottery sheds the carts then had to be backed against long benches onto which more men heaved the loads and others hacked them into more manageable proportions. Fifty-five tons of Cornish clay took a long time to bring to this stage, and in addition a consignment of Devonshire terra-cotta had arrived almost simultaneously. Turn-around time was therefore prolonged, and so were the hours of driving across bumpy ground which threatened to break every bone in the body. By the time the mid-morning break arrived, she felt battered.

  The interval lasted ten minutes. With it came mugs of strong tea. Drayton’s workers were loyal because they were treated well. Even the periods of carting were done in shifts, relieved by shed work which brought the women partially under cover until the mid-day break. From the carts they changed places with other women standing at the long benches on which the rough-hewn clay was stacked. The material was despatched from the quarries uncleansed and therefore required careful attention before use. Attacking it with hand axes and metal claws, lumps were dislodged and examined for grit or any other matter which would render the clay useless, but rakes were not so nimble as fingers, nor could they extract minute particles so easily, with the result that by the end of the morning Olivia’s hands were torn and bleeding.

  Covert glances from fellow-workers revealed a mixture of amusement and compassion. ‘So now you know what it’s like,’ the glances said, plainly expecting her to give up.

  She didn’t. At mid-day she tore strips from her petticoat, washed her hands and forearms beneath a pump, bound her fingers as best she could, and followed the others to the eating shed. They were already gobbling, tearing hunks of bread and cheese with clay-covered hands and thirstily washing it down with small ale. The babel of voices died when she took her place. A few hesitant smiles answered hers, but also some averted heads, and then the babel broke out again.

  Silently, she ate, refusing to feel an outcast. In time, they would accept her, though the restraint she encountered was disconcerting. She realised that they were ill at ease, failing to understand why she was sitting amongst them. This, their glances said, was no place for a lady.

  Her mother would have said the same.

  So there’s to be opposition from both sides, she reflected, and it’s no use whining to Uncle Martin. He did warn me. ‘You’ll start at ground level … a first-time pottery worker, equal with the rest … ’ In any case, she had no intention of whining. If her Drayton forebears, male and female, had gone through the mill, she could do the same. Although born a Freeman, her lifelong interest in the pottery had made her identify equally with the Draytons, and it was her Drayton side which now asserted itself. One day, she resolved, she would belong to this place as much as any working descendant from that itinerant Draitone clan.

  After the mid-day break she headed back to the canal, to find herself in the line of cart-drivers again. Gripping the reins when lurching over pot-holes wrenched her raw fingers and made her curse the generations of potters who had dug up clay wherever they could find it, leaving areas such as this deeply pitted, but it was a relief to work sitting down, even on a cart driver’s hard wooden seat, after which, returning to the sheds for the next relief shift, she found the stacks of raw clay even higher.

  So passed her first day. When she set out on the ride back to Tremain, she was almost too weary to keep awake.

  Mercifully, her mother was absent. She had gone to a recital in Stoke with the gentleman who called yesterday, Hannah told her, and hesitated before adding, ‘There’s a note waiting in your room, miss.’

  ‘Olivia,’ Phoebe had written, ‘I must ask you never to disturb me again in the early hours of the morning. If you must rise at an ungodly hour, pray be quiet about it, but after one day in that dirty place amongst those rough people, I have no doubt you will have learned the folly of your ways. Meanwhile, I insist that you occupy another room.’

  Delighted, Olivia flung her arms round the maid’s sturdy figure and cried, ‘Hannah dear, please make up another bed for me — in a room as far away as possible from my mother’s. I will move all my things later. There’s no need to trouble the maids.’

  There were plenty of guest rooms in this large wing, rarely occupied and some never used at all. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of moving into one of them before, and after eating a meal which the motherly Hannah brought and for which, tired though she was, she found she was more than ready, she slipped gratefully between the sheets, glad of the heat left by a hot brick. She was scarcely aware of the woman’s concern. ‘You look fair wore out, that you do, Miss Olivia. You won’t be going to that there pottery tomorrow, I hope?’ Olivia assured her, sleepily, that indeed she would. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, so please arrange for me to be called at the same time, dear Hannah.’ She was scarcely aware of the woman’s worried shake of the head, or of her cluck of disapproval as she gathered up Olivia’s discarded clothes. Such garments were only fit for labouring women, she remarked sadly, at which Olivia pointed out that that was what she now was, so everyone would just have to get used to it.

  She expected sleep to come quickly, for it was a long time since she had been so fatigued; instead, Roger Acland’s handsome features thrust themselves into her mind, together with uneasy speculation. His pursuit of her mother was now obvious. His reasons for it were not. Worrying about them, she fell into exhausted sleep.

  *

  After enduring the silent observation of her fellow workers for many weeks, Olivia stopped hoping to be accepted and concentrated solely on work. Interminable drudgery on the canalside exacted unremitting toll, but she was determined not to crack beneath the strain. In all weathers she drove the laden wagons from the barges to the sheds, her muscles hardening along with her resolution. By the time she eventually qualified for other duties, she was able to drive the cumbersome vehicles over the rutted ground with a skill to rival the best, but all this won for her was an occasional, and reluctant, glance of admiration, hastily concealed. Her team-mates were still suspicious, still withdrawn; if not actively her enemies, they were not yet her allies.

  She had reached a stage of resignation, both to their attitude and to the bondage of her seemingly endless initiation, when release came. She was transferred to the cleansing benches for further prolonged weeks of manual labour, but though this brought a change of activity it brought no change of atmosphere. Hostility and doubt remained, and were even increased because here the team of workers consisted of fresh faces, some of them male. So the initiation dragged on, testing her endurance anew.

  Sometimes she wondered if the months would ever pass. Aware though she was that apprenticeship in the potteries was a prolonged business and that the customary five years would, in her case, be lessened since her un
cle’s tuition had provided her with some basic knowledge of the craft, she still had to pass through essential stages of manual training. Not until she mastered them, one by one, would she be promoted to whatever came next. Now she had reached phase two, she knew she would stay at the cleansing benches for as long as it took her fingers to become adept at removing grit and stones and other particles which endangered the condition of the clay — a laborious exercise demanding intensive concentration, plus the patience essential in every aspect of potting.

  Sometimes, when her mittened fingers became raw and the nails and cuticles broken and bleeding, she would glance out of the sheds and watch the canal wagons with something akin to envy. At least her hands, when on the reins, had acquired nothing but callouses. Then, aware that fellow workers knew how she was feeling and expected her to crack, she would cast aside her sodden mittens and, teeth clenched, resolve to show them what she was made of.

  She was determined to advance to the next stage, the troughs, as capably as any of them, well aware that when she did achieve that step she would cherish no illusion that life was to be easier. Having watched the trough hands at work she knew that washing and riddling recalcitrant clay was back-breaking work. Slowly and rhythmically their huge sieves would revolve beneath fierce, non-stop jets of cold water, leaving sediment and grit and useless waste behind. It meant raw hands and wet arms below rolled-up sleeves, and it meant no protection from the weather, for this was outdoor work. Not until the liquid clay was ready to be spread on plaster slabs could the trough hands seek shelter from the ravages of wind and rain. Only in summer was their work remotely enviable.

  But she knew she would take each stage as it came and master every form of labour as it came, because this was the way in which potters were made. Stage one, canal work, was behind her. Stage two, the cleansing benches, she had now reached. Stage three, the troughs and the spreading, had yet to come, and after that would be the garnering of partially dried out clay and then the rolling and the kneading, preparing the texture until it was right for wedging. Armed with a long-handled wooden shovel, she would face the laborious task of scooping up the material from the drying-out slabs, then placing it in sizeable mounds to await transport to the wedgers’ tables. This was essentially woman’s work because it was considered light labour in the potteries.

  Not until long after that would she reach the packing sheds, though here again much was done in the yards, where bales of straw were dumped from delivery drays. Smaller articles were handled within the sheds, but massive earthenware was packed outside, consequently the cobblestones were littered with straw which, on windy days, flew in all directions, ignored by everyone.

  The skill with which packers worked was deceptive. Lifting giant wine jars called for the strength of two people, and dexterity was needed to avoid damaging the projecting faucets, each carefully wrapped around with straw and binding rags. Such monster wares were handled by men, women being mainly confined to lighter products like bakers’ mixing troughs and kneading crocks, all glazed on the inside to overcome porosity. Such items were heavy, but were carried one inside the other to a height of several feet, like towers on the women’s gracefully poised heads. Not once had Olivia seen a tower topple over.

  Hazel and willow crates provided the most reliable containers for packing china and earthenware. Light, pliant, but strong, their plaited sides and bases, with open squares like windows, shed straw everywhere, but shraff rarely emanated from these unwieldy contraptions. A by-product of all pot banks was broken or imperfect ware, rejected in various stages of the manufacturing process, but more usually after firing. This was ‘shraff’. It finished up on waste dumps and even in distant spots on the Staffordshire landscape. Unfired clay was reclaimable but, once fired, it became too hard. Drayton’s master potter, along with his other many dreams, believed that one day shraff would be reground and re-used in some valuable potting process, but meanwhile this wastage persisted.

  Little blame for it could be laid at the door of the packers, whose deft hands stuffed the crates with straw and laid the goods amongst it with skill and speed. Lighter items were packed in panniers and sent by donkey down to the canal for loading, a far cry from the packhorses of Martin’s youth, attacked on the roads to Liverpool and Manchester by the dreaded cratemen.

  But all these phases were a long way ahead of Olivia. Meanwhile, a welcome break had come — for one hour every afternoon she joined Amelia in the children’s recreation sheds, helping with their tuition. It was here that Damian Fletcher found her when he called unexpectedly one day.

  Curiosity brought him to the pottery, a desire to find out how two enterprising women were progressing with their revolutionary ideas. He was taken aback when confronted by the Tremain heiress clad in workers’ clogs and the rough clothes of a pottery hand.

  ‘You look surprised, Mr Fletcher.’ She managed to keep her voice light, though her heart was sent spinning by this unexpected sight of him. Thrusting out a clogged foot and indicating her thick hessian apron, she said, ‘How else should I dress, now I am a Drayton worker? I’m at the cleansing benches now, but not for long, I hope.’

  ‘That, on top of all this?’

  ‘“This”, Mr Fletcher, is my recreation, a welcome hour in which I can actually sit down. Potters are on their feet constantly. The only tasks which can be done sitting down are decorating by hand, or monochrome printing from copper plate transfers, and I haven’t advanced to any of that yet. You still look surprised, sir, though I can’t think why.’

  ‘Naturally I am surprised, as I am sure everyone must be.’

  ‘Then you, like everyone else, will have to get used to it.’

  He smiled. Her frankness was disarming. He had always seen her as a very likeable young woman, even attractive in her way, and as such he had then dismissed her. Since parting from Caroline he had shunned the opposite sex; the wound was too raw, his loss too painful, the memory of shared passion sometimes too agonising to be borne. He wanted no reminders, no knife twisting. And yet he had to endure it, as he had endured the nightmare months in prison and the dreams which had plagued him there. Even now they could recur, spanning the vast ocean and the endless miles between Savannah and Burslem, plunging him again into the horror of stinking cells and violent companions. And even now a worse dream could recur, a nightmare recollection of an innocent youth lying dead … flogged until the flowing blood washed the life out of him.

  The memory of that still came to him at unexpected moments, day as well as night. It came to him now, watching Olivia guiding a child’s hand in the formation of a letter, though there was no possible association between this innocent scene and the brutal one he had never been able to obliterate from his mind, and hard on it came the inevitable sequence … his own blind fury and uncontrollable reaction, followed by subsequent arrest. Then the anger of his wife’s grandfather, the autocratic Henry Williamson, condemning him for interfering in matters which didn’t concern him.

  ‘Being my granddaughter’s husband doesn’t give you the right to meddle, Englishman.’

  ‘Meddle! That Petty Officer has ill treated women and slaves ever since he arrived. He deserved every stroke of the flogging I gave him, and worse.’

  ‘Meting out justice isn’t your prerogative. It is mine.’

  ‘Then exercise it!’

  ‘I am doing so. To you. I have already taken the first step. I was against your marrying Caroline, but her heart was set on you and her parents have never been able to refuse her anything. But I have been proved right. A hard-up tutor should have been sent packing before worming his way into the family. I shall dispose of you as I have wanted to all along. Both the Hopkeys and the Williamsons will be glad to see you go. They have good cause to want no Englishman in their midst.’

  ‘You are an Englishman too. Being a Colonial hasn’t changed your nationality.’

  ‘But we are sixth generation settlers. We don’t feel English any more.’

  ‘Then why
are you defending the barbaric act of one of George the Third’s soldiers? Only an extreme loyalist would do that.’

  ‘I am doing my duty as an officer of the law. You will now find out what it is like to be a criminal in a Colonial jail, but first you will be tarred and feathered and dragged on a rail through the streets of Savannah in the usual way after the militia has arrested you. That, plus imprisonment, is the punishment for attacking an officer who was lodged here in accordance with the Billeting Act — the British Government’s Billeting Act. I sent an immediate message to the Governor and the militia is on its way. There’ll be no escaping, so don’t try it. You’ll be found guilty on my testimony and after you have served your sentence, you will never set foot in this house again. When the unrest is over and the law has time to deal with civilian problems, I will set divorce proceedings in motion.’

  ‘Caroline will never agree.’

  ‘So she declares — at the moment. But in time she will. In time, she’ll be glad to. What delicately nurtured woman could endure being the wife of an ex-convict, a man so disgraced that no one would employ him? And mark this carefully — if you took her away from here, I’d guarantee to spread the news of your guilt so far and wide that you’d never escape it, even on a continent so vast as this. Your name would be known in all the thirteen Colonies. Remember that.’

  He did remember it, but despite the secrecy of his hurried escape at the beginning of the second year of his three year sentence, and despite the advice of the prison warden who aided him, he had nonetheless attempted to see Caroline for one last time.

  ‘Make sure you’re on that ship by dawn,’ Warden Robertson had said. ‘You’ll be taken on as a deck hand, but if you get caught before boarding remember that I’ll swear you escaped without aid, or I’ll be sharing those prison bars with you.’