The same significance was applied to the cricket on the hearth. We’d all be in the kitchen when Kate would exclaim ‘Listen’. Everybody would stop what they were doing and listen to the cheep, cheep, cheep, of the death beetle as it was called, coming from somewhere under the hearthstone. If they had known at the time this noise was caused by an insect rubbing its legs together they would have said, I’m sure, that it had been bidden to do just that to act as a warning. So again they would wait for a death, and a death there would be sooner or later. I cannot remember what explanation was given when the ticking went on after the death.
In connection with deaths naturally came funerals and in the New Buildings when there was a funeral there was always a gathering for a wreath. I was quite young when I knew that this business of gathering for wreaths annoyed me. Sometimes as much as two pounds would be gathered in a door-to-door collection. Two pounds was a lot of money in those days but every penny was spent on floral tributes, when perhaps the widow did not know where her next penny was coming from. There were a number of people in the New Buildings who I knew would have preferred the money to a floral tribute. The stupidity of this practice did not occur to those kind people who went gathering and had something to say about those who would not, or could not, contribute.
But to return to my question ‘What am I going to do?’ The answer of course was, ‘You’ll have to go into service.’
Kate had sworn that I wasn’t going into service, whatever else she let me do she wasn’t going to let me go into service. But I seemed to fall into service quite accidentally. I made friends with a girl who was a daily at a house on the terrace. Although the head of the house was only a foreman-carpenter in the docks their prestige was high because of his wife’s association with the mayoress of Jarrow. I think they were sisters. Anyway this family had nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with the other inhabitants of the New Buildings. They were considered very swanky. Some evenings I would go and wait for this girl and Mrs Johnson would ask me into the kitchen. I was very taken with the house and the nice little kitchen which was kept for kitchen uses only. They had a separate dining room, and a sitting room. Well, my friend offended her mistress in some way and when Mrs Johnson asked if I would mind helping out I was only too glad to do so.
There were three sons in the household, all working, and the eldest I liked very much, as only a very young girl can like. I knew he liked me and at fourteen I was ready to fall on his neck. But he was an honourable man and being much older he didn’t allow any such thing to happen. He waited until I was eighteen, but it was too late then, for I fancied I had the world of lads grovelling at my feet. And when many years later I thought that I might be able to recapture that girlish passion I found that it was much too late.
There were six rooms in the house, all packed with furniture, two passages, a staircase, a backyard and a front to clean besides preparing the meals and doing part of the washing. I got ten shillings a week less my stamp. I worked from eight until six each day and for a time was so happy there that I even went back at night and cooked big pans of chips for the men.
But before long I found that I didn’t like service, and I feared that if I continued in my post there would soon be a mix-up as to who was the mistress and who was the maid. I dared to fancy that I wasn’t made for taking orders or working after other people. As some people in the New Buildings put it: ‘She’s got ideas about herself has that one,’ and as Mrs Waller added, ‘She’ll end up the same as big Kate.’
I happened to know a girl at the church whose father had been a sea captain, I think their name was Cooper. Kate was very flattered that this girl should want to be friends with me.
The girl and her brother were at boarding school and during the vacation she gave lessons in pen-painting and bookkeeping at a shilling a lesson. Funds were very low at the time so I asked her if I could have half a lesson for sixpence and she agreed, and as soon as I took the pen in my hand, lifted up a dab of paint and applied it to the pattern on the handkerchief sachet I knew that I could do this kind of thing, and do it right away. And that’s just what I did, and on that sixpenny lesson I started a business. Nearly everything was bought by clubs in the North, so why shouldn’t they buy painted cushions and tray cloths, and mantel borders on clubs? Why not? They made lovely presents, and to have a hand-painted cushion reclining point upwards in the armchair in the sitting room was a hallmark of refinement. So I went round canvassing and I got my first twenty customers. They paid a shilling a week, which entitled them to two small black satin cushion covers or one large one.
Now began two years of real hard work which was eased by the oil of refinement. Everybody in the house was happy for a time. Kate was glowing. I wasn’t in service, I was earning my living at ‘art’ of all things, and me granda’s pride was oozing out of him. I think it was their attitude towards my grand job that gave me the courage to put my foot down firmly at last on the carrying of the grey hen. I’d still had to go for the beer all the time I had been in service but now I felt the grey hen was outside the aura of this elevated Katie McMullen who was earning her living by painting.
Earning my living! I would sit from early morning until late at night, my nose only a few inches from the pen, and I would paint in the transfers of baskets of lilac, irises, daffodils, or gilt cornucopias of fruit. And on the mantel borders, nearly always two peacocks, their nebs meeting and their tails trailing towards the end of the material. And did I work! And how much did I earn? Even in the best of weeks I never cleared more than nine and sixpence profit. I was working much longer hours than when I was in service but as Kate pointed out, ‘You’re your own boss, hinny, an’ you’re not dirtying your hands.’
No, I wasn’t dirtying me hands, I was only filling me belly with white lead and slowly poisoning myself, but I wasn’t dirtying me hands.
I had a friend at this period called Lily Maguire. She was my first real friend and I was very fond of her, as I was of her mother. They lived up in White Leas about three miles from us, and of an evening I would go up to see Lily, and we would talk and laugh, and when we became the proud possessors of bikes we rode miles and for a few hours the world was good and everybody in it was happy.
I used to like going up to the Maguires’ house. Mrs Maguire was one of those hard-working, patient women that sustained the mining communities. On my visits Mr Maguire was nearly always washing himself in the tin bath in front of the fire. He was a little man with a big voice who always gave me a loud welcome. And I remember Lily and me standing under the arches one night exchanging our troubles. She herself was seventeen and she was upset, even horrified that her mother was going to have yet another baby. My worries were of a different nature, I was upset because every decent thing I had found its way to Bob’s. I can remember saying, ‘I can’t put up with it much longer, Lily, I’m ashamed to the core, I have no things. As soon as I get them they go.’ But when we parted I was filled with regret for having given our Kate away, because Lily, like everyone else, liked Kate, and it was the very first time I had ever said a word against her to anyone.
I lost touch with Lily nearly thirty years ago and tried to contact her for a long time but succeeded only a few years ago. In her first letter to me she asked if I remembered us walking through the fields, and me saying to her that I would probably marry a rich gentleman and live in a big house, and that she would marry a miner. It must have been said as a joke, but a poor one, but she did marry a miner, and a very nice fellow I remember; as for me marrying a rich man, schoolmasters will never pay surtax, but I did marry a gentleman. She also said that when she heard that I had brought Kate to Hastings she shook her head, saying, ‘Poor Kitty. How foolish, she is taking her troubles wherever she goes. She should have learnt by now.’
I was fighting with Kate a lot these days and sometimes me granda would take her part. I didn’t mind this in the least; I had realised early on that they could both go for me but that whatever happened they hadn’t to go f
or each other because they had to live together. Come what may, they were tied together for life, and for Kate there were no compensations.
Kate never lifted her hand to me now. She hadn’t from the day I hit her back. I can see now that at this particular time she was in a highly nervous state. It was a Saturday dinner time. She was making a rush dinner of some kind, frying something on the fire. And she had told me to dust the kitchen and get it finished before dinner – all household chores had to be finished before Saturday dinner time – I had finished the dusting when she said, ‘You’ve never dusted the bottom of the machine.’ The box sewing machine had given place to a Singer’s treadle sewing machine and the iron sides formed a sort of lattice work into which you had to poke your fingers to clear the dust.
‘I’ve done it,’ I said.
‘Get down on your knees and get that properly dusted,’ she commanded.
‘I’ll not. I’ve done it once and I’m not going to do it again.’
She raised her hand to give me the familiar clout across the ear. I was no longer sent into the bedroom and told to wait, but this raised hand, this hitting of me on the head filled me both with fear of the descending blow and angry resentment at having to endure it. As I saw the hand coming at me I cried, ‘If you hit me again I’ll hit you back!’ There was a stunned silence. Then her hand came down on me but without force, whereupon I retaliated swiftly. And swifter still, me granda cried, ‘My God! We’ve come to somethin’ now when you’re hittin’ your mother. What’s come over you?’
Both Kate and I turned simultaneously on him, both denying that I had struck her. But as in the case of me being brought to my senses by Olive Swinburne’s blow so Kate never lifted her hand to me again, at least not until I was twenty-seven, and then she didn’t know what she was doing.
I had been painting for about a year when David McDermott came off a long voyage. I hated the thought of him coming into the family, yet I had nothing against him, he was a quiet, absolutely unassuming man, and good-natured to the point of fault.
It fell to me to make the arrangements for the marriage. I had to go down to the registry office in Shields and give the names in. And then one Saturday morning, bowed down with a nameless shame and the feeling of betrayal, I accompanied them to their wedding. What followed was cold, soulless, drab. I can’t see the scene, but I can recall the feeling, and it was from this day that the longing to find my father became active in me.
When with delicate tact I said I would like to go to Birtley on my bike for the weekend there were no obstacles put in my way and so I left them to themselves. I say to themselves for there was me granda still lording it over his domain, even if in a somewhat subdued fashion. And he had taken on a kind of halo for allowing the marriage to take place at all – I doubt, but for the fact that Davie went to sea for long periods, whether he would have sanctioned the alliance without a fight of some kind. But Davie, being a quiet man, let the fathar have all the saying.
With Davie at sea and Kate drawing the enormous half-pay note of two pounds eighteen a month we settled down into our old way of life, but unrest was deep within me and I would relieve this feeling with spurts of writing.
I was very religious at this time. I would never miss Mass and Benediction on a Sunday, or think of going to the pictures unless I first paid a visit to the Holy Family. So I suppose it was understandable that I should now write a story about Christ coming down in the form of a man and living in a tenement. I called the story ‘On the Second Floor’. Years later when I read ‘The Passing of the Third Floor Back’, I realised that everything has been done before. All our ideas have been thought up before and will be thought up again and again. Nothing is new. But having finished this story and shed bucketsful of tears onto the pages I called in at the little Post Office on my way to White Leas, and Lily’s, and asked the man how much it would cost to have it printed – I didn’t know anything in those days about typing – and he said, ‘How many words are there?’
‘Sixteen thousand five hundred and twenty,’ I replied accurately. I had counted every one.
‘Oh, well, hinny, I think you’d have to pay something in the region of ninepence a thousand to have it typed and if you want a copy it’ll be a bit more.’
Ninepence a thousand! Sixteen ninepences. Good lord! I could never rise to that. On I went to White Leas and spilled out my tale of woe. Then Lily saved the day.
‘Our Maisie’s a good printer,’ she said.
Maisie was the clever one, she had got to the High School.
‘Would you print my story for me, Maisie?’ I asked.
Yes. Maisie said, she’d do it at nights.
So there and then we came to a business arrangement. Maisie was to hand-print my story and on completion I was to pay her the sum of half a crown.
After many, many months I got my story and poor, poor Maisie got her half a crown. Sweated labour, indeed.
At last, at last I was able to parcel my story up and send it to the Editor of the Shields Daily Gazette, who had been waiting for just such a story.
The Gazette had an office on the Dock Bank. I sent it on a Wednesday morning, they received it on the Thursday, and I had it back by the Friday morning. I felt that they must have thrown it at the postman without even looking at it. I was wrong. It was when I had had my fourth novel published that I received a letter from a retired reporter. He had started with the Shields Daily Gazette, which was a penny daily, and he remembered the day my story arrived at the office, and he explained to me the scene. The assistant editor came tearing out of his room with this bundle in his hand, saying, ‘Some so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so fool has sent a sixteen-thousand-word story to a penny daily, can you beat it? Chuck it back.’
When I went silently into the kitchen with my returned – hand-printed – manuscript, me granda said, ‘Well, don’t you let it get you down, hinny. They’re nowt but a lot of soapy sods. You can tell that by the stuff they stick in the paper. Dozy buggers the lot of them.’
This from the man who couldn’t read. He comforted me finally by saying, ‘They haven’t got the brains of Betty.’ Betty was a pet hen. She was twelve years old, she had rheumatics and couldn’t walk but could still lay eggs. When she died he couldn’t eat her, but he wasn’t going to lose on her so he sold her to one of the Arab boarding-house keepers in Costorphine Town.
So the irritations mounted and mounted at this time until one night I had a big row with Kate. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember that me granda took her part, and I was thankful for this. I said to them both, ‘I’m finished, I’m getting out.’
I was near the end of a club and had no desire to renew my clients, in fact I felt very tired. There was a great weariness on me and when it came about that I couldn’t even talk back to Kate she took me to Doctor McHaffie and the verdict was I must give up pen-painting immediately because the white lead was poisoning me. His words were, ‘You’d better give it up if you don’t want to go up.’ Also he said I was very anaemic. Anaemic? That meant not having plenty of blood. Kate couldn’t understand this. Why, look at the big shives of meat she got every week. Look at the cabbage and vegetables she cooked; the broth she made, and didn’t I have fresh eggs when nobody else had eggs? Yes, I suppose in a way this was all true. The food was there if I wanted it. But I hated brisket. The unending monotony of roast brisket every Sunday, cold brisket every Monday, hashed stews or panhacklety on the Tuesday and cabbage always beaten up with the fat from the meat, or dripping; and meat puddings, never-ending. Whereas I always had plenty of home-made bread I never had fresh milk more than a half a dozen times until I went into Harton Institution in my late teens. Condensed milk was the order of the day, straight out of the tin during a weekday but put into a glass container for Saturday and Sunday.
Feeling too ill to attack the painting and finish the few articles due to the club-holders I returned the money they had paid in. This left me absolutely penniless, but I was determined I was goi
ng to make a break. There was nothing else for it but place again. I wasn’t speaking to Kate after yet another row, so I went up to Mrs Maguire early one morning, and I asked her for the loan of a shilling. It was the first money I ever borrowed for myself. I wanted the shilling to go to the registry office to put my name down for a place.
The woman in the registry said to me, ‘I think I’ve got something that’ll suit you straight away. Would you mind looking after a little boy?’
I didn’t care much for looking after children but I said, ‘Not at all.’
‘Well, this lady is going to travel and she wants a nice girl to look after her little boy. He is only four. It’s a grand chance for the right person, it could lead to anything.’
Away I went to Westoe. I saw this lady and we took to each other on the spot. She was going to Italy. My sole duty would be to look after the child. She didn’t want a trained nurse but someone nice who would be a sort of companion to him, someone still young enough not to have forgotten how to play, but old enough to have sense. She thought I would fit the bill in both requirements.
I was floating on air down the staircase when I suddenly thought of Our Lady and said a little prayer of thanksgiving, and so sincere was this prayer that the essence must have been conveyed to the woman for she said, ‘Are you of any particular denomination?’
‘I’m a Catholic,’ I said.
She stopped on the stairs and I turned and looked up towards her.
‘But you’re not one of those Catholics who wants to run to Mass every Sunday, are you?’
Our Kate Page 16
