Protective of her sister, Beata waited until Eliza’s attention was diverted, then grabbed Mims’ crusts off her, these disappearing under the table. She caught Clem’s eye – he had seen her! A suspenseful moment ensued whilst she waited anxiously for him to give her away, but mercifully all he did was to shake his head in exasperation.
When Eliza turned round again Mims’ plate was empty. This provoked suspicion. ‘You’d better have eaten them.’ Making everyone except Clem leave the table, she checked underneath to see if there was anything on the floor, but there was nothing to see. Only half satisfied, Eliza gave the children a list and a purse, armed with which they left for the market, leaving their stepmother and Clem to enjoy a cup of tea in peace.
‘It’s a good job I’ve got strong elastic.’ Beata hoisted her skirt and delved into the leg of her knickers, withdrawing a crust. ‘Are you sure you don’t want this?’ Glad that the crust was refused, for she herself was always hungry, she devoured it, along with the others that were withdrawn one by one from their hiding place.
On reaching Mexborough, they made their purchase of everything on Eliza’s list, ensuring that her favourite cake, walnut with butter icing, was placed safely on top of the basket. After a covetous look in the window of Harry May’s toyshop and not overly keen to get home, they decided to call in and visit their sister on the haberdashery counter of Bon Marche, delivering their pretend requirements in lardy-dah tone – ‘Horf a yord of rrribbon, pleeese!’ – and causing Madeleine great embarrassment before being shooed from the shop by an irate manageress.
Their trepidation at going home turned out to be unwarranted, for Eliza’s mood seemed to have taken a turn for the better when they finally arrived, their stepmother engaged in good-humoured banter with Clem whilst he repaired a cupboard door.
In fact she was to remain equable for the rest of the day, even allowing the children a sliver of walnut cake at teatime. Hating butter icing, Beata politely refused, knowing that this was one time she was in no danger of being made to eat something she did not like.
After tea, Eliza announced, ‘Millicent, how would you like to play the piano for us?’
Clem looked somewhat shocked. ‘Don’t you think the neighbours might think it’s a bit funny?’ His father had barely been dead two months.
‘Oh, I don’t intend for us to have a knees-up.’ Looking conscientious and pressing her hand to his shoulder, Eliza went to sift through the sheets of music in Grace’s piano stool, selecting only the most respectful tunes. ‘But a quiet sing-song won’t do any harm. We’ve had a lot of bad luck lately, we need cheering up. Your father would have been the first to tell us to get on with our lives and not stay miserable.’
Lifting Mims onto the stool, she placed a sheet of music before her, then went to stand behind Clem’s chair, her hands resting on his shoulders. Joining in with everyone else, Beata glanced across the room to see that the hands had set up a gentle caressing. At one point Clem even put up his own hand to cover one of hers, causing Beata to look away quickly as if burned.
Otherwise, it was to be a very enjoyable interlude that lasted until bedtime which, for those under thirteen, was seven thirty.
This being far too early for sleep, Beata, Mims and Doris were still awake when Maddie came up a few hours later and climbed in beside her sisters. Ever-hungry, Beata sniffed Maddie’s breath like a dog. ‘You’ve had bread.’ Only those with paid work were allowed supper.
‘Aye, a whole slice,’ marvelled her sister, faintly sarcastic. ‘She’s in a good mood tonight, what have you done to her?’
Beata could not imagine. ‘It wasn’t me.’
‘Me neither,’ chimed Doris.
‘She’s laughing fit to burst down there with our Clem,’ said Maddie.
On the other side of the partition, Joe was climbing into bed beside Edwin, George and the sleeping Marmaduke, grumbling to the speaker, ‘Aye, you’d be laughing an’ all if you could pocket everybody’s wages and give them only a tanner to spend.’
‘Is that what you get?’ Beata asked her sister.
Maddie nodded. ‘I’ll bet our Clem gets more than that.’
‘You mean golden boy.’ Edwin had noticed the favouritism too.
‘Aye, Mother likes him, doesn’t she?’ chipped in Doris.
Beata agreed. ‘Still, if he can keep her laughing I’m not bothered how much she gives him.’
‘It’s all right for you!’ came her brother’s voice from the other side of the partition. ‘You don’t have to slave away all week in a bloody mucky pit just for her to rob you of all your earnings.’
Beata wondered how Joe could not recognize that she was equally oppressed. She might not go out to work but having to spend longer in Eliza’s company brought a different form of slavery.
‘Shush, our Clem’s coming!’ Maddie’s warning plunged everyone into silence, all snuggling under the covers.
Duly, Clem slipped into the single bed that stood only inches away from that of his brothers and everyone settled down to sleep.
* * *
Jolted awake in the middle of the night, at first Joe assumed that Clem had got up to use the chamber pot. It was a normal occurrence and, after being briefly disturbed, he himself fell back to sleep. But when he woke again to find the rising sun warming the room and his brother’s bed still empty, he became curious, this keeping him from further slumber.
Deciding to investigate, he rolled out of bed leaving only three sleeping figures in it, and crept out on to the small landing – where his tiptoeing figure almost collided with Clem, who was leaving Eliza’s room.
There was a stifled cry, a moment of acute embarrassment, then angry muttering from Clem as he gestured for Joseph to get back to bed. ‘Can’t a man have any bloody privacy?’
‘I just wondered where—’
‘I got sick of listening to you lot snoring!’ Clem hissed aggressively, shoving him backwards. ‘Mother said I could come into the double bed for a while and enjoy a bit of peace. That’s all, so don’t go saying owt to anybody or I’ll bloody thump you!’
‘I weren’t going to!’ Joe continued to back away.
‘Better not!’ Clem poked Joe in the chest, which caused him to fall on top of the bed’s occupants, who had been woken by the dispute and who now yelled in complaint as their brother got back in, squashing the smaller ones against the wall.
‘And you can shut up an’ all!’ warned Clem.
‘What’s going on?’ Behind the partition, Beata’s muzzy face lifted itself from the pillow.
‘Get back to sleep,’ growled Clem. ‘It’s not time to get up yet.’
The house fell silent for another hour, a shocked Joe lying there wide awake, horrified by what he had witnessed. What if his siblings were to ask about the disturbance? How could he share the knowledge that he had seen his brother coming out of their stepmother’s bedroom?
It was small relief for Joe that he was not to be the one who broke the shocking story. Unaware that Duke had heard every word,
Clem was plunged into embarrassment when the nine-year-old asked innocently at the breakfast table, ‘Mother, can Clem sleep in your bed every night? Then we’d have more room.’
Everyone stopped eating. Ignorant of the facts of life but knowing this could not be right, Beata’s heart started to thud.
Blushing furiously, Clem’s eyes flew to Eliza. ‘I never brea—’ But when he saw that her mouth had begun to turn up at the corners, he did not feel quite so bad.
Eliza threw back her head and laughed out loud. She seemed deliriously happy today, the onlookers noticed, her breast jiggling up and down under the white bib of her pinafore as she gave vent to her amusement. ‘Why, I think that makes great sense! Don’t you, Clem?’ She dabbed at her watering eyes. ‘After all, you are the man of the house now. You might as well enjoy the privileges.’
Clem ran a self-conscious hand over his angular jaw and glanced at the older children to gauge their opinion. Only Joe
and Maddie realized the true significance in all this, their antipathy forbidding them to meet Clem’s eye, but the rest seemed unperturbed, obviously grateful for anything that could inject Eliza with such good humour.
With Clem’s nod, it was taken for granted by everyone that this was the way things would be.
‘But you don’t mention a word of it outside this house!’ Eliza warned the younger ones, showing them the back of her hand. ‘Or else.’
Both Maddie and Joe thought this warning superfluous, could not even bring themselves to voice it to each other as they and the rest made their way to church, though each nursed the private query: how could Clem love a woman who treated his siblings so harshly? But the question remained unspoken, the only reference to the new sleeping arrangement being made later when Maddie snuggled down beside her sisters in bed.
‘I can’t stand this.’
‘What do you mean?’ Beata’s auburn head turned on the pillow.
‘I can’t explain,’ muttered Maddie. ‘You’ll know when you’re older. There are things going on here that aren’t right. I can’t stick it. I’m off to ask if I can go into service. It can’t be harder work than here and at least I’ll get properly fed.’
Next morning, before leaving for work, she put her request to Eliza. Her stepmother was none too pleased at first, objecting that she could not spare her, but when Maddie pointed out that someone else would have the job of feeding her and she would still be sending money home, Eliza gave it serious thought. ‘All right,’ she said eventually, ‘but you mustn’t tell a soul – and that goes for you lot,’ she warned the others as they prepared for school. ‘If anyone should ask, Madeleine’s still living at home.’
21
Following their sister’s departure, her household tasks were divided between the rest of the children. ‘Well, you needn’t think I’m doing them!’ Eliza retorted at the look on their faces when she informed them. ‘I do enough running about after you lot.’ She was constantly bewailing this, but to Beata and her siblings the only one she seemed to run around after was Clem.
Still, they must be grateful to their brother for diverting her attention from them. Since taking him into her bed she was generally a lot happier.
But happiness was a fragile entity in a mining village, the word ‘goodbye’ having deeper significance amongst those who earned their living underground, every wife and mother, even the cynical Eliza, spending eight hours of dread until their men were safely home. Even so, with no siren to warn of a disaster, she was not anticipating anything untoward when she answered a knock at her door that same week.
Finding two men bearing her son Edwin on a stretcher, his face contorted by pain, she let out a shriek.
‘He’s been kicked by a pony, love,’ came the swift explanation from one of the men. ‘It’s his leg.’
Though relieved to hear it was nothing more serious, Eliza moaned in despair. ‘God help us, what else could go wrong?’
The strain was beginning to show on the stretcher bearers’ faces. ‘Well, can you just tell us where to put him?’
Sighing, an anxiety-ridden Eliza ushered them indoors, and watched helplessly as her son, crying in agony, was transferred to the bed-chair where Probyn had recently died.
Having deposited their burden, the men made for the door.
‘Well, what am I supposed to do now?’ Eliza entreated them.
‘I don’t reetly know, love. The doctor’s seen him, told us to bring him here and he’d be in to talk to thee later.’
With a gloomy nod, Eliza allowed them to leave, then turned to view Edwin. ‘Another wage down. Did they say how long you’d be off for?’
In too much pain to answer, her son merely shook his head. The doctor came then, but was also unable to give Eliza an answer. It was just a matter of waiting until the wound healed, he said.
* * *
But the wound did not heal. In fact it became even more painful because, as further tests eventually informed them, the bone had become infected. It looked as if Edwin might be a permanent invalid.
Interpreting the word invalid as burden, Eliza fell into a state of aggravation, becoming even more short-tempered with the others to whom she now delegated chores once undertaken by herself, her excuse being that she had a cripple to look after – though to Beata, who took on most of the load, it did not seem that Edwin attracted any more of his mother’s attention than he had done previously, Eliza spending much of her time reading and stuffing her face with the chocolate cracknels that she selfishly hid from others.
Yet even without the stress of overwork and a young man in her bed Eliza remained a very unpredictable housemate. She could be in a good mood for weeks, allowing Mims to play the piano or Beata to read a book, then just when they became accustomed to this entente cordiale she would fly into a rage for the slightest deviation from her rules. Sometimes there did not appear to be a reason at all. Many a time Beata would feel a hard slap round the head and yet remain totally ignorant of what she had done to deserve it for Eliza would simply glare at her and walk away. Then the next day might find their stepmother as nice as pie. To Beata it was totally beyond comprehension.
One might have hoped that, as the possessor of a kind nature, Clem would direct this towards his siblings and protect them from the blows, but alas no. The surrogate father acted out his role to the full, his sympathy almost entirely for Eliza. As one who found it impossible to control his own temper, Clem knew exactly what she must feel after these unbridled displays, and he empathized with her, guessing that the outbursts were induced by a feeling of helplessness over her situation and knowing how guilty she must feel afterwards. Blinkered by youth and by his sexual obsession with her, he failed to see the difference between the two of them: in him the violent trait was balanced by a compassion totally absent in her. And at twenty-one, he was even less equipped to recognize the deeper, darker reason for his own behaviour: through union with his father’s widow he became the man he had always wanted to be.
Beata might have derived some small comfort that the abuse was indiscriminate, meted out to everyone including Eliza’s offspring, but some had conjured up a way to avoid it. The minute his mother grabbed hold of him, the wily George would simply hold his breath and go blue in the face until she dropped him like a hot cake out of fear of killing him – then he would laugh behind her back and jab two fingers in the air. Edwin’s handicap too went some way to sparing him, and even if Doris might occasionally be the recipient of her mother’s volatile temper, she was favoured in material ways.
At Whitsuntide, when their mother had been alive there had always been new outfits in which to attend the procession through town. Now, though, there was insufficient money to reclothe everyone from top to toe. Even the bestowal of new hats was marred by an act of favouritism, for whilst Doris received a proper leghorn straw hat, the top of the range, Beata’s looked as if it was made from the material used to thatch roofs, a row of artificial buttercups lending nothing to its lack of daintiness. It did not matter that Mims, being the youngest, only received the usual hand-me-down. To Beata no one was unluckier than herself. Feeling utterly miserable and conspicuous, having to tolerate rude remarks from other children, she hated every moment of the Whitsun parade.
But the humiliation was to continue long after the parade was over, for, too terrified to do otherwise, she was forced to wear the detested hat every Sunday for church.
* * *
The thought of running away had never really occurred to Beata before, but now she began seriously to consider it. Born with a wanderlust, her brother Duke had taken to sloping off for longer periods since Father had died, his truancy usually prompted by some upset with his stepmother. Lately he had disappeared again, this absence being the longest of all.
He had been gone for a week now. Maybe he had gone for good, mused Beata, the thought causing an even greater vacuum in her disconsolate heart. Lying in bed that evening after another trying day, she had just mad
e her decision to emulate him when there was a commotion down in the yard that had her and her siblings bounding to the window to investigate.
‘You little sod, we’ve been worried sick about you!’ On his way to the lavatory, Clem had heard a scuffling from the coal shed and discovered Duke bedding down for the night. Having been at the receiving end of Eliza’s constant grumblings that he should do something about his ungrateful little wretch of a brother, and feeling useless at not being able to prevent Duke’s escapades, he was finally able to vent his frustration on the culprit. ‘Well, you won’t bloody do it again in a hurry!’
Leaning over the windowsill, the others watched in consternation as the offender was dragged into the yard by a furious Clem, who proceeded to deliver upon the small, malnourished frame a hail of unrelenting blows that would have felled a man.
Such was the severity of the thrashing that Mims and Beata began to wail, ‘Don’t, oh, don’t!’ – this luring Clem’s attention upwards and so allowing a terrified Duke to scramble away from the murderous blows and press himself into a corner, weeping.
Horrified at his own behaviour, Clem hurled a last order – ‘Get up them bloody stairs!’ – before he himself strode for the lavatory, banging the door after him and thence slumping into an attitude of utter despair, beseeching help from the Almighty. Please, please, can’t You make them all behave? I just want everything to be nice.
* * *
Though having glimpsed what treatment she herself might expect for running away, Beata was only more determined to escape. What had happened to Clem? He had always been fiery, but this odious streak had previously been far outweighed by kindness and she loved her eldest brother. But there had been nothing kind in tonight’s actions.
Choosing a totally unsuitable time for her departure, a time when her absence was most noticeable, Beata’s escape was to be shortlived. She had only gone five miles before Clem pedalled up behind her on his bicycle and took her back to receive punishment.
A Different Kind of Love Page 44
