Workhouse Child

by Maggie Hope

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Maggie Hope

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Read on for an extract from The Coal Miner’s Daughter

  Copyright

  About the Book

  All she wants is a family of her own...

  Lottie is just three years old when her Mammy dies and she is sent to the workhouse. A childhood spent in poverty, skivvying for other people, leaves her with no prospects, no family...

  Yet Lottie is bright and has ambitions for a better life. And when an opportunity arises at the local Chapel, Lottie seizes her chance. But will she ever be anything more than a workhouse child?

  About the Author

  Maggie Hope was born and raised in County Durham. She worked as a nurse for many years, before giving up her career to raise her family.

  Also by Maggie Hope:

  A Wartime Nurse

  A Mother’s Gift

  A Nurse’s Duty

  A Daughter’s Gift

  Molly’s War

  The Servant Girl

  A Daughter’s Duty

  Like Mother, Like Daughter

  Orphan Girl

  Eliza’s Child

  One

  1863

  ‘Mammy!’

  Lottie woke suddenly, panic flooding through her whole body. She sat up in bed and stared across the large dormitory filled with beds and sleeping children. The child in the bed only 12 inches from hers began to cry, and a couple more followed suit.

  ‘Quiet!’ shouted a stout woman standing in the doorway holding a lantern. ‘Any more noise and I’ll bray the lot of you.’ The room quietened at once until only an odd muffled sob could be heard.

  Lottie sank down in the bed, feeling the lumps in the hard mattress against her backbone and skinny shoulders. The bed was wet, she realized with a shiver of foreboding. She would be smacked, or brayed as Matron called it, anyway. Well, she thought, she was used to that. Ever since her mammy had gone to heaven she had been smacked most days.

  Matron closed the dormitory door and the room was dark again but for the moonlight filtering in through the high windows. Lottie stared at the bits of sky she could see through the panes. There were stars shining between small clouds. Her mammy was there, she told herself, and she was happy and watching over her little girl.

  Lottie couldn’t remember very much about her mammy. But she comforted herself with holding on to the small scraps she could remember and added to them in her imagination. She hugged her pillow as her heart slowed back to normal after her nightmare. She couldn’t remember what the dream had been about even, only that she needed her mammy. Mammy would look after her; she would make the unnamed thing go away. Even if Lottie couldn’t see her, she knew Mammy was there in the sky just like one of those stars.

  Suddenly aware that the tiny girl in the next bed was sobbing and the noise was getting louder, Lottie sat up and leaned over towards her.

  ‘Ssh,’ she said softly. ‘Whisht now, whisht, don’t cry, pet. If Matron hears you she’ll come back and we’ll both get wrong, we’ll be smacked.’

  ‘Lottie? Can I come into your bed? Please can I?’

  ‘Howay then, come on,’ Lottie replied and a small body climbed in and snuggled under the blanket, not minding the dampness of the sheet. She put her arms around Lottie’s neck and Lottie cuddled her skinny little frame to her. Betty had only come into the workhouse a day or two ago and she was only two years old or maybe three. Even the matron couldn’t say for sure how old she was, because she had been a foundling. One of the Guardians, Mr Robson, who had a greengrocer’s shop, had caught her biting into a plum she had taken from the stall at the front of the shop and had chased her into Newgate Street before catching her.

  ‘You little imp!’ he had shouted and she had dropped the plum and begun to tremble and wail in fright.

  ‘Shame on you!’ a woman shouted at him. ‘What do you want frightening a little bairn like that for?’

  A few late shoppers, for it was eight o’clock on a Saturday evening, stopped and stared at the woman, the child and Mr Robson.

  Mr Robson’s face was as red as a beetroot with the injustice of it, for the remarks they made about him were uncomplimentary, to say the least.

  ‘She was stealing my fruit!’ he said and then wished he hadn’t, for he certainly didn’t want to bandy words with people like that. After all, late shoppers were usually folk in from the mining villages and just looking for bargains as the shops closed for the weekend. After something for nothing, they were.

  ‘The lass must be hungry,’ another woman observed. ‘What’s a mouldy old plum to you?’

  ‘Nevertheless …’ Mr Robson began, then stopped. ‘As a matter of fact, I was looking for her mother,’ he said stiffly. ‘But as there is no sign of her, I’ll take her up to the workhouse for the night. Not that I have to explain to any of you. I am a Poor Law Guardian and it is my duty.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said the woman, favouring him with a scornful glance. ‘Of course it is.’

  He turned away, remembering he wasn’t going to talk to these people. Instead, still hanging on to the little girl, he called to his assistant to close the shop while he went up to the workhouse, with its adjacent orphanage.

  ‘It’s an infernal nuisance, that’s what it is,’ he grumbled to Matron when he brought the child in. ‘I have better things to do on a Saturday night. But what else was I to do? There was no sign of her mother, or father either. If she has one, that is.’

  He handed the child over to Matron, holding her away from him with some distaste, for there was a nasty, dirty smell about her.

  Lottie happened to be walking along the corridor at the time, trying not to be noticed, but the woman had a sharp eye. She too held Betty away from her clean apron as she called to Lottie.

  ‘You there! Lottie Lonsdale! Take her and see she is washed and gets a uniform. And mind, I’m putting you in charge of her. Oversee her properly or you’ll feel the edge of my belt.’

  ‘Yes, Matron.’

  Matron and Mr Robson watched as Lottie took the child and went on down the corridor. ‘I’ll enter her into the record, Mr Robson,’ Matron said. ‘There’s no need for you to bother. You get off home to your wife and family, they’ll be wondering why you’re out so late.’

  ‘I will, thank you, Matron,’ Mr Robson replied. ‘But it was my Christian duty to fetch the lass. Duty comes first, Matron.’

  ‘Indeed, Mr Robson.’ She smiled archly at him and the bow beneath her chin wobbled. She shouldn’t have mentioned his wife and children, she thought as he turned away. He may have joined her in a cup of tea in her cosy sitting room. Sometimes she could do with a little company in the evenings.

  Meanwhile, Lottie had t
aken the new little girl to the kitchens, where Susan Dunn was washing up the supper bowls at the enormous stone sink. Though Susan was twelve years old, old enough to have recently joined the inmates on the women’s ward, she had to stand on a stool to reach the tap. It was just a cold water tap, but there was a large copper boiler to the side of the range and hot water had to be ladled from there.

  ‘Who’s this then?’ she asked Lottie, as she eyed the little girl. ‘I’m not seeing to her mind, I’m done for the day. Just as soon as I finish off these pots.’

  ‘Matron said I had to see to her,’ said Lottie. ‘Is there any panacklty left? I reckon she’s hungry.’

  ‘A bit. You’re lucky, I haven’t washed the pan out yet. I was just going to put the panacklty in a bowl and put it in the pantry. The night porter likes a snack when he comes on.’

  Lottie looked at the child. She was gazing at the bowl with undisguised hunger. She would have to be fed before she was bathed.

  ‘I think the bairn’s need is more important than the night porter’s,’ Lottie opined and Susan nodded agreement as she put the bowl of potatoes, onions and a few scraps of fat bacon on the table and Lottie sat the girl in front of it.

  ‘What’s your name, any road?’ she asked.

  ‘Betty,’ the girl said, through a mouthful of the food she was stuffing into her mouth with her hands rather than the spoon Susan had given her. Lottie brought in the tin bath and ladled hot water into it from the copper boiler and added cold from the tap.

  ‘Well, hurry up and eat your supper. Then you can have a bath and I’ll fetch you a uniform from the linen cupboard.’

  It was the policy of the Guardians for the inmates of the workhouse to do all the cooking and cleaning for themselves and that included looking after the little ones. In addition, the children had to be taught how to take over all the tasks as soon as they were old enough. After all, they were there at the expense of the ratepayers, and should show their gratitude for their board and lodging by paying some of it back.

  And they got a free education too, didn’t they? It was not so long ago that poor children got no education at all, and even now most scholars at the National Schools had to take their threepence every Monday morning to be taught their letters and figuring.

  Lottie knew all about this, because the children were reminded of it every single day.

  Lying in bed a short time after being assigned to Betty, her arms around Betty as the little girl’s breathing slowed into a sleeping rhythm interrupted only by the occasional snuffle, Lottie was having difficulty in getting back to sleep herself. Her thoughts were going over her nightmare and the unnamed dread that was always in the back of her mind.

  It was still dark when she heard the shuffling and occasional cough as the male inmates walked along by the end of the corridor on their way to the stone yard. That meant it must be half past five in the morning already and they were starting their working day. They broke stone with picks and shovelled it into huge barrows, ready to be taken away to be used to mend the roads across the county and even up to Weardale, where roads were being built which stretched right across the dale as far as Tynedale in places where there had been no roads before, just cart tracks or donkey trails.

  Betty had settled down at last and was fast asleep, her thumb stuck firmly in her mouth. Poor little soul, thought Lottie, did she remember her mother at all? Did she miss her, as she herself had missed her mother when she came into the workhouse? The tears were dried on to the tiny girl’s cheeks and her lashes sparkled in the dawning light. Soon she would have to wake the child up and return her to her own bed or there would be another reason they would both be smacked. Still, it was very quiet at this hour and if she sneaked to the linen cupboard she could get dry and clean bedclothes and change the bed. If she hid the wet sheets in the dirty laundry basket, then neither of them would be smacked.

  Carefully, Lottie drew herself out of the bed and ran off down the ward to the linen cupboard at the bottom. As she had thought, the woman responsible for it the night before had left the key hanging in a concealed niche near the door.

  Betty reminded her so much of herself when she had been left on the step of the workhouse, not because her mother had deserted her as Betty’s had done, but because she had been taken away to the women’s ward and Lottie had never seen her again. That terrible night was the earliest memory Lottie had. The figure of her mother had become shadowy after the six or seven intervening years, but the feelings were as sharp as ever.

  Two

  ‘You’ll be all right if you are a good girl, Lottie,’ her mother had said when she brought her to the Big House. That’s what Mammy had called it, the Big House, and Lottie, who was only three, had looked up at the forbidding stone frontage of the place. It was a dark night and she and her mammy had been walking all day and Mammy was breathing with a funny rasp, which frightened Lottie more than the fear of the house. By the time a man came to open the door and let them in, her mammy was slumped against the stone at the side of the door and when she tried to walk over the step she slid gently down in a heap.

  Lottie was crying by then and the man caught her roughly by the arm and dragged her into the entrance.

  ‘Shut your noise and sit down there,’ he said sharply. And she did, for he was a big man and she was frightened of him. She watched with large, frightened eyes as a woman came and was seeing to her mammy and taking her away, and Lottie never saw her again except in her dreams.

  ‘Your mother has gone to heaven,’ Matron said on the day Minnie Lonsdale was laid to rest in a pauper’s grave beside all the other paupers. Lottie was taken to the committal and she saw the box in which her mother was, but she comprehended very little of it. But when she went to church in the crocodile of girls dressed in checked dresses and black stockings and boots, the big girl who held her hand and walked alongside her whispered that her mother had not been in the box really, she had gone to heaven. The big girl’s name was Edna and it was her job to look after Lottie and take her to the earth closet and stop her messing herself. Mostly she was kind but sometimes she lost her temper and smacked Lottie. ‘You do what I tell you or I’ll smack you in the gob,’ she would say and Lottie would shrink back, for everything in the Big House was bewildering and frightened her, but mostly she didn’t like being smacked.

  Lottie talked to her mammy at night, whispering of what had happened to her during the day, and she gleaned some comfort from that. After a while, the picture of her mother she carried around in her head began to fade until it had gone altogether and there was nothing left but the memory of her presence and the feelings it aroused in her.

  By the time Lottie was ten, she was working in the linen room of the workhouse at Crossgate. She could sew a neat seam and patch and mend the clothes of the inmates of the workhouse. She also still had the job of looking after the waif who went by the name of Betty Bates, just as she herself had been allotted to the girl called Edna when she first entered the place. Not that Betty’s name was really Bates, but she had come to the workhouse as a foundling and the matron, who had the naming of little girl paupers, chose it. The one before that had been called Allen.

  ‘Betty, you’ll get into trouble if Matron finds you here. You’re not supposed to be in the corridors,’ said Lottie as she came out of the sewing room one day and found the tiny girl standing by the door, thumb in mouth. The one o’clock bell had rung for dinner and everyone was looking forward to it, because today it was to be a special dinner, provided by the ladies of the town.

  ‘Don’t tell,’ said Betty, looking fearfully over her shoulder.

  ‘I won’t tell,’ Lottie reassured her. She took Betty’s hand in hers and fell into her correct place in the hierarchy of the sewing room, behind the grown-up women and in front of the younger ones. ‘There will be brawn, maybe, and even cake,’ she whispered to the little girl and Betty’s eyes brightened. She could say very little as yet, being only three and a bit slow, but she could say Lottie’
s name and small phrases like ‘don’t tell’, a phrase she used a lot as she wet her bloomers so often still, even through the day.

  The orderly lines of children in their blue-checked dresses and black stockings and older women in rough grey serge and their hair knotted back and covered with large caps that came over their foreheads almost to the eyes, were swelled by others from the laundry and scrubbing maids with swollen red hands. The women were to eat in the same room as the men today because it was a special day. Women looked forward to seeing their men and children for the first time in weeks. Of course, the men would be at tables on one side of the refectory and the women at the other with the children in between, but messages could and would be passed along the lines of narrow tables.

  It was one of the days that stood out in Lottie’s memories of the workhouse at the junction of Allergate and Crossgate when later, as she turned thirteen, she was sent to Sherburn Hill to Place. All the children thought of Place with a capital ‘P’, for it meant they would be free of the workhouse and even be earning money for themselves. Place meant a job and lodging outside, where they did not have to answer to Matron or Master or even to the Poor Law Guardians, those men and sometimes women who were the absolute monarchs of the paupers.

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ sobbed Betty on the day Lottie carried her bundle out to the door where Mr Green was waiting to take her to his house in Sherburn Hill. It was the longest sentence Lottie had ever heard the girl, who was now five years old, say.

  ‘Betty Bates, you come in now and go to your class,’ Matron’s voice came from inside. She opened a window to the side of the front door and leaned out to speak to Lottie. ‘Be a good girl now, Lottie Lonsdale, don’t you be giving our lasses a bad name,’ she said and Lottie nodded silently. She might have spoken, but if she did she might have been rude to Matron and she wasn’t sure if the woman could bar her going, even now.

  ‘You be good now and learn your lessons, Betty. I will try to see you when I can,’ she said instead, her own eyes filling with tears. ‘I will, I promise. I’ll have a half-day off every month and I’ll come to see you if I can.’