Beggars and Choosers

by Catrin Collier

  ‘Yes. I tell you what I’ll do, Mrs Jones, you last the month and I’ll return this with an extra pound. It will be worth that in saved wages from my staff in the shop. But, should my uncle throw you out sooner, I’ll return it in full. Just come to me at the shop and ask for it.’

  ‘You told me why your uncle sacked three of his housekeepers. Why did he ask the others to leave, Mrs Rodney?’ Sali asked diffidently.

  ‘He didn’t like their cooking. Oh, and by the way,’ she turned back at the head of the stairs, ‘I’ll tell my uncle the first version you gave me of your life story. In my experience, men are unsympathetic to women who leave their husbands. Goodbye.’

  Only four hours! Sali considered what she should do first to create a good impression. Baths, miners needed to wash as soon as they came home, and food. She unfolded the mattress, laid it flat on the iron bedstead in the box room and opened her valise. Taking off her hat and coat, she hung them on the back of the door, slipped the overall she had bought over her suit and went to the kitchen.

  The range was stoked to burn for hours. It was dusty, but that could wait. She found tin buckets in the pantry, filled four at the pump and lined them up in front of the range ready to be put on the hobs at two o’clock. She ran down the staircase to the basement. The range was burning and the room warm, but she was daunted by a mammoth pile of washing that reached halfway up the wall and filled a quarter of the room. The dirty clothes would have spread even further if a makeshift wall, cobbled together from a wooden tub, dolly, mangle and row of buckets hadn’t contained them.

  Deciding that the washing too could wait, she filled another four buckets with water from a tap in the corner that didn’t have a sink, only a drain set in the floor beneath it. She lined them up next to the range, which was in even more need of a clean than the one upstairs. A second walk-in pantry contained dozens of empty preserving jars, earthenware containers filled with salt that she guessed had been used to preserve eggs, and empty jam jars.

  Recalling that there hadn’t been any vegetables other than potatoes in the pantry, she went outside. The first door she opened was the ty bach. The lavatory and seat were cleaner than she expected them to be after the dust and dirt of the house and there was a pile of newspapers on a stand behind the door. It was conveniently close to the back door, which seemed a luxury after the long trek down the yard in Mill Street. She opened the two brick-built sheds alongside it. One had coal heaped almost to the ceiling. She recalled her father telling her that miners received a coal allowance as part of their wages and with four colliery workers in one house that either amounted to more than they could use, or they had just had a recent delivery. The wood shed was filled with split logs.

  Rows of leeks, runner beans, onions, cabbages, turnips, peas and raspberry canes stretched from the shed down to a chicken coop and dog run at the bottom of the garden. The coop held a black cockerel and several white-feathered hens; the run housed two dogs that started barking as soon as they spotted her. When she looked at them, the Jack Russell and black Labrador stopped barking and gazed curiously at her. She approached the wooden palings and the Labrador stuck his head out and wagged his tail.

  ‘Some guard dog you are.’ She fondled the dog’s ears in a way she would never have dared do with Owen’s dogs.

  There were no weeds in the vegetable plot and both chicken run and dog pen were clean with freshly filled bowls of water. She reflected that someone in the house spent more time tending to the yard than the living quarters.

  She retrieved a bucket from the basement, filled it with beans, leeks, onions, turnips and carrots and scavenged enough late raspberries for a summer pudding. The garden clearly produced more vegetables than one family could use, and she understood why there were so many preserving jars. She was beginning to feel that there was enough work in this terraced house to occupy the time of the entire complement of servants who had worked in Danygraig House in her father’s time.

  As she wasn’t used to the oven, she decided against roasting the beef. After her father had died she had persuaded Mari and the cook to give her occasional cookery lessons, as much to give her an excuse to stay in the kitchen away from her uncle and mother as from any desire to learn. And Owen had never found fault with her pastry, or at least hadn’t said he had, so she thought she would make a pie. Seeing a small herb bed, she recalled some of the things her father’s cook had done to make meals more interesting and spent a few precious minutes picking sprigs of rosemary to mix in the pastry, mint for the peas, and enough horseradish to make a sauce. Tempted by a clump of heavily scented stock that suddenly and painfully reminded her of her childhood home, she picked a small bunch and arranged them in a vase she found in the basement kitchen.

  The next hour was spent cubing and braising the meat, cleaning the vegetables, and mixing the pastry from flour, lard, rosemary and water. She decanted cream from the top of the milk in the jug in the pantry, added a few spoonsful of sugar, whipped it and returned it to the slab to cool. She made the pie in the largest dish she could find and the summer pudding in the largest bowl.

  When the pie was in the oven, the peas podded and mixed with mint in a saucepan waiting to go on the hob, and the raspberries encased in a bread crust ready for baking, she cleaned the gas lamps, washed every surface in the kitchen, scrubbed the table and lino-covered floor and polished the dresser and window. She did her best with the range but it was obvious that it hadn’t been taken apart and given a thorough cleaning for weeks. If Mr Evans allowed her to stay, she would clean it in the morning.

  She found clean bed linen, towels and tablecloths in the linen cupboard, made her bed and changed the others. She only stopped work to set the buckets on the hobs to boil and set out towels on the rail on the basement range to warm. The soiled linen, she tossed on top of the mountainous pile in the basement.

  She laid the table with crockery, cutlery and water glasses, filled a jug with water and set it and the vase of stock in the centre. The bread she used for the summer pudding and cut for the meal wasn’t as soft as the ones she had learned to bake under Rhian’s guidance. Seeing no yeast in the larder she resolved to order some from the shop tomorrow, if she still had a job.

  The buckets started bubbling at twenty-five minutes past two on the kitchen clock. Using a jug she tipped the contents of two buckets down the tube. She ran down to the basement, dragged the full bath away from the pipe and replaced it with another. She found it harder, heavier work to carry buckets from the basement range to fill the baths than to tip water down the tube.

  She left three baths steaming, and returned upstairs to tip down the last two buckets of water. She was returning the buckets to the pantry when she heard the door slam in the basement accompanied by the sound of masculine voices.

  She opened the oven door. She hoped her employers wouldn’t take too long over their baths. Another ten minutes and the pie would be browned to perfection. She was making extra gravy in the pan she had used to braise the meat, when footsteps sounded on the stone steps and the door opened.

  ‘You’re the housekeeper Mrs Rodney has hired for us.’

  The man in front of her was massive and she instinctively dropped a curtsy. Her father had been six foot but this man was taller and broader, with wiry, grey curly hair and a stern expression in his grey eyes. He was also turned out in a white shirt, collar, black tie and suit, more suited to a tradesman than a collier. He glanced around the kitchen, then at the table. ‘Have you made a meal for us, Mrs Jones?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Mr Evans will do, I’m not used to being called sir. Mrs Rodney stopped us on the way home and told us about you. I take it she has also told you what we expect from you?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Evans.’

  ‘The boys will be up in a minute.’ He sat at the head of the table.

  She picked up a pair of thick crocheted oven cloths, unlatched the oven door and, straining to hold the weight, heaved the pie on to a wooden board she had
placed on the table to receive it. Straining the peas she had boiled with the mint into a bowl, she set them besides the pie, filled the gravy boat, put it on its saucer next to the peas, stood back and waited.

  A man opened the door and smiled at her. She retreated, terrified. She had thought Mr Evans enormous but he stood half a head taller. He had to stoop to negotiate the doorway and his shoulders were wider than the door. He was young, with light brown hair and grey eyes like his father, but when she dared to look into them, she saw that they were softer and kinder. He was dressed in moleskin trousers, a dark shirt without a collar, and had a red handkerchief tied around his neck like a farmer.

  ‘This is the new housekeeper Connie has engaged for us,’ his father informed him abruptly.

  ‘Hello, I’m Victor Evans.’ He offered her his hand. ‘Connie said she’d told you all about us.’

  ‘Connie?’ Sali repeated in confusion.

  ‘Mrs Rodney.’ Mr Evans looked suspiciously at the pie. ‘I thought we had a joint of best sirloin in the meat safe.’

  ‘You did, Mr Evans,’ Sali answered nervously, ‘but as I’m unused to the oven, I hoped you wouldn’t mind if I turned it into a pie.’

  ‘When did you arrive?’ He looked around the kitchen.

  ‘Four hours ago, Mr Evans. I am afraid I haven’t had time to do very much, but if I stay on, I will do better tomorrow.’

  ‘Waste of good sirloin if you ask me.’ Mr Evans cut into the pie and spooned a generous helping on to the top plate of the four Sali had stacked in front of him.

  ‘That looks good, Mrs Jones,’ Victor complimented, and Sali realised he was compensating for his father’s rudeness. ‘It is Mrs Jones, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sali stepped back as a young man rushed headlong into the room.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Mr Evans demanded.

  The breath caught in Sali’s throat. She had thought Mansel and her brother Geraint handsome, but the boy standing in front of her was the most beautiful she had ever seen. No other word could possibly describe him. His hair was as thick and curly as his father’s but blueblack like Mrs Rodney’s, and his enormous eyes so dark, the irises appeared to be as black as his hair. His features, smooth, perfect, reminded her of a print she had once seen of a portrait of the young Lord Byron.

  Like his father he was dressed in a white shirt, collar, tie and suit as if he were going to a social, or the theatre for the evening.

  ‘You must be the new housekeeper.’ He walked over to Sali, took her hand into his, shook it and to her embarrassment continued to hold it. ‘It was so kind of you to get the baths ready and warm the towels. And this,’ he looked at the pie, ‘smells wonderful ...’

  ‘Stop flirting, Joey, and sit down and eat,’ his father ordered brusquely. He eyed Sali. ‘How old are you, Mrs Jones?’

  ‘Almost twenty-four,’ she answered, hoping he wouldn’t regard her as too young for the post.

  ‘And already a widow.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Evans.’ She found it even more difficult to lie to him than to Mrs Rodney.

  Mr Evans filled another plate and handed it to his youngest son. ‘I’ll need a ladle for the gravy in this pie.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Evans.’ She lifted it from an overhead rack as his eldest son walked through the door. He was dressed, like his younger brother and father, for an evening out, in a dark suit, white shirt, collar and tie.

  ‘Damn you, Joey. You have absolutely no sense of responsibility –’

  Sali dropped the ladle and it went crashing to the flagstones.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was so busy having words with my brother that I forgot Connie had engaged a housekeeper for us.’

  Sali gripped the Belfast sink for support.

  The man standing in front of her had been her father’s deputy manager and had inherited five per cent of the Watkin Jones Colliery’s stock on her father’s death. Lloyd Evans. He obviously hadn’t recognised her. Or had he? She wavered indecisively for a moment.

  ‘Mrs Jones.’ Lloyd nodded to her and took his place at the table.

  ‘Mrs Jones, are you all right?’ Mr Evans enquired frostily.

  ‘Yes, Mr Evans. Would you like more gravy?’

  ‘I’d like you to get another plate for yourself and sit at the table so we can start eating.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be proper, Mr Evans.’

  ‘Proper! Where do you think you are, girl? Living with the crache with their upstairs, downstairs, kitchen and parlour maids? I’ll have no class distinctions in this house. You sit at this table. Now!’ He banged his knife on the table.

  Too terrified not to, and mindful of Mrs Rodney’s instructions not to sit on either of the late Mrs Evans’s chairs, she took another plate from the dresser, gave it to Mr Evans and took the empty seat next to Lloyd, opposite Joey, who flashed her a dazzling smile. Even in her present panic-stricken state, she sensed it was one that he had practised many times in the mirror.

  Mr Evans handed Lloyd her plate, which held the same sized portion of pie that he had given his sons.

  ‘Please, Mr Evans, I can never eat all that,’ she demurred.

  ‘I suggest you try, Mrs Jones. If you intend to carry on working at the rate you have begun, you are going to need it. And don’t stand on ceremony. Victor and Joey might follow the Popish doctrine but I’ll have no grace said in this house. This food doesn’t come courtesy of any God, but from our sweat and labour.’

  After the summer pudding had been eaten and she’d made the tea, Sali cleared their dessert dishes to the sink.

  ‘Mrs Rodney showed you where you are to sleep?’ Mr Evans sugared his second cup of tea.

  ‘Yes, Mr Evans.’

  ‘She warned you that you are on a month’s trial? If you don’t suit, you will have to go.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Evans.’ A month, a whole month before she could start looking for her son, because she would never find the courage to ask this man if she could bring her child into his house. But a month’s employment would give her time and money to look for another position, hopefully one where she could keep her son with her. And there was always the possibility that she might find something before the month was up.

  Mr Evans patted his pockets and pulled out his pipe and tobacco pouch. He took his time over filling it, eyeing his sons as he did so. ‘I am going to the County Club. If any of you need me I will be in the library there. I will be back before ten o’clock. I take it you will be going down to Connie’s to do her accounts, Lloyd?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll walk part of the way with you.’ Lloyd pushed his empty teacup into the centre of the table. ‘Thank you, Mrs Jones, that was a good meal.’

  ‘Victor?’ Mr Evans addressed his middle son.

  ‘I’m meeting the boys and taking the dogs rabbiting over the mountain. Do you know how to cook rabbits, Mrs Jones?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Evans, and joint and skin them.’ Sali found it strange to think that she had found the task so distasteful when she had first moved to Mill Street.

  ‘No one calls me Mr Evans, Mrs Jones. I’m Victor.’ He gave her another of his shy smiles. ‘So, if I’m lucky, we could have rabbit pie before the end of the week.’

  ‘After the pie tonight, perhaps you’d prefer stew?’ she suggested tentatively.

  He looked at the pie dish that had been scraped clean by him and his brothers in search of second helpings. ‘Pie will be fine, Mrs Jones, but you’ll need at least half a dozen rabbits to fill a dish that size.’

  ‘Where are you off to, Joey?’ his father enquired, as Joey left his chair, picked up a bottle of cologne from the window sill and splashed it liberally over his cheeks and neck.

  ‘Out and about,’ Joey replied airily.

  ‘Out and about where?’ Mr Evans questioned sternly.

  Joey bent his knees to study himself in a mirror that had been hung low on the wall at the side of the range. ‘Some of the boys are going to catch the show at the Theatre Royal. I thought I’d go with them.’

 
; ‘Just make sure that you stay with the boys and leave the variety acts to the professionals. I don’t want to hear any more complaints about you or your antics,’ his father warned. ‘There is no need to wait up for us, Mrs Jones. We are on the six to two shift. I would appreciate it if you have breakfast on the table at half past four sharp in the morning. You will find bacon, eggs, lava bread and sausages in the pantry. And don’t forget to cut the snap boxes and fill the water bottles.’ He pointed to four square tins and four tin bottles stacked on the cupboard next to the sink.

  Lloyd angled his trilby on his head, his father picked up his cap and they went out through the front door. Joey lifted his cap from a row of hooks on the wall, gave Victor, who was finishing his third cup of tea, and Sali a broad wink, and left by the basement stairs.

  Sali opened one of the boxes and gazed at the small tin bottle and crumbs it contained. ‘Victor, please tell me, what I should put in your snap boxes?’ she asked, as he rose from the table.

  ‘You’ve never cut a snap box before?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘No,’ Sali admitted sheepishly.

  He picked up the small tin bottle. ‘After you’ve washed these out, you fill them with strongly brewed tea, four sugars and a dash of milk to a bottle. The larger ones you wash out and fill with water.’

  ‘Won’t the tea be cold?’

  ‘All colliers drink cold tea. It’s the one thing that gets the dust out of your mouth. In the boxes we like two rounds of sandwiches, meat, omelette or cheese. Nothing soft like tomato or cucumber that makes the bread soggy. My mother used to put in a slice of fruit cake or some of her cinnamon biscuits ... but we haven’t had anything like that for a while.’ He reached for his cap.

  ‘Thank you, Victor. Good luck with your rabbiting.’

  ‘It might help if you made the boxes tonight, Mrs Jones. My mother used to do that. We’re always in a rush in the morning.’

  Lloyd made a cross in pencil against the last entry in the ledger, leaned back in his chair and stretched his hands above his head.

  ‘Tired?’ Connie Rodney’s question was casual, but her eyes glittered as she gazed at him.