The Whispering Road

by Livi Michael

  That night we all stay in the shop, drinking porter and celebrating the start of a new life while Annie sleeps. Then in the morning a horse and cart pulls up on Oldham Street, and we load it with boxes full of The Poor Man's Guardian to take to Huddersfield. And Travis is going with them.

  ‘You can stop when we get to the moors and let me off,’ he says as Abel helps him up. He blows a kiss to Annie. ‘My special girl,’ he says, and she hides her face.

  Then he reaches forward and shakes my hand. ‘Keep telling your good stories,’ he says, and I say I will.

  ‘Give Dog-woman a pat on the head from me,’ I tell him, and he smiles and waves. And the cart pulls away and Travis gets smaller and smaller. I hope he finds Dog-woman, and her bite heals him and that he stays with her, running wild through the forest with her pack. I wish it so hard I can almost see it, Travis and Dog-woman bent low, her on four limbs, him on three, the dogs wreathing and flowing like smoke around them.

  I stare after him as he travels out of our story, and into his own.

  Later we all go to see the house in Ardwick Green. We walk there, Annie clinging tightly to my hand and Nell's, and I wonder whether she'll ever get used to the noise. But Ardwick's better, and the house does overlook a green, with a few trees beyond. This is where we'll stay with Nell, until the wedding.

  But what about the others? you're thinking.

  What about Queenie and Digger and Pigeon and the rest of the gang and Milly?

  What about Mr M, and Bailey, and the farmer and his wife at Bent Edge Farm, and Old Bert and his idiot son? They're all brought to justice, right?

  Wrong. I wish I could say they were put on trial and hanged for what they've done, but it never happened. Oh, there was an investigation, all right, Abel saw to that. He ran a series of articles in his paper till more and more people spoke up, and in the end a special commission was set up to investigate the deaths of workhouse children that had been placed out in apprenticeship.

  The first place they went to was Bent Edge Farm. But they never found owt. Evidence inconclusive, they wrote on their important-looking papers. For though they found that for years the farmer had been taking a girl and boy from different workhouses thereabouts, and that more than one pair of children had gone missing, it was hard to prove that they weren't already ill and starving when they got them. They were charged with neglect, and prevented from ever taking children on in that way again. And we had to be satisfied with that. Though when you consider that you can still be hanged for stealing bread, or wandering into the wrong field, it hardly seems good enough.

  And Mr M? No case was ever brought against him. There was no evidence, except from the dead, and it was hard even to know what to charge him with.

  And there was no news of Queenie and the others. Once, Abel's paper ran a story about a young black boy who was hanged for thieving at the New Bailey, and all day a great heaviness weighed me down, in case it were Digger.

  Abel took me out on a walk that evening to try to cheer me up. When I saw that we were walking by Mosley Street I tried to twist away, but his hand held firm on my shoulder.

  ‘Don't take it to heart, lad, Abel says as we walk right by Mr M's house, towards St Peter's Fields. ‘You never know what might happen yet. Life's a funny thing, happening all around us without anyone seeing. Look around you,’ he says. ‘What do you see?’

  I look around the broad open space. ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘Do you know what happened in this very field, not twenty years ago?’

  I shake my head. Haven't a clue.

  And he tells me then the story of Peterloo. How when he was a little lad of nine he went with his mother to join a great crowd that had come to hear orator Hunt speak. It was a fine day in August and the crowd was festive; that is, until someone gave an order and the military charged at them, sealing off all the exits and lashing out with sabres. Everyone was crying and screaming and the field was full of blood. Abel lost his mother and ran about in a panic, and a horse reared above him and a sabre flashed – he shut his eyes but the man next to him fell dead. By some miracle neither he nor his mother was hurt.

  ‘They said only eleven people died that day,’ he says, looking around as if he can still see it. ‘But hundreds more were injured and some died later. My father's friend had his fingers trampled by a horse, and he never worked again. And that's a slower kind of death.’

  He looks at me and I can see it all through his eyes, the little lad fighting his way through the bloody crowds, crying, ‘Mam, Mam!’

  ‘And do you know,’ he says, ‘how many ever got compensation for their injuries?’

  I shake my head again.

  ‘None of them,’ he says.

  ‘That stinks,’ say I.

  ‘Oh, they tried,’ he says. ‘But the cases just kept being dismissed. Or delayed for so long everyone lost heart and hope. So there was no justice in the usual way. And nothing left to tell you what went on. But just because you can't see a thing,’ Abel says, ‘doesn't mean it isn't there. Or that things won't change. Change comes in by the back door, and leaves by the window. There's never been another Peterloo, at least, and maybe one day there won't even be a workhouse. You have to take the long view. A hundred years from now,’ he says, looking around the open field, ‘the world'll be a different place – even as we speak it's changing.’

  That's Abel for you – always looking on the sunny side when everyone else is in the dark. But things did change. Soon after the Charter for Incorporation was passed by parliament. Manchester became a municipal town and then a city, and gradually the Mosleys lost power and moved out of the centre. I heard that Milly didn't go with Mr M when he left; she went back to her family home.

  At the end of the month Nell and Abel got married in the church in Ardwick Green. Annie got over her fear of crowds far enough to walk behind them with a basket of flowers. And crowds there were. Everyone Abel's ever known through the paper, which is hundreds, and all Nell's shirtmaking friends came out to see them, and throw rose petals in front of them.

  And from that day on we've lived together, as family, in the house in Ardwick Green. Abel's paper goes on thriving, and I help him sell it on street corners.

  ‘Come and hear how the giants of industry will fall!’ I shout. ‘Make the dragons fall and distribute their wealth through the land! The vote is your sword!’

  Abel tells me I'm a great asset. And I love it – I'm doing what I love to do.

  Sometimes I feel the past dragging me back. When I've had a bad day at work, or seen something I don't like on the streets. Seems like the past is a giant too, and it has to be knocked down like all the others. So I tell myself, going home, that I have a home to go to, and Annie'll be there, waiting with Nell, stitching clothes for the new baby. And sometimes when I get in and the evening sun glints on them through the window, I fancy I can see something glimmering, just for a moment, into the shape of a boy and girl, standing behind Nell and Annie, and leaning forward as branches of trees lean towards water, or flowers to the sun.

  Glossary

  beadle

  a parish official

  Blue Locusts

  the police

  bob

  one shilling

  boggart

  supernatural being, often associated with a particular place, e.g. swamp, pool

  bowking

  coughing hard

  clemmed

  starving

  drubbed

  beaten

  frit

  frightened

  furmety

  a dish of grain boiled in milk like porridge

  gibbet

  a gallows

  ginnel

  narrow passage between houses

  jerkin

  a man's close-fitting jacket

  Jinny Green-teeth

  boggart (see above)

  Lammas

  harvest festival; first day of August

  libbed

  torn apartr />
  midden

  a rubbish heap

  mizzy

  confused state

  oakum

  picking oakum – untwisting old ropes to make new

  Owd Nick

  the devil

  scally

  urchin/thief

  scunnered

  frightened/spooked

  skelp

  a glancing blow

  slutch

  muck

  thistlefluff

  thistledown

  tow-haired

  very fair hair

  wainwright

  an historical wagon builder

  wezilled

  shrivelled/wizened

  Author's Note

  A long time ago, on a farm very close to where I live, a farmer and his wife took in two children, boy and girl, from the workhouse, to help with the run of the farm. As the years passed, people began to notice that the children never got any older. But the farm was isolated, people kept themselves to themselves, and only when the mother of one of the children came looking for her, did the truth finally emerge. The farmer and his wife had been working the children to death, and replacing them with similar looking children from different workhouses.

  No one ever discovered how many children had been disposed of in this way.

  As soon as I heard this dark history I knew I wanted to write about it. It became the factual basis for my fictional story – though in the course of researching it I discovered that it was not so unusual as I had initially supposed. In the 1830s there were several inquiries into the deaths of workhouse children who had been placed in apprenticeships. Charles Dickens himself became involved in one while writing Oliver Twist.

  There are other factual elements in this story. Manchester was granted a Charter for Incorporation in 1838. Until that time it had been run as a feudal village, by the manorial lord. Rapid expansion and industrialization meant that the struggle for political representation came to the fore in the 1830s.

  One of the key figures in this struggle was Abel Heywood (1810–93). The son of a weaver, Abel Heywood worked in the town centre from the age of nine, and was educated at a Sunday school in Bennett Street. He established the radical paper The Poor Man's Guardian in 1828, and on different occasions was imprisoned and fined for distributing it cheaply, i.e. without the Stamp Tax, which would have made it too expensive for the working people he wanted to reach.

  Abel Heywood went on to have a long and illustrious career, becoming alderman of the city in 1853, and mayor in 1862. He refused all other titles, remaining devoted to the cause of the urban poor. It is said that on his inauguration as mayor, Queen Victoria refused to stand with him. His association with Joe, Annie and Nell in this story is entirely fictitious.

  The Mosley family were the manorial lords of Manchester. As Joe discovers, it was a Nicholas Mosley who bought the township and surrounding lands in 1596 for £3,000. At the time of the story, Sir Oswald Mosley was the manorial lord, and he was well-regarded and philanthropic, helping to fund the new hospital in Ancoats and subsidizing Poor Relief. His cousin, Sheridan Mosley, is a fictitious creation, though Mosley Street and the Portico Library still exist.

  Dr James Phillips Kay (1804–77) was one of a small but energetic group of doctors who devoted themselves to the urban poor. He worked in Ancoats, where the life expectancy was only fourteen and, in 1832, at the height of the cholera epidemic, served in all the most dangerous districts, finally publishing that year his classic Moral and Physical Conditions of the Working Classes. He eventually left Manchester after a breakdown, but continued to publish investigative medical journalism and is one of our main guides to health conditions in the 1830s.

  John Sanderson was a weaver who injured his hand while weaving, and stayed on to work at the hospital, eventually becoming governor. He was known for his humane administration – particularly where the so-called ‘lunatic wards’ were concerned – which were exemplary at a time when the treatment of those suffering from mental illness was hair-raisingly brutal.

  Livi Michael.