by Mary Hooper
I’d bought some short ends of narrow red ribband, and with these and several lengths of straw taken out of the mattress, told her to make some more corn dollies while she waited. I impressed upon her that, on leaving the lodging house to come and find me, she should come straight round to the dairy and not dilly-dally or speak to anyone. I had already, listening to women in the market, heard of a child who had been taken off the street, stripped of all its good clothes and sent home wearing only its vest. Betsy’s little country smock, shawl and shoes were only worth a few pennies, but nevertheless would be valuable to a woman whose child had nothing. I just had to hope and pray that nothing bad would happen to her.
Chapter Twelve
I woke to hear the clocks strike three o’clock and lay awake until I heard a cryer call that it was half past three on a wet morning. Rising, I found the room dismally cold and, although I was used to waking to a freezing room in Bridgeford Hall, this cold seemed much worse, because there was no rug on the floor, no shutters at the windows nor a bold patchwork quilt to lift the cheerless scene. I would have liked a clean apron to wear to work, but had not, of course, thought to bring such a thing with me. The evening before I had asked our landlord for a jug and basin, however, so I was at least able to wash myself, and I used Betsy’s little scrubbing brush to cleanse my hands and nails thoroughly, just in case my new employer should take it upon himself to inspect them. I was, in spite of the gloom of the morning, looking forward to meeting my new four-legged friends and seeing the extent of my workplace. If I did well there and he kept me on, surely it wouldn’t take long for me to earn our fare back to Devonshire.
On leaving the lodging house I had to light a candle in order to see my way through the streets and was very nervous as to where I was putting my feet, for it had rained heavily in the night and much rubbish – offal, mud, dead rats and stinking old green-stuffs – had swept its way down from the higher ground of the fruit and vegetable market and deposited itself into the corners and holes between the cobbles. It had stopped raining, but the ground was very slippery, and twice I fell over on to heaps of soft and squelchy matter, so I fear that when I arrived I was not nearly as clean as when I left.
Going through the rusty gates I could hear, somewhere, two or three cows mooing heartily, so I presumed that the cow stalls were out at the back of the dairy, perhaps with some outside space and a little patch of green grass for them to chew on.
I called, ‘Mr Holloway!’ then stood and listened through the mooing for a reply. Light was coming in, dimly, from a lantern in the street, which enabled me to see a sconce in the wall of the dairy with a flint box beside it. I lit the candle in the sconce and, while I waited, looked around me. The stink of cows was horrendous; I began to wonder how clean their stalls were, and how good their milk.
‘Have you made a start?’
I jumped, alarmed, for the mud was soft underfoot and I hadn’t heard my employer coming up behind me. He stood frowning at me, his face so strangely illuminated by the lantern he carried that he looked like someone dressed as a ghostie for All Hallows’ Eve.
‘Not yet,’ I replied. I looked around. ‘Where are the pails and stools?’ I asked, then gave a little nervous laugh. ‘Where are the cows?’
‘All down below,’ he said, and he gestured into the space beyond. ‘They had a bale of straw and a sack o’ turnips late last night.’
I looked at him, baffled.
‘Get you started, then. They’re below, I said.’
‘Below?’ I repeated. I did not have the slightest notion what he meant. In the lower field, perhaps?
He shook his head. ‘Country girls!’ he said with some amusement. ‘Down the ladder – off you go.’ He gave me the lantern. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours. You should be finished by then.’
I didn’t say anything in reply to this. Eight cows are not that many for one girl to milk, but the fastest time in which I can milk a cow is ten minutes – and that on a good day when your cow is being quiet and obedient. If she wants to be difficult, then twenty minutes might be more usual, and even up to thirty minutes if you don’t know her well and she has a mind to play you up.
Mr Holloway left me, which I was glad about, for I had been afeared he would stay and watch me milking. Lifting the lantern, I tried to see into the darkness below me and took a nervous step forward. Down the ladder, he’d told me. But surely the cows couldn’t be down a ladder, underground?
But they were. Another two steps forward and I could see a large square hole cut into the floor, like a trapdoor, with a ladder descending from it, and lifting my lantern higher and peering downwards I could see some movement below.
I stood and stared down, scarce able to believe what I was seeing. Cows in the cellar! Why, these poor creatures should be outside enjoying the dawn air while they waited to go into their milking parlour, or at least be in a barn, feeding. How could cows possibly live underground?
I hitched up my skirts, placed the lantern at the top of the hole and climbed down a few steps, then retrieved the lantern and climbed the rest of the way. It was a good job, I thought, that I was used to the smell of cows, although this was not so much a smell as a heady, stomach-wrenching stink. At the bottom of the ladder, crammed into a small space and looking thoroughly miserable, the eight cows were standing in their own filth. They had a manger of turnips to eat, and a bale of hay was hanging about head height, but they were paying little attention to these. At some point someone had made an effort to clear their standing space, for there was a channel affair running around the room and a long-handled broom to brush the muck into, but it made little difference to the overall state of the cellar before me.
I turned my attention to the cows themselves and could have cried at their condition. What a sight they were: crammed together with barely enough space to turn around in, smelly and distressed and stuck all over with muck and mud. How miserable they looked! Why, the poor creatures had probably never rolled in a patch of clover or eaten fresh grass in all their lives. I felt like turning and scrambling back up that ladder as fast as I could, but I knew I had to stay.
Sighing, I surveyed the cows. I was in a quandary now, for the main thing with milking, the first lesson I was ever taught by my mother, was that cleanliness must come first. Nothing else was as important as ensuring that a milkmaid’s hands, the hindquarters of the cow and any equipment that was going to come into contact with the milk was as clean as could be, or otherwise all sorts of infections and illnesses could be spread. I had no access here to hot water, however, and no way of knowing if the pails I could see standing about had been scoured and aired, or the churns cleaned with wood ash and then scalded. I thought it was highly unlikely.
For the sake of the cows I wanted to do the best I could, so I went back up the ladder and out on to the street, filled a pail with water from the nearest pump and took it back down. I then went up and down the ladder several times for clean water, so that half an hour passed before I had even started the milking.
After acquainting myself with the cows (I believed, from what I could see, they were of the Jersey breed), I washed their rear ends with some rags that I’d found hanging on nails, and while doing so spoke to them in a gentle voice, telling them of my lovely South Devons at home, of how Betsy and I had come to be in London and even about the falseness of Will, so that they became used to my voice. People sometimes query the effectiveness of this, but I knew from experience that cows who are spoken to kindly yield more milk than cows where the milkmaid has nothing at all to say for herself or, worse still, is abrupt and offhand.
At last I was ready to begin and though, in that grim little room, it was difficult to find a space where a girl could sit and milk quietly and not be kicked by the next cow in line, eventually I found a corner, picked what I thought to be the cow in most urgent need of being milked, rinsed out the bucket and started.
The quality of the milk yielded was poor; I could see that straight away. It was th
in and blue-looking rather than creamy in texture and colour. And although, of course, cows give less milk in the winter, I barely got a full pail from the first one I tried. The others gave about the same and I knew the truth of the expression that miserable cows give miserable portions.
Mr Holloway arrived down the ladder – thankfully much later than he had predicted – just as I was finishing.
‘Is this all you have from ’em?’ he asked, holding a candle aloft over the line of buckets.
‘Indeed it is – and you’re lucky to have it!’ I said, for by this time I had roused myself into a ball of indignation about the cows and the conditions in which they lived.
‘ ’Tis a wretched small amount.’
‘And ’tis a wretched life for these cows – standing around in their own muck day after day with ne’er a sight of the sun,’ I retorted. I went on, surprised at my own boldness. ‘It’s a wonder that they haven’t dried up entirely.’
He shrugged, and it was strange to me that, whereas I would have taken it personally if someone criticised my cows and the way they were kept, he didn’t seem to be bothered either way. ‘These are London cows born and bred,’ he said. ‘That’s the way of cows ’ere.’
‘But they need air and light and grass!’
‘They get their turnips and their good hay. Why, some days in winter they cost more to feed than they gives.’
‘But do they ever go outside?’
‘Not they!’ he said. ‘They come in, they’re lowered down on ropes and there they stay until they dry up or die.’ He looked interested suddenly. ‘But in the country, surely your beasts aren’t out all year round?’
‘They stay under cover in really bad weather,’ I said, ‘but most winter days they are turned out to nibble the grass and take a little air.’
‘Take a little air!’ He began laughing. ‘Seems to me that cows in Devonshire lead an altogether daintier life than those in London!’
‘I believe they do,’ I said, and might have gone on to tell him of Miss Alice and Miss Sophia’s pastoral tableau, except that I heard Betsy’s voice from above, calling my name.
‘I’ll go and do the round now, shall I?’ I asked Mr Holloway quickly, before he could comment on Betsy. ‘Where must I go?’
She shouted again, saying that she had made six corn dollies and had no more ribband left, and he glanced upwards and looked curious, but didn’t say anything. I called back that I would come up in a moment, and prayed that she wouldn’t wander off.
‘My milk round is at the other end of the Strand,’ he said. ‘I have twenty or more houses with an H chalked on the wall – that means they have credit with me. If you call outside them, a housemaid will come down with a jug.’
I nodded. The Strand was, I knew, some fair distance off, for we had walked all the way down it after arriving at Charing Cross. ‘I must take the yoke and pails?’ I asked.
He nodded, then gave a humourless grin. ‘But afore you go, you must visit the cow with the iron tail.’
‘Which cow?’ I asked.
He gave a snort of laughter. ‘ ’Tis what we cow-keepers in London call the water pump.’
I still did not know what he was talking about. ‘To wash the pails?’
‘No, to dampen the milk!’
‘Dampen?’ I repeated.
‘The milk is too rich for most of our customers. Too thick, too creamy. Give ’em indigestion, it would.’
‘Would it?’ I asked in surprise, for, newly up from the country, I believed what I was told.
‘It goes further when ’tis damped down,’ he said, grinning. ‘Sometimes it goes near twice as far.’
And then, of course, I realised what he was talking about. The milk, even though it was poor quality, was to be diluted before it was sold.
‘You water it down?’
‘Hush!’ he said. ‘But not with river water,’ he added virtuously, ‘for once I had complaints that there was a fish in the milk.’
I stared at him in dismay.
‘No, you must use water from the pump,’ he said. ‘A quarter-pail of water to every pail of milk. I’ll go and fetch it now.’
He went up and we ‘damped’ the milk down and I did not approve in the slightest, but merely wondered how many more London ways I would have to get used to.
Betsy and I walked along Fleet Street towards the Strand, and the distance seemed far greater now that I had a yoke over my shoulders with a pail of milk balanced on each end. These pails were not lidded, but open to the elements so that anyone might spit or cough over them, or apprentice boys could, for sport, choose to throw in a handful of dirt.
Betsy was scratchy and tired and determined to be difficult. She wouldn’t hold on to my hand, but kept stopping and looking in windows or sitting down on the cobbles to talk to passing cats and dogs. I would alternately shout at her, plead with her, try to bribe her – but, of course, with a great wooden yoke across my shoulders I often couldn’t move quickly enough to catch hold of her. In the end I had to promise her faithfully that, as soon as I had delivered all the milk, we would go down to the river and look for Will. She was cold, I knew, and hungry, too, for although we’d had some undiluted milk to drink (and trusted to luck that it would not be tainted), other than that we’d had nothing.
We both needed to eat. Worried about money, I reckoned up the price of things in my head: I had pawned the fur rug for two shillings and five pence, our room for two nights had been a shilling, so, after taking off the cost of the food we’d had the previous day, there should now be one shilling and sixpence in my pocket (although I could not, of course, check this because of trying to keep the yoke balanced). This would pay for two more nights’ lodging. But we had to eat right at that moment, for it was near noon and Betsy was trailing behind me again, crying, so I stopped a pieman and bought a meat pasty. I gave Betsy the biggest half, tried to stop her tears and sighed mightily as I did so, for I had discovered that having a child with you was a very great burden and that I was not really up to it. I loved her very much, I was sorry for what she was having to go through, but also felt sorry for myself and longed not to have the responsibility of her.
By the time I found the first house marked with an H, my back felt as if it were breaking. As I walked along, I shifted the yoke around on my shoulders, first leaning it one way, then the other, then putting both my hands up and underneath it to help bear its weight, but whatever I did brought little relief.
‘Milk below!’ I called up to the houses. ‘Fresh milk below!’
I knew I must look a sight, for I was grubby and tired, with bird’s-nest hair and cheeks cracking under smudges of dried milk. So much for the pretty pastoral scene depicted by Miss Alice and Miss Sophia, I thought. So much for the May Day milkmaids, garlanded with flowers, dancing along the street to a fiddler’s tune. I knew the truth now.
By calling ‘Milk below!’ under the windows of those houses marked with a chalked H, I sold all the milk in my pails quite quickly. Though I had to get back for that afternoon’s milking, I’d promised Betsy that we would go and look for Will, so didn’t think it would hurt to go back the slightly longer way, by the river path.
Walking down Clover Street, the stink of the river hit us as soon as we were no longer sheltered by buildings, and this odour increased the closer we came to the water, even though it had rained the night before and washed most of the sewage and garbage away on the tide. I thanked heaven that it was a cold month, too, for as I’d walked along Fleet Street I’d heard a woman say that in high summer the river smelled so bad it could make a grown man fall down insensible.
Once we had stopped gagging at the stench, there was much to stare at: steamboats, barges laden with grain or coal, little boats with sails, wherries, sailing ships with cargo aboard, and even one or two grand barges bearing the flags and insignia of livery companies. Most numerous of all, however, were the ferry boats darting backwards and forwards laden with passengers, with those who rowed them shoutin
g and hollering at other, larger boat-owners, who hollered right back.
So much to see; so many ferry boats. How was I ever going to find Will amongst them?
I stood there, bewildered, my eyes criss-crossing the river to the far side and back again, trying to count how many little boats there were going backwards and forwards. This was a hopeless task, I soon realised, akin to trying to count the number of cherries on a tree.
There was an old sailor close by us, in dark oilskin and a sou’wester, and I waited until he’d finished puffing on his pipe, then asked if he knew how many ferrymen there were on the river.
‘Just roughly,’ I added. ‘Would it be about . . . one hundred?’
‘One hundred!’ he said scornfully. ‘Pssshh! I could see one hundred with my eyes shut. No, there must be nigh on a thousand. Probably more.’
I stared at him in dismay.
‘Ferry boats is like ants all over the river and back again,’ he said, gesturing with his arms. ‘Why, there are so many ferrymen with so many boats that sometimes a fellow has to wait half an hour at Puddle Dock for a landing space.’
My heart sank. ‘That many ferries?’
Betsy was hanging over the river wall and not listening to us, so I felt safe to ask him, in a low voice, if he might possibly know of the Villiers family, who were ferrymen born and bred.
He shook his head.
‘They have a cousin who has lately joined them from the country,’ I added as a desperate afterthought, but he just grunted and began refilling his pipe.
Betsy straightened up, sighed and yawned. ‘Oh, where is Will?’ she said crossly. ‘I’m getting tired of him not being here.’
‘So am I,’ I answered miserably.
‘When are we going to find him?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. You see, we don’t know which stretch of water he works on. The Thames is a big, big river.’
