With Love From Ma Maguire

by Ruth Hamilton

  He crept to her side and laid an arm across her shoulders. ‘You’ve still got us, lass. I know I’m not up to much, but you’ve Molly and the babies—’

  She reached out and touched his face. ‘Paddy, you are what the world made of you, no more and no less. Don’t be putting yourself down, for I shall do that often enough with my sharp tongue. They’re lovely babies, babies you can be proud of, son.’ She walked towards the door then turned to look at him. ‘God bless,’ she whispered before disappearing on to the landing.

  Paddy knew he was grinning from ear to ear, felt as if his face would split in half at any minute. At last, he’d done something right. He was a family man now, a man with responsibilities. He would change, aye, he would that.

  Molly opened her eyes and stared at her husband, watched the pleasure and pride in his face as he looked at the twins. ‘Bring them here, lad,’ she said quietly. ‘Time we taught them how to feed, eh?’

  ‘Oh.’ He studied his shoes. ‘How do I pick them up?’

  She began to giggle. ‘Not by the scruff and not by the feet, Paddy Maguire!’

  He fumbled among the tiny sheets and quilts. ‘There’s not a right lot to get hold of—’ He swung round and glared at his wife. ‘What the hell’s up with you at all? There’s nowt to laugh at! I might be used to calves and such, but this here’s a different job altogether. They keep wriggling.’

  ‘Oh, Paddy!’ She clutched her bruised belly and screamed hysterically. ‘They’ll not break.’ It didn’t matter any more. They were born safely, that was the main thing. And she was wed proper, so there was no need to tell the truth ever. The euphoria of new motherhood filled the whole of her being, put everything into a perspective that seemed so clear just then. Paddy, happy because she was laughing once more, joined in the merriment as he struggled to carry his precious cargo across the room.

  ‘Thanks, Paddy,’ she said finally.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Well – for marrying me, for the twins – for everything.’

  He shook his head in bemusement. ‘And you weren’t for getting wed, were you? Oh no, you were off for a ladies’ maid down London till the job got you down. I’m right glad it did, Molly. Hey, have you seen the size of these fingers? You can hardly see the nails . . . still, that’ll be with them being a bit premature, like. Ma says twins often come early.’

  ‘Yes. Go and get me a cup of tea. I shall be needing fluids.’

  He left the room reluctantly, capering about and dancing as he made for the stairs. Alone, Molly hugged her children and kissed their downy heads. Charles Swainbank would never know the happiness she felt at this moment, would never see or hold his children. Because they weren’t his at all. From now on, they were definitely Paddy’s.

  It wasn’t as bad as it used to be, though no doubt it could have been a deal better.

  In the mill where Ma worked, cleaners had been taken on, a small army who came in during the night to move the worst of the day’s wastes. But there was still just one lavatory to each floor, while lunchtime facilities consisted of a temperamental boiler from which the workers might take water for tea. Even this was an improvement on several other mills where the workers paid nearby cottagers a few pence a week for hot water, travelling back and forth with billies and jugs during the dinner time break.

  In mute deference to frequent demands, a box had appeared on each landing, an old skip containing a few bandages and ointments. As no-one seemed to take direct responsibility for the refurbishment of these containers, Ma filled them up in her spare time, coming in early or staying behind to see what was needed. The bills were written out by Molly and these were always paid through Ma’s packet, though no mention was ever made of the service she provided.

  There was a pecking order in the mills, a sort of division of classes within the class, with breakers and carders coming somewhere at the bottom of the list and weavers wearing the crown right at the top. By 1926, Ma was a master weaver, having learned every function of her machines, every pattern card, every quirk of her looms. She’d kept her side of the bargain all right. No longer the prime agitator, she simply followed where the union dictated, made sure her mouth stayed shut and her hands remained clean. The workers had, at first, expressed dismay at this change in her attitude, but she explained it away by telling them to follow the real leaders now, the proper and educated stewards.

  And now, in May of this year, what Ma had prophesied was about to finally happen. On the Friday night, every loom and mule shuddered to a halt and the workers moved among machines for a last wiping down and oiling. There was a grim silence about them; not a one could be heard rejoicing at the thought of England closing down for a whole week if not more. ‘Ah well.’ Ma folded her final cut. ‘I suppose we’ve seen it coming.’

  Meg Butterworth clucked her tongue. ‘Aye. Try telling that to my lot come next Thursday and no tea on the table.’ As always, Meg’s mouth twisted itself into exaggerated shapes as she spoke and Ma found herself wondering, not for the first time, whether or no she’d discovered the true origin of the Lancashire dialect. The noise in the mills was usually so loud that messages had to be mouthed and the Bolton folk seemed to have taken this habit home with them, lips stretching this way and that, faces changing shape constantly during speech.

  ‘Eeh well,’ said Meg now. ‘No use mithering over it, I suppose. Best get home and stop in bed for a week. You don’t feel so clemmed in bed. Mind, he’ll be at home too, so I don’t want to give him no ideas. Nay, if I’m not careful, we shall be having another mouth to feed. How’s them twins of your lad’s?’

  ‘Fine, Meg. They’re doing great, ready for school soon.’

  ‘And Paddy?’

  Ma looked up to heaven. ‘Don’t talk to me about him. I knew it wouldn’t last, all that business about turning over a new leaf now he’s a father. He’s doing a bit of droving when it suits him, though he’s not allowed to kill on account of his hand. Still spends a lot of time messing around with horses, going to fairs and the like with farmers. When he’s sober, that is.’

  Meg nodded sagely. Her own husband wasn’t too clever when it came to drink and she often turned up with a black eye or a bruised cheek. ‘They’re buggers with a pint inside them. I’ve told him often enough, I might be only little but I’ll get him one of these days.’

  ‘What’ll you do?’

  ‘Poison his bloody dinner, grease the stairs—’

  ‘You wouldn’t!’

  ‘Aye, I know I wouldn’t. And so does he.’

  Ma wandered towards the door, wondering how it was that Meg Butterworth carried on worshipping a husband who beat her mercilessly every payday. She stopped in her tracks. Richard was being carried in on a chair, supported on one side by Paddy and on the other by his own son. She folded her arms and watched this sight, her head on one side as she considered the irony of it. The twins’ grandfather being supported by both their fathers. If it wasn’t so dangerous and tragic, it might be funny.

  They set the chair down and she studied the man who hadn’t been expected to live anything like this length of time. He was truly old now, shrivelled and shrunken, a shell of a man but with a light still burning brightly in the fevered eyes.

  He nodded. ‘Ma?’

  ‘Good evening.’

  Paddy removed the driving gloves and smiled at Charles. He’d done a fair bit of work for the Swainbanks lately, was becoming quite an expert driver, in fact. Perhaps he should have cards printed, ‘Patrick Maguire Driver and Drover’. That appealed to him, he liked a play on words.

  ‘What the bloody hell are they up to?’ asked the old man now. ‘Bring them all over here, Charles. Let’s see what they’re made of.’ The two younger men went off to gather the weavers together.

  Ma coughed self-consciously. ‘Is this just for the benefit of our shed?’

  ‘No.’ His breathing was laboured. ‘I’ve been in every room. If I could get on my knees, then I would—’

  ‘It wouldn’
t do any good, for there’ll be no coal—’

  ‘We’ve stocks, haven’t we?’

  ‘For a month or two.’

  ‘Enough, I’d say.’

  She shook her head slowly. ‘They’ll be out a while, the miners. What can you expect when they’ve had wages dropped? The rest of us are just standing by them for a week or so.’

  ‘Waste of bloody time,’ he gasped, his cheeks darkening.

  ‘You should be in your bed.’

  ‘While you close my mills?’

  ‘It’s not me! This was a proper decision, a vote—’

  ‘Philly?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How . . . how are they?’

  She bit her lower lip. ‘They’re well. But I’d feel more comfortable if Paddy wasn’t getting so familiar with that son of yours.’

  Richard coughed so that he might breathe more easily. ‘What would you do, I wonder?’

  ‘If what?’

  ‘If I had our . . . little agreement wiped out? Would you hold them up as Swainbanks, poor little mites?’

  ‘You know that I could not do such a thing. Not now that they’re born and well grown.’

  ‘You’d never have done it anyway, would you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you won’t keep me to the deal?’

  She looked at him for a moment or two. ‘I suppose not.’

  He grinned and she caught sight of the handsome man he had once been. ‘It’s all right, lass. We won’t back out of it now. Charles is a good lad – two of his own now. Peter and John. He knows he wronged the girl, Philly. He’ll not let the kiddies down.’

  ‘It’s glad I am to hear it.’

  Richard delivered a somewhat breathless sermon from the confines of his chair, telling the assembled weavers and tenters how foolish were their ways, issuing the occasional veiled threat about closures and no work for the future. No one seemed too impressed. The old man was weak, his son promised to be a softer option than old Richard had been in his heyday. And when all came to all, right was on the side of the workers. Time these bloated capitalists got the odd lesson.

  Everyone went home to a very strange week of silence, a holiday that wasn’t quite a holiday because folk’s future seemed to hang by such a slender thread these days. All the uncles did a roaring trade, queues stretching either side of the three brass balls every morning, everything from father’s suit to the best brasses pawned against starvation. When it didn’t rain, the skies were clear and beautiful; this was how life might have been in the valley if the mills had not sullied the atmosphere each working day. But there was a listlessness, a feeling of unreality to it all.

  An extremely strange lady called Sarah Leason came down from her house on the moors, stepping for the first time ever on cobbles, sending her man to call at the colliers’ cottages she owned. She stood at the end of Delia Street where just four houses belonged to her. Ma Maguire came out of the end house, a tray of flour cakes held in her arms. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Are those for the strikers?’ asked Miss Leason.

  Ma indicated the affirmative, wondering what this posh-knob was doing hereabouts. ‘I’m on strike meself too,’ she said defensively.

  ‘And so you ought to be, my good woman. Are you a spinner?’

  ‘A weaver, Ma’am.’

  ‘It’s Miss. Miss Sarah Leason.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ They’d heard of her. She kept a very peculiar household by all accounts, barn door left open for tramps, then there were tales of cats, dogs and even donkeys roaming everywhere. And her dad had been a pit owner too . . .

  ‘What’s your name?’ barked this eccentric lady.

  ‘Maguire. They call me Ma.’

  A thin hand in a fingerless black glove thrust itself forward and touched the tray. Ma studied the tiny creature in its cape and fusty grey dress, like a blackbird, she was. Or like something from another century altogether.

  ‘I’m calling in my rent books.’ Beady eyes fixed themselves on Ma’s face.

  ‘You’re not . . . not putting them on the streets, Miss?’

  A weak laugh escaped from thin pale lips. ‘Not on your nellie, Ma! I’m letting them stop rent free until this bloody mess is over. You’ll be back in a day or two, you and the others. But my lot won’t. I’ve sold the pits but kept the cottages. They’ll pay me not one penny while they’re out and they’ll have no empty rent book sitting on the table as a reminder of their supposed inadequacy.’

  Ma stepped back, her breath temporarily taken away. So it was true, then. Not all the rich folk were against the strike. And the way this one talked, like an ordinary woman – swearing too!

  ‘My family killed dozens of men and children, Ma Maguire. This is my small way of making reparation.’

  ‘Then God will know it.’ There was a small catch in Ma’s voice.

  ‘Yes, well you can leave God out of it, because I’ve no time for fairy tales. I stopped believing in God after Pretoria. If there is such a being, then it’s something that plays with the earth like a ball, bouncing it about from time to time to see how many of us fall off. No, I place my faith in creatures. We could learn a lot from them.’

  Ma shifted the weight of the tray on to her right hip. ‘You sound like my son. He won’t eat flesh at all, lives on turnips and apples most days.’

  ‘Sensible chap.’

  Ma sighed. ‘Aye, but there’s another part of his diet I didn’t mention. Stout and Irish whiskey . . .’

  ‘A sure sign of sensitivity,’ said Miss Leason. ‘He can’t face the inhumanity of it all. I’m the same myself. Got a fox at the moment, a poor terrified creature hunted half to death by silly great men. I don’t know what to do with him, for he trusts me now and probably trusts all men because I’ve healed him. If I keep him, he’ll pine for his own kind. If I let him go, then he’ll be hunted right to a kill. The wildest of creatures, Ma.’ Her eyes misted and her voice was small and hurt. ‘Yet he would never damage his own. We kill. We kill all things living, ourselves included.’ She brought herself together suddenly, clicking her tongue against her teeth. ‘Bring this son of yours to me.’

  Ma looked down at the tray. The small fierce gentlewoman snatched this item from Ma’s hands. ‘I’ll hold on to the bread for you.’

  It was a meeting of minds. Ma stood aside while Miss Leason propounded her theories, heard while her son agreed to go up to The Hollies and help with planting and weeding and harvesting. All for no pay, all in his spare time and just for a few vegetables and fruits.

  ‘Money’s almost gone, you see,’ snapped the tiny woman. ‘I had families to care for, mining families – and no one to stop me doing what was right. I’m the last of an iniquitous line, Mr Maguire. The house has gone to seed and I need money to feed my animals. Any help you might give will be appreciated.’

  ‘I’ll help you, Missus.’

  ‘Miss.’

  ‘Right then, Miss. I’ve debts to pay too, ’cos I killed a lot of beasts when I was slaughtering. So I’ll come up the odd weekend and give you a hand.’

  Ma delivered her flour cakes, wondering all the time about Miss Leason who seemed not to have the price of a loaf for herself, yet who came down in her dusty carriage with her one remaining servant to reduce her income so drastically. That, concluded Ma, was what having principles meant. She felt honoured to have met such a lady.

  All kinds of people showed their hands that week. Vicars and priests patrolled streets arm in arm while they gave out shillings and oranges. Councillors from both sides collected up money and distributed it throughout the poorer wards, doctors treated the sick without charge, shopkeepers gave ‘tick’ without knowing whether or when the debts would ever be paid.

  At the beginning of the second week, everyone returned to work. Everyone except the miners. Ma hated this. She walked past Pierce Murphy’s door on her way to the mill, head bent with the shame she felt, lips tightened against words she must never say. For she had promised that she would be ‘
good’ in return for the weaving job.

  Pierce chased after her. ‘Ma?’

  ‘Hello, lad.’

  ‘Tell them . . . tell them we understand. Well, some of us do, at least.’

  She laid a hand on his arm, her eyes bright with anger. ‘Some of us must work to keep those of you who must not.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the three further miners’ houses. ‘These four families belong to Delia Street and to Miss Leason. You will be cared for. Others have landlords too. And did you know how much the churches take from coal? Did you know that colliery land is rented from the highest in the country, paid for by the pit owners? If the owners hadn’t such high rents to pay for ground to work, then your wages would improve. Tell that to the Archbishop in London, for he’s surely a very wealthy man. The miners must take all they can from whoever owes it.’

  ‘I’ll tell the committee—’

  ‘They already know it. It’s a fierce fight, for you’ve taken on some powerful people.’

  ‘I feel sick to the stomach, Ma.’

  ‘Molly will be down with your bread and soup. Don’t give in, Pierce.’

  They didn’t give in. Thirty-six weeks they stayed out while other industries struggled on the brink of starvation for the lack of fuel. Attempts were made to break the strike, but strikebreakers themselves were broken repeatedly by determined opposition. People died, people survived. Slates at shops ran into impossible figures and few pledges were redeemed over those months.

  When it was finally over, shattered men went back into the earth’s bowels with little flesh on their bones and for not much pay. Ma Maguire watched the sun rise on the day that the four doors opened, saw the men greeting one another in the middle of the cobbles, noticed how they clung together in their relief and humiliation. Ma was on short time, would not be required until the afternoon. So she sat as the winter sun brightened the sky, her eyes filling with tears. Even the sun seemed to mock this morning. Even the sun held just an empty promise.

  Fergus had got out somehow. He kept doing it, kept going off to look for a mate, came back every time he got hungry. Miss Leason and Paddy patrolled fields and moors, he whistling between his teeth every few seconds, she calling the fox’s name in her silly girlish voice, a voice that certainly didn’t belong to a woman in her sixties. A strange figure she cut, thought Paddy, in men’s overalls and with great big wellies on her feet. They paused for a breather and a sup of lukewarm tea from the bottle he carried.