The Rag Nymph (aka The Forester Girl)

by Catherine Cookson

  It was on a sigh that Aggie replied, ‘No, love, I’m not afraid of getting splinters. I crawled down these stairs forty-eight years ago and I’ve walked up and down them ever since, mostly in me bare feet, and I’ve never got splinters.’

  On the landing Millie stopped and, looking about her, she said, ‘This is a big house.’

  ‘Aye; I suppose it is.’

  ‘There are lots of doors.’

  ‘Aye, there are lots of doors, and through this one’—Aggie pushed a door wide—‘is me bedroom. Now come on and no more lip, an’ get your clothes off and into that bed, ’cos there’s things I’ve got to do before I sleep tonight.’

  ‘Are you vexed with me?’

  Again Aggie sighed and she half closed her eyes before answering, ‘No, child, I’m not vexed with you, but, as I said, I’ve got things to see to. Now, off with your clothes and no more chatter. D’you hear me?’ Her voice had risen and the child now sat down on a low chair and quickly took off her shoes, then pulled her grey stockings down over her knees before, standing up, she asked, ‘Will you unhook me, please?’ And Aggie, bending down, undid four buttons on the back of her dress.

  After the dress, the child took off two white petticoats, and Aggie noticed that the material was quite good; and when it seemed that the shift was about to be taken off too, she said, ‘I would keep that on, if I were you; you haven’t got a nightgown.’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, I forgot. I haven’t got a nightgown.’

  ‘Well, up you get!’

  ‘I must say my prayers.’

  ‘Oh. Oh aye. Well, get on with it.’

  When Millie knelt by the bed and the mattress seemed out of reach, she had to raise her clasped hands head high to rest them against it. Then she began: ‘God bless Mama and Dada, and please take care of them. And thank you for this day and make me grateful for what I’ve got. And God bless Mrs Melburn and this big woman…lady who has been kind to me today. And please bring my mama back early in the morning. Amen.’

  As she rose from her knees Aggie said, ‘Who’s Mrs Melburn?’

  ‘She was a lady in Durham who was kind to us, the parson’s wife. She let us stay with her for a week after Dada—’ She paused, and again her hesitation appeared as if her mind were groping for an answer or a revelation to something she couldn’t understand; then she said, ‘After Dada…died. And…and she set us to the station, and…and Mama promised to write.’

  ‘Did she? I mean, did your mother write?’

  ‘Yes, and so did Mrs Melburn.’

  ‘Well, get up into bed.’

  ‘Do you have bed bugs?’

  ‘No! I do not have bed bugs. A flea now, here and there, but no bed bugs. Get in!’

  When the child shrank back against the edge of the bed and made no attempt to climb up on to the mattress, Aggie put a hand to her head before muttering, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t look so scared. But I’m particular about me bed. All right, you might find everything that crawls in the yard an’ they might get as far as downstairs here and there, but not up here. And not on me clothes either, not if I know anything about it. If I do find them, they get short shrift. So come on, love.’ And she leaned down towards the child, her thick arms going out and around her, and she lifted her into the bed, saying softly, ‘There now. Isn’t that nice and comfy?’

  Still shaking somewhat with fright, Millie swallowed twice before she brought out in a small voice, ‘It’s very nice, thank you.’

  ‘Well then, go to sleep now. But I’ll leave the door open, and it won’t be dark for a long time. I’ll be popping up and down to see how you are, an’ when it gets dark I’ll light the lamp. But I’ll be up long before that. Now the pot’s under the bed if you want to do a number one. You’ll be able to get out on your own, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, thank you.’

  ‘Well then, snuggle down.’

  Aggie took two or three steps backwards, smiled, and turned and went out of the room, leaving the door wide open. At the head of the stairs she paused and gripped the broad banister; then slowly descending the stairs, she muttered to herself, ‘A little of that one will go a long way.’

  Back in the sitting room she found Ben packing the fire with tins filled with coal dust mixed with dried mud, and he turned to her, saying, ‘One of these days you’ll go daft and buy some real coal.’

  ‘Why should I? What’ll we do with all the tins?’

  ‘You could always get a few coppers for them.’

  ‘Coppers, aye, but it takes more than coppers to cart them there; they won’t come and pick ’em up.’

  He straightened his back and while dusting his hands he said, ‘You got her off, then?’

  ‘Aye, I got her off, and thankfully. By! She’s got a tongue.’

  As she sat down on the couch, Ben sat opposite her on the settle, his big body and large head topping the back of it while his short legs hardly touched the floor.

  ‘She’s been well brought up,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, she has, finicky, I would say. And you can imagine it, if her mother has been a lady’s maid or some such. I wonder what happened to the father? I bet you a shillin’ he’s not dead. Gone off, more like it. By what I can gather they must have lived in Durham for a time, ’cos when she was saying her prayers she brought in a Mrs Melburn, a parson’s wife, who was kind to them after the father died or whatever, an’ from what I made out of her jabbering the woman and the mother have written to each other. Now’—she leant towards him, her finger wagging—‘first thing in the mornin’ you get down to the station and have a word with Constable Fenwick; he’ll know what’s goin’ to happen to that lass. Don’t say anything about the bairn being here. Just make out you’re interested in her, the woman called Forester.’

  ‘Oh, Aggie, that’s a laugh for the wrong side of me face. Now, I ask you, me bein’ interested in somebody, a woman who looks like that bairn upstairs…Have a heart.’

  ‘Well, all right. If your feelings are so tender about your damned legs, tell him that Aggie was enquirin’ about her. Make up some tale that I’ve spoken to her on me rounds. D’you hear what I’m sayin’ to you?’

  Ben’s voice was solemn as he said, ‘Aye, I hear you, Aggie. Sometimes I wish I didn’t; you don’t half rub it in.’

  ‘I don’t rub it into you more than you rub it into yourself. You’re not above mentioning your height, even bragging about it at times, saying you’re as good as any two men twice your size. Aye well, you might be, the upper half of you, but you’ve got to reach them and you do it with your tongue. So I’m not speakin’ about any part of you you don’t bring to the fore yourself.’

  A silence fell on the room, and its increasing heaviness made her heave herself up from the couch and take the three steps to throw herself onto the seat beside him; and to put an arm around his shoulder and say, ‘Come on, lad, come on. You know me. There’s nobody in this world more sorry for you at times than I am, for you could have been a real good-lookin’, strappin’ fella. You’re still good-lookin’; and after all, you’ve got Annie.’

  ‘Aye, I’ve got Annie.’ He turned towards her now, adding, ‘And you don’t think much of Annie, do you? And you’ve made that plain enough.’

  ‘Well, lad, it’s only because I think you’re worth somebody better than her. And it isn’t the first time I’ve said that, is it? You undervalue yourself. There’s plenty of men that haven’t half your appearance and are five feet or so who have married decent lasses and brought up a family.’

  ‘Aye, well, Aggie, there’s a lot in the “or so” bit. “Or so” could be two, four, or six inches. But I’m five feet dead and it wouldn’t look so bad if I was narrow from the legs up. But to have an upper bulk like mine and a head like a bull, well, I can’t see all the good, kind lasses falling over themselves and saying, “Aw, Ben, come on to bed with me.”’ His voice had changed during the last few words and she pushed him hard against the end of the settle as she said, ‘No, they won’t co
me running, but have you ever thought of you doin’ the askin’? Anyway, what I’m askin’ you to do now is to get on your feet and go and get me a drop of gin and a couple of pints of beer.’

  ‘Is it a party?’

  ‘Well, it could be; but then, you might want to get away.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to get away. They can all wait, all those stupid bitches beggin’ me to strip ’em. You get tired of doin’ it.’

  Aggie pushed him and he got to his feet, saying, ‘Will I take the money from the box?’

  ‘Aye, where else?’ she said as she, too, rose from the settle and returned to the couch, from where she watched him go to the box that was standing on the end of the sideboard, and from it take a piece of silver, then button his coat across his broad chest, take his cap from his pocket and, having put it on at an angle, salute her, saying, ‘Your servant, madam.’ Then, clicking his heels together, he turned on his short legs and marched from the room.

  After the door shut behind him, she sat looking at it, wondering what she would have done over the years without him. She, too, remembered the day he had come into the yard and cheeked her father, telling him he could choose his name from Smith, Jones or Robinson. He had said he thought he must have been eight but that he didn’t really know. At that time he would have been like many thousands of other youngsters, the sweepings of the hungry ’forties.

  He must have been born in the middle ’thirties, when hunger was already rampant. The corn laws had seen to that. He had been with them for some time; two or three years before, he had told her that he didn’t know where he had been born, or who his parents were. He only knew of the life he had led in the baby-farming house, one of seventeen young children. He had made his escape on the day he later confronted her father in the yard. She had taken to him from the first, and he to her, perhaps, on his part, because she had given him some hot mutton broth and let him eat as much bread as he could manage, which had been half a loaf; and then she had rigged him out in odd things.

  Her father would joke about him to her when he’d had a drink over much: ‘Ready-made son you’ve got now then, daughter, is it?’ he’d say. ‘Why didn’t you have a shot when the goin’ was good? It’s too late now.’ And many were the times when she had wanted to bawl at him, ‘And who was to blame for that? You were, and me mam.’ Lazy bitch, she was: lying on this couch day after day feeling too bad to move; but she could go upstairs and carry out the duties of a wife whenever the fancy took her. More likely in case he should go along the road to ease himself on Alice Mulcahy. Yet he was the kindest man you would wish to meet when the drink wasn’t on him. It was she who had cared for him, and looked after him, too, until he died, and in the bed upstairs in which he had been born, and his father before him, in the days when this house had really been a farmhouse and the land about had been glowing with crops in their rotation. There had been cows in that yard outside and horses stabled around.

  Her great-grandparents had lived in this house; it was her great-grandfather who had bought the farm; but from where had come the money for a Polish immigrant to buy a farm in those far-off days remained a mystery to both her grandfather and, of course, her father. All her father remembered about his grandfather was that he was a dour man and that the only relaxation he ever gave himself was at the races.

  Therein, she thought, lay the source of the money as well as its eventual loss, because, when her grandfather inherited the place, the farm was already in debt. By the time he died there were no animals left in the yard, nor land to call his own, for it had been sold to the building men, who were throwing up The Courts in order to house the rabble from starving Ireland and those flooding in from all the villages from miles around, all in the hope of being set on in the great new factories that made linen and lawn and blankets and shawls, everything that would go to cover a human being.

  It had been from this influx that the rag business had started. Before that they had sold coal from the yard. She remembered when the coal had finished. It was the time when her mother took to the couch because she couldn’t stand the sight and sound of the hordes of women and children with their buckets, and the arranged fights among the urchins so that one or two of their gang could get away with some lumps of coal, which would make all the difference between having a fried meal or freezing both inside and out.

  She could never remember just how the rag business started, but she recollected that she no longer went three times a week to the paid school. Her education from then on was the Sunday afternoon spent in the basement underneath the church in Halton Street, chanting the catechism.

  It was scrap iron that came into the yard first, and bits and pieces of lead. What prompted her father to go out with the handcart she didn’t know, because underneath it all he was a proud man. She only remembered that right from the beginning he took her with him, and it was she who was sent to the doors to ask politely if they had anything to sell. At first they never went round The Courts; the route was always to the outskirts and to where houses had gardens, small or large. But there again, he never sent her to the really big houses because, as he said, if there was anything going, the servants would have had the first pick. Later, he was to learn that the terraces were really the best area, for here a woman would take pride in being seen to hand over some cast-offs, because, in a way, this indicated that she was well able to replace them.

  The Saturday morning market in the yard was taken from the pattern of the street market, where the clothes were laid out in heaps on the ground with a decent garment on the top of each pile to tempt the passer-by to look further. So, what they had managed to gather during the week, her father would arrange on makeshift trestles in the yard. Should it rain, he would bring the stuff under the arches. But if a woman should ask for a particular garment, he would take her into what had been the front room of the house and there, in comparative privacy, she could make her choice and try on the clothes. Yet with all his hard work and, definitely, hers too, he seemed hardly to make a living.

  It wasn’t until almost his last breath that he told her of the board beneath his bed and what was under it, assuring her he had saved it for her. And after raising the board and finding six wash-leather bags of sovereigns she had really believed him, and for only the second time she could remember in her life, she had cried. That was until the day of his funeral, when his fancy woman, Alice Mulcahy, through gin-inspired sorrow, told her that they had been making plans to go to America. She had known her father to be a kindly man: he would do anything to keep the peace and keep people happy. But then, a week later, she had a visit from a strange man enquiring for her father, and who, after being told of his demise, informed her he had been asked to sell the property for which he had felt able to assure her father he would get a good price, seeing that land around was scarce. And he had ended by saying, ‘He’ll never get to America now.’

  She remembered, following the man’s visit, that she had sat dumb with rage, and had then rushed upstairs to his room, and every article belonging to him, even to his razor strop, she had brought down and thrown into the yard for the Saturday morning onslaught. And that morning’s takings had trebled and brought her new custom, for he had always seen to it that he was shod well and had good small clothes and shirts.

  It was now ten years since he had died, and during the first year she had herself pushed the handcart out almost every day for, except for young Ben, she was on her own. With the years it had seemed to get heavier, so that now she made only two excursions a week, mostly to the outskirts, making a point never to visit the same house more than twice a year. And there was also another point she made: she would discard her black coat, black skirt and black hat once she left the environs of The Courts. Early on, she had learned one thing: if the poor saw you prospering they didn’t deal with you if they could help it, their idea being they weren’t going to give you a hand. So, for The Courts she would wear the old black coat with the large pockets at the side holding the narrow strips o
f candy rock in one and the coppers in the other. However, it wasn’t often she had to fork out the coppers when pushing the handcart through The Courts. A caring parent would pay a penny or tuppence for some old coat or skirt that could be cut up to meet the needs of some child.

  She had discovered, too, one good source of decent clothing: periodically, churches and chapels would hold a sale of garments given them by their better-off parishioners. To those ladies who were responsible for dealing with this charitable effort, she would offer as much as five shillings for a bundle of what appeared to them as less attractive articles, especially if they were food-stained, as some old gentlemen’s coats often were. But she knew that Chinese Charlie would clean and press a garment to make it look almost new and she could get as much as two shillings for a good overcoat or a suit.

  So, over the years there had been a number of leather bags added to those under the loose floorboards beneath the bed in which she now spent her nights and, in her time, expected to die…

  Ben came in, saying, ‘Billy the welder is roaring in The Crown. That’ll mean he’ll flail the lot of them tonight, an’ there won’t be a penny of his pay left for her. He was screaming his head off about the war and the Russians. He was all for sending Gladstone over to the “bloody” Russians.’ He grinned now. ‘It was really funny to listen to him. They just stopped him from choking the life out of Bobby Carter because he had said everybody was for the war: if we didn’t show them Russians what was what, who would? By! I thought Bobby Carter was a brave man to stand up to Billy, and him twice his size.’

  As he put the bottle and the can on the table, he said, ‘Have a drop of gin first, eh?’

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘An’ don’t leave the glass dry. But about Billy Middleton. Something should be done in that quarter. He’s practically crippled that oldest lad of his, and him not ten yet, and she won’t have a word said against him. Stupid bitch! The next thing’ll be, he’ll do for one of them, then she’ll find out where she stands.’