Reach for Tomorrow Page 2

  ‘All right, man, all right. Not now.’

  But the old wizened miner was in full flow. ‘Order of Merit! An’ that’s the man who called the rail strike an anarchist conspiracy an’ then turned down nationalization of the mines. Too many pals of his have too much to lose, that’s the thing. There’s barely bin a month without a strike, an’ why? There’s nothin’ else we can do, that’s why. They pay nowt but lip service to safety--’

  ‘Jimmy.’

  Silence reigned again, an uneasy, tense silence broken now and again by a whispered word or two, or children crying in the cold northern afternoon as the bitter chill seeped into their bones.

  It was quite dark when the first rescue party came up and the next one went down, and by then Rosie was a block of ice, every part of her frozen, and she knew she would never feel warm again. Sam and her da were down there, maybe Davey too, and it was more than she could bear. And Phil, he was just fifteen. Fifteen. And the pit might have taken them all. But they couldn’t be dead - it was inconceivable that she wouldn’t see them again, they had to be all right. And her mam, her poor mam. What would her mam do . . . ?

  One of their neighbours had taken Hannah and Molly when it had begun to get dark, and now, as she stood cradling her mother in her arms, Rosie saw Davey Connor and her heart leapt. Davey was on the rescue party, he was safe. But Sam, and her da and Phil . . . ?

  ‘You’ve been down?’ she asked weakly, but she had seen it in his eyes, that look of desperate pity and compassion, and she knew that, whatever he might say, there was little hope for the others.

  ‘Aye.’ He cleared his throat, his young face under its mantle of black dust working slightly. ‘Aye, I’ve bin down, an’ it’s goin’ to be a long job, lass. Best take your mam home, eh?’

  ‘I’m not goin’ nowhere.’ Jessie spoke for the first time in hours.

  ‘Mrs Ferry, it’ll be a long job, there’s a good stretch of the roof down,’ the young man said softly, ‘an’ it’s no use you waitin’ an’ gettin’ chilled to the bone, is it? Your man wouldn’t want that. They might well be at the back of the fall, there’s still hope, but it’ll take time to reach them. Go home, the bairns need you.’

  ‘Bairns?’ Jessie looked up at him, her brow wrinkling, before it cleared and she said, ‘I’m stayin’ put, lad.’

  ‘No, you’re not, Mam. You heard what Davey said, they’ll not have any news for hours yet and we can be back at first light. You’re coming home and having something hot and getting a few hours’ sleep. You’ll be no good to Da and the lads in the infirmary with pneumonia, now then.’

  Rosie didn’t expect her mother to take any notice of her - Jessie was well known for her stubbornness within the family - so it was with some surprise that she glanced up at Davey again as her mother turned obediently in the direction of home and said, ‘All right, lass, whatever you think best,’ without any more argument.

  ‘Davey?’ Rosie caught hold of Jessie’s arm as she spoke - the older woman was already walking docilely away - and said hastily, ‘How many? How many are down?’

  ‘Your da’s section an’ some of the lads from five, the rest were up when it happened.’ Rosie knew Davey Connor to be a fine, fresh-faced, good-looking lad, but at that moment he looked like all the miners did when they came up from the bowels of the earth - a barely recognizable creature from a different planet. ‘Rosie, it could be forty-eight hours if not longer, you’d better prepare her.’ He nodded quietly at Jessie’s back. ‘They’re talkin’ about establishin’ a fresh-air base an’ comin’ in from a different angle an’ that takes time.’

  Rosie nodded, her breath a white cloud in the bitterly cold, frosty night as she said, ‘Aye, I’ll do that, Davey, and . . . thanks.’

  ‘Oh, lass, lass.’ He didn’t say any more but he didn’t have to. There are some heart cries that are too deep to express.

  It was seventy-eight hours later before the first body was brought up, and a full week before they reached the last man. The rescue teams had worked frantically, long after any hope of finding anyone alive had gone, each man aware that the training he had gone through over and over again was now being used in a disaster the like of which he had never imagined.

  It had snowed heavily on the day of the funeral and the whole town had lined the route to show their respect. Even Fawcett Street, with its wide road paved with wooden blocks and magnificent town hall, was subdued and strangely still. But to the families concerned, many of which had lost their main breadwinner, there was only the long black line of horsedriven hearses, and the seemingly endless service when coffin after coffin was lowered into the hard, unforgiving northern earth.

  But in a strange sort of way she had almost welcomed the funeral, Rosie thought now, sinking down into a straightbacked chair at her mother’s side, and taking Jessie’s limp hands in her own as she began to chafe them gently. During the terrible wait for news, and then the agony of each body being brought up from the black cavernous depths that had consumed it, she had really feared her mother was losing her mind.

  Jessie’s grief had been overwhelming. There had been times when the older woman had sat for hours without speaking, her hands picking at the fringe of her shawl and her eyes staring sightlessly ahead, and then others when she had ranted and raved like a madwoman and Rosie had had to physically restrain her. At her worst she had lashed out at little Hannah when the six-year-old had tried to clamber on her knee, knocking the child against the hard wood saddle where only the plump, flock-stuffed cushions had saved the little girl from serious injury. Even Molly, the undisputed favourite, had failed to make any impression on Jessie’s deranged mind, and her two sisters had clung to Rosie increasingly.

  But although the frightening mood swings had passed along with the funeral, the woman who had returned home with Rosie from the cemetery was not her mother. The big, buxom, rosy-faced Jessie had died in the mine along with her husband and her sons, and what remained was a silent, bitter shell.

  ‘Mam, me da was a fine man, I know that,’ Rosie said now, her voice soft. ‘I’m just saying that Mr Kilbride knew which side his bread was buttered, that’s all. And now Da - now things have changed, he won’t put himself out for us beyond what he’s already done. You have to see that, Mam.’

  ‘Aye, perhaps you’re right, lass.’

  It had become Jessie’s stock answer to anything that was put to her, and always spoken in the same dull, uninterested tone.

  ‘Mam . . .’ Rosie bit hard on her lip, shutting her eyes for an infinitesimal moment. ‘Mam, you do see we’ve got to find somewhere to live? And Davey, he said that the hot potato man - you know, Mr Nebb who’s the verger at Holy Trinity - well, he told Davey on the quiet that he knows of two lasses who are going to leave Bradman’s jam factory in Hendon Street in the next week. They’re going up Newcastle way, the family’s moving there because their da’s found work through his brother, but they’re not telling the foreman before time in case he gets rid of them early.’

  ‘So?’ Jessie turned to look at her pretty, dark-eyed daughter, but Rosie had the feeling her mother wasn’t really seeing her.

  ‘So we could get in on the ground. I’m fourteen next week and Bradman’s pays more than most. If we could get set on--’

  ‘You’re not sayin’ I should work outside? Your da won’t have that.’ Jessie looked scandalized. ‘The most he’s ever allowed is me takin’ in the odd bit of washin’ when you bairns were all young an’ money was tight. He’s got no time for women who work outside or for men that allow it.’

  ‘Mam, things are different now.’ Rosie prayed for control as she kept her voice quiet through the frustration and pain that gnawed at her every waking moment. What was she going to do? What was she going to do? Mr Kilbride had been at his most officious when he had called round the night before, his black eyes as hard as bullets, and their meagre store of cash was nearly all gone. There was just enough to buy food for the next few days and then . . . She bit down on the panic
and fear that threatened to swamp her. There were men being laid off all over the place, there was even talk of a soup kitchen being set up in High Street East besides the ones in Boldon and Jarrow. Things were bad. Da, oh, Da. Tell me what to do.

  ‘No, Rosie.’ For a moment an echo of the old, stubborn Jessie was back. ‘I’ll take in washin’, or maybe card them linen buttons like Annie does next door, eh? Anyways, who’d be here for when the bairns get home from school?’

  ‘Mam, we’re not going to be here, we’re going to have to look for rooms elsewhere. And Molly can take care of Hannah, she’s old enough. I was taking care of her at eight when Hannah was born and she’d only have to walk her home and keep an eye on her till we’re back in the evening. They’d be fine.’

  ‘Not be here?’ Rosie doubted if her mother had heard anything else as Jessie, her voice high, repeated, ‘Not be here?’ as she glanced round the kitchen of the neat two-up, two-down terraced house.

  Rosie, from the age of eight, had always included a nightly thank you in her prayers for the fact that she lived on the north side of the River Wear in one of the ordinary prosaic streets of terraced houses that made up the heart of Monkwearmouth. There had been complications with Hannah’s birth, which had occurred in March 1914, just five months before Britain was plunged into the Great War against Germany, and her father had taken Rosie, along with the other three children, across the Wearmouth Bridge to his mother’s house in Sunderland’s East End where the four of them had stayed until her mother was well enough to have them home again.

  Of course Rosie had visited her grannie’s before; brief visits which she had always enjoyed as her grannie’s lodgers had tended to make much of the bright-faced little girl with the silky dark hair and deep brown eyes, but always with her parents and only for an hour or so at the most. Nothing had prepared her for sleeping in her grannie’s kitchen along with Sam, Phil and Molly on a big flea-infested mattress that her grannie kept for the odd lodger who couldn’t be fitted into the two crammed rooms upstairs; or for the cold and general filth in the dirty, overcrowded, insanitary house, which was only one of countless hundreds in the back-to-back tenement slums that made up the wretched East End of Sunderland.

  She had cried against her father’s broad chest when he had come to visit them the next day, but when he had told her, gently but firmly, that there was nowhere else for them to go - she knew her mam’s mam and da had died afore she was born when her own mam was still a little bairn, didn’t she? and her da’s only brother had moved away years ago to escape the mines - she had gritted her teeth and endured the rest of the endlessly miserable visit without complaint.

  But on her return home, to the small but immaculately clean house in Forcer Road where she shared a bedroom with Molly and her brothers - a big square of curtain on a piece of string separating their half of the room from the lads’ section - she had cried again, but this time with thankfulness. The blackleaded grate, the big iron kettle that was always on the hob, the bright clippy mat in front of the fire on the scrubbed floor, the smell of Metal Shino polish and the broken flagstones her mother scoured with soda, all took on the form of heaven. Even the communal privy in the yard which they shared with the houses either side, and which all three housewives took turns in cleaning daily, became something wonderful after her grannie’s foul, stinking square box that had caused her to gag every time she entered it.

  There was poverty and there was poverty, and the lesson Rosie had learnt when Hannah was born had embedded itself deep in her young soul; so now, when Jessie’s eyes came to rest on her and her mother said, her voice dull again, ‘There’s always your grannie’s shakedown while we get sorted,’ Rosie’s voice was loud in her reply of, ‘I’m not taking the bairns there, Mam, and anyway we want to keep as much furniture as we can, don’t we? There’s no money to get anything stored.’

  ‘Aye, perhaps you’re right, lass.’

  Perhaps you’re right, lass. If she heard that one more time she would scream. But then a flood of compassion and guilt lowered Rosie’s voice as she said, ‘I’ll sort something out, Mam, don’t worry. You get yourself to bed, you look all done in.’

  ‘Aye, lass.’ Jessie shambled immediately to her feet like an overgrown child, and again the change in her once vital and authoritative mother made Rosie want to weep. It just showed you never knew anyone, not really. Her mam had gone all through the war years, the dreaded Zeppelin raids and the rationing and all, with a cheerfulness that had kept the whole family on an even keel. She would never have dreamt in a million years that her mother would have gone to pieces like this, but from the moment Jessie had heard that whistle it was as though her life spring had snapped. And there was Molly having screaming tantrum after screaming tantrum and refusing to go to school, and Hannah - sensing the general atmosphere without fully understanding it - crying herself to sleep each night.

  Alone now, and for the first time since she had opened her eyes that morning and begun the daily task of chivvying the family into some sort of normality, Rosie walked across to the old battered armchair in front of the range where her father had sat most nights on his return from the pit, and sank tiredly onto its thin, flattened cushion, her mind worrying at the urgent matter of work.

  She’d take the tram into Hendon tomorrow if Mrs McLinnie would have Molly and Hannah for a few hours; she didn’t dare leave the two bairns with her mother but she couldn’t drag them round with her either. She could have a look and see if there were any cheap rooms going, although how they were going to pay the first week’s rent she didn’t know, and she could perhaps call in at the jam factory and make enquiries. Although she couldn’t let on about the two lasses who were going to leave; Davey had been explicit about that when he had tipped her the wink.

  Davey . . . Rosie leant back against the hard wood and shut her eyes. She’d always liked Davey Connor, Sam used to tease her about him unmercifully. Oh, Sam. Sam. She always did her crying at night when the others were in bed, and now the hot tears scalded her face but she made no effort to wipe them away. How could he be dead, her tall, shy, sensitive brother? It wasn’t fair for him to have died like that, away from the sky and the wide open spaces he loved so much. She had watched him and Davey breathing in the fresh grass-soaked air on the country walks the three of them had shared on a Sunday afternoon along with Flora, and Sam had seemed to come alive as he and Davey had discussed their plans to get out of the pit and work on the land, and then on a Monday morning that dead look would come over his face again. She hoped he hadn’t died in the dark, she couldn’t bear to think he had died in the dark . . .

  She scrubbed her face dry on her hessian apron after a time, her body still shuddering. Of course she missed her da and their Phil too - her bouts of crying invariably ended with feelings of remorse that her main grieving was centred around Sam - but she’d been so close to Sam. His dreams and Davey’s had been so aligned to hers; they had shared her desire to escape these grim back streets where the only view of the sky was of a thin rectangle in between the narrow roads and alleyways. All the girls she had been at school with seemed to look only as far as marriage and bairns, that was the sum total of their aspirations. And when she’d used words like that - aspirations - they’d oohed and aahed and poked fun. Except Flora. Flora had always stood up for her even when her friend didn’t understand what she was talking about. She was longing for Flora to come back from visiting her mother’s family in Wales, things were always brighter when Flora was around, and if ever she had needed her friend’s infectiously optimistic presence it was now. Although all this was going to hit Flora hard too; she’d always had the notion that Flora had a soft spot for Sam although she had never let on.

  The thought of Sam brought the weakness into her mind and body again and Rosie pushed it away determinedly, rising abruptly and walking across the kitchen to slip the bolt on the back door before she banked down the fire still further. She had to be strong now, she couldn’t afford to give in to her gri
ef for more than the odd minute or so, there was too much to do. Her da, and their Sam and Phil, would expect her to keep the family together.

  Her mam would get better in time, hadn’t Davey said that very thing when he’d called round the night before with a sack of coal? She glanced at the fire which was now smoking profusely under its blanket of damp slack, and her face softened. They had been down to the dust and grime in the bottom of the scuttle before Davey had called, and she had been thinking she would have to use some of the precious hoard of money to buy fuel, but now they could manage for a bit longer. He was so nice, Davey. And Mrs McLinnie was good, bless her; she’d called round twice in the last week, once with a pan of rabbit stew and dumplings and another time with a bag of chitterlings and two pig’s trotters, and one or two other neighbours had dropped by with small offerings. But people couldn’t keep doing that, most of them were living hand to mouth as it was.

  No, she had to take stock and get things sorted, and she had to do it by herself, that was becoming clearer every day. The idea of her going into service with the Chester family in Seaburn was no good now, not that she had ever really wanted to in the first place. That had been her da’s idea, her being taken on as a kitchen maid in the big house, he’d had a bee in his bonnet about her being somewhere safe and secure. But her mam and the bairns needed her; her mother didn’t seem able to make even the most elementary decisions any more and she couldn’t leave them. Everything had changed.