The Urchin's Song Read online

  Chapter One

  It seemed like weeks and weeks since the sun had shone. Josie adjusted the collar of her old blue serge coat more securely round her neck, wrinkling her face against the whirling snow as she slipped and slid on the packed ice beneath her boots. Only November and already everything was frozen up; it was going to be a long, hard winter. They’d had to push pieces of burning paper up the tap in the yard to get a trickle of water for days now.

  And then she thought of the big pile of scrag ends and six pigs’ trotters rolled up in newspaper in her shopping bag, and smiled to herself. Mr Duckworth was nice, oh he was, saving them for her, and she’d managed to get three penn’orth of pot stuff for a penny just because the cabbages were browning and the taties and onions had gone over. They’d be fine in a stew though.

  She passed another butcher’s shop, gas flares burning amid the joints of meat, but, owing to Mr Duckworth’s generosity, she didn’t stop to look in. She needed the rest of her money for flour, yeast and fat anyway. They had no bread at home.

  The pavements were crowded and it was hard going, but it was always the same late at night when the market stalls began to pack away. Bruised fruit and spotted vegetables could be picked up cheaper then, and for some families it meant the difference between eating and going hungry. Every evening saw raggedy little urchins fighting and rolling about under the stalls for a half-rotten apple or squashed orange or two, kicking and biting until they drew blood.

  Public penury and private ostentation meant conditions were grim in Sunderland’s wretched East End. Back-to-back tenements, noxious chemical works, breweries, brickworks, foul-smelling abattoirs and the like, all coexisted in rabbit warrens of filth and human misery. Homes which had originally been built for prosperous merchants were now notoriously overcrowded, with whole families living in one or two rooms, and the area was a breeding ground for all manner of unsavoury activities and crime.

  And still, in the midst of it all, good, decent folk struggled to bring up their children the best they could. The desperately respectable housewife and mother, working eighteen-hour days taking in washing or carding linen buttons and sewing endless hooks and eyes by the dim light of a tallow candle, and all the time trying to ignore the goings-on in the brothel across the way.

  And fathers, enduring gruelling ten-hour shifts unloading iron-ore boats at the dockside, trousers wet and cold up to the thighs and every day an accident of some kind, whilst men they had grown up with - sometimes brothers or friends - stole and murdered for their living and taught their children to do the same.

  One such individual, a crony of Josie’s father, now lurched out of a gin shop a few yards in front of her and stood swaying slightly as he surveyed the passers-by with bleary eyes. Josie’s stomach tightened, but she forced herself to continue without checking her stride. For a moment she thought he was too drunk to recognise her, but then a bony hand reached out and fastened on her coat-sleeve. ‘ ’Tis the bonny Josie.’ The stink of his breath almost knocked her backwards. ‘An’ how’re you, me little lassie?’

  ‘Fine, thank you, Mr Duffy.’ She was staring into the mean sallow face without blinking and her voice was flat. She didn’t like any of her father’s associates but this one, a small wiry Irishman with hard black eyes and a vicious temper, was a particularly nasty piece of work. She would rather have died than let him see it but this one frightened her.

  ‘That’s right.’ His eyes crawled over her and she wanted to rub where they had touched. ‘You bin doin’ a bit of shoppin’ for your ma? That’s a good lass.’

  She continued to stare at him but she said nothing, her face blank. He always wanted to touch her, this man. Whenever he called for her father at the house he would find some excuse to pat her arm or brush against her, and the smell of him - a mixture of acrid body odour and stale alcohol - was as repugnant as the man himself. That he had some hold over her father she didn’t doubt. Bart Burns’s normal bullying ways were replaced by a sickening obsequiousness in Patrick Duffy’s presence.

  ‘Your da tells me you’re doin’ well for yerself at nights then, in the pubs? I said to him, “There’s no flies on your Josie. Knows how to give ’em what they want,” eh, darlin’?’

  In spite of her determination to show no emotion Josie drew back, her face expressing her distaste. Her work in the rough riverside pubs for the last five years had brought her into contact with all sorts, and she couldn’t have failed to pick up the hidden meaning in the last words, even if he hadn’t emphasised the smutty innuendo by winking at her.

  ‘I just sing, Mr Duffy, that’s all,’ she said bluntly, and pulled her arm free. He was horrible, he was, and she didn’t care if her da said they’d all got to be nice to Mr Duffy or he’d knock them into next weekend. She was tired of smiling and pretending not to mind when he touched her, or said what a big girl she was growing into with his eyes on her chest, like he’d done the other day.

  She saw the ferret face straighten as he blinked rapidly, obviously surprised at her temerity, but in spite of the way her stomach had turned over, she schooled her face to show no fear when she said, ‘Me mam’s waiting for the shopping so I’ve got to go. Goodbye, Mr Duffy,’ as she backed away from him.

  Patrick Duffy made no attempt to return the salutation, but his eyes were gimlet hard as he watched the small upright figure with the enormous cloth bag walk on. He saw her pause in front of an open fish shop, where flickering candles enclosed in greasy paper lanterns cast their dim and tallowy light over wooden tables slimy with the remains of the day’s cheap fish, but then she was bobbing in and out of the crowd on the cobbled pavement again and was lost to view.

  He swore, softly and obscenely, under his breath, before moving his thin lips one over the other for a moment or two. Right, so that’s how it was, eh? By, if ever there was an upstart in the making, she was one. Not that she had anything to hold her head up about. He’d seen the muck-hole she was born into; rats lived better than Bart’s bairns had. True enough, the girl had cleaned it up a bit in the last few years since she’d started this singing lark, but Long Bank was rough, even by East End standards.

  He allowed his mind to picture Bart’s dwelling the first time he had seen it some eight years ago. Two rooms, with six inmates, the walls, ceiling and furniture filthy. The floor had been bare and the walls covered with blood marks and splotches that spoke of the vermin which had been swarming about. Dirty flock bedding had occupied all of one room, and a rickety table and two chairs, along with a couple of orange boxes and the remains of a dresser, the other. There had been no fire in the range and the rooms had been as cold as ice, and if he remembered rightly, Bart’s missus had been about to deliver another of the brats he planted in her every nine months. He couldn’t remember if that one had been stillborn; quite a few had since he’d got to know Bart.

  Duffy drew the air in between his teeth in a slow hiss as his thoughts returned to the child who had just affronted him. Her sisters had been a couple of years younger than her when he’d first had them, aye, and paid Bart proud for the privilege. First Ada and then Dora when she’d turned ten or thereabouts, and he’d put Bart on to the right connections for them to continue to earn for their da after he’d deflowered them. No one could say he hadn’t played fair. It hadn’t even crossed his mind it’d be any different with Josie, and if he’d had to choose any one of them it would be her, damn it. She was a beauty, was Josie, even now at twelve years old.

  His thoughts intensified the feeling he’d been cheated out of what was rightfully his. Bart should have told the chit what was what, like he had with the other two, but the trouble was that Josie earned more with her caterwauling than the other two ever had on their backs. And since Dora and Ada had skedaddled to pastures new just after that one had started singing, Bart wasn’t about to upset the applecart of his main provider. The bit his lads brought in with their thieving could be something or nothing depending on their luck, and the other one - Josie’s sister Gertie -
was ailing more than she was out begging.

  The thought of Gertie Burns made his cruel little eyes narrow still more. Patrick Duffy liked them young, the younger the better, and the life of villainy he had chosen meant he could afford to pay well. Every so often a man like Bart would come his way and he’d make the most of the opportunity . . .

  The sister was a scrawny little piece but it had been some months since he’d tasted something fresh and unspoilt. Slowly now, he turned and began to make his way along the frozen pavement, his gait unsteady, not least because of the swollen member between his legs which his thoughts had made rock hard. He’d set things up with Bart over the next day or two, and he hadn’t given up on the other one either. There were more ways to kill a cat than drowning it. The alleys and back lanes were chancy places come nightfall, and he knew the haunts Josie frequented and the routes she took. ’Course, nine times out of ten she had her sister with her, but if he had a word in Bart’s ear likely Gertie would be despatched same as Ada and Dora once he’d broken her in, which would leave the upstart to walk alone.

  He smiled to himself, bringing a yellow, furry-coated tongue over his lips before he caught a drip from the end of his nose on his coat-sleeve. He’d see his day with that one all right, by, he would, and it would be all the sweeter for the wait.

  By the time Josie had reached Walton Lane and then turned right into New Grey Street, she had forgotten all about Patrick Duffy, her mind full of the groceries she had yet to buy. The meat and vegetables would keep them going for a couple of days, but she still needed a quarter stone of flour and that would be fivepence even for seconds, and then there was the fat. She’d have to buy the lamp oil today too, they were completely out, and the cheapest she’d get would be thruppence a quart. Thank goodness she’d got a sack of coal in yesterday, and although there was quite a bit of slack in it, the majority of it was roundies. Eked out with the sack of cinders she’d made Jimmy and Hubert collect from the tip, it would see them through to the end of the week if they were careful. That’s if her da didn’t stoke up the range until it was a furnace when she was out, like he’d done last night.

  The thought of her father caused Josie’s soft full mouth to tighten and her nostrils to flare. She knew why he’d done it. Oh aye, she knew all right. She’d given him the beer, baccy and betting money he’d demanded at the end of the week - precious shillings they could ill afford but without which she knew her da would certainly beat the living daylights out of them all at the slightest provocation - and then he’d wanted more yesterday for one of his ‘certs’ on the horses. She knew how that would turn out - more often than not he lost the lot but on the rare occasions the horse came in he’d drunk his winnings the same night, treating all and sundry in the pubs as though he was Lord Muck.

  So she’d stood up to him and received a swipe round the lug for her refusal to hand over the rent money which he’d taken anyway. She paused, her hand unconsciously touching her bruised cheek. She hated him. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t hated him, but she hadn’t realised her mam felt the same way until an incident which had occurred just after she’d started the singing some five years ago.

  The Council had been digging out the foundations for the new Town Hall in Fawcett Street - right bonny it was now with its lovely clock-tower - and her da hadn’t been home for a couple of nights. One of their neighbours had been funning with her mam and had joked that her husband might have fallen in the hole, and her mam had smiled and that, but . . . Josie started walking again, her breath mingling with the starry flakes of snow. She’d seen the look in her mam’s eyes and she’d known. She had known her mam wished her da dead.

  She reached the little shop where she intended to buy the flour and, pushing open the door, stepped inside the dim, dusty interior. She always bought her flour here for two reasons. One, it was cheaper than most places and although there was a lot of chaff in it and what her mam called boxings, it made as much bread as the nice white flour and moreover it was filling. Secondly, the man who owned the shop - a big jolly Scot called Mr McKenzie - frequented one of the pubs in which she sang, and he always gave her a little extra flour for her money. His brother had a smallholding on the outskirts of Bishopwearmouth and Mr McKenzie often had some pig’s fat at the right price for his favourite customers, of whom she was one.

  ‘Hello, lass.’ Mr McKenzie was busy weighing out bags of flour from an enormous hessian sack in the far corner of the shop, and he continued with his task as he said, ‘Is it flour you’re wanting?’

  ‘Aye, yes please.’

  She waited quietly until he had finished what he was doing and then smiled as he straightened his massive frame and walked over to her. ‘Don’t tell me - a stone, is it? Or maybe two the day?’ It was their little joke. Josie never varied in her order. And then his face lost its smile when he said, ‘You walked into another door, lass?’

  Josie was looking straight into Mr McKenzie’s eyes and she made no reply to the remark. The door excuse was her stock explanation when her father’s fists left visible marks. It didn’t happen so often now, not since she had started singing and her da had realised she needed to look presentable to woo the punters, but occasionally his temper got the better of him, especially if she defied him. And she was doing that more and more lately; she just couldn’t help herself somehow.

  ‘I’d like to take that door into a back alley and give it a hammering it wouldn’t forget in a hurry.’ Mr McKenzie knew Bart Burns and it was a constant source of amazement to the big Scot that Josie came from such a family. ‘Rose on a dungheap’ was how he described it to his wife. He looked at the slender young girl in front of him, her poor clothes and ugly black boots unable to hide her natural grace and poise, and great velvet-brown eyes under dark curving brows stared back at him. Her skin was like rose-tinted cream, her features delicate, and he knew - although her felt hat was sitting low on her forehead - that beneath it there was an abundance of thick, wavy, golden-brown hair.

  By, if she was his daughter he’d dress her like a little princess. There was his Beatty and him, been married twenty odd years now and still no sign of a bairn, and yet worthless so-an’-sos like Bart and his missus churned them out as easy as blinking. There was no justice in the world. But likely this little lass knew far more than him on that subject.

  When Josie staggered out of the shop a few minutes later the quarter stone was approaching half, and Mr McKenzie had refused to take any money for the large portion of pig fat.

  She had to stop every few yards now, the weight of the bag pulling her arms out of their sockets, but once she had purchased the lamp oil and she knew she could go home it didn’t seem so bad.

  The lamplighter had long since finished his round of igniting the gas lamps with his long poke in the main thoroughfares, but the side streets and back lanes and alleys were as black as pitch where there were no shops to provide a little light. The darkness didn’t bother Josie unduly, but she knew better than to risk venturing into certain alleys and short cuts; the painted dock dollies regularly used them for their furtive business.

  Once in High Street East, she walked as quickly as the heavy bag allowed. She passed one of the entrances to the market, the others being in Coronation Street and James Williams Street, but most of the stalls had packed up, it being after ten by now. Her da wouldn’t like it that she hadn’t gone to work tonight, he’d have her performing every night if he had his way, but the last couple of years she had determined that every Monday she’d clean their two rooms from top to bottom and then go shopping once it was late and bargains could be had. She could make a penny stretch to thruppence that way.

  By the time Josie reached Long Bank she was puffing fit to burst and - despite the raw night - sweating profusely. Long Bank joined High Street and Low Street, and the pungent smell of fish was always heavy in the air from the kipper-curing house, but Josie didn’t mind this. There were worse smells than fish.

  A flat cart trundled by her,
its presence made visible by a swinging lamp near the driver behind the plodding horse, and when a voice said, ‘What now, Josie lass. How y’doin’?’ she recognised it as Archibald Clark’s, the lad who delivered the wet fish to various shops and some of the big houses in the better part of town.

  ‘I’m all right, Archie, but it’s a cold one.’

  ‘Aye, you’re right there, lass.’

  Josie stood for a moment watching the glow of the swinging lantern grow fainter before she opened the door of the house and lugged the bag inside. The hall was in total darkness but she knew the narrow steep stairs were straight in front of her. These led to the two rooms at the top of the house which were occupied by Maud and Enoch Tollett, an elderly couple whose eleven children had all long since flown the cramped nest.

  Josie liked the two tough old northerners. She could remember times before she had started her singing when, once the pair upstairs were sure her father was out, they had appeared with a pot of broth and a loaf of bread, or a plate of chitterlings and pig’s pudding for her mam. They had all known they had to eat the food quick and get the pots back to Maud before Bart returned. Enoch had still been working at the Sunderland Brewery on Wylam Wharf then, but since he had seized up with arthritis his children had managed to pay the old couple’s rent of one and ninepence a week between their eleven families, and provide the basic essentials to keep their parents alive. Essentials, in their book, however, didn’t run to baccy for Enoch or half a bottle of gin for their mam, and no one but Josie and the old couple knew how often she secreted little packages up the narrow stairs.

  By memory rather than sight, Josie now moved along the passageway and fumbled for the door handle on her left. Her fingers having found their objective she opened the door quickly, heaving the bag half across the threshold as the door swung open, and then she stood for a moment surveying the room immediately in front of her. As always, a faint glow of pleasure flushed her checks as she contemplated the changes she’d been able to make. Hard-won changes they were, too, because she had had to fight her father every inch of the way to keep back some of the money she earned.