Dancing in the Moonlight Page 3

‘Now look here, you little runt—’

  ‘Please.’ Lucy’s voice was quiet, but of a quality that caused the brothers to become silent. ‘It – it’s my mam’s funeral.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Jacob’s hand reached out, only to drop away before it made contact with her shoulder. ‘Lucy, I’m sorry.’

  She said nothing, continuing to break up the rice cake and put small chunks into Flora and Bess’s mouths, with Ruby and John stolidly working their way through a plate of food they had between them at the side of her.

  Tom stood looking at the little tableau, his jaw working. As Jacob’s gaze met his again, he muttered, ‘I’ll see you at home’ and there was a threat in the words. Jacob did not answer, but stared at him, unblinking, and it was Tom who turned away with a growled curse.

  ‘You’ve made him angry.’

  Jacob had been staring after his brother, but now his eyes focused on Lucy’s worried face. He smiled ruefully at her. ‘It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. We’ve never got on, as you know.’

  She nodded. Jacob’s other brothers – Frank, who was seventeen, and Ralph, who was fifteen – always kept on the right side of Tom, but Jacob didn’t seem scared of him or intimidated. ‘Be careful,’ she said softly.

  ‘Of Tom?’ Jacob grinned. ‘He’s mostly wind and water.’

  No, he wasn’t. She didn’t know how she’d come by the knowledge that Tom Crawford could be dangerous, but she was sure of it. As her mam would have put it, she felt it in her water. And maybe it was her mam who’d led her down that road, thinking about it. Her mam had never liked Tom; not that she’d said, but her face had changed when his name was mentioned. She’d always been stiff with him, different from how she’d behaved with Jacob and the others. Her voice scarcely above a whisper, Lucy said again, ‘Be careful, Jacob. I mean it. I don’t want him to hurt you and he would, you know.’

  Oh aye, he knew all right. He’d had many a good hiding from Tom. But although he didn’t want Lucy to worry about him, not with everything she had on her plate now her mam was gone, her concern gave him a warm feeling inside.

  From the time he and Lucy had been two little bairns making mud pies in the back lane together, she’d been his world. They had begun school on the same day, faced the playground bullies side by side, and helped each other with their homework. Or rather Lucy had helped him, Jacob admitted silently. But he hadn’t understood that the feeling he had for her was love, not until the last year or so. But with the changes in his body that puberty was bringing had come the knowledge that he wanted her for his lass, and no one else would do. He didn’t want to mess around with this girl or that, like lots of lads did, he just wanted Lucy. For keeps. As soon as she was old enough he’d ask her da if they could begin courting – that’s if she’d have him. But she would. She was his Lucy.

  Becoming aware she was still staring at him, he bent his head and said quietly, ‘Don’t let on I’ve said, but me mam’s got some bits for the bairns for Christmas that she’s going to slip round nearer the time. She wanted it to be a surprise, but I thought it’d ease your mind, knowing that’s taken care of, what with your da and the lads being on short time an’ all.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Her voice was soft, her eyes were soft, and for a moment their gaze held, conveying what they were as yet unable to express in words. But for the present it was enough.

  Chapter Three

  The relentless snow and blizzards which the beleaguered North had endured for the first three months of the year had given way to an April of driving rain and icy winds. Lucy didn’t know which was worse. The rain probably. She glanced at the kitchen window, where the force of the rain rattled the glass now and again. It made the back lanes seas of thick glutinous mud, which was tramped into the house no matter how often she told her father and brothers and Ruby to leave their mucky boots in the scullery. Wet clothes were draped all round the kitchen, and Flora and Bess hadn’t been outside for weeks and were snotty-nosed and fractious. Worse, the menfolk’s shifts had become increasingly few and far between. This not only meant she was at her wits’ end trying to juggle putting food on the table while still paying the rent, but it was a continual battle to keep the twins occupied and out from under her da’s feet. His temper was short these days.

  But today was a Saturday. To Ruby and John’s delight, she’d allowed them to make a den with the clothes horse on the girls’ double bed, with strict orders to her sister to keep the twins upstairs for a few hours. Her da was in a worse mood than usual, Ernie and Donald having picked up half a day at the shipyard while he’d been refused a shift.

  She looked towards him now as she continued to knead dough for the bread to supplement the stew they were having for the evening meal, a stew consisting of scrag ends and the spotted vegetables she’d bought cheap the night before as the shops were closing.

  Walter was aware of his daughter’s gaze, but he didn’t look up from his task of mending John’s boots. It was the third time he’d done this since Christmas and in truth there was little of the original boots remaining, so patched were they. He was in no doubt they wouldn’t last another month, but without boots John couldn’t go to school. He kept his eyes fixed on the iron last between his knees as he hammered a quarter-inch nail into the boot he was working on, and with each blow of the hammer he was venting his fury at the foreman who’d turned him down.

  Then, all at once, the rage he’d been stoking up to keep the despair at bay drained away and his hands became idle. It wasn’t the foreman’s fault, he knew that. Sid Chapman wasn’t a bad bloke and he had his orders from on high to follow. If there wasn’t the work, there wasn’t the work. It was the same everywhere. The miners had come out with the slogan ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’ in answer to the call for less pay for longer hours, but it wouldn’t get them anywhere. He’d worked at Thompson’s since he was a lad and had thought he’d walked into hell his first morning, with the noise of the drillers, riveters and caulkers, and barely a day went by that some poor so-an’-so wasn’t maimed or killed, but he knew where he was at the yard and he was damn good at his job. All this sitting about was driving him round the bend.

  He ground his teeth before starting work on the boot again. At forty years old Walter was a thin, prematurely aged man who carried the evidence of his trade on his scarred hands – one of which had the tip of a finger missing – and the arthritis that racked his body, especially in the winter months. As a boy of twelve he’d had to get used to the fact he always seemed to be cold and wet, even on the hottest day, when working on the huge steel plates in the yard, but the discomforts he’d brushed off as a lad weren’t so easy to dismiss as he’d grown older. But all his mates were the same, he told himself, stretching his aching back for a moment. Deaf as posts, welder’s lung, vibration white finger, poor eyesight, crippling arthritis – they’d do well to make up one good body between the lot of them.

  He smiled grimly. His Agnes had never wanted the shipyard for her boys when they were bairns, especially Thompson’s, which was known as a ‘blood yard’ because of the number of accidents, along with Doxford’s over the river. As the lads had grown she’d accepted the inevitability of it, though, bless her soul. She’d been a good wife and mother, none better.

  Thoughts of his late wife brought Walter’s gaze to Lucy. She was in the process of placing the bread tins, covered with clean muslin, on the hearth for the bread to rise. As always since Agnes’s passing, Lucy’s likeness to her mother was bittersweet. It reminded him of what he’d lost, but he took comfort in the fact that Agnes lived on in their daughter. He was glad at least one of their bairns had turned out like Agnes and was a beauty; not even their nearest and dearest could call the rest of them bonny. Mind, what good it would do her was questionable.

  He heard the back door open and the sound of Ernie and Donald chaffing each other about taking their boots off. The next moment his two eldest sons came through from the scullery, wet through, but smi
ling. For a second he wanted to growl at them, ‘What have you got to laugh about?’, but he bit back the words. Nevertheless, he couldn’t bring himself to greet them. When Ernie said, ‘All right, Da?’ he had to swallow deeply before he could say, ‘Aye, as you see.’

  Lucy signalled her two brothers by shaking her head, and quietly now they sat down at the kitchen table after taking off their sodden caps and coats and hanging them over the backs of their chairs. It was after Lucy had made a pot of tea and poured a cup for her father and brothers that Ernie spoke again. ‘Saw Tom Crawford as we were coming in, Da. He said he might have a couple of days’ work he could put our way, the three of us like.’

  Walter raised his head slowly. ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘Loading and unloading at the docks, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And how long has Tom Crawford been a gaffer at the docks?’ said Walter flatly. ‘It’s only the gaffers that hire and fire.’

  Ernie glanced quickly at his brother and then again at his father. ‘He’s not a gaffer, not exactly. This work’d be . . .’ – Ernie cast another glance at Donald – ‘on the quiet.’

  ‘Oh aye, I know what the work’d be, if Tom’s at the back of it.’ Walter’s voice was rising. ‘I’m not daft. An’ I’ve told you before, we’re not going down that road. He’s sailing close to the wind, is Tom, and likely he’ll capsize before long and take everyone else in the boat down with him. And don’t tell me he’s trying to do us a favour, like he did when he offered us that butter and cheese and what-have-you last week, cos it won’t wash. He’s trying to suck you into his thieving, lad, and he knows if you do it once he’s got you.’

  Lucy’s mouth had fallen open and she shut it with a little snap. Butter and cheese? Tom had offered them some butter and cheese and her da hadn’t taken it? She thought of the scrapings of this and that she attempted to turn into meals these days. The stew simmering on the hob didn’t have enough mutton in it to feed a sparrow, and the two handfuls of barley, and potatoes and turnips, couldn’t hide the fact that it was watery and thin. The bread she was making to mop up the gravy would help fill their bellies of course, but butter and cheese . . .

  ‘It’s not like that, Da.’

  ‘The hell it isn’t!’ Walter answered Ernie with a bawl and, when both boys stared at him in surprise, he took a deep breath. Then, his voice quieter but holding more authority than his bawl had done, he said, ‘What the Crawfords do is up to them, but we’re not soiling our hands by thieving – an’ that’s my last word on the matter. I know times are hard, but we’ll get by if we pull together, all right? I’ve lived longer than the pair of you and sooner or later Tom Crawford will get his fingers burnt, you mark my words.’

  Ernie shrugged. It was clear he wasn’t in agreement, but his father’s word was law and he didn’t argue.

  Lucy didn’t either, but as she fetched out the bread and dripping which was their midday meal, before going to the foot of the stairs to call Ruby and John and the twins, she was thinking: Cheese and butter, cheese and butter; and her mouth was watering. Principles were all very well, but you couldn’t eat them.

  The next weeks were rife with talk of strikes, and when the coal owners’ final offer of a return to the 1921 minimum wage structure – which would be equivalent to an average wage cut of about 13 per cent – was rejected by the miners, everyone knew the national coal stoppage had begun. Within five days, on May 4th, the first General Strike in British history was under way.

  A formal state of emergency was declared, but as undergraduates, stockbrokers, barristers and other white-collar professionals up and down the country signed up to do the jobs of the workers on strike, a bitter class war split Britain.

  By the time the TUC called off the General Strike, leaving the embattled miners to fight on alone, Lucy was sick of hearing about the whys and wherefores of the dispute. It might have only lasted nine days, but her father had talked of nothing else. He had been a force on the picket line and vitriolic in his condemnation of the owners and management. That he’d been as vocal outside the house as within its confines became apparent very quickly. Those shipyard workers who had held their tongues about their employers got any available shifts. Those who hadn’t, didn’t. The existence of a blacklist was strenuously denied, but then, as her father bitterly pointed out to anyone who’d listen, it would be, wouldn’t it?

  Lucy had been worried Ernie and Donald would be tarred with the same brush as their father, and this might well have been the case, but for the fact that Ernie’s best friend was the foreman’s son. Consequently Sid Chapman took the lads on for enough shifts for the family to survive, just. Lucy became adept at cooking the wild rabbits and wood pigeons her brothers trapped on the days when they walked umpteen miles into the surrounding countryside looking for anything the family could eat, and she made good use of the mushrooms, wild mint and thyme the summer produced. Her brothers bought flour direct from the mill, a sack of seconds, and took turns carrying it home on their backs, and again the lads walked miles to a farm that sold potatoes at a good price and often threw in any spotted or yellowing vegetables for free.

  After a few fruitless weeks of sullen rage, Walter decided to try his hand at painting and decorating. He made himself known to the big houses and grand residences as far afield as Whitburn to the north of Monkwearmouth and Ryhope and Seaham to the south. His perseverance paid off in July when he got himself work for the landlady of a bed-and-breakfast establishment at Seaham. It meant a six-mile walk in the morning pushing the old handcart he’d mangled together, which held his tins of paint and brushes and other necessities, and the same come evening, and the pay was poor compared to what he’d earned as a skilled welder, but the change in her father when he began earning again transformed the atmosphere in the house and made things easier for Lucy.

  She was worried how he would fare once the harsh winter months began, but put it to the back of her mind. For now it was summer and it was a hot one. The holes in John’s and Ruby’s boots didn’t matter so much – once home from school, they went barefoot in the back lanes and streets like so many other children – and Flora and Bess’s constant colds and coughs were a thing of the past. As a family they went searching for driftwood and pieces of washed-up coal and coke for the range on the beaches and round by the harbour mouth, Ernie and Donald carrying the twins on their shoulders there and back and making the exercise into a game. Lucy often delayed their departure home at the end of the day until the fishwives were selling the remainders in their baskets at next to nothing, wanting rid of the dregs after a long hot day. She could pick up a penn’orth of broken kippers or a couple of dozen herring in this way and eke out the fish for two or three dinners if she was careful. Jacob often accompanied them on these trips, helping Lucy with the little ones and making them laugh with his infectious brand of humour. The days when Jacob wasn’t with them seemed harder and longer to Lucy, as though the sun had gone behind a cloud and everything was duller in consequence.

  She glanced at him now through the kitchen window as she stood gutting and cleaning the herring they’d returned with that day. Jacob was helping Ernie and Donald construct a kind of lean-to next to the brick-built privy at the end of the yard. It would afford the driftwood and other bits and pieces they’d collected, to burn on the range, some protection in the winter. The lads had staggered back from the beach with half of a massive tree trunk earlier. Once dried out, it could be chopped up and used for weeks.

  Lucy sighed happily. The kitchen smelt of the sea, the bairns were tired out after a day in the sunshine and were content to sit in a little row in the yard watching the lads’ activities, and her father was finishing the job at the landlady’s house in Seaham today, which had gone so well he already had another lined up a few doors down from her, which was also a bed-and-breakfast.

  She began to dust the fish with flour and rolled them carefully, before putting them in the oven dish where they lay, rank on rank, black and silver. After adding some boi
ling water and vinegar, she scattered a handful of the wild herbs the lads had collected a few days ago and popped the dish in the oven. They’d eat half tonight and the rest tomorrow, cold with baked potatoes cooked in the ashes of the fire. And all for a penny. The fishwife had wanted two, but Jacob had made her laugh as he’d chaffed and teased her and acted the goat, and in the end she’d emptied the contents of her basket into their bucket, pocketed the penny and told them to skedaddle.

  Lucy’s countenance changed as she looked through the window again as she began to clear the table. Tom Crawford had joined the others, a package tucked under his arm. His head was bent close to Ernie’s and Donald’s, his manner conspiratorial. She watched as Ernie shook his head, but whatever her brother had said, Tom wasn’t taking no for an answer. What happened next occurred so swiftly it caused her to give a little scream of shock. One moment Jacob had taken his brother’s arm and was saying something, and the next Tom had swung round and hit him, sending him sprawling backwards to land on his backside on the stone slabs.

  Lucy stood frozen for a few seconds, her fingers pressing against her mouth, and then as she saw Tom aim a vicious kick at Jacob, which was only prevented from reaching its target by Ernie and Donald hauling him back, she flew out of the house. ‘Leave him alone!’ All fear of Tom was forgotten, she was so angry. ‘He didn’t do anything to you.’ Turning to the children huddled together by the wall of the house, she said, ‘Get inside and stay put.’

  Jacob had scrambled to his feet as she’d been speaking, and now he launched himself at his brother. Donald sprang between them, holding Jacob off as Ernie hung onto Tom, although at Lucy’s appearance Tom had become still. His eyes on her face, he said softly, ‘Didn’t do anything to me? Here I am, trying to do you a good turn, and he calls me every name under the sun.’

  ‘I said you were thieving scum, because that’s what you are,’ Jacob panted, struggling to break free of Donald.