One Snowy Night Read online

  The landlady hitched up her ample bosom with her forearms before saying, ‘The privy in the backyard is kept as clean as a new pin, winter and summer, and I expect my ladies to leave it as they find it, all right? There’s a door at the end of the hall straight outside – you don’t need to come into my kitchen. I have the downstairs to myself but the other two rooms up here are taken by single ladies. You’ll meet them in due course if you decide to take the room?’

  This last was said with raised eyebrows to Ruby and was clearly in the form of a question. Ruby glanced about her again. The walls were distempered in a faded brown colour and the thin curtains at the window were a shade or two darker. Altogether it was the most depressing and cheerless room she had ever encountered. But she was bone-tired and at the end of herself after what had been the worst day of her life. Taking in a deep breath, she forced a tight smile as she said to Ellie, ‘Shall we?’ knowing what the answer would be even before Ellie nodded.

  ‘Right you are.’ Mrs Duffy didn’t give them a chance to change their minds. ‘I’ll go and get the sheets and blankets for the bed while you sort out the rent, a week in advance, please, like I said. And all your laundry is down to you but you can use the line in the yard to dry anything if you’ve a mind.’ So saying she bustled out of the room leaving the two girls staring at each other.

  The room was lit by a single gas jet on one wall and its flickering light, far from making the interior cosier, actually made the stark surroundings duller. Ruby walked across to the window and moved the curtains to look out, but the glass was a frosted mass of snowflakes and she could see nothing.

  Mrs Duffy was back within a minute or two with their bedding, which proved to be barely adequate but at least was clean, and after Ruby had paid her the rent and the landlady had disappeared downstairs, Ellie said timidly, ‘Shall I light the fire? Things will seem better when it’s warmer.’

  Nothing would ever seem better for the rest of her life. The thought brought with it the hot sting of tears at the backs of her eyes but before they could fall she blinked furiously. Now was not the time to give way. They had things to do, to sort out, and she had to get on with it. She had Ellie – she wasn’t completely alone, even though she was gripped by such a feeling of utter and absolute loneliness that she would like to go to sleep and never wake up. The thought of having to go on, to find her way through a future that seemed barren and empty and devoid of everything she had ever wanted, had drained her to the core. And this wasn’t her fault; she hadn’t done anything wrong. She had loved Adam; she’d even loved Olive, come to that.

  For a moment the flood of self-pity swamped her, making her want to howl and scream like a hurt child and shout against the unfairness and the arid months and years ahead.

  ‘Ruby?’ Ellie’s voice brought her out of the maelstrom of pain and despair, and turning she found her friend staring at her with anxious eyes. She breathed out slowly, fighting for composure. She had always been the strong one in their relationship, the comforter and fixer, the one who sorted things out, and Ellie was waiting for her to take control now, to tell her what to do.

  ‘Don’t light the fire yet,’ she said in a voice that surprised her with its calmness. ‘We’ll go out and get something to eat first. There was a pie shop on the corner of the street, we’ll go there. We’ll see to the fire and make the bed up when we come back, and come Monday we’ll get some groceries and more coal and perhaps a thick eiderdown for the bed and a rug for the floor, before we look for work. We’ll be all right, Ellie. Don’t worry.’

  Ellie nodded in relief. This was the Ruby she knew. Her friend never let anything get her down for long; Ruby would bounce back. She was tough, always had been. She would be fine.

  Ruby knew exactly what Ellie was thinking and it added to the weight on her shoulders. Turning away, she reached for her handbag. ‘Come on,’ she said dully. ‘We’d better get what we need before the shops shut. We’ll buy enough for tomorrow too, it being a Sunday. I can’t see Mrs Duffy helping us out with any food.’ Or anything else for that matter. But that was the way it was going to be from now on, and the sooner she got used to it the better. She had made the decision to leave Mrs Walton’s and strike out on her own; no one had forced her to come to Newcastle.

  It was a fortnight later. Between them, Ruby and Ellie had transformed the once dark and uninviting room into a bright and cheerful little dwelling place. With Mrs Duffy’s permission, they had painted the walls and ceiling a pale sunshine yellow, which had immediately made it a different environment. It had taken three coats of paint and a lot of elbow grease to cover the horrible brown colour, but the finished result had been worth the effort.

  Ruby had noticed a small Singer sewing machine for sale in the pawnshop next to the hardware store where they’d purchased the paint, and had bought it with a view to making new curtains and a matching cover for the thick eiderdown they’d seen in a second-hand shop. She’d assured Ellie it was a good bargain at a third of the price of a new machine, and an investment for the future because she could make their clothes on it too. But that wasn’t the whole reason she’d wanted it. Even at school she’d excelled at needlework and since working for Mrs Walton her skill and expertise had grown, but it was the satisfaction she felt at turning a piece of material into something beautiful that was the important thing. It was an essential part of her, a true gift Mrs Walton had called it, and even though her world had fractured and she was all at sea, she didn’t want to lose that part of herself. She needed it. It was all she had left.

  Since moving in they had kept the little fire going night and day; initially to air everything and dry the paint, but then because it made the room feel more like home. Now the musty smell of damp was a thing of the past, and with the flowered curtains and eiderdown and a small clippy mat covering the limited expanse of visible floorboards, the place was unrecognizable.

  Admittedly there was barely room for one person to live in the space, let alone two, but gradually they had begun to master the art of simmering a stew or broth over the open fire, which they would supplement with baked potatoes cooked in the ashes under the burning coals or a loaf of bread bought from the bakery in the next street. Breakfast was usually toast, and although they had lost the odd slice of bread when it had slipped off the toasting fork into the fire, their proficiency was growing. Ruby had even cooked them porridge one morning, and although it had had a slightly burnt flavour where the bottom of the pan had caught, it had filled a hole in their tummies.

  Finding work didn’t seem so straightforward. For the first week they had spent every waking hour sorting out their new home, but then, with their money fast evaporating, they had concentrated on looking for jobs. Initially they had thought to find employment in a similar vein to what they knew – Ellie making enquiries at various bakeries, and Ruby at a couple of dressmakers and then a clothing factory. She had been appalled at the second-rate garments the latter had produced, the shoddy workmanship and cramped dark surroundings housing lines of weary-looking women depressing enough, without the leery foreman who had shown her round the premises and who had seemed to imagine he was God’s gift to womankind. She could have coped with everything but being forced to produce substandard clothes that looked as though they would barely hold together, and after her visit to the factory she and Ellie had recognized they had to rethink their options.

  It had been that night that one of the other two lodgers they had talked to a couple of times knocked on their door. Bridget Finnigan was an Irish lass who had come over the water a few years before. She had told them she was employed at the Newcastle Workhouse, which was situated a little over a mile from Bath Lane Terrace as the crow flies, to the west of the city at the top of Westgate Hill. This particular workhouse was an extensive complex that had come into being over eighty years before, when the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Board of Guardians had decided to replace the then existing four smaller workhouses in different parts of the town for one purpose-built facili
ty. Included were an administration block, dining hall, laundry, bakehouse, workshops, school, sick wards, lying-in ward, imbeciles’ ward and inmates’ quarters – the males on the western side of the building and the females to the east. An infirmary had been added thirty years later, but at the beginning of the new century any children had been removed and taken to live in the Union’s new cottage homes that had been built on a seventy-acre rural site at Ponteland. The children’s quarters had then become wards for the workhouse’s aged and infirm population, and their dining room converted into a chapel.

  Bridget had told them there were a couple of vacancies in the workhouse laundry, and had offered to put in a good word for the pair of them with the head laundress if they were interested? They would then have to be interviewed by the matron.

  Ruby and Ellie had stared at each other. Their small hoard of cash was nearly gone and they couldn’t afford to be choosy, but the thought of the workhouse was daunting. Neither of them had imagined they would willingly enter one of those fearful places. Having said that, Bridget seemed to be quite happy working there on the whole, and the fact that any employment was becoming harder to find since the brief euphoria after the Great War was a consideration. Ruby had written to Mrs Walton asking for a reference a couple of days after arriving in Newcastle and received a glowing commendation back by return of post, but Ellie was still waiting for something from her previous employer whom she imagined had turned awkward because she had walked out and left him in the lurch. This was an added problem.

  With this in mind, Bridget had said persuasively, ‘If you went after this, Ruby, you could vouch for Ellie if you applied together. I’m sure that’d do the trick for her. Your reference was so good, wasn’t it, and it won’t matter it’s not the same kind of work. They go a lot on character an’ all that at the workhouse – it was my old priest in Ireland talking to Father McGuigan who got me the job when I first came here. An’ the money’s not bad, eight bob a week an’ lunch included, and it’s good grub too. You’d eat in the officers’ mess like me as we come in from outside. The officers and outsiders have their own kitchen an’ dining room so it’s separate from the workhouse kitchen an’ dining hall. Even the smell of them poor devils’ food makes you want to gag, take it from me, an’ there was cockroaches in their porridge the other morning ’cause it’d been left to soak overnight in the kitchen.’

  Ruby’s face expressed her horror, and realizing she wasn’t selling the job very well, Bridget added hastily, ‘But like I said, the mess is lovely and clean, spotless, and the food’s like you’d get in a hotel or something. We had roast lamb yesterday and baked haddock today an’ it was beautiful, an’ the cook’s apple dumplings and custard can’t be bettered.’ Bridget was as round as she was tall and set great store by her stomach. ‘Anyway, shall I say something to the head laundress and see if they’ve advertised yet? It’s always better to get in first, isn’t it.’

  The upshot of Bridget’s word on their behalf was that on a bitterly cold morning in mid-March with the snow thick on the ground and more forecast, Ruby and Ellie caught the tram into the Arthur’s Hill ward of the town. On leaving the tram they stood for more than a minute staring at the imposing three-storey building with a central archway at the entrance to the grounds of the workhouse. They knew from Bridget that this building contained waiting rooms and receiving wards on the ground floor, with a three-roomed residence above and then storerooms on the top floor. Looking at the forbidding Victorian frontage where people would enter into the soulless complex that made up the workhouse, Ruby shivered. Everything inside was run with a view to discouraging the poor from wanting to live at the expense of the community and life was deliberately hard and uncomfortable. Her da had always maintained that the workhouse made it seem as if ill health and destitution were crimes that deserved punishment, and that charity was an offence to God and man.

  Ellie’s voice was small when she said, ‘I don’t think I can go in there, lass.’

  Ruby was talking as much to herself as to Ellie when she said briskly, ‘Of course you can. Whatever it’s like we shall be together and that’s the main thing, and frankly, there doesn’t seem to be much else going, Ellie, and we need to earn some money. If we get the jobs, having a good lunch will be a bonus. We can stuff ourselves and then just have some toast or bread and jam at night, which will help things.’ She was finding buying coal for the fire, small as it was, expensive, and if they bought pies or bread or cakes the money just seemed to melt away. Somewhere with an oven would have made all the difference but of course that was impossible.

  Ellie nodded slowly. Living with Ruby was wonderful, that’s what she had to remember, and anything was better than being in Sunderland with her mam an’ da. But the workhouse . . .

  They were interviewed one at a time by Matron Henderson, an iron-faced woman whose husband was the master of the workhouse. Ruby was shown into the matron’s office by a thin wisp of a girl clad in the workhouse inmates’ uniform. Bridget had told them that only the officers wore black dresses and white aprons with caps and cuffs, and that paid hands from outside wore blue dresses and white aprons with caps. The inmates were dressed in grey smocks and mob caps of inferior-quality cloth, but it was their sad faces, Bridget said, that distinguished them the most.

  The matron’s office was as warm as toast compared to the chilly corridor outside, a good coal fire burning brightly in the large fireplace and thick gold curtains at the window. Matron Henderson was sitting behind a highly polished mahogany desk and although there was a chair in front of it she didn’t suggest Ruby sat down. Instead she stared at her in silence for a few moments, eyeing her up and down, before saying, ‘Your previous employer speaks very highly of you,’ in a tone that stated she found it surprising.

  Ruby didn’t know what she was expected to say and so she said nothing, but her shoulders straightened and her chin lifted slightly. Bridget had described the matron as a real tartar and having met her, Ruby could understand why, but she wasn’t about to let herself be bullied by the woman, job or no job.

  The matron continued to examine her, her eyes narrowed behind her black-framed spectacles. ‘If you were as good at your work as Mrs –’ she consulted the letter on her desk – ‘Mrs Walton states, what made you leave Sunderland and come to Newcastle, Miss Morgan?’

  Ruby had been expecting the question and she had already discussed her answer with Ellie. She would tell the truth, or the bare bones of it anyway. Quietly, she said, ‘I was engaged to be married but things didn’t work out and I wanted a new start somewhere. My friend offered to accompany me, and now we are settled in our lodgings we need a job.’

  ‘A broken engagement. Does that mean the young man in question is liable to turn up and persuade you to go back to Sunderland?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  Even Matron Henderson couldn’t doubt that Ruby was telling the truth. She stared at her for a moment more before saying curtly, ‘Absolutely not, Matron.’

  ‘Absolutely not, Matron.’

  ‘Hmm. And unlike you, your friend has no reference to give me, I understand.’

  ‘We left quite suddenly and there wasn’t time to obtain one. She has written to ask but unfortunately has heard nothing back.’ The matron’s eyes narrowed further and Ruby added hastily, ‘Matron.’

  ‘Unsatisfactory, but if you are prepared to vouch for her perhaps I can stretch a point.’ Matron Henderson settled back in her chair. It was clear that the girl standing in front of her was a step up from a mere laundry worker who did the washing and ironing, many of whom were workhouse inmates with limited intelligence. Just that morning she had been informed the laundry checker had sent word that owing to family problems she had been forced to give her notice with immediate effect, which was most inconsiderate in the matron’s opinion, considering that the post was at junior officer level and carried a high degree of responsibility. She made allowance for the common workers to be flibbertigibbets, but not her officers.
Still, that was beside the point. The fact was, the post had become vacant.

  ‘Are you proficient in maths?’ she asked suddenly.

  Ruby blinked. What did maths have to do with working in the laundry? ‘I suppose so, yes, Matron. At – at my previous job I did the bookkeeping for Mrs Walton.’ The old lady had started her doing this when she had been with her for a while and it was only since Mrs Walton had revealed the plans she’d had for Ruby’s future that Ruby had realized why.

  Most fortuitous. Again the matron murmured, ‘Hmm.’ She had always prided herself on recognizing potential when she saw it. Coming to a decision, she said briskly, ‘There is another post that has become vacant, that of laundry checker, Miss Morgan. It is a junior officer’s post and each week the checker balances the ledgers, among other duties. You would earn eleven shillings a week and have three assistants to supervise, and you would report directly to the head laundress who reports to me. Obviously this post carries more responsibility than a laundry worker and your duties would reflect this. You would be asked to stand in for other staff on occasion, and once a month you would be expected to do the afternoon visiting duty in the workhouse hall. For the main part of any day it would be your job to check the dirty linen into the laundry and then account for its departure, but as I’ve said, other duties would be expected of you as an officer when need dictates. You would start work at eight in the morning and finish at six o’clock, Monday to Saturday. After three months you would be subject to a review and, depending on your performance, an increase in salary.’

  Ruby stared at the matron, completely taken aback.

  ‘Well?’ Matron Henderson was watching her closely. ‘What do you say? Do you think you are up to the job?’

  Ruby pulled herself together. ‘Yes, I do, Matron, and if you are offering it to me I would like to accept.’

  The grim lips twitched just the slightest. ‘I am indeed offering it to you, Miss Morgan.’