Reach for Tomorrow Read online

  ‘I know, I know.’ Now it was Davey who was doing the patting.

  ‘I’ve got a bite of somethin’ at home for you when you’re ready, lad. It’s in the oven, keepin’ hot. You tap on the wall when you’re ready an’ I’ll pop it round.’ Mrs Riley wiped her eyes with the hem of her apron and bustled out of the door with her head down, pulling her shawl more tightly about her as the cold hit.

  Poor Mrs Riley, she’d miss his mam. Davey stood for a moment in the kitchen and for the first time in his life he thought of it as empty. The lump in his throat became choking. He’d miss her too. She’d been a good mam, a loving mother, not like some round these parts who put on a show outside and became harridans and worse with their own menfolk. No, she’d been too giving if anything and his brothers and sisters had always taken full advantage of it. He felt something hot and wet drop onto the back of his hand and looked down at the teardrop in surprise. He hadn’t been aware he was crying. He squared his shoulders, raised his chin, and prepared to walk through to the front room as the tears became a flood that coursed down his young face.

  Chapter Four

  It was a full five weeks after the pit disaster and eight days after Davey’s mother had died before Rosie opened the door to Flora one cold February afternoon when Zachariah was out, and it was Flora who had to be helped up the stairs and into the sitting room as she burst into tears at the sight of her friend’s face.

  ‘I can’t believe all that’s happened, I just can’t believe it.’ Flora’s pretty face was white, her grey eyes enormous. ‘And me da didn’t even write and tell us, he didn’t say a word.’

  The two girls were sitting in the bigger of the two rooms which now housed the kitchen table and two straight-backed chairs and the kitchen dresser at one end, and her father’s old armchair and the five-foot wooden saddle with its flock cushions set in front of the fireplace at the other, with a space of four feet separating them. On the floor in front of the small grate was a large clippy mat, so heavy Rosie had difficulty in lifting it, and her mother’s deep blue front-room curtains were hanging at the windows. Sam’s small collection of dog-eared secondhand books were stacked neatly on a small cracket placed against the wall in one corner - Rosie couldn’t bear to part with one of the painstakingly acquired little hoard - and a large orange box and a big ugly chest held all their clothes. There was absolutely no room for anything but the two three-quarter size beds in the other room.

  Her mother’s stiff horsehair suite had gone, along with the brass bed, the sale of which had meant Rosie needn’t worry about the rent for a few weeks, and her father’s Sunday suit and those of the two lads had swelled the coffers a little more.

  Rosie shifted on the saddle where she was sitting with her arm round Flora’s shoulders as she reflected, and not for the first time, that she knew why Mr Thomas hadn’t written his daughter and wife about the accident. The tightlipped Welshman - who had a prestigious job at the Castle Street Brewery, which employed over two hundred staff and owned about a hundred and fifty licensed houses in the district - wanted his only daughter to associate with better than a mining family. The Thomases lived in a nice, terraced, double-bay-fronted house in the better part of Fulwell, which had its own garden front and back. Rosie had gone to tea there once and returned home with stories of the splendour and space, and the fact that Flora had a bedroom all to herself, but out of loyalty to her friend she hadn’t mentioned, even to Sam, that she had hated every minute of it. Mr Thomas was a tyrant and his little mouse of a wife had scuttled about nervously in an atmosphere that had seemed to Rosie to be choking. Since that day she had felt desperately sorry for Flora.

  So now she said, drawing Flora close for a moment more before moving to stand with her back to the glowing embers of the fire, ‘Likely he thought it best. You couldn’t have done anything being so far away and you would only have worried.’

  ‘I’d have come home.’

  Yes, she would have, and that was exactly why her father hadn’t told her, Rosie thought perceptively. He couldn’t control Flora as he could her mother and he knew it.

  ‘Well you’re home now.’ Rosie managed a bright smile, Flora was feeling worse than she was right at this minute. ‘And I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you.’

  ‘How . . . how have you settled in?’

  ‘All right.’ Rosie shrugged, her face betraying none of the worry she was feeling. The jobs at Bradman’s hadn’t materialized, mainly due to her mother saying all the wrong things when they had gone to talk to the manager the day after Mr Nebb had tipped Davey the wink the two lasses had off and skedaddled. She had done it on purpose, Rosie knew it, and she hadn’t pressed her mother to go with her on her subsequent searches for work. But it wasn’t just the way merely living ate into their reserves that kept Rosie awake at night. She had thought Davey’s manner - first when he’d told her the coast was clear at Bradman’s and then when he had helped to move them in the coal cart - was due to his mother dying so unexpectedly, but now she wasn’t so sure. They had been at Benton Street over a week and he hadn’t called round once, and at his mother’s funeral he had barely spoken to her except to announce his plans for the future.

  Her thoughts prompted her to say, ‘Have you heard about Davey’s mam?’ in as matter-of-fact a tone as she could manage.

  ‘Davey’s mam?’ Flora’s eyes sharpened on Rosie’s face. ‘No?’

  ‘She died, of a heart attack.’

  ‘Davey’s mam?’

  ‘The funeral was Thursday.’

  ‘No.’ Flora stared at her in open amazement, her full-lipped, wide mouth agape. ‘I can’t take all this in, I just can’t.’

  ‘And Davey’s had enough of the pit. He--’ Here Rosie had to pause in order for her voice not to wobble. ‘He told me at the funeral he’s thinking of leaving these parts now his mam’s gone, getting right away altogether.’

  ‘Well turn me over and call me Katie.’

  The saying was a favourite one of Flora’s and brought a smile to Rosie’s lips despite the direness of the circumstances. ‘Your da would go mad if he heard you say that.’ Mr Thomas was always lecturing his outspoken daughter to conduct herself like a lady.

  Flora shrugged unrepentantly. ‘Everyone knows Katie Flanders has been no better than she should be since she’s been knee high, now then. Aw, Rosie . . .’ Flora shook her head bewilderedly. ‘What’s happened? I can’t imagine Davey going off. I know you can never tell with lads but I’d have bet me last penny Davey was soft on you.’

  Rosie averted her head - Flora’s gaze was searching - before she said, ‘Well that’s what he said, Flora. And he was deadly serious.’

  ‘Can’t you talk to him?’

  Rosie looked at her friend, her very dear friend, and her voice was flat when she said, ‘No, I can’t talk to him, Flora, ’course I can’t, and you wouldn’t if it was you.’

  Flora nodded her acceptance of the statement, and as Rosie joined her again on the saddle the two girls were quiet, their bodies shoulder to shoulder as they sat staring into the tiny flames licking round the base of the fire. The bang of the front door followed by thudding footsteps and voices on the stairs brought Rosie to her feet. ‘They’re back.’ Her mother had taken Molly and Hannah to see their grandma in the East End. ‘You’ll stay for a bite, Flora?’

  ‘If you’re sure.’ Flora was feeling strange. When she had left Sunderland five weeks ago the world had been the same as it had always been. Granted, she had known she was going to take up the post of assisting Miss Wentworth in the office of W. Baxter and Sons, a small shipyard on the north side of the river, on her return from Wales, but that had held no surprise. Her father was a close friend of the Baxter family and the arrangement had been in place for months. But this with Rosie, her da and the lads dying and now Davey leaving, had turned everything upside down. Didn’t Rosie care that Davey was going? Flora asked herself silently. Because she did, she couldn’t bear to think she might not see him again. The p
ain that always accompanied thoughts of Davey - or more especially Davey and Rosie - caught at her throat causing her to swallow hard. She knew Rosie had always imagined it was Sam Flora liked and she hadn’t disabused her friend of the notion. In fact she had actively encouraged it, because a blind man could see where Davey’s fancy lay. And she liked Rosie - loved her - she was the sister she’d never had, which made things all the more confusing and horrible.

  ‘What? ’Course I’m sure, you daft thing. Oh Flora, you don’t know how I’ve longed to see you. I’ve missed you so much and everything has been so awful.’ Rosie caught Flora’s hands, her eyes moist, and Flora felt the coals of fire smoulder on her head. She couldn’t be so nasty as to wish that she had got it wrong about Davey, could she? Especially when she knew how much Rosie liked him? But it was exactly what she wished and the self-knowledge was mortifying.

  ‘Do you want one of Sam’s books to remember him by?’ Rosie said this last quietly as the door to the room swung open and Molly and Hannah entered at a gallop, and at Flora’s nod, Rosie continued, ‘We’ll sort it out before you go and I’ll walk with you to the tram. I want to tell you something.’

  ‘What?’ Flora didn’t like the look on Rosie’s face.

  ‘I can’t say now but it’s to do with Shane McLinnie.’

  ‘The dirty blighter!’

  It was so exactly Flora, and so very definitely everything her father had tried to drum out of her, that Rosie found herself laughing as she clutched at her friend’s arm and whispered, ‘Shush, Flora, not so loud.’

  ‘And you haven’t told your mam anything about it?’

  The two girls were making their way to the tram stop through dark streets where the frozen pavements were like glass.

  ‘I couldn’t, Flora, not the state she’s in, and Mrs McLinnie is her friend. I wouldn’t want to cause any trouble between the two of them. All round it seemed better not to worry her.’

  ‘Well, remind me to show you a little trick my cousin Ronald taught me for putting a lad in his place if he gets frisky,’ Flora said darkly. ‘I haven’t had the need to use it meself, but I can’t think of a nicer bloke to try it out on than Shane McLinnie.’ She made a sharp upward movement with her knee as she spoke and winked expressively. ‘He’ll get the message with that right enough.’

  ‘Oh, Flora.’ Again Rosie was laughing, but then her face straightened as she said, ‘He wants to start courting me.’

  ‘I bet he does, he’s not daft, but you can do a sight better than Shane. By, even scraggy Aggie would be coming down a peg or two to walk out with him.’

  Rosie grinned at the thought of the Sunderland fishwife who was notorious both for her loose living and vulgar tongue, but the laughter died as she said, ‘He frightens me, Flora. Oh, I’d never let him see it, I’ve more up top than to let him think he’s got the upper hand, but there’s something about him . . .’

  ‘And I dare bet his mam has told him where you live?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ And then Rosie flapped her hand almost irritably as she added, ‘Anyway, he’d be bound to find out sometime, wouldn’t he, and I’m blowed if he’s going to make me hide away as though I’ve done something wrong.’

  ‘Aye.’ Flora nodded. ‘Still, he can’t do nothing if you keep saying no, and he’ll get fed up in the end.’ It was said with little conviction and Rosie didn’t answer. She didn’t want to waste the little time she had left with Flora before her tram came talking about Shane McLinnie. She didn’t even want to think about him.

  In the murky light from the street lamps the two of them continued to slip and slide their way along, clutching hold of each other now and again as one of them nearly fell and all the time talking. They passed a group of children about a game of mount the cuddie. Their cry of ‘mountiekittie, mountiekittie, one, two, three,’ at the player stumbling about with another child on his back followed Rosie and Flora down the street, and all but two of the little ones had no coats despite the bitter night.

  It was as they passed the Dog and Rabbit on the corner that Rosie noticed the two little lads, who couldn’t have been more than five or six, sitting huddled in the doorway of the pub, their bare feet blue with cold and encased in old holey boots that were falling apart. They looked frozen to death.

  ‘You all right, hinnies?’ Rosie stopped to stare down at the children as Flora continued to walk by. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting yourselves away home?’ she asked quietly when they didn’t reply.

  ‘Me mam said we gotta wait for our da.’ One of the boys, who was all eyes and teeth, jerked his head backwards towards the pub and even from two feet away Rosie could see the lice in his hair. ‘He got his pay the night. We can’t go home without him.’

  ‘Poor little mites.’ As the two girls walked on Rosie shook her head pityingly. ‘What chance have they got, Flora?’

  ‘Same as most round these parts,’ came the stolid reply.

  Rosie stopped abruptly, turning round and looking back at the public house with the flaking, creaking sign showing a snarling dog and a timid-looking rabbit above the doorway. She couldn’t see the children now but she could picture them in her mind’s eye huddled on the top of the cold stone steps with their thin little arms tightly round each other, in an effort to combat the raw chill with a measure of human warmth and comfort. Was it any wonder that bairns still died like flies round here? she asked herself bitterly. Why, only yesterday Hannah had come home from school half hysterical and Molly had informed them that little Millie Ross, who was just six years old, had had a heart attack in the middle of morning prayers and died. She had been ill with measles before, Molly had told them importantly when Rosie and her mother had questioned the children, and she’d only come back to school that morning, but she’d been all trembly and white in the playground and snivelling all the time. And now another child was dead, due to a lethal combination of lack of medical care, lack of food and - in Millie’s case - lack of that most basic ingredient for a child’s wellbeing, love.

  ‘My bairns will have better than this.’ Rosie turned to face Flora who was looking at her questioningly. ‘By, they will, Flora.’

  ‘Then you’d better set your sights on one of the gentry, eh?’ Flora nudged her none too gently in the ribs and almost sent Rosie skidding off the pavement and into the road. ‘Lucky that they’re ten a penny hereabouts.’

  ‘Oh aye, queuing at the door every night,’ Rosie agreed, nodding solemnly at Flora and entering into the spirit of the exchange. ‘Miss Rosie Ferry?’ She struck a flamboyant pose in the manner she imagined a prospective suitor might, which brought a hoot of laughter from Flora. ‘May I beg your company at the ball tonight?’

  ‘Beg, eh? Ooo, la-de-da.’ Flora was giggling helplessly now.

  ‘What? You’re just on your way out to the theatre?’ Rosie’s voice managed to express deep regret and obsequious civility. ‘Then me poor heart is broken, Miss Ferry. May I enquire who the bounder is who’s stolen your affection? Lord--? Oh aye, I know him, and he’s not worthy to lick your boots, me dear.’

  She eyed Flora with her head tilted slightly to one side for all the world as though she was listening to another voice. ‘What? You want to present your friend, Miss Flora Thomas? Enchanted, I’m sure. I’ve heard of the lady’s charm and elegance, of course.’

  Rosie bowed low in front of Flora, who, in an effort to curtsey, found her feet flying up in the air as she slipped on the icy pavement with a loud squeal. She landed, legs outstretched and her arms supporting her, and let out a bellow of a laugh, and Rosie, her arms round her middle as she leant back against the wall, joined her, their breath white clouds in the freezing night air.

  Oh, she was glad Flora was home, she was. Things were always brighter when Flora was around. And they would get through this, her mam and the bairns and her. They had enough money to last them for the next week or two if she was careful, even though the suite and her mam’s big brass bed hadn’t fetched a quarter of what she knew they were worth.
And she would find work of some kind to keep a roof over their heads even if it killed her.

  And Davey? The thought of the tall good-looking miner with his eyes of rusty green and wide smile made her heart skip a beat. Yes, and she’d sort that too somehow. She couldn’t let him go.

  Rosie found that vehement resolution was put to the test one night some three weeks later when she answered a knock at the front door when Zachariah was out.

  ‘Davey.’ Her warm smile of greeting dimmed when his face remained straight. She hadn’t seen him at all in the last month and although she had tried to tell herself it was because he was busy, with his mam’s passing and all, she had missed him terribly. And then the rush of euphoria at seeing him died away completely as he refused her invitation to come upstairs to the sitting room, his manner verging on the abrupt.

  He had given up the rent on his mam’s house starting the next day, he informed her gruffly as they stood in Zachariah’s narrow hall, and he didn’t see any point in remaining around Sunderland after that. He wasn’t going back down the pit, that was finished, and with work of any kind being so hard to come by he thought he might try his hand at signing on with a ship. He wanted to travel a bit, see foreign parts, broaden his horizons.

  ‘I . . . I’ll miss you. There must be some work hereabouts you could find? Perhaps you could try at working on the land for a time like you and Sam always wanted?’ It was as far as she dared go and even then Rosie felt she was being forward, all the worries which had tormented her since that morning in the kitchen five weeks ago crowding in with renewed vigour.

  She had put him off in some way, she’d told herself a hundred times, as she had lain wide awake while the other three had slept. Or he had changed his mind about her and what he wanted, now he was free of all ties and could do what he liked. With things the way they were it wouldn’t be just her he was taking on, certainly not initially, and what young man of his age wanted to be lumbered with a ready-made family? Or there might have been someone else who had taken his fancy. He was a good-looking lad and now his mam was gone it would be an added inducement to some of the girls hereabouts to land such a catch. Or . . . And so it had gone on, night after night.