One Snowy Night Read online

  ‘Thank you. Thank you very much, Matron.’ Eleven shillings with the prospect of a rise after three months. For the first time since she had arrived in Newcastle, Ruby felt a spark of her old self ignite deep inside. Unbeknown to Ellie and once her friend was asleep, every night she had lain awake for hours, tears seeping from her eyes and tormented by thoughts of home and what might have been. She had written to her mother to let her know she and Ellie were safe and had found lodgings but had not given her address for a reply, and in her letter to Mrs Walton she had asked the old lady not to divulge her whereabouts to anyone. But from this day she would take hold of her emotions, she told herself firmly. A phase of her life had ended, and with it had gone everything she had ever known and all her dreams for the future as a married woman and mother. That was over.

  ‘Perhaps you would send Miss Wood in to see me and wait outside until her interview is over, Miss Morgan. If she proves satisfactory, one of my staff will take you both along to the laundry and show you where you will work before fitting you with the necessary uniform. You understand that your position is superior to that of hers, of course? I trust that will not prove a problem?’

  ‘No, of course not, Matron. We’re friends—’ Ruby stopped abruptly as the matron held up her hand.

  ‘A friendship that will be left at the front door when you enter this building and taken up again when you leave. My officers do not liaise with those beneath them.’

  This one would. Ruby nodded sweetly. ‘Yes, Matron.’

  Ellie was sitting waiting on a hard-backed chair in the corridor outside and looked up anxiously as Ruby left the matron’s office, shutting the door behind her.

  ‘She wants to see you,’ Ruby whispered. ‘Just say yes, Matron and no, Matron and three bags full, Matron, and it’ll be all right.’

  ‘Is she awful?’

  ‘She’s fine. Go on, don’t keep her waiting. Knock and wait for her to say you can go in.’

  Ruby seated herself on the chair Ellie had vacated and once the matron’s door was shut behind her friend, glanced about her. Everything was painted a dull green and there was a peculiar smell in the air, a fusty, unpleasant odour even though there didn’t look to be a speck of dirt anywhere. She supposed that came from the waiting rooms and receiving wards where inmates were first taken before being processed through into the workhouse proper. Poverty had its own smell, she had found.

  She swallowed hard. She would get used to it, she’d have to, and however hard the job was she would get used to that too. Mind over matter. She nodded to the thought. And no more wallowing in self-pity either. The Lord helps those who help themselves. How often had she heard her mam say that in the past? And it was right. She sat up straighter. This was the start of the rest of her life, that’s how she had to look at things now, and if she could survive that night two weeks ago when her world had fallen apart, she could survive anything. She wouldn’t let Olive beat her – she was stronger than that. She would make a success of her life, she would, and one day she would rub Olive’s nose in that success. Her mouth set, she nodded again. Her day would come . . .

  PART TWO

  Choices

  1924

  Chapter Six

  ‘You all right, man?’ Walter Gilbert’s voice was quiet, which was unusual. Even when he considered he was whispering it was normally a bellow.

  Adam’s answer was a curt ‘Aye,’ as he wrenched at the prop he was trying to move.

  ‘Only you’ve not said owt for hours.’

  ‘Nowt to say.’

  ‘You had another barney with Olive?’

  ‘Leave it, Walt.’

  ‘Aw, man, come on. Look, Da’s asked me to talk to you. He’s worried. We all are.’

  Adam now swung round on his belly from where he was lying in the cramped confines of the coalface. His shift of forty men were busy moving the face further in, which meant withdrawing the props to let the roof drop, always a dangerous part in the proceedings.

  ‘I said, leave it,’ he muttered, looking at his brother whose face was as black as his own.

  ‘I can’t.’ Walter was the oldest of Adam’s brothers at thirty, and a trace of the importance he attached to his place in the family came through as he added, ‘Like I said, Da asked me to have a word.’

  ‘You’ve had it.’

  ‘You and Olive and the bairn haven’t been round to Mam’s on a Sunday since Christmas, and even then you were like a bear with a sore head and as miserable as sin. It put a damper on everyone’s day, I can tell you.’

  ‘Good job I’ve stayed away then, surely?’

  Walter swore, before saying, ‘You’re an awkward beggar an’ no mistake but I don’t like to see you like this, man. I know you an’ her didn’t have the best of starts but you’ve got the bairn now and she’s a little cracker. Surely that counts for something? And Olive keeps the house nice and she’s a good cook an’ all. Mam reckons you could have done a lot worse, all things considered.’

  ‘Is that right? That’s what Mam thinks, is it?’

  There had been a quality to these last words that warned Walter he’d gone as far as he dare. He’d purposely chosen to talk to Adam whilst they were working. With thousands of tons of rock, coal and slate above them his brother couldn’t brush him aside and walk off as he’d done on numerous occasions in the last months, not when they were hemmed in like sardines in a can. Nevertheless, by the same token, if Adam got so riled up with him he made a mistake in what he was doing it could jeopardize not only his brother’s life but the rest of the men in the low narrow tunnels.

  Walter swore again before muttering, ‘Have it your own way, I was only trying to help.’

  Only trying to help. Adam wriggled forward, the heat and overwhelming humidity causing the sweat to run off him in rivulets. Walt and the others still had no real idea what they’d done that night two years ago, not even now. It was all right for them; they went home at the end of a shift to their bonny wives and families nice as you like, meeting up now and again as they’d always done down the pub for a jar or two where their chief topic of conversation would invariably centre around the coal owners locking men out and reducing wages and the rest of it, as if it mattered. As if anything mattered in this damn awful life he was trapped in. He didn’t give a monkey’s jig that working conditions were getting harder or the working day longer for less pay at the end of it. He wasn’t daft; he knew as well as the next man that coal owners like the Duke of Northumberland or the Bishop of Durham had gone straight back to their old ways after the Great War. They had no regard for the safety of the men they employed in their deathtraps and took no responsibility for the injuries and crippling disabilities suffered by miners every day of the week. But what good did it do to bleat on about it? Did Walt and Fred and Pete and the rest of them really think that strikes and the unions shouting the odds would get them anywhere?

  Adam looked up, the light from his lamp shining on the roof of the tunnel he was inching down. All it would take was it caving in and his problems would be over. Before he had lost Ruby he’d used to have the occasional moment of blind panic when he was down the pit, his stomach flipping over so he felt like throwing up and his bowels turning to water. He’d had something to want to live for then, whereas now . . .

  He began to work at another prop with the iron lever he was holding, conscious of Walter some feet behind him as his brother coughed and spat before saying, ‘Easy, man, easy. You’re going at that like a bull in a china shop, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘I do mind.’ He heard Walter mutter something that finished with ‘. . . miserable blighter,’ but didn’t respond. He wanted no truck with Walt, or Fred or Pete either. The three of them had ruined his life and even looking at them made him want to strike out. The number of times he’d told the three of them to leave him alone in the last couple of years must run into the hundreds, but still they persisted in keeping up the brotherly facade, especially Walt. But then they probably hadn’t
got the sense to believe what he said. Gormless, the three of them. Gormless and as thick as two short planks.

  He should have gone down south. Even without Ruby he should have cleared off when Olive told him she was pregnant. Instead he’d let himself be bullied into marrying her, thereby saddling himself for life with Ruby’s sister and her child. He never thought of their daughter as part of him – she was wholly Olive’s – and this was apparent in his day-to-day dealings with the infant. He had never taken to her from the moment she was born, and he made no effort to hide his resentment at her coming, totally blaming the child and her mother for his present circumstances.

  Telling himself to work and not think, he continued with the job in hand. Moving the conveyor belt towards the new face was always precarious for the miners withdrawing the old props, but the whole shift were working flat out as always, some men cleaning the conveyor itself, some hauling sections of it inch by inch in the confined space and others spreading stone dust to dampen down the danger of the coal dust exploding. No one needed to be told what to do; they worked as a team and each miner prided himself on doing the task in hand to the best of his ability. Lives depended on it.

  A few hours later the new face had been established and the deputy had made his inspection before signing the shift off. Adam and his brothers, along with the rest of the men, made their way towards the main roadway where at last they could straighten up and ease their aching backs. All of the men walked along joking and laughing and swearing at each other, but although one or two glanced Adam’s way they knew better than to try and talk to him. When he had suddenly upped and married one sister after being engaged to the other for a couple of years, there had been plenty of speculation, especially because – as one miner put it – the sister he’d been landed with had a face as rough as a badger’s backside.

  When they reached the cage that would transport them above ground there was the usual pushing and shoving and banter, but again Adam stood aloof from it all, merely making sure he didn’t ride up in the same group of men as Walt. Because he had hung back he was in the last few of the shift to go up, and as the cage rattled its way towards the light he experienced none of the relief he’d once felt at the thought of seeing the sun and the sky again after hours in the bowels of the earth.

  He knew he had changed, he told himself grimly as they reached the surface and he exited the cage and gave his lamp and token in. He hadn’t needed Walt to tell him that. It had begun on the day he knew Ruby had left Sunderland and had washed her hands of him for good, and it had gathered pace since. He didn’t recognize himself any more, that was the truth of it. The lad Ruby had fallen in love with didn’t exist. And he knew just how absolute the change now was by the fact that this didn’t bother him as it had done at first.

  It had been some months into his marriage before he had acknowledged how angry he was with Ruby. Before that he had imagined it was just Olive he was furious with, but his anger against Ruby had been different. Olive he would always loathe for the way she had set out to trick him, but Ruby should have seen that in a way he was as innocent as her in it all. If she had loved him like he loved her, she would have understood; she would have agreed to leave Sunderland with him and go down south where they could have got married and put the past behind them. Instead she had assumed the moral high ground and cleared off leaving him in hell, a hell of fierce anger and pain and longing, a hell in which his corroding hate had gradually eaten away the core of him.

  He made a sound in his throat, a harsh sound. He didn’t know why he was thinking of all this now. No, that wasn’t true, it was because of Walt, damn him, stirring things up. All he wanted was to be left alone – that wasn’t too much to ask, was it? He could get by if he was left alone. Work, eat, drink, sleep, work again, and on a Sunday, come rain, hail or shine, he’d tramp the countryside for miles around until he was even more tired than when he had finished a shift down the pit. Thinking only tied him up in knots and brought the ever present rage to the surface, a rage that genuinely made him fear he’d do murder one day when he looked at Olive.

  So, don’t think. He nodded to the command, and like a child obeying a parent, made his way towards the wash house, his face set and his eyes cold and hard.

  Olive glanced at the clock on the kitchen mantelpiece. He’d be home soon. Her stomach turned over. It was ridiculous, after two years of marriage, but every time Adam’s arrival was imminent the trembling would start inside. Once he walked through the door she could cope with the bitterness and dislike that were evident in his every glance and word, but it was the waiting that caused her insides to knot. She supposed she should be grateful he hadn’t taken to the drink like some men did to drown their sorrows, but if it had made him more mellow she wouldn’t have minded. Anything would be better than the present state of affairs. But it was the way he was with Alice that hurt her the most.

  As though her daughter had heard her name Alice gurgled in her highchair where she was chewing on a crust of bread Olive had baked in the oven until it was as hard as iron. The infant was teething and her mouth was bothering her, day and night. But she was such a good baby, Olive thought fondly, walking across and ruffling the silky brown curls. Even with the teething Alice rarely cried, although sometimes her plump little cheeks would be bright red with pain, and at twenty-one months old she was as happy as the day was long. Considering the misery of Olive’s pregnancy, she was constantly amazed none of her anguish had communicated itself to the child in her womb.

  From the day she’d married Adam, exactly a month after Ruby had left Sunderland, Olive had known that this mistake superseded anything that had gone before. Tricking him into sleeping with her, falling for a baby, the breakdown of his engagement to Ruby and her sister leaving and breaking their mam’s heart, all that was as nothing compared to becoming Adam’s wife. He was going to continue to make her pay for what she’d done to her dying day and by marrying him she’d effectively put a noose round her own neck.

  Turning back to the range, Olive checked the tin of baked herring in the oven. It was the second week of June and the country was in the grip of a heatwave. Cloudless skies, backyards swilled daily to lay the dust, and the roads to the beaches jammed tight at the weekends as folk sought the relief of a sea breeze. Consequently, the old fishwives who plied their trade along the seafront and round the back lanes had been selling their glut of herring that the good weather had brought in for knockdown prices. Hannah, the old woman whose round included Olive’s back lane, was a character, but then most of the fishwives were cut from the same rough cloth. Dressed in a cotton blouse, heavy woollen skirt and thick linen apron, an old shawl round her shoulders and her feet shod in black hobnailed boots, Hannah wasn’t to be trifled with. All the bairns were fascinated by the coil of thick material on her head on which her fish basket was balanced, and by the way Hannah kept it steady when she walked. She never came in winter or bad weather when the herring were difficult to fish, but come the summer months her cry in the back lanes would ring out and housewives would appear out of their yards.

  Fetching the baking tin with its rows of black and silver fish out of the oven, Olive left it on the side while she sliced a crusty loaf of bread she’d baked that morning into thick wedges. She had cooked the herring in vinegar and dripping, the oil from the fish adding to the mixture, and before she dished the fish up on their plates she would drain the gravy and tip it into two bowls in which she and Adam would dip the bread. Hannah had been anxious to get rid of the last of the fish in the back lane, and Olive had bought the herring for eight a penny, a bargain. It provided a cheap meal and one that Adam always enjoyed. While she had still been living at her mother’s, her mam had always cooked herring with potatoes and vegetables, but she’d learned Adam didn’t care for them that way, preferring the fresh bread as his mother had served them. It had been one of the more innocuous things she had had to come to terms with in her marriage.

  Glancing again at the clock, she spoon
ed the last of Alice’s meal of mashed vegetables and gravy into her daughter’s little rosebud mouth, and once the bowl was empty gave her another piece of hard bread just as she heard Adam walk into the yard. He objected if Alice made a mess when she ate; he objected to a lot of things concerning the child if it came to that, and from the day she had been born had insisted she slept in her own room rather than allowing the crib to be at the side of their bed for the first few weeks.

  He didn’t speak as he came into the kitchen and neither did Olive greet him, but Alice gave a little squeak of agitation at the sight of her father, which Adam completely ignored. Taking off his cap and frayed working jacket he sat down at the table and opened the newspaper he always bought on his way home from the pit, disappearing behind it while Olive dished up their meal. Only when his plate was in front of him did he put the paper to one side and pick up his knife and fork. They ate in the silence that permeated the house when Adam was home, a silence that was in no way a quiet, hushed thing but which vibrated with a dark energy that was alive. Even Alice felt it. Olive knew she did. Young as she was, her daughter seemed to instinctively understand that she must bring no attention to herself when her father was around. It was becoming more and more noticeable that Alice was afraid of him. This concerned Olive so much she’d mentioned it to her mother several times, but Cissy’s reply was always the same.

  ‘He’ll come round, lass. Just give him a bit of slack and he’ll come round. The bairn’ll win him over if nowt else, she’s that bonny, so don’t fret. Have patience.’

  But Adam wasn’t coming round. Olive cast a sidelong glance at the man she’d come to hate and fear. She knew now he would never come round. And while she accepted that Adam’s loathing and resentment regarding her was justified to some extent, she couldn’t forgive his treatment of their daughter. Alice was completely innocent of any wrongdoing, she’d said that to him once in one of their rows, and he’d answered her by saying that the child was here, wasn’t she? And her presence was fault enough. It had been from that day she’d stopped trying to make their marriage work.