The Stony Path Read online

  ‘Gave them away?’ Eva’s voice was rising. ‘You gave them away to Bill Hutton? They were to last us the next month. You said there were enough to last us the next month.’

  ‘Aye, there were.’

  ‘And you gave them away on account of some sob story?’

  ‘There was no sob story, I told you how it happened, an’ besides, you’ve got money in your purse to buy vegetables, which is more than Peggy’s got.’

  ‘How do you know what Peggy’s got? Soft as clarts, you are, believin’ everythin’ anyone says. Likely Bill’s not as bad as he makes out and he’s laughin’ up his sleeve right now.’

  ‘Saints alive.’ It was said through gritted teeth. Was she really so stupid or was she trying to get under his skin? If ever there was a numbskull in this world it was Eva. ‘His bairns’ backsides are hangin’ out an’ him an’ Peggy are walkin’ scarecrows, so I doubt there’s much laughter in that house.’ Like this one, he added with silent bitterness.

  ‘Peggy works,’ Eva snapped.

  ‘Aye, Peggy works all right, you never said a truer word there. Peggy was never one for sittin’ on her backside.’ This was sharp and pointed; Eva was far better off than most of the housewives thereabouts, who needed to supplement their family income by taking in washing or engaging in other menial work, and Nathaniel never missed an opportunity to remind her of the fact. ‘Works her fingers to the bone by all accounts, an’ she’s lucky if she can pay the rent, as you well know.’

  ‘I know nothin’ of the sort.’

  ‘Well, I’ve always said there’s none so blind as them that don’t want to see, an’ I’m not discussin’ this further. Where’s me tea?’

  They stared at each other and it was Eva’s eyes that dropped away first as she sniffed before turning to the kettle sizzling on the hob. That was typical of Nathaniel, give away their last penny he would. Talk about a soft touch! She spooned three ladles of tea into the big brown teapot with tight, angry movements, and then poured water over the tea, leaving it to mash as she walked through to the pantry at the side of the kitchen and took the butter and cheese from its marbled slab. Once she had carved a whole loaf into thick slices and placed it with the cheese and butter and a small bowl of jam, she went to the foot of the stairs and called, ‘Supper’s on the table,’ before returning to the kitchen, taking a plate of cooked pig’s trotters and chitterlings from the pantry and adding it to the table.

  She hadn’t glanced once at Nathaniel sitting in his armchair in front of the hearth, and neither had they spoken, but at the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs Eva said stiffly, ‘You’d better come and get it before they go through the lot.’

  It was an overture of a kind, and Nathaniel answered it by saying, ‘Aye, I’ll do that.’

  It was another two hours before Eva had the kitchen to herself again once Nathaniel and the lads had gone up to bed. After putting the oats to soak for the morning’s porridge and washing up the supper things, she made another pot of tea, but in the small teapot this time, which held two cups, and then seated herself in the armchair Nathaniel had vacated. She had started this habit just after Michael was born, claiming the baby’s fretfulness late at night disturbed Nathaniel and it was better to let the child have his early-morning feed before she came up to bed, after which Michael always slept through until six o’clock. Whether Nathaniel had guessed she was merely postponing the moment she would have to lie down next to him in the big feather bed she didn’t know and she didn’t care, but when Michael had been off the breast and sleeping soundly alongside Luke and Arnold she had continued to stay down in the kitchen and Nathaniel had made no comment. When he wanted her he would normally wake her up with his fumbling early in the morning, and she never objected; she merely shut her eyes and pretended she was elsewhere and that the physical act wasn’t really happening. It worked, mostly.

  Eva now glanced round the kitchen, its shadowed cosiness creating no housewifely satisfaction. Nathaniel thought she was fortunate to be living here, she told herself bitterly, their altercation over the vegetables on her mind. And maybe she was at that. Five of them in a two-up, two-down with its own netty and washhouse was untold spaciousness and luxury compared to plenty, she had realised that soon after she’d been wed. A good many of Sunderland’s working class lived in tenement poverty, with one terraced house providing accommodation for two or even three families, or in two-roomed, single-storey cottage rows sandwiched around their place of employment like insects round a dung heap. Women tirelessly cooked, cleaned, baked, washed and fought to keep their families afloat, rising at dawn to make bread and falling into bed late at night too exhausted to think. So, aye, maybe she was lucky compared to most. Nathaniel didn’t drink or gamble his wage away like some, and now Arnold and Luke were earning she supposed they were in clover. But she’d give it all up for life in a stinking hovel with Henry, even if it meant ostracism from the rest of the world.

  She leaned forward slightly, looking into the faintly glowing fire she had recently banked up for the night with slack and damp tea leaves. She had hoped, in her first hellish months here, when she had thought she was going mad, that Henry’s child might prove a comfort to her, but that hadn’t been the case. Not that Michael was any trouble – except when he started that ridiculous business about not wanting to go down the pit – but she had discovered her love for Henry filled every crevice and part of her heart, leaving no room for anything or anyone else. She lived only for Sunday afternoons. Aye, she could say that in all truth, she thought morosely. Without the promise of them she would have done away with herself years ago, and likely no one would have missed her.

  By, Eva was a bitter pill, why did his da put up with it? Luke always referred to his stepmother by her christian name in his mind, even though out loud he addressed her as Mam because he knew it pleased his father. Or at least it had done in the early days, when his da had still been trying to make them into a family.

  All that carry-on about the vegetables, you’d have thought they were dusted in gold the way she’d created. And she wasn’t short of money, not with what he and Arnold stumped up, and his da’s wage and all. But then nothing his da did was right, it never had been, so why had they married in the first place? Of course Arnold had his own ideas about that. He glanced across the room as though he could see Arnold’s bed in the blackness. When you looked at the dates, Michael had arrived early, even being premature as his da and Eva had maintained. But he couldn’t see his da taking a lass down out of wedlock himself; Da wasn’t like that. Oh, what did it matter anyway.

  Luke turned over in the narrow iron bed that was pressed close to the wall, conscious of Arnold’s heavy breathing across the room, although there wasn’t a sound from Michael’s small pallet squeezed in between the two single beds. An hour or more she’d been down there by herself and it was the same every night; he knew exactly when she came up to bed because the floorboard just outside their room on the cramped landing creaked if you so much as breathed. By, he couldn’t stand the thought of a marriage like his da’s.

  Across the room there came the sound of a grunt and a groan, followed by a long and loud passing of wind, causing Luke to wince as his insides tightened. He was a dirty pig, their Arnold. Always had been. But it wasn’t that which made Luke dislike his brother, nor the loud-voiced bumptiousness and bragging; not even his foul language once he was in the company of his pals and other miners. He knew men that turned the air blue down the pit who were good blokes, decent. But Arnold ... Arnold wasn’t decent. What exactly Arnold was, Luke’s mind couldn’t find a name for, but he knew it was unclean, and there were times when his brother, his own brother, made his flesh creep. And Arnold wanted Polly.

  He twisted in the bed again, but the reality of what he had seen in his brother’s eyes had to be faced. He had tried to put it to the back of his mind all day, first by taking on that pompous fool Frederick, and then by focusing his thoughts on his father and Eva, but it wasn’t any of them who
were twisting his guts. The thought of Polly and Arnold – but it wouldn’t come to that, of course it wouldn’t, he reassured himself in the next moment. She was just a young bairn, as innocent as they came. He was letting his mind run away with him here. Look how she’d been that Sunday a few months back when Michael and Arnold had been doubled up with the skitters, and he’d made the journey to the farm with Eva alone, only to find Ruth laid low too with a bad cold.

  Just he and Polly had gone to the stream, and it had seemed like an enchanted place that afternoon – at least to him. Without the others dashing about and splashing it had been quiet and still, and Polly had been content to sit with her feet dangling in the crystal-clear water without engaging in aimless chatter. It had been late May and the scent from the hedgerows had been heady. A flock of goldfinches had busied themselves, twittering sweetly, among the thistles and wild flowers on the far side of the stream, and at one point a green woodpecker had flown across their eyeline with a startled laughing call. He couldn’t remember what they had spoken about that afternoon, or even if they had spoken at all; he’d just known it had been heaven on earth.

  Aye, she was a child still and she didn’t look on any of them in that way, but one thing was for sure. Luke stared up into the blackness that seemed light compared to the consuming darkness of the mine. He would kill Arnold before he let his brother touch such stainless purity with his filth.

  Chapter Four

  The hard, long winter of 1902 was nothing but a distant memory now as a hot July gave way to an even hotter August, but in the farm kitchen Polly was sick and tired of the heated discussion which had been raging for most of the afternoon, prompted by Labour’s by-election victory some eight days before.

  She didn’t care that Labour had won the Barnard Castle seat in the Durham coal-mining constituency, thereby swelling the Labour representation committee to three MPs, she told herself fiercely, or that the new MP had switched sides from the Liberals, which branded him a traitor as far as her Uncle Frederick was concerned.

  Her mother’s stepbrother and Luke had been at it hammer and tongs for the last hour or so, with her grandda, Da, Arnold and even Michael joining in now and again. Even her mam and Auntie Eva had got involved; her mam on Uncle Frederick’s side and her aunt supporting her da and Luke when they had said they thought more and more Liberal agents might change their allegiance in view of the big anti-Tory swing in the north. Everyone was cross with each other and tempers were running high, and it was such a beautiful Sunday afternoon and soon it would be Monday again and a whole seven days before she’d see Michael once more.

  Polly caught her granny’s eye across the room, and as the old woman wagged her head Polly got the impression Gran had read her mind and moreover agreed with her. Then, as Alice beckoned to her, she left her seat on the cracket next to Michael and made her way to her granny’s side.

  ‘Help me put the food on the table, hinny. That’ll stop their blatherin’, an’ why don’t you an’ Ruth an’ Michael take your plates outside, eh? It’s too bonny a day to waste indoors.’

  ‘Can we, Gran?’

  ‘Aye, me bairn. This lot’ll be at it all afternoon now they’ve started. Out to change the world, they are.’

  They walked backwards and forwards between the scullery and pantry and the kitchen amid such snippets of conversation as, ‘Oh, aye, aye, great gentlemen the mine owners, an’ no doubt their lady wives look bonny enough when they attend their fancy balls an’ such like, but it’s them same folk that shed crocodile tears over the dead an’ don’t you forget it. Why, only last week ...’

  ‘... and refuse the chance of education when it is offered to them. What can you do if a lad would prefer to play the wag and earn a bob or two rather than be at his lessons, now you tell me that? It can’t be so bad a life if they’re breaking their necks to start it ...’

  ‘Aye, I said beyond belief an’ I mean beyond belief ! Of all the half-baked notions I’ve heard this afternoon, that takes the biscuit, Frederick. Sure sign you’ve never bin down a pit ...’

  ‘... get the wrong end of the stick because they don’t understand the finer points, that’s the thing. Most of them can’t even read or write ...’

  ‘... tell you I’ve heard pitmen arguing the toss on everythin’ from politics and pigeons to women and whippets, now then, so don’t tell me they’re all ignorant halfwits ...’

  ‘... nothing but trouble since the first trade union in 1851. Aye, I mean it, Luke, whatever you say. Mob rule, that’s what it boils down to, and it’ll ruin the country if the unions get the upper hand. The mines, the steelworks, the shipbuilding yards and factories; they’re all hotbeds of discontent, whereas the workers used to know their place and everyone was happy. Well, I’d like to see someone try to tell me what to do on my own farm.’

  Frederick’s face was as red as a beetroot and the mood in the kitchen had turned dark. Polly knew a little of the ins and outs of what the others had been talking about, and she sensed there was none of the normal Sunday jollication flowing, and that her Uncle Frederick looked more than a little upset. And if he was upset that would mean another bout of her mam and da’s quiet fighting and her mam being impossible for days, besides which – she looked across at the big burly figure sitting next to her mam on the saddle – her uncle had been very kind to her of late. The severe winter had meant she and Ruth had got to school even less than normal, but it hadn’t mattered so much because her Uncle Frederick had taken to bringing her books and newspapers from Stone Farm when he visited. This had become more frequent, often encompassing an evening or two in the week. And he usually sat and talked with her, discussing what she had read and explaining all manner of things. She liked those times and she was glad they had continued even when the winter had finished.

  So now, aiming to diffuse the electricity in the air as much for Frederick’s ease of mind as to avert her mother’s wrath from her father, she reached for a plate of sliced buttered fruit loaf and walked across to the saddle, offering her uncle the plate as she said smilingly, ‘I don’t know if you dare try a shive, Uncle Frederick, ’cos I made it meself. Gran’s rheumatism has been playin’ her up so me an’ Ruth did the cookin’ yesterday.’

  For a moment she didn’t think it was going to work, and then, as her uncle brought his eyes from Luke’s grim, tight face to her own, Polly watched him take a long, hard pull of air before he relaxed, saying, ‘Did you now? Well, I’ll have to be trying a piece in that case, won’t I?’

  ‘Gran thought I was a sight over-generous with the fruit, but I like it nice an’ claggy.’

  ‘Nice and claggy, eh?’ A smile was spreading over his face, widening his mouth and giving his eyes the crinkled look she liked best. ‘We’re two of a kind then, you and me, because there’s nothing I like more than a sticky fruit loaf. Betsy, bless her heart, is a mite sparing with the currants.’

  ‘I can make you one any time, Gran won’t mind.’

  ‘No?’ His voice was soft now, and low. ‘Well, that’s right nice of you, lass. And what do you think of your reading for this week? Is Nicholas Nickleby to your taste?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Her voice was bright now, and eager. ‘It’s more cheerful than Great Expectations, isn’t it, and I can understand it better.’

  ‘Good, good.’ He nodded, his eyes wandering over the sweet face in front of him. ‘We’ll discuss it in the week, eh? Maybe Tuesday? Would you like that?’

  Polly glanced at her mother. Hilda had subjected her daughter to a ten-minute lecture the previous week on the merits of being seen and not heard when visitors were present, but she had known it was only one visitor in particular her mother had had in mind. Ever since her Uncle Frederick had started to bring books to the farm and tell her about literature and the classics and such, her mother had played up. She had even made Ruth sit with them every time her uncle called, and her mam knew how much Ruth disliked reading and writing. Ruth hated all that stuff as much as her sister loved it. ‘Can I,
Mam?’ Polly said now.

  Hilda’s voice was as low as her stepbrother’s had been when she said, ‘Can you? You don’t have to ask me, girl, you know that. If your uncle is kind enough to spare his time, the least we can do is to be grateful.’

  Oh, her mam. Always twisting things round.

  Polly could feel the colour flooding into her face as she turned away from the saddle. Mam had made it seem as though she had asked permission because she didn’t want to sit with her uncle and learn about everything, and that wasn’t the case at all. Uncle Frederick had told her numerous times that he looked forward to their discussions, and that she was a bright, intelligent lass, and much as she loved her grandparents and Da, it was nice to have a grown-up listen to her like her uncle did.

  They’d read Great Expectations throughout the winter months, along with a book of poems for what her uncle termed ‘light relief’. He’d told her he had been pleasantly surprised at how quickly she’d taken to Dickens, and when he encouraged her to discuss and comment on different newspaper articles and such, he never laughed at what she said or made fun of her, but said her slant on things was refreshing. She liked her Uncle Frederick. And her mam would like to spoil those precious times if she could.