Authors: Janet MacLeod Trotter
‘The hall has been gifted by the merchant who owns the building,’ Heslop told her as they entered.
‘How generous,’ Maggie answered, pulling a wry face at the spartan cellar as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. The bare stone walls glistened with damp in the spluttering light from oil lamps that hung from low beams over rows of wooden tables and benches. The hall was already filling up and Maggie tried not to gag at the stench of unwashed bodies and paraffin fumes. Men and women of all ages were occupying the wooden forms, exchanging subdued comments. After the noise and bustle of the Sandgate outside, where families were sitting and playing in the dust, chatting, knitting, shouting, spitting and courting, this twilight place seemed unnaturally quiet.
‘How do you get so many to come to your service?’ Maggie whispered, astonished by the mix of vagrants, sailors, prostitutes, hawkers and elderly. Some appeared respectably dressed but their neatness was frayed, their faces careworn and ill.
‘Word soon gets round if there’s a bowl of soup on offer,’ Heslop replied candidly.
Maggie glanced towards the curtained-off area in the corner which she had assumed was a store of hymn books and tracts. Now she noticed the steam rising from behind the hangings.
‘You’re running a kitchen?’ Maggie asked in surprise. ‘You’re not just preaching at them?’
Heslop tugged at his sideburns. ‘Most of these people are destitute,’ he growled. ‘We attempt to sustain their bodies as well as their souls. You can’t transform people’s lives on empty stomachs. We don’t give them much, but it’ll keep some of them out of the workhouse a while longer.’
Maggie felt humbled. She knew from first-hand experience that the greatest fear of the poor was to be consigned to the workhouse where families were separated and treated like prisoners, carrying out menial tasks with little prospect of escape. It was the perpetual humiliation of the workhouse, Maggie thought, which weighed heaviest in the minds of these people. It was the spur that had driven her own mother to find work at all costs and provide shelter for her family after Pearson’s had cut off their security so abruptly on the death of her father.
She wanted to say something encouraging to Heslop about what he was attempting to do here but he had already crossed to the makeshift kitchen and disappeared behind the curtain.
Maggie looked around, feeling awkward in her neatness. A woman caught her eye and gave her a guardedly hostile look. Maggie recognised her as the prostitute who had drawn her mother’s censure outside Stella’s cafe. Closer up, her painted face looked old and weary, as if here at least she did not have to pretend to be young and appealing. There was an air of watchfulness, almost expectancy, about the patiently waiting dozens. Maggie escaped behind the curtain.
‘Here, give me something to do,’ she said.
Heslop was in conversation with a stout woman in her middle years and a girl with a delicate waxen face.
‘Stir this, hinny,’ the older woman said, handing her the ladle.
‘Two minutes and we’ll begin,’ Heslop said, after introducing his helpers as Millie Dobson and her daughter Annie.
As Maggie stirred a broth of bacon bits, peas and potatoes, which gave off a welcome aroma in the fusty hall, she heard Heslop calling his congregation to attention. Annie was dishing out hymn books with an anxious smile, while her mother hacked at a pile of loaves with a blunt carving knife.
‘Mr Heslop’s a good’un,’ she panted over her task, ‘Doesn’t turn up his nose at us like other do-gooders.’
‘You’re not from the chapel, then, Mrs Dobson?’ Maggie asked.
The woman gave a loud cackle. ‘Me from the chapel! Eeh, that’s a laugh. Never been inside a church since me baptism.’ She saw the confusion on Maggie’s face. ‘I came here to give my Annie some nourishment, hinny. She’s always been thin as a reed. I like a bit sing-song and Mr Heslop was that canny, we kept coming back. Then he asks us if I’d like to give a hand - extra bowl of broth in it for my Annie, an’ all. Been working here for a year now, taking care of the hall.’
Maggie glanced over at the lean butcher and smiled to herself at his pragmatic approach to saving souls.
He led his flock in a rousing hymn which most of them sang and then said prayers and gave a short address, through which a couple of foreign sailors fidgeted and yawned. After a final hymn, there was a clatter as the assembled sat down and shuffled in anticipation on the benches. Heslop tapped two men on the shoulder and they got up and went to help carry out the bowls of soup for Annie. Maggie joined them, doling out hunks of ragged bread to the grimy hands that reached out to her.
All the while, Heslop went among them, talking and listening and sharing a joke with his motley congregation. Maggie noticed him in conversation with the prostitute and wondered what the respectable ladies of Alison Terrace Methodist Church would say if they could have seen him in such company. What, Maggie wondered wryly, would her own mother think, for that matter?
With the food finished, people began to drift away and the hall to empty. Maggie helped the Dobsons to clear away and wash the bowls and spoons in a half-barrel that did for a sink.
‘Miss Beaton will be sleeping here tonight,’ John Heslop told Mrs Dobson. He turned to Maggie. ‘Mrs Dobson and Annie are my caretakers, they live above.’
‘No need for the lass to stay on her own,
’
Mrs Dobson said at once. ‘She’s welcome to share with us.’
‘Ta very much,’ Maggie smiled with gratitude, ‘if it’s no bother.’
‘No bother at all, hinny,’ she insisted. ‘Only too pleased to help a friend of Mr Heslop’s.’
Locking up the hall, John Heslop bade them goodnight and left. Maggie followed the women up to the next floor. What must have been an old office, still with a large marble fireplace, was now the living quarters of the two Dobsons. A large bed stood in one corner, a horsehair sofa in another, a dresser with a tin washbowl and chipped china jug, along with a small gas stove, filled the remaining space. From one large opaque window the room was washed in a muted green light. By the proud way Mrs Dobson showed Maggie their home, she realised they must have come from somewhere infinitely worse.
‘We’ll have a little nip before bed, eh?’ Millie Dobson chuckled, going to the dresser and producing a small bottle of brandy, almost empty.
‘Mam,’ Annie said fretfully, ‘Mr Heslop would hoy us out if he knew you were drinking.’
‘Brandy’s medicinal,’ Millie Dobson replied, pouring the contents into a teacup and handing it to Maggie. ‘Have a sip to help you sleep, hinny.’
Maggie hesitated. She knew Heslop disapproved of drink and according to Susan it was the reason why he had not married their mother. Yet it might help take her mind off the ordeal ahead. She sipped and then nearly spat it back out as the alcohol tore at her throat. Seconds later, warmth flooded into her cheeks and she felt better. Annie left the room in disapproval, taking the jug to fetch water.
Millie Dobson cackled. ‘Annie doesn’t like it, but it’s got me through many a night’s whoring.’ She drained the rest of the brandy.
Maggie stared at her, wondering if she had heard correctly.
‘Didn’t Mr Heslop tell you what I was?’ Millie laughed. ‘Suppose you won’t want to stop with us now.’
‘Makes no difference to me,’ Maggie answered, trying to hide her shock.
‘Well, what could a widow like me do but gan on the street?’ Mrs Dobson said, suddenly defensive. ‘Me man died at sea. I had nee money and a sickly bairn. I wasn’t going to sit back and watch my Annie die an’ all!’
‘I understand,
’
Maggie said quickly.
‘How can a lass like you understand?’ the older woman said bitterly.
‘Because me mam was widowed too and had to bring up four bairns on her own. She was lucky, Mr Heslop lent her a bit of money to set up a second-hand clothes business and she had a few household things to sell. But it’s been a struggle.’
‘Ah, Mr Heslop! He’s given me a hand up off the street with this mission, and Annie too. I want Annie to do better than me, have a future, respectable like.
’
‘But doesn’t it make you boil that women like you and me mam have to rely on the charity of men like Mr Heslop?’ Maggie asked, emboldened by the brandy. ‘Widows should have more security - and the families that depend on them.’
‘Aye,’ Millie sighed, ‘but there’s nowt we can do about it, hinny.’
‘By heck there is!’ Maggie cried. ‘We can fight for the vote, then we can begin to change the laws to suit us women.’
Millie Dobson looked at her with eyes that sagged in a liverish face. ‘Are you one of them militants?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Aye,’ Maggie admitted proudly, ‘and if there were more of us, we’d have the vote sharpish. Women have bowed their heads and carried their burden without a fuss for too long. Even Heslop thinks we should have the vote.’
‘Does he, you bugger!’ Millie exclaimed in astonishment. She peered hard at Maggie. ‘Are you in bother with the coppers or summat? Is that why Heslop’s hiding you?’
‘Not yet,’ Maggie said with a grim smile.
‘Tell us what you’re up to, hinny.’
Maggie found it a relief to confide in the woman who sheltered her, for her aloneness was at times overwhelming. Even if Mrs Dobson was indiscreet, who would take any notice of a talkative old prostitute? She outlined her planned protest.
Millie cackled with glee. ‘Eeh, and you just a slip of a lass! Good on you! I wish I had summat stronger to give you, but it’ll have to be tea we toast you with, hinny.’
She went to the stove and lit the gas under a blackened pan of stewed tea and condensed milk. When the dubious mixture had boiled, Mrs Dobson poured it into two cups with their handles missing and handed one to Maggie. ‘To us lasses!’ she toasted.
Maggie clinked cups. ‘To us lasses!’ she echoed and took a gulp. It was thick and sweet and the most revolting tea she had ever drunk, but with the broken-toothed Mrs Dobson grinning at her in encouragement, it tasted strangely comforting.
***
On the day of the launch, Alice Pearson rose early. Dressing in an outdoor skirt and jacket, she slipped out of Hebron House as the maids were still laying the fires downstairs. Her dog Rosamund padded eagerly from her basket in the flower room when Alice called her. Together they set off across the terrace and down the front steps onto the dew-soaked lawn. Mist lay like a shawl over the treetops, obscuring the view of the river and its docks, but in its damp chill lay the promise of its evaporation and a hot day ahead. The smell of coal fires wafted over the high park walls, reminding Alice of the teeming humanity beyond her oasis of green trees and flowering bushes.
Rosamund returned and shook droplets of water over her skirt, the hem of which was already soaked with dew.
‘This is going to be a great day!’ Alice said aloud, reaching down to fondle her poodle.
She thought of her father in the east wing, sleeping off the grand dinner she had thrown for those involved with the Pearson’s enterprise: the chief engineers, their business suppliers, the local coal-owner, their financial partners, agents and bankers. Alice had been determined to impress them all with Pearson hospitality, so that it would be the talk of the business world for the next year. They had dined on Scottish salmon, delicately clear soups, massive sides of beef and pork, a dozen different vegetables, strong cheeses and soft puddings that sparkled with spun sugar and spectacular decoration. They had drunk sherry and wine and port and Madeira and the dining table had groaned under the weight of silver candlesticks and gleaming tureens and cutlery and bright crystal. The downstairs rooms had been filled with fresh cut flowers whose perfume had filled the old mansion with a warm heady scent in the evening sun. Daniel Pearson had been delighted with it all.
Alice looked up at her father’s curtained rooms. Why was he so liberal towards her as an individual, she pondered, while so reactionary in his attitude to women in general? He encouraged her involvement in Pearson’s and resisted her mother’s attempts to have her married off and yet he scoffed at the idea of women having a share in political power. Perhaps he was merely posturing to his political allies and business associates, Alice thought. One thing she was sure of was that he valued her companionship and conversation more than that of his wife or son and, for her part, she would do anything to please him.
Alice shot an uneasy look at the unseen, ordered rows of terraces that muscled against the walls of the estate. To please her father she had co-operated in the subduing of the local suffragettes for the duration of Asquith’s visit. More than that, she had provided the police with details about Maggie Beaton.
‘The girl is unstable!’ she said aloud to Rosamund. ‘I could tell from the way she ranted at me at Emily’s funeral. Very bad form!’
The dog barked at the sound of her mistress’s cross voice.
‘Talking of what Emily would have wanted as if she had been a friend - quite insulting! And making threats about taking action. No, it was important the girl be warned off.’
No doubt a visit from the police would have scared her from acting rashly, Alice thought, and if not her, then certainly her family.
‘She mustn’t be allowed to spoil my plans, Rosamund,’ Alice said to the dog as they returned to the house.
Her father had promised that she would be seated next to the Prime Minister at lunch and would have an opportunity to do some discreet lobbying. Alice did not allow herself to dwell on what her fellow suffragettes might think of such a passive approach, for she had convinced herself that she could do more for the cause using her position of influence than they could throwing missiles or protests from afar. Anyway, she did not care about making herself unpopular, as long as she achieved what she wanted, she thought stubbornly.
‘Come, girl!’ she ordered Rosamund. ‘We’ve work to do today.’
***
No one was taking any particular notice of the two women and the pasty-faced girl making their way along Scotswood Road among the crowds. One was small and old, stooped under a large black cape and lace cap, the other stout and coarse-looking in a drab brown dress and battered orange hat