Authors: Janet MacLeod Trotter
‘It’s Oxford Hall,’ John told her. ‘The Pearsons’ country retreat.’
Maggie felt the food in her mouth turn sour and found she could eat no more.
‘How do you know?’ she asked.
‘I’ve been on walking holidays out here many a time - tramped all these hills. I can remember the hall being built. There were scores of men working on it.’ John stopped munching as he saw Maggie’s hostile expression.
‘Must you go on hating them for ever?’ he asked gently. ‘You’ll have no peace of mind until you stop.’
Maggie was stung by the reproof. ‘I don’t need you to preach at me. Pearson’s treated us like scum after me dad died and if they hadn’t blacklisted George he would never have gone to France and ...’ She saw the flicker of hurt in John’s eyes, but ploughed on. ‘And they did all they could to stop women’s emancipation. Did you know Herbert Pearson was one of the twenty-three MPs who tried to stop the bill going through? And as for Alice Pearson, well, she was the biggest betrayer of them all.’
John was quick to challenge her. ‘She befriended you once. Perhaps it was your arson attack on her home that turned her against the cause. Has that ever occurred to you?’
Maggie flushed and glared at him hotly. ‘Her heart was never in it. She just enjoyed lording it over the others in Newcastle society.’
‘Perhaps she did,’ John acknowledged, ‘but nevertheless she did you a great personal service.’
‘You mean arranging me escape from the nursing home, I suppose,’ Maggie said begrudgingly.
‘Yes, that - and paying for you to recuperate there in the first place.’
Maggie stared at him in surprise.
He nodded. ‘It was thanks to Alice Pearson that you were able to recover after your first imprisonment. What do you think your chances of regaining your health would have been if you’d had to return to the likes of Gun Street?’
Maggie was dumbfounded. She had never known of Alice Pearson’s intervention, assuming the Movement had paid for her nursing. Her mouth dried and she could not speak as the truth hit her - the stark realisation that the Pearson woman had probably saved her life, for she had entered the home desperately weak and deeply depressed after the weeks of force-feeding. In return she had agreed to burn the woman’s home because the Pearson men were implacably opposed to women gaining the vote. Was it any wonder that Alice Pearson had become disenchanted with the local militants, Maggie thought, and by all accounts pleased to see her go to prison for arson?
Maggie stood up, her small figure seeming lost in the vast landscape of browning bracken and purple bell heather.
‘I wish I had known,’ she sighed deeply.
‘She didn’t want you to know. She only told me in confidence during one of her visits to the mission,’ John explained. ‘She said she didn’t want you to think she was trying to buy your trust or friendship, she wanted to earn it. It struck me she was a very lonely woman, isolated within her own class. I probably shouldn’t be telling you all this now, but you’re still so bitter, Maggie, it might help you see things differently.’
Maggie looked away into the distance, to the house of the family she had grown to hate with a passion. She had no idea what had happened to Alice Pearson except that she had gone to France to photograph the troops and Hebron House had been turned over to the military while the MP and his family moved up here to their country mansion.
‘Miss Alice gave funds quietly to the mission too,’ John continued. ‘She was never one for grand gestures.’
Maggie gave him a reproachful look. ‘Like me, you mean?’
John shook his head. ‘Perhaps she never had the courage to do the things you’ve done - few of us have,’ he smiled. ‘But there are other ways of fighting for what’s right, Maggie, and you shouldn’t judge the rest of us so harshly.’
Suddenly Maggie reached out to him and John stood and went to hold her.
‘I’m sorry,
’
she whispered as she put her arms about his neck. ‘I’ve never meant to criticise what you’ve done. I’ve always admired your work at the mission, the way you treat people all the same, no matter where they come from or what they’ve done. It’s what I like about you most, John.’
He held her more tightly and kissed her hair.
‘Come, let’s forget the Pearsons and go home,’ he urged.
***
That autumn, Maggie accepted a part-time position at the offices of the Women’s Co-operative Guild to occupy her time, while Millie took on the role of housekeeper and a new cook was appointed. On Saturdays, Maggie helped Susan down on the quayside with the second-hand clothes and used her new-found status among the middle-class of Sandyford to procure clothing for the business. But the task that occupied her most was the search for Christabel. She thought of little else all day and her sleep at night was filled with dreams of finding her daughter and plagued by nightmares of losing her.
Sometimes she would wake to find John had come into her room to discover why she cried out in her sleep. He would stroke her forehead and stay by her side until she fell asleep once more, but he was always gone when she awoke in the morning.
He spent hours at St Chad’s, trawling the records and interviewing the staff in the children’s wing, but the matron and the midwife who had assisted at the birth had both left without trace and the records were a mess of inaccurate and missing entries. The Relieving Officer who had disappeared with Poor Law funds seemed to have taken registers with him, or disposed of them to cover up a web of embezzlement.
They visited orphanages and grim asylums for the feeble-minded, but no one had any information on a Christabel Beaton, born on 26 December 1916.
‘It’s as if she never existed!’ Maggie howled after a forlorn visit to an institution in Gateshead.
She had scanned the peaky faces of the children in the nursery for any family resemblance or likeness to George or herself, but had seen none. They gazed at her from blank, sad eyes, penned into iron cots or sitting on the linoleum floor playing with pieces of rag, skinny and uninterested. She had never seen such subdued infants; none of them appeared capable of speaking when she asked them their names. Maggie left swiftly, their dismal whimpering echoing down the dingy, urine-smelling corridors.
There were times when she caught a look in her husband’s eyes, as if he had begun to doubt whether the child had ever existed. If it had not been for Millie’s forceful confirmation that she had held the baby in her own arms, Maggie suspected John might have persuaded her to give up the fruitless search.
Then one day in early November, he came home with some news. Maggie was sitting at the roll-top desk in the corner of the sitting room, bathed in a pool of light from the gas lamp on the wall bracket above her. As soon as he strode into the room, she knew something had happened.
‘I’ve found Lily Smart, the midwife who was there at the birth!’ he told her.
‘Where?’ Maggie said, springing out of her seat.
‘She’s living in lodgings on Pandon Bank. A woman who comes into the mission lodges in the same tenement. Lily Smart is still helping out at lie-ins, by all accounts.
’
Maggie shuddered to think of the heartless woman bullying other young mothers through their labours.
‘I imagine she has to, to make ends meet,’ John said, seeing Maggie’s look of distaste.
‘Well, let’s go to her now!’
‘Dearest, it’s late in the day,’ John protested, ‘and the streets are dark—’
‘I’m not afraid of the dark, John,’ Maggie answered impatiently, already making for the door.
He sighed. ‘You won’t build up your hopes too much, will you, Maggie?’
She turned and gave him a direct look with her grey eyes. ‘I’m full of hope,’ she answered simply. ‘I can’t be any other way.’
John insisted they took a cab through the town. They alighted on the steep bank that plunged down to the quayside, its tall slum dwellings clinging together as if they might topple over at any moment.
John took Maggie’s hand firmly and led her up a narrow, covered lane with stinking water dripping from its slimy walls. Children were playing war games around the steps and Maggie had to dodge their crudely fashioned wooden guns.
They were directed to Lily Smart’s room by the woman from the mission. Maggie hardly recognised the grey-haired woman who answered their knocking with a wheezing shout. Lily Smart had aged dramatically in the past two years of wartime deprivation, dismissed from St Chad’s in the shake-up of staff.
At first she was reluctant to speak, but John produced a sovereign and she came out onto the landing.
‘Aye, I remember the bairn,’ Lily grunted. ‘But she never stayed more than a month or two at St Chad’s. Matron wanted her out of harm’s way.
’
‘Meaning me, I suppose,’ Maggie said tersely.
‘Aye,’ Lily said, eyeing her with resentment. ‘She could tell you were one of them troublemakers.’
‘But the child,’ John intercepted quickly. ‘Where did they take her?’
‘Sent her to a cottage home - up Tynedale.’
‘Which one?’ John questioned.
‘Can’t remember the name. Small place, paid for by the Pearsons.’
Maggie thought of their futile search of Tyneside. ‘So we’ve been looking in the wrong place all the time!’ she cried.
‘But why send the child all that way?’ John puzzled.
Lily snorted. ‘Matron was on to some fiddle. She picked out the pretty bairns.’
‘Why?’ Maggie asked, her heart pounding painfully.
‘Well, it was a model home, see. And rich folk could have their picking of the orphans - you know, the ones what couldn’t have their own, or didn’t want to risk childbirth. That’s what was rumoured, anyways.’
Maggie could not speak. She was paralysed by the thought of Christabel being chosen like some pretty ornament to adorn some rich person’s nursery.
‘Thank you for your help, Mrs Smart,’ John said politely, steering Maggie towards the stairs.
‘Oh, there’s one other thing I remember,’ the craggy-faced midwife called to them on the dark stairwell. They looked back. ‘The bairn - the Matron changed her name to Martha, said it was a plain, dutiful name and wouldn’t give the lass ideas above herself like her mother had. Maybes that’s why you couldn’t find her.’
All the way home, Maggie could not stop shaking.
‘Where is this place?’ she demanded. ‘John, we must go there tomorrow.’
‘I have the shop to run, my dear,’ John reminded her. ‘I can’t just go tearing off to search Tynedale. Besides, we need to discover the name of the home first.’
‘Daniel can manage the shop quite well without you,’ Maggie answered bluntly. ‘You should be giving the lad more responsibility anyways at your age.’
John flushed. ‘I can’t go before Saturday,’ he insisted.
‘That’s nearly a week!’ Maggie protested.
Her desperation made him relent. ‘Just give me time to make enquiries about this cottage home first, then we’ll go,’ he promised.
Maggie could settle to nothing for the rest of the week. She tried to immerse herself in her work at the Guild’s office but could not concentrate. She trailed around town with Susan while Millie watched the children, but she was tense and preoccupied.
Her mood unnerved Susan and made her impatient.
‘What if she’s not there?’ she dared to ask. ‘You’ve got to face the fact that with all the upheaval of the war, she may not be. Will you give up looking for her?’
‘Never!’ Maggie cried.’ How could you think such a thing?’
‘But is John not tiring of it all?’ Susan demanded. ‘It might be kinder on him if you were to put it all behind you and settle to the life he’s given you. Why can’t you just make the best of what you’ve got, Maggie? You’re always hankering after what’s just around the corner.’
Maggie spun round and glared at Susan. ‘You’re a mother. Could you imagine a life without Alfred or Beattie or Bella?’ she challenged.
‘No, of course not,’ Susan admitted, ‘but…’
‘So why is it any different for me?’ Maggie demanded. ‘I carried my bairn for nine months and brought her into this world with as much pain and effort as any other woman. You may think I’m hard but I’ve just as much feeling inside as the next lass.
’
Maggie put a hand on her sister’s arm, willing her to understand. ‘I held that bonny baby in me arms, Susan. She sucked at me breast. I was a mother for those brief moments and it felt grand! I was lying, half bleeding to death in that hellhole, yet I felt so at peace...’ Maggie struggled to explain. ‘When John talks of the love of God, I think of that time in that dark cell with Christabel lying beside me.’ Her eyes glistened as she dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘It was the most comforting feeling you could ever imagine. I knew that Christabel was mine and that I’d always be bound to her whatever happened.’ Maggie looked pleadingly at Susan, then her voice hardened in determination. ‘Christabel doesn’t belong in an orphanage, Susan, or to anyone else. She belongs to
me
.’
Susan stared at her sister in awe. She had heard Maggie rant about politics and rights but she had never heard her speak before about something so personal. It surprised and touched her.
‘Of course the bairn belongs to you,’ she said, squeezing Maggie’s hand. ‘I just hope you find her.’
By Friday, John had discovered that the most likely orphanage was the Hebron Children’s Home, named after the Pearsons’ Newcastle mansion and situated outside a small village in the upper Tyne valley. They travelled by train up the valley and then walked the steep dirt track that wound its way up the valley side to the moortop institute. Maggie drank in every detail of the sturdy stone building, hidden among a spinney of wind-blown trees. It must have been an old vicarage or gentleman farmer’s house which had been taken over for the orphans, for its windows were large and unbarred and its aspect in the summer must have been pleasant. It was early November now though and the wind battered the ivy-clad facade with a squall of icy rain and whipped around their chilled faces. Even so, Maggie could hear the shouts of children playing in a field at the side of the house, half hidden by a thicket of hawthorn. She was pleased and surprised that they were given such freedom and quickened her step.