‘All in good time, lass. All in good time.’ They were sitting on the edge of the narrow bed and now Mary rose to her feet saying, ‘Look, you stay here an’ I’ll go an’ see if there’s a bite of somethin’ in the mess room an’ bring it along, all right? No matter if you can’t eat it, it’ll keep till later. Some cake or somethin’.’
Connie nodded. She didn’t want anything, but Mary was trying to be kind and she appreciated the other girl’s concern.
Once she was alone again she rose slowly and walked across to the window, pulling up the paper blind and gazing out on to the brick wall in front of her. This room was now all the home she had. She shivered, turning and surveying the dingy surroundings with new eyes. But it wasn’t always going to be like this – by all that was holy it wasn’t. She was going to make something of herself – for her mam, her granny, and for Larry.
Oh, oh . . . Larry
. She was the only one left now, but the Stewarts weren’t going to have the satisfaction of winning, of destroying them all.
When they had crippled her Uncle Jacob that night it had started something, she couldn’t explain it, but things had never been right since. All the bad things that had happened had their roots in that night, in that family.
But she would see her day with them.
She nodded to herself, the autocratic figure of Edith Stewart standing militantly outside the big house in Ryhope Road clear in her mind. And the leader of the brothers, John Stewart, he was horrible, but she would show him too. Aye, she would. She wasn’t going to let them beat her.
And the young lad, Dan? Immediately the thought came she pushed it away, angry that it had intruded this day of all days. But ever since he had rescued her from the snow she had found it difficult to banish his image from her mind, and it intruded at the oddest moments. He had helped them that day, given them food and logs and such, and paid for the doctor, but then all their trouble had been caused by his brothers so he should have, shouldn’t he? Connie couldn’t quite justify this conclusion and she brushed the confusion it brought to one side. He was a Stewart. And she hated
all
the Stewarts. End of story.
The tide of hate rose in her throat, seeming to choke her, and then she glanced down at the tatty piece of rag still clutched tight in her hand.
They were gone and nothing could bring them back.
She sank down on to the bed, the pain of her loss swamping her afresh and bringing a desolation so great it made her gasp at the air as though she were drowning.
Part Three
1913
New Beginnings
Chapter Ten
Connie had blossomed into a full-grown woman of unusual beauty in the last eight years, and as her grandmother had suspected many years before, her loveliness had even eclipsed that of her mother. At twenty years of age, she carried her five-foot five-inches very straight, and wore her thick, golden-blonde hair, which reached to her tiny waist when loose, high on the top of her head in a shining coil which made her appear taller than she really was. Her skin had the smoothness of warm cream, her lips were red and finely shaped, and her eyebrows curved naturally above the eye sockets and were of a delicate light brown. But it was her eyes – the deep blue of a violet shade and heavily fringed by brown lashes – that people really found arresting. They had just missed being too big for her face, although they still dominated it, and their liquid appeal was riveting.
But most of all Connie was determined and intelligent, two things which had proved – and were continuing to prove – a mixed blessing in the narrow confines in which she found herself living. The desire for knowledge which Sadie’s sacrifice in sending her daughter to school had engendered, had been satisfied in part over the years. But only in part. Connie was a frequent visitor to the library in the Extension Park just off Borough Road, at the rear of which was a large conservatory called the Winter Garden which housed tropical plants, cages of foreign birds and a pond well stocked with goldfish.
Until a couple of years ago she had had to consult a list to see which books were available for borrowing, but then ‘open access’ to the shelves commenced for Sunderland’s working class and she liked nothing better than to browse amongst the thousands of books and choose her quota, which would be eagerly devoured in the privacy of her little room at the workhouse, much to Mary’s frustration as she hadn’t the slightest inclination towards books or learning. Mary couldn’t understand Connie’s interest in current affairs either, or why her friend spent precious pennies each week on such boring items as newspapers when she could have spent them on little luxuries. And Connie’s avid following of the fortunes of the suffragette movement was quite beyond Mary.
This last passion of Connie’s had come into being not long after Larry and her grandmother had died. In the midst of those caustic days she had come across an old newspaper and read, for the first time, about the militant battles in the war to get women the vote. The article had stated that the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell, had advised a deputation of the Women’s Suffrage Societies that, ‘It is more likely you will succeed if you wait rather than act now in a pugnacious spirit’, to which a Miss Annie Kenney, wearing the stamp of working-class clogs and shawl and standing on a chair, had retorted, ‘We are not satisfied!’. She’d said that to the Prime Minister! Connie had been intrigued, especially when she’d read that on that same day the women’s leader, an Emmeline Pankhurst, had addressed a 6,000 strong crowd in Trafalgar Square and stated, ‘We have been patient too long. We will be patient no longer.’ It was fighting talk, and it touched something deep in Connie’s angry, troubled heart.
During the next few years Connie had been horrified when she’d read of the brutal force-feeding of the suffragettes in the prisons, and the way they were treated by those in authority, but it was in 1910, when the fight for the vote for women came to Sunderland, that Connie and many others realised the sheer animosity of those who were against giving women their rights. On the 14th of February of that year three women were addressing a crowd at the comer of John Street and High Street West and were being continually heckled by men in the assembly. When things began to get out of hand the suffragettes were chased by a mob, one escaping into the High Street whilst the other two took refuge in the Arcade at Broadbent’s Oyster Saloon. By this time the crowd had swelled to over 2,000, and although the women made their getaway at the St Thomas end of the Arcade they were badly shaken, and continued to suffer abuse and taunts from the mob before effecting their escape down Frederick Street.
It was a nasty incident, but far from intimidating Connie and other sympathisers when they read about it in the local paper the next day, it made them all the more passionate about the moral justice of the women’s cause.
Even Mary was impressed when in June of the following year 60,000 women from all walks of life and all classes – factory girls and aristocrats, actresses and university graduates – marched through the streets of London in a five-mile-long procession dressed as Boadicea, Joan of Arc and other courageous women. And when Emmeline Pankhurst visited the Sunderland branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union for a meeting in the Victoria Hall in February, 1912, she accompanied Connie to hear Mrs Pankhurst appealing to the women of Sunderland to help the suffrage campaign, although most of the arguments went right over her head.
All she had to remember, Connie would explain patiently, was that with the vote women everywhere could start making a difference and the Government knew that and that’s why they were afraid of the challenge. The awful riots in London, when thousands of pounds’ worth of damage occurred in the East End and the windows of No. 10 Downing Street were shattered, would never have happened if the Movement hadn’t been driven to such extreme action by the Government not only refusing the demands of women but taunting them with the accusation of not expressing themselves forcibly enough.
Why not women solicitors and managing directors and members of parliament? Why not a woman prime minister one day?
‘A woman prime minister?’ Mary’s voice had been high when Connie had voiced that one. ‘Never, lass. Never. The men’d never allow it.’
‘Then women will have to make them,’ Connie had answered with a twinkle in her eye, which had faded somewhat as she’d continued, ‘Look at it like this, Mary. Can you see a woman prime minister refusing to accept the miners’ unions’ demands for a minimum of five shillings a day for men and two shillings for lads?
Two shillings
for young lads working in lethal gases and floods and fire in the pits. And would a woman send in the cavalry against men, women and children supporting striking miners like they did in Wales? And what about female shop assistants working ninety hours a week for a pittance, and all the women who bring bairns into the world in conditions that aren’t fit for animals? Look at how your own mam and da are forced to live.’
‘It’s a man’s world,’ Mary would answer stolidly. ‘It always has been. It’s not right, but there it is.’
‘Then women’ll have to change it, won’t they.’
Normally at this point in the proceedings Mary would nod thoughtfully, her eyes half closed as she said, ‘Aye, you’re right, you are that,’ and then follow almost immediately with, ‘Right, lass, you comin’ to the Palace the night?’ or something similar. And Connie would catch her friend’s eye, and the two of them would laugh and escape into the world outside the harsh walls of the workhouse for an hour or two.
But Connie wasn’t laughing tonight, and neither was Mary. It was a Sunday, and the February day had been raw with a cruel cutting wind and frequent snow showers, but in spite of the freezing conditions Connie had waited around for nearly an hour after the last mass for Father Hedley that morning. She had wanted everyone to leave, she needed to have the Father all to herself, and not for a rushed confession either. No, she had needed to talk to him. Really talk to him. And it had been an angry and bitter young woman who had poured out her heart to the old priest once they were alone in the vestry.
‘It’s not fair, Father, it’s not. I’ve proved myself there over the last eight years, you know that as well as I do, and at twenty-two-well, they think I’m twenty-two anyway-I’m more than old enough to start training as a nurse. I don’t want to stay in the laundry’ -here Connie dismissed the back-breaking hours she had worked to claw herself up from laundry checker to second assistant laundress, and finally to assistant head laundress -‘any more, I don’t. I want. . . oh, something more.’
‘Are you sure of what you heard, Connie? You couldn’t have been mistaken?’
‘I’m sure.’ It was said with a great deal of asperity. ‘They didn’t know I was there of course, Mrs Wright and the matron, but the door was slightly ajar and because I heard my name mentioned I didn’t knock straightaway when I was delivering the time sheets. They said –’ Connie swallowed hard, the conversation she had overheard still like an open wound. ‘The matron remarked it was a shame about the Bell girl and that she didn’t doubt I would be a good nurse, but of course the idea was quite out of the question in view of my “unfortunate” background. There . . . there was no possibility of them recommending my application to train as a nurse when my mother had been known to the police as a woman of ill repute. That’s what they said.’
Father Hedley nodded slowly. This had cut deep and he was aware that the anger was covering a whole host of emotions Connie had battled with during the years. He had watched her fight back against circumstances which would have crushed many others, and not only fight but gain ground. Her efforts to improve her mind had not been without success; she was now an articulate and well-versed young woman and he knew she had read widely of the classics as well as modem literature. Nevertheless . . . The old priest sighed inwardly. Society was narrow-minded, especially where a young and beautiful woman was concerned. She would be termed an upstart by her peers and possibly a threat to those in authority above her. This latest development surprised him not at all.
However, it wouldn’t help Connie to speak his thoughts out loud, and what he did say, as he gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder, was, ‘When the good Lord closes one door He invariably opens another, child. Life has taught me that if nothing else. But sometimes it’s necessary to push with both hands. You understand me?’
And she had nodded, biting her lip in much the same way she was doing now as she finished telling Mary what had transpired.
‘They’re barmy, the matron an’ Mrs Wright. Clean barmy. You’d make a canny nurse, lass, an’ I’m not just sayin’ that,’ Mary declared stoutly.
‘Maybe.’ Connie looked back into the plain, bespectacled face in front of her and even managed a small smile as she said, ‘But it’s not going to happen, Mary, and I’m not going to waste time crying over spilt milk, neither am I going to apologise for my mother to anyone. She was a good mam and she did what she thought she had to do. I’m not going to have anyone sitting in judgement on her and then give them the opportunity to tell me about it.’
Mary stared at her. ‘What are you goin’ to do, lass?’ she asked anxiously. She had been frightened she’d lose Connie when her friend had told her she was putting in the application to train as a nurse, but she was even more perturbed now. She had never thought she’d have a friend like Connie – she was more than a pal, even more than a sister, in spite of them being so different. Mary knew she wasn’t half as bright but that didn’t matter, not a jot, because Connie didn’t care – Connie didn’t judge people like that.