It had been eight years ago when his mother had made the decision that their social standing now made it desirable for Kitty to be so attired, but he could recall the announcement as though it were yesterday, and the squall that had followed which had rocked the household for days. But there had only ever been one possible outcome, and so Kitty had consented – albeit grimly – to the uniform, balking only at the starched cap with the long ribbons that tied under her chin. ‘I won’t be looking like a badly made Christmas cake that needs covering up for no one, now I do put me foot down about that.’ And so, with his father acting as gentle arbitrator, an uneasy peace had fallen again.
‘Kitty. . .’ Dan shook his head at the big Irishwoman who, if the truth be known, had a bigger place in his heart than the woman who had given birth to him. ‘I really don’t think I can face going in there this morning.’
‘You’d be surprised what you can do if you need to, lad.’
No he wouldn’t. Not any more he wouldn’t. ‘I’ll make it right tonight, bring her a bunch of flowers or something.’
‘Do it for me then. You know what she can be like, she’ll make me life hell all day. And she loves you, lad. Whatever else, she does love you.’
He knew that. His mother’s love had always been like a thick blanket, suffocating him, weighing him down and filling him with enormous guilt because he had known, right from a bairn, that he couldn’t reciprocate the feeling. She didn’t give a fig about the others, not deep down. Oh, she went through the motions, made the appropriate noises and so on, but they all knew it was as though she had only had the one child. Art, he knew, felt sorry for him; perhaps Mavis did too as she’d had her share of being smothered, although in a different way. The twins had each other and didn’t care much about anyone else, but it was John who bitterly resented the favouritism. John, who was so like their mother and so ached for her approval.
The thought of his brother brought Dan’s mouth into a hard line and he said, opening the front door as he did so, ‘I’ll talk to her tonight, Kitty. I’m sorry.’
‘All right, lad. All right.’
His father’s funeral the day before had been a nightmare, and the empty places belonging to Jacob and Mavis a constant reproach, but it wasn’t that, or the harsh words he and his mother had exchanged when her calm composure had driven him to voice his disgust at her lack of emotion, which had prevented him from joining his mother and the twins in the breakfast room. He hadn’t wanted to walk to work with Gilbert and Matthew this morning, he had other matters to see to, and Art, bless him, was providing him with the necessary cover by saying he’d sent him to oversee a consignment of marine engine, cylinder and burning oils being given speedy shipment down at the railway, should anyone enquire of his whereabouts.
He hadn’t allowed for this wretched snow though. Nevertheless, in spite of the conditions Dan walked swiftly, almost at a trot, cutting through the Cedars and then across the open ground away from the built-up area of the sprawling outskirts of Bishopwearmouth to avoid seeing anyone he knew. He skirted round the edge of the Old Quarries and into the road bordering Tunstall Hills Farm and then the fields beyond where he found himself wading knee-deep.
He could have missed her. That was the thing that haunted him for days afterwards. As it was he ignored the thin, reedy cry at first, putting it down to the solitary call of a bird if it registered on his consciousness at all. It was only when he had walked some ten yards past the great bank of snow that bordered a dry stone wall that something – a second cry, the disturbance of the smooth, lethal white coverlet behind him – caused him to swing round and retrace his steps.
And then he saw the tip of a small gloved hand sticking out of the pale silver tomb, and the beating of his heart filled his ears. His face blanched, turning as ashen as the beautiful frozen world around him, and he sprang forward, digging at the snow frantically and all the time babbling that it was going to be all right, that he was here now, he was here . . .
When he uncovered the small white face he thought for a moment that she had gone, that he had been seconds too late, but then the eyes opened and two orbs of a startling deep violet-blue stared at him. ‘Me feet are stuck.’
‘What?’
‘I think I’ve slipped in a ditch an’ me feet have gone through the ice an’ they’re stuck in the mud,’ said Connie matter-of-factly.
‘Right.’ He didn’t have time to marvel at her stoicism, that came later, but once he had dug and dug and uncovered most of the small form he found that her feet were indeed stuck fast in the glutinous mud beneath the ice, and that she had sunk to above her calves. It was her instinctive raising of her arms in front of her face that had saved her and formed a pocket between the suffocating white mass and her upper arms, but she was cold, very cold. She wouldn’t have lasted much longer.
Once he had pulled her free and lifted her up into his arms her tininess became all the more poignant, and he found himself raging in his mind against the adults who had allowed so small a child to venture forth in such dire conditions. These people! You wouldn’t send a dog out in this. Something his mother had said recently when she’d been on her high horse with his father came back to him. A family had been begging for bread at the back door, and the mother’s and children’s feet had been bare and bleeding and the lot of them clothed in rags. His father had happened in the kitchen as Kitty had been sending them away with a loaf and some cold brisket and cheese, and he had fetched some old clothes and a couple of pairs of boots that he, Dan, had outgrown, and handed them to the snotty-nosed little urchins. His mother had been furious, absolutely furious, insisting that they would immediately be taken to the pawnbrokers and the money used to buy beer and tobacco for the man and woman.
‘They don’t want to rise above their squalor, that’s what you don’t understand, Henry,’ she had stated coldly. ‘They wallow in it, their hands forever stretched out as they shun honest toil. They don’t think like us.’
It was one of the rare occasions he had heard his father raise his voice to his wife, and in the heated exchange that had followed, when his father had reminded his mother that both he and she had come from working class stock and he – for one – was proud of the fact, Dan’s sympathies had all been with his father and the destitute family, but now he wondered if there hadn’t been a grain of truth in his mother’s declaration.
He glanced down at the child in his arms. ‘Right, we’d better get you back to your mother and get you warm.’
‘I can’t go back home yet, I haven’t bin to the farm.’
The small figure wriggled but the last had been said through fiercely chattering teeth and Dan didn’t relinquish his grip. ‘Nevertheless, home it is.’
‘You put me down, you!’ A small part of Connie’s brain was acknowledging that she wouldn’t have got out of the ditch without this lad helping her, but a larger part was telling her he was one of them – one of them that had caused all the nasty things that had happened – and now her struggles became frantic as she began to beat her small fists against his chest and yell, ‘You! You! It’s all your fault. It is. Me mam’s bad an’ the babby’s dead an’ it’s all your fault.’
By the time Dan got to the cottage he had got the gist of what had happened, but nothing had prepared him for the freezing cheerless interior of the tiny dwelling place, or the sight of that drawer with its pitiful package, and he was to remember the feeling, as though burning coals had been heaped upon his head, for the rest of his life.
Raw emotion was tearing at him as he ran as fast as he could to the farm, thrusting a handful of coins into the farmer’s wife’s hands and telling her to get fuel and food to the cottage while he went for the doctor, and it was still with him in all its searing intensity when he struggled into Bishopwearmouth, his chest on fire from the exertion and the breath rasping in his throat.
No, Doctor Turnbull wasn’t here at present, the small neat maid informed him when he reached the practice in High Street East in the East End. Peggy had been adamant that only Doctor Tumbull would do – she had been treated by his father as a child and later, when the son had inherited the practice, had found him as understanding about such matters as payment by instalment as his predecessor. Some of the more highfalutin of the medical fraternity wouldn’t turn out before you had greased their hand with a half crown, and what good was that when you were faced with an empty purse and a sick child or whatever? Peggy had challenged Dan bitterly.
If the matter was as urgent as it appeared, the maid continued, perhaps the young gentleman would like the address of the patient Doctor Turnbull was attending? It wasn’t too far.
Yes, the young gentleman would like it very much indeed, Dan assured her quickly, and so it was that he found himself running the twenty or thirty yards into Hartley Street and then along into Northumberland Place where he banged at the door of one of the houses.
Dan knew this area; his father’s business stretched from William Street to more warehouses storing heavy goods such as tar, pitch and resin in East Cross Street, while ships’ provisions, consisting of mess beef and pork, together with the overspill of canned and dry goods from the central warehouse in William Street, were catered for in another two-storey warehouse overlooking the river in Sunderland Street, so in spite of living in the seclusion of Ryhope Road he had, to some extent, seen how the other half lived. He and his brothers, without their mother’s knowledge, would oft times escape the house to the old market in the East End of a Saturday night, which would be full of people from the collieries and shipyards round about. Besides all the stalls holding second-hand clothes and such, there were barrels of nuts and raisins sold at ha’penny a bag, sweet stalls, buskers playing accordions, a roundabout – like a fairground – at the top of the market, even boxing most Saturdays.
Dan had always loved the Saturday nights, from drinking at the tap in the centre of the market which had a lead basin and a lead cup attached to it with a very heavy chain, to the walk home when they would spend their last pennies on fish and a halfpennorth of chips, and finish off with a quarter of brazil nut toffee from the large sweet stall at the bottom end of the market. Everyone always seemed happy on Saturday nights and – in a childlike fashion – he had never questioned the poverty that was apparent under the jollity.
But now, as the door was opened by a young child of indeterminate sex who stared at him warily, it was the smell that hit Dan first; the smell of unwashed humanity, of decay and rot and mould and a hundred other things besides, and he found himself wanting to retch.
‘Is –’ He had to take a deep breath and try again. ‘I’ve come for Doctor Turnbull. Is he here?’
‘He’s seein’ to me da, he’s had his leg smashed right bad at the docks the day,’ the child replied without much interest.
‘Can I talk to your mother then?’
‘Me mam’s deliverin’ the washin’ down near Mowbray Park with our Gertie an’ Jimmy.’ The child sniffed wetly, catching a drip from the end of its nose on the back of its hand. ‘You can come in if you want,’ it offered apathetically.
‘Right. . . Thank you.’
Dan found himself stepping into a narrow hall, devoid of wallpaper, where the encrusted floorboards spoke of years of dirt.
‘You want to come in the kitchen?’
‘No, no thank you,’ said Dan hastily. ‘I’ll wait here if I may?’
‘Please yerself.’
It seemed like forever to Dan before Doctor Turnbull emerged from the first door on his right, but within minutes they were back at the surgery and shortly afterwards bowling through the snowy roads in the good doctor’s horse and trap.
The scene which met their eyes at the cottage was fractionally better than earlier in as much as the farmer’s wife had been true to her word and sent a good supply of logs and a sack of coal, along with another sack containing a whole ham, fresh milk, eggs and some other foodstuffs which were spread out on the table by the window. However, in spite of the roaring fire now blazing in the range the two rooms were still cold, and when Doctor Turnbull walked through to the bedroom, after a cursory glance at the drawer, his voice was sharp when he turned to Peggy – ensconced in front of the fire with her shawl pulled tight around her and her arthritis deepening the wrinkles of pain on her face – and said, ‘How long, exactly, has she been like this?’
Peggy shrugged wearily. ‘The bairn gave her a bowl of broth once she’d cleaned her up just gone midnight, but after that. . .’
The doctor glanced at the golden-haired child standing just within the bedroom, her brother perched on her hip, and his voice was tinged with the sense of failure and frustration he always felt in such situations when he said, ‘You looked after your mother, did you? That’s a good girl. You were quite right to give her the broth, she needed something inside her to fight the fever.’
‘Is . . . is me mam goin’a be all right?’
‘Of course she is.’ It was too hearty, and as Doctor Turnbull’s eyes met those of Dan – who was standing by the front door – he swallowed deeply, moderating his tone as he added, ‘But not for a few weeks I’m afraid. Do you think you can take care of her?’