Shelter from the Storm (2 page)

When Joe Forster went to church on Sundays he had to walk past his mother’s grave. His father had had her buried as near to the church door as he could, as if he needed to keep an eye on her even though she was dead. Joe didn’t remember her. His father never spoke her name, and where he had heard that she had run off with another man and then died and been brought back he was not sure; it was just that he had always known it. Joe did not blame her for running away; he did not understand why anybody would stay here who could leave.

He went to church every Sunday, partly because it was one of the places he was allowed to go without his father and partly to admire Esther Margaret Hunter, who was the prettiest girl in the village. It was Palm Sunday, a fine cold spring day, and the church was packed. People nodded and murmured respectfully at Joe because his father owned the Black Prince Pit where many of them worked, but he also felt, he hoped, that they liked him. They didn’t like his father, and Joe could understand that.

He didn’t hear much of what went on. He sat two rows behind Esther Margaret and watched her as often as he thought no one noticed, but it was difficult and he didn’t want to be obvious. He sang the hymns readily enough, because having always gone to church he knew them, but he didn’t listen much to the rest of the service, just followed other people, kneeling and
getting up and standing and so on, but all the time he looked at Esther Margaret. She was sixteen.

After the service Joe shook hands with the vicar and then, while people stood around in groups, he made his way across to where she stood with her parents and said hello. Both Mr and Mrs Hunter spoke to him and Esther Margaret blushed beetroot because she was shy, but she smiled too and her eyes lit up for him and all the happiness that Joe was capable of made its way into his head until he was almost dizzy. He didn’t need to touch her, he didn’t need her to say anything, all he needed was for her to stand there blushing and smiling and being herself.

‘Well, now, Mr Forster, and how is your father?’ Mrs Hunter could put a great deal of venom into her words, Joe decided. He had talked to Esther Margaret every Sunday for three weeks, just a few words, nothing special, but it was the highlight of his week. For two weeks her parents had tolerated it without saying much, but he could see by the closed expression on Mr Hunter’s face and the way that Mrs Hunter spoke that they did not favour him.

‘He’s very well, thank you.’

‘I’m very glad to hear it. We mustn’t stand here in the cold. Our dinner will be ready. Come along, Esther Margaret.’

Her mother bore her away. All Joe had said was how was she and had she done anything exciting that week and she had just smiled idiotically at him and said she was fine and no, nothing exciting had happened. He could believe that, with parents like hers. He felt silly standing around, watching as they walked off, so he went home, down the church lane to the main road and up Dans Castle bank and around the corner by the Catholic church and on to the fell beyond the Black Prince Pit with its own row of houses. Up here the air was so clean it made him feel even more dizzy. Esther Margaret liked him, he could feel that she did, and all the way home he devised ways of rescuing them both from this dull little pit town and running away to some glorious place where pit wheels didn’t turn and he was out of reach of his father, somewhere he could make a living for them and they
could have their own house and children. Their children would have two parents and a cosy home and all the things he had not had, and he would love Esther Margaret all his life. He thought it would be somewhere like Durham. He would be a professor at the university and they would live in one of those houses that surrounded Palace Green, old houses with stone-mullioned windows and wooden ceilings and oak-panelled rooms, and there would be fires and books and big dinners and nobody would get drunk and shout and there would be no silences.

He slowed his steps as he reached his home. It stood upon the fell where the keen spring wind was enough to cut your ears. He looked across at the house. Up here was nothing but the heather and a narrow road and the fell which stretched as far as you could see. There were no trees. The only life was the thick-fleeced sheep and the odd grouse and the stone walls that separated the farms which rose up from the Deerness valley.

The house was as unloved as any person. Its windows were splintered, the panes were cracked, the front door was shabby and there was no garden, just great stretches of grass which reached to the front door. The inside was not much better. As he went in, his father’s servant, Jacob Smith, scowled at him. Jacob was the only servant in the house. He had always been there, saw to everything, which meant, as far as Joe could see, that he saw to nothing. The house was thick with dust, the furniture was old and scarred, the meals … His father didn’t eat, he drank so he considered food unimportant, but Joe understood from the few times he had eaten in other people’s houses, unbeknown to his father, who wouldn’t go out, that things could be better. There could be comfortable chairs and interesting food, instead of which the house, with the exception of the study, was always cold, and bitterly so in this weather, the covers on the bed were grey with dirt, and there was no such thing as new clothes. In the kitchen a fire burned for cooking and hot water. The only other fire was in the study, where his father spent all his time when he was not at work. Sometimes he slept in there by the dying embers.

‘Your dinner’s in the kitchen,’ Jacob said shortly as he disappeared into the dark depths of the house. Joe went through and discovered on the table something he didn’t recognise, brown meat and brown gravy and a sludge of potatoes. He ate it because he was hungry and because there was nothing else and because he was used to it, but it didn’t stop him from thinking that it could have been much better. Afterwards he escaped to his room and lay there on the bed with a book and the covers around him. After a short while he could hear his father shouting his name from below, so he left the small warmth that he had made on the bed and put down his book and went downstairs.

His father was always dressed as though he was going outside, which, since he didn’t go out unless he was going to the pit, seemed odd. He wore boots and a coat although the room was warm. Joe looked at the huge fire in the grate and thought that as pit-owners they could have had blazing fires in every room. It was just that his father didn’t think about other people. He didn’t look round from where he had one booted foot on the hearth.

‘So, how was church?’

He managed to make it sound as though Joe had spent a morning in debauchery. His voice was low and mocking and perhaps even admiring that Joe could be interested in such a stupid thing. His father hadn’t brought him down here to listen to a short recital of the sermon or a list of who had been there so Joe didn’t answer him. He waited.

‘I hear you’ve taken an interest in some village lass.’

Joe still said nothing, but this was a surprise. His father turned and Joe looked into his dark face and was reminded for the millionth time that his fair looks and his clear pale skin must have come from his mother. He was aware also when his father looked on him that he was reminded of betrayal, unfaithfulness, the woman who had run away with some common man; he thought it had been a soldier.

‘I spoke to her,’ Joe said.

‘Oh, you spoke to her.’

He hated the heavy sarcasm in his father’s voice. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘And is she bonny?’

‘She’s very pretty, yes.’

‘You think maybe that you’ll marry her?’

‘I don’t think I’ll marry anybody yet. I want to go to university and—’

His father laughed. ‘But you like her. You like the shopkeeper’s daughter?’

‘Yes, I like her.’

Joe went on looking into his eyes. He had practised until he could do so for a long time without faltering.

‘Shopkeepers’ daughters are not for you. Don’t speak to her again. And as for university … we’re pitmen. The world is our university, the pit office is your classroom.’ He went on and on. He was drunk, of course; he always went on and on in mocking tones when he got drunk at Sunday dinner-time. Joe was used to that too. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find somebody for you to marry and she won’t be any village lass neither.’

Joe wanted to say that he had to go to university, that he had to go somewhere new, he needed to leave here, he wanted to meet men with interesting minds and talk about books, he wanted to see some other parts of the world. He lay in bed at night and wondered what it was like. He wanted to run and run, to go so far away that he could not find his way back, so that the house would fall out of sight and the village would be lost and Durham would be nothing but a memory.

‘Where were you?’

‘What?’

‘When I called you. Were you upstairs? Reading a book, no doubt. An improving book, was it? You can get back to it now.’

Dismissed, Joe went.

*

Esther Margaret lived on the corner of Ironworks Road and Oaks Row in the centre of the pit village. She was very fond of her house; it had a little garden along the side, wrought-iron railings with a gate and two steps down. To the side there was a small lawn and a few flowers and in the corner was a lilac tree. At the other side of the gate was another patch of ground, which became a yard outside the kitchen window, and at the bottom was a wash house and inside you turned left into the kitchen or right up two steps into the rest of the house. The kitchen was big with a pantry on the end, and if you went farther into the house the hall ended with a stained-glass inner door and a big solid outer door, and there was the dining room where a bright fire always burned except in the warmest weather and the sitting room where a fire also burned and there were lots of books and two big squashy settees and the windows looked out over both roads, and she loved it. She had a big bedroom to herself and there was also her parents’ room and another room. Her parents had lots of friends, mostly from the church but also other shopkeepers and small businesspeople within the village. Her mother ran a sewing circle at the house and helped with various things at the church and her father took her for walks on summer nights and they sat by the fire in the winter and read stories and chatted to their friends.

She liked Sundays. Peggy, who helped her mother in the house, was busy while they were at church, making the Sunday dinner, and the smell hit you when you walked in by the back door. There was nothing in the world as wonderful as the smell of Yorkshire puddings and beef and vegetables. Peggy’s Yorkshire puddings were like gold and brown clouds. They did not sink in the middle as Esther Margaret’s mother claimed hers did. The vegetables were just right and the gravy was neither too thick nor too thin.

Today when she got home Esther Margaret felt as though she were on some kind of cloud. Joe Forster had spoken to her, and although she had felt awkward and could not look at him she
was pleased. Joe was two years older than she, and she thought he was every girl’s idea of what a young man should be. He was tall and slender and he had yellow hair and eyes like emeralds, eyes which had been gentle on her that day. The dinner would not be ready for half an hour and in that half-hour, while her parents sat by the fire with a small sherry each, she wanted to go to her room and dream about Joe.

‘Esther Margaret, I want to talk to you.’ Her mother’s voice interrupted her thoughts. Her mother was brown-haired, blue-eyed, neat and always did the right thing. Her father said so. When he was cross once he told her mother that it was very difficult living with somebody who was always right, and her mother laughed and he wasn’t cross any more.

To me?’ She blushed, banishing her thoughts, and followed her mother into the sitting room, where the fire licked around the coals. Her father wasn’t there. Her mother closed the door. She didn’t say anything for a few moments, as though she wasn’t quite sure what to say.

‘I know that you’re very young and …’ Her mother’s eyes flew to her face. ‘Joseph Forster is the pit-owner’s son.’

That conveyed all it was meant to convey, Esther Margaret knew, even though it was not new information. She blushed harder and looked down.

‘Does that mean there’s something wrong with him?’ she managed.

‘There is nothing wrong with him that I have ever heard. I’m sure that he is a very fine young man but …’

Esther Margaret knew exactly what she meant. His father was a drunkard who neglected his pit and his workers, and his mother had run off with someone else because she could not control her desires.

‘What people come from, their background, their parents and their upbringing, is an important part of them. Loving someone carries a great deal of responsibility, which is why we must choose our partners very carefully. A mistake like that is for life.’

‘He does seem to like me.’

That’s why I had to say something.’

‘You think he does like me?’

‘You’re very pretty.’

Her mother had always told her that being pretty was a gift from God, and that how you acted towards other people was very much more important.

‘And he is a very attractive young man, but he must be flawed, I think, having been brought up as he has been—’

‘It isn’t fair that you should judge him! You don’t know him.’

It made her feel closer to Joe, defending him like this, though her common sense told her that her mother was probably quite right, just as she always was.

‘No, I don’t, but I know of his family, and he has nothing to recommend him beyond his looks, which he gets from his mother, and she was a very weak, depraved person. His father …’ She shuddered. ‘They don’t live a godly life, anything but. How can a young man like that have any values? You must not think of him any more.’

Her mother kissed her and then went into the kitchen, even though Peggy could manage and did so every Sunday without her mother’s help. Esther Margaret ran upstairs to her bedroom. It was a big room and held all her most precious possessions, and it had the best view in the house. It looked out across the valley into Weardale and from it you could see the tiny grey stone farms and the moors before they fell away and became fields. It faced west, and in the evenings the sun shone red and blinding gold before it sank spectacularly into the earth. When she had been a little girl the round orange ball of fire had fascinated her. It hadn’t changed and she hadn’t changed; she still loved it. The problem was that she didn’t know whether she had sufficient regard for Joe Forster to defy the parents she loved so much. She didn’t want to upset them and her mother was right; Joe had nothing to recommend him but looks and a pit that was doing badly. He was probably not what he seemed; she didn’t know. It
was difficult to accept that older people knew better just because they were older and had more experience. She cried a few tears and then dried them with the corner of her handkerchief and went downstairs for the meal, smiling bravely as she walked into the dining room. Her father looked up and smiled at her and so did her mother. She could not help but think about Joe, in spite of what her mother said, but she knew that it must go no farther than that.