The evening was oppressive; the whole month had been a stormy one, and Luke could feel the weather pressing against his eyeballs as his head pounded. There were numerous bairns playing their games on the pavements and in the gutters, some of them barefoot and most none too clean as they threw their pebbles or bits of coloured glass for hopscotch or careered madly round in the air hanging on to a piece of rope one of them had tied from the iron arm of a lamppost.
The occasional open door omitted strong smells of cabbage and other unsavoury odours as Luke walked by, and on one doorstep a girl was busy fixing her younger sister’s hair into tight rag corkscrews to the accompaniment of vigorous protest from the infant in question.
It was just after he saw one little mite – who couldn’t have been older than six or seven – staggering along under the weight of one of the stoneware jars known as a grey hen that Luke decided to make his way to Carley Road. The jars carried up to a gallon of liquid when full, and it looked like the local beer shop had filled this particular one to the brim from the crablike walk the child had been forced to adopt under its weight. The little girl had just reached a doorway in front of Luke when a blowsy, dirty woman appeared on the threshold. She grabbed the child by the ear, making her squeal, and lugged her into the house, crying, ‘’Bout time an’ all! Your da’s bin callin’ for this for half an hour an’ more. You’ll feel the side of his hand the night, Tess me girl.’
Poor little devil. Luke had stopped, he couldn’t help himself, and as the woman went to close the door she noticed him looking at her, and read the condemnation written all over his face. Their glance held for a moment, and then she looked swiftly up and down the street before tossing her head and stepping backwards into the filthy interior, banging the door shut behind her.
By, in spite of everything he had a lot to be thankful for. His family life might never have been much to write home about, but at least it had been devoid of the shame and humiliation some of these bairns suffered. What was it David Lloyd George had said recently during some address or other? Oh, aye, he had it now. ‘Britain is the richest country under the sun, yet it has ten million workmen living in conditions of chronic destitution.’ Well, there weren’t many of Sunderland’s poor that would argue with that, Luke thought bitterly. It was the next bit of the speech, ‘The imprudent habits of gambling and drink cause sixty per cent of the poverty’, that had caught him and others on the raw. ‘Drink is the most urgent problem of the hour for our rulers to grapple with,’ Lloyd George had continued. Luke had actually laughed out loud when he had read that. Drink was the most urgent problem? What about the hopelessness and desperation caused by families of fifteen and more being packed into two rooms along with an army of rats and bugs and cockroaches? Why did the powers that be think men and women drank themselves silly anyway, if not to escape their miserable lot? But it was the bairns, like that little Tess back there, who were the real victims. She’d be lucky to survive to adulthood.
The name stayed with him and brought his father into his mind, and he turned left at the corner of Bond Street into Wallace Street, before cutting through at the back of the vicarage of St Columba’s Church, off Swan Street. He skirted round the side of the Cornhill glassworks into the street where his father’s woman had lived before the pair of them had left town, and then stood aimlessly for a moment or two as he looked up and down Carley Road. Tess’s next-door neighbour’s husband, Bert, had taken him aside at the pit a couple of weeks after his father had left and muttered that Tess had got word to Joan that they were all right and could his wife let Nat’s lads know, but it had been evident that Bert had been uncomfortable in the role of go-between and Luke hadn’t mentioned his father to Bert since. But now, suddenly, the need to hear if they knew any more was strong.
He thrust his hands into his pockets as he considered whether he should go the next step and make enquiries as to which house was Bert’s, but before he could come to a decision he heard his name called by a familiar voice. Stifling a groan, he turned, his eyes alighting on Katy Chapman and another young lass who were coming towards him, their arms entwined and their faces bright. ‘Look who it isn’t.’ Katy dimpled at him as she got closer, and Luke reflected, and not for the first time, that she was a bonny lass, with her fair fluffy hair and dark eyes. But forward. Definitely forward.
‘Hello, Katy.’
‘Hello yourself.’
Luke sighed inwardly. Katy’s manner was coy, it was always that way around him. The Chapmans lived next door but one in Southwick Road, and Katy was a few months older than Polly, but it could have been a few years older, such was the knowledge shining out of her big brown eyes. And then he checked the thought sharply. It wasn’t Katy who had just got engaged to a man old enough to be her father, and a wealthy man to boot. The censure was savage and sharp, and he acknowledged that he hadn’t realised until that very moment how bitterly disappointed he was in Polly, or how Arnold’s words had struck home. If she had really loved Michael she wouldn’t be marrying Frederick a few months later; she didn’t have to do that. If they were finding it difficult to cope with Henry gone and Walter laid up, they had only to sell up and move into town – they’d get a fair bit for the farm as it stood. But Polly liked farm life. Luke’s eyes narrowed. And she obviously liked Frederick – enough to agree to share the marriage bed with him. His guts twisted and tightened and it was a second or two before he realised that Katy had been talking and he hadn’t heard a word.
‘I’m sorry?’ His eyes focused on the pretty pert face in front of him, which was looking distinctly put out.
‘I asked how your mam was.’ Eva was always referred to as such by their neighbours and friends.
‘Not too good.’
Katy stared at him for a moment, then bit on her lip, her face straight as she said, ‘Me an’ Gert are going to the Picture Hall.’
It was both an invitation and a question, and Luke replied to both as he said, ‘I’m on my way to see a friend of me da’s. He lives round here.’
Katy paused for a moment. She was glad he wasn’t going to meet a lass, but she’d spoken to Luke Blackett umpteen times in the last twelve months or so and he had never followed up. Why was it you only had to look at some lads for them to take liberties, and others – or more especially Luke – didn’t seem to cotton on? She wetted her full red lips and fluttered her eyelashes a little as she adjusted her brown felt hat more securely on her curls, before saying, ‘You ever been to the Picture Hall, Luke?’
She was a brazen little piece. Luke hid a smile as he looked more closely into the big brown eyes set in skin that resembled thick, warm cream. But she certainly had something. Nevertheless, the thought of accompanying Katy and her friend to Sunderland’s first permanent cinema – opened four months previously at the north end of the bridge in Bonnersfield, and billed as ‘the Premier Picture Hall in the North of England’ by its owner, George Black – was like a betrayal to Polly. ‘No.’ It was succinct, but he softened his abruptness with a smile – he found Katy’s boldness amusing in spite of himself.
‘No?’ Katy’s eyes widened as she pouted prettily. ‘Oh, me an’ Gert are always going, aren’t we, Gert?’ Gert – a plain, tall and painfully thin girl who had been chosen to be Katy’s best friend for those attributes alone – nodded quickly. ‘We’ve seen
An Irish Eviction
an’
A Moonlight Dream
an’
Oliver Twist
an’— Oh, loads. You ought to go, it’s packed every night. ‘Course, the seats are a bit hard with them bein’ old chapel pews, but we don’t mind that. It’s
The Game at Athens
on tonight, an’ it’s only tuppence in the pit. You’d love it, Luke. Wouldn’t he, Gert?’
Gert nodded again. She hoped Luke wouldn’t come. She was fed up with waiting about on street corners after evenings such as these when Katy disappeared down an alley or one of the back streets with a lad for a while. Katy’s mam would kill her if she got the wind of half of what she was up to.
‘And you really think I’d enjoy
The Game at Athens
?’ Luke was laughing openly now; Katy’s blatant flirtatiousness was a balm to his sore heart. Here was one lass who wasn’t averse to being seen with him, he told himself, as he ruthlessly pushed the mental image of a sweet, blue-eyed face topped by a mass of burnished curls out of his mind. Polly had chosen her path, her letter had made that abundantly clear, and it was about time he did something other than working down the pit and returning home to those four walls and his stepmother and Arnold. He’d had a bellyful the night, he had straight. A little diversion would keep him sane.
‘Aye, ‘course you would.’ Katy had picked up the different note in his voice and she sensed victory. ‘You can give it a try anyways. There’s no knowin’ what you’ll like until you give it a try, is there?’ The innuendo was blatant, and Luke would have found it shocking in any other girl, but spoken as it was in a laughing gurgle he found himself chuckling again. And when Katy linked her arm through his – indicating for Gert to do the same – he made no protest.
As they made their way to the Picture Hall, Katy was animated. She might not get a chance like this again; she had to get him sufficiently interested so he would want to see her again, she told herself silently. She was on the verge of getting something of a name for herself – she knew that well enough without Gert going on about it all the time – and she needed the respectability of a steady beau, although there hadn’t been anyone up to this point she had really wanted. But she wanted Luke Blackett, she had always wanted him, although up to now he hadn’t looked the side she was on.
But she had to be careful. Luke wasn’t like Edward Thornhill or Archy Stamp, interested in one thing and one thing only. He was different. She glanced at him under her eyelashes and her heart gave a little jump. She would have to play it cautiously with Luke, but it’d be worth it. Oh, aye, it would be worth it all right if she could bring him up to scratch.
Luke paid for both the girls at the pay-box, and as they took their seats on the wooden pews facing the large white sheet hanging at the front of the hall, he was already regretting the position he had put himself in. What was he doing here? he asked himself as the hand-cranked kinematograph started the programme rolling and Katy giggled at something Gert said. Katy was old Stan’s daughter, and Luke had worked on Stan’s shift until recently, when the veteran miner had had one accident too many and injured his back. Now Stan was on top in the line of young lads, old men and miners such as himself who were crippled who worked the huge, slow-moving conveyor belts carrying the coal and stones from the tubs that came up the pit shaft. Sorting the coal wasn’t hard work but it certainly didn’t require any brains, and old hands like Stan found it hard to be relegated to the ‘screens’. Luke had liked Stan – he liked him still – and he couldn’t mess about with his daughter. Besides which – and here Luke grimaced to himself in the darkness – Katy had five brawny older brothers who also worked down the pit and were handy with their fists and feet.
‘What do you think? You like it then?’ Katy leaned towards him slightly as she spoke. She had taken her hat off once they were seated, and now wispy tendrils of her hair, which was very fair and curly and had escaped the shining coil at the nape of her neck, brushed his cheek.
‘Give him a chance.’ Gert, seated on Katy’s other side, spoke before Luke could answer, and it was as though she had said something very witty as the two girls giggled together.
By, the sooner he was out of this lot the better. Luke shifted uneasily on the wooden bench and then stopped abruptly as his thigh touched Katy’s, and he was glad of the cover of darkness as he felt his face begin to burn. Still, there were two of them, that was one good thing. It didn’t look so bad with there being the two of them.
Katy made sure there weren’t two of them later that night. Considering the Chapmans only lived a door or two away, Luke found he couldn’t argue with Katy’s suggestion that they see Gert home to Lower Dundas Street on their way to Southwick Road, and when they left the other girl and Katy put her arm through this – ostensibly because of the greasy pavements, which were wet and slippy after another downfall – it seemed crass and churlish to object.
He could feel the rounded curves of her body against his as they walked, and he began to sweat a little, his eyelids blinking rapidly as his body hardened in answer to the subtle stimulus in spite of himself. The smell of her was in his nostrils, and it was faintly cloying but not unpleasant. He realised, with another little shock, that she must be wearing perfume. He had never been close to a woman who was wearing perfume – most lasses didn’t have the money for such indulgences – but then he remembered Stan had been full of the fact that Katy had been taken on at Binns on the west side of Fawcett Street some months earlier, in their ladies’ department, so likely that was where it had come from. Whatever, it was nice. More lasses should wear it. He was sweating more now, and he would have liked to adjust the bulge in his trousers, but that was out of the question.
‘You haven’t got a lass, have you, Luke?’
They had just reached Thomas Street North, and Katy was smiling up at him, her pretty face innocently enquiring as her thick eyelashes fluttered. Luke swallowed, stretching his chin out of his collar as he said, ‘No, no, I haven’t.’
‘I haven’t got a lad.’ She still had her face upturned, and he swallowed again before he said gallantly, ‘I can hardly believe that.’
‘It’s true. I’ve had offers, lots of ’em, but I wanted to wait until I met someone I really liked. You know what I mean?’