Workhouse Child Page 3

  Lottie said nothing. A deep resentment burned in her chest but she controlled it, for she knew she couldn’t bear to go back to the workhouse and say she had been let go for talking back to the master of the house.

  ‘I said, do you understand?’ Alfred caught hold of her front and raised his hand to her, ready to strike again.

  ‘Aye,’ said Lottie.

  ‘I cannot hear you, what did you say?’

  ‘Aye, I said aye, Mr Green,’ Lottie replied. She burned with a resentment that was stronger than the pain from the blow but she kept her voice controlled and her face expressionless. She had learned to do this over the years in the workhouse when confronted by an unjust authority. But all the time her thoughts were racing. She had to get out of this house. But how could she? There was poor Mrs Green who needed her. And the lads. Young Mattie was not a bad lad, but he was influenced by his older brothers, of course he was. Besides, where would she go? Not back to the workhouse, which she had left with such high hopes. There would be no help for her there.

  ‘If I hear another sound from down here, I’ll take the belt to you,’ Alfred Green said, still in that quiet, menacing voice he was using so as not to disturb his wife. ‘Now, get on with your work.’ He stalked back up the stairs and Lottie watched his braces swinging his shirt tail, which was hanging out of his trousers.

  Lottie turned back to the kitchen and her work. After a while she began to feel a little less despairing and even started to sing as she worked, though very, very quietly. In her young life she had found that despair got her nowhere, she just had to get on with it. But she could dream, couldn’t she? She cleaned the kitchen and washed the passage and sandstoned the front step, working energetically and with a thoroughness that had been drummed into her in the workhouse. But in her thoughts she had escaped into the world of her imagination and there she had gone to a proper school and learned to do things and she had friends like Sister Mitchell and she was making something of herself. Maybe not a Nightingale nurse but something else. Like working in a posh shop up by Castle Chare and all the nobs came in and asked for her to serve them.

  ‘Miss Lonsdale is so good, so knowledgeable about the latest fashions,’ the bishop’s wife said to the manager of the shop, for Lottie had decided it would be a dress shop selling fine silk dresses and bombazines. Lottie wasn’t sure what bombazines were, but she had heard them being admired by two ladies who were looking in the window of a shop in Silver Street. One day she might even become the manageress of the shop, even the owner. And she would take Betty on as an apprentice and they would live together in the rooms above the shop and they would have a red velvet-covered sofa and …

  ‘Afternoon, Lottie, how is my patient?’

  Lottie scrambled to her feet from where she had been kneeling by the front step as she applied the sandstone to the sides. It was Sister Mitchell, back already!

  ‘G-Good day, Sister Mitchell,’ she said, feeling a pang of guilt, for she hadn’t looked in on Laura Green for at least an hour. ‘Em, she is asleep I think.’ She dropped the scouring stone into the bucket and followed the sister indoors, wondering if she should apologize for leaving the step scouring until so late in the day. It was a morning job but the morning had been so busy.

  ‘You see to that, Lottie, I’ll call if I need any help,’ Sister Mitchell said and watched as the diminutive figure in the oversized cap and apron hurried out to the back of the house. Poor Lottie, she thought, the lass reminded her so much of her friend Bertha when she was that age.

  Mrs Green was awake and moaning softly to herself but when she saw the nurse she smiled slightly, a smile that transformed her worn face. ‘Sister,’ she whispered. Was her fever lessening? Or was this just the onset of the crisis?

  Four

  Lottie sat in the flickering light of a candle that stood in a holder on the bedside table. Outside, rain pattered at the windowpane and the wind blew down the chimney, making the small fire in the grate blow out sudden flurries of smoke. Lottie’s head nodded and eventually her chin fell down on her chest as she succumbed to sleep. Her upper body slumped on to the bed and she slept until her usual getting-up time, which was five o’clock.

  Her neck ached when she woke and her eyes felt as though there were cinders in them. It was cold in the room, as there was only a tiny red glow left in one corner of the grate; the rest was grey ashes.

  ‘Mrs Green?’

  Suddenly awake, Lottie jumped to her feet and leaned over the bed. The candle was gutted and only a pale shaft of moonlight came through the thin curtains.

  She touched Laura’s forehead with her fingertips: it was cold. Her temperature had broken, praise be.

  It was only after she had mended the fire with some sticks from an offcut of pit prop and added a few pieces of small coal so that it flared up, crackling, that Lottie turned back to the bed and an awful suspicion entered her head. Mrs Green had not moved, though her eyes were open. Lottie fetched the candle from the kitchen mantelpiece and lit it at the fire and held it to Laura’s face. Laura was gone, passed away, gone to live with the angels. The usual euphemisms raced through Lottie’s head. Sometime during the night, she had died.

  Her husband Alfred was at the pit and the boys were in bed. Only Lottie had stayed up beside her, in case she needed anything during the night; but Lottie had been exhausted by all she had had to do the day before, for it had been washing day. Still, she had sat on a chair by the bed and sponged Laura’s face and hands at intervals. Her skin was hot and dry and Lottie had to be very gentle so as not to hurt her. But Mr Green had given Laura an extra dose of laudanum before going out and she had seemed to be sleeping fairly peacefully.

  Lottie had seen dead people before in the workhouse. She had even helped the old woman who laid them out; had done so since she was eleven. She knew that Laura was dead. But she was only thirteen and she was nervous. She stood by the bed, filled with guilt besides the nervousness. She should have been awake, she knew she should have been awake. Even the paupers usually had someone keeping vigil with them when they died. Poor Mrs Green had had no one.

  ‘God rest you, Mrs Green,’ she whispered. Then she went out of the front door and around to the next door, which stood side by side with the Greens’. There was a faint light in the window and she knocked on the door and Mrs Bowron came.

  ‘I think Mrs Green has passed away,’ Lottie said, her eyes wide, for she could barely see Mrs Bowron’s face in the near dark.

  ‘Eeh, lass, I think she might have been gone for a while,’ said Mrs Bowron when she followed Lottie into the house and laid a hand on Mrs Green’s cold forehead. ‘Get Noah out of bed, now, and send him up to the pithead to tell his da.’

  Lottie hurried to do her bidding, though she paused by the door. ‘I fell asleep,’ she mumbled.

  Mrs Bowron looked at the girl’s white face. Why, she was nobbut a bairn, she thought. ‘It doesn’t matter, she would have gone any road,’ she said, trying to offer some comfort to the girl. ‘Hadaway and get Noah.’

  But Noah sobbed and cried when she told him and the other boys woke and they cried too, all three huddling together and wailing and sobbing. In the end, Lottie had to put on her shawl and run up to the pithead. The only person she could find at that time of the morning was the engine winder and he was busy with the engine, winding up the cage with tubs of coal. The noise was deafening and there was an overall stink of coal dust and sulphur that made Lottie gag. She had to shout to make herself heard.

  ‘Here’s the under manager now,’ he said when at last she succeeded in getting her message across. ‘Tell him.’

  The under manager frowned when he saw her. ‘What’s up, lass?’ he asked. ‘Thou shouldn’t be here.’

  Lottie explained again and he glanced at the clock on the wall of the engine house. ‘Send a message, Potter,’ he said to the engine winder. ‘Best stand outside out of the road,’ he advised Lottie. He didn’t hold with women cluttering up the engine house.

  Po
tter tapped on the iron casing of the engine with a spanner and again a few minutes later, and an answering tap came. Lottie was diverted for a minute, wondering how those few taps had sent the message for the overman. But still, the fact was the engine noise came louder and the overhead wheel began to whirr and the cage came up again, but this time with Mr Green in it. He dipped his head and stepped out into the yard.

  ‘Well? What’s happened?’ He sounded irritable and impatient. Evidently the taps had not told him his wife was dead. Lottie had hoped that they had.

  ‘Mrs Green has gone,’ she said. She began to shiver for it was, after all, a cold October pre-dawn.

  ‘Gone? Gone where?’ Then comprehension dawned and he gazed down at her. His expression didn’t change; it seemed to have frozen on his face. Maybe he didn’t care that his wife had died, Lottie thought dismally. Did men not cry? Paupers did sometimes, she remembered. Maybe that was the difference between men like Mr Green and paupers. She folded her arms across her thin chest, trying to make them as small as possible so they would be covered by her short shawl.

  ‘I’ll come back wi’ you,’ he said and strode out of the yard, the metal studs in his pit boots ringing on the stones of the yard. Lottie had to trot to keep up with him.

  Mrs Bowron met them at the door. The noise of the boys crying was still coming from upstairs. ‘I’m that sorry for your loss,’ the neighbour began, but he cut her short roughly. ‘Aye, thanks, missus,’ he said. ‘Lottie hadaway up and stop the lads making that racket.’

  The next few days, until the funeral, Lottie was run off her feet preparing food and tea for the neighbours and family calling to pay their respects to the deceased. She somehow got through them despite her permanent haze of tiredness, until in the end she was hardly aware of what she was doing, be it slicing bread and butter or cleaning the house from top to bottom before relatives descended on them.

  Sister Mitchell called. ‘If I can help you with anything, Lottie,’ she said, ‘I will.’ But Alfred Green heard her. Lottie had asked her into the house when she knocked, but now Alf put a firm hand on the Sister’s elbow and ushered her out.

  ‘Nay, she can manage,’ he said. ‘I can’t afford nurse’s prices now that I have a funeral to pay for.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking for pay,’ Eliza gasped.

  ‘Just being nosy, were you?’

  Eliza’s face turned scarlet and she turned on her heel and went back to her gig.

  In fact, there was a funeral club with the union and it covered the bulk of the expenses, as both Lottie and Sister Mitchell well knew.

  ‘I meant as a friend. I was not asking for payment,’ she repeated, looking back at him from her seat behind the horse, but he had already closed the door on her. He would not have her in the house for reasons she could not fathom.

  But at last the funeral was over and the relatives and other guests departed.

  ‘I would help you with the lads, Alf,’ said his sister, before going back to Hartlepool. ‘But you know I have my own family to see to.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Alfred in a hard voice and opened the front door for her. She hesitated.

  ‘I just thought,’ she said, ‘you know that Whitby jet brooch that Laura wore on her blouses? Well, I bought it for her for when you got wed, if you remember. I do like it and it would be a nice keepsake. And …’

  ‘I’m not giving it you back,’ said Alfred, opening the door wider. ‘You’d best go or you’ll miss your train.’

  ‘I just wanted it for a keepsake,’ his sister sniffed. She had flushed a bright red and her eyes flashed, but she compressed her lips and marched out into the street.

  Life in the house returned to something like normal. Lottie didn’t have Mrs Green to see to of course, but she still seemed to be working from early morning until late at night. She fell into bed exhausted at the end of every day. Even when she had an afternoon free, she had to prepare the meal before she left and see to the boys when she got back in the evening. Mostly she went for a walk along by the Wear or if it was a nice day she sat on the riverbank enjoying the sun, but only for half an hour. She simply had not enough time to walk all the way back to the workhouse to see Betty.

  Besides, she was so tired, the workhouse seemed miles away. So she sent her a postcard and hoped someone would read it to the little girl.

  Once or twice she met Sister Mitchell on her rounds while she was out shopping at the Co-op store, and once, a red-letter day this, Sister asked her back for tea. There she met Sister Mitchell’s son, Tot, who was around her own age though still a schoolboy. And she met Sister Mitchell’s friend, Bertha, and learned that she had been a workhouse lass like herself, only in Alnwick, which was somewhere in Northumberland.

  Three weeks after Mrs Green’s funeral, Lottie at last managed to go to the Big House to see Betty. She stood on the step before the imposing front door and pulled on the bell rope and from inside came the familiar jangling of the bell. It was part of her childhood, that bell, ringing out as it did so often just as the daylight faded. It was usually answered by an inmate and the person who had pulled the rope had to wait outside on the step while the inmate went to Matron’s office and told her there was a pauper outside wanting admittance, or a vagrant, or a woman with a little child. Sometimes it was a little baby, wrapped in rags or sacking or even in a lacy wool shawl and fine lawn. By the time the door was opened, the person who had brought the infant was away, hurrying up Crossgate or diving around a corner.

  ‘We’re full!’ announced the old woman who answered the door to Lottie, startling her out of her reverie.

  ‘You’ll have to come back …’ The woman stopped and peered at the visitor. ‘Eeh! It’s Lottie, isn’t it? Mind, you’ve not been gone long before you’ve come back, have you?’

  ‘I’ve just come to see Betty Bates,’ Lottie replied, lifting her chin.

  ‘You’d best come in then,’ the woman inmate said. ‘She’s in the kitchen. You know where that is, you don’t need me to show you.’

  Turning on her heel, she walked away and Lottie made her way to the back of the building to the kitchen, which was dismally dark due to the tree branch right outside the window.

  ‘Lottie!’ cried Betty and dropped the cup she was washing into the sink. ‘Oh, Lottie, I’m so pleased to see you.’

  ‘And me you, pet,’ the older girl replied. ‘I’ll give you a hand with the washing-up, then we can go into the garden for a while.’ She had come just an hour after dinner time, for she knew Matron and the Master would be having their forty winks upstairs in their private rooms and so they would probably not be disturbed.

  They sat on a bench under the kitchen window with their arms around each other and chatted. Or rather, Lottie told Betty about the house where she was now and the poor woman, Mrs Green.

  ‘She’s dead now, poor soul,’ she said. ‘But she was a nice woman. And there are three lads an’ all. And Mr Green.’

  ‘Is he nice?’ asked Betty.

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Lottie. Betty couldn’t remember anything about the world outside the workhouse and she used to make up stories about it as though it were a sort of fairyland. Lottie hadn’t the heart to disillusion her.

  ‘When are you coming back?’ she asked when Lottie said she had to go.

  ‘I’ll try to next month.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise,’ Lottie assured her. ‘Don’t cry, pet. I will, I will.’

  ‘I reckon you’re not due to three shillings a week and your board, lass. Not now you haven’t got the missus to see to. Two bob is ample. After all, you’ve not much to do with only the three lads, an’ them at school most days. I’m not paying you to sit on your arse all day,’ said Alfred one Saturday afternoon after dinner. He pushed two bob over the table to her.

  Lottie put the pile of plates she was holding back on the table. She stared at him, thoroughly shaken. Today she had planned to take her money and go into Durham to the second-hand market and get her
self a pair of serviceable boots to replace the ones she was wearing and which were worn through and past taking to the cobblers to be resoled. It was her afternoon off and Mr Green’s too, so she was free of the lads for a couple of hours.

  ‘I need the money, Mr Green,’ she said desperately.

  ‘Get away, what do you want money for? You get all your meals and no doubt more behind my back.’

  ‘I need boots, Mr Green.’

  ‘There’s a pair of the wife’s in the bedroom, use them,’ he replied.

  ‘I cannot, they’re not my size,’ said Lottie. She couldn’t bear to think of wearing the dead woman’s shoes. At least with any from the second-hand market she didn’t know who had worn them first.

  ‘You’re getting particular, aren’t you? Well, I’m telling you, I’m not giving you three bob and that’s the end of it.’ Mr Green rose to his feet and stomped out of the room. ‘Noah!’ she heard him calling. ‘Noah, get yourself here, I want you to put a bet on for me.’

  ‘I’ll take it, Mr Green,’ said Lottie. ‘I could do with a breath of fresh air.’

  Alf looked at her. ‘Aye, go on then,’ he said, as though he were being magnanimous. He had expected more of an argument from her with regard to her wages so he didn’t mind letting her out for a few minutes. He handed her a note and sixpence. ‘You know where the bookie’s runner stands?’

  ‘Aye, I do.’

  Lottie put on her shawl and went out of the house, clutching the note and the sixpence in her hand. She walked up the street and around the corner and across the road, fighting a battle with her conscience. But she knew what she was going to do. She went past the man standing on the next corner and turned down a back street. The night-soil cart was standing there and the man was shovelling muck from the midden on to the cart before taking it out into the country to sell to the farmers. Lottie tore the note into strips and dropped them into the cart, then ran down the alley with the sixpence clutched in her hand. Before going into the house, she slipped the coin into her shoe.