Farewell to Lancashire (2 page)

Just as she’d filled the bucket, there was a tap on the back door and she opened it to see the little boy from two doors away.

‘I’m hungry, missus,’ Timmy said.

She fought a battle with herself and lost, giving him the crust of bread intended for her own dinner. He was a child born of disgrace and although the mother’s husband had taken on her bastard child as well, everyone knew the poor lad was unloved and wasn’t as well cared for as the other children.

Cassandra sighed as she closed the door on him. You could see Timmy’s unhappiness graven deeply in his face. His three younger half-brothers were bigger and plumper than he was. How could anyone treat one child in the family so badly?

She went back to work, scrubbing the flagstones on the kitchen floor but stopping often to think. Her father had been right all those months ago. The war had indeed stopped most cotton shipments getting through and times were hard now in their small town. People said things would get worse before they got better, which was a terrifying thought.

Some families were already on relief from the Poorhouse Board, others were selling their furniture and spare clothing piece by piece, doing anything rather than accept charity. You lost your independence once you were on relief, because the Board’s officers poked their noses into every corner of your house, making you sell nearly everything you owned before they’d give you any money.

She and her family were managing – thanks to their father’s foresight. There was still money in the tin box in his wardrobe. But it was dwindling more quickly than it should, because Edwin couldn’t help giving to neighbours with tiny children crying for lack of food. It was one thing to see adults clemming, but he couldn’t bear to see children going hungry. And even though he only gave a few pence each time, that was emptying the pot more quickly.

And she’d just given what she’d meant to have for dinner to the neighbour’s child. She’d go hungry today. But Timmy wouldn’t, poor little thing.

When Edwin came home from work a few nights later, he felt sad and weary.

‘The millowner told me this morning he has only enough cotton for three more months,’ he said over tea, which was a meagre meal these days, mainly bread or potatoes with a little butter. ‘And to last even that long, he must turn off more operatives.’ He looked at the twins. ‘You’ll be losing your jobs from next week, Xanthe and Maia. Mr Darston’s trying to keep one person from each family in work, as far as he can, and for us, that’ll be me. He’s a good man, doing his best to spread what work there is fairly.’

‘What will people do if this war goes on and on, and there’s no work at all?’ Maia asked. ‘Already some folk look half-starved. I feel guilty that we still have something to eat every day.’

‘The Queen won’t let Lancashire folk starve to death,’ Edwin said stoutly. ‘When she realises how bad it is, she’ll tell the government to help us, I’m sure.’ He had great faith in Her Majesty, who lived a good life with her husband and children and cared about her subjects.

Xanthe clutched her twin’s hand. ‘I don’t ever want to ask for relief. What if they force us to go into the poorhouse? I’d starve first. It makes me shiver even to walk past that place.’

Edwin could understand her feelings. The Vicar of the parish church, who was responsible for the management of the union poorhouse which served their own and the five neighbouring parishes, was a hard man, who treated the poor as if they’d committed a crime. Any charity offered under his auspices was grudging in the extreme.

The law said conditions inside had to be worse than anything outside, and while most poorhouses in the north refused to implement this rule strictly, the one in Outham kept to the letter of the law. The inmates were kept on a starvation diet while the Vicar went home to stuff his own belly till it looked as if it was going to burst out of his trousers. He also made sure they separated man from wife ‘to prevent fornication’, even the elderly who were beyond that sort of thing.

Edwin didn’t regard this Vicar as a true man of God, which was why he’d become a Methodist in the first place.

‘Going into that place will be the last resort for any of us, the very last,’ he said gently. ‘We can hold out for a good while yet. But if it’s go into the workhouse or die, I hope you’ll choose life, Xanthe love. I certainly would.’

Cassandra came to link her arm in his. ‘I heard today that they’re going to set up a soup kitchen in the parish church for those who’ve no work at all. It doesn’t matter if you’re a member of the congregation or not. It’s to be held there three times a week, Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays. We can get a meal there on those days and that’ll be a big help.’

Edwin wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing to do this in the parish church. He’d been hoping the Minister of their own chapel, a more compassionate man, would organise something. But the Town Council in its wisdom had decided that all charity efforts were to be combined because help would go further that way. And since the parish church had the biggest hall by far, the soup kitchen was to be held there.

What was the world coming to when his lasses had to go out and eat the meagre bread of charity?

Maia still had two days’ work a week, so on the first Monday the soup kitchen was open, the other three sisters went to get tickets for it. People waited patiently in the long queue outside the church hall, not saying much. It was shaming to depend on charity and they felt the humiliation keenly.

Cotton workers might be used to tightening their belts when there was a downturn in trade, but they weren’t used to this almost total lack of work. Some had already left the town, seeking jobs in the woollen industry of nearby Yorkshire. Others had braved the south, where people spoke differently and the land was softer. It was said there was still work to be found there.

Those men who found it too hard to leave spent their days wandering round Outham like lost souls, not knowing how to fill their time. It was easier on the women, who at least had their homes to keep tidy, their children to care for.

When they got to the front of the queue, Cassandra and her sisters had to answer questions about their circumstances before they could be given anything.

The man from the committee, who was a member of the parish church, questioned them in a sharp, impatient voice, then said curtly, ‘I hope you’ll thank your Maker on your knees for this generosity.’ He waved one hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘Go to the next table for your meal tickets.’

There a lady asked yet again, ‘Name?’

‘Cassandra Blake.’ She saw the lady write down Cass Blake. ‘That’s not my name.’ Her father had always refused to have their names shortened, saying he’d chosen them because they were beautiful names, belonging to the Greek goddesses he’d read about in the books the Minister had lent him.

The lady stared at her in outrage then turned to the person sitting next to her. ‘The impudence of this creature! She comes here to beg for food then corrects what I write.’

The Vicar came across. ‘Is there a problem, my dear Mrs Greaves?’

‘There certainly is. This young madam has actually dared to correct what I’ve written.’

‘But you asked for my name, then wrote something else down,’ Cassandra protested.

He bent over the long book in which the names were being inscribed. ‘Cass Blake.’

‘My name is Cassandra. I’ve never been called Cass in my life.’

‘My dear young woman, you should be grateful that this lady is generously giving her time to help you and not fuss about such unimportant details.’ He looked down his nose at her. ‘In any case, Cassandra is a most unsuitable name for a person of your station. I don’t know where your parents got that from but I wouldn’t have allowed them to christen you by such a name in
my
church. Now, take your tickets and move along quickly or I shall have you removed from the hall. The food is over there. One ticket for each day, remember.’

He spoke as if she hadn’t the wit to understand that. She hesitated, feeling outraged. But she’d eaten virtually nothing for more than a day, having slipped most of her portion to her father and Maia the previous night, because they still had to go out to work and because he’d been looking so tired lately.

When she went across to where they were serving the soup, she found herself facing her uncle Joseph’s wife on the other side of the table.

Without a flicker of acknowledgement, her aunt said, ‘Give me your ticket and take a bowl!’

The next lady ladled some soup into the bowl and a third lady passed Cassandra a piece of stale bread and a battered old spoon. ‘Here you are. Don’t forget to take the bowl and spoon to the table over there when you’ve finished.’

Cassandra forced a ‘Thank you,’ then escaped to a trestle table as far away from her aunt’s glare as possible. She set down her food with fingers that trembled, shaken by the encounter. Such hatred!

A short time later she was joined by Pandora, whose cheeks bore red patches and whose eyes were sparkling with anger. ‘That woman put down my name as Dora.
Dora!
And the Vicar scolded me when I tried to correct her.’

Xanthe followed her, setting the bowl down and splashing soup on to the table. ‘She put
me
down as Susan.’

A young man came across to join them. ‘I heard what that woman said to you. I think it’s shameful. Absolutely shameful. What right have they to change your names?’

Cassandra watched Pandora smile at him, saw how he blinked. Yet another male was entranced by her youngest sister, who didn’t even seem to notice the effect she had on men. She was definitely the beauty of the family, with hair so dark it was almost blue-black and eyes of a vivid blue.

‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he asked. ‘I’m on my own and I don’t know anyone else here.’

‘You’re welcome to sit with us,’ Cassandra said.

They began to eat. The bread was so stale and hard, they had to dunk it in the soup to soften it, which wasn’t good manners and drew scornful looks from the Vicar as he passed. But you couldn’t waste food.

The hall was soon full. The soup was unappetising, made mainly from cabbage, potatoes and bones, but no one left a drop.

‘Poor thin stuff this is!’ Pandora muttered. ‘I could make better myself. And the bread is days old.’

‘At least it’s not mouldy. And it’s free.’ Xanthe sighed. ‘I can see why Father stopped coming to this church, if that’s how they treat you. Do they think poorer people have no feelings?’

When they went outside, they parted company from the young man and strolled home slowly. People used to walk briskly, Cassandra thought as she saw others sauntering along. Now there were so many long hours to fill, no one hurried.

She looked up to see only a few thin trails of smoke instead of a sky criss-crossed with thick plumes of dark smoke from mill chimneys. It looked wrong, as if this wasn’t their town any more, only a ghost of Outham.

It wasn’t till they were nearly home that Pandora said what they’d all been thinking, ‘Our aunt looked as if she hated us, didn’t she?’

‘Yes. Don’t tell father we saw her. It’ll only upset him.’

Pandora was silent for the length of the street, then said thoughtfully, ‘She always has such a strange look in her eyes.’

‘Never mind her,’ Xanthe said. ‘I want to go and change my library books. At least we’ll be able to do that any time we want now.’

‘I think we’re going to be very grateful for that library,’ Cassandra said. ‘At least reading costs us nothing.’

Joseph Blake closed his grocery store at nine o’clock that night as usual, saw his employees off the premises and locked up. He walked reluctantly up the stairs to the comfortable rooms where he and his wife had lived ever since her parents died. He’d eaten a meal with Isabel at six o’clock, seen what a foul mood she was in and claimed an urgent need to finish some accounts in the shop. There, as he supervised his employees and attended to the more important customers himself, he’d tried to work out what she could be so angry about this time.

She was often in a bad mood these days, it seemed. Their poor little maidservant was regularly reduced to tears, but Dot needed the work, because her family had no other source of income, so had to put up with it. If Joseph had tried to intervene, Isabel would have been even harder on the girl, so he bit his tongue and contented himself with slipping Dot the occasional treat from the shop, a broken biscuit or the untidy scraps of ham. He knew Isabel kept an eye on how much their maid ate and wasn’t generous.

Perhaps his wife had seen his nieces while she was out. That always put her in a bad mood. They were fine-looking girls and the youngest one was truly beautiful. He was sorry he didn’t know them, but Isabel had made it very clear before they married that if he wanted her, he had to sever all connection with his brother, and he’d given her his word, thinking he’d persuade her to change her mind later. But she never had. She came from high church stock and was proud of that, wanted no truck with those she called ‘canting Methodists’.

Only it seemed to him that she was the one doing the canting, mouthing meaningless religious phrases and living in exactly the opposite way to what the Bible taught. She’d been extremely jealous of his brother Edwin’s wife Catherine, who hadn’t been exactly beautiful but whose smiling face and kindly ways made friends for her everywhere. Isabel had few friends and her plain face was made even plainer by her sour expression.