The Miner’s Girl (37 page)

Carefully, Lottie drew herself out of the bed and ran off down the ward to the linen cupboard at the bottom. As she had thought, the woman responsible for it the night before had left the key hanging in a concealed niche near the door.

Betty reminded her so much of herself when she had been left on the step of the workhouse, not because her mother had deserted her as Betty's had done, but because she had been taken away to the women's ward and Lottie had never seen her again. That terrible night was the earliest memory Lottie had. The figure of her mother had become shadowy after the six or seven intervening years, but the feelings were as sharp as ever.

‘You'll be all right if you are a good girl, Lottie,' her mother had said when she brought her to the Big House. That's what Mammy had called it, the Big House, and Lottie, who was only three, had looked up at the forbidding stone frontage of the place. It was a dark night and she and her mammy had been walking all day and Mammy was breathing with a funny rasp, which frightened Lottie more than the fear of the house. By the time a man came to open the door and let them in, her mammy was slumped against the stone at the side of the door and when she tried to walk over the step she slid gently down in a heap.

Lottie was crying by then and the man caught her roughly by the arm and dragged her into the entrance.

‘Shut your noise and sit down there,' he said sharply. And she did, for he was a big man and she was frightened of him. She watched with large, frightened eyes as a woman came and was seeing to her mammy and taking her away, and Lottie never saw her again except in her dreams.

‘Your mother has gone to heaven,' Matron said on the day Minnie Lonsdale was laid to rest in a pauper's grave beside all the other paupers. Lottie was taken to the committal and she saw the box in which her mother was, but she
comprehended very little of it. But when she went to church in the crocodile of girls dressed in checked dresses and black stockings and boots, the big girl who held her hand and walked alongside her whispered that her mother had not been in the box really, she had gone to heaven. The big girl's name was Edna and it was her job to look after Lottie and take her to the earth closet and stop her messing herself. Mostly she was kind but sometimes she lost her temper and smacked Lottie. ‘You do what I tell you or I'll smack you in the gob,' she would say and Lottie would shrink back, for everything in the Big House was bewildering and frightened her, but mostly she didn't like being smacked.

Lottie talked to her mammy at night, whispering of what had happened to her during the day, and she gleaned some comfort from that. After a while, the picture of her mother she carried around in her head began to fade until it had gone altogether and there was nothing left but the memory of her presence and the feelings it aroused in her.

By the time Lottie was ten, she was working in the linen room of the workhouse at Crossgate. She could sew a neat seam and patch and mend the clothes of the inmates of the workhouse. She also still had the job of looking after the waif who went by the name of Betty Bates, just as she herself had been allotted to the girl called Edna when she first entered the place. Not that Betty's name was really Bates, but she had come to the workhouse as a foundling and the matron, who had the naming of
little girl paupers, chose it. The one before that had been called Allen.

‘Betty, you'll get into trouble if Matron finds you here. You're not supposed to be in the corridors,' said Lottie as she came out of the sewing room one day and found the tiny girl standing by the door, thumb in mouth. The one o'clock bell had rung for dinner and everyone was looking forward to it, because today it was to be a special dinner, provided by the ladies of the town.

‘Don't tell,' said Betty, looking fearfully over her shoulder.

‘I won't tell,' Lottie reassured her. She took Betty's hand in hers and fell into her correct place in the hierarchy of the sewing room, behind the grown-up women and in front of the younger ones. ‘There will be brawn, maybe, and even cake,' she whispered to the little girl and Betty's eyes brightened. She could say very little as yet, being only three and a bit slow, but she could say Lottie's name and small phrases like ‘don't tell', a phrase she used a lot as she wet her bloomers so often still, even through the day.

The orderly lines of children in their blue-checked dresses and black stockings and older women in rough grey serge and their hair knotted back and covered with large caps that came over their foreheads almost to the eyes, were swelled by others from the laundry and scrubbing maids with swollen red hands. The women were to eat in the same room as the men today because it was a special day. Women looked forward to seeing their men and children for the first time in weeks. Of course, the men would
be at tables on one side of the refectory and the women at the other with the children in between, but messages could and would be passed along the lines of narrow tables.

It was one of the days that stood out in Lottie's memories of the workhouse at the junction of Allergate and Crossgate when later, as she turned thirteen, she was sent to Sherburn Hill to Place. All the children thought of Place with a capital ‘P', for it meant they would be free of the workhouse and even be earning money for themselves. Place meant a job and lodging outside, where they did not have to answer to Matron or Master or even to the Poor Law Guardians, those men and sometimes women who were the absolute monarchs of the paupers.

‘I don't want you to go,' sobbed Betty on the day Lottie carried her bundle out to the door where Mr Green was waiting to take her to his house in Sherburn Hill. It was the longest sentence Lottie had ever heard the girl, who was now five years old, say.

‘Betty Bates, you come in now and go to your class,' Matron's voice came from inside. She opened a window to the side of the front door and leaned out to speak to Lottie. ‘Be a good girl now, Lottie Lonsdale, don't you be giving our lasses a bad name,' she said and Lottie nodded silently. She might have spoken, but if she did she might have been rude to Matron and she wasn't sure if the woman could bar her going, even now.

‘You be good now and learn your lessons, Betty. I will try to see you when I can,' she said instead, her own
eyes filling with tears. ‘I will, I promise. I'll have a half-day off every month and I'll come to see you if I can.'

She had exchanged one master for another, Lottie thought as she came down the stairs in the house on the end of a row in Sherburn Hill. It was half past five one morning a few weeks later. Mr Green was gruff and barely looked at her when he was barking his orders at her. He watched how much she ate as though she were stealing it from the mouths of his children.

This morning as usual, she went into the kitchen at the back of the house and riddled the ashes in the grate and relaid the fire. Before she put a lucifer to it, she looked over her shoulder in case Mr Green should see her do it.

‘I'm not made of money, you know,' he had said last time he saw her use a lucifer. ‘You should bank it on a night and then there'll be a few embers to start the fire away.' Lucifers were to buy from the grocer's cart that came along twice a week, but as an overman at the pit Mr Green got a supply of coal every few weeks. It was tipped in the alley behind the house close to the coalhouse hatch and was to shovel in. The Green boys were too young to do the job: Noah, the eldest, was not yet ten and small for his age. There were always lads who would come and offer to ‘put in the coals' for a penny but Mr Green would have none of it.

‘I'm not keeping a great lass like you and paying a lad to put in the coals,' he said when she suggested it. So Lottie had to do it, getting the coal in before Mr Green came home from the pit, no matter what else she had to do that day.

Lottie put the kettle on to boil and cut bread and butter for Mrs Green's breakfast. While she waited, she sat down for a few minutes in the rocking chair by the hearth, the one that had been Mrs Green's before she became bed-bound. This was her favourite time of the day, when she had a few precious moments before she had to make Mrs Green comfortable against her pillows and then prepare a meal for Mr Green coming in from fore shift or going out on back shift. Then the lads were to get up and feed with great bowls of porridge sweetened with sugar and with fresh milk poured over it.

She was just lifting the heavy iron kettle from the fire when there was a cry from the front room that had been turned into a sick room for Mrs Green. Placing the kettle on the hearth, she ran through to see Mrs Green half out of bed, hanging precariously, with only her legs anchored beneath the bedclothes. She seemed quite incapable of righting herself and was moaning pitifully.

‘Mrs Green, what are you doing?' asked Lottie in alarm. She hurried around the bed and for all her small stature managed to lift the woman back to the safety of her pillows, where she flopped with her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow. Lottie grabbed the extra pillow from the chair by the bedside and propped her up a little better so she could catch her breath. Oh, she looked badly, Lottie thought. Mrs Green's skin was blue around the mouth but her cheeks were flushed and her skin was hot to the touch. She brought the woman
a drink of water from the pail in the pantry and held it while she took some. Only a few sips, for even that seemed to exhaust her.

Then she wiped her face and arms with a cold flannel.

‘You're a good lass,' said Mrs Green.

‘Where's my breakfast?' asked Mr Green from the doorway. ‘Lottie? I don't pay you to sit about on the wife's bed.'

Lottie jumped up quickly, dropping the flannel and having to bend down to retrieve it. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I'll do it now. Only Mrs Green needed me.'

‘Aye, well, be quick about it,' said he. ‘A man shouldn't be coming in after ten hours in the pit to an empty table.'

‘Alfred, the lass is doing her best.' The voice from the bed was weak and fluttering.

Mr Green regarded his wife, frowning. ‘Mind, you keep out of it, Laura,' he said, but not roughly or unkindly. If he had a soft spot for anyone, it was his wife.

‘I'll stay here, Lottie,' he said, ‘while you get it ready. I picked some mushrooms on the way home; do them with a bit of bacon. Give us a shout when they're ready.'

Lottie fled to the kitchen and did as she was bid. By the time she was calling the boys down to eat with their father before they went out to the National School, the house was filled with delicious smells. They came down the stairs in a rush: Noah, the eldest, who was nine; Freddie, who was eight; and Mattie, six. Mattie was grizzling again, she saw, his shirt hanging out where his braces met his trousers, his feet still bare.

‘Freddie hit me,' he said pathetically to his father. ‘I want my mam.'

‘Leave your mam alone,' Mr Green ordered. ‘Sit down and eat your porridge.' For the boys and Lottie had porridge for breakfast rather than bacon and mushrooms. But it was good porridge, made with real, fresh milk. The two older boys set to with a will and the only sounds were the occasional slurp and that of Mr Green's knife against the plate.

When he finished, he sat back in his chair and looked at Lottie. ‘I want you to go and get the doctor when you've got the lads away to school,' he said. ‘Tell him the wife's badly.'

Lottie looked back at him in some alarm. He must think Mrs Green was very bad if he wanted the doctor to come back. He had only been to see her a few days before and Mr Green grumbled at the expense every time the doctor came.

‘Don't look so gormless, lass,' he said. ‘Hurry yourself and get on with it.'

‘Is Mam badly?' asked Noah. ‘Can I go in to see her?'

‘Leave her alone, lad, she wants some peace. If I hear you bothering her I'll take the belt to you. Now, away to school with the lot of you.'

Lottie ate the last spoonful of porridge made with the skimmed milk left after taking off the cream for Mrs Green, for the boys had used up all the fresh milk. ‘I'll go straight away,' she replied. Grabbing her shawl from the back of the kitchen door, she ran off down the
yard, thankful for the chance to get out into the fresh air before starting the clearing and cleaning in the house.

‘I think you should ask the Nightingale nurse to call and see your wife,' said Dr Gray to Alf Green when he had returned with Lottie and had examined Mrs Green. ‘Sister Mitchell-Howe, her name is. Here, I'll write it down for you.'

‘How much will that cost?' Alfred Green asked. ‘I don't begrudge it mind, but I've a lot of expense already what with having to have a lass to keep an eye on the lads as well as the wife. Will she not do? She's good with Laura, I'll say that for her.'

Dr Gray looked at the pitman before him and sighed. The fellow was an overman and as such must be earning more than most miners. He was fond of his wife too, he could see that.

‘A trained nurse can see to your wife better than a young girl can,' he said. ‘In any case, she will keep an eye on her if she visits every day until Mrs Green is over the crisis.'

They were outside in the narrow passage that led from the front door past the room where Mrs Green lay to the kitchen at the back. It was Laura Green's voice that decided the issue.

‘Lottie,' she said, her voice too weak to penetrate to the kitchen where Lottie was scouring the porridge pan. ‘Lottie!'

‘Lottie!' Mr Green shouted and the girl appeared in the passage, looking anxious. She had managed to get the boys off to school before the bell rang and ran to call the doctor and washed and changed Mrs Green before he came and now she was trying to catch up on her work. She was already thinking about the task after the next one and that was to prepare something filling for the lads' dinner when they arrived back at twelve o'clock.

‘See to her, can you not hear her calling?'