The Urchin's Song (2 page)

It was a good two hours later when, after ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ had been sung enthusiastically at least five or six times to the accompaniment of a merry fiddle, Vera seemed to suddenly remember her old friend’s offspring. She bent down to the eldest child who had twisted round to face her. ‘They’re well oiled the night, hinny,’ she said softly, her voice full of meaning. And when the child didn’t answer her but continued to stare steadily into her eyes, Vera said, ‘You know any songs, lass? You sing ’em a tune an’ you’ll soon get a few pennies to take home to your da, the mood they’re in.’

A number of seconds elapsed before the whisper came. ‘Me sisters, our Dora an’ Ada, sing sometimes if me da’s not in.’

‘An’ can you remember what they sing, hinny? The words an’ all?’ Vera’s mouth had tightened briefly. From what some of her former neighbours in James Williams Street had told her, this one’s older sisters didn’t have much to sing about. If what she’d heard was true - and she’d bet her eye-teeth it was - Bart had put the two lassies on the game when they were nowt but nine or ten. Evil swine.

‘I know “Father, Come Home” an’ “The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery”.’

‘You do? That’s a canny lass.’ Vera stared into the little face for a moment. ‘Father, Come Home’ was a good one. Vesta Tilley had been about this one’s age when she’d entreated a drunken father to come back to his wife and reduced her half-boozed audiences to maudlin tears. Aye, that should do very well. If this didn’t get the bairn enough to avert a good hiding she’d eat her hat. ‘Look, hinny, Horace’ll set it up for you an’ you don’t be shy, eh? Don’t matter if you can keep a tune or not, you just belt it out an’ they’ll love it. All right? An’ have another sup to warm you up a bit. What’s your name, lass?’

‘Josie.’

‘Josie Burns. Well, Josie, you heed what I say an’ you’ll do just fine.’

By the time Horace beckoned the child over to where the fiddler was standing, the little body was trembling, and when Vera’s husband reached down and lifted her on to a battered table, Josie gave a partly smothered squeal of alarm that made those nearest guffaw into their glasses.

But within a few moments they weren’t laughing any longer. Emboldened by Vera’s confidence that she could earn some pennies, and aided by the food she had eaten and not least the fortifying effects of the gin, Josie closed her eyes to shut out all the slack-mouthed, grinning faces and began to sing. Note after crystal clear note silenced the pub and brought even the most inebriated revellers upright in their seats, aware that they were privileged to hear something rare.

Those who were still sober enough to be able to think sensibly might have expressed amazement that such a voice could spring from this tiny, undernourished frame, but for once the Mariners’ Arms, one of Sunderland’s most ribald dockside pubs, was so silent you could have heard a pin drop.

The absolute stillness continued for a moment after the child had finished singing, and when Josie opened her eyes she gazed around bewilderedly, frightened she had done something wrong and disturbed by the staring faces. From her vantage point on top of the roughly hewn table she searched out Vera’s face. Her mother’s old playmate was weeping unashamedly, but had time to give the child a reassuring nod and smile and thumbs-up before the place erupted in a roar of clapping and whooping and cheering.

Three songs later Josie had made more money in half an hour than she had been able to collect in whole days spent begging. At just seven years of age, she had taken the first steps to grasping control of her life.

It seemed like weeks and weeks since the sun had shone. Josie adjusted the collar of her old blue serge coat more securely round her neck, wrinkling her face against the whirling snow as she slipped and slid on the packed ice beneath her boots. Only November and already everything was frozen up; it was going to be a long, hard winter. They’d had to push pieces of burning paper up the tap in the yard to get a trickle of water for days now.

And then she thought of the big pile of scrag ends and six pigs’ trotters rolled up in newspaper in her shopping bag, and smiled to herself. Mr Duckworth was nice, oh he was, saving them for her, and she’d managed to get three penn’orth of pot stuff for a penny just because the cabbages were browning and the taties and onions had gone over. They’d be fine in a stew though.

She passed another butcher’s shop, gas flares burning amid the joints of meat, but, owing to Mr Duckworth’s generosity, she didn’t stop to look in. She needed the rest of her money for flour, yeast and fat anyway. They had no bread at home.

The pavements were crowded and it was hard going, but it was always the same late at night when the market stalls began to pack away. Bruised fruit and spotted vegetables could be picked up cheaper then, and for some families it meant the difference between eating and going hungry. Every evening saw raggedy little urchins fighting and rolling about under the stalls for a half-rotten apple or squashed orange or two, kicking and biting until they drew blood.

Public penury and private ostentation meant conditions were grim in Sunderland’s wretched East End. Back-to-back tenements, noxious chemical works, breweries, brickworks, foul-smelling abattoirs and the like, all coexisted in rabbit warrens of filth and human misery. Homes which had originally been built for prosperous merchants were now notoriously overcrowded, with whole families living in one or two rooms, and the area was a breeding ground for all manner of unsavoury activities and crime.

And still, in the midst of it all, good, decent folk struggled to bring up their children the best they could. The desperately respectable housewife and mother, working eighteen-hour days taking in washing or carding linen buttons and sewing endless hooks and eyes by the dim light of a tallow candle, and all the time trying to ignore the goings-on in the brothel across the way.

And fathers, enduring gruelling ten-hour shifts unloading iron-ore boats at the dockside, trousers wet and cold up to the thighs and every day an accident of some kind, whilst men they had grown up with - sometimes brothers or friends - stole and murdered for their living and taught their children to do the same.

One such individual, a crony of Josie’s father, now lurched out of a gin shop a few yards in front of her and stood swaying slightly as he surveyed the passers-by with bleary eyes. Josie’s stomach tightened, but she forced herself to continue without checking her stride. For a moment she thought he was too drunk to recognise her, but then a bony hand reached out and fastened on her coat-sleeve. ‘ ’Tis the bonny Josie.’ The stink of his breath almost knocked her backwards. ‘An’ how’re you, me little lassie?’

‘Fine, thank you, Mr Duffy.’ She was staring into the mean sallow face without blinking and her voice was flat. She didn’t like any of her father’s associates but this one, a small wiry Irishman with hard black eyes and a vicious temper, was a particularly nasty piece of work. She would rather have died than let him see it but this one frightened her.

‘That’s right.’ His eyes crawled over her and she wanted to rub where they had touched. ‘You bin doin’ a bit of shoppin’ for your ma? That’s a good lass.’

She continued to stare at him but she said nothing, her face blank. He always wanted to touch her, this man. Whenever he called for her father at the house he would find some excuse to pat her arm or brush against her, and the smell of him - a mixture of acrid body odour and stale alcohol - was as repugnant as the man himself. That he had some hold over her father she didn’t doubt. Bart Burns’s normal bullying ways were replaced by a sickening obsequiousness in Patrick Duffy’s presence.

‘Your da tells me you’re doin’ well for yerself at nights then, in the pubs? I said to him, “There’s no flies on your Josie. Knows how to give ’em what they want,” eh, darlin’?’

In spite of her determination to show no emotion Josie drew back, her face expressing her distaste. Her work in the rough riverside pubs for the last five years had brought her into contact with all sorts, and she couldn’t have failed to pick up the hidden meaning in the last words, even if he hadn’t emphasised the smutty innuendo by winking at her.

‘I just sing, Mr Duffy, that’s all,’ she said bluntly, and pulled her arm free. He was horrible, he was, and she didn’t care if her da said they’d all got to be nice to Mr Duffy or he’d knock them into next weekend. She was tired of smiling and pretending not to mind when he touched her, or said what a big girl she was growing into with his eyes on her chest, like he’d done the other day.

She saw the ferret face straighten as he blinked rapidly, obviously surprised at her temerity, but in spite of the way her stomach had turned over, she schooled her face to show no fear when she said, ‘Me mam’s waiting for the shopping so I’ve got to go. Goodbye, Mr Duffy,’ as she backed away from him.

Patrick Duffy made no attempt to return the salutation, but his eyes were gimlet hard as he watched the small upright figure with the enormous cloth bag walk on. He saw her pause in front of an open fish shop, where flickering candles enclosed in greasy paper lanterns cast their dim and tallowy light over wooden tables slimy with the remains of the day’s cheap fish, but then she was bobbing in and out of the crowd on the cobbled pavement again and was lost to view.

He swore, softly and obscenely, under his breath, before moving his thin lips one over the other for a moment or two. Right, so that’s how it was, eh? By, if ever there was an upstart in the making, she was one. Not that she had anything to hold her head up about. He’d seen the muck-hole she was born into; rats lived better than Bart’s bairns had. True enough, the girl had cleaned it up a bit in the last few years since she’d started this singing lark, but Long Bank was rough, even by East End standards.

He allowed his mind to picture Bart’s dwelling the first time he had seen it some eight years ago. Two rooms, with six inmates, the walls, ceiling and furniture filthy. The floor had been bare and the walls covered with blood marks and splotches that spoke of the vermin which had been swarming about. Dirty flock bedding had occupied all of one room, and a rickety table and two chairs, along with a couple of orange boxes and the remains of a dresser, the other. There had been no fire in the range and the rooms had been as cold as ice, and if he remembered rightly, Bart’s missus had been about to deliver another of the brats he planted in her every nine months. He couldn’t remember if that one had been stillborn; quite a few had since he’d got to know Bart.

Duffy drew the air in between his teeth in a slow hiss as his thoughts returned to the child who had just affronted him. Her sisters had been a couple of years younger than her when he’d first had them, aye, and paid Bart proud for the privilege. First Ada and then Dora when she’d turned ten or thereabouts, and he’d put Bart on to the right connections for them to continue to earn for their da after he’d deflowered them. No one could say he hadn’t played fair. It hadn’t even crossed his mind it’d be any different with Josie, and if he’d had to choose any one of them it would be her, damn it. She was a beauty, was Josie, even now at twelve years old.

His thoughts intensified the feeling he’d been cheated out of what was rightfully his. Bart should have told the chit what was what, like he had with the other two, but the trouble was that Josie earned more with her caterwauling than the other two ever had on their backs. And since Dora and Ada had skedaddled to pastures new just after that one had started singing, Bart wasn’t about to upset the applecart of his main provider. The bit his lads brought in with their thieving could be something or nothing depending on their luck, and the other one - Josie’s sister Gertie - was ailing more than she was out begging.

The thought of Gertie Burns made his cruel little eyes narrow still more. Patrick Duffy liked them young, the younger the better, and the life of villainy he had chosen meant he could afford to pay well. Every so often a man like Bart would come his way and he’d make the most of the opportunity . . .

The sister was a scrawny little piece but it had been some months since he’d tasted something fresh and unspoilt. Slowly now, he turned and began to make his way along the frozen pavement, his gait unsteady, not least because of the swollen member between his legs which his thoughts had made rock hard. He’d set things up with Bart over the next day or two, and he hadn’t given up on the other one either. There were more ways to kill a cat than drowning it. The alleys and back lanes were chancy places come nightfall, and he knew the haunts Josie frequented and the routes she took. ’Course, nine times out of ten she had her sister with her, but if he had a word in Bart’s ear likely Gertie would be despatched same as Ada and Dora once he’d broken her in, which would leave the upstart to walk alone.

He smiled to himself, bringing a yellow, furry-coated tongue over his lips before he caught a drip from the end of his nose on his coat-sleeve. He’d see his day with that one all right, by, he would, and it would be all the sweeter for the wait.

 

By the time Josie had reached Walton Lane and then turned right into New Grey Street, she had forgotten all about Patrick Duffy, her mind full of the groceries she had yet to buy. The meat and vegetables would keep them going for a couple of days, but she still needed a quarter stone of flour and that would be fivepence even for seconds, and then there was the fat. She’d have to buy the lamp oil today too, they were completely out, and the cheapest she’d get would be thruppence a quart. Thank goodness she’d got a sack of coal in yesterday, and although there was quite a bit of slack in it, the majority of it was roundies. Eked out with the sack of cinders she’d made Jimmy and Hubert collect from the tip, it would see them through to the end of the week if they were careful. That’s if her da didn’t stoke up the range until it was a furnace when she was out, like he’d done last night.