Eliza's Child (4 page)

She was about a mile from her parents' small house in the row by the pithead when she had to stand aside for a horse and gig coming up behind her. As it passed, one wheel dipped into a hole filled with rainwater and splattered her already wet dress with mud. It was the last straw for Eliza.

‘Watch where you're going!' she shouted, rather unfairly, for the track was narrow enough and the driver hadn't had the chance to avoid the pothole. He stopped the gig a few yards further on and waited for her to catch up.

‘Are you talking to me?' he asked softly.

‘Aye, I am,' said Eliza. ‘You might have knocked me and the bairn down.' He looked at the woman with the filthy dress and sodden hair and a baby wrapped in her shawl. She was soaked through and so was her bundle. Just at that moment Thomas began to struggle against the wet confines of the shawl. His tiny fist and arm fought free and waved in the air and he let out a furious cry. Eliza's tone changed immediately as she put down her bundle and lifted the baby to a more comfortable position.

‘There now, pet,' she said. ‘We'll be at your grandma's in a minute or two and she'll have a fire to warm you, you'll see.'

‘Poor little mite,' the man said. ‘Come on, I'll help you into the gig. Going to Blue House, are you? So am I.' He climbed down and helped Eliza into the gig, throwing her bundle on the floor after her.

‘ELIZA!'

Mary Anne opened the back door just as her daughter reached it. ‘How did you get here? On a stormy night an' with the babby an' all. By, you want something to do bringing the canny bairn out on a night like this. He'll be lucky if he doesn't catch his death an' you an' all!'

‘Let me in, Mam,' said Eliza. ‘I can't get past you.'

Mary Anne, now she had paused for breath, stood aside and Eliza came into the kitchen where the warmth from the fire in the grate radiated through the bars. Now she had reached Blue House she felt ready to drop. She was shivering and white-faced and her hair had escaped its pins and hung down her face in rat's tails.

‘Eeh, lass, take those wet things off. Here, Tommy, take the bairn while I see to the lass.'

Tommy, who had been sitting in the wooden rocking chair by the fire, enjoying his first clay pipe after the back shift down the pit, stood up ready to protest at being asked to do anything after grafting on the coal face, but on looking into Eliza's face he took his grandson and held him in one brawny arm while putting his pipe down on the hearth with his other hand. The three boys, the only survivors of the six born to Mary Anne, sat in a row on the old horsehair sofa. They were still in their black, having come in with their da from the pit. The youngest, seven-year-old Miley, was asleep and leaning against the wall of the inglenook. He had only been a doorkeeper in the pit for a few weeks and hadn't yet got used to the long hours and the dark. Albert and Harry sat and stared at their father holding the baby. He had loosened Thomas's clothes and a small fist waved in the air. Steam was already rising from him and he let out a cry.

‘He's a braw babby, he is an' all,' Mary Anne observed. ‘Good lungs on him, the Lord be praised.'

‘I'd best change him, he's that wet,' said Eliza. ‘Only all his spare clothes are wet, the whole bundle.'

‘By, I don't know, our Eliza,' snapped Mary Anne. ‘Why you brought him out in this weather is beyond me.'

‘I had to,' Eliza replied. ‘The candymen were in the house and Jack was away out.'

‘The candymen? Whatever for?'

‘Jack hadn't paid the rent and he is in debt an' all.'

Mary Anne paused only for a minute. She was well used to dealing with crises. ‘There's an old shawl in the bottom drawer of the press. You'll have to wrap him in that. Get on with it,' she said. ‘I'll get you some dinner.' She took some soused herring out of the oven and added a dollop of mashed potato from the pan on the bar then set the plate on the table for Eliza.

‘That's thy dinner, Mary Anne,' Tommy protested.

‘Aye well, I'm not hungry now. I'll have a bite later on. Mebbe you can bring me a penny pie from the inn?'

‘I'm not going out the night,' Tommy asserted. ‘I have nowt.'

‘I'll give you tuppence for a pint of porter,' Mary Anne coaxed him. ‘Me an' our Eliza have to talk.'

Eliza was already starting to eat but she paused in the act of lifting the fork to her mouth. ‘Are you sure, Mam?'

‘Get it down, our Eliza. I have to get the bath ready for the lads; young Miley there should be in his bed.'

‘Aye, poor bairn, he doesn't like the dark. I found him begging a bit of candle from the night-shift men coming on. Then I had to carry him up the ladders, I was fair done in by the time we got to bank.'

Mary Anne gave her youngest a worried glance. ‘Mebbe he's too little for the job. He's still a babby.'

‘I was minding the doors, lifting the fire-flaps when I was his age,' said Tommy. ‘It never hurt me. He'll have to get used to it, be a man.'

‘Tommy, he's just a babby, I telt you.' As she talked, Mary Anne was setting the tin bath down before the fire. She poured hot water in it from the iron kettle on the bar and added cold from the bucket she had brought in earlier from the pump in the street. It was water pumped straight from the pit, for Blue House was a wet pit, but it was clear and fairly pure though smelling a bit of the coal dust.

Miley protested when she woke him and took off his clothes but sat docilely enough in the water. She soaped a piece of flannel and washed him while having the usual argument with Tommy. ‘Dinna flannel his back, woman!' Tommy roared. ‘You'll weaken it, he has to grow with it strong, the washing'll make it femmer!'

‘There's plenty of time for him to get a strong back,' said Mary Anne, not raising her voice at all. ‘Any road, don't shout, you'll wake the babby.'

Thomas was warm and dry and fast asleep, wrapped in the old shawl and laid across his grandfather's knees. In spite of the shabby furniture, the scrubbed table bare of a cloth, and the battered press and ancient settee, it was cosy in the kitchen. The fireplace was small and without an oven or water boiler or even a proper hearth, just a stone and an iron fender with a brass rail, but it was home to Eliza and she was slowly relaxing. All she felt for Jack at that moment was a slowly increasing anger. After the boys were washed and tucked into the bed upstairs in the one bedroom, she took the baby from her father and laid him on the settee. He slept on, seemingly none the worse for the soaking.

‘Now then, our Eliza,' said Mary Anne as she sat herself down in the chair just vacated by Tommy, who had gone to the inn, ‘you'd best tell us what's happened. Have you left your man? If you have, you'll get no sympathy from me. You've made your bed and you'd best lie on it. I know what you said, Jack's got himself in a right bad seam, by the sound of it, but you should stick by him. For better for worse, the minister says. And any road, what are you doing getting a ride from that one, the new owner's son? He has a name for himself, he has, and you want nowt to do with him.'

‘The owner's son? Is that who he was? Eeh, Mam, I didn't know. But he was coming this way and I was fairly on me last legs, I was.'

‘Aye, likely. Just don't do it again, the neighbours might see. You don't want to get a name for
yourself
, do you?'

‘No, Mam,' Eliza said meekly.

‘Well then,' said Mary Anne.

‘Mam, I had nowhere else to go and Jack wasn't there. He took off, I told you.'

Mary Anne sighed. ‘Well, there's nowt to be done the night any road. But you must see we can't keep you. I'm sorry, lass. Did you not manage to save anything?'

‘No, I did not. Jack took the necklace out of the drawer. That was all I had. The candymen let me keep a few clothes for me and the bairn, but that's all.'

‘Aye well, we'll leave it for the night and work something out come the morn,' said Mary Anne, sighing heavily. ‘You'd best sleep down here on the settee with the babby. I cannot have him waking the lads through the night. They have to go on shift first thing.' She shook her head worriedly. ‘I don't know about our Miley. He's taken badly to sitting in the dark for twelve hours at a time.'

Eliza went to sleep the minute she laid her head down. She was worn out with the day and her sudden change of fortune. She didn't even hear her father come in and hang his jacket on the hook behind the door before slipping through to the front room where he and Mary Anne slept.

Mary Anne was awake. She was worrying, her mind going round and round her problems and getting nowhere. Tommy lit the stub of a candle and handed her the pie he had brought from the inn.

‘I cannot eat it, Tommy,' she said.

‘Aye you can,' he replied stolidly. ‘Get it down you, woman, we cannot do with you being bad an' all.'

In fact she found she was ravenous as she took a bite and gravy ran down her chin. She caught it with her forefinger and pushed it into her mouth. By, it was grand, she thought. Likely she would feel better after she got it down. Tommy took off his boots and stripped to his undershirt, then climbed into bed. He usually went straight to sleep but after a while she realised he was lying awake.

‘Tommy?' she whispered.

‘Aye?'

‘Our Miley looks badly, Tommy, I wonder if he should have the shift off the morn.'

Tommy moved restlessly. ‘He has to get used to it, Mary Anne, you know he has. In a month or so, he'll be fine. The other lads were.'

‘I don't know,' she fretted, thinking of the lad she had lost from bad blood. He'd only got a graze when he fell against the pillar of coal that was supporting the roof. In the dark it had been, his stump of a candle had run out. It had turned to the bad though and spread to the rest of his thin little body.

Tommy grunted. ‘He'll be fine. Look you, he's close to me, I made sure of that. The other two are with me an' all, they're better off with me.'

‘An' what about our Eliza and that canny babby?'

‘Aw, man,' Tommy said irritably, ‘things'll look better come the morn. Any road, I need me sleep. It'll be five o'clock and the pit hooter going before we know it at this rate. Shut thee gob, woman.' He softened this last remark by turning over and flinging an arm around her. ‘Things'll be all right I tell you,' he said, ‘settle down.'

Things! Mary Anne told herself. Aye well, mebbe he was right. She turned her thoughts to her daughter and little grandson. Once she had thought that Eliza had made a good marriage, one away from the pits. But Jack had turned out to be a gambler and gambling was the ruination of families. Hadn't Mr Wesley said so? Any road, Eliza and her babby had to be kept somehow, fed and all. Mebbe there was work at the pithead for there surely was none anywhere else in the village, not for a lass like Eliza.

Eliza, for her part, was lying awake too, despite her weariness. She was thinking of Jack. Where was he? Oh, she was so angry with him she was churning up inside when she thought of the happenings of the morning. To have the candymen, the bum bailiffs, throw her out of the house, by, she'd not be able to lift her face in the street again, she was so mortified. Eliza turned over on the lumpy settee and almost fell off its narrow seat. The horsehair prickled her skin even through the old blanket her mam had covered it with. She thought of the comfortable bed she and Jack had shared at his father's house. But then she thought of her mother-in-law's sharp tongue and the way her father-in-law had tried to rule their lives, hers and Jack's. Old John Henry had a nasty tongue, too, and he hadn't failed to use it on her. He'd made scathing remarks about her family, contemptuous ones about pitfolk. By, she was sick of being put down, she was an' all.

Oh, Jack, she cried inside. You didn't have to leave me and the bairn, not again. I would have stood by you, I would. Now here she was back at Blue House and she had to find work of some kind for she had to keep herself. There was no way she would take little Thomas into the workhouse, no, never. Yet her mam and da couldn't keep them, that was for sure. She thought of her brothers with pity. The two older ones were putting, drawing the corves of coal through the low seams not big enough for a man. Bent double over the wagons, one pulling in a harness like an animal and one pushing. They had both had sore spots on their backs and after their mother had washed them she had put vinegar on them. They had whimpered a little when it stung the button-shaped sores from catching their backs on the the roof of the seam. And there was little Miley, a trapper boy, sitting by the fire doors. By, she swore to herself just before she fell asleep with exhaustion in spite of her uncomfortable couch. By, my Thomas will not do that, no indeed he will not. Beside her little Thomas slept on a blanket in a drawer from the press.

Eliza woke from an exhausted sleep when Tommy came downstairs carrying Miley and with the other two lads behind him. Her mother was already up. She had lit the fire and was heating a pan of broily, milk and crusts of bread sweetened with a little sugar. The only light was that from the fire, for Mary Anne was saving the candle end for Miley. She had put it in his bait tin, his food box, so it would be a nice surprise for him. The boys, all three of them, were rubbing their eyes.

‘Don't do that,' she said sharply, ‘you'll most likely just rub them sore and that'll make them really bad.'

‘My eye itches,' said Miley.

‘Aye. It's the coal dust,' said Tommy. He was eating a thick slice Mary Anne had cut from the heel of bread, left after putting a slice in each of their bait tins. ‘You'll get over it. Howay now, the pit hooter will be blowing again in a minute.' It blew as he swallowed the bit of bread and the lads hurriedly finished their broily and licked the tin bowls clean.

‘Ta ra,' said Mary Anne as she handed each of them a bait tin at the door. She bent to kiss little Miley, but he was having none of that, for after all, he was a worker now, wasn't he?

‘Be'ave, Mam!' he said, ducking his head and racing after the others. Mary Anne sighed and went back to the fire. She shook the kettle and nodded her head. There was enough water left in it for them to have a drop of tea, she reckoned. Eliza was changing Thomas's sopping wet nappy and the baby was gurgling and waving his legs in the air.

‘Howay then,' said Mary Anne. ‘Have a bite of breakfast.' The pit hooter had stopped blowing and it was suddenly peaceful in the little room. She cut the heel of bread in two and smeared the two halves with dripping before mashing the tea and pouring out two cups. ‘I'll need some more yeast before I can make new bread for them coming off shift,' she said as she sat down with Eliza to the meal.