Ragamuffin Angel (10 page)
Once in the pie shop the smell brought the saliva running in her mouth. She hadn’t eaten properly for days – what food there had been she had tried to save for the children – and now the hunger was threatening to overwhelm her. So when Phyllis, after a long look at her white face and thin frame said, ‘I always have a couple meself, same for you, Sadie?’ she could only nod her thanks weakly and swallow hard.
She watched Phyllis order four meat pies and her mother-in-law’s cow-heel and tripe, and present the can for the peas which was duly filled, and then they were out of the dilapidated shop and making their way back along Long Bank to Low Street and the harbour.
Sadie was holding the pies which were wrapped in a piece of newspaper, and the smell and heat of them were filling her senses so much it hardly registered when Phyllis opened a door in one of the houses and pushed her inside.
Phyllis’s mother-in-law’s house was filthy but there was a blazing fire in the hearth and it was lovely and warm. From what Sadie could make out the two women did nothing but sit and talk all day, certainly there was no evidence of any housework or cooking, but the old lady was friendly and insisted Sadie join her and Phyllis in a glass of stout from the grey hen – the large stone-ware bottle she fetched from the scullery. Sadie had only tasted stout once before in her life, and she had thought she didn’t like it then, but after a couple of glasses with Phyllis and her mother-in-law the grimy room seemed brighter and more appealing, Phyllis’s conversation more quick-witted and amusing, and the world in general a more benevolent place. For the first time in weeks Sadie found herself relaxing. She was replete after the big meal, as warm as toast in front of the roaring fire, and as the women chattered and dozed the winter’s afternoon away – aided and abetted by several more glasses of stout – Sadie lost all sense of time and purpose.
So it was with a sense of shock that she heard Phyllis say, after what Sadie thought had only been an hour or two, ‘It’s gone five, Mam. I’ll light the lamp, shall I? It’s nearly dark outside.’
‘Five o’clock?’ Sadie jumped up from her flock-stuffed chair only to find she had to hold on to the table for a moment or two as her head spun. ‘Phyllis, I should have bin home hours ago. Me mam an’ the bairns’ll be worried out of their minds.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry, lass,’ said Phyllis comfortably. ‘You’ve got to have a life of your own an’ all. Stay an’ have a bit of supper, eh? There’s some chitterlings with bread an’ cheese, or a pig’s trotter if you’d rather?’
‘No, no I have to go. But thank you.’
‘As you like, lass. As you like.’
She wished she hadn’t had all those glasses of stout. As Sadie pulled on her coat and hat her head was whirling. And what was she going to say to her mam? It would be seven o’clock before she was home.
When Sadie stepped out of the front door after further goodbyes to Phyllis and her mother-in-law – both of whom were a little the worse for wear after the stout – the freezing air hit her like a solid wall and made her gasp. It must have snowed a little at some time during the afternoon because a light layer was lying on the ground and the frost was making it sparkle like diamond dust. But night was falling rapidly now, it was dark already and the temperature was a good few degrees colder than earlier in the day. Sadie thought of the long walk home and her shoulders drooped, but what was even more disheartening was that she had no good news to impart at the end of it. Suddenly all the pleasure and cosy enjoyment of the afternoon was gone and reality was back with a vengeance, made all the more stark by the serenity of the hours she had enjoyed at Phyllis’s.
Sadie hurried along Long Bank, cutting into Silver Street from High Street East, and then into Prospect Row from whence she was intending to take a short cut across the town moor into Hendon, before striking westwards past the Hendon Ropery and towards Mowbray Park.
It had been years since she had been out on the streets after dark – four years to be exact, ever since she had taken up with Jacob and left her job at Henry Stewart’s – and although the lamplighter had already lit some of the streetlamps the back lanes and alleyways were dark, unknown places, places where things were sometimes done that were . . . not nice.
She had just stepped on to the path that would lead her across the moor, past the bandstand and the Trafalgar Square almshouses and on to Hendon Junction, when she was conscious of someone just behind her, and with the knowledge came the realisation that this someone had been there for a few minutes. She was being followed.
‘What do you want?’
Her voice was overloud, and almost immediately a man stepped out of the shadows, shushing her as he said, ‘Quiet, lass, quiet. I was just wonderin’ if you’re doin’ the business the night, that’s all.’
‘Doin’ the business?’
‘Aye. I know it’s a bit early but when I saw you turn on to the moor . . . I like it private like, always have done. Can’t be doin’ with visitin’ houses meself, too much chance of bein’ seen.’
He was a tall man, and burly, but his manner wasn’t threatening – indeed it could be said to be sheepish – and now Sadie stared at him for a long moment before she said, ‘You think I’m a . . .’
‘Look, lass, don’t get on your high horse. If I’ve made a mistake I’m sorry, all right? But I’m prepared to offer a couple of bob if you’re game.’ And then, when Sadie continued to stare, ‘All right, two an’ six then, but I’d want to see you for that, mind, up top. An’ you won’t get a better offer the night, I’m tellin’ you.’
Two and sixpence? He was willing to give her two and sixpence? That was nearly a week’s rent in some places, and a half crown would mean she could pay the farm what she owed and get the lads to bring a load of logs and maybe a sack of taties on tick.
Whether it was the stout, or the memory of how it had felt to be snug and full to bursting, or yet again the recollection of the occupants of the cottage all huddled in the brass bed for warmth as she had left that morning, their faces pinched and hungry and Larry crying because his stomach was empty, Sadie didn’t know. But when she found herself nodding and walking deeper into the blackness of the moor it was as though it was happening to someone else. It wasn’t real, the whole afternoon hadn’t been real.
And so it had begun.
Part Two
1905
The Workhouse
Chapter Six
How do you measure time? In the last five years England had seen the creation of the Labour Party by the trade unions, the death of Queen Victoria, a state of emergency declared in Ireland, along with the crowning of Edward VII. 1903 saw the formation of a new militant movement – The Women’s Social and Political Union – whose fiery and determined leader was a Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst. Two years later, an MP who stated that ‘men and women differed in mental equipment with women having little sense of proportion’, whilst emphasising that giving women the vote would not be safe, succeeded in seeing the Suffrage bill fail, and the first suffragettes were sent to prison for their beliefs.
But to hundreds of northerners the electrification of Sunderland’s tram service and the boom in the shipyards was the only news worth talking about, signifying, as it did, the steady and determined progress of the north into the twentieth century. And when the most famous escapologist of all time appeared in the Avenue Theatre, Sunderland, in May 1905, crowds flocked to Harry Houdini’s appearances, stating it wasn’t only London that could command the stars to perform. That, that, was news, man.
But for Sadie Bell, caught in a downward spiral that had begun that evening on the town moor five years ago, time was measured only by the night hours. Wet mouths, grasping hands, oftentimes foul breath against her face, and the thrust of a stranger’s body as it penetrated her flesh summed up this eternity known as time. She didn’t know or care about the events beyond Sunderland’s dark backstreets, it was enough that she survived the next twenty-four hours, a night at a time. The indignities, the humiliation, her mother’s silent reproach even as she held out her hand for the night’s takings, had ceased to call forth a silent protest deep within her. This was life. And life had to be endured. It was as simple as that.
Now, as she glanced across the small living room which was warm and sticky in the airless June evening, there was no animosity in her dull gaze as she took in Father Hedley sitting with her mother and the two children.
‘Hallo, Sadie.’ Father Hedley’s voice was without expression.
‘Hallo, Father.’ She hadn’t known he was here. She was rarely home before three in the morning and consequently slept most of the day away, usually rising about five to a meal Connie had prepared and cooked. After washing and tidying herself, Sadie would then leave the cottage for the walk into Bishopwearmouth where she would make for the East End and the docks. There was business done along the quays most nights, and in the labyrinth of bars and gin shops, brothels and seedy eating places of every description, there was also safety in numbers. Sadie didn’t go to the town moor any more; there had been the odd girl disappear – one of whom had ended up floating in the black water of the docks – when they had gone there.
‘Well, Peggy, I’d best be going.’
As the priest rose Connie darted a sidelong glance at him. Father Hedley always did that – got up to go as soon as her mam appeared, even if he’d only arrived a little while earlier. And he never laughed with her mam these days, he was always sort of stiff. The only good thing was that Father McGuigan didn’t come at all. She had asked her granny why it was that the priests didn’t approve of her mam being on the night shift at the laundry where she worked, and her granny had said it was because the priests believed she should be home with her children at night. Which was stupid, really stupid, when you thought about it, because even her granny admitted that if her mam hadn’t got the job when she did it would have been the workhouse for the lot of them. And since her mam had been at the laundry they had never been short of food or coal and logs for the fire, and they’d even had some money spare with which to purchase the hens and cockerel and the goat from the farm two years ago. She could understand Father McGuigan playing up-he would argue with the Pope himself as Freda Henderson would say – but not Father Hedley. It had saddened her to know that Father Hedley could be dogmatic like that. It still did. Which was one of the reasons she hadn’t walked to the road with him of late. But tonight was different. She needed to talk to him tonight.
‘Larry, you get the baked herrings on the table an’ the bread an’ butter,’ Connie instructed as she too rose and followed the priest to the door, and then to her mother, ‘I won’t be long, Mam.’
‘Aye, all right, pet.’ Sadie hadn’t raised her eyes since that one glance at Father Hedley, but now she looked at Connie and smiled and her eyes were soft. She was bonny, her lass. As bonny as ever she’d seen, and with her bust developing and her hips losing their flatness she was growing up fast. Pray God Connie would never find out about the whoring. Aye, pray God, but at least it had provided for her schooling. And her bairn was bright. As bright as a button. She had often thought it strange that Michael’s child should be so intelligent, whilst Jacob’s – and him a learned man and all – should border on the dim-witted. Even now, at seven years of age, Larry still had a job stringing a sentence together and he was no nearer learning his letters than when he had first started school two years ago, in spite of Connie’s patience with him. By, how that bairn loved her brother, and him her.
Outside the sticky confines of the cottage-where the smell of the baked herrings soused in onions, cloves and vinegar which Connie had cooked earlier was strong – the air was sweet and full of the scents of summer, even though the smoky pall and oppressive staleness of the steelworks and dark gloomy factories of Sunderland were but two or three miles away. The town’s expanding economy and the resulting population growth meant Bishopwearmouth was rapidly devouring its outlying districts, but as yet the house in the wood remained untouched. For how much longer, though? Father Hedley questioned as he breathed the woody air deep into his lungs, and for how much longer could this child at his side remain untouched by the darkness that was within her own family? It troubled him, it troubled him greatly, this affair of Sadie Bell.
‘Father?’
‘Aye, Connie?’
For a moment Father Hedley felt he had gone back a few years in time. Since the mother had succumbed to temptation, Father Hedley had been aware that the running of the household he’d just left had fallen wholly on the slim shoulders of the child at his side. He knew Connie rose at the crack of dawn to deal with the grandmother who was now quite infirm, as well as doing the washing and cleaning, and preparing and cooking the meals for the family. The girl was mother and father to her brother, cook, housemaid . . . It was too much. How many times had he told himself it was too much, whilst reminding himself in the next breath that there were others just as worse off – ten times, twenty times worse off – in the wretched decaying tenement slums of the East End, where unimaginable depths of squalor reduced whole families living in one room to nothing more than animals? But he couldn’t get away from the fact that his sorrow and pity was more profound where this child was concerned. It was grieving to the Almighty that he should favour one of the lambs of his flock in this way, but there it was. Somehow the thought of this child’s spirit being crushed was unbearable. And now here she was, speaking in that certain tone experience had taught him meant trouble.
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