Ruby McBride (41 page)

She left him spluttering and swearing, not least cursing at his first mate who was roaring with laughter.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

24 June 1911

The man standing amongst the motley gathering of dockers was tall and with a powerful build that would make him appear dominant in any crowd, despite his evident desire to stay well back and not be noticed. He wore rough working clothes like everyone else, and a slouch cap pulled well down over his eyes, allowing him to glance to right or left unobserved. He was only half listening to the irate debate taking place amongst the dockers who, having finally lost patience with being ignored, had come out on strike. The rest of his attention was centred upon a young woman. She stood on the fringes a few yards away from him, holding tightly to the hand of a child: a boy, of around three or four years old at a guess.

Only yesterday the people of Manchester and Salford had been celebrating the Coronation of George V. The streets were still decked with paper bunting, Union flags, and dusty-looking banners wilting in the heat. It had been one of the hottest summers on record, trade was booming and any visitor to these shores, come to revel in the majesty of imperialistic glory, must have thought it a fortunate land indeed.

But Bart, like many another union man, knew that all was not as it appeared. Underneath the pomp and circumstance festered an open sore of discontent.

A voice rang out, echoing his troubled thoughts. ‘A chap shouldn’t be at risk of losing his job just because he’s joined a union. The bosses have their combinations, why not we men? We should have the right.’

Murmurs of assent rippled through the crowd, though one man shouted out a warning. ‘Take care who you say that to, lad. A bloke at Pickering’s Wharf got sacked the other week for just such a remark.’

Bart recognised the speaker as Flitch and smiled to himself. Big he may be, but never foolhardy, not where his livelihood was concerned. The same could be said of most of these men. Good, honest men who asked only for someone to listen to their problems, offer some sort of security, and at the very least provide decent working conditions. He understood their frustrations and felt a nudge of guilt because by doing his disappearing act, he felt he’d let them down somehow.

He’d spent the last few years working on the docks in Glasgow, physically hard labour for a low wage, but sufficiently taxing to allow him to sleep at nights. Now he was back and dockers, carters, railway workers and union men everywhere were making their voices heard up and down the land, here in Manchester as much as anywhere.

The trouble was there were too many unions: small, regional groups with too little power or muscle to use against the employers, who rarely managed to agree with each other let alone join forces and work together for the benefit of all. Owners and managers were every bit as stubborn, and often refused even to speak to a union man, let alone employ one. Madness!
 

The syndicalists might speak with passion of their dream for creating one big union that would tailor the share of power in society to suit all, but there was little chance of their succeeding in this over-optimistic aim. Unlike his father, Bart had never seen them as an evil and sinister force, out to destroy the very people who provided them with work, and found it hard to hold his patience with such an attitude. Though in truth he believed the real answer lay in seeking a middle ground, one less radical but fair.

‘
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ his father would say. ‘The world is changing too fast for me. Join forces with me in the business, if you care that much.’ Yet Bart had always refused, knowing the cost of such an action would be high. Swallowing his pride for one thing. Learning to work with his father for another. Quite impossible.

And now his father was gone. Giles Pickering had died of a heart attack less than a week ago. Bart had returned for the funeral, and now had some hard decisions to make. Did he stay, and take responsibility for his heritage, or return to Glasgow and anonymity?
 

It surprised him that he’d even been given the choice, but the solicitor had called him into his office and outlined the terms under which he could take control of Pickering’s. And there were indeed conditions. No unions had been one. He must take his proper place in society and stop denying his background and heritage for another; also recognise that his stepmother could continue to live in the house for the remainder of her lifetime. Bart had listened carefully and then walked out of the door without giving his response. Even in death his father attempted to control him. But Giles Pickering could not halt the progress of history.

‘I got the push last week,’ one man cried out. ‘For being an agitator, though I’d only attended a couple of meetings. I’ll show ‘em agitating! They won’t know what’s hit ‘em, once I get started.’

‘Don’t talk so daft. We’re wasting our time. The union will never be recognised.’

‘It will if we keep faith. We have to hold fast to our beliefs.’

‘Aye, and stick to our demands for a wage above starvation level.’

‘How can we hope for that when employers want things all their own way.’

The argument raged on, but Bart’s attention was again distracted by the woman who was now moving away. She had her head down as she talked to the boy, and a swathe of nut-brown hair fell forward over her cheek. He ached to go over to her, push back the hair and kiss her, as he might once have done without a moment’s thought. Though would she have welcomed such a kiss even then? He thought not. There were times, in the privacy of their bed, he’d felt he’d come close to possessing her, yet even that may well have been an illusion.

They’d got off on the wrong foot from the start. He shouldn’t have bullied her into marrying him. He probably would never have done so had not that pompous Chairman of the Board of Guardians been so determined to have her locked up for inciting a riot. The prospect of that lovely girl being incarcerated in a stinking cell had been more than he could stomach, even then, and he’d put forward an alternative suggestion without hesitation.

And not for a moment, a second, had he regretted it. He loved her now even more than he had loved her then. He froze as he saw that she was walking towards him, heard the clear tinkle of her laughter, and his heart clenched into a ball of pain deep inside. He should walk away now, before she spotted him, but somehow his feet wouldn’t respond. He stood transfixed, paralysed by the sight of her.

Discovering she had taken Kit Jarvis as her lover had nearly broken him. He’d followed her because he’d been unwilling to believe it could be true. For a time, after he’d saved her from that crazy escapade on the ship, he’d thought he’d finally won her. But Kit Jarvis had put him right on that one, and the fight, coming as it did on top of the argument with his father and his failure to help the men, had well-nigh finished him. His whole life had suddenly seemed useless, without value or purpose. It had been touch and go for a while at the bottom of that filthy canal but even after he’d finally come up, some distance from the tug and gasping for air, he’d felt no urge to return.

Looking back, he didn’t regret taking advantage of the fight and his plunge into the canal, cold and unpleasant though it had been. He’d been
right to leave. Look at her now, with living proof of her betrayal. The child was dressed in a spotless blue shirt, buttoned at the cuffs but open at the neck, and knee-length grey trousers. The child looked healthy and robust, with rosy cheeks and a large floppy beret pulled down over his head to protect him from the sun.
 

She was wearing a blue linen, ankle-length dress that moulded to her figure as she walked. It suited her, contrasted well with her colouring. Her hat, he noticed, was a golden straw with a matching blue ribbon. She’d taken it off in the heat and was swinging it idly in her hand.

She was less than ten yards from him now. Were she to glance up, she might look straight into his eyes. Fortunately, she was utterly absorbed in the child who was playing with a diabolo, trying to make the bobbin spin in the limpid summer air.

‘Toss it, Tommy. Go on, don’t be afraid. Roll it along the string, then up it goes.’

The child was concentrating hard but didn’t quite have the necessary dexterity. The spinning bobbin flew from its string well enough, its painted colours glittering in the sunlight, but did not return as expected. Ruby laughed uproariously as she chased after it.

Their fingers closed on the toy at the same moment. ‘Oh, thank. My son dropped it, he...’
 

She stopped speaking and every vestige of colour drained from her face as she looked up into his eyes. Then she put her hand to her mouth, shook her head slightly as if in disbelief. Bart handed her back the bobbin, tugged the neb of his cap and gave a cool smile.

‘He looks a fine boy, ma’am. His father must be proud of him.’ Then he turned smartly on his heel and strode away.

Ruby found that she was shaking so much her knees buckled. She staggered to the low stone wall that ran along the quayside and slumped upon it. Perhaps she’d dreamed it. Perhaps it was simply her imagination playing tricks. How could it have been Bart? Bart was
dead
!
They all knew that. She’d seen him fall in the canal with her own eyes.

But what if he wasn’t? At the time she’d found difficulty in believing that he could simply vanish off the face of the earth. And his body had never been found. Since that terrible day the baron had become a legend. Many people were convinced he’d been murdered by political opponents who disapproved of his union activities, while others said that he’d gone back to his wealthy family some place when he’d failed to establish a union at Pickering’s Wharf.

Ruby didn’t know what to think. She knew only that her world had changed forever on that dreadful day. When he fell from the tug she’d lost the one man she could ever love, for she loved him still. She’d loved him all along and hadn’t realised it until far too late. But had she lost him? If he was still alive...

She jumped to her feet, shading her eyes against the sun as she scanned the jostling crowd, now dispersing with nothing having been settled. The dockers’ strike was spreading, involving thousands of seamen, firemen and miners as more and more men came out in sympathy with their fellow workers. Her own carrier business was in jeopardy with precious little in the way of orders coming in. No conclusions had been reached today, save to call another meeting, at some other time. Yet now her livelihood didn’t seem important as panic filled her breast. What had she been thinking of? Why hadn’t she run after him, grabbed him, fallen into his arms with a cry of joy? Oh, drat! Why did she always do the wrong thing?

‘Are you all right, Mummy?’

‘Yes, love. I’m fine. It’s the heat, just give me a minute.’

‘I’m hot too, Mummy. Can we have an ice cream?’
 

She smiled at her son. He was a good boy, her right hand man she called him. ‘Why not?’ She followed him, laughing, as he ran excitedly after the ice cream barrow. He jigged up and down beside her while she bought them each a licking dish of ice cream.

‘Here you are, darling. Strawberry, your favourite.’

It probably hadn’t been him at all, just her fevered imagination. How many times since he’d disappeared had she thought that she’d seen him. No doubt it was simply a man who looked like him, no more than that.

When they had finished their ice creams she wiped the rim of pink from his small mouth, took off the floppy beret and mopped the beads of perspiration from his brow, pushing back the tousled red-gold curls with her fingers. Then she replaced the hat, and once more the vibrant colour was banished from sight.
 

What if it had been Bart, and he’d thought Tommy was Kit’s child? Had her son not been wearing the beret, it would have been all too plain that was not the case. Ruby began to laugh, even as tears rolled down her cheeks. She’d put on the hat to protect his head from the sun, had she as a result lost the only opportunity to be reunited with Bart? No, hadn’t she just decided it was the heat, and her own desperate longing to see him again that had conjured him up. But Barthram Stobbs was dead.

‘Forty thousand people idle.’ cried a passing paperboy. Ruby gave him a couple of pennies for an
Evening News
and quickly scanned the contents. It was now August, almost September, and the situation was growing worse by the day, with winter just around the corner. There was no coal, no fresh supplies, factories and shops were closing, and no manufactured goods were being transported. She screwed the newspaper up and struck out across the square.
 

A few strike breakers, protected by police, were making an effort to shift some goods, coal and food mainly. A futile attempt as pickets created blockades. But what choice did they have? They weren’t asking for charity, only what was just and fair.

But then who said that life was fair?