Stone Cradle (17 page)

It’s amazing we lasted as long as we did in that house. We staggered on for another year – and amidst all our difficulties another baby came, Bartholomew. He was small like Mehitable but healthy, thank God.

Then came the night when there was a knock at the door. Elijah
was out, of course, so his mother answered. I was upstairs feeding the new baby but looked out the top floor window as the men left. They stalked off down Paradise Street in the dark, three big bulky fellas, and Elijah’s mother ran after them and pleaded with them, and I thought,
that’s it
. We’ve borrowed from friends and neighbours until we can’t hold our heads up any more. We’re weeks behind with the rent. And now he’s brought the bailiffs down upon us.

A few days later, Elijah’s mother sat me down and explained, quite gently, that the men were debt collectors and if we didn’t leave that very night, they would be back tomorrow, take everything we owned and put us out on the street, in front of everybody. Elijah was going to come to the house after dark that night, to help us get away.

‘Where’s he been?’ I said, dully, trying to summon the strength to be angry – but in truth the fight had long gone out of me by then.

‘Sorting things out,’ was all she would say. ‘He’s found somewhere we can all go. Friends of his.’

He had not come home to discuss it with me, needless to say. He and his mother had it all arranged. She knew more about the parlous state we were in than I did. Me, his wife, I counted for nothing. He had not even had the courage to come home himself and explain to me that his boozing and gambling had lost us our home.

‘I’ll go and pack,’ I said. As I mounted the stairs, to parcel up what had not already been sold or pawned, I thought to myself, and to think I once craved a marble-top washstand from Peak’s.

We crept out before dawn, skulking down Paradise Street like stray dogs who’d been starved and beaten. Elijah and Clementina both had heavy bundles and I had the bedding, which was lighter, but I was bent double all the same, bent double with shame. I could not
believe my life had come to this. I prayed and prayed as we slid down the street that nobody we knew would be up and looking out of a window. I was finished in East Cambridge. I would never be able to come back after this.

As we reached the corner of Adam and Eve Street, Mehitable, who was just in front of me, tripped over a beer bottle left out on a step. It clattered and rolled with a jingly-jangly sound that echoed down the empty street. I gave her a sharp kick on the leg and hissed, ‘
Be careful, you clot
.’

Daniel was carrying Bartholomew and I heard him turn and mewl. ‘
Hurry
up
…’ I hissed, to all of them.

I did not begin to feel easier until we were well out of the Garden of Eden, past the narrow streets where I was born.

We were heading for the edge of town, to Stourbridge Common. Elijah said the friends who would help us out lived near there. Probably one of his drinking pals in some tumbledown cottage, I thought with foreboding.

But no. It was worse than that, much worse.

When he said
near
Stourbridge Common, what he actually meant was
on
it. I did not realise precisely where we were headed until we were walking up Garlic Row, past the Oyster House and on to the open grassland of the common.

There, ahead of us, were the dark shapes of tents and wagons just visible in the breaking dawn.

I stopped where I was, in the middle of the common, and put down the bundle of bedding. ‘Oh Elijah,’ I breathed, and my voice caught in my throat. ‘Oh no.’

He turned, looked at me and scratched his head. The children stopped too, baffled.

Elijah grimaced, as if he was about to speak, but his mother cut in. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ she snapped. ‘If we spend this night with something over our heads, even be it a bender tent, you should think yourself lucky.’

I glared at her. ‘You may be used to this, Mother, but I am not,’ I said sharply.

She glared back in response, but Elijah stepped in. ‘Shut it you two, will you?’

Mehitable burst into tears.

‘What’s
wrong
with you?’ I asked.

She shook her head, and sobbed. Clementina stepped forward and bent her head to the child, then lifted it and said, ‘She’s thirsty.’

‘Well, we’ll be there soon,’ said Elijah. ‘Come on, then.’

I picked up the bedding. I had no choice.

Elijah had given me the impression that he knew the folk we were visiting, but as we approached the first row of tents, I could see him stiffen and glance around, as if sizing the place up. Clementina strode ahead a little. Elijah dropped back to me and said, ‘Keep your mouth shut to start off with, all right, Rosie?’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Just keep it closed, all right?’

We walked forward in a line, and as we did so, a young woman emerged from the nearest tent. She saw us, and stared at us. Her skin was dark, even darker than Clementina’s, and her cheeks were hollows, her hair black and straggly. She was wearing a huge man’s shirt which came down to her knees but her legs and feet were bare.
What
on
earth
have
we
come
to
? I thought, shocked by the state of her and wanting nothing more than to snatch the children and run for it.

As we passed her, the young woman turned and shouted across the still quiet camp. I did not understand the words she used. They were full of
ushing
sounds.

Immediately, other figures emerged from other tents, in various states of undress, and came over to us quickly across the grass: men, women and children in a swarm. Within a moment or two, we were surrounded by a crowd that pressed in on us unsmilingly
and prevented us from moving further into the camp. I looked from face to face, but still nobody spoke a word. I put my arms around Daniel and Mehitable and pulled them in close to me. Daniel was still holding Bartholomew. Mehitable clung to my legs. Still the people pressed forward, not smiling or speaking. We were effectively trapped. Lijah was separated from me a little and I looked to him for help but he just glared at me, and I understood from his glare that I must not speak.

Mehitable said, ‘Mother …’ in a whining, frightened voice and I took my arm from around her shoulders and clamped my hand over her mouth.

One boy was insolently close to me. He reached out a dark, dirty hand and plucked at the fabric of my sleeve. I shook the sleeve free, but he just pressed in closer and continued plucking. I felt someone else, behind me, tug at my skirt, and resolved that if Elijah did not intervene soon to save us I would shout out, whatever he had told me.

Just at the point when I thought I might suffocate with all this unwanted attention, a man emerged from the light-grey gloom and strode quickly towards us. He stopped a few feet away and the crowd fell back. He was looking at Elijah.

He was a tall man, barrel chested. He was wearing a shirt that was unbuttoned, despite the cold, and I could see that he was strongly built. He had a huge moustache that draped over his upper lip and hung down either side. He stared at Elijah very directly but ignored the rest of us.

Then Elijah started to speak, and I looked at him in amazement, for though I had heard him and Clementina use the odd peculiar word together, I had never heard anything like this – a proper language.

There were a few exchanges between Elijah and the man with a moustache, the crowd listening intently all the while. Then all at once, the man broke into a smile. At this, the crowd all smiled too,
and the atmosphere changed completely – the people around us loosened, fell apart. Some returned to their tents or wagons – others began chatting among themselves. A couple of women came forward and gestured that we should walk with them.

As we were led towards the centre of the wagons, I realised that Clementina was not with us. Looking around, I saw her, heading off to another part of the camp, chatting in a lively fashion to a woman about the same age as herself. A young boy walking beside them was carrying her bag. It was the last we saw of Clementina for a couple of days.

I did my best to fit in, I really did. I’m not one for moaning when there’s no point in it, and after my initial shock and a short period when I felt very gloomy, I saw that I had better get used to the idea of being a … a what? Lijah had told me, a long time ago, never to use
that
word
in front of him.
Gipsy
was an insult, he told me – bad language. It was only
gorjers
who used the word
gipsy
. Travellers is what they called themselves and Travellers is what they were. Romanies. The People. I can’t say as I really understood the difference myself at the time, but I understood well enough how the word
gipsy
got used as an insult. I’d heard the way my stepfather used it in the kitchen at the farmyard. ‘Have those damn
gipsies
all paid up, Rose?’ Or sometimes, ‘Take a good look round the camp when you go down, Rose, and see if any of those
bloody
gipos
have lifted my sharp spade. I can’t find it anywhere,’ when I knew for a fact that Henry had left the sharp spade in the yard.

I thought the Travelling folk who came to the harvest were a bit queer in their ways and I was a little scared of them, but they were always nice to me and the fact that my stepfather hated them was a pretty strong recommendation as far as I was concerned. And I did fall for one of them, after all.

Sometimes, when Elijah and I fought, he would try and use it
against me, being a Travelling man. ‘You’ve no idea, woman, when you’ve lived the life I’ve had …’

‘Don’t you use that as an excuse, Elijah. I wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in my mouth, you know.’

I wouldn’t have Elijah trying to make me feel bad on account of what a hard life he’d had – and I never blamed his bad behaviour on his being a Traveller. Elijah was Elijah, and if he’d been born a lord he’d have been exactly the same.

So what I’m saying is the problem with the Stourbridge Common lot was not on account of them being Travellers. It was on account of the fact that I wasn’t, and they made sure I knew it.

I think the problem was I expected they would be like Mrs Boswell, who had always been so nice and kind to me back at River Farm. She would have explained things to me and I would have understood the life much quicker then. Mrs Boswell was a lady, whatever she called herself, and she always made me feel like a fine lady too. She respected me, and I respected her back. There was no one in the Stourbridge Common lot who was like her, I saw that the very next day.

The man who had spoken to Elijah when we arrived was a Cambridgeshire Smith, and I gathered some weeks later that he and Elijah had decided they were distant relations in some way. Bartley, his name was, or Bartle or something like that. Bartley Smith’s wife was called Morselina, although I was never invited to be on first-name terms with her. She was a thin, suspicious-looking woman, and I knew as soon as I set eyes on her that she had decided not to like me.

I went over to their caravan the very first morning, with Elijah. We had gone to bed for a couple of hours after we first arrived, in a tent which someone else had been sleeping in that night, for the blankets were all mussed and the ground warm. Me and the children were so tired we thought nothing of it.

At full light, Lijah nudged me awake and, whispering that we should leave the children to carry on sleeping, told me to brush myself down and come with him.

I didn’t want to leave the children. They had only that night left their home and all they knew behind. What if one of them woke and was afraid? Lijah told me not to be stupid. If the children woke up, they would be looked after by whoever was nearest to them; that was the way it worked in a camp.

It’s not the way I work
, I thought to myself as I brushed myself down and tried to make myself presentable.

It was a chilly morning and my bones ached. I had a terrible thirst and was dying for a cup of tea. How will I ever get through this day? I thought to myself as we made our way across the damp grass to the Smiths’ wagon.

The whole family was up already and a fire lit. Bartley Smith and two other men were seated on upturned boxes. An elderly woman, older than Clementina, was squatting on the grass beside them. Morselina Smith was pouring tea into the row of tin mugs that sat on a tray on another upturned box.

Bartley Smith rose and greeted Elijah. He ignored me, and I should have taken the hint. Instead, I did what I would have done had we just arrived as guests at a house in Paradise Street. I sat myself down, and waited to be offered a cup of tea.

Morselina Smith straightened herself from pouring the tea and stared at me. I stared right back. She lifted the tray up and I half lifted a hand, expecting that I would be offered tea first, but she gave tea out to all the men, including Elijah, and then the old woman. There was no cup left for me, and I was left sitting like a fool with my empty hands in my lap, while they all drank noisily and nodded their appreciation.

I could have wept with disappointment. I had been up half the night and left my home with nothing but what I could carry. Was it too much to expect a little kindness from these people?

Elijah was glaring at me but I could not work out why.

Then he and the other men began to talk to each other in their strange language. I thought it most rude of them when they knew I could not understand.

So I had to sit there, in the damp and chill, with my shawl wrapped around me, while the men ignored me and drank their tea, and I could feel my cheeks growing pink with humiliation. Elijah had never behaved this rudely toward me in company before, whatever rows we may have had in private.

All this time, the old woman had been staring up at me keenly. Eventually, she rose from where she squatted and spoke to the men. Whatever she was saying, I knew it concerned me as she nodded in my direction when she spoke. The men took notice of
her
, all right. In fact, they all grinned from ear to ear. I gathered she had made some joke at my expense.