A Song Twice Over (53 page)

He cared deeply about her well being. About
her
. Yet he was not long on his way to Brighouse that raw February morning before his conscious mind had ceased to think of her at all, the road –
any
road – claiming his eager attention, the distance meaning nothing to him – as it would have meant nothing to Cara – nor to the hardy, wiry men who fell into step beside him, coming down in droves from the hills in every direction as Brighouse drew near.

‘Now then, lad – and how are you?' Some of them had recognized Frizingley's Chartist candidate, an Irishman, of course, although he could be forgiven for that in view of the risks he'd taken for the Cause.

‘I'm well. And you?' He remembered none of them, these stocky, craggy Northcountrymen looking much alike to him, although it made no difference to the carefree warmth of his greeting.

‘It's a grand morning.'

‘So it is.' And he walked on with chance-met strangers who, in the space of ten minutes, had become chance-met friends, fellow wayfarers, comrades in arms.

So had it always been with him.

Turning up his collar against the wind, his dark head bare, a spotted black and red gamekeeper's kerchief around his neck, he strode out into the cold, bright day – into a hundred such days to come – whistling these English marching songs when the words evaded him, his blood stirring, his heart light.

So would it be again.

There were ten thousand men and women and four brass bands waiting around the Station Hotel at Brighouse where Richard Oastler had spent the night to take him back in triumph to Huddersfield which, as yet, had no station of its own. He was fifty-five years old and had spent three years and two months in jail for debts incurred in the service of men and women like these who, in their turn, had raised the money to pay what he owed and set him free. And now they expected a great deal – perhaps too much – of him.

He was a man of presence and dignity. A man of emotion. No man of the people, to begin with, being High Church and High Tory, a country gentleman employed as steward by Squire Thornhill of Fixby who had first lent him money and then had him locked up for debt, leaving a mainly Nonconformist, Chartist, very far from Tory population to buy him out again.

He was a man of natural authority, a man who was
noticed
by other men, a supporter of the campaign to abolish slavery in the West Indies until, one day in 1830, only 14 years past, he had been invited to ponder the state of Yorkshire's mills. And had looked on slavery of another kind, much nearer to hand.

‘Let truth speak out,' he had written to the editors of the
Leeds Mercury
, who may not have greatly wished to hear. ‘Thousands of our fellow creatures and fellow subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town, are at this moment existing in a state of slavery more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system Colonial Slavery. The very streets are wet with the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice who are compelled by the thong or strap of the overlooker to hasten half-dressed to these magazines of British infantile slavery – the worsted mills in the town and neighbourhood of Bradford.'

Or Halifax, of course, or Huddersfield. Or Frizingley where the looms were kept turning day and night when trade was good, tended by weary women and those pitiful ‘factory brats'who were kept awake, towards the end of their fifteen-hour shifts, by that dreaded overlooker's thong, choking on the dust and grime they took in with their few mouthfuls of food eaten – to save time – in the loomgate, subject to appalling injuries, broken arms and thighs, torn flesh, the loss of scalps and eyes and lives when, despite the vigilance of the strap, they tumbled fast asleep into the machines.

For wages which could hardly feed a sparrow.

Oastler and his Short Time Committees declared war on all that. They would have the ten hour working day, at least for women and children which – since no millmaster could afford to keep on his engines for the men alone – meant ten hours for all.

They would have the ten hour day. Oastler and his Ten Hours' Men would raise the North for it. The Short Time Committees, the gathering crowds, the pilgrims on the march to York, chanted it:

We will have the Ten Hours'Bill.
That we will, that we will.
Or the land shall ne'er be still.
We will have the Ten Hours'Bill.
For Oastler says we will.

What they had received, after four years of mass meetings, petitions, wild unrest and the threat of more to come, was ‘The Act' forbidding the employment of children under nine, and stipulating that those under thirteen might work no more than forty-eight hours a week and attend schools like Gemma's for two hours a day. A small victory instantly cancelled out by the system of working children in shifts so that the working hours of men and women need not be reduced at all.

It was not enough. Both Luke Thackray and his mother, Sairellen, had stood in the rain and heard Oastler say so. And they had cheered him as loudly as they had cheered in the Castle Yard at York, continuing the struggle, at his direction, against fresh forces of oppression, the New Poor Law which by then had started to creep north, having – without too much trouble – already filled the southern half of England with large new workhouses into which the poor were herded, graded, separated into groups labelled ‘sick', ‘insane', ‘male', ‘female', and locked away in their separate categories.

For ever, in most cases, following the New Poor Law policy of making conditions in the workhouses so horrible so shameful, that people would – it was hoped – become industrious, hard-working, give up strong drink, or starve to death, before making an application to enter.

But what the quieter agricultural populations of the south had accepted would not do for the harder, more turbulent masses of the industrial North. The North would not have it. Oastler and his Short Time Committees said it over and over, loud and clear, and the North agreed with them. Poverty was not a crime to be punished with imprisonment. Nor was it the result of laziness, inflamed sexual appetites or natural inferiority, as the Poor Law Commissioners seemed to think, but of social oppression. Luke Thackray had carried that message back to Frizingley, one sweltering August day, with Richard Oastler's blessing. And so thoroughly did the North respond that when an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner arrived in Huddersfield to meet the local Board of Guardians, the Riot Act had had to be read to save his skin from the angry crowds. No Huddersfield inn would give him room and board. Effigies of the Poor Law Officers were burned in the market place. And when a meeting of the Workhouse Board was finally held the Oastlerites broke down the door and cancelled all the Board's decisions.

The North would not, and did not, have it. But the North did not keep its Factory King for much longer either, Squire Thornhill intervening at this moment to claim back the money which Oastler had long since given away to the needy, the unfortunate, the Short Time Committees, the Anti-Poor Law Campaign. Causes which no longer found favour with the Squire who had come to feel that his steward, instead of saving the world, would have been better employed in looking after his estate.

Oastler went to prison. Chartism blazed out suddenly, fiercely, and then seemed to flicker although not to fade. The world outside the prison walls moved on, perhaps only an inch or two, while Oastler remained motionless inside. And even now, as he was escorted all the way home to Huddersfield by cheering crowds and stridently triumphant brass bands, there were some – Daniel Carey among them – who wondered how he would take up his work again within the wider movement of Chartism which catered by no means exclusively for factory reform.

With the ten hour working day still to fight for, still looming large in his mind, could he really make the adjustment? Or would he remain on the fringes of the new agitation to carry out his own reforms in his own fashion, the Factory King unwilling to accept that the quickest road to his ten hour day was through the Charter?

It was the subject of much discussion later that day between Daniel and Luke Thackray who, having spotted each other in the crowd, had quenched their thirst in the same ale-house, shared a meal of pork pies and pickled onions and then, as the early winter dark began to fall, made their way, in no great hurry, back to Frizingley.

There had been speeches, declarations, pledges of loyalty brother to brother, much back-slapping and laughter, a few tears. Daniel, never averse to airing his views, particularly after a jug or two of ale and a drop of malt whisky, had stood, most of the convivial evening, leaning against a bar-counter, speaking at length on the Rights of Man as they concerned his listeners, both enthusing and amusing them with his verbal blueprints for at least a dozen perfect societies. Luke, his pipe in his hand, had told, by request only, the tale of his pilgrimage to York and had given, to the older men, such details as he remembered of the massacre of Peterloo and his martyred father.

It had been a long day but even so, with a three hour walk over rough, uphill ground before them, they felt no need to pace themselves, leaving Huddersfield behind and striding out in the general direction of Frizingley with no apparent regard for either the dark or the cold. Neither one of them possessed an overcoat. They simply turned up their collars and went on their way, Luke taller, much more loosely put together, his legs in their Sunday-best moleskin trousers much longer, Daniel a more compact, far more flamboyant figure with his scarlet neck-cloth and his jacket of Chartist green, his hands in his pockets, whistling snatches of English marching songs and Irish ballads, still setting the world to rights, talking easily, rapidly, while Luke, drawing on his pipe, dropped no more than an occasional accurate word into the conversational pool, each one a well-aimed stone causing its share of ripples.

And having settled without the least animosity that Luke would probably support first Oastler and the localized issues of factory reform and then the Charter, Daniel the Charter alone, they talked on for the pleasure of talking, of morals and music and manners, poets and philosophers and preachers, a classically-educated and a self-educated man each with his own brand of knowledge, so intent on sharing and comparing that they were both equally startled by the figure which seemed to come upon them as if it had risen from the ground.

‘I reckon you'll not be wanting me alongside you, Luke Thackray.'

Daniel saw a thin, crook-shouldered lad in his early twenties, he supposed, pasty-faced and sharp featured as a rodent with his red-rimmed eyes and furtive manner, his clothing by no means shabby, a very decent broadcloth coat, in fact, when one really looked at it through the impression of unwholesomeness he somehow created. Daniel knew, at once, that he did not like him. He saw too that the stranger did not like Luke Thackray and that Luke, although fully aware of it, seemed disinclined to make a fuss.

‘Why not, Oliver? If we're going in the same direction. You'll know the face of our Chartist candidate I reckon. Daniel – this is Oliver Rattrie, who used to be a neighbour of mine.'

‘Yes. I know Mr Daniel Carey all right.'

Unable to return the compliment Daniel said a brief ‘Good evening', puzzled by the degree of emotion in the young man's face.

‘You'll have been to Huddersfield, Luke,' he said, his thin mouth working strangely. ‘To see Oastler?'

‘You know I have, Oliver.'

Luke's voice sounded perfectly steady, so natural and matter-of-fact that Daniel could find nothing in it to cause, in this strange young Oliver, such a jittering of what looked like temper and nerves. Yet – whatever it was – the boy was shaking with it, his emaciated body in disjointed turmoil beneath his incongruously smart new jacket.

Luke had evidently noticed the jacket too.

‘You're looking well, Oliver.'

‘I can't complain. I do the best I can, Luke.'

‘Aye. You'll have been to see Oastler yourself, I expect.'

‘I have. A fine man. And a crowd of fine men around him.'

Luke drew on his pipe and then grinned suddenly, not unkindly. ‘Very fine, Oliver. Will you be able to remember all of their names tomorrow?'

At once Daniel understood, accepting Luke's comment as a warning to himself to guard his tongue, to say nothing in the presence of an informer – and, God knew, there were plenty of them – that might harm himself or others. Filthy little brat. Daniel glared at him, conveying contempt and then experiencing a moment of shock as Oliver Rattrie's sore, red-rimmed eyes darted at him a glance of pure and almost comically savage hate. What had
he
done to merit that? He had never seen the lad before in his life. Or, at least, had never noticed him. Was the boy half-witted as well as treacherous? Certainly he looked it, standing there with his bones rattling like a demented skeleton, his eyes spitting venom at a stranger. Unbalanced, certainly. An opinion confirmed by the manner in which, after keeping pace with them for a quarter of an hour, he suddenly broke away on a path of his own, muttering about ‘friends to meet'as he disappeared into the dark.

‘I wonder what friends he'll find up there,' said Luke calmly, his eyes on the high, stony track Oliver had taken.

‘Where does it lead?'

‘The main road if he climbs far enough. But if he takes to the road he'll have to walk a good few miles farther than us to get to the same place. Maybe he's scared to be on the moor alone. Aye – very likely. He could meet a lot of men tonight, coming back from Huddersfield, with no reason to wish him well.'

‘An informer?'

‘Yes. Not a good one to begin with. He sold the names of the Plug Rioters to his master back in 1842 and nearly got himself drowned by their wives for his trouble. But he works for somebody else now who seems to have taught him his trade. I never caught a glimpse of him today and I had my eyes open.'