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Authors: Audrey Howard

Angel Meadow (6 page)

BOOK: Angel Meadow
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It was Saturday afternoon and it seemed the whole of Angel Meadow, Strangeways and New Town were intent on making the most of the bargains to be had as the day drew on. The “Begorra”s and “to be sure”s were thick on the air and one might have been forgiven for thinking that the market stood in the middle of Dublin or Belfast. The crowds, the women in shawls, aprons and clogs, the men in velveteen jackets, homespun waistcoats and fustian trousers, were on the whole good-natured, turning over the goods for sale with a keen hand and eye, for every penny had to be made to count. The second-hand clothing stall was busy and the girls, Nancy towing the other two behind her, elbowed their way to the front. She would not, naturally, buy the first garment on offer. She meant to have a good look round first, for this was not the only second-hand clothing stall, glorying in the wonder of having money in her pocket to buy what she thought was good value. She had never done it before. Her mam had brought stuff home, carelessly telling them to “get yerself inter this or that”, the remarks mostly directed at Nancy, for Mary wore what Nancy cast off and Rose wore what Mary cast off!
The stall holder was beginning to get irritable, for the tall bonny girl had fingered every garment on her stall, holding them up and then casting them down with a contemptuous air as though she were used to better than this.
“Holy Mother o’ God, why didn’t yer say it was high fashion yer were wantin’, mavourneen?” she shouted in high dudgeon. “’Cos if it is yer’d best get yerself down ter Deansgate. I’ve nowt in from Paris just now,” winking at the rest of her customers and getting a round of laughter.
“I’m lookin’ fer quality an’ value,” Nancy said in that high-falutin’ tone she was beginning to adopt, or so their Rosie said. Ever since Mam went Nancy had taken to her role as protector of the family with great seriousness and in some ways it had gone to her head. She was proud of what they had achieved in such a short time and her imperiously held head and disdainful glances at those who couldn’t get off their bums and do the same were getting her talked about.
At last she settled on three serviceable grey skirts, hardly worn, the stall holder told her, three bodices and three warm shawls. Their clogs would have to do this winter, though she did go mad and buy three pairs of warm woollen stockings which, she warned them, must be taken off the minute they got to their mules or the oil would ruin them.
They bought tripe and onions, a whole rabbit, unskinned, carrots and potatoes, all going cheap as the day drew to a close, and a ham bone with a fair amount of ham still on it which, when boiled with the vegetables, would make a nourishing pan of soup.
They idled their way through the crowds, stopping at every stall to pick over the goods on sale and it was then that Nancy’s sensible practicality deserted her for several minutes and she reverted to the child she really was. There was a stall that sold ribbons and hairbrushes, combs and fans and stockings, pretty if soiled parasols, cheap soap and cheaper perfumes and, as though they were fastened together by an invisible thread, which in a way they were, the three little girls stopped.
“Come along, step up an’ ’ave a look. Three pretty girls like youse’ll be wantin’ a ribbon in yer ’air, ter be sure,” the old woman behind the stall cackled. “An’ would yer look at me soap. Rose or jasmine, whatever yer fancy an’ fresh made by me own ’ands this very day. Now tell me that don’t smell lovely,” and they could not argue with her. It did indeed smell lovely and the thought of warming the water by the fire and lathering themselves from head to toe with this magical aroma was too much for Nancy who couldn’t get enough of being clean. Of smelling as she had now begun to notice her workmates did not, of knowing that comforting and comfortable feeling of freshness when she had washed herself. Mary and Rose, left to themselves, would have slipped back into their old ways if she’d let them but she, now that she had a few pennies to spare, so to speak, meant never to be dirty or stinking again.
She bought a bar of what the old woman called incongruously “Rosebud soap” and a hairbrush. She was tempted by the ribbons. Such lovely colours of scarlet and emerald and bright blue and though Rose and Mary both begged for one, Rose turning sullen when she was refused, she would not give in. And to regain her sense of purpose and practicality, she purchased a big bar of washing soap for their clothes which she meant to put in to soak, as Annie had advised her, this very night and hang to dry in the upstairs room.
The rent of the low, two-roomed, back-to-back cottage was two and sixpence, and thanks to Nancy, learning to be a good manager and already a sensible girl, they not only eked out a living, but began to put a farthing here, a halfpenny there, to one side. Nobody thought to question what three young girls were doing living alone, certainly not the landlord who came to collect his rent each week. So long as his money was in his hand he didn’t care who put it there. He did notice that the eldest was growing into a real bonny lass with a cloud of tight brown curls and the loveliest golden eyes he’d only ever seen on a cat, but when he tried to put a hand on her she acted like a bloody cat an’ all, clawing his hand away and spitting, threatening to tell her Sunday school teacher if he touched her again.
As the year ran on and became two, then three, he also noticed that the appearance not only of the three girls but of their home was considerably improved. Strips of matting were laid on the uneven floor and a chair arrived to match the one already in place by the fireside. A battered settle big enough only for one person, and then a cupboard, the open door revealing a shining assortment of plates and dishes, while beneath it were suspended on hooks a set of skillets, stewpans and assorted cooking and household utensils. A highly glazed teatray which reflected the firelight and even a couple of tiny prints on the freshly whitewashed walls. A clock, a little Dutch machine with a busy pendulum swinging openly and candidly to the right of the fireplace. There was a small mirror, a barrel or two containing meal and flour, a row of smoke-browned little earthenware ornaments and a muslin window-screen to replace the torn rags that had been good enough for Kitty Brody, and in the window bottom a row of cheerful geraniums in cracked pots. It was so attractive, cheerful and warm he began to wonder if it was time he put his rent up.
When he mentioned this carefully to the eldest girl she turned on him like a tiger.
“You do an’ we’re off,” she told him fiercely. “Yer not the only landlord in Angel Meadow and this in’t the only cottage. We could get decent lodgin’s in Angel Street fer less than we give you, so think on. It’s only our stuff what makes it look nice an’ it’d go wi’ us. Just because we’re not as bloody feckless as the rest and have done the place up a bit don’t mean yer can charge us more than the rest o’ Church Court. Me an’ me sisters’ve worked hard fer this so stick that on’t wall an’ dance round it. We’re not payin’ another penny. Now, here’s yer money an’ good-day to yer.”
The reference to her Sunday school teacher was the absolute truth. That’s where they went every Sunday, the Brody girls. To Sunday school. Not from any particular desire to learn about religion, prayers or a thirst for any other high moral knowledge but because Nancy insisted upon it.
“Why can’t we go to Peel Park like the others?” Rosie would demand. “There’s a band there on Sundays, Marie Finnigan told me. She’s goin’ wi’ their Niall an’ Gregory—”
“Can Marie Finnigan read?” Nancy interrupted curtly. She was busy at the task of whitewashing the ceiling – since she was the tallest – in her fierce determination to rid the cottage of the swarming creatures that had decorated its walls for as long as she could remember and when she’d done she meant to start on the upstairs. Mary was busy on the other side of the room, her tongue between her teeth, her eyes narrowed, as she did a tricky bit round the window frame. They had moved all their bits and pieces to the wall at the back of the room and when they had finished this side would move it all again and paint the rest.
“Well then!”
“Well then, what?” Rosie Brody was more aggressive than Mary, who would always docilely do as Nancy bid her. Their Rosie had a lot of her father in her, Irish and truculent with it, inclined to be volatile now that she had enough to eat, and ready to argue about everything, from whose turn it was to do the cooking to her reluctance to spend every waking hour when they weren’t at the mill cleaning the sodding cottage, as she put it. Was it really necessary to scrub the floor so often, she would whine, and the windows already shone like diamonds. Not that she’d ever seen a diamond nor expected to but it would have been nice to have just one day a week when they weren’t either at their looms or on their knees in the cottage.
“How many times do I have to tell yer that unless we can read an’ write we’ll end up like Mam. D’yer want that? D’yer want ter wed some chap like we see at Monarch an’ have a bairn every year. Do yer? Mam was wed at sixteen, she told me once, and had eleven children. She was only in her early thirties, I suppose when she . . . when she left. If she was with us now in the end we’d have had her ter support and supply her with her gin but she’s not so I mean ter get on somehow an’ I’m takin’ you two wi’ me whether you like it or not, so shut yer gob, our Rose. An’ that’s why we’re goin’ ter Sunday school each week an’ not ter Peel Park.” Her voice softened, for she knew she drove her sisters hard, but what else could she do? She had this horror hanging over her, a picture of her mam lying on the kitchen floor with a man’s bum pumping away at her and the nightmare of it happening to her or their Rose and Mary drove her on and on and she knew she would not escape it until she had . . . Well, she didn’t really know, for Nancy Brody had no conception of what was beyond Angel Meadow but whatever it was it must be better than her mam had had. And she meant to find it.
“I know we have ter sit through a lot of old rubbish about God an’ Jesus, our Rosie, and how he said ter bring all the little children to him, if yer can believe such a thing, but if that’s the price we have ter pay then we’ll pay it. Now get on with that wall. There’s upstairs to do yet.”
4
Mick O’Rourke was seventeen years old, a tall, powerfully built lad, light on his feet, which he had learned in the prize-fighting ring. He was a great favourite with the opposite sex and a porter at Smithfield Market. He was second-generation Irish, as were fifteen per cent of the population of Manchester, with a great deal of cheek and charm. From the day he first noticed Nancy Brody when she was fourteen years old, as a
female
and not just a kid who lived in the same street as himself, he wanted her. You got “nowt for nowt” in this world, though this did not always apply to handsome Mick, so he began to put himself out to be helpful to her.
He had forgotten that years ago, before her mam disappeared, he had found and mended a bucket for the Brody family, an old thing with a hole in it, rusty and seemingly beyond redemption but with a bit of metal cut from a pipe, a smear of glue and some ingenuity, of which he was not short, he had put it right.
It was the day of the Whit Walks. She was passing his mam’s house, she and her sisters, for it seemed they went nowhere without one another, or so his mam said, with that sneer in her voice that appeared when she spoke of “Lady Muck” as she had christened Nancy Brody.
He saw her hat first, a pretty thing made of straw with flowers on it – he didn’t know what sort – bobbing along just above the level of the windowsill, and was immediately intrigued. Who, in Church Court, owned a straw hat with flowers on it? he asked himself, and when he went to the door to investigate he was in time to see three straight backs, three gracefully swinging skirts, with three pairs of immaculately polished boots twinkling beneath them, walking away from him towards Angel Street. She was in the middle, her sisters one on either side of her and it was a measure of the fascination with which the street’s occupants regarded them that every last one of them fell silent.
As she felt their eyes on her Nancy Brody lifted her bonnet even higher. She had made it herself; well, most of it, having found it, a simple, unadorned and somewhat battered pancake at the bottom of a pile of old rags on Mrs Beasley’s stall one Saturday afternoon. Nancy and Mrs Beasley, she of the caustic wit that she had sharpened on Nancy on that first day, were old friends now, old combatants since Nancy had learned to bargain for what she wanted, often bringing the old woman down a farthing or two, which satisfied her enormously. Mrs Beasley admired that. She admired spunk and Nancy Brody had plenty of spunk. In the last five years she and Nancy had formed a sort of mutual respect born of their recognition in one another of a spirited refusal to allow the world to get the better of them. Mrs Beasley, who had kept her stall there ever since Smithfield was amalgamated with other markets in the 1820s, had stood at the same spot in all weathers, sometimes frozen to the marrow, or pelted with icy rain and sleet, sometimes hardly able to keep to her feet in the sweltering, sultry heat which was trapped beneath a pall of smoke in the deep canyons of Manchester during the summer, and she had a feeling the lass would have shaped the same!
She had taken a fancy to the bright-eyed young girl who had a strong vein of common sense and self-preservation in her that Mrs Beasley respected, seeing herself as she had been forty years ago. She began to put to one side bits and pieces she thought the lass might find to her liking, garments that were redeemable or with a bit of decent fabric in them that could be retrieved. Stockings and undergarments, which the sisters now wore without question, boots and bonnets and, with a great deal of ingenuity and a sense of style come from only God knew where, the Brody girls were so well dressed they caused a sensation every Sunday when they set off on their weekly visit to Ashley Road Sunday school.
And that was another thing. They could all three read and write and do sums, even in their head, and, since the opening of the Manchester Free Library in Castlefield, it was not uncommon to see the Brody girls stepping out along Church Court with books borrowed from the library under their arms. Why in the name of the Holy Mother they still continued to live in Church Court, Mrs O’Rourke said to Mrs Murphy, who sported her usual Saturday night “shiner”, she couldn’t think, for with their hoity-toity, “we’re better than the rest of you” attitude, it was a bloody wonder to her why they hadn’t moved over to Higher Broughton by now.
BOOK: Angel Meadow
11.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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