Between Friends (4 page)

‘There’s to be three of them, Mrs Whitley,’ Mr Lloyd had told her apologetically, though two strong young boys had been all that was asked for. ‘You see, this little girl has been with these two lads since she first went there and she’s so attached to them …’

‘A little girl, sir! What am I to do with a little girl?’

She had been considerably put out, imagining a child, no use to anyone, probably crying all day long and not fit to do a hand’s turn but she was to be proved wrong for it turned out that Megan Hughes, an orphan since she was five years old at which age both her mother and father had died in the same week of the typhoid
was
as much a ‘beggar’ for work as Mrs Whitley herself! And she disliked ‘muck’ only marginally less! A perfectionist was Agatha Whitley, her former mistress had been fond of saying, and she was enormously mollified to discover she had met another in the ten-year-old child who came – against the cook’s wishes – from the orphanage to the emigrant lodging house owned by the ‘Hemingway Shipping Line’ in Great George Square. Mrs Whitley’s kitchen was as spotless as her maids could make it, as was the rest of the house. Nothing would do but their ‘best’, she was to say to them at least half a dozen times a day and Meg was put through the same rigorous training she herself had undergone at the same age nearly fifty years ago!

And the lads as well! The ‘three of ’em’, as they were increasingly to be called, had never worked so hard in their lives but they thrived on it. Meg, because she was still only ten years old, attended the local ‘council’ school in Cornwallis Street, not five minutes walk from the house but before she left in the morning and again when she came home at four o’clock she had her allotted tasks to do, for as Mrs Whitley remarked firmly, she must earn her keep if she was to stay. Under the cook’s tutelage she was given the chance to try her hand at one or two of the simpler of Mrs Whitley’s dishes and Meg was pleased when she was told she had an aptitude for it and if she was a good girl and kept at it, and given a few years of practice she might make a half-way decent cook!

But for the first few months at the house Meg had done nothing but clean and black-lead grates, lay fires and sweep and dust. It was her job to polish the ebony grates for these must not be neglected or they would rust. Emm showed her how to make ‘Brunswick black’ which was a mixture of common asphaltum, linseed oil and turpentine and when it was applied with a small painter’s brush and left to dry it came up a treat if you buffed with a dry leather! She swept carpets, first sprinkling them with wet tea leaves to lay the dust and give a fragrant smell to the rooms. Every Saturday morning all the rugs were beaten in the back yard and here the boys were allowed to help her for it was a big house and the floor coverings were too numerous and too heavy for a young girl to throw over the clothes line.

They had a bit of fun then, the ‘three of ’em’, larking about and shrieking with laughter as Martin chased Meg with the carpet beater, darting breathlessly between lines of rugs and he and Tom
had
furious ‘fencing’ bouts with two sticks and they invariably came in for a lashing from Mrs Whitley’s tongue and the threat that she would send them all packing back to the orphanage and get some replacements who would do a decent hand’s turn instead of fooling about and wasting the company’s time and good money!

But by then of course they knew the value of Mrs Whitley’s warnings and had the measure of how far they could go with her and though they stood still and cast down their eyes, suitably reprimanded, when she was done and had gone indoors with a last admonishing wag of her finger they would giggle and jostle one another just as children everywhere will when left unattended.

Meg had left school when she was twelve years old, bright as a polished russet apple, Mr Lloyd said, pleased that his impulsive gesture of two years ago had turned out so well. She could add a column of figures in her head quicker than any of the other servants could write them down and was a big help to Mrs Whitley whose eyesight was not as good as once it had been in the preparing of the weekly accounts for his inspection. She wrote a good bold hand and was shrewd in her dealings with the local tradesmen.

The boys laboured just as hard, doing, as Meg did, the work of full grown adults. Polishing windows, cleaning the marble tops of the dressers and fireplaces with soda, pumice stone and finely powdered chalk, hauling carpets upstairs and down, whitewashing the walls of the outside privy and laundry. They cleaned and sharpened cutlery, attended to boxes and bellows, cauldrons, cisterns, funnels, flues, hand-mills and oil jars. They polished lamps, copper pans, brassware and plate and, as they grew and became more responsible began to help Mr Lloyd with the actual emigrants who lodged at the house. It was arduous work but the three children were fed on Mrs Whitley’s hot-pots and ‘scouse’, on her steak and kidney pies, on fruit tarts in season with custards, eggs, milk and roly-poly jam puddings and they grew like weeds, upwards and outwards. Their eyes were bright and lively and so were they, shining with good health for hard work harms no-one. Their skins glowed and their hair was glossy and their limbs were straight and strong. Beseeched by Mrs Whitley to taste her delicious tripe and onions, her cowheel and pigs’ trotters and currant dumpling the three of them grew six inches in as many months and the boys thin frames began to fill out and put on muscle, particularly Martin who would be a big man when he was full grown. At thirteen the boys were five feet four inches tall
and
a year later a little under six feet, the two of them! Their voices deepened and broke as they came to that stage of awkward vulnerability in which they developed the inclination to fall over their own feet as they passed into graceless adolescence. Meg, two years younger, would laugh at them, teasing until Martin turned on her pulling the thick plait of her hair until her eyes watered and Tom would patiently separate them though he himself felt like giving their Meg a clip round the earhole at times! He was very conscious of his own fourteen-year-old shortcomings as he approached young manhood and the lively child and her tormenting was more than his growing pains could sometimes endure.

He and Martin bickered over who was to run to the ‘Fiddlers Arms’ for Mrs Whitley’s nightly jug of stout until she threatened to knock their heads together and they could scarcely understand their own snarling hatred of one another which seemed to alternate with their usual careless affection. They would pummel one another ferociously, only to go off arm in arm moments later, one nursing the bloody nose the other had given him and their young minds and bodies, growing and maturing were uncertain of which state they were in between boy and man.

The house was part of a chain linking the old world from which the emigrants came to the ‘New World’ across the great Atlantic Ocean. Most who sailed with Hemingway’s came from Scandinavia, gathering in Gothenburg in Sweden from where they went by steamer to Hull and then by rail to Liverpool where they took ship for New York. Emigrant traffic was a major part of the earning capacity of the passenger liner companies in Liverpool and of the five and a half million men, women and children who had left British shores since 1860, four and three quarter million of them had gone from that great seaport. For two reasons Liverpool was able to deal with this vast flood of humanity – firstly, the port had the tonnage available and secondly it had the railway network which served the city, bringing those millions not only from all over Britain but from other countries as well. Mr Lloyd and his officials would meet them at Central Station and they would march them through the streets, peasant stock for the most part, men, women, youths, girls, babes in arms, silver-haired infants and grey, bald-headed patriarchs, silent and staring, to the welcome of the house in Great George Square. For a few days they would be sheltered and fed, waiting for the sailing of their ship in the steerage accomodation which would be another
temporary
home until they reached their final destination. They had that stunned look of those who are afraid beyond describing of what they are about to do but are powerless to change their fate, only the children treating the upheaval as a great adventure. They were well-cared for during their stay and their rooms, though small, hardly more than divided cubicles were scrupulously clean and quite comfortable. They ate Mrs Whitley’s nourishing food and each batch of emigrants was inspected daily by the doctor from the Medical Committee for the rules regarding the health of the travellers was strict and must be complied with before they were allowed to sail. The house was registered and the conditions under which they lived whilst awaiting passage must be strictly observed.

It had not always been so! Mr Lloyd, whose father and grandfather had both worked in the emigrant trade had tales to tell of the harrowing conditions which had once prevailed. The emigrants had had to provide their own food for the journey and before the weary traveller had ventured more than a yard or so from the transport – often on their own feet – which had carried him to the city he was accosted by ‘runners’ or ‘man-catchers’, which, as the name implied snared the unwary and swiftly parted him from what few belongings he had. He was swindled by lodging house keepers, porters, ships chandlers and even those from whom he bought his passage.

Now, twenty to thirty thousand went annually from Liverpool alone, their steerage accomodation costing them two pounds ten shillings a head and in the past fifty years or so the population of the United States of America had quadrupled. They came from Europe, Scandinavia and Ireland, bound for America, Canada and Australia and their temporary presence in Liverpool, most dressed in their native costume added a new interest and colour to the streets of the city.

Meg, Martin and Tom worked amongst them and Meg had become Mrs Whitley’s right hand, or so the cook said, for none of the other maids, even the willing Emm had the capacity to understand what was needed in the often ticklish reception of two hundred bewildered foreigners. She was efficient and business-like and yet she had an intuitive understanding of their needs. Her sharp wit and common sense, even at twelve years old quickly had them arranged into the obligatory order of age, sex and marital status for families were kept together and the unmarried
men
and women were strictly segregated. Tom and Martin took charge of the younger men and would stand no larking about, something neither Mr Lloyd, nor Mrs Whitley would allow amongst the people in their charge. She and Meg attended to the unattached women and to the families, and order, and propriety reigned!

Meg might have lived in the house all her life, so well did she take to the task of caring for the perplexed and exhausted travellers. Her enthusiasm and pleasure in her new life flourished and as she grew so did her beauty. The skin of her neck and face was flawless with no more than a hint of colour in it apart from the dozen or so golden freckles which dusted her nose. Her eyes glowed with the richness of a topaz and her hair became even more vivid with the shine of her health.

Martin was the ‘handy’ one of the two boys. A ‘wonder’ he was, Mrs Whitley said with ‘that there machinery’, or indeed anything which came apart and could be put together again. He was neat fingered, showing an aptitude from an early age with kitchen appliances such as the knife sharpener, the mechanical workings of the insides of the household clocks, the mangle in the laundry which had a tendency to become jammed, the workings of the flue and the hot-plate and indeed any gadget or apparatus which needed oiling, cleaning, repairing or a part replaced. They had only to be put in his hands and he seemed to sense what was needed and to know exactly how to put it right.

Now Tom, he was different! Though his parentage was not known since he had been an inmate, like Martin, at the orphanage, from birth, it seemed evident from his appearance that one of the young travellers from Scandinavia, on his way to the new world had persuaded some pretty maid to succumb to his fair-haired charm! Like the Vikings of old Tom was tall and golden-skinned with a short cap of curls the colour of wheat. His eyes were the vivid sea-blue of the waters of the Norwegian Fjords and his slow, easy-going smile was already beginning to turn the heads of the parlour maids in the Square. He was even tempered, quick to laugh, unhurried with an infectious good humour which would allow no-one to be cross with him for long. Mr Lloyd said he had a head on his shoulders and if he could conquer his natural inclination towards unruffled indolence, his tendency to live only for today, would make a good steward, or even an agent in the company’s service like himself.

They were each as different from one another as the carriage is from the horse which pulls it and yet they fitted together, the three of them, forged in the years of their young childhood into a strong, unbreakable triangle. Children then, but suddenly, with the incident of Fancy O’Neill, they were grown up!

The hot weather ended the following day with a storm of such magnitude, and with rain which fell so heavily and for so long it flooded the coal cellar and Martin Hunter and Tom Fraser had no time to consider their new conception of Megan Hughes as they worked furiously to keep the storm water from invading Mrs Whitley’s kitchen. They barely had time to notice Meg as she huddled in the corner of the hearth and had they done so it was doubtful they would have plucked up the nerve to speak to her! Just at the moment and possibly for the next few days, or even weeks the sight of her would embarrass them to awkward silence for they were still only boys at heart, without the delicate perception to know how to deal with her shocked female humiliation at Fancy O’Neill’s hands. She had become an unknown quantity, one of the beings whom, during the past months, as they matured, they had eyed and whistled after and whispered about. They were boys and yet
not
boys. Young men and yet
not
and their Meggie had suddenly and in the most devastating way, become a woman and they simply could not cope with it!