The Girl From Seaforth Sands (26 page)

Smiling to himself, Paddy ate the last of his apple pie and collected the empty dishes. ‘You goin’ to wash up, Gran?’ he enquired cheerfully. ‘If so, I’ll give you a hand with the wiping before I fetches in water for the morning. Then I’ll make up the fire and be off to bed, for I’ve an early start tomorrer.’

It was a brilliantly sunny day in July, and Amy had got off the tram at the St Martin’s Market stop (usually known as Paddy’s Market). She needed a lightweight jacket for the warmer weather, which she should be able to pick up in the market and,
since she ran the stall on a Monday and business was usually slack after the weekend, she had decided not to open until eleven o’clock that day. What was more, because there was no fishing done on a Sunday she sold mainly salt fish, smoked fish and potted shrimps, which meant that takings were usually down. Now that Mrs O’Leary had given her a second day on the stall, most of her money was made on a Thursday, so opening late on Monday was acceptable both to Amy and her customers. Accordingly, she decided to walk the rest of the way, enjoying the sunshine. She also wanted time to think and the walk would enable her to do so without interruption.

Once again, after a gap of several months, she was seriously considering moving out of the little house in Seafield Grove. For within a month of Bill coming home, Amy knew that Mrs O’Leary had been right. Gradually, over the course of those weeks, Suzie’s attitude had begun subtly to change. At first she only found fault with Amy’s work or attitude when Bill was out of the way, but because Amy did not fight back and simply accepted the criticism with what good grace she could muster, Suzie began to return to her old ways.

Bill was back on the fishing boat, but he was far from his old self; after so long in hospital it would have been strange indeed had he not found an ordinary job exhausting, let alone the extraordinarily taxing job of catching fish. Amy worried about him and knew Gus and Albert did as well, but she hesitated to mention the matter to Bill himself. His pride in his ability both to find and to catch the fish was understandable and Amy thought that to take this pride from him – to insinuate that he was no
longer capable of such work – would be cruel indeed. However, she wished fervently that there were some tactful way he could be persuaded to find himself an easier job.

Apart from the fishing, Bill seemed to be coping admirably with the rest of his life. His allotment was flourishing – although any heavy digging was still being done by either Albert or Paddy – with new potatoes, peas, tender young carrots and even a row of onions, as well as the thick hedge of pinks and sweet-williams, which Bill grew for the house. Because of the allotment and because of Bill’s deep knowledge of the fish they searched for, the Logan family were doing well and pulling back from the lean days of the winter in excellent style. Amy knew they would miss her dreadfully if she were to leave, but she did not know for how long she could continue to put up with the atmosphere in their small house.

Baby Becky was now at a dame school and although this would seem to lessen Suzie’s responsibilities, it soon became apparent that taking Becky to school each morning and fetching her in the afternoon was an excellent reason, or perhaps excuse would be a more appropriate word, for Suzie to leave a good many tasks to be done by her step-daughter. This usually consisted of large piles of ironing, for although Suzie sold shrimps from door to door when the catch was good, taking little Becky with her during the school holidays, she no longer did any other work inside the home. Instead, she had managed to find herself a job laundering the linen from one of the big houses along the front. She used Gran’s copper to boil the whites because the shrimps were boiled in the Logan copper, but the
ironing, great mounds of it, were piled up in the kitchen waiting for Amy’s attention. Amy had to concede that the flat irons were always stood ready for her in the hearth, the nearest one to the fire being the first employed, but this did not help much when she came home tired from a day in the fish market to find the back-breaking work of pressing the dry linen awaiting her.

Suzie left her other jobs, of course. She had never been able to make good bread and had relied on Gran to do so for her. But since her illness Gran had not baked her own bread, let alone Suzie’s. So on a Sunday, before church, Amy would get up early and go down to the kitchen to begin the task of making bread. She would leave the loaves to prove beside the fire while she went to church with the rest of the family and then, upon her return, would pop them into the small bake oven beside the fire. Amy quite enjoyed making bread – she certainly enjoyed the result – but she resented being no longer able to call her Sundays her own. Bill was strict about the family going to church, Amy thought more in memory of his dead wife than from any profound conviction, but he had always been happy for his children to make themselves scarce once the service was over. Even on Sunday the main meal of the day was eaten in the evening, which should have given her several hours in which to meet her friends, walk along the beach and visit the Bowersdale Park. But because Suzie could not be relied upon to check the loaves and stand them to cool on the kitchen table when they were done, Amy was denied even this freedom.

At first she had not realised why Suzie either took the bread out too soon or left it in until the crust was black as coal, but it was soon borne in upon her that
this was yet another skirmish in the war which she had declared on her stepdaughter. She told Bill that Amy couldn’t even make bread without spoiling it, said the loaves were heavy when they were merely undercooked, complained that Amy had weighed the ingredients wrongly when the crust was burnt to a crisp. So Amy decided she must stay with the bread until she had it safely out of the oven, and since the family was a large one and she was baking bread for Gran’s household as well as her own, the task usually lasted her until early evening.

Now, with a sigh, Amy turned into Paddy’s Market and immediately forgot her troubles in searching the many and various stalls for the garment of her choice. Ruth had recently bought a nice one in a dark-grey gabardine and Amy wanted something similar. After some good-natured haggling, she managed to buy a brown linen jacket, which seemed ideal. Having completed her purchase, she slipped the jacket across her shoulders, for it was easier to carry it thus on such a warm day, and set out once more for the fish market. She was passing the free library when she remembered glancing at the clock over the jeweller’s on Byron Street and realised that it had shown only half past ten; she had another half-hour before she needed to go to work. Accordingly she headed for St John’s Gardens, wishing she had had the foresight to purchase a bag of buns. She had passed a confectioner’s window displaying mouth-watering cakes and could easily have spared a copper or two. It would have been nice to sit on the benches beneath the cherry trees and have a little picnic; a sit-down would be infinitely preferable to arriving at work half an hour early.

Crossing William Brown Street, she headed for the gardens and was on the further pavement when she heard a considerable commotion coming from her left. She glanced towards St George’s Hall and realised, with a shock of surprise, that the plateau before it, the long rows of steps and even the roadway itself were crowded with figures, most of whom were shouting, gesticulating or singing what sounded, at this distance, like ribald songs. For a moment she simply stood where she was, staring, and then decided to take a closer look. The pavement upon which she stood was relatively empty but as soon as she got nearer the hall and the stone lions which guarded its frontage, she realised that this must be a political meeting of some description. The police were out in force, apparently trying to control the crowd, who were taking absolutely no notice of the long arms of the law. The people surged to and fro, and roared applause whenever the small figure perched at the very top of the long line of steps stopped speaking for an instant.

Amy had watched for several moments before she realised that, with one or two exceptions, the crowd consisted entirely of women. Old ones, young ones, fat ones, thin ones; women shabbily dressed in calico aprons and clogs, women in smart town clothing, country women in gingham gowns and stout boots, and young women in straw hats, leg-o’-mutton blouses and straight, pale-coloured skirts.

Quite near Amy, a man began to shout abuse at the speaker and immediately the women nearest him turned on him, telling him to shut up in no uncertain terms. ‘Shut your bleedin’ face, you hairy little nothing,’ a hugely fat woman, wearing a straw hat richly furbished with curled ostrich plumes,
screamed at him, her face inches from his own. ‘If you don’t shurrup I’ll . . . I’ll flatten you and believe me, if I were to roll on you, you wouldn’t be eatin’ no dinner, nor shoutin’ at your betters for a week or more.’

The man began to reply, his words clearly couched in offensive terms, when two policemen approached. Amy thought hopefully that this would end the fracas but, to her astonishment, the policemen walked straight by the offending man and grabbed the fat woman by both arms. ‘You just keep your evil mouth shut, you great boiled puddin’,’ the larger of the two policemen said. ‘Gawd, you bleedin’ suffragettes make more work and more trouble than a couple of hundred protesters – the male sort, that is. Now, are you goin’ to shut up or shall we take you in charge?’

Amy stepped forward, full of indignation; this was prejudice the like of which she had never encountered before. The poor were always discriminated against, she knew that, but in her experience the scuffers were more inclined to stand up for the poor and indigent than to persecute them and had always seemed well-disposed towards women. Before she could interfere, however, a tall, stately woman in her mid-fifties, carrying a small parasol and wearing an extremely smart walking dress, had acted. With one swift poke of her parasol, the first policeman’s helmet was sent spinning into the crowd and, turning as if to apologise, a neatly judged blow from her elbow had the second policeman releasing his prisoner to straighten his helmet and tenderly caress one tingling scarlet ear.

‘So sorry, officer,’ the woman said in a cultured, self-confident accent. ‘These little . . . accidents . . .
happen when too many people are squeezed into too small a place, don’t you know?’

The first policeman was chasing after his helmet and paid no heed to her words, but the second one growled ungraciously, ‘Ho, I dare say, but a decent woman wouldn’t be seen dead among all these trouble-makin’ bitches, I’m telling you.’

Amy, open-mouthed, watched this drama, trembling for the fate of the tall woman but then the crowd surged forward again and the policeman, muttering beneath his breath, lost sight of both combatants and went grudgingly off to find his companion, still rubbing his inflamed ear.

The woman standing at the top of the hall steps had a megaphone and, as she spoke, whole phrases suddenly began to make sense in Amy’s mind. She was talking about women’s rights and Amy remembered that the policeman had called them suffragettes. Instantly she knew what this was all about – getting women the right to vote for members of parliament, a right which had been denied them for so long. But listening as hard as she could, Amy realised that the speaker was addressing other issues, issues which affected her far more man the parliamentary vote. The woman was talking about the right to work, to earn a decent wage, to be regarded equally with men in the workplace, ideas so revolutionary that Amy gasped and began to wriggle through the crowd in order to get closer to the speaker.

She had got within perhaps ten feet of the bottom step when someone addressed her. It was a girl of about her own age, dressed in a striped toilinette blouse and a dark-blue skirt, her small waist clipped into a neat black leather belt with a silver clasp. Her
light-brown hair was piled on top of her head and held in place by a silver and tortoiseshell comb, and she held a straw hat, with a chequered ribbon round the crown, in one hand. She looked neat, smart and collected, but the smile she gave Amy was warm and natural, and when she spoke her voice was low-pitched and pleasant, with no trace of a local accent. ‘Hello! Is this your first suffragette meeting? I was quite frightened initially, because the police seem so aggressive. It’s almost as if they hate us, wouldn’t you say? Mrs Blenkinsop is such a wonderful speaker, though, that I’ve stopped minding about the crowds and the police. In fact, I’m really enjoying myself.’

Amy smiled at the other girl. ‘I wouldn’t say it was my first meeting, because I’m not here really at all,’ she explained. ‘I was on my way to work, only I’m half an hour too early, so I thought I’d sit down in the gardens for a bit, seeing as how it’s a lovely day, but then I heard the rumpus and I came over to take a look. I saw the scuffer grab hold of ever such a nice lady, who’d done nothing wrong, and I was moving forward to tell him what I thought, when another lady knocked him for six and sent him running after his helmet. Then I heard what Mrs . . . Mrs Blenkinsop was saying and it caught my fancy. Only it’s hard to hear, because the women keep shouting and cheering, and the fellers at the back keep hollering to drown out her voice.’

‘She’s talking a great deal of sense,’ the other girl said. ‘We could try and get a bit nearer, though. Put your arm round my waist and I’ll put mine round yours and we’ll shove our way through somehow. She’s been talking about education for women, saying that ordinary girls, girls like us, ought to have
equal opportunities with young men, so we could take degrees and go to college like they do. My employer would be mad as fire if he knew where I was, but it’s my day off and I told everyone I was going shopping in Blackler’s to choose a nice new hat for my cousin Lucy’s wedding. I bet half the girls here had to tell untruths to someone, just to get away for a few hours. It isn’t right that we should have to descend to such expedients, but . . . Oh, look, there’s a gap! Let’s see if we can squeeze through. If we could reach one of those pillars . . .’

But at this point it was as though all hell had broken loose. A phalanx of policemen had forced their way through the crowd, mounted the stone steps and completely surrounded the speaker. One moment the crowd was quiet and orderly, the next a policeman had seized her megaphone, another twisted her arms behind her back and, while the crowd was still gaping, unable to believe what was happening, they found more policemen were among them, swinging their truncheons, cursing and kicking, and doing their best to break up the meeting.