The Stony Path (6 page)

How could her mam, who was always going on about how grand life had been at Stone Farm before she was married and how nice everything was there, how could she bear to spend all her time up here in this smelly little box? And she didn’t have to, Polly told herself silently as she carefully carried the pot out of the room without glancing again at the narrow-eyed figure in the bed. She agreed with her granny on this. Her mam was quick enough to come downstairs on a Sunday when she heard her stepbrother arrive, and she was always quite animated on those occasions.

Polly shut the bedroom door and hurried downstairs, walking through the kitchen and out into the yard, where she entered the privy. There were rarely any overpowering smells in here; her grandmother was meticulous in keeping the small stone-built hut fresh with ashes down the hole in the wooden seat extending right across the breadth of the structure, and her grandda cleared it out every other day by lifting the little wooden hatch at the back of the privy and evacuating the contents with his long shovel.

Once out in the fresh air again, Polly stood still for a moment, her grey woollen dress and white pinny flapping about her calves as she put the empty chamber pot down on the cobbles before straightening and lifting her face to the cool, keen breeze.

She could hear mooing from the cows in the field beyond the lane; they only had a dozen left now and she knew each one by name and all their little mannerisms. The geese and hens were occupied scratching about amongst the straw in one corner of the yard, and low grunts from the pigsty in its square of ground at the rear of the farmhouse told Polly the pigs had recently had their mash. The sights and sounds were like food and drink to her; they created a feeling that often made her want to whirl and dance and fling her arms into the air with the shivery, jumpy sensation that rose up and up in her at such times.

She was so glad she didn’t live in the town like Michael. Poor Michael. The feeling diminished into one of aching pain. He hated it, she knew he hated it, and if he had to go down the pit like his da and Arnold and Luke ... Her Aunt Eva wouldn’t make him, would she? Michael thought she would.

Polly stood a second more staring into the distance, and then purposefully shook off the sad greyness that always accompanied thoughts of Michael descending into the bowels of the earth. That wouldn’t happen for another eighteen months or so, until Michael’s fourteenth birthday, and eighteen months was a lifetime away. Anything could happen before then. Michael had told her, the last time he had been at the farm, that Mr Sotherby – who Michael worked for part-time delivering milk in the East End – had said he would be willing to give him his own permanent round when he left school. Of course that wouldn’t earn the same as working down the pit, but with Michael’s da and Arnold, and now Luke this last twelve months, bringing in a good wage, her Aunt Eva didn’t have to worry over-much.

Mind, her aunt was funny about Michael. Polly’s fine brows drew together in a frown. She knew her aunt took all of the shilling and tenpence Michael earned a week and only gave him a penny or two back for sweets and things, because she’d heard her granny talking to her grandda about it and saying it wasn’t fair. Michael had to carry twenty cans of milk at a time up two or three flights of tenement stairs, and last winter his hands had been cracked and bleeding with the frost and cold. He had cried one Sunday afternoon, and her granny had covered his hands with goose fat and made little muslin gloves to fit under his wool ones, but her aunt hadn’t cared. She didn’t like her Aunt Eva.

Polly bent down and retrieved the chamber pot from the cobbles, and now the shivery feeling was quite gone as she thought flatly, Aunt Eva’s like my mam, she is, but in a different way. And although she couldn’t have explained it out loud in words, she knew exactly what she meant.

Alice was busy dividing up portions of the sly cake as Polly entered the kitchen again after washing the chamber pot under the pump, and Ruth’s mouth was already full of the sugared pastry liberally sprinkled with currants. Alice said nothing as Polly scurried past her for the stairs, but once her granddaughter reappeared in the kitchen, Alice’s voice was soft as she said, ‘Sit down an’ have a sup, hinny.’

‘Aye, ta, Gran.’

It was quick and relieved, and for a moment guilt was hot and heavy in Alice’s heart. The load this bairn – this precious bairn – bore was enough as it was, without her having to act as peacemaker between her mother and grandmother. Alice knew she should have kept her mouth shut the last time she’d gone for Hilda, like Walter had said, at least until the bairns had been out of the road. But he didn’t have to put up with Lady Muck, did he. Alice’s mouth hardened. He and Henry might be out from dawn to dusk and doing the work of four men, but she’d take that any day compared to what she endured.

Alice brought her chin tightly into her neck. She had considered herself very fortunate when she had been sent to this farm from the workhouse, until she’d got here, that was. Walter’s mother had been sickly and unable to see to the meals and household chores, but if she had been a kind mistress the hard work from five in the morning until late at night wouldn’t have mattered. But she’d been a dreadful woman, eaten up with frustration at her enforced idleness, which had manifested itself in a cruel and biting tongue and an obsessional desire to see Alice crushed and brow-beaten. The missus, as Walter’s mother had dictated she be addressed, had known that by hiring a chit from the workhouse she would be able to have free rein; before Alice a series of girls from the town had come and gone, staying a month at the longest.

And so, rather than be sent back to the workhouse in disgrace, which would have meant being incarcerated for a good few more years, Alice had cooked and cleaned, fed the poultry and calves and pigs, and suffered Walter’s mother. And when some particular act of spite had been harder to stomach than normal, she’d repeated to herself that this wouldn’t last forever. A few years and she would be experienced enough to work anywhere.

But then Walter’s parents had died of cholera within a week of each other the third summer she had been at the farm, and on the night of the second funeral Walter had plied her with home-made cider and had his way with her. The next morning when she’d come to her senses she had known it was because he had sensed she was ready to leave the farm and didn’t want to lose his workhorse, but as fate would have it she’d already fallen for Eva and she and Walter were married by September.

She’d been full of suppressed rage and bitterness all through the pregnancy, railing silently against the farm, Walter, herself, and when her daughter was born she’d barely been able to bring herself to look at the means of her entrapment. She had often wondered since if her rancour during those nine months had communicated itself to her unborn child, because she and Eva had always disliked each other.

‘Gran? I’ll carry the kettle through, shall I?’

Alice came back to her present surroundings to see Polly, having finished her mug of tea and sly cake, attempting to lift the kettle off the hob. ‘Aye, hinny, an’ you, Ruth, get up off your backside an’ help her, an’ careful mind, the water’s boilin’. I’ll flake up a wee bit more soap by an’ by when I’ve finished me tea.’

As the two girls staggered through to the stone-floored scullery carrying the great black kettle between them, Alice sat on for a few moments more. By, she was tired the day; she hadn’t the list to tackle the mounds of washing, but they wouldn’t poss themselves. And there was that madam upstairs playing the old soldier again, and it was Sunday the morrow. Sunday seemed to come round quicker and quicker, and with Eva and the lads not visiting last week they were bound to make an appearance come the afternoon. She rose slowly, her thin shoulders hunched, and walked wearily through to the two girls to find Polly attacking the poss tub with enough gusto to make the water bubble, while Ruth scraped idly at the big hard chunk of blue-veined soap in a manner that guaranteed only the smallest of slivers fell into the tub.

‘Oh, it looks grand, Poll, bonny, but do you think they’ll come?’

‘’Course they’ll come.’ Polly smiled at her sister, standing pressed close to her side, before both girls turned again to survey the kitchen, which they had spent most of the day cleaning.

The fire was glowing a deep red in the shining blackleaded range to their left and it turned the newly polished brass fender rosy pink. It illuminated the hardwood saddle and hid most of its imperfections with the mellow flickering on the old wood, the flock-stuffed cushions appearing plump and soft for once. The kitchen table was sporting its white Sunday cloth over its weekday oilcloth, the six hardbacked chairs clustered round it all seeming to admire the bowl of wild flowers the girls had picked a few minutes earlier. And the colours of the flowers were reflected in the big clippy mat on the stone flags in front of the range. Polly and Ruth had lugged and pulled the mat into the yard that morning, beating the dust and grime from its cloth pieces for over five minutes before hauling it back into the kitchen.

‘I hope they come, Poll.’ Ruth ran across to stand in front of the mantelpiece, staring up at the little wooden clock in the middle of it. ‘What’s the time now?’

‘Nearly three.’ In spite of all Polly’s help, Ruth still hadn’t grasped how to tell the time, but now, as they heard their grandmother descend the stairs, their sense of expectation grew. Their granny always changed her working pinny for the fancy one with little daisies on before their aunt and the lads came, once she had made sure everything was ready for tea, which was prompt at four on a Sunday. The meal held part of the magic of this one special day in the week.

Every weekday – if they were at home and not at school, which was mostly the case – the routine never altered. Oatmeal porridge for breakfast, and then tea and bread and butter. This was at six o’clock, after the men had been out an hour milking the cows and feeding the horses – old Bess, and Patience, the last of Bess’s foals, who was four years old now.

Then the men went off into the fields with the horses, taking a tin bottle of tea with them and two slices of bread and jam, and the girls worked with their grandmother in the house and dairy. The men came in for a cooked dinner at twelve, which they all ate together, and then at three, Polly and Ruth took their grandfather and father their tea in the fields – a can of strong black tea, two thick shives of bread and butter and a currant bun. Supper – bread, butter and cheese – was at seven o’clock, after the men had come in from the fields and milked the cows and attended to the horses. This routine never varied and the food never altered.

But on Sunday afternoons everything was different. After dinner the girls would help their grandmother fill up the tin bath in the scullery, and the menfolk would wash and change out of their rough working coats and soiled breeches into their Sunday clothes. Then they would disappear into the barn after donning thick hessian butcher’s aprons and work on ‘clean’ jobs for an hour or two. On the arrival of any visitors they would leave the aprons in the barn and stroll in a few minutes later with their pipes alight, as though they had been taking the air after dinner.

It had taken Polly some years to understand that this act of apparent ease and relaxation was for her mother’s stepbrother’s benefit, and his alone. Frederick Weatherburn always arrived at or about the same time as her Aunt Eva and the lads and, like them, he rarely missed more than one week in a month. He was big and jolly and smelled of good tweed cloth and cigar smoke, and he was rich – or so her mam maintained anyway. Her grandda and da were always hearty and loud when Uncle Frederick was around, and Polly didn’t know if she liked that – it made her feel uncomfortable and slightly embarrassed somehow, although she didn’t know why. But she did know she liked Sunday tea.

Baked jam roll, cheese scones, fruit loaf, seed cake – they usually had the lot on a Sunday, along with slices of her granny’s delicious white bread and butter, and a big plateful of their home-cured ham cut very thin.

Sometimes, when the farm had been going through a harder spell than usual and Polly had noticed her granny’s stews and broths consisted mostly of taties, and that the flour was the cheaper kind – dark and with bits in it – which made the hard bread she didn’t like so much, she thought they wouldn’t have the white bread and plateful of ham on a Sunday afternoon. But they always did.

‘All ready, me bairns?’ Alice was smiling as she walked into the kitchen, but when Polly looked at her grandmother she saw it was her granny’s Sunday smile.

This smile went hand in hand with her grandda and da being different, the elaborate tea, her mam coming downstairs and perching herself on the saddle near the fire, and her granny’s face sometimes when she looked at Aunt Eva. But Sunday meant Michael too. Polly hugged the thought of her cousin to her and skipped across to her grandmother, burying her face in Alice’s apron and holding her tight round the waist as she said, ‘Look at the table, Gran. Isn’t it bonny?’

‘Aye, pet. Right bonny.’

‘An’ the rain’s held off. I told you it would, didn’t I?’

‘That you did,’ Alice said heartily, too heartily. Bad weather sometimes meant a respite in this weekly torture, although on more than one occasion she had known Eva drag the lads through a foot or so of snow on the two-and-a-half-mile walk from the tram stop. At least now the bairns were grown Frederick couldn’t give them all a lift part of the way home in his horse and trap. She’d suffered the torments of the damned every time that had happened, although Walter had assured her Eva had more sense than to open her mouth to anyone. But Alice wasn’t so sure. Seeing Eva sitting there week after week with her hungry eyes fixed on her brother’s face ... No, she wasn’t so sure what Eva would do if the mood took her.