Stone Cradle (9 page)

I dumped the tub down behind the
vardo
and found him where I knew’d he’d be, a-sitting on the step. Afterwards I thought, he knew before I spoke to him what it was about on account of how he didn’t greet me. He had probably been expecting it.

I stood over him for a moment, but he did not look up. Instead, he continued cutting at a new block, and I stupidly watched the pile of shavings grow between his feet, all the while waiting for him to give me my cue. And all the while I felt my blood boiling up
as I thought of how the whole camp knew more about my son than I did. There he sat on that step, the person who’d been everything to me these last twenty years, even though it killed my Dei and kept us moving and gave me more trouble than a dozen other children could have done. And I had poured everything into him. Everything he was; his neat shirts that I stitched, his fancy waistcoat – the kiss-curl on his forehead. It was all me. I thought I would burst with it, with him not realising.

Eventually, he knew’d I would stand there all day unless he spoke first. Do you know what he said?

‘Say your piece, Dei.’

That was it. He didn’t even look up.
Get it over with, makes no dif
ference
to
me.

So I let him have it straight. ‘I don’t know what you think there is to be so not-worried about,’ I said, and I was surprised at how calm my voice sounded. ‘It may not bother you to have the whole camp talking about us behind our backs but it bothers me and I think you might do a bit of respecting of that. You’ve always gone your own way. You’ve always done whatever you’ve wanted to do without so much as a thought for me or Adolphus. I suppose I should’ve got used to it after all this time …’ He stopped shaving the block, although he still did not look up.

‘Dei …’ he said, but I was under way by then.

‘Ever since you was a boy you’ve done exactly as you please with never one thought for what folk might say. You’ve larked about and disrespected, never mind the drinking you’ve been doing recently. But in all my born years, with everything that’s happened to us, I never,
never
thought that you would sink so low as to be seen mooning over a
gorjer
girl. I would have thought you’d have more pride than that.’

That stung him. He looked up then. His eyes narrowed. ‘You can talk, can’t you?’

I gasped out loud. ‘Don’t you dare bring that up. That’s years
ago. I’ve told you, you ain’t no half ’n’ half, whatever they say, don’t you dare say that to me.’ He must have seen the fierce look on my face for he dropped his gaze again. There was a silence between us.
He’s
slipping
away
from
me,
I thought, full of misery,
my
only
child.

Then he said, ‘I likes the way her hair looks in the sun, Dei.’

That was it? For that, he was prepared to tear everything apart, to leave me and lose his work and be always looked down upon by all the people around us and have his children sniggered at?
Rose.
A farmer’s daughter, with her cloud of hair and her broad hips and shoulders and that great body of hers that said, look how large and soft I am – and what more did any man want? And suddenly I thought of my poor, tiny little Dei, as small as a bird, who was broke so easily on the tread-wheel all those years ago, snapped like a twig, and I thought that big, soft Rose looks at me and she thinks I’m like a little bird as well, but I’ve got news for her. I’m tougher than my Dei was. I won’t break nearly so easy.

I
likes
the
way
her
hair
looks
in
the
sun.

It doesn’t matter how much you love a child. It counts for nothing, not when he gets grow’d, and sees a girl’s hair in the sun.

I was sore after our argument, right enough, but we had argued plenty before and the thing about me and Lijah is we fought like anything but then we cleared the air and the next day we just got on with it. Adolphus always found that hard to understand. He would hear us a-shouting at each other and off he would go on some errand or other, shaking his head. Then he would come back and Lijah and I would be chatting all peaceable, and he would shake his head again. I think he felt a bit left out, in truth, for he and I never shared a cross word in the whole twelve years we were together.

Lijah had gone off somewhere after we spoke and was not back before we went to bed but I didn’t think on’t and the next day I got
up at first light as usual and stepped down. I took the clods off the fire and blew on it, and smoked it up into life. I put the tripod over and hung the kettle, which I had filled the night before, and only then did I turn around to stir Lijah.

The ground was damp with dew. The early morning air had that fine freshness that summer mornings have, when you know it will be hot later so you don’t mind the little chill of it. Just breathing that air was like quenching a thirst. A thrush was hopping in the grass. As I turned it took fright, fled.

Lijah wasn’t there.

That was it. I knew it. He’d gone for good. His blanket roll was gone too, and his pack that he normally put his head on and I didn’t need to go round to the back to know his box of small tools and his blocks would be gone too.

I drew breath, great large gulps of that fresh, dew-laden air. Then I clamped my hand over my mouth to stop myself from crying out.

It was three months before I got word of them. They had married in Cambridge, in a church. Apparently, she had said how if she was giving up her family and everything then the least he could do was wed her proper, so they did it just like a pair of
gorjers
with a vicar and everything.

I only heard all this because once they were settled in Cambridge, Lijah got to know the local hostelries, of course, and a man he drank with there was a Heron, a nephew of Manabel Heron, who was married to a fella in our camp. It wasn’t Lijah sent word to me or anything. I found out just like anyone might find out when word gets round about what so-and-so is up to, and of course the whole of our camp was agog with the news that Lijah Smith had run off with the farmer’s daughter. They were talking about that one for months. Yes, you can imagine how much I enjoyed walking around the camp after word of that got out.

Tale was, after Rose Childer’s father had found out she was consorting with
gipsies,
he horse-whipped her and locked her in her room, but she got out and shinnied down the drainpipe and came to Lijah in the night. I can’t rightly credit it, as I can’t see her shinnying down anything myself but that was how the story went. In the morning, her father and her brothers went after them on horseback but they couldn’t find them, which was a good thing for my Lijah.

I don’t know how long after that they was married. But this nephew of Manabel’s said Lijah told him that none of her family showed up, even though she sent word of the where and the when, hoping they might forgive her as she was getting properly wed in a church an’ all. Not one of them showed, but the church bells was rang as they came out, and later we found out her father had paid for them to be rung, though he would not show his face.

No one sent word to me, of the where, and the when. No one asked for my forgiveness. Perhaps they thought there was no need.

Anyroad, about ten years later, Rose said to me how it would’ve been better if one of those church bells had fallen off and killed her stone dead, such a life she had with Lijah.

It was later that same summer that I lost my Adolphus. And by the time it had happened I had sort of thought it was coming soon on account of how he was getting short of breath all the time and had pains in his chest a lot.

There was nothing I could do for him when he was poorly, but there was something I could do once he was gone. No one was ever going to pull that fine
vardo
of ours but him. I had promised him that much, and it went up in smoke with him. I could’ve sold it for a pretty penny, and nobody would have held it against me on account of how I was left with no one and would have to be looked after by the camp and have people pretending they respected me when they pitied me, in fact. But it had to go with him, his
vardo
.
He had planed and painted every inch himself. Even the sailcloth flooring with the swirls that meant something to us alone but no one else could ever read them. Unusual it was, with its sash windows. I saw a few men shake their heads with sorrow as they piled the branches on.

I had been into town the day before and gone to the dressmakers, and do you know what? I had to buy a child’s mourning dress. They said they had nothing small enough for me and it would have to be made to order and of course there was no time for that so I bought a child’s dress and did a few adjustments. It had pleats down the front. At the neck, I wore a broach, and Manabel Heron said to me that when I walked back in the camp they thought a fine lady had come to visit.

I bought some pointy lace-up boots, as well, but I did not wear those in the camp as I did not want to ruin them. They were for my journey. Those, and the new carpet-bag I bought for my things, the buying of them took most of what I had kept by.

I had nothing after that: no son, no husband, no
vardo
to live in and no way of living in it even if I had. When I burned Adolphus I burned up my whole life until that moment, all the miles I’d Travelled and everything that went with it. Lijah had taken Kit with him when he went. I had given my china to Manabel and sold my few bits of jewellery to buy my dress and boots and bag. There was only just enough left over to pay someone to take me down to Cambridge.

M
y name is Rose Smith and I was born on Paradise Street, in East Cambridge. I wasn’t a Smith when I was born, of course. I was Rose Blumson. My mother was Emmeline Blumson, laundry maid, and my father was nowhere in sight.

I became a Smith when I married my husband, Elijah Smith, who I met when he came fruit picking at the orchards that belonged to my stepfather. That was later, of course.

East Cambridge. The Garden of Eden, they called it. Lots of those streets south of Maids Causeway had their own allotments back then, and the grocers and fruiterers had shops and warehouses nearby. Fruit ’n’ veg was big in that district. The traders round there supplied the colleges and all the posh folk. That was how that area got its name.

The houses on Paradise Street didn’t have anything fancy out back like allotments, just a yard and a privvy. Paradise was south of Fitzroy Street, one of the new terraces that they built not long
before I was born, on account of all the railway workers coming to town. The houses were neat enough but they hadn’t got the roads or pavements sorted out and when I was a baby my mother had to take me to lodgings on Prospect Row, on account of the flooding and the sewerage problem. Great lumps of it would float down the road, apparently. We had a spell on Adam and Eve Street, then back to Paradise.

My mother called me Rose because I was born in the Garden of Eden. She might as well have called me Carrot, or Swede, to be perfectly honest, but as a child I liked to tell myself that I was born beautiful and perfect, like a flower in a garden. My mother was a simple woman, loving but simple. She was sixteen years old when she had me, and unwed. It’s a common enough story – so common, in fact, that I was inclined to embroider it when I was little. She was a college laundry maid and I used to have lots of fancy thoughts about how my father was probably a lord or something. The young gentlemen at the colleges thought nothing of getting a handful of bastards along with their learning, after all. There’s plenty a child runs along the poor, narrow backstreets of East Cambridge with blue blood in its veins. Perhaps my father had a great mind to go with his great fortune, I used to think, and I would one day come across him on Jesus Lane with a book in his hand and a frown upon his brow. I imagined him as a noble young man, with a head of fair curls. Maybe, one day, he would be out punting on the Cam and I would fall in from the bank and he would rescue me, and after one look at my face he would embrace me as his own dear child. I would never have to turn a mangle handle again.

I nagged my mother terribly to know who my father was and my ideas were so fancy that I daresay she thought she had better disabuse me as soon as I was old enough to believe her. When I was about six or seven, she took me by the hand and marched me round the corner to Fitzroy Street, where there was a whole load of big shops – a fishmonger’s, and the shellfish shop, and a grocer’s by
the name of Rawson’s. The Rawsons were a significant family round our way, owning quite a few places and renting out allotments in return for produce.

We stood across the road, my mother and I, holding hands. It was a busy morning and there was a lot of pony and cart traffic going to and fro but we could see Rawson’s well enough. Boxes were stacked up high upon the slope outside. They had just had in a load of new cabbages, the pretty ones with dark, crumply leaves, and they had been arranged nicely in the boxes so they blossomed out, as if begging you to buy them. Apples gleamed in piles on the other side. I can still picture it. It was riches to me, then.

Through the window I could see Mr Rawson, a large fella with a belly to match, a drooping moustache and no hair on his head. He was patting butter on a slab. One of his sons was helping out behind the counter, holding a fold of blue paper and flipping it over to make a bag.

‘That’s your father. So, are you happy now?’ my mother said.

‘What, the young fella?’ I said, a little confused, as he was married not the week before and we had all gone out onto the street to see him bring his wife back on the cart belonging to the Orchard Tavern pulled by two beautiful greys.

‘No,’ she said, ‘not him, the old fella. Mr George Rawson. He got me with you and hasn’t spoken to me since, nor will he ever. And if you were to go in there right now and call him Dad, he’d chase you out of his shop with a big stick. But I reckon most folk round here know it, and you should know it too.’

Well, this was something large to squeeze into my small head. George Rawson, my father? But he was big and fat, with four grown-up sons, and his wife still living. And they all had houses in the streets round ours and we must pass one or other of them in the street every day, although we had no need to go in their shop as there was a little fruiterers just at the end of Paradise owned by a man called Empers.

When you’re that age you just accept what you’re told, and although in truth I was mightily disappointed that my father was not a lord with a noble brain, I can’t remember feeling much about it except just an oddness in my stomach if I saw one of the Rawson family around.

You could say that fruit and vegetables played an overly significant part in my early days. Apples, potatoes, cherries and the like. That was how I ended up with a stepfather.

When I was ten years old, my mother stopped being a laundry maid and got a job helping out at the shop at the end of our road. It was owned by our neighbours, Lilly and Samuel Empers, who became like my aunt and uncle. After she went to work for them, my mother and Lilly Empers got as thick as thieves.

Lilly had worked the shop-front all her life but she was somewhat older than my mother and had an inflammation of the spine that meant she could not stand for long. So, when their shop expanded and business increased, they asked my mother to give up her laundering and help them out. One of their regular suppliers was a farmer named Childer, who had his farm up near Cottenham, on Smythey Fen. River Farm, it was called, on account of the closeness of the Old West, part of the Great Ouse. Muddy river, the Ouse.

Farmer Childer must have come into the shop when I was there, as I helped out often enough, every day after school, but I don’t recall being introduced to him. I can’t help feeling that if I’d only seen him, I might have also seen through him, in the way that children can. I might have been able to warn my mother not to marry him. But perhaps that is no more than wishful fancy on my part.

In truth, what can a ten-year-old girl do with her life? What power has she? None, I soon discovered. You are no more than chaff.

No, I do not remember meeting Farmer Childer in the shop, nor
do I recall being told when he first took an interest in my mother. The first I knew of it was when my mother went away for one night and I stayed with Aunt Lilly, and Aunt Lilly said when my mother returned, she might have some news for me.

She had news all right. She was married. I had a father. He was a Fenman, an important farmer, she said, and we were going to live together on his farm. Oh, and I had a set of new brothers into the bargain.

She told me this in the shop, as I sat on the stool, eating the sugar twist she had brought back for me as a gift. Her eyes were shining as she knelt before me and looked up at me, hopefully.

‘Rose,’ she said, ‘Guess what I had for breakfast this morning?’

I sucked on the twist, staring down at her.

‘Toast and chocolate.’

Later that day, I overheard a conversation between my mother and Aunt Lilly. Aunt Lilly was saying, ‘Are you sure you want to take her? Are you sure he doesn’t mind?’

‘Lilly, no, I said, didn’t I?’

‘Well I just wanted to say again, just so’s you knew.’

They were in the back of the shop. I was behind the counter, stacking the weights in the right order next to the scales. We were due to close soon. There was a thick curtain across the doorway that led through to the back: not thick enough, mind. They were trying not to be heard, but only in that half-hearted way that adults do when they think a child won’t understand anyway.

‘Part of why I’m doing this is to get her out of East Cambridge.’

‘It’s not that bad.’

‘It is, Lilly, and you know it. At least there’s no soap works on the Fens. You know my Rose’s chest has always been bad.’

‘Well, it was good enough for you, wasn’t it?’ I could tell by Aunt Lilly’s voice she getting stiff and upright in the way she sometimes did.

My mother lowered her voice. ‘It wasn’t, Lilly, you know it wasn’t. I was near taken for the Spinning House. And my Rose, who knows but she might end up like I did.’

‘Emmeline!’

‘Well, I’m sorry but it’s true. Facts is facts. I don’t want Rose being like me when she’s grown. I want to see her a proper married missus, with a husband to look after her.’

I remember the day we left East Cambridge. That I do remember. A young man came to fetch us on a cart, and my mother said he was one of my new brothers, Horace. I took one look at Horace and gathered he was none too happy about the arrangement either but my mother seemed oblivious to any of it, loading up our few things and cheeping like a canary.

The neighbours gathered round. People who had scarcely been on nodding terms with us helped my mother with her trunk and hugged her and wished her luck.

Mrs Chadwell from number eleven came up to me and bent to give me an embrace. ‘Now, Rose,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘This is your mother’s big chance in life so you be a good girl and don’t go messing it up. You’re very lucky that a man like that is prepared to take you on, all things considered.’ I understood her right enough. Funny, but I never felt like a bastard until my mother married.

Farmer Childer was a deal older than my mother. He had three sons. The first was the grown-up Horace whose coldness had a very simple history, I soon discovered. His mother had died in childbirth and he had known nothing but his father as a boy. The next two were William and Henry, by the farmer’s second wife, Agnes. She had died of the Fen ague not six months before the farmer met my mother.

At least William and Henry had been raised by a mother. William was a soft, pale thing, who wore his grief like a child who
is playing ghosties wears a bed-sheet. It covered the whole of him. Henry was a terror, for ever neglecting his farm duties and running off. They were both older than me and had finished their schooling and worked all their daylight hours on the farm. Three sons meant no hired help for Farmer Childer, except when a harvest was due in. But he still needed a wife for keeping house and book-reckoning.

The fact that Farmer Childer had got through two wives already was a disadvantage when it came to finding himself another in the immediate locality – and he needed another in a hurry. Being an unsociable sort of man, I don’t think Farmer Childer came across women in his daily business. And anyway, his needs were quite specific. Jobs around the farm were already allocated. He didn’t want a woman who was going to march in and run things her own way. No, he needed a woman like my mother who knew her place and would roll up her sleeves and work like a beetle from dawn ’til dusk. He wanted a woman who would be nice and grateful. And she was, my poor mother, oh she was, even though the cup of chocolate she had tasted on her wedding morning was the only one that ever passed her lips in the whole of her brief married life.

It is hard for me to go into what happened next, for my mother’s death was as sudden and unexpected to me as her marriage had been. We had been living on the farm for less than two years. They had not been happy ones. Horace, the eldest son, was as mean as his father and did his best to make our lives a misery from the start. My mother worked in the kitchen all hours, when she wasn’t looking after chickens or the vegetable patch or the goats, and seeing as she was a thin young woman who had not been raised for farm life she acquitted herself very creditably, I think.

I wish I could say it was the work that wore her out but I know it was more than that. It was disappointment. She must have been wondering, the whole of my childhood, what it would be like to
have a husband, and I suppose she had gilded her imaginings somewhat, considering how hard it was without one. Then she got one, and he was the kind of man whose sole comment at the supper table was, ‘Mrs Childer, I believe I have noted before how a stew must be well salted, have I not?’ with an air of such disdain you would have thought he was addressing the lowliest of serving girls.

Mrs
Childer.
I hated that he called her that. She had a name but he never used it, not in front of me, anyway. He probably called all his wives
Mrs
Childer,
to save him the trouble of learning a new name when one died on him. He killed my mother, did Farmer Childer, as sure as if he cut her throat with his own razor.

It was a damp, cold March. She had had a cough and a fever for a week, and was losing her food both ends, although he did not know that bit of course as it was me that tended to her.

One evening, he came and stood at the door to her room while I was mixing beeswax and tar for a poultice. I was doing it in a small metal dish held above a candle. The smell was deep and warm and the yellowy beeswax was goldening amidst the tar. Tiny bubbles surfaced as I stirred.

I was not frightened at that time, for what child can imagine that their mother is about to leave them for ever?

Farmer Childer – Father, as I had been told to call him – stood at the door and said, ‘Mrs Childer, must I get help from Cottenham tomorrow? The vegetable patch wants attending and if we need help in the morning then I must send Horace now, I think.’ He could have told me to do it, of course, or one of the boys. He was making a point. She had been ill quite long enough, in his opinion.

And she replied, in her weak, chirrupy voice, ‘Oh no, Mr Childer, there is no need of that. Another night and I shall be right as anything.’