The Jarrow Lass (39 page)

Chapter 44

To Rose's relief, there was no one yet up on this early Sunday morning to spot them tiptoeing back up the mud track to the house. Only an expectant squawk from the henhouse broke the silence. They found John slumped asleep in his chair by the hearth, still dressed, his face pinched and unshaven. Rose thought how old he looked, vulnerable even.

But when he stirred with the sound of her making ready for breakfast, his habitual sour expression returned. He watched her with bloodshot eyes and she could tell he was trying to recall the events of the night. Kate, now dressed, was sweeping up the broken cups and resetting the table with what was left.

‘Me and Mary can drink out the jam jars,' she murmured to her mother.

John scowled at them and went to douse his face in the pantry. They listened to him groaning as the shock of cold water hit him. No one spoke. They sat at the table, eating in silence, Rose hardly able to force down the food for the dryness in her throat. Jack and Mary scarpered as soon as they could after breakfast. Jack went to feed the hens.

‘I'll gan for the newspaper,' Mary offered, and was gone before anyone objected.

Rose and Kate exchanged tense, guarded looks as the time ticked on and church bells began to ring for morning worship. John returned to his chair by the fire without a word to either of them. He sat in brooding silence and Rose knew with a sickness in her heart that he had not forgotten or forgiven.

She would have warned Sarah not to come in the house, if she had spotted her returning first. But the young woman returned so quietly, while she was in the front room making up the bed with Kate. The first they heard was John's sudden bark. Rose saw Kate jump with fright. She rushed into the kitchen.

‘Where've you been?' John shouted. ‘You were told!'

‘I spent the night at Bella's,' Sarah said breathlessly. ‘I'm sorry. I couldn't get on the last tram. People were hanging off it...' She threw her mother a pleading look.

‘We were worried sick,' Rose whispered.

‘You could've walked home,' John snarled, rising out of his chair. ‘You haven't been at Bella's at all, have you?”

‘I have, Father,' Sarah insisted. ‘Me and Clara. Bella wouldn't hear of me walking home with all the crowds.'

‘That's what I thought,' Kate piped up from behind. ‘Didn't I say she'd be safe at Auntie Bella's, Mam?'

John whipped round. ‘You keep your big mouth out of this.' He glared at Rose too. ‘And you.' He swung back to Sarah. ‘How do we know where you were? You can't keep your promise to your mother, so why should we trust you?'

‘Honest, I was,' Sarah said, holding her ground.

‘You went into town, didn't you?'

‘Aye, but—'

‘You went looking for lads.' John advanced towards her, his finger pointing.

Sarah took a step back. ‘No I didn't.'

‘Look at you - all done up like a tart.'

‘Mam, tell him to stop.'

‘Your mother will stay where she is,' John snarled. ‘She's let you gan wayward for long enough. Well, I'll not have a slut for a daughter!' He yanked at the large buckle at his waist and pulled the long thick worn leather belt from his trousers.

Sarah's face froze in alarm. ‘I'm not your daughter,' she shouted back at him. ‘You can't beat me!'

This riled him further. ‘You don't tell me what to do in me own house!' He drew back the belt and lunged for her. Sarah sprang back, but he half caught her and brought the belt down on her back. Sarah cried out.

Kate screamed, ‘Stop him, Mam!'

Rose went after her husband. ‘Don't, John, please don't!'

She took him by the arm, but he threw her off violently and sent her sprawling on the floor. It just gave Sarah enough time to wriggle free.

‘Run!' Kate cried at her sister.

Sarah fled out into the yard with John just behind her, roaring obscenities, belt bunched in his hand. She might have got clear away, if Jack hadn't let the hens out. The boy emerged from the henhouse with a handful of eggs to see Sarah and his father bearing down on him. Sarah tripped over a chicken and fell flat. John knocked Jack out of the way to get at her. The eggs smashed and feathers flew as the screeching birds flapped in panic around them. At the bottom of the yard John cornered Sarah.

His face was scarlet with fury. He lifted his belt and brought it down, buckle first, on the girl's back. Sarah yelled, throwing up her arms in protection. John pulled back his belt and hit her again, bellowing oaths at the top of his voice, disgusting words that made Rose cringe with shame. She watched in horror from the doorway, quite incapable of moving, as her husband whipped her eldest daughter like a stray dog.

Sarah crumpled under the blows, as the hard metal of the buckle bit into her skin and bruised her soft flesh. She wept in terror and pain, as her torturer beat her with his leather strap and his stinging words. She was vaguely aware of Kate screaming her head off at their stepfather, to no avail.

Rose could not say how long the assault went on. It seemed like an eternity, though it could only have been half a minute. It was long enough for the neighbours to come out of their houses to listen and stare. Through the open gate where Jack had gone chasing the terrified birds, she could see the gawping faces of people in Phillipson Street opposite. Children were climbing on to a back wall to watch the spectacle. This was better than the travelling fair, the boxing ring. They were a freak show; The Notorious John McMullen and his whip.

Rose stood there helpless, dying inside of the disgrace. Fear and anger flooded through her in equal measure. Fear of John; anger at Sarah for bringing this upon herself - upon them all. Fear of the neighbours, of being cast out of this paradise and doomed to wander the earth with this tyrant who bullied them all with his bitterness and hatred of the world. Anger at John for the shame he brought. Anger at herself for ever having married him. Sick anger for doing nothing to stop him.

Eventually something made him stop. He stood back, panting, flecks of spittle on his chin. His wrath was subsiding, his anger sated. Sarah lay curled in a ball like an animal, whimpering. She was still alive - Rose registered relief through her numbness. John wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, then calmly began to fasten his belt around his waist.

‘Let that be a lesson,' he mumbled.

He stalked back up the path, brushing past Rose. He avoided her bitter look. Grabbing his jacket and cap, he marched back past her and out of the back gate, without looking at anyone. She hurried down the path to Sarah where Kate was already bending over her sister and holding her.

‘She's black and blue, Mam,' Kate said in disbelief.

‘Get her inside,' Rose said in a strained voice. She could hardly speak.

Between them, they half carried the weeping Sarah into the house. Rose unbuttoned the girl's dress. She winced at the sight of the wheals across her shoulders and back. Even her neck and jaw were livid with the marks from his buckle. Nobody spoke as Rose set about bathing the wounds, too shocked at what had happened for conversation.

Finally, wincing with pain as her mother pulled the dress back over her bruises, Sarah hissed, ‘I hate him! I'm not stopping here any longer, Mam. You'll not make me!'

Rose paused for a long time, considering. She looked at Sarah's tear-swollen face, then at Kate's perplexed one. She felt overwhelmed with guilt at having allowed such a beating to take place. Why had she not defended her daughter? Better that she had put her own body between the girl and that evil belt! She had failed her - failed them all - and brought humiliation on her family by her lack of action. No doubt the neighbours were gossiping about it at this very moment, shaking their heads in disapproval at such carry-on in a respectable street. They could not stay. None of them could stay now.

‘We'll go to Aunt Maggie's,' Rose said quietly.

Her sister would give them shelter for a night or two while she thought things through. She saw the relief on her daughters' faces and felt encouraged. Whatever she did now, she must do her best for them.

Briefly, Rose laid her hand on Sarah's head. It rested there for an instant, like a benediction, a promise. She would never betray her children like that again. She would protect them by whatever means possible, so that one day - and she knew deep down that day would come - they might be able to protect her.

Chapter 45

Rose stayed at Maggie's cramped two-roomed house for a month, while John disappeared on a drinking spree. Sometimes he would turn up after dark, bawling at her from the street below, cursing her for leaving him. It lasted till the Boers were defeated at Diamond Hill and Roberts declared the war in South Africa won. Rose knew at some stage his black mood would blow over like a storm and he would wash up as wreckage on the doorstep. But by the time he did, they were deep in debt once more and unable to afford the rent in William Black Street. Not that Rose could have faced going back there.

One morning, as she had predicted, John turned up at Maggie's door looking haggard and contrite.

‘Landlord's hoying us out,' he told Rose.

She looked at him with disdain. ‘What am I supposed to do about it? It's you that's made us homeless with your drinkin'.'

She saw his jaw tense but he did not try to deny it. His bloodshot eyes looked utterly weary.

‘I'll find us somewhere,' he promised. ‘Just come back, Rose. I'll not touch you - or the lasses.'

She did not trust him. That was why she had found Sarah a job in Hebburn where she could live in with a draper's family and not have to come home at night. He would never horsewhip any of her children again.

She told him brusquely, ‘Come back when you've found us somewhere,' then shut the door in his face.

Rose did not know where she found the courage to stand up to him, but since that moment a month ago when she had slammed the door at William Black Street firmly behind her, she had felt stronger. That part of her life was over. Never again would she stand by powerless and let John bully and frighten them as he had done these past years. Maybe it was the only way he knew, but it was not her way. She had been brought up with a sense of worth, both for herself and for her fellow beings.

Sometime during those dark years of depression when she had had to send out her own daughters to beg for food, she had lost her self-respect. It had seeped away so gradually that Rose had hardly been aware of it. Until that dreadful morning when she had watched John beating Sarah to within an inch of her life and done nothing. Then her self-loathing had hit her like a blow to the stomach.

Two days later, John returned. ‘I've found lodgings,' he told her, ‘a couple of rooms. Pat's offered to help us move.'

‘Where?' Rose demanded.

John looked wary. ‘Straker Street.'

Rose's heart sank. Straker Street was opposite the stinking chemical works. It was a slummy street of cramped houses and factory gates that straggled through East Jarrow. Its ugliness was only partly relieved by the stark Methodist chapel and the brash new tram depot.

‘Not Straker Street,' she answered stubbornly.

John looked at her with desperation in his faded eyes. ‘It's just temporary. And I'll stop the drinkin'. Here,' he dug into his pocket and brought out a half-crown, ‘tak it. I'm workin' again. You'll get all me wages.'

She looked at it lying in his calloused palm. His hand was shaking like an old man's. Rose hesitated. She wished she had the luxury to throw it back in his face. But she didn't. She needed that half-crown, needed the wretched lodgings in Straker Street. Maggie and Danny could not keep her any longer. It was expected that she should return to her husband at some point. It would be a scandal if she didn't. For richer for poorer. She had taken her vows. She looked at him and knew she had no choice.

‘Haway, Rose,' John chivvied, ‘you cannot stop here.' When she said nothing, he added, almost whispering, ‘Lass, I want you back - you and the bairns. Help me, Rose.'

Rose was astonished; he had tears in his eyes. It was the first time she had heard him really plead to her or ask for her help. She did not know whether to feel pity or despise him more for it. Yet she could not help feeling touched at the sight of a hard man like John on the brink of tears because of her. Perhaps at that moment he really meant it. Rose could not tell. All she could do was hope it was true.

‘I'll come,' she said with a defiant lift of her chin. ‘But we move out of Straker Street as soon as we can afford it, do you hear?'

‘Aye, bonny lass,' John rasped, his grim face breaking into an unaccustomed smile.

‘And the boozin' stops,' Rose added firmly.

‘Not another drop past me lips,' John promised. ‘I'm signing the pledge.'

Rose and the girls hated Straker Street. The air was thick with noxious gases which invaded every corner of their damp, poky dwelling. At times when the wind blew off the river, the fumes from the chemical works were overpowering. They burnt the throat and clogged the lungs. Rose used to tie a damp cloth around her mouth and nose when she hung out the washing. She had seen the sallow-faced workers streaming out of the Lake Chemical factory doing the same, and copied them.

Kate tried to make the best of it, bringing home small trinkets at the end of the week to brighten the drab mantelpiece or a piece of gaudy cloth to cover the scratchy horsehair chairs. But Mary complained constantly.

‘I cannot stand the smell any longer. Mrs Simpson says I stink of rotten eggs when I come in the house. I hate it here! Why can't we move? I wish I could live with the Simpsons.'

Rose tired of hearing her, but could not blame the girl. Some days the atmosphere was suffocating. She felt increasingly ill and lacking in energy. At times she found it hard to haul herself out of her chair where she dozed half the afternoon. Her chest felt tight and her breathing sounded like a pair of bellows. The swelling in her legs grew worse.

But what worried her the most was the effect living there was having on Jack. His bouts of wheezing and breathlessness had returned. His dark eyes were ringed with black smudges while his pallor was tinged with yellow. Usually one for running around outdoors from dawn until dark, he spent half the winter confined to bed with recurring colds, chills and a persistent wheezing cough.

John had been quiet and subdued for months, going to work and returning to eat and sleep. He hardly touched a drop of drink - just the occasional small glass of beer - but it did not sweeten his temper. Rose knew he had tried to curb his outbursts of anger, but it was in his nature to be moody and he was beginning to pick on Kate again. That January Queen Victoria had died and the country had been plunged into mourning. To Rose's surprise, John had taken it badly though he had never had a good word to say for her when she was alive. It was as if one more mooring in his life had been severed, one last solid anchor lifted, cutting him further adrift from the old certainties.

When Jack came in from school one day and collapsed on the floor, unable to breathe, Rose was frightened into action. With Kate's help, she managed to calm the boy and get him to bed. They gave him a steam infusion, holding his head over a bowl of boiling water, enveloped in a blanket. Jack emerged wheezing and gasping, his eyes wide in terror.

‘This place is killing him,' Rose declared to John, ‘it's killing us all.'

John just looked at her with a deadened expression. ‘Aye, we're all headin' in the same direction.'

With a shock, it struck Rose that John was giving up. He had the world-weary look of a defeated man. He no longer cared how they eked out the rest of their miserable existence or in what manner they died. He was merely going through the motions, biding his time. Rose realised that if anyone was going to save them from the hell of Straker Street it would have to be her.

That Sunday she dressed as best she could and took Kate and Mary to Mass. She prayed as hard as she had ever prayed in her life. Amid the smell of burning wax and musty bodies, she pleaded to the Virgin for Jack's life as he lay listless on the bed at home.

‘You saved him once before - let him grow to be a man - please let him live!'

Rose prayed for deliverance for them all, a way out of the slow, suffocating death that was sapping their will to carry on.

On the way home, bowed down with her troubles and feeling no relief from the bout of frantic praying, Rose was surprised by Kate's sudden suggestion.

‘Mam, let's take a walk up Simonside - blow out the cobwebs.'

Rose resisted. ‘I haven't the strength.'

‘We'll take it steady,' Kate replied, slipping an arm through her mother's.

‘I should be gettin' back to our Jack ...'

‘Father's keeping an eye on him.' Mary joined in the pressure, for she had no desire to hurry back to East Jarrow. ‘He'll manage a bit longer.'

‘Haway, Mam,' Kate smiled, and the two girls steered her away from the town.

Within minutes Rose was glad they had bullied her into the walk. The stiff breeze at their backs helped push them up the bank. At the top, the air tasted fresher than Rose had ever remembered it. Around them were small signs of spring - purple crocuses sprouting in a ditch, tight resinous buds forming on a straggle of trees. Up here a thrush was trilling noisily, drowning out the clangs and sighs from the riverside far below.

‘Look, Mam,' Kate pointed, ‘Grandda's old home.'

‘Aunt Maggie's house,' Mary corrected at once.

Rose looked up and squinted through the pearly light which dazzled after the greenish gloom of Straker Street. With sadness she saw that the old cottage stood forlorn, its roof fallen in and its door off its hinges. It was derelict. The once-cultivated field around it was a mass of bricks and planks and paraphernalia of the builder's merchant who now used the plot. A dog ran to the fence and barked at them territorially.

‘It's all gone,' she sighed.

‘Let's gan on,' Kate said gently.

They skirted round the former smallholding and kept on walking, each of them wrapped in her own thoughts yet content with each other's company. They followed a lane which petered out in a field, crossed it and found themselves beside the main railway line. In one direction it stretched all the way to Newcastle and in the other disappeared towards Tyne Dock and South Shields. A short distance away stood a signal box and across the track lay two short rows of railway cottages.

Someone had fashioned a crude bench out of a railway sleeper and placed it near the signal box. Who it was meant for Rose had no idea, but it beckoned her tired legs. Without a word she crossed the track and plonked herself down on the rough seat. With the bank at her back it was sheltered and warm in the weak spring sunshine and smelt not unpleasantly of grass and axle grease.

The girls sat down beside her, Kate closing her eyes and tilting her chin to the sun like a contented cat. Rose thought how bonny she had grown. At eighteen she was blooming into the prettiest of them all. She must not waste her life away in Jarrow! Rose felt a rush of conviction. She would see that Kate got away from the drudgery that had pulled her down like the muddy backwater of the Slake, drowning the potential that had been in her to better herself. Kate would do it instead.

As Rose wrestled with the problem of how, she suddenly thought of Lizzie. She would ask her sister to keep an ear out for any jobs at Ravensworth. There was slim chance that the aristocratic Liddells would take on a lass from Jarrow, but there was no harm in trying. Perhaps Kate should be sent to Lizzie's for a while anyway - get her away from the unhealthy conditions of Straker Street and John's critical comments. It might be the making of her, just as Rose herself might have flourished if she had stayed with her dear granny at Lamesley and not been brought back to Jarrow all too soon.

Rose's musings were suddenly disturbed by the distant hoot of a train. Above them she heard a clank in the signal box. They all bent forward to look down the track. The rhythmic puffing of the steam engine could be heard long before it rattled into view round the bend. The passenger train thundered past them, covering them in a cloud of smoke. By the time it cleared, the train had vanished, whistling breathlessly down the line.

A tall, wiry man emerged from the signal box and walked towards them. He touched his cap.

‘Morning, ladies. Grand day,' he greeted them.

Kate smiled back at once. ‘Aye, a grand day.'

‘You from Shields?' he asked.

‘Jarrow,' Kate told him. ‘Just taking the air.'

Mary sniggered. ‘Listen to you, all hoity-toity!'

Kate blushed but the signalman smiled. ‘Good on you.' He was about to walk on when he looked closer at Rose. ‘Are you all right, missus?'

Rose's pulse was fluttering and she felt breathless and faint all of a sudden. ‘It was the smoke - I feel a bit funny. Maybes a glass of water ... ?'

‘Haway with me,' the man said quickly, ‘my missus'll give you a cup of milk straight from the cow - that'll settle your dizziness.'

Kate and Mary helped Rose to her feet and they followed the railwayman along to the first terrace of cottages. The front garden was neatly cultivated and the sweet smell of wood smoke drifted through the air. Inside it was dark at first, but as Rose grew accustomed to the dimness she saw a plain, well-kept kitchen with a lean dog stretched across the hearth asleep. She was ushered into a high-backed chair and a small, birdlike woman bustled over with a tin mug of milk.