The Stony Path (35 page)

‘I beg your pardon, but I know nothing of the kind.’

‘Then you are purposely ignoring the facts,’ Frederick had snapped tightly. ‘Just like those disgraceful women who shouted Asquith down last week.’

‘They weren’t disgraceful,’ Polly shot back just as quickly, ‘and again, in my opinion, they are perfectly justified. The bitter clashes between the suffragettes and mounted police in February could have been averted if the government had just listened to what the Pankhursts were saying. It was only the next month that women in Finland won seats in the Finnish parliament the year after they got the vote, and it wasn’t just the female sex that voted them in either. What sort of message do you think it sent to women all over the country when Keir Hardie’s Women’s Enfranchisement Bill was defeated in the Commons in March?’

‘I don’t care what message it sent.’

‘Exactly! And that’s why we have the sort of scenes that erupted in Nuneaton last week, but shouting insults and chanting slogans didn’t justify the harsh physical treatment the women received at the hands of the stewards. Even most of the men present objected to that.’

‘I am not discussing the militant attitude of a certain type of woman as though it bears credible examination.’

‘You were the one who brought the suffragettes into the equation,’ Polly had reminded the cold-eyed man in front of her sharply.

‘That’s enough, Polly.’ How dare she, how
dare
she display such an attitude in front of the others like this? Frederick asked himself bitterly, the ever-present inadequacy in his sexual prowess which his marriage had forced him to recognise colouring his thinking and making it imperative he was seen to be given due authority by his wife. She was a young, ignorant girl, not only of politics but of life in general beyond the narrow confines of Sunderland. ‘Emmeline Pankhurst and all her kind should have been drowned at birth. She is a lure to silly, gullible women to get involved in things of which they have no concept, and all this talk of hunger strikes and marches and such should be an affront to the delicacy of any respectable woman. Women’s minds are not capable of understanding important state issues and so on, they simply weren’t made that way.’

‘I don’t believe that. People are capable of anything they aspire to, be they men or women, it’s just that most women are not given the chance to prove themselves.’

‘That is idealistic clap-trap,’ said Frederick coldly, ‘and evidence of your youth and immaturity.’

‘I am young, yes.’ Polly had been very aware of her mother and Ruth staring at them, and her grandmother’s bent head as the old woman plucked at the shawl covering her knees, but both Frederick’s tone and his scornful face had caught her on the raw. For months now she had striven to make this marriage work – putting up with his boorish behaviour in bed and out of it, turning a blind eye to his ridiculous indulgences where her mother and sister were concerned, and the fact that the three of them seemed set against her at every turn was just the tip of the iceberg. This wasn’t the first time he had ridden rough-shod over her and attempted to make her look foolish in front of her family, and even his friends on occasion, but young as she was – and aye, aye, maybe immature too – she had a mind of her own and she intended to use it. ‘But times are changing, Frederick, and you know it at heart. The vote
will
come for women and I, for one, will welcome the opportunity to make up my own mind about who I want to see in Parliament. As present things stand, it’ll likely be a Labour man, like the candidate who won the Jarrow by-election from the Liberals.’

Polly had stopped then. Frederick’s face had flushed to a deep red – the subject was still a very sore one with him – and his voice had been a loud bark as he’d shouted, ‘Never! I’d rather see you dead first. No wife of mine would disgrace me in such a way.’

‘Please, please.’ Alice was attempting to pour oil on troubled waters. ‘It’ll probably never happen anyway.’

‘It will happen, Gran.’ Polly’s voice had been stiff and unyielding. ‘The ball is rolling faster and faster, like the one asking for pensions for the elderly, and a stop to women working eighty– and ninety-hour weeks in the factories and mills, and families being so destitute that the bairns are barefoot in winter and even the bread knife is in the pawn. Things like that aren’t
right
.’

She had glared at them all before she had risen abruptly and walked from the room, ignoring Frederick’s ‘Come back here, woman, I’m not having this!’ He had followed her, his face thunderous, and once in the hall had caught at her arm so angrily she had winced with pain.

‘Take your hands off me.’

‘Don’t you take that tack!’

‘I said, take your hands off me.’ Her voice had been soft and low but of a quality that had seemed to nonplus him, because he had let his hand drop to his side. ‘Two things, Frederick,’ Polly had said quietly. ‘One, I have my own mind and I intend to use it, and not you or anyone else will tell me different. Two, as you have reminded me constantly over the last months, I am your wife, but that cuts both ways. I expect respect and consideration just as much as you expect it from me. I won’t be treated as a doormat or an imbecile when your friends are here or at any other time, I just won’t. And don’t keep calling me young all the time. I’m not young, not here in my head –’ she had tapped the side of her skull with a pointed finger – ‘and that’s partly because of the last thirteen months. Do I make myself clear?’ she’d asked with naked bitterness.

Frederick had stared at her, his full lips slightly apart and his eyes narrowed. He was totally taken aback. This was not the reasonable young girl he had proposed to, who had promised him she would try to love him and be a good wife. Neither was it the strained but efficient spouse of daylight hours or the tense young lass who shared his bed each night. Over the last thirteen months a development had been taking place, he’d realised suddenly, and he’d only been aware of it in part. But now Polly’s antipathy was glaring out of her eyes, and it was the emotion of a woman, not the slip of the girl he’d married, however much her slender outward appearance gave lie to the fact.

And when he had spluttered and blustered his leave of her – ostensibly to check on his red chestnut, which had had the misfortune to rip a flank that morning – they had both known a new stage of their marriage was beginning. But it was a marriage in which Polly would fight for equality, and there was no going back. And because she had seized equality, rather than having begged for it or coaxed and manoeuvred her way along, Frederick couldn’t forgive her.

That had been four years ago.

Now had come the August of 1911 and with it riots that were rocking Britain. Since June, when King George V had been crowned ‘King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the seas, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India’, a heatwave had steadily been mounting alongside bitter discontent among Britain’s workers. British ports had been paralysed by a shipping strike since the second week of June, and in Llanelli, in South Wales, in July nine people had been killed – three by soldiers’ bullets – during furious rioting which occurred as a climax to the railway strike which was bringing Britain to its knees. Now it was the middle of August, and fifty thousand troops were on duty as the nationwide strike by stevedores, railwaymen, carters, miners and others caused huge problems for the police, with over two hundred thousand angry workers taking to the streets daily.

Keir Hardie’s advice to the strike’s leaders – ‘The masters show you no mercy. They starve you, they sweat you, they oppress you. Pay them back in their own coin’ – had caused fury in Parliament, and few were surprised when the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, dug his heels in and took an even tougher line against the strikers, saying they were endangering the country’s industrial wealth and other men’s jobs.

However, the women of Britain’s working class were battling with an even more relentless enemy than the government. With temperatures soaring to record-breaking levels, the death rates in the overcrowded tenements in all the big cities were at a new high, with children at most risk. Two and a half thousand children had died in the heatwave in the capital alone, and in Sunderland – especially in the East End, which was a rabbit warren of wretchedness, filth and poverty with unimaginable depths of squalor – there was scarcely a family untouched by the grim reaper. Cholera and typhoid were rearing their ugly heads and causing the overworked medical fraternity to despair, and with the city living on its food reserves and the prices in the shops soaring, some strikers’ families were slowly starving.

It was with this last fact in mind that Polly now turned to Emily, who was busy peeling taties in a bowl on the kitchen table, and said, ‘Is your mam going to her sister’s this afternoon, Emily?’

‘Aye, aye, she is, missus.’

‘I’ve got a few things for her.’ Polly pointed to a sack beside the door. ‘Take them across before she goes, and tell her’ – here Polly’s blue eyes flashed to Betsy’s for a moment – ‘tell her to see Croft about your uncle and his lads helping with the harvest next week. The pay won’t be much, but it’ll be something.’

‘Oh, ta, thanks, missus.’ Emily’s plain little face lit up. Her mam and da were worried sick about her mam’s sister and their family, she knew they were. Her uncle and his two eldest lads had been out on strike for ten weeks now, and with the remaining six bairns all being under eleven years old, things were dire. Her mam and da had done what they could, but it was the missus’s sacks that had kept her aunt’s family going the last month. ‘I’ll take it across now and tell her, shall I, while the master’s riding?’

‘Aye, you do that, Emily,’ said Polly quietly. Emily was just as aware as Betsy that the matter of the sacks was a sore point between the master and missus, along with other help Polly insisted on giving to the Silksworth strikers. The roof had nearly gone off the farmhouse a couple of times lately.

‘How did you get him to agree to having Emily’s uncle and the lads for the harvest?’ Betsy asked immediately the door had closed behind the kitchen maid, her tone saying quite clearly that wonders never ceased.

‘I didn’t.’ Polly grinned and shrugged her shoulders as she glanced round the huge kitchen, which held all a kitchen should hold. She brushed her hand down the side of one gleaming copper pan that was hanging with its companions on a row of wooden pegs at one side of the black-leaded range. ‘But May is beside herself with worry about her sister and the bairns. They’re starving, literally starving, so what could I say when she came to see me on the quiet?’

‘Oh, lass, lass.’ Any formality between the two women had long since been dropped when they were alone, although Betsy was always careful to give Polly her title of missus if Emily or one of the family was present. ‘He’ll go stark staring barmy if he cottons on.’

‘Croft’s the one who sets on any casual labourers for the harvest, and I’ve already seen him. He won’t let on.’

Betsy nodded. No, Croft wouldn’t say a word. Did the master know how his young wife was regarded among both the inside and outside workers and their families? Likely not. He only saw what he wanted to see, Frederick Weatherburn, and it didn’t suit him to acknowledge that although he might have his employees’ loyalty up to a point, it was his wife who had their hearts. People weren’t daft, and they recognised that the missus went the extra mile – as in the matter of the food sacks for Emily’s auntie. Mind, there was one who was constantly pushing Polly’s good nature to the limit . . .

Betsy’s hands stilled on the butcher’s block where she was boning a breast of lamb from the cold meat store at the side of the scullery, and her voice was low when she said, ‘What are you goin’ to do about Ruth, lass? He was here agen last night an’ she’s expectin’ him to ask Frederick soon, accordin’ to what Emily told me on the quiet. She was clearin’ out the fire in your mam’s bedroom an’ she heard the pair of ’em talkin’. They’ve got it all worked out. He’s goin’ to come here, that’s in their minds, as a manager or somethin’ similar.’

‘They’re mad.’ Polly’s voice was harsh. ‘Frederick would never allow it.’

‘Maybe.’ Betsy pressed her lips together and narrowed her eyes for a moment before she said, ‘But he’s wheedled his way in, lass, don’t forget that. Who would’ve thought he’d win your mam over with his blatherin’ but he’s got her eatin’ out of the palm of his hand with his butterin’ up an’ little presents an’ such. An’ he’s played it crafty with the master an’ all. Pretendin’ to see everythin’ his way now an’ actin’ as though the master’s made him view things different. An’ Ruth’s forever presentin’ his case.’

‘She’s only interested in him because there’s no one else.’ Polly’s voice was emphatic. ‘She can’t really like him, not Arnold.’

‘Aye, I reckon you’re spot-on there, lass, but she’s only herself to blame. Young Cecil was clean gone on her, used to disappear up his own backside every time Ruth made an appearance, but your sister wouldn’t look the side he was on until it was too late an’ he’d taken up with young Mary from East Herrington. I’ve heard Ruth talk to that lad as though he was muck under her boots, an’ soft as clarts as he was about her, she pushed him too far. They’re expectin’ their first, Cecil an’ Mary. Did Emily tell you?’

‘Aye.’ Polly nodded briefly. She found any talk of babies painful, knowing she was now unlikely to be a mother, with the existing state of affairs between herself and Frederick so dire, but this situation between Arnold and Ruth – ostensibly begun twelve months ago but in reality six months earlier, at Christmas time, when a smiling Arnold had visited the farm with an armful of gifts – was a cause of even greater concern.