The Town House (6 page)

I had not been in Baildon long before I saw that I had exchanged one servitude for another; in place of my Lord Bowdegrave I had a trinity of masters, Master Armstrong, the Guild, and money.

One wet October evening a man known as Tom the Juggler came to sleep in the loft. It was Saturday, one of the two market days, and he was grumbling that the weather had ruined his trade; people were not going to stand in the rain to watch his tricks.

‘Another day like this,’ he said,‘and I shall be sleeping in Squatters Row.’

‘Is that cheaper?’ I asked, wondering whether all my inquiries had missed some useful piece of information. He laughed.

‘It’s free, you fool.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Down by the Town Ditch. Grant you it stinks, but not worse than this. Only trouble is, the roof leaks.’

‘Maybe I could mend it. I’m handy,’ I said. He laughed again, as though at some wonderful jest.

Next day, when he took me along to the place he called Squatters Row I understood his merriment.

It was at the rear of the Abbey, on the side farthest from the market place. It was a street, a good deal wider than any other in Baildon; one side of it was bounded by the Abbey’s eastern wall, the other by the backs of houses, some of them slaughter-houses. The street sloped towards the centre and there ran the Town Ditch, the drainings of all the gutters and privies in the town, the blood from the slaughter-houses, the over-flow from pigsties. It had, at some time long past, been decently covered in by an arched hood of stone, stretches of the cover still existed, but in the main it had given way. The stench was loathsome, but as Tom the Juggler had said, not much worse than the loft when it was fully occupied.

‘But I see no place to live hereabouts,’ I said.

‘Use your eyes,’ he said; and pointed across the ditch to the Abbey wall. It was heavily buttressed, and the buttresses stuck out to within a few feet of the Ditch, making, as it were, compartments with three walls. I looked along and saw that several of these compartments were occupied, most were open to the sky and to the Ditch, some were roofed over by pieces of sacking or sailcloth, supported at the foot on poles.

A sick feeling of defeat squirmed in my belly and when Tom the Juggler laughed I could have hit him.

‘The north wind’s the sharpest,’ he said, ‘you want to get the wall between you and it.’ I noticed then that he had brought along his pack. He crossed the Ditch at a place where the arch, still held and chose his buttress, throwing the pack down.

‘There’s worse places. If you want to come back say so, and I’ll keep you the stall next door.’

It was still raining, but the rain was coming on a wind from the west; I noticed that the tall wall of the Abbey sheltered the ground immediately below it to a distance of some feet. The buttress would keep off the north wind which brought the snow. I could do better than rig a flimsy bit of sailcloth on four posts; I could fix timbers to the wall and the buttress and lay a thatch over. I could make a fourth wall. With what little money I had left I could buy the materials for that work, and enough timber to make a table and two stools, straw and sacking for a mattress. All at once I could see the little hut completed, weatherproof, even snug. And ours alone. After the lack of privacy in the loft that in itself seemed a blessing.

‘I shall stay. And I’m very thankful to you.’

‘Then your wife can cook my supper,’ said Tom the Juggler.

I hurried back to our lodging where Kate was doing some washing and told her I had found a place. I warned her that it was in a foul place and in the open, but that I had plans for it.

‘Just so long as we can be alone at night,’ she said. So, when the washing was done I led her to the spot and tried to make her see the little hut as I had seen it in my mind.

In our lodging we had been among the poor, now we had joined the destitute. Our permanent neighbours were a one-legged sailor who lived alone, a man who was deaf and dumb, his wife and four children who had not inherited his infirmity, an aged crone, who, when anyone would employ her, acted as midwife and layer out of the dead, and an evil-looking young woman who twice a year was whipped through the streets for harlotry. As well as these, Squatters Row had a drifting population of people
who had failed to find, or could not afford to pay for, a bed for the night. As the weather grew worse these grew fewer in number.

Before winter set in I had made a hut, just as I had planned; we had a table and two stools and a mattress stuffed with sweet fresh straw, much better than our louse-ridden bed in the loft, and rough, humble and cold as it was, it was, as Kate said,‘our second house’ and it became home to us. That we should be happy in such circumstances and that the meals we ate there – often no more than hunks of four-day-old bread thinly smeared with fat, should seem like feasts to us, may sound strange, but is none the less true. We were young, we had our health, love was still lively and so was hope. If we were lucky, in a year and a day we should be free. In two years I should have served my time and be a journeyman, working for a daily wage. Then things would change. We had a great deal to look forward to. We had another advantage, too, and one which is, I think, sometimes overlooked when people think of living in great poverty; the smallest thing extra, or nicer than usual was a wonderful treat. I remember Kate coming home with a skip in her step because, there being a shortage of stale bread, her mistress had told her to take a fresh loaf.

‘Feel it,’ she said, thrusting it into my hand, ‘smell it.’ To the full fed it would be a rare dainty indeed which could bring such pleasure.

The year and the day, so important to us, passed. On a September Sunday evening we could look at one another and say, we are free. On the Monday Lord Bowdegrave could ride up to the forge where I worked, recognize me for his smith’s son and no more lay claim to me than he could to Master Armstrong. Only the serf born can know or guess or even dimly imagine what that moment meant to us.

We were spending the evening as we, and many of our kind, spent all our free time in fair weather – gathering firewood on the fringe of the Common ground. The forest there belonged, like most of the things around Baildon, to the Abbey of St. Egbert, and the Abbot granted the townspeople that privilege; any dead wood which could be found within thirty paces of the boundary might be collected and taken away. Kate and I were indefatigable wood-gatherers; often through the past winter our less active or less provident neighbours had come to warm themselves, sometimes to cook by our fire. On this evening we were making two faggots of what we had collected, a large one for my back, a smaller one for Kate’s, when she said,

‘Thanks to the Virgin, our child will be free-born.’

God forgive me for the way my heart went plummeting down. A first
child, indeed any child, should be a wished for, a welcome thing. But I was earning no wage, nor should be for another year. It was Kate’s meagre money and the bread she brought home that stood between us and hunger. And I had known all along that the work in the bake-house was heavy, too heavy for her frail body; how long, with another burden within her, could she stay at work? And what would happen when that time was out-run?

There was that side to it; and there was another. It went hard with me to think that our child would be born, and live its first year in a makeshift hovel by the brim of the Town Ditch. As month had followed month since our arrival in Baildon, I had hoped that God in His mercy was seeing fit to withhold parenthood from us until we had a home ready for a child.

Now all the cheer that the day had brought me failed and faded. Walking home, bowed under my faggot, I knew the first faltering of hope. I looked into the future and saw, not the neat little house in some more habitable part of the town, but Kate and I and our family condemned to live our lives out in that stinking place of outcasts.

Kate said, ‘Don’t be angry.’ And that made me ashamed, remembering how, on a like occasion, the deaf-and-dumb man had beaten his wife until she was black and blue.

‘I’m not angry,’ I said. ‘How could I be? It takes two to make a baby. But Kate, I am worried.’

‘God and St. Katherine will take care of us – and the baby,’ she said. ‘They always have done. We’ve done very well so far.’

‘That is true. But I was looking ahead. You can’t stay in the bake-house when…’

Then something else will turn up,’ she said, with the utmost faith. ‘You’ll see.’

Hating to drag her down into my own state of discouragement, I said no more. I only hitched my load a little more firmly on to my shoulders so that I could spare a hand to ease hers a little, thinking, as I did so, of the flour sacks, the loaves, the firing of the oven which she must manage, with none to help.

Kate must have known about her state for some time before she told me in September, for the baby was born in February. The baker’s wife had kept her on until Christmas and then told her not to come back, because
it worried her, she said, to see Kate straining herself to do the work.

‘Once your belly is out beyond the point of your nose when you stand upright, you should be careful,’ the woman said. ‘If you don’t the child’ll come feet first.’

Kate had argued that in the country women worked in the field sometimes until the very day the birth took place.

‘Maybe, but I don’t have to watch them,’ said the baker’s wife.

All this Kate told me, making light of it and still saying that when one door shut God opened another. I could see, however, that she was a little dashed that another door had not opened already. And none did, just as I had feared. After Christmas was the worst time of the year to go looking for chance employment, even the markets grew small; there were few travellers and no pilgrims in the inns; housewives were saving their work for the spring. Everything was at a standstill.

Since September we had saved what we could, but it was pitiably little and we were once again on the very verge of starvation when that other door did open.

Ordinarily both Kate and I were out of our hut and away early in the morning, and did not return until late in the evening, so of the ordinary comings and goings of our neighbours we saw very little. Now, doomed to stay at home, Kate noticed that every morning the sailor with the wooden leg and one of the children of the deaf-and-dumb man left Squatters Row together just before mid-day and came back carrying food. She asked where they had been and was told, ‘To the Alms Gate.’

‘And the monks give you food? Would they give me some?’

‘Brother Stephen would. Brother Justinius would not,’ Peg-Leg said. He knew all the rules. He explained the situation to Kate in his own simple words. The monks had plenty to give away. Baildon was a very rich Abbey and had in time past been heavily endowed by wealthy men who had sought favour in the sight of Heaven by remembering the poor in their wills. There had been a time when anyone, needy or not, deserving or not, could present himself at the Alms Gate and be fed; but after the great upheaval of the rebellion in the year when I was born, people in high places had become alarmed at this ‘indiscriminate charity’ as they called it. They said it encouraged indolence and the habit of drifting from place to place. So a law was passed saying that alms were to be given only to those who were not able-bodied.

This was a law which admitted of varying interpretations. Some monks said that they had no time to waste on making a close physical inspection
before handing out a bowl of pease-porridge or a hunk of bread, or would split a hair of logic by arguing that a man in the throes of hunger could not rightly be said to be able-bodied. There were others who accepted the law as it read and made it an excuse for reducing the scope of their charity.

In Baildon, in the main, the law was accepted. Dummy, our deaf-and-dumb neighbour, for instance, could hope for nothing at the Alms Gate: he was able-bodied, that is, sound of wind and limb. Peg-Leg, on the other hand, was accepted as a responsibility, and so was Dummy’s child because she had been knocked down by a bullock running wild from the shambles and she had grown crooked.

A woman like Kate was a debatable case, and, as Peg-Leg said, it all depended upon which of the two almsgiving monks threw up the hatch in the Alms Gate which lay just beyond the Bell Tower. Brother Justinius argued that pregnancy was a natural state and that a woman heavy with child was in no sense disabled; Brother Stephen on the other hand, counted heaviness of body and shortness of breath as a disability.

‘There you are,’ Kate said to me, after learning all this from Peg-Leg. ‘I told you we should be cared for.’

She joined the miserable little crowd at the Alms Gate and came away, empty-handed, or happy according to which monk was on duty that day. Brother Stephen even carried matters so far as now and then to dole her out a double portion, saying, ‘You must eat for two.’

I invented a tale that Master Armstrong had taken pity on me and offered me a break fast piece in addition to my dinner. This meant that I went to work every day with an empty belly. In fact the dinners which our master provided were as scanty as he dared make them, and the weather being very cold and wet, I grew thin and low-spirited. Those who have never hungered think little of food, those who are hungry think of little else. I confess that there were many times between Christmas and the birth of my first son when I would have exchanged even my freedom to be back in the hut behind the smithy at Rede, with the fat pork cooking in the pot. I had to find another, a longer way home. Cooks Lane, the shorter way, was so full of mouth-watering smells; and then I would be home and Kate would have something left from her dole if it had been a good day with Brother Stephen at the hatch, and she would offer it to me and I could feel the wolf look come into my eyes.

However, the child was born, whole and sound. The old woman who was our neighbour – her name was Agnes – came and gave her assistance. And hardly was the baby born – it was a boy – before the old woman said,

‘There, my dear, you’ve a fine lad and now you can claim your Trimble.’