A Daughter's Duty (2 page)

‘Hoy there! What’re you two doing sitting all by yourselves there? Howay along with us, we’ll have a good time. What d’you say?’

The girls looked down at the two boys on the path. ‘It’s Jeff and Brian,’ Rose said unnecessarily, for the two had been a couple of years ahead of Rose at the Council School and worked at the pit at Jordan. ‘Come on, let’s go with them, it’ll be more exciting than sitting here.’ She jumped to her feet and took a few steps towards the path before looking back. ‘Don’t be such a wet blanket, Marina Morland.’

Marina remembered that Rose had always liked Jeff, who was tall and good-looking, his fair hair darkened with brilliantine and slicked back from his brow with a quiff in the front. His skin was clear, untroubled by the scourge of acne, unlike Brian’s which was pitted with old scars. Marina felt a twinge of sympathy for him, perhaps the reason why she got to her feet.

‘All right, I’m coming.’ She followed her friend down to the path where Rose pushed her way between the boys so that Brian fell back, leaving her to walk with Jeff.

Jeff and Rose were talking and laughing close together and the couple behind watched in silence as Jeff bent his head to whisper something in Rose’s ear, casually putting his arm around her waist. Rose glanced back at Marina with a smile which made Marina blush and stare down at the path in case Brian should have noticed. Not that he would care, she told herself. The lads probably thought she and Rose had been there by the river waiting for a couple of presentable boys to come along the path, ones they could have a harmless flirtation with, just for the afternoon. What else was there to do when the old folks were listening to boring old speeches or catching up on family gossip? But she was still a bit worried about Rose. She seemed frenetic somehow in her determination to enjoy herself today.

Marina glanced sideways at Brian and caught him looking at her. He grinned. ‘How about going on the river?’ he asked. ‘The punts are just down there, past the bridge.’ Without waiting for her reply he called to the other two, ‘Hey, how d’you fancy taking a punt out?’

‘Howay then,’ shouted Jeff, and Brian caught hold of Marina’s hand and all four of them began to hurry to where the punts were lined up in a row at the side of the water, a small crowd of young people waiting their turn to get in one and push the punt away from the bank with a long pole to glide away with the current.

‘Are you sure you can use one of them poles?’ Rose asked the boys. ‘The water’s awful deep, mind, and I’ve got me good clothes on.’ She hitched up the neckline of her peasant blouse so that it covered her shoulders. ‘Me mam’ll give me what for if I get them spoiled, we have no clothes coupons left.’

‘There’s nowt to it,’ Jeff asserted. ‘What’s to go wrong anyroad?’ He grinned across at Brian, who was helping Marina into the punt, and his friend grinned back. ‘You’ll not get a spot on your clothes.’

‘Have you done this before?’ Marina asked nervously, wishing she hadn’t been so keen to get in the boat. She thought about getting out again, but when she moved the punt rocked alarmingly and Rose, who was just stepping in, shrieked.

‘Keep still, man!’

Marina looked at the punts already on the move. They seemed to be doing all right, and by, it must be lovely just to sit back and glide around the bend in the river with the steep wooded bank to one side and the cathedral towering over the water. It was just like a picture she’d seen once with Robert Donat pretending to be a student in Oxford – or was it Cambridge? Anyway, he was poling away on the river there in a punt just like this one and it had looked as easy as pie. Besides it was too late now, the punt was moving and Jeff was standing there, showing off, pushing the pole into the water then suddenly they were into the middle of the Wear and across, almost to the opposite bank.

‘The other side, you daft beggar! Turn it round or we’ll be ganning nowhere,’ shouted Brian. ‘Here, let me have a go.’ The punt swung round and Rose shrieked and fell off her seat.

‘I knew we shouldn’t have come with them,’ she muttered to Marina, who decided it was a waste of time reminding her whose idea it had been as she helped Rose back on to the seat. The two girls hung on to the sides of the boat, just in case.

But they were travelling serenely down the Wear now. ‘Hey, look, I’m getting the hang of this,’ Brian shouted.

‘Why aye, man.’ Jeff nodded his head. ‘Anything those bloody students can do, a pitman can do better.’

‘If your mam heard you swearing like that she’d bat you round the ear,’ Rose observed, but he didn’t deign to hear.

There were a lot of punts and rowing boats on the river now, mostly navigated by young lads from the myriad pits of the country, and it wasn’t long before the four from Jordan found themselves getting into the thick of them. Marina realised that she and Rose were the only two girls in this lot, but before she could warn her friend the cheerful insults the lads were shouting at each other turned into outright war.

They were starting a mock battle, their weapons poles used like lances. It was just as well there were no points on them.

‘Howay, Brian, don’t forget we have the lasses.’ Jeff belatedly remembered their responsibilities. To give Brian his due, he tried to steer away from the battle but when the punt nearest them tipped over and splashed into the water after a particularly telling blow to the ‘knight’ at the helm, their own was almost overturned and there were Marina and Rose, swamped in dirty river water, choking and spluttering and spitting it out. Brian leaped about and the punt rocked even more dangerously and suddenly Rose found herself over the side, her movements restricted by the weight of water in her full skirt, with Marina clutching on to her and screaming.

‘Give me your hand!’ someone shouted, and Rose saw there was a rowing boat beside them with someone leaning towards them, holding out an oar. Then somehow or other she was hauled into the punt and Marina after her and they were moving away from the scene of the battle, threading their way through overturned punts and pitlads swimming in their best suits, and the two girls were being helped out of the boat on to the grass of the race course and Marina’s mother was there, scolding and using the tablecloth she’d brought to have a picnic on the grass as a towel to dry Marina off.

‘By heck, our Marina, I sometimes think you’ll never grow up. Making a show of me in front of all me relations like that! Do you not know the Wear’s a lot deeper here than it is at Bishop? It would have served you right if you’d drowned – then you’d have been sorry! It was a good thing Charlie was there to save you. Now say thank you to him.’

Marina looked over her shoulder and there was the lad she had already bumped into once today. Charlie? She coughed and spluttered, trying to get rid of the foul taste of river water, and suddenly it came to her. It was Charlie Hutchinson of course, from Yorkshire, the one Mam’s cousin had practically adopted. This was twice in one day she had shown herself up before him and there he was, a superior sort of smile playing about his lips. Well, blow him, she thought and turned away, lifting her nose up in the air and pretending a great interest in Brian, who was standing to one side looking guilty.

‘Oh, Brian,’ she said, looking up into his face with exaggerated concern. ‘You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?’

The only trouble was it was hard to get rid of him after that. Kate invited him to share their picnic and everyone pooled their sandwiches and sat around on the grass. The wind dried the wet patches on their clothes, leaving them only grubby, not half as bad as the lads who had had to swim for the bank in their thick suits. Charlie disappeared, probably gone off home disgusted with the behaviour of these common folk, Marina thought.

‘There you are, Rose,’ said a familiar voice. It was Alf Sharpe and Rose suddenly looked even more bedraggled and pale and sick to her stomach. No doubt she had swallowed some water, Marina thought, and then her friend was whisked away by her father without even being allowed time to say goodbye.

After Marina had spread her skirt and dried off a little bit it was time to wend their way up to the cathedral, following the three bands and banners which had been chosen for the service this year. They played ‘Gresford’, the miners’ hymn, willed to the Union by the composer, and Marina was struck dumb by the solemnity of it and the grandeur of the great church of St Cuthbert.

‘Cuthbert’s people, we are,’ asserted Dad, nodding his head. ‘Aye, we’re the real Cuddy’s people, never forget it, lass. Never mind these university folk, it’s the workers that count.’

Marina’s dad was a great labour man. He never forgot the hardships of the depression years, the hard times of the twenties and thirties, and was always talking about them. And the fact that many of the undergraduates of the universities had gone against the workers in the general strike of 1926, rushing to man the buses and such. Not that any had gone so far as to go down the pits, he would add with a grin.

But Marina only half listened to him. She’d heard it so many times before and the thirties were just history now, weren’t they?

‘I feel real bad, lass,’ said Sarah Sharpe wearily. ‘I haven’t even been able to get up and give the bairns their dinner. And you know all the women were away, there was no one to see to them for me. They had to fend for themselves.’ She lay back on a pillow damp with sweat and sighed.

Rose gazed at her mother guiltily. She really shouldn’t have gone off to Durham, she knew that. But, oh, she had so wanted to have a break, a day out in Durham with everyone else. She glanced at the twins, Mary and Michael, standing together, thumbs stuck in their mouths, both with tear-streaked faces and runny noses, both with jam on their clothes where they had been digging into the jar. No longer crying now that Rose was home, they simply stared at their elder sister, waiting for her to make things better.

‘All right, Mam, I’ll see to them,’ she said. ‘I’ll make some eggy toast. You like eggy toast, don’t you, kids?’

The pair nodded. ‘Can I have two, Rose?’ asked Michael. ‘And Mary wants two, an’ all.’

‘All right. But go and play while I see to our mam and I’ll call you when supper is ready.’

The twins went out into the yard readily enough and Rose heated water and helped her mother to wash before changing her bed. She found a clean nightie for her, brushed her hair back from her forehead and wove it into a plait. Rose remembered it being as black and thick as her own but now it was streaked with grey and thinning rapidly. A wave of anxiety ran through her as she made her mother comfortable, turning her pillows and straightening out her sheets.

‘I’ll start on the supper now. At least I’ll have the bairns to bed before he comes home,’ she remarked. ‘Then they might get off to sleep.’

‘Eeh, Rose, don’t talk about him like that. He loves you really, you know,’ Sarah protested weakly. ‘He is your dad after all.’

‘I do know. The thing is, sometimes I wonder if he does,’ Rose said grimly, but in an undertone to herself as she got out the iron frying pan and put a knob of dripping in it before setting it on the hob. There were four eggs and she considered using them all but Sarah seemed to know what she was thinking.

‘Leave an egg for your dad, he’ll be hungry when he gets in.’

Regretfully, Rose put one egg back in the bowl, though in fact she thought it more likely that her father would be too drunk to eat by the time he finally left the Club and staggered up the road. Weekends were the worst by far, she mused. At least during the week when he had his work at the pit to go to he didn’t drink too much, though he still went down to the Club. But Saturday nights were hellish for her and her mam.

She beat the eggs with salt and pepper and dipped slices of bread in the mixture before frying them in the hot fat.

‘By, it smells nice, mind.’ Sarah’s comment came through from the ‘room’, where her bed had been set up since she found it hard to climb the stairs.

‘Yes, well, I hope you eat it, that’s all,’ Rose replied. She was encouraged, Mam didn’t often show any interest in food these days. She glanced through the connecting door which led from the kitchen. By, her mother looked so white and frail, apart from that lump on her neck. If that was a goitre, like the doctor said, then she was a Dutchman. The feeling of anxiety which had begun rising in her the moment she had turned into the gate was heavy on her now but she smiled at her mother. ‘I’ll call the bairns in,’ was all she said.

If she got them fed and washed and into bed she would be able to follow them upstairs herself before her dad came home, and all three of them would be out of the way of him and there would be no rows or anything else. It was the anything else which loomed before her, filling her with dread.

Lying in bed, tired out but unable to sleep, Rose couldn’t stop thinking about her dad. She remembered how it was before the twins were born. She’d idolised him then. Mam and Dad had been so different. He’d hardly ever gone down to the Club apart from a Friday with his mates and then only for a couple of pints. They’d played games together, she riding on his shoulders when the three of them had gone for a walk. Mam had always been small and slim, like a girl, and had acted like a girl too, playing games with her daughter. They would find a stick and play cricket with Rose’s painted rubber ball and Mam could run like a hare after it. And laughing … she’d always been laughing.

Had it been the twins that changed her? She was often lying about after that, putting on weight, looking bloated for a time. And then she’d gone thin, so thin. Rose turned on to her side restlessly, pushing the sheet back from her overheated body. What was the use of wondering what had gone wrong? Probably things had always been as they were now, she had just been too young to see it. She heard unsteady footsteps coming up the yard, the back door opening, and turned again in the big double bed to put out a hand to her sister Mary, curled up in a ball beside her. There was a sort of comfort in touching the small body. In the tiny room opposite where Michael slept in a narrow bed which nevertheless took up most of the floor space, the boy coughed but didn’t wake up.