The Most Precious Thing (14 page)
With her father in mind, Carrie now said, ‘Who was in your shift for picket duty?’
‘Damn the picket duty.’ David was not going to be deflected. His voice raw, he repeated, ‘You’re not doing it, Carrie.’ Here she was, liable to have the bairn at any time in the next few days, and as big as a house, and she had not only defied the unwritten law that said she shouldn’t be seen outside in the street, she had actually gone to the factory to ask for work despite what he had said some weeks earlier when she’d raised the matter.
At one end of the table were brown papers spread out and pasted. In her lap lay the cases already rolled; to the right of her was a pudding basin and paintbrush covered in paste. He had the urge to fling out his hand and sweep the lot on to the floor.
‘David, but for Ada we’d be on the streets right now.’ Carrie’s voice was low but nonetheless determined. ‘There’s nothing in the cupboard to eat and not a penny to buy anything. ’
‘I thought Ada was picking up a few bits from Marleys for us yesterday?’
‘No, I told her I didn’t want her to do it any more. She . . . she let something slip the last time she brought stuff in. Apparently our credit stopped weeks ago, along with everyone else’s round here, but she didn’t want to tell us. She’s been buying us food out of her own pocket and her without two farthings to rub together. The bread and cheese we ate this morning was the last of anything.’
‘Marleys stopped our credit? By, that’s ripe. Thought he was supporting us all as long as it took.’
‘It’s a small shop, David, and he’s bairns of his own to feed. They can’t live on thin air, any more than we can. All the shops, even the Co-op, are the same. They’re tired of it all.’
He stood looking at her, despair working a muscle in his jaw as though he had a tic. He felt sick to his stomach. All their efforts over the last weeks and it had come to this. And it had been
their
efforts, not just his. Even when Carrie had begun to show to the extent it wouldn’t be seemly her working in the soup kitchens or helping organise the events, she had taken on knitting at home before people had run out of old woollens and such to donate in the last couple of weeks. And in a strange sort of way he thought the strike had helped to get them over the awkwardness of living together in one room. He still turned his back while she undressed and scuttled under the covers, and he’d not seen so much as a bare ankle since they’d been wed, but he didn’t mind that as long as she was feeling more comfortable with him. Their joined purpose in seeing the cause succeed and unity of mind had brought them together a bit, he felt. Or maybe he was just fooling himself. Clutching at straws. And now she was proposing to slave away all day for a pittance, but a pittance, he had to admit, which seemed like a fortune in their present circumstances. Nevertheless . . . ‘I’ll do something, anything, but I don’t want you working on them things.’
their
efforts, not just his. Even when Carrie had begun to show to the extent it wouldn’t be seemly her working in the soup kitchens or helping organise the events, she had taken on knitting at home before people had run out of old woollens and such to donate in the last couple of weeks. And in a strange sort of way he thought the strike had helped to get them over the awkwardness of living together in one room. He still turned his back while she undressed and scuttled under the covers, and he’d not seen so much as a bare ankle since they’d been wed, but he didn’t mind that as long as she was feeling more comfortable with him. Their joined purpose in seeing the cause succeed and unity of mind had brought them together a bit, he felt. Or maybe he was just fooling himself. Clutching at straws. And now she was proposing to slave away all day for a pittance, but a pittance, he had to admit, which seemed like a fortune in their present circumstances. Nevertheless . . . ‘I’ll do something, anything, but I don’t want you working on them things.’
For a moment Carrie wanted to scream the truth at him, so weary did she feel. Since the strike had dragged on, people in work had got fed up with donating and lending and helping, and she couldn’t really blame them. The same ones tended to get pestered all the time. Gardens were maintained to the last blade of grass, scissors and knives and garden shears had been sharpened repeatedly, and some housewives - the kind ones - had more tea cosies, doorstops and clippy mats than the big shops in Bishopwearmouth. He’d said he would do something, but the last few days he had tramped miles without so much as the whiff of a job.
With the government refusing to let the workhouse Guardians give coal miners a penny - if they wanted relief they could go into the workhouse with their families to get it, that was Chamberlain’s attitude - there was nowhere else to go. And she would die before she went into one of those places, and work till she dropped on her feet before she saw her mam and da and the others go in. Walter and Renee were just about getting by on Renee’s wage although they were weeks behind with the rent, but Renee could have helped their mam out a bit by pawning some of their furniture. But if her sister didn’t want to do that, she didn’t want to. She couldn’t force Renee to help out at home and when she’d broached the matter with her, Renee had got very much on her high horse.
Carrie took a deep breath and spoke to David from the heart. ‘I’ve had a couple of weeks of doing nothing and I can’t stand it,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m not made that way, David.’
‘You’ve kept this place clean and got us meals.’
‘Which doesn’t take more than half an hour at most.’ With no coal to light the range, they’d been eating bread and cheese, and any food they could get from the market stalls at the end of the day, such as bruised fruit or the scrapings of cooked ham or chitterlings and dripping.
‘But look at you.’ The wave of his hand took in her swollen stomach and puffy ankles. ‘And what about when the bairn comes?’
He knew immediately he’d made a mistake. She never mentioned the coming event; it was as though she had blocked it out of her mind, and any reference to the baby by him always got the blank dead look he was receiving now. ‘I’ll manage.’
It was final and David recognised it as such, even as he continued to argue with her for a few minutes more. In truth, he didn’t know what they were going to do. The last few nights he hadn’t slept a wink worrying how he was going to provide food for them to eat, and they had nowt for the bairn when it came, not so much as a few rags to use for nappies.
From the beginning of the strike the miners’ halls had given out second-hand clothing and boots, particularly for the bairns, when they knew the need was genuine but plenty of desperate families wouldn’t ask for charity, despite the fact their bairns were running around in rags with their backsides hanging out and no shoes on their feet. Others had been up to get something or other more than once, some on the quiet and some militantly declaring to anyone who would listen that it wasn’t ‘handouts’. They were all owed something for the blood, sweat and tears they’d put in over the years, and were still putting in.
Of the two camps, David knew he was in the former. How his pride would stand up if he saw Carrie in boots with more holes in them than leather, and the baby without a stitch, was another matter, and he prayed it wouldn’t come to that. His suit and one decent shirt and tie had long since found their way to the pawn shop, along with the dress, hat and shoes Carrie had been wed in. They both now only possessed the clothes they stood up in, which Carrie would wash and dry overnight when necessary.
He stood awkwardly staring down at her bent head as she rubbed soap over the metal roller she was using because it was sticking. Her hair was still as shining and silky as if she washed it every night in a fancy shampoo, and the curve of her long slender neck brought an ache to his chest and his loins. He still couldn’t look at her without wanting her, and that in spite of her being so far gone and about to pop, he thought wretchedly. He’d die for her without even giving it a thought, and here he was standing watching her work herself to death. Maybe she would have done better without him after all; his good intentions seemed to have dragged her further and further down.
And then she looked up and smiled at him. ‘There’s some tea in the pot although it’s a bit stewed. Ada brought it in earlier,’ she said softly. ‘She made out she fancied an afternoon cuppa with me and then wouldn’t take the tray back, saying she’d forgotten she’d got a pot on the hob at home. I don’t know what we’d do without her, do you?’
He forced himself to smile back although he was horrified to find he wanted to cry.
Perhaps something of what he was feeling showed in his face because the next moment Carrie pushed the baking board to one side, rose to her feet and touched his arm gently in one of the rare physical gestures she made now and then. ‘It will all work out, David. The strike won’t last for ever and we’ll get through.’
He felt himself tense slightly as she touched him; he always did because if he didn’t have absolute control of himself he knew he would grab her and crush her to him. Other times, when the desire sprang up so hot and strong it was unbearable, he would take a long walk, even as far as Seaham on occasion. The nights were the worst. Lying beside her as she slept, rock hard and his loins on fire for hours, he thought he’d go mad at times. But it was worth it.
She
was worth it. He still couldn’t believe it sometimes when he opened the door and there she was, waiting for him to come home.
She
was worth it. He still couldn’t believe it sometimes when he opened the door and there she was, waiting for him to come home.
He swallowed, as if ridding himself of a piece of sharp stone, and said, ‘I know, I know,’ and in case she read what was in his eyes he turned and walked over to the bed where Ada had left the tray. There was a small plate of gingerbread beside the teapot, and again the lump in his throat threatened to choke him. In spite of everything he was a darn sight better off than his da; by, he was that, he told himself grimly. Alec and his mam had made it clear every bite his da ate was on sufferance, according to Lillian, and but for his sister insisting their da met her in her break at midday when she always made sure he had a good feed from the faggot and pease pudding stall or the meat pie stall in the old market, he’d have wasted away by now. Lillian said it had got so he wouldn’t take so much as a mouthful at home.
Not that his da had said a word about it, in spite of them being on the same shift for picket duty and such. But he could understand that, David thought. He’d be the same if it was him. It was one thing to suffer such humiliation, quite another to bring it out into the open. He knew Lillian was worried about their da; every time she came round to see him and Carrie it was the first thing she talked about, and he had noticed a change in him the last weeks or so. His da didn’t carry himself straight any more or whistle like he used to. It was almost as if something had gone, been extinguished inside, so that he was shrinking down inside himself. Damn this strike, they’d all be up the pole by the end of it.
He poured two mugs of black tea and took one across to Carrie, along with the gingerbread. ‘Get this down you, lass,’ he said roughly, his eyes resting on the batch of fireworks she had already made which were lying in a Riley’s Toffee-Roll tin.
Carrie took the tea but shook her head at the gingerbread. ‘I’ve had some, that’s for you.’
Her wrists were so thin they looked as if you could snap them with the slightest pressure, and although her stomach was ballooning and her feet were puffy, the rest of her was as thin as a rake. He didn’t believe she’d eaten anything since the crust of bread and small smidgen of cheese she’d had before he had gone out that morning. ‘Eat it.’ He put the plate in front of her. ‘You’ve had your way about the fireworks, let me have mine in this,’ he said with a smile to soften his words.
‘Half each then?’
He moved his head impatiently. ‘I don’t want nowt. Eat it up and then I’ll take the tray back to Ada in a minute or two.’
The saliva filled his mouth as Carrie reluctantly bit into Ada’s homemade gingerbread. He had thought he knew what it was to be hungry in the past, but the strike had shown him different. He had only to think of inch-thick bread held in front of a glowing fire on the toasting fork for his stomach to grumble, toast with melting golden butter fresh from the farm or salty pork dripping from the butcher’s.
Funny, but of all the food he’d had to do without in the last weeks, it was the smell and taste of toast he missed the most. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange. Toast was part and parcel of the happy times in his childhood, the occasions when he’d spent days or weeks at his Gran and Granda Sutton’s when his mother had got fed up with four bairns under her feet and had shipped himself and Lillian off to South Shields for a while.
He had loved it there, running wild for the most part in a way he was never allowed to do at home but always knowing Gran Sutton’s small two-roomed cottage was there to go back to at the end of the day. A kettle always on the hob, hot bath water in front of a rich red, yellow and orange fire, a glowing oven shelf wrapped in old sacking to warm the pallet bed in front of the range in which he and Lillian slept, and the smell of nutty slack and leftover tea leaves dampening down the fire as they’d drifted off to sleep listening to his gran and granda talk.
When he was still knee high to a grasshopper he would go and sit with the retired miners on the bench outside the village hall. They would send him home when the sun was setting and it was time for dinner, chivying him off with a tiny clay pipe and a hap’orth of chocolate tobacco, like as not. There had been big fat mushrooms in the fields close to the village, along with blackberries and sloes in the autumn, and he could still recall the beauty of the glistening frost on the spiders’ webs draping the hedgerows in the winter.
He had never wanted to go home, never. And when his da had come to collect them, he’d known the indefinable something that existed between his parents made his da feel the same. His gran would send them off loaded down with homemade toffee, as brittle as it was transparent, and she always hugged his da longer than she ever did anyone else.
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