The Urchin's Song (3 page)

The thought of her father caused Josie’s soft full mouth to tighten and her nostrils to flare. She knew why he’d done it. Oh aye, she knew all right. She’d given him the beer, baccy and betting money he’d demanded at the end of the week - precious shillings they could ill afford but without which she knew her da would certainly beat the living daylights out of them all at the slightest provocation - and then he’d wanted more yesterday for one of his ‘certs’ on the horses. She knew how that would turn out - more often than not he lost the lot but on the rare occasions the horse came in he’d drunk his winnings the same night, treating all and sundry in the pubs as though he was Lord Muck.

So she’d stood up to him and received a swipe round the lug for her refusal to hand over the rent money which he’d taken anyway. She paused, her hand unconsciously touching her bruised cheek. She hated him. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t hated him, but she hadn’t realised her mam felt the same way until an incident which had occurred just after she’d started the singing some five years ago.

The Council had been digging out the foundations for the new Town Hall in Fawcett Street - right bonny it was now with its lovely clock-tower - and her da hadn’t been home for a couple of nights. One of their neighbours had been funning with her mam and had joked that her husband might have fallen in the hole, and her mam had smiled and that, but . . . Josie started walking again, her breath mingling with the starry flakes of snow. She’d seen the look in her mam’s eyes and she’d known. She had known her mam wished her da dead.

She reached the little shop where she intended to buy the flour and, pushing open the door, stepped inside the dim, dusty interior. She always bought her flour here for two reasons. One, it was cheaper than most places and although there was a lot of chaff in it and what her mam called boxings, it made as much bread as the nice white flour and moreover it was filling. Secondly, the man who owned the shop - a big jolly Scot called Mr McKenzie - frequented one of the pubs in which she sang, and he always gave her a little extra flour for her money. His brother had a smallholding on the outskirts of Bishopwearmouth and Mr McKenzie often had some pig’s fat at the right price for his favourite customers, of whom she was one.

‘Hello, lass.’ Mr McKenzie was busy weighing out bags of flour from an enormous hessian sack in the far corner of the shop, and he continued with his task as he said, ‘Is it flour you’re wanting?’

‘Aye, yes please.’

She waited quietly until he had finished what he was doing and then smiled as he straightened his massive frame and walked over to her. ‘Don’t tell me - a stone, is it? Or maybe two the day?’ It was their little joke. Josie never varied in her order. And then his face lost its smile when he said, ‘You walked into another door, lass?’

Josie was looking straight into Mr McKenzie’s eyes and she made no reply to the remark. The door excuse was her stock explanation when her father’s fists left visible marks. It didn’t happen so often now, not since she had started singing and her da had realised she needed to look presentable to woo the punters, but occasionally his temper got the better of him, especially if she defied him. And she was doing that more and more lately; she just couldn’t help herself somehow.

‘I’d like to take that door into a back alley and give it a hammering it wouldn’t forget in a hurry.’ Mr McKenzie knew Bart Burns and it was a constant source of amazement to the big Scot that Josie came from such a family. ‘Rose on a dungheap’ was how he described it to his wife. He looked at the slender young girl in front of him, her poor clothes and ugly black boots unable to hide her natural grace and poise, and great velvet-brown eyes under dark curving brows stared back at him. Her skin was like rose-tinted cream, her features delicate, and he knew - although her felt hat was sitting low on her forehead - that beneath it there was an abundance of thick, wavy, golden-brown hair.

By, if she was his daughter he’d dress her like a little princess. There was his Beatty and him, been married twenty odd years now and still no sign of a bairn, and yet worthless so-an’-sos like Bart and his missus churned them out as easy as blinking. There was no justice in the world. But likely this little lass knew far more than him on that subject.

When Josie staggered out of the shop a few minutes later the quarter stone was approaching half, and Mr McKenzie had refused to take any money for the large portion of pig fat.

She had to stop every few yards now, the weight of the bag pulling her arms out of their sockets, but once she had purchased the lamp oil and she knew she could go home it didn’t seem so bad.

The lamplighter had long since finished his round of igniting the gas lamps with his long poke in the main thoroughfares, but the side streets and back lanes and alleys were as black as pitch where there were no shops to provide a little light. The darkness didn’t bother Josie unduly, but she knew better than to risk venturing into certain alleys and short cuts; the painted dock dollies regularly used them for their furtive business.

Once in High Street East, she walked as quickly as the heavy bag allowed. She passed one of the entrances to the market, the others being in Coronation Street and James Williams Street, but most of the stalls had packed up, it being after ten by now. Her da wouldn’t like it that she hadn’t gone to work tonight, he’d have her performing every night if he had his way, but the last couple of years she had determined that every Monday she’d clean their two rooms from top to bottom and then go shopping once it was late and bargains could be had. She could make a penny stretch to thruppence that way.

By the time Josie reached Long Bank she was puffing fit to burst and - despite the raw night - sweating profusely. Long Bank joined High Street and Low Street, and the pungent smell of fish was always heavy in the air from the kipper-curing house, but Josie didn’t mind this. There were worse smells than fish.

A flat cart trundled by her, its presence made visible by a swinging lamp near the driver behind the plodding horse, and when a voice said, ‘What now, Josie lass. How y’doin’?’ she recognised it as Archibald Clark’s, the lad who delivered the wet fish to various shops and some of the big houses in the better part of town.

‘I’m all right, Archie, but it’s a cold one.’

‘Aye, you’re right there, lass.’

Josie stood for a moment watching the glow of the swinging lantern grow fainter before she opened the door of the house and lugged the bag inside. The hall was in total darkness but she knew the narrow steep stairs were straight in front of her. These led to the two rooms at the top of the house which were occupied by Maud and Enoch Tollett, an elderly couple whose eleven children had all long since flown the cramped nest.

Josie liked the two tough old northerners. She could remember times before she had started her singing when, once the pair upstairs were sure her father was out, they had appeared with a pot of broth and a loaf of bread, or a plate of chitterlings and pig’s pudding for her mam. They had all known they had to eat the food quick and get the pots back to Maud before Bart returned. Enoch had still been working at the Sunderland Brewery on Wylam Wharf then, but since he had seized up with arthritis his children had managed to pay the old couple’s rent of one and ninepence a week between their eleven families, and provide the basic essentials to keep their parents alive. Essentials, in their book, however, didn’t run to baccy for Enoch or half a bottle of gin for their mam, and no one but Josie and the old couple knew how often she secreted little packages up the narrow stairs.

By memory rather than sight, Josie now moved along the passageway and fumbled for the door handle on her left. Her fingers having found their objective she opened the door quickly, heaving the bag half across the threshold as the door swung open, and then she stood for a moment surveying the room immediately in front of her. As always, a faint glow of pleasure flushed her checks as she contemplated the changes she’d been able to make. Hard-won changes they were, too, because she had had to fight her father every inch of the way to keep back some of the money she earned.

The floor in front of her, like the one in the kitchen which was just visible through the interconnecting door - left open during the daytime - was covered in large flagstones Josie had scoured with soda that very day. Two raised wooden platforms which acted as settees during the day and beds at night - one housing her parents and the other her brothers - stood either side of the small iron grate in which a good fire was burning, a bright clippy mat in front of it and another lying lengthways in front of each of the platforms. In the far corner of the room next to the interconnecting door, a table and four hardbacked chairs were squeezed against the wall, an oilcloth covering the battered wood on which reposed Josie’s most recent gift to her mother and one which had aroused her father’s fury at such useless extravagance - a red earthenware pot of pure white hyacinths.

Either side of the window, which again was clean and sporting bright yellow curtains of thin cotton, were two orange boxes covered with the same material as the curtains and housing one spare set of darned clean bedding, one folded white tablecloth and the few extra items of clothing the family owned between them.

Above the grate on the thin flat piece of wood which didn’t deserve the grand name of a mantelshelf were two brass candlesticks complete with flickering candles, and in the centre of these stood an empty oil lamp. And it was to this item Josie now directed her gaze as she said, ‘I’ve got the oil, Mam, and the flour and everything. Mr McKenzie gave me the pig’s fat free an’ all.’

‘He did?’ Shirley Burns was lying on one of the wooden platforms, a faded patchwork quilt pulled up to her chest; so slight was her thin body she barely caused a rise in the covers. Numerous miscarriages and stillbirths - the last being two years ago at which point both the doctor and the parson had warned Bart that the next pregnancy would take his wife’s life - had stripped her of her health and her looks, and she appeared twenty years older than her forty years.

Shirley’s voice was soft when she said, ‘That bag’s too heavy for you, lass. I’ve told you afore: you should get one of the lads to help you of a Monday night.’

Josie smiled at her mother but said nothing as she lugged the bag through the doorway, shutting the door behind her before she walked through to the other room. They both knew the furore that would erupt should she ask for help from one of her brothers. She didn’t like to think what Jimmy and Hubert were about most nights, but knowing her father was at the bottom of it, it was bound to be sailing close to the wind, if not downright illegal.

Like the first room, the kitchen was a different place from the filthy hole it had been five years before. The shining, blackleaded range had another clippy mat - larger than the ones in the living room - lying in front of it, and the brass-tailed fender reflected its colours in a rainbow haze. A large wooden table to one side of the range held a tin bath, a smaller tin bowl and assorted cooking utensils, along with plates, mugs and cutlery, all clean and scrubbed.

Along one wall was the desk-bed where Josie and her sister slept. The bed was made from wooden lathes and they had to lift the chiffonier storing their meagre food supplies to get the bed out each night, whereupon the hard lumpy flock mattress was revealed in all its glory.

Her mother had suggested the lads sleep on the desk bed when Josie had first purchased it some three years before, but Josie would have put up with far more than the stiff limbs and aching muscles the mattress caused, for the joy of sleeping in a separate room to the others with just Gertie snuggled beside her.

A smaller and very battered table used for preparing food, with a wooden box slotted beneath which did as a seat, made up the sum total of furniture in the kitchen. Another door led out into the end of the hall. Beyond this, the back door of the house led into a communal yard shared by the inhabitants of seven houses. The privy - a square box with a wooden seat extending right across the breadth of the lavatory and filling half its depth - could be a stinking place both winter and summer, depending on the cleanliness of its last occupant. Josie had got into the habit of leaving a full bucket of fresh ashes, along with squares of trimmed newspaper, by the kitchen door at all times. Although there was a daily rota which accounted for each household taking its turn in cleaning the privy, there was rarely a day that one or two buckets from the kitchen didn’t find their way down the round hole in the middle of the seat.

Along with the privy there was a communal washhouse and tap in the yard, with several lines of string hung up at one end for drying bedding and clothing, should the weather permit.

After placing the shopping bag on the smaller table Josie now picked up the big black kettle at the side of the range which, as normal, was empty. The lads were supposed to keep the kettle full, along with the bucket used for fetching water from the yard, but they were experts at remembering to forget this particular chore. Sighing, Josie went out into the cold again with the bucket and was relieved to find the tap hadn’t frozen up again, although the trickle of water was painfully slow.

Once back in the warmth of the kitchen she stoked up the fire in the range and put the kettle on to boil. That done, she fetched the lamp from the other room, and once she had trimmed, filled and lit it, carried it in to her mother, bringing the candles back into the kitchen once she’d blown them out. The light from the living room along with the glow from the range was just adequate in the kitchen, and at fourpence a pound, candles couldn’t be wasted. Especially with the rent money gone again.

After scooping the drips of tallow from the candlesticks Josie put them into the small iron pan containing other remnants, along with the small ends of used candles, to be melted down for further use when there was sufficient. The candles dealt with, she put the shopping away before making a pot of tea, and it was only whilst it was mashing that she finally slipped out of her coat and hat.