The Urchin's Song (55 page)

Strangely, the one thing that brought her out of the abyss to a limited extent and gave her the will to go on was the news which her sisters had feared would be the final straw to her delicate state of mind. Oliver had left debts, vast debts. Sums of a nature to be overwhelming to the average man and woman.

Josie listened to all Oliver’s solicitors said, took all the papers and correspondence relating to her husband’s liabilities, and wrote to each and every creditor assuring them that the debt would be honoured in full if they could but be patient.

At the end of September she walked out of the house in Park Place with little more than the clothes she stood up in and the contents of her wardrobe, and moved into the residence at the back of the Caledonian Market. At Lily’s insistence, they converted the sitting room into Josie and Gertie’s living quarters, and Josie threw herself into her work.

Oliver’s agency had died with him, but when Anthony found another position at the end of October he asked Gertie to marry him and she immediately accepted. Josie was pleased for her sister, and when there was talk of the marriage being deferred out of respect for Oliver, she told the young couple in no uncertain terms that Oliver would not have wished it and neither did she. They must marry when it suited them to do so, she said. Time was a precious commodity and who knew what tomorrow would bring? And so Gertie and Anthony set the date for the following summer, and Gertie immediately began sewing her wedding dress in any free moments she had.

Barney wrote to Josie in November but she did not reply to his letter. He wrote again in December, a letter on the lines of the first one - kind, understanding, warm and friendly, but making it clear she was on his mind constantly. This time she replied with a cool note thanking him for his concern but making it plain she did not wish him to write a third time.

She would never go to the north again. Josie sat by the glowing range in the huge kitchen which was the focal point of the three converted houses, and glanced round at the merry faces singing carols. Lily and the rest of the women, plus Ada and Dora, had all collected for the little party Josie had thrown for Christmas Eve, and poor Mrs Wilde, who had no family of her own and didn’t like her new position with a retired colonel and his wife, had come along too. Gertie was spending Christmas with Anthony and his mother.

No, she would never go home again. Josie smiled as she accepted another glass of hot mulled wine from Lily, who had had several and was singing lustily as she bustled round filling everyone’s glasses and thrusting shives of Christmas cake on all and sundry. ‘Get it down you, lass.’ Lily bent over Josie, her eyes soft as she set a plate containing an enormous wedge of cake on Josie’s lap. ‘Good old northern recipe this, with a bottle of Guinness and black treacle and all sorts. None of your southern doings with a cherry and sultana a piece, and maybe a walnut if you’re lucky.’

‘Hey, Lily, you watch it!’ Teresa, a Cockney by birth, chipped in here. ‘You’d go a long way to beat my ma’s Christmas cake, God rest her soul. Quarter bottle of brandy she used to use, and enough fruit, peel and nuts to feed the Coldstream Guards for a week.’

‘No, no, it is the Christmas fare in my country which is best.’ Maria, an old Spanish singer and dancer, spoke up, her plump cheeks glowing from the effects of the wine and the heat in the kitchen. ‘And in northern Spain, where I was born, we have the hollow log known as Uncle and we place him near the fire. He is oh so noble, that log, and filled with presents and sweetmeats . . .’

More of the ladies, not to be outdone, chimed in, and Josie was content to sit and listen to these women she considered as part of her family. This house and its occupants came first, before anything, and then the slow and steady diminishing of Oliver’s debts. She had estimated they would take some time to clear - maybe two years or more - and that was if she continued to earn top money. But her new agent was good; he’d make sure she was treated well. Short, balding and approaching fifty, Timothy Tattle was a staunch family man and grandfather of three, and he suited Josie down to the ground. No complications of the emotional kind with Timothy.

Josie caught Ada’s eye across the room, and as her sister smiled at her and she smiled back, Josie thought, I’m lucky in a way, I am. I’ve got Ada and Dora in my life again and all these good friends, and my work. Aye, thank God for my work. Hubert is so happy with his Laura, and he’s content working for Mr Foster. If I could just get peace of mind, just enough to let me sleep all night through without the nightmares, I’d be content. I would, I’d be content with peace of mind. But then, as Ada had said to her more than once since Oliver’s death, time was a great healer. ‘Look at me,’ Ada had persisted when Josie shook her head in disbelief that she’d ever feel happy again. ‘Times I wanted to die when I was a bairn, an’ when I was a mite older an’ all. But for Dora I’d have done meself in afore I reached twenty, an’ Dora’s said the same about me. But we’re happy now, probably happier than them that’ve never known the valleys. How can you really appreciate the mountain tops if you’ve not gone through the valleys?’

Josie had said she didn’t know the answer to that. She had the feeling she knew very little these days. But she did know how to sing . . .

The next seven years saw the campaign for women’s suffrage waged with increasing violence, and unlike the massive unrest among the miners, the dockers, the railway workers and the rest of Britain’s industry, it was not the working-class contingent who were most vehement, but those women in the middle and upper classes. These ladies had taken on the fight for their so-called sisters who lived and died in the sweatshops of the big cities, the women who worked fifteen- and sixteen-hour days in the mills and factories and shops, and in conditions not fit for animals.

Josie, encouraged by the fiercely active twins Winifred and Victoria, took an ever-increasing interest in the Movement. By March, 1912, when Sir Almroth Wright wrote a long letter to
The Times
in which he argued that militant suffragettes were sexually and intellectually embittered, Josie was as furious as the rest of her sisters in the Movement.

Mrs Winston Churchill’s effective reply, also published in
The Times
, Josie considered a masterpiece. ‘“After reading Sir Almroth Wright’s able and weighty exposition of women as he knows them, the question seems no longer to be ‘Should women have votes?’ but ‘Ought women not to be abolished altogether?’ . . . We learn from him that in their youth they are unbalanced, that from time to time they suffer from unreasonableness and hyper-sensitiveness, and that their presence is distracting and irritating to men in their daily lives and pursuits. If they take up a profession, the indelicacy of their minds makes them undesirable partners for their male colleagues. Later on in life they are subject to grave and long-continued mental disorders, and if not quite insane, many of them have to be shut up . . . Cannot science give us some assurance, or at least some ground of hope, that we are now on the eve of the greatest discovery of all - i.e. how to maintain a race of males by purely scientific means?”’

‘By, lass!’ Josie had just read out the letter from the newspaper to Lily, who had become bedridden over the last year and whose eyesight was failing fast. ‘I wish I could pen words like that. That’s telling ’em all right.’

‘It’s not so much that Almroth Wright wrote the letter which bothers me as the fact that the press could treat such claptrap with respect.’ Josie rose from her seat at the side of Lily’s bed and walked across to the open window, breathing deeply of the mild spring air, before she added, ‘But it will come, Lily, the vote for women, and soon. It’s happened in Finland, and if the government had the sense it was born with it’d realise women are showing themselves to be every bit as good as men. Look at Madame Curie winning a second Nobel prize this year.’

‘Aye, I know, lass, I know. And I’ll tell you something else; there’s not a woman on this planet who can’t juggle a hundred and one things at the same time, but men have this problem of only being able to do one thing at a time. What woman worth her salt isn’t used to cooking and cleaning and seeing to the bairns, as well as having her man’s dinner on the table for when he walks in, and all that often after a hard day’s work taking in someone’s washing or carding buttons or whatever to make ends meet. I tell you, lass, it’s a man’s world.’

Josie smiled at her old friend as she turned from the window, but she said nothing. Lily would think she was mad if she said she’d give the world to be an ordinary housewife and mother, even one who had to make a penny stretch into two, especially if she revealed who was forever in her thoughts and her dreams.

Barney had ignored her plea not to write and had written twice more before he had come down to London to see her himself. It had not been a happy meeting. She was being ridiculous, he had said, to cut off her friends and family in the north at a time when she needed them most. When she had replied that this was not the case at all, and that she would be expecting Vera and Betty, and Hubert and his young lass too, to come and see her in London now and again, Barney had said that wasn’t quite what he had meant. He had not gone on to explain what he
had
meant because Josie’s stiff manner had made it clear she did not wish him to.

Two more letters had arrived before he had come to the house in the Caledonian Market again, three months after the anniversary of Oliver’s death. Josie had not been ready emotionally or mentally to see him, and again it had been a difficult meeting. Guilt had still been uppermost in Josie’s heart, and it had made her reserved and very distant towards him. When Barney had mentioned he was thinking of taking a position in one of the London theatres, she had told him she did not think that was a good idea. He had left shortly afterwards and he had not written again for a full twelve months, by which time Vera had informed Josie that Barney had a lass, a nice Sunderland lass.

Barney’s letter had stated that he understood Vera and Horace were coming to spend Christmas with Josie in her new home; she had cleared the last of Oliver’s debts a few months previously and had purchased a small threebedroomed property in a quiet part of Richmond. The house was nothing grand, but it had a pleasant rear garden and the luxury of an indoor privy being part of a new development close to Richmond Park.

Josie could have afforded a larger property but she had fallen in love with the house - and especially the garden in which the builder had had the good sense to leave several mature trees - the first time she had viewed it, and it was more than large enough for her purposes. She invited Mrs Wilde to leave the colonel and housekeep for her - something the woman accepted with alacrity - and with one bedroom spare for guests the property was ideal.

So . . . Barney’s letter had gone on, he felt he ought to write and let her know that Vera’s legs weren’t too good and he and Horace felt it best Barney made the journey down to London with them. He had business in the capital, he’d written, which would involve a couple of visits, so he could help Horace with Vera on the return journey too. He trusted his brief presence for a minute or two on both occasions would be acceptable?

Josie’s letter to Barney saying that this would be quite in order crossed in the post with one from Hubert. Jimmy had been in touch, Hubert wrote, and he could scarcely believe it but the letter had come all the way from Australia. Jimmy hadn’t said exactly what he was involved in out there - here Josie had bitten on her lip and tried to dismiss from her mind the hundreds of nefarious activities the newly formed country had to offer - nor had he given his address, but he had said he was fit and well and he just wanted his brother to know that.

Jimmy had wished his brother a long and happy life and had asked to be remembered to Josie and his other sisters - Josie didn’t think she believed Hubert here, but it was nice of him to say Jimmy had thought of them - and had added that Hubert had to forget the past and everything that had happened; the only thing that mattered was the present and what you made of the future. He’d finished by saying he wouldn’t be writing again.

Something had changed in Josie when she had read Hubert’s letter. Call it a release or a deliverance or whatever - she couldn’t really put a name to it and she didn’t actually try - but suddenly the weight of the remorse and guilt she had carried for two years was lifted off her shoulders, and it had been instant. For days afterwards she awoke expecting the old self-condemnation to rear its head, but it did not return, and she couldn’t understand why. Oliver was still dead, Jimmy had still committed murder, but for the first time in over two years she could see that none of it was her fault. Patrick Duffy had manipulated and caused all the events which had brought her family such misery, and the eventual showdown had been inevitable from the day she had defied him and her da and taken Gertie to Newcastle.

And as to her husband, dear Oliver,
she had not betrayed him
. She hadn’t been able to stop loving Barney, but she had worked at her marriage 100 per cent. She would always regret Oliver’s death, and she was so glad they had been happier than perhaps they’d ever been together in those last twenty-four hours, but she had to look to the future now.

She agonised for weeks as to how she was going to put all her newfound wisdom to Barney, but in the event she needn’t have bothered. He came to the door with Vera and Horace but would not even stay for any refreshments, and Vera informed her that Barney’s young lady was waiting in the carriage. Harriet had never seen the sights of London before and so they had all thought it would be nice for her to accompany them.

Harriet lasted until the summer; after that a Frances was on the scene briefly, followed by Esther who hung on for almost twelve months. Josie lost track of Barney’s lady friends after that, although every time she saw Vera or her friend wrote to her, Vera always included the line,
Barney wishes to be remembered to you.