100 Tiny Threads Read online

  ‘It does look delicious,’ Winifred said. She wavered before asking, ‘Are you also in in the Suffragettes, Mrs…’ She stopped, realising she didn’t know the surname.

  ‘Goodness me, no; my husband’s congregation would be horrified.’ She gave a low chuckle. ‘Now don’t forget, pop in to see your father before Winifred leaves.’ Dorothy’s mother closed the door behind her.

  As though they not been interrupted, Mildred continued. ‘The Government has passed more and more laws to stop us.’ She took off her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her nose. ‘Women’s suffrage is inevitable. One day men will understand that. We are determined; nothing on earth or in heaven will make us give up the fight.’

  ‘What we’re asking, Winifred,’ Anna said, ‘Is that you join us in our cause? We’ve discussed this between us and we’re hoping you’ll be our spokesperson. When we go to the next meeting in Morrisfield, we’d like to put you forward as the speaker to represent our group.’

  An hour later, Winifred was already regretting giving in to the girls’ persuasion. Meeting Dorothy’s gently benign father, up to his elbows in flour making bread in the vicarage kitchen, and being given what seemed to her to be almost a small sermon on emancipation had reinforced her doubts. But she’d promised to read the papers that Mildred had given her and to prepare ideas for a speech and there was no backing out. The thought terrified her. ‘Sure it will only be a small meeting, ya know that,’ Honora said, linking arms with Winifred as they stepped off the door step. ‘Ya’ll be fine.’

  Winifred was glad to be in the fresh air. But, when turning off the drive, she saw Conal waiting for them further along the road she pulled away from Honora.

  ‘You told him where we’d be?’ she hissed.

  ‘But I didn’t know he’d be here, I promise ya.’

  There was nothing for it but to be polite as he fell in step with them on the other side of Honora.

  ‘Miss Duffy.’ Conal touched the neb of his cap.

  Winifred dipped her head in acknowledgement and murmured a greeting.

  On the way to the tram stop, on the tram itself, Conal kept up a general chat. As far as she could make out he spoke on nothing in particular; only catching the odd word as, first the traffic passing on the road and then the hum and rattle of the tram, muffled what he was saying.

  It seemed to her that he was only actually speaking to Honora. And when they at last alighted from the tram in Lydcroft, and he merely doffed his cap again and walked away, she didn’t know whether she was glad of or offended by his lack of attention.

  Chapter 9

  April 1911

  Bill Howarth stopped at the end of the gravel drive, rested his hand against the tall stone pillar, and looked back at the large square building where he had spent the last four months. Towards the end he’d felt as trapped in the hospital as he had that day in the mine after the explosion.

  At one of the upper windows two figures watched him. The taller one, Arnold Blakely, lifted his arm in a gesture of farewell. What he was going to do now with only the one arm was a bloody mystery; he’d be no good down the mine. The other slighter figure, stiff in her white apron, her cap flowing across her shoulders, stood motionless besides the man. Bill couldn’t see their faces but he waved back; a jaunty gesture, before moving out of sight to lean against the wall that surrounded the cottage hospital.

  His legs shook; they felt too weak to hold him up and he didn’t trust himself to walk far. Not yet anyway. He closed his eyes against hot tears and cursed himself for being soft. Looking around he was relieved to see there was no-one on the road and allowed himself to take a moment longer to stop the shuddering deep inside his chest.

  He didn’t know where he would go. From the day he’d arrived at the cottage hospital neither his stepmother nor his stepsister had been to see him. He’d be buggered if he was going to beg them for bed and board now.

  It would have been different if it had been his real mam; she would have cared what happened to him, she would have insisted he went home with her. He was sure of that. He only vaguely remembered her; just an elusive smell of lily of the valley and the softness of long dark hair on his face when she kissed him goodnight. Her hushed voice lingered at the back of his memory. But he remembered feeling loved by his mam and how he’d adored her. She’d gone years ago, giving birth to a brother who was hadn’t lasted a week before he’d died as well.

  Bill hated his father as much as he loved his mam. He remembered the first time he’d retaliated after his father hit him. He was six years old. Wilfred had lifted him by the front of his jumper and slammed him into the scullery wall.

  ‘You’ll not raise yer ’and to me ever again, yer young bugger.’

  Jessie, Bill’s mother, jumped on her husband’s back. ‘Bastard!’ She hung around his neck, pulling at him as he gave one last kick to the small inert figure on the floor. Falling to the side of her son she covered his body with her own.

  Without looking at them Wilfred grabbed his jacket and cap from the hook behind the back door and, flinging it back, pushed his way through the small crowd of neighbours who had gathered at the gate of the back yard.

  ‘Get out the way, go on, bugger off.’

  The silent crowd let him through. Then the shawled women jostled into Jessie’s kitchen.

  ‘Come on, hen.’

  ‘There, there.’

  ‘Rotten sod.’

  ‘Put the kettle on.’

  Bill heard them all as they helped the weeping woman to her feet and carried him to the old Chesterfield in the corner of the kitchen. One of the neighbours wrung out the grey dishcloth in the sink and wiped his face.

  He knocked it away. ‘Hey-up, missus, that stinks.’

  The women laughed, the tension lifted and, eventually, they scattered to their own homes, the excitement over for today. Jessie and Bill gazed across the room at each other.

  ‘Don’t try that again, son.’

  ‘One day, Mam, one day.’ Bill gingerly touched the growing bump on the back of his head and scowled.

  The day Jessie died Bill’s father disappeared for two weeks, leaving Bill dependent on the good will of the neighbours for his existence. Wilfred returned, stinking of drink and defiance.

  It had taken exactly a month before his father had moved Marion into their home, the woman who became Bill’s stepmother. He had wanted to like her, for her to love him but he was on a loser from the start. She was a woman completely opposite to his mum, a coarse bitch who resented him from the off and didn’t miss a chance to get him into trouble with his father.

  The memory of lying injured after the accident in the mine, thinking he should have told them he loved them, made him cringe with embarrassment. He didn’t even fuckin’ like either of them, never had. So he wasn’t bloody sorry his stepmother and sister had kept away.

  A few of his work mates had called once or twice but the people who’d looked in on him every week were the bosses. And they only came to let him know he was there by their goodwill; that it was them that’d funded the hospital with their own money. At first he was in too much pain to argue but in the last month he’d made it known to them that he’d paid his dues with his weekly subscription towards his sick pay, taken from his wages. Once he’d started on that tack, he known his time there was limited.

  So here he was, almost a fuckin’ cripple and out on his ear.

  He didn’t remember arriving at Rowlands House on the back of the horse and cart but some of the other patients, the ones lucky enough to have a bed by the windows, told him they could hear his screams above the sounds of the horse’s hoofs and the general clatter from inside the ward way before they saw him coming along the road. They hadn’t thought he’d make it. Neither did he; every rut in the lane from the pit, every jolt as the horse stopped or turned corners onto yet another road along the two mile journey to the mine owner’s hospital, tortured him. He’d thought he was going mad with the pain.

  The lad lying
next to him, making just as much row, they said, didn’t last a week what with almost every bone in his body broken.

  Crushed under the fall of rock, Bill’s pelvis and right leg had been broken. Remembering the weight on him that day, he knew he was lucky it hadn’t been his back. And he knew he owed the fact that he could walk to the doctors who’d operated on him. But lying flat on his back all those months had been painful and boring. Now he was upright there was no way he’d be going back down that bloody mine. He wasn’t daft; he knew the doctors were as controlled by the owners as much as he was. Practicing walking along the narrow corridor one day, he’d heard old Rowlands in the doctors’ office accusing one of them that they were keeping him in too long; that he was malingering. They wanted him back working on the seams; they owned him.

  Well Bill Howarth was owned by no bugger. And now he needed to get away.

  Swinging himself off the wall and with one last glance at the slate roof of the three-storey red-bricked building he limped away, his clogs scraping, uneven on the flagstones. He’d be long gone before management showed their faces. Let some other poor sod do their dirty work.

  Chapter 10

  April

  Winifred turned off Wellyhole Terrace into the entrance that led into the courtyard of the three storey back-to-back houses where her grandmother lived. It was bedlam; children playing a noisy game of tag, a baby crying, a couple at the far end of the yard quarrelling, dogs scampering around and barking.

  Two women were washing clothes in old dolly tubs, the muscles in their arms straining as they pounded at the bundles beneath the water. They didn’t look up as Winifred passed them. She dodged pools of scummy soapsuds and green-slimed flags, holding her breath when she passed the dustbins outside the communal lavatories.

  She pushed at the door of number four. ‘Granny?’ The smell of the outside lavvies followed her into the scullery and she quickly closed the door and looked around. As usual the sink and the narrow worktops looked spotless but the small room smelt damp and a cockroach scuttled into the far corner. There was a large lidded saucepan on the trivet over grey ashes in the grate. She recognised it as the pan of soup she’d made and given to her dad to bring there the day before. ‘Granny?’

  ‘Up here, ducks.’

  Winifred trod carefully up the wooden stairs avoiding the silverfish which lined the corners of the treads. Her mouth turned down in disgust; this was no place to live.

  The room was dim even though it was bright sunshine outside. Florence Duffy was sitting in her chair by the small window, holding back the net curtain, a large grey shawl around her shoulders.

  ‘Hello, Granny.’ She dropped a kiss on top of her grandmother’s head. As usual her white hair smelt of lavender and carbolic soap. How she kept so clean in this place Winifred could never fathom.

  ‘Mrs Fisher never stops washing for those ten kiddies of hers,’ Florence said. ‘She keeps ’em as clean as she can and feeds ’em on a pittance. He drinks every night, I tell you. D’you know that’s the second black eye she’s had this month.’

  ‘It’s a disgrace.’ Winifred peeped out of the window. ‘Why does she have so many children, Granny?’

  ‘It’s what happens when you marry, ducks. You’ll find out one day. Men will have their way.’

  Winifred shuddered.

  ‘But if you love your husband, Winnie, it’ll be your way as well.’ Her grandmother’s eyes were anxious; it was as though she thought she’d said too much. ‘It’s nothing to be frightened of.’ She closed her lips together firmly before saying, ‘Though such as Mrs Fisher doesn’t have a lot of say in such things, I reckon.’

  They watched the woman in the courtyard struggling to raise dripping washing on a line with a clothes prop, apparently trying to catch the last of the sun before it disappeared behind the roofs of the tall houses around her.

  ‘Nip down and help her will you, ducks.’

  At that moment a sturdy looking boy came from one of the doorways and gave the prop an extra shove. In seconds the line of clothes was a v-shape above the two figures.

  ‘Think they’ve sorted it,’ Winifred said. ‘You all right, Granny?’

  ‘I’m fine, Winnie.’ The old woman let the corner of the curtain drop and lifted her hand to pat Winifred’s cheek. ‘Yourself?’ The lines around her faded blue eyes deepened as she smiled up at her granddaughter.

  ‘Same as usual.’ Winifred held Florence’s thin fingers closer to her face for a moment before straightening up. ‘Your fire’s out downstairs.’

  ‘I thought it would be. My knees are playing up a bit today and I haven’t been down yet.’ She crossed her shawl across her chest and let her folded arms rest on her lap. ‘But it’s warm so I didn’t bother.’

  ‘But you’ve not eaten?’ Winifred checked the clock on the old-fashioned oak sideboard. ‘It’s nearly three o’clock. Are you telling me you haven’t had a drink all day either?’

  ‘Nay, don’t fret, the Misses Johnston next door brought me a brew this morning. And when you get to my age food doesn’t have the same interest. But I did have some of that soup last night; they warmed it up for me in their place.’

  And helped themselves to some of it as well, I bet, Winifred thought.

  Florence smoothed the black bombazine skirt over her thin knees and leaned back in the chair. ‘Don’t fret,’ she said again, as though she could read Winifred’s mind. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You should have got a message to us, I’d have come earlier,’ Winifred chided. But she knew her gran was too proud; she would never ask for help, she wouldn’t give Ethel the satisfaction of refusing. ‘You know Dad or me would always come.’

  ‘Aye, well…’

  ‘Right then, I’ll get that fire going and make a pot of tea. I shan’t be long.’

  It took a little time to persuade the flames to catch hold of the few pieces of wood she found in the bucket. Placing small chunks of coal on top she blew on the fire for a few moments before squatting back on her heels, waiting until she was confident it wouldn’t go out. Then filling the kettle with water she rested it on the trivet.

  On a more careful study of the kitchen she saw the grit on the flag floor that had been trodden from outside and that black mould had formed on the hem of the net curtain where it rested on the windowsill. Despite the closed door the smell of the courtyard still pervaded the room.

  And there was something else. Winifred wrinkled her nose, looking around before going to the sink and lifting off the muslin cloth that covered the jug of milk standing in water. There were lumps of sour curdled cream on the surface. Holding her breath, Winifred poured it down the sink and, turning on the tap, flushed it away.

  Her gran shouldn’t have to live in this hovel, not when there was a perfectly good spare room at their place. There was no reason why she couldn’t live with them. Except for her mother, of course; the two women hated one another. Winifred didn’t think either one had ever stepped foot in the other’s home.

  When she’d brewed the tea she replaced the kettle with the saucepan of soup and took the two cups upstairs. Her Granny was dozing despite the rowdiness coming from the back-adjoining wall of the house. Winifred was tempted to knock on it to quieten the family that had recently moved in there but thought better of it; she didn’t want to cause trouble for her grandmother.

  She knelt by the chair. ‘Tea, Granny. It’ll have to be black, the milk’s off. I should have brought some with me, sorry. Drink it while it’s warm. And the soup won’t be long.’ She waited until Florence had a grip on the handle. The cup trembled as she lifted it to her lips. ‘Ah, that’s good,’ she said after swallowing. She motioned towards the wall with her head. ‘New neighbours moved into the front house.’

  ‘So I hear. Are they always this bad?’

  ‘Not always. Five children, though, I believe. Eldest three must have just come home from school. It’s all right, I don’t mind. Bit of company to hear them, really, ducks.’

/>   Winifred frowned. ‘As long as you’re sure.’ She had to raise her voice above the din.

  Florence lifted her head and sniffed. ‘Is the soup burning?’

  ‘Oh heck!’ Winifred put her cup down and ran. The soup was bubbling. She sniffed it and poked at the bottom of the saucepan with the ladle. ‘No, it’s okay,’ she called. She carried the bowl up on a tin tray and put it on her grandmother’s lap. ‘Here’s a spoon and there’s more soup if you want some afterwards.’

  ‘Thank you, Winnie.’

  Winifred stood and went to get one of the wooden chairs. She put it next to Florence’s. She was nervous; she’d made up her mind to ask her grandmother’s opinion about her agreeing to go to the next protest meeting with Honora. Would she react in the same as her mother had to hearing about the Suffragettes? She loved her grandmother and it was important that she at least approved of what she was about to do.

  ‘May I ask you something, Granny?’ She’d raised her voice before realizing it had gone quiet next door. There was a babble of faint shouts from the courtyard; the children must have been shooed out to play. ‘Something important,’ she said, quietly.

  ‘Of course.’ Florence Duffy studied Winifred, the spoon halfway to her lips. ‘What is it?’ She pushed out her lips and blew on the soup. ‘Trouble at home?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that. It’s something I think – I might – have got myself into.’ She swallowed, nervous. ‘It’s something I want to talk to you about but I’m not sure what you’ll think.’

  ‘Listen, Winnie, you can’t shock me. I’m too old to be shocked by anything.’

  ‘Okay.’ Winifred laced her fingers in front of her, loosening them when she looked down and saw the whiteness of her knuckles. ‘Right.’ She paused slightly, before saying, ‘What do you know about the Suffragettes, Granny? About women trying to get the vote?’

  From the look of surprise, the faint smile on Florence’s lips, she could tell her Gran was relieved and pleased. Clearly the question wasn’t what she’d expected. Winifred wondered what her grandmother thought she was going to say.