Above the Harvest Moon (10 page)
‘To the last man. They know that all working men’s jobs, their wages and conditions, are under threat. What happens to us miners today will be what happens nationwide if they don’t stop the rot.’
She wished she could believe it. There had nearly been murder done in this kitchen a week ago when Jake had been listening to Wilbur and Adam rant on that the government would be broken by working men’s solidarity. He had proferred the opinion that they’d be sold out within a matter of weeks if not days if a general strike came about, and it was only Wilbur and Joe restraining Adam and she hanging on to Jake like a limpet that had prevented the half-brothers coming to blows. And the thing was, she was with Jake on this.The Alliance had sold them out in 1921, they’d do the same now. But she couldn’t say that to her husband and sons.
Quietly, she said, ‘I’ll make a pot of tea.’
‘Not for me, Mam. I’m just going to let Hannah know what’s happening.’
Adam was out the back door in the next moment and she watched from the window as he strode out of the backyard. His step was jaunty, his head held high, and he looked elated. All three of them did. And she understood why. Years of short time, pay cuts, being treated as less than muck under the mine owners’ feet had caused a resentment that was bitter and deep rooted. Now they could actually do something, fight back. Of course they wanted the strike.
Please God, please let it turn out right. Don’t let them be broken. Let the country back them. Jake was sure the rest of the country’s workers wouldn’t put their necks on the line for the miners. Let him be wrong
.
Please God, please let it turn out right. Don’t let them be broken. Let the country back them. Jake was sure the rest of the country’s workers wouldn’t put their necks on the line for the miners. Let him be wrong
.
‘Him and Hannah are courting strong.’ Joe sat down at the kitchen table as he spoke. ‘I haven’t seen him so keen on a lass before.’
Rose nodded but again she kept her opinion to herself. She loved all her children but she wasn’t blind to their weaknesses, and lassies were Adam’s. From when he could toddle they’d been after him and he loved every minute of their attention. But perhaps it would be different with Hannah. Maybe he wouldn’t mess her around like he had the others. She hoped not. She loved that little lass like one of her own.
Joe drank his tea down and then looked at his father. ‘The lads are having a meeting at the Tavern. You coming?’
‘Mebbe later. You go.’
When Joe had left they had the house to themselves, the other children being at school, and Wilbur said, ‘I’m not sorry it’s come, Rose. Can’t you at least pretend to be for it? The other wives are backing their men to the hilt.’
‘That’s not fair, Wilbur.’
‘The hell it’s not.You’d have me working for nowt, that’s what you’d do. According to the coal owners and their friends in Parliament we’re the “New Red Threat” and “worse than the Hun”.You’ve read the papers, you know what they’re saying about us. And why? Because honest working men want a wage that’ll support a wife an’ bairns.’
‘I know, Wilbur, I know.’ He was working himself up into a state and she didn’t want that. She hadn’t seen him lose his temper until they had been married six months or more, but although it happened infrequently she had learned to fear it. She had also learned how to deflect it most times, a knack she’d never managed with Silas. Not that you could compare her first husband with Wilbur. Her voice placating, she said, ‘I’ve just made some teacakes.You want a couple with your tea? And I’ve got a nice bit of brisket for dinner.’ She didn’t add the latter had been courtesy of his stepson.
‘Aye, I’ll have a bite.’ He settled back in his chair, satisfied his point had been made.
As Rose glanced at him she experienced an echo of the old tenderness that had persuaded her to marry him. He could be childlike at times. When she had first met him he had been struggling to cope with two young children on his own, and he had needed her. He still needed her. And he was a good father, as far as his own bairns were concerned anyway; Wilbur and Jake had never hit it off. That had grieved her more than a little. In the early days of their marriage she hadn’t known how to handle Wilbur, and the fact that Jake had seen him raise his hand to her once or twice had forever set her son against his stepfather. They’d never spoken of it, she and Jake, but she knew. And it was a shame.Wilbur had his faults but there were worse than him as she knew only too well.
Her thoughts made her voice soft when, setting the plate with the teacakes in front of him, she said, ‘The bairns are at school all day now, I could take washing in for a while. Just till you and the lads are back at work,’ she added hastily as her husband’s face darkened.
‘Don’t start.’Wilbur glared at her.‘I’ve told you before, no wife of mine works.’
Rose didn’t point out that with three grown men, Naomi and four little ones to cook and clean and wash for, she was on her feet from dawn to dusk and what was that if it wasn’t work?
‘I can just hear that son of yours if you did something like that. Crow about it all the way to Newcastle, he would, me not being able to support me own family. Well, I can support you, all right?’
Rose bit her lip. It was always there below the surface, this antipathy towards Jake. And it wasn’t fair. Jake was so good to them. Quietly, she said, ‘He knows you can and he wouldn’t take it like that—’
The crash of the plate as it smashed against the wall of the kitchen, spraying fragments of teacake in a wide arc, caused Rose to jump violently. Her hand to her mouth, she shrank against the table as Wilbur stood to his feet, glowering at her. ‘You’re not taking in washing or owt else. Get that through your head once an’ for all. The day that happens’ll be the day after they put me six foot under an’ I can’t do owt about it. Until then I’m master in this house. Me. Not him, all right?’
He glared at her before grabbing his cap and stuffing it on his head. Rose said nothing as he left the house by way of the back door, but once he had gone she drew in a deep shuddering breath. He was all of a two-an’-eight and no wonder, what with the lockout and what it might mean. He wasn’t daft, Wilbur. He knew the coal owners and the government would fight dirty. Whenever a group of workers protested about poor living standards or dangerous working conditions, the same old labels were bandied about in the papers. ‘Organised menace.’ ‘Wicked and treacherous.’ She plumped down on a hard-backed chair, reaching for her own cup of tea with a shaking hand. ‘Where will it all end?’ she murmured to herself. ‘And when?’
Adam was saying much the same thing to Hannah in the kitchen at the back of the shop but in contrast to his mother his voice was bright and animated. ‘I don’t know how it’ll work out, lass, but I do know we’ll be a sight better off at the end of it than we are now. All the lads know that the government, especially Churchill and his gang, together with the coal owners and the owners of every other industry in the land, want to destroy the unions once and for all. But there’s more of us than there are of them, that’s what they’re forgetting, and if we all stick together we can come out of this smelling like roses.’ He grinned. ‘Would you like that? Me smelling of roses?’
She didn’t care how he smelt and her eyes told him so. He kissed her, long and hard, and then held her close as he said, ‘I’ll come round later once you’ve had your tea. Do you think your mam will do the last hour or two so we can go for a walk before it’s dark?’
‘I’ll ask.’ This latest from her mother, offering to work in the shop in the evenings so she could see Adam, was only one of the surprises of the last weeks. She had thought there would be ructions when Adam had come to the house on the afternoon of her sixteenth birthday and made his intentions plain. Instead her mam had been all sweetness and light, immediately agreeing they could start courting. It hadn’t improved her mam’s attitude to her the rest of the time, in fact she was more snappy and prickly than she had ever been, but where Adam was concerned, everything was hunky-dory.
‘I’ll come just after six.’ He kissed her again, his hands wandering up under the swell of her breasts before Hannah caught them and brought his fingers back to her waist. He accepted the silent reproof without comment, he always did but she knew he would try it on again. After a moment he raised his head, saying, ‘I’d better get going. There’s a meeting at the Tavern.’
She walked through into the shop with him and saw him out. Her uncle was tied up with a customer and didn’t look their way, and she returned to the job she had been doing before Adam’s arrival - stacking tins on the shelves. Once the customer had left, her uncle began to clean the counter with a damp muslin cloth, working it round and round the wood for what seemed to Hannah an inordinately long time.
‘I don’t want him coming in here at all times of the day and night. This is a working environment. Does he understand that?’
‘What?’ She turned and looked at her uncle. He was red in the face and obviously in a tear about something. ‘Adam came to say the miners are out,’ she said quickly by way of explanation. People had talked of little else but the impending showdown for the last week.
‘Be that as it may, I don’t want him in here unless he’s buying.’
Her face changing, Hannah straightened. ‘I see.’
‘And don’t take that tack with me. You wouldn’t expect to be able to go and see him at the pit, would you? Or visit the shipyard or the glassworks for a nice little chat? Just because this is a shop it doesn’t mean every Tom, Dick or Harry can waste your time.’
He was angry, furiously angry, and she didn’t understand why. People called in all the time for a gossip, it was part of the going-on, and they didn’t always buy something. Her temper rising, Hannah said, ‘Mr Routledge was in here half an hour yesterday talking about the match on Saturday and he didn’t buy anything.’
‘Mr Routledge is a friend of mine.’
‘And Adam’s my friend.’
‘This is my shop, are you forgetting that? And you and your mother live under my roof.’
‘No, I’m not forgetting that.’ She faced him squarely, her eyes flashing. ‘Neither am I forgetting that you get your money’s worth out of the pair of us.’ She wasn’t sure this applied where her mother was concerned but it suited her to ignore that for the moment. ‘Mam takes care of Aunty so you don’t have to have a housekeeper or a nurse, and I work for nothing, remember? I could leave here tomorrow and get a job in a factory or somewhere and you’d have to pay out for an assistant or even two. And you know it.’
‘You ungrateful little scut.Where do you think you’d be now if I hadn’t took you and your mother in? Eh? You answer me that. I’ve looked after the pair of you for years.’
She stared at him, at his greasy face and big fat wobbly belly and it came to her that any affection she’d once had for her uncle had died, the death knell having rung on New Year’s Eve. Quietly now, she said, ‘Anything you’ve done, you’ve done because it suits you. And I am grateful that you took us in, whatever you might think, but it doesn’t mean I’m beholden to you for life.’
She expected more angry words and it took her aback when he just stared at her and seemed to deflate. Suddenly he seemed to lose inches. ‘I don’t want to argue with you, lass,’ he said, his voice low. ‘I’ve never wanted that.You know how much I - me an’ your aunt - think of you. But that Adam is not the one for you. He’s too much of a lad where the lassies are concerned. I know the type.’
For a moment she was sorely tempted to throw her knowledge about him and her mother in his face. Only the thought that it would make living at home impossible and that her aunty might get to know about the affair stopped her. She was almost sure it was over; certainly there was a coolness between her mother and uncle these days, and she didn’t want to be the one to cause her aunt unnecessary pain. But for her uncle to criticise Adam after how
he’d
behaved. Stiffly, she said, ‘I like Adam Wood and he likes me.’
he’d
behaved. Stiffly, she said, ‘I like Adam Wood and he likes me.’
The look she hated came over her uncle’s face and his voice held the soft thickness that went hand in hand with it when he said, ‘You’re a bonny lass, you could have anyone.You don’t want to throw yourself away on a miner, now then. And not one like him who’s had umpteen lassies that I know of—’
‘Stop it.’ She actually stamped her foot. ‘I won’t listen to this. I’m seeing Adam and that’s that. And I trust him, I trust him absolutely. He would never do anything to hurt me.’
‘And you think you could stomach being a miner’s wife? If it came to that? Scrimping and scraping and never having a penny to your name? One bairn after another until you’re an old woman at gone thirty?’
He was angry again but she preferred that to the squirmy creepiness that always made goose pimples prickle her skin. ‘If necessary.’ She was ramrod straight. ‘But it won’t be like that. After the unions win, the miners will get a decent wage and everything will change. Adam says so.’
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