Читать книгу: «No Man’s Land», страница 3
‘You will be. I promise. But for now you’ve got to stay here and trust me. Can you do that, Adam?’ Daniel asked. He leant down, putting his hands on his son’s shoulders, trying to look him in the eye. But Adam kept his gaze on the floor: he hated his father just as much as he loved him at that moment. Finally, reluctantly, he nodded his head.
‘Good lad,’ said Daniel, straightening up. ‘I knew I could count on you.’ He reached out his hand and pulled the bell cord.
‘Listen, Adam, I’ve got to go now,’ said Daniel quickly. ‘The Guardians, the people who run this place, might cause problems if they see me here, but if you’re on your own they’ve got to look after you; so – goodbye. I’ll be back, I promise.’ He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and suddenly pulled him close in a tight embrace. And then, picking up his bag, he walked quickly away.
And for Adam there was no time to think. A wooden grating in the door was shot back and a pair of dark eyes looked out at him for a moment from above a thick moustache.
‘New?’ asked the voice of the otherwise invisible man.
Adam nodded, and there was a sound of bolts being drawn back and a key being turned in the lock. Adam wanted to run away. He felt that once inside, behind this thick iron door, he would never get out again. He hesitated, looking wildly up and down the street, and gave up. He had nowhere to go, no money in his pockets, and he had given his word that he would stay. If he left now his father might never find him when he came back. If he came back.
The porter was dressed in a blue serge suit with gold braids on the sleeves and collar. He looked pleased with himself; pleased with his uniform and with his elaborate military moustache curled up into tiny black spikes at the corners of his mouth. He towered over Adam, looking him up and down as if he was conducting a preliminary assessment, which perhaps he was.
‘All right then,’ he said eventually. ‘Follow me.’ And he set off at a brisk pace down a series of wide corridors with spotless linoleum floors and plain whitewashed walls. There was not a speck of dust anywhere. And all the doors they passed were shut; the porter’s thick bunch of keys jangled against his trousers as he walked and Adam imagined that he had individual keys for every one.
In the receiving ward Adam was told to take off his clothes by a male attendant who went through all the pockets, searching for contraband, before packaging them up in brown paper. And then he had to endure a bath in cold water and a badly executed haircut before he was allowed to get dressed again, this time in the workhouse uniform: a striped cotton shirt, ill-fitting trousers and a jacket made of some coarse fabric with ‘Islington Workhouse’ stitched above the breast pocket.
He felt tired suddenly and wanted desperately to sit down, but the attendant pushed him forward down yet another corridor and into a small windowless office where a grey-haired man with half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose was sitting behind a large kneehole desk from which he never seemed to look up. He asked Adam questions about his history and recorded the answers in a huge ledger, pausing frequently to dip his pen in the inkwell, and then listened without interruption to Adam’s account of how he had ended up at the workhouse door before writing the single word, ‘Abandonment’ in the ‘Reason for admission’ column.
‘What’ll happen to me?’ asked Adam. There was fear in his voice: each stage of the admission process had seemed to strip another layer of his identity away until he felt that there was almost nothing left.
‘Perhaps they’ll send you back to school, although you’re almost too old for that. The Guardians will decide,’ he told Adam.
‘When?’
‘At their next meeting,’ the grey-haired man laconically replied, and turned his attention to the next admission, an old man with his belongings tied up in a dirty red handkerchief, distraught because he’d just been separated from his wife of forty years. His protests fell on deaf ears. The Poor Law required separation of the sexes and in the workhouse the law was absolute.
It was a terrible place: everything was regulated – from the exact weight of stones required to be broken in the yard each day to the precise allowances of food for each inmate (Adam received six ounces of bread at supper, although he would have been entitled to eight if he had been a year older). The refectory vividly reminded Adam of the penny sit-up that his father had taken him to in what felt like another lifetime. The inmates sat in rows facing forward, eating their allotted portions in silence before the bell called them back to work.
Because of his age Adam was excused from stone-breaking and was instead put to work picking apart tarred ropes to make oakum that the shipyards used for caulking boats. After unravelling the rope into corkscrew strands, the inmates had to roll them on their knees until the mesh became loose and the fibres could be broken up into hemp. Soon Adam’s fingers became red and raw, so they looked like his father’s hands had sometimes used to look when he came back from work after using soda water to strip old paper from the walls of houses that his crew was refurbishing.
Throughout the day two old sallow-faced officials dressed in identical threadbare black suits walked up and down the aisles between the benches, watchful for any slacking. The inmates picked in silence and the overseers’ monotonous pacing of the hard boards was the only noise in the big windowless workroom in which all the light came from above through circular skylights set in the flat roof. And at the end of the day each worker’s oakum was weighed at a desk by the door; failure to pick the required quota was punished by a reduction in the malefactor’s food allowance. In this, as in all its rules and regulations, the workhouse was mindful of its legal duty to ‘provide relief that was inferior to the standard of living that a labourer could obtain without assistance’. The Guardians wanted to be quite sure that nobody in their right mind would choose this life if he could possibly avoid it.
At night the inmates slept side by side on flock-filled sacks in narrow unheated dormitories. There were men of all ages and boys all mixed together. Some screamed out in their sleep: unintelligible cries which kept Adam awake into the small hours. Lying on his back in the dark, he thought of his mother and then tried not to because it hurt to remember her when she was dead. But blocking her out of his mind made him feel guilty – it felt as though he was killing her a second time. He remembered what the children in his street said about the dead: touching them stopped you dreaming of them. That’s why the old midwife who lived above the Cricketers was paid to lay out the corpse; that’s why bereaved families stopped the clocks and kept candlelit vigils around the body while the neighbours came by and paid their respects. But Adam’s father had refused to do any of this. He’d refused to employ the midwife; he’d shut the door on his neighbours. And as a result Adam had never seen his mother dead; he’d never had the chance to say goodbye.
Adam blamed his father for his mother’s death and for abandoning him in the workhouse. He was angry with his father, angrier than he had ever been with anyone in his whole life, and yet he longed for his father to return and take him away as he’d promised. But he heard nothing. It was as if he had been forgotten, walled up and left to rot like the Frenchman in the iron mask in the story that his mother had read to him the year before from a book that she’d bought second-hand from the barrow man.
In the workhouse only the birds were free, able to escape. Adam looked up through the skylights in the workroom and saw them circling overhead and remembered an autumn evening years and years before when his mother had come and woken him. He was sleepy and she had carried him down the stairs and out of the door and pointed up into the misty sky where he could make out the shapes of hundreds of low-flying swallows, calling to one another as they flew over.
‘Where are they going?’ he’d asked.
‘To Africa where it’s warm. They’ll be back in the spring. Aren’t they wonderful, Adam?’ she’d said – and he thought for a moment that he could hear her voice in his head like a distant echo. The vividness of the unexpected memory jolted him – it seemed significant, as if his mother was communicating with him in some invisible way. Suddenly the hope that had been draining out of him ever since her death returned. And when Daniel arrived at the workhouse the next day with two third-class railway tickets in his hand, it was almost as if Adam was expecting him.
The destination was somewhere Adam had never heard of – a place called Scarsdale.
‘Where is it?’ he asked as they came out through the workhouse door into the early-morning sunshine.
‘In the north,’ said Daniel.
Adam saw his father was smiling, as though he didn’t have a care in the world, and it made him angry. ‘How far in the north?’ he asked.
‘A long way.’
‘Well, I hope it’s as far away as Australia,’ said Adam fiercely. ‘Because I never want to see this place again and I never want to remember that you put me here.’
‘I had no choice,’ said Daniel, biting his lip.
‘There’s always a choice,’ said Adam.
Daniel didn’t answer. He’d seen inside the workhouse and he felt ashamed of having left his son in such a place, and he also sensed obscurely that he didn’t have the same authority over him that he’d had before. The last weeks had changed Adam: he was no longer a boy even if he was not yet a man. Daniel had mixed feelings about the transformation: he mourned the past but he was also glad, knowing that Adam would need all the inner strength and independence he could muster to survive in the place where they were going.
They reached the end of the street and turned the corner and Adam didn’t once look back.
Chapter Three
The train left in the evening and Adam and his father waited on the platform under the huge vaulted roof of the station as the day turned to dusk and everything around them dissolved into a blue and grey mist of vapour and smoke, pierced here and there by the pallid glow of the tall arc lights. Across from where they were sitting, they could see the rich coming and going through the door of the first-class restaurant: tall men in frock coats with hats and gloves escorting ladies in narrow-waisted hobble skirts who minced slowly along, their heads almost invisible under elaborate feathered hats. They reminded Adam of the flamingoes that he had seen at the zoo years before, inhabitants of an unknowable world operating on principles entirely outside his understanding.
As the departure time approached the platform filled up and Adam felt his heart beating hard. He knew Euston from days spent in the shadow of the great arch, earning coppers loading and unloading luggage for cabbies at the roadside, but he had never been on a train. He had never been outside London.
He heard the locomotive before he saw it – the scream of its whistle, the screech of engaging brakes, the hiss of steam; and then emerging out of the great pall of smoke came the black-and-red engine, a breathing, snorting mammoth of incredible power. And suddenly there was a frenzy of activity: carriage doors opening and disgorging passengers all the way down the line; porters and guards shouting, holding back the pressing crowd.
‘Come on,’ said Daniel, picking up his bag, and Adam almost lost his father in a sea of shabby jackets and cloth caps but caught sight of him at the last moment waving from the running board. He pushed forward and felt his father’s hand on his, pulling him up into the train.
Inside the compartment they found seats, perched on the ends of two wooden benches, facing each other in the flickering gaslight. Doors slammed and the shouts of the people outside were stilled by the guard’s whistle as the train spluttered back into life and began to pull away from the platform, picking up speed as it headed north, running smoothly along steel viaducts built high above the poor streets where Adam had grown up.
He closed his eyes and thought again of his mother: the leaving of London felt like a betrayal, as if he was leaving her behind too, somewhere back there in the smoky darkness, deliberately severing his last connection with her forever. He knew he was being irrational – that she was gone already – but that didn’t help with the raw tearing emptiness he felt inside whenever he forgot she was dead and then suddenly remembered. He hated that he couldn’t think of her without pain. It made him angry, and he realized that he was angry with her too – because she was supposed to explain these things to him and now she couldn’t.
He shook his head hard as if to expel his thoughts and opened his eyes. His father was looking at him intently, as if he was trying to read his mind.
‘I’m sorry, Adam. I know this is hard.’ Daniel spoke slowly, leaning forward towards his son. ‘It’s hard for me too. But we’ve got no choice. London will chew us up and spit us out if we stay; it’s a cruel town and it’s hurt us enough already.’
Adam nodded, not knowing how to respond. They’d hardly talked all day – the death of Adam’s mother and the weeks in the workhouse had set Adam against his father, and he had repeatedly rebuffed Daniel’s attempts at conversation. But, in spite of himself, he had begun to sense a change in his father. Daniel seemed more thoughtful, less driven. Adam had seen how he had said nothing when they had sat watching the rich men and women coming and going at the station dressed in all their finery. In the past he wouldn’t have been able to resist a political commentary accompanied by plentiful statistics about the unfair distribution of wealth in society, but today he had seemed hardly to notice. Adam wondered what the change meant for the future.
‘What’s this place where we’re going?’ he asked, looking out into the night. Surrounded by strangers in the spartan compartment, rushing forward on the express train towards a new unknown world, he felt apprehensive and hoped for reassurance.
‘Scarsdale? It’s a small coal-mining town not far from the sea. The north is full of places just like it. Everyone works at the mine, on the surface or down below. And it’s hard work, harder than you can imagine, which makes the people hard—’ Daniel stopped in mid-sentence, smiling at his inarticulacy. ‘But not mean, not cruel – miners stick together; by and large they’re good people.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve worked with them. Not in Scarsdale but further south – in Nottinghamshire where I grew up.’
‘You were a miner?’ Adam asked, sounding surprised. He couldn’t imagine his father as anything other than a builder. That’s what he’d been all Adam’s life.
‘No, the firm I was apprenticed to specialized in putting up structures round pitheads to house the heavy machinery and to support it too. It meant I was working side by side with miners all the time so I got to know their ways.’
‘And is that what you’re going to be doing now?’ asked Adam. ‘Building things for them?’
‘No, this is different – nothing to do with construction. I’m working with them – or rather for them, I suppose. I’m to be their checkweighman, which means I measure the weight of the coal in each tub they’ve mined to make sure they get paid the right amount for it.’
‘So you’re down in the mine as well, with them?’ asked Adam nervously. The thought alarmed him – it made him think of being buried, like his mother. He was brave by nature but the thought of being underground had always terrified him. He remembered the well at the back of the school in Islington that Old Beaky had told them was out of bounds. Adam had disobeyed at the first opportunity, using all his childish strength to push the thick wooden cover aside. And, if he shut his eyes, he could still relive the long wait after he threw in a stone, counting the seconds before he heard the faint splash deep down below. He’d had nightmares for weeks afterwards, dreaming of falling down into the thick darkness, his unheard cries echoing off the damp brick walls.
‘No, don’t worry. I’m up on the surface where the tubs of coal come out,’ said Daniel reassuringly. He knew all about his son’s phobia – he’d never even been able to persuade Adam to set foot in the London Underground, let alone get on one of the trains. ‘The job’s not dangerous,’ he went on, ‘but it’s important, and the money will be better than what we’re used to, which will help.’
Daniel’s words were optimistic but Adam sensed an uncertainty lurking underneath and wondered if his father was feeling ashamed that he wouldn’t be sharing the hardships of the men that he was working for. But Adam dismissed the thought: what mattered was that his father would be out of harm’s way. He’d lost his mother and he didn’t want to risk losing his father too.
‘How did you get the job?’ Adam asked. It made no sense that his father should have been able to walk into this cushy, well-paid job in this faraway place when by his own admission he’d never actually been a miner.
‘I have a cousin who recommended me. He’s a good man and he’s worked in the Scarsdale pit most of his life so he has a lot of influence with the men. And it turned out they wanted me because of what I’d done down here with the builders’ union – getting more members, getting organized. It’s the miners’ union that’ll be paying me,’ said Daniel.
‘Will you make them strike?’ asked Adam anxiously. He knew what union work meant – poverty and violence and death. Was this what lay in store for them in the north? A second dose of what they were trying to leave behind?
‘No, I hope it won’t come to that,’ said Daniel, choosing his words carefully. ‘I do want to help, to make things better. But I hope I can achieve that by negotiating with the owner. I hope he’ll listen to reason. I learnt from what happened with your mother, Adam. It changed me, you know, just like it’s changed you.’
Later, much later, they had to change trains. Crossing a footbridge in the rain, they looked across a moonlit landscape of warehouses and factories to where the funnels and chimneys of a blast furnace were throwing columns of white fire and belching orange smoke up into the night sky.
Adam stopped, awestruck. He had never seen anything like it.
‘The jaws of hell,’ said Daniel, clapping his son on the shoulder. ‘And inside it’s hotter than hell; hot enough to make iron into steel, which is what the British Empire is built on. And the fires never stop. They can’t because the demand never does. And the fires need coal, mountains of coal. Which is where we come in,’ he added with a smile.
They got to Scarsdale on the dawn train. And at first, as they approached, Adam could see nothing of the mine. Instead the view from the window was a vision of loveliness. Still-water lakes and green fields carpeted with the first wild flowers of spring, divided one from another by silvery white dry-stone walls; woods of beech and oak and quick-flowing streams, and up on the crest of a hill a picturesque village of thatched cottages surrounding the weathered tower of a mediaeval church. But the railway didn’t go that way, curving round instead into the valley behind where all at once the landscape was utterly transformed. Down below in the valley bottom the mine was marked out by a line of wooden towers and tall red-brick chimneys standing across from a huge man-made heap of slate-grey waste, and stretching up from it on all sides row upon row of squat grey houses, monotonous and monochrome, straddled the hillsides like an encamped army of insects. The change in the view shocked Adam. It was jarring – almost violent – to go from beauty to ugliness in a moment; from a world unchanged in centuries to this industrial outcrop of the new century, with both existing side by side in a bizarre juxtaposition.
As they got closer, Adam could see that the houses were built almost back to back along long narrow streets which all led down like the irregular hands of a giant clock towards the mine at the centre, surmounted by the high towers that dominated the landscape. They had huge wheels at their apex and Adam could see that one set was turning as they approached. The spokes of each one rotated in opposite directions and the sense of power they conveyed reminded Adam of the beast-like locomotive at the front of the train that had made such an impression on him at the station in London.
‘What are they? What do they do?’ Adam asked his father, pointing towards the towers.
‘They’re the headstocks – winding gear like I used to work on. The wheels draw the steel cables that raise and lower the cages up and down the mine shafts,’ said Daniel admiringly, looking at the structures with a craftsman’s eye, taking pleasure in their design.
‘How deep are they?’ asked Adam.
‘Different depths: I’ve heard the deepest is over five hundred feet,’ said Daniel.
Adam shivered. Again he remembered the well in the school yard, the coin falling and the splash far away down below. He’d been terrified but fascinated too, going back again and again for weeks afterwards, drawn to the well like a magnet, although he’d never removed the cover after that first time.
‘Don’t think about the shafts,’ said Daniel, sensing his son’s anxiety. ‘I told you I’m going to be working at the pithead, not down below.’
‘What about me?’ asked Adam.
‘You?’ said Daniel, sounding shocked. ‘I’d never let you work in a mine. You’re my flesh and blood, all I’ve got left, and I’m going to look after you, keep you safe. You believe me, don’t you?’ he asked, looking hard at his son.
Adam nodded, grateful for the reassurance, although he wondered at his father’s willingness to come to this place and represent the men when he was obviously so appalled at the idea of sending his own son underground to work with them.
‘You’re going to school,’ Daniel went on. ‘It’s all arranged. You’re a bright kid, brighter than I ever was, and you deserve a better life than I’ve had, one where you can use your talents and get on in the world. And that’s what your mother would have wanted as well. I’m sure of that. Now come on,’ he added as the train came to a halt. ‘This is where we get off.’
They had pulled into a small station halfway down the valley. From the platform Adam could see the railway line split in two with one set of tracks heading away over the far hill into the invisible land beyond and another continuing down to the pithead below where it wound around among the mismatched assortment of grey brick buildings surrounding the headstocks.
Shouldering their bags, Daniel and Adam walked out through an empty waiting room lined with posters advertising seaside holidays in Blackpool, Scarborough, Whitley Bay and other places Adam had never heard of. The world of brightly coloured deckchairs and bathing machines, pleasure boats and parasols under a hot sun, seemed a long way removed from this bleak mining town which was to be their new home.
Outside the station they had to pause for a minute as a column of cloth-capped miners came up the street from the direction of the mine, returning home from the night shift. Their faces were smeared black with coal dust and their iron-heeled clogs clattered on the roadway as they approached, setting off sparks on the cobbles. Some of them were singing. The tune reminded Adam of a hymn that the congregation used to sing at the church in Islington when he went there with his mother but he could not recognize any of the words. They seemed to be in another language.
The last of the group had almost gone past when a tall man stopped in mid-stride and rushed over to them. He had an open tool bag in his hand, which he dropped on the ground as he put his arms around Daniel, pulling him close in a bear hug. Something tin-like inside it clanged as it hit the pavement and Adam instinctively bent down and picked it up, holding it out to the stranger.
‘So, this is thy boy, eh, Daniel?’ said the stranger, releasing Daniel and looking Adam up and down with a broad smile. ‘’E’s the livin’ image of thee, ain’t ’e? An’ good-mannered too, which I s’pose ’e gets from thee,’ he added, taking the bag. ‘Not like us miners. I’d shake thy hand, lad, but it needs washing first.’
‘Adam, this is your cousin, Edgar Tillett,’ said Daniel. ‘We’re going to be staying with him and his family until we find our feet.’
‘Find thy feet,’ repeated Edgar with a laugh. ‘Thy feet’re at the end of thy legs last time I looked so thou shouldna’ be wastin’ thy time tryin’ to find ’em. An’ you can stay wi’ us as long as you need. You know that. Blood’s thicker than water as they say, an’ they say right.’ He clapped Daniel on the shoulder and Adam sensed his father’s awkwardness in the face of his cousin’s largesse as he smiled uncertainly in response.
The other miners had gone on ahead and now they began to follow them up the hill, walking towards the rising sun. Edgar walked in the centre with Daniel and Adam on either side.
‘How was work?’ asked Daniel.
‘Tight,’ said the miner with a smile, pronouncing the word with relish as if pleased with the selection he’d made from a choice of other possible epithets. ‘That’s the word for it, I’d say. We’re workin’ a plough seam jus’ at present – that’s a narrow ’un, no more’n two feet high – and so we ’ave to be on our ’ands an’ knees most o’ the time. Hurts the back and it hurts the ’ead too if thou doesna watch thyself,’ he said with a grin, stretching his arms out wide as if to release the tension. Adam could see that he was a powerfully built man, lean and strong with muscle.
‘An’ it hurts our pockets too when the owner won’t pay us enough for all our hard work. Which is where you comes in,’ he said with a sideways look at Daniel. ‘You’ve come at the right time, Cousin, I can tell you that. I’m looking for’ards to seein’ thee gangin’ toe to toe with ol’ Sir John and the managers,’ he added with a smile.
‘Who’s Sir John?’ asked Adam, who’d been listening avidly to the conversation. The foreignness of everything in this new world had begun to excite him: the landscape, the way Edgar talked, the things he said. They made Adam want to understand, not to be left behind.
‘Sir John? Why, ’e’s the owner – o’ the mine, an’ o’ nigh ivrything ’ereabouts,’ said Edgar with an expansive sweeping gesture of his hand that seemed to encompass everything in sight. ‘’Cept me ’ouse o’ course. I owns that, lock, stock an’ barrel. I’m one of the few that do, so ’e canna evict me even if the notion takes ’im, which is nice to know.’
They had followed the road up from the station without turning right or left and now came to a halt in front of the last house in the street. Beyond, a yellow cornfield ran up the rest of the hillside to a thick-limbed oak tree standing alone like a sentinel on the sharply etched skyline. The house was the same height as its neighbours but it had been extended out at least fifteen feet to the side where a vegetable and flower garden had been planted out in tidy rows behind a picket fence.
‘Well, ’ere we are,’ said Edgar, pushing open the door and beckoning them to follow him inside. ‘Not exactly a stately ’ome but it’ll do. Thomas, Ernest, say ’ow d’yer do to your cousins.’ This last was addressed to two young men sitting at a deal table on the other side of the large low room into which the entrance opened directly. There was no front parlour as Adam had been used to in London or, if there had been, the partition wall had been knocked down to increase the main living space, which was centred on a big fireplace with a bread oven set in its side. The fire was banked high with red coal and Adam could feel the thick heat radiating off it from the moment he came in.
Ernest, the younger of Edgar’s two sons, came forward and shook Adam’s hand. He was a few months older than Adam and seemed open and friendly like his father. His brother Thomas stood back. He appeared reserved, nodding his head rather than shaking hands. And behind him Adam could see a woman in a white apron and cap, evidently their mother, come bustling out from another room at the back of the house.
She didn’t wait to be introduced but came straight over to Adam and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m Annie, Edgar’s wife,’ she said. ‘And I’m glad you’re here. Now, take your coat off and Ernest will show you your room. Edgar, you need to go in the back and wash yourself. You’re black from the pit and you’re not eating breakfast with the likes of us looking like that.’
‘Why do your parents talk different?’ Adam asked as he followed Ernest up the stairs, and then immediately regretted the question. It was rude to ask about the way people spoke. His mother had told him that.
But Ernest didn’t take offence. ‘She’s had more schooling than our dad – he went down the pit when he was nine or ten. One of the two – sometimes he says eight but that’s when he’s had a few too many to drink on a Saturday night and he’s trying to lay it on thick and make you feel sorry for him,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Schooling takes the Yorkshire out of thee, or at least that’s what they say round here. And yes, I suppose it’s done it to me too. That and my mother who’ll clip me round the ear if I talk silly, as she calls it. But I don’t know if it’ll last: I’m working at the pithead now, on the screens, and it’s hard not to talk like everyone else. We all end up down the pit sooner or later, you’ll see. And now here’s my room. And yours too – we’ll be sharing if that’s all right …’
