The Rebels

I

I

“S

usan! Susan! Where

are you? I want you!”

I can never think of my youth without hearing again the knocking and the sad whining cry from my mother’s sick-room; and then I see myself running again across the big red-tiled kitchen, through the conservatory where the plants flung down their heavy breathless scent, past the foot of the steep high stairs, and so to her door.

That door will never leave my mind, though God lets me live to be ninety—which I earnestly pray He may not, for I have seen enough suffering, known enough evil, to suffice as it is . . . But it is the door of which I speak now, and not of myself. It was a tall, narrow door, always painted cream, in contrast with the heavier sombre colours of the rest of the house. Its handle was of carefully polished brass, by the side of which there was screwed a long, oval dutch tile, with a blue-painted scene of canal-boats and windmills on it. This tile was intended to protect the cream paint-work from our dirty fingermarks we were always told, though now I do not recall that any of us were ever allowed to have dirty fingers—except perhaps Elijah, the ‘Black Sheep’ of our family, and the one I came to love best of them all . . . He seemed to be outside all the ordinary laws of the family; at first because he would not conform to them, and later because the family seemed to abandon him, and let him go his own way among the pitbanks and the gipsies, a spiritual brother of their ragged tents . . .

The two upper panels of the door were of coloured glass, but of such deep tones, of red and old gold and menacing purple, that little light ever passed from one side to the other of those panes. It is this glass, I think, that comes most readily to my mind when I sit here against my sunny wall, knitting and looking back across the years that are dead.

But then I was a young girl, hardly more than seventeen and small for my age, they said; and when I heard mother knocking on the floor with the light bamboo curtain-rod that she always kept at the bedside, I would run until I got to that door and saw the coloured glass of the panels. Then I would stop, as though I might be entering church, for that is what the glass reminded me of. Then I would call to mind my sins, my guilt, as I looked up at the deep vibrant colours.

I do not think that any of the children ever entered mother’s room but in that state of guilty-mindedness; none of them save Elijah perhaps, or the eldest son Tom, who was strong-minded and ‘right’ in his ways, like our father himself. Tom did not stop before the coloured door, I imagine, to call to mind the weight of wickedness which he must shed before he entered that room. Tom was the sort of young man who never stopped in his progress to consider anything. He seemed always to feel that, as the future head of our family, God would not let him be wrong—though sometimes I have shuddered to think of the sort of God Tom’s must have been at that stage of his life.

So I would pause before the door, heavy with sin, and call fearfully, “Mother, did you want me?”

And the faint high querulous voice would come back, full of complaint and unhappiness. “Susan! Susan! Are you there? I thought you were never coming. I thought you had gone out and left me.” How sad those words would make me feel, for I never did go out. Indeed, I was too afraid of going out to leave her. She was my sole responsibility, I felt . . . Or was it the rest of the family that made me feel like that? I do not know; but I always became confused when my mother accused me like that. It made me feel that I had indeed intended to go out, leaving her, thinking selfishly only of my own pleasures and not of the poor invalid who lay in the dark mahogany four-poster, dying as we had been warned of a malignant growth, a cancer; in the bed that had been father’s wedding-present to her so many years before.

“I am sorry,” I would say when I was in the room and smoothing her head. “What is it, mother? What can I get you, dear? Will you have the salts or a little drop of brandy in a spoon?”

But she would only shake her head hopelessly. “Sit with me, Susan girl,” she would say. “I am lonely. Sit by the window where I can see my daughter.” And I would sit in the old cane-seated chair before the big bow-window, gazing through the tumult of fern-tendrils in the lush window-box, through the heavy-leaved lilac trees that father had had planted close to the window for privacy’s sake at the time when this downstairs room had become mother’s parlour and we inquisitive children were forbidden to look into it from the long garden.

I must have sat many many hours there, in the window, which was darkened by the green of the leaves, saying nothing, just listening to the fire purring—for since she had been so ill mother had a fire in her room even in the height of summer—listening to her breathing so painfully and calling out quietly to my father who was dead, or to the little ones she had lost, like everyone else in those days, earlier in her married life. Yet sometimes I was overcome with self-pity as I sat there, a prisoner to compassion, especially when I heard the others outside, laughing in the garden and planning what they would do when Saturday came and the horse-bus called at the end of our street.

It was then that I would remember my deformity, my strange painful ankle-bone that made me limp a little and would not let me run and dance like my brothers or my elder sister, Phyllis. “God must have intended you to be patient, to wait on others,” she once said to me. “That is why he gave you that ankle, to remind you. For your place is in the home, dear.” She would often say things like that when I was young; and then she would smile to me sweetly and go to change her dress; always a new one, a beautiful one—shot silk, or taffeta, or in the right season, when the sunshine called us out on picnics, sprig muslin . . . Yet she seemed kind to me in those days for she always gave me the old ones to wear when she became tired of them or the hems got torn at a dance.

But our elder brother Tom was not always so kind. It was as though he did not dare allow himself any expression of tenderness at all in those days. When he spoke of my ankle he would say, “You had better be careful, Susan. It seems that you have been punished already for the original sin that is in you. Remember that the just God who has visited you once is not likely to overlook you if you disregard the warning a second time!”

I think he was genuinely anxious for my welfare, in his grave humourless way, though at first his words troubled me and even stopped me from sleeping for a while, for I knew not where my sin could possibly lie; but later I came to accept them, to accept my state of sinfulness, though I could never understand why it should be so. And at last I even came to accept my crippled ankle and to think of myself without grief as being different from the others, a poor thing who was meant by God to serve and not to be served.

Yet sometimes in my own little room at the top of the house, I would look at myself in the mirror that Phyllis had given me when father bought her the new cheval glass, and I would note my shining dark hair and big eyes and my long hands . . . Then I was guilty of sin again, for these things gave me pride, such a fierce dark pride that for a while I saw myself as the lady of Baggerley Hall, the great house at the edge of the Black Country which, family tradition whispered, was my grandfather’s by right but had been stolen from him by a noble lord in some false dealings over a coal-pit. And when this sin was on me, I saw myself driving out along the broad avenue that led from the house towards Kinver Edge, those long pale hands resting with negligence against the polished ebony of my carriage; my dark hair strung with a row of delicately-lustred pearls; my great eyes half-closed beneath their heavy languid lids, as I smiled with condescension to the humble tenants who stood bareheaded by the roadside to see their lady pass . . .

But always this dream died sadly, for it led inevitably to the great Hunt Ball and even in my wildest fantasies my ankle was still lame. What should it profit a great lady to be comely if she could not dance among the pink coats and the swirling white dresses? Then I would come away from my tarnished little mirror, hating my hands and my hair and my eyes. Hating myself and the sinful pride which I was unable to control.

And at such times I would sit on the cabin-trunk that father had had made once when a great sadness was on him, and I would look out across the night through my high window . . .

Below me, over the high wall and the wide green gate of our garden, lay the street, Wood Street, with its lamps spluttering and groups of small ragged children playing in the yellow light, shouting and skipping, their long shadows leaping crazily back and forth across the cobbled roadway. And beyond them, out of reach of the lamps, a darkness lit faintly by the warm deep glow of a foundry that lay at the end of that little street . . . Then beyond that, a high gorse-covered hill, among whose deep green tunnels we crouched in summer-time and down whose clay slopes the more adventurous boys and sometimes even the girls careered on stolen tea-trays, unknown to their watchful families . . . And beyond that hill, a wasteland of marsh and of tussocky grass that rose gradually until it reached the cluster of houses which marked the outskirts of Walsall . . . And so on and on, up the hill to the gaunt spire of the church . . . And beyond that yet again, the open sweet-smelling countryside, the rose-embowered cottages and whitewashed apple trees . . . Not the Black Country any more, but Great Barr, Sutton Coldfield, Pelsall. And then names which even I did not know.

But when I leaned far out of my window and looked to the right there was no mistaking the nature of the countryside, the poor pitted face of a land that had once been beautiful, once upon a time, before men found clay at surface level and so flung up their hunched and nightmare kilns; or before men found their precious ironstone and so created huge belching monsters that poured their sulphurous smoke up into God’s clean air to make it foul and destructive of men’s hopes; before men cut criss-cross into the meadows and ran their oily water through the lush fields and sent barges across the pastures, laden with coal for furnaces and bricks to build factories. And above all, before men flung out the excavated rubbish, the ordure of the soil, the slag, the shale, the smouldering wastes, across stream and valley, creating a stinking landscape of despair where once children had chased white butterflies.

As I leaned on my high window-sill and looked to the right, I could see just beyond the scattering of houses that marked the limits of Darlaston the low beast-like brick-kilns, their ovens burning through the night, low down and near the hard clay of the ground they squatted on; strange fires past which men walked busily, their coarse shirts open to the waist, tending their monsters until dawn, their long shadows thrown spasmodically across the surrounding lands . . . And beyond them, waste land, the grey and melancholy steppes of ruin where reed-fringed pools lay steaming in the sun, choked with iron bedsteads, sodden news sheets, broken pottery, cast-off clothing, the dead creatures of kennel and farmyard. And past these pools, hills that God had never put there with His own hand; shamefaced carbuncles of waste matter, sparsely covered by gorse or sapless grass; mounds that seemed to try to hide their true identity in that second-hand clothing of feeble green. And then again, past such hills, the town of Wednesbury, black, sturdy, ignorant and kind; an ancient Saxon stronghold that had long since lost any beauty or nobility it might ever have had and was now a place where those men who dug the coal, who smelted the iron, who sailed upon the canals, who moulded bricks, slept and ate, fought and sat in cellars to watch gamecocks thrust out each other’s eyes. A place of well-meaning, savage ruffians, a typical Black Country town; a swarming hive of strange contradictions where one might stand on the steps of the tall church on the hill and look down across crumbling roofs to a bull ring where but a generation earlier the laughing citizens made their way, bemufflered and moleskinned, to watch the local bull terriers rip the face from a chained and bewildered bull . . .

And beyond all that, other towns almost exactly like Wednesbury, and then others, and others, where men were humped or consumptive or weak-sighted or white-haired, because of the trade that kept their families alive . . . Until, great smoke-laden Wen, we came to sprawling Birmingham, or Brummagem, as we all called the city, whatever our class or education . . . And beyond Brummagem, what was there? I did not know; perhaps Stratford, or Warwick, and then London? Perhaps. I did not know.

I only knew that if a man dared turn right and follow his nose, he would at last shake off the filth of the Black Country and come at last into Bewdley on the Severn; Bewdley, where the gracious houses came down to the broad waterside and where the swans glided in majesty and with a quiet mind, sweet princes among their gentle people . . . And beyond Bewdley, the great Forest of Wyre, then crooked-steepled Cleobury Mortimer with its merry public houses and its black and white dwelling-places, set below the whale-backed Clees that hid half-timbered Ludlow from the eye.

Once I had been that way in my father’s wagonette, staying the night at Bridgnorth on the way back. The outing had taken two days, and that was the longest time I had ever been away from our house among the marshland and rust-tinged pools. There I had seen men with ruddy faces, men whose clothes were not marked with the dust and grease of their trade; men who spoke a free and leisured tongue, without bitterness or cursing. I had seen the corn-stooks mellowing in the westering sun and had looked breathless down from the slopes of Clee across the gently falling, coloured countryside that led the eye at last into Wales. And in that ochred sunlight, that glorious tawny sunlight, I had actually glimpsed the first of the great blue hills of Wales, the country of my fathers. I had glimpsed Heaven!

And that evening as we drove on, I was too full for words and sat on my cushion at my mother’s feet with my eyes shut, trying to fix in my mind for ever and ever the picture of that sunlit glory of fields and hedges and spinneys and hills. “Oh, the lion-coloured days!” I mumbled to myself in a private ecstasy. “The lion-coloured days!”

And Phyllis had touched mother on the arm and said, but so that I should hear, “Hark at the child! She’s sickening for something, mark my words, mother. We shall have trouble with her before Ludlow. She was too young to bring. The excitement has been too much for her. She is too highly-strung!”

And mother had said quietly, “Maybe, maybe; but you never know with bairns, especially at her age. It’s a trying time.” Then I was deeply sad because I knew that I could never tell mother or Phyllis the miracle of what I had seen, never pass on and share my joy with them. Nor with our Tom, who would have sneered at me in his solemn way; nor little Enoch, who was too young to understand; I could only tell Elijah. Only Elijah, and then only if I caught him in the right mood, when his mind was not set on poaching, or dogs, or fighting-c***s, or gipsies . . .

And all this I thought of in my high bedroom, looking out of the window before getting into bed, gazing above the long broad expanse of garden that stretched out at the front of our tall house.