Never Such Innocence Again

Chapter 1-1

ONE

July 1914'I hope it may'nt be human gore.'

Mary Blackett Garforth dozed fitfully in her chair. She was desperately tired, in fact she could hardly remember a time in her life when she had not been tired, no, not just tired, exhausted to bone-weary numbness, drained to a point beyond fatigue. Possibly as a child maybe, but even then, she would have had to help her mother look after her brothers and sisters, carry the water for her Dad’s bath, help with the washing and the baking, run errands and black the stove.

At 13, she had gone into service at 'the Big House' as Exham Hall, ancestral seat of the Lords Exham, was known, and life as a 'tweenie' had not been conducive to leisure or an excess of sleep either, especially when old Mrs Lankester, the master’s mother -in-law, had still been alive, as vicious an old b***h as ever had been; nothing could ever be right for old Mrs Lankester. No matter how hard you tried, she would always find fault and box your ears, she made you bend over her bath chair and keep still as she smacked her leathery hand, full tilt, at the side of the head.

'Take that, girl, and if you can't do better next time, you 'll be all the sorrier for it’. Or worse still, she would smack her walking stick onto your knuckles, often until they bled.

She had been hateful and petty, and Mary had been glad, no, ecstatic, when she died, and even though she prayed hard for forgiveness for harbouring such un-Christian thoughts, nothing could replace the relief when the old witch was finally laid to rest in the family plot. 'And good riddance to you', Mary had thought as the coffin was lowered into the grave. All the staff had been allowed two hours off, without pay, to attend the funeral and had stood, heads bowed, at a discreet distance, away from the graveside and Mary could bet every single farthing she owned that not one of the other gardening or domestic staff felt sorrow or grief at old Mrs Lankester’s passing.

Things were better after that, when she became Lady Exham’s personal maid, still tired, of course, but tiredness was simply a way of life and she remained as maid to Lady Exham until she died in an accident in 1897 when following the Hunt—trying to put a 3'0’ horse at a 4'0’ fence was how Mr Brindley, the butler, had put it in his usually sneery way, curling his lip as he spoke, his moustache crawling up into his nostrils like a hairy slug.

Butter wouldn't melt in Brindley’s mouth above stairs, bowing and scraping and licking the master’s boots until his tongue was as black as a coal scuttle whilst, below stairs, he hadn't a good word to say for any of the family. He was forever asking Mary to go into the cellar with him, but Cookie said she knew what he was after and told him to keep his wandering hands to himself.

Then, in 1898, Mary had married Jack Garforth and moved down from Exham Hall to Victoria Street. Then, she had really learned what tiredness meant.

She was Jack’s second wife and he had come with a ready built-in family, Jack himself, Joe the eldest boy, Daniel, Mary Margaret, always both names together, as if they were joined into one, Mary-Margaret. No one could remember how Mary Margaret came to be called that; she wasn't christened that way, as though it were a double name like the gentry sometimes did, it had just happened.

Margaret Mary followed and then there was Harold, sneery, thin, creepy Harold, burning with sullen resentment at the world, who always seemed to be somewhere else, or at least his mind was. She tried to love all of Jack’s children as her own, but there was something unlovable about Harold; the way he looked at her reminded her of Brindley at 'the Big House'.

Mary did not like being in the house alone with Harold. He never did anything untoward, never touched her or said anything you could take exception to. It was just the way he looked at you—with red bitterness in his eyes—and it made her feel uncomfortable to be near him.

After Harold, there came Edgar and her own especial favourite of Jack’s children, the wondrously dreamy Eleanor, so pale and ethereal and fragile that Mary had kept her at home far longer than was normal, stopping Jack from letting her go into service, claiming she was needed at home.

This was only partly true. Mary always needed the extra pair of hands around the house, but it was more than that. Eleanor was … what was the word? Simple? Not in the sense of stupid, but innocent, naive, untainted by the world, as trusting as a lamb amongst wolves. Mary felt that Eleanor would bruise too easily if left to fend for herself … bruise inside where the hurt was always so much the greater.

There had been three other bairns: John, Jack’s first born, Edward and Sophie, but all had died in infancy. Losing those three children had been too much for Jack’s sickly first wife, also called Mary. She had simply been worn out and had died giving birth to Eleanor.

Mary always wondered if something had happened during the childbirth that had left Eleanor the way she was; perhaps the cord had got wrapped around her neck, starving her of oxygen. They said that that could cause simple-mindedness, but there again, Eleanor wasn't simple-minded exactly.

At least, not in the way you thought of simple-minded children, not like Jimmy Poskit from Alice Street, twisted and garbled, forever touching and playing with himself, leering at you as he did so, a bit like Harold, only more so. And come to think of it, Jimmy wasn't the only Poskit boy who was a bit feeble-minded, a bit peculiar. Sammy Poskit, who was married to Ethel Whittaker as was and lived on Whitton Lane, he was a few lumps short of a full coal scuttle as well.

Then, there were her own children, Nicholas, the apple of her eye, who had won a scholarship to the grammar school and would never ever have to work underground like his father or brothers and for that blessing alone Mary gave Thanks every night.

And lastly there were the twins, Isaac and Saul, 13 years old now, and up to every conceivable bit of mischief imaginable. Their father had taken his belt to them on more than one occasion and would no doubt do so again, but nothing seemed to have much effect. They would take their beatings, dry their tears and, within minutes, be up to their tricks again, as artful as a barrow-load of monkeys.

Still, Mary thought, ‘I would rather have them as they are, safe and above ground, than going down the pit, but soon, too soon, they would be 14 years old, no longer boys.’ Unless she could find some way out of it; down the mines they would go. The prospect filled her with dread that clogged up her heart. Often, all too often, there were deadly collapses, gas explosions or flooding. The pit was always hungry for men; it devoured men with ferocity that was almost Satanic. Too many men had been maimed and killed for any mother to be sanguine about her children working in the mines.

Mary nodded off again for a minute or two, and then she woke with a start of disorientation. She had felt herself about to slip into a deep pit, a dream she had had over and over recently, and it terrified her, believing that it portended a great disaster, and to a miner’s wife that could only mean a collapse or explosion underground.

She shuddered in trepidation. ‘Someone walking over my grave,' she whispered fearfully and pulled her shawl tighter about herself. She was cold as well, even in the height of summer; those dead chill hours before dawn could be frigidly bitter.

Mary stretched to ease the knots on the muscles of her neck and back. Yesterday had been washday, the most tiring of all days, hours spent hunched over the washtub, as sheets and linen and thick black coal encrusted pit clothes were scrubbed and battered on the washboard, boiled and beaten with the poss stick, rinsed in the rinse tub, twisted and mangled damp-dry, the kitchen filled with a dense, almost gelatinous fog compounded of sweaty clothes and steam and soap fumes, a sour-sweet brume that caught in the throat and stung the eyes.

Line after line of washing had crisscrossed the back street, the whole street bedecked with washday bunting like a fleet of galleons at full sail. Then, it had rained, so all the clothes had to be swiftly dragged off the lines and brought in to join the piles of still damp and wet clothing waiting to go out on the line. The skies cleared up and, with Eleanor’s help, they had strung out the laundry once more, only for the coal cart to come around, so back inside went the still wet washing, to join the ever-growing pile again.

She thought she would never get any of it dry and, in fact, there was still a load drying on the clothes horse in front of the range; the boys’ school shirts and underwear hung over the brass rail under the mantle shelf and yet more hung on the drying rack suspended on pulleys from the ceiling, a gallows liberally strewn with flannel shirts and grub-grey vests, long johns, short hogger trousers, neckerchiefs and wool stockings, dangling like executed criminals hanging from a gibbet.

By the time she had got all the washing hanging somewhere to dry, there had been Jack’s dinner to fix when he came back from the 'Green Tree' and then, later, Edgar’s dinner and breaktime sandwiches to fix before he went on night shift.

Harold had come in from afternoon shift at ten and needed his bath and dinner, there was ironing to do, and it had been well after midnight by the time she had finished, bone weary, back aching, hands with the dead white skin of a drowned corpse, eyes bleary and smarting, wanting nothing more than to fall into her bed and sleep for a week.

But she could not, Jack was on morning shift, starting at four and she would have to be up and about by three o'clock to get his breakfast ready and prepare his bait, the sandwiches for his break. They were always strawberry jam sandwiches, sticky jam to lubricate the back of a throat made as raw as a harsh file by the coal dust.

She squinted up at the clock nestling between a forest of brass candlesticks on the mantle-shelf, peering through the nightgloom, trying to read the time, but could not and had to get up from her chair to hold the clock close to her face. 'Ten to three,' she said to herself. 'Well, I'm up now and may as well stay up.'

And feeling her bladder suddenly full, she padded across the backyard to the privy, wrinkling her nose as ever at the smell. No matter how often she scrubbed it, no matter how much carbolic was used, she could never get rid of the smell, the smell of stale urine and fetid dankness that seemed permeated into the very fabric of the whitewashed walls.

As she hoisted her skirts, the cold air on her bare legs and thighs sent a shiver through her body, rattling the bones inside her goose-pimpled flesh.

The night air was still, as if buried under a quilt of silence, an eerie silence; even the sound of her urine tinkling into the bowl seemed deadened, mute, and Mary shuddered again, portents of disaster casting icy fingers up her spine.

‘Somebody else walking on my grave,' she said aloud, needing the sound of her own voice to break the spell of heavy, woven silence.

Back indoors again, she warmed herself over the dampened down coals in the range, washed her hands in the stone sink and swiftly made up Jack’s sandwiches before going into the front room to wake him.

The big four-poster bed seemed to fill the whole room, and she looked longingly at it again, feeling her eyelids weighting down from just thinking about sleep. She might catch an hour or so in the rocking chair after Jack had gone, but Edgar was on night shift and would be home at six, ready for his bath and breakfast.

Harold was on two o'clock shift, the boys Isaac and Saul had to be got off to school, and Nicholas to the Grammar; she would have some time to bake and prepare dinner, by which time Jack would be home again.