Bone Street/Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
THE AWAKENING
NEXT morning Jack awoke at eight o’clock. For two minutes he puzzled over the gaiety that lay close to his heart. Then the events of the previous night drifted back to him. The fact that the morning was sunny took on a new significance. A moment sufficed to fix the day’s promise in his mind, so he carefully crawled over his sleeping father, dropped noiselessly off the bed, gathered up his clogs and clothes and went downstairs.
He put the can on the gas for tea. This contrivance, before the day of gas mantles, was a simple one, and the usual way with working folks in the West Riding.
Filling the can with water, he climbed on a chair, then on to the table in the middle of the room, and hung the can on a hook suspended by a wire from the ceiling, a proceeding which would appear strange to the onlooker until he observed that the gas jet which lighted the room was directly underneath. This Jack lit, and then proceeded to dress himself, an affair of seconds.
His wash at the sink took longer, for it was a special wash. He explored the intricacies of his ears, he pulled off his shirt to wash his back and chest until the cold water trickled down his legs. He was even considering taking off his clogs and beginning at the other end, when Tzzt!—the can boiled over, and at the same moment noises from above showed that his father was getting out of bed.
Jack scrambled on to the table again which was now messed with sooty water, but that mattered little. The only real calamity in connection with this panboiling arrangement was when the can boiled over on to someone who unwarily sat underneath. The same method often served for frying bacon, except that you held the frying-pan over the flame, and that made your arm ache.
Jack dropped some tea into the can while the water was still seething, and at that moment his father came downstairs, his temper hovering between the benign and irritable. But the tea was ready and smelled good, the boy was clean and naked to the waist, and there is something about the leanness of a child’s body which clutches every human heart.
While his father went to wash at the sink, Jack finished preparing the breakfast. Bread and dripping doesn’t take much preparing, and last night’s pots served for morning’s breakfast, without an intervening dish-cloth. By nine o’clock they had finished their meal, and Jack was sent across to Granny Hinchcliffe’s little corner shop for a quarter of a pound of cheese. He returned in a few minutes with joy on his face and a parcel which certainly was not cheese.
“What’s ta gotten theer?” asked his father.
“Granny Hinchcliffe gave me two currant cakes,” was the lad’s reply.
“What’s she given thi ’em for?” was the further question.
“I don’t know,” said Jack. “I telled her we wor going on t’moors, and she said she wished she could come an’ all, an’ I wor to bring her some heather. I can, can’t I, father?”
“Aye, we’ll noan be short of heather,” said Bradley.
Jack, with the self-consciousness and reserve of the neglected child, hardly spoke a word as they passed along the sunny and almost deserted streets. His hand was in his father’s, he felt himself to be in touch, and held his breath for fear of breaking communion; but his heart lilted blithely to the marching rhythm. They went up the familiar streets until they came to Bramfitt’s Mill, where they turned off at the street opposite the mill, and continued along the main road until they had almost left the town, and Jack commenced to get his first real look at the country, for this time he had a guide who knew a little of the topography.
“Sithee, lad,” said his father, “yon’s Beacon Hill.”
And so he showed the lad the various landmarks as they passed them until they turned off the highroad to make their way to the moors. Here the first churchgoers passed them by, stiff rigged in top hats, rustling silks and black alpacas. They looked curiously at the man and boy, and Jack heard the word “Tramps,” which caused an acute consciousness of the gaping hole in his ill-fitting corduroy trousers to cast its first shadow on his day. He even tried to still the clatter of his clogs, but that feeling soon passed away, leaving only a conscious thankfulness that he was with his father.
They passed the church, and in a few minutes the beautiful wooded hill-side lay before them, and towering above it a great dome of another hill. To the left and behind the hill, lay the moors, and now strange odours assailed his nostrils. The pungent scents of meadowsweet and wild peppermint across from the marshy fields below, the nutty fragrance of heather in the distance, the perfect morning and the August smell of sun under the breaking foliage were a revelation. High overhead the larks trilled their continuous song, and a small stream splashing down its fern-hung rockery bore a mellow burden.
They stopped as if by mutual consent on the edge of these marvels, where a rocky path led up to the wooded hill, and for a full minute drank the air.
“Can we goa up theer, dad—does it lead to t’moors?” said Jack.
For a moment his father looked on him with a face so grave and wistful that for a moment the lad was afraid, and then replied:
“Aye, we’re going up theer, and I’ll tell thee what else, lad—we’re going to live again, just thee and me. Ah tell thee we’ll be born again. Tha little knaws what tha lost when thi mother died, but tha won’t lose thi father again. Aye,” and his face softened with a smiling tenderness, “we go up theer, are ta tired?” To which Jack replied by bounding forward up the slope.
A mile and a half and the moors spread out before them. The heather smell breathed strong in their nostrils. The sun had climbed the zenith, the air trembled in the heat, one lark, incredibly high, gave forth a silver thread of song, the moors burned noon-time incense to the Creator.
They flung themselves down upon that fragrant bed, staring at the sky until all things grew pale to the eye, then turning better to smell, Jack buried his nose in a bilberry patch and tuned his ear to the ceaseless summer music of a myriad of small insects.
“John Newcome Bradley,” said his father to himself, looking at the lad, and his thoughts wandered back to another John Newcome.
Nearly twelve years ago, Bradley, a farm labourer, had hired himself out to John Newcome, a Lincolnshire farmer, and had gone, as the custom was, to live at his farm. Newcome was soured and harsh. He had lost his wife a few years before, but he had a daughter, Mary Newcome, a blithe lass with cheeks like apples and hair of ruddy gold, with no sourness in her nature. She was an only and a lonely child. Bradley was neither big nor handsome, and had neither gold nor learning, but he lacked the servility that marked his caste in those days. They met on almost equal terms, and in the end, youth held out a hand to youth, and they were sweethearts before they knew it.
One day, Newcome taxed his daughter with being fond of the farm-hand, and bid her cease, but Mary, driven suddenly to assert her womanhood, replied with defiance. Bradley was dismissed on the spot, but he went only as far as Gainsborough, where he found a motherly woman who agreed to provide a lodging for Mary in her own house, and another for Bradley in the house of her brother, until the banns had been published and they were wed.
But soon their tiny store of money was almost exhausted, the hirings were distant, and there was no work to be got on the farms. They drifted to Leeds, from whence Mary sent an appealing letter to her father, but there was no reply. “She has made her bed, and must lie on it,” thought Newcome, sitting sternly in his low-roofed farm-house, steeling his heart against the vision of his daughter.
The couple finally reached Beckton, and found work in the woolcombing shed. Things were hard with them, but bearable. They could live. In time their baby came, and for a few brief years they had known an incredibly bare existence, but one which gleamed with happiness.
When there was any work, they both worked in the sheds, he on the night turn, she on the day, so night and morning they would meet in the street, one going to work, the other leaving, and give each other the door-key, while a neighbour took charge of the baby for a shilling or two a week.
Week-ends were their happiest time. On Saturday afternoons, when the mill work ceased, they cleaned up the house, he scrubbing the floor while she scrubbed the table. He washing the windows while she baked. They got in each other’s way on purpose, and abused each other with laughter. He would rise up from the black-leading with his hands the colour of the grate he had been operating upon, and offer to knead the bread for her, and Mary would retort with a threatening gesture of a clout or a rolling-pin while baby Jack, in his high chair, laughed and chuckled at the joke. Then she died.
“Aye, we mun pull up,” thought Bradley for a second time. He let the lad lie for awhile and then nudged him gently.
“Biting on time, lad,” he said, “aren’t ta hungry? Ah know ah am.”
“Aye, me an’ all,” said Jack.
And they laughed in each other’s faces.
So they took the beaten track to the left, and after a little walking came to a cottage with “Teas” painted in huge white letters on the gable end. Here, for twopence each, they got a mug of tea, and sitting at the small rustic table in the garden, they undid their parcel, ate their simple food, and then, after the meal, while Bradley sucked in comfort through his pipe, Jack explored the premises.
“D-a-ad,” yelled a small excited voice.
Bradley got to his feet and met the lad as he came running, but it was experience not tragedy pitched the small shrill voice.
“An apple-tree, dad. There’s real apples growing on it, and there’s a big pig and ten little pigs ower yonder.” And with a smile and a twinge, Bradley followed him to admire.
Presently the lad bethought himself of the bargain, and again they set forth to another part of the moors, and throwing themselves down on Nature’s glorious mattress, the reading began.
You who have read books at your pleasure ever since childhood, can you imagine the mind of an illiterate?
Mary, it is true, had been clerk to her husband, and as is the case in many working-class families, even to-day, she had written what letters they wrote, and occasionally read to him, perhaps from an evening paper. For a time they had taken in a weekly paper, and she had read to him the serial story, the details of which still clung in his mind. He had intelligence, and talk with his mates who could read gave him a general hazy idea of the events of the day, good enough for the easy standards of those times. In his brain, undoubtedly, a tiny secret library existed, a library of superstitions and folk-lore, native to the soil, a library of country-side culture. But this he had learned to hide from mortal sight; it was foreign to the townsman, and Bradley had learned that to be comfortable he must conform to pattern, and so his avid mind was in abeyance. What food for the mind he had was taken in with drink at the Crown and Anchor, and consisted of poor dull talk and poorer songs.
Ivanhoe bewildered, yet gladdened his heart. Its myth and glamour found a ravenous appreciation in the attendant spirit of his secret library. Yet it was bewildering.
“That’ll be old times, like,” he said once.
“Aye,” said the lad, eager to explain. “Happen a thousand years ago.” And then his honest little soul requiring accuracy he cast up sotto voce: “William the Conqueror, 1066; William the Second, 1087; Henry the First, 1100; Stephen, 1135; Richard the First, 1189”; and then followed a subtraction, “Nearly seven hunnerd years.”
“Afore my time, lad.”
Jack chuckled at the joke, and continued his reading, and so alternately reading and discussing, the hours slipped by, until Bradley, judging by the sun that it was after five o’clock, broke in:
“I’d like thi to go on a bit, lad, but we’ve no tea with us, what’s ta say if we set off home?”
And to Jack, gravely consulted, it never occurred to be troublesome. “We can come again, happen. Have we to go the same road back?”
“Aye, we’ll come ageean t’first fine Sunday. Noa, we’re noan forced ta goa t’same way back, we can goa t’low road. And doan’t forget thi heather.”
And so, after making a great bunch of ling, they took their homeward path, Jack trotting contentedly enough by his father. But when the low road was reached he began to flag. His clogs were rubbing the skin off his heels, but he limped along bravely to the point where the old horsecars started.
They got a short lift, and soon were in Bone Street, where he was bid to sit down while his father prepared tea.
Tea revived him, and renewed his zest for the glorious present. He caught his father’s affirmative eye, seized the bunch of heather, slipped out of the door, burst out of the passage with a whoop, and ran across the street to Granny Hinchcliffe’s.
Left alone, Bradley felt his resolution tested. Male company at the Crown and Anchor would be a change; on the other hand, such a day as he had spent would not fit in with the public-house company, and another thought struck him. Hitherto, Jack had been too young to examine his father critically, but soon he would do so, of that he felt sure. He wavered, and half made a move for his cap and coat, and in turning his eyes fell on the portrait of his wife. With a muttered groan he sat down, still looking at the picture of his mate. Why was she taken away, leaving him like this? “But there’s the lad,” said a voice within. Then perhaps his guardian angel decided that the trial had been long enough, for a knock came at the door, and a cheery voice hailed him. It was old Ezra Hinchcliffe, Granny’s husband.
“Can ta come across to ahr house a minute?” he asked, and before Bradley could fairly pronounce a sentence about his not being washed or dressed for calling, added hurriedly, “There’s thy Jack telling t’tale to t’missus abaht heather, apple-trees, an’ pigs, an’ ah doan’t knaw what. T’lad brought her some heather back with him an’ they’re reight set up wi’ one another; I’ve had my nose put out reight.”
“Aye, he was set up wi’ t’heather,” said Bradley, as almost reluctantly he followed the old man across the road.
The Hinchcliffe room gleamed with polish. The small kitchen range shone and the fire-irons answered it, the fire shone and the mahogany tallboy answered it with all the pride of a tallboy polished once a week for eighty years. It reflected the winking fire to what appeared to be another tallboy, but whose drawer-handles were a mere sham. This was in fact the shut-up bed in which Granny Hinchcliffe had slept ever since her rheumatism had become so severe that the journey upstairs was an almost impossible agony.
The glass dome over the wax fruit shone, and the lustres on the old-fashioned dessert-stand winked back at them. The horsehair-covered sofa and the rocking-chair shone. Ezra Hinchcliffe’s white hair shone, Jack’s eyes shone, and Granny Hinchcliffe’s mild old eyes answered them all.
Bradley and Ezra, sitting in the background, fell into companionship immediately, smoking and exchanging a sentence now and again, and watching, as from a stage box, the love scene being enacted on the hearthrug where Jack sat and talked, gesticulating with his whole body, and Granny Hinchcliffe supplied a chorus of “Eee, bless the bairn,” “Well, I nivver did,” and such-like remarks.
The tended room and Ezra’s friendliness quietened Bradley’s restlessness, and he stopped thinking of the Crown and Anchor. Once or twice he caught the mild appraising eye of Granny Hinchcliffe, and then the boy had her sole attention again.
But the story was thinning down, and soon it came to an end. One or two questions revived it fitfully, but only for awhile. The glinting head began to droop and Granny Hinchcliffe met Bradley’s eye. He rose, bent down and gathered the boy in his arms, and turned to leave the house.
“Ah’ll be back in a minute,” he said over his shoulder, adding thoughtfully, “If you’ll have me.”
He was Granny Hinchcliffe’s from that moment.