Authors: Janet MacLeod Trotter
‘It’s worth eighteen shillings, but I’m prepared to take fifteen.’ Mabel was business-like.
The pawnbroker snorted. ‘It’s fraying at the cuff here, and it’s hardly the height of fashion. Not worth more than six shillings.’
Mabel swallowed her indignation. ‘It’d be robbery to let it go for less than ten shillings,
’
she bartered.
‘I’ll give you eight,’ the shopkeeper said, ‘or you can take it elsewhere.’
‘Eight then,’ Mabel said with resignation and gave the suit one last affectionate brush before pushing it across the counter.
The pawnbroker showed more interest in the jewellery that Mabel had to offer; gifts bought by her husband when he had begun bringing in a good wage from Pearson’s, whose precious value only she knew.
When Mabel left she was determined that she would reclaim her lost treasures although she knew in her heart that she would never wear them again.
All too soon, the trips to the pawnbroker became a weekly event and out of the house trickled vases, linen, ornaments and china. Her humiliation became public knowledge when the furniture shop came and reclaimed her oak dresser and there was an ugly scene with the rent collector, who waylaid her in the street.
‘You’ll have to find the money by Friday,’ the weary man shouted, ‘or Mr Thomas wants you out.’
‘We’ve always been good payers, haven’t we?’ Mabel answered with spirit.
‘Listen, if you can’t afford to live here, you’ll just have to find somewhere cheaper,’ the rentman said testily. ‘I’m just trying to do my job.’
Mabel turned her back on him and stormed into the house, slamming the door in his face, cursing the avaricious accountant Thomas whom she had never set eyes on, who owned the roof over her children’s heads and now threatened to make them homeless. But she still clung to the idea of staying in Sarah Crescent, unable to face the alternative.
To her surprise it was the stoical Granny Beaton who shook Mabel out of her paralysed state and goaded her into action.
‘It’s only bricks and mortar,’ the old woman said quietly that night as they sat in the dark of the kitchen with just a spluttering fire for comfort. ‘Not worth going to an early grave over, lassie.’
‘But it’s where Alec and I have been so happy,’ Mabel whispered, unburdening herself for once, now that the children were in bed.
‘Aye, but Alec’s gone from here and there doesn’t seem much point in staying. Do you want the sadness of seeing your little ones turned out on the street in front of all your neighbours?’
Mabel felt tears begin to trickle unbidden down her face. ‘Now I know what it must have been like for you,’ she said miserably.
Agnes Beaton put her hand over her daughter-in-law’s and squeezed it. ‘It was different for me because it was happening to everyone around me too. It’s hard for you, lassie, because most of your neighbours are just looking on, thanking God it hasn’t happened to them.’
‘Oh, Mrs Beaton, what shall I do?’ Mabel pleaded.
‘Flit before they come to throw you out,’ the older woman said roundly.
Mabel peered at her in the dark, astonished ‘You mean run away from Sarah Crescent?’ she gasped ‘What would the neighbours say?’
Agnes Beaton’s smile was wry. ‘They won’t be your neighbours much longer, so don’t you be bothering what they say. God will guide your steps and lead us to another home.’
‘Us?’ Mabel queried. ‘So you’re going to stay too?’
‘You need me to look after the children while you find work,’ her mother-in-law said matter-of-factly. ‘I’m used to getting by on a scrap of meal and a prayer.’
‘What can I do?’ Mabel asked, still despairing. ‘I’ve never worked outside the home.’
‘You’ve still got your sewing machine,’ Agnes pointed out. ‘You could take in mending - a bit of dressmaking. Susan and Maggie will have to find wee jobs to help out too. We’ll manage.’
Mabel felt a flood of warmth towards Alec’s strange mother. She had seen her as a burden and an old blether, filling the children’s heads full of fairytales, but Agnes Beaton was showing the strength of character that had helped her survive eviction and near starvation and still bring up her son to be a skilled craftsman.
The next day, Mabel ventured down the hill to the warren of mean streets that packed around the riverside factories and docks and sought out a flat for a lower rent. She steeled herself to enter a dwelling in Gun Street, stinking of damp and excrement from the earth closet in the back yard. Her nerve nearly failed her when she saw the filthy, dilapidated state of the three downstairs rooms she was being offered by the surly publican who owned the building. From upstairs she could hear the squalling of children and the thump of heavy boots which shook the gas mantle overhead.
‘How much?’ Mabel gulped, glancing out of the dirty window at the drab street with not a tree or blade of grass in sight.
‘Four shillings a week,’ the publican grunted.
‘I’m a widow with four bairns to keep,’ Mabel said in a supplicating voice she despised. ‘And this place is too small to take in lodgers.’
‘Three and six then. I can easy find other tenants who’ll show more gratitude than you.’ He gave Mabel a disparaging look, seemingly annoyed by her bargaining.
‘I’ll take it,’ she said stiffly. ‘We’ll move in the day after tomorrow.’
‘I need a week’s rent up front,’ the landlord insisted.
Mabel bit back a retort that no one should have to pay in advance for a hovel such as this and that he should be paying her for the work she would have to do to make it habitable.
Instead she fumbled in her coat pocket for the precious coins and handed them over with a proud look. With relief she hurried from the depressing street, shrouded in dank mist from the river, and climbed the steep streets to Sarah Crescent for the last time.
Borrowing a cart from Mr Heslop, the Sunday School teacher who had been generous in giving her leftovers from his butcher’s shop, Mabel had the house cleared of its remaining possessions by the time the children returned from school. John Heslop and Mabel’s brother Barny came to help in heaving the two beds and the kitchen table onto the cart, though Barny spent most of the time drinking from a jug of dark mild beer he had brought to fortify them during the task. Heslop politely refused, but Mabel took a glass after he had gone and found that despite its bitter taste it had a reviving effect on her flagging spirits. She was silently grateful that the butcher had made no criticism of her decision to do a moonlight flit; in fact Heslop had been eager to help.
‘What’s happening, Mam?’ Susan asked in astonishment as she ran in from the cold twilight, Jimmy at her heels. She stared around the empty kitchen in bewilderment.
‘We’re leaving tonight, pet,’ her mother answered as calmly as possible. ‘I know it’s sudden, but I’ve found somewhere else more affordable.’
Maggie rushed in after her sister and took in the sight of her mother drinking beer with Uncle Barny while Granny Beaton stood over the cooling range, crooked hands outstretched in their black mittens, quietly humming one of her Gaelic songs.
‘Where are we going?’ Maggie asked, half excited by the idea of flitting. Since her father’s death she had hated to see her mother’s unhappiness as their home was gradually denuded of pictures and furniture. Perhaps they were going to live in the country in some homely farm with animals all around them and fields to play in like in Granny Beaton’s childhood tales.
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ her mother answered shortly, unable to bring herself to tell them the worst. ‘We’re leaving as soon as it’s dark.’
Mabel glanced anxiously out of the bare window, half expecting that someone would have reported her planned escape to the accountant Thomas and that the police would soon be at her door. But no one had; flits were all too common and no one knew when a similar fate might befall them. An hour later, John Heslop returned and drove the cart off down the hill, the children squashed in among the chattels, silent and subdued. Mabel did not look back at her old home and vowed she would never set foot in Sarah Crescent again until she could afford to live there.
That night she bedded down her frightened children in the kitchen of the Gun Street flat while Granny Beaton coaxed a fire into life in the soot-clogged grate.
‘Tomorrow we’ll give the place a good scrubbing out,’ Mabel told her daughters. ‘We’ll soon have it looking like home.’
‘Does that mean we don’t have to go to school, Mam?’ Susan brightened at the thought.
‘Not tomorrow,’ her mother agreed, thinking silently how Susan’s school days were numbered anyway. She would be needed to help bring in money. Maggie was a different case; she had brains and Mabel was determined to keep her at school as long as she could.
Then Helen began to cry for her old bedroom. ‘I hate it here,’ she sobbed. ‘I shan’t stay! It’s all your fault, Mam. I hate you for bringing us here!’
Mabel snuggled down beside the miserable girl and held her close until she wore herself out with crying and fell asleep.
Only Maggie stayed awake long into the night, watching the flames of Granny’s fire flickering and throwing weird shadows across the blackened ceiling and listening to the muffled shouts from the room above. She imagined they were the rough calls of the landlord’s men come to evict them from their thatched bothy in the Highlands, but Granny Beaton would cast a spell on them and they would not be able to put out the fire that was the heart of the home ...
A boat hooted somewhere out on the Tyne, much louder than could be heard in Sarah Crescent, and Maggie realised there was no escape from their new pitiful surroundings. The dismal flat with its poky slime-covered yard which they must share with strangers was a place of terror, but she must show no fear. She would never blame her mother for what had happened as Helen did; it was the fault of landlords like Thomas and powerful people like the Pearsons who did not care what became of the families of their dead and discarded workers. They would go on living in their big fancy mansion at Hebron House no matter how many riveters fell from their scaffolding while building their ships.
That night, Maggie felt the stirrings of a deep resentment in her troubled mind, a new mood of rebelliousness against the world outside. She was not sure with whom or what she was most angry, but somehow she was going to change things for the better.
With that thought to nurture and comfort her, Maggie finally fell asleep.
‘Votes for Women!’ Maggie Beaton shouted as she thrust a copy of
The Suffragette
newspaper at the people alighting from the tram. ‘Equal wages for equal work!’
Most of them ignored her, but a stout man in a bowler hat pushed her out of his way. ‘Get off home,’ he growled, ‘where you belong.’
Maggie was undaunted. ‘Penny a copy, madam,’ she spoke to the woman beside him. ‘Read about the terrible way our sisters are treated in prison - force-fed and—’
‘You should be ashamed of yourself, a young lass like you getting mixed up with them sort.’ The woman glared at her with disapproval.
‘Aye,’ her companion agreed with an aggressive jut of his fleshy chin, ‘you deserve a good hiding for going against men’s authority.’ With this he grabbed the newspaper from Maggie and tore it in half, throwing it to the ground and stamping on the Joan of Arc figure on the front.
Fuming at the man’s actions, Maggie bent down and picked up the tattered newspaper, blocking his way with her slim, defiant body.
‘That’ll be one penny, please,’ she said in a loud voice that carried over the din of trams and horse traffic.
The astonished man hesitated a moment, his jowly face colouring red as passers-by began to stop and take interest. He regained his aggression quickly.
‘Out me way! I’ll not be spoken to like that by any lass.’
‘You took the newspaper, now you’ll pay me for it,’ Maggie insisted stoutly.
‘I’ll do nothing of the sort,’ the man blustered.
A crowd began to gather round them, amused by the exchange. Maggie’s friend Rose Johnstone who had been selling copies of
The Suffragette
outside a nearby cinema hall hurried over.
‘You’ve wantonly destroyed my property,’ Maggie seized her chance for publicity as the number of spectators grew, ‘and now you are refusing to pay. It’s just another example of how women are badly treated by men. You wouldn’t have dared do that if I’d been a man, would you?’
Someone shouted, ‘What about you suffragettes destroying public property?’
Maggie rose on her tiptoes and bellowed back, ‘We women have to resort to damaging the property of the rich and powerful because they won’t listen to our arguments or give us justice. But we pay, all right. We pay with our bodies. Do you know what they’re doing to women in British prisons?’ Her voice rose. ‘Torturing them, that’s what!’
‘That’s right,’ Rose Johnstone came to her friend’s support, ‘women are being brutalised by our own British doctors and prison warders - it’s barbaric.’ Her face glowed crimson with indignation under her shock of frizzy red hair.
‘Aye,’ a woman burdened with a large basket of shopping and an infant agreed. ‘It’s not right what they’re doing, no matter what the Pankhursts and them have done.’
‘And it’s going to get worse,’ Maggie continued, feeling a thawing of hostility among the crowd. ‘The government have brought in this new law, the "Cat and Mouse" Act, which means that when the women get worn down and ill they send them home, then re-arrest them when they’re only half recovered. This way they’re trying to keep us lasses in prison for months. We’ve been outlawed and banned for daring to speak against the government.’ Her vital grey eyes scanned her audience as she shook the damaged newspaper in the air. ‘But, by heck, they’ll not silence our protest with their wicked laws! However many women foot soldiers they lock away, there’ll be more to rise up and take their place and carry forward the banner of justice for women. For ours is a just cause and we will have victory!’
Rose cheered and someone behind her started to clap. Maggie’s pale face shone as it always did when roused by her own oratory. Rose marvelled once again how people forgot her friend’s small stature and delicate appearance as soon as she began to speak in that loud resonant voice that brought horses to a standstill and children to gawp.