The May morning was once again fresh and pleasant as Ellie pushed her bicycle along the bumpy lane to the main road, caught up her skirt and freewheeled down the slope to where the gradient levelled out and ran past the three separate entrances to Robinson’s farm.
Pedalling slowly, she glanced at the silver-painted, decorative gates her father had made for the shrub-lined avenue. They were closed as they always were, the drive beyond rising sharply to the farmhouse itself. Standing squarely, surrounded by a low wall, pierced by a small garden gate, also of her father’s making, the morning sun reflected from its blank windows. There was no one in sight.
She could hear the clatter of pails from the nearby byre, but was not really surprised there was no one to be seen either on the driveway or in front of the house itself. The front door was seldom used. Only the doctor or someone collecting for the Parish church would walk up the gravel path under the shadow of the monkey-puzzle to disturb the highly-polished brass knocker.
She moved on and drew level with the wide entrance to the farmyard. The large, five-barred field gate was seldom closed but there was no sign of life there either and no familiar figure to greet her. As she paused to glance in, the only movement was a row of ducks crossing from their shallow pond behind the hedge to peck hopefully among the scattered residues on the floor of the hayshed.
She stared up and down the familiar cobbled yard, its surface now caked with dried mud after two days of warmth. The hayshed stood open to the mild breeze, its year’s supply of fodder almost at an end. The tall ladders needed to stack the uppermost bales after the harvest were neatly laid to one side until the new crop came home and the solid battlements were rebuilt for another year.
Still she waited, but George was nowhere to be seen. Her heart sank, the pain of disappointment so sharp she felt angry with herself. She’d missed seeing him yesterday morning, because of setting out half an hour before her usual time, but surely he could have made a special effort to walk down the yard from the byre this morning. He knew exactly what time she left home and it would only take him a few minutes. She so needed to see him, just to exchange a few words, after the turbulence of the night.
She turned her eyes back reluctantly to the empty road and pedalled off vigorously. There was no use at all hoping she might see him at the third and final entrance to the farm. It would not be used till the milking was finished and the cows were herded along its rough, dung-splattered surface and back across the road into the largest of the Robinson meadows.
As she cycled the two miles into Armagh she barely saw the passing countryside. Yesterday, she’d had an eye for every bush and tree, for every sign of the approaching summer, and especially for the flowers of garden or hedgerow. Today, she spared not a thought to her surroundings. She could not get beyond the fact that George was going away. Going to Canada. And she was not going with him.
Without the slightest prompting on her part, the facts printed out like newspaper headlines. It felt as if she were having an argument with someone who kept asking the same things over and over again, because they either wouldn’t listen to what she was saying or didn’t accept the answers she gave them.
‘He never even thought of taking you.’
‘But that’s perfectly reasonable,’ she retorted, stung by the implicit criticism. ‘He couldn’t very well take me to a lumber camp.’
‘He might just have asked you whether you thought it was worth the separation to be able to start your married life with a home in a new country.’
As she came alongside the railway bridge, she was so absorbed in arguing on George’s behalf, she didn’t even hear the approaching roar of the Portadown train. It steamed past in the direction from which she’d come, enveloping her in a cloud of smoke and steam, but she hardly noticed the sting in her eyes or the catch in her throat and gave not a thought to the daily threat of soot particles falling on her clean blouse.
Perhaps Uncle George didn’t realise that his nephew was as good as engaged. Surely George would have told him the only reason it wasn’t announced was a lack of means. Everyone agreed there was no point getting engaged when you had no immediate prospect of getting married.
She cycled past the newly-opened gates of Drumsollen without noticing the elegant motor that paused between them until she had gone by. Sitting behind the wheel, wearing his chauffeur’s uniform, Ned Wylie watched her go and wondered what could be the matter with Ellie Scott that she didn’t give him her usual cheery wave.
Had he but known it, she was far away, trying to imagine a life in Canada, the wife of a lumber-man, or a clerk in a timber-office in an unknown town called Peterborough. The more she considered the prospect the more the thought of going to Canada filled her with anxiety. Her distress was the greater because she couldn’t imagine why she could possibly be anxious about anything, so long as she had George at her side.
She knew of lots of women who had emigrated. Indeed, that’s what two of her own sisters had done. But things were different when Polly and Jimmy had gone off five years ago. In 1927, Jimmy had a good job in Toronto to go out to with a house available at a modest rent. Two years later, Polly newly pregnant with her second child, house and job had disappeared. They’d had to sell their lovely new furniture and go into lodgings and Jimmy had been lucky even to find a labouring job.
Still, that wouldn’t happen to her and George, surely. His uncle’s was a well-established business, selling lumber in Canada and the States and exporting to Europe as well. So what was she worrying about?
Struggling and perspiring, she found herself almost at the top of Asylum Hill without having stopped and wheeled her bicycle up its steep slope. Gasping, she got off to catch her breath.
Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, she remembered something Polly had said quite recently. If she and George were thinking of Canada he had to have a job lined up and an employer’s address to put on his papers before Immigration would consider them.
She always told George about what Polly said in her letters. When she went to meet him that particular evening, she’d wondered how he’d react when she mentioned the fact that Polly thought they might be thinking of joining her and Jimmy. But George had just listened to Polly’s news, laughed and said Canada wasn’t for him. He was a home bird and so was she. Something would turn up for them soon to let them get settled.
Some months later Polly had written to say the Canadian Government had begun to encourage immigrants who’d not become Canadian citizens to go back home. They were even handing out one-way tickets to speed up the process. With times as hard in Canada now as they were at home, there wasn’t much point either of them thinking any more about it whether they were home birds or not, so she hadn’t even mentioned it to George.
She wondered if this was why she felt so upset and so confused. She’d completely accepted that they were homebirds. Some people were like that. She’d heard many a person say, for better or worse, they wanted to stay where they were, her father for one.
Many times he’d told the story of having the chance to go out to Alberta. His much older half-brother, Charley, had a successful clothing business and wrote home to his mother and told her any one in the family, brothers or sisters, or even friends, would be welcome. He’d pay their fare, fill in their papers, have a job for them and find them somewhere to live until they got settled. But her father had said no. Charley was a good-hearted man and it was generous of him to make the offer. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate it, but this was his place and here he intended to stay.
She sighed. Perhaps she had thought George was a man like her father, but clearly she’d been wrong.
The outskirts of the city were always quiet on a Saturday morning. As most of the goods arriving by rail came on weekdays, neither the jingle of harnesses nor the oppressive grinding of wheels on the cobbles outside the station gates interrupted her thoughts. Peddling on up Railway Street, she didn’t have to pull in and stop if two Wordie carts met each other head on, one with a projecting load, the other empty, the carters shouting to each other as they edged past in the confined space.
Later, it would be busy enough as farmers and their wives came in to do the weekly shopping. But they would not appear till the morning jobs were done in byre and dairy and the mare brought up from some nearby field to be put between the shafts of the trap.
As the sun moved higher and cleared the rooftops in English Street, she pedalled on, perspiring now, her thoughts exhausted for the moment. She slowed to a crawl behind a hay float laden with wooden crates on its way to the egg packing station in Dobbin Street and scanned the frontage of the local newspaper office. Attached to the walls between the windows of the densely-packed shop were bright and bold posters. She loved their colour and pattern and their striking images, but this morning she couldn’t bear to look at the familiar images displaying the ships of the Canadian Pacific Line.
They had been advertising cruises and holidays for weeks now. She loved the white ships on the blue water, the sharp line of the hull contrasted with the smooth rounded curves of the clouds of steam set against a perfect summer sky. There was one of the Rockies as well, high and jagged with patches of snow in dazzling sunshine. Superimposed upon them was a train steaming across the prairies, a smiling couple, arms entwined, in the observation car just like those she’d seen on the screen at the Ritz cinema, the man pointing into the distance with a long, suntanned arm.
Perhaps George had something like that in mind, she said to herself, suddenly glancing back at the smiling couple. She would come out to join him. He would meet her in Quebec and they would travel on to their new home, wherever that might be. Distances were so vast in Canada. Instead of an hour on the train to Belfast, you might say a day to Toronto, or two days to Alberta. George’s geography wasn’t any better than her own, but he’d made the point last evening about the size of the country, the huge, wide open spaces. So different from the place they lived where nothing of any importance to you was more than a few miles away, and a hundred miles in almost any direction would take you to the sea.
Just as she was beginning to worry about being late for work, the float pulled off unexpectedly to one side of Market Place where the nurserymen were laying out their wares in front of the Technical College. As she set off again she saw a young man emerge from behind the egg boxes and begin unloading bundles of cabbages and a couple of young trees wrapped in sacking.
Though not the main one of the week, the Saturday market was already crowded and busy. Women were examining trays of bedding plants laid out on trestle tables and well-wrapped shrub roses parked against them. She glanced across at the splashes of colour, an equal and opposite grey sadness clutching at her. How often had she gone to walk among those same trestle tables in her lunch hour, looking at similar plants and just occasionally allowing herself to buy one she could slip for cuttings, growing them on in her own garden till such time as she and George would make their garden together. She couldn’t take wee plants to Canada, so there’d be no point in making any more.
She edged her way through the market and was just rounding the corner into Scotch Street when she heard the clatter of hooves. She stopped and waited while three heavy Shire horses pulling grocery vans emerged one by one from the yard behind the tall, red-brick frontage of the Co-op. They blocked her path till there was a gap in the traffic coming up Scotch Street and they were able to turn right down Thomas Street on their way to begin their morning rounds in the villages to the west of the city.
She freewheeled the remaining short distance to Freeburns High Class Drapers, its wide, plate glass windows dazzling now in the morning light. She wheeled her bicycle up a narrow entry between high brick walls, pushed open the door into a crowded yard and parked it against a mangle left to rust beside the door of what had once been the privy. She had barely crossed the stone floor of the maid’s scullery and set foot on the servant’s staircase when a familiar voice echoed from the floor above.
‘Ah, Miss Scott, you have arrived.’
‘Good morning, Miss Walker,’ she replied politely, as she climbed the narrow stair, perfectly aware of the older woman’s half-concealed glance at the fob watch pinned to the ample bosom of her severe black dress.
Ellie did not possess a watch, but she knew the cathedral clock had not yet struck the half-hour. She followed the dark figure across a landing stacked to the ceiling with cardboard boxes and into a small, congested room, known as ‘the Staff-room’ which also served as an additional store for bales of cloth and yet more boxes of extra stock. She hung up her bag on the hook provided, took out her comb, ran it quickly through her hair and straightened her blouse and skirt.
Now in her sixties, Miss Walker was a tall, unbending woman with steel grey hair and eyes so pale they seemed to lack any colour at all. She had been senior assistant at Freeburns for the last thirty-five years. Her greatest virtue was the meticulous attention she gave to any piece of information that passed before her eyes, accompanied by an enormous memory for detail. Her greatest vice was a complete lack of forgiveness for anyone not similarly gifted.
She stared at Ellie as if unwilling to accept, for the moment, the girl was presenting no opportunity for the sharp comments she felt entitled, and indeed required, to make on any aspect of her punctuality, appearance or demeanour. She compensated herself for this lost opportunity by a quite unnecessary asperity in conveying her instructions.
‘I’ve made a list of replacement stock, Miss Scott. As soon as Miss Hutchinson favours us with her presence, I want you to collect the boxes and take them downstairs. You will need to do them one at a time behind the counter so that there are no boxes sitting on the floor when customers are …’
Though Ellie had heard the instruction a hundred times before, she assumed a gravely attentive expression, but this time Miss Walker was forced to break off as the door flew open. A tall, round-faced girl burst into the room, dark curls sticking damply to her flushed cheeks. From the floor below, the former kitchen clock ran through its preliminary wheezings. After a moment of complete silence, its tinny notes rose up through the stairwell. Though muffled by the barricades of cardboard boxes piled high on the landing outside, its message was clear enough. Eight thirty. They listened in silence as it struck the half hour.
‘You may indeed be in time for work, Miss Hutchinson, but I hardly think by any stretch of the imagination one could say you were ready for work.’
‘I’m sorry Miss Walker. Scotch Street is desperate busy. There was a Crossley tender tryin’ to get down the street through the carts comin’ up for the market an’ I coulden get through.’
‘Perhaps if you’d left home somewhat earlier the necessary activities of our Police force would not have inconvenienced you,’ the older woman replied sarcastically. ‘Tidy yourself up and when you’re fit to be seen come and take over from me in the Ladies Department. Miss Scott has her duties already.’
Her lips snapped shut on the last word like a vice and she sailed out with as much dignity as the congested area permitted.
‘The old cow!’
‘Shh, Daisy, she’ll hear you,’ said Ellie softly, as she took out her comb and pushed her friend gently down on to a bentwood chair. ‘Let me do it, I’m quicker than you.’
One look at Daisy’s crumpled face told Ellie that things were bad. It wasn’t just the effort of getting up early and cycling the three miles from her home on the other side of the city, it was the burden she’d been carrying since her father had died suddenly, two years ago, leaving his small farm in debt.
For some time now her mother had been poorly. The doctor didn’t seem to know what was wrong. That meant the only labour they had was Daisy herself and her two younger brothers, Bill and Johnny, who were both still at school. Their only regular income was Daisy’s meagre pay. However much she hated Miss Walker, she just could not afford to upset her. Getting the sack would be a disaster.
‘What’s happened, Daisy. Something’s wrong,’ Ellie whispered as she undid the black ribbon, caught up the dark curls and repinned them into a neat chignon.
‘We’ve had a notice from the landlord. He says he’ll put the bailiffs in if we don’t pay up,’ she said gasping, her eyes wide, her lips trembling on the verge of tears. ‘What am I goin’ to do Ellie? What am I goin’ to do?’
‘I don’t know, Daisy, but we’ll think of something,’ she replied, giving her a little kiss on the cheek. ‘Tuck your blouse in, it’s out at the back. We’ll go and have an ice-cream after work. My treat,’ she added hastily, as she saw the look of anxiety in her friend’s eyes. ‘Now away down as quick as you can. Give her no excuse to pull you up. We’ll manage something. We really will.’
Ellie took a deep breath, put her comb away and consulted Miss Walker’s list, but the beautifully written copperplate suddenly blurred before her eyes as the thought came back to her yet again that George was going away and she was going to have to remain. Here, in this cramped and confined room. Here, in the more spacious but equally confining Ladies Department. Here, being polite and courteous and helpful to people who were seldom polite to her in return, seldom courteous and rarely helpful.
But she had a home to go to, a roof over her head, and was short of money only because she’d been saving every penny she could, whereas poor Daisy had to spend every penny she earned on food for the family and meal for the hens. She hadn’t even been able to afford a new blouse in all of the two years she’d been at Freeburns and her shoes had pieces of cardboard in them, because she couldn’t afford the cobbler in Jenny’s Row.
The box of Ladies Knickers, Large she needed was at the bottom of the pile stacked on the landing. She reached up, tugged at a box labelled Leather Gloves, Black which was pressed against the low ceiling, managed to slow its fall as it tipped towards her and dragged it to one side. A further struggle with Aprons and Overalls, assorted enabled her to reach the one she needed. She had just finished rebuilding the column of boxes and was about to pick up Ladies Knickers, Large when from below she thought she heard her name.
Yes, someone was calling her. For a moment, she didn’t recognise the speaker. She picked up her box and staggered down the steep stair. The voice called again and she realised who it was. Miss Walker, of course. Who else? She was in the shop and the voice was her shop voice, so there must be a customer present.
‘Miss Scott. Do come down please. Mrs Richardson is here and she would like your assistance with some of our new material.’
Miss Walker beamed at her as she stepped into the well-lit rear of the shop and looked around the cardboard shield of Ladies Knickers, Large.
‘Oh Miss Scott, do leave that box for one of the young gentlemen. Really, my dear, that’s much too heavy for you,’ she said, smiling across at Mrs Richardson as Ellie put it down and came up to the counter already strewn around with swathes of fabric.
Ellie said ‘Good Morning’ smiled politely and took a deep breath. The working day had begun in earnest. Whatever problems she or Daisy might have, there would be no rest or comfort for either of them till it had ended.