The white feather lay on the mahogany table in the dining room as the clock marked time on the mantelpiece.
Harry was sitting there in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves, with his head in his hands.
‘Where did that come from?’ said Kitty, panic rising in her voice. She unbuttoned her jacket and ran to his side.
Harry looked up at her, his eyes as grey as slate. ‘I went for a quick pint in the Bigg Market after work and a woman came up to me in the pub and pressed it into my hands. ‘She asked me why I wasn’t in uniform, when her son was already away fighting.’
‘But that’s ridiculous!’ said Kitty, giving her thick, auburn hair a shake as she unpinned it, letting it fall to her shoulders; she hated having to be so buttoned up for work. She sat down beside her brother. ‘She should mind her own business. You aren’t going to take any notice of a stranger, are you?’
Harry sucked in a breath. ‘I don’t see that I have a choice, Kit. I’m bound to be drafted at some point. I’m nineteen now, I’m old enough to fight. She’s right.’
Ever since the Military Service Act had been passed a couple of months ago, Kitty had known in her heart of hearts that her little brother would have to go away to war. Wherever she went, there were posters of Lord Kitchener pointing his finger, saying ‘Your Country Needs You!’ You couldn’t pass a shop window or get on a tram without seeing a bill urging young men to ‘Enlist Now!’ Lord Kitchener and his unrelenting gaze seemed to be seeking out Harry. And now, at last, he’d found him.
‘But it’s different for us because Dad isn’t here,’ said Kitty. ‘We need your wage. It’s not practical for you to go away. Mum’ll have to go back to doing extra hours teaching and you know she’s got a weak heart, and with her rheumatism it could kill her.’
Harry was working as an apprentice engineer at Hawthorn Leslie, one of the big shipbuilding firms, and he was learning how to build the diesel pumps for the engines which powered the ships, which were such a major part of Tyneside, with black smoke belching from their funnels as they headed out to sea. Just as the River Tyne ran through the heart of the city, shipbuilding was the lifeblood of the economy and it made Kitty proud that her brother was a part of that.
Mum and Kitty didn’t involve him in the running of the house, but the price of food had rocketed in recent months. They weren’t struggling to put food on the table like some folks, but they were already feeling the effects of the war on the household purse strings. Bread was getting very expensive and she and Mum had both noticed that all their essentials – meat, cheese, flour, eggs and sugar – had gone up by tuppence a pound, sometimes more. People were becoming anxious and that had even spilled over into unrest when one shopkeeper had pulled down his blinds at noon and locked the door, saying he’d run out of food. A crowd had gathered and hammered on his window, shouting abuse. Of course, the papers had just put it down to people losing their nerve, faced with the anxiety of war, but there were days when the queues were simply ridiculous and you couldn’t get basics like sugar for love nor money anywhere in the city.
Kitty’s words came gushing out, but Harry only shook his head, his jet-black hair flopping forwards as he did so.
‘There’s shame enough on this family without me adding to it by being called a coward. I’m not scared to go to the front,’ he said, scuffing his feet on the worn patch of carpet under his chair.
‘But I’m scared,’ said Kitty. ‘I’m scared for you and I’m scared about what it’ll do to Mum if you don’t come back. It will destroy her, Harry!’ She stood up and walked over to the window, where the aspidistra was wilting slightly in its yellow ornamental pot.
She read the local papers, the Northern Echo, the Newcastle Journal and the Evening Chronicle, and she’d followed the reports of how our Tommies were giving the Hun a good hiding. But she couldn’t help noticing that the list of the fallen seemed to get longer by the day. And, what’s more, she had no intention of her little brother’s name appearing there.
She hesitated for a moment and then spun around to face him. He was staring into space, thinking, as the clock ticked slowly towards the end of the hour, while the two china dogs at either end of the mantelpiece stood guard.
There was fire in her eyes as she spoke. ‘What do we care what other people think of us, Harry? Haven’t we been through enough? Don’t speak to me of shame! I won’t have it. I’m not ashamed. Dad told us never to be ashamed, to look people in the eye and hold our heads high. I’m not ashamed for you to be alive. Don’t be such a fool.’
Harry’s mouth pressed itself into a thin line and he rose to leave, his fingers gripping the green leather back of the dining room chair. ‘I care what other people think of us, Kitty. I’ve had more than five years of it. I thought it would get better, but at least when I was a boy I could raise my fists and fight, even if they beat the living daylights out of me. It’s worse now, in some ways, people talking behind our backs or giving us sideways glances.
‘This is my chance to bring some honour back to the family. My mind’s made up and there’s no changing it. I’m joining up first thing in the morning.’
Mum went into a frenzy of cleaning after Harry broke the news that he was going to volunteer, just as she had the night they’d said goodbye to Dad for the last time. Kitty tried to get her to stop, to rest and have something to eat after her long day teaching at the primary school, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
‘We can’t have the place looking like a slum, Kitty. What will the neighbours think?’ she said, frantically polishing the dining table. ‘And I’m sure people will want to pop in for tea soon to ask how Harry is getting on in the army, won’t they?’
It was Mum’s dearest wish to have people to visit, but no one ever stopped by. Mum said it was because they’d moved from the smarter side of Jesmond, with its leafy streets and grander houses, to Simonside Terrace in Heaton, which was that little bit more working class. They’d had to economize now there were just the three of them paying the bills, so it was further for friends to come. Kitty knew different. Nobody wanted to be seen darkening their door any more.
Mum’s cloth worked its way over the remnants of the life they’d led before: the piano, the glass-fronted bookcase, the tallboy with all their silver cutlery in it and the walnut kissing seat which had come from Dad’s side of the family. They’d been gentlemen farmers only a few generations back, Freemen of the city of Alnwick, before they’d moved closer to Newcastle to set up a flourishing farming and butchery business and that was the life that Dad had been born into. But he had other ideas and trained as a ship owner’s clerk instead, which hadn’t gone down too well with his father, by all accounts.
The family had blamed it all on a wild streak from the French side of the family – Dad’s mother, Zelina, was from the Champagne region, and she’d been a governess for one of the wealthy shipbuilding families in Sunderland. Dad only had the haziest of memories of her because she’d died in childbirth when he was just three but everyone who’d known her said she was a spirited woman, determined and outspoken, making her views known in an accent which was a curious mix of English overlaid with Gallic, and a distinct hint of Geordie.
Dad’s job had changed quite a bit when Kitty was growing up but that hadn’t affected their home life at first. He’d become a secretary to one of the colliery companies, but he helped broker a takeover deal which had made him redundant, even though he got a decent pay-off. Then he came into some money from a wealthy relative in France, and that’s when everything changed.
By the time Kitty was fifteen, leaving school and starting secretarial college, they’d moved to their home in Lily Avenue thanks to his inheritance. Dad’s head was full of big ideas to use his inheritance to make even more money as a speculator in the coalfields, with one eye on where the next pit shafts might be sunk, so that he’d earn yet another big commission.
Mum seemed worried by it all because Dad was spending more time away at the races, where he’d place bets on behalf of wealthy coal merchants. Kitty realized, from the hushed conversations she’d overheard between her parents, that being a bookie was illegal and he was sailing close to the wind, but Mum did her best to shield Kitty and Harry from her concerns.
There were big losses but there were big wins too, and then he’d really celebrate. Mum could only laugh when one evening he came home three sheets to the wind, clutching a massive, ornate glass bottle filled with coloured water that he’d bought from the chemist’s shop, thinking it was perfume. ‘I just want to give my darling wife a lovely present,’ he slurred, swaying slightly as she took it from him and placed it on the mantelpiece. Kitty and Harry were shooed away into the scullery while she helped him out of his new winter coat with its astrakhan collar and he fell asleep in the armchair by the fireside for a while. Later that evening, Kitty heard Mum helping Dad find his way up the stairs and into bed.
Dad was a bit shamefaced at breakfast and Mum seemed to enjoy teasing him, raising an eyebrow when Harry asked about the new glass ornament, filled with garish pink liquid, which loomed large over the table.
But what followed only a few months later was no laughing matter. Kitty had gone over and over it all in her mind. Could the people he was dealing with at the races, in Birmingham and York and Newcastle, have been to blame somehow? She was clutching at straws but sometimes she’d lie awake, staring at the ceiling, willing the hands of the clock to run backwards, so that she could say or do something that might change what had happened.
The chimes rang out in the parlour. Kitty glanced at the silver fob-watch that Dad had bought her for the last Christmas they’d had together, before their lives were turned upside down. It had been a Sunday tea-time ritual for Dad to take the clock down from the mantelpiece to wind it. Harry was supposed to do it now, as the man of the house, but he kept forgetting – at least, that was his excuse. It was running slow again. Kitty knew that once Harry had joined up that task would fall to her because Mum wouldn’t be able to bear it; it reminded her too much of the quiet Sunday evenings they used to enjoy together, reading, playing the piano or a round of bridge.
It was dark outside now and the house was filled with the overpowering smell of furniture polish. Every piece of wood shone from Mum’s efforts and she had collapsed in her favourite chair in the parlour. Kitty brought her a cup of cocoa and sat at her feet, just as she used to do when she was a girl.
‘Must he leave us?’ said Mum. She reached for the cocoa but her hands seemed almost frozen with rheumatism after all the cleaning, and she winced in pain.
Kitty lifted the cup to her mother’s lips and she took a sip and then Kitty started to rub some life back into Mum’s swollen fingers.
‘Yes,’ said Kitty, who could almost hear the sound of boots marching in time through the city streets, as hundreds of young men like Harry headed off to war. ‘He must.’
Mum dressed in black the next morning as all three of them left the house. She and Kitty were taking Harry to swear his oath of allegiance to the King. Her long skirt swept the ground as they walked, arm in arm, to the tram stop to take them the two miles from Heaton into the city. She was still a fine figure of a woman, with her waist nipped in by her corset, which she insisted on wearing every day, and she had a quiet dignity about her which commanded the respect of her pupils at school.
Kitty couldn’t be doing with all that whalebone and lacing, mind you. She wore her skirt shorter, so that her ankles and her woollen stockings were just visible, and she preferred a longer, looser belted jacket to go with her sailor-collar blouse, so that she could get through a day’s work without feeling faint. She’d been a shorthand typist and secretary for a firm of accountants in the city for the last few years. It was steady work, boring really, but at least she didn’t have to spend long hours in a factory or stand around in a shop trying to sell things to those silly, flighty women who made a career of acquiring fripperies. They dressed in gauzes and silks, trussed up in their corsets, waving their gloved hands at whatever took their fancy. Despite all that, they had nothing between their ears.
The three of them climbed aboard the No.11 tram with a huge Bovril advert emblazoned on the front and, of course, Lord Kitchener plastered on the back. Mum sat next to Harry, clasping his hand, and Kitty sat behind them, rocking gently from side to side with the movement of the tram as it clattered over the cobbles and against the metal rails. It took them down Jesmond Road, through the leafy suburb and past the cemetery and the park, where they’d spent so many happy hours when they were younger – when they were still a real family.
Kitty would have traded places with her brother, if only she could, so that Mum wouldn’t have to lose him. She should have been born a boy; that’s what Dad used to say when she was kicking up her petticoats to run about in Jesmond Dene with Harry when they were bairns. Dad hadn’t minded; in fact, he’d encouraged her. He always laughed when she and Harry played rough and tumble, his hazel eyes shining with delight. But there were limits, like the time Harry tied her to a tree in the back garden with her skipping rope and cut a lump out of her fringe in a game that got out of hand. Dad had thrashed him for that, even though she’d begged him not to.
As a schoolteacher and a working woman, Mum had encouraged her to have her own thoughts and never to be afraid to speak her mind. She was friends with Mrs Harrison Bell, who’d been a primary school teacher in Heaton, and when she became a leading light of the Newcastle and District Women’s Suffrage Committee, Mum went along to her meetings at Fenwick’s Drawing Room Cafe.
‘Off to your tea and cake chinwag again?’ Dad would tease Mum, who’d roll her eyes at him and bang the front door shut. Kitty was just turning sixteen when she was allowed to go along to those gatherings for the first time and she listened, transfixed, as Mrs Harrison Bell – who looked like she wouldn’t say boo to a goose with her little round glasses and warm expression – expounded her views on women’s emancipation with zeal, to an eager audience.
Before long, the Newcastle suffragettes had moved from the tea room of the department store and church halls to the streets. Mum and Kitty went along to listen to the speakers and to march alongside well-to-do women, wearing sashes of green, white and purple, the colours that Mrs Pankhurst wore; they signified purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope – Kitty had learned that off by heart.
What’s more, there was a group of young women, not much older than Kitty, who were in favour of direct action to force the men in power to listen.
‘Making a nuisance of themselves’ Dad had called it. Mum wasn’t in favour of that either and she made it clear to Kitty why: ‘Breaking the law is never the right thing to do. We are law-abiding people, Catherine. You must never forget that. We can’t win this battle by getting into trouble with the police. It’s about calm and reasoned argument and political change.’
But there was a spark in their eyes which ignited something in Kitty. She sewed her own little rosette to wear at meetings and on marches, but she had to pin that on her lapel when Dad wasn’t looking, or he wouldn’t be best pleased; in fact, he’d make her take it off.
Kitty began to idolize the suffragettes who carried placards and wouldn’t be shouted down by the Bigg Market thugs. Instead, they resolutely insisted that they should have a voice and rights at the ballot box, the same as men, and when it didn’t happen, they were prepared to take matters into their own hands.
Dad had put his foot down after the Battle of Newcastle in 1909. That was what the papers had called it, after suffragettes broke windows all over the town and one even took an axe to a barrier in Percy Street. The city had never seen anything like it. Lady Lytton, who was so posh she spoke like she had a mouth full of plums, chucked a stone at Chancellor Lloyd George’s car and got sent to prison, along with ten other women that Kitty had come to know so well. There were hunger strikes, and force feeding, and, in Lily Avenue, the most almighty row between Mum and Dad.
Raised voices were not something Kitty was used to. Yes, Mum might get cross when Dad had spent too much money betting on the horses or when he’d come home one over the eight after a big win, but that was about the extent of it. Until that cold night in January of 1910, just a few months before he went away for good, that is. Her parents were having a late supper together in the dining room and Kitty was upstairs in bed when she heard them rowing.
‘You cannot let her go near those bloody women again!’ he yelled. ‘I will not have my daughter involved with criminals, do you hear me?’
‘Please, Jack, don’t be so angry with me,’ Mum sobbed and then Kitty heard Dad’s murmured apologies and no more was said of it. Kitty just wasn’t allowed to go to meetings any more. After he left, she did, of course, because he was no longer there to stop her. Besides, she felt so full of rage that he’d gone, it was good to channel that anger into doing something positive.
She was only too happy when the pavilion at Heaton Park got burned down shortly before the war and she didn’t feel a shred of remorse about the attempt to set fire to Heaton station. In fact, it was a shame when the stationmaster smelled burning and found the large cardboard box filled with tins of oil, rags and a candle in one of the ladies’ lavatories because the whole timber structure would surely have gone up in flames. Not that she knew anything about it at the time, of course, but that is just what she read in the papers.
Once, she had even wanted to throw a brick through a police station window, like the suffragettes, but she’d thought better of it. Yet she could have done it. Just knowing that was enough to get her through the days in which her dreams were reduced to keystrokes at her typewriter, her ambitions boxed and filed away in buff-coloured envelopes. She still wanted more. She couldn’t help it, even if she was a woman; she was a woman with ideas and Mrs Harrison Bell, Lady Lytton, the Pankhursts and all the rest had fanned the flames of something in her and they would not be quenched. A little ember was still burning inside her. Kitty knew it could never be snuffed out, not even by this war.
The tram trundled on past the big houses, where the grocer’s van was delivering to servants. There’d been plenty of talk about the wealthiest in the city stockpiling food despite the higher prices, and while shopkeepers might close their doors and say they’d run out of eggs and flour, there always seemed to be plenty for the better-offs, Kitty had noticed that much.
Approaching the city, the buildings grew taller, blackened from years of smoke and dirt and soot. Coal and steel were the lifeblood of Newcastle but there was something elegant about it too, with the neatly laid-out gardens of Eldon Square and the imposing statue of Earl Grey at its heart, towering high above the bustling shopping streets below. They got off the tram and walked down Grainger Street to the town hall, where a crowd of young men had gathered as a recruiting officer waded through them, armed with a clipboard and pencil.
‘Now then, lads, we’ll have you sworn in in groups of ten,’ he said, his moustache bristling as he ushered the first lot inside to take the oath. ‘And you will then report to barracks in the morning.’
Mum clutched Harry’s arm. ‘Are you sure you want to do this, son?’
He turned and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It’s my duty.’
Harry joined the Royal Field Artillery and his first month was spent dressed in a Kitchener Blue standby uniform of the scratchiest serge, doing his basic training on the Town Moor in Jesmond.
Half of the moor had been dug up by miners who were practising their trench-digging skills and the other half was used to drill the new recruits. He was given leave every Sunday and came home to tea, to a hero’s welcome from Mum, even though he was yet to see a shot fired in anger.
Mum always made him his favourite bread and butter pudding, even if it meant she went without during the week to have enough leftovers. She poured him endless cups of tea and drank in every last detail of his life as a gunner.
He was based at No.1 Depot on Barrack Road and had quarters in a temporary hut at St James’s Park, the football ground across the way. The horses that would be used to pull the guns into battle were stabled underneath the stadium and Harry couldn’t hide his love for the animals and how he’d learned to ride them. There was a sense of their training being a bit like an extended holiday with the boy scouts for the new recruits. Many of them were around Harry’s age and they found humour where they could.
‘We had to fix bayonets and attack sacks stuffed with straw yesterday,’ he laughed, through mouthfuls of pudding. ‘I just sort of growled at them to keep the drill sergeant happy, but you’ve never seen ’owt so daft as a horde of us charging across the moor screaming our heads off.’
He travelled to the shooting range in Ponteland to learn how to load shells and fire them from the eighteen-pound guns and howitzers. ‘It took seven men to move the big gun into position and, oh good Lord, the noise of the shells when they exploded. My ears are still ringing,’ he said. All the fresh air and exercise seemed to have turned him into a man, and he had muscled arms from all the heavy lifting. Kitty thought he looked more handsome than ever.
But she knew that his time in Newcastle could not go on forever and so it came as no surprise one Sunday afternoon in late June when he turned up in a smart new uniform and announced excitedly that he would be leaving for France in the morning, where he was to join the 55th Lancashire Regiment of the Royal Field Artillery.
Mum and Kitty met him on the platform at Newcastle Central Station to say their farewells, amid a seething mass of khaki and weeping women. So many young men were leaving. Families were losing husbands, sons, brothers and cousins, all travelling on to an uncertain future on the fields of France and Flanders.
‘No tears,’ said Harry, hugging Kitty tightly as she handed him a little parcel containing chocolate, biscuits, tobacco, some warm socks she’d knitted and some tins of corned beef. ‘Promise me.’
‘I promise,’ said Kitty, who despite not wanting him to leave, felt so much pride in what he was doing. She’d come to accept it over the past few weeks and she was determined to keep positive. He would survive because she was willing him to.
‘Well, I won’t promise not to cry,’ said Mum, clutching him to her. ‘So just you come back safely to me, Harry.’ And she sobbed on his chest until it was time for him to go and join the other volunteers.
The carriage door slammed shut and the last Kitty saw of her brother was his hand, still waving goodbye from the window through the steam blowing down the line, as the train took him away from Newcastle and off to war.