The summer of 1911 was hot and the sun beamed down almost every day, turning mill sheds into infernos for the people who slaved inside them. In the slums wan-faced children played on the street wearing only dirty, ragged vests and dancing about with loud shrieks when the sunbaked cobbles became too hot to be trodden on with bare feet.
The smells that emanated from the crowded tenement buildings were stomach-churning and many a tired man and woman, trudging home at night, lifted their eyes and stared across the wide estuary of the Tay to the sun-dappled coast of Fife where white houses glittered in the evening light. Over there the trees, green fields and houses with spacious gardens looked like an unattainable Promised Land.
When Cairds chose the hottest week of the year to announce that their staff was to be cut but the same number of looms had to be kept in operation by the remaining workers, discontent spread like a forest fire.
‘It’s no’ possible,’ cried angry women at street corners. ‘They’re expecting one woman to run two looms. Anybody that agrees to it’ll be doing a friend out of a job.’
A local clergyman, concerned for the people of his parish who could not bear any more unemployment and deprivation, helped a few men to form a union which presented the workers’ case to Cairds’ management. The presentation was summarily thrown out and there was no alternative for them but to call a strike. In a matter of hours the strike spread to every mill in the town and the streets were full of angry, shouting people.
In the jute-men’s club news of the strike was greeted without anxiety.
‘It’ll not last long. They’ll go back when they’re hungry,’ said Sooty Sutherland.
‘If you ask me they’re only striking now because it’s fine weather and they think it’s nice to sit in the sun for a bit. When the weather breaks they’ll be knocking on our doors again,’ was the contribution from one of the Bruntons.
‘They can knock!’ said a grim-faced Caird. ‘We’re locking our gates against them. They’ll not get in when they come back. By the time we open they’ll be ready to agree to anything we want just to have work.’
‘And then you’ll cut their wages, won’t you?’ Goldie Johanson’s grim voice rose above their chatter.
His friends nodded gleefully. ‘That’s the idea, Goldie!’
‘For God’s sake, haven’t any of you seen bairns in the slums with faces like sixpenny pieces?’ he asked.
‘That’s not our worry,’ said Sutherland. ‘If they care about their bairns they shouldn’t strike.’
That night the workers thronged into the streets, singing and shouting. Banners waved above their heads as they paraded from mill gate to mill gate, rousing the nightwatchmen. They plastered posters on mill walls, instructing all workers to withdraw their labour, and next day only a handful turned up at any workplace. The looms were silent and the town seemed strangely hushed. People who should have been working hung about in sullen groups outside the gates, watching and jeering as the mill managers and owners went in.
A few rowdy characters took too much to drink and were quickly out of hand but the police stood by, unwilling to wade in against their own kind. They knew the people had justification for their anger. Around midnight the drunken mob joyously looted Alex Henderson’s High Street shop and dark-shawled women could be seen flitting up closes into the tenements carrying huge cheeses and immense hams. There had never been such feasting in many homes as there was that week.
On the following day it was decided that drastic action was necessary and because the Dundee-born bobbies were reluctant to act, the Lord Provost sent to Glasgow and Edinburgh for police reinforcements. Within hours trains steamed into the station carrying uniformed constables and their horses. When they clattered in a long line into the High Street to push back the crowd, the simmering anger of the people erupted into real violence. Till then they had been fairly good-natured, but this was war.
The strikers hauled at the policemen’s booted legs and managed to pull some of them out of their saddles. Fists flew and eyes were blackened, truncheons crashed down on unprotected heads and the terrified horses neighed and reared, their steel-shod hooves flashing above the fighting men and women.
When the police withdrew to regroup they left behind a scene of devastation with shattered windows in the fashionable shops and luxury goods strewn up and down the pavements as another army of looters moved in.
The main body of protestors, realizing that no headway would be made in the centre of the town, decided to take their anger direct to the mill owners in their fine houses.
Well over two thousand people were out in protest and they listened as their leaders shouted orders: ‘We’ll go to the Perth Road first. Sooty lives there and so does Coffin Mill. Let’s go and show them what we’re made of!’
‘Green Tree’s out there too,’ shouted a voice from the throng and the mob started running westwards, howling for vengeance.
Lizzie had tried to stop her workers from striking. She stood in the middle of her yard and shouted to the crowd of sullen women, ‘Come to work. You know I pay better wages than anybody else. Come to work and I’ll put you up a penny an hour.’
She was desperate because her order books were full and she could not waste a single day.
The women turned away from her. Outside the gate stood a union organizer who was also exhorting them: ‘Don’t blackleg. If the strike’s not total, it won’t work. Don’t blackleg!’
Loyalty to their own kind won and Lizzie’s mill shut down like all the others. She was infuriated by what she considered the ingratitude of her work force and when she returned to Tay Lodge she went straight to bed, suffering from a raging headache.
It was after midnight when she wakened. She thought she was dreaming about being engulfed by a roaring sea but, sitting up in bed, she swiftly realized that what she was hearing was not a dream. What sounded like a torrent of water was coming down her drive and surging around her house. She rushed across to hold back the curtain and look into the garden. To her horror, hundreds of people were surging over her flowerbeds and trampling her lawn. Their faces were turned up in the light of torches, staring at her windows, mouths wide open like black yawning holes out of which poured words of hate. ‘Green Tree, Green Tree, ye fancy bitch, come oot and talk tae us! Green Tree, we want more money!’
Without stopping to consider the danger, she dragged on a lace-trimmed dressing gown and ran downstairs in her bare feet. When she threw open the front door her face was thunderous.
‘Get off my property,’ she shouted, pointing with an extended arm towards the gatehouse at the end of the drive where her head gardener and his family were cowering.
‘And whae’ll make us? You?’ called a tubby woman in the front of the throng. Lizzie recognized her as one of the winders from her own mill.
Charlie, accompanied by a growling Bran, came up at his mother’s side and put a hand on her arm in a protective way. ‘Don’t do anything silly, Ma, there’s a lot of them,’ he whispered.
Behind him stood Maggy with Lexie and at the back of the hall the maids huddled in a terrified cluster. There was no way a few women and a boy could defend the house against the riotous mob if they decided to enter. She felt a chill of fear and did not enjoy the sensation because acknowledging that she was afraid was alien to her nature.
‘What do you want? Why have you come here? Who’s your leader?’ As she spoke she stepped out on to the granite step of her entrance porch and felt the chill of stone beneath her toes. The crowd fell silent at the sight of her. They had expected her to barricade the door against them, leaving them to wreak havoc in her garden, break a few windows and go away to do the same somewhere else. They really had no intention of anything worse.
Her question – ‘Who’s your leader?’ – made some of the men in the front of the party stare at each other till one young fellow stepped forward.
‘We’ve come to protest against the way you mill owners are treating the workers. There’s been a lot of wage cuts and now you’re trying to make people work two looms at once.’
Lizzie stared back at him, her head high, unconscious of the fact that her shapely figure in the diaphanous nightclothes was outlined by the glare of the house lights behind her.
‘I don’t do that. I’ve not been a bad employer. Why come and cause trouble for me?’
‘You pay the same as the others. When they cut their wages, you cut yours.’ The man realized it had been a mistake to start explaining himself for the rage of the people behind him was gradually dissipating like a kettle going off the boil. Fear of the consequences of their actions was creeping into their collective consciousness. From the tail of his eye he saw one or two slipping away and disappearing among the trees of Lizzie’s garden.
Something had to be done to rally them so he bent down and lifted a stone out of the flowerbed. With a swing of his arm, he cast it at one of the drawing room windows, which shattered. The crowd and the owner of Green Tree stared at the hole as if they could not believe their eyes but she went on standing bravely in the porch, defying anyone to cast a stone at her. No one did. Still shouting, they turned and flooded back the way they had come.
When the last of them had gone, Lizzie walked with trembling legs into her house. Her family and the maids parted in front of her with looks of respect and Charlie said with awe in his voice, ‘My word, you were brave, Ma!’
She put her hands over her eyes and said, ‘Get me a drink. I think I’m going to faint.’
Maggy rushed up and helped her to a chair; Charlie ran for the decanter and poured out a glass. When she sipped it, she felt better and her fear disappeared but it was replaced by anger that made her cry out, ‘What a terrible thing to do to me. I’ve not been a bad employer, not like the Cairds or the Sutherlands. But let them see what I’m like now. Just let them see. I’ll show them.’
The strike did not last long. Within a week, as Mr Caird had predicted, the hunger of their children drove the first strike breakers back to work. The trickle became a flood but the people who returned to their looms and spinning frames were angry, because instead of having improved their lot, the strike made it worse. Mill managements took the opportunity to impose more wage cuts and harder schedules. Lizzie Kinge was among them. She no longer tried to explain herself to the women who worked for her but passed on hard orders to her overseers and let them do her dirty work. When other mills cut wages, so did she; when they paid off staff, Green Tree did the same; people injured at work received minimal pay-offs; women whose children were sick knew that if they were as much as five minutes late to work, their jobs would be gone.
She was angry and she was lonely. From her desk in the mill office she stared bleakly out at her yard which was full of carts piled high with bales of jute. Men with aprons belted round their waists with thick leather straps hurried back and forward unloading the carts and filling her sheds with the raw material of her success.
For she was successful, very successful. Green Tree was making a profit and Lizzie’s own bank balance was so satisfactory that when any transactions were done these days, it was the bank manager who came to see her. It seemed like a thousand years since she walked with little Charlie to the bank on the corner of Dens Road to make her deposits and withdrawals. How thrilled she had been on the day the bank manager offered her a glass of sherry!
Her mind ran back over the years and she remembered her happiness with Sam. That joy could never return, she would never feel so light and free again. It seemed that she was remembering another woman when she thought of Lizzie, wife of Sam. Now she was Green Tree, a businesswoman with a talent for making money and an empty heart.
With a shrug she stood up and walked to the window, still slim, still erect, high-breasted and proud.
Today was her fortieth birthday.
Today she had found a strand of silver in the hair that curled back from her temples.
Today when her son, Lexie and Maggy gave her their gifts she remembered how her father always used to arrive on her birthday morning with a sheaf of flowers. Tears shone in her eyes like sparkling diamonds.
When her workers saw her standing bleak-faced in the window, they bustled about frantically. No one wanted to appear lazy or slow because her temper was quick and she had been known to dismiss a worker out of hand for nothing more than a minor error.
‘She’s not a hard woman. She’s a soft heart inside,’ Maggy assured her sister Rosie when they discussed the gossip that went the rounds about Lizzie Kinge.
‘If she’s soft-hearted, the Dens Law’s made of marshmallie,’ said Rosie disbelievingly.
‘She misses her father. She’s lonely and she’s got nothing but her mill. She’s determined that it’s not going to fail,’ Maggie protested on Lizzie’s behalf.
‘She goes about with that grocer Henderson, doesn’t she? Why doesn’t she marry him? He’d fit her book well enough. He speaks gey fancy and he’s plenty of money,’ said Rosie.
Maggy shook her head. ‘She’ll never marry again. She was daft about Sam and no man’ll ever match up to him as far as she’s concerned.’
Rosie snorted. ‘They’re a’ the same when you’ve got them between the sheets. She’s needing a man – but Henderson wouldn’t be much help judging by the look of him.’
Rosie’s opinion of Alex was secretly shared by Lizzie, but though she would have reacted in horror if he made a lover-like approach to her, it piqued her that he did not. They attended parties and dances, they sat side by side at concerts and Temperance meetings, which he attended with great regularity though a large part of his fortune came from selling wines and spirits to less rigid customers. They played cards together and it seemed that this amiable relationship was perfecdy sufficient for Alex. She was not sexually attracted to him, but Lizzie felt slighted by his indifference to her as a woman. Was it only Sam who found her appealing? Her loneliness and the awareness that Lexie and Charlie were growing up and could not be expected to stay with her for ever preyed on her mind. The future stretched before her like a desert.
‘The bobby’s been here about Charlie again,’ said Maggy sadly when Lizzie arrived home that evening.
‘What’s he done this time?’ asked his mother. The local police constable was a frequent visitor at her house.
‘Somebody broke a window with a football in that big house with the fancy flowerpots in Magdalen Yard. He says it wasn’t him but the maid said she saw an Airedale running away with the laddie that kicked the ball.’
‘He’s too old to be kicking footballs around. My God, he’s fifteen,’ wailed Lizzie.
She paced to and fro, going over his most recent transgressions – broken windows, street fights, impudence to all and sundry, gambling, truancy, lavish expenditure, even coming in smelling of beer, not to mention that he’d been smoking cigarettes for months and had recently progressed to cigars.
‘Come and have your supper. He’ll not be back for hours,’ said Maggy.
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘But the cook’s made sole with prawn sauce. Lexie’s mouth’s watering.’
‘Oh, all right. If she’s waiting for me.’
Lexie was sitting at the dining table with her red hair neatly brushed. The girl was growing up. All at once she had a look of adulthood.
‘That’s a pretty dress. Where did you get it?’ asked Lizzie when she sat down, trying to break the ice between them.
A flush made the thickly clustered freckles stand out even more. Those freckles and the red hair were two very obvious legacies from Chrissy though Lexie, thank heavens, did not have her mother’s victimized attitude to life.
‘You bought it for me last winter,’ she said.
‘Did I? It suits you. What have you been doing today?’ Lexie shuffled her knife and fork to and fro on the tablecloth. ‘I – er – I went down to visit George. He’s not very well. What’s consumption, Lizzie?’ The question came out in a quick rush as if it was something that had been on Lexie’s mind for a while.
Lizzie stared blankly at the girl. ‘It’s an illness. It’s what your mother died of.’
Lexie nodded. ‘I thought so.’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘It’s just something I heard today.’
A tightness came to Lizzie’s throat. ‘About George, you mean?’
Lexie looked at her. ‘It was just something Rosie said.’
‘Did she say he’s got consumption?’
Lexie nodded. ‘Yes, she did.’
Lizzie rose from the table and tinkled the silver bell that stood beside her plate. When the maid came in, she said, ‘Send for my carriage. I’m going out.’
It was a very long time since Lizzie had visited the Vaults but as soon as she entered the courtyard behind the Exchange Coffee House she was carried back in memory to her childhood.
Suddenly and very vividly she remembered her mother. She relived the night the bridge fell. Her steps speeded up in anxiety to reach her brother. The fates had not relented about her family. George was in danger.
The door at the bottom of the stair that led to Rosie’s home stood ajar. There was no paint on it, but then she could never remember it being painted. The huge hinges were rusted and pitted with age. The stair was dark and smelt disgusting. She hitched up her long skirt in one hand and began the climb, her shoes slithering on the crumbling steps that were worn to deep hollows in the middle. Her flesh crawled as it had always done with fear that an enormous rat would suddenly jump out at her. She remembered her brother asking Maggy to confirm that the rats dipped their tails into the whisky casks that were stored in a warehouse on the other side of the courtyard.
‘Drunk rats!’ she whispered to herself, and with an effort continued her climb.
The Davidsons’ room was not as poverty-stricken as it had been in the past. A table with a white cloth stood in the middle of the floor and two armchairs were drawn up at the cheerfully blazing fireside. Pottery jugs and framed prints were ranged along the mantelpiece and there was a flowering plant in the window. Rosie turned in astonishment when she saw Lizzie in the doorway. For once her glib tongue failed her and she was lost for words.
‘Where is he? Why did no one let me know?’ asked Lizzie.
Rosie gestured with her hand to the box bed in the corner where the outline of a body could be seen beneath the covers.
‘How bad is it?’ Lizzie’s voice was quavering.
‘He’s fevered and he’s spitting blood but he’s been worse,’ Rosie told her.
‘Lexie said he’s got consumption.’
‘That’s what they call it. The doctor says George should go and live someplace sunny. I said the sunniest place he’s likely to go is Wormit,’ said Rosie, pointing in the direction of Fife.
‘I’ll pay for him to go to Italy,’ said Lizzie with determination.
Just then a voice came from the bed: ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. What would I do in Italy?’
She ran to kneel by the bed. ‘Why didn’t you let me know? How long has this been going on?’ With guilt she realized that it was several months since she’d seen her brother. Business had occupied her mind to such an extent that it shut out everything else.
Rosie was clattering pans on the hearth. ‘He’s been poorly for a couple of months. He’s not been working.’
Lizzie looked down at the flushed face of her brother. ‘How are you living?’ she asked.
‘I’m working and Johnny sends money,’ said Rosie fiercely. ‘I keep him. He’s my man and I keep him.’
Lizzie looked round the dark room. Though it was better furnished than when the Davidsons were children, it was still a slum and it horrified her that her brother was lying ill in such a place.
‘My carriage is outside. I’ll take you back with me to Tay Lodge,’ she told him.
Rosie advanced, arms crossed over her bosom. ‘You’ll dae naething o’ the sort. You don’t want to go to Tay Lodge do you, George?’ She pronounced Tay Lodge in exaggeratedly fancy tones.
George raised his head and said, ‘No, I don’t. Rosie’s looking after me well, Lizzie. Don’t make trouble.’ Then he slumped back on his pillows as the coughing started.
Lizzie fled the house, but not to go home. Instead she drove to the house of young Dr McLaren, the son of her old friend, and knocked on his door.
‘I want you to go and examine my brother. I want to know exactly how ill he is and exactly what should be done for him. I want you to do it as soon as possible.’
Next day, Dr McLaren appeared at Green Tree Mill and requested an interview with Mrs Kinge. When he was shown into her office, she rushed to usher him to a chair. Her heart was thudding in terror of what she was about to hear.
‘You’ve seen George?’
He nodded.
‘What do you think?’ Her eyes were searching his face as she asked the question.
‘Your brother has chronic pulmonary tuberculosis,’ he said.
The word ‘chronic’ sounded like a death knell in Lizzie’s ears.
‘Is he going to die?’ she whispered.
Dr McLaren shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. It’s a very variable disease. The attacks come and go but he’s been well fed all his life and he’s well looked after. Rosie buys him milk and he’s kept warm.’
‘Is there anything else that can be done?’
‘If you could wave a magic wand and change the climate in this town it might help,’ joked the doctor. ‘Otherwise you mustn’t worry. He’s as well as can be expected. We’ll just have to keep an eye on him.’