‘You’ve done what?’Aunt Hatt sank into a chair in the back room later that morning, looking up at Annie with plain horror on her face. ‘Annie Hanson – you’ve only been out of my sight for a couple of hours!’
‘Well, you did say you were going to toughen us up,’ Annie said. She could not help the triumphant grin spreading over her face. Margaret was mortified at Annie’s forwardness, seeing that her aunt looked genuinely upset. They had already quarrelled about it on the way home.
‘Couldn’t you have stopped her?’ Aunt Hatt looked at Margaret. Aunt Hatt didn’t know Annie, Margaret thought. If there was ever a born crusader it was her. Annie thought she was going to convert the world by sheer force of personality.
‘I didn’t know she was going to do it and then it was too late, Auntie – I’m sorry,’ Margaret said, very dismayed by what had happened.
‘Whatever would your father say? He’ll think I’m letting you run wild – or worse, making skivvies out of you.’
‘Oh, no – he won’t,’ Annie assured her with her usual forceful confidence. ‘You don’t need to tell him, do you? And Mother used to say, Perfect love casteth out fear . . . One John, chapter four, verse eighteen. How can you take the message of God’s love into the world if we’re afraid to be in it in the first place?’
Aunt Hatt stared at her nonplussed, this being a dilemma with which she was not especially familiar.
‘I just want to get some experience, Aunt,’ Annie said, more appeasingly.
‘Well, you’ll certainly get that,’ Aunt Hatt retorted. ‘And a lot more, if I know anything about those places.’
After their tour of the works of Watts & Son that morning, the girls had gone into the front office where Susan was seated at her desk, Bridget standing at the bench by the window, surrounded by little boxes, and Cousin Georgie leaning over his mother’s desk, the two of them talking shop. Aunt Hatt looked elegant as ever, a gold brooch pinned to the high neck of her dress.
Georgie greeted them in his friendly way and said he would bring Clara and little Jimmy over to meet them as soon as they could all manage and that they must come to Handsworth and visit the house.
‘We thought we might go out for a short while,’ Margaret said tentatively. It now felt as if she and Annie were in the way in the office as well as in the rest of the house. With all this business carrying on around them it felt as if the only place to go to was the attic.
‘D’you think it’s all right for them to wander about like that?’ Aunt Hatt asked Georgie.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Susan piped up. She had a brisk, confident manner. Bridget was nodding her agreement.
‘People always think there are thieves and robbers on every corner in this part of town,’ Georgie said. ‘There’re always some who are out for what they can get, but it’s quite safe just to walk about in the daytime – don’t you worry. Just don’t go wandering too far off – and mind the horse road. You won’t be used to as much traffic as we have here.’
Margaret could see that Aunt Hatt was torn between needing the two of them out of her hair while feeling responsible for their safety.
‘We’ll be all right, Auntie,’ she said. ‘We go out and about at home all the time, visiting people and so on.’ A pang of homesickness gripped her as she said this. If only they could be there today, in the peace and beauty of the countryside, serving the people of their own village as they had always done.
‘Well, if you think you’ll be all right,’ Aunt Hatt said. ‘You needn’t get lost – just ask for Chain Street and anyone’ll tell you the way. Mrs Sullivan puts our dinner on the table at one o’clock, all right?’
Straw hats on, they set out into the humid morning and the stench and clamour of the streets at the heart of the jewellery quarter.
‘Oh, dear – I do feel we’re in the way,’ Margaret fretted. ‘We can’t stay long, can we?’ She felt in every way out of place, a country bumpkin with a gentle West Country accent, not knowing how to go about anything.
‘I don’t know,’ Annie said. ‘I think she likes having us – but it would all be so much easier if we had something to do.’
‘How can we?’ Margaret said. ‘There’s so much to learn. I can hardly even remember the name of anything Uncle told us about this morning, can you?’
‘No!’ Annie laughed. ‘Never mind – let’s just have a look around and see. It’s not as busy as yesterday, is it?’
‘I’ve never seen so many people as then,’ Margaret agreed.
Margaret was glad of Annie’s steadiness, when her own heart was aflutter with nerves. She felt queasy – partly from having to eat porridge which always turned her up a bit. But this seemed to be how she felt all the time now, shocked and trembling inside, as if she was horribly changed and life could never be the same again.
The streets were not as thronging at eleven in the morning as they had been at going-home time. All the same, there was still plenty happening. They linked arms and walked the blue brick pavements, gazing about them. They passed along Frederick Street, Vittoria Street and Vyse Street, reading the signs and plaques over the doorways, trying to take in the sheer number and variety of trades: the silversmiths and goldsmiths; the factories making buttons of brass, bone and shell; the pen makers, enamellers and die sinkers; the badge makers, spectacle and false-eye makers; the gem setters and engravers and makers of church metalwork. Each street was a warren of doorways, entries, overhead passageways linking buildings with ramshackle parts added on to them and protruding out of them, looking as if they must fall at any moment. The roads were busy with horses and carts.
Margaret felt a rank taste building in her mouth. To walk was to move through smells: here the sudden stench of horse urine, or a pungent acid whiff from the nearby buildings; coal dust forever on the air, horse muck lying on the cobbles with flies swarming over it, and in the heat, which was becoming oppressive, the rot of refuse collecting in the backyards.
Everyone seemed to be in a hurry. Barrows rumbled along the pavements, pushed either by men who seemed impossibly old and bent or boys who appeared just as unfeasibly small, looking like tiny, barefoot men. They saw two lads who had discarded their barrows, the basket containers piled with parcels and bundles, and were setting about each other with their knuckles.
Annie, used to being a Sunday-school teacher and bosser of children, immediately went up to them.
‘What d’you think you’re doing?’ she said. ‘That’s no way to go on, is it? You stop that and get back to your work!’
‘Annie!’ Margaret protested, horrified – and too late. ‘You can’t just . . .’
The boys stopped for a second, bemused. The smaller of the two, perhaps nine years old, was ragged and filthy, a cap on his head at a cock-eyed angle. He moved his jaw, spat into the gutter, shot Annie a look of insolent indifference and the two of them went back to punching each other with renewed enthusiasm.
Annie was not used to people not doing as she said.
‘Come away, Annie.’ Margaret pulled her arm. ‘For goodness’ sake, you’re not in charge of them.’
Annie glanced back at their barrows. ‘I wonder what they’ve got in there.’
‘Whatever it is, it’s probably worth a king’s ransom,’ Margaret laughed. ‘No one seems to take any notice!’
For some reason she had enjoyed the boys not doing as Annie said, as if there was a devil in her that warmed to flagrant disobedience in someone else. And, to her surprise, now she had got out, it felt exhilarating walking the streets like this, discovering new things. They had lived in the small village ever since they could remember.
They seemed to be walking towards the edge of the quarter now. The buildings became shoddier. Instead of the ornate, variegated brick buildings with beautiful windows, everything felt more drab and mean and the road was quieter. ‘Camden Street’, they read, ‘Pope Street’, ‘Craig Street’.
‘I think we’re going too far,’ Margaret said. She had started to feel uneasy.
The eyes of the few people on the street who turned to look at them, strangers in the area, seemed to fix on them with hostility. A woman stood at the end of an alley, leaning against the wall, looking up and down as if waiting for someone. A very old man shuffled along in the distance and another, younger, came along the street supporting himself on a crutch. He had a peg leg and was wincing at every step. His hair was long and straggly, his face unshaven and, Margaret thought with a tense feeling of dread, he looked the worse for drink.
‘Good morning,’ she said as they passed him, bent over his rough crutch.
He half raised his head and stared at them, saying nothing, but the expression in his eyes chilled her already troubled heart. A cold, male gaze. Like his gaze. That look she had once mistaken for love. She wondered if she would ever be able to look into the eyes of a man again. A shudder went through her.
‘Annie – let’s go back now,’ she said, suddenly afraid.
‘But look –’ Annie was peering along a narrow slit between two buildings. ‘All along there are these passages. I want to see what’s behind – it must be where people live. These are just the sort of places that Mr Rowntree was writing about.’
‘Annie, you can’t go intruding on people’s privacy!’ Margaret said, trying to grasp her sister’s arm, but Annie shook her off.
‘You just wait there one moment. I’m going to see.’
‘Annie, no!’ But there was no stopping her. She slipped into the dark passageway, leaving Margaret standing on the corner feeling conspicuous and furious. She lowered her head, hiding in the shade of her hat brim. Why must Annie be so headstrong and arrogant? What did she want with nosing into such places?
After a few moments left waiting there to be stared at by the few passers-by, Margaret thought, I can’t just stand here. It seemed easier to follow.
The passageway was like a tunnel through the houses, arched overhead so that the only light was what filtered in each end. As she stepped into it, the air was suddenly cool and dank, even in the summer warmth. The bricks she was walking on were rough and potted with holes. She felt her way carefully so as not to rick an ankle, having to steady herself with her hand on the slimy wall. The passage took her along the length of the building and she soon joined Annie, who had paused at the far end.
‘Oh, my goodness,’ she whispered.
The alley opened into a yard, its atmosphere so overcast and sunless that it felt almost like dusk even at midday. Never in her life before had she seen so cheerless a place. All along one side were the doorways of small, shabby houses built up against a wall and all facing a blank, soot-encrusted wall the other side. There were slates missing from the sagging roofs, windows broken or boarded up. One had no door, only a gaping black hole for an entrance. Several washing lines were suspended across with a few items hanging limply from them. There was a tilted lamp in the middle of the uneven bricks. At the far end they could see some other low buildings, an upended barrel standing in front of them. A rank smell drifted from somewhere. No one was about in the yard. Everything looked and smelt mean and demoralizing.
‘Come away,’ Margaret said. She pulled Annie’s hand and the two of them hurried back to the street, which felt like another world of light.
‘There must be yards like this all along behind here,’ Annie said. Even she seemed sobered by what they had found. ‘You’d never know they were there, would you, unless you went in? I wonder if the whole city is full of places like that?’
Margaret looked along the street, imagining the dank yards crammed in behind the frontage facing them.
‘How do people live?’ she said as they walked away. The place had oppressed her. ‘Even the washing was grey with soot.’ She thought of their washing line in the garden at home, the clothes billowing in the fresh country wind.
‘How can souls flourish in a place like this?’ Annie said. ‘It’s bad enough in Watery Lane.’
In the worst and poorest lane in the village, the water level rose during the winter months so that the path became a stream or a swamp of sucking mud. The cottages were damp, their thatch covered in moss and mould, and the inhabitants and their children were afflicted by coughs and wheezing chests. But on summer days it could look quite pleasant and even Watery Lane felt cheerful compared with the yard they had seen.
The girls walked side by side in silence. Margaret felt a sense of despair wash through her at the enormity of the Lord’s calling. Were they not charged to bring the word of Jesus to all people in this wretched world? It was enough of an uphill struggle in a small village, where she had usually felt unequal to the task. Where did anyone begin in this dark warren of Birmingham streets?
Annie, walking fast, her head down, did not share her sister’s despair. God had brought her here for a reason, she knew. Her father and mother had met through the Congregationalist Church and God had been the air they breathed through their upbringing. William Hanson, their father, had spoken to them of the work of Quaker Seebohm Rowntree, the clarion call he had sent up about the poverty on which he had reported in York. His book, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, sat on their father’s shelves.
Their parents’ work, Annie knew, was God’s work: the work of souls as well as material welfare. And Annie was sure she had a mission in life. She knew right from wrong. She knew the word of the Lord and it was her life’s work to take it to others. Any quarrel she had was with her father, and the puritan gloom and rigidity into which he had sunk after their mother’s death – not with God.
I have to find a way of meeting people and being able to talk to them, she thought. If the Lord is to use me in his work, I need to know their lives – what it is that blights them, how they are wrong and sinful in their ideas, how they might be saved . . .
As they headed back the way they had come, Annie looked around her more carefully, full of a passionate zeal. She stopped suddenly, her attention caught by a sign on the wall next to the entrance of an imposing and decoratively built factory. Along its frontage, of variegated colours of brick, curlicue lettering announced ‘Masters, Hogg & Co., Steel Pen Works’. The hand-painted sign read ‘Stampers and piercers wanted’.
This was it. She stood for several seconds. Surely this was the Lord speaking to her, calling her to follow . . .
‘I’m going to see,’ she announced to Margaret, and before Margaret could grab hold of her, Annie, looking as bold as she dared, an elf in her neat black boots, was already tip-tapping up the steps.
‘Annie – don’t be ridiculous!’ Margaret was aghast. Now what was the wretched girl doing!
But Annie was already disappearing inside. In the dark entrance hall, she felt suddenly small and girded herself with thoughts of Daniel walking into the den with a lion. Of David and Goliath.
‘Yes?’ A man’s head appeared at a hatch in the wall.
‘I’ve come about a job,’ she said, as boldly as she dared. She was suddenly aware that her well-spoken voice, slightly tinged with West Country, must sound out of place, but he did not react. He was picking at his teeth with a little stick and his pouchy eyes regarded her in silence, seeming wholly unimpressed by this announcement. At last, after a period of cogitation, he removed the toothpick from his mouth and said, ‘Done it before?’
‘No – but I’m sure I could learn. I’ve only just come to Birmingham.’ Annie felt foolish now, but was damned if she was going to show it. Haughtily, she added, ‘Is there someone else I should apply to?’
Again, he stood looking at her for such a long time that she wondered if he had been suddenly struck dumb. Eventually he straightened up.
‘Come in tomorrow. If ye’re unskilled, Miss Hinks’ll start yer on stamping. Eight sharp.’
As she went to go out into the street, a bell rang and there came a sudden sound like a wave breaking behind her. A tide of feet were descending stairs somewhere in the building and as she emerged to the street which was now thronging with dinner-time busyness, women began to pour out past her, through the door. She barely got a look at any of them as they were all rushing so fast. She just had an impression of drab clothes and a variety of faces, all pale, of varying ages, all intent on getting out of the building. Annie managed to move out of the way and found Margaret pressed against the wall, trying not to be pushed along by the surge of people.
‘I’m starting tomorrow!’ she cried, in triumph.
‘But Annie, you’ve never done any such work before.’ Aunt Hatt looked disturbed and cross at this news.
‘I told him I’m a fast learner,’ Annie said. ‘He said there’s nothing to it – I’ll be stamping out pen nibs.’
‘I know it’s unskilled work, but they have to work very fast – your fingers’ll be cut to ribbons.’
‘I want to try it,’ Annie insisted. ‘And Uncle did say he wanted us to work. We’ll be in the way otherwise, won’t we?’
Aunt Hatt did not argue with this, but her eyes were full of doubt.
‘Well,’ she conceded. ‘I can see you’re a determined young madam so on your head be it. Everyone’s got to start somewhere. If you’re no good, you’ll be out. But I really don’t know what your mother would have said.’
‘I’m sure Mother would have said it’d do us good to see a bit of life,’ Annie argued. Their grandfather, Mother and Eb’s father, had been a jewel setter a few streets away and Leah – or Lilian – had started her working life in his workshop. ‘She said honest work never did her any harm.’
Aunt Hatt stared back. There was not much she could say to argue with this.
By that evening, their arrival the day before seemed years ago to Margaret. They all sat round the table for the evening meal and Uncle Eb chuckled heartily at the news that Annie had gone and found herself a job.
‘Well – you’re a one, aren’t you?’ He looked at Annie with amused admiration. ‘There’s still the offer of a job for you here, Margaret,’ he said. ‘I could do with one more polisher out the back!’
Margaret blushed, not knowing what she should say.
‘Oh, leave her alone, Eb,’ Aunt Hatt said. ‘Our Margaret’s too delicate for this sort of thing. I can find her plenty to do without that. We’re rushed off our feet in the office.’
Margaret looked up to see her aunt looking very directly at her along the table. ‘I thought, Margaret, that perhaps you and I could have a little talk when we’ve finished our tea?’
Margaret’s chest tightened and she felt her face burn with embarrassment. The thought of having to talk about what had happened filled her with horror. She would have to say something to Aunt Hatt. Their aunt was being so kind. She looked down, giving a faint nod.
During their meal Aunt Hatt held forth on her two favourite subjects: her grandson Jimmy and the decoration of the new house, both things, they were soon learning, she could talk about almost endlessly. And to Margaret’s surprise, once they had finished their meal Uncle Eb, who, she had the impression, would usually have sat on at the table smoking his pipe, got to his feet and left the room, with a rumbling sort of announcement that he was ‘Off out for a bit . . .’
‘Is Uncle going to a meeting?’ Annie asked, this being the only kind of evening outing with which they were familiar.
‘Oh,’ Aunt Hatt said, seeming amused. ‘You might say that. He’s off to the Jewellers’ Arms – his favourite watering hole. Quite a bit of business goes on in there, though, so it’s a meeting of sorts!’
Neither Margaret nor Annie was sure what to say to this. Annie got to her feet, pushed her chair under the table and said she was going upstairs. As she passed behind her, Margaret felt her sister’s hand on her shoulder for a second. The hand gave her a squeeze before leaving the room. Margaret was warmed by Annie’s tact and support, even though she had driven her mad earlier in the day. Annie often knew to do just the right thing even if she argued about everything else.
The room settled. The clock ticked. Aunt Harriet cleared her throat and poured herself another cup of tea, offering Margaret one, but she shook her head.
She sat, head bent, hands clasped on the cloth, and stared at the frayed grey cuffs of her dress. She couldn’t do it, she knew. The very idea of having to find words to describe the shameful thing that had happened was utterly beyond her, however kind Aunt Hatt was.
‘It’s really nothing much, Aunt,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen what Annie’s like. She’s very headstrong and . . . Well, we had a bit of a falling-out with Father and we thought it might be best if we were out of the way for a while, that’s all. And we’ve always so much wanted to get to know you both as well.’
Her cheeks burned with remorse at the inadequacy of this explanation, but it was all she could manage. She looked up to see Aunt Hatt eyeing her over her teacup. Clearly, her aunt strongly suspected she was not hearing the whole truth.
But she put the cup down and said, ‘Well – it’s lovely to have you here. We never had any daughters, dear. I had a difficult time with that side of things – one of my great regrets. So you’ve no fear of not being welcome. But if you’ll be staying a little while, we’d better get you both settled in with summat to do, hadn’t we?’
Later, Harriet Watts climbed into bed beside her beerily snoozing husband.
‘That all seemed a bit serious,’ Eb murmured as his wife arranged the covers over herself, throwing the eiderdown off. He lumped about, turning on his back and yawning loudly. ‘She tell you what’s been going on? Can’t be anything that bad in that house of virtue, surely?’
‘I can’t exactly say she did,’ Hatt said.
‘What d’yer mean?’ He spoke through another yawn. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘I don’t know.’ She settled on her back, sounding uneasy. ‘Whatever it is, she wasn’t letting on. Said summat about a falling-out with their father.’
‘Oh – that old stick.’
‘He wasn’t so bad – not in the beginning,’ Hatt said. ‘I think it was that babby dying, little John. His only son – and then Lil, of course.’
‘Yes.’ Eb sighed. ‘All the same – our Lil changed once she was with him.’
‘She was a lovely lady – you know she was. Even then.’
Eb sighed. ‘All that religious claptrap. You know what I say about—’
‘Yes, dear, I do. Every time.’
He chuckled, hands starting to explore the warm, soft body beside him. In a wheedling voice, he said, ‘Come on, Hatt – as we’re both so wide awake. D’yer fancy a bit of – you know . . . ?’
‘No, Ebenezer Watts, I don’t,’ Hatt said, firmly removing a wandering hand. ‘It’s late enough already and we’ve got to be up early.’
‘Never mind. It won’t take—’
‘Eb – no.’
There was another defeated sigh from beside her, as her husband gradually sank back into sleep.