As we came out of the cellar, we heard the sound of a handbell. ‘Supper time! Supper time!’ a man called as he walked down the corridors.
‘Must be six o’clock already,’ Mrs Clynes said in her gravelly voice. ‘Follow me and I’ll show you where the dining room is. Make sure you don’t talk or you’ll be in trouble. And watch out for Big Bertha at the head of the table. She’ll snitch on you first chance she gets.’
We climbed the stone steps to the first floor and joined a long queue in an unlit corridor. I noticed a grubby poster on the wall and even though it was quite dark I could make out that it was a list of food rations we were to be given during our stay. ‘Official Diet Number One,’ I read. ‘Each inmate will receive 137 to 182 ounces of solid food a week. Women and children over nine will get the lower amount and able-bodied men the higher.’ Monday’s supper was to be a pint of soup and one piece of bread. Other meals were gruel with bread, and the highlight during the week was to be Wednesday when we were due for three ounces of cooked meat and two potatoes. Saturday, too, looked as if it was going to be a big day ’cos we were to get two ounces of mincemeat with the potatoes, but Sunday was the red letter day for we were promised two ounces of cheese at dinner and one rasher of bacon at supper. In big
capital letters, the sign told us that water was to be the only drink allowed and that beer was strictly forbidden. That was no hardship for us as we didn’t drink the stuff though I didn’t know how Mam would take the news. Men and women over sixty were allowed tea and sugar if a visitor gave them any.
‘What’s it say, Kate?’ Cissie asked.
‘It’s a list of indulgences that you can earn for people in purgatory,’ I lied again. Keeping up this pretence was proving to be a hard task but I had to try to give Cissie courage and hope. I wished there was someone to keep up my spirits.
I’d just about finished reading this stuff on the wall when I noticed Mam ahead of us in the queue. She gave us a big smile and put her finger to her lips to tell us to stay quiet. I managed to read her lips though. ‘See you on Sunday,’ she mouthed silently.
The main doors opened and we filed into the huge barn-like dining room. On the rafters there were lots of banners with religious sayings like: ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is not eating and drinking’, ‘Envy and Wrath shorten life’.
At the front of the hall were four large cauldrons of bubbling hot soup. It smelt appetising and we could hardly wait. There were about twenty long tables, each with wooden benches, facing a raised platform. The table layout was like the one you see in pictures of the Last Supper, with the diners facing one direction. Mrs Clynes showed us where our dormitory - Number 16 - sat. At the head of the table stood a huge woman who must have weighed a ton and a half; at the other end was a tall, gangly woman, so tall she had a permanent stoop. When everyone had entered, I could see the arrangement: at the front were the old ladies and the young girls like us; immediately behind,
the old men and the boys, and I smiled and nodded when I saw Danny standing there with his new friends; the next row of tables was occupied by the able-bodied ladies, and right at the back the able-bodied men. Everyone remained standing until Mr and Mrs McTavish marched onto the platform. They were accompanied by two big male trusties. Old Jock rang a large bell suspended on the wall by hitting it with a metal hammer to get everyone’s attention. Not that it was needed ’cos everyone was staring in his direction anyway.
‘Before we begin eating,’ he said, ‘we have a small matter of discipline to attend to. Freda Williams and Paddy Cox, come to the front.’
The two inmates left their tables and went to the front and mounted the stage. They looked nervous, especially the Williams woman who was trembling.
‘These two wretches,’ McTavish announced, ‘have committed serious breaches of discipline. Last night at supper, this Cox fellow broke Rule Number Eight and Rule Number Ten by daring to leave his own table in order to speak to some woman at Table Twelve. A woman he claimed to be his wife though I think it doubtful they’re married. Be that as it may, I won’t have the workhouse rules flouted in this way. There must be no fraternisation and no talking in the dining hall. D’ye hear that?’
Cissie turned to me and nodded, holding up one finger.
‘This floutin’ o’ the rules will not be tolerated,’ Jock bellowed. ‘I sentence Paddy Cox to ten days in New Strangeways. Take him down.’
Poor old Paddy was escorted out of the dining hall while McTavish made a note in his Purgatory Book.
Now he turned his attention to Freda who stood quivering with fear.
‘As for this good-for-nothing,’ he sneered, ‘she broke a
number of rules yesterday. Number Fourteen by stealin’ a lump o’ bread from the dining room and eatin’ it in her dormitory.The eating o’ food in the dormitory is expressly forbidden as we dinna want to encourage the breedin’ o’ mice and rats. Taking food out o’ the dining room is stealing. When she was confronted with her crime, she denied it and so not only is she a thief but she’s a liar too. For that, she’ll have no supper tonight and she’ll stand here wearing the card and watching you enjoy your hot, nourishing soup.’
Round the neck of the luckless Fanny he hung a card which said: Thief and infamous Lyar.
After his little ceremony he intoned grace: ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’
Everyone said ‘Amen’ and sat down.
Even though McTavish said, ‘For what we are about to receive,’ I noticed that neither of the pair showed any sign of joining us in the meal.
‘Forward the table leaders!’ Mr McTavish commanded. Twenty inmates went to the front and collected their zinc buckets which were filled with the broth from the taps on the cauldrons.
I hoped the buckets hadn’t been used for other purposes.
Next, the soup was ladled onto plates by the leaders and passed down the tables. Our utensils were made of tin - plates, spoons, cups. They didn’t break so easily, I supposed.
On the platform, Mrs McTavish began weighing hunks of bread.
‘The Poor Law Commissioners insist that we show you that you’re getting the right amount of bread. Waste of time, if you ask me, but you can see that each lump of bread weighs the legal five ounces. Deputy leaders, collect the bread!’
The deputies climbed onto the platform. In our case, it was the long, thin woman.
I took one look at the greasy water that was our soup and my stomach turned over. It looked like the water in which rancid meat had been boiled. Or maybe it was water used for boiling clothes. Whatever it was, it was an insult to the name of soup. As for the bread, it was a dirty grey colour and had a musty smell. I saw that Cissie and Lizzie sitting on my left had both turned sickly green.
I tapped Cissie on the shoulder and pulled a face pretending to vomit into my plate. It brought a smile to their lips. I held up one finger and made the sign for year by pointing to her and pulling on my ear. Cissie’s face lit up when she got the message and she began drinking her soup.
To my surprise, the elderly lady on my right touched me on the arm and offered her lump of bread. I nodded my thanks and broke up the extra piece of dough into three parts to share. Terrible though the stuff was, we had to eat something.
Throughout the workhouse feast, Mr McTavish read from a tattered Bible.
‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’
I looked around at the workhouse inmates slurping their soup and I thought that maybe the lowest slave in Solomon’s palace was not dressed as one of these.
After the meal, we trooped out in silence. There was no mixing and no chance to talk to anyone from our family.
The three of us went back to the cellar to collect our blanket, towel, and carbolic soap and then found our way to our dormitory which was a long narrow room with one window, one door and twenty single beds in rows on each
side. At the wall nearest the door, there was a communal chamber pot for use during the night. At the wall furthest away from the door was a fireplace, round which were huddled ten or twelve old ladies with shawls wrapped tightly round them in an attempt to keep warm on that cold March night. In one of the beds a woman was strapped down and in another was an old lady who looked as if she was at death’s door.
The big woman who had dished out the soup at supper sat in the large rocking chair near to the fireside.
‘I’m Bertha,’ she told us, ‘and I’m in charge of this dormitory now that old Sal there is about to snuff it. She’s taking her time over it, though, for she’s had Extreme Unction nineteen times. Do as you’re told and you’ll have no trouble. As you three are the youngest and the newest, your beds will be at the end nearest the door and the chamber pot, and it’ll be your job to empty it each morning.’
‘Two years each time we do it,’ I whispered to Cissie who looked as if she was about to break down. I felt like breaking down myself when I thought about the horrible job that’d been dumped on us. I wondered how long God was going to keep us in this terrible place.
‘Under your bed,’ Bertha continued, ‘you’ll find a box to keep your bits and pieces in, if you have any. The shelf above your bed is yours for any ornaments you might have.’
The statue of the Sacred Heart and my glass swan, I thought to myself. The Sacred Heart to remind me to pray for Dad in purgatory, and the swan to remind me of past happiness.
I saw the old lady who had been so kind as to give us her hunk of bread.
‘Thank you for the bread,’ I said. ‘It was welcome as we were so hungry.’
‘Don’t thank me for that,’ she said with a wild, fierce look. ‘The bread in this place is poisoned to reduce the population.’
‘I did notice that it had a funny colour and a funny taste,’ I said to make her happy.
‘This place is a death trap,’ she went on. ‘Even the pigs get better food than we do ’cos they want to fatten them up for sale. I’ve heard that the Poor Law Guardians are planning to kill children over three and women are to be spayed. They do it with the bread.’
‘Take no notice of what Jessie there tells you,’ Bertha said. ‘She thinks we’re surrounded by devils who are out to get us.’
‘It’s true,’ insisted Jessie. ‘I’ve heard that the Guardians took a lot of children and their mothers on a boat trip down the Irwell and drownded the lot of them.’
What sort of place is this? I wondered. It resembled a madhouse.
The long gangly woman who had dished out the bread now came up to us. More bad news, I thought. This time I was wrong.
‘My name’s Victoria,’ she said in a friendly voice. ‘But everyone calls me Queenie on account of me being born on the day of the Queen’s coronation. June the twenty- second, eighteen thirty-seven. I don’t belong in this workhouse as I’ve mixed with the highest in the land. Edward, Prince ofWales, was a personal friend of mine - I used to be his courtesan - and I know he would be upset if he knew I was in here.’ *
Bertha raised her eyes to heaven.
‘Why don’t you write and tell him to get you out?’ Lizzie asked innocently.
‘I’d be too ashamed to let him know that I’ve landed up in a place like this. What would my friend, the Duchess of
Marlborough, think? And I shudder to contemplate what the Duke would say as I used to be his mistress as well.’
Over her shoulder I could see several of the other old ladies pointing to their foreheads, giving the cuckoo sign.
A young, nice-looking lady with a trim figure now approached us.
‘I’m Hannah,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Welcome to our dormitory. It’s so nice to see fresh faces like yours. I hope you’re going to be happy here. I have the bed next to yours.’
I was happy to meet such a normal person for a change. Yet there was something not right about Hannah. Perhaps it was the slight nervous tic or the staring eyes. She seemed to read my mind for she said, ‘I should be in with the able- bodied women but I suffer sometimes from epilepsy and I can’t work like the rest. But I’m not as bad as Elsie Peters over there who has to be strapped down in the bed as her convulsions are so bad.’
At half past eight, it was time for lights out. Bertha raked down the fire and everyone got into bed. As this was our first night, we three decided to share one bed - top and tail - for the comfort of each other’s company and also to share our blankets. Cissie clung to me and her Raggedy Ann doll. Soon everyone was asleep except us.
I looked at the bodies sleeping around us. They were like a lot of corpses. Some were stretched out full length, others lay with nose and knees together; some with arms or legs sticking out of the blankets. Half an hour later, the night was filled with the noises of snoring and coughing. And what strange noises they were! There was every kind of coughing you can think of - the hollow cough, the short cough, the hysterical cough, the bark that came with the regularity of a grandfather clock, even a weird rattling one like the sound of somebody gargling. Coughing from deep
within the chest, tickly coughing from the throat - now in singles, now in doubles, now three or four together. A silence and then it began all over again. And in the intervals between the coughs there was the snoring, the hoink- hoinks and the hink-hinks. We traced the culprit to Mrs Clynes in the bed next door.
‘Nora the snorer,’ I whispered to Lizzie and Cissie in a vain attempt to make them laugh.
‘I don’t like this place, Kate,’ Cissie whimpered. ‘All these funny noises - I can’t sleep.’
‘But listen to it, Cissie,’ I said. ‘It’s like music. You can even fit a song to it.’ Softly, I sang to the rhythm of the coughs and the snores:
After the ball is over (COUGH COUGH)
After the dance is through (COUGH COUGH).
I soon had Cissie and Lizzie laughing quietly.
‘I love you, Kate,’ Cissie whispered, ‘more than anything in the world. More than . . .’ she searched for the words. ‘More than chocolate biscuits.’
The rest of the song fitted beautifully to the coughing attacks and before I’d finished, Lizzie and Cissie were sound asleep. I was left with only one problem - how to get to sleep myself.
I was lying there for about an hour when I heard a voice in the bed next to me. A man’s voice. Next I recognised Hannah’s voice pleading.
‘Please don’t, Mr McTavish,’ she cried. ‘Please leave me alone.’
There was the noise of frantic movements and the squeak of bed springs.
Suddenly the snoring and coughing stopped. Everyone in the dormitory was on the alert. The silence was finally
broken when we heard the powerful voice of Bertha from the end bed.
‘Listen to me, Mr Andrew McTavish! This is the third time you’ve been here to disturb our sleep and that poor unfortunate girl. If you’re not out of that bed in ten seconds, I shall ring the fire bell and your father will be here to give you merry hell. Now leave!’
There was the sound of scuffling and we saw the shadow of a man leaving the dormitory. Then all was quiet.
The night passed slowly. I heard a church clock strike two and, far off, the sound of a train which for some reason made me feel sad and lonely though the patter of the rain on the roof somehow gave me comfort. I must have dozed off in the end, for I was startled out of sleep by the clanging of a loud bell. Everybody was getting up and dressing though the day had not yet begun to dawn and our light was from a couple of oil lamps. Queenie was setting the fire and I suddenly remembered that we’d got to empty that foul-smelling chamber pot. No use complaining about it. Lizzie and I picked it up and turning our faces away so as not to have sight of it, we carried it outside to the privy where we poured out the contents.
It was a bitterly cold morning but despite our shivering we got dressed and took our turn washing at one of the four dormitory basins. The water was freezing but we were already getting hardened to the workhouse conditions.
‘Come back here after breakfast,’ Bertha ordered, ‘and I’ll give you three girls your jobs for the morning.’
With the rest of the inmates, we went down to breakfast. It was the same routine as before except that table heads took a roll call and reported the results to McTavish who recorded them in a big book. Bertha went to the front to report that Table 16 was present and correct. We three kids
were feeling hungry and we wondered what breakfast would bring. It brought a lump of bread and a jug of porridge - not ordinary, common or garden porridge, you understand, but workhouse skilly which was in a class by itself. I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more nauseating mixture. Oats and water, no matter how small the oats, simply boiled, would have been tastier. But this concoction served up was the nastiest dish I had ever set eyes on. I didn’t have to look far for the reason. It had been cooked in the same cauldrons that had held last night’s soup. I doubt if anyone had washed them out between meals. Skilly was the stuff everyone linked with the workhouse and the Bastille, and after tasting it that first morning, I could understand why. But what could we do? Either we ate it or we starved. But, oh, what I would have given for a pinch of salt or a spoonful of sugar!
With our hunger only partly satisfied, we climbed the stairs back to the dormitories to await Bertha’s instructions. There we found everyone in a state of distress for during the night Old Sal had died in her sleep. That explained the rattling noise I’d heard around two o’clock.
At the end of the dormitory, McTavish and Dr O’Brien were in earnest conversation and they seemed to be having a fierce row.
‘The old lady must be given a decent funeral,’ I heard the doctor say. ‘None of your penny-pinching or skimping on a coffin or the tolling of the bell. One chime for each of her seventy years.’
‘That’s all very well,’ McTavish snapped, ‘but the Poor Law Commissioners make no allowances for fancy funerals.’
‘I know you and your pauper funerals,’ Dr O’Brien retorted. ‘You’re given enough to afford to have the body washed and dressed in a clean shroud as well as a decent coffin. Or does the money go into your own pocket?’
McTavish turned purple with rage and it looked as if they might come to blows until they noticed us kids watching them goggle-eyed.
‘Anyway, see that old Sal is buried with respect,’ the doctor said finally, ‘or I may have to report you to the authorities.’
As Dr O’Brien was coming away, I plucked up courage to speak to him.
‘Do you remember us. Dr O’Brien?’
He looked closely at us and said in a kindly voice, ‘I seem to recognise your faces but I can’t place them. Where’ve I seen you before?’
I explained that he had attended my father, Michael Lally, before he died.
‘Of course I remember you now. Mike Lally was a friend and a fine man, a brave man with a great sense of humour. But what in God’s name are you doing in a place like this?’
I felt like asking him the same question but instead I told him our story and how we’d come down in the world, how we’d been forced to sell everything to survive. He listened closely, clucking in sympathy from time to time.
‘Look,’ he said at last, ‘I have to go but I work now in the workhouse infirmary, such as it is. I want you to know this - if ever any of you need my help, don’t hesitate to come to me, no matter what time of day or night. It grieves me to see you in such a place as this. Your father would turn in his grave if he knew. I shall try to see your mother and tell her I’ve spoken to you. Meanwhile, keep your chin up. Remember, it’s always darkest before the dawn.’
These words of encouragement cheered us up no end. But that was before Bertha gave us our morning’s work.
It was seven o’clock when we began. We were to clean and scrub the whole dining hall - floor, tables, benches. It
looked as if the diners had poured their soup and their skilly across the surfaces instead of eating it. In some ways I wouldn’t have blamed them. My part was to do the rear portion of the hall and a long, long passage leading to the kitchens. We were given cloths, brushes, buckets and soda but no aprons. We had one kneeling pad between us and this we gave to Cissie. I was used to scrubbing and donkey- stoning Butler Court but I have never in all my days worked as hard as this. We cleaned the hall, the passageway, a whole flight of stairs and the McTavish private sitting room which had to be done with the greatest care if we were to avoid Old Jock’s fist. Whilst we were on our hands and knees in that area we heard Florrie McTavish giving Jock hell. It was all about him drinking too much whisky and having it off with Mrs Burns, the cook. It did our hearts good to listen to him getting it in the neck and we hoped his missus would give him one with the poker. It was the only light relief that morning.
We went through four buckets of water for the dining hall and another five for the long passage and the sitting room. We had brasses to clean and paintwork to dust. At dinnertime, one o’clock, we stopped for a break but we were exhausted as we’d been at it for six solid hours. I couldn’t touch the food but Lizzie and Cissie managed a small lump of bread with margarine, washed down with cold water. Tired? That word wasn’t strong enough. We were jiggered. We’d each of us done a charlady’s day’s work in one morning. We’d all got sore knees, including Cissie despite her kneeling pad. Lizzie and Cissie could hardly speak and we just about had the strength to crawl up the stairs to our dormitory beds where we collapsed in a heap. We were more dead than alive and every limb ached. We wondered how Mam and Danny had got on and how we were going to survive afternoon school.
‘I don’t like it here,’ Cissie announced, rubbing her sore knees. ‘I’m going to run away.’
‘Where to?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know - to China or Timbuktu.’The last named was the most faraway place she could think of. ‘How do I get there, Kate?’
‘Go straight out of the workhouse gate and walk down Oldham Road as far as Great Ancoats Street. Then ask again at the post office.’
‘Is it past Albert Square?’
‘About another three miles. But if you go, what happens to Dad? You can’t leave him burning for hundreds of years in purgatory.’
She considered this for a while. ‘How many years off purgatory up to now, Kate?’ she asked.
‘I reckon that each of us earned about fifty years for that little bit of scrubbing today. If we keep this up, soon we’ll be in credit and God will owe us time off.’
‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’ll have to stay.’
Before two o’clock, we dragged ourselves off our beds and prepared to go to afternoon school. We asked Bertha for directions, which she gave along with lots of warnings.
‘Watch out for that man Harold Catchpole. He’s a bad- tempered old bugger. He used to be a miner - lost an arm and an eye in a colliery accident. Now he has to make do with two substitutes, a glass eye and metal arm. He tries to take out his bad luck on the rest of the world. Him a teacher! I’d be surprised if he can read and write himself.’
Trembling with anxiety, the three of us found our way to the schoolroom where we saw about thirty other kids, boys and girls, standing with Catchpole in their midst. He held a thick hair rope in his right hand. The room was dismal and dark because the only window had been whitewashed to stop people looking in. Or out. Not seeing
the usual classroom paraphernalia, like writing slates, wall maps, or a blackboard, we thought at first that we’d come to the wrong place until we saw tattered copies of the Bible and Dr Mavor’s Spelling Primer.
‘Yes, yes, come along,’ he bellowed, waving the rope around his head. ‘You’re new here?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said quietly, numb with fear in front of this terrifying man.
‘You’ll have to speak up,’ one of the big boys said from the side of his mouth. ‘Lord Nelson there is as deaf as a post.’
‘Yes, sir, we’re new,’ I shouted.
‘Stand at the back with the other new ones,’ he instructed.
Then we saw Danny and the Foley boys. What a change had come over them. They were wearing the grey work- house uniform but what made them look so different was their new hairstyle. Like us they’d been cropped but their barber had left them with a tuft at the front, giving them the appearance of a billy goat. We made no comments, however, as all eyes were on Catchpole who was delivering a speech.
‘Most of you brats have been dumped here on the parish because your own parents can’t look after you. I’m supposed to learn you but most labourers’ kids outside don’t get much of an education and so I don’t see why you should. You’ll learn two things here - the Bible and spelling. And God help any of you I find slacking.’ He brought the rope down heavily on a desk to show what would happen to anyone doing such a thing. ‘If you can’t read, you must get one of the other scholars to learn you. But there’ll be no writing, not in my class. Writing leads to mischief and I’ll not have it. We’ll begin today with a Bible reading.’ He pointed to the big boy who’d told us about his deafness.
‘You, McBride, make a start and show them how it’s done.’
McBride was standing in front of us. He opened his Bible and began to read in a loud, clear voice.
‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’
That’s pretty good, I thought. Obviously a good reader. Then I noticed that McBride had the book upside down. He must have memorised the passage.
The rest of the reading lesson went without incident and when it came to my turn, I thanked God for the teaching I’d received at St Michael’s Elementary School. I looked back wistfully to those days in Gerty Houlihan’s class. Whatever I thought about her at the time, she’d certainly knocked her stuff into our thick heads.
After the Bible, we switched to spelling. Catchpole told us to learn a list of thirty words - some of them easy, some hard. He gave us ten minutes for the task. Holding the book in his good hand, he tested us.
Lizzie was first.
‘Spell “receive”.’ He watched her lips to check her answer.
‘R-E-C-E-I-V-E,’ she answered.
He consulted the book. ‘Correct.’ He sounded disappointed.
I got worried when, pointing to Cissie, he ordered her to spell ‘cocoa’.
This was where my ventriloquist skills came into play. ‘C-O-C-O - A,’ I whispered.
‘C - O - C - O - A,’ Cissie repeated after me.
If I stay in this place much longer, I said to myself, I’ll
develop my skills to the point where I don’t move my lips at all. Maybe I could go on the stage.
It was my turn next but I wasn’t nervous ’cos my spelling wasn’t bad. I got the word ‘skeleton’. Easy, I thought, as I gave him the answer.
‘I’ll bet he wouldn’t know the answers if he didn’t have that book in his hand,’ Cissie whispered.
‘Don’t be silly, Cissie,’ I said. ‘He’s got to have the book. He’s not learning - he’s teaching.’
Danny was next. No problem as he used to be top of the class at St Michael’s. He got the word ‘stationary’.
‘S-T-A-T-I — O-N-E-R-Y,’ he spelt out confidently.
‘Wrong! Wrong!’ Old Nelson yelled triumphantly. ‘That’s not what it says in the book. It should be A - R -Y at the end. Get out here, you lazy good-for-nothing. You were told to learn those lists and you’ve spent your time day-dreaming.’
‘But, sir,’ Danny protested. ‘It can be spelt two ways. The way I’ve spelt it means writing materials, like paper and envelopes. The one with A - R -Y means standing still - not moving.’
‘I can see you’re one of them clever dicks. Don’t argue with me, lad. Out here!’
Poor old Danny. He was always in the wars. He received two stinging blows of the rope across his shoulders. I used to think Miss Houlihan was a tyrant but compared to this bully, she’d been a kindly old soul.
The rest of the lesson .dragged its weary way with more errors, more shouting, and more vicious punishments.
\
At the end of the lessons, we got a chance to exchange notes with Danny. We told him about our dormitory and the strange characters, the murderous task of scrubbing
out the dining hall. He told us how he and the Foley boys had been put on oakum picking.
‘What is this oakum picking?’ we asked.
‘Oakum is rope covered in tar. It’s used in ships to fill the cracks to make them watertight. Our job is to unravel and remove the tar. We were given three pounds of rope each but after three hours I managed only half a pound. They said I was lazy and I got belted.’ He showed us his torn and bleeding fingers.
‘You’re not the only one, Danny,’ Cissie said sadly. She showed him her sore knees. ‘That’s from kneeling all morning on stone floors. Kate said we’ll get Dad fifty years off purgatory if we don’t cry.’
‘Do you see me crying?’ he said. ‘But the men tell us that there’s something worse than oakum picking and that’s bone-crushing. If they put us on that, I don’t think we can stand it and the Foleys and me are planning to run away and live rough, like the tramps you see in the brickyards.’
My heart skipped a beat when I heard him say this. No telling what would happen if he tried that.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ I warned him. ‘McTavish will put you in solitary confinement in New Strangeways. Or, even worse, they can make you spend the night in the mortuary.’
We parted company but Danny’s words had made me anxious.
We went into supper. We were that hungry, we felt that we could eat anything - and we did. Broth! Workhouse broth!
After supper, we returned to the dormitory and wondered how we were going to spend the time. There were no books, no magazines, no games, no toys. I appealed to Bertha for help. She found us an old register and three pencils. ‘Black leads’ she called them.They were our lifeline
and saved us from going mad with boredom. We thought of lots of games to play, like Hang Man, OXO, Consequences, and Your Future Job. You played the last game by making a list of jobs and careers and rolling up the paper. When your partner said ‘Stop’, you looked at the job they’d landed on and that was what she was going to be when she grew up. We always included a few daft jobs like lavatory attendant or painter of stripes on humbugs. It gave us a laugh or two and God knows we needed them in that Union Workhouse.
At other times, we lay on our beds and listened to the old ladies as they huddled around the fire. Sometimes, that was the best entertainment of all. After half past eight, it was not permitted to put more coal or coke on the fire and as it began to die down, some of the younger women gathered round the fireplace to take advantage of the last bit of heat.
‘Well, Old Sal’s gone at last,’ Bertha sighed. ‘She’s in a better place now. I’ll be taking her bed as it’s nearer the door and it’s my job to lock it.’
‘Fat lot of good that did last night,’ Jessie, the worrier, said. ‘Didn’t stop Randy Andy last night, did it?’
‘That’s because he has his own master key,’ replied Bertha. ‘From what I’ve heard he’s been visiting a few ladies’ dormitories at night.’
‘A chip off the old block,’ Norah Clynes said. ‘Old Jock likes his oats too and not only with his missus. He’s been getting a bit of rump steak with Fanny Burns the cook - if you take my meaning.’ v .
‘Apart from that,’ Bertha said, ‘Old Jock’s only other interest is cutting costs. Always trying to save a ha’penny here and a ha’penny there. Did you hear Dr O’Brien going on at him about pauper funerals?’
‘Dr O’Brien’s a good man,’ said Mrs Clynes. ‘I don’t
know why he stands for McTavish and his penny-pinching ways. Why doesn’t he do something?’
‘His hands are tied,’ Bertha said, ‘and he has to watch his step or Old Jock’ll have him out on his ear. Then where would we be?’
‘What are these pauper funerals they were arguing about?’ Queenie asked. ‘How are they different from the ordinary kind?’
‘I can tell you that,’ Jessie butted in quickly. ‘It means planks for a coffin, no shroud, a strip of calico, no tolling of the bell, a quick service, inmates in workhouse uniform as pall bearers, and lastly a communal grave. I hope I don’t die in this terrible place.’ She swivelled her eyes in our direction when she said this and I shivered with fear. But Jessie was half mad and no one believed her. Did they?
Hannah now made her first contribution. ‘What I want to know,’ she asked, ‘is why they separate families. My husband is in with the able-bodied men and I get to see him only for an hour on Sunday afternoons.’
‘You are kept apart, my dear,’ Queenie answered haughtily, ‘firstly as a way of making this place as nasty as possible; and secondly, so that you won’t breed. At least not whilst you’re in here.’
‘We old ’uns over sixty are allowed to see our husbands every day if we like,’ Bertha said. ‘More’s the pity. My old man’s such a moaner that five minutes once a month would be quite enough for me.’
The fire had now gone out and the room had turned cold. Time to turn in.
Soon it was back to the snoring, the wheezing and the coughing.