A Man of his Time

Burton had never known them to do anything as willingly as he’d had to do. ‘Feed the pigs. Edith, help him to get the mash from the outhouse. The stuff that was made today.’

The eldest daughter, she was a vivacious seventeen-year-old with golden-blonde hair. ‘I was just going out for the evening.’

‘Do as I say.’ Seeing them start to obey, he closed the door, but as his back turned Edith gargoyled her face, then went to help Thomas.

Oliver came from the pantry with a yoke across the back of his neck, and a steel bucket in each hand. ‘When you’ve done that,’ Burton said, as if never to leave him alone, ‘you can get some coal in.’

Softly whistling, Oliver was happy to be liberated from the pall of his father, and set off along the path between chicken coops and the house wall. Passing the front door, the long garden gave off its smell of dry soil, a scent of fresh flowers, and a tang of rotting potato tops that he would later gather up. Every week he and Thomas, under Burton’s critical eye, lest they slacken on the distance or spill a drop, manoeuvred iron buckets reeking also of creosote from the outhouse to furrows indicated in the garden, and splashed it liberally about, nothing from the house being wasted. The garden gave shining red beetroot, potatoes, onions, carrots, marrows, cucumbers, lettuces and kidney beans, as well as sweet peas and mint, while raspberries, gooseberries and redcurrants made pies, puddings and jam.

The well up the slope was covered by a triangular wooden roof and, however many times Oliver had laboured to and from to get water he liked the sight of its fairy-tale shape, as depicted in books brought home as an infant from Sunday School. The vision of magical enactments at midnight, or even during daylight, summer or winter, when he wasn’t there, set him cheerfully whistling To be a Farmers Boy, letting the chain that Burton had made rattle the bucket from its roller and hit the water with a satisfying smack, before it sank and began to fill. Turning the handle, he brought up the first overflowing bucket.

All the others at work, Burton in the kitchen enjoyed his usual pinch of snuff after the evening meal, stood with back to the fire, as contented as could be after the day’s work.

‘Don’t I get any money this week?’ Mary Ann said.

‘You always have.’ He took cash from his pocket. ‘Take this sovereign.’

‘I was hoping for a bit more.’

‘Have another five bob, then. Trade’s been good.’

And that was all, though it was better than usual. She looked at the head of King George on one of the half-crowns, then put the coins into her pocket.

‘I’m off to town for a couple of hours.’ He stomped his way up the stairs to change.

Thomas was half bent over carrying a huge bucket of pig food from the wash house to the sty, Edith following with another, helped by fifteen-year-old Ivy, while Rebecca, Sabina and Emily looked on.

‘I hate the old bastard.’ Edith’s words were smothered by the shrilling pigs, smelling their supper, already at the trough, as if to start on the bare wood. Thomas drove them away with a stick, then poured in the flood of mash, bran, slops and old seed potatoes, stepping aside to avoid the rush at his trousers.

‘Don’t hit them anymore,’ Emily said. ‘I like the piggies. They’re my friends.’

‘How can you be friends with pigs?’ he jeered.

‘Well, I am. I’ve got names for both of them.’

‘And what are they, young madam?’

‘That fat one’s Lollipop, and the other’s Kidney.’

‘Percy the slaughterer’s coming up from Woodhouse soon to cut their throats,’ he said spitefully. ‘And then we’ll eat ’em.’

It was easy to make her cry. They sometimes called her Monkey Face, or Mrs Meagrim, or Dolly Dumpling, in spite of being told by Mary Ann to treat her kindly. ‘I’ll run away, then, and take them with me. We’ll go and live together in Robin’s Wood. I’ll cook their dinners and wash their faces.’

‘You like sausages and crackling and chitterlings and pork scratchings, don’t you? I’ve seen you gobbling them up when Mam wasn’t looking.’ He turned to Edith. ‘You’d better not let Burton hear you talking about him like that.’

‘Well, I do hate the old bastard. I always have. Did you see Oliver’s face? I’ve never seen such a bruise. He’s always hitting people. I’m going to leave home the minute I can.’

Thomas stroked one of the guzzling pigs. ‘And when will that be?’

Oliver came into the yard, two buckets on the yoke slopping water. He waved, and straightened his back before going into the house.

‘I’ll do it after I’m married,’ Edith said. ‘And he won’t dare touch me then. Every time I go out he tells me not to be long. And when I don’t go out he calls me in to do some work. And when I do go out I’ve always got to be back in bed by nine o’clock. I’m seventeen, and I’ve been working for four years.’

‘You stopped out till eleven the other night.’

‘Yes, and I’ll blind you if you tell Burton.’ The older girls, exploiting the inconvenience of a lavatory set apart from the house, sometimes made their way downstairs when Burton and Mary Ann were already in bed, as if to go there, then walked quietly through the gate and down the lane to see boyfriends in Woodhouse. They might not get back till midnight, but a piece of gravel at the window of their bedroom brought Sabina down to let them in. ‘The only good thing about Burton,’ Edith laughed, ‘is that he sleeps so deep an earthquake wouldn’t wake him, though if one should ever swallow him up it would be good riddance.’

‘I’ll run away from home,’ Rebecca said, ‘one of these days.’

Thomas smiled. ‘You’d soon come back.’

‘I bleddy wouldn’t.’

‘You might, if you got hungry,’ Edith said, ‘but once I go, that’ll be that. He won’t see me till after I’m married.’

‘You’re not twenty-one,’ Thomas said, ‘so he could fetch you back.’

Rebecca smoothed her long dark hair. ‘He might be glad to get shut of us.’

‘And where would you lay your head at night?’ Thomas asked. ‘Under Trent Bridge?’

‘I would if I had to.’

‘I’ll always find a bed to sleep in,’ Edith said, ‘but I shan’t say who with.’

‘You’ll get into trouble one of these days.’ Thomas took the empty buckets back to the outhouse.

They were locked in notions of what they imagined freedom to be. ‘I don’t care.’ Edith was adamant. ‘It’ll be better than staying here.’

Oliver placed the buckets under the large sink, came out of the pantry and picked up the long-handled woodsman’s axe to tackle a heap of logs by the fence at the laneside. At the noisy opening of an upstairs window they saw Burton’s face: ‘Don’t stand there. Get on with your work all of you.’

The house was small but adequate, one bedroom for the five girls, another for the three sons, and the largest for Burton and Mary Ann. There was a four-poster curtain-drawn bed, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers with a swivel mirror above, which showed Burton putting on a laundered white shirt, a high collar, and square-ended bow tie.

Tucking the shirt into the trousers of his navy-blue suit, and fastening the thick leather belt into place, a sudden irritation took him again to the window. ‘Thomas! Get your hands out of your pockets and come in to polish my boots. The black ones. They’re in the parlour. And look sharp, or you’ll get a stick across your back.’

A few minutes were needed to arrange the correct set of the tie, and finish turning him from a blacksmith at the forge into a smartly dressed man of consequence. He fixed the watch and chain across his waistcoat with its attached couple of sovereigns, and slipped the white folded handkerchief in his lapel pocket. Down in the parlour he held his boots against the window to make sure they had a sufficient shine, then drew both on and carefully laced them up.

He went to the back of the house, the evening warm and damp with plenty of gnats, and from the garden decapitated a chrysanthemum with a small pocket knife, to adorn his button hole, thus completing the presence he wished to show. Satisfied that everyone was at their allotted tasks in the yard, he strode onto the lane, leaving the gate open.

SIX (#ulink_a58cc315-da4e-5a77-82cc-26b8a4169331)

He pushed into the swing doors of the Crown Hotel, the smell of pipe smoke and ripe ale as familiar as if he had known it even since before birth. Walking to the bar he noted everyone with hardly a turn of the head, those known and unknown. Eli the barman had the same facial colour and white albino hair as his father had at the old White Hart. ‘I’ll have the usual.’

‘Can’t get enough, eh, Burton?’ Morgan wiped froth from his long moustache. Burton had known him from a youth, but disliked such familiarity, at least so early in the evening.

Tom, who also worked with the ponies at Radford pit, hovered on the other side. ‘He’ll need a lot of ale to dowse the fire in him.’

Eli put the tankard down. ‘That’s a tanner you owe the till.’