The clydesiders, p.4
The Clydesiders, page 4
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, Madam.’
Virginia kept silent.
‘How dare you!’ Mrs Cartwright was even more enraged at this impertinent lack of respect. ‘You will leave this house immediately. Immediately, do you hear? And I can assure you that I will see that you are never allowed to work in any other decent household.’
‘Yes, you would do that, wouldn’t you? Well, I would not want to work for such an ignorant and spiteful woman anyway.’
‘You . . . you . . . !’ Mrs Cartwright was spluttering with rage now. She looked as if she might have a stroke.
With as much dignity as she could muster, Virginia said ‘Goodbye,’ and walked unhurriedly from the room.
5
Virginia collected her tin trunk and instead of going down the back stairs to the basement, along the passageways and out the back way, she went through the green baize door and into the main hall. She was still in her reckless, rebellious mood. Awkwardly clutching her trunk, she gazed at the wide carpeted stair and the ornate gas lamps that brightened them every evening. No dark, unlit stairs for the Cartwrights to find their way up and down. These stairs branched out on either side at the top of an oak panelled gallery hung with gloomy paintings of the family and their ancestors.
Virginia now saw all this for what it really was—the Cartwrights trying to ape aristocracy like the Forbes Lintons. The Forbes Lintons had illustrious ancestors, the Cartwrights had not. The Cartwrights, however, had money, something that perhaps the Forbes Lintons envied. A surge of hatred engulfed Virginia. What had the Cartwrights, or indeed the Forbes Lintons, done to deserve such a luxurious way of life? It was people like her father and her brothers—who slaved for wealthy people like these—who created their wealth. It was people like herself, slaving in the homes of such people who allowed them to enjoy lives of ease and comfort, and all the time the working class led lives filled with anxiety, poverty, ill-health and constant drudgery. Trembling with the unexpected strength of her emotion, Virginia turned away and left by the front door.
Outside she took one last look at the imposing mansion. She would never see it again. Nor did she want to. Hitching the tin trunk up to balance on her hip, she made her way down the drive and began the long walk to Glasgow. Mrs Cartwright, as she’d expected, had not given her a penny of the wages she was owed and so she had no money to pay for her fare to the city. For miles she tramped along between fields full of butterflies that settled and vanished when the sun went behind a cloud. Every now and again she sat down for a rest and listened to the robins and the wrens until their hectic twitterings encouraged her on once more.
During the night, there had been a nip of frost but now it was a balmy September day. Virginia was thankful for the weather. Had it been in the middle of winter, she might have perished on the journey—or so she imagined. It had been bad enough suffering the winter in the attic. She well remembered rising shivering each morning, then trying to wash in water that had a layer of ice on top of the jug, with the face flannel frozen solid. Then a hurried breakfast of tea and a slice of meat left over from the Cartwrights’ dinner from the previous night, and a piece of bread.
Bitterness overcame her again when she thought of the different world Mrs Cartwright awakened to. The housemaids would trudge up and down the stairs with hot water for my lady’s bath. The lady’s maid would give Mrs Cartwright a cup of tea in bed, and after Mrs Cartwright had had her bath, the maid would help her to dress and do her hair. Mrs Cartwright, and Mr Cartwright if he was at home, and any guests who happened to be staying, would linger over a delicious breakfast—a choice of bacon and eggs, kidneys, cutlets, boiled chicken, omelettes and fish, according to their taste. Plus as much bread, toast, rolls, butter, honey and jam as they desired.
While the family gorged themselves, the maids would be struggling up the stairs with heavy buckets of coal to light the upstairs fires. Rumpled beds had to be made, baths cleaned. Chamber pots had to be covered with a cloth and carried discreetly down the back stairs to be emptied, to avoid offending the sensitivities of the very people who had filled them. Carpets had to be swept, furniture and ornaments dusted, every pane of glass and every mirror polished until they sparkled.
Virginia glanced down at her hands. They were red and roughened by the amount of scrubbing she’d had to do. She thought of the soft white hands of Mrs Cartwright and Fiona and all the pampered women like them, and the hatred in her heart kept her going and saved her from fainting with exhaustion.
She did sit down for a few minutes when she reached Kirkintilloch. It was a small town that went back to the time of the Romans. She gazed at the old parish church with its crow-stepped gables, and was tempted to go in and pray for help and strength, but she could pray just as well sitting here. She closed her eyes but found prayer impossible in the midst of the bitter turmoil of her emotions. There was nothing for it but to continue on her journey using only her determination and willpower to push forward one foot after another.
It was dark by the time she reached the city of Glasgow. Buildings menaced her on each side with their towering blackness. The gas lamps gave a feeble pool of ghostly light. A man was singing in a drunken moan, ‘Keep the home fires burning. . . .’
It reminded Virginia of the war and of Nicholas. Quickly she banished him from her mind. It was too painful to think of him.
At last she reached the Gorbals and Cumberland Street. Almost weeping with relief, she stopped inside the close. All the closes led up to the various flats on each of the three landings and also through to the communal back court, or yard, in which the shared wash houses and middens were situated. Her parents and brothers would be in bed asleep by now, and although she didn’t relish the idea of waking the household she had no choice. If the close had been warm and dry, she might have sat down on her trunk, and leaning back against the door, tried to get some sleep until morning. But a cold wind was funnelling through from the street, making her shiver miserably.
She pulled the door bell, then rattled the letterbox for good measure. She listened. There was only the loud snorting and whistling sound of her father snoring. Then a clatter of sound and a cacophony of voices started outside. Virginia knew it must be the bin men but she went to look out the back close. Sure enough there they were in the back yard with candles strapped round their heads and flickering over their brows. String tied round each leg below the knee prevented rats or mice running up their trousers. They were heaving bins onto their backs and trudging out with them to their cart.
Virginia retreated back to pull the door bell again. This time she heard movement inside the house. As expected, it was her mother who came to the door. Her father and her brothers were heavy sleepers but her mother slept fitfully, and sometimes had to get up during the night and make herself a cup of tea in the hope it would settle her. Virginia remembered, this from the time she shared the kitchen bed with her mother, and Granny, and sister Rose.
Her mother peeped round the door, then gasped at the sight of her. ‘Virginia, come away in, hen. What on earth are you doing out at this time of night?’ Clutching her grey shawl over her white cotton nightdress, she stood aside to allow Virginia to enter. It only took them a few steps to cross the shoebox of a hall into the kitchen. The hall had a row of hooks on the wall facing the outside door, suspended from which were a shabby collection of men’s jackets and dungarees. The kitchen itself wasn’t much bigger than the hall. From the edge of the built-in coal bunker and dresser to the fireplace was only a few feet. And from the sink at the window to the edge of the hole-in-the-wall bed measured only a few more feet. In the centre of this small area was crowded a wooden table, four wooden chairs and an armchair on either side of the fireplace. As a result there was hardly any floor space in which to move around.
Janette Watson lit the gas mantle above the fireplace, then turned it down low so that the light wouldn’t disturb her sleeping husband. Then just to make doubly sure, she tugged one of the bed curtains further along to shield his face. After giving the fire a poke to bring it to life, she placed the kettle on to it.
‘It was boiling just a wee while ago, it won’t take a minute,’ she whispered to Virginia. ‘What happened? Are you all right?’
‘Just tired,’ Virginia said. ‘I was dismissed. She never even gave me my wages and I’ve had to walk all that way.’
Janette eased the poker in and out of the fire again. ‘It won’t be long. You’ll feel better after a cup of tea.’ She fetched the teapot and lifted the tin caddy down from the fireplace.
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘In your own time, hen.’
‘I was impertinent.’
‘Oh dear!’ Janette’s sigh betrayed her fear that this was bound to happen some day. Virginia had always been a spirited child.
‘Well, she was a horrible woman. Nobody liked her.’
Janette nearly added, ‘Even so, hen, she was the mistress,’ but thought better of it.
Virginia had taken after her father, Tam Watson, as indeed had her brothers. Like most of the country, they used to be good Liberals, but gradually first Tam, then the boys, then Virginia, had developed an angry independent spirit and become socialists. They’d even turned away from God and the church—at least Tam and the boys had. Janette partly blamed too much reading—and all the meetings and classes Tam went to, run by firebrands like John Maclean. Tam even went to meetings on Sunday afternoons. Now the boys attended them as well.
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in education. She’d had a good education herself. She’d left school when she was twelve but her parents had always had books in the house and encouraged her to read. She enjoyed reading, but nice romantic or Christian stories. For one thing, she was far too tired with scrubbing out pubs and halls all day to be able to burden her mind with all this socialist stuff, although Tam kept on pushing high-brow books on her. She had to admit that she did enjoy some of them—but only if they were novels. Not the serious political stuff that he was so fond of. Tam had stuffed the boys’ heads with wild ideas he’d got from books like Merry England by Robert Blatchford—which he claimed was ‘the best introduction to socialism there is’. He’d even got hold of a copy of something called Das Kapital—a dreary-looking volume which remained, unread and gathering dust, on the mantleshelf.
Janette never objected, except in a gentle way, about Tam’s worrying drift away from the church. It wasn’t so much his turning away from church attendance and his criticism of priests and ministers that worried her. It wasn’t even his sincerely held views about the unfair distribution of wealth—she knew as well as anyone that it was an unfair world, and when you lived in the Gorbals such an idea hardly came as a great revelation. But she did worry terribly about his hardening atheism. All right, there was a lot wrong with the church and you didn’t need to go there every Sunday to be a good Christian, but the actual teachings of Jesus Christ were sacrosanct as far as she was concerned. She had always tried to instill this deep feeling into Virginia, though with how much success she could never be sure. When Virginia had been a child, she had told her stories and shown her picture books about ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’.
Now, looking at her daughter and seeing the rebellious spark in her eye and bitter twist to her mouth, she doubted that her religious teaching had had much effect.
‘I’ll start looking for another job right away. Factory work maybe. Anything but service. That’s just slavery.’
Janette sighed. ‘You think factory work’s likely to be any easier? I think you’ll soon find, hen, that you didn’t know how lucky you were working in that nice big house, getting your bed and board.’
‘Och, mammy, you don’t understand what it was like, or what that Mrs Cartwright was like.’
‘You’re forgetting that I had a spell in service myself in my young days.’
‘You were lucky. You got a nice unmarried Christian lady who treated you like a daughter. How often do you think that happens?’
‘Well, maybe not quite like a daughter, Virginia, but Miss Hamilton was a very good Christian lady, right enough.’
‘Well, Mrs Cartwright is anything but a good Christian lady. Although she probably thinks she is because she’s a regular church-goer.’
‘Och well,’ Janette soothed. ‘You’re here now. Drink up your tea. We’ll talk about what you’re going to do in the morning.’
‘Where’ll I sleep?’
‘Oh aye.’ Janette nibbled worriedly at her lip. It had been over a year since Virginia had slept overnight. She had only ever got a few hours off from Hilltop House. Sometimes she didn’t come home on her time off so that she could save her fare and help out with the housekeeping money. She was a good wee soul, really.
‘It’s all right, mammy. The floor’ll do. I’m so tired I could sleep on the edge of a knife. I’ll lie down on the rug in front of the fire. It’ll be nice and cosy.’
‘All right, hen. And here’s a cushion for a pillow. And I’ll slip one of the blankets off the bed.’
‘No, no, you might waken daddy. Your shawl’ll do fine.’
‘Will you put out the gas?’
‘Yes, don’t worry. Goodnight, mammy.’
‘Goodnight, hen.’ Janette gave a faint smile. ‘Sleep tight and don’t let the bugs bite.’ It was something she always used to say when Virginia slept at home. She climbed carefully back into bed and eased herself between the blankets.
Virginia finished her tea, turned off the gas and then settled down in the darkness under the grey woollen shawl. She became aware of the smell of paraffin wax. The wood of the hole-in-the-wall bed had long been infested by bugs but her mother kept them at bay by constantly rubbing every hole and crack with paraffin oil. As Virginia snuggled further down under the shawl, as well as the smell of the wool, she could also detect that of her mother, warm and sweaty from her hard day’s toil. The familiar smells comforted Virginia and helped her to relax into a dreamless sleep.
It seemed no time at all until her mother was saying, ‘Come on now, hen. You’d best get up before the boys come through.’
‘Are they working again?’
‘Aye, a lot of folk are being taken on at the munitions factories. Ian’s doing that. Duncan’s been doing a bit of labouring here and there.’
Her father appeared in the kitchen. He’d been at the lavatory and was in his rolled up sleeves, with a white scarf knotted at his throat.
‘I told Ian,’ he said, ‘that the German workers were his friends. It’s the capitalists over there that are the real enemy of the British and the German workers. I told him, but it still hasn’t sunk in.’
Virginia thought he looked quite ill. His cheeks were sunken and under his eyes was dark brown crepey skin almost the colour of his bushy moustache.
‘It’s a good job, Da,’ Ian said, following his father into the kitchen. He was a lively eighteen-year-old with laughing blue eyes and curly brown hair. He’d always been popular with the girls. ‘And we need the money,’ he went on. ‘What Ma earns barely gets us a piece and jam for our dinner. Oh, it’s you Virginia,’ he cried out in surprise and pleasure at the sight of her.
She’d already replaced the cushion on the chair and folded her mother’s shawl. She had tidied her clothes and now she was pinning up her hair.
‘I’ve been dismissed.’
Her mother, in an apologetic tone, explained, ‘She was cheeky to the mistress.’
Ian laughed. ‘Good for you, hen.’
‘Will there be any chance of a job in the munitions factory, do you think, Ian?’
‘Aye, they’re needing as many as they can get now.’
‘Not you as well?’ her father groaned.
Duncan’s big frame filled up all the elbow room that was left in the kitchen. He was a year and a half older than Ian and much more serious.
‘You’d be better to stay in service, Virginia,’ he said, thumping down at the table.
‘That’s what you think!’
‘Virginia, apart from anything else, service is not dangerous like working with munitions. And you won’t like turning yellow either.’
‘Yellow?’ Virginia laughed. ‘You’re joking.’
‘No, it depends where they put you. In some departments, dust and chemicals fly about and make everyone’s skin and clothes turn yellow.’
‘Well, I’ll just have to hope they don’t put me on that.’ She shrugged. ‘I might not get taken on at all, but I think it’s worth a try. Like Ian says, we need the money.’
‘It’ll be dangerous no matter where they put you.’ Duncan had always been the moody, pessimistic one of the family.
‘I’m willing to take my chances,’ Virginia said cheerfully. ‘I believe in equality and if Ian isn’t afraid of the work in the munitions factory, then neither am I.’
Her mother cast her eyes heavenwards. That Pankhurst women and her suffragette friends had a lot to answer for. ‘Equality,’ she said. ‘What next!’
6
At first Virginia thought it was great. Starting work at eight o’clock in the morning, instead of five or six. She could hardly believe her luck. It was all very exciting and interesting too. After clocking in to the large, one-storey building, she was given a fireproof overall and a cap that had to completely cover her head. Not one hair must show. Pins, brooches, rings or metal of any kind were strictly forbidden. Rubber shoes had to be worn. She was led down long corridors and into the huge room where she was to begin work.
When she saw the number of girls in the room, she was astounded. She had never in her life seen so many people all together in the one place. Hundreds and hundreds of girls—or so it seemed to Virginia—all dressed the same and standing intent on doing the same thing, or hurrying to and fro. She was given boxes of small brass parts for fuses, to be gauged and checked for rejects. It didn’t take her long to learn how to do it and soon her attention began to stray a little. She saw notices stuck up on the dark grey walls. They told the workers where to go in the event of a raid by zeppelins or other aircraft.
