Martha turned slowly and began, droopingly, to go back. More people in the streets now, the town bestirring, a few carts clattering over the cobbles. Harkness of Bethel Street School went by, a little man with a pointed beard, gold-rimmed glasses and a warm overcoat; some rope-work girls in clogs; a clerk to the Council Offices hurrying, blowing on his hands. They all avoided her, studiously, avoided her eye. They did not know her. But they did know she was from the Terraces, part of the trouble, the blight that had lain upon the town these last three months. Her feet dragged as she began to climb the hill.
Outside Teasdale’s bakery, a horse and van stood loading bread for delivery. Dan Teasdale, the son, hurried in and out with a big basket on his arm, loaded with new-baked loaves. As she came abreast the shop the hot sweet scent of the new bread rose from the basement bakehouse, and caught her by the throat. Instinctively she paused. She could have swooned with desire for the bread. At that moment Dan came out with another basketful. He saw her, saw the ravening in her face. He paled; a kind of horror clouded his eyes. Without thinking, he took a loaf and thrust it into her hands.
She said nothing, not a word, but a mist of gratitude, the nearest she ever got to tears, danced before her as she continued up Cowpen Street into Sebastopol Row. She liked Dan, a decent lad who was working for his ticket at the Neptune, but now, since the strike, was helping his father, driving the van, delivering the bread; he often spoke to Davey. Breathing a little fast from the climb, she laid her hand upon the door of her house.
“Mrs. Kinch’s Alice has the congestion.” Hannah Brace, her next-door neighbour, stopped her on the way in.
Martha nodded: all that week the children of the Terraces had been going down with pneumonia.
“I’ll look round later, tell Mrs. Kinch,” she said and entered her own house.
They were up and dressed, the four of them, Robert and her three sons, gathered round the fire; but as usual her eyes fell first on Sammy. He smiled at her, that ready, tight-lipped grin which sent his deep-set blue eyes right out of sight beneath his nobby forehead. There was an infinite hardihood behind Sam’s grin. He was only nineteen, already a hewer in the Neptune, Martha’s eldest son, her favourite.
“Eh, look,” Sam winked at David. “Look what yer mother has been and gone and done. She’s been and gone and done and pinched a loaf for ye.”
In his corner Davey smiled dutifully; a thin, quiet white-faced boy with a long, serious, stubborn face. His shoulder-blades stuck out as he stooped over the fire; his big dark eyes looked inquisitive usually, but they were less inquisitive now. He was fourteen years of age, horse-putter in the Neptune, Paradise section, nine hours each day underground bank to bank, now on strike and rather peckish.
“What do ye think about it, lads?” Sam went on. “Here’s your uncle Sammy trainin’ for the living-skeleton act. Loses ten stone a fortnight, doin’ the Hints for Stout Ladies, doin’ the cure for corpulency. And then wor mother walks in wi’ a banquet. Hard lines on Sammy, eh, Hughie lad?”
Martha drew down her dark brows at him.
“You’re lucky to be getting it.” And she began to slice the loaf.
They all watched her, fascinated; even Hughie looked up from cobbling a patch on his old football boots, and it took a lot to take Hughie’s mind off football. Hughie was mad on football, centre forward — at seventeen, mind you — of the local Sleescale team when not hand-putting in the Paradise section of the Neptune. Hughie did not answer Sam. Hughie never had much to say, silent, even more silent than his silent father. But Hughie looked at the loaf.
“Pardon me, mother,” Sammy jumped up and took the plate. “Whatever in the world wor I thinkin’ ov te forget my manners. Allow me, said the Duke, in his magnificent uniform ov the Tyneside Hussars.” He offered the plate to his father.
Robert took a slice. He looked at it, then at Martha.
“Did this come from the Guardians? If it did I’m not wantin’ it.”
She looked back at him.
He said in a defeated voice:
“I’m asking you if this bread came from the Guardians?”
She still looked at him, still thinking of his madness in flinging their savings into the strike. She said:
“No.”
Sammy stepped in with loud cheerfulness.
“What in all the world does it matter, wor all goin’ te eat it, I suspect.” He met his father’s eyes with the same hardy cheerfulness. “Ye needna look that way, dad. All gud things come te an end. And aw’m not bleedin’ well sorry. Aw want te be workin’. Not sittin’ about handless like, waitin’ for mother te fetch in wor bait.” He turned to Davey: “Here, count, have a doormat — do. Don’t hesitate. Believe me, they’ll only be chucked out.”
Martha snatched back the plate from his hand.
“Aw don’t like that kind of fun, Sammy. You oughtna te mock good food.”
She frowned upon him heavily. But she gave him the biggest slice. And serving Hughie next, she kept the smallest to herself.
TWO
Ten o’clock. David took up his cap, slipped out, and sauntered along the unevenly sunk pavement of Inkerman Row. All the miners’ rows in Sleescale were named after the glorious victories of the Crimea. The top row, David’s row, was Inkerman; the next Alma; the one below Sebastopol; and the lowest of all, Joe’s row, was Balaclava. David was on his way to Joe’s house now, to see “if Joe was comin’ out.”
The wind had fallen, the sun broke through unexpectedly. Though dazzled, not quite used to it, the brilliant profusion of sunshine was beautiful to David. In winter, when he was working, often he did not see real sunlight for days on end. Dark in the morning when he went down; dark at night when he came up.
But to-day, though cold, was bright, flooding his being with a strange brightness, reminding him oddly of those rare occasions when his father took him fishing up the Wansbeck. Away from darkness and pit dirt, green hazel woods, a ripple of clean water—
“Look, dad, look!” as a clump of early primroses yielded themselves to his excited eye.
He turned the corner of Balaclava Row.
Like the other rows, Balaclava stretched for a bad five hundred yards — a reach of grimed stone houses sooty black in colour, but daubed and seamed with clumsy veins of white where mortar had been added to fill the larger and more recent cracks. The square chimneys, broken and uneven, looked drunken; the long line of roofs undulated from subsidences, like a wavy sea; the yards were palinged with decayed railway sleepers, broken stubs and rusty corrugated iron, backed by heaps of slag and pit-waste. Each yard had its closet and each closet had its pail. An iron pail. The closets stood like sentry-boxes, between the rows, and at the end of the rows was a huddle of home-made outhouses, built on lumpy ground beside a span of naked rail tracks. Neptune No. 17 stood up near the middle, with the hummocky drab of the Snook behind. The Snook was all waste land, cracked and puddled and seamed with the old Neptune workings that went back one hundred years. The old Scupperhole yawned in the Snook. All of it had to do with pits. The far flat background was all pit chimneys, pit heaps, pit-head gear, pit everything. A string of washing flapping its vivid blues and scarlets against the dreary pattern of dirt caught the eye like an affront. That string of washing gave to the picture a grim, perverted beauty.
David knew it all and he did not like it much. He liked it less now. Over the long line of dreary back-to-back dwellings there hung an air of apathy and defeat. Some colliers — Slogger Leeming, Keeker Howe, Bob Ogle and a few others that made up the gambling school in ordinary times — squatted upon their hunkers against the wall. They were not schoolin’ now, they had no coppers for schoolin’, they were just crookin’ their houghs. They squatted in silence. Bob Ogle, marrow in the Paradise foreshift, stroking the narrow head of his whippet bitch, nodded to Davey. Slogger Leeming said: