Bread and Roses, Part One: The Daughter of the Newly Rich

1.1 The new money’s daughter

Early spring in South Wales, 1910, is still cold and wet. You are on the small train back to the coalfield. Steam blows out of the engine in a white fog and settles along the edge of the window in fine beads. The wheels bite the rail joints one after another, and the wooden seat trembles with them, tapping out a beat.

You hear a deeper roar further off. The sound of the colliery reaches you first, welcoming you home before the outline of the town does.

The leather travelling bag presses on your knees. A few books show at the mouth of it: a French reader, an arithmetic primer, exercise books. Your teaching certificate is tucked between the pages, and at certain doors it lets you through without question.

The glass gives you back to yourself. A pale straw hat over brown curls, a sprig of dried flowers at the band. A short jacket nipped in at the waist, the collar buttoned properly; a grey-blue skirt to the ankle, its pleats pressed into obedient lines. The toes of your pale laced boots have small scuffs on them, as if to remind you: however clean the cloth, a journey will wear marks into it.

You remember the girl who first went to London. You still carried a roughness from the edge of the coalfield then: long strides, a loud voice, the ends of your sentences drawn out. People could hear where you came from in the syllables of good morning. The corridors of the boarding school were waxed, and a heel came down hard on them, as if to remind you that here every step has a listener. At table, silver forks touched china with a brightness that hurt. Someone laughed under their breath — not loudly, but enough to keep your back straight all evening, your hands more careful, every word rounded off.

Your parents named you Isabel because they wanted exactly that roundness. Your father holds shares in a textile mill and in collieries; new money comes fast and comes black. Old money will take his cheques and still not count you as one of its own. Your mother treats respectability as a thick fabric: the more expensive, the safer. So your childhood was tied down rule by rule — French pronounced like polished silver, embroidery stitched close, piano kept exactly in time. You drew your shoulders back until you could hardly breathe. You did not understand then who those rules were protecting. Later you did: they protected the family’s front, and they pushed you along a road that had been planned for you a long time ago.

After that, the women’s college in London and teacher training put another set of rules into your hands: the smell of chalk and ink in the classroom, tram bells and hooves crossing outside the window. You heard Fabian lectures. You heard, in the early arguments about women’s rights, a new tone — sharper than charity, harder to tame than gentleness. You read Germinal, read about the wet rock and the breathing in the pit, the edge of the page curling with the sweat of your hand. A modern reader might call all that an awakening; in your time, reading alone was enough to have you labelled a bluestocking. Knowledge was a thin line tied to your ankle: the further you walked, the tighter it pulled.

You thought none of it had anything to do with you. Then your father put your teaching certificate on the table like a counter in a game, and said, calmly, that it was time you married. A baron, short of money. You lack the name, he lacks the cash; both sides gain.

You remember the smell of the room where you met him. Cigar smoke. Coal fire. A carpet thick enough to swallow footsteps, thick enough to swallow a person. The baron’s silver cuff links were too bright. When he looked at you, his eyes went over your hat trimmings first and then settled on your surname, pricing it. Your father talked investment and property in the tone of a man turning ledger pages. The baron talked tradition and honour like a man reciting a prayer. You held your teacup with the china against your lips and could not taste its heat, only a dryness in your throat.

When you refused, you did not raise your voice. You put the cup back on the tray, and the small knock of porcelain carried clearly even through the thick carpet and the thick curtains. Your mother’s lashes trembled once. Your father, saying nothing, turned his newspaper more loudly.

You were not refusing for the sake of refusing. It was only getting harder to use respectability as an excuse. Those London arguments had not given you a pass that would change the world tomorrow, but they had left a splinter in your chest: you had seen, suddenly, that there was coal grit in your father’s dividends, and blood in the grit, and that you were meant to wrap the whole thing up as a step upwards by marrying.

You could not pay that bill with silence any longer.

So you would go back to South Wales.

You said: I am going to teach at the charity school. Reading, writing and arithmetic, for the children.

Your father did not stop you. He probably thought that once you had had enough of the cold and the coal dust you would come home. Your mother did not stop you either. She chose the colours least likely to cause trouble, sewed your buttons on more firmly, as if adding one more layer of protection.

The train whistles again and the sound stretches out along the valley. The roar comes closer, like a huge animal breathing in the fog. You press your fingers to the edge of the certificate. You do not think again about the baron’s cuff links or your father’s ledgers, and you do not think again about the laughter in the London corridors.

Your reason for coming back is clear enough: you will not hand yourself over to an elegantly itemised bill. You want to put what you have learned down beside the most grating noise there is, so that it does not stay a subject for dinner-table conversation.

You are going to the town ringed by collieries, to that charity school, to be its teacher.

1.2 The first lesson: the half-timers

When you push open the door of the charity school, the cold comes in after you through the gap, carrying coal smoke and wet earth. The room is packed with children. The benches are too close; stretch a leg and you touch somebody’s boot. The old blackboard has an oily shine and the chalk dust has banked up in the tray like frost. Coal murmurs in the iron stove, and the heat only circles the stove itself; two steps away it is cold again.

You put your bag on the desk and introduce yourself. Your voice sounds too clean in this small room, like a freshly washed cloth shaken out. The children do not answer. Somebody whistles. Somebody drums a heel on the floor. A boy in the front row says “Isabel” wrong on purpose, and the ones beside him laugh harder.

You do not correct him yet. You look at their hands. Many of them have chapped red splits across the knuckles and black under the nails that will not wash out. You look at their eyelids: heavy, a night’s sleep short. You think of the half-time system here — after twelve, a child can apply to attend in the mornings and work in the afternoons, in a factory or at the colliery, so that hunger and tiredness turn school into a secondary obligation. You memorised the clauses in a London classroom. Here they have grown a smell: cold sweat, wet wool, the sourness of stale bread.

You begin the first lesson. Letters, then arithmetic. You write a few lines on the board and the chalk squeaks dryly across it. Halfway through, there is a dull thud behind you — a crumpled ball of paper lands on the desk, right beside your notebook. It falls open. There is coal dust folded into it, as if someone wanted to bring the dirt of the pit in and show it to you.

The laughing starts again. Someone claps. Someone imitates a bird.

A second ball flies past your cuff, and a little chalk dust shakes loose. You understand now: the rules here get written by testing and answering back. Take a step away and they will take a step forward.

You swallow it down and fix your eyes on the direction the paper came from, the way you would fix on a taut wire. You find the source quickly.

Against the wall there is a girl, not tall, with a hardness in her face that does not belong to her age. She moves just before the laughter does — chin up, toe tapping, an elbow nudging the child beside her.

You put down the chalk and walk slowly off the platform. Your heels come down on the boards, one, two, and the smiles nearest you stiffen. You stop in front of her. You can smell the sweat in her damp clothes and a thread of coal smoke under it, as if she has come straight from the screens.

“What’s your name?” you ask.

She turns her head away and does not answer.

You take the register out of your pocket. The rustle of the pages is very clear in the quiet. Your fingertip stops on the line. “Martha.”

Hearing her own name, the corner of her mouth twitches: not giving in, and rather pleased.

“Martha,” you say, “pick up what you threw.”

She does not move. The children murmur, waiting to see what you do next. You feel a thin damp creeping up from your ankles — this classroom is like the mouth of the pit, where the draught always finds the cracks.

You do not raise your voice. You just make it more specific. “You can leave it. You can carry on. And then I’ll write your name down and give it to the school attendance officer.”

Martha’s eyes change. Not the flinch of a child afraid of a telling-off, but a more practical wariness, the way you’d look at a notice that could take the pot off your family’s stove. She glances at you and looks away again quickly, as though afraid of what you might read in her eyes.

At last she bends, picks up the ball of paper, drops it into the iron bucket by the stove, fast, like somebody making up time on a shift.

You go back to the desk, pick up the chalk, carry on with the sums.

This time the laughter does not start. The children are still watching you, but there is something else in it now: weighing, calculating, reassessing how long you will last.

There is only the chalk on the board, the scratch of pencil points on paper, and the far-off roar of the colliery through the window. That roar presses low on everybody’s back, through the wall.

You come back to the desk and close the register. You know this lesson has only just begun. So has the game that childhood plays in a coalfield. You have found the ringleader.

And you know Martha is not afraid of being scolded. She is afraid of that phrase in your mouth: the attendance officer.

1.3 The man who takes children, and the law in your hands

The school attendance officer — in a colliery town in the first half of the twentieth century, people put it more plainly and call him the Kid Catcher, the man who catches truants. If he writes your name down, your family can be fined; if you cannot pay the fine, it goes to court, and the last of the family’s money gets raked out like stove ash. Worse, the child can be taken away, sent to a reformatory or an institution, put in different clothes, given a different name.

At the end of the corridor a paraffin lamp burns low and flickers, and where the paint has lifted off the wall it looks like a patch of old scars.

You unscrew the cap of your pen and dip the nib. The ink sinks into the paper fibres and leaves a thin black line.

There are a lot of blanks on the register. It is not the first time you have seen absence, but here the blanks crowd together. The clauses of the 1902 Education Act come into your head: the local authority is responsible for children’s education, parents or guardians must ensure attendance, truancy can be punished.

You stop the nib on Martha’s line. Not many gaps, but they stand out. You think of the way she lifted her chin, and of that flicker of wariness when she heard “attendance officer”.

You close the register, take your coat and go out into the yard. It is not large; the ground is packed mud, and the puddles reflect a grey sky. A little dusk leaks down between the eaves. The children have gone. A few crows are left on the low wall, making their hoarse noise.

The screens are still roaring in the distance, as if to tell you: days here are decided by machinery and by hours.

Martha has not gone. She stands under the porch with a length of rope clenched in her hand, a knot tied at the end of it. The side of her shoe is worn through, her stocking is patched, there is dried mud on her knee. As you come closer, her toe draws back half an inch and then stops dead.

“Who is your guardian?” you ask.

She presses her lips together and does not answer at once. The wind comes through the corner of the yard and moves a few loose hairs at her forehead. Then, very quietly: “Don’t call him.”

“Who?” you press.

“The one who takes the children.” She forces it out. “He’ll take me away. He’ll take my sister too. Mam’ll cry, and the money’ll go.”

Something stops in your chest. You had been ready to talk about responsibility: you have the law behind you, you have a right to demand attendance. Now, landing in her ears, it becomes something else — not classroom order, but disaster at the door of a house.

Your fingers tighten a little on the register. A fine is a blunt knife: it does not kill at once, but it can push a family towards a cliff a step at a time. And you are not unaware of what a charity school means in this town: some take it for alms, some take it for surveillance. If you keep the attendance officer in your mouth, your good will starts to sound like a threat.

Still you do not let go. You say quietly, “I won’t call him. But I must see your guardian. From tomorrow, you come to school properly. You can work in the afternoon, but you come in the mornings. Do you understand?”

Martha stares at you, and there is nothing in her eyes but arithmetic. She is working out a sum: how many pence a morning at school will cost, and how much an afternoon at the screens can make back. In the end she nods once, very unwillingly.

“Bring your guardian,” you add. “Now.”

She grips the rope tighter, knuckles white. She turns and runs off, her boots splashing small spots of mud out of the ground. You stand under the porch and wait. Lamplight leaks out of the corridor and lies in the standing water of the yard like a shaking sheet of gold.

Before sunset, a light but carrying step comes towards you. You look up and see first a length of dark trouser leg, corduroy showing its faint ribbing in the lamplight; then a short waistcoat and an old jacket, the cuffs worn to fluff. Whoever it is wears a flat cap pulled down over fair hair, with a bright red neckerchief at the throat. She stops in the middle of the yard, her eyes going over you and settling on your register. A careful look, the way you would watch a blade that might come down.

“You wanted me?” she says, in a voice with the hardness the screens grind into people.

Martha hides behind her, half her face in her shadow.

Only then do you understand. Not a tired mother. Not an angry father.

The guardian in front of you is barely more than a child herself.

1.4 The pit brow lass and the “little canary”

She is wearing a coarse jacket like a grown man’s, and still you cannot look at her as a grown woman.

You keep your voice as flat as you can. “I asked for Martha’s guardian.”

The corner of her mouth moves, as though she is about to smile, or grinding her teeth. “That’s me. Name’s Kate.”

Later you will learn she is nearly seventeen. At the time, your first thought is that she is far too young. You have seen older students than her at the women’s college in London, with clean, soft fingers. This girl’s hands are rough and her fingers red. Even so, her face is clear enough to remember at a glance: a clean brow bone, bright eyes, a straight nose. The lamp shifts and the side of her face comes out like a shape cut by hard stage light.

In that moment your memory drags you back to a London theatre. You were in the second circle with the worn plush rail in front of you, and the audience smelled of hot wool and face powder mixed together, close and sweet enough to make you dizzy.

Not a proper theatre with Hamlet in it — a music hall. Songs, jokes, short sketches. When the lights went up it was like a bright cloth pulled off the stage: everything fast, neat, and made to hold your eye. The turns that held it best were the male impersonators: women in men’s clothes, playing sailors, officers, young lovers, even flirtatious gentlemen. They wore binding waistcoats and pushed their hair up under hard hats; they lengthened their stride and straightened their backs, held a cane or a prop cigarette between their fingers, took up a man’s way of standing. They tipped the corner of the mouth when they joked and dropped the voice half a note in a love song, and the house believed it was watching a real young man.

Vesta Tilley was the great name on that stage. She was best as a smart, respectable young gentleman, walking light, as if there were springs under her heels. Bessie Bonehill preferred the boyish, cheeky songs, and laughed as though she meant to poke a hole in the rules. Hetty King often came on with a cane and tapped its head lightly on the boards, and the whole house would go quiet, caught by her timing. They did not make themselves ridiculous to get a laugh. Just the opposite: they played handsome with such seriousness that you forgot it was a costume.

You heard those names at the girls’ school. Nobody said “I like her” out loud; they said it in the dormitory with their voices down. Whose picture had been cut out of the paper and slipped inside a Latin book. Whose fingertips paused on the page, as though afraid the paper might get warm by itself. A mistress came near and the book shut at once, the cover perfectly straight, the heartbeat not straight at all. At the time you took it for a gust of adolescence, blown through and gone.

And now that gust is standing in front of you, her face given a clear edge by the paraffin lamp, and the handsome of the stage has suddenly come off the page and landed as real bone and flesh. You even have the ridiculous thought that this might be some kind of performance — that someone has arranged it to watch you make a fool of yourself. The next moment you see the coal on her cuffs and the mud on her boots, and you understand: this is not a performance. This is a life.

“What do you want with a guardian?” she says, in that voice ground rough by the coalfield.

You lift the register a little; the corner of the paper touches your palm. “She comes to school tomorrow. Full days, if possible. She’s missed too much.”

The corner of Kate’s mouth pulls. “Full days? Easy for you to say. Will you feed her?”

Martha shrinks further behind her, like a small animal afraid of being lifted away. The words attendance officer go through your mind like a blade stirring in its sheath. You know what that blade weighs: fines, a summons, the bread money taken, the child taken too. You also know that if you do not dare even mention that much power, the laughter will push you straight out of this school.

You make it concrete. “Mornings here. Afternoons she can work. She needs to read and write, and keep accounts.”

Kate makes a small sound of contempt, and her eyes travel from your cuff to the curls under your hat brim. “Reading and writing’ll fill her belly tonight, will it? Stop her mam coughing?”

You hear the machinery roaring in the distance, and coal smoke works into your nose, like an invisible hand herding people. You still do not lower the register. “The half-time can be discussed. But she must be here in the mornings. She has to learn to add up, to read a notice, to write her own name. Otherwise she’ll be led by the nose all her life.”

Something flickers in Kate’s eyes, like a spark going over.

“You people sent for me to teach,” you say. “I came. And I’m not leaving.”

Kate looks at you as though weighing the sentence. The wind goes through the dark, the colliery hooter sounds, and she laughs once, suddenly. “Little canary.”

That is what she calls you.

When it lands, Martha’s shoulders draw in tighter. What comes into your head first is a joke from a London drawing room — sweet, pretty, something to be fond of. But the wind in the coalfield has blown the sweetness out of the word, and only a rust-cold edge is left. You think of the canaries they use in the pit to test for gas: they sing, and when the danger comes they are the first to die.

“Is that a threat?” you ask, and your voice comes out sharper than you expected.

Kate shakes her head. “It’s a warning. This isn’t a theatre. Sing one part wrong here and you go down.”

The words sting. “I didn’t come here to sing. I want her in school. That’s what the law says too.”

Kate’s eyes brighten, and not kindly. “The law? The law said women couldn’t go down a pit, and all.” She lifts her chin higher, as if setting a stone in front of you. “And we worked in the pits anyway. Pushing tubs, sorting coal, taking the abuse. You call that protection. Protecting who? Protecting us from a man’s wage, from a man’s job.”

You hear your own breathing get heavier. You know the ban she means goes a long way back — the Mines Act shut women out from underground. A modern reader would call it protective legislation; here, dropped into a real life, that protection is usually a taking-away. You look at Kate’s trousers and her boots and suddenly understand why they cause offence.

“You want to go down?” you ask.

Kate half smiles. “I want the money. I want us to decide what we do. Let me go down and earn what’s there, and don’t use decency as a rope to tie us to the surface and let us starve.”

You hold the register, and for a second you hesitate: whether the legality in your hands might really be a knife, cutting into days that are already barely standing. And still you do not let go. You look at Martha, who has buried her face deeper.

“I’m only talking about this one thing,” you say, more quietly. “Martha comes in the morning. After school she stays twenty minutes. I’ll teach her, and we’ll get today’s sums right.”

“Ten minutes.” Kate repeats it like a woman haggling. “Not one more. She’s got the screens after.”

You nod. “Fifteen.”

“Done.”

With that, she reaches out and pulls Martha behind her, fast, the way you would shield something easily taken. Martha’s fingers are still holding the hem of her jacket.

Kate turns and takes two steps, then looks back at you. “Little canary. Don’t sing too loud. Down a pit, the one that sings loudest is always the first to drop.”

You watch them disappear into the streets, and only then notice your hand has never let go of the register.