Bread and Roses, Part Two: Into the Screening Shed

2.1 Into the screening shed: what the sunlight costs

For a fortnight the arrangement between you and Kate holds like a thin string tying the classroom to the street: Martha stays fifteen minutes after school and corrects her sums line by line. Sometimes Kate waits at the door, standing in the draught, trousers and red neckerchief easy to pick out. She does not come in. She only uses her eyes to remind you of the time.

Then one day Martha does not stay. Nor the next day. After that she stops coming at all.

The classroom is as crowded as ever, the benches creak as they are shoved about, and the seat against the wall is empty, glaringly empty. You ask after Martha, and the children pretend not to hear. You ask again, and a boy looks up. “She’s at the colliery. Go and look at the pit head.”

You go out. The wind comes from the direction of the pit, and the cold goes into the bone like fine needles. You know perfectly well that you are a shareholder’s daughter. You grew up hearing output, dividend, accident compensation, hearing your father talk about a colliery at the dinner table as though it were a machine: repair what needs repairing, replace what needs replacing. You have never once gone near the machine.

The screening shed sits against the pit head, and before you reach the door the sound has already filled you: belt pulleys humming, chains rattling, coal thudding dully on the boards, three or four noises boring into your ears at once. Hot air comes out through the gap in the door, coal dust and grease in it, and hits your face.

The moment you step inside, the light is cut off. Inside it is a dull yellow, the paraffin lamps darkened by coal dust. Black grit floats in the air. The belt rolls up out of the depth of the shed and spits coal and spoil forward, and along both sides stand women and half-grown children, their aprons and cuffs so black you cannot tell the original colour. Their hands go out, grab, throw, without stopping, frighteningly fast, because half a beat late and the coal has rolled past their feet, or into the heap where it should not be.

Right and wrong here are not marked in red pen. They are docked from your pay. Spoil is flung into the wooden chute, coal pushed the other way, and the dust turns over and comes at your cheek like a handful of ash. You raise a hand over your mouth and nose; the cloth blackens at once and your throat fills with a dry coal taste.

You push in two more steps, your shoulder brushing coarse cloth backs. The foreman comes past, his boots knocking the floor, and raps his short stick on the rail — and every pair of hands in the shed speeds up a little.

In all that confusion, you find the bright red neckerchief.

Kate is at the belt, further forward than the others. Her cuffs are rolled higher, there is coal dust and a scatter of fine cuts on her forearms. Her hands do not hesitate: a stone, a lump of coal; the stone flies into the chute, the coal is pushed away. That handsome face is even more conspicuous in the dust, like a bright nail driven into black cloth.

Martha is beside her, shorter, slower, a flurry in her movements. She reaches, and the coal has already rolled past and hit the boards with a thud. Kate does not turn her head. She only works faster, so that Martha can keep up. Martha bites her lip, her eyes red-rimmed from the dust, and does not dare stop.

You want to call their names, but the moment you open your mouth the dust goes down your throat. You cough, your eyes sting, and the water that comes drags a black line down your cheek with the grit in it.

The foreman goes over to Kate and taps the rail with his stick; the sound is thin and sharp. “Slowing down, Kate. Tuppence off you today.”

Kate’s hands stop for one beat. In that beat a long stretch of coal rolls past on the belt, and Martha nearly reaches for it before Kate catches her wrist. She looks up at the foreman with eyes like sparks struck off iron. “Off? You’re quick enough at that.”

The foreman shows a little of his teeth. “You lot work under the sun. Better than down below. Lucky it’s only that much.”

“Under the sun?” Kate’s voice comes through the roar, perfectly clear. “Can you eat sunlight? We’re under the sun and the dust still goes in our mouths, our hands still split, our legs still ache. You’re good at finding words for cutting our pay.”

On the last word she hurls a stone into the chute, and the wooden trough booms with it. The foreman’s face darkens and his stick strikes the rail again.

You stand a few steps off with the roar in your ears and your tongue dry. In London you learned words like reform, responsibility, charity. Here they are made of paper, and a lump of coal cuts through them the moment you take them out.

You understand at last: you have not come to fetch Martha back to a classroom. You have walked into a place where sunlight itself is used as a reason to pay people less. Open your mouth here and the sound is swallowed, and the words come out bent.

Kate turns her head and finally sees you. Her eyes stop for a moment on the hand over your mouth. Then she looks away and acts as though she does not know you.

You want to say something, and there is nothing in your throat but a cough you cannot hold down. The belt goes on roaring, the coal goes on rolling, the sun is outside and does not get into this shed.

The light in here is drowned in coal dust. Only a small shaking patch of yellow is left.

And you, standing in the yellow, can no longer say any of the fine things you learned in London.

2.2 The foreman’s ledger: your father’s name behind the numbers

The foreman shuts the ledger, and the pages crack together like a slap.

Kate does not back off. Her chin is up and her eyes are on the ledger in his hand.

His mouth goes sideways and he lifts his voice a little so the others will hear. “You women in trousers, what do you think you are? Surface work, surface pay. Don’t like it, clear off.”

Somebody nearby joins in, and the coarse words come in a string. You hear the word women turned into a joke that can be discounted at will. Martha’s shoulders jerk up and her fingers grip the hem of Kate’s jacket.

The foreman takes a step forward with a threat in the rhythm of it. It is half an order, half a humiliation. “Get back to work. Or I’ll send the lot of you home, and you can be good girls at the school.”

At good girls, there is another wave of laughter.

Your stomach turns over and your throat tightens. You had expected to dislike Kate’s sharpness. Only now do you find that what is actually hard to bear is not her edge, but the slightness with which the others look at her.

You take your hand away from your mouth. Coal dust settles at once on your lips; you swallow, and it feels as if your throat has been scraped. And you speak anyway.

“Show me the ledger,” you say.

It is not loud, and it cuts a gap in the roar. The woman nearest you stops working, and a lump of coal rolls past and thuds down by her foot.

Only now does the foreman look at you properly. His eyes go first to the leather edging of your gloves, then to the cloth of your coat, and stop at the black streak the dust and the tears have drawn on your face. There is a hesitation in that look, and also a sneer. “Miss, this isn’t where you teach children.”

You put out your hand. “Show me the ledger. Stoppages by the rules, settlement by the rules.”

The foreman scoffs and pulls the ledger against his chest like a man guarding a purse. “Rules? The rule here is whatever I write down.”

You hear your own heart. In that second you know exactly what you are holding. You hate it, and you use it.

You step forward and drop your voice, and put weight in it. “Mr Hargreaves is my father. Edmund Hargreaves. If you don’t know the name, go and ask the colliery manager. Ask him whose desk the accounts of this shed end up on.”

When those syllables land, the air changes at once. The ones who were joining in go quiet, as though a hand has closed on their throats. Someone swallows a swear word and turns it into a vague cough. The smile stops on the foreman’s face.

He stares at you, up and down, and finally exchanges outsider, some lady for trouble itself. His throat moves; his tone is still holding out. “Hargreaves? What are you doing here, taking the part of these—”

He does not finish. You cut him off. “I’m only talking about the rules.”

You push your hand an inch further forward. “The ledger.”

The belt is still spitting coal, and the clatter of it plugs everybody’s ears, and still you can hear the moment his breathing thickens. At last he hands the ledger over, unwillingly.

The pages open on dense pencil marks. You do not need to understand every figure. You only need him to know you have the power to give an order. You press a fingertip on that line of marks.

“This one,” you say. “Strike it out.”

His face darkens and he opens his mouth to push back, and it sticks. The others are watching him. If he holds out in front of a shareholder’s daughter, tomorrow the business will be written into a ledger somewhere else.

He snatches the ledger back, taking his face with it, and drags the pencil hard across the paper.

“Lucky for you.” He says it through his teeth and shuts the ledger; the crack is still there, but not as loud as before. “Back to work. Move, all of you!”

He turns to Kate, to pick up on her the dignity he has lost. “You hear me? Don’t make trouble for me again!”

Kate puts her hands back to the coal, and only then do Martha’s shoulders come down a little.

As you turn to go, the looks stick to your back like dust you cannot shake off. You know what they are thinking: why is a shareholder’s daughter speaking up for the women at the pit head? Is she here to do good, or here to inspect? Is there something behind the kindness?

“Fifteen minutes a day.”

You say it to Kate, even though she will not look straight at you. You say it anyway.

The belt roars on. You have to go back. And in the instant you step out of the door, Kate turns her head.

“Little canary.”

The same name, only the noise has roughened it.

“Get yourself home early.”

By the time you look back, she is no longer looking at you.

2.3 The walk back: men’s hands in the alley

On the day Martha comes back to the classroom, the black marks from the screening shed still will not wash off her face. She is quieter than before. When she sits down she first opens her palms to show you — the fingertips coarse, coal dust set into the splits. You do not ask why she was away. She speaks first, quietly, as if afraid of waking something.

“My littlest sister had a fever,” she says. “Burning hot. Moaning all night. Mam had no money for medicine.”

Medicine in the coalfield is rarely a doctor’s prescription. Mostly it is a small bottle of cough syrup from the chemist, a few papers of fever powder, or a cheap powder queued for at the charity dispensary; and even one or two shillings can empty a household. Martha says that she and Kate put in extra days at the screens, pushed extra tubs, and put that money together. Now her sister’s fever has broken and she has dared to come back.

When she says Kate’s name, her eyes drift to the door without meaning to, as though afraid the woman might appear, and also as though waiting for her to.

“Kate’s good,” Martha says under her breath. “She’s got a bad mouth but—” she puts a hand on her chest, “—she hasn’t got a bad heart.”

You do not smile. You think of little canary, of the way she lifts her chin, of the moment she threw those bitter words back at the foreman. And Martha goes on, laying out a piece of family business nobody has ever asked her about: her father and her eldest brother died in a pit accident, and when the bodies were brought up they were not shaped like men any more. Her mother has been in bed ever since, coughing as though her chest will split. The children left have to eat and be clothed, the rent has to be paid, the rates have to be paid. Kate has to earn, and settle their mother, and deal with the creditors, and look after the younger ones. She never says it is hard. When she swears worst, it is usually when she is most desperate.

You listen, and your fingers tighten on the chalk without your noticing. You understand suddenly: what you and Kate are arguing about is not whether a child should go to school. It is who pays for today.

Martha stays to correct her work that day, and does it more carefully than usual. When she has written the last figure she looks up at you, and there is a new closeness in her eyes, as though she has exchanged the teacher who’d call the attendance officer for the teacher who’ll listen. Before she goes she even adds, quietly, “Miss Isabel, mind how you go home. There’s men on the road.”

You take it for a child exaggerating. Children are best at telling fear as a story. But over the next few days, walking home, you keep feeling there are footsteps behind you: not close, not far, two or three yards back, stopping and starting.

In the shadow at the mouth of the alley there always seems to be a pair of eyes. You look back more than once and see nothing.

You talk yourself round: you heard stories about rough coalfields as a child; perhaps it is only an old fear coming up again.

Until that evening.

You come out of the school and it is already dark. The way home goes through a narrow alley with damp stone walls on both sides. The moment you step into it there is a sound behind you. You walk faster, and the footsteps behind you go faster too.

You look back and see two figures blocking the mouth of the alley, and another closing in from the other side. Their cap brims are down and their faces are in shadow. You smell drink, mixed with sweat and machine oil. Somebody laughs, low.

“The Hargreaves girl,” one of them says, chewing the surname on purpose. “Loud enough in the shed, wasn’t you.”

Your heart drops. You try to step back and your heel comes down on wet coal slurry and nearly goes from under you. A hand takes your wrist, the palm coarse, the grip like a pair of tongs. You try to shout and another hand comes over your mouth and nose at once, coal smoke and drink pushing into your throat, and the sound is stopped in you until there is nothing but breath.

They do not bring out a knife, and they do not hit you straight away. One of them leans close to your ear and says quietly, “You’re a rich man’s daughter. We don’t want much. Just something. Be good, don’t shout, don’t make it hard for us.”

You do not believe a word of it, and you fight. Somebody gives you a shove and your shoulder hits the stone wall and the sight goes white for a second.

And at that moment, from the far end of the alley, there are footsteps — hobnails on flagstones, like a rush of alarm bells.

Somebody swears, turns, and a shadow comes straight into them.

It is Kate.

Her red neckerchief is a small patch of fire in the dark. She moves as cleanly as she throws spoil at the screens: knee up, into the belly, elbow, take the space. When the first man doubles over she takes him by the collar and puts him into the wall, and the stone booms with it. Another reaches for her, and she twists his hand back until the joints make a dull sound and he sucks in his breath. Someone tries to get his arms round her from the side; she stamps a heel down onto his instep, and while he is gasping she swings a stone down onto the ground — the noise of it breaking is louder than any threat.

“Get out,” she says.

It is not loud, but it is like the hooter at the pit head: direct, and final. The men back off swearing, and throw a few ugly words behind them as they go. Kate does not follow. She takes one step towards you, catches your arm and hauls you off the wall.

Only now do you notice you are shaking. You want to say thank you and your tongue will not move.

Kate looks at you once.

“Come with me.”

She pulls you out of the alley and takes you round, away from the dark lanes. The account between you gets clearer with every street: you struck out a stoppage with a surname, and she dragged you out of an alley with her fists, and calls it paying you back.

Lights shake ahead of you. Kate does not look round, only grips your arm harder, as if afraid the dark will pull you back in.

2.4 Kate’s house, Martha’s load

She does not slow down until a row of low houses. The eaves are very low, and rain drips from the broken edge of the tiles onto the mud in front of the door, a small ticking sound. The door boards are old and blackened, and a line of paraffin light shows through the gap.

Kate pushes it open and heat comes at you — damp cloth in it, and the fire, and the sweetness of potatoes boiling. The room is so small that stepping in makes you want to pull your shoulders in. There is coal and an old wooden box in the corner, and a black pot on the fire with steam round its rim.

Martha puts her head out of the back room, sees you, and her eyes go wide. She rubs at her face with the back of her hand and smears the coal dust across her skin. “You… you came?”

Before you can answer, two smaller children squeeze out from the bed. One has loose plaits, the other’s hair is like a bird’s nest. Their bare feet on the boards are red with cold. They hide behind Martha at the sight of a stranger, and then crane out to look anyway.

From the bed in the back room comes a fit of coughing. You see a woman lying in the dark. Kate goes over and pulls the blanket up, quickly but very lightly, as if afraid one touch too many would break her.

“Don’t wake her.” Kate does not look back; she goes straight to the supper. In the pot there is a soup of potatoes and leeks, pale, but it smells good. She stirs it with a wooden spoon and a little sheen of fat rises to the top. There is a small piece of salt bacon by the fire, whitened at the edges; she cuts it thin and drops it in, and the room fills with a salt smell. On the table is a coarse loaf with a hard crust, and the knife goes through it with a crack, and inside it is soft and warm and smells of wheat. She spreads dripping on it from a small pot — fat saved from a roasting tin.

You have seen finer food at your own table, and eaten more expensive meat. The smell here is rough, and at this moment it is warm and it steadies you.

While Kate’s back is turned, Martha edges closer. She keeps her voice very low, afraid of being heard. “Kate follows you. Every day.”

You stop.

“She won’t say.” Martha hurries it out. “She’s afraid something’ll happen to you. She waits at the end of the street till you come out, watches you from the corner of the alley, all the way to your road — and then she goes home.” Martha’s eyes flick towards Kate, as though afraid her sister will turn round.

You think of those days when you kept feeling there was somebody behind you. It was not imagination. Those eyes had been in the shadow the whole time.

When Kate brings the bowls over, her face still has the same impatience on it. “Eat. Don’t sit there.”

The soup is very hot. You hold the coarse china and the heat goes into your palms and your fingers come back to life. You take a mouthful: the sweetness of potato, the clean taste of leek, the salt of the bacon, all landing at once, plain and solid. The bread with dripping on it is first the crack of the crust and then the fat, and it pushes the coal smoke aside for a while. The two little sisters eat fast, as if the food might get away. Martha looks at the bed in the back room after every mouthful, as though working out whether their mother will sleep a little longer.

After supper Kate stacks the bowls and gives them a rough wipe with a cloth. She chases the two little ones into bed, her voice hard and her hands tucking the blanket in tight.

You expect her to let you rest in the chair. Instead she throws her jacket over her shoulder and lifts her chin at you. “Come on.”

She pushes the back door open. The night wind comes straight in, cold as wet cloth slapped against your face. You go round behind the house, and Kate climbs up on a wooden box and some stones; you hesitate and then set your teeth and follow. The roof tiles are loose and creak faintly underfoot.

You sit side by side, not far from the chimney. In the distance the lights of the coalfield are scattered like stars the fog has half swallowed. There is moonlight, but it is not clear. The moon is like a worn silver coin, shining with effort.

“John, Thomas and Henry,” Kate says. “Those three. Go to the police station in town tomorrow, give them the names, and they’ll know what to do.”

She looks at the black mass of the colliery, silent for a while, and then says, “You saw, didn’t you. There’s nothing good under the sun either.”

You look down at her hands. They rest on her knees: thick knuckles, callused palms, fine splits in the web of the thumb, black marks that will not wash out. Those are not hands made by writing. They are made by pushing tubs, by sorting spoil, by snatching seconds at the rail.

And you understand suddenly what your saving has been like: like handing clean paper to somebody whose hands are covered in coal dust, and then blaming her for not valuing the paper. You keep your eyes on her fingertips, and something in you slowly turns.

“Kate,” you say.

She does not answer, only tilts her head, as if listening for what you will say and ready to throw it back.

“Can you write your own name?” You ask it very quietly.

She makes a small contemptuous sound. “Will writing my name get me another shilling?”

“No.” You soften your voice so that it does not sound like an order in a classroom. “But the things you said to the foreman — if they were written down, if more people heard them, they couldn’t pretend to be deaf.”

The night wind makes the corners of your eyes sting. Kate is silent for a while. Then: “Teaching me again, are you?”

“Not teaching you to be obedient,” you say. “Teaching you to keep what you’ve already said.”

Kate does not answer. She brings her eyes back from the colliery and looks at you properly for the first time. The look is still hard, but it is not all thorns any more.

She saved you. What you want to give back now is more than thanks.

2.5 Night lessons: deeds not words

A few days later the men who attacked you in the alley are taken away.

The night wind still blows through the coalfield, the coal smoke still sticks to your collar, and walking home there are fewer footsteps behind you and the shadows in the alley are not so thick.

Then Kate comes to the back door of the school.

The moon that night is thin as a dirtied sheet of silver, and the light through the window is yellow. You turn the lamp wick down so the light falls on one small patch of the table: yellowed paper, the inkwell, the pen nib. The room is very quiet; even the old clock by the blackboard ticks softly, as though speaking with its voice down.

Kate stands in the doorway with her jacket still on and her red neckerchief still knotted. She knocks her boots lightly on the threshold and a little coal dust comes off. She looks at the paper and pen on the table the way you would size up a tool that does not sit well in the hand.

“What are you teaching me?” she asks.

“To put things down in writing.” You push the paper across. “For the foreman, for the manager, for the papers. Until they can’t pretend not to see.”

Kate makes her contemptuous sound as if to throw it back, and in the end only pulls her cap brim down and comes and sits at the table.

First you have her hold the pen. It is too thin for her; the barrel slips, her knuckles are thick and the web of her thumb is split. Kate’s brows draw together, and she says nothing. You move her fingers one by one into position, slowly, as if setting out lengths of timber.

She tries. The first stroke goes crooked and the ink spreads into the fibres of the paper. Kate is annoyed at once and goes to throw the pen down. You hold the corner of the sheet so it does not get swept away.

“You learned to steal time at the belt,” you say. “Writing isn’t racing. It wants to be slow.”

Kate’s throat moves. She takes the pen again and changes to a steadier pressure. The nib goes across the paper as though cutting a road through the dark.

You spread out an old newspaper and show her the kind of writing working people read: short sentences, plain words, and their pain put down so vividly that you feel it with them. You mention how common papers like The Clarion are among men teaching themselves, how in the coalfield people gather round a lamp in the evening and read the paper aloud to those who cannot read, and argue about it afterwards, and argue until the fire has nearly gone out.

Kate listens, and there is less of an edge in her eyes. Then she says, “I’ve heard there’s an association over Wigan way. For the women at the pit brow. Their own, not the men’s union.”

You nod. You know why such a body has to be their own: the men are afraid of losing the work, and respectable people find their trousers indecent. They can only hold together, like picking out of the spoil the few pieces that will still burn. Kate talks fast, as though afraid that if she slows down somebody will take the words away from her.

“They say they’ll ban it again next year.” She puts weight on ban. “Not even the surface. Say we’re indecent. Say we spoil what a woman’s supposed to be.”

You hear next year and something tightens in your chest. Law and morality often arrive wearing the same face, with a kind smile, and leave a person no way to live. You have heard that argument in London; change one word and it is protection. Here, protection means having the food taken away.

You push the paper a little nearer her. “Then write it. Write what work you do, what dust you breathe, what injuries you take, how many shillings you get in a week. Let more people read it, so they can’t wipe you out with nothing but indecent and not allowed.”

Kate stares at the paper as though it were the belt, except that what is coming along it only she can see. She is quiet for a while, and then asks, suddenly, “Those women in London — are they at it as well?”

“There’s a group that goes further,” you say. “The Women’s Social and Political Union. Their slogan is deeds not words.” You write the English on the paper, letter by letter, very clear: Deeds not Words.

Kate looks at the line, and the corner of her mouth moves. “Deeds I understand. Block the cage, stop them going down. Either we go down too, or nobody does.”

She says it as though it were the most natural thing. You hear what is dangerous in it: the rules of a coalfield recognise only strength and ledgers, and when women cross a line the mockery turns into fists. You think of the hands in the alley, and of the Hargreaves girl. You push that cold feeling down, do not preach, and only put the pen into her hand.

“Write your name first,” you say. “All of it.”

Kate looks up at you for a second, still guarded, but with less hostility in it. She lowers her head and the nib goes down. She writes very slowly, like pushing a full tub uphill. Every letter costs her, and she does not stop. As the last one finishes the ink is still wet and shining, like a thread of light dragged up out of the dark.

Kate Rees.

She looks at the name. She does not smile, and she does not praise herself.

She only touches the edge of the paper with a finger, as if making sure it is real. She rests there a moment, and then writes something else.

Isabel Canary — not Hargreaves, but little canary, crooked and misspelled, right beside Kate Rees.