Poppy's Dilemma Read online

  Over to their right they could see the grey ruins of the Old Priory, some ivy-clad walls were still standing but dilapidated, and arched windows still remained, if devoid of glass for a few centuries.

  ‘How old is this place?’ queried Poppy as they walked across a field of long grass towards it.

  ‘It was founded around 1160 by Gervase Paganel,’ Robert said, ‘though it never amounted to much ecclesiastically.’

  Poppy looked at him sideways because of that big mysterious word, but did not ask its meaning. She imagined it might have something to do with religion, so it held little interest. In any case, Robert did not bother to enlighten her.

  ‘So it’s nearly seven hundred years old?’

  Robert looked at her in astonishment. ‘You worked that out rather swiftly for somebody who can’t read and write.’

  ‘I can work out sums in my head. You have to when you’re handing money over in the tommy shop, or one of the shops in the town. If they think you can’t count they fleece you rotten.’

  He laughed at that. ‘I never thought about it, but yes, I see that. All the men do count their money knowingly, even though they can’t all read.’

  ‘I know my numbers, Robert. My mother taught me. I can count shillings and pence, and I can tell the time as well.’

  ‘Good. I wondered about teaching you your numbers. Well, that won’t be necessary, at least.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s a shame,’ she said, disappointed. ‘It means I shan’t have to see you so often. I like being with you, Robert.’

  He smiled, a little embarrassed by her innocent admission that proclaimed so much. ‘I like being with you, too, Poppy.’

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘I’ve never met anybody quite like you before.’

  They had reached what remained of the large west window. Robert sat down on an outcrop of fallen masonry and gestured for Poppy to sit beside him.

  ‘Somebody else told me that,’ she said with a broad smile of satisfaction as she smoothed the creases out of her skirt, about to sit.

  ‘Oh, who?’

  ‘One of the new navvies, called Jericho. Have you come across him?’

  ‘I know who he is. A big, strapping young man.’

  ‘And handsome with it,’ Poppy added teasingly.

  ‘You think he’s handsome, do you?’ Robert tried to stifle the illogical pang of jealousy that seared through him. ‘So what’s his interest in you, Poppy?’

  Poppy felt herself blush and sheepishly cast her eyes down, looking at the grass and moss sprouting between the limestone masonry. ‘Oh,’ she uttered with as much disdain as she could muster. ‘He asked me to be his woman …’

  ‘He did? Good Lord! And what did you say?’ Robert’s heart seemed to stand still while he waited what seemed like an age for her answer

  ‘I told him I didn’t want to be anybody’s woman, Robert.’

  He breathed a sigh of relief. ‘So when did you tell him that?’

  ‘After he kissed me.’

  Robert felt the breath leave his body and a hammer hit him hard where his heart was. ‘No … I … I meant – how long ago?’

  ‘Oh … Last night. After we’d been to the fair. He saved me from some lad who was trying to get off with me.’

  ‘How very gallant.’

  ‘Well, I thought the least I could do was let him kiss me after, for his trouble.’

  It pained Robert that the great brute had had such intimate knowledge of Poppy, but the more significant knowledge that she had willingly allowed it disturbed him even more. She was so vulnerable, exposed to all the lechery and immorality of her kind – especially handsome buck-navvies with pockets full of money, muscles flexing and relaxing visibly beneath their rough clothing. Nothing was taboo in that grim society of theirs. There was never any shame. No wonder she spoke so openly, so frankly, about such things; she didn’t know any better, she saw no wrong in it.

  ‘Shall we begin your lesson?’ he said, wishing to change the subject which was causing him so much concern.

  She nodded keenly and looked into his eyes with frank adulation.

  ‘Let me have your writing pad and blacklead pencil and I’ll begin by jotting down the letters of the alphabet for you.’

  She handed them to him and he began setting down a list of lower case letters in his precise engineer’s hand. ‘First is a … then b … c …’ He wrote them all down from a to z. ‘There’s a good way of remembering them and the order they always come in. Do you know the tune to “Baa-baa Black Sheep”? Well, you can sing these letters to that.’

  He began singing and it made her laugh to hear the sound of a string of letters put to a tune. It sounded so strange, like some foreign language.

  ‘No, it’s not to be mocked, Poppy,’ he said, indignant at being interrupted. ‘This trick will enable you to learn the alphabet very quickly. Just don’t laugh. Listen instead to me …’ He began singing again and once more she giggled, partly at the incongruity of the tune and the letters, and partly at the earnest look on his face and his pleasant voice. Despite her mirth, he carried on to the end. ‘Now you sing it along with me, Poppy … and stop your giggling, else we won’t get anywhere.’

  ‘I can’t sing,’ she protested playfully.

  ‘Yes, you can. You know the tune. After three … One, two, three … “Ay, bee, cee, dee” …’

  Poppy stumbled many times, not knowing which letters were which, but, as they sang it over and over, it started to etch itself into her mind.

  ‘To help you know what sound each letter represents, I’ll write a word beginning with that letter alongside it. “A” is for apple … you see. “B” is for bonnet, like the one you’re wearing … “C” is for cutting, like the navvies dig … “D” is for … drainage … No, that’s not a very good example. “D” is for door …’

  When he’d finished, he said, ‘I want you to take this home and learn your letters. Practise writing them yourself, copying what I’ve written. When you’ve learnt them by heart, I’ll show you how to write capital letters and then we’ll go on to when to use them.’

  ‘I will,’ Poppy promised. ‘Thank you, Robert, for taking the trouble to teach me. I shall owe you so much.’

  ‘Tell me, Poppy,’ Robert said, still somewhat preoccupied by the disturbing revelations about her personal activities. ‘This Jericho … Did you give him any inkling at all that you might agree to be his … his woman?’

  ‘I told him I’d think about it if he gave me time,’ she said frankly.

  ‘So you like him then?’

  ‘He’s all right. He makes me laugh. I don’t know whether I really fancy him that much though … Still, what’s fancying got to do with it? Minnie says that in the dark you can always make-believe it’s somebody you do fancy.’

  ‘I think this Minnie’s a parlously bad influence on you, Poppy. Promise me you won’t agree to becoming Jericho’s woman.’

  ‘But what’s it to you, Robert?’ she asked, for the first time really convinced of his interest in her.

  ‘Well …’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just that … I think you’re worthy of so much better. Save yourself for somebody more fitting …’

  ‘Some duke or earl, you mean?’ she said mischievously.

  ‘Who knows? Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘Not to me, Robert. Never to me.’

  ‘All the same, promise me …’

  She was surprised at the intensity in his eyes. Well, maybe she could use a little guile here. ‘I’ll tell you the same as I told Jericho. I’ll make nobody no promises yet.’

  The Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway received Royal Assent on 4 August 1845, backed by the Great Western Railway who wished to promote another broad-gauge line. By 1846, work on tunnelling had begun at Dudley, Worcester and Mickleton, near Chipping Campden. By 1849, the Dudley tunnel, for which the contractors were Buxton & Clark of Sheffield, had been finished. The actual railway track had not yet been laid, for there w
as some political argument about whether broad gauge or narrow gauge was to prosper. The contract for the southern section beyond the Dudley tunnel had been awarded to Treadwell’s. Work at the Mickleton tunnel, however, operated by an unfortunate succession of inept contractors, had been beset by problems and was far from complete.

  At Mickleton, where Lightning Jack and Buttercup were working, the exact line of the tunnel had been set out and pegged over the surface, as had the rest of the route. Sinkers then dropped trial shafts along the path of the proposed tunnel to investigate the strata and water content of the rock. Standard practice was to sink a shaft at every furlong, but more if considered necessary by the engineer. Having reached the proper depth, some of those vertical shafts would be widened and lined so that men, horses, tools and materials could be lowered into and raised from the workings on platforms or in huge tubs, hauled by stationary steam engines or horse gins. Headings went out on the correct alignment from the bottom of each shaft in opposite directions until the tunnel was driven through the hill.

  At the end of June, Lightning Jack arose from his bunk in the shack he shared with the other men, dressed and went outside into the early morning sunshine. He breathed in the fresh morning air of the Cotswolds and looked across at the gently rolling hills around him, the patchwork of fields like a far-flung quilt of yellow and green and gold. This was a far cry from the squalid landscape of the Black Country … except for the brown spoil from the tunnel which was turning the top of the hill where they lived and worked into a slag heap of monumental proportions. Soil and rock was ripped from the bowels of the earth beneath his feet and tipped randomly over the hill in separate mounds. One day, perhaps nature would clothe it in trees, in grass and fern, and it would surreptitiously blend into the countryside and leave no clue as to its man-made origin. But now it was an angry boil marring a beautiful face.

  Lightning Jack stood, his hands on his hips, morose despite nature’s unsullied beauty stretched out beyond the dingy heaps of spoil. He likened himself to that spoil; dirty, unkempt, unwashed, undisciplined. He was unshaven too, except for those nights he had been out carrying on with Jenny Sparrow. How he wished he’d never set eyes on the woman. Oh, they’d had their fun. She had lived up to her sensual promise. She could take her share of drink as well, and seem unmarked by it. Sometimes she would even pay her turn. But she was no good for Lightning, and he had discovered it too late.

  Now he yearned for Sheba. He longed to see his children; to ruffle Poppy’s restless yellow curls, to hug his younger daughters Lottie and Rose, to put his arms around his son Little Lightning, to see his youngest child Nathaniel at Sheba’s breast. How were they faring without him, without his protection? Had Sheba managed somehow to engineer a continued sojourn at the encampment at Blowers Green? If not, where might they be now? Well, there was no point in worrying about it. It did not matter any more. It did not matter where they were or how they were faring.

  Lightning Jack heard Buttercup calling him and turned round to look. Buttercup and a score of other tunnellers filed out of the hut, swearing and muttering as navvies did, and headed for the shaft nearby, which was their entrance to the workings. Lightning joined them and fell into step beside Buttercup, behind the others. They reached the head of the shaft, where a steam engine, a great heap of coal penned beside it, chugged and rasped, primed and ready to lower the men into the earth’s cool heart. One by one, they stepped onto the platform and Lightning was the last. As they descended, the familiar sulphurous smell made him cough. The platform began to spin and Lightning began to feel giddy. He braced himself against the twisting motion and focused his eyes on Buttercup.

  ‘Bist thee all right?’ Buttercup asked his chum, grabbing hold of him. He had noticed a decline in Lightning’s demeanour lately.

  ‘Aye, fit as a fiddle, me.’

  ‘Mind as you don’t get giddy.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  The temperature inside the shaft became cooler the further they descended, and the air felt damp on Lightning’s skin. The light from the open shaft above diminished and the encircling wall grew eerily dark. The rate of descent decreased and the platform halted with a hard bump, which made Lightning’s knees buckle. They had touched the level.

  In the workings of the tunnel the atmosphere was oppressive, for want of free circulation of clean air. The smell and smoke of gunpowder from the night shift’s blasts lingered. Lightning and Buttercup made their way in a single file with the others towards their base. There, each lit a candle. The feeble light exaggerated the dimness of the vault and the thick, foggy atmosphere. They took such tools as they needed and, unspeaking, picked their way through pools of inky black water that plopped with incessant dripping from above. They tramped over the temporary rails laid for the tip trucks, which would collect the spoil and be hoisted up the shaft to be emptied over the once picturesque hill above. In the uncertain light they picked their way past huge blocks of stone, planks of wood, scaffolding, and piles of bricks which were manufactured and employed by the million to line the tunnel. Tiny points of flickering light showed where the navvies were working. The sounds of picks, shovels and sledgehammers echoed, mingling with the shouts, hacking coughs and guffaws of the men, and became louder the closer they got to the work face. An army of bricklayers toiled behind them, working like ants to install the vital brick encasement. The tunnel, which up until that point had been cut and lined to its full dimensions, suddenly narrowed. The level floor began to rise steeply and the gang, with Lightning Jack and Buttercup, were at the face and relieving the other workers who had been there all night.

  ‘Let’s get off our steam packets and get stuck in then,’ Buttercup declared in their recognised slang, ‘else the bloody ganger will be docking us our sugar and honey.’

  They took off their jackets and got stuck in, working at a pace that an ordinary mortal would have found back-breaking, by the light of the candles fixed to their hats. Buttercup tightly gripped a six-foot bar of steel, holding it firm against the rock face while Lightning Jack swung a sledgehammer in a great arc with the rhythm of a machine. He aimed it at the end of the steel rod, a drill, and his accuracy was such that he never missed, drunk or sober. Had he missed, he could easily have killed his mate. Slowly, surely, he drove the drill into the rock face. When the hole was deep enough, about five feet, he would pack it with explosive.

  Come one o’clock, the ganger blew his whistle and shouted, ‘Yo-ho, yo-ho!’ It was the signal to stop work and take a break. The men tramped back to where the tunnel was level, set a few planks across small stacks of bricks and sat down. One of the navvies, Frying Pan, called one of the nippers to drum up the tea. The nipper, a lad of about ten or eleven, had already set light to a gob of tallow that had been collected in a round tin box, at once doubling the amount of light in the vicinity. He had then placed an iron bucket containing water on an iron tripod astride the flame. Now he added the mashings of tea and sugar which he took from each of the men, and emptied them into the bucket. While it came to the boil, the men wiped the sweat from their brows, ate their tommy and talked.

  It began as a noisy meal, liberally laced with ferocious swearing, bravado and laughter, which echoed and re-echoed around the cavern of the tunnel.

  ‘Still poking that Jenny Sparrow, Lightning?’ Frying Pan asked when talk had reverted to women, as it generally did.

  ‘Not any more,’ Lightning replied tersely, for it was a sore subject. ‘Not that it’s any o’ your business.’

  ‘Gone off it, have ye? Had your fill?’

  ‘Why are you so bloody interested? Fancy it yourself, do you?’

  ‘I might.’ Frying Pan took a huge bite out of his bread. ‘If every other bugger in the world hadn’t already been there afore me.’

  ‘Well, I can recommend her,’ Lightning said coldly. ‘Her knows how to draw out the best in a man … if you get me meaning.’

  ‘Her’s had plenty experience,’ another, Long Daddy, put in.
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  ‘Piss off, the lot o’ yer,’ Lightning rasped, and touchily moved away from the ensemble.

  He ambled over to the other side of the wide tunnel with his tommy box and settled himself on a remote pile of bricks. He had no wish to air his private problems with the rest of the encampment. If they wanted to discuss their amorous adventures that was up to them, but he didn’t want to share his.

  Buttercup came over to him and sat beside him.

  ‘What’s up wi’ thee, Lightning?’ he asked quietly. ‘Thou hasn’t been theeself for a week or two. Bist thee upset about summat? That Jenny Sparrow, for instance? I never realised th’ was a-pining for her?’

  ‘The only one I’m a-pining for is my Sheba,’ Lightning confessed sullenly.

  ‘For Sheba? Then that’s easy remedied. Collect your money tonight and go off on tramp, back to Dudley and the – what? The Blowers Green workings, did’st thou say?’

  ‘Aye, Buttercup,’ Lightning said with scorn. ‘But that’s easier said than done.’

  ‘Why? What’s to stop thee?’

  ‘Listen, Buttercup,’ Lightning said, and his tone was morbid. ‘You’ve been a good mate to me in the weeks we’ve been together, and I’ve appreciated it – more’n you realise, very like. I want you to promise me summat …’

  ‘Anything, me old mucker. Just name it.’

  ‘Well … if anything was to happen to me, an accident like, would you be good enough to go and let my Sheba know? It’d mean going off on tramp for a few days, but it’d mean a lot to me if you’d undertake to do it.’

  ‘Don’t be so damned gloomy,’ Buttercup said. ‘Tell her theeself. Take theeself home and tell her how much you’ve missed her. All right, so yo’n had a little diversion with that Jenny Sparrow along the way. So what? Sheba ain’t to know that, is she? And any road, yo’ll have gone back to her. She’ll welcome thee with open arms … and open thighs, I’d venture to say.’

  Lightning threw a piece of bread down on the ground in frustration. ‘That’s just it, Buttercup … I can’t go back. Not for anything. Not now.’