Ben Retallick

Book 1: Retallick Saga

by E.V. Thompson

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

In the tin mines of Cornwall during the first decades of the nineteenth century, death is the constant companion of the working man. Ben Retallick has grown to sturdy manhood among the miners and fisherfolk, through the hard and hungry years when blood was often the price of bread. When cruel fate steals away Jesse, his dark-eyed love, Ben searches the hiring fairs to find her again, knowing nothing of her parentage and caring only for the day he'll make her his wife.

Release date: July 5, 2012

Publisher: Sphere

Print pages: 473

Sample

It was bitterly cold at the surface of the cliff-edge Money Box mine. The night wind blew from the sea with an icy ferocity, and the waiting miners about the shaft huddled closer together, cursing those ahead of them for their tardiness in descending the creaking ladders to the underground levels.

The wind carried spray from the rocks at the foot of the cliff, and young Ben Retallick tasted salt on his lips as he stood shivering in a threadbare thin shirt and cheap serge trousers.

‘How’s your dad, boy?’

The question came from one of the men pressing close behind him. Ben could not see his face in the poor light.

‘Not so good, but he says he’ll be back to work as soon as he can breathe easier.’

‘He’ll not be working underground again. I’ve yet to know a man with tin dust in his lungs get better. Tell your ma to take him right away from the mines if she wants him with her for a few more years. There’s many a place in Cornwall where he’ll be able to breathe air as pure as the Lord made it. Hereabouts, the dust clings like a disease.’

Ben frowned in the darkness. His mother had been saying the same thing to his father for as long as he could remember.

Martha Retallick came from the south coast fishing-village of Mevagissey and desperately wanted to return there. Pearson Retallick would have none of it. He was a tinner, at home only amongst the engine-houses and mountains of mine waste in the far west of Cornwall.

All the same, Pearson Retallick’s health had been deteriorating rapidly of late, and the time would soon be at hand when he would have to do what he was told. This latest bout of lung sickness could hardly have come at a worse time. Working a poor tin lode on a high rate of tribute – or commission – Pearson Retallick and his partner had unexpectedly struck it rich: the poor-quality lode had suddenly opened out into a wide seam of ore. The two men needed to take out as much of it as they could before the next bidding-day. At that time the pitch they were working would be reassessed by the mine captain and auctioned off to the miner who was prepared to work it at the lowest rate of tribute.

The fire-doors in the engine-house of the nearby Botallack mine opened momentarily, throwing a red glow to the sky. In the unnatural light Ben saw the empty shaft of the Money Box mine yawning below him. Swinging on to the wooden-runged ladder, he began the climb down.

It was warmer in here, heat rising up the shaft from the lowest levels of the mine a hundred fathoms below, the cold night wind cut off by the rough-hewn walls.

Ben had only to descend to the thirty-fathom level. The tunnel where he worked sloped gently away from the shaft, extending beneath the rocks at the foot of the cliffs and under the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. It was here that Pearson Retallick and his partner mined the most ancient of all metals – tin.

Pausing at the mouth of the narrow tunnel, Ben lit a candle from the spitting, jumping flame of the half-inch butt he found wedged in a crevice there. He stuck the newly lit candle on his hard-brimmed hat and entered the tunnel. He had gone only a few yards when he heard the protesting squeal of an ungreased wheelbarrow, and a flickering light advanced along the tunnel towards him.

A short broad-shouldered youth, stripped to the waist, brought the heavily laden wooden wheelbarrow to a halt. Flexing the fingers of his hands, he rubbed the back of one of them across his glistening dirt-streaked face.

‘Your pa still bad?’

Dick Hooper spoke with the thick soft accent of Cornwall’s far west.

Ben nodded wordlessly.

‘Josiah ain’t going to take kindly to that. If he had his way, we’d all be working non-stop until bidding-day.’

Josiah Clamp was Pearson Retallick’s partner. The brunt of the additional work caused by the illness of Ben’s father was falling on his shoulders.

‘Pa says if he’s no better tomorrow he’ll get someone to come in and work for him.’

‘You’d best get along and tell the bad news to Josiah. I’ve got to get down to the sixty-fathom level. My brother should be down there working but he’s sick, too. I’ve promised to help out for half a shift.’

Ben looked at the older boy in sympathy. At sixteen years of age, Dick Hooper was the head of his family, and its only permanent breadwinner. His father had died of lung sickness a year before, leaving Dick to support a mother crippled with rheumatism, and a consumptive brother. He would now work a half-shift at the lower level of the mine, then go home for a couple of hours’ sleep. Returning to the mine at dawn, he would work a full day shift with the energetic Josiah Clamp.

‘Leave everything just as it is, Dick. I’ll tip the barrow after I’ve spoken to Josiah.’

‘Thanks. I’ll do the same for you some day.’

Dick Hooper lifted his crumpled shirt from the wheelbarrow. Tying the sleeves about his waist as he went, he hurried off in the direction of the main shaft.

In less of a hurry, Ben set off to find Josiah Clamp. Walking along the narrow rough-walled tunnel, Ben could hear the rumble of the storm on the sea-bed above him as hundreds of tons of shingle moved with the waves. The sound of stones grating one upon the other was a nerve-racking din in the confined space of the tunnel. Occasionally, an extra-powerful undersea current would dislodge a giant boulder and send it bouncing along the sea-bed in a terrifying game of underwater bowls. Echoing through the thirty-fathom level, the noise set every nerve in Ben’s young body tingling. It gave him a feeling of raw exhilaration he had never experienced above grass. Ben was a natural miner. He had an instinct for his work, bred into him by countless centuries of Cornish tinners.

Josiah Clamp lay full length in a narrow fissure between two masses of granite, checking on the lode that opened out again beyond the rock.

Ben had to tap the miner’s boot-clad foot three times before he wriggled his way backwards towards him.

When Josiah Clamp’s head came into sight, he turned and glared at Ben, then looked beyond him.

‘Where’s your pa?’

‘He’s still sick. He’ll get someone else in tomorrow.’ ‘That’s no help to me tonight,’ Josiah Clamp snapped. ‘Damn! Why couldn’t your pa have hung on for another week? Well, there’s nothing else for it; I’ll have to use black powder to bring this lot down. That should give you enough ore to carry away tonight. We’ll have to take tomorrow as it comes.’

Josiah Clamp’s statement dismayed Ben. His father would never allow gunpowder to be used on this level. He said that the sea-bed was too close above them – proof of which was the salt water oozing down the walls of the tunnel. When Ben reminded Josiah Clamp of this, the miner turned on him angrily.

‘Do you think I don’t know it for myself? But your pa isn’t here to give us the benefit of his opinion, so I must do what I think is best. That means I’ll blast. That idler Dick Hooper has left plenty of ore lying about here. You get to moving it while I set the powder and prepare the fuse.’

Ben’s father was often saying that Josiah Clamp took too many chances in his eagerness to make money, but there was little that Ben could do to prevent him tonight. He could even understand the miner’s reasoning. With one man trying to do the work of two, there was need for desperate measures. All the same, Ben felt a deep uneasiness about this operation.

Ben emptied the wheelbarrow left behind by Dick Hooper, then trundled it back to the work-face to pick up more ore. The Money Box was a small mine. It was a single shaft, used by the men to reach their working levels and also for hoisting ore to the surface. A horse-whim raised the ore. The same source of power operated the rag-andchain pumps bringing up water from the lower levels of the mine.

Because of the limited means available for raising ore, each pair of miners was allocated a very short period of ‘lifting-time’. In order that this should not be wasted, Ben needed to have enough ore at the shaft to fill the huge iron buckets or ‘kibbles’.

He had been working for an hour and was trundling an overloaded wheelbarrow towards the shaft when Josiah Clamp overtook him.

‘Quick! The fuse is lit. Take cover.’

Hurriedly dropping the wheelbarrow to the ground, Ben followed the older miner and flung himself down behind a stacked pile of waste rock. Putting his hands over his ears, he remained tensed for almost two minutes, anticipating the explosion.

Nothing happened.

Ben uncovered his ears as Josiah Clamp cursed and scrambled to his feet.

‘I thought the powder felt damp. It must have gone out. It’s that bloody storeman at the Botallack mine. I pay him with good money and he palms me off with old powder that won’t light.’

Ben grinned knowingly. Josiah Clamp had not paid over the counter of the Botallack mine store, of that he was quite sure. The storeman there was one of Josiah’s cousins. He would have stolen the gunpowder and passed it on to Josiah in a gin-parlour for no more than the price of a drink or two.

As Josiah Clamp hurried back along the tunnel, Ben took up the shafts of the wheelbarrow again, leaning against the weight of the load.

He had taken no more than five unsteady paces when it seemed that the whole tunnel erupted about him with a terrifying roar. Ben was thrown forward over the top of the overturned wheelbarrow, an agonising pain in his head. It felt as though his brain had been crushed.

Josiah Clamp had been only partially correct about the gunpowder. It was old – but not damp. The straw-and-gunpowder fuse had merely been reluctant to burn. Spluttering and spitting, it burned a spasmodic course towards the gunpowder packed in a deep hole at the end of the tunnel. Not until Josiah was examining its burned-out trail did the powder suddenly flare up and take a leap forward. It had less than a foot to travel. Before the horrified miner could turn and run, he was blown into eternity.

Josiah Clamp was not to die alone on this stormy March night. As Ben picked himself up, gasping for the oxygen that had been burned up by the explosion, the ground beneath his feet began to tremble. Ben reeled about the tunnel for what seemed an age. In fact, it was seconds only before he realised that the thunderous roaring was not in his tormented head. It came from the tunnel behind him – and Ben knew what it was.

The explosion had blown a hole in the sea-bed!

The level was in darkness, every candle blown out by the force of the explosion, but Ben ran for his life, oblivious of the jagged edges of rock that grazed his head and outstretched hands. In his panic-driven flight he would have plunged to his death down the mine shaft had he not fallen headlong over the pile of tin ore waiting at the mouth of the tunnel.

Ben scrambled over the ore and his hands located the ladder leading to the surface – and safety. He climbed on to the ladder just as tons of sea-water and dislodged rock spewed from the tunnel mouth and thundered into the shaft.

The ladder began to vibrate dangerously and, although Ben was now above the level of the tunnel, the water soaked the lower part of his legs. He had begun to climb higher when his ankle was grasped from below and a hoarse scream for help reached him above the deafening roar of the water.

For a long terrifying moment Ben imagined that Josiah Clamp was trying to drag him down with him to a watery grave. He kicked out violently in an effort to break free. Then, as quickly as it had left him, reason returned. Ben realised that the hand holding his ankle belonged to another human, trying to escape from the tunnel that led inland from the thirty-fathom level.

The ladder was shaking in a frightening fashion as tons of water pounded at its lower sections. All the ladders were linked together, and it would not be long before the steel pins attaching it to the wall of the shaft were wrenched free.

This was not the moment to be thinking about what might happen. Gingerly, Ben lowered himself until he could reach down and grip the hand of the unknown miner below him.

As Ben secured his grip, the fingers released his ankle and closed about his wrist. With his legs twisted securely about the ladder, Ben heaved with all the desperate strength that was in him. Slowly, the unseen miner struggled clear of the thundering water pouring unceasingly from the ruptured tunnel – and then he was crouched, panting, on the rung below Ben’s feet.

Disentangling his legs from the wildly juddering ladder, Ben shouted, ‘Climb! The ladder will go at any moment.’

With these words, Ben began climbing as fast as his shaking legs would allow. He had made ten rungs when the ladder swung wildly to one side, with a suddenness that nearly dislodged him. He knew that the ladders below him had been swept away, leaving the one on which he was standing hanging by only one pin.

Slowly and fearfully, he climbed the last few feet to the ladder above. Behind him, the man he had rescued did the same.

Now they were both safe, Ben had to rest for a few seconds. His legs felt weak and were trembling so violently that he was afraid they would take him no farther.

‘Are you all right?’ The voice from the ladder below him was not that of a man, but of a boy, like himself.

‘Yes. At least, I think so. And you?’

‘Yes, but I have lost my boots. The water must have torn them off while I clung to the ladder. They were new only last week!’

It was such a ridiculous thing to worry about after coming so close to death that Ben felt an overpowering urge to giggle. The sound caught in his throat and came out as a choked sob. Ben gulped in air noisily until he knew he had control of himself once more.

‘We had better get up top and tell them what has happened.’

Ben resumed the upward climb. This time he did not stop until he stepped off the ladder on to the ground at the top of the shaft.

Immediately, he was surrounded by the men who worked the whim, and off-duty miners brought from their beds in nearby houses when the water burst into the Money Box mine with a boom that was heard for a mile around.

‘What’s happening down there? What level are you from?’ Questions came at Ben from all sides.

‘Thirty fathoms.’

No one worked above this level. The played-out tunnels of the ten- and twenty-fathom levels were now utilised as draining-adits.

‘How many of you got out?’

A lamp was held up to Ben’s face and in its light he saw the mine captain. Fresh from his bed, he tucked a nightshirt inside his trousers as he spoke.

‘Two of us.’

Looking about him for his companion from the shaft, Ben saw only the faces of the anxious miners.

‘Get a rescue team together. We’ll go down to see what can be done.’

‘Nothing can be done now.’ The choking feeling in Ben’s throat had returned. ‘Josiah Clamp blew the top off the thirty-fathom level. The sea is in, the ladders swept away. You can’t get down there – and no one will ever get out.’

For long moments the only sounds were the booming of the sea emptying into the mine and the mournful dirge of the wind as it plucked at the taut ropes of the shafthead whim.

‘There are more than thirty men down there!’ one of the miners whispered in horror.

‘Thirty-four, and every one of them as dead as the Money Box mine,’ corrected the mine captain grimly. To Ben, he asked, ‘What is your name, boy?’

‘Ben. Ben Retallick.’

‘You will remember this day, Ben Retallick. It is the day the Lord has seen fit to take the lives of thirty-four men – and hand yours back to you. Make sure it is not wasted.’

The mine captain rested a hand heavily on Ben’s shoulder, then turned away before any man could see his face.

Ben was left shivering in the darkness. Then he, too, turned and headed for home. Wednesday, 18 March 1818, was barely half an hour old. It was Ben Retallick’s fifteenth birthday.



In the cold grey light of early dawn, the last piece of furniture was carried from the Retallick cottage by a surly wagoner and dumped unceremoniously on the farm-wagon that stood outside the door.

‘That’s the lot. If you don’t hurry up and climb on the wagon, we’ll still be on the road when night falls.’

‘If we are, then you’ll need to find Mevagissey in the dark,’ declared Martha Retallick. ‘You’ll not get paid for another day. You’ve been given your guinea. How long it takes you to earn it is your own business. Now, save your breath for helping with my husband.’

Pearson Retallick looked ill and frail as Ben and the wagoner helped him from the house and lifted him carefully on to the back of the wagon. He sat on a straw mattress, propped against the high driving-box seat. There was little meat on him, and he would never again earn his living digging tin beneath the ground in a mine.

Ben knew it, and so did his mother. Armed with this knowledge she had been able to get her way after many years of trying in vain to win her husband and son from the mines.

Martha Retallick hated mines and everything that went with them as deeply as her son loved them. The dust; the noise of the stamp-hammers and machinery; the ugly tall chimneys – even the miners themselves. Once above ground they had little interest in anything but brawling and drinking – and raising new generations of miners and bal-maidens to follow their unhappy example.

Martha Retallick’s brothers and cousins were fishermen. Her father and his father before him had been fishermen, too. It was a permanent way of life, a healthy living. In Mevagissey old men might be seen standing on the jetty at dusk, sucking contentedly on their pipes as they talked and waited for the fishing-boats to return to harbour.

There were no old men in the mining areas. Those who miraculously survived the ladders, the roof falls and the hundred other daily hazards to be found below ground ended up like Pearson Retallick, dying of lung sickness, with half of their allotted lifespan unfulfilled. Few miners found contentment in their work – and Martha Retallick firmly believed they never would. They attacked and violated the land, taking what they wanted and discarding the remainder, leaving deep scars for all to see. She was convinced this was the reason they were paid back a hundredfold by the land. It took from them their health and happiness – even life itself.

Such was Martha Retallick’s deep-rooted belief. Because of it, she used the disaster at the Money Box mine to force her husband to abandon mining once and for all. The mine would never be worked again, and Pearson Retallick’s career came to an end with it. He would never again be able to find employment as a miner. The family’s future now depended upon what she and Ben were able to earn. Ben was still classed as a boy. He might earn twenty shillings a month – if he were lucky enough to find a generous and sympathetic mine captain. For the surface work she was able to do, Martha Retallick would bring in another twelve shillings. Neither job would provide them with a house.

Martha Retallick argued that, if they returned to Mevagissey, Ben could go fishing with her family while she worked in the family’s fish-cellar. Together they would earn twice as much and could live in the house occupied by Ben’s grandfather and grandmother until they found somewhere of their own.

Supported by Ben, Pearson Retallick held out for as long as he could, but had finally been forced to give way to the logic of his wife’s argument. He had agreed to leave the St Just mining area and move to Mevagissey.

Ben protested in vain that he was a miner and not a fisherman. His mother would not be thwarted now. She told Ben he was lucky to be alive. He should accept the disaster at the mine as a warning and turn to something else. To go down a mine and risk his life again would be flying in the face of providence.

As Martha Retallick closed the door of the tiny mining-cottage for the last time, she had not a single twinge of regret. She had arrived at this cottage as a young bride. Ben, her only son, had been born here. But that was the only good thing to which she would admit during the whole of her life at the Money Box mine.

Climbing up to the high wagon-seat, she nodded to the wagoner. Flicking the reins, he shouted unintelligible orders to the horse. The beast leaned into its padded collar, and the Retallick family was on its way.

There was no one to see them leave the Money Box mine. No friends to wave, or wish them well in their new lives. The out-of-work miners had already moved away to seek work elsewhere. Only the families of the men who had died remained. There was nowhere for them to go. They would stay on at the derelict mine until hunger and desperation drove them out to join the scores of beggars and discharged veterans of Wellington’s great and victorious army, roaming the lanes of Cornwall.

The journey along half the length of Cornwall passed without incident, although Pearson Retallick was shaken up badly by the pot-holed road. By the time they began the steep descent of the hill leading down to Mevagissey village he was in a state of exhaustion.

The horse, too, was tired. Head hanging low, it slipped and slid on a road wet and muddy after the storms of recent weeks. Halfway down the hill, on a sharp and narrow bend, they overtook a young girl. Across one of her shoulders was balanced a long pole, at each end of which was a large and cumbersome basket.

As the wagon passed, the tired horse slipped – recovered – then slipped again. The wagoner was so busy braking the wagon and cursing the horse that he hardly noticed the girl.

She stood as far back from the road as was possible, balancing on the very edge of a short but steep bank that fell away to a half-filled ditch. Unfortunately, there was little room at this particular spot, and as the wagon slid to one side it clipped one of the baskets.

Ben watched in awed fascination as the baskets and pole swung lazily in a wide arc, twisting the girl around. She lost her footing, stepped backwards and tumbled down the bank, the baskets falling with her. As the girl landed in the ditch they crashed to the ground and burst open, releasing a number of indignant, noisy and wildly flapping ducks.

Martha Retallick had not seen the accident occur, and she was startled when Ben leaped from the wagon to the ground. He slid down the bank to the unfortunate girl’s aid while the wagoner continued to curse his horse, working all the time to keep the wagon on the road.

When Ben reached her the girl lay half-submerged in mud, her thin legs protruding from a froth of petticoats and dress. Reaching down he grasped the neck of her dress and pulled her to her feet.

She came out of the mud like a cork from a bottle, but she showed very little gratitude to her rescuer. Flailing wildly, her fists caught Ben two substantial blows in the face. He immediately released his grip on her dress, and she slipped on the wet grass and fell back into the ditch.

This time Ben made no attempt to help her. Looking up at the road he saw the wagon disappearing around the next bend. His father waved to him, a wide grin on his pale face.

‘Well! Don’t just stand there. Help me!’

The girl was on her hands and knees in the ditch, glaring up at Ben.

‘Why? So you can hit me again?’

Clamping her mouth tight shut, the girl hoisted her skirt above her knees with one hand and used the other to pull herself from the ditch.

‘It was your cart that knocked me off the road. Look at my ducks! They are everywhere.’

She grabbed at one of the birds, which was head down in the ditch, worrying at the mud. The duck complained vociferously, but she unceremoniously dumped it in one of the baskets and went in pursuit of another at the edge of the water.

Ben helped her to recapture the remainder of the ducks. It was not an easy task, and by the time the last one was safely back in its basket he was almost as wet and muddy as she was.

‘Look at the time!’ complained the girl, glancing up at the sky. ‘The boats will have been in for ages. The best of the fish will be gone long before I get to the quay.’

‘I’ll help you carry the baskets.’

‘No, you won’t! You’ve caused me enough trouble.’

The girl’s dark eyes warned Ben off as she shouldered the pole and baskets, but she did allow him to help her up the steep bank to the road.

As he walked beside her down the hill, he said, ‘I’m sorry you’ve got all muddied up. The wagoner has never been to Mevagissey before. He didn’t know how steep the hill is.’

The girl snorted derisively and they walked together in silence for a while. Then her mouth twitched in a sudden mischievous smile, and she gave him a sidelong glance.

‘I don’t suppose it was your fault really. Besides, you are as muddy as me now. I haven’t seen you before. Do you come from Mevagissey?’

‘No, from St Just.’

‘Isn’t that where all the mines are?’

‘Yes, I’m a miner.’

Seeing her incredulous look, Ben’s chin went up. ‘Well … my pa was a miner. I worked with him. Now we’ve come to live in Mevagissey.’

‘Why? There are no mines here – none worth mentioning, anyway. A good thing, too. Miners are digging farmers’ graves, that’s what my dad used to say. What are you going to do here?’

‘My pa is ill. He can’t work any more. So, when the mine flooded, Ma said we should come here for me to learn fishing with her folks.’

Ben lapsed into a deep silence as he remembered the Money Box mine.

The girl looked at him with sudden renewed interest. ‘The mine you worked in … was that the one where all the men were drowned?’

‘Yes.’

Ben clenched his fists tightly, and she could see the tension in him.

‘I heard that only one miner, a boy, escaped. Was that you?’

‘There were two of us, but I don’t know what happened to the other one.’

‘That must have been an awful experience.’ She looked at him with a new respect. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Ben Retallick.’

‘I’m Jesse Henna. Me and my ma have a small farm up the hill at Pengrugla. Just a couple of fields really. But we get by.’

They had almost reached the small harbour now. Ben stopped at the entrance to a lane that was so narrow that the upper storeys of the houses on either side were only inches away from each other.

‘This is where my grandpa lives.’

She nodded. ‘Then you had better go. They will be wondering what has happened to you.’

Ben had turned to walk away when Jesse Henna called out to him.

‘What is the name of your mother’s kin?’

‘Dunn.’

‘I know them. They are good fishermen. I’ll look out for you when I next come to Mevagissey and trade for any fish you’ve caught.’

Ben raised his hand in acknowledgement and made his way to Grandpa Dunn’s house.

The little fishing-cottage had always fascinated him on his infrequent visits here as a small boy. Cosy and lacking light it tucked tight into the hillside. The back door actually opened out of the roof on to a narrow terrace that descended in a series of elongated cobble steps to the harbour.

Ben let himself in through the front entrance and walked into an atmosphere that was as chilly as winter rain. Grandpa Dunn was leaning well back in his rocking-chair, watching the smoke from his clay pipe drift upwards towards the low beamed ceiling of the kitchen. In front of the fire Grandma Dunn busied herself with pots and skillets, arranging them noisily on the black foundry-made range. The old lady’s bristling disapproval was held in check only by the smug satisfaction of being proved right – after sixteen years of waiting.

Grandma Dunn had never approved of her daughter Martha’s marriage to a miner. She had given it her reluctant blessing in a moment of uncharacteristic weakness, upon learning that Pearson was a Methodist – as were the Dunn family. But she had warned her daughter that no good would come from such a union. Mining, she had declared, was the Devil’s work. The Prince of Darkness had his kingdom in the bowels of the earth. Men who invaded his domain either paid tribute to him or suffered the consequences. As a small girl, Grandma Dunn had listened to the fire-and-brimstone sermons of the aged John Wesley. His words had burned into her soul, allowing of no argument. Hell was in the darkness beneath the ground. Heaven was above; it came down to meet at the sea where a fisherman earned his living. It stood to reason, therefore, that a fisherman was closer to the Good Lord than any other man alive.

Grandma Dunn did not hear Ben arrive, so busy was she with her own thoughts. When she turned round and saw him for the first time, her hands found her hips and she glared at him in disapproval.

‘Goodness gracious, boy! What have you been doing to get yourself in such a state? Whatever will the neighbours think? Away with you. Get out of those clothes before you dirty up my kitchen. You’ll not sit down at this table in filthy trousers like those.’

‘These are my best clothes! I’ve only got my working-trousers––’

‘Don’t argue with your grandmother, Ben,’ Martha Retallick interrupted quickly. She wanted to avoid an argument at all costs. ‘Your working-trousers are clean; they will do fine. You’ll find them in the old trunk, upstairs in the back bedroom. Go on, now.’

When Ben left the room, Martha Retallick tried to explain why Ben was in such a mess.

‘Hah!’ The lines about Grandma Dunn’s mouth deepened and her mouth clamped shut for a moment. ?