Not a Bird Will Sing

by Audrey Howard

Genres: Sagas; Historical Romance

Synopsis

Set on a 19th century farm in rural Lancashire near Liverpool, this heartwarming saga is the story of Poppy Appleton, a girl who grew up in ignorance and poverty but has been adopted by a prosperous farmer's wife. At Long Reach farm, Eliza Goodall teaches Poppy all the skills she would have passed on to her own daughter: the skills that would enable a young lady to become the mistress of a farm just like Long Reach. And when the time comes for Eliza's son Richard to choose a wife, it seems only natural that he should choose Poppy. But though she feels nothing but affection for Richard and all her new family, the only man for whom she has ever felt love is an Irish boy, Conn MacConnell. And when he returns unexpectedly, Poppy has to choose between loyalty and love.

Release date: May 23, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 512

Sample

Chapter 1

The child first came to Eliza Goodall’s notice when Eliza walked down from the farm one wet day in search of her best “layer”, a pretty but contrary brown hen usually to be seen strutting and scratching round the farmyard. Now and again the stupid bird had a fancy to deposit her daily egg in the cleared ditch on the field side of the hedge which bordered Primrose Bank. If the hen hadn’t been such a good little layer Eliza would have said to the devil with her, letting the dratted thing come home when she felt like it but Eliza had grown quite fond of the independent little madam and had even given her a name: Clucky. Not very original, she smiled to herself, and she hadn’t let on to Tom, of course, but that’s the sound the hen made. Not “cluck-cluck-cluck” like the other hens but “cluckee-cluckee-cluckee”, with the emphasis on the “eee”.

     That was what Eliza was calling, softly, of course, in case there was anyone about, as she trudged down through the rain-sodden field alongside Primrose Bank, peering from time to time beneath the dripping hedge.

     It was May. Eliza would remember the month and the year precisely since they had just heard that an attack had been made on the queen’s person by the nephew of the crack-brained enthusiast, Feargus O’Connell, whose family were known to be feeble-minded. The attacker was demanding the release of Fenian prisoners, it was said, thrusting an old flintlock in Her Majesty’s face. What was the world coming to when not even their dear queen, who would be fifty-six years old this month, was safe from madmen, her Tom had said to Eliza only this morning.

     The child, no more than eight or nine by the size of her, was swearing, using language even men about the farm would hesitate to use and when Eliza parted the newly burgeoning hawthorn hedge and squinted curiously through it, she could see why. It was raining, a slanted, heavy rain which drove directly into the front of the cottages, running down the stone walls in a torrent which then made its way to the lowest point which was, with the passage of many feet, the rough path which led to each doorway. From there it ran with a gleeful chuckle under the ill-fitting door and into the living-room of each cottage, all of which had their doors shut except one.

     “Bugger it . . . bugger it . . . bugger it . . .” the child at the open door was shouting into the downpour as she dashed a broom made from twigs time and time again into the river of rainwater which gurgled over the step and on to her bare feet. She was herself soaked through, her ragged skirt and bodice sticking to her like a second skin. Her long, matted hair was plastered to her small skull, hanging to her waist where it ended in twisting ringlets, and rainwater ran across her face and into her eyes which blinked furiously. Where it had run it left tracks in the grime.

     “Hell and damnation”, and “bugger it” were two of the mildest epithets which fell from her childish lips as she continued her resolute but unsuccessful attempt to hold back the force of water which was just as resolute in its determination to get in.

     “I think you’re beaten,” Eliza called through the gap in the hedge. “I should wait until the rain stops, then you can mop it up.”

     “I’ll not be bloody beaten,” the child snarled, apparently undismayed by the disembodied voice, shocking Eliza even more, not with the words but with the venom, the bitter hatred with which they were spoken. It was as though she bore a deep grudge against the elements that were doing their best to inundate her home while she, like Canute, was equally resolved to hold them back.

     Eliza said so, amusement in her voice. “I know you’re doing your best, child, but can’t you see you’re fighting a losing battle? Canute gave up in the end, you know.”

     There was a gate a few yards further on and, lifting the latch, Eliza let herself through it, sinking at once into the evil-smelling mud which lay on the track. She was hindered for an anxious moment or two by the glutinous sludge which seemed ready to suck the very boots from her feet, but pulling each one in turn from the mire with a squelch which sounded disgusting, she managed to stagger towards the child.

     “Well, ’appen ’ooever ’e is don’t give a tinker’s toss about sittin’ wi’ ’is feet in a puddle o’ mucky water burr I do. I’ve just scrubbed that . . .” – here using a word that made Eliza blanch – “floor, an’ gorrit dry an’ all which is bloody ’ard goin’ at best o’ times. Then this lot started” – pausing to glare up into the greyness of the low and drooping clouds – “an’ I might just as well’ve sarron me bum an’ twiddled me bloody thumbs fer all’t good it did.”

     Suddenly, as though accepting the sense of what Eliza said, the child sighed resignedly and stopped plying her broom. She looked up. Her eyes were the palest blue grey, so pale they were almost transparent, as though they were windows through which might be seen what was in her mind. Round each iris was a line the colour of charcoal. They were quite the most extraordinary eyes Eliza had ever seen, enormous in the girl’s thin face. The lashes surrounding them were long, dark, fine, curling in a fan almost to her delicately arched eyebrows. She scratched busily in her armpit, hunching her shoulders as though to ease the wet fabric of her bodice from her back and Eliza had an urgent desire to step back since she had no wish to carry away some creature the child obviously harboured.

     The child’s eyes widened. “Oh . . .” she said, recognising who Eliza was as she bobbed a hasty curtsey. Eliza found herself with nothing to say, which was ridiculous for as the wife of the man who owned these tumbledown, quite terrible cottages, she had the right to say whatever came into her head, but the child was so unusual, not only in her looks but in her manner, Eliza could do nothing but stare.

     “ ’Oo’s Canute, anyroad?” the child said at last. “Does ’e live round ’ere?”

     Released from her strange abstraction, Eliza smiled. “He was a King of England a long time ago. He sat on the seashore as the tide rose and commanded the waves to come no nearer. They took no notice, of course.”

     The child considered this gravely, scratching again, this time the nape of her neck.

     “What’s seashore?” she asked with great interest.

     Eliza blinked, not only surprised by the question but blinded by the downpour which was getting heavier.

     “Well, it’s where the land meets the sea.”

     “An’ what’s waves?”

     “That’s the sea itself as it strikes the shore.”

     “An’ what does tide do?”

     “It goes in and out.”

     “Where to?”

     Eliza laughed out loud and shook her head, scattering raindrops from the brim of her old bonnet. The child, one hand on the door latch, the other still clinging to her broom, looked taken aback, then, with a sound which was infectious, began to laugh too. A throaty laugh unusual in one so young, a joyful laugh, though what this poverty-stricken girl had to be joyful about was beyond Eliza’s understanding. It was obvious she was not at all sure what they were laughing at either, but her merriment, the bright enquiring expression on her face, astonished and delighted Eliza.

     But how to explain to this child who had evidently never seen the sea, the shore, or possibly anything that was not within a hundred yards of her squalid home, what they were? It was like trying to describe colours to a man who had always been blind. Eliza had been a school teacher in the small country town of Prescot before her marriage to Tom Goodall. Not in all her years in the chalky, chilly schoolroom, gritting her teeth as she did her best to instil the alphabet and a sum or two into the apathetic children whose parents sent them there, had she come across one who cared a fig for learning. None had shown more than a half-hearted interest in what she had tried to teach them. They knew, as she did, that the moment an opportunity arose of earning wages they would be withdrawn by their parents from the class. That they were there simply because there was no work available. When it was they would be put to odds and ends of farm labouring or the girls to taking the place of a mother in the care of their younger brothers and sisters. It was a precarious business bringing up a family, usually ten or twelve children, and an education, no matter how badly it was desired, came a poor second to the simple need of survival. The foundation stone of a new ragged school in West Derby had just been laid but the question of how many pupils were to attend seemed to be one to which there were only vague answers.

     “Well, I’m getting soaked out here so perhaps I’d better be . . .” Eliza began but at once the child stepped back with an odd gesture of hospitality, indicating that Eliza should come inside.

     “Yer’ll ’ave ter tekk them boots off, though,” she said sternly. “I’ve just scrubbed this bloody floor. Not that it’ll be clean fer long, like, not when they all gerr ’ome. Pa does ’is best but me brothers’re sods an’ our Rose an’ Iris an’ Marigold’s not much better. I tell ’em if they’d soddin’ floor ter scrub ’appen they’d tekk more care. I’ve me work cut out, I can tell yer, wi’ ten of ’em traipsin’ mud all over me flags.”

     “Ten? Oh dear.”

     “Aye, wi’ me mam an’ pa an’ me it mekks eleven of us. Pa, our Arthur an’ Douglas’re clearin’ them ditches fer Mr Goodall up by Park Moss terday an’ our Eustace – ’e’s five, or is it six? – Mr Goodall’s purrim ter’t gate in top field, openin’ an’ shuttin’ it, like, which mekks it ’andy fer them what wants ter get through wi’t waggons. Me sisters’re ’elpin’ out wi’t sowin’ o’t mangold-wurzels so yer can imagine state of ’em when they gerrome. Wi’ a bit o’ luck ’appen they’ll’ve thought ter tekk off their boots. Mind, we’ve a rain butt at back.” This was said with such pride she might have been boasting of a fine carriage and six matched horses. “Wi’ all’t rain we get it’s not often it’s empty.”

     “No, I can imagine.”

     Eliza felt the strangest emotion flood through her and knew it for what it was. Enchantment! She was enchanted, fascinated, charmed by this comical scrap of a creature, this child, so practical, so natural in her manner, so accepting of her place in life and yet with a resolution to make it as good as she could get it. She had met no one like her, not as a school teacher nor later as the wife of a small but well-to-do farmer who employed dozens of the casual labourers and their children from these cottages.

     “Come in then if yer comin’,” the comical scrap said.

     Leaning on the door frame, pulling off her sturdy boots and dropping them on to the step, Eliza stepped down in her stockinged feet on to the unevenly tiled floor. It was wet and slippery. The dampness inside the cottage made it seem cold and yet there was a fire burning on the raised bricks of the hearth. Smoke from the chimney billowed out into the room as a gust of rain howled down it, but beyond waving her hand in front of her face and coughing drily, the child appeared not to notice it. Perhaps in her childish wisdom she knew what her family’s resources were and they did not allow for the mending of a smoky chimney.

     In the fire itself was a pan of something simmering, probably a small square of bacon and a few vegetables which, with plenty of filling potatoes, was a staple of the poor. A table with uncertain legs stood in the centre of the room, about which were four broken wooden chairs and several upturned boxes. There was an ancient dresser leaning against one wall on which were displayed an assortment of chipped pots and pans. Amazingly, for such items were not usually to be found in the possession of a family such as this one, on either side of the fire were two of the most dilapidated armchairs Eliza had ever seen and she wondered where they had come from. The stuffing had all but gone in both of them and so had the original colour, whatever it had been overlaid with what looked like decades of grime. The room was bare and depressing, despite the golden crackle of the fire, with nothing in it that was was not essential to living except for a large jar on the cracked windowsill in which a bunch of wildflowers had been carefully arranged. A mass of bluebells, already wilting, mixed with the yellow of ragwort and the deep, reddish pink of valerian. Eliza was certain it was the child who had put them there.

     Suddenly the girl became shy as though at the realisation of sharing her kitchen with the wife of the man who not only employed her family but all the families who occupied the cottages on Primrose Bank. She stood, one bare foot on top of the other, her eyes cast down, her hands twisting in her skirt. Eliza waited before speaking, hoping to give her a moment to regain the astounding confidence she had previously shown but the child did not speak.

     “What’s your name?” Eliza asked encouragingly.

     “Poppy. Poppy Appleton.” Still the lowered gaze.

     “And do you have no work to go to, Poppy?” It was unusual, unless there were younger children to be cared for, to find a child of working age at home.

     Poppy lifted her head, her pale face strained with what seemed to be a problem of enormous proportions.

     “I did ’ave. I can do all sorts, me. I ’elped wi’t ’arvest last back end. I can do weedin’, pickin’ stones, spreadin’ dung fer’t ploughin’ in, tater plantin’, all sorts. I were put ter scarin’ rooks from’t corn what were just sown when I were a nipper. I done gleanin’, that’s pickin’ over’t stubble fer ears o’ wheat,” she explained kindly, “an’ I’ve gathered apples fer’t cider mill. All sorts,” she declared stoutly. She shrugged. The heavy work, the long hours entailed in the jobs she had just described appeared not to disconcert her. If Eliza was honest, since she had always known children did this kind of work, it had not concerned her up to now. Most of those who worked for her husband, earning a few coppers a week, were graceless creatures, slow-witted and scarcely more intelligent than the cows they herded at milking time. Now, when it came to this child and what she was forced to do because of her family’s circumstances, it suddenly seemed a scandal and a sin.

     “Me mam were in’t family way,” Poppy was saying. “Badly she were. One of us ’ad ter stop at ’ome fer a day or two. Me mam reckons I’m only one what’s not cack-handed round’t kitchen so it were me.”

     “I see. I hope your mother is recovered.”

     “Oh aye, she’s back on ’er pins now. She’s up far field transplantin’ cabbages terday. She’ll be soaked through an’ all. I’m ter go termorrer.”

     “And . . . the baby?”

     “Oh, babby died.”

     “I’m so sorry.”

     “She’ll ’ave another,” she said with the wisdom of experience. Babies were easy to get in her world.

     There seemed nothing further to add to this careless indifference in the matter of birth and death, the cycle of reproduction which was inflicted on most women in this child’s social group. Women were either pregnant or just recovering from childbirth with scarcely a month or two between these two states, accepting it as a fact of life. It was their husbands’ only pleasure, that fumbling, grunting act in the dark of the night, the only one which cost them nothing and who were their wives to deny them, not unless they wanted a black eye and a thick ear. They would probably suffer both and still get put in the family way so best say nowt and let him get on with it.

     Poppy’s face glowed suddenly as some thought struck her.

     “I could mekk yer a cup o’ tea if yer like,” she said as though she was well used to entertaining visitors such as this one. “While yer wait, like. Rain might go off in a bit.”

     “Well, if you’re sure it won’t deprive your family.”

     “What’s that mean?” this remarkable child asked suspiciously, turning back from the hearth where she had been just about to reach for the brown earthenware teapot on the shelf above it.

     “It’s . . .” Eliza had the extraordinary notion that it might be an affront to Poppy’s pride if she told her the truth. Tea was not easily come by at eightpence and a farthing a pound on a farm labourer’s wage which was between ten and fifteen shillings a week. The tea leaves, if they were available at all, were used several times so that the last brew was scarcely more than hot water.

     “I would love a cup of tea, Poppy,” she began, “but  . . .”

     “But what was it yer said – deprive?” It was apparent that Poppy was reluctant to let it pass. She was frowning as though at something she did not expect to like.

     Eliza sighed. “Deprive. It means to take something which the person giving it . . . can ill afford to give.”

     Still Poppy looked puzzled. This woman who she knew as Farmer Goodall’s wife had the queerest way of speaking, not just the words she used, which Poppy didn’t always understand, but the way she strung them together. Still, it hardly mattered, did it, since she was not likely to have much to do with her, was she?

     As if deciding it was too hard to make head or tail of what Mrs Goodall was saying so she might as well ignore it, she whipped back to the hearth and carefully measured from the tin beside the pot a scant half-teaspoon of tea. With neat, careful movements, none of them wasted, she poured the hot water into the teapot, put on the cracked lid, then set it on the hearth to mash beside the bricks which held the coal.

     “Won’t be burra minnit,” she said comfortingly, moving across the flooded floor, her bare feet swishing in the inch or so of water that lay there. From the dresser shelf she took down two teacups, neither one matching the other, and two saucers which were again of a different pattern. They were all scrupulously clean, if a bit knocked about.

     “Yer’d best get that coat off,” she went on in her practical manner. “I’ll ’ang it on’t back o’ chair while it dries.”

     The child might have been the adult and the adult the child. Eliza did as she was told. Seated in the rotting armchair, her feet lifted out of the water and placed on an equally rotting footstool, she sipped the weak tea. There was a splash of milk in it but no sugar and it was without doubt the worst cup of tea she had ever tasted.

   

Tom Goodall was a prosperous farmer who owned a fair bit of mixed farming land to the south of Old Swan and Knotty Ash and three miles east of Liverpool. The Liverpool to Manchester railway lay across Tom Goodall’s land. It had opened for traffic over forty years ago when Tom’s grandfather, a canny North Countryman, had been alive and it was said he had made a pretty penny out of the transaction with the railway company. This had enabled him to purchase old Ned Grimshaw’s farm, once known as Jordan’s Farm, before Ned had married Alice Jordan. Ned had bought an inn on Prescot Lane which he had called the Grimshaw Arms and it was still owned by the same family today.

     Tom’s father and then Tom himself were of the same stripe as old Seth Goodall so that whenever a bit of land adjoining Long Reach Farm came on the market it had been snapped up and added to the Goodall acreage.

     The row of tied cottages, one of which housed the Appletons, belonged to Tom Goodall and in them, six in all, lived Tom’s casual labourers, those who had no particular trade but could turn their hands to most manual jobs about the farm: hedging, ditching, draining, haymaking, filling dung carts, cleaning out yards and cowsheds and dragging over the land in readiness for sowing root crops.

     The employed men who had a proper trade, the head cowman, carters, men who ploughed and sowed the fields, stockmen who cared for Tom Goodall’s valuable herd, married men, most of them, lived in well-built, well-maintained, permanent cottages which were clustered about the farmhouse itself. These dwellings had slated roofs, whitewashed walls, inside and out, diamond-paned windows and each was set in a plot of land, perhaps a quarter of an acre, where a pig might be kept for fattening, and chickens, and where vegetables for their own consumption were grown. The cottages had three bedrooms, a parlour and a back kitchen, a privy to each family, and the occupants were expected to keep themselves and their cottages to the standard Tom demanded. They considered themselves to be, and were, a cut above the rough labouring class to which the Appletons belonged. They and their forebears had worked Goodall land as long as the Goodalls themselves and they were sober, hard-working, church-going, dependable men and women, proud of their labour and the neat cottage to which it entitled them.

     Not so those who lived in Primrose Bank, which, as though old Ned Grimshaw’s ancestors had done it deliberately, tongue in cheek, could not have been less appropriately named. There was not a primrose, nor indeed a flower of any sort within sight. The cottages stood in a meandering row well out of sight of the farmhouse, the track itself seldom less than six inches deep in mud through which Tom Goodall’s herd plodded and, to Poppy’s perpetual annoyance, across which they spread their droppings. The front door, opening as it did directly on to the track, was often splattered with their mess and the stench was enough to put you off your grub, Poppy complained, and she was a country lass used to country smells!

     Primrose Bank had been thrown up before the coming of the railway when Ned Grimshaw’s father-in-law, who had been known for a tight-fisted old bugger, had no brass to spare for the comfort, nor even the health of his farm labourers. They had been built without foundations on to bare earth, cramped, two-storeyed affairs with a downstairs living-room no more than twelve feet by twelve feet and a tiny back scullery. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, into the smallest of which led the ladder that was the only means of getting up there. There was no ceiling. The bedrooms were directly under the eaves through which the rain often seeped and in which lived an assortment of animal and bird life. The windows were so constructed that they could not be opened and in hot weather the inside of the cottage was unbearably stuffy.

     There was a narrow passage between each cottage leading from the track up to the back where the privies, two of them to be shared by six families, were placed. There was no drainage and sometimes matter from the privies escaped, finding its way between the buildings and on to the front track. The passing of sanitary legislation over thirty years ago had not affected the folk who lived in Primrose Bank! All the water had to be fetched from the public pump down the track so washing of persons or clothing was not considered a priority by the residents, with perhaps the exception of Poppy Appleton.

     Tom Goodall was a hard man but he was fair, a man who prided himself on his decency to his workforce, but the labourers, those who rented living accommodation in Primrose Bank, had proved to be as unconcerned with the state of their own welfare and comfort as pigs in a sty. They would sit with their boots in the rain puddles which collected on their floors until the leather mouldered, he complained to Eliza, like animals who know no better. Should a roof fall in or a door part from its hinges he had it seen to, for after all it was his property, but for the most part he simply left them to it. As long as they paid their rent on time and performed the tasks he set them with the diligence he demanded then he let them live in their own squalor if that was how they liked it. Besides, they were of a transient nature, inclined to move on a whim, or if they thought they could do better elsewhere, hiring themselves and their families out to farmers in other parts of the county at the Michaelmas hiring fairs with no thought for the future. They would pile their goods and chattels on to a handcart and simply move on; another family would be hired, move in and the cycle would be continued.

     Reuben Appleton’s cottage was an exception as far as cleanliness was concerned and that was due to his youngest daughter who might have been born with a bloody scrubbing brush in her hand, he was fond of saying to his slatternly wife. Whenever their Poppy was not working in the fields she was at it in the cottage, always on her knees, a coarse sacking apron wrapped about her diminutive figure – she had begun her activities at an early age – her abundant hair neatly tucked away in a kerchief. She would remove her stout hobnailed boots and her woollen stockings and go about barefoot, begging the others to do the same and save “her” clean floor but they rarely took any notice of her. Martha and Reuben, both good-natured and feckless, who often asked one another where their Poppy got her pernickety ways from, would sometimes give in to her. Anything for a quiet life, they would sigh, but Poppy’s brothers and sisters thought she was a bloody nuisance, and told her so. They weren’t walking about on no cold, damp flags with nowt on their feet, they declared and if she didn’t give over and let them alone they’d land her a clout that’d rattle her teeth.

   

Eliza sipped her tea and listened to the hiss and splatter of the rain falling down the chimney and hitting the glowing embers of the fire, and the slow drip of water coming from somewhere above her. It plopped rhythmically into something, probably a bucket, but Poppy seemed not to notice or was so used to it she did not hear it. She sat quietly in the depth of the chair on the other side of the fire, her bare feet tucked under her, drinking her tea with evident enjoyment. Mostly she just gazed into the heart of the small fire, only once getting up to stir whatever was in the pan. She had a quality of stillness about her, giving the appearance of drawing in on herself as though her surroundings, despite the evidence of her hard work, were something from which she felt the need to escape. The place could not be said to shine or sparkle, for there was nothing in it from which a light might reflect. No brass or copper, no ornaments of any kind, no glassware or mirror, but every surface was scrubbed clean. Across the floor the rainwater, in which flotsam of some kind floated, continued to eddy from beneath the ill-fitting door.

     And yet despite her quietness, that feeling of pause in her active domestic pursuits, she had an air of suppressed humour, a brightness of spirit which shone from her luminous eyes whenever she glanced up at Eliza. Nothing was going to beat Poppy Appleton, her vivid, bird-like expression seemed to be saying. It was as though inside her was a bubble of joy, a light of hope, contained for the moment with the need for seriousness, for assiduity to the work on hand but which, when the moment allowed, would escape and transform her into a lark, soaring high above the earth in great cartwheels of exuberance. She was a child who had known nothing but drudgery, poverty, neglect and probably hunger. Many of the labourers on the farm found their way on pay day to the Grimshaw Arms where their wages were poured down their throats, creating empty bellies for their children. There was nothing anybody could do about it, Tom said, for it was not his place to say how they were to spend their money, was it? He only gave them work and paid them for it and his responsibility ended there.

     This home, though as clean as this scrap of a girl could get it, was a poor home. The rest of the family, apparently ten of them, were out working in Tom Goodall’s fields, and tomorrow Poppy would make the eleventh. She could not be spared to sit idly at home, or even spend her days keeping it clean for the others.

     The words were out of Eliza’s mouth before she had time to wonder how they had got there in the first place.

     “How old are you, Poppy?”

     “Eleven in August, ma’am.”

     “Then how would you like to come and work for me?”

Chapter 10

The house lay in total darkness and though she strained her ears to catch the smallest sound, there was none, not even from the mice who lived in the walls. Poppy stood beside the deliberately wide-opened window of her bedroom, breathing deeply of the cold draught of air that lapped about her, glad of it to keep her awake, since her tired, over-excited body craved sleep. She was weary with the exhaustion that afflicts those who have laboured from dawn to dusk. She was burdened with the intensification of all that had happened during the past few hours but she knew she could not rest. She longed for her bed and the deep slumber that she fell into at the end of every day but in the stable across the big, cobbled yard lay the boy who had no one but Poppy Appleton to help him and as soon as she was convinc