The Foundryman's Daughter

by Elizabeth Gill

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Sagas

Synopsis

An emotional saga about the meaning of home from a bestselling author. Perfect for fans of Dilly Court, Maggie Hope and Nadine Dorries. 1890, County Durham. Dennes Eliot has worked hard to create a better life for himself. Now a respectable worker at the local Foundry and boarding with his friend Nat, he tries his best to forget his shameful beginnings. But can he really fulfil his dreams in a place where everyone knows his past? Grace Hemingway knows all about the Foundry her father runs, and loves the community built around it. But her parents are grooming her for a stunning London marriage to a man she's not yet met. Can she bear to leave the place she calls home?

Release date: January 31, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 256

Sample

At first Dennes used to think that he remembered the house where his mother had been born but as he grew older he realised that it was her talking about it that he remembered, and her talking about it altered as things changed, so that in his mind the house could be anything he wanted and he could people it with kindness. He only knew that it was near a river, that she had lived there with her parents and that it had been his fault they had had to leave. When the gin was sweet on her breath she blamed him for his being a baby, for his being there at all, for her losing her home and her parents because they had been ashamed and had put her out.

For a long time there was only the two of them in the house in Wesley Street. They lived in a small town called Deerness Law up on the moors of north-west Durham. He remembered stealing things for her, he thought he remembered that right from the start, her laughter, her seeming delight when he brought home whatever food he could take from the shops, her pretty teeth biting into the cake, and his reward was being pulled into her arms, against her body, the smell of gin.

‘The only thing I’m glad about is that you aren’t a girl,’ she would say. ‘You won’t grow up, will you, Dennes, you’ll be my little boy.’

He didn’t want to stay her little boy, he wanted to grow, to grow up and be older, he willed himself there because he soon realised that the men who went upstairs with her gave her money and she didn’t like going upstairs with them, she only pretended to them that she did because there was no money. He needed to be big enough and old enough to make money so that she wouldn’t have to go upstairs with men any more.

For some reason the people in the village didn’t like his mother. People didn’t talk to them and they were not invited into other houses for a cup of tea.

He had come in one day out of the light, out of the street and he had said, ‘Where’s my dad? Why don’t I ever see him?’

She had looked at him. Her lovely golden hair was thin and lank by then, her blue eyes dull.

‘Your dad was a soldier, he went away and didn’t come back. I expect he got killed. Aren’t I enough for you? I’m enough for most. Don’t you think I’m pretty, Dennes?’

Dennes pressed her about his father as he got older. What had he been like and when had he been killed and in which war, but her answers were short and vague and he learned nothing, and there was a small part of him which feared that he had had no dad at all.

When Joseph was little she kept on saying how glad she was that she had two boys, but all Dennes could think about was whether there would be enough to eat when Joseph grew and needed more bread, and he got work where he could so that there would be coppers to bring home to her.

Gradually she changed. She laughed less, she stopped cooking food for them, she stopped cleaning the house. She was not pretty any more by then and there was no comfort except sometimes when she was drunk and the men had gone. She tried not to get drunk before they arrived but she always did after they had gone. She didn’t sleep and she didn’t eat, she sat by the window and drank and she would think about the house then.

‘I used to play the piano and we had a lawn and I could dance. I used to dance with men.’ She laughed and put the cracked cup briefly to her lips as though she was drinking tea, taking tiny sips from it. ‘I danced too often, Dennes, that’s how I got you.’

Dennes grew and Joseph was her little boy. Dennes was not little any longer. He thought it was alarming how he grew. He was taller and bigger than the other boys and it meant that he could get work and make money when they couldn’t – all you had to do was lie and sometimes you didn’t even have to do that as long as you were cheap. Making money was like throwing it over the edge of the old whinstone quarry because it was such a small amount compared to what they needed. Dennes tried to make sure that he bought food for himself and Joseph before he went home. She rarely ate, but if there was not enough for gin she used to cry, and the sight of his mother crying was more than he could stand.

In the house daily there were men. Sometimes they stayed and he and Joseph slept on the rug by the fire, and when he awoke in the night there were sounds from above, laughter, the bed creaking, a man’s voice low and her voice taking on the note that Dennes hated, the almost pretty, almost childlike voice, pleading. He knew somehow that that was what they wanted, that it was what all men wanted, for her to be almost a child, for her to pretend that she didn’t want them to touch her so that they could be big, so that they could be powerful, so that they could win and be important. She never used that voice when the men weren’t there. Dennes wanted to kill them.

The women in the village hurried past him. The back street was his territory, keeping an eye on Joseph until he got old enough to fend for himself, watching other children go to school.

‘Can I go to school?’

‘Not today. Run down to the Golden Lion and fetch some beer.’

From somewhere was the desperate desire to read and write, going to school occasionally – she didn’t notice – struggling there at first because children younger than he was knew more and then the realisation that it was just another trick after all, except that reading turned more tricks for you if you let it. It let you run away in your head. It was another kind of pleasure and you could learn to control it, you could blot out the darkness and make it open at your will.

He was her big boy now, he was bigger than she was, as though not only was he getting bigger but she was getting smaller. Sometimes he was in the way and it frightened him. Men frowned at him, sometimes more; he kept Joseph out of the road of their hands and their belts, away from the clouts and the kickings.

It seemed to Grace Hemingway, by the time she was fourteen, that there was no other place on earth which mattered but the small town of Deerness Law and its surrounding moors. She went to other places, it was true; her parents were concerned for her, they even talked of sending her away to school though it came to nothing and she was glad of that. She had been to Durham and Darlington and Bishop Auckland. She had seen the Tyne and the Tees and she knew that in the future she would see the Thames, because her mother had a sister in London and when she was older Grace would go there, but as far as she was concerned the real world was here where the bitter winds swept the fell, the people worked at her father’s steelworks, and on a clear day when she had managed to escape from the house and its grounds there was beyond the town the clearest purest air that God saw fit to grace the earth. To grace it. Was that how her mother saw her? Something high and pure like the air upon the fell? Grace had seen the sea and to her that was what the fell was like, another sea where the wind reigned with its strange noises, the grouse flew low over the purple heather in the early autumn and as far as you could see there was nothing but that rich colour. She thought of God there. She never thought of God when she was in church but when she didn’t believe in him she only had to go to the fell. It was better than any cathedral, better even than the rose window and the special knocker on the door at Durham Cathedral. It was the most wonderful place in the whole world and she lived here.

From here high up ran the water which turned into the River Wear. She had leaned over Framwellgate Bridge at Durham and seen the castle and the cathedral and the Wear in its wide way on to Sunderland, but here was where it all began, on the edge of the Durham coalfield and from the dale, the high fells and the moors where it started its journey running among the heather, where the curlew cried and the sheep fed and people had lived for hundreds of years.

People hadn’t lived in her pit town for a long time like that. The village itself was less than fifty years old. Her father and his partner, Nicholas Barmouth, had come here twenty years before, in 1870, because of the mines and the raw materials to make iron and steel, and they had stayed.

It was winter here now and there were no bees buzzing in the heather. Everything was dark. The light had begun to fade from the short November afternoon and she would get into trouble when she reached home for staying out like this by herself.

She walked up past the Lizzie pit which stood on the outskirts of the village and then down the Front Street and off to the right, past the Co-operative store, the draper and the grocer and the shoeshop on the corner, down past the butcher’s shop and the baker’s, past the few houses and the Mechanics’ Institute and then into her own short road where the doctor had his surgery, and there further along, standing quite alone, was her house.

Grace loved it like she thought she would never love a house again. It was a big square stone building with its own driveway which went around to the back, with carriage-houses and stables and a big yard with a hen house and a wash house and the back kitchen where Mrs Jackson, the cook, and Ruth, the maid, spent most of their time. Through from there was the kitchen and the pantry and the big place under the stairs where they kept crockery and jugs and vases and all manner of glassware. There was a little window under the stairs which you could see from the yard. It had looked to her when she was small like a shop with the different coloured glassware glinting through the window in the sunlight.

Through double doors there was the main part of the house where she lived with her parents, the dining-room and the sitting-room which overlooked the garden, and her father’s study and the big dog-leg staircase which led to the bedrooms and from which a big arched window overlooked the yard. From her bedroom on a clear day she could see to Yorkshire. From the back bedrooms you could see the yard and the fields which belonged to the house and the backs of the houses on the main street. Further over was a pitheap past which you couldn’t see anything, though there were more houses, and at the very top of the view were the graveyard and some trees. When she had been small Grace was happy that she did not sleep at the back of the house like Ruth did. She didn’t like the idea of the graveyard even though it was nowhere near the house, a good field away.

The lights were on both at the front and the back. She went in by the side entrance which led from the back hall down past the front kitchen and through the front hall and the double doors. She could hear her mother, Dorothy, playing the piano. Mr and Mrs Barmouth were there for the evening and had come early. The piano playing stopped as she went in and her mother greeted her and scolded her a little, and then Mrs Jackson came in with the tea. There was fresh teacake and strawberry jam.

Alexandra Covington, Grace’s friend, arrived shortly afterwards with her father. He owned three pits in the Deerness valley and they lived on the edge of the town towards the fell. Grace and Alexandra were both fourteen and had been friends for as long as Grace could remember. There were few girls in the village other than the doctor’s daughter and the vicar’s daughter who had anything in common with them, and Alexandra considered them both too stuffy. Alexandra was anything but stuffy, Grace thought now, as her guest arrived. She was a big dark girl who liked her food, had run her father’s house for the last five years since her mother died and read all the books she could get her hands on.

They went up to Grace’s bedroom to discuss the book they were both reading and ended up talking about dresses and their hair until Ruth came to help them to dress for dinner.

‘We don’t need any help, Ruth,’ Grace said, ‘we can help each other.’

‘Mrs Jackson said I had to come up so here I am,’ Ruth said simply.

‘Have a sweet,’ Grace insisted, opening the box which Nicholas Barmouth had presented her with over tea. Ruth stared into the box and gingerly reached out. ‘Have two,’ Grace said.

‘Thanks, Miss Grace.’ Ruth stuffed them into her apron pocket. ‘Don’t want chocolate all over your dresses. I’ll eat them later if you don’t mind.’

They spent as long as they could changing for dinner to keep out of the way of the adults and finally went down only when they had to. Mrs Barmouth, Grace thought casually, didn’t look well but then she was never well, and Mr Barmouth, although he was always polite to her, usually looked as though he would have been glad either to have been somewhere else or to have come without her. Sometimes he did come without her. She was pale and though the dinner was the best that Mrs Jackson and Ruth could prepare and therefore was good she ate virtually nothing.

Later Grace and Alexandra escaped again to her room and there Grace said, ‘Mrs Barmouth didn’t eat much, did she?’

‘My father says she’s dying.’

‘Dying?’

Grace had never met anyone who had died except Alexandra’s mother and that seemed such a long time ago now. She did not really believe that anybody died. She did not believe that she would ever die and leave the fell. But Alexandra’s father was probably right. Mrs Barmouth had looked bad for a long time now. Because he had nobody else to talk to, Mr Covington talked to Alexandra like she was a grown-up, so they usually found out everything that went on, even though Grace’s parents told her little. When she came into the room they usually stopped talking or changed the subject, which would have been very frustrating had she not had Alexandra to consult about important matters. If Alexandra mentioned them to her father Grace got to know what she wanted. All she wanted now was for her small world not to change, for Mr Barmouth and Mrs Barmouth and her mother and father and Alexandra and Mr Covington and Ruth and Mrs Jackson just to stay as they were and for this Christmas to be the best ever. She hugged the thought to herself. Christmases were always good.

When the guests had gone Grace went to bed. She wasn’t tired but she knew that her parents liked to have some time to themselves. Sometimes Alexandra stayed and Grace didn’t feel lonely. Now Ruth helped her to undress and brushed out her hair and Grace chattered so that Ruth would stay a little longer, but in the end she let her go. Ruth had to get up early to light the kitchen fire; it wasn’t right to keep her too late.

‘Do you think we’ll have snow for Christmas, Ruth?’ she said as Ruth reached the door.

‘I just hope it stays warm enough for that,’ Ruth said with a shiver as she went out.

Grace went and stood by the fire for a few minutes after Ruth had gone and thought how lucky she was. She and Alexandra had arranged to go riding the next morning. She loved these mornings – the valleys ghostly with mist, the odd leaf glistening on a branch, the dawns dark red and slow and the stars paling slowly into light. She took a last peep through the curtains at the fields beyond the house, but it was too dark to see anything, and then she climbed into her warm bed and was soon fast asleep.

It was just another journey as far as Nat was concerned. Ever since he could remember they had been leaving places. He longed to stay in one place for more than a short time. It seemed to him that they were forever packing. At one time his mother had done so cheerfully, but now she was tired of the continual shifting and longed for somewhere to call home. She never said anything and it would have done no good because they always had to leave. His father was always quarrelling, always causing trouble of some kind and being put out of work. Nat felt guilty for minding. Thomas Seymour was a good honest man and he tried for better conditions for the men wherever he went, but his family were the ones who suffered. Sometimes Nat wished that his father had not been quite so keen on trying to get things right. His father called himself a socialist and was proud of having read a book by a man called Karl Marx which his father said would change the world and make men equal.

Sometimes they went by cart, sometimes by train. He did not like the cart journeys but he did like trains until he began to associate trains with leaving, and after that there was no pleasure in them. Taylor, who was two years younger than he was, still got excited and Dolly who was the youngest at nine did whatever her mother told her.

Their mother would enliven the journeys by telling them tales of the old days when their grandparents were small children and there had been no trains. Nat could not imagine a world where you could not move around freely but he thought that from their point of view it might have been an advantage, at least his father would have had to stay in the same place more or less.

They had been a lot of places by the time Nat was thirteen. He had attended a lot of schools. That was awful too, having to prove yourself in the school playground and be jeered at for your accent because it was different. Everywhere you went people sounded different and they were always the ones at home. You were always the foreigner. In the end he complained about school, about going.

‘Plenty of lads my age don’t go at all.’

‘Well, they should,’ his father said and he turned Nat to him in the serious way that Nat hated. ‘Education is power, Nat, don’t forget. Education and sobriety are the ways to win.’

And so another train and another place but this time it was to the edge of the Durham coalfield, to Deerness Law, a town so small and windswept that after living near the mighty goings-on around the River Tees Nat felt a superiority the moment he arrived.

‘It’s not much of a place,’ he said to Taylor.

Taylor sniffed.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

Taylor was always hungry. His stomach was the most important thing in the world to him, that was why he was so podgy. He had a round face and bright, happy eyes and as long as there was food within sight and reach he didn’t care for anything else.

The house was a foundryman’s house in a street not far away from the railway. It didn’t impress Nat. The wind blew in at the back door and out at the front and he was sure that he could smell the sheep in the nearby fields.

‘It’s nice here,’ Dolly said, coming into the room with bedding.

From the window Nat looked out over the back yard.

‘It’s not nice, it’s just another place.’

‘Don’t be like that, our Nat,’ she said, and he turned and smiled and thought, who could resist her? She was so small for her age that he could pick her up and carry her upstairs or on to a cart or up the steps of a train. She and Taylor fought but, perhaps because of the distance of years between them, she never fought with Nat and when Taylor fought with her Nat always bettered him for her within seconds. Taylor knew better than to go crying to his parents over this and Nat taught him how to play draughts, and to fish when they had lived over at the coast near Middlesbrough.

There were two bedrooms in the house. He and Taylor and Dolly would sleep in one and his parents in the other. He could hear voices downstairs, new voices.

‘It’s the woman from next door,’ Dolly said. Dolly always knew everything. She had lugs like an elephant, Taylor said. ‘She’s called Mrs Boylen. She’s made tea and soda bread.’ Dolly wrinkled her nose as she spoke, she hated soda bread, but Taylor had heard the word food mentioned and made his way off downstairs, clattering as he moved too fast.

Dolly came over to the window.

‘‘Tisn’t much of a view,’ Nat said.

‘You’re always complaining, our Nat. There’s nothing wrong with it. Anyroad, Mrs Boylen said my dad’ll get taken on at the foundry no bother.’

‘Yes, but for how long?’ Nat said.

‘Will you help me with this?’

This was the bedding which was too big for her to manage by herself.

‘No.’

‘I’ll tell Mam.’

‘Tell her then,’ Nat said and he sauntered off downstairs and out of the door before anybody had a chance to stop him.

The main street went on and on. Nat thought it was the most dismal-looking place he had ever seen. It wound down from one slight hill to the bottom where there were railway gates and then up at the other side. There was the odd shop but he cared nothing for shops. As he walked snow began to fall. He pushed his hands into his pockets and watched as the streets turned white and his booted feet made imprints, and he kept his head down against the way that the snow was beginning to blow hard into his face. He kept going until there were no more houses and no more shops and no habitation of any kind, until he reached the fell.

Sheep huddled in against the stone walls. A narrow road trailed out of the town and the fell itself had nothing growing on it; it was vast and the wind howled across it and drove the snow relentlessly as far as he could see. What sort of place had his dad brought them to now?

When he got back his mother, Gwen, had a bright fire burning in the kitchen, the table and chairs were in place, the better stuff was in the front room and he didn’t doubt that his dad and the man next door would have taken the beds upstairs. As Nat came through the door his mother looked up from where she was dealing with pans on the fire. She was a slight, pretty woman, dark-haired with soft blue eyes, heavily lashed.

‘And just where have you been?’ she said.

‘Out.’

She looked hard at him.

‘I needed you here to help. You had no right to go and leave our Dolly with everything to do upstairs. She’s just a bairn.’

‘Where’s my dad?’

‘He’s gone to see about work and before you ask, no, you cannot go. It’s school for you tomorrow.’

‘I’m not going to no school,’ Nat said. Nat could have left school by now, he was thirteen, but his dad believed in as much schooling as you could get. The minute the words were out he knew them for a mistake, he was even sorry. His mam had had her fill already that day, she didn’t need him to cheek her. She didn’t generally lose her temper, she was too nice for that, and he was already sorry.

‘Get upstairs,’ she said.

Nat quietly called himself names. She was tired now. He wondered whether saying that he was sorry would make a difference and decided not so he went up the shadowed stairs and into the bedroom. The beds were made up and Taylor and Dolly were sitting there. It was cold and snow blew hard at the window.

Gwen called the other two children from the bottom of the stairs. Taylor looked at Nat and Dolly pulled a face.

‘Have you cheeked my mam again? You’re not nice to know,’ she said and went out.

Taylor said nothing before he went.

Nat lay down on the bed, regarded the ceiling and listened to voices below. Some other neighbour calling, probably with a cake for tea. He went on lying there and the smell of freshly baked cake wafted through the ceiling. The snow stopped, the wind died and he could hear the sounds of Dolly and Taylor playing in the yard. They would be building a snowman. The room got colder. It was funny, he thought, how when it wasn’t snowing it got colder. It was quite dark now. He leaned over and lit a candle and watched the shadows flickering on the walls through the draught from the window. Eventually he heard his mother’s footsteps light on the stairs and she came into the room.

‘I forgot about you,’ she said, ‘somebody came in. Are you frozen?’ Nat felt awful. She sat down on the bed. ‘We will find a place to stay some day,’ she said. ‘Come down and have some cake.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nat said.

‘You’re a bad lad,’ she said and kissed him. Nat loved being close to her, she smelled of tea and milk and cake crumbs. She was small and skinny but there was a softness about her and instinctively he knew that women always had that softness. Dolly had it, and the lass he had kissed at a party, and they smelled just wonderful.

She got up and Nat went with her, vowing never to make her cross again. Taylor was wolfing cake in the kitchen and Dolly was playing by the fire. His mother gave him a big mug of tea and some fruit cake which was fresh and moist, and then his father came in. He was smiling which meant that he had work, so there would be meat at the weekend and plenty on the table. His dad was always taken on because he was a skilled man, a moulder.

His mother didn’t tell his dad of him like most would have, but that was not because he was forgiven, it was because his dad wouldn’t have done anything about it anyway. His father wasn’t capable of telling anybody off, which was funny if you thought about it because his father was as determined and stubborn as anybody Nat knew. He was not a weak man, he just had different ideas than other people had. He wouldn’t hit a child and he wouldn’t let any other man do it. Nat had seen him get hold of a man who was thrashing a horse and frighten the man so much that he ran away. His father didn’t have to use violence. In his presence they rarely fought or argued and when he was younger Nat had cried hard over just a wor. . .