Poppy’s Dilemma

Copyright

Published by Avon an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton in 2003 as Poppy Silk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

This ebook edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2016

Cover design © Debbie Clement 2016

Nancy Carson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008252342

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007948482

Version 2018-01-09

POPPY’S DILEMMA

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

She did not really want to be there, but Poppy Silk loitered compliantly with her friend Minnie Catchpole outside the alehouse, which was called ‘The Wheatsheaf’, but somewhat appropriately known by some as the ‘Grin and Bear It’. Poppy was wearing the only reasonable frock she possessed; second-hand and made of red flannel with buttons down the front. It was a size too big for her slender figure and had cost her mother a shilling. Her black worsted stockings and inelegant clogs were made more conspicuous by the frock’s short skirt. Despite the frock, and despite her reluctance to be among her own kind, Poppy had seldom been short of admirers lately. She had the face of an angel, strikingly beautiful, manifesting all the innocence of the unenticed, and yet she was much too worldly to warrant a halo.

There was a stiff breeze, not uncommon for the middle of May, and the evening sky was shredded with sprinting clouds. The road, growing dustier and more uneven the longer the dry spell lasted, was strewn with old news-sheets that flapped like misshapen birds against the wind.

The Wheatsheaf stood alone, surrounded by wasteland on one side and the Old Buffery Iron Works on the other. Within spitting distance was a collection of wooden shanties that lined the Blowers Green section of the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, which was just another of the huge civil engineering enterprises under construction.

The event was payday and it only occurred monthly. A horde of railway navvies had assembled in blustery sunshine two hours earlier at The Wheatsheaf, Poppy’s and Minnie’s fathers among them. The tavern was where they reaped their monetary reward for four weeks’ gruelling labour minus, of course, what they owed in truck to the contractor. Most were the worse for drink. Their pockets were bulging with money, which was begging to be spent on beer, whisky, or whatever other libation would intoxicate them into sublime oblivion and render painless their aching backs and limbs. Some had ventured further afield in their search for it, but were now returning, having boisterously worn out their welcome at other public houses and beer shops, and even wobble shops, which were illicit drinking houses.

Poppy and Minnie were not the only girls aware that it was payday and hoping to be treated at least to a drink; many neighbourhood girls had gathered, hoping some of the navvies’ hard-earned money would trickle down to them. Minnie, the flightier and more buxom of the two, struck a pose calculated to attract the favourable eye of the young workmen who were there in abundance, and she was flattered when some young buck whistled his approval. Poppy, though, was not so sure about those others who sidled up and made bawdy suggestions, even though those suggestions elicited girlish giggles, or feigned indignation, depending on what was being suggested and by whom.

‘I reckon our dads have forgot we,’ Minnie commented.

‘They forget everything once they’ve got the beer in ’em,’ Poppy replied realistically. ‘Shall we go inside and ask ’em for money so’s we can buy our own?’

A particularly well-built navvy, who looked old enough to be her father, suggested something spectacularly indecent to Minnie. She stared at the man in mock outrage for a moment or two, yet inwardly remained unruffled, before she turned round to reply to Poppy’s question. ‘I ain’t going in there. We’d get mauled to death by this lot o’ dirty buggers. I don’t mind somebody young, but not that lot o’ dirty old buggers.’

‘Well, I ain’t stoppin’ here much longer,’ Poppy said, glancing apprehensively at the same man. She turned to Minnie. ‘They ain’t doing to me what they done to that Peggy Tinsley the other week down by the Netherton turnpike. Seven of ’em, there was, she reckoned. They just left her there lying in the grass after. She couldn’t walk properly for days. And her best bonnet blowed away in the wind.’

‘Poor soul,’ Minnie commented, but with little sympathy. ‘Still, I’m glad it wasn’t me. If they’d done to me what they done to her, and Dog Meat had found out, it would’ve spoiled me chances.’

‘Why do they call that chap o’ yours “Dog Meat”?’ Poppy asked. ‘Does he eat dogs or summat?’

‘Course not. It’s ’cause he used to sell meat for dogs to the swells afore he was a navvy. Any road, it’s just a nickname. Everybody’s got a nickname.’

‘I ain’t got a nickname, Minnie.’

‘Nor me, but your dad has – “Lightning Jack”.’

Poppy smiled and her blue eyes sparkled. ‘So’s yours – “Tipton Ted” … Come on, where shall we go? We ain’t gunna get a drink here. And I want to be safe in me bed asleep come turning-out time when they’re all drunk and a-fighting.’

‘Let’s have a walk up the town,’ Minnie suggested with a gleam in her eye. ‘Let’s see what the swells am up to.’

As they were about to go, a packman carrying a case came up to them. He opened it up and displayed rows of necklaces, earrings, bangles and other trinkets.

‘Buy a necklace, Miss?’ he suggested to Poppy. He lifted one out and held it before her throat where it tantalisingly out-glittered the glass and paste example she was already wearing. ‘It’d look a treat on you with your pretty face, wouldn’t it?’ He regarded Minnie beseechingly, in an attempt to elicit her support. ‘Wouldn’t she look a picture, eh, miss?’

‘I got no money,’ Poppy informed him.

‘Got no money? Well, it’s soon got, a pretty wench like thee.’

‘It’s me dad what’s got the money,’ Poppy replied, the innuendo lost on her. ‘But he’s making sure he spends it on himself.’

‘What about you, my flower?’ he said, addressing Minnie.

‘I got no money neither.’

‘The men got paid tonight, didn’t they?’ the packman queried, placing the necklace back in the case and closing it up again. ‘I daresay I’ll be able to prise a sovereign from somebody afore I’m done.’

Poppy and Minnie turned to go. They were content to leave behind the hawker and the local girls who were making up to the young navvies, content to leave behind the guffaws and the swearing, the shouts and the bawling, which were increasing in direct proportion to the amount of beer being drunk. A hundred ordinary workmen, each with a pocketful of money, in even a large public house, could wreak havoc. A hundred drunken navvies, with their own brand of disregard for order and serenity, could triple the chaos. Poppy and Minnie were well aware of it. They were all too aware that towns which were being linked to the railways did not altogether embrace the arrival of hundreds of burly, uncouth men, some with their so-called wives, however transient their stay. It was commonly believed that the shanties they erected alongside the railway workings were hardly fit for pigs, let alone people. And heaven protect decent, God-fearing folk from the unspeakable goings-on inside. But how those men could shift earth!

The girls left the turnpike and walked steadily towards Dudley up a track known as Shaw Road that ran alongside the new cutting the men had been excavating. As they passed the gasworks, chattering amiably, Minnie imparted some very personal secrets about herself and her man Dog Meat.

Poppy giggled in disbelief. ‘You don’t do that, do yer?’

‘Course we do. It’s nice.’

They sauntered between the houses, factories, shops and alehouses of Vicar Street. The granite spire of the recently built St Thomas’s church came into view, pointing the way to heaven as it gleamed ethereally, caught by the sun’s dying orange glow. It was good to be away from the rabble and babble of the navvies. Here was the chance for Poppy to derive some notion of how civilised society functioned.

They reached the church, turned right and headed downhill towards the town hall and the market square. The market square occupied the area that split High Street into two carriageways before joining up again to form Castle Street. Poppy and Minnie nudged each other at the sight of bonneted women in fine dresses and handsome men in cylindrical top hats. A carriage passed them coming in the other direction, its wheels clattering over the uneven surface. Neither girl would have known whether it was a barouche or a phaeton, a landau or a clarence; the only horse-drawn vehicles they could recognise were the tip-trucks that conveyed spoil from the cuttings and the tunnel. Poppy marvelled at the pristine goods on display in shop windows. Soft feather mattresses adorned with clean white sheets and pillowcases lay on bedsteads fashioned from glistening brass. There was highly polished furniture you could almost see your face in. Shoe shops displayed modish boots, cuffed and lace-edged, with delicate heels. Poppy drooled over elegant white dresses – the height of fashion – and beautifully tailored coats, and bonnets bedecked with colourful ribbons and flowers. Oh, it was a fine town, this Dudley, both Poppy and Minnie agreed.

‘If me father’s got any money left after his randying I’d like to get me mother to come here and buy me a pair of them dainty boots,’ Poppy said, knowing it to be a vain hope. ‘I’d love a pair of new boots.’

They ambled on, past the old town hall and market. Things were subtly different in this part of the town. The street was busy with people. Even this early in the evening, several people were stumbling tipsily as they entered or left the profusion of noisy public houses. A few were sitting in sluggish stupors adorning alcoves, or lolling against convenient walls. Women and girls stood around, gossiping animatedly, cackling like hens in a farmyard. Some were overtly trying to tempt men with coquettish looks. Here and there a glimpse of some well-turned ankle promised heaven. Poppy and Minnie giggled at the sight and sound of an old man emptying his nose into the gutter with a voluble snort; that sort of action would hardly offend them, used as they were to witnessing far less refined behaviour. They chuckled even more at the pettiness of a woman walking behind them, who tutted self-righteously and muttered, ‘How disgraceful!’

They walked past the frontages of some more tightly squeezed shops, inns and houses; a succession of stone and red-brick porticoes, forming an unbroken way on both sides of the wide Georgian street. It narrowed as they approached St Edmund’s church, with its red-brick tower overshadowed by the cold grey stone of the old Norman castle on the high adjacent hill.

‘Shall we turn back?’ Poppy suggested. ‘We don’t want to walk down the hill towards the station, there’s no shops down there.’

‘Only the new railway bridge.’

Poppy chuckled. ‘Remember when the first one they built fell down? It’s lucky we weren’t under it.’

They turned around and retraced their steps. As they passed The Seven Stars opposite the town hall and the market place, four youths who were loitering around the doorway called after them. They made disparaging comments about the girls’ clogs, and their unusually short skirts which revealed their shins.

‘Show us your drawers!’ one called, and laughed with satisfaction at his own bravado. Rumour was rife that some working girls were wearing the long johns of their menfolk.

‘Show us your pego, then,’ Minnie replied with equal bluster. ‘If you’ve got e’er un worth showin’.’

With a cheeky grin, the lad put his hands to the fly buttons of his trousers and, fearing Minnie had failed to call his bluff, Poppy turned and walked on. Minnie, laughing, caught her up.

At the side of the road in front of the town hall a woman was arguing with a hawker about the price of a coal scuttle. A middle-aged man with sunken cheeks was sitting on a step, lecherously stroking the blooming cheeks of a full-bosomed woman sitting next to him. A couple of urchins in rags and tatters, who had been nowhere near a bar of soap in a fortnight, rolled over in the gutter and came to blows, one of them squawking with hurt pride.

After only a few minutes, Poppy and Minnie realised that the four youths were following them.

‘Quick, let’s hurry up,’ Poppy urged.

‘Let ’em come,’ Minnie said, unabashed. ‘Mine’s a nice-looking lad.’

‘Oh?’ Poppy queried. ‘What about Dog Meat?’

‘Sod Dog Meat. You take your pick of the other three.’

‘What if Dog Meat sees yer with one of ’em? What if he finds out?’

‘He won’t. He’ll be fuddled out of his mind by now. Any road, I always deny everything.’

‘Are yer gunna go with him then?’ She tilted her head to indicate she meant one of the four lads following at no more than ten yards’ distance now.

‘If he asks me. If he buys me a drink. You want a drink, don’t you, Poppy?’

‘I’m parched.’

‘Well, I’m parched an’ all, and we ain’t got no money to buy one. So let these.’

Minnie stopped and waited for the boys to catch them up. ‘D’you want to buy us a drink?’ she asked forwardly, catching the eye of the lad she fancied.

‘Will you show us your drawers after?’

‘Who says I’ve got any on?’

‘Show us then …’

Minnie shrugged and cocked an eyebrow suggestively. ‘That depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘On whether I like yer enough.’

‘Then what?’ the lad asked provocatively.

‘Depends on whether I like yer enough.’ Minnie tantalised him with an alluring look of devilment. ‘Tek me and Poppy for a drink and then it’ll be dark. Who knows what hidey-holes there am round here.’

‘They’m navvies’ wenches, Tom,’ one of the lads murmured apprehensively to the one in charge of these delicate negotiations. ‘From that new cutting down Blowers Green. Yo’ll get yer yed bosted.’

‘They’ll have to catch me fust.’ With a grin, Tom turned to Minnie again. ‘Come on, then. We’ll goo in The Three Crowns.’

It was of no consequence to Poppy and Minnie that The Three Crowns was scarcely more refined than The Wheatsheaf, with its sawdust floor and its spittoons not so strategically placed. Oil lamps hung from hooks screwed into the beams of the low ceiling. The lads barged a way through to the bar and the girls followed compliantly. Soon they were handed a tumbler of beer each, which they quaffed eagerly. They stayed for about an hour, laughing with the lads and their increasingly bawdy humour, until Poppy said it was time she went back to her mother and her brothers and sisters.

‘Stop a bit longer, Poppy,’ Minnie entreated.

Minnie had been getting on famously with Tom; she was obviously equal to his probing indelicacies, and their rapport showed immense mutual promise.

‘No, Min, not with me father out on a randy,’ Poppy insisted. ‘I want to go to my mother.’

‘Luke’ll goo with yer,’ Tom said, keen to part Minnie from her companion and so boost his chances further.

Luke was keen to oblige. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Poppy’s lovely face the whole time but, because of his complete lack of conversation, he had made no impression on her.

‘I’ll walk with yer, Poppy, if yer like,’ he mumbled.

She gave her assent and he finished his beer. Outside, darkness had fallen.

‘So what’s it like, being a navvy?’ Luke asked.

‘How should I know? You should ask me dad. He’s the navvy.’

‘They say it’s hard work.’

‘The hardest job in the world, me dad says.’

‘But they get paid plenty.’

‘And spend plenty,’ Poppy replied, and her contempt for the fact seeped through in her tone. ‘All on beer. They got paid tonight and they was all drunk two hours later. None of ’em will be sober till it’s all spent. About Wednesday at the latest, I reckon. Then they’ll all have to live on truck till the next payday.’

‘What’s truck?’

‘Vouchers,’ Poppy explained. ‘They can buy food, boots and clothes from the contractor’s tommy shop with the vouchers, and then it gets docked off their next wages.’

‘Sounds fair,’ Luke commented.

‘No, it ain’t fair, Luke. Some of the contractors charge a pound for fifteen shillings’ worth of goods. That ain’t fair at all.’

Poppy spied a group of navvies walking towards her and Luke. Even in the darkness you could tell they were navvies by their distinctive mode of dress. They wore white felt hats with the brims turned up, bright neckerchiefs and waistcoats, moleskin jackets and trousers, and big boots. She hoped they wouldn’t recognise her as they approached.

‘You’d best leave me now,’ Poppy suggested, fearing for Luke’s safety.

‘Not till we’ve gone past this lot.’

‘No, they’re navvies from the Blowers Green cutting. If they recognise me, they’ll make trouble for you.’ She looked around for some means of escape. ‘Quick, let’s hide in that alley, out of the way.’

She shoved him into it unceremoniously. There was a gate at the top and he took the initiative and opened it, leading her quickly through. He put his forefinger to her lips, gesturing her to remain silent, and pressed himself to her while they waited. The warmth of his body against her made her heart pound with a bewildering mixture of pleasure at his closeness, and fear at the sound of footsteps, scuffs and the navvies’ muttering and swearing in the alley. But the men were too drunk to know what they were doing or who they had seen, and quickly lost interest in their search. Poppy and Luke lingered a minute longer, enraptured by this enforced intimacy, yet lacking the confidence or know-how to exploit it.

‘You’d best go back,’ Poppy said, when they were out in the street again. ‘I’ll be all right from here. I know the navvies. They won’t hurt me, ’cause of me dad, but they’d kill you if they saw you with me.’

‘Any chance o’ seein’ you again, Poppy?’ Luke asked.

Poppy smiled appealingly and shrugged. ‘You never know. If me and Minnie come up to the town again.’ Luke seemed a decent lad; he’d shown her consideration and a heart-quickening, gentle intimacy she’d never experienced before. ‘Thanks for walking me back.’ She turned and gave him a wave as she hurried on down the road.

The hut Poppy shared with her family and eight other navvy lodgers was a ramshackle affair. It stood amongst a muddle of shacks huddled together in bewildering confusion, as if they had fallen randomly from the sky and been allowed to remain just where they had landed. Heaps of disused planks, discarded bottles and all manner of rubbish littered the place. The huts were owned by Treadwell’s, the contractors, and had been dismantled and reconstructed several times in several parts of the country before their sojourn at Blowers Green in Dudley. Although built predominantly of wooden planking, they were a mix of other waste materials such as engineering bricks and refractories, stone, tile and tarpaulin. Over the door of the hut occupied by Poppy and her kin hung a piece of wood that bore the name ‘Rose Cottage’, nailed there by some joker who’d been blessed with the ability to read and write. At least one of the four panes of glass in each window had been broken; one was replaced with a wooden board, the other a square of cardboard. Rose Cottage had three rooms. One was the communal living room that served as kitchen, dining room, brewhouse and gambling saloon. There was the family’s bedroom, and another separate bedroom for the lodgers, crammed with eight bunk beds and such other accoutrements as the navvies deemed necessary. The kitchen area was nothing more than the space at one end of the hut that had a fireplace. Also crowded in was a stone sink that emptied into the dirt outside, a copper for boiling vast amounts of water, a rickety table and a row of lockers that were the lodgers’ personal tommy boxes. Every navvy provided his own food, which he called his ‘tommy’, and which he paid for in either cash or vouchers from the tommy shop. It often fell to Sheba, Poppy’s mother, to cook it.

When Poppy returned to the hut, Sheba, a mere thirty-one years old, was sitting on a chair in the communal living room nursing her youngest child; her fifth that had survived. Another woman, a neighbour from a similar hut, was with her, smoking a clay pipe they called a ‘gum-bucket’. While they gossiped, they shared a jug of beer tapped from the barrel that stood cradled in a stillage against one wall. Neither woman was drunk but the beer had loosened their tongues, and they were talking over each other in their eagerness to chatter. Poppy undressed herself in the adjacent family bedroom and put on her nightgown. She could hear the women’s conversation clearly, but took little notice as she clambered over the rough, bare floorboards to the two dishevelled beds that were shoved together through lack of space. She slid into the one she shared with her two younger sisters and her younger brother Jenkin, better known as Little Lightning.