Love on the Dole Read online

  LOVE ON THE DOLE

  Walter Greenwood was born in 1903 at Salford in Lancashire. He was educated first at Langworthy Road Council School, Salford, and then by himself. He began part-time work as a milkroundsman’s boy when he was twelve, then worked, again part-time, with a pawnbroker, before leaving school at the age of thirteen. He later worked as an office boy, a stable boy, a clerk, a packing case maker, a sign-writer, a car-driver, a warehouseman, and a salesman, never earning more than thirty-five shillings a week except while working for a few months in an automobile factory. He was on the ‘dole’ at least three times.

  Love on the Dole, his first novel, was accepted for publication in 1932, and when it appeared in 1933 it was at once recognized as a classic. Walter Greenwood published ten more novels, a volume of short stories and his autobiography, There Was a Time. He also wrote plays, several of which have been filmed. He died in 1974.

  Walter Greenwood

  LOVE ON THE DOLE

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Adobe ISBN: 9781409004080 Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 1993 10 9

  Copyright © Walter Greenwood

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser First published in Great Britain in 1933 by Jonathan Cape Vintage

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9780099224815 (from Jan 2007) ISBN 00992248IX

  Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  PART ONE

  Hanky Park

  Getting Up

  Looking for It

  Price and Jones’s

  Girls Make him Sick

  Overalls

  Saturday

  PART TWO

  Revelation

  He is Happy

  ‘Raspberry, Gooseberry…’

  Fine Feathers

  Consulting the Oracle

  Low Finance

  The Smile of Fortune

  Magic Casements

  PART THREE

  Plans

  Tangle

  ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes…’

  Musical Chairs

  The Plot Thickens

  A Man of Leisure

  Dirty Work at the Crossroads

  It is Driving him Barmy

  Now it’s Driving her Barmy

  Historical Narrative

  Upset in North Street

  The Covered Wagon

  Wanted, a Fiver

  ‘Voice that Breathed o’er Eden’

  ‘Leanover’

  ‘Unto us…’

  The Villain still Pursues Her

  No Vacancies

  The Time is ripe, and rotten ripe, for change;

  Then let it come…

  JAMES RUSSEL LOWELL

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1 - HANKY PARK

  THEY call this part ‘Hanky Park’.

  It is that district opposite the parish church of Pendleton, one of the many industrial townships comprising the Two Cities. In the early nineteenth century Hanky Park was part of the grounds of a wealthy lady’s mansion; at least, so say the old maps in the Salford Town Hall. The district takes its name from a sloping street, Hankinson Street, whose pavements, much worn and very narrow, have been polished by the traffic of boots and clogs of many generations. On either side of this are other streets, mazes, jungles of tiny houses cramped and huddled together, two rooms above and two below, in some cases only one room alow and aloft; public houses by the score where forgetfulness lurks in a mug; pawnshops by the dozen where you can raise the wind to buy forgetfulness; churches, chapels and unpretentious mission halls where God is praised; nude, black patches of land, ‘crofts’, as they are called, waterlogged, sterile, bleak and chill.

  The doorsteps and window-sills of the houses are worn hollow. Once a week, sometimes twice, the women clean them with brown or white rubbing stone; the same with portions of the pavement immediately outside their front doors. And they glare at any pedestrians who unavoidably muddy their handiwork in traversing the strip. Some women there are whose lives are dedicated to an everlasting battle with the invincible forces of soot and grime. They are flattered when you refer to them as ‘house-proud’. But they are few. The others prefer to have a weekly tilt at the demon dirt and to leave the field to him for the next six days. Of a Friday evening when this portion of the housework is generally done, the pavements have a distant resemblance to a patchwork quilt. Women, girls and children are to be seen kneeling on all fours in the streets, buckets by their sides, cloth and stone daubing it over the flags, then washing it into one even patch of colour.

  Families from south of the Trent who take up residence here are astonished at the fashion and say that from whence they came nothing like this is ever seen. The custom persists. The ‘sand-bone men’ who purvey the lumps of sandstone in exchange for household junk, rags and what-not, can be seen pushing their handcarts and heard calling their trade in rusty, hoarse, sing-song voices: ‘San’ bo -. Donkey brand brown sto - bo - one,’ which, translated, means: ‘I will exchange either brown or white rubbing stone for rags, bones or bottles.’

  At one time, in the old days, when local men made their millions out of cotton and humanity, when their magnificent equipages trotted along Broad Street past Hanky Park from the local Eccles Old Road - or ‘Millionaires’ Mile’ as it then was called - when large families lived in the Park’s one room cellar dwellings and when the excess in population was kept in check by typhus and other fevers, it was the custom of the ‘sand-bone men’ to sprinkle sand on the newly scoured flag-paved floors of the houses in exchange for bones, which, I suppose, went to the tallow factories to be made into farthing dips. Most of the flag-paved floors are gone, now. The years have brought their changes. Water closets have superseded the earth and tin privies, though not so very long ago; the holes in the tiny backyard walls from which the pestiferous tins were drawn when to be emptied of the ordure are still to be traced, the newer bricks contrasting in colour with those of the original wall. Fever is rarer; large families are no longer permitted to live in cellars; instead, by force of circumstance and in the simplicity of their natures, they pay much more than their grandparents did for the convenience of living in a single room over a cellar.

  The identical houses of yesterday remain, still valuable in
the estate market even though the cost of their building has been paid for over and over again by successive tenants. The houses remain: streets of them where the blue-grey smoke swirls down like companies of ghosts from a million squat chimneys: jungles of tiny houses cramped and huddled together, the cradles of generations of the future. Places where men and women are born, live, love and die and pay preposterous rents for the privilege of calling the grimy houses ‘home’.

  CHAPTER 2 - GETTING UP

  5.30 AM

  A drizzle was falling.

  The policeman on his beat paused awhile at the corner of North Street halting under a street lamp. Its staring beams lit the million globules of fine rain powdering his cape. A cat sitting on the doorstep of Mr Hulkington’s, the grocer’s shop, blinked sleepily.

  ‘Tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh,’ said the bobby and stooped to scratch the animal’s head. It rose, crooked its back, cocked its tail, pushed its body against his hand and miowed.

  The melancholy hoot of a ship’s siren sounded from the Salford Docks.

  A man wearing clogs and carrying a long pole tipped with a bunch of wires came clattering down Hankinson Street. His back was bent, beard stained and untrimmed, his rusty black bowler hat was tipped over his eyes. Blind Joe he was called, though he never gave wrong change out of a shilling nor had need to ask his way about. Whether or no he actually was blind none could say; he was Blind Joe Riley, that was all.

  The bobby straightened himself as Joe approached: ‘Mornin’, Joe. Heigh, hei, ho. More rain, more rest,’ said the copper.

  ‘N’ rest f’ t’ wicked, lad, ‘cept them as is bobbies, an’ they ne’er do nowt else. Ah don’t know how some folks …’

  ‘Ah know, Joe. … Ah know,’ the bobby interrupted: ‘Ah know all about it’

  ‘Well there’s one thing Ah’d like t’ know if tha knows all about it … how thee and thy mates have cheek to hold hand out for wages just f walkin’ about streets…. N’ wonder folks call it a bobby’s job.’ He ejaculated, disgusted, clattered into North Street, stopped at No. 17, raised his pole and began to rattle the wires against the bedroom windows. A voice responded. Joe answered: ‘Come on, now, Mrs ‘Ardcastle. Hafe past five, Monday mornin’ an’ pourin’ o’ rain….’ He shouldered his pole to repeat the performance at other houses in the street Then he turned the corner at the far end.

  Silence. Not a cat stirring.

  The solitary lamp half-way down the street emphasized the enshrouding gloom and silvered the gently falling drizzle.

  Lights began to appear in the lower windows of the houses. The grocer’s shop at the corner of the street blazed forth electrically, the wet pavement mirroring the brilliance. Unwashed Mr Hulkington, the gross, ungainly proprietor, shot back the bolts and stood on the step, wheezing, coughing and spitting on the roadway. He panted, shivered in the rawness of the morning, turned about and closed the door to stand behind the counter in readiness for the women who would come, soon, stealing like shadows, to buy foodstuffs on tick.

  At No. 17, Mrs Hardcastle, an old woman of forty, came downstairs ‘Ah-ah-ing’ sleepily, hair in disarray. She groped on the tiny kitchen’s mantelpiece for the matches, struck one and lit the gas. The glare hurt her eyes: she blinked and stifled a yawn, stretched and shrugged her shoulders. It was cold. She stooped, raked out the grate and stuffed it with a newspaper taken from a thick pile under the cushion of the rocker chair. Then she stood, indecisively, still sleep-dazed, as though at a loss what next to do: ‘Oh. aye,’ she said: ‘Coal.’ She picked up the shovel, trudged to the back door and paused by the stairs to shout: ‘Harry, Sal. Come on, now; five an’ twenty to six.’ She unbolted the door. The cat ran in miowing noisily, tail in air: it leaned heavily against the table leg and walked round and round, still miowing. Other people in the neighbouring backyards were shovelling coal; the gratings of the shovels on the yards’ flaggings rasped harshly in the still morning air.

  In a few moments the fire was made. The shovel, balanced on the top bar with a sheet of paper spread in front, drew a great draught and sent flames roaring and leaping round the kettle. Smoke and flame roaring up the chimney, gushing out of the chimney-pot and into the sky; thousands of smoky fires;

  millions of chimneys exhaling simultaneously; smoke drifting, converging, hanging, an immense pall over the Two Cities.

  Mrs Hardcastle went to the foot of the stairs again to call the boy and girl. Still no response. She frowned, sighed, lit a taper at the gas and went upstairs to the back room. A candle, secured in its own grease stood on a chair-seat by the bed; over the chair-back was flung, anyhow, feminine clothes. The rusting iron bed-end was similarly adorned except that the clothes there belonged to a boy. Except an old chest of drawers and a curtain suspended in front of an alcove by the fireplace, doubtless a makeshift wardrobe, there was nothing else in the room.

  ‘Come along, there. Come along,’ cried Mrs Hardcastle, petulantly, as she lit the candle: ‘Harry. Sal. … D’y’ hear?’ She shook one of the forms.

  A smothered grumbling. Sally withdrew her head from the thin coverings and yawned. Eighteen, a gorgeous creature whose native beauty her shabbiness could not hide. Eyes dark, lustrous, haunting; abundant black hair tumbling in waves; a full, ripe, pouting mouth and a low, round bosom. A face and form such as any society dame would have given three-quarters of her fortune to possess. Sally wore it carelessly as though youth’s brief hour was eternal; as though there was no such thing as old age. She failed in her temper; but when roused, colour tinted her pallid cheeks such as the wind whipped up when it blew from the north or east.

  Tea brewed, ma?’ she asked, rubbing her eyes.

  ‘Long since,’ her mother lied, adding, plaintively: ‘Come on wi’ y’. Get up. … Havin’ me trapesin’ about like this…. Why can’t y’ get up first cal… .When I was your age I was up wi’ t’ lark. … Harry. Harry. Y’ll be late for work. Oh, willy’ get up. Sick an’ tired I am wastin’ breath.’

  Sally prodded him with her elbow: ‘Hey, dopey… . D’y hear …? Gerrup.’

  He stirred, grumbled, struggled half-heartedly to a sitting position, and, still keeping his eyes closed, groped over the bed for his clothes: ‘What day is it, ma?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Monday, lad, an’ pourin’ o’ rain. They’ll be wet through i’

  Price’s yard,’ coaxingly: ‘Come on, son. … Hurry, lad, or y’ll ha’ no time for y’ breakfast.’ She went downstairs.

  Sally groaned: ‘Rainin’…. Allus rainin’…. Ne’er does nowt else i’ this hole.’ She threw the bed clothes back, got out of bed and began to dress. Harry, fair hair all tousled, crawled on all fours to the edge of the bed and stepped on to the icy lino. He shivered, his skin pimpling with the cold: ‘Stockings gone agen,’ he mumbled, dithering and groping about the bed end: impatiently: ‘Aw, Ah’m sick of it all.’

  ‘Wrap ‘em round y’ neck of a night, then y’ll know where t’ find ‘em,’ snapped Sally. She pulled on her knickers and half-turned. ‘Open y’r eyes: there they are on floor.’ She stood in front of the candle slipping her clothes over her head, an enormous shadow of herself reflected on wall and ceiling.

  Harry muttered something, dragged on his stockings and knickerbockers, stumbled past her and went below, his sullen expression mirroring the surly dissatisfaction he felt towards the day’s prospect. Rebellion stirred in his heart. Bleak visions both of the school classroom and of Price and Jones’s pawnshop where he worked as half-time clerk, rose to his mind. He would be writing tickets there from half past six this morning until school time; he would return after school and continue writing pawntickets until the place closed. Then it would be bed time again. He could smell the stale pungency of the place after it had been shut up over the week-end. His spirits retched. It was incredible, shameful, unbearable. No escape; had to go. And tedious lessons on top of it all. A lump rose to his throat as he pushed his hands under the cold water of the tap. The shock of the icy water roused him; the fair hairs on his thi
n arms stood upright. Then he remembered!

  Why, how on earth had he overlooked - ! He’d done with schooling, had finished with it on Friday last! He now was free! His wondering spirits revived. Free! They contracted the instant he recalled Price and Jones’s pawnshop and his mother’s and father’s desire that he should accept Mr Price’s half-promise of full time employment there. Price and Jones’s though! that above all things. Couldn’t they understand that he’d had a surfeit of desks there? that the pawnshop was a worse prison than school? Imagine it, tied up there all day until eight o’clock of an evening and nine on Saturdays. He flamed with indignation. Three years now he’d been tied up there; three years before school hours and after; three years he’d sat in that dark corner of the pledge office writing out millions of pawntickets. Damned in a fair handwriting: ‘See our Harry’s handwriting. By gum, think o’ that, now, for one of his years.’ He had paid dearly for those flattering remarks. And now, if his parents were to have their way he was to be penalized even further; they wanted him to be a scrivener for the rest of his life. They would do. ‘Well, Ah’m not doin’ it,’ he muttered, aloud.

  ‘Eh?’ answered his mother.

  Harry did not hear her. He wouldn’t obey them; couldn’t; the thought was sickening; he would die. He began to cast about in efforts to devise a means of frustrating their plans. What could he do? Surely there was a way, a means. He wanted to …

  Ah! Of course! But dare he? He paused, staring, unseeing into the gloom of the backyard transfixed by an idea. His heart swelled; a glow of eager anticipation suffused him; his eyes kindled. He would have to hurry, though. He’d to be at Price and Jones’s by six-thirty; and his father would be home from the night shift at the pits presently. Better be gone before he returned; might ask awkward questions as to the reason of the early departure. Hurriedly he finished washing himself to sit down to the table. And by the time Sally came downstairs he was bolting his breakfast, mechanically, while staring with absorption at the tablecloth. Yes, it was a fine notion, indeed. What luck! Dare he hope that it would materialize?