A loyal lie

 Jane Traies has kindly given us permission to use an extract from her forthcoming novel. Set in the late nineteenth century, it centres on the lead mining communities of Shropshire, England, where Jane herself lived for many years. Here we meet Edie, missing school to bring lunch to her father.

There was a perfectly good road leading out of the Dingle all the way to the mine, but Edie preferred to go over the hill. She liked the effort of the climb through the moving shadows of the wood, and the sudden brightness as she came out onto the top of the ridge. Her path (hers, because she knew no-one else who used it) started just behind the cottage and climbed steeply between the trees. No wider in places than a sheep track and slippery with rotten leaves, it was familiar as the path to her own door, or the road she walked to school. The ground between the trees was mined with holes and burrows, but she rarely saw anything move, however quietly she tried to walk. The birds gave her away, so that anything that lived in the wood had hidden itself before she came in sight. Once, a pine marten had poked up its head at the mouth of its tunnel and looked straight at her, bright eyes in a black mask; and sometimes in a mild winter she had seen a day-time badger, too hungry to stay asleep. Today it was quiet.  She stopped to catch her breath and to hoist Father’s dinner onto her other shoulder. Looking back, she could no longer see Wren’s Nest. A stranger passing by would not know it was there, or that anyone at all lived at the bottom of that dark wooded cleft. Which must, of course, be how the cottage had got its name.

She turned her face uphill again and walked on. The brambles along the edge of the path had only a few shrunken berries left now, unwholesome for people but useful for the birds and wood mice. She started to look in earnest for fungus; the weather was just right. Soon she found a clump of yellow and white toadstools; then a sprinkling of tiny brown ones just off the path; pretty, but not special. Further on she spotted a strange bright yellow fungus between the toes of an oak: it was crumpled into a wriggly pattern, like one of the pictures of south sea corals in the Children’s Encyclopaedia. Edie stood still and looked at it, storing its colour and shape in her head, and then walked on. 

However many times she came this way, she always had the same little rush of joy as she came out of the trees into the huge sky. After the enclosed space of the wood, the world was suddenly endless and the air always moving, even on the calmest day. She stood in the October sun breathing hard. Below her the Dingle was a dark crack furred with trees. Ahead, autumn bracken gilded the rocks at the valley’s mouth, where the land fell away in a patchwork of greens. Straight ahead, the clump of trees on Bromlow Callow stood out in silhouette against the sky. The mist and fog that had hung over the Dingle that morning had gone, and a brisk south-easterly was blowing the sky blue. Edie set off at a trot along the path above the valley.

The land still rose gently as she crossed the grassy hilltop, bitten close as a lawn by wandering sheep; and then she was on the windy crest of the ridge, and queen of the whole world. The wide expanse of green and blue and purple was patched here and there with whitey-brown ploughed fields, netted with hedgerows and sprinkled with farms. The tall chimney at the mine, standing up like a warning finger, was way below her, dwarfed in the great sweep of the view. Whenever Miss Deakin read them the Bible story about the Devil taking Jesus up into a high mountain and showing Him all the countries of the world, this was the picture that came into Edie’s head. Slowly, she turned in a circle, naming the familiar shapes: the bump of Earl’s Hill, the long slope of the Mynd, the ridge of Corndon; and, as she came full circle, a view which stretched beyond the Callow far into Wales. Right on the horizon she could just see Cadaer Idris. The air was so clear today, the colours so beautiful, it made her almost want to cry.

As she ran down the last field towards the stile, the dark chimney grew taller and taller, its red brick sides towering over the trees, until she could smell the soot that sifted down day and night from its mouth. The stile was the door to another wood, but this one was different. Beyond the fringe of crisp brown bracken, the trees were ghostly grey, their leaves sparse and coated with ash. Further down the hill, nearer to the chimney, the trees were quite dead, bare as winter all year through. Nothing twittered or rustled here. Edie hurried through the birdless silence towards the thump and wheeze of the engine house. Trapped behind stone walls two feet thick, the great beam engine groaned like a monster in chains, pumping water from the deep shafts so that men could work in the dark, hacking out the lead ore. Her father had been one of them, long ago. The rock fall that had crushed his leg had happened when Edie was a baby – all her memory of him was as she knew him now, a man with a crutch and an uncertain temper.

Just above the engine house the railway cut across her path. She stopped and listened for the rattle and chug that meant a coal wagon climbing up from Minsterley. When she was sure none was coming, she stepped carefully over the shiny rails and the sharp grey chippings between them. There had been no railway when the Cornish Giant was set up here – Edie’s grandfather had seen the great stone blocks for the engine-house pulled uphill from the road, each wagon-load drawn by ten horses. Edie let her eye travel up the smooth grey wall, as high as three cottages, and heard her name called in greeting. It was Arthur Jones, Tom’s father, whose job it was to feed and watch the engine. She waved back, though she could not hear what he said above the noise.

Shifting the satchel to her other shoulder, she followed the stony path down towards the road. The noise of the engine house was replaced by the clang of hammer on anvil from the smithy, the shouts of men and the creak of the winding gear bringing the ore from under ground. The smell of soot gave way to the wood-smoke of cottage chimneys and the warm smell of horse dung. No one was waiting at the head of the shaft, for it was two hours yet to the next shift. The wheels atop the great black head-frame revolved slowly against the bright blue sky, winding up the cage with its baskets of ore. A steady whine came from the smithy, where men took their drills to be sharpened before each shift. Across the road from the shaft-head, a trio of men were smoking and rolling dice outside the barracks where some of them lived in the week. It was a long hard walk to the mines from Priest Weston or White Grit, especially in winter, and many of the single men preferred the companionship of a shared billet, however lacking in home comforts.

They worked eight-hour shifts in the pit, and John Dorricott must be there at the candle-house before each cage-load of men went down, to provide them with fresh supplies. He worked from five in the morning until ten at night, winter and summer. If Mother was well, she would get up and make his dinner before dawn, and he would take it with him and be gone before Edie woke in time to walk to school. But on the days when Jane Dorricott lay staring at the wall and did not speak, there would be no school. Instead, Edie must light the fire and sweep the house, make her father’s dinner and take it to him prompt at noon. School for Edie was a special place, orderly and satisfying. The other children, especially the boys, grumbled about going to school as much as their parents cursed about having to send them when they would be more use on the farm or in the shop, but Edie loved it. At school she was praised for doing things well, as she never was at home. She was in the highest standard now; her father wanted her to leave next summer, but she could not bear to think about that. Since Mother had been poorly more often, Edie had tried her hardest to wake at four o’clock, to see her father off in the cart with everything he needed for the day, so she would be free to go to school after. But it was tiring work, running a home. There were more and more days when she slept too long, or forgot to light the copper or to set the bread to rise, and she had missed school far more often.

She tried not to think about that now. The candle-house lay across the road, a little beyond the mine buildings and the handful of cottages that made up the settlement. As Edie arrived outside the squat stone building, a short man in the moleskin working trousers of a miner swung up the path towards her, stowing a fistful of candles in his jacket pocket. 

He saw her and smiled. ‘All right, our Edie?’ He nodded at the satchel. ‘That’s a good girl. No school today?’

It was Uncle Andrew. He must be on the two o’clock shift. 

Edie looked at the ground. ‘I don’t mind about school. I’d rather see to Father.’ 

He patted her arm, knowing it for the loyal lie it was, and knowing that his brother did not tolerate what he saw as a meddling curiosity in his family’s affairs.

‘Well, it’s good luck for me, meeting you,’ he said, reaching into his pocket. ‘A man that has neither wife nor sweetheart does well to meet a pretty maid in the path, that will put a light in his darkness.’

She smiled, grateful to him for changing the subject, and put out her hand for the candle.

Uncle Andrew took off his hat. It was a bowler such as all the men wore in the pit, rubbed with resin to stiffen it and with a lump of clay stuck to the brim in front. The clay had hardened round the first candle that had been pushed into it, forming a socket for the one she fixed there now. 

She kissed his cheek. ‘Good luck and God bless, Uncle.’

‘And so He will, my dear, thanks to you.’ His hand was warm on her shoulder. ‘Now in to your father with his bait.’   

She listened to him whistling up the path, and turned towards the door.