Hope - Lesley Pearse [31]
Chapter Four
1843
‘Surely Father should be back by now!’ Hope remarked. She was looking out of the window at the pelting rain. Her father had left on a cart for Bristol to collect some goods from a ship at the docks three days ago and he had been expected to return the same night.
Her mother sighed, for it wasn’t the first time today that Hope had asked the same question. ‘Ships can’t be relied on if the weather’s bad,’ she explained. ‘But he won’t have liked staying in Bristol; he always says it’s a noisy, filthy place.’
‘And what can Joe and Henry be doing?’ Hope said peevishly. ‘Surely they can’t work in this rain?’
Hope’s brothers were thirteen and twelve now. Silas’s hope of getting them apprenticed to a trade had been dashed because he hadn’t been able to find the money for their indentures. The Reverend Gosling had done his best to find them positions as gardeners, grooms or footmen but without any luck. So until something better turned up they were doing casual work on farms, at present for Mr Francis of Woolard, who had sent Silas to Bristol.
‘Cows have to be milked whatever the weather,’ Meg replied a little sharply. ‘But maybe they’ve lost a few and had to go out looking for them.’
Autumn had come early this year with high winds, storms and such heavy and prolonged rain that the river Chew burst its banks. The mill in their village was flooded out, and much of the recently harvested grain was lost. At Woolard and Publow several cottages had five feet of water rushing through them. They had heard that a child fell into the floodwater at Pensford and drowned. Everyone had rallied round to move cattle and sheep to higher ground, but many perished before they could be reached.
At night, Hope could hear the river rushing through the valley below their cottage, and although she knew they were too high up to be flooded, it was still frightening. Bad weather made all the daily chores so much harder. They got soaked going out to feed the chickens, they brought thick mud back into the cottage which meant more work, and when the wood they brought in was wet it wouldn’t burn.
The vegetable garden had been laid to waste, apples and pears were knocked down before they were ripe and quickly rotted. Only a little hay had been cut before the rains came, and the rest was ruined. Down at the inn, old men sucked on their pipes and prophesied that a bitterly cold winter would follow and everyone would have to tighten their belts.
Hope knew what belt-tightening meant, for the last two years had been bleak for everyone. She no longer resented having to work so hard, especially on the farm with her father, because she understood the necessity of it now. It had always been expected that a farm worker’s wife and children would help him at crucial periods, and though there was no extra pay for this, there was often some kind of reward like a couple of laying hens, a sack of potatoes or a bag of flour. But the reward, however welcome, wasn’t as important as keeping the farmer’s goodwill.
Life was precarious for all farm workers: if they had no work they couldn’t pay their rent, and that could mean eviction, and ultimately the workhouse. The only way they could ensure they got work was to make themselves more valuable than any other man. A wife and several children ready to pitch in too helped to achieved this.
Hope had heard the chill in the word ‘workhouse’ or ‘Union’ even when she was too small to know what it was, or even where it was. But now she had seen the grim grey stone building in nearby Keynsham, and observed the misery etched into the faces of the destitute who finally had to resort to banging on its doors for shelter.
It was a very real threat for her family now. Last year’s harvest had been a poor one, and now this spell of terrible weather was a potential disaster.
It wasn’t only the Rentons’ winter vegetables that had been destroyed; most of the farmers had lost theirs too. With nothing to sell at the market, and no hay stored for their animals during the winter, they’d be forced to sell them