Hope - Lesley Pearse [98]
‘Mole and Shanks went to London but they was only there a couple of days and they was beaten up and robbed of their coats and boots,’ Gussie retorted, referring to his two male friends who shared the room in Lamb Lane at night. ‘They’re as ’ard as nails an’ all; so I don’t reckon your brothers would stand a chance up there!’
Gussie’s suggestion that a couple of farm boys couldn’t look after themselves in London didn’t bother Hope, but it did trigger the memory of her father staggering in soaking wet and sick, trying to explain the horror he’d experienced in Bristol. All at once she realized that the rooming house where he’d caught the disease which killed him and her mother had probably been in Lewins Mead.
Suddenly she was afraid. Not so much of sickness, though she knew there was plenty of that around, especially among the Irish people who arrived hollow-eyed and starving on every ship out of famine-ridden Ireland. But she had been infected by the other evil her father was so shocked by – theft.
Her parents had always been scrupulously honest. Her father wouldn’t even have helped himself to a cabbage or a few potatoes while working on a farm. She knew they would spin in their graves if they were aware of where she was living and what she’d done today.
In her first week or two in Lewins Mead she had been every bit as horrified by the place as her father had been. She used to cry herself to sleep at night, hating Albert because of what he’d done to her. But in front of Gussie and Betsy she had to put a brave face on it; after all, if it hadn’t been for them she would have no roof over her head.
Nell always used to say, ‘You can get used to anything,’ and she was right. The conditions she lived under, wearing the same clothes day in, day out, and never knowing where the next meal was coming from – she’d got used to all of it.
Before long Betsy and Gussie became her new family, and she’d embraced their views and standards, putting aside those she’d been brought up with.
But now, as images of her parents and her brothers and sisters kept coming to her thick and fast, she was ashamed of losing her old values. While it was right and good to show affection and loyalty to people who had helped her when she most needed it, she should never have lost sight of who she was, or stopped listening to her conscience.
Tears pricked at her eyelids as she remembered how cherished she’d been as a child. As the baby of the family she’d been better fed, dressed and educated than her siblings. Every one of them had been proud that she could read and write so well, and Nell had often said that their parents had purposely kept her at her lessons longer in the hope that it would give her chances they’d never had.
Yet she’d become a common thief!
The frozen fields they were walking through, the woods in the distance, even the astringent cold wind were further reminders of home. She could smell wood smoke and cow pats, and hear crows cawing in the bare trees. Up on the hill before her she could see a church spire, and that evoked an image of the Reverend Gosling and his fiery sermons on sin.
Betsy stopped grumbling about the cold as they reached the woods. Gussie became excited at the abundance of fuel for their fire littering the ground. But Hope was so choked up with feelings of shame she couldn’t even feel any triumph that it had been her idea to come out here. She began filling her sack quickly and silently, all the while reproaching herself.
It wasn’t her fault she had to leave Briargate, or that she ended up in Lewins Mead, but she knew in her heart that she hadn’t tried very hard to get herself out of it.
Back in early January when her bruises had begun to fade, she had tried to find respectable work. She’d asked in shops, at inns, even a couple of laundries. But the refusals got her down, and it was far less daunting to go scavenging with Gussie and Betsy. It was a lark doing the rounds of warehouses, factories and workshops to search amongst their rubbish for stuff they could