her sagging breasts, the ends were tucked into a filthy ragged skirt, and in a whining tone and a smile widening her flat face she exclaimed, ‘Aw begod! it’s vou, Mr Connor. Is it the rent you’re after? Well now. Well now. You know it’s near Christmas it is, and you know what Christmas is for money. Chews it, it does, chews it. An’ look at the bairns. There’s not a stitch to their arses an’ himself been out of work these last three weeks.’
Without seeming to move a muscle of his face Rory said, ‘He’s in the rolling mills and never lost a day this six months, I’ve checked. You’re ten weeks in arrears not countin’ the day. Give me five shillings and I’ll say nothing more ’til next week when I want the same and every week after that until you get your book clear. If not, I go to Palmer’s and he’ll get the push.’
It was an idle threat, yet she half believed him because rent men had power, rent men were rich; rent men were a different species, not really human.
They stared at each other. Then the smile sliding from her face, she turned abruptly from him and went through the room, shouting, ‘You Willy! You Willy!’ And the eldest child followed her, to return a moment later with two half-crowns and the rent book.
Rory took the money, signed the book, marked it in his own hard-backed pocket ledger, then went on to the next house. Here he pushed open the bottom door and called up the dark well of the staircase, ‘Rent!’ and after a moment a man’s voice came back to him shouting, ‘Fetch it up.’
His nose wrinkled in distaste. If he had a penny for every time that worn-out quip had been thrown at him he considered he’d be able to buy a house of his own. After a moment of silence he again shouted, ‘Rent, or it’s the bums Monday.’
The moleskin-trousered bulky figure appeared on the stairhead and after throwing the rent book and a half- crown down the stairs he yelled, ‘You know what you and the bloody bums can do, don’t you?’ then as Rory picked up the money and the book and entered in the amount the man proceeded to elaborate on what he and the bums could do.
Without uttering a word now Rory threw the book on to the bottom stair, looked up at the man still standing on the landing, then turned about and went towards the end of the street.
There was no answer whatever from the next three doors he knocked on, but he had scarcely raised the knocker on the fourth when it was opened and Mrs Fawcett stood there, her rent book in one hand, the half-crown extended in the other, and without any greeting she began, ‘You won’t get any change out of them lot.’ She nodded to one side of her. ‘Nor to this one next door.’ Her head moved the other way. ‘Off to Shields they are, the lot of them, to the market and they won’t come back with a penny, not if I know them. Lazy Irish scum. And I’ll tell you somethin’.’ She leant her peevish face towards him. ‘Her, Flaherty, she’s got her front room packed with beds, and lettin’ them out by the shift; as one lot staggers out another lot drops in. Great Irish navvies with not a drop on their faces from Monday mornin’ till Saturda’ night, but Sunday, oh, that’s different, away to Mass they are, and straight out and into the bars. Disgrace!’
Rory closed her rent book, handed it to her, looked at her straight in the eye, then turned and walked away. He did not bother knocking at the door next to hers for he believed what she had said, they were all away on a spending spree. It was odd, she was the only good payer in the street; she’d always had a clear rent book; but of the lot of them, scum Irish they might be, he preferred any one of them to Mrs Fawcett.
Pilbey Street was bad but Saltbank Row was worse. Here it was the stench that got him. The dry middens at the back of the Row, dry being a mere courtesy title, seeped away under the stone floors of the two-roomed cottages, and the dirt in front of the cottages was always wet to the feet. In winter the stench was bad enough but in summer it was unbearable. Why the Town Corporation did not condemn the place he didn’t know. Vested interests he supposed; in any case anything was good enough for the Irish immigrants, and they didn’t seem to mind, for as it was well known they had been used to sleeping among the pigs and the chickens in their tiny hovel huts over in Ireland.
Yet there were Irish in the town among Palmer’s men whom he had heard were buying their own houses. That had come from old Kean himself, and the old boy didn’t like it.
His own father had worked in Palmer’s for years, but there was no sign of him being able to buy his own house. Likely because he didn’t want to; his father spent as he went, he ate well and drank as much as he could hold almost every day in the week, because his body was so dried up with the heat from the furnaces.
Drinking was one thing he didn’t blame his father for, but he did blame him for his carry-on with her . . . Lizzie. He supposed it was by way of compensation that he’d had him sent to the penny school but he didn’t thank him for that either, for he hadn’t attended long enough to take in much beyond reading, writing and reckoning up. When funds were low the last thing to be considered was the penny fee. And he wouldn’t go to school without it. Nor would his father have his name put down on the parish list so that he could send him free—not him.
Anyway, his reading and writing had enabled him finally to become a rent collector with a wage of fifteen shillings a week. He was told from all quarters that he was damned lucky to be in such a job. Fifteen shillings for neither bending his back nor soiling his hands. And his employer, more than others, emphasized this statement.
Mr Kean owned about half the cottages in Saltbank Row, and the rent of each was two shillings a week, but when he reached the end of the Row all he had in the back section of his leather bag was twenty-five shillings and sixpence.
It was just turned twelve o’clock when he reached the main street and joined the stream of men pouring out of Palmer’s and the various side streets which led to different yards on the river. They were like streams of black lava joining the main flow, faces grey, froth-specked with their sweat. He was carried along in the throng until he reached the church bank gain by which time the blackness had dwindled into idividual pockets of men.
He reckoned he should be back at the office by one o’clock. He never carried a watch, not on his rounds, because it could be nicked in the time he blinked an eyelid. A gang of lads supposedly playing Tiggy could rough you up. He had seen it done. But he told himself as he paused for a moment on the Don bridge and looked down at the narrow mud-walled banks of the river that there was no immediate hurry today, for old Kean was off on one of his duty trips to Hexham to see his old father. When this happened the day’s takings were locked up until Monday. Saturdays takings didn’t amount to very much, not on his part anyway. John George took more, for he did the Tyne Dock area and the better part of Stanhope Road.
He was getting a bit worried about John George. There was something on his mind; he supposed it was that damned ranter’s lass he had taken up with. Only last night he had told him to think hard about this business, for being her father’s daughter, she might turn out to be a chip off the old block and be ‘God-mad’ like the rest of them.
The whole of Shields was becoming ‘God-mad’; there were chapels springing up all over the place and the more of them there were the greater the outcry against drink and gambling. And them that made the fuss, what were they? Bloody hypocrites half of them. Oh, he knew a thing or two about some of them. That’s why he had warned John George.
As he walked on into Tyne Dock he forgot about John George and his troubles for his mind was taken up with the evening’s prospects. He had heard tell of a square-head, a Swede who lived down Corstorphine Town way. He was known as Fair Square; he did summer trips there and back to Norway and Sweden, but in the winter he stayed put somewhere along the waterfront and ran a school, so he understood, and not just an ordinary one, a big one, for captains and such. But as little Joe, the tout, had said, they didn’t often let foreigners in . . . That was funny that was, a Swede calling an Englishman a foreigner, and in his own town at that. Anyway, little Joe had promised to work him in somewhere.
He felt a stir of excitement in his stomach at the thought of getting set-in in a big school; none of your tanner pitch and tosses or find the lady, but banker with a kitty up to twenty pounds a go. By, that was talking. Twenty pounds a go. Once in there it wouldn’t be long afore he could set up house—he and Janie, setting up house. He wanted to get married, he ached for Janie. And that was the right word, ached. At night he would toss and turn until he would have to get up and put the soles of his feet on the ice-cold square of lino that stood between the beds.
He’d see her the morrow. Just to be with her lifted him out of the doldrums; just to look at her pulled at his heart, ’cos she was bonny, beautiful. And he wasn’t spending the whole afternoon the morrow playing cards for monkey nuts. Huh! He wondered why he let himself in for it Sunday after Sunday. No, hail, rain or shine they’d go out up the lanes, and he’d settle things in his own way. Aye he would.
‘Rory! Rory!’
