The Sweeping Saga Collection: Poppy’s Dilemma, The Dressmaker’s Daughter, The Factory Girl. Nancy Carson

the men’s swearing. It reminds him of his youth, I suppose. Sounds as if your father was the same.’

      Poppy smiled angelically. She had told Bellamy no lie. But to her surprise he had likened what she’d told him to his own family’s situation. Well, there seemed little sense in allowing him to think otherwise.

      ‘And what about your mother?’

      ‘My mother thought it would be a good idea if I went away … to see a bit more of the world …’ To see why the rest of the world fared better might have been nearer the truth. ‘I was told about this lady … So I presented myself at her door one day … She turned out to be Aunt Phoebe.’

      ‘Well, I’m blessed. Just think. If you hadn’t, you and I might never have met. Aunt Phoebe deserves to be beatified. Anyway, it’s so obvious she thinks the world of you, Poppy.’

      ‘I think the world of her. She’s been so good to me …’

      They fell silent awhile as Bellamy negotiated the cobbled streets beyond St Thomas’s church. They drove down the Pedmore Turnpike Road where they crossed the unfinished and unloved Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway. Seeing it again brought a lump to her throat. It was deserted, save for some young lads playing on part of the levelled strip of land. No navvies, drunk or sober, populated it now.

      On to Pear Tree Lane. The landscape was desolate here, devoid of vegetation. Not one blade of grass dared show itself against the clammy black earth that glistened with mud and melanite puddles in the bright sunshine after days of enduring April rain. Both sides of the road were afflicted with the dismal spoils of coal mining. Slag heaps loomed, some higher than several houses, and the primitive headgear of pits looked like the skeletons of automata picked clean by some monstrous vulture. Scores of chimney stacks, idle on God’s appointed rest day, pierced the sky, which was, for once, blue and free of smuts. Tomorrow, the same chimney stacks would come alive, volleying upward great columns of acrid smoke. A little further on they passed the Earl of Dudley’s burgeoning ironworks. Its dark furnaces, even on a Sunday, were as hot as Hades, and endless plumes of smoke – vast, brown, woolly serpents – reared up into the atmosphere. Locomotives, like well-trained animals, hauled slag for tipping, iron bars as thick as tree trunks for puddling.

      Neither Poppy nor Bellamy commented on the bleakness. It was part of everyday life, something that was visually tolerated but financially encouraged, for wealth grew out of it; a landscape wilfully ravaged by man in his relentless quest for prosperity. A necessary evil. Poppy had never minded it; she had never known anything different until she had spent some time in Aunt Phoebe’s lavish garden, shut away from it all. In that quiet idyllic corner, she might have been a hundred miles away from the industrial canker that blighted the rest of the Black Country. So it must be for Bellamy. So it must have been for Robert.

      They pressed on, Bellamy making little jokes about this and that in an effort to make Poppy laugh. They passed through an area of stubbly fields and small impoverished farms until the road led them among rows of shabby cottages, close packed, with angled roofs crowded this way and that, miserably poor. A place known as the Lye Waste, built on the side of a hill and in fear of sliding down it. The air was heavy with smoke. Poppy held her nose and felt like retching at the sickening stench.

      ‘What’s that stink?’ she exclaimed, forgetting herself. ‘It’s ’orrible.’

      ‘Burning clay from the brick kilns apparently,’ Bellamy told her. ‘My father said it might reek a bit.’

      Stunted children in rags ran barefoot through the dirty, muddy streets. Men, drunk on cheap beer, tottered from one alehouse to another till their money was gone, urinating in any convenient alley, behind any corner. Young women, with the haunted look of the old and weary, stood on their front doorsteps and gossiped with neighbours, with nothing to look forward to but tomorrow. Tomorrow, and the chink of hammer on anvil as they wrought one iron nail after another with mind-numbing, soul-destroying monotony in the hot forges in their back yards. Poppy saw them and her heart bled. Never had she seen such grim poverty, such woeful conditions. The navvies’ encampment at Blowers Green was gruesome enough, but it was a paradise compared to this. It served as a grisly reminder of just how fortunate she had been lately.

      ‘Do we have to come back this way, Bellamy?’ she asked. ‘I don’t fancy going through that place again.’

      ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps we can avoid it.’

      But just as quickly as they had come upon the Lye Waste, they passed through it and were surrounded by countryside as pretty and smiling as anywhere in England.

      Soon they were near Hagley, at the very foot of the Clent Hills. They reached the village of Clent through lanes that were fairy grottoes of overhanging trees, their budding limbs casting an intricate tracery of shadows in the slanting sun. They drove on up, past a pretty church, the hill becoming steeper.

      ‘D’you think we ought to get out of the gig and walk?’ Poppy queried. ‘Make it easier for the poor horse?’

      ‘Poor horse be damned,’ Bellamy replied. ‘He’s well cared for. He’s fed and watered regularly, groomed. Let him earn his keep.’

      Poppy shrugged. It was not the response she had anticipated. She felt she should get out anyway. She had some sympathy for the animal, but was reticent about asking Bellamy to stop, lest he refused and made her feel silly. Perhaps ladies were not supposed to consider the welfare of animals. She would ask Aunt Phoebe.

      On and on they went, climbing higher and higher, until the road levelled out and they were on a high ridge. A vast panorama stretched out before them. Bellamy stopped the gig and stepped down.

      ‘That’s quite a view, Poppy.’

      He walked round the gig and took her hand to help her down. She went to the other side and looked out. They were facing north, the slanting sun peering over their shoulders. He came up to her and stood beside her.

      ‘What can you see?’ he asked.

      ‘I’m not sure.’

      ‘Right there on the horizon …’ He put his arm around her proprietorially, leaned his face towards hers and pointed. ‘Dudley Castle keep. Can you see it?’

      ‘Just about.’

      ‘And there’s the spire of St Thomas’s …’

      ‘Oh yes … But all those chimney stacks, look …’

      ‘And that conglomeration over to the right, look … That must be Birmingham.’

      ‘Have you ever been to Birmingham, Bellamy?’ she enquired, the thought of it appealing to her sense of adventure.

      ‘A few times. Have you?’

      ‘Never … Someday, maybe …’

      ‘Someday I’ll take you.’

      Well, someday he might, but she would not press for it.

      ‘At the moment we – Crawford and Sons Limited, that is – are involved with the Borough Council and the Commissioners there over the planning of a huge project, to build a new sewerage and drainage system. We are awaiting the order to proceed. It will keep us occupied for years and make us a fortune.’

      ‘So you will be rich, Bellamy.’

      ‘We don’t do so badly now.’

      She smiled. ‘Shall we walk on? Up there?’

      ‘Let’s … I’ll tether the horse to the fence.’

      ‘I bet he could do with a drink of water, Bellamy.’

      ‘There’ll be a trough in the village on the way back,’ he answered indifferently.

      He took her hand and they began walking, climbing a grassy knoll. It was hard going and he had to hold on to her hand and pull her. At the top they found a bench and sat on it, glad of the rest.

      ‘I can’t get over the view,’ she