The Frobishers/Chapter 9

POLLY MYATT

On the following morning, having had her breakfast, Joan Frobisher left the Griffin, with the purpose of finding a cottage which she could rent for herself and her sister.

After much consideration, she had come to North Staffordshire, to the pottery district, in the hopes of obtaining employment as an artist on china. She was skilful with her pencil and brush, and she had attempted painting on biscuit china, which had been subsequently fired. Some of her achievements in this department had furnished stalls at bazaars, and had even sold.

It was a moot point with her, whether to obtain employment first and take lodgings after, or to look out for and secure a house previous to making application for work. She had turned the alternatives over in her mind, and had resolved on first finding suitable quarters. Should she obtain a place in a workshop for porcelain painting, she would desire at once to enter on it, and not be then put to the difficulty of securing a habitation.

The pottery district in North Staffordshire forms a belt of seven miles in length, nowhere exceeding two in breadth; beginning with Tunstall and ending with Longton, and running from north-west to south-east. In addition to the two places above named, it comprehends as well Burslem, Hanley, and Stoke. It consists, in fact, of certain centres of shops and public buildings, with intervening tracts of streets, collieries, factories, and furnaces, and occasional intervening fields. The streets are composed of thoroughfares between dingy cottages, with volumes of smoke rolling over and frequently enveloping them. The pottery ovens rise hardly higher than the ridges of the roofs of the houses, and when they are heated, and there is some wind, then, during the forty or sixty hours of firing, the houses to leeward are involved in coils of smoke that fill every crevice with grime.

Fortunately the pottery district lies high, between five and six hundred feet above the sea, and catches every wind. This prevents the burden of coal smoke from hanging over the region in black or brown fog as in London. But it is a cheerless district, where the eyes have no objects to rest upon that produce delight. The public buildings are as though moulded out of soot, and smuts hang from their cornices as a fringe. Such trees as exist have trunks of ebony, the sheep in the pastures bear blackened fleeces, such leaves and flowers as grow&mdash;they do not flourish&mdash;soil the fingers that pluck them. The sky is never wholly blue, the water never crystal clear, the earth is heaped with refuse, the very air is never uncontaminated.

Only at night, when the banners of flame flaunt in the sky, and ten thousand lights sparkle in the habitations of men, does the country assume some pretence of picturesqueness; but then it is the picturesqueness of an Inferno. If the belt consisted of potteries alone, its dinginess would not be so considerable, but it is bordered with collieries and foundries, and tile and brick works.

Joan walked about the town, past row after row of low dwelling-houses, and noticed that they were all constructed on one pattern&mdash;at the most slightly varied. They presented to the street a face in which opened a door, with one window beside it, and in the upper storey two windows, one of which was above the door. Not a house had more than ground floor and one storey over it. None had attics above, nor gardens before them. The only attempt at these latter were facing the houses of the parson and doctor, and in each case was a failure, nothing showing therein save naked soil, or at best mangy turf.

Joan found that there were houses more commodious in the suburbs, also small, and, as far as she could judge, possessing the advantage of a lobby into which the front door opened, instead of opening immediately into the kitchen. These houses were new, and had been secured and entered into so soon as mason and plasterer had turned out.

The streets formed by these new habitations had not been paved as yet; the ruts remained formed by the waggons that had brought the bricks of which the houses were made, and the clayey soil, churned by the feet of the horses, was resolved into adhesive mud.

Joan passed huge marl pits of vast depth and circumference, craters out of which the clay had been drawn for the making of the coarser pottery for drain pipes and chimney pots. Beyond this region she got among collieries and furnaces, and consequently turned back.

The streets were well-nigh deserted. No business whatever was being transacted in the shops. Vans lumbered by conveying cases laden with earthenware, that was being taken to the railway; or waggons ascended from the canal charged with china-clay brought by water from Cornwall.

The electric tram travelled, but the car was occupied by only a stray commercial traveller. No young people were about, save the children swarming in the playground of the school, and a prodigy of piety, a converted boy of fourteen, who stood before a chapel admiring a poster twice as tall as himself, that announced he was to preach and conduct a revival on the ensuing Sabbath.

Joan gravely questioned whether it would be safe to venture on one of the bran-new houses only completed at Michaelmas. No such scruple seemed to have occurred to the minds of others, or hard necessity had driven them to risk health and life; for almost every new house was already occupied. One, indeed, she noticed with a dab of whitewash on the window pane, indicating that it was but just out of the tradesmen's hands. She ventured to the glass of the bay window and looked into the room, and saw the new plastered wall exuding drops, which here and there had run together and trickled down, leaving trails like snail-tracks.

Reluctantly she turned back from these more attractive houses, and entered the town itself, and wandered up and down its many streets, all stricken with the same monotony and the same meanness, only relieved by the long walls of some great pottery.

At last she saw a corner house, that was untenanted, and bore the ungrammatical notice in the window&mdash;"To let. Inquire next door."

The house was humble, but not out of repair, and certainly did not contain many rooms. After slight hesitation Joan tapped at the door of the adjoining cottage.

A girl opened, and before addressing her looked her critically up and down.

"What do you want here?" she asked presently.

"The house next door is to be let. It is my wish to look over it. Have you the key?"

"Yes, I have. It is just a fellow to this house, only that it is turned t'other way on. Our door is on the left hand and the window beyond that, and in. No. 16 it is right hand&mdash;that's the difference."

"But you will allow me to step within, will you not?"

"Who are you?"

"My name is Frobisher, and I am on the lookout for a small house for my sister and myself. As you see, I am in mourning. We have recently lost our father."

"Is your mother alive?"

"No; she has been dead these many years. We are left badly off, and shall have to work for our livelihood."

"What are you going to do? Take in needlework or trim bonnets? You look like a dressmaker. There's a living to be picked up that way. The girls here dress a lot."

"I cannot say what my sister may do, but I, for my part, intend to go into a pottery."

"Pottery!&mdash;potbank you mean. Come in, and sit you down. We'll talk a bit. What makes you think of going into a potbank?"

"I can paint flowers."

"Oh, on paper, maybe. It's another trick on pots."

"But I really have done a little that way."

"Now look here," said the girl&mdash;"there, take a seat. Was your father a Staffordshire potter?"

"No; he was a Staffordshire man, but he lived at some distance from this."

"Then it's no good your thinking of it. We have been brought up to it from babies. They do tell there have been potbanks here for hundreds of years, and our people been at it for generations; and the little ones take to it naturally, as ducks to water and cats to milk. But for a stranger" she shrugged her shoulders and gave a contemptuous sniff&mdash;"you'd best turn to dressmaking."

Joan looked at the girl; she had red hair, was deadly pale, with ashen lips, and her right hand was paralysed.

"You are not well, I fear," said she gently.

"I&mdash;I'm poisoned."

"Poisoned?"

"Ay, with the lead."

"How so?"

The girl looked hard at Joan.

"You're as green as a Whitsuntide gooseberry," she said. "I've been a ground-layer&mdash;that's how it came about. In time we are all poisoned. Look at my hand. It was like yours once, but it has dropped at the wrist, and I can't work with it any more. So it's up with me."

"I do not yet understand."

"Well, you are soft not to know that. There's lead in the dust, lead in the glost, and the lead gets into us through the eyes and ears and nostrils and the pores of the body; it gets into your hair; it gets into the lungs and into the blood, that turns to goulard water, and then you have the colic and are crippled with the palsy, and sometimes you die of it."

Joan looked at her with eyes dilated with horror.

"But all are not so?"

"Oh no, not all&mdash;only the ground-layers and the dippers. But then there be towers&mdash;they get the potter's asthma."

"Is there nothing to be done for you? Cannot the doctor put you to rights?"

"Me!&mdash;never get my hand to work&mdash;never. But for the rest, to drive the lead out of you, some say suck lemons.1 Lemons cost a penny a piece, and it would take five or six to make a good squash. How can I afford a couple of squashes in a day? Then others tell&mdash;drink no end of ale and get boozy on it, and it'll clear away the lead. That's what the men say as an excuse for becoming fuddled. I find it's not only the dippers that take too much beer. Others say take a pint of raw milk morning and evening. A pint of raw milk! Why, that's as much as supplies a dozen houses for their tea. And where am I to get real genuine raw milk from&mdash;a quart a day? It's got wonderful like sky-blue, the milk has, when it comes to our street. So&mdash;do you want to see No. 16? Come along then&mdash;I've got the key."

(1 It is a delusion to suppose that lemons are of use against plumbism. What is effectual is sulphuric acid, diluted. This forms with lead an insoluble salt, which is carried out of the system.

"I do wish to look at the house, for indeed I believe I shall take it. Will you mind my asking what is your name?"

"Me!&mdash;I'm Miss Myatt."

Joan smiled.

"What are you a-larfing at?" asked the pale girl, suspiciously and angrily.

"I am smiling to think of us two being next-door neighbours, and seeing one another every day, and being Miss Frobisher and Miss Myatt to one another."

"Get along, then. I'm Polly Myatt, and what be you?"

"I am Joan Frobisher."

"All right. Here's the key. Hope we shall be neighbours. I like you, though I can see with half an eye as you are not one of us."