Herring Girl Page 11

  ‘Oh, buff-puff! You said he seems to be stuck in that one year when she was a teenager. We’ve got to start somewhere. It was during the herring season, right? Which Pete says was June to September back then, so I thought I’d start looking around June 1895 and work forwards for the next ten summers, to be sure of covering the right period.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to wait until we know the actual year?’

  But Laura’s already turned back to Pete. ‘Right, lead on McDuff,’ she declaims. ‘Where’s that microfilm machine?’

  Shrugging helplessly, Mary looks at Ben. ‘Shall we get started? You’d better do the driving, assuming you know how to operate these contraptions.’

  They settle at a computer, Ben at the keyboard tapping instructions; but it soon becomes obvious that without a surname it will be impossible to track down the right Annie. Typing in just ‘Anne’ and ‘North Shields’, with a likely date range, brings up hundreds of possibilities.

  ‘I don’t even know if it’s spelt with an ‘e’,’ Ben says. ‘Or if the Annie’s short for Mary-Anne. That’s so weird. Why can’t I remember?’

  ‘In my experience, people often have trouble recalling the surnames of a previous incarnation. I think it’s probably because the nature of this type of recall is via the unconscious – which has a tendency to elide facts it doesn’t consider important. If you think about it, how often do you dwell on your own surname? Or even your official Christian name, assuming you are actually a Benjamin rather than a Ben.’

  ‘So what can we do?’

  ‘Can you remember the address? Your father mentioned you became very upset once because there was a tyre factory where Annie’s house used to be.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I can remember the stairs down to the house from the top bank. There were loads of stone steps going down to the river, in alleys between the houses on the bank, loads more than today, so you were always climbing up or down somewhere. It was right knackering. And really dark, because the houses towered up either side, so you’d just get these little glimpses of the river as you were going down.’

  ‘So let’s see if we can work with that. Can you remember anything particular, something on the opposite bank, perhaps, that Annie might have noticed on her way down her particular flight of stairs?’

  He shakes his head again, then: ‘Yes!’ he says excitedly. ‘The Wellesley! Do you remember? That ship Sam was on. It was like a boarding school for these really rough lads, like proper thieves, and orphans and lads with crap parents who beat them up and that. Anyway, it was moored in the middle of the river, right near where we lived – I mean where Annie lived. You could see it, just the stern of it, from the top of the steps.

  ‘If you saw a photo of the river bank, with the ship on it, do you think you might be able to estimate the position of Annie’s house? Good. Let’s ask the obliging Pete if he can direct us to his image archives – always assuming such things exist.’

  The picture archive, such as it is, is housed in a bank of ancient green filing cabinets. Trundling open a drawer, Mary feels the tug of her nicotine leash and ignores it. When it comes again, as she’s flicking through dog-eared files of old photos, she realizes she’s enjoying herself.

  The Wellesley’s easy to find – it was clearly something of a landmark at the time – and they spread out a range of misty photos, taken from various angles, at high and low tide, from the north and south banks of the river – including several from 1914 surrounded by tugs spraying water to douse the fire that destroyed it. The vessel’s gigantic, an enormous floating hostel, four storeys above the water and probably a further one or two below, with three elaborately rigged masts.

  ‘How cool was that?’ Ben’s saying. ‘Living on a ship with a load of other kids.’ Then he thinks again. ‘Except the food was probably crap, wasn’t it? And there’d be really hard blokes in charge, to stop them fighting and that. So it was probably more like a prison.’

  He pauses, dredging up another memory. ‘Annie used to stare at the ship. There was a sort of bend in the steps near the top, and a bit of broken down wall she used to sit on.’

  Mary peers at the rows of windows on the ship’s flank, and a little shudder of something – empathy? recognition? – goes through her. ‘Look at the buildings on the bank,’ she tells Ben. ‘Imagine Annie sitting on that wall. Can you work out where she might have been?’

  ‘About here,’ he says, confidently pointing. ‘I remember the bottom of those stairs. She lived about half way up the bank.’ Then: ‘Oh no, hang on. There’s another set of stairs, just along a bit. I think it might have been that one. Sorry.’

  ‘They knocked the whole lot down in the thirties,’ says a gruff voice as Pete materializes behind them. ‘After the Housing Act the whole area was condemned. But they documented everything before the bulldozers went in.’ He tugs open a drawer. ‘The photos are in here – what’s left of them. That’s the trouble with public-access archives,’ he remarks without rancour. ‘Things tend to disappear.’

  He heaves out a sheaf of buff folders and Mary and Ben start to leaf through the photos inside: scene after scene of brick walls and grimy windows, a haphazard zigzag landscape of tiled roofs and lofty chimneys. And steps everywhere, like an Escher painting: stone stairs down to the river with open sewage channels running alongside; wooden flights to first and second floor flats, some with tin canopies; rickety wooden bridges between buildings; shared yards with a single tap and toilet; buckets and coal bunkers, patched lean-tos and crumbling brick buttresses – and washing lines, like ships’ rigging, strung across every meagre open space.

  ‘Where are the people?’ Ben wants to know. Save for a scattering of bedraggled hens, the buildings and alleys are empty.

  ‘They moved them out, onto the Ridges Estate, what they call the Meadowell now. All the keelmen and deckies, shipyard workers, fishwives, all decanted into little modern semis miles from the river.’

  ‘Meadowell – that was the scene of those riots, wasn’t it?’ Mary asks. ‘I didn’t realize all those families came from the quayside.’ She recalls the shock of it on the news in 1991: all that tangible anger, so close to her home; the sealed-off roads and police sirens; the stench of burning plastic, the pall of smoke hanging over the town.

  ‘They never settled, is what I think,’ says Pete. ‘Uproot a man from his home, his livelihood, it’s bound to cause trouble down the line. I mean, what did they have? Inside toilets, fair enough, but no jobs after the fish disappeared, and the mines had closed down, then Swan Hunters went belly-up, no community, nothing to take pride in. It was a no-go area for years. Police didn’t dare put a nose in.’

  ‘So the people who rioted were the children and grandchildren of the people who were displaced from these houses.’

  ‘They thought changing the name to Meadowell would make a difference, but it was still the same folk living there.’

  Mary taps Ben on the shoulder. ‘Where’s that photo you found?’ She shows it to Pete. ‘We’re looking for a particular house on this bit of the bank,’ she explains. ‘We think it’s near where the Wellesley’s moored, but we don’t know the address.’

  ‘Looks like the Liddell Street, Bell Street area, what they used to call the Low Town,’ says Pete. ‘What year are you after? Eighteen nineties? Nineteen hundred? What you need is a map.’

  They follow him to a large cupboard with old maps swinging gently like coats on metal hangers inside. He extracts three large sheets and lays them out on a table. ‘Will this do you – 1896? Forty feet to the inch, so you can see the different buildings. The Wellesley was moored about here, so you’d probably be looking around the Ropery Stairs.’

  ‘Wow, there’s all the alleys I told you about, going down from the top bank to the river,’ says Ben. ‘But they’re all called “stairs” and “bank” instead of “road”. I remember that; people going, “Oh he bides on the Ropery Stairs.” Weird. It’s all just bushes now, apart from them posh flats down by the fe
rry.’

  ‘Presumably there was a rope-maker, or a clutch of rope-makers, plying their trade on Ropery Stairs,’ says Mary. ‘What amazes me is the number of public houses – though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, given the provenance of the area.’

  ‘There were more pubs in Shields per square mile than anywhere else in the whole country,’ says Pete with a note of pride in his voice. ‘At one time pretty much every other building was some kind of pub or hotel. They needed them too, to house all the men from outside, all the seasonal fishermen and traders and that.’

  Ben starts reading out the names: ‘Highlander Inn, Lord Collingwood, Newcastle Arms, Bluebell Inn, Edinburgh Castle. I like this one, look: Push and Pull Inn. Probably because it was so hard to get up all them stairs when you were drunk.’

  ‘Look at the alleys leading down to this bit of the river,’ Mary tells him. ‘Tully’s Bank, Dale’s Bank, Lighthouse Stairs – are they familiar names? What about Coble Entry, Turpin’s Bank, King George Stairs?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ben says uncertainly, running his finger down the alleys, one after another. Then: ‘Hang on. Here – this little alley leading up to Turpin’s Bank. It’s not labelled but I think it’s called Lamb’s Quay Stairs, because – can you see? – it goes straight out onto Lamb’s Quay, on the river.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mary looks at his face. The blue eyes are narrowed, concentrating on another shadowy memory.

  ‘I think the lads moored the boat at Lamb’s Quay sometimes, when they were unloading the nets for Mam and Nana to mend. Do you remember me saying we had to stop inside when they were putting to sea? Because it was bad luck to wave them off? That was because we lived just up the bank from where the boat was, so we couldn’t help seeing it if we went outside.’

  Mary smiles to hear him saying ‘we’ instead of ‘they’. ‘So you think Annie lived on Lamb’s Quay Stairs.’ She turns to Pete, who’s listening, rather bemused, to their conversation. ‘Is there any way of finding the names of people at a particular address? Assuming Lamb’s Quay Stairs even existed, of course.’

  ‘You’d have to go to the census data,’ he says. ‘There was a census done every ten years, starting 1841. So 1891 and 1901 would bracket the years you’re interested in. Most people start with a name, but if we go back to the old index, we can work through the streets no bother.’

  ‌Chapter Fifteen

  2007

  There’s an old pork butcher’s in the shopping arcade beside the library. It sells flanks and shanks and suchlike; trotters and pease pudding; various indigenous pies. In the back room, Mary has no doubt, entire heads and curly tails are stockpiled, waiting to be minced into unspeakable pâtés. Laura and Ben order hot bacon baps; Mary opts for a ‘jumbo’ sausage roll, rendered damp and flabby by the microwave. She eats it outside, in a scabby little park, while Ben and Laura examine the life-size statue of a fishwife that adorns a low plinth in the centre. There are benches in the park, but none of them sits; they’re fired up to continue their research.

  Inevitably perhaps, Laura has deviated from her stated mission and is burbling on about irrelevant items from the Shields Daily News. ‘I came across a report of this earl in London,’ she’s saying, ‘who was fined fifteen guineas for speeding. D’you remember guineas, Mary? Posh folk’s money. Anyway the earl was arrested for, and I quote, “driving furiously” in his car at – listen to this – twenty miles an hour!’

  ‘I can run faster than that,’ laughs Ben.

  ‘The car must just have been invented,’ Laura goes on. ‘People were still using horses and carts, or steam engines – and boats called “steam packets” to get to London and Edinburgh. There were loads of ads for stable boys and that in the paper. And ‘strong daily girls’, whatever they were. Cleaners, I suppose. Twelve shillings a week. Eighteen shillings for a cook.’

  ‘What’s a shilling?’ Ben wants to know.

  ‘Five p. in today’s money,’ Laura says. ‘Hardly bears thinking about, does it?’

  ‘Did you find anything about Annie?’ Mary asks, screwing up greasy paper.

  ‘Not yet, but I’m only up to September 1896. The Tynemouth Ladies Temperance Society has just held its AGM, and there’s been a big church do for a couple of reverends setting off as missionaries to Africa. Then of course there’s Veronica Chisholm’s classes in dancing, elocution and deportment. All very hoity-toity, until you get to the Police Court reports on page three.

  ‘That’s where to go for your local colour. It’s like two different worlds in Shields: one up round Dockwray Square, buying pianos and that, lace for their ruffled camisas, and patterns for the latest “cycling costumes for ladies”, if you don’t mind. Then the riff-raff in the Low Town, picking pockets and scrapping, then getting stotting drunk and passing out on the quayside. Talk about upstairs downstairs.’

  ‘Annie and them lot were definitely in the Low Town,’ Ben says. ‘And we think we’ve found where she lived, so we’re going to check with the census.’ He turns his gaze hopefully in Mary’s direction as she grinds out a Gitanes with her boot and reaches into her pocket for another. ‘Can we go back in now?’ he asks.

  After the circumnavigations of the morning, Mary had envisaged further detours en route to their goal in the afternoon. But in the event, matters proceeded smoothly. Pete had the 1891 census microfiche loaded in the viewer, and had already scrolled through to the relevant section.

  ‘The streets are in the order the enumerator would have walked, so you have to think of him on your map, working his way along Bell Street at the bottom of the bank, and turning off to climb up and down all the different stairs and banks, and out along all the quays, knocking at doors.’

  The data’s all hand-written, in an untidy copperplate that invites speculation about the personality of the enumerator in a way no databank these days ever could. Is it Mary’s imagination, or does the writing waver rather more following his visit to the Black Swan Inn?

  ‘People are recorded where they sleep on the night of the census,’ Pete’s saying. ‘So if a lassie’s stopping over with her nana when the enumerator knocks, she’d be recorded at her nana’s house, not at her mam’s.’

  ‘What about men out fishing?’ Mary asks.

  ‘You’d have to go to the boat logs for them. All the boats operating out of Shields had to fill in a log twice a year to say what they’re doing and who’s on board. But I expect quite a few men were left out – if they were just out on a coble, crabbing for the night.’

  Pete shows them how to scroll through the hand-written sheets – Ropery Stairs, Miller’s Bank, Turpin’s Bank – until, there it is: Lamb’s Quay Stairs, just where Ben said it was. And there, at number 23, is Dorothy Milburn, aged twenty-seven, housewife; her three sons: James, aged eleven, Frank, aged four, Richard aged six months – and one daughter, Anne with an ‘e’, aged nine.

  ‘There she is.’ Mary puts a finger on the screen and tears sting her eyes: the girl actually existed. After Hester’s damning review, it’s more than she dared hope. And the thought occurs to her that she should write up Ben’s case, along with as much supporting evidence as she can find – and see what Professor Hester Griffin makes of that.

  ‘So that’s where she lived in 1891. Now we have to find out if she’s still there ten years later,’ she says.

  Pete retrieves the 1901 census microfiche and loads it onto the machine. There’s a different enumerator, with smaller hand-writing, walking a slightly different route, but eventually they find number 23 Lamb’s Quay Stairs. And there the family is again, ten years older, with the head of household at home this time: Henry Milburn, aged forty-two, Master Mariner.

  Mary scans down the list of inhabitants. There’s James again, aged twenty-one now, working as a mariner; and Frank, aged fourteen, just a few years out of school, also down as ‘mariner’ – and a new name, Emily, aged seven, the little girl Ben remembers, who has presumably been born in the intervening years.

  Ben grips
her arm. ‘Annie’s missing,’ he says.

  ‘So is Dorothy, the mother,’ says Mary. ‘And that baby boy, Richard, from 1891. He’d have been ten in 1901.’

  She’s been sitting braced forwards in her chair. Now she leans back to digest the information. Annie being absent is expected. But the mother too? And the youngest brother? ‘So where are they?’ she says.

  ‘If someone’s missing, there are three possibilities,’ supplies Pete, anticipating Mary’s own speculations and elucidating a logic he’s obviously explained a thousand times before to eager descendants trying to trace their roots. ‘Either they’ve moved, or they’re away for some reason – or they’re dead.

  ‘If someone’s dead,’ he continues, ‘that’s quite easy to check. Now we’ve got a surname and an address, we can just look at the BMD website for the previous ten years – that’s the Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths. But if they’ve moved it’s a bit clever, especially if you’re looking for a female. See, if your Anne got married, she’d be on the census in her married name. If she married in North Shields we’d find her on the Marriage Register no bother, but if she’s moved out of the area you could search for years and never find the right Anne from North Shields.’

  ‘And if she’s away?’

  ‘That’s even cleverer. You can check relatives’ houses if you know their names and addresses. Then there’s hospitals and prisons. Inns and hotels. Though if you’re after a casual labourer or domestic, they could be lodging in a private house, which could be any one of a thousand addresses. Or the poor house – there was a big poor house in Tynemouth at that time with over seven hundred folk living there.’

  ‘I need a cigarette,’ says Mary.

  ‘No, please!’ cries Ben in anguish, unable to bear another delay. He apologizes immediately, of course, sweet boy that he is, but Mary slides the pack back into her cardigan pocket and resolves to invest in a carton of Nicorettes as soon as she gets a chance.