The taming of Nan

The voice of Nan Cherry, shrill and aggressive, sounded its war alarm on the quiet, dawn-glimmering street. Whereupon a crowd of sparrows, busy picking up from before that door of the unluckiest of unlucky numbers what looked like a supper flung out the night before, flew away with great commotion. Their panicky flight made a cloud of wings against a long white cloud, behind which boiled the gold of a September morn ready to overflow the world of Narrowfields. The town lay in a hollow below the little street. In the imperfect light it appeared as the body of a long dragon, from whose back rose half a hundred chimney stacks. These stacks pricked into the opaline glimmer of the sky like the charred fingers of some underworld giant, thrust smoking through the earth to grab at sun, moon and stars.

The bent figure of an old man who could toil no more, crept from little door to little door, rousing others to toil, then disappeared from the street.

Through it all the voice went on.

A child’s rebellious cry rose sharply as it was roused to be carried out to nurse--quavering away into little exhausted, sob-coloned murmurs of acquiescence. Whilst the sound of a poker rattling the bars of a fire that did not realise it must boil a kettle within ten minutes; the banging of a door; the barking of a dog; were the first signs of industrial Lancashire waking up.

Unawed by the echoes that shrilled back her voice, in the mocking way of echoes, the shrew carried on her tongue-onslaught. To all its fire, no defence answered.

According to Scripture a soft answer turns away wrath. But the man who wrote the proverb had not met Nan Cherry. Possibly, as Granny Harker said, Nan was familiar with that provincialism which states that nothing said often means quite a lot.

Be that as it may--the fact has to be recorded that her rage leaped the higher for not being fanned by back-words.

Her voice became such as only a man deaf and dumb, dead drunk, or a philosopher could hear without a human desire to choke it into human decency.

“Thee! As calls thysel’ a ’usband. Tha lazy son of a whilk! Thy tay’s brewed. Mun I sup it for thee? Th’ world’s aired. An’ thee--our Polly, if I come up to thee, bitch, I’ll scalp thee. Folk doesn’t know what I go through. I don’t shout my troubles off the housetops. For you never get pity if you carry colour in your face.”

Then silence fell once more. The sparrows returned to their feast. The sound of a woman beating carpets two streets away woke dolorous echoes.

Within the Cherry castle a chair was rocking. The sound suggested gritted teeth.

A mighty yawn from an upper room was followed by a shower of ceiling-plaster in the room below as a number eleven foot touched the bedroom floor.

The shower fell on the head of a dark-haired, comely-featured, blue-aproned woman rocking in the ingle-nook. Her body had a crouching attitude. Daylight streaming through a red blind just behind her spattered crimson bars and blotches over her.

Nature had given her a pleasant exterior. Her chin might thrust itself out too prominently, but she did not look anything that could demoralise ninety-nine men out of the hundred. Only as she turned her face to the fire, under that pattering shower of plaster, an expression crossed her face which stamped it. She was the untamable hooligan--the Stone Age hidden under the veneer of Civilisation. She had neither humour, imagination, nor protectiveness. She should have been an apache’s mate. She had married a porter who gave her a pound a week and bought his own clothes. With that look upon her it seemed miraculous that this cramped, drab kitchen could hold her.

A jocular whistling of “Home Sweet Home” filtered down into the place that was mainly wash-boiler, table and chairs--four badly blistered, dun-painted walls, and a phonograph.

On the very first sound of the big voice there was a response of doggy delight from the yard, which taken in conjunction with unframed pictures from “Our Dogs” and a couple of framed pedigree forms hung over a pipe-rack holding pipes mostly crippled, told its own story of man’s ancient love for dogs.

Then more plaster fell.

The look cast upwards at the ceiling, just at the centre of its trembling, was rapier-like enough to have made a hole--if a look could. The boss of the show was hitching up his braces. Innumerable bumpings, on the same spot, at the same tick of the clock, week in, week out, had first shaken the ceiling.

Bump!

It really seemed as if the roof must give way at this last assault. He was crossing the room.

His weight was set upon the stairs. They creaked under his fourteen stone. Two steps were followed by a longer pause, as the man dodged an angle of a dark staircase built for lesser men. On an afterthought he called to the sleeper in the other room.

“Polly!”

The word was at once a caress and an apology.

“I’m up.”

Muffled as it was by bedclothes the voice had all the Harker euphony--that curious, bird-like sound come down from generations that had sung in choirs--and sometimes in pubs.

“Lyin’ little hell-cat!”

The viciousness from the one member of the Harker stock who had been given no singing voice, was of the quality which only one female can mete out to another.

“I thought I was up----”

A girlish giggle ended the admission.

It was a gush of light in a dark place, that trickle of laughter from a little white feather-heart that might blow anywhere. It became a symbol of the tenacity of youth to turn to the sun of life--to have its day--in the mire of the pit, or on a cinder-heap of hell.

“Tha’s only once to get up,” said the big voice of the man on the stairs, and he bumped down another step.

The reply was curious, the voice more bird-like on account of bedclothes no longer muting it.

“Oh--some gets up twice,” was the remark on which her father pondered as he went down the stairs. Had the tone not been so utterly frivolous the words might have been interpreted into some dark hint of discontent.

“Bump--bump.”

There were thirteen bumps in all. Their steady way of coming on gave no clue that Cherry wished to dodge the storm waiting for him. He must pay this morning for that ten minutes game at draughts he played last night with Billy Breeze, after which he had returned to find his shirt on the doorstep, his supper laid out on the pavement.

“The Big Porter,” as he was known to Lancashire and Yorkshire passengers, bent a massive head and passed into the drab cage of a kitchen. He was almost a giant of a man, fair-haired, dangling in his left hand a pair of boots ridiculously large in this world of dwindling manhood. A stump-end of a cigarette was stuck in his close-shaven mouth--a cigarette being economised to the last shred thereof. It was a mouth that did not need covering up. Under it was a great depth of chin. His blue eyes were of the sleepy order that Granny Harker had once defined as being able “to see without looking.”

His first action was to spit out the cigarette a couple of seconds before it would burn his mouth.

His second was to blow out the smoky lamp--with a saving instinct to burn daylight.

The glance he had cast at the woman in the chair was one of affectionate tolerance, mingled with that of a man who has lost all illusions, but knows that he has his feet, if the worst comes to the worst.

The woman returned the look with one only explainable by the fact that this was the man who had married her--who, for twenty years, by the aid of Laughter and of Feet, was still unvanquished, yet outside what he sarcastically termed “th’ Henpeck Club.”