Free The Petticoat Men by Barbara Ewing

tried to pull it open or push it open and all the time making up lines, ‘ Oh aren’t you leaving, Polly dear? Thought you were going! Here, Polly dear, let me help you! ’and they banged and pulled the door and finally a man had to come on stage with a big hammer to move it and everyone in the audience was laughing by now, big huge laughs and Ma and me and Billy was laughing loudly too, and thought of our dear Pa who thought of this first.
    It was Pa that got me and Billy educated, Ma’s not such a reader. And yet it’s funny, Billy and I often ponder on this: Ma knows more knowledge, and more people, than anyone else we’ve ever met. That’s being a Londoner for fifty years and working in Drury Lane Theatre I suppose, and later the Haymarket Theatre, everyone came there. But her knowledge isn’t out of books, and he just loved books our Pa, he had gone to the Mechanics Institute when he was a young man and eaten up education like a starving person. He read Oliver Twist to us when we were little, the first book I ever knew, and we all cried at the sad bits, and I love that book to this day.
    And he got us into a new elementary school by Covent Garden, me as well as Billy, ‘ your leg dont hinder your handwriting, Mattie. ’ And by the time I was about eight I was already coming home with Billy to Drury Lane from Mudies Lending Library in New Oxford Street with high piles of books borrowed, clutched in our arms like treasure – by the time I was twelve I had read Jane Eyre and Frankenstein and Agnes Grey. So we’re good at reading and writing, well here I am, writing this and Billy always has his nose stuck in a book or a serious newspaper and like I say he now writes down lots of Parliament business.
    Oh damnation, that’s about London and our Pa and everything, all that’s a long time ago, I’m supposed to be telling about Ronald Duggan. So. Mr Ronald Duggan the train driver. He was nice, and he was good to me, good to Ma, paid the rent – away a lot mind, well that’s a railway man, we knew that. He liked me, we started walking out, and Ma was pleased to see me cheerful again, and then this happened. Me having a baby. Ronald knew, he didn’t seem to mind, and me, I was glad, even though I was so surprised, a baby . After all that trying before! And even Ma, after she’d checked to see if I really was happy, and after she got used to the idea of being a grandmother after all, was pleased, and called Ronald ‘Ronnie’ and if he was here on a Sunday he came and drank stout in the parlour while we drank our port and we played cards sometimes, and Freddie and Ernest had just started coming and going to our house (“those girls ” Ronald used to call them, but only laughing) and sometimes we heard the singing drifting down the stairs and our house was so cosy.I was only a bit sorry that Ronald never read any books, only the penny papers.
    ‘Have you ever tried a book?’ I asked him one day. He laughed.
    ‘Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel once said – and he was the cleverest man that ever lived, ask any railway man – well except for his father who built the Thames Tunnel. But Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he said, “It is impossible that a man who indulges in reading should make a good engine driver.” Your Billy would be a disaster with a steam engine,’ and Ronald laughed more, and pulled me on his knee.
    But one summer evening I went into Ronald’s room with some yellow daisies in a little pretty vase, I always kept it nice for him, never knew when he’d be back. The key was in the door, he must have come home already and I – well I just gave my knock and went in, the way I always did.
    And there was nothing there.
    Not his railway clothes and boots, not his timetables he loved, not his timepiece, not his couple of bottles of stout he always kept on his table. And he paid his rent in advance so he didn’t owe us money. I suppose he didn’t owe us anything. I looked for a letter, or a note. No