I am recreating them at this time to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens, so appologies to him, also to Emily Bronte, George Elliot, Victor Hugo, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskil, George Orwell and countless others - all too good not to parody.
A low, moaning wind rolled down from the summit of Arkwright’s Hump and along Festeringdale, bringing with it the unmistakable aroma of rancid cow fat from Globbin’s Glue works, liberally laced with smuts and sooty deposits from the tall chimney of Hardgraft Mill. A lazy tide slopped and foamed across a beach littered with old spars, broken boards, pieces of tattered rope and ripped sailcloth. In the half light of the winter afternoon a pale and wan Sun spluttered to break through thin clouds and thicker yellow, sulphurous smoke, causing the huddled forms of beachcombers to offer up a communal cough in this small corner of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
Wandering off above the beach was a precipitous and winding path. It climbed and climbed around boulders and through small clumps of over-optimistic gorse until, somehow, it managed to stagger onto the cliff top.
If one had stood alongside the shambling forms that walked here, bent down there and carefully examined every piece of flotsam and jetsam thrown up from an unforgiving sea, one might have seen a tiny, tattered speck, finally achieving the farthest recesses of the steep climb, puffing and panting onto a small plateau of muddy grass. This forlorn scrap of humanity was Martha Crudd, wrapped and wreathed from head to foot in the tattered remnants of what had once been rags.
Before her stood, or rather leaned, the worst excuse of a hovel that ever graced England’s fair shores. It looked about as secure as a dandelion clock and was composed of a mixture of driftwood, used coal sacks, cobbles from the beach, the odd, ancient packing case and a rickety selection of wattle and daub panels. The front door, which in truth was the only ‘solid’ part of the construction, had come from the captain’s cabin of a collier that ran aground decades before on a treacherous set of rocks close by, known as Old Nick’s Stumps.
The door was open. Immediately outside of it, and almost indistinguishable from the collection of refuse that made up the house, was a human vision of hell. This gaunt and skeletal form was that of a man, in his late forties but looking nearer seventy. He wore a motley collection of oilskins, with an ancient, grime splattered sou’wester perched atop his grey, grizzled hair. Covering his lower legs and feet were a pair of down-at-heel sea boots, badly hand stitched decades before from the air dried scrotum of a humpback whale.
Martha stopped in her tracks at the sight. Blinking in disbelief she peeled back two or three layers of rags from the folds around her brow, she eventually managed to say.
“Eee Obadiah Crudd, my dear husband. It’s a miracle. You’re up and about. I've just staggered up from the jetty. My, but there were a terrible storm last night. I called into'd Cod and Winkle to see if anyone had been lost. They'd just carried Moses Holroyd into’t back room. Stiff as buckram he were, his body all swole up like an overstuffed sausage. And his face! Eyes as big as dinner plates, all bloodshot and staring, wi’ a look of horror like as if he'd seen the very gates of hell. “
Obadiah leaned back against the door frame, which creaked at the injustice. His eyes were wide and staring and his skin stretched over his cheekbones like yellow parchment. After a moment or two to take in the import of his wife’s words he spluttered.
“By Martha, but that's terrible. It’s a sorrowful thing to know that my old mate Moses Holroyd is drowned dead.”
Martha was quick to respond.
Drowned? He weren't drowned Obidia. It were so stormy last night he lost his way in the dark and fell down the beer chute into't pub cellar. He's been in there all night. Pickled as a soused 'erring he is. That's why he looked so awful. There were three full barrels down there yesterday afternoon, and the landlord's having to send for more this morning.”
For the first time she fully registered the fact that her husband was somehow vertical and what was more, outside their hovel. “But Obadiah” she almost screamed, “tha's got thy sea boots on. You can't be meaning to go out fishing today?”
Obadiah wobbled a little as a miniscule breeze passed by, on its way to the cliff top, and replied.
“Tha knows I've have to Martha, for I'm a proud man.”
“But what about thy consumption Obidia?” Martha demanded to know. “Nathanial Spanner, the apothecary's apprentice, only thought tha'd last a day or two!”
Obadiah let forth a low, mournful wheezing, rasping cough. Eventually he gained his composure and said. “Aye lass, but there must have been some’at powerful strong in that medicine he left for me. It burned a bit as it went down, and I steamed all night like a coal merchant's 'oss, but I'm feeling more like me old self today and no mistake.”
His wife looked puzzled. “But he didn't leave thee any medicine Obadiah.” Tears welled up in her dark-ringed eyes and she went on, “I couldn't afford the farthing he was asking for it. What on earth did you drink?”
Obadiah looked equally puzzled. “It were in't back scullery, in a blue bottle. I felt certain sure it were meant for me.”
In a moment Martha’s look of puzzlement turned to one of outright panic. “Hardly Obadiah”, she gasped. “That were Peebles and Smollets Patent Scouring Acid, for to clean't barnacles off thy boat. Aaron Hackenslatt brought it round yesterday, along about the time that I thought you were breathing your last. Didn't you read t' label on the bottle?
Obadiah looked contemptuous and spat into the middle distance. “You know I've never been one for book learning Martha.” He turned to face the direction of the sultry breeze and took in a lungful of sooty air. “By but it cleans out the tubes though” he commented.
His wife shrugged, immunized by a lifetime of expecting the worst and so being habitually surprised by something less. “Aye it would, “she admitted. “They use it for de-scaling the boilers on the colliery pit engine!” After a moment’s pause the panicky look came upon her again and she exclaimed. “But surely tha's forgotten Obidia. You can't go out fishing today - for this is a day of great rejoicing in the Crudd household. It's today that our Bathsheba comes home.”
The fisherman took on the look of a startled rabbit as he tried to order his still errant wits. “Is it Martha? I don't know what's happening to my memory. It's not like a small dose of consumption, double pneumonia, cerebral influenza and septicaemia to dull my wits. How long have I been laid up?”
Martha began to weep again. “Forty two days Obidia, since last Lamethstide. Ee but I've been that worried about thee” she sobbed.
Obadiah looked aghast. “However have you managed since then? What have the family been eating without me going out to fish?” he wanted to know.
“It's been hard Obidia,” Martha confided. “ I don't mind telling thee. If it hadn't been for Bartholomew Ravenscar giving me his old pit boots a few weeks ago, I don't know what we'd have done.”
Obadiah staggered back into the doorway, stunned by the revelation. He finally managed to regain an element of composure and then blurted out. “Martha! What did I tell thee about going down't pit again? It's not fitting for a married woman. Twenty-two hours a day, seven days a week, four hundred feet, up and down that ladder with an old enamel mug.”
She smiled at his ignorance and his obviously failing memory. “Oh I'm not working in the pit Obadiah” she told him. “They don't need me and the enamel mug any more. They have a steam operated pump now. No, Bartholomew gave us the boots to keep body and soul together. I boiled 'em up, along with a second hand potato from the seaman's mission and a swede I found on the beach.
Her husband looked slightly disbelieving. “Martha, tha's a wondrous woman right enough. But we've twenty-four children to feed now. Bartholomew’s old boots can't have lasted long, even with the potato and the swede.”
Martha shrugged again before replying and said nonchalantly, “Oh I don't know Obidia – he were a big man, that Swede. I think he must have drifted ashore from one of them whaling ships.”
“Drowned Martha?” Obadiah wanted to know.
“Drowned death Obadiah”, she solemnly replied.
His mood lightened after a moment as the import of the day finally dawned on him. “So our Bathsheba is coming home eh? Ee but I'm that proud of her. She’s the only inhabitant of Festeringdale ever to win the Gladys Hollerenshaw Memorial Scholarship for Itinerants, Vagrants and Herring Gutters. How long has she been gone now Martha?”
Three years this Candlemass Obadiah, she offered, and then began to snivel once more. “Three long years struggling to educate herself: suffering the torments of scorn and ridicule. Condemned to sneers and taunts from those posh university brats, on account of her rough hands and course tongue.”
Obadiah put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. Aye, but she was always a strong'un though Martha. Rough and ready though she may be; deprived of any decency by the rudeness of her sea-washed home and starved from childhood until she was that thin and transparent the light shone through her at the full moon.” He paused from a moment and gazed heavenward. “She has the spirit of a Crudd. Browbeaten she may be, but she'll not have changed one jot Martha, or my name's not Obadiah Crudd. And now that she's finished her book learning, why she can take up again with her childhood sweetheart, Aaron Hackenslatt; for though he is a humble collier, a human mole, digging away in the bowels of the earth day and night - he has a noble spirit.
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