Ragamuffin Angel by Rita Bradshaw

Author:Rita Bradshaw [Bradshaw, Rita]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Sagas
ISBN: 9780755375851
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2010-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

St George’s Square was under half a mile from Walworth Way but it could have been the other end of the world. The misery and hardship that went with disease, unemployment, injustice, grinding poverty and class-consciousness had not touched the square’s tranquil borders. Here children still had hot homemade bread, a comic and a bag of dolly mixtures and juju’s on a Friday night when their da got paid, but it was without the spectre of the dreaded words ‘being laid off’ entering into their consciousness. Life was secure here. There was wallpaper on the walls and it was bug free, the pawn shop wasn’t part of their vocabulary – neither was the dread and humiliation that went hand in hand with it – and the workhouse was just a building on the other side of St Michael’s Ward.

It had seemed to Connie and her two companions that half of Sunderland was out on the streets as they had made their way down Crowtree Road and into Park Lane, passing Stone Yard on their left as they walked on to West Park. The public houses were doing a roaring trade, and although it wasn’t yet ten o’clock there was more than one bleary-eyed reveller lurching along under the starry, icy sky or hanging shakily on to the solidity of a lamp-post or sitting, half propped, on a friendly stone windowsill as they surveyed the world with an inane happy grin.

The three of them had been giggling and infected with the inexplicable thrill that accompanied the seeing in of a northern New Year when they had left Walworth Way, but by the time they had passed Higher Grade School they had become more subdued.

The square was bordered with trees and it was elegant; there was no other word for it, Connie thought apprehensively, as they turned into its gracious confines. And the houses were bonny. By, they were. She could imagine their occupants might well be the sort of liberated folk who would read D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, a new book recently published which had raised a few eyebrows being all about the sentimental education of a miner’s son, as the author himself had been. However, Connie couldn’t help feeling that few of these homeowners had experienced a working mine. Here it was as though they were a thousand miles away from the grimness of the narrow mean streets of the growing town, and the cesspool of the docks.

‘This is it then.’ Mary’s tone was – if not solemn – definitely repressed, and Connie glanced at the pair’s sober faces before she said, a gurgle of laughter in her voice which didn’t sound at all like the prim and worthy Miss Bell, assistant housekeeper of daylight hours, ‘Just remember, me bairns, they use the privy the same as we do. All right?’

‘Connie!’ That Mary was shocked was transparent, and her eyes, wide and startled behind her spectacles, sent Connie and Wilf into helpless laughter, the three of them ending up clutching each other as they slithered about on the glassy pavements.

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