the scullery floor, which he’d brought up from the cellar on the soles of his boots.
‘Our Kate should have gone down,’ he called back. ‘She’s got smaller feet than me. She wouldn’t have made so much mess.’ Then, before he could be asked to perform any more disagreeable chores, he dashed outside and returned to the Bingham’s butty, waiting for Marigold to appear.
From where the Stokes’s cottage stood, the canal descended by a series of locks and basins towards Wordsley. You could see, beyond the massive cone of the Red House Glassworks, green valleys swooping between wooded hills and leafy glades. Towered and spired churches clad in the ivy of centuries dotted the landscape, as well as cosy homesteads, farmhouses and stately old manor houses. Nibbled pastures, where sheep and cattle grazed, receded into the hazy green distance. It was a sight that cheered Algie’s heart.
Over the hill in the opposite direction lay, incongruously, a black industrial wilderness of slag heaps, mines, glassworks, and forges. Foundries and ironworks belched forth acrid brown smoke from great chimney stacks, and red flames from open hearth furnaces, even on this warm spring Sunday. Humble little red-brick houses shared this desolate eastward outlook, sparsely dotted with clumps of coarse grass, railways, viaducts and bridges as well as the interlinking canals with their locks, basins and wharfs. This was the astonishing landscape of the Black Country, that broad tract of man-made bleakness that lay roughly between the opposing boundaries of Wolverhampton to the west and Birmingham to the east. Yet it held as much diversity as you could reasonably assimilate in a month of Sundays if you cared to look. Prosperity lived symbiotically with hardship, as did culture with ignorance, good taste with bad, virtue with wantonness, respectability with indelicacy, and hard work with idleness. Significantly, the Black Country, for all its limited size, generated a disproportionate amount of the enormous wealth that enabled Britain to wield such undeniable power in the world.
Marigold popped her head round the cabin door.
‘Oh, you’re back then.’
‘Yes, I’m back. Are you ready yet?’
She nodded and stepped out onto the gunwale, then onto the towpath. ‘I just wanted to change me frock, wash me face and tidy me hair up a bit. Me mom don’t like me venturing away from the cut in me working frock. She says it’s common to do that.’
He smiled his response, looking her up and down. The frock was plainly cut in muslin and well-washed, the floral pattern almost faded from enthusiastic and frequent laundering, but she looked divine, and there was no shame in cleanliness. It fitted her perfectly, enhancing her slender figure. Her dark hair had been hurriedly brushed and re-pinned, and it was tidier now.
‘You look ever so nice,’ he said sincerely.
‘Thank you. So do you in your Sunday best suit. Where you taking me?’
‘There’s a path over the fields to Kingswinford. I bet you’ve never been there?’
She shook her head. ‘Not if there ain’t a cut what goes there. Is it far?’
‘A mile, a mile and a half, maybe – nothing really. But it’s a fine afternoon for a stroll.’
‘What is there at Kingswinford? Anything special?’
He shrugged. ‘Nothing special. It’s just a nice walk over fields.’
He led her back to the bridge he’d just come from and onto the lane that led first to Wordsley.
‘I’m thinking of getting meself a bike,’ he announced, in a manner calculated to impress.
‘A bike? Blimey.’ Marigold sounded duly impressed. ‘I wish I could have a bike. I could ride to the locks ahead of our narrowboats and open ’em ready. It wouldn’t half save us some time.’
‘Suggest it to your dad. Mebbe he’ll buy one.’
‘I doubt whether he could afford one. How much do they cost?’
‘About twelve pounds with pneumatic tyres. Pneumatic tyres are best. You don’t want solid tyres.’
‘Twelve pounds?’ Marigold queried with disbelief. ‘That’s a fortune. Me dad would never spend that much, even if he’d got it to spend.’
‘I’ve been saving up for ages.’
‘Where would you moor it?’
‘In our shed.’
‘What d’you do for a living, Algie, if you can afford to buy a bike?’
‘I make brass bedsteads at Sampson’s up at Queen’s Cross in Dudley. A bike will be handy for getting to work and back.’
‘Don’t you fancy being a lock-keeper, like your dad?’
‘Me? Nah. It don’t pay enough wages. You get your coal for free, granted, and a house to live in as part of the job, but I wouldn’t be a lock-keeper. Me dad gets called out all hours. I wouldn’t want that. I like peace and quiet. How about you, anyway? D’you intend to spend the rest of your life on the narrowboats?’
‘Depends,’ she said with a shrug.
‘On what?’
‘On whether I marry a boatman – a number one, f’rinstance.’
‘A number one? You mean a chap who owns his own boats?’
‘Yes.’
‘Got your eye on anybody?’ he asked, dreading her answer, but grinning all the same.
She shrugged again. ‘Dunno. Nobody on the boats at any rate.’ She gave him a sideways glance to assess his reaction.
‘Who then?’
‘I ain’t telling you.’
So there was some chap in her life. Damn and blast. It was naïve of him to think otherwise, a girl like Marigold.
‘Go on, you can tell me.’
‘There is a chap I like,’ she admitted. ‘He ain’t a boatman. He works at one of the carpet factories in Kiddy. He’s one that generally helps offload us.’
‘Oh, I see … So the crafty monkey sees to it as you don’t get offloaded on the same day as you arrive. That way, you have to stop over till next day, eh? Then you can meet him at night. Is that it?’
Marigold blushed, smiling in acknowledgement of the truth of Algie’s astute assessment.
‘So you’ll be doing a spot of courting tomorrow night, then?’
‘I suppose. It depends.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Jack.’
‘Shall you tell him about me?’
‘What is there to tell?’ She glanced at him again.
‘Well … you could tell him that you went a walk with another chap.’ He
