ambled beside him. ‘Similar to this one but with a better means of propelling it forward. I’m convinced that something like it has immense commercial potential.’
She turned to him and smiled with admiration, uncertain of the meaning of the words ‘commercial’ and ‘potential’. If only she was educated. If only she had been given some schooling, she would be more able to talk with him on his level.
‘What time do you have to be back at work?’ she asked, mundanely.
‘Half past one. Mr Lister, the resident engineer, gets rather rattled if I’m late.’
‘So what time is it now?’
He took his watch from his fob and checked it. ‘Quarter past. We’re easy on.’
‘Good. I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble on my account.’
For the first few yards of their walk back, there was a pause in their conversation. Poppy noticed the wild flowers growing at the edges of the black earth footpath – buttercups, daisies, ragwort, dandelions. Thistles were thriving too, growing tall in the warmth of the May sun and the recent rain, and it struck her how beautiful they were to look at, if not to touch.
‘Thank goodness we didn’t fall off into those thistles,’ she remarked. ‘We’d have been scratched to death.’
‘Or into nettles,’ Robert replied easily.
She nodded. ‘Oh, yes, I hate nettles.’
‘So do I.’
‘Do you like being an engineer, Robert?’
‘Actually, yes, I do.’ He turned to look at her face, always an entertaining mix of earnestness and gaiety. He was fascinated as well at how easily she could turn from one subject to another. ‘It’s interesting being an engineer. There’s something different to deal with all the time.’
‘What sort of things do you have to do?’
‘Oh, measuring and marking out, tracing plans, trying to calculate whether the spoil we take from a cutting will be sufficient to build an embankment. I’m handy with a pair of brass dividers, a blacklead and a straight-edge.’
‘I’ve often wondered,’ Poppy said, her face suddenly an icon of puzzlement, ‘if they start driving a tunnel from more than one place, how they manage to meet exactly in the middle.’
Robert laughed, fired with admiration for her curiosity. ‘By candles, usually,’ he replied.
‘Candles? How do you mean?’
‘Well, it’s dark inside a tunnel, Poppy. So what you do is to line up the centre line of the tunnel by exactly placing lighted candles at predetermined intervals. When you have three candles exactly in line as you match them up against the cross hairs on your theodolite, then you know your tunnel is straight – or level, if you’re taking levels.’
‘What about if there’s a bend in the tunnel?’
He laughed again, astonished at her grasp of engineering problems. ‘Before you start excavating a tunnel, you sink narrow shafts along the way,’ he explained. ‘These shafts would already have been pinpointed during a survey. The centres of those shafts meet the centre line of the tunnel perpendicularly and, if they’re not in direct line – in other words, if they form a bend – you follow the line they form. Do you understand?’
Poppy nodded and emitted a deep sigh. When Robert looked at her again, her expression was serious, almost grave.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, concerned. ‘Are you worrying about your father?’
‘Oh, no, I was just thinking how lovely it must be to be educated. To be clever enough to do all the things you do.’
‘Oh, I’m not particularly clever,’ he said modestly. ‘But having had a decent education enables me to earn a good living, I admit.’
‘I wish I was educated. It’d help me get away from the navvy life. If only I could read and write …’
‘Don’t you like the navvy life?’
‘Would you like it?’
‘Probably not,’ he admitted. ‘But I work with the navvies, such as your father. I find them agreeable enough, by and large – when they’re sober, anyway. Ask them to do a job, explain what you want, and they do it. They work like the devil, shifting hundreds, even thousands of tons of earth in no time. You must have watched an excavation and seen how, in only a few days, they can transform a landscape. They don’t mince their words either. If they have something to say, they say it. But living with them?… I imagine some of them are inclined to be uncouth.’
‘I don’t know what that word means, Robert – uncouth. I hope you’ll excuse my not having been educated.’
‘Uncouth?’ He smiled kindly. ‘It means rough, rude, barbarian.’
Poppy laughed. ‘Oh, yes. Most of them are uncouth … barbarian … See? I’ve learnt two new words a’ready. I do wish you could teach me more …’
‘I’m afraid that what I know is limited to engineering and surveying, and not much use to a young woman,’ he said realistically.
He turned to look at her, sympathy manifest in his eyes. This girl was not like the navvies to whom she belonged. She was apart from them, a cut above, bright – extremely bright – thirsting for an education which had eluded her, and thence for knowledge to lift her out of her humdrum existence. It was a worthy aspiration, too. If her life took the normal course one would anticipate of a navvy-born girl, she would be expected at her age, or even younger, to be the compliant bed partner of whichever buck navvy was first to claim her, if not of her own volition then either by buying her, or by fighting somebody else for her. It would be a sin if she were so treated and thus doomed for lack of education. She was worthy of so much better. Her self-respect raised her above the meagre expectations of navvy women. It was truly a wonder she had not already been claimed …
‘Where the hell d’you think you’ve been?’ Sheba angrily asked Poppy when she re-entered Rose Cottage. ‘Fancy sloping off when we was finishing off the dinners. Where’ve you been? You’ve been gone nearly an hour.’
Some of the navvies were still in the room, sitting at the round table, their legs sprawling, big boots seeming to take up most of the floor space. The place reeked with an unsavoury mixture of pipe tobacco smoke, beer, sweat, cooking and rotting vegetables.
‘I had to go out, Mom,’ Poppy replied quietly with a guilty look, turning away from the navvies so that they shouldn’t hear.
‘Had to?’
‘I promised to meet somebody. I couldn’t let them down.’
‘Bin a-courtin’, my wench?’ one of the men, called Waxy Boyle, asked through a mouthful of dumpling.
‘It’ll pay her not to have bin a-courtin’,’ Sheba railed. ‘Not when there’s work to be done. Who did you go and meet?’
Poppy blushed. Blushing was becoming
