hut Poppy shared with her family and eight other navvy lodgers was a ramshackle affair. It stood amongst a muddle of shacks huddled together in bewildering confusion, as if they had fallen randomly from the sky and been allowed to remain just where they had landed. Heaps of disused planks, discarded bottles and all manner of rubbish littered the place. The huts were owned by Treadwell’s, the contractors, and had been dismantled and reconstructed several times in several parts of the country before their sojourn at Blowers Green in Dudley. Although built predominantly of wooden planking, they were a mix of other waste materials such as engineering bricks and refractories, stone, tile and tarpaulin. Over the door of the hut occupied by Poppy and her kin hung a piece of wood that bore the name ‘Rose Cottage’, nailed there by some joker who’d been blessed with the ability to read and write. At least one of the four panes of glass in each window had been broken; one was replaced with a wooden board, the other a square of cardboard. Rose Cottage had three rooms. One was the communal living room that served as kitchen, dining room, brewhouse and gambling saloon. There was the family’s bedroom, and another separate bedroom for the lodgers, crammed with eight bunk beds and such other accoutrements as the navvies deemed necessary. The kitchen area was nothing more than the space at one end of the hut that had a fireplace. Also crowded in was a stone sink that emptied into the dirt outside, a copper for boiling vast amounts of water, a rickety table and a row of lockers that were the lodgers’ personal tommy boxes. Every navvy provided his own food, which he called his ‘tommy’, and which he paid for in either cash or vouchers from the tommy shop. It often fell to Sheba, Poppy’s mother, to cook it.
When Poppy returned to the hut, Sheba, a mere thirty-one years old, was sitting on a chair in the communal living room nursing her youngest child; her fifth that had survived. Another woman, a neighbour from a similar hut, was with her, smoking a clay pipe they called a ‘gum-bucket’. While they gossiped, they shared a jug of beer tapped from the barrel that stood cradled in a stillage against one wall. Neither woman was drunk but the beer had loosened their tongues, and they were talking over each other in their eagerness to chatter. Poppy undressed herself in the adjacent family bedroom and put on her nightgown. She could hear the women’s conversation clearly, but took little notice as she clambered over the rough, bare floorboards to the two dishevelled beds that were shoved together through lack of space. She slid into the one she shared with her two younger sisters and her younger brother Jenkin, better known as Little Lightning.
Poppy had consumed two half pints of beer and the effect of the alcohol was making her drowsy. The drone of the women’s voices became indistinct and in no time she was dreaming of Luke and his unexpected chivalry. She did not know how long she had been sleeping when she was awakened by the urgent shouts of agitated men and the sudden, alarmed crying of one of the children. Poppy raised her head off her pillow and tried to understand what was happening in the darkness. A lamp flared into life. Men were gathered in the open doorway, and her mother looked anxious as she stood at the bedroom door.
‘What’s the matter?’ Poppy asked as she rubbed her eyes.
‘They’ve got your father.’
‘Who’s got me father?’
‘The night watch. He’s in the lock-up in Dudley.’
‘Why, what’s he done?’
One of the navvies answered. ‘Nothing, as far as we can tell. A packman come in the public house selling baubles. Your father asked to see one and the packman handed one to him. When he asked for it back, Lightning Jack said somebody else had took it to have a look. But he accused Lightning of pinching it.’
Poppy looked with bewilderment at her mother, then at the navvy. ‘And had he pinched it?’
‘Nay,’ he answered. ‘Oh, somebody did, but I don’t reckon it was yer dad. He just passed it to somebody who asked to see it. Any road, the packman went out and the next thing we knowed, the police was there. The men am up in arms, and in the right mood. There’s gunna be trouble aplenty.’
Poppy quickly got dressed. Already she could hear the shouts from an army of angry men outside. Because they were navvies, they were regarded by those who didn’t know and understand their isolated way of life as the absolute dregs of society. Well, the navvies knew and understood their own way of life well enough and they stood together nobly, especially when one of their number was locked up for supposedly committing some felony of which he was innocent. The news had quickly spread. Those navvies who lodged in houses close by had been knocked up from their beds. They answered the call as well and joined those from the encampment, grabbing whatever they could that would serve as a weapon. It was time to set the record straight.
Poppy ran outside. Every man from the encampment still capable of standing must have been there. The ringleader was a ganger she knew only as ‘Billygoat Bob’. In the darkness, she could see that he was standing on a box as he incited the men with his ranting about injustice and bigotry. For the benefit of men who had been drinking elsewhere, he was explaining what had happened at The Wheatsheaf.
‘Nobody thought anythin’ on it, till the packman come back to the Grin and Bear It half an hour later with three bobbies. They came in like three devils, clouting everybody wi’ their blasted copper-sticks. The damned packman pointed out Lightning Jack and Dover Joe, so they dragged ’em out and chucked ’em in the Black Maria. Afore we knew what had hit us, they was away.’
The men were sufficiently inebriated to accept with fiery enthusiasm his tirades on the police and on the packman, which fed their lust for revenge.
‘If any one of you was in trouble, would ye not look to we, your own kind, to help yer in yer travail?’ Billygoat yelled over the hubbub, and there was a thunderous response of accord. ‘Well, Lightnin’ Jack and Dover Joe am innocent, but they’m in that stinkin’ gaol. It’s up to we to fetch ’em out afore they come before the beak and get sentenced. If we fail, they’ll end up doing penal servitude in Australia – that wilderness on the other side o’ the world … And they’ve both got women and families … It could have been you dragged out of that public house, mates. It could have been any one of you …’
A raucous jeer rang ominously through the night and a forest of arms shot up, most wielding pickaxe handles, shovels or hedge-bills. Billygoat stepped off his wooden box and led the incensed army away from the compound and up the hill towards Dudley. One or two stumbled and fell in their drunkenness, but they got up or were helped to their feet by mates bent on avenging this savage oppression.
Poppy followed behind. She had a vested interest. The other women, however, keen to witness some action, were caught up in the fervour of the moment as they hurried to keep up with the men, forming a separate, more passive group. The ragtag army fell more or less into step as they slogged on. Poppy had no idea of the time, but the streets were deserted except for the horde. They strode through the sleeping town, led by Billygoat Bob and those who knew the way, having deliberately followed the Black Maria which carried their comrades to the lock-up.
The two-hundred-strong mob reached the police station in Priory Street, a castellated, red-brick building with a mock portcullis through which they teemed. Hearing the commotion, the two policemen that were on duty presented themselves at the door on the other side of the yard that had rapidly filled up with the ranting crowd. One of the constables asked what the trouble was.
‘We want our two mates, Lightning Jack and Dover Joe,’ Billygoat Bob replied, with all the aplomb of a victorious army general negotiating a surrender. ‘They’ve been locked up for pinchin’ trinkets, but they took nothing. They’m innocent.’
‘Not according to what I’ve been told,’ the policeman said defiantly.
‘Then
