Daisy Drake had always been able to summon up a picture of the man she might eventually marry. Apart from the essential virtues of being tall, lean, excessively handsome, kind and, of course, gentile, he would be reasonably well off and never inhibited about showing his affection – even in public. He would also be a patient man; patient not only with her but with her family as well. Such high marital expectations for a lowly working-class girl like Daisy might have been unrealistically optimistic, but her self-esteem was high and she never doubted that such a man existed and would eventually emerge through the Black Country’s industrial murk. By the time she was twenty-two however, her imagined bridegroom still had not shown up and the thought had already crossed her mind that maybe she was destined to be an old maid.
Daisy was born in Dudley in Worcestershire on 18th May 1866 to Mary and Titus Drake. Mary had wanted the baby named after her own mother, Rhiain who was Welsh, but Titus would have no further truck with anything that came out of Wales. Better to call his new daughter after his own mother, Hannah. After some spirited – but never serious –arguments when Welsh and English forebears had been equally disparaged, they settled on neither, and Daisy emerged as the favourite. ‘There’s ne’er another wench like thee, our Daisy, yo’m a one-off,’ he used to tell the little girl proudly in his dense Black Country accent, tousling the dark ringlets that hung down her neck in thick coils. It irritated her to death but she loved him, and he loved her; small, wiry Titus Drake, iron puddler.
Titus told his young daughter casually that while he was at work, sweating over a searing hot hearth, puddling iron, he could sink eighteen pints of beer on a hot summer’s day.
‘Eighteen pints?’ Daisy queried, wide-eyed with incredulity.
‘Eighteen pints and I never get sozzled! We sweat it out, see. All the blokes drink like fish, working in that heat. The gaffers gi’ it us free. We even have a beer boy to keep we topped up.’
‘Why don’t you drink water, Father?’
‘Drink wairter? You couldn’t drink the wairter, my angel. You wouldn’t dare drink the wairter. It’d gi’ yer the ballyache and the squits. Yo’d be off th’ooks for days and lose time at work.’
From the point of view of other folks Titus Drake was nobody special, just an unskilled ironworker. To Daisy, though, he was everything. On Saturday afternoons he would say, ‘Come on, our bab, we’m off somewheer,’ and he would take her over the Oakham woodland, known as the Dingle, and show her the bluebells in spring; they were so dense you couldn’t walk anywhere without treading on them. In the autumn, they would take a basket and gather mushrooms and make mushroom soup when they returned home. Everything they saw, every bird, every nervous animal, every swaying flower, every gnarled tree, he had something to say about and made it all so interesting and vivid. Life was always exciting. There was so much to see, so much to learn about. Once, they gathered blackberries to make wine and, when they returned home with baskets full, he asked Daisy to help him make it.
‘Pour the sugar in now, my wench,’ he said stirring the must.
Unfortunately, washing soda came in blue bags identical to those the sugar was packed in and … Well, it was an easy mistake … But together they just laughed and laughed.
‘What’s your earliest memory, our Daisy?’ Titus asked one day, on another blackberry harvesting when she was a little older.
‘Oh, walking with Mother to take you a basin of broth for your dinner.’ She stooped to reach a cluster of blackberries she’d just spied. ‘I remember toddling beside her for miles, holding her hand, on our way to you at the Woodside Ironworks.’ She looked up at him and smiled. ‘We seemed to have been walking forever.’
‘Oh, it’s a tidy walk I grant yer, our Daisy. I hoof it there and back every day, bar Sundays.’
‘Yes, but you’re used to it. I wasn’t. I was only little. I was that thankful when we stopped.’ She dropped a handful of blackberries into her basket. ‘My little legs seemed so heavy and my poor feet ached. Then all I heard was this terrible roar from inside the factory. It frightened me to death. That, and the clanging of iron and the noise from the steam engines …’ She stood up to stretch her legs. ‘I can even remember the stink. It caught at the back of my throat. I don’t know how you could stand it. It can’t have done your health any good … Anyway, before Mother handed over your basin, you scooped me up in your arms and hugged me. Reuben Danks was with you and you showed me off to him and made me say hello and I was all shy.’
‘I remember. And Reuben said, “Titus, yo’ll have to watch her when her’s a young madam – her’ll be a bobbydazzler and no two ways.” And he was right.’
Daisy laughed contentedly.
She also remembered the smell that clung to her father that far-off day, though she did not mention it. It was the sharp aroma of iron and oil and smoke and sweat, all mixed together in some malodorous blend. Yet it was beyond her to actually dislike it, simply because it was his smell, the smell he always carried with him when he came home.
She licked the blood-red blackberry juice that was dribbling between her fingers. ‘Something else I remember …’ She looked at him with all her love in her eyes. ‘You giving me donkey rides on your back as well. You used to run about the backyard like a frightened pig escaping from the slaughterman, while I screamed and Mother begged you to be careful lest I fell off and broke my neck.’ She chuckled at the memory.
They were not well off, but neither were they poor. Titus Drake earned regular money, sufficient to live on, and he turned it up; he drank only moderately outside of work.
