Nancy Carson - Poppy’s Dilemma

So the navvies slowly dispersed. They took up their picks, their shovels and their barrows, and commenced work.

Only two days before his temporary incarceration at the Dudley lock-up, Lightning Jack had spoken to a navvy who had passed through the Blowers Green workings on tramp. The man had been looking for good, dry tunnelling work and had been disappointed to discover that the Dudley tunnel had already been completed. He’d told Lightning that he’d been working on the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton at Mickleton, but had got into trouble with a card school to whom he owed some unpaid gambling debts, so he’d sloped off. Recalling what this man had told him, Lightning decided to head south and try his luck at Mickleton. That first Saturday, he walked about twenty miles and was refreshed and victualled at a public house in Ombersley, Worcestershire.

Afterwards, he found a suitable hedge under which to sleep, the weather being settled. Next morning, he awoke under a blue sky and took in a great gulp of the cool morning air, so fresh with the promise of summer, and free of the stench of coal gas that had normally greeted him at Blowers Green. The sight of the leaves stirring gently on the trees, and of the ordered pattern of fields that adorned the landscape, set his heart singing after the muck and filth of the Black Country. Maybe he should have gone on tramp before. He finished what food he had in his pantry, gathered his things together and set off again, intent on reaching Mickleton later that day. At Evesham, stopping for a gallon of ale at a beer shop, he met another navvy on tramp and they got talking. The stranger told Lightning that people knew him as ‘Bilston Buttercup’.

‘I’ve never seen anybody less like a buttercup in all me life,’ Lightning said, genially, as they supped. ‘Buttercups are pretty, dainty flowers. You’m as plain as a pikestaff and as ungainly as a three-legged donkey.’

The stranger laughed good-heartedly at Lightning’s banter. ‘That I am, and no doubt about it. Here … fill thy gum-bucket with a pinch or two o’ this best baccy.’

‘Ta …’ Lightning helped himself to some of the tobacco the man was offering and filled his clay pipe. ‘So you’re a Bilston bloke, eh?’

‘Bilston born and bred,’ the plain man said, filling his own gum-bucket. ‘Though I’ve been most places.’

‘So where are you heading for now?’ Lightning asked.

‘The Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton. They say there’s work on the Mickleton tunnel near Campden.’

‘That’s where I’m headed. We might as well tramp there together, if that’s all right by you.’

‘Let’s have a drink or three together and celebrate the fact,’ suggested Buttercup.

So Lightning Jack and Bilston Buttercup drank. They drank so much that they lost their resolve to reach Mickleton and, instead, discussed where they would doss down that night.

‘Under the stars,’ declared Lightning. ‘There’s nothing like it, and the weather’s fair.’

‘Then maybe we should find somewhere afore darkness falls. We can always find an inn afterwards for a nightcap.’

So they finished their drinks and set off in search of a place to sleep, into countryside that was wearing its vivid green May mantle. They pitched camp just outside a village called Wickhamford, alongside a stream that was invitingly clear. Buttercup contemplated building himself a sod hut, constructed by cutting turf from the ground and stacking it into walls, to be roofed with a tarpaulin.

‘So where’s your tarpaulin?’ Lightning enquired.

‘Oh, bugger!’ Bilston Buttercup replied with a laugh of self-derision. ‘I ain’t got ne’er un, have I? Damn it, I’ll sleep in the open … Like yo’ say, Lightning, the weather’s fair. Tell thee what – I’ll go and catch us our dinner. Why doesn’t thou gather some wood and kindle us a fire, eh?’

Lightning did what his new friend suggested. He collected some dry sticks of wood and had a respectable fire going in no time. He carried in his pantry a small round biscuit tin in which he kept his mashings, which was tea leaves mixed with sugar and wrapped in little parcels of paper screwed together at one end. From the stream, he filled this biscuit tin with fresh spring water and set it over the fire to boil. He stood up and stepped back to admire the fire. In an adjoining field he could hear the lowing of cows and knew at once where to get his milk. He took his metal tea bottle, rinsed it in the stream, and clambered through the hedge that surrounded the field. Startled rabbits bolted before him, but the cows regarded him with that indifferent curiosity of which only bovines are capable as he strutted towards them. Already he had picked his cow, its udders bulging.

‘Here, come to daddy,’ he said softly and stooped down alongside the compliant animal. As Lightning returned to the campfire with his bottle of fresh warm milk, he saw that Buttercup had arrived back also, and was feathering a chicken.

‘Bugger’s still nice and warm,’ he said. ‘Feel.’ Lightning felt. ‘There’s another, yon, for thee.’ Buttercup gestured his head towards the ground behind him. By the flickering light of the fire, Lightning could just make out another chicken lying forlornly dead, its neck broken.

‘Feather it, and I’ll draw the innards out for thee,’ Buttercup offered.

‘Where did you pinch these from?’ Lightning asked, collecting the chicken from the ground.

‘Some farm, yon. I picked up some eggs as well.’

‘Let’s hope no bugger heard you or saw you,’ Lightning said, recalling his brief stay in Dudley gaol for allegedly stealing something of similar value.

When the men had finished plucking feathers, Buttercup drew the innards out of both chickens and washed the hollow carcasses in the stream. Lightning constructed a spit from wood, on which they could cook the two fowls over the fire. Meanwhile the water in the little tin was steaming promisingly. Lightning watched his companion’s face by the light of the flickering fire as he rammed the chickens on the spit and began cooking them.

‘What brings you on tramp?’ Buttercup asked his companion.

Lightning Jack filled and lit his gum-bucket and told his story. ‘But it’s hard to leave a woman and kids. It is for me, at any rate. Some buggers couldn’t give a toss, but I think the world o’ my Sheba. I shall send for her and my babbies just as soon as I got meself settled at Mickleton. What about you, Buttercup?’

‘Me? I’m single, me.’ Buttercup turned the chickens on the spit and the fire crackled as it was fuelled with a further sputtering of fat. ‘I wouldn’t be in thy shoes, tied to a woman’s apron strings all thy natural. I’ve seen it all afore, watched men and women and seen how as they make each other as miserable as toads in a bag of flour. Look at another woman and just see how they moan. They swear as yo’m having it off. Dost ever look at other women, Jack?’

‘That I do. Show me a bloke as don’t and I’ll show you an elephant that can purr like a kitten.’

‘How old is your old woman, Jack?’

‘Not so old. Thirty-one. And not bad looking, considering she’s had seven. Two of ’em died, though, Buttercup.’

‘Aye, well when she’s forty-one her teeth’ll very likely fall out and all her hair. Then you’ll be gawping at even more women … younger women … and wondering why on earth thou ever messed with her in the fust place.’

‘Well, she was a right pretty young thing when we jumped the broomstick,’ Lightning said. ‘Fourteen, she was, and pretty as a picture. I was about nineteen.’

‘Aye,’ replied Buttercup. ‘But, by God, how quick they go to seed. The time will come when thou would’st rather kiss a scabby hoss.’