Break of Dawn BY Rita Bradshaw
For our infinitely beloved grandson, Reece Benjamin Bradshaw, born 26 July 2011; precious baby son for Ben and Lizzi, beautiful new cousin for Sam and Connor, Georgia and Emily, and Lydia. You were prayed for and wanted more than you will ever know, little one, and we praise the Lord for his treasured gift and give all thanks to God for you. ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.’
And I couldn’t let this moment go by without mentioning Bailey, our dear grand-dog, who was going to be put down simply because he’s a Staffie cross and his face didn’t fit, before Ben and Lizzi took him in. He’s the most endearingly daft canine in the world, an utter softie and a comic genius without knowing it!
Acknowledgements
In the twenty-first century, few people think twice about women having the vote along with equality before the law in Britain, particularly in the divorce and custody courts, but these rights were won at great cost.
In the Victorian and Edwardian eras and beyond, courageous women from all walks of life and all classes rose up to fight for what we now take for granted. Many women’s movements existed, among them the Actresses’ Franchise League featured in this story.
I’ve gathered material from many sources, but particular thanks go to Julie Holledge for her wonderful history of women in the Edwardian theatre. Her book, Innocent Flowers, was quite a revelation.
It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions they fail not. They are new every morning: great is Your faithfulness.
Lamentations 3, v. 22-3
PART ONE
The Homecoming
1880
Chapter 1
Every jolt of the coach was torture. She didn’t know how she had stood the journey thus far, but this last leg was the worst. Or perhaps it was that she knew she was going home.
Esther Hutton, or Estelle Marceau as she liked to be known, attempted to ease her swollen body into a more comfortable position on the hard wooden seat, but it was no use. She gritted her teeth, opening her eyes – which she had kept closed for much of the time since leaving London in an effort to avoid conversation with any fellow passengers – and sat staring out of the grimy window. The November afternoon was dark and overcast. The weather had got progressively colder over the long, tedious days since she had left her lodgings in Whitechapel, and for the last forty-eight hours, squalls of wintry rain had battered the coach roof and stung the travellers’ faces when they had hurried into the various inns for a meal or overnight stay.
How she hated the north – and her home village in particular. Her full, somewhat sensual lips curled. From as long as she could remember, Southwick’s residents had successfully fought off attempts by Sunderland’s corporation to integrate the village into the township, as though there was something worthy in remaining separate. She had been brought up listening to her parents talk about the dregs of humanity ‘across the river’, as though poverty and disease and squalor didn’t exist in Southwick. The hypocrisy, that’s what she couldn’t stand. All right, her family might be middle class, her father being a vicar and all, but his work must have brought him into contact with the seamier side of life in the village. When she had been able to escape her mother’s obsessional control and run wild in Carley, the area closest to the vicarage, it was the smell and flies she had noticed the most.
Esther swallowed hard, the memory of the ash middens rising up in her throat as the child inside her kicked as though in protest at her thoughts. The children she had played with on those oc casions had never seemed to be aware of the stench filling the back lanes, but once, when she’d had no choice but to use one of the backyard privies shared by several families or soil her drawers, the excrement was piled up practically to the top of the wooden seat and she had thrown up the contents of her stomach right there on the rough stone floor. Some of the children had even played in the field where the scavengers who cleared the human muck each week dumped their grisly load. Flies lived in their millions on the dung hill and during the summer months they invaded the tightly packed terraced houses closest to the farmer’s field, resting on food and getting into jugs of milk and crawling on babies’ sticky faces.