Handywoman

by The Great Mother, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Under Ravelling there is a forest. It is lying down. It has been lying down for three hundred million years, pressed so flat by everything I have laid on it since that a yard of it now holds what was once a hundred feet of tree fern and club moss, standing water, and the bodies of things with too many legs. The men of Ravelling call the forest by its layers, the Hutton and the Harvey and the Busty, and they go down into it in the black of four in the morning with a pick, a tin of bait and a bottle of cold tea, and they cut it out of me and send it up and burn it. That is all right. It was mine before it was theirs and it will be mine after. Everything they burn goes up as weather and comes down on me again.

I mention the forest because Hannah Gowland walks on it every night of her life and never thinks about it, which is how it should be. She has other things to think about. On the night of the eleventh of February 1927 she has a birth at number fourteen Office Row and a death at number nine, across the back lane, and one enamel bowl.

---

The knock for the birth comes first. It is a quarter past nine, and Jack Tweddle has run the length of the row without his cap, so that the frost is already in his hair when Hannah opens the door.

"Her waters," he says. "On the mat."

"Then the mat'll want scrubbing," Hannah says, "and that's not a job for tonight."

She takes her coat off the nail. She takes the bowl down from the shelf over the set-pot, where it lives upside down so the soot cannot settle in it: white enamel, a blue rim, a black chip at nine o'clock where the iron shows through. Into it she puts a cake of carbolic, a hank of string, her scissors, a clean towel, two folded sheets of brown paper and the brown bottle of Lysol from the Co-op chemist. The lot goes into a string bag, and the bag goes over her arm.

Jack is talking about the doctor all the way down the lane. He has been to Dr Lauder's house. Dr Lauder is out at a farm past Witton Gilbert, and Mrs Lauder has said she will send him on when he comes in, and Jack has said thank you, though he and Ellen have nothing to pay a doctor with. They have seven months of the lockout still on the slate at the Co-op, and the pit is back on the eight-hour day at less money than before.

"He'll come or he won't," Hannah says. "Bairns come either way."

Ellen Tweddle is nineteen and has never seen a birth, though she has heard several through the wall. She is standing in the kitchen of number fourteen holding the edge of the table with both hands. The fire is banked high, as it always is in the rows, because the coal is led free to the door and nobody in Ravelling has been cold indoors since they were born. The room smells of hot iron and wet wool and the hessian of the proggy mat stretched in its frame by the window: Ellen's mat, half made, a red diamond on a ground of old grey trousers.

Hannah puts her hands on her.

She lays them flat on the belly, over the nightgown and then under it, and feels for the hard round of the head and the long curve of the back, and finds both where they ought to be. She says nothing about it. She says, "Jack, fill the kettle and the big pan both, then get yourself round to your mother's." She says, "Ellen, you can let go of the table, hinny. It'll not run off."

Ellen laughs. Then the pain comes, and she stops laughing and holds the table again.

I know this. I have done it more times than there are stones in the pit heap. I did it before there were women, in the warm shallows, in the fern-dark, in burrows under the roots of the forest that is now the Busty seam. There is no hurrying it and no stopping it once it has begun, and Ellen Tweddle is finding that out now, holding on to a deal table in a pit row, which is as good a place as any.

---

The second knock comes at half past ten, while Hannah is spreading the brown paper over the newspapers on the bed in the front room. It is the youngest Robson lad, Alfie, eleven years old, in his father's jacket with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He stands on the back step and says it to the flags.

"Me granda's gone, Mrs Gowland. Me nana says will you come."

"When?"

"Just now. She was holding his hand."

Hannah looks at Ellen, who is walking now, dresser to window and back, barefoot on the oilcloth, a hand pressed into the small of her back. Between the pains she is herself. It will be hours yet. First ones always are.

"Tell your nana I'll be across directly. Tell her not to do anything till I'm there."

To Ellen she says she will be over the lane and back before the next one, and very nearly is.

Number nine is the same house as number fourteen turned round, as all the houses in the rows are the same house. Matthew Robson is in the bed in the kitchen recess, which they brought him down to at Christmas when he could no longer manage the stairs. Seventy-one years old. Hewer, fifty-two years, most of them in the Busty. His chest has been going for six winters and has gone. He lies on his back with his eyes half open and his mouth open, as if there were one more breath to come and he were waiting politely for it.

Bella Robson sits in the wooden armchair drawn up to the bed. She has his hand in both of hers, in her lap, the way you might hold a bird you had found in the yard.

Hannah does the first things, because they are hers to do and asking would only make Bella answer. She lifts the glass of the clock on the mantelpiece and puts her finger to the pendulum until it stops. She turns the looking-glass over the dresser to face the wall. She goes to the sash and lifts it two inches, and the February air comes in over the sill, smelling of frost and sulphur from the heap.

Then she goes to the bed, because there is not much time for the next part. The eyes have to be closed and the jaw bound while the body is still soft. Leave it, and by morning the face sets in whatever shape death left it in, and it takes force to undo, and the family see the force.

"Don't touch him," Bella says.

"Bella. His mouth."

"Not yet."

"If it sets..."

"Then it sets."

Bella does not look up. She is not crying. She is looking at his hand, at the knuckles, at the blue marks across the backs of the fingers where the coal got into the cuts fifty years ago and the skin healed over it. She is turning the hand a little in the lamplight, as though she were reading it.

Hannah stands a moment with the strip of linen ready in her fingers. Then she puts it back in her apron pocket.

"I'm at Tweddles'," she says. "Send Alfie."

---

Matty Robson came down to me for the first time when he was twelve. He sat at a trapdoor in the dark for ten hours a day and opened it when he heard the tubs coming. By sixteen he was putting; by twenty-one he was hewing, lying on his side in a seam no higher than a kitchen table, cutting the old forest out from under itself. He was good at it. He listened to my roof the way a farmer listens to weather, and when it talked he got out.

His brother Tom did not get out. In 1885 a stone came away from the roof in the Hutton, a slab the size of a front door, and Tom was under it. I do not apologise for that. A roof of stone is held up by nothing but the men's props and its own patience, and in the end it comes down, as everything comes down to me. Matty dug for him with his hands. When they brought Tom up, Matty walked behind the stretcher, and the next morning at four he went down again, because the family had to eat, and because the forest was still there.

I took Tom early and I let Matty grow old. I am not two things. I am one thing, seen from two sides of a lane.

---

At one in the morning Ellen is on the bed with her knees up and her face in the pillow, and the pains come one on another with hardly a breath between, and Hannah judges there is time for one more crossing.

The kitchen at number nine is cold.

She feels it before she has the back door shut. The fire is out. Not banked, not low: out, grey ash in a black grate, in a pit house in February. She has never seen it in that house. She has hardly seen it in any house in the rows, except where the people have gone.

Bella has got into the bed. She is lying beside Matty under the patchwork quilt, on her side, her boots still on, her arm across his chest. The window is still open its two inches. The breath of the room shows in the lamp.

The cold is good for him. Any laying-out woman knows it; you put the dead in the coldest room in the house and leave the window open. It is bad for her.

Hannah goes to the grate. She rakes the ash through with the poker into the pan, and kneels, and screws up the Northern Echo off the fender into twists, and lays sticks over the twists from the box, and small coal over the sticks. She strikes a match. The paper takes. She holds a sheet of the Echo across the front of the grate to draw it, and the fire roars behind the paper and browns it, and she whips it away before it catches. She builds the coal on, a shovel at a time. She fills the kettle from the bucket and sets it on the bar.

She does not ask. Bella did not ask either, when Hannah's husband Billy was carried up out of the Harvey in 1919, his back broken and his face without a mark on it; she just came in and lit the fire and stayed.

From the bed, without moving, Bella says, "Fifty-one year."

Hannah takes a cup down from the dresser, one of the good ones.

"Fifty-one year next month. We were wed in the March." Bella's voice is perfectly level. "I was cross with him this afternoon. Over his tea. He'd not eat it and I said to him, Matty, I'll not make it again. And I'll not, will I." She says it without the question in it. "I'll not, now."

Then she makes a sound into his shoulder that is not crying, because crying is a thing a person does and this is a thing that happens to a person, from underneath, the way a seam goes. It comes up out of her low and long and does not stop. It fills the cold kitchen to the ceiling. Hannah stands at the fire with the kettle beginning to tick and lets it.

Let it. I know that sound. Demeter made it on the road outside Eleusis, and the barley stood in the fields and would not grow, and the gods themselves had to come down and bargain. There are not many forces in the world bigger than the grief of a woman who has kept one man alive for half a century. Nobody should ask it to be smaller. It is what love does when it is all used up at once and still wants to go somewhere.

When the kettle boils Hannah makes the tea and puts a cup on the chair by the bed, with the saucer over it to keep it hot.

"You'll want to get back to that lass," Bella says, into the shoulder.

"I will."

"Go on, then."

The jaw has begun to set. Hannah can see it from the door: the mouth fixed a little open, the lower lip gone stiff. She goes.

---

Ellen's daughter comes at ten to four, with the head first and the cord once round her neck, which Hannah finds with two fingers and lifts over the crown as easy as taking off a scarf, so that Ellen never knows there was anything to find. Then the shoulders, one, the other, and the rest all at once in a slither, blue and greased and furious.

Hannah lays her on Ellen's belly. She ties the cord with the boiled string, two knots a hand's width apart, and cuts between them with the scissors she scalded at midnight. The afterbirth follows in its own time. She checks it whole by the lamp, wraps it in newspaper and puts it on the kitchen fire, where it hisses and goes up the chimney into the dark over the rows with all the rest of the smoke.

She fills the bowl from the kettle and the cold bucket, testing it with her elbow, and washes the child. Grease, blood, the waxy white in the creases. The baby screams the whole time, which is right. Hannah dries her in the clean towel and folds her into a flannel that Ellen's mother hemmed in November, and gives her back.

Ellen holds her daughter as if she had been handed something hot. Then the child turns her face and finds the breast, and Ellen says, "Oh," in a quite ordinary voice, like a woman who has dropped a stitch.

Out in the lane the boots are going by. The fore shift, early, heading up the bank to the pithead in the dark, forty or fifty men in a long loose file, the iron of their soles striking the frozen ruts, nobody talking. At four the buzzer goes, one long note over Ravelling. On the bed the baby lets go of the breast at the noise, and roars at it, and then goes back.

The doctor does not come. Jack comes, at five, from his mother's, and stands in the doorway of the front room with his cap in both hands, and is a long time saying anything.

---

At half past five Hannah scalds the bowl out with boiling water and a capful of Lysol, dries it, and carries it across the lane.

The fire at number nine is high. Somebody has made it up: it has been raked and fed and the hearth swept. Two big pans are on the bar, steaming. Bella is up and dressed, in her black, with her hair pinned. On the table, laid out square, are the things from the bottom drawer of the dresser, the drawer every woman in the rows keeps for this: a white nightshirt she sewed for him in 1912 and he never once wore, a pair of white cotton stockings, a strip of good linen, a twist of paper with two pennies in it, and a bar of the scented soap, Pears, kept back for years.

"I'll wash him," Bella says. "You show us."

So Hannah shows her.

First the jaw. It has set as Hannah said it would, half open, stubborn as a gate in frost. Hannah puts the heel of her hand under his chin and her other hand on the crown of his head and presses, steady, long, the way you press the sides of a jar lid, until the jaw comes up and the mouth closes. She takes the linen and passes it under his chin and up over his ears and knots it on top of his head.

Bella looks at him. "He looks like he's got the toothache."

"It comes off before they see him."

"Fifty-one year," Bella says, "and I never once saw him with the toothache," and she laughs, the first time, a short hard laugh like a cough, and puts her hand over her mouth.

Then the pennies on the eyes, to hold the lids. Then the washing.

Bella does it. Hannah fills the bowl from the pan, cools it from the bucket, tries it with her elbow, the same as for the baby an hour and a half before, and Bella wrings the flannel and begins at his face and goes down. Hannah holds him on his side for her when she reaches the back. Matty's back is mapped all over with blue: forty years of the roof scraping him in low seams, the cuts healing over the coal dust that got into them. Lines and freckles and blots of it from shoulder to hip, under the skin, permanent, blue as the veins of a hand.

Bella washes over them. She knows every one. She knows they will not come off. She washes them anyway, slowly, a hand's breadth at a time.

Those are mine. They are the forest, in him. Three hundred million years it lay in the dark and he let it in through his skin, a little at a time, every day for half a century, and it stayed. He has been carrying me about on his back since before Bella met him. Now he comes home, and he does not even need to bring them; I have them already.

They put him in the nightshirt. It takes the two of them, his arms stiff now at the shoulders, and Hannah shows Bella how to work an arm into a sleeve by easing it, not pulling. The stockings. The quilt folded down and the clean sheet drawn up to his chest. Bella combs his hair with her own comb and wets it to make it lie. Then she sits down in the wooden armchair, very straight, with her hands in her lap.

Hannah takes the bowl.

The water in it is grey, a little scum of Pears on top and a grit of something dark at the bottom. She carries it out through the scullery, across the yard, past the netty and the coalhouse, to the strip of garden at the back where Matty used to grow his leeks for the show. The trench is dug and empty, the ground white with frost, hard as a step.

She throws the water out along the trench in one long swing.

It lies on the frozen soil a moment, steaming in the half light. Then, slowly, it goes in. The ground takes it, as it takes everything, without hurry, without asking. Hannah knocks the last drops out of the bowl against the coalhouse wall, puts it under her arm, and walks back across the lane to see to Ellen before she goes home to sleep.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Magnā Mātre per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

The Great Mother, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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