The Peppered Moth Read Free Page B

employees of Bednerby Main, in dark tunnels supported by wooden pit props. The ground might give at any moment and let one down into the darkness. The crust was thin. It was easy to fall through. Dawn by dawn the miners tramped their way to the pithead. They were of another race, an underground race. They were the scum of the earth, the dregs of the earth. (This is how Ellen Bawtry spoke of her neighbours.) The streets might at any moment crack and open in terrible fissures, and the menace beneath would grab one’s ankle and pull one down, however clean one’s ankle socks. It was not safe to venture far. Between the scum and the dregs one might hope, by keeping still, to survive, in some kind of suspension. Do not rise with the scum, do not sink with the dregs. Stay safe. Stay where you are. Keep your mean place.
    No wonder Bessie Bawtry hid.
    Bessie’s earliest memory was of a steep and narrow staircase. Strait was the way. A narrow, steep incline, of steps too high for her short legs, and herself midway, on the seventh step, crouching, unable to climb up, afraid to fall down. The drugget-protected carpet runner was tethered with cruel rods and clamped down with brass teeth. Its abrasive weave attacked her knees and her fingers. She was afraid to let out a whimper. The great sharp edges towered above her, the geometric cliffs plunged down beneath her. How had she got there? It was forbidden. And now she must stay there for ever, trapped, between two perils, in utter terror of wrath or of unbeing. She had been paralysed with fear. How had she got there? She had been unable to move. What had rescued her? She could never remember. Had she been slapped or scolded for climbing the stairs? She did not know. And were the stairs in her birth-home, in Slotton Road, or in some stranger’s house? Again, she did not know. Could that puny little staircase even have seemed so long, so steep, so high? Did the memory belong to her grandmother’s house in Leeds, of which she had no other recollection? She would never know, would never work it out.
    But again and again, throughout her life, she would dream of that staircase. A birth trauma, we now might call it. Will Bessie Bawtry ever learn this term? It seems unlikely, as she crouches in her cave. But so much is unlikely. Bessie Bawtry herself is unlikely, and so are her imaginings. (‘Where
did
she get those notions from?’ will be an indignant, often dismissive, but occasionally proud refrain.) Nobody taught Bessie to recoil from stale fish, from over-boiled meat, from suet, from dank lavatory moss on the steps of the outside privy, from the silt that stiffened the curtains. Nobody had taught her that the town’s unmade streets were unsightly, nor that its patches of wasteland were an affront to order and to common sense. She had never seen a handsome building or a well-planned town. Had she constructed for herself some image of the Ideal City from photographs in newspapers and magazines, from paintings, from descriptions in books? And if she had, what gave her the notion that she had a right to inhabit it?
    The house in Slotton Road had been built in 1904, not long before Bessie was born, but she was not to remember it as a new house, for the dirt had invaded it so rapidly. But new it had been, and not so long ago. It was a corner house, and of that the Bawtrys were proud, for corner houses were desirable. The street itself straggled along in a haphazard, low, creeping, speculative manner. Fern Villas, a semi-detached double-fronted building, had been built first, and was dated 1902 in crude Art Nouveau script: this was followed in 1903, if the runes spoke true, by Hurst House, marginally detached. Then came the rapid march of unnamed numbers, of two-storey houses in red brick with shallow projecting bays, not quite regular or uniform in design, but showing small signs of not always very happy or confident decorative independence—a fretted eave, a patterned airbrick, a