The Sweeping Saga Collection: Poppy’s Dilemma, The Dressmaker’s Daughter, The Factory Girl. Nancy Carson

       Chapter 1

      She did not really want to be there, but Poppy Silk loitered compliantly with her friend Minnie Catchpole outside the alehouse, which was called ‘The Wheatsheaf’, but somewhat appropriately known by some as the ‘Grin and Bear It’. Poppy was wearing the only reasonable frock she possessed; second-hand and made of red flannel with buttons down the front. It was a size too big for her slender figure and had cost her mother a shilling. Her black worsted stockings and inelegant clogs were made more conspicuous by the frock’s short skirt. Despite the frock, and despite her reluctance to be among her own kind, Poppy had seldom been short of admirers lately. She had the face of an angel, strikingly beautiful, manifesting all the innocence of the unenticed, and yet she was much too worldly to warrant a halo.

      There was a stiff breeze, not uncommon for the middle of May, and the evening sky was shredded with sprinting clouds. The road, growing dustier and more uneven the longer the dry spell lasted, was strewn with old news-sheets that flapped like misshapen birds against the wind.

      The Wheatsheaf stood alone, surrounded by wasteland on one side and the Old Buffery Iron Works on the other. Within spitting distance was a collection of wooden shanties that lined the Blowers Green section of the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, which was just another of the huge civil engineering enterprises under construction.

      The event was payday and it only occurred monthly. A horde of railway navvies had assembled in blustery sunshine two hours earlier at The Wheatsheaf, Poppy’s and Minnie’s fathers among them. The tavern was where they reaped their monetary reward for four weeks’ gruelling labour minus, of course, what they owed in truck to the contractor. Most were the worse for drink. Their pockets were bulging with money, which was begging to be spent on beer, whisky, or whatever other libation would intoxicate them into sublime oblivion and render painless their aching backs and limbs. Some had ventured further afield in their search for it, but were now returning, having boisterously worn out their welcome at other public houses and beer shops, and even wobble shops, which were illicit drinking houses.

      Poppy and Minnie were not the only girls aware that it was payday and hoping to be treated at least to a drink; many neighbourhood girls had gathered, hoping some of the navvies’ hard-earned money would trickle down to them. Minnie, the flightier and more buxom of the two, struck a pose calculated to attract the favourable eye of the young workmen who were there in abundance, and she was flattered when some young buck whistled his approval. Poppy, though, was not so sure about those others who sidled up and made bawdy suggestions, even though those suggestions elicited girlish giggles, or feigned indignation, depending on what was being suggested and by whom.

      ‘I reckon our dads have forgot we,’ Minnie commented.

      ‘They forget everything once they’ve got the beer in ’em,’ Poppy replied realistically. ‘Shall we go inside and ask ’em for money so’s we can buy our own?’

      A particularly well-built navvy, who looked old enough to be her father, suggested something spectacularly indecent to Minnie. She stared at the man in mock outrage for a moment or two, yet inwardly remained unruffled, before she turned round to reply to Poppy’s question. ‘I ain’t going in there. We’d get mauled to death by this lot o’ dirty buggers. I don’t mind somebody young, but not that lot o’ dirty old buggers.’

      ‘Well, I ain’t stoppin’ here much longer,’ Poppy said, glancing apprehensively at the same man. She turned to Minnie. ‘They ain’t doing to me what they done to that Peggy Tinsley the other week down by the Netherton turnpike. Seven of ’em, there was, she reckoned. They just left her there lying in the grass after. She couldn’t walk properly for days. And her best bonnet blowed away in the wind.’

      ‘Poor soul,’ Minnie commented, but with little sympathy. ‘Still, I’m glad it wasn’t me. If they’d done to me what they done to her, and Dog Meat had found out, it would’ve spoiled me chances.’

      ‘Why do they call that chap o’ yours “Dog Meat”?’ Poppy asked. ‘Does he eat dogs or summat?’

      ‘Course not. It’s ’cause he used to sell meat for dogs to the swells afore he was a navvy. Any road, it’s just a nickname. Everybody’s got a nickname.’

      ‘I ain’t got a nickname, Minnie.’

      ‘Nor me, but your dad has – “Lightning Jack”.’

      Poppy smiled and her blue eyes sparkled. ‘So’s yours – “Tipton Ted” … Come on, where shall we go? We ain’t gunna get a drink here. And I want to be safe in me bed asleep come turning-out time when they’re all drunk and a-fighting.’

      ‘Let’s have a walk up the town,’ Minnie suggested with a gleam in her eye. ‘Let’s see what the swells am up to.’

      As they were about to go, a packman carrying a case came up to them. He opened it up and displayed rows of necklaces, earrings, bangles and other trinkets.

      ‘Buy a necklace, Miss?’ he suggested to Poppy. He lifted one out and held it before her throat where it tantalisingly out-glittered the glass and paste example she was already wearing. ‘It’d look a treat on you with your pretty face, wouldn’t it?’ He regarded Minnie beseechingly, in an attempt to elicit her support. ‘Wouldn’t she look a picture, eh, miss?’

      ‘I got no money,’ Poppy informed him.

      ‘Got no money? Well, it’s soon got, a pretty wench like thee.’

      ‘It’s me dad what’s got the money,’ Poppy replied, the innuendo lost on her. ‘But he’s making sure he spends it on himself.’

      ‘What about you, my flower?’ he said, addressing Minnie.

      ‘I got no money neither.’

      ‘The men got paid tonight, didn’t they?’ the packman queried, placing the necklace back in the case and closing it up again. ‘I daresay I’ll be able to prise a sovereign from somebody afore I’m done.’

      Poppy and Minnie turned to go. They were content to leave behind the hawker and the local girls who were making up to the young navvies, content to leave behind the guffaws and the swearing, the shouts and the bawling, which were increasing in direct proportion to the amount of beer being drunk. A hundred ordinary workmen, each with