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In the Workhouse Yard

March 1840, Birmingham

The pile of waste bones from the slaughterhouse had been dumped in the yard and lain uncovered and stinking for days. As we sunk our hands into it brown rats swarmed out and I gasped, fearing they would bite me, but they fled to their burrows in the workhouse walls. We dropped the bones in the ramming-bin and between us both worked the heavy iron rammer up and down, grinding the bones into meal. We went on for hour after hour.

The kinds of labour that bore little profit for much effort, not enough to support life, were given to those who existed by the feeblest of margins in the workhouse, under the control of the Guardians of the Poor. The bone-crushing work, normally given to the men, was meant to punish Clara and me, for we had both offended by complaining of Reverend Glyde, the workhouse chaplain.

Siviter, the workhouse master, watched us as we slowed, jeering at what he called our idleness and swishing his cane. Rows of small windows peered down from the high black walls: on one side the loathsome dormitories and the workshops, on the other the infirmary and morgue. Before us was the chapel with its cross; behind us rose the boundary wall.

The fragmenting bones squirted putrid marrow up at us. Sweat soaked the armpits of my dress; my shoulders were burning, my hands blistering. The bone-meal had to be shovelled into sacks and a new load of bones fetched. It had been just after six o’clock in the morning when we had started; now the chapel bell was striking ten.

‘Are yer hungry in yer bellies now, yer idle bitches?’ Siviter demanded. ‘There’ll be nought for yer today, no bread nor water, only work. Let yer lying tongues go dry, teach yer a lesson.’

It was the day after Ash Wednesday, when we had already endured a fast, but we made no reply, and kept on banging the iron rammer down, its thuds reverberating in the stone enclosure.

‘Idlers like you get a night in the lock-up,’ gloated Siviter.

I had been in there once before, for some infringement of rules I had not understood, hungry, thirsty and alone in the fetid gloom behind the iron door. And not only that: we had already been condemned to the ordeal of the Sunday Penances, administered by Reverend Glyde. It was unjust.

‘I won’t.’ I let go the rammer and stood doubled over, my hands dropping to my thighs. ‘It’s not right.’

‘Get back on the job, yer!’ Siviter lashed out with his cane. ‘I’ll kill yer, lazy drab!’

The blow jarred my spine and cold needles of pain shot down into my legs. I heard a man shout. As I tried to straighten up, another whack of Siviter’s cane caught my head and knocked off my cap.

‘Jane!’ Clara cried out, but she did not come to me.

The pain was immense. I put my hand to my head; it came away wet, and red. I knew Siviter had not finished. I was overwhelmed by fear, and by the grotesqueness of the scene: the hideous walls of the workhouse yard, the fetid reek of the bones, the blood filling my palm. His next blow sent me crumpling forward so that I lay curling my arms over my throbbing head, my face to the slimy cobbles, one eye open to the red rivulet of blood that trickled between them.

As I heard Siviter’s cane whistle again through the air, there came another shout from across the yard.

Siviter stopped.

‘Coroner Doughty, sir, good morning, sir!’ he called out, and to Clara and me he muttered that we should get back to work.

I could not move.

‘Mr Siviter!’ A cold, clear voice came closer to where I lay. ‘Mr Siviter!’

‘Good morning to yer, sir, Dr Doughty, sir, a fine morning too.’

Then I saw darkness and heard nothing.

After a time I smelt a gentleman’s cologne, and found I was lying on my side. My head throbbed as something pressed it down against the cobblestones.

My first sight of Doughty was of his wrist emerging from a white shirt-cuff, of his black coat sleeve, and the corner of his handkerchief. He was kneeling beside me on the filthy cobbles of the workhouse courtyard, applying pressure to my wound. As he lifted the handkerchief I raised my eyes to his: wide-open, dark, intent on mine. His face was close and as I looked up I could see the dark hairs inside his nostrils and the tiny black dots left by his cleanshaven beard. A frown creased his forehead.

‘She’s conscious again, but still losing blood.’ He pressed the handkerchief to the side of my head again. ‘Speak to me. What’s your name, m’dear?’

‘Jane.’

‘Jane what?’

‘Verity.’ I closed my eyes again.

‘Well, Jane Verity, you must go to the infirmary. Are you able to get up?’

Doughty grasped my upper arm, trying to raise me with one hand while still holding the handkerchief to my head with the other. I opened my eyes but as I lifted my head and shoulders the darkness came back. I leaned into the handkerchief, drooping my head against his hand with a sigh. The scent of his cologne revived me a little.

‘Malingering, sir.’ Siviter was still close by.

‘Get help,’ snapped Doughty.

Siviter sent Clara to find his wife, the Matron.

If I made no effort it would count against me later, so I heaved myself up and around, resting on hands and knees like an animal. My breath came fast and shallow, hindered by the pain in my back. The Coroner cursed, for his handkerchief was dislodged by my movement and my blood dripped on the ground beneath. I was dizzy and wanted to sag down again to the stones.

‘You’ve already given me sufficient work for one day, Mr Siviter. I have one inquest to hear in this place, and have no need of more.’ Doughty pressed the handkerchief back into place with a hand either side of my head.

Clara had not returned but Siviter called out to a couple of male inmates who came across the yard and, laying hold of me, hoisted me upright. I winced at their grasp, and felt I might faint again. Doughty gave up his handkerchief, placing the hand of one of the men to where he had been applying pressure, and standing away.

He turned to Siviter. ‘Put her in the infirmary with a proper binding on the head wound, and a milk diet until she’s healed.’

I closed my eyes.

‘Filthy drab, full of disease,’ muttered Siviter.

But, as the men lugged me away, Doughty continued: ‘My inquests have only four possible verdicts: natural death, accidental death, temporary insanity – that means suicide – and the fourth verdict is wilful murder. What verdict, in this young woman’s case, shall I recommend to my jury?’

I was brought to the workhouse infirmary and dumped on a bed, where I lay for some time, half in a swoon. To my relief Mrs Siviter did not come to tend me. It fell to Clara instead, who brought a bucket of water and an old nightgown to tear up for bandages. There were no dressings or medicines in the infirmary, only two rows of iron beds on which the sick lay coughing and crying out. I was lucky to have a bed to myself.

‘That gentleman liked the look of you, I’d say.’ Clara smiled at me. She had beautiful diction, having learned a cut-glass accent at an early age from her clients. ‘He might have been tending your wound but his eyes were all over you like a rash.’

‘You’re mad, Clara.’ My breath came easier now. ‘In that state, and me, to quote Mr Siviter, a filthy drab?’ Workhouse girls were considered ignorant and loose.

‘But wouldn’t you fancy a man with kind hands, darling?’ Clara arched a fine, dark eyebrow.

‘There’s no such creature.’

‘Did you not notice his gentleness, and how he pressed his handkerchief to you?’ Clara lowered her voice a couple of octaves and drooped her eyelids with feigned passion. ‘What’s your name, m’dear?’

I levered myself up to sit on the edge of the bed. The workhouse stench was powerful here: the odour of the paupers, whose clothes were never washed but merely heated in the stoving room to supposedly kill lice. Added to that were the vapours of bad food and worse digestions, of greasy heads, of sores and sweat, all mingled in an atmosphere tainted by the effluvia of the cesspit and the mortuary.

‘What was he doing here, Clara? He said he had an inquest. Who’s died?’

Clara did not reply. Her smile faded and she busied herself tearing the nightgown into strips.

It was not the routine for the Coroner to be summoned. The last time had been several weeks ago when an old man had fallen into the hot water in the laundry copper and half his skin had scalded off. Usually if a pauper died there would be a swift burial, and no concern over the reason why, as long as there was one less burden on the so-called Guardians of the Poor. Reverend Glyde might recite an extra prayer at Evensong, although I knew that he never concerned himself over the babies who, as had befallen my poor Nathan, died unbaptised and were put into the cesspit.

‘Who’s died, Clara?’ Perhaps someone on the outside had reported a concern of ill- treatment.

Clara, no longer able to maintain her teasing demeanour, detached Doughty’s handkerchief from my wound, and said she didn’t know. She was a poor liar, yet it was often hard to make her speak the truth.

‘Look at this,’ she said, showing me the blood-soaked cloth. ‘Fine linen, such dainty hemstitching – you might wash it with some salt and get a ha’penny for it at a clothier’s. A penny if you unpicked his initials.’

‘You do know something,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

‘Or you might use it as a clout for your monthlies,’ said Clara, casting it aside, then taking a remnant of the nightgown and dipping it in the bucket. ‘He’d be glad of that, I should think.’

I winced as she dabbed at my wound but I would not give up.