The Town House

The Town House by Norah Lofts Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: The Town House by Norah Lofts Read Free Book Online
Authors: Norah Lofts
into the night; after the horses had all been shod and taken home we worked, by fire and candle-light on plough-shares and harrows, and chains, and spits and iron sconces. The other thing was that in towns all labour was organized into Guilds, which were communities of craftsmen, governed by strict laws, all of them aimed at upholding a monopoly. An apprentice to the smith’s craft, for instance, was forbidden to work for hire outside the place where he was apprenticed. If he did so he would be punished, and worse yet, it would count against him when, his apprenticeship completed, he applied for journeyman status and admission to the Guild. The person who employed him would also be in trouble, since every Guildman in the district would beagainst him, refuse perhaps to do the most urgent job for him for a period varying from a month to six, and, if the man himself were a Guildsman of another craft, his own members would regard him as a traitor. There were some forms of work which I would have been allowed to do, I might, for instance have helped to drive cattle to market, or dig somebody’s garden, but such jobs must be done in daylight, and I never had a daylight hour to spare. The smithy closed early on Saturdays, and then another rule came into force; every apprentice was bound to go and practise shooting at the butts on Saturday afternoon; so I had only Sunday, when nobody wanted cattle driven or gardens dug:
    I had not been in Baildon long before I saw that I had exchanged one servitude for another; in place of my Lord Bowdegrave I had a trinity of masters, Master Armstrong, the Guild, and money.
    One wet October evening a man known as Tom the Juggler came to sleep in the loft. It was Saturday, one of the two market days, and he was grumbling that the weather had ruined his trade; people were not going to stand in the rain to watch his tricks.
    ‘Another day like this,’ he said,‘and I shall be sleeping in Squatters Row.’
    ‘Is that cheaper?’ I asked, wondering whether all my inquiries had missed some useful piece of information. He laughed.
    ‘It’s free, you fool.’
    ‘Where is it?’
    ‘Down by the Town Ditch. Grant you it stinks, but not worse than this. Only trouble is, the roof leaks.’
    ‘Maybe I could mend it. I’m handy,’ I said. He laughed again, as though at some wonderful jest.
    Next day, when he took me along to the place he called Squatters Row I understood his merriment.
    It was at the rear of the Abbey, on the side farthest from the market place. It was a street, a good deal wider than any other in Baildon; one side of it was bounded by the Abbey’s eastern wall, the other by the backs of houses, some of them slaughter-houses. The street sloped towards the centre and there ran the Town Ditch, the drainings of all the gutters and privies in the town, the blood from the slaughter-houses, the over-flow from pigsties. It had, at some time long past, been decently covered in by an arched hood of stone, stretches of the cover still existed, but in the main it had given way. The stench was loathsome, but as Tom the Juggler had said, not much worse than the loft when it was fully occupied.
    ‘But I see no place to live hereabouts,’ I said.
    ‘Use your eyes,’ he said; and pointed across the ditch to the Abbey wall. It was heavily buttressed, and the buttresses stuck out to within a few feet of the Ditch, making, as it were, compartments with three walls. I looked along and saw that several of these compartments were occupied, most were open to the sky and to the Ditch, some were roofed over by pieces of sacking or sailcloth, supported at the foot on poles.
    A sick feeling of defeat squirmed in my belly and when Tom the Juggler laughed I could have hit him.
    ‘The north wind’s the sharpest,’ he said, ‘you want to get the wall between you and it.’ I noticed then that he had brought along his pack. He crossed the Ditch at a place where the arch, still held and chose his buttress,

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