CHAPTER XII THE WOMAN WHO WAS NOT ASHAMED
"'Tell the truth and shame the devil,' they say. Well, to tell you the truth, there are some truths which would indeed shame the devil!"—Moleskin Joe.
The potato merchant met us on Greenock quay next morning, and here Micky's Jim marshalled his squad, which consisted in all of twenty-one persons. Seventeen of these came from Ireland, and the remainder were picked up from the back streets of Greenock and Glasgow. With the exception of two, all the Irish women were very young, none of them being over nineteen years of age, but the two extra women needed for the squad were withered and wrinkled harridans picked from the city slums. These women met us on the quay.
"D'ye see them?" Micky's Jim whispered to me. "They cannot make a livin' on the streets, so they have to come and work with us. What d'ye think of them?"
"I don't like the look of them," I said.
The potato merchant hurried us off to Buteshire the moment we arrived, and we started work on a farm at mid-day. The way we had to work was this. Nine of the older men dug the potatoes from the ground with short three-pronged graips. The women followed behind, crawling on their knees and dragging two baskets a-piece along with them. Into these baskets they lifted the potatoes thrown out by the men. When the baskets were filled I emptied the contents into barrels set in the field for that purpose. These barrels were in turn sent off to the markets and big towns which we had never seen.
The first day was very wet, and the rain fell in torrents, but as the demand for potatoes was urgent we had to work through it all. The job, bad enough for men, was killing for women. All day long, on their hands and knees, they dragged through the slush and rubble of the field. The baskets which they hauled after them were cased in clay to the depth of several inches, and sometimes when emptied of potatoes a basket weighed over two stone. The strain on the women's arms must have been terrible. But they never complained. Pools of water gathered in the hollows of the dress that covered the calves of their legs. Sometimes they rose and shook the water from their clothes, then went down on their knees again. The Glasgow women sang an obscene song, "just by way o' passing the time," one of them explained, and Micky's Jim joined in the chorus. Two little ruts, not at all unlike the furrows left by a coulter of a skidding plough, lay behind the women in the black earth. These were made by their knees.
We left off work at six o'clock in the evening, and turned in to look up our quarters for the night. We had not seen them yet, for we started work in the fields immediately on arriving. A byre was being prepared for our use, and a farm servant was busily engaged in cleaning it out when we came in from the fields. He was shoving the cow-dung through a trap-door into a vault below. The smell of the place was awful. There were ten cattle stalls in the building, five on each side of the raised concrete walk that ran down the middle between two sinks. These stalls were our sleeping quarters.
The byre was built on the shoulder of a hillock and the midden was situated in a grotto hollowed underneath; its floor was on a level with the cart-road outside, and in the corner of this vault we had to build a fire for cooking our food. A large dung-hill blocked the entrance, and we had to cross this to get to the fire which sparkled brightly behind. Around the blaze we dried our sodden clothes, and the steam of the drying garments rose like a mist around us.