End of the Line

Chapter Four. George

Chapter 4.

George 

Pop Benson could never bring himself to go underground again. He handed in his notice at the Wellington Pit, and began a search for a job elsewhere. Unfortunately, the only work he knew was mining. His dwarfish stature was ideally suited for this occupation and through many years of toil in the pits, he had developed extremely powerful arms and shoulders. It was therefore not surprising that despite his advanced age of forty-three he was hired by a company operating an opencast iron ore mine in Askam. The conditions of hiring included the option of renting a cottage - an option Pop took. 

The family's new home was a typical terraced miner's cottage fronting rather dangerously on to a major turnpike. The back yard led to an alley paralleling the embankment of the recently completed Furness Railway. With each passing train the house shook and enormous cracks, that seemed to worsen every day, crisscrossed the distempered walls and ceilings of the small home. Downstairs consisted of a back kitchen, a living room and a front parlour. Upstairs there were two main bedrooms and a tiny "extra"- no bigger than a cupboard, that Mary the eldest daughter commandeered. At the bottom of the back yard stood a lavatory (a major advance over the communal toilet they had shared in Whitehaven), and a coalhouse. There was no washhouse, merely a standing tap outside the toilet.  

Initially the four children shared one of the bedrooms. It contained two double beds separated by sheets suspended from a rope stretching across the room. Their parents occupied the other room and it apparently offered sufficient privacy, for Annie gave birth to a baby girl, Betty, in 1911, one year after they had moved in, and in early 1914, she became pregnant for the seventh time. Again, she was hoping for a boy, a replacement for Sid.  

The announcement of this upcoming birth caused great consternation. Another baby could only exacerbate the acute overcrowding, already the source of a great deal of friction, especially between the two boys. 

George, the eldest, was a fragile boy. Tall, thin, and quite passive, he made an irresistible target for Dan, his bully of a younger brother. The torment continued both day and night, as of necessity the two boys shared the same bed. George desperately wanted to be free of his abusive sibling. School offered no escape. There he was victimised not only for his effeminate appearance, but also for his bookish behaviour and his attempts to speak "posh". To escape the constant teasing, George took to spending most of his spare time in lonely vigils on the seashore, where he studied the activities of seabirds and life forms left stranded in pools by the receding tide. It was there that he discovered the natterjack toad. 

George, a Darwin disciple, could not understand how these noisy amphibians had escaped extinction. The toads had very short limbs and moved with great difficulty on land. They could not leap very far and only did so when startled. Normally they moved slowly with a lizard-like gait. Incompletely webbed feet made them poor swimmers. In fact, they sometimes drowned in deep water. Natural misfits, they became George's obsession, his personal conservation project. 

Each year, George anxiously awaited the arrival of Spring. It was usually early April when he first heard the cacophonous "mmhups" of the males summoning the females to the breeding grounds. George harvested the resulting spawn from rock pools on the shore, transferred the eggs to a large baking tin filled with salt water, and placed it on the windowsill in the back yard. In about eight days, the eggs hatched and hundreds of tiny tadpoles emerged to feed on the vegetation that George provided. After about six weeks, George added small insects to their diet. As the tadpoles matured, he placed small stones in the water. These stones offered a resting place for the small toads when their metamorphosis was complete. When it became time for their release, George took the tin down to the beach and joyfully watched as the toads jumped to freedom.