The Time-Traveller's Choice

odd 'un

"Hullo, odd 'un," said Charlie.

I looked up. He stood in the kitchen doorway, hands pressed into his pockets.

"Didn't know whether I'd find you here after all."

"Couldn't resist a cuppa," I said weakly.

Charlie bellowed with laughter. "An East End lass under all that," he said. "What's your name, odd 'un?"

"Emma Scott," I said. "Pleased to meet you."

"Charlie Lawrence," he replied, "and likewise. Now where's this home I am transporting you to?"

"About that..." I said.

Charlie cocked a suspicious eyebrow.

"I'd... I don't want to go home, you see. I came to London to try and get a job."

Now the other eyebrow joined the first. To his credit, Charlie did not look my outfit up and down again, but his thoughts were plainly written. "What sort of job?"

"As a secretary," I said, lifting my chin.

"Have you been to Vocational School, then?"

"Yes, in Durham, but I lost my papers."

"I'll be thinking that putting you on the train back to Durham is the wisest course," said Charlie, scratching his chin.

I felt a twinge of curiosity. What would Durham in 1921 look like? How much of it would I recognise?

I shook my head. "There's nothing for me up there," I said.

"Fair play," said Charlie.

I leaned forward. "Listen, did you know that woman we saw at the Receiving Home? She seemed familiar."

Charlie hooked the the leg of the wooden chair nearest him, pulled it back from the table, and sat down. "From Durham?"

"Maybe. Anyway, I was just wondering."

"No, she ain't known to me," said Charlie. I noticed his speech was a mishmash of cockney and a blander type of English, as if at one point he had gotten used to speaking differently.

"Why would someone give up their baby to the Receiving Home?"

"Lots of reasons. Don't they have the Poor Law Unions in Durham?"

"Er, no," I said, again relying on the eternal view of Englishmen from the south that 'the North' was somehow a foreign country with its own exotic customs.

"Happen she can't take care of the baby," said Charlie. "She's down on her luck, or she's in and out of the spike. Maybe she's got others at home, or her man's took sick and can't get a job."

"She said the baby was illegitimate," I said, mostly to myself.

"There you have it, then. Better the babe have a new life free of its mother's troubles."

"But don't you think babies should be with their mothers?"

Charlie shrugged. "I think the Union's no place for a baby. But it ain't much worse than some of the other states a body can find itself in around here."

"What's the spike?"

"The workhouse. Where they go that can't take care of themselves."

"I see."

"It's a hard world you've dropped yerself into, Emma Scott. You sure you don't want to go home?"

"I do," I said in a small voice, "but I can't." And then, to my mortification, I started crying. Even the restorative effects of tea couldn't save me. I put my head in my hands and cried because I was trapped in a strange, unfriendly place, and I had no plan and nowhere to go.