Mistress of Green Tree Mill

by Mistress of Green Tree Mill (retail) (epub)

  Lizzie was aghast when she realized that the volume of orders coming into Green Tree was rapidly dwindling. She was not the only manufacturer to be hit, and her rivals were making Draconian retrenchments. First of all they cut staff, and then it was decided to cut wages. The workers were powerless. If they did not accept the cuts, they lost their jobs. When she saw that she could not hold out against the downward drift, the mistress of Green Tree Mill adopted the same measures.

  The town seethed with resentment and protest meetings were held in little halls and committee rooms all over the city. Strikes were called, but women with children to feed and no man’s wage coming in could not stay out of work indefinitely. Union newspapers and posters appeared with photographs of blacklegs but the drift back to work could not be stopped. The opposition caved in but the atmosphere in the mills was heavy with resentment. No one smiled when Lizzie paraded the pathway between her looms, no one spoke to her. The eyes of the women who looked at her were full of anger. As she left the sheds, a babble of jeering voices broke out at her back.

  ‘I hate this,’ Charlie told his mother one day when they stood together in the mill yard after touring the biggest weaving shed. He could see an anxious crowd of would-be workers outside the mill gate waiting to be picked out for the jobs of people who did not clock in on time.

  ‘I don’t enjoy it myself but we must keep up our profits,’ she told him.

  He turned and looked at her. ‘Why?’

  She was astounded. ‘What do you mean, why? If I don’t make a profit, who’s going to pay the wages of all the people who are working here? If I lose money none of them’ll have a job. Who’s going to pay the wages of the people at Tay Lodge? Who’s going to pay you?’ She was angry and her face flushed red as she spoke.

  ‘I don’t know how you can suffer the way they look at you in there. You’ve plenty of money. You could live on what’s in the bank for years,’ said Charlie bleakly.

  ‘I never heard such rubbish. I suppose you suggest I close Green Tree and put five hundred and seventeen people precisely out of work. Would that solve the problem?’

  Charlie went into the office with his mother following close on his heels. He lifted his coat off the back of the chair where he had slung it and turned to her. ‘I don’t know what’s going to solve the problem but I hate being on one side of a huge gulf and seeing the poor devils on the other.’

  Then he went home in his super-powered car that had cost more than the wages of ten weavers for a year.

  That night he apologized and they made up. Next day Charlie went back to the mill and Lizzie knew he had little alternative. She told Goldie about the trouble with Charlie and he looked sympathetic.

  ‘It must be hard for him. Perhaps you should allow him a freer hand at the mill. Why don’t we go away for a little while and you leave Charlie in charge? Then he might realize your situation better. He’s not a stupid lad.’

  ‘But how can we go away?’ she asked in longing.

  ‘You can say you’ve business in London. Go down by train. I’ll go the day before and we’ll meet in the Ritz again, Lizzie. Then maybe we’ll go to Paris.’

  Her eyes shone. To go to Paris with Goldie and leave behind all her problems about strikes and order books, mill output and angry workers seemed like a trip to Paradise. Goldie’s wife was now almost totally detached from reality but Lizzie was determined not to disrupt the peace and respectability of his family, though there were many times when she wished he and she could be acknowledged as a couple. She wanted them to go out openly together and show their happiness to the world.

  She cast caution away and said, ‘I’ll do it. When can we go?’

  * * *

  Once having made the decision, they wasted no time. The following week saw them alighting from a train at the Gare du Nord.

  ‘Let’s not stay in one of the huge hotels. Let’s find a small place where we can pretend to be an ordinary couple having a second honeymoon,’ Lizzie said.

  They were soon in a comfortable pension not far from the Rue de Rivoli where they were given an enormous bedroom with windows opening on to a balcony overlooking the street and a bathroom of white marble where the bath was large enough to accommodate them both.

  ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we’re really here!’ Her assumption of the character of a hard-bitten businesswoman – the front she presented in Dundee – completely disappeared as she stood on their little iron balcony and gazed over the busy street with dazzled eyes.

  Goldie slipped an arm round her waist. ‘Let’s go for a walk. I want to show you the sights.’

  The simple pleasure of wandering through Paris together, feeling the warm pressure of each other’s arm as they strolled, made them supremely happy. All their concerns and worries were thrust away for a few magical days as they walked beneath the plane trees and stood gazing at the bridges over the Seine, watching how the reflection of the arches cut across the satin sheen of the water. The beauty of the city dazzled them.

  They did not go out much at night, preferring to walk all day, pausing now and then at cafés where they sat close together and talked as they had never talked before. By the end of the week they knew everything about each other from their earliest childhood days.

  Goldie began talking about his wife. ‘I don’t want you to think I fell out of love with Theodora when she became ill. It wasn’t like that at all. We’d been drifting apart for years. She was always difficult, temperamental, very jealous of me. She was obsessed with you from the first day I mentioned you after that dinner party in the club. She seized on your name and badgered me, always asking if I’d seen you again, if I’d spoken to you.’

  Lizzie toyed with her coffee cup and did not look at him. ‘Was that why she wanted to see me? Was that why you asked me to go to Monte Bello?’

  Goldie nodded. ‘That was why. Nothing else would satisfy her. Her doctor said anxiety was making her worse. He thought she needed to be put at ease about something. I knew what it was. She wanted to see you.’

  She looked directly at him now. ‘Did she put the idea of loving me into your head? Would it not have happened but for her being so jealous?’

  He took her hand and said earnestly, ‘Oh no, I’d been thinking about you for a long time. It was as if she could read my mind. I kept wondering how I might meet you properly. You really hit me like the haymaker you handed out to Sooty. Everything about you was fascinating.’

  ‘Was?’ she asked.

  He laughed. ‘Still is. You’ve my heart like no one else has ever done, Lizzie. You must know that by now, but Theodora’s my wife and she’s ill. I’ve a duty to her and to the girls. They’re devoted to their mother. But believe me when I tell you that I truly love you. I’ve never been so enraptured by anyone the way I am with you.’

  She took his hand. ‘I wish we could be together all the time. It’s so marvellous being with you. I feel entirely different.’

  ‘We mustn’t worry about it, we should be happy and not think about anything else,’ he told her. Then he put his other hand over hers and said, ‘I want to buy you a present. I’ve been thinking about what it should be. Come on.’

  First they went to a jewellery shop where the assistant displayed magnificent bracelets of diamonds and emeralds. She tried on one after the other, slowly turning her shapely arm for Goldie’s consideration until he announced, ‘It’s that one,’ pointing to a very unusual narrow gold bracelet in the shape of a snake with emerald eyes. It was worn pushed over her elbow on to the upper arm and the price staggered even the lavish-spending Lizzie but he swept her objections aside, saying, ‘We’ll take it and you must have a gown to wear it with.’

  In the dressmaking establishment of the famous couturier Paul Poiret the women ran to and fro with silken gowns of the most brilliant colours. When they were held out Lizzie was reluctant to try any of them on.

  ‘They’re so bright, and I’m a widow, remember. It would look too bold if I wore one of thos
e lovely things.’

  ‘But you are bold. You always looked like a banked fire in widow’s weeds. You ought to blaze with colour and show your true nature. I want you to parade like a princess,’ said Goldie.

  When she was robed in a pink and purple gown edged with brilliants and swathed over her hips in soft folds, she hardly recognized herself in the mirror. The hem dipped and rose in jagged drops, coming so high in the front that it showed her knees.

  When she stepped out of the dressing room and paraded before Goldie, he was enchanted and cried out, ‘That’s the one. You must have it.’

  The girls clucked round and adorned her head with a sort of turban. Then they draped long strings of beads round her neck and found her a pair of high-heeled, pointed-toe slippers.

  When they arrived back at their hotel with all her new finery in packages and boxes she said to him, ‘When will I ever wear all this?’

  ‘You’ll wear it tonight when we go out to dinner,’ he told her. ‘I’ll sit and look at you all evening and after that it doesn’t matter when you wear it again. I’ll have seen you in it for the first time.’

  They dined by candlelight in a café by the river Seine and both of them felt that they had reached the high point of their lives. Their happiness affected everyone around them and the other diners smiled indulgently at the handsome middle-aged couple who were so obviously engrossed in each other.

  ‘They have to be lovers,’ said one waiter to another, ‘I’ve never seen a married couple look like that.’

  During the journey back across the Channel they were quiet and subdued. In London while waiting at the station for Lizzie’s train to leave, they clung to each other as if they were parting for ever, and as her train rattled nearer and nearer to Dundee, a sense of foreboding filled her. She began worrying about what she would find at Green Tree and her worries overlaid the memories of happiness and pleasure in Paris. Instinct told her that problems lay ahead. What can they be? she wondered.

  Chapter 27

  At Tay Lodge a mournful Maggy informed Lizzie that Charlie had crashed his car. His tyres had skidded on wet tram rails and he’d run into a Ninewells tramcar.

  ‘Is he hurt?’ asked his mother and was quickly told that he was unscathed. The tramcar company was sending him a bill, however.

  There was more. ‘Rosie and Bertha and Lexie are having to leave their house. Their building’s being pulled down and a grand new town hall’s being built on the Vaults.’

  ‘Lexie can always come home here.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll no’ do that. She’s in with a bunch of folk that hasn’t a good word to say about mill owners and their mansions. They’ll find another place. Johnny sends money to Rosie but she’s fair cut up about leaving the room. We were all born there, and so was our mother and her mother before her.’

  ‘Don’t worry, they’ll settle down somewhere else,’ Lizzie reassured Maggy. Those bits of bad news were not enough to account for her presentiments. She was sure that something else was about to be sprung on her.

  She did not have long to wait. No sooner did she set foot in her Green Tree office where a bored Charlie was sitting at her desk than there was a terrible rumbling sound as if the earth was opening. Then, after a pause that seemed to last for ever, the alarm hooter screamed.

  Lizzie and her son headed the rush into the yard where a scene of devastation met her eyes. In the most distant corner, where the buildings of the little mill she had snatched from under Sooty Sutherland’s nose stood, was a pile of rubble. One of the spinning sheds was half in ruins. She saw at once that its chimney had collapsed on to the gable wall. The interior of the shed was gaping and exposed and groups of stunned women were staggering into the open from the debris.

  She ran over to where a forewoman was counting the group… ‘Jeanie and Meg and Bell and Isa. Where’s the bairns? Oh, there they are. Where’s Kitty and daft Annie?’

  Two women, their faces smeared with dust, called out, ‘We’re here. But where’s wee Helen?’

  The survivors were counted and counted again while everyone agreed that it was a blessing the shed was not full, for the mill was only working at half capacity. The forewoman kept on calling out for wee Helen but she never answered. Eventually Charlie and one of the men climbed over the pile of stones and within minutes they called back, ‘She’s here. She’s dead.’

  They pulled her out and Lizzie was one of the group of scared women who stood looking at the pathetic bundle covered with a white sheet.

  ‘Who is it?’ she asked the forewoman.

  ‘It’s Helen Allison. The one wi’ the bad leg. She’s no’ been here long. A big stone must have fell on her.’

  Lizzie nodded. She knew Mrs Allison, a new employee who had been taken on when a neighbouring mill paid off workers. She was a skilled and swift spinner and needed the work because she had two children and her husband was unemployed.

  Lizzie turned to her young and eager manager who was also a recent appointment and very anxious to make his mark. ‘Make arrangements about paying for the funeral and the compensation,’ she told him.

  Then, regardless of danger or her fine clothes, she climbed into the devastated shed and started examining the machinery to see if it had escaped damage. She was unaware of the astonishment in the eyes of the people around Helen Allison’s body as she did this.

  For the next week an atmosphere of resentment met Lizzie every time she stepped out of her office. It seemed that whatever could go wrong, did. Machinery broke down mysteriously; there was a flash fire in one of the sheds; schedules were not met; orders misdirected. She was almost afraid to go home at night, and as for snatching an afternoon at Gowan Bank with Goldie, that was impossible. Through all the time of trouble the sun shone, dappling the courtyard with golden pools as she sat in the office. Paris seemed a million miles away.

  One morning she was astonished to be met at the gate by a deputation of women.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked, climbing out of her carriage.

  ‘We’re on strike,’ they told her.

  Her first feeling was astonishment. Her second was anger. She swept past them into her office and stood glaring from the window while the strikers massed outside the gate, waylaying any woman who might have wanted to work. No one passed their picket line. It was obvious that she would have to go out and reason with them. Charlie seemed to have disappeared so, surrounded by her managers, she went out into the throng and listened to the complaints.

  ‘We want more money,’ said one of the women.

  ‘And shorter hours,’ said another.

  Lizzie held up a hand. ‘That’s impossible and you know it. I’m the only mill in Dundee that’s not working short time now. You should be grateful.’

  A voice rose from the back of the crowd: ‘It’s about wee Helen, really. That was a bad show.’

  ‘What do you mean? Accidents happen but we’ve a good record here.’ She turned and looked at the shed which was being repaired by a team of stonemasons.

  A little woman standing near Lizzie spoke up: ‘We dinna like working here now. Wee Helen’s haunting the mill.’

  Lizzie snorted, ‘What rubbish! If that’s why you’re striking you’d better go back at once or I’ll pay off the lot of you.’

  ‘It is haunted,’ said another woman, ‘I’ve seen her. She comes in and sits down at a weaving machine beside the woman working it.’

  ‘You’re all hysterical. I won’t have this nonsense holding up the work of my mill. Go back inside or I’m warning you, you won’t have jobs to go back to.’

  She was about to turn on her heel when a stronger, more confident voice rang out from the centre of the crowd. ‘The strike’s got nothing to do with ghosts. It’s to do with the living.’

  Lizzie’s eye searched the crowd for the speaker and saw a grey-haired woman in a cotton overall standing with her arms crossed over her chest.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ve organized ourselves. The
girl in the green hat told us how to do it. You’d better listen, Green Tree.’

  ‘But I can’t afford a strike now. Orders are hard to come by and we need every one we’ve got. Don’t think I just sit here and rake in money. I wish it was true. You should try changing places with me.’

  The spokeswoman was pushing her way through the crowd with a sheaf of papers in her hand. ‘We’ve several points of dispute. First of all we want a rise of four per cent. That’s to replace the two per cent cut in wages that was brought in last winter. You said you’d give us an increase when things were better and you never did.’

  Lizzie decided not to argue each point but to hear them all first. She said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘And we want shorter hours, especially for the nippers. The lassie in the green hat says that in India there’s a law that stops black bairns working more than seven hours a day. Our bairns work twelve – and they have to go to school at night. The wee souls are exhausted all the time.

  ‘We want better safety measures, guards on machinery and proper first-aid rooms. We want paid lunch breaks and half hour breaks in the middle of the morning and the afternoon. We want time off for sickness. We want our jobs to be kept for us if we’re ill or having a bairn. Anyone who’s injured or killed should be paid proper compensation.’

  At this point she lifted her eyes and stared hard at Lizzie. ‘You only paid fifty pounds to the Allison bairns when Helen was killed. That was what decided us to strike. Fifty pounds is no’ enough for anybody’s life, Mrs Kinge.’

  Lizzie turned and stared at her young manager. He flushed as he gazed back at her. ‘I was trying to do the best I could. I was saving you money,’ he whispered.

  She knew that she should have checked on the compensation for the dead woman but she had been so busy and so distracted… Her anger against herself rose but she was determined not to show weakness, for the conditions presented to her by the strikers were excessive. To grant all of them would put her out of business.