by Marie Joseph
‘It will be clogs to clogs in three generations. You mark my words.’ Oliver Peel left the house in high dudgeon one August morning, bemoaning the fact that the postman was later than usual. ‘The cotton trade is finished in this town; there’s three mill chimneys with no smoke coming from them, and the way things are going Bridge Mill will be next.’
Used to the morning ritual, Libby and Carrie hovered in the hall, one twin handing her father his walking stick and the other his newspaper and bowler hat. Carrie, pale but composed, had stopped skimming hastily through the paper, holding her breath as she ran her finger down the obituary column in dread of seeing Mungo’s death reported.
The fact that Libby, once she had give the tearful tale her full attention, had called Mungo’s threat moral blackmail and had laughed his threat of suicide to scorn, helped to assuage the biting fear in Carrie’s mind. It was no use saying that she felt responsible, that remorse was eating at her soul, waking her in the night sweating and shaking. Remorse was a wasted emotion. Libby had always maintained that; what people did of their own accord was their own responsibility. ‘Not that circumstances don’t sometimes push them over the edge,’ she had conceded rather loftily, ‘but in the main we work out our own salvations.’
Oh, to be like Libby, sure of herself, restless, with quicksilver reactions, taking over in a crisis and doing what had to be done without weighing the consequences. Like now.
‘I’ll take the post down to the mill,’ Libby volunteered when it finally dropped through the letter box. Father obviously thought there was something here he wanted to see.’ She held up a long buff envelope. ‘This one looks a bit sinister. Maybe it’s a summons. If he treats his workers with the contempt he holds for them I wouldn’t be surprised.’
Ettie Peel appeared round the bend in the stairs, a loose wrapper over her nightgown. ‘But there is going to be a storm, dear. The air is heavy with it.’ She came down the remaining stairs slowly, feeling for each tread with a slippered foot. ‘I think I have one of my heads coming on and, oh, I wish Sarah would come back. I know it’s selfish of me, but I miss her so much, and she always knows what to do. Thunder terrifies me. It reminds me of the sound of guns, and then I get to thinking about Willie . . .’
Immediately Carrie went to her mother, leading her gently into the lounge.
‘I’m here, Mother. I won’t leave you.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And Libby needs to do something. The long school break leaves her with so little to do, especially this year when Father decided there was too much going wrong at the mill for us to take our usual holiday at Lytham St Annes.’
‘But what will she do if the storm breaks?’ Ettie, to whom worrying came as naturally as breathing, allowed herself to be led to the chesterfield.
‘Tell her to ring for a taxi cab. Father can charge it to the mill.’
Ellie raised a small piteous face. ‘Why does your father insist on walking everywhere? He may have this notion of showing the world something or other by not having his own car and chauffeur, but he doesn’t stop to think that it makes me a prisoner in my own home. It’s all very well for him to say I have Miss Gray to dressmake whenever I need a new outfit, and that all we need is delivered to the door, but, oh, how I would long just to walk round the shops one day. You know. I could manage to walk through the Arcade if I took it easy.’
She frowned and put up a hand to the hair that was once a bright buttercup yellow and now was faded and streaked with grey. ‘And another thing. Why isn’t Libby showing more interest in her trousseau? The wedding is in four months’ time, and she hasn’t even looked through the catalogue sent from Manchester. All that sewing and fitting to be done, and once she goes back to school there’ll be so little time. And why does she insist on working next term? She should have left in July and spent the time in preparations. She told me one day she wouldn’t care if she got married in her best blue jacket and skirt, and you know how your father has set his mind on a proper wedding with all the trimmings. Dr and Mrs Brandwood would be so upset if we made it seem like a hole and corner affair. Harry is their only son. It would be dreadful if we let them down.’
Carrie went over to the drinks cupboard and poured her mother a glass of her favourite tonic wine. ‘Drink this, Mother. I know it’s early, but who cares? And try to stop worrying about Libby. She knows what she’s doing. She’ll probably get the tram and take her umbrella, and she won’t melt even if it does rain. Libby would burst if she didn’t get out of the house at least once a day, you know that.’
‘I wish Sarah would come back,’ Ettie said, sipping the wine and refusing to be cheered. ‘What if her mother decides she needs Sarah at home now Mr Batt had died? She has a heart condition, Sarah once told me, and that boy . . . he must be a handful now, and surely the village won’t hold it against Sarah any more. It’s nineteen twenty-six, not nineteen hundred. People are more liberal-minded these days, even about illegitimacy. But Sarah never speaks about her son, and I respect her silence. She’s such a good girl, Carrie, and she isn’t always wanting to go to Mass like most Catholics.’ Ettie took another pensive sip. ‘Now that would set the cat amongst the pigeons. Your father would never hold with that. I can never understand him having Sarah back, not with his high principles. I would have thought a fallen girl would be the last person he would want in his household, so it proves he isn’t as strict as he appears.’
Carrie turned away. Oh. Mother, poor trusting helpless Mother, she was thinking, if only Ettie knew the reason for her husband’s supposedly liberal-mindedness. It would be the pot calling the kettle black for him to condemn Sarah, when all the time he was creeping up the back stairs to gratify his frustrated desires. She sighed and glanced through the tall window to where the trees stood motionless against a lowering sky. ‘I think I will take a glass of wine with you, Mother,’ she said, remembering having read somewhere that more suicides took place in stormy weather than at any other time.
‘Oh Mungo. Please God you didn’t mean it and that Libby was right,’ she said silently as she watched the dark red liquid fill the glass.
If it rains, then it rains, Libby told herself, boarding the tram and settling herself in the seat nearest the exit. She would get off at the stop before Meadow Street and approach the mill that way. It would save going over the canal bridge, she decided, refusing to admit that her real reason for going into town was that she might possibly see Tom Silver.
And if he saw her, she had a genuine excuse for being in that street on Tuesday morning, wearing her most becoming dress and loose jacket with its false ermine collar. He might say something sarcastic, but she would brandish the letters and explain she was merely being a dutiful daughter and delivering them to the mill.
The tram was clattering its way past the Corporation Park gates now. Along the wide pavement groups of unemployed men walked slowly, hands in pockets, heads bent, shoulders dropping. She saw one stoop and pick up a discarded cigarette from the gutter, examine it closely, then toss it aside in disgust.
Meadow Street was completely deserted when she turned into it. No landladies gossiping on doorsteps, no children throwing balls up against the walls chanting ‘onesy, twosey, threesey, foursey’. Nothing but closed doors and a menacing boil of thunder clouds over the rooftops. Out at Westerley, where the view was not blocked by rows of terraced houses, the sky was yellow with sheet lightning, and even here the very air seemed charged with electricity.
Libby began to run. She forgot about looking for a chance encounter with Tom Silver; all she wanted now was shelter and the safety of her father’s office at the top of the sloping mill yard. Suddenly there came a blinding flash, followed by a crash of thunder, and as she turned into the short street fronting the mill she heard a scream. She looked up at the tall chimney, surprised to see it still standing. Then, as she tore through the mill gates, she saw a young girl lying face down on the cobbles, arms spread wide.
By the time Libby reached her a crowd of women weavers, clogs ring
ing on the stones, had poured out from the weaving shed. One women, her hair brushed up into an old-fashioned cottage bun, knelt down and lifted the unconscious girl into her arms. ‘She’s been struck!’ she cried aloud. ‘Me daughter’s been struck! Oh, Mary, Mary, love! I’m here! Your mam’s here. Oh, God, look at her eyes. What’s happened to her eyes?’
‘She’s been blinded by the flash. See, she’s staring straight at us, but she can’t see nowt. Another weaver, helping to support the girl in a sitting position, waved a hand in front of the strangely staring eyes, getting no response.’
‘Can you see anything?’ Libby, heedless of her best outfit and of the rain now pelting down, took the limp hand in her own as she stared into the panic-stricken face.
The girl, no more than fourteen years old, a thin waif of a child with a black fent apron over her short-sleeved blouse and skirt, opened her mouth wide and screamed. Her loud, piercing shrieks brought more weavers running from the shed to stand in a circle round the little kneeling group.
‘I can’t see! Oh, Mam, I can’t see!’ The hand snatched itself away from Libby’s grasp and began to claw the air. ‘There were this big flash and I fell down and now I can’t see. Oh. Mam! Help me! Help me, somebody! Help me!’
‘We must get her inside.’ Libby recognized Jimmy Earnshaw, her father’s tackler, a small wiry man with a moustache too big for the rest of his face. She turned to him eagerly. ‘It’s probably only a temporary thing, but we can’t do anything out here. Bring her into the office out of the rain.’
Gently the hysterical girl was helped to her feet, hands stretched out at either side.
‘Tha’ll be awreet, lass. Take it steady.’ Jimmy Earnshaw, a former weaver with the expertise of a qualified engineer necessary to his role of tackler, a man who could tune a machine just by listening to the sound of it running, glanced at Libby. ‘I never thowt to see you here, miss. You come to see the maister?’
Before Libby could answer, she looked up and saw Oliver Peel coming down the yard from the office block. Bare-headed in the pouring rain, his black hair already sleeked to his skull, he advanced towards them, head lowered like a bull charging a fence.
‘What’s going on here? Why have you left your looms?’ Ignoring Libby, he spoke directly to his tackler. ‘Get this lot back, Jimmy. What do you think I’m made of? Bloody money? The hooter hasn’t gone, has it? Go on, the lot of you, before I send you all home.’
‘This child’s been hurt, Mr Peel.’ Libby cringed as the man seemed to shrink in size. She almost expected him to doff his cap as he answered his employer apologetically. ‘We was bringing her into the office before sending for the doctor. She’s lost her sight.’
At that the girl began to scream again, and now her mother put both arms round her and rocked her backwards and forwards. ‘If you won’t send for the doctor, Mr Peel, then I’ll take her home,’ she said, facing Oliver with the rain running down her face mingling with her tears. ‘An’ we’ll neither of us come in no more.’
‘You can’t afford to stay at home,’ Oliver stated calmly. He pointed back down the yard. ‘Anybody not back at their looms in one minute goes home.’ He turned to the tackler. ‘Jimmy, take their names and bring the list to me. They’ll get their pay docked for the length of time they’ve been out here, every man jack of ’em.’
And with that he turned on his heel and walked back to his office.
‘The callous bugger!’ A woman with the wizened face of a monkey muttered in a low voice as she turned to walk back into the weaving shed. ‘He knows we dursn’t risk our jobs, the bloody sod.’
‘One of these days I’ll swing for ’im and gladly.’
The faces, pale from lack of sunshine and weary from standing at the looms in the humid atmosphere of the weaving shed, reflected a hatred so powerful, so intense that it was almost tangible. Libby, unable to credit what she had just witnessed, stood irresolute for a moment. Then the young girl pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes, held them there for a moment, and, raising her small pinched face to the rain coming down like stair rods, sobbed her relief.
‘Mam! I can see! It’s come back. The black has gone. I can see again!’
‘The Lord be praised . . . oh, my little lamb, the Lord be praised.’ The mother’s arms were once again round her daughter. ‘It were the shock, little love, just the shock.’
‘Take her home, Maggie.’ Jimmy Earnshaw touched the woman on her arm. ‘I’ll square it with the maister. Just thee get her home and coddle her for a bit. I’ll make it reet.’
‘Nay, tha won’t!’ Libby recoiled from the venom in the strident voice. ‘We’re going back to our looms like what he said. I’ll see to her. It won’t be the first time I’ve done the work of two.’ She lifted a clenched fist and shook it in the direction of the mill office block. ‘But I’ll not forget, and one of these days I’ll get even, if it’s the last thing I do. If her sight had gone for good he’d have done nowt but bother about his bloody profit-making. I spit on him!’ She rooted round in her mouth and ejected a stream of spittle on to the cobblestones. ‘I spit on his immortal soul! May he rot in ’ell, the unfeeling sod!’
‘I still think tha should tek her home, Maggie.’ The tackler took off his cap, revealing a bald head at variance with the flourishing moustache. ‘See how she’s shaking. She’s as white as a piece of bleached fent. She’ll not find the strength to stand at her loom.’
‘I’m all right now, Mam.’ The little girl, smaller than Libby had been at eleven years old, leaned on her mother for support and walked unsteadily down the yard. But her mother hadn’t finished, not quite.
‘He knows I’ve got four more at home like ’er, an’ me husband laid off since the strike. He was right when he said we can’t afford. He holds the trump card, an’ him an’ his sort allus will. If I go home now he’ll lock me out tomorrow, an’ if tha doesn’t keep tha’ mouth shut, Jimmy Earnshaw, tha’ll be locked out an’ all.’ Then, without a single glance in Libby’s direction, she led the trembling child back down the yard and into the weaving shed.
‘I’ll have to go after her, miss.’ The tackler wrung out his dripping cap and replaced it on his head. ‘If them looms ’as been left there’ll be ’ell to pay.’
Libby nodded once, then walked away in the opposite direction. First she passed through the outer office, with the trio of clerical workers on their high stools and the large safe in the corner containing the account books. Looking neither to right nor left she walked determinedly through the tiny room where the manager sat at his desk, and into the inner sanctum, her father’s private preserve. This room was carpeted, with a desk, a telephone, and a smaller safe on the wall. She opened the door without knocking and walked straight in.
‘Did you see me out there?’ she demanded. ‘Or did you take me for one of the herd? Father! I’m asking you a question!’
Oliver Peel had taken off his jacket and draped it over one of the chairs set in a semicircle by the window. There was a glass by the files on his desk and it was obvious that he had been drinking.
He jerked his head towards the closed door. ‘Keep your voice down, for God’s sake. I’ve enough on my plate trying to keep that lot in order without it coming out that I can’t control my own daughter.’ He opened a drawer at the side of his desk and slid the empty glass into it with a furtive movement not lost on Libby. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? What are you doing traipsing down the town on a morning like this? Have you seen yourself? You look like something the cat’s brought in. Why aren’t you at home seeing to your mother?’
Opening her purse, Libby took out the letters and threw them down on the desk. ‘You missed the post this morning, so I brought these. Doing you a favour, I brought the post down to you. That’s all.’
She was still identifying with his weavers, staring at their maister with hate-filled eyes.
‘You saw what happened to that child.’ Libby gripped the front of the desk and leaned forward, her face almost level
with her father’s. ‘She might have been killed, and if she had been you would have had her covered with a length of your flaming cotton and left her there till the twelve o’clock hooter blew.’
Oliver stood up, his six-foot frame towering over her. Outside, the sliding rain hissed across the yard.
‘But she wasn’t killed, was she, now? She wasn’t even blinded like she was making out to be. She was out in the toilets where she had no right to be, and when the flash came she had the hysterics.’ he picked up a fat ledger, balanced it in his hand, then dropped it with a thud on to the desk. So don’t you think you can came down here, madam, and tell me how to behave. And as for bringing her in here . . .’ He waved a hand round the room. ‘I don’t have weavers in my office. I never have and I never will.’
‘Even when they are hurt and frightened half to death, Father?’ Libby’s voice was dangerously quiet.
‘Even when they think they are hurt, and want to make out they are frightened.’ Oliver said the words slowly, and as he spoke Libby saw the way the veins bulged on his forehead and his already high colour deepened to a purple hue with two bright spots on his cheekbones.
And all at once the compassion which was more inherent in her twin’s make-up than her own rose to the surface. As they glared at each other she saw suddenly the way it was for Oliver Peel. A man who had to do everything for himself, never for a moment believing that anyone else could take the responsibility weighing so heavily on him. The threat of closure of the mill, the crippling competition from overseas markets. And then coming home every evening to a house peopled with women, and wife who had retreated both physically and mentally into a dim, complaining world of her own. Libby glanced over to the corner where once at a small desk her brother had bent his yellow head over his ledgers, and she thought how on the dark gloomy morning Willie’s brightness of expression and his sweet temperament would have lightened the atmosphere with a touch of gold.