The Bobbin Girls

by Freda Lightfoot

  The next day, which was a Saturday, Alena didn’t see Rob. He wasn’t in his hut, nor did he put in an appearance at breakfast. When she enquired, she learned that he’d gone off early with some of the men to fell one particularly large tree. The day stretched out long and lonely ahead of her, with nothing to occupy her but her own hands. She wished now that she’d not allowed Mickey to hurry her away the previous evening. By doing so, she’d only made the situation worse. What must Rob have thought of her? Why hadn’t she settled the matter there and then? Jealousy could be painful, and the last thing she wanted was to hurt him. As the morning wore on her worries grew and festered, and a kind of self-loathing built up at her own apparent callousness. The feeling became so bad she was forced to speak quite sharply to herself.

  ‘I’ve done nothing wrong, for goodness’ sake. A chat and a stroll by the river, that’s all.’ If Rob had taken it into his head to be foolishly jealous that was his problem. Mickey was just being kind, giving her the ointment. She could feel the benefit of it already. Alena struggled to stop herself brooding and concentrate on her work.

  This morning she was being instructed in the making of besoms that would be used by housewives as sweeping brooms. She had learned how to gather together a tight bunch of twigs and tie it in three places with hazel withies. Then, taking a length of birch pole already stripped of its bark, she would knock it into the bundle, and peg it to keep it in place. The task wasn’t as easy as it looked and she marvelled at the speed and dexterity of the other women, who could make as many as thirty dozen in a day, for which they might be paid a halfpenny a dozen for their efforts by Frank Roscoe. What he would be paid later when he sold them on, nobody dared ask.

  Despite herself, she was surprised and almost glad when Mickey came to sit with her as she worked.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ he told her, and Alena flushed, either because of the compliment or because he sat so close. She was surprised how much Mickey Roscoe’s presence flustered her, despite her best efforts not to allow it to. He held the bunch of twigs for her, giving the withy an extra firm tug and a quickly tied knot to hold it in place. Alena tucked her hands hastily away on to her lap as he did so, concerned that they might brush against the tough strength of his.

  ‘Now you do the next.’

  The fire in her cheeks warmed further as her fingers fumbled beneath his steady gaze.

  ‘Your hands would harden if you did this regularly, and you’d soon become quick and skilled,’ he said, smiling down at her, evidently proud of her efforts. He watched how her cheeks glowed, how the wind lifted her hair, bright as copper beech leaves, from her slender white neck, and how the tip of her tongue crept out at the comer of her mouth as she concentrated.

  She half glanced up at him from beneath her lashes and wondered if this was to be her lot in life. Would she stay here forever with the coppicers and acquire more of their woodcraft skills? Alena decided it might be quite pleasant, if only she could persuade Mickey and Rob to be friends. The tranquillity and slow rhythm of the forest were already seeping into her soul, making her feel as if she had always been here, that time no longer held any meaning. Rob would surely be pleased if she could only banish this lingering ache she still carried for abandoning her mother, and agree to stay in the woods for good. She was the one who’d made the decision to run away in the first place, so she should stop looking back and harbouring nostalgic longings for the past, and look to the future. But how would they get through the harsh months ahead?

  As if reading her thoughts, Mickey said, ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She could no longer feel her feet.

  ‘We don’t live here all year, you know. We do have homes to go to, and when the worst of the winter sets in, we go to them. That’s the time the women catch up on their indoor jobs. Making more of the besoms, for instance. The men make the swill baskets and ship’s fenders, sell firewood, do odd jobs, see to their tools and so on. Then, at the first sign of spring, we’re ready to pack up and be off again.’

  ‘But I thought you worked in a bobbin mill?’ The worry over what she and Rob would do when the coppicers all went off to their real homes niggled unpleasantly at the back of her mind. Though now didn’t seem an appropriate moment to give the subject an airing.

  He grinned. ‘I’m good at my job so I stick with that. Besides, I need the money. There isn’t enough in coppicing for both me and Dad, not nowadays. But I help when I can.’

  ‘Are there many gangs like this in the forest?’ Alena asked.

  ‘Not so many as there once were. All the more work for us though, eh? There isn’t the same demand for coppice timber as there used to be, not since the iron forges started to use water power or coke instead of charcoal. Not surprising, mind, considering the way the forest was near decimated at one time. There were once pitsteads and iron bloomeries all over the Low Furness Woodlands and more charcoal burners than they could rightly support. Thriving industry, it was once. The forest is better managed these days but we still send charcoal to the gunpowder works, and the larger timber to the bobbin mills. Have you met old Isaac, our friendly charcoal burner?’

  Alena shook her head and Mickey’s eyes twinkled more merrily than ever as he grinned from ear to ear. ‘Now there’s a treat in store. You think we live simply, you should see old Isaac’s hut.

  Real hermit he is, but a man of great character and intellect, as he will tell you himself. No flies on him.’ He pegged the birch pole into the besom for her and set it to one side, his eyes never leaving her face. He wanted to keep her here all day talking to him. And he would if he had any say in the matter. Which was why, in his position as deputy to his father, he’d been able to send young Robert off into the depths of the forest, leaving the field clear for himself. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘You were telling me about the timber you send to the bobbin mills.’

  ‘Oh, aye. Might be five or six inches in diameter, or nearly a foot. They slice the bigger pieces like cake so they can stamp out cylinders for the small bobbins from them.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know about that, my…’ Alena stopped, appalled. She’d been about to say her brothers worked at Low Birk Mill, and could have bitten off her own tongue. One careless word could ruin everything. She felt herself start to tremble, struggling to think of something else to say in its place and cover up her slip.

  Mickey, pretending not to notice, continued with his tale. ‘They’ll always need bobbins, I reckon. Mind you, some of the greedier landowners have planted larch and other quick-growing conifers.’ He shook his head, pressing his lips together with disapproval. ‘Not good for our line of business. Gloomy dull place is a larch plantation, and doesn’t grow well here. Not native timber, d’you see? We worry that coppicing might die out altogether one day, which will be the death of the forest and woodlands.’

  Recovering her composure, Alena listened enthralled, drinking in every word. Afterwards she told Rob all that had been said, and how she had almost blundered. ‘But I don’t think he noticed. I mentioned no names.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Perhaps Mickey’s right and it won’t be so easy for you to get work, after all?’ she suggested, but Rob seemed certain that he could, once he’d honed these new skills he’d acquired.

  ‘Mickey Roscoe doesn’t know everything. I can do this work. Besides, it’s better than doing geometry and algebra far from home, in the freezing bare classrooms of a new school, I can tell you.’

  Yet strangely enough, it was he now who talked of moving on. He was distrustful of the attention Mickey gave to Alena, though not for the world would he say as much. Rob noticed how much time Mickey spent demonstrating some skill or other to her, which she already understood perfectly well, and he found that he didn’t much care for it. ‘Soon as we’ve learned all we need to know, we’ll find somewhere better. I’ll see you want for nothing, Alena, but I’ve decided we’d be better away from here, soon as we can manage it.’

  ‘You�
��ve decided?’

  ‘Aye, I have.’

  ‘And when did you decide?’

  ‘Last night.’

  She bunched her fists on her hips and glared at him. ‘Don’t I get a say?’

  He scowled at her, wishing for once she’d not argue but seeing the familiar stubbornness set in. ‘It was your idea in the first place that we keep moving. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind. Why can’t we stay? I like it here. I thought you did too.’

  In the silence which followed, Rob’s face became more serious than she had ever seen it. ‘You do realise they’re probably looking for us, Ally? My father will get up a search party and be scouring every inch of these woods by now. It’s right what you said before, we have to get further away. Miles and miles away from Lancashire. Perhaps as far as Scotland.’

  This new idea came as a shock to her, and yet was so eminently sensible, that, at a loss for a sensible response, Alena sat down in a huff and began to pull off her Wellington boots. Her mouth set in a furious pout as she wriggled her freezing toes, wishing again for warmer footwear as a tumult of confused emotions ran through her. She wanted to go with Rob, of course she did, but she also wanted to stay here, in the forest. She’d heard that Scotland was beautiful, with perhaps even more magnificent mountains than the ones in her own part of the Lake District, but it sounded a long way from home. A flutter of unease grew in the pit of her stomach as she recalled the warmth of her own fireside and her mother’s home-baked bread. What should she do? She longed in that moment to lay her head upon Lizzie’s soft breast and ask for her advice.

  ‘We’ll have real skills and experience to offer,’ Rob was saying. ‘Who knows where that could lead?’ His whole face was alight as he talked, gold flecks seeming to dance in his brown eyes. ‘I always wondered what I would do with my life. I knew I didn’t want to go to university, but nor did I want to work on the farm with my father or have to take over the mill one day. Now I know exactly what I want. Now I know where I belong - in the forest. This is the life for me, Alena. I don’t care which forest, or where it is. I mean to be a woodsman.’

  She looked up at him then, responding to the thrill of his voice, and her heart swelled with a sudden rush of love for him. The feeling was so unexpected it left her breathless, banishing the last of her doubts. Where else would she want to be, but with Rob?

  She pushed her feet back into the boots and stood before him. ‘What about me?’ she quietly asked, struck by a sudden and unaccustomed shyness. ‘We won’t always be fourteen. We won’t always be like this, a boy and a girl. What then?’ She looked at him from under her lashes, trying to imagine him as a grown man, fearful he might no longer need her then.

  Somehow he had moved imperceptibly closer, so close she could feel the fan of his warm breath upon her cheek, trace every beloved feature of his face, see the satin smoothness of his skin. Was he going to kiss her? In that heart-stopping moment Alena knew that was exactly what she wanted him to do. She held her breath, swayed slightly towards him, waiting - hoping - longing for the touch of his lips on hers. When the kiss came it tasted as sweet as honey. Just as she had imagined it would. Far too soon it was over, the merest whisper of a kiss, a promise for the future.

  ‘I thought - I hoped - you might want to be with me. But if you’d rather stay here, with Mickey...’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she breathed. It was enough. They looked deep into each other’s eyes, and after a moment Rob gave a lop-sided little smile and Alena grinned with impish delight. There was no need to say more. They understood each other perfectly. She still had her darling Rob, and now a planned future together. It was the fulfilment of all her dreams.

  On the fourth Sunday James Hollinthwaite walked into the clearing with a group of men hard at his heels, and Alena knew that their idyll was over. The search party had arrived and nothing would ever be the same again.

  Chapter Six

  Low Birk Bobbin Mill was a remnant of another era. It had changed little, if at all, since Victorian times. Various owners had attempted to make their fortunes but, once the height of the cotton boom had passed, few had succeeded. The textile industry remained an important outlet but bobbins for copper wire and cable and in a whole variety of other shapes and sizes were made there now, with strange names such as ratchet or spout, number 24s or three and three-quarters. The mill also produced such things as tool handles, toggles, axe shafts and similar products.

  All about the outside of the mill, in and around the drying sheds, were stacked the long poles of birch, ash and sycamore. The bark was peeled and the wood allowed to dry at its own pace over a twelve-month period, sometimes finished off in the drying kilns. These were considered to be ready when only a slight dampness remained in the centre, which made them easier to drill. They would then be cut up into slices, like a loaf of bread, and the bobbin-making process begin.

  When her shift finished for the day, Alena left the mill as always with mixed feelings; glad to have finished work, yet dreading returning home.

  The weeks following Rob’s departure for his Yorkshire school had proved to be the bleakest of her life. She’d wondered at times if she would survive. All the purpose of her life seemed to have departed with him.

  On their return from the forest she’d learned that her father had suffered a stroke as a result of an accident at High Birk Tarn. No one said it had happened while he was looking for her, but they didn’t need to. She could see it in the way her brothers avoided her eye, villagers stopped talking when she walked by, and her mother kept on assuring her that she mustn’t in any way feel responsible. She knew there had been a fight. He and James Hollinthwaite were old enemies, and because she’d run away with Rob, it had flared into something evil and dangerous.

  Ray Townsen had laid unconscious in the cottage hospital for four weeks after they’d dragged him out of the icy water. Now he lay in a bed specially installed for him in his own front parlour, barely aware of his family creeping in and out with bowls of vegetable broth or cups of tea. Their efforts were more often than not rewarded with a sour grunt or even a flailing left hand, that being the only limb he could move, knocking the contents all over the eiderdown so that cloths had to be fetched, the mess mopped up and the bowl or cup refilled for the cantankerous patient.

  ‘He finds it frustrating,’ Lizzie would say, always ready to excuse her irascible husband. ‘He’s always hated staying in bed.’ Whenever she herself nursed him, the result seemed to be even more traumatic. Ray would rant and roar at his poor wife, saying that it was she who’d chained him to this dratted bed; that he wouldn’t be here at all but for her.

  ‘Didn’t I give thee four fine sons?’

  ‘Of course you did, and don’t I love you for it?’

  ‘I took care of things.’

  ‘You’ve been a good husband to me, Ray. No woman could have wished for a better.’

  ‘Fought a war for the likes of that bastard - and he robs me!

  ‘Hush, Ray. Rest now.’

  None of his ravings made much sense to Alena, but they so upset Lizzie that Ray’s four sons and one daughter shared most of the work between them, with as much patience and good grace as they could manage. If only for the sake of their long-suffering mother.

  The worst of it was Alena’s sense of guilt. Not simply because of her own part in his predicament, but also because she could feel no real love for her own father, not even now when he was a pathetic wreck of the man he had once been. The distance that had always existed between father and daughter now caused her more distress than it ever had before. She wanted to grieve for his pitiful state, for his ruined life and the loss of his functions, as her mother did. But she couldn’t. She could only be grateful for the fact that there would be no repeat of the slap she had witnessed, and that the belt hanging behind the back door would never be used again.

  In January, almost as soon as Christmas and the New Year festivities were over, Rob had gone f
rom Ellersgarth. He had been allowed to come and see her to make his farewells. That was the first and last time she had seen him since they’d been brought out of the forest, and they’d stood together, not knowing what to say or how they should react. An awkward silence had hung between them, their shared experiences and raw youth making it impossible for them to express any of the emotions that churned within.

  In February, as soon as Dolly turned seventeen, the family surfaced sufficiently from their troubles to agree to Tom’s marrying her in the little parish church up on the hill. Not a moment too soon since she was already five months gone with his child and as ‘big as a cow’s backside’, in her own choice words.

  So far as Alena could tell, there was little sign of its being a love-match. The ceremony had been performed as quietly as possible, with little celebration, then Tom had reluctantly moved into Applethorn Cottages with his new wife and mother-in-law, and somehow the light and joy that had always been a part of his boyish nature seemed to fade and die as his new responsibilities weighed heavily upon him.

  But if life with her family was difficult, those first weeks at the mill where Alena now worked were even worse.

  Inside, the stark lofty rooms were crowded with men and women at their machines. Long slapping leather belts hung from the rafters and flew at a speed that could scalp a careless worker in seconds if concentration wandered. The wooden floor was largely invisible, being knee-deep in wood shavings and sawdust. Alena, like the other women, wrapped sacking about her legs in a futile attempt to keep out the cold. Since they were now in the midst of a freezing cold March, the girls also wore fingerless gloves, coats and scarves over their pinnies, taking it in turns to sneak into the boiler room and warm themselves whenever the foreman wasn’t looking.