The Bobbin Girls (13 page)

‘Times are hard,’ Lizzie insisted. ‘What if the mill should go on short time, or one of the boys be laid off or become sick?’

Harry wrapped his big arms about his mother in a huge bear-like hug. ‘Or the whole village go up in flames, or the vicar run off with the organist to a desert island? Aw, come on, Ma, haven’t we enough worries to be going on with, without thinking up things that haven’t happened yet? ‘Smiling shame-faced at her grinning son, Lizzie allowed herself to be comforted.

Jim set down his newspaper and picked up his fork. ‘Look what’s happening to steel, coal and ship building, not to mention cotton, which most concerns us. Production is half what it used to be, and exports are well down, so a man has to look after himself these days.’

A fact with which Lizzie didn’t disagree. She just wished her family wasn’t so beholden to James Hollinthwaite. She had this prickly feeling between her shoulder blades that he’d take the least opportunity to be rid of the lot of them, favour owed or not.

‘There’s talk in the papers that the country might go bankrupt. If that’s true, then it’s survival of the fittest, eh?’ Jim said. stabbing at a plump sausage and making hot fat spurt everywhere.

‘Now who’s talking daft? Who ever heard of a country going bankrupt?’ Lizzie was laughing as she dabbed at the spots of grease on the clean cloth. ‘Eat your tea, and don’t count on things till they happen, like your brother says.’

Alena was bitterly disappointed when Rob didn’t come home at Easter. He’d talked of little else in his letters for weeks. She’d marked the days off on her calendar in red pencil, her stomach churning with increasing excitement. Spring lightened her heart and softened the Lakeland air. Ox-eye daisies, red campion and ragged robin starred the hedgerows. She’d made an Easter card for him, which she’d painted herself using an old childhood paint box, ready to give it to him personally, under the old oak.

But two days before Good Friday she saw Mrs Hollinthwaite strolling through Low Birk Coppice and eagerly ran to meet her, hugging her like the old friend she surely was.

‘How are you, my dear? You never come and see me these days,’ Olivia smilingly complained. ‘You really must. I miss not having young people around.’

‘I’m a working girl now.’

‘Of course you are.’

Olivia made polite enquiries about the new job at the mill. Family health and fortunes, Alena’s father, even the weather were discussed in a general sort of way, but when Alena anxiously broached the subject of when exactly Rob was expected to arrive, the woman’s face took on a faraway look.

‘Oh, dear, didn’t he tell you? We’ve decided - well - James thinks it best if he stays at school for this first holiday.

‘Why?’ Sick disappointment swamped her.

‘Because coming home so soon after he’s started might unsettle him again.’

‘But he’s been away months.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s been homesick, hasn’t he? I knew he would be.’

Olivia nodded, uncomfortably avoiding the girl’s intense gaze, only too aware that her own eyes were still puffy and red from the tears she herself had shed on hearing the news that Rob was not to be allowed home after all. Yes,’ she admitted, in a bleak little voice. ‘He has rather.’

But Alena was too concerned with her own disappointment to notice Olivia’s. ‘And you think keeping him away from home during the holidays will make him better?’ There was angry disbelief in her voice that she failed entirely to suppress.

James thinks it will. He is more knowledgeable about a boy’s emotions than I am, I suppose.’

Alena managed, somehow, to bite back further protests, realising that she couldn’t say anything more without sounding rude, or shamefully giving way to tears. To be fair, Olivia probably had no more say in the matter than she had. James Hollinthwaite was a selfish brute, everybody knew that. But somewhere behind her breast bone, a piercing pain told Alena that her heart was breaking.

They’d planned to meet again in their favourite place and talk about old times, might even have boiled a couple of eggs in onion skins and gone pace-egging, as they’d used to when they were children, just for laughs. Now all her carefully prepared plans had crumbled to dust.

How would she bear it?

‘We’re going to see him, of course. On Sunday, to take him out to tea,’ Olivia eagerly assured her, and then wished she hadn’t as she saw hope flare and instantly die in the bright young face. She would have taken the girl with them, of course she would. Only James wouldn’t hear of it, so there was no point in asking. ‘I’ll give Rob your love, shall I?’ And the young girl and the woman regarded each other with something very close to despair.

Then Alena turned on her heel and ran, crashing deep into the woods, as if by doing so, she would find Rob there waiting for her, as he always had been.

Chapter Seven

It was in late-April that Dolly lost the baby. The child was born seven weeks premature with the cord tight about its neck. It lived barely ten minutes. Tom took one look at his tiny son and walked out of the house.

Alena found him sitting by the beck at Hollin Bridge, having desperately scoured the village for him. ‘Leave him be,’ Lizzie had told her, but she couldn’t.

They sat in silence for some time watching a clutch of water hens paddle about in the clear spring water, then Tom spoke in a low choking voice. ‘I only married her because of the bairn. Now she’s lost it. So it was all a waste of time. A bloody waste of time!’ And her big nineteen-year-old brother burst into tears and cried like a baby on Alena’s shoulder.

Dolly took two weeks off work and then came back, pale-faced and quieter than usual but otherwise recovered from her ordeal and perfectly well. The girls at the mill were sympathetic about her loss assuring her that there was no reason why she shouldn’t have any number of babies in the future. She was young and healthy, after all. It was simply bad luck. And she had that lovely young husband to console her.

‘Yes,’ Dolly agreed, not wishing to admit that the young husband in question was far from consoling. In fact, he could barely find it in his heart to remain in the same room as her for more than a minute at a time.

Most nights of the week he was to be found in the snug of The Golden Stag, not so much drinking as escaping from her. Or he’d go back to Birkwith Row and have supper with his family. Shed trapped him, he’d said, and now they were stuck with each other.

The Townsens seemed to think they were a race apart, altogether better than the likes of her. Dolly decided she hated the whole bloody lot of them.

Rob told himself that the other boys were in established groups that had grown up over several years. Fitting in as a newcomer, so far into their school careers, was bound to be difficult both for them and for him. But even now, months later, he’d made few friends, and felt very much the odd one out.

He’d expected tricks to be played upon him and had been determined to take them all in good part, but what he hadn’t been prepared for was the sheer vindictiveness of it all. He’d almost come to dread the arrival of letters, constantly worrying in case one from Alena should fall into the wrong hands. This fear so entirely ruined his pleasure in receiving them that he began to write back less often. And he knew where to place the blame.

Colin Briggs - otherwise known as The Boss, a name he had devised for himself which meant that he had to be obeyed. He was the one that the other boys looked up to, the one to decide who was to be favoured with friendship, and who wasn’t. He was Captain of the Lower School Cricket Team, Head Boy of the dorm, added to which his father made vast contributions every year to the school fund.

Briggs it was who encouraged the other boys in the dormitory to do the usual silly things like apple-pie beds and pillow bashing. Rob’s natural tidiness seemed to irritate them and, following the success of the lost pillow incident, other, more personal items such as shoes, socks or school tie started to go missing, which got him into yet more trouble with Matron.

Once the other boys learned that he didn’t like, and couldn’t play, rugby - that in fact Rob found team games of any kind to be anathema to him - his life was made a complete misery. He could never quite predict where the ball should go, and if he was unfortunate enough to catch it, would be flattened in seconds, kicked and butted black and blue by a mass of bodies, fervently wishing that he’d let it bounce past. He became convinced that he suffered harsher treatment than anyone else on the pitch, and took to avoiding being selected for a team by any means he could devise, while hating himself for the seeming cowardice. But the more he struggled to fit in, the more he was made to feel the odd one out.

Yet sport was apparently so important that it took place every afternoon between two o’clock and tea at four, after which came the final session of lessons which he welcomed almost with relief. He opted, whenever possible, for hurdles, athletics, or better still cross-country running, which he loved. But even this earned him more brick-bats than accolades. It appeared that actually running on these cross-country outings was considered soft. The idea was to get well out of sight of the school and any masters, then smoke an illicit cigarette behind a tree. The fact that he didn’t smoke, actually enjoyed running through the open countryside, and usually finished in the first half dozen, only proved that he was trying to suck up to the masters yet again.

The other boys seemed to resent his self-sufficiency, his quiet. thoughtful nature. Even his very real interest in nature and science became a subject of ridicule, and carefully collected specimens of fossils and stones, fir cones and feathers which he kept on his bedside locker, were broken or stolen.

Rob had simply committed the offence of being different.

He often thought longingly of those peaceful weeks in the forest, and missed Alena’s cheerful chatter and bossy ways more than he would ever have imagined. There were moments when he considered running away, yet he knew that was no answer. It would solve nothing. Besides, he was determined to face up to his problems, finish his education and somehow learn to stand up to his father. He knew what he wanted to do with his life: he wanted to work in a forest, with trees. All he had to do was explain this and everything would be fine. Miles away from James Hollinthwaite’s anger and power, such a decision seemed easy.

Under the skilled tuition of the masters he’d discovered that he wasn’t such a duffer as he’d thought. At first he’d spent hours longer than everyone else at prep, desperately trying to catch up. But slowly, bit by bit, the work began to make sense to him. Rob began to find the lessons interesting, the masters not in the least threatening and keen for him to learn. Once he’d got the hang of it, even mathematics was a revelation, a logical progression through a set of rules to arrive at an end result. The excitement of realising that he could actually remember and carry out these rules, and bring about the correct conclusion excited him so much that he didn’t care if it earned him yet more accusations of ‘sucking-up’ to masters.

His marks improved steadily, for all they would never be high, except perhaps in Science, which somehow made most sense to him. It was when he gained an A minus for a Botany project on seed propagation, and was cited as an example to the whole class that the bullying really began.

One night, as he prepared for bed as usual, there seemed to be a tension in the air, the kind of eerie silence that comes before a summer storm. Trying to ignore it, Rob pulled on his pyjamas and climbed into bed. Seconds later, the covers were yanked off and he found himself surrounded by a circle of scowling boys.

‘Get up!’

‘Why?’

‘It’s time for your penance.’

‘Don’t talk rot.’ Rob could feel his heartbeat quicken but had no intention of letting anyone guess as much. He glared from one to the other of them. John? David? What is this? What’s going on?’

David, one of the few who had made any attempt at friendship, looked shame-faced and apologetic. ‘Boss says you’ve overstepped the mark. Sorry.’

‘What mark?’ A movement near his locker caught his eye. ‘What the hell are you doing? Leave that alone.’

Colin Briggs was pulling his school books out one by one, and as Rob leaped at him to grab them back, hands held him down, pinning him to the bed. Impotent with fury, he could do nothing but watch as Briggs tore out a page here, scattered a few ink blots there, bent corners and generally left his usually neat books looking as if a dog had chewed them up or walked all over them with ink-covered paws.

‘When the Science test comes up next week, make sure you fail it. I’m usually top, for your information. And I intend to stay there. Right, lads, let’s go. Lesson over for tonight.’

The result of this ‘lesson’ earned Rob one hundred lines from the mathematics master, detention, a telling off, and a chunk of the Old Testament to learn by heart from others.

The Science test, however, was perfectly straightforward and Rob sailed through it, beating Colin Briggs to first place by ten marks. No other boy came anywhere near and he wondered if perhaps this was a deliberate strategy on their part.

That night they came for him again. On this occasion, Rob took the ‘punishment’ without a word of protest. There was little he could do to prevent it as he was held down by Briggs’s henchmen while he did the punching, with a few kicks thrown in for good measure. The bruises were cleverly inflicted on ribs and flank, so that when Rob dressed the next morning, not a single mark showed. Over the next few days, so long as he gave no indication of the pain he felt as he moved, and made some excuse as to why he couldn’t take part in the cross-country running for a day or two, no one was any the wiser.