The Bobbin Girls (15 page)

Even so, Rob had one last valiant try. ‘You can’t make me do what you say,’ he cried. ‘Send me to a new school if you must, but you can’t make me learn, or obey your every command!’ And he ran from the room to hide the shame of his tears in the privacy of his room.

Later, when the house was in darkness, despite the howl of the wind in the eaves and the spatter of rain on the window panes, Rob crept from his warm bed still fully clothed and let himself quietly out of the kitchen door. It was a daunting walk through the eerie stillness of night, beneath the whispering blackness of the beech trees that lined the long drive, but his mind was made up. He didn’t trust his father, and knew he must grab this opportunity while he could.

It took only a scattering of shingle against her window-pane to bring Alena from her bed. Rob saw the twitch of her curtains then in seconds she was beside him, her blue eyes glinting with excitement in the moonlight, the warmth of her body seeming to enfold him even though she did not touch him. Her hands thrust deep into her pockets and her voice quite matter-of-fact, she asked him how he was.

Rob shrugged. All the explanations he’d planned to say to her had vanished from his head. They sat on the garden wall, kicking their heels and gazing at the moon sailing high above a bank of clouds as youth and embarrassment, and their shared misery, robbed them of speech. They could find no words to describe their feelings, or the difficulties in their new lives. Rob chewed on his lip while Alena was scarcely able to look him in the eye, let alone take part in her usual bold teasing.

She shied away from talking about her father’s illness, knew better than to ask him questions about his own father, or the new school he was going to. And all the gossip she’d so often longed to tell him, about Tom and Dolly, Sandra and her crush on Harry, Jim getting married and Kit’s latest girlfriend whom he’d promised to take to Windermere and then forgotten and left standing in the rain, seemed suddenly small and insignificant. Not at all the sort of thing which would be of interest to this public schoolboy in smart grey trousers and blazer. He seemed more like a stranger to her and Alena could find no way to bridge the yawning gap between them. Only when he jumped down from the wall did the words burst from her.

‘You’ll come back for me one day, won’t you?’

‘Always.’

‘You won’t forget?’

‘How could I forget? You make me who I am.’

It was enough, and said everything that needed to be said between them. Which was just as well for the next morning, almost the instant dawn broke, Rob was called from his bed and taken by his father in the motor to the station at Lake Side where he was packed on to a north-bound train with his trunk, a five-pound note, and instructions to make it work this time.

‘I want no namby-pamby in this family,’ James coldly informed Rob as he slammed the carriage door shut. Then he walked from the platform without a backward glance, failing entirely to see the stark hatred in his son’s eyes, or the grim set of his young face.

James’s fears were proved entirely correct and by August a coalition government had been formed. In September Britain was indeed forced off the Gold Standard, prices rose, a means test was introduced, and in October a hasty general election brought the Conservatives into power on a landslide. The only businesses that had more customers than they could cope with were the soup kitchens which sprang up the length and breadth of the land.

There were, however, new industries coming, of which James was only too aware. The electric grid was spreading fast; cinema, motor cars, and domestic products of all kinds coming to the fore. But what good would they do him? He knew nothing of such things.

He sat in his study for hours on end, reading his account books until he could have recited them like psalms. If the bobbin mill wasn’t going to make his fortune, there must be some other way. What other skills did he have? What else did he own? A farm, too small to make anyone rich. A patch of woodland, and some land. How could he best use his resources?

It was exceedingly vexing to be disappointed in his business as well as in his son.

Then he remembered George Tyson. George had done very nicely for himself. Made a fortune in shares, on top of the one he already had. Unfortunately, James had no liquid capital to speak of. George had also become a local councillor, and was canny enough to keep his ear to the ground for where the money was being made these days. With that fact in mind, it might be worth telling Olivia to invite the Tysons over for another of her famous dinners. Aye, that might be the very thing.

Chapter Eight

1933

With her seventeenth birthday in sight, Alena decided that Hallowe’en mischief and climbing trees were no longer the kind of activities she should be interested in. She’d grown taller, her curves had filled out to a slender gracefulness, her face matured to a fine beauty, shedding some of its soft plumpness without losing any of its natural allure. Her eyes still glowed with a glorious brilliance, laughter never far away. And although she’d persuaded Lizzie to trim and bob her hair, it still reached to her shoulders and curled as haphazardly as ever. Alena liked the more grown-up style, and spent happy hours brushing and curling it.

She’d worked at Low Birk Mill for nearly three years now, and though she still constantly thought of Rob and his promise to return, deep down she no longer believed it. She found that it simply hurt too much to devote time and emotion to longing for a lost friendship.

Since that poignant moonlit night, Rob had never again returned to the valley. Even their correspondence had, if anything, grown more sparse and painfully polite. Sometimes Alena thought he only wrote to her out of duty, and he never said anything which remotely encouraged an exchange of confidences. He sent her cards on her birthday, of course, and at Christmas, but she had learned not to reveal quite so much of her feelings in her more frequent letters to him. What was the point, when it only left her weeping into a damp pillow all night?

She’d tried not to blame him. Yet a part of her railed and raged at his quiet acceptance of his lot, telling herself that if he really loved her, he would stand up to his father and insist on coming home, at least for a visit.

But in the end she’d been forced to accept that she must make a new life for herself, and in the years since their final parting, had found many friends amongst the girls in the mill.

She’d also learned that aching legs and back from the hours of standing and carrying swill-loads of bobbins, not to mention cold feet and chilblains, were all part of the job. But not for a minute would she have changed places with anyone. The girls were a cheery bunch, always ready with a joke and a friendly smile. Alena was as happy as she could be, in the circumstances.

Edith, who had been there the longest, would often be seen clutching her aching back and complaining, ‘Eeh, I’m that worn out, I wish I were in heaven wi’ t’door locked.’ No one took this declaration very seriously.

Then there was Annie Cockcroft, giggly Deirdre Swainson, Mary Jane Linklater, who suffered from rheumatism and chills on her chest, moaning Minnie Hodgson and her group of stalwarts, quiet, pretty little Sandra, and Dolly. About a dozen girls altogether, including Alena herself. A small but merry band, as Edith was fond of saying.

The men weren’t bad either; not that they ever offered to help the women lift a heavy swill, or to load a sack of finished bobbins into the wagon for them. Every man and woman for themself, that was the unvarying rule, and one that Alena approved of. She certainly never asked for help.

‘You’ve to pull your own weight here,’ they’d shout, if anyone dared to complain.

‘I’m not carrying you.’ Or, ‘Fetch it yourself, I’m not your donkey.’

Only the foreman, Stan Renshaw, was a bit of a trial. If he took a dislike to a girl, he could make life very difficult by leaving her on the same machine for months on end.

‘He left me on the boring machine for nigh on two year,’ Edith told her. ‘And right boring it was too. When I asked for a change, he says, "All right, you can change with Annie sitting next to you."’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘So I spent another two year doing the same job, only on a different machine. Men!’

‘Time that one was put out to grass,’ Minnie agreed, and a few days later, to everyone’s astonishment, Stan Renshaw did indeed declare his intention to retire. The girls excitedly discussed who would take his place.

‘I hope it isn’t Alex,’ Deirdre groaned.

‘Or that awful Arthur who’s always giving little homilies about the devil watching us while we work. Gives me the creeps!’

‘Happen it’ll be your Harry, Alena,’ Sandra suggested.

‘I very much doubt it.’ Somehow Alena instinctively knew that for all he had little to do with the day-to-day running of his mill, James Hollinthwaite would never favour a member of the Townsen family with promotion. Though after that fight with her father, he certainly owed them one. Yet Alena guessed it would not be forthcoming.

Harry, however, could talk of little else that evening as the family sat down to eat supper around the big kitchen table. Since two of her brothers, Tom and Jim, were now married men, there was more space and less laughter at the kitchen table these days. Lizzie watched with pleasure as her eldest son talked of his dreams.

‘If I was made foreman, we’d be laughing. I’d get a good rise then, and Ma wouldn’t have to worry any more. And why not? I’ve worked in that mill for twelve years, since I was fourteen. I know what’s what.’

Lizzie ladled steaming stew on to his plate that had as much mutton in it as her Christmas puddings had sixpences. ‘Who decides? James Hollinthwaite, or Bill Lindale, his manager?’

‘Both. Either. I don’t know. Does it matter?’

Alena suggested that perhaps it might and was told, very firmly, that she knew nowt about owt, so would she keep her opinions to herself?

Lizzie frowned at her son as she searched out a few extra pieces of precious meat for him. ‘Alena might have a point, things being the way they are between our two families. You’re happen best out of it. Anyroad, they’ll give it to one of the older men,’ she warned.

‘Who? Old Joe, who’s sat on the same machine for thirty years? He couldn’t organise a tea party, let alone a mill full of workers. Good relations between men and their employers is an important issue these days, Ma. And work is hard to come by so I mean to apply for the job, come what may.’

Sandra thumped at the dough, wryly admitting to herself that at least her anger would result in lighter bread.

It had been a perfectly simple request. Many of the girls had bicycles, certainly Alena had ridden one for years, so why shouldn’t she? Walking the length of the village, and then out up that long winding lane every morning and evening, was wearing to say the least. It added hours to her day. which she could ill afford. Sandra had rather hoped that her aunt would have taken to the idea, since she liked her to get home from the mill in good time to cook supper. But she realised now she should have known better than to ask.

‘Do you think I’m made of money?’ Aunt Elsie had predictably remarked. ‘It would be a complete waste. You can’t even ride a bike.’

‘I could learn.’

‘Want, want, want, that’s all I hear from you these days. Haven’t I given you enough over the years? Gave you a home and devoted my life to your care, since my poor darling Georgie died. Oh, dear, and now you’ve brought on one of my headaches. I shall have to retire to my bed for the afternoon, and you must make supper. I’ll have a little of that haddock, lightly poached in butter, dear. And do cut the bread thin for a change.’

Sandra sighed as she recalled this painful conversation, and slapped the dough some more. Aunt Elsie, a maiden lady with a strange musty smell about her and a small moustache, had been left with the task of raising Sandra from childhood after her father, Elsie’s brother George, was killed on the Somme. Sandra’s mother had not survived her birth. Even that had produced guilt in her as a child.

Sandra lived at Grove House, a tall Victorian terraced house, hemmed in by huge pieces of mahogany furniture, violent flock wallpaper, aspidistras, and almost permanently closed paper blinds because, as Aunt Elsie frequently remarked: ‘Curtains are such a fire hazard, dear, and the sun does dreadful damage to the carpets.’

But the effort of bringing up a lively young girl had, as her aunt constantly reminded her, taken its toll. Elsie Myers had been told by a doting mother when she was quite a young gel herself, that she was not strong and her heart might very well fail to sustain her into adulthood, and certainly not through the rigours of matrimony. Elsie had readily agreed. Nor did it sustain her through ordinary household chores, for all the stubborn organ had flouted her mother’s dire prediction by carrying her through the long years since with remarkable tenacity.

It was Sandra who cleaned the house from top to toe every Saturday afternoon, since the mill closed early that day. Sundays she spent cooking the stringy meat her aunt wheedled out of the butcher at a knock-down price, baking a selection of breads and cakes to see them through the week, followed by an hour or two digging the garden and tending their small vegetable plot. Add to that all the numerous chores, errands and interruptions necessitated by caring for an elderly aunt, due to the sad state of her health, and Sandra was usually quite glad to be back to the mill on Monday mornings. Usually she knew better than to complain, for that only resulted in one of Elsie’s ‘bad turns’. But today, for once, she’d made a stand.