The Bobbin Girls (33 page)

Setting a steaming cup of tea in front of Sandra, best China of course, as befitted the Myers household, Alena attempted to say some of this. ‘It’s probably only temporary. Harry’s right, he’s a skilled worker. Some other mill will be glad to take him on. I don’t know what Hollinthwaite was thinking of to sack him, let alone over a trick that every bobbin worker plays. But then, who can understand that man?’

But Harry didn’t find any work, not that week or the next. Every day he caught the bus and went round all the bobbin mills he could think of, asking for work. There was none to be found. In desperation he went as far afield as Workington and Barrow, returning each evening increasingly demoralised, the situation there being even worse. If he wasn’t careful, all his meagre savings would be used up in travelling while he looked for an elusive job. He’d even gone against his principles and asked the Forestry Commission for work, but all their jobs were taken.

There were times when Sandra saw him in the village, sometimes waiting for his mates to come out of the mill at the end of their shift. He would look so dejected, hands thrust deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched, that all her instincts cried out for her to run to him, but she never did. She thought he was aware of her passing by, but he would always half turn away, as if to discourage any action on her part. Sandra understood that it was his pride that had made him end their engagement, not lack of love for her.

One day, perhaps, that love would bring him back to her. She just had to be patient.

It was on her twenty-first birthday, a dull, rainy, lonely day at the end of November 1936, that she decided to fight James Hollinthwaite. Alena came for tea: tinned salmon sandwiches and a jam sponge with a single candle to celebrate the auspicious day. Aunt Elsie ate her fill then retired to bed early after all the ‘excitement’. As the two girls sat toasting bread by the fire on the end of a long toasting fork, enjoying the two bottles of stout that Alena had secreted in her coat pocket, Sandra made her decision.

She would start a campaign. What did she have to lose? Alena laughed at the very idea of quiet, mouselike Sandra campaigning for anything, let alone setting herself up against the formidable James Hollinthwaite, until she noted the glint of resolve in her friend’s eye.

‘He’ll destroy this valley as surely as he tries to control the people within it. Someone’s got to stop him. Why not me? Are you with me or not? What have you got to lose?’

‘Nothing, except my job.’
 

Alena thought of all she’d suffered at James Hollinthwaite’s hands, and a kind of recklessness raced through her. Sandra was right. He did need stopping. Job or no job, she had no intention of being afraid of him. ‘Okay, I’m game if you are.’

Sandra set about her campaign with a diligence that surprised even her. Aunt Elsie was appalled by the activity and resulting mess in her kitchen but, for once, Sandra did not allow this to deter her.

She painted posters to advertise the public meeting she planned to hold, and pinned them up all over the village. The vicar agreed to her using the village hall, and Mrs Rigg provided a selection of biscuits to go with the tea Sandra had bought. She asked Lizzie if she would make it, but the expression of panic that came into the woman’s troubled face told her this had been a mistake.

‘Nay, I’d love to help, lass. But what with our Harry out of work, my wages are important, for all they’re little enough. You’ll have to find someone else.’
 

This proved surprisingly difficult. Everyone had some reason why they couldn’t help. Few promised even to attend. They’d something else on, family visiting whom they hadn’t seen in an age, or else they had a cold, a headache, didn’t feel quite up to the mark. The more honest openly confessed, as Lizzie had done, that they daren’t take the risk. Even so Sandra was determined to go ahead with the meeting, as planned.

Another supper kept warm in the oven, another night in alone for Dolly. She couldn’t even face eating so sat in misery by the burned out coals in the empty grate, all her merry plumpness falling away and she didn’t even care. Where was he tonight? Surely he wasn’t going to risk attending Sandra’s meeting, not after what had happened to Harry?

Jack Turner at The Stag had told Maggie that young Tom rarely showed up there any more. He’d been seen on long walks, spotted in the woods, but whether alone or not, Dolly couldn’t say. Tom wouldn’t be with some other woman, would he? The thought made her feel all queasy and sick inside. He surely wouldn’t do that to her, he wouldn’t. Nevertheless jealousy was born in her. For the first time she began to wonder how he had felt when the rumours had gone around about her and Danny Fielding, though it had only been an innocent bit of fun.

Reaching a decision, she tipped the dried remains of his meal into the bin, put on her coat and went looking for him. She’d give him a piece of her mind, that she would. But, as she’d feared, he wasn’t at The Golden Stag. Nobody had seen him all evening. Nor was he at Sandra’s meeting, as one glance into the village hall confirmed.

Dolly walked the entire length of the lane right through the village as far as Hollin Bridge, but still hadn’t found him by the time she reached the end and turned, despondently, to head back home. Could he be in someone’s house? Whose? She knocked on a few doors only to see heads shake and hear their denials. No one knew where Tom was.

Shivering with cold and emotion, Dolly decided to call it a day, and set out along the path through the woods that fringed Ellersgarth Hall. It would save at least half a mile. She thought nothing of the rustling in the undergrowth, or the crack of a twig, thinking it a deer or rabbit.

Then she almost fell over him.

He was lying in the shadows beneath a sycamore but she knew at once that it was Tom. She recognised the sound of his groans. And Dolly, being Dolly, assumed it to be a woman that caused him to gasp and moan in such a way. Hadn’t she heard the sound often enough before? Hot rage, fuelled by the bitter disappointment she felt in her marriage, flooded through her and she flew at him, hands flailing, ready to slap him about the ears for his betrayal. But they weren’t groans at all that she had heard, but sobs. Her husband lay on the damp grass with his arms wrapped about his head, crying his heart out.

Alena had made a point of arriving first, so she could turn on the gas and set the big kettles to boil. It was cold in the village hall and she kept on her coat and hat while she did it.

Sandra arrived five minutes later, dressed in a smart navy blue costume with a short belted jacket and calf-length skirt cut on the bias. She’d made it herself from a worn out jersey wool frock of Aunt Elsie’s and was reasonably pleased with the result. She’d pinned a large daisy just below the shoulder as a note of defiance, but felt far from brave as she spread the tablecloth and set out cups and saucers and plates of biscuits. The short speech she’d prepared lay upon the table, and, as the fingers of the village hall clock crept towards seven o’clock, her nervousness increased accordingly.

‘I must be crazy, taking on James Hollinthwaite. What am I thinking of?’

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ Alena told her, a touch of asperity in her voice. ‘No one will come. They are all too afraid of him. There’ll be you, me, and Mrs Rigg’s biscuits. Will she give us a refund on the uneaten ones, do you reckon?’

Sandra giggled. ‘Oh, Alena. How would I do without you?’

‘Very well, by the looks of you.’ And Alena hugged her friend. ‘I admire you. Your campaign has at least given you something else to think about besides Harry.’ And got you out of the clutches of dreadful Aunt Elsie, she thought, but wisely didn’t say as much.

‘Have you stopped thinking about Rob, or whether to marry Mickey?’ Seeing Alena’s face, Sandra hurried on. ‘But it isn’t just that I need something to do, I’m serious about this campaign. What if you’re right and only a few people do come, the old and the unemployed probably? What then?’

‘You’ll give your speech and I’ll move from chair to chair around the hall, applauding madly. Or you could do a rendition of ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’, and hope you get paid for it like our Gracie.’ And they both fell to giggling again at this delightful notion.

But for all their hilarity they were relieved when, at five to seven, the door opened and old Joe Pickhall walked in, leaning heavily on his walking stick. He hadn’t worked for James Hollinthwaite for years, so had nothing to lose by opposing him as he fiercely announced to the girls. They exchanged a speaking glance.

‘He’ll not rape our valley with them great giants if I can help it,’ the old man said with spirit.

His arrival seemed to start a small rush. Three other old men followed him in and one woman, a Mrs Simpson, who had lived alone since her son and husband were both killed in the last war. She promptly sat down and got out her knitting.

‘She probably thinks she’s come to a parish council meeting.’ Alena whispered, and suddenly felt so nervous she had to bite her lip hard to stop an irresistible urge to giggle. Sandra looked almost ethereal, her thin face gaunt with worry. Then just as the clock started to strike seven, Harry walked in, and, nodding to them by way of greeting, sat on the end chair nearest the door on the back row, twisting his cap in his lap but not speaking to anyone.

No one else came.

Sandra gave her talk in a small high-pitched voice and when she had finished there was a brief flurry of applause. She’d hoped that Harry would come over and congratulate her, but he got up, hooked his cap back on over his thatch of blond hair and slid quietly out of the hall. She watched him go with raw agony in her eyes.

Alena made a pot of tea, which the seven of them drank. Old Mrs Simpson said she’d really enjoyed herself and had got twenty-two rows done. The three old men had a good moan about trees, the lack of employment for the young, and the weather, not necessarily in that order. And Joe compared James Hollinthwaite’s high-handedness with Hitler.

‘That chap reckons he can decide who does what and when and with who. Stopped marriages between Germans and Jews he has. You should go and start a protest in Germany, lass. If we don’t stop him, we’ll have another war.’

But none of them laughed. It suddenly wasn’t funny any more, and somehow put their own problems into perspective.

‘We have to talk.’ Dolly and Tom sat together in a heap of fallen leaves. Cocooned in the soft dusk and quiet rustlings of the forest, perhaps now at last they were free to speak of their pain.

‘I’ve missed one of me monthlies, Tom.’

Silence.

‘What if I’ve fallen again after - after - you know? That would be summat, eh?’ Dolly realised her mistake almost the moment the words were out, for he turned his back on her with a snort of derision.

‘And how would I know it were mine?’ His voice was so hard and bitter, she couldn’t believe she’d heard right. ‘Of course it would be yours!’ Dolly was outraged by the accusation. But no matter how hard she tried to convince him that he was the only man she’d ever actually done it with, she could tell by the frozen stiffness of his back that he didn’t believe her. ‘Since we were wed anyroad,’ she acknowledged, wanting to be honest.

‘There you are then. You’re cheap, Dolly, that’s your problem. Anybody’s for a farthing. How do I even know if that bairn you lost were mine?’

Her throat felt tight and swollen and she could hardly get the words out. ‘Oh, Tom, he was the spitting image of you. How can you say such a thing?’

‘Well, you didn’t seem to care much about him.’

‘Are you saying it were my fault that the baby died? I wanted him same as you did. I just wanted him to have a father. Fathers are important to a child.’

‘But not a husband to a wife, eh? You were back at work days after he died, without a care in the world. I was the only one of us to grieve.’ He was facing her now, punching himself in the breast with his fist, and Dolly was flapping a hand to quieten him, afraid he’d storm off and leave her before they’d made their peace.

‘That’s not true, it’s not true!’

She could see his eyes glittering angrily in the darkness. It’s true all right. You tarted yourself up and went back to work as if naught had happened. You didn’t give a damn that our baby had died. Never have. While I grieved, you threw yourself at any pair of trousers that came within hailing distance. Now, apparently, you’ve decided to go for summat a bit older. Not to mention richer. Well, you’re welcome to him!’

It was a shock to hear that Tom had grieved so much for the baby. He’d never said, keeping his feelings all bottled up, showing only anger. She’d thought he was annoyed with her for making her marry him, and he’d thought she hadn’t cared about their child. Now he believed she bothered with other men, and as a result no longer trusted her.

Deep down Dolly knew his suspicions to be justified. She had flirted with and chatted up quite a few blokes in these last few years, usually in The Stag, and also under the bridge with Danny a time or two. More to flatter her own vanity than anything really serious. Though things might have got a bit out of hand, admittedly, if Tom hadn’t followed her to Ellersgarth Hall that night. She could feel her cheeks burning with shame in the darkness. Just as well he had, really. She’d been a right daft fool. The question was, could she explain all of this to Tom? Was it too late for her to save her marriage?