The Overlooker (3 page)

‘I'm glad,' Nick said. ‘You may need a bit more help when Uncle Martin comes home.'

If he does, he thought. Even so, the stroke may have left him partially paralysed. Thelma had said how his face seemed slack on one side. Could she manage to look after him? Would they have to move him to a nursing home? And what would that cost?

But it was too soon to ask that sort of question. For the moment, it was enough that Great-uncle Martin was alive.

The thunderous heartbeat of the steam engine thrilled Nick to the core. The Fewings watched from behind the safety line in the narrow room at the top of the mill. The huge silver piston shot forwards and back on its bed of oil. At the other end, the bright green painted mechanism it powered would be sending the leather belts whirring in the weaving shed below.

‘Fantastic!' Nick raised his voice above the roar. ‘She looks in as good fettle as the day she was made.'

‘Aye. Not bad for a hundred and twenty years.' The volunteer engineer patted the casing with pride. ‘She could have been put in yesterday.'

Suzie's long hair swung as she turned to Nick with a quizzical look. ‘You do realize it was machines like this that put your great-great-great-grandfather out of work. You know, the handloom weaver. The Industrial Revolution spelt the end of his way of life.'

But Nick was in love with the pounding beast in front of him. ‘That's progress. You can't expect history to stand still.'

One of the museum guides called up the stairs to them. ‘You'd better hurry up if you want to see the looms under power.'

They clattered down the steps. At the bottom, fourteen-year-old Millie tugged her father's arm. Her pixie face grinned up at him. ‘Seen this, Dad?'

Nick read the notice at the foot of the stairs. ‘. . .
Even the mill manager had to ask permission to enter the engine room.
'

‘Now that's power,' Millie laughed. ‘Think yourself privileged to get up there.'

The noise in the weaving shed was even more deafening. Over three hundred looms stretched away in row upon row under the tall windows. The dancing diagonals of leather belts carried the power from the engine room overhead. Just two of them were working. Their high-pitched clatter added another layer of sound to the thunder of the piston overhead. A metal grille separated the Fewings from the darting machinery.

‘Just imagine,' Suzie marvelled, ‘what it must have been like when all three hundred were going at once.'

Nick stared at the scene with a hungry intensity. ‘My grandmother worked in a mill like this,' he told Millie. ‘She had five looms to look after.'

‘I'm trying to watch the shuttle,' Millie said. ‘But it goes so fast I can hardly see it.'

Their guide had joined them. ‘You'd have to imagine the air thick with cotton dust. And first thing on a winter morning the machines would be covered in frost. Your hands would freeze to the metal if you didn't wrap them in cloth. And the noise was so terrific, the weavers worked out a way of lip-reading.'

Suzie was silent for a while. She carried the details of Nick's family tree in her head better than he did.

‘James Bootle was a handloom weaver back in the 1851 census. And then he re-invented himself. He turns up in later records as a medical herbalist. There's a trade directory that shows he had a shop on Market Street Court, in the centre of the town, where the shopping precinct is now. But he couldn't save his children from being sucked into the mills. Millicent was a cotton factory worker in the next census at the age of eight.'

Millie's eyes grew round. ‘Millicent! You never told me! Did you name me after her?'

‘I'm afraid not,' Suzie laughed. ‘We weren't into family history then. I only discovered her a few weeks ago, when I started chasing up Dad's family history as well as my own.'

‘All the same . . . But it's daft. She couldn't have managed even one of these looms at that age. She wouldn't have been big enough to reach.'

‘She'd be working her socks off, supposing she had any, keeping the weavers supplied with weft for the looms, and clearing away the waste.'

‘She'd learn to be a weaver when she was older,' the guide agreed. ‘But if you could reach your arm over your head and touch the opposite ear, you were thought big enough to work. And they didn't stop the machinery if something needed fixing or cleaning. If she didn't look out, she could lose an arm or her scalp.'

Millie shuddered. Her hand went protectively to her own blonde head.

She gazed back at the clattering machinery with renewed intensity. ‘Millie Bootle. She worked here?'

‘In a mill like it, certainly.'

‘It's just possible,' Nick said, ‘that your Great-great-uncle Martin knew her.'

Millie swung her wondering eyes round to him. ‘
Really
?'

‘It's possible. If she lived that long, she'd have been in her sixties when he was born.

The noise slackened overhead. Nick could hear the piston slowing to rest. The flicker of hundreds of leather belts ceased their dancing. The shuttles on the looms fell still. A strange silence held the vast weaving shed. For several moments, none of the three Fewings moved.

Then Suzie's hazel eyes smiled sympathetically at Nick. ‘That was great, wasn't it? I never thought it would seem so real.'

He turned away from the looms reluctantly. ‘My gran and granddad left all this to move south, soon after they got married. Apparently Granddad Fewings had been posted to Portsmouth in the First World War, and liked it. They set up a fish and chip shop. But Gran was always a Northerner at heart. She was proud that she'd worked in the mills.'

‘I bet James Bootle was proud of the cloth he wove on his handloom. But his was a different world. Before all this.'

They wandered off to the café, through rooms stacked with samples of cotton cloth, the myriad sizes of shuttles for every conceivable job, arrays of weavers' tools, and the Jacquard looms that could weave more complicated patterns. Room after room opened up in the rambling mill. And there were more doors that were marked ‘Private'.

Nick thought of the contrast between his own modern office in the southern cathedral city, his architect's practice designing houses and offices for the future. Until recently, he had not shared Suzie's all-consuming passion for family history. But this had gripped him. Here he was in touch with a woman who had died only a few years ago. His grandmother. A woman whose shy grey eyes had come to life as she told her children and grandchildren about her life as a cotton weaver. The knocker-up tapping the bedroom window with his pole, the clogs on the cobbled street, the close-knit community where almost everyone on the street worked at the same mill.

And now that high tide of the Industrial Revolution had receded. The mills were deserted, the chimneys cold. Here and there they were being demolished, but slowly. There was no money to replace the mills. No new industries. Half the town seemed to be on benefits. He thought of Geoffrey Banks, the embittered industrial chemist. A disappointed man whose life's work had been taken from him.

Suzie could take her mind far enough back to imagine the way of life James Bootle had lost in the 1850s. Nick could only feel sadness for the loss of his grandparents' world.

They enjoyed a homemade lunch in the museum café. Nick chased the last crumbs of a rhubarb-and-apple crumble round his bowl.

‘I wonder how Thelma's getting on at the hospital. Visiting hours don't start till the afternoon, but it sounded as if they were letting her see him this morning.'

‘You could ring her.'

‘I'm not even sure if she's got a mobile.'

They stepped out of the café on to the canal-side. Millie looked along the once-busy waterway. Derelict mills stretched into the distance. Only the textile museum was a hive of activity.

‘What do
people
do
with all these empty buildings?' Millie asked. ‘There must be something going on, mustn't there?'

N
ick checked his watch. ‘It's only early afternoon. If Thelma's gone to visit Uncle Martin, she won't be home yet. Do you feel like a walk along the canal? I'd like to take a look at Hugh Street, where my family used to live. We could drive round, but it'll be more interesting on foot than taking the car.'

‘I'm fine with that,' Suzie said. ‘Is that OK with you, Millie?'

‘I suppose so.' Millie dug her hands deeper into her jacket pockets. ‘It's a bit creepy, though. Those mill chimneys. If you stand too close and look up, you feel they're going to fall on top of you.'

‘I'm sure they wouldn't have left them if they were unsafe,' Suzie reassured her. ‘There used to be a spate of programmes on TV about blowing up chimneys like these. There's an art in getting them to collapse just where you want them to. I haven't seen one of those for a while.'

They were walking along the muddy towpath, avoiding the puddles. Nick peered through a gap in the stone wall alongside them. ‘They may have left the chimney, but the rest of the mill has gone. There's just an empty space and a bit of rubble.'

Suzie looked across the canal. ‘There are plenty of them still standing on the other side. But they all look empty. The lower windows are boarded up or they've got metal grilles over them.'

‘Gran said they needed those big windows for the weaving sheds,' Nick said. ‘It could be freezing cold in the morning, but once you got all those looms working at once, they generated a terrific heat. And they had to have good light for mending broken threads or spotting a dodgy patch in the weaving. If the overlooker said your work wasn't good enough you'd to unpick the weft and do it all again. And you were paid by the piece, so that meant you lost money.'

The stone wall of the demolished mill ended. They were walking now beneath the towering brickwork of another derelict mill, four storeys high.

‘Someone's gone a bit mad with the graffiti on this one,' Millie observed. ‘It's not exactly a Banksy artwork, is it?'

The dark wall of the mill overlooking the canal had been daubed with letters in black and red a metre high. Nick read one message aloud.

‘They called to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the wrath of the Lord.”'

‘Cheerful,' said Millie. ‘How about this one?
He shall drink the wine of God's wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger, and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels.
It's enough to put you off religion altogether, isn't it?'

‘It's from the Book of Revelation,' Suzie said. ‘The last book of the bible. Written when the Church was undergoing martyrdom. John wrote it after he fled to the island of Patmos in fear of his life. He had this vision of the Roman Empire being overthrown and terrible happenings before the end of the world. Like that one up there.
Their torture was like the torture of a scorpion.
' I guess he was dreaming of seeing his persecutors persecuted.'

‘Gross,' said Millie. ‘I thought Christianity was all about loving people who did nasty things to you.'

‘It is.'

‘Anyway, whoever did this is wasting his time. He'd have done better painting it in the middle of town. Who's going to see it out here, with just a lot of empty mills?'

‘Oh, I don't know. There'll be plenty of people like us who walk along this towpath.'

Even as she spoke, a man with a dog overtook them, squeezing past on the narrow path.

As the Fewings passed underneath the mill, with its louring messages, Millie ran her hand along the brickwork. Her fingers twanged the metal grilles guarding the windows.

Nick and Suzie walked on. Not far ahead, Nick could see a bridge. He was fairly sure that was where Canal Street crossed the waterway. They would need to leave the towpath there to find his grandparents' old home in Hugh Street.

A voice called from some distance behind them.

‘I don't think this one is going to keep people out.'

Millie had stopped. She was pulling at the grille over the window beside her. It was red with rust. As she tugged, a corner sprang away from the wall.

‘Millie!' Suzie exclaimed as she turned. ‘I don't think you should be doing that. It may be empty, but this mill belongs to someone.'

Millie had prised a second corner free. A side of the grille swung away from the wall. There was no glass in the window behind it. Two boards had been nailed crookedly across the gap. But they were rotting away. There was a gap big enough for Millie to put her head through.

‘It's a bit like that museum, except it's all covered in dirt.' She wriggled sideways to see better. ‘Some of the machines have gone, but there's still rows of them.'

Nick strode back to join her. ‘Let's have a look.'

Millie stood back to let her father peer through the hole. As he put his weight against it, a section of board broke off.

‘Nick!' Suzie exploded. ‘You're as bad as Millie. What if someone comes along and finds you breaking and entering?'

‘I admit to the breaking. But we haven't entered yet.' He withdrew his head and grinned at Millie. ‘Are you up for it? I got a bit frustrated back at the museum, with a metal screen between us and the looms. I know they have to have it for safety reasons, but I'd love to stand in front of one, just like my gran did. Even if it's not working.'

A little boy's curiosity had got the better of Nick. He squeezed himself between the loosened grille and the window space and swung a long leg over the sill.

He dropped down on to the dusty mill floor. His heart beat faster with recognition. There were rows of disused looms, stretching away down the long dusty room. Diagonal leather belts still connected drive wheels at the side of each to a pulley overhead. It did not take much imagination to picture the threads of the warp stretched over the rollers. You would only have to set those leather belts in motion for the warp threads to lift and fall and the shuttle to fly across at twice a second.