Angel Meadow (4 page)

Last night, for the first time any of them could remember, they had removed all the tattered rags that were their clothing and stood naked before each other. Three scrawny little girls who were frightened and hungry, for though they had been to the market and bought scraps of what was really nothing more than rotting meat and vegetables, it had not been enough to satisfy their appetites. They must eke it out, Nancy had told them gravely, for it might be a day or two before they got work and then they had to wait until the end of the week to be paid.

Careful not to spill any of it, Nancy had tipped hot water from the kettle into the bucket. When the kettle was empty she filled it again from the stewpot which contained cold water, setting the kettle in the bosom of the fire.

Rosie shivered, her bony frame cringing from the coming ordeal, but bravely she allowed her sister to begin the process that she had decided upon.

“We’ve got to be clean an’ I mean all over.”

“All over? Why? Nobody can see under our clothes. Can’t we just do our faces an’ hands? The rest’s hidden.”

“It doesn’t matter, our Mary. We’re starting summat new tomorrow: a new life without . . . without Mam and I’ve decided we must begin as we mean ter go on. Besides, there’s bound ter be others after jobs and we’ve gotter be different, look different, ter get noticed. Ter be picked.”

“I don’t know what yer mean, our Nancy.” Mary was plainly perplexed and Rosie just wanted to get it all over and done with and get her clothes back on. It was strange wearing nothing at all, seeing her sisters’ bodies which were exactly like her own, grey and peculiar-looking with the bones all sticking out, and when Nancy began to rub vigorously at her chest with a cloth wrung out in the water she was absolutely astonished at what it revealed. From some hidey-hole of her mam’s who, she supposed, to please her customers had now and again washed her face, Nancy had found a sliver of soap. It smelled quite horrible but when it was applied to the cloth and then to her body something quite lovely began to appear. They were all mesmerised as the smooth white skin gleamed through the muck, the firelight warming it to a rich cream. Their enthusiasm intensified and so did their vigour, for by now both Nancy and Mary were polishing Rosie as though she were made of a precious metal and she began to squeal.

“’Ere, ’old on. Watch where yer rubbin’, our Mary. That ’urts,” but she was as delighted as they were not only by the wonder of her lovely skin but by the magical feeling of lightness, of freshness, of stepping out of something nasty and letting it fall away. She stood on a bit of rag in front of the fire and tried to peer over her shoulder at her own back, running her hand over her chest and stomach as though she expected to feel different under her own hands. She smiled and smiled and so did her sisters, for they’d no idea that skin could be like this. They had trouble with her feet, though, for the layer of horn on the soles was thick and the filth was deeply encrusted and, short of shaving it off with one of those razors they’d heard men used, it had to remain.

“Now yer hair,” Nancy ordered, picking off a couple of lice that had had the effrontery to fall out of Rosie’s curls on to her immaculate little body.

“Oh, bloody ’ell,” Rosie began to groan as, tipping her up, they put her head in the bucket of water. When it was thoroughly wet they stood her on her feet and began to rub at the mass with the soap.

“Be careful with it,” Nancy warned Mary. “We want ter save a bit for you an’ me.”

It is doubtful that if they’d knocked on their neighbour’s door they would have been recognised. Their hair was quite glorious, standing out in an abundant rippling mass of rich curls, a soft brown but with paler streaks in it. In fact, Nancy said worriedly, it had created another problem, for what were they to do with it all? She had no idea that hair could be so thick, and so much of it. It hung, since it had never been cut, to their buttocks, a springing cloak that would have to be tied back with something or they’d never get taken on at the mill with all that machinery about. She’d heard that if you weren’t careful it could whirl at you like a demon, catching your hair or your hands and indeed Bridie Murphy’s mam’s little brother had had such a thing happen to him and had died of it. Perhaps they could bind it up with a bit of cloth from the scraps they had hoarded upstairs and which she’d known would come in useful one day.

Suddenly her face cleared and her two young sisters watched in astonishment as she leaped up the stairs. She came down a moment later with a triumphant look on her face. She waved a piece of what looked like greasy newspaper under their noses.

“I knew I’d kept this. I liked ’t pictures in it. It were wrapped round them pies Mam brought ’ome a while back. Look. Look at this. I don’t know what it’s called ’cos I can’t read the words but can yer see what’s bein’ done ter that hair?”

They could indeed. The picture showed a lady with long hair and a pair of disembodied hands were doing something quite intricate with it. First it was divided into three strands, then the right strand was placed over the middle one and the left strand over that until all the hair was in one long, tidy rope which the hands tied a lovely ribbon on. They hadn’t got a ribbon, of course, but they could tear strips from Mam’s old skirt, the one she wore to lounge about the house in and which, sadly, she would no longer need. They were made up with each other, practising again and again until each of them had a long plait – though they didn’t know the name of it – as thick as a man’s wrist, hanging neatly down their backs. Of course there were still curly bits round their foreheads and ears and on their necks, bits that were too short to go in the plait but they felt, and looked, wonderful, they told one another.

The only disappointment was having to put on again the filthy rags they had removed so reluctantly an hour since. They were stiff and unyielding, at once setting up a scratching against their newly discovered and tender flesh, but they’d just have to put up with it, Nancy said firmly. As soon as they’d got a few bob together, confident and making them feel it too, they’d go to the market and get some new things and then this lot could be washed. They were going to do a lot of things now, she told them. They were strong and straight and they would be good workers and whoever took them on would be so pleased with them it wouldn’t be long before . . .

It was here that she ran out of dreams to pass on to them, for they were barely formed in her own nine-year-old mind. She had known nothing but this hovel, this place called Angel Meadow, this life her mam had forced on them. Not that she blamed Mam; she didn’t. You had to do the best with what you’d got and sometimes that wasn’t much, but Mam had done her best and you couldn’t ask more of a body, could you?

A burly man came to the gate and peered between the bars. He was the “gaffer”, the spinning-room overlooker and it was he who decided who was to be taken on out of the crowd of patient, be-shawled women who waited outside the mill gate. He was an important man, at least to them, and there was a small surge as they pressed closer in order to catch his eye.

They might have saved themselves the trouble, for at once it fell on the three young girls who were pressed almost in his face and the look of amazement that came over it was very evident. The other women had been muttering to one another on the strange appearance of the three girls, wondering who they were, and now, so did he. His eyes narrowed as they roamed over the taller girl. Thin, she was, but then weren’t they all, but she was straight and bonny, her limbs, as far as he could see, with none of the stunting or deformities found in many of the children who came begging for jobs at his gate.

“Stand back,” he ordered the women and obediently they did so, allowing him to open the gate. “You . . .” He beckoned to Nancy and at once she and Mary and Rose stepped forward through the opening. He blinked, for like the sergeant at the police station – and he had only seen them in their muck – he was fascinated, not only by their comeliness but by the fact that there were three of them, each an almost exact replica of the other.

“No, lass, I only want you,” he said, indicating that Rose and Mary were to rejoin the others outside the gate.

Nancy lifted her head autocratically and the man gaped. “We work as a team, sir.” Unknowingly she had spoken the correct words. “Was it a spinner yer wanted?” willing to be anything he asked for, spinner or piecer, which would give them employment.

“Aye, but . . .”

“I’m a spinner,” she lied, “and this ’ere’s me sister who’s a piecer. Little ’un could scavenge fer me if yer took me on. One wage fer’t two of us and p’raps a few bob for’t little ’un.”

“Nay, lass, it don’t work like that. I’d pay you and out o’ that you’d pay them. I couldn’t—”

“That’s all right. We’re good workers, sir. Reliable an’ good time-keepers.”

“Where’ve yer worked?”

“’Ere an’ there.”

“Oh aye, an’ how old are yer?”

“Thirteen, sir.”

The gaffer looked her up and down. She was tall enough to be thirteen, or perhaps twelve but even thirteen was young to be in charge of a spinning mule; really you had to admire her spirit. She was looking at him, not with that piteous and humble yearning most of them did when they were after a job, but with her head up, her eyes steady as though to say she knew her own worth and he’d be a fool not to take her on.

He chewed his lip, hesitating while the women beyond the gate watched raptly. There had been an accident in the mill the day before, a careless spinner who had looked away from her machine for a moment and it had reached out and grabbed her loose hair, almost dragging her into its whirl of straps and gears and had it not been for the spinner next to her she might have died. As it was her hands were badly injured. Now this lass, with her hair fastened neatly back from her face, her look of bright intelligence, her belief in her ability to do the job exactly as it should be done, as he demanded it be done, was just the sort of lass that Mr Hayes liked to see at his machines.

“Can yer start now?” he asked them and three pairs of glowing golden eyes looked at him as though he were a god and three heads nodded vigorously.

“Right, come wi’ me. Yer’ll be next ter Annie Wilson so if yer’ve any questions yer can ask ’er. Yer’ll ’ave two machines ter see to but then yer’ll know that if yer’ve worked ’em before. I’ll ’ave ter leave yer ter find yer own way about as I’ve not checked the yarn from each mule yet so . . . Well, follow me an’ watch yer step, there’s oil about.”

The room to which the gaffer led them was fearfully hot, despite the open windows. Dozens of women and older children attended to the mules while others, younger and smaller, ran from machine to machine piecing any yarn that broke, or sweeping up the cotton waste; the smallest, who were surely not over the legal age, slithered on the oil-soaked floor beneath menacing straps and pulleys, chains and wheels to retrieve the oil-coated waste that collected there. There were young lads carrying empty roving bobbins, taking them to the machines and fetching away the full bobbins of spun yarn which were placed in an enormous basket on wheels which was taken away by an older lad. The three girls looked about them, stunned by the noise and the never-ceasing movement of the machines and those who “minded” them. The air was thick with “fly”, the specks of mixed, clinging, cotton fibre and dust that hung in a haze above the machines.

At once Rose began to cough and Nancy turned to her in concern but the gaffer merely shouted over his shoulder, for the noise was deafening, that the lass would have to get used to it or she’d not last long.

They were led between a long row of machines, each pair looked after by a woman in the briefest of skirts and a scanty sleeveless bodice and Nancy silently went over in her head the accumulated rubbish that was upstairs in the house in Church Court. What they had on now, thin and worn as it was, would be too warm for this stifling heat. The lads wore fine cotton drawers and a sleeveless shirt and not one of the “hands” wore shoes. Their feet and ankles were a solid black to halfway up their legs. They all had a tallow-yellow hue to their skins and their hair, or what showed beneath their caps or scarves, was uniformly greasy. It was no wonder that they had been stared at outside the gate and it was the same here, the women watching them go by with their mouths open; had it not been for the gaffer’s shout of annoyance which turned them back to their machines, damage might have been done, to them and the yarn they spun.

“Now then, lass, ’ere’s yer machine so switch it on and let’s see what yer can do. See, there, that’s the switch.”

A small child edged his way up to the gaffer’s elbow, touching his arm timidly and the man turned to him, not pleased to be interrupted.

“What?” he snarled so that the child cowered away and at Nancy’s side both Mary and Rose looked as though they were going to take fright and bolt.

“Maister wants ter see yer, sir,” the boy shouted, ready to dart away as soon as his message was delivered.

“Bugger it, what does ’e want?” he muttered, then turned to Nancy who was standing in front of the mules which had both sprung to life at the push of the switch, doing her best to appear calm and totally in control of what she was about to do.

“Yer’ll ’ave ter get on wi’ it, lass. I’ll be back ter see ’ow yer gettin’ on but I’m warnin’ yer, if I don’t like it there’s plenty at gates ter take yer place so think on.”

Nancy stepped up to her machine watched not only by her apprehensive sisters but by the woman who was working next to her, presumably Annie Wilson. She turned helplessly, terrified to put her hands near the pulsating machinery and the woman smiled.

“I like a lass wi’ a bit o’ gumption,” she yelled, switching off her own machine. “An’ it tekks gumption ter mind a spinnin’ mule when yer’ve never set eyes on one afore. Yer ’aven’t, ’ave yer? No, I thought not. Well, watch me. I’ll tell yer only once then yer on yer own. I can’t afford ter lose me wages.”