The Mill Girls of Albion Lane (7 page)

‘I'll speak to you again at dinner time,' the manageress told Lily as she walked away, pitter-patter, in her dainty shoes.

Lily swallowed hard and once more picked up a smile from her round-faced, fair-haired neighbour.

‘Never mind, her bark is worse than her bite,' Vera whispered as she ran her fingers over the surface of her material, deftly marking a flaw then hooking her burling iron into the knot to loosen it.

‘I'll bear that in mind, thanks,' Lily whispered back. Nevertheless, she began work with trembling fingers.

Soon, though, she grew absorbed in her task, appreciating the quietness of the room compared with the noise of the weaving shed and hardly noticing the ticking of the large clock on the wall next to Miss Valentine's small office or the to-ing and froing of Jennie, the matronly looking taker-in whose job it was to lift newly delivered pieces on to her perch, which was a roller fixed to steel rods. The taker-in would pre-check a length of cloth for major flaws and mark them before carrying it to the burlers and menders for further, more detailed checking.

‘Take care not to miss the least little thing,' Jennie warned Lily when she brought a fresh bolt to her station. She was a small, round, confident woman with wrinkled, rosy cheeks and an old-fashioned style. ‘Miss Valentine has eyes in the back of her head.'

‘I'll do my best,' Lily promised, already more at ease. A glance at the clock told her it was just before ten and she paused to wonder how Evie was getting along in the weaving shed below.

‘You know what to do with the cloth when you're finished with it?' Jennie enquired. ‘You have to call me back and I take it away to the flipping machine to be folded – that's the routine.'

‘Ah, but not yet,' Vera reminded them. ‘Not before Miss Valentine has come back to teach Lily mending.'

‘Quite right,' Jennie confirmed. Then she leaned in towards Lily for a further chat. ‘Call me a nosy parker and tell me to mind my own business, but you wouldn't be a Briggs from Albion Lane, by any chance?'

‘Yes.' Lily wasn't sure if talking was permitted in the mending room but it seemed rude to ignore Jennie so she continued. ‘Rhoda Briggs is my mother. Do you know her?'

‘Know her? I should say so. I only went to school in Overcliffe with her, though I haven't seen her in years and her name was Preston back then. We both married and fell out of touch. How is she these days?'

Lily noticed Vera shake her head in warning and looked up in time to see Miss Valentine leave her office. She heard the click of the manageress's heels on the wooden floor and wondered at Jennie, who didn't seem in the least bit afraid of the ticking-off she was about to receive.

‘Tell Rhoda I said hello,' she told Lily, casually moving off.

‘We don't pay you to gossip, Jennie Shaw.' Miss Valentine blocked her way and Jennie had to stop short. ‘I'd thank you if you left our new girl to get on with her work.'

The stout woman met the beady gaze of the manageress. Lily noticed they were of a similar age but total opposites in every other respect. Where Jennie was easy and relaxed, Miss Valentine was prim and self-contained. Jennie was large and solid, Miss Valentine a little wisp of a thing. In other words, they were chalk and cheese, but if Lily had to bet on who was the stronger personality she would back the manageress every time.

‘I was only being friendly and making Lily feel at home,' Jennie protested mildly.

Miss Valentine's eyes narrowed behind her round glasses as she sought a way to put down this minor insurrection. ‘Please confine your friendliness to your dinner break,' she reminded Jennie. ‘Vera and Ethel both have finished pieces waiting to be taken away for flipping so I'd be grateful if you would carry out your duties. Lily, please move aside while I show you our mending method.'

The reprimand was enough to send Jennie scuttling off to the far side of the room and to make Lily feel very hot under the collar. Still, she paid full attention to Miss Valentine's new instructions.

‘Let's start with these two broken ends,' she began. ‘You see how I pick up two stitches with a number-five needle, go over the next two then pick up two more?'

Lily concentrated and nodded. ‘Yes, Miss Valentine.'

‘And so on, for twenty-six stitches. Then thread your needle with the broken end and pull it through. You see – now the end is invisible and you have mended approximately one inch of material.'

Lily admired the dextrous movements of the manageress's small fingers and wondered if she would ever learn to be so clever with her needle.

‘A quick mender can mend three yards in one hour,' Miss Valentine told her. ‘So you see, Lily, you have no time to stop and chat.'

‘Yes, Miss Valentine. I'm sorry, Miss Valentine. It won't happen again.'

The manageress nodded then stepped down from the stool. ‘Remember what I showed you and now try it for yourself while I stand by and watch.'

Lily felt her mouth go dry. This was ten times worse than school, she thought, afraid that her fingers would fumble and Miss Valentine would declare her too clumsy to do the fine work required. Before she knew it, she would be back down in the weaving shed, red faced and with her tail between her legs, on the wrong end of Fred Lee's nasty jibes.

‘Begin,' Miss Valentine instructed.

So Lily took a deep breath and picked up her needle. Keep calm, she told herself, don't let yourself down. Concentrate, Lily Briggs, and prove you're as good as the next girl at Calvert's Mill.

‘So how was your first week?' Harry asked Lily and Evie as they left work the following Saturday. He sat behind the wheel of his boss's shiny black Bentley, parked outside the main door, his peaked cap tipped back and his broad smile inviting a detailed account from the weary girls. He smiled warmly at Lily.

‘Long.' Evie sighed. The days had been packed with action. From the moment the knocker-up had rattled his lead-tipped pole against the bedroom window of 5 Albion Lane at six thirty each morning until the five o'clock buzzer had sounded at Calvert's she'd been on her feet. The routine was unvaried – get up and dressed in the icy-cold attic bedroom, eat breakfast then trudge down the hill to join the jostling crowd on Ghyll Road, on then almost to the junction with Canal Road and then left under the mill's arched entrance to clock on and run errands for her fellow workers all morning long. Mash the tea and shop for dinners, trying not to forget who took three spoonfuls of sugar and who wanted a pork pie and who had ordered tripe and onions, and Lord help Evie if she got it wrong. Her afternoons had been taken up learning from Maureen Godwin what it took to be a loom cleaner.

‘Very long,' Lily echoed. There'd been so much to learn under Miss Valentine's eagle eye, and not a day had gone by so far without her missing a flaw or a broken end, or being reprimanded for working too slowly by Jennie Shaw, standing by with a knowing smile and a fresh bolt of cloth for checking.

It was only at dinner times, when the two sisters got together with Annie and Sybil in the canteen to relax and swap cheerful stories, that the situation had been made more bearable.

‘Listen to you two!' Harry teased. ‘Anyone would think you had a hard life!'

‘Look who's talking, Harry Bainbridge,' Lily retorted. ‘Sitting on your backside all day long, driving around like Lord Muck!'

‘Sticks and stones,' he replied merrily. ‘Oh, you haven't seen Billy by any chance?'

‘No – why?' As Evie gave her answer she was forced to step aside by Fred Lee in flat cap and goggles, riding his motorbike out from under the archway, weaving his way through the departing crowd and leaving a whiff of exhaust fumes in his wake.

‘He's supposed to be here, working on the manager's garden,' Harry explained. ‘I'm meant to pass on a message from Mr Calvert.'

‘Oh well, you're in luck. There he is.' Evie pointed out the figure of Calvert's gardener wheeling a barrow along the path by the side of Derek Wilson's house at the far end of the mill building. Spotting Harry in their boss's car, he left off work and strolled towards them.

‘Chatting with the girls as usual, eh, Harry?' Billy began. He was in his shirtsleeves and without a scarf despite the November chill, his corduroy trousers held up by both belt and braces. Lean and wiry, with an outdoor complexion and a naturally cheerful expression, he seemed to bring a breath of fresh air wherever he went.

‘Since when did the pot start calling the kettle black?' Harry replied with unshakeable good humour.

‘Is this gentleman bothering you, girls?' Billy said with a wink. ‘Would you like me to move him on for you?'

‘You and whose army, Billy?' Harry laughed.

‘No – we want Harry to give us a ride home in his car,' Lily joked. She and Evie knew Billy almost as well as they knew Harry, having grown up together since the Robertshaws had moved into a house at the bottom end of Albion Lane when Lily was six. The two lads were firm friends and it was Harry who had tipped Billy the wink when the gardening job at Moor House fell vacant a year earlier, allowing Billy to move on from a lowly street-cleaning job with the town council. ‘We want a taste of luxury after the hard week we've had,' Lily insisted.

‘And pigs might fly,' a voice said.

Lily turned to see that Margie had sneaked up on them on her way home from Kingsley's and she greeted her sister with a sympathetic smile. ‘You look done in,' she said.

‘I am,' Margie admitted, shoulders sagging, her new haircut the worse for wear after a hot, grimy morning in the spinning shed. Then she noticed Billy standing behind the car and she stiffened.

‘Well, ta-ta, I must be getting along,' she told Lily and Evie, turning on her heel.

‘Wait for us,' Evie called after her.

‘Was it something I said?' Billy quipped, leaning against the car and lighting up a cigarette, watching Margie closely as she ignored Evie's appeal and hurried off.

‘Anyway, Billy – I've got a message for you from Mr Calvert.' Harry got around to his reason for being there. ‘He wants you up at the big house this afternoon, working on the borders.'

‘But it's Saturday.' Billy frowned. ‘I'm ready to knock off.'

‘Ours is not to reason why,' Harry commiserated.

Billy looked and sounded seriously put out. ‘Why can't his bloody borders wait until Monday?'

‘Because they can't.' Turning on the ignition, Harry listened proudly to the purr of the car's engine. ‘Hear that? Sweet as a nut.'

Lily took the hint. ‘Better let you go then, Harry.'

‘We'll still see you later?' Harry checked with Billy. ‘Six o'clock at the Cross?'

‘I'll be there,' Billy confirmed, puffing moodily on his cigarette.

‘How about you, Lily?' Harry wanted to know. ‘What are you girls up to tonight?'

‘We're going to the flicks,' she said a touch too quickly, feeling herself blush under Harry's questioning gaze.

Pushing his advantage, he teased her a little more. ‘Not teaching me to quickstep to “Goodnight, Sweetheart”?'

‘“Goodnight, Sweetheart” is a waltz,' Lily reminded him. ‘Anyway, Harry, I'm sorry but not tonight.'

‘Ah well, there's always next week.' He grinned. Then he wound up his window and eased away from the kerb, glancing at Lily in his overhead mirror as he left.

‘And pigs might fly,' Billy repeated Margie's mocking phrase. ‘Harry Bainbridge doing the quickstep – now that I'd like to see!'

A long week, but satisfactory. Lily thought in school report terms as she and Evie walked home together. She was still buoyed up by her recent promotion and willing to learn from her mistakes, and although she only carried in her pocket what was left of her wages after deductions for the scissors and burling iron, et cetera, she knew that at the end of next week she would receive the full twenty shillings, rising as she'd told her mother to thirty when she'd learned her new trade.

She was less confident that Evie had settled into her role in the weaving shed, though there'd been no complaints so far as she knew from the over-looker, and Sybil and Annie had kept their promise of keeping an eye out for her. ‘Evie's doing all right,' they had assured Lily at the end of each day. ‘We make sure she stays out of harm's way.'

‘You're not saying much,' Lily mentioned to her youngest sister as they turned off Ghyll Road on to Albion Lane and called into Newby's for Arthur's sweets. ‘What's the matter – cat got your tongue?'

‘I'm just tired.' Evie sighed, waiting inside the shop door. ‘My fingers are sore, my back aches, sometimes I think I'm going to drop to the floor I'm so hot and bothered.'

Lily was alarmed. ‘It's not too much for you? You can manage the work?'

Evie nodded. ‘I have to manage it, don't I? What else is there?'

Lily took her change from Alice Newby, an older version of her daughter Ethel with the same polite, smiling manner. She put the sweets in her pocket then walked on with Evie until they came to a stop by the alley connecting them to Raglan Road. Then haltingly she took up the conversation again. ‘You're right – there is nothing else.' It seemed harsh, but it was true – there was no other work for girls like them.

Ten or twelve years earlier, soon after the Great War had ended, some school leavers in the area might have dreamed of office work or going into a bank, even of getting their own small grocery shop or working as a milliner, but not in these hard times. ‘We have to grin and bear it, hang on to what we've got.'

‘I do realize that. Only I didn't know it would be so hard.'

Lily took her hand and squeezed it. ‘You'll get used to it and then it'll seem easier.'

Evie's eyes welled up with tears, which she quickly wiped away. ‘You won't tell Mother I was upset? She has enough on her plate.'