Shining Threads Read online

  Charlie looked about him and sighed in satisfaction. He was pleased with the general air of cheerfulness which lay over the room, the smiles the women and children gave him as he passed and the sound of a man whistling nearby. Years ago a man could be fined for whistling at his work though Charlie often wondered what any man had found to whistle about in those days. The greatest boon, in his opinion, of the 1833 Factory Act had been to open a window to the rest of the world on the industrial conditions which existed in the mills, though it seemed to him that not a lot of good had come out of it in many of them, despite the reports of the Factory Inspectorate. Tales of abuses had shocked the world and there had been outcries from a great number of people on how conditions should be changed. But poor building materials had produced unsafe buildings, bad ventilation, suffocatingly high temperatures in which the hands worked. Very few millowners were prepared, as Mrs Jenny Harrison and Mrs Joss Greenwood were, to spend money on renovating factories which quite satisfactorily produced the required yardage each week. Long hours and the increasing speeds at which the machines went exhausted the operative, but she turned up for work each day so what was the millowner to do but allow her to do it? Disease thrived in the overworked and undernourished bodies and adults who burned themselves out were easily replaced by others. More, not fewer children were employed since the new machine did not need the brute force of a man to run it, and besides, was not a child’s wage a quarter of that paid to a man?

  Nine years ago a further Factory Act had reduced children’s working hours to six and a half each day with a half day’s compulsory schooling. However, what was known as a ‘relay’ system was introduced by unscrupulous millowners, the factory day stretching over fifteen hours, from five thirty in the morning until eight thirty at night, making it almost impossible to detect whether the new law was being observed. The Act, passed to protect the overworked and underpaid labourer, mainly children, not only in the textile trade but in all forms of employment, was once more obstructed by the unprincipled employer. Children continued to work for fourteen hours a day, and profit, the god, the duty, the right of the master, grew a hundredfold.

  John Fielden, supported by Joss Greenwood, continued to press for the ‘Ten-Hour’ Bill, a ten-and-a-half hour day from six in the morning until six at night with one and a half hours for meals, and in 1847 the Act had been carried for young women and children. This further incensed the millowner since, if he was to turn off his engine for two-thirds and more of his workers, it was scarcely profitable to keep it running for the remaining third. But again, with a series of shifts and overtime, which could be checked by no one, the Bill was got round and women and children laboured, just as they had always done.

  ‘Mr Greenwood’. A light touch on his arm made Charlie turn but before he could speak the overlooker at his back, his face thunderous, began to bluster, attempting, without appearing to, to hustle away the girl who stood there. She wore only the briefest of skirts and a scanty, sleeveless bodice. Her feet were bare but she was sturdy enough, with the wiry look of a young greyhound.

  ‘Get back to thy machine, my lass,’ the overlooker hissed, ‘an’ don’t thee be mitherin’ Mr Greenwood. Can thi not see ’e’s busy? If there’s ’owt wrong I’ll see to it mesen directly.’

  ‘No, let her speak, Edwards. What is it, lass?’ The overlooker was forced to stand back, his face red, his eyes snapping with vexation, his expression conveying to the unfortunate girl that she’d be sorry for this, really she would. Charlie frowned, a feeling of unease evaporating his former sense of satisfaction.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh sir . . .’ Though she seemed somewhat overcome at her own daring now that she had his attention since he was manager of this mill in which she was nought but a humble spinner, her chin lifted stubbornly and there was a resolute gleam in her almost colourless eyes. She had never spoken to Mr Greenwood before, indeed it was not her place to address anyone higher than the tackler who was over her, but this was an extreme circumstance and extreme circumstances made for extreme measures.

  ‘Yes?’ he said kindly and she took heart, despite the tackler’s steely expression, looking directly, bravely into Mr Greenwood’s eyes. They were a greeny-brown, she noticed, surprised that she should observe such a thing, the state she was in, but they were smiling encouragingly at her and he bent his head a little the better to hear her in the clangour around them. He was not a tall man. In his early childhood there had been poverty in the textile towns of Lancashire.

  His diet had not encouraged the building of sturdy limbs and firm flesh, but later, when his family’s circumstances had improved, so had his physique. He was not handsome really, but with a nice face even though the scars on it, one across his mouth and the other above his left eye, gave him quite a rakish air. She had heard, though perhaps it was just a rumour, that he had been a ‘piecer’ himself once and had been beaten within an inch of his life by a bullying overlooket for defending a little girl who was the butt of the overlooker’s ill-temper. It was hard to believe when you looked at the smooth, beautifully tailored cut of his coat and trousers, the immaculately ruffled white of his shirt front, the gold tie-pin and cuff-links and the impression of superb good health which glowed about him. And even harder to believe was that the lady who was his wife, Mrs Laurel Greenwood, was that very same small girl he had rescued. It sounded very romantic, if you believed in such things, which she didn’t, and anyroad she was not here to speculate on the past of this man who was in charge of the whole of the spinning side of Chapman Manufacturing. Really, how she had got up the courage to speak to him at all, she didn’t know, but speak she must, choose how.

  She drew in a deep breath.

  ‘It’s new under-tackler what’s bin took on, sit. ’Im as come from Abbotts.’

  ‘What about him?’

  She bared her teeth for a moment as though she would like nothing better than to sink them into the new tackler’s neck Mr Greenwood was waiting patiently and though she was well aware that the overlooker at his back was warning her with narrowed eyes that she had best know exactly what she was doing since she was going over his head, she continued courageously.

  ‘’E’s got our Nelly in’t tackler’s room, Mr Greenwood.’ Her voice held a note of apology as though she was sorry to be bothering him over such a trifling matter and him so important, but there was defiance in her since it was her right, her eyes said, to speak up when an injustice was being done. And there was fear too, for though such things were rare in the Chapman mills one did hear of such terrible happenings, especially to young girls, in other mills in the valley. ‘She’s bin in theer ower ’alf an ’our an’ . . . well, tis a long time, sir. ’E said as ’ow she were cheeky an’ needed a talkin’ to but that be a long while talkin’ to a little lass, an’ anyroad . . . well . . .’ She squared her thin shoulders obstinately and her pugnacious little chin lifted, ‘I reckon someone ought ter fetch ’er out.’

  Charlie Greenwood straightened up and looked beyond her in the direction of the tiny office at the end of the room, the door of which was closed, and the overlooker behind him stirred uneasily. He too had heard, aye, even witnessed some of the . . . well, to give it a kind word . . . the mistreatment of little lasses in the industrial areas of the country. Though he himself was not slow to give a child, for its own good, a lick or two with his overlooker’s cane, since many a time it could save that child’s life by preventing it from falling asleep and into the moving parts of a machine, he didn’t hold with interfering with young girls.

  ‘Lead on, lass,’ Mr Greenwood said ominously and the overlooker added ‘aye’ just for good measure.

  The girl turned thankfully, light as thistledown in her relief, running on bare and filthy feet between the neat rows of machines all set in pairs and at each pair a woman and child. It was very hot, not a dry heat, but humid like some tropical jungle, and every man, woman and child in the room was dewed with perspiration. The heat brought out a variety o
f smells from the cotton itself, from the oil-soaked pinewood floor and from the mahogany carriages and creels. Above it all was the whirr of spinning spindles, the shriek of tortured leather straps and the thump of carriages ‘letting-in’. At the door to what was known as the ‘little cabin’ the girl stopped, with Mr Greenwood and the overlooker directly behind her. It was a small room opening off the main spinning room, used as an office, and in it the overlooker kept his equipment, usually no more than a simple balance and wrap-reel, a quadrant-type yarn tester and a ready reckoner. With these he checked the yarn from each mule at regular intervals and ordered gear changes to be made whenever his ‘wrappings’ indicated a departure from the required count.

  It was somewhat quieter here away from the vicinity of the clattering machinery and Charlie could hear the echo of his own and the overlooker’s boots on the floor of the main passage along which they had just hurried. This part of the flooring had been overlaid with maple to withstand the relatively heavy traffic of shod feet. Only the overlookers, of the work force, wore boots. Everyone else was barefoot and it was common practice among the operatives to pick up waste with their toes which became, in a sense, a third ‘hand’.

  From the office came no sound at all.

  ‘Oh, Mr Greenwood, tell ’im to give ower. Tell ’im ter let our Nelly out.’ The girl, whose protective instincts were savagely alert put her hand to her mouth, her eyes huge and desperate in her chalk-white face. She was afraid now, not of the sound of anger, or even the dreaded overlooker’s strap, but by the absence of any sound at all.

  ‘Out of me way then, lass,’ Mr Greenwood said menacingly, putting his hand on the door-knob, turning it, ready to thrust himself into the room, surprised when he met resistance since there was no lock to the door. It was unnecessary as there was nothing of value worth stealing. His face darkened as his frown drove down his fierce eyebrows and the girl edged up to his back, as eager as he to get inside, willing, it seemed, to lend a hand in the breaking down of the door if it should be needed.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Mr Greenwood roared and the sound of his voice lifted every head in the lofty room, turning each one avidly towards him. They had all been aware, of course, that Annie Beale had accosted their employer; most had been keeping half an eye on the small drama but they could afford no more than that since each operative spinner was paid a sum directly and precisely related to the amount of yarn she had spun in the preceding week. Besides, if a thread should break in the fraction of time it took to glance away and the yarn end be lost in the machinery, it would take valuable time they could ill afford to find and repair it.

  ‘Open this bloody door.’ Charlie Greenwood’s voice was dangerous now and even Annie was alarmed since she’d never seen such a killing rage in anyone’s face. His eyes were slitted and gleaming, the whites suffused with blood, and his big hands had formed into fists which threatened to smash through the door-panels, indeed through anything which stood in his way. But the door remained shut though on the other side could now be heard small scuffling sounds and a child whimpered.

  ‘Nelly . . .’ Annie Beale whispered and before the name had sighed from her anguished throat Charlie Greenwood’s sturdy frame had smashed against the door taking it from its hinges as though it was made of cardboard, sweeping it into the cabin. The chair which had been placed beneath the door-knob went with it.

  The man was still fumbling with his trouser buttons when Charlie fell on him. He was a thin, sallow-hued, round-shouldered little man with a hank of dusty hair who, if something was not done to stop it, would be snapped in two like a bit of dry stick in Charlie Greenwood’s maddened grasp.

  ‘You rotten bastard . . . you filth . . . you stinking piece of filth . . . I’ll kill you, kill you for this, d’you hear?’ Charlie was yelling, out of his mind, it appeared, his face white and sweating, his eyes staring at something which surely, thought the overlooker who had followed him in, had really nothing to do with what had been done to the frightened child. He seemed to be looking at and acting upon images of such horror and obscenity, awakened by the scene in this room, that Edwards knew that if he himself did not act quickly, Charlie Greenwood would commit murder.

  Nelly Beale stood against the wall, her eyes wide and shocked. She was fully clothed but down the inside of her bare, grubby leg ran a dribble of blood. She was nine years old and almost at the end of her own six-and-a-half hour shift as her older sister’s ‘piecer’. When it was finished, when she had washed herself in the women’s washroom Kit Chapman had installed twenty-five years ago, when she had eaten her ‘baggin’ in the dining-room provided for the workers, she would spend the afternoon doing her sums, reading her book from which over the weekend she had learned by heart a whole passage to ‘say’ to the teacher. She would be a little girl in a normal little girl’s world, singing, playing a tambourine, giggling as little girls do with others. But now, in a moment of animal lust, her young innocence had been cruelly taken from her.

  Her sister ran to her wordlessly, swift in her need to remove her from the violent destruction which threatened. She put her arms about her and led her from the room where, it seemed to her, not only rape but murder was to be done today.

  ‘Mr Greenwood, sir . . . Dear God in ’eaven . . . Mr Greenwood . . . leave ’im be . . . Christ man, thee’ll do fer ’im . . .’ Edwards was grunting, his own considerable strength unable to control Charlie Greenwood’s killing rage. The molester of the child was screaming like a pig with a butcher’s knife to its throat and in the spinning room women began to cry out, their machines coming to a standstill, threads snapping and children running this way and that for want of direction.

  There was a cracking of bone and the sallow-faced under-tackler went as limp as an old dish-rag in Charlie Greenwood’s grasp and as he slid, like water which can be held in no man’s hand, to the floor, Charlie regained his senses. Edwards, who had grasped him fiercely from behind about the arms and chest, slowly, carefully, stepped away from him, hardly daring to look at the crumpled heap on the floor, though it was nowt to him if the man lived or died. The heap stirred and groaned, then was violently sick and Mr Greenwood inched away from him looking as though he could quite easily be sick himself. The man fumbled his way to his feet holding the arm which Edwards had heard snap, shivering and sweating at the same time, and when Mr Greenwood lifted a hand to wipe his own sweating face, recoiled away from him.

  ‘Nay, I’ll not touch you again, man,’ Mr Greenwood croaked. ‘I’m only sorry I soiled me hands on you in’t first place. I thought never to see the likes o’ this again, not in my mill, anyroad, but it seems I was wrong. But you’ll not satisfy your perversions again in this town, no, nor in bloody Lancashire, if I’ve ’owt to do wi’ it.’ In his distress Charlie Greenwood had begun to revert to the broad northern vowels of his youth. ‘If I could have you clapped in gaol or flogged at the cart-tail, by God I would, but I know the magistrates in these parts, aye, an’ the rest o’t country an’ all.’ His voice was bitter. ‘Throw up their hands they would if it were one o’ their own but some poor workin’ lass’d be nowt to them. So get yer gone before I have yer thrashed in’t yard fer all to see. An’ don’t go lookin’ fer work in south Lancashire fer I’ll make sure you find none.’

  The man had gone and Charlie and Edwards stood uneasily side by side in the cabin.

  ‘I can’t abide that sort o’ thing, Edwards,’ Charlie Greenwood said at last.

  ‘Nay, sir, tha don’t ’ave ter say ’owt ter me,’ Edwards protested. ‘I can’t say as ’ow, if I’m ’onest, I agree wi’ all tha methods in’t mill but I don’t like ter see a lass taken down, especially as young as that ’un.’

  Charlie looked surprised at Edwards words. ‘What is it you don’t agree with then?’ He was calmer now, glad it seemed, to talk of normal, everyday things.

  ‘I don’t reckon it ’arms some o’ them bigger lads to ’ave a bit o’ discipline now an’ again.’ Edwards stuck his chin out. ‘I
’ad a few thrashin’s in me life an’ it did me no arm.’

  ‘Happen not, but I’ll not have it in my mill, think on. And you’re not the only one, lad, to have been given a beating. Where d’you think I got this face of mine? Not in the prize-fighting ring, I can tell you.’

  ‘Aye . . . well . . .’ Edwards cleared his throat and moved towards the smashed doorway. He’d said his piece though much good it would do him. ‘If that’ll be all, sir, I’ll get back ter me work. Them women out theer are runnin’ about like ’eadless chickens and the machines all tangled up. It’ll tekk the best part of an hour ter sort ’em out. Oh, an’ I’ll ’ave to ’ave another chap ter take place o’t . . .’

  ‘Right, Edwards . . . and thanks for stopping me from killing that . . . bastard. He deserved it but I wouldn’t like to swing for him, just the same.’