Eppie (51 page)

Shivering, Eppie clung to Martha as they plodded through the
oppressive, dank fog.

‘I wish we never had to set eyes on that mill again,’ Eppie
said, knowing that only a few hours would pass before they returned.

Sitting around the upturned market basket they blew upon the
potato, onion and rook broth, glad of its watered-down mix to keep them warm.

‘When we first came over from Ireland, Mr Grimley owned the
textile mills and the weaving shed,’ Eibhlin told them. ‘Things were better
then. Workers were fined for smoking whilst at work, dangerous things. Nothing
like what we get from Mr Crumpton. He was put in by the current owner.’

For the remainder of the week, Eppie worked to the point of
exhaustion, consumed by the ghastly feeling that she had never slept in her
life. Often she would glance at the bales of cotton in the drying-room, longing
to snuggle down, but she had seen other children succumb and listened with
dread to their screams as Crumpton beat them. So she fought against her sagging
tiredness. She did not want the same thing happening to her.

Saturday, the last day of the
working week. They would finish early and receive their wages. This was Eppie’s
only compensation as, rising early, she trembled with weariness.

To Wakelin’s eyes the women and girls, treading through the
dark streets, shrouded in shawls, looked like a row of crows with broken wings.

Life was better for him. The skill of his work required his
utmost concentration so that he was less aware of the monotony. Regardless of
this, he craved fresh air and the friendly banter he had with Ezra when they had
worked in the cropping shop.
 

First light of day appeared.

Eppie stared longingly out of the windows, which were kept
shut to keep the mill at a constant temperature to stop cotton threads
breaking. High above leafless boughs, doves flapped against pink clouds. How
she longed to hear the dawn chorus and the murmur of the wind instead of the
continual battering of the machines.

Plucking raw cotton, she was
painfully aware of torn scabs bleeding beneath her nails. Waves of tiredness
welled. She fought them back. Tried to recall happy times, like the evening
after she had put her stuffed rabbit and his carrot in the garden:

Gillow was laughing. ‘What have you in mind to learn, my little
maid?’

‘I’m going to write poetry.’

‘Leave clever words to the gentry who’ve nowt better to do
than mull over such useless things. To handle soil and rotting leaves, that’s
what brings you close to God, not fancy words.’

‘But can’t you see, Pa?  Poetry
is in the earth. It’s in your ‘tatie plot, the clouds, the trees. It’s
everywhere you look!’

Now she realised she was wrong. There was no poetry here. Steady
and monotonous pumped the iron heart of the mill, its rhythm thumping through
the soles of her feet, ticking repetitively in her veins. There was no escape
from breathing in the stagnant stench of sweated labour trapped within airless
rooms
.

There was no poetry here.

‘Dunham, to the mules!’

It was the same day after seemingly endless day, the relentless
metal beasts crushing the life out of their victims. 

Backing from the mule, where she had swept up waste cotton, an
appalling tickling caught at her throat. Coughing ceaselessly she was sure she
would choke to death, there and then, on the sucking dust. Clasping Eppie’s
hand, Martha stared anxiously into her red-rimmed eyes. Fever-bright they
burned in her lean face, reflecting her hunger and deprivation. Eppie fought to
draw breath, ‘It’s the … little cottony bits.’

‘No talking!’ Crumpton shouted. ‘What do you think this is?
The market square?’ A toffee stuck to his set of false teeth. He spat them out,
picked off the sweet, and sucked the dentures back in.

Eppie jumped at the feel of a hand crawling upon her
shoulder. A willowy fellow, Longbotham was, as ever, dressed in a cheap black
cotton suit. He was acting upon instructions from the overseer. ‘Name?’ he
asked in an unhurried voice.

‘Eppie Dunham.’

The clerk carried a wooden board upon which was set an ink
pot and quill.

She watched as he wrote slowly in the red fines book:
Two
pence deduction. Speaking whilst working.

‘Two whole pennies?’ she cried.

Crumpton cast her a wry smile. ‘Make that four
whole
pennies.’

Weighed down by a wooden box off-loaded from a narrowboat, a
man entered the mill and dumped it beneath a window. ‘Chalks!’

‘They’re shouting out for chalks in the finishing shed,’ the
overseer told Eppie. ‘Take some over.’

Whilst grabbing a handful she glanced through a window and gaped
in surprise, having spotted Tobias Leiff. He was standing beside a narrowboat, turning
the handle of a crane. Another steersman directed the unloading of bales. She
longed to rap on the window to gain Tobias’s attention.

‘Rules!’ Crumpton snarled. ‘No looking out of the windows.’ He
hung a heavy stone around her neck.  ‘You will wear this at work all week as your
punishment.’

‘A whole week!’ she protested, tugging at the thick cord.

‘Longbotham, make those six
whole
pennies,’ Crumpton said mockingly.

In the glass-roofed finishing shed, women sat at tilted
tables on which cloth was spread, repairing faults and colouring it to make it
appear an even shade. 

Wakelin and Ezra stared at Eppie in sorrow as she stepped
towards a table. The stone,
Time Waster
daubed upon it, was so heavy,
and the rope so painful as it bit into the skin of her neck that it forced her
to walk round-shouldered. 

Depositing the chalk, she returned, gloomily, to the
spinning room.

The engine shut off for the night, a queue of children stood
in rigid silence before the office door.

‘Next,’ Mr Grimley called.

Seated upon his lofty stool, Longbotham totted each family’s
due wage in his ledger.

‘Name?’ Mr Grimley asked without looking up from a tin box.

‘Eppie.’

He huffed, though she guessed, more from weariness than
bad-temper. ‘Surname?’

‘Sorry, Dunham.’

‘You appear to have got yourself into a bit of mischief this
week, young lady.’

Hands gripped behind her back, she stared at the blazing
coal fire. ‘Umm.’

Having checked the wage, Longbotham informed Mr Grimley who,
in turn, handed her a few shillings, pence and twenty badge-like copper coins. 
‘Next.’

‘What’s them?’

‘Tokens.’ Sorting the earnings for the following child he
had no time to explain. ‘Owner’s scheme.  Take my advice, stick to vegetables.’
  

Martha turned the unfamiliar coppers over in her hands.

‘You’ve done well,’ Eibhlin said. ‘We’re compelled to buy
nearly all our food and wares from the truck store.  Those are truck tokens.’ 

Whilst Eibhlin and Coline headed to the cellar, Eppie,
Martha and Fur joined the queue of workers outside the truck shop.
Abel
Loomp, Purveyor of Quality Foods
was painted in lurid orange letters above
the door.  Lantern-lit, the interior looked a jolly place with seed buns and cottage
loaves displayed in glass cabinets. Stacked to the ceiling were all manner of
merchandise.

‘We’d best have pig’s fry tonight,’ Martha said. ‘It’s cheap
and warming.’

Eppie gazed wide-eyed at the rows of tiny wooden drawers
with their shiny brass handles, longing to creep behind the counter and peep
into each to see what treasure it held. Above the drawers were arrayed
cardboard boxes, jars of pickled eggs and onions and blue-wrapped packages of
varying shapes and sizes. 

Having exchanged some of his tokens for a limp-looking
cabbage, Fur tore off to the market to see if he could procure any good deals
with his few pennies.

Fighting back tiredness, Martha smiled genially at the
beefy-faced grocer. ‘I’d like some pig’s lights, heart, liver and chitterlings.
Also half a pound of oatmeal, three onions and six potatoes.’

Loomp worked the handle of the meat-mincing machine. ‘Going
to eat like lords and ladies are we, missus? You must be fresh.’

Rudely, Crumpton barged Martha aside. ‘Quart o’ toffees,
Hubert,’ he demanded of the apron-clad boy, who helped behind the counter. ‘Make
it snappy.’

Fetching a stool, Hubert reached up to a glass jar. Unscrewing
it, he tipped the sweets into a set of pendulum weighing scales, and funnelled
them into a paper bag.

‘Workers may only ask for up to four food items a day,’
Loomp informed Martha. ‘Mustn’t be greedy, must we?’ 

A blank where her smile used to be, Martha crunched the
handle of Eibhlin’s wicker basket in embarrassment, stammering her apologies.

Crumpton smirked at Martha’s discomfiture.

Impatiently, Loomp passed over a bag. ‘Here, take it.
Tokens?’ Eyes gleaming, he thrust a raw-looking hand into Martha’s and snatched
nine. 

‘So many!  I won’t have enough to last the week.’ 

‘Watch your tongue; else I’ll not be serving the likes of you
again.’ 

Foggy air chilled them as they left the store.

Martha felt dazed and dirtied by the experience. ‘It’s not
going to be as easy to save as I imagined.’ 

‘You can buy all this for a few pence in the market,’ Jenufer
said as she, Ezra and Simkin followed them out, ‘not that the quality’s any
better there.’ 

They traipsed through town to collect their younger
daughters from Grandmother Mobsby.

‘Only last week we fetched a fruit pie off Loomp,’ Ezra
said. ‘This is stuffed all right, I told Jen, though not all with apple. There
were bits of hay and cotton fibres in it. I even fished out a horse’s
whisker.’ 

Eibhlin was delighted with Martha’s offer that her family
share the pig’s fry.

Coline and Eppie set about slicing the meat and onion,
rolling them in flour and salt and frying them in fat.

‘I don’t know if Lottie will stay awake to eat,’ Martha said.
‘She hasn’t opened her eyes since I fetched her home. Her cheeks are flushed as
though she’s been crying.’

‘It’ll be the stench of the river making her eyes water,’
Eibhlin reassured her. ‘It takes some folk queer.’

‘Becky, Jenufer’s daughter, is sick as well,’ Martha said. ‘Jenufer
has an inkling that Grandmother Mobsby force-feeds the young ones a pudding of flour
and water.’

Eppie approached Wakelin with a chipped pudding basin of
stew. Gleefully, he rubbed his hands together. Moments later, chewing, he grumbled,
‘This ain’t proper cooked.’

‘It can’t be helped,’ Martha said, exasperated. ‘The fire
hardly has any heat in it.’

He threw down his spoon in
disgust. ‘I’m off to The Barrel to drown the taste.’

Valiantly, Martha forced herself to work through the weeks
though, like Eppie, she was feeling the strain of the long hours. Knowing they
had to be up well before dawn she often stayed awake all night, afraid that they
would oversleep and not hear the bell. Now she understood why so many mill workers
suffered from upset stomachs, appeared miserable, and aged prematurely. The same
was happening to her.

Despite her anxiety, as the first weeks of December crept
by, it was seeing their savings slowly grow that most pleased Martha. They had even
acquired a few domestic utensils on credit from the truck store and earned a
little extra by selling the pigs to a local butcher.

Strengthened by Martha’s optimism and listening to her plans
for their future that, before long, they would be free of the mill, Eppie
steeled herself to work through her fatigue. Each day, though, was a ghastly
endurance.

The weather worsened. Hail or rain often fell upon them as
they stomped to and from the mill, and it was almost impossible to dry their
shawls in the cellar.

Ever a fog hung over the grimy river. There was no respite
from breathing in its dankness as it seeped into the basement through cracks
and crannies in the brick mortar.

At work the impure air, deficient in oxygen, was no better.
Workers lived with the nauseous stench of whale oil, used to lubricate the
machinery. Smearing the floor, it sank in and became rancid.

Overwhelmed with a sense of meaninglessness in her life,
Eppie often went to bed suffering from headaches, gripped by the nagging need
to sleep, a cherished experience that often eluded her these days.

Eppie dallied beside a window making
pretence of collecting bobbins from a buffalo hide skip. From her vantage point
it was possible to see most of the garden on the river bank beside Bridge House.
Rowan was breaking ice on a fishpond.

Appearing as from nowhere, the white robin crashed into the
pane with a force that would have killed a living bird.

A carriage clattered into the yard. Hopping from the rear
board, Duncan, the footman, pulled out a foldaway step. Robert du Quesne
alighted.

The man was part of the past, a painful memory. Panicking,
Eppie grabbed an armful of bobbins and instinctively made to flee. In her nervousness
most tumbled around her feet. 

‘That’s seven pence!’ Crumpton yelled, seeing her scrabbling
on the floor.

Despair swept through her. Afraid for the loss of Martha’s
savings, she retorted, ‘I’ve only dropped six. The Yellowing says it’s a penny
fine for each dropped bobbin.’  

Though du Quesne had not caught Eppie’s cry of consternation
upon setting eyes on him, he had noticed a ragged child staring at him from a
grimy window on the second floor. He marched towards her, brimming with fury. ‘So,
Strawhead, you’ve crawled to my mill! I presume the rest of your odious family
are here. Having trouble with her are you, Crumpton?’    

‘The girl is a dreamer,’ the overseer said sneeringly. ‘Many
are the times I have had to fine her for gawping out of windows.’