Angel Meadow Read Online Free PDF

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