Angel Meadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

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