Balancing Act Read Online Free PDF Page B

her mid thirties, with a growing family, a growing business, and a raft of powerful impulses driving her on, chief of which was a determination to commemorate her grandfather in the most appropriate place and manner conceivable. His old factory in Hanley, flanked by wasteland on one side and a scarcely used canal on the other, was now only occupied by its owner in a single wing. The central block, where her grandparents had met, was boarded up, and the secondary wing, where the stores had been kept and machinery repaired, had broken windows and planks nailed across the main doors. In the yards between the wings, where cobblestones had once kept the horses’ hooves from slipping, and buffer stones had protected the corners of the buildings from heavily laden carts, weeds were growing dankly and half-heartedly, and there were drifts of litter and cigarette butts in the gullies. It was not, Susie thought, standing looking at it all on a leaden March morning, a factory in good health. Everything was dispirited; everything spoke of decay. It was a business limping along making cheap goods for an unenthusiastic market. Seventy people laboured in that rundown building, making nothing that they, or anyone else, could take pride in. She turned up her coat collar. Well, it was time to change all that. It was time to energize, to put the heart and the craft back into the old Snape pottery, time to give the people of Hanley a proper reason to live and work where they did.
    Looking at the factory now, she thought, as she stood gazing out of the upstairs window at the Parlour House’s unkempt but promising garden, you could still see the original pot bank. The canal was still there, of course, with an old bottle kiln on the far bank, one of the few survivors ofits time. The stretch of wasteland on the other side had been reclaimed from rubble and weeds and planted optimistically as a meadow. But the factory itself looked cherished now, its brickwork repointed, its slate roof solid, its whole appearance softened and mellowed with duck-egg-blue paint on all the woodwork and climbing plants trained up the walls. Susie had left the Snape Pottery lettering on one wall, but had added SUSIE SULLIVAN above it in bold white letters surrounded by the daisy and diamond motifs that had been her first bestsellers. It had never failed to thrill her, arriving by taxi from Stoke station and seeing the factory standing there looking so coherent, so collected, with lights in all its windows, cars in its yard, and stack after tidy stack of her diamond-patterned boxes visible in the warehouse wing, packed full of pottery destined for stores in London, stores in Edinburgh, and kitchens the length and breadth of the country.
    She gripped the sill of the window she was standing by. It meant so much to her, that factory, that business. It didn’t just represent what she had built, or where she had arrived at; it represented her past, her grandfather’s past, the past of those six towns and the riches of the land they were built on, as well as all the unimaginable human effort that had gone into digging coal out of its depths, and fashioning its clay into every kind of object required by domestic life. And it was this, this belief that she grasped the essence of this part of England, as well as the essence of what people wanted in terms of home and hearth, in taming some tiny patch of the wide, wild world to be a reliable sanctuary, that made her resist relinquishing any control of the business to outsiders.
    Her brand was essentially her invention. Without her, it was traduced somehow, diluted, distorted. She understood the figures – good God, hadn’t she looked after all the books herself for twelve years? – and she understood the ambition.But none of
them
– Cara and Daniel and Ashley and Grace – seemed to grasp how intrinsic her eye, her sense was to the success of the whole business.
    Which was, really, what this cottage was about. With the Parlour