Forged with Flames Read Online Free PDF

‘Here comes Little Miss Dairy Milk again’. If I were particularly lucky Dad would even give me a piece after he’d opened it, but not always.
    Life in Barrowford beat to a predictable rhythm. It had been a mill town since the sixteenth century: generations worked at the looms and there was hardly a family that didn’t have some connection to them. My mother worked in the Lilia mill as a machinist while her mother had been a weaver in one. Her father was a wheelwright and blacksmith. Dad’s father also worked in a mill—as an overlooker, checking the cloth after it had been woven. There were at least three cotton mills near us, and more beyond. You’d hear the sound of the workers in the streets going to and from their shifts in their metal-soled clogs—a wonderful noise, clunking on the cobbles. The mills, however, were daunting buildings with inky smoke belching outof their towering chimneys, dwarfing you as you approached. The unrelenting clang of machines grated from inside as you walked past the windows, a little quicker than you might otherwise. I would look up at them and shudder, knowing even then that I would never work in a mill.
    By the time I was an adolescent, the mills were in decline anyway because cheaper fabric was being imported, so it was becoming less common for people to take up jobs in them. Village life was also loosening up—but only just. Most people worked away from Barrowford, in Nelson, Colne or Burnley, the three closest large towns. My father worked first as a clerk in Nelson and later as an accountant in Burnley. He was given a car as part of his salary, a cause for some excitement as not many people had one. It was a mark of someone who’d done well in his job—one up on the neighbours! We thought the lime green Morris was the most wonderful car in the world. The first time Dad took us out in it he was so nervous he ran it right up onto the pavement.
    After Mum stopped working at the mill she was enlisted as a cleaner with a woman called Mrs Halstead, who lived in one of the big posh houses. Mum was a born cleaner—she loved everything to be ordered and in its place, something that rubbed off on me as a child and, in more extreme ways, later in life. She was often in her “pinny”, straightening things, dusting and vacuuming. I went with her to Mrs Halstead’s a couple of times when she cleaned, which was the closest I’d ever got to what I thought of as a posh person. It certainly beat spying on them. I knew Mrs Halstead must have been important because the name Halstead appeared here and there in Barrowford, including as the name of a main street, and because my mother made aspecial point of reminding me to ‘make sure you’re on your best behaviour, now’ before we went.
    I was quite in awe of Mrs Halstead despite her initially disappointing appearance—short with trim, black curly hair and glasses—not at all grand or regal as I’d imagined she might be. But there was a decided air of authority about her that stopped any thoughts of misbehaving around her on my part. I remember once being allowed to play in her ample garden and being in awe of the size of it, especially compared to our postage stampsized backyard.
    Although we knew many of our neighbours, my parents mostly kept to themselves. Dad was not one to engage in unnecessary conversation. Like most men of that generation, he demonstrated his love for his family by working hard and providing well. He was much more likely to give you a ‘quick clip around the ears’ than have a conversation with you. As a child, I longed to have my father’s approval—or even just his attention—but Dad seemed much keener on watching the television, particularly the wrestling. If I were in the room with him during The World of Sport , he would suddenly jump up from his chair in the ad breaks, grab me and pin me to the ground and say in great