Child of the North. Piers Dudgeon

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СКАЧАТЬ be torn down a century later. Ruby Miller lives there in Jo’s novel Nobody’s Darling. Mollie and her fiancé, Alfie, try for a house there in Looking Back. In Rainbow Days, ‘the ruined house at the bottom of Derwent Street was a favourite meeting place for villains,’ and in The Woman Who Left it is the place to which Sal, Louise and Ben Hunter must return when they are stripped of beautiful Maple Farm on the outskirts of the town. Louise gives her true feelings: ‘I often stand at that front window and look down Derwent Street, and my heart sinks to me boots.’ Jo’s message is clear: you can’t fall much lower than Derwent Street.

      However, for an imaginative child born in the summer of 1941, during the Second World War, a child who knew nothing of the wider world, Derwent Street was all-consuming. The street ‘was all little houses,’ Jo told me, ‘but it was a real community. The house was heated by a coal fire, if you were lucky enough to have any coal. There was a tiny scullery, no bigger than a few feet. Back parlour, front parlour, each of the parlours had a tiny fire grate.’ The scullery appears in Take This Woman – ‘a cold, forbidding place, separated from the parlour by a heavy brown curtain at the door-way. It was some eight feet square, consisting of an old gascooker, a single wooden cupboard with several shelves above it, and a deep stone sink beneath the window. Built into the corner was a brick container, housing a copper washtub and closed at the top by a large circular lid of wooden slatted design.’

      To this came Barney and Mary Jane Brindle, and Mary’s two children by her first marriage, the family swelling in time to include, besides Jo, her two sisters, Winifred and Anita, and seven brothers: Sonny (so named because as a child he was always smiling), Joseph, Bernard, Richard, Billy, Harry and Alec.

      Like Amy Tattersall with her brood in Looking Back, the Brindles suffered the trials of so many growing up in a cramped house:

       ‘Four little ‘uns and the two older girls. Six altogether.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Might as well be sixty, the way they drive me to despair.’

       Horrified, and unable to take his eyes off the army of children, he asked, ‘How do you manage?’

       ‘I get by.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t know how Frank will cope though, when this one arrives in a month’s time. He doesn’t know one from the other as it is!’

      ‘At one stage we slept six in a bed in an attic room – three top, three bottom,’ Jo recalls. ‘We had a couple of blankets and my dad’s khaki overcoat thrown over us. The lavatory was outside and the walls were paper thin…You’d get someone’s foot in your mouth when you were half-asleep. But it was part of the normality of life…Like any family, ours has its ups and downs, its joys and sorrows, but beneath all of that is a great reservoir of love, and to this day we always watch out for each other.’

      In between having her many children, and right through her pregnancies, Jo’s mum worked in the carding room of Cicely Bridge Mill, preparing the cotton fibres for spinning. Tucked behind the railway station on the south bank of the Leeds-Liverpool canal, Cicely Bridge Mill specialised in spinning, while, opposite, Alma Mill specialised in weaving.

      ‘The knocker-up used to wake me dad up to go to work, used to wake the whole house up, actually,’ recalls Jo. ‘It was a long stick knocking on the [upper] windows, still going on in the early 1950s. Every day started the same noisy, predictable way: bleary-eyed workers tumbling from their beds, the screech of the factory hooters, droves of blue overalls, flat caps and khaki demob-coats, billy-cans a-rattling and snap-tins shaping their deep pockets.’ Jo describes the scene in Jessica’s Girl and Angels Cry Sometimes:

       The market-ball clock was showing sixthirty…Already the town was awake. Hordes of cotton mill workers huddled together, pushing towards Cicely Bridge, their flat caps like a sea of twill and their snap-cans clinking in rhythm with the stamp of their iron-rimmed clogs on the pavements…The tram shuddered to a halt, jerking Marcia’s wandering thoughts to the long hard day ahead at the spinning frames. The bleary-eyed workers, tired and worn even before they started, tumbled from the tram, all pushing and shoving towards their place of labour. ‘Morning Marcia lass…’ ‘Bit parky, eh…shouldn’t send a dog out this time o’ the day!’ ‘Ow do, Marcia love; weekend coming up, eh…thank Christ!’

      The muffled-up workers shouted their cheery greetings, as they hunched their shoulders against the piercing cold, and set about trudging their way up Cicely to the sprawling cluster of cotton mills there. Marcia returned their friendly greeting with genuine affection…

       As the hurrying throng of mill-hands swarmed across the top of Cicely Hill to disperse along various paths leading to their respective mills, the sounds of their departing voices was effectively silenced beneath the banshee wail of the five-minute hooter.

       ‘Come on, Marcia! You shoulda done your dreaming while you were still abed! Or wouldn’t the old fella let you, eh?’

       Marcia turned at the coarse laughter which cut through her private thoughts. ‘Oh, morning Old Fred,’ she said as she stopped for the merest second to rub her hands in the intensity of heat radiating from the brazier. Old Fred was the night-watchman, a harmless little man with a mountain of cheek and more than his fair share of smutty humour…

      Jo remembers old Fred very well: ‘Harmless, but incredibly ugly. Whenever I went up to Cicely Bridge, he was the little man always sitting there. “All right, lass?” he’d ask. He didn’t talk a lot, in fact, he was just a funny little creature sitting there.

      ‘I remember going into the mill for the first time and I couldn’t believe how hard me mam had to work. They all wore aprons with big pockets. The noise was horrendous! Huge machines, great big rooms.

      ‘And do you know they had their own language? They couldn’t hear what was being said, so they had their own language. It wasn’t a sign language with fingers but with the mouth. They used their mouths. My mum could talk to someone right at the other end, and they could converse, they knew what each of them was saying. You couldn’t hear a thing.’

       The most crippling discomfort, and the hardest to get used to, was the noise. The constant highpitched whine from the machines, tempered with a rhythmic thumping, was painfully deafening and nerve-jarring. In the monstrous Victorian building which swallowed Marcia’s days, the spinning and weaving machines dominated thought and action. It was physically impossible for the workers to converse in an easy normal manner. Pitching the mere human voice against the brawling of these tireless machines was utterly futile. So, in the deviousness born of necessity, the Lancashire mill-hands had devised a silent but functional language of their own. With their sophisticated sign- and lip-reading language they cheated the screaming machines which sought to render them mute.

       Marcia’s clocking-in card was the last in the rack. Everyone had punched their cards and placed them in the in-shelves. She slipped the yellow card into the slot over the time-clock, just as the hand swung round to register six a.m. ‘Good,’ she whispered, tapping the clock gratefully, ‘just in time!’

       As she pushed against the heavy green doors leading into the cloakroom, she could hear the machines starting up one after the other. Wriggling out of her coat, she slung it hurriedly over one of the pegs on the rack before hastening to her own machine.

       ‘Come on, Marcia! Where the ‘ell ‘ave you been?’ Tom Atkinson was the gaffer. A great elephant of a man he was; shaped like one of the cotton-bobbins, swollen to bulging in the middle and tapered off at both ends. His watery red-rimmed eyes were incapable of direct focus because while the left one struggled to hold you tight in its quivering СКАЧАТЬ