A dutiful daughter, p.2
A Dutiful Daughter, page 2
‘Mirren?’ Robbie jumped the last few steps and ran the short length of the close to gather her up. ‘Ye shouldnae be sittin’ there – ye’ll get chilled tae the bone,’ he scolded gently as he half carried her up the stairs. The relief of having him there, his strong young arm supporting her, made light work of the flight that had been an impassable barrier only moments before.
‘I was only there for a minute, just taking a wee rest before coming up.’
‘Aye, that’ll be right,’ Robbie said in grim disbelief, guiding her into the flat and nudging the door shut with one foot. ‘I’ve got a good fire going and some soup waiting for ye.’
She could smell it. Suddenly she was ravenously hungry. She eyed the chair drawn close to the bright fire, and the waiting slippers propped on the fender so that the torn linings caught the heat from the flames. ‘I should go and see how Mam is first.’
Robbie was at the gas stove, ladling soup into a bowl. ‘Mam’s fine,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I looked in on her before I went downstairs. She can wait till you eat some of this soup.’
The slippers were soft and warm and wonderful. ‘I brought you a fish supper.’
‘We’ll share it.’
‘I’d rather just have soup and a chunk of bread, but you could leave some of the fish in case Mam fancies it.’
He brought the soup and bread to her, spreading a newspaper over her knee to protect her skirt from spills, then setting a kitchen chair by her side to hold the bread plate. Opening the packet she had brought, he carefully divided the fish, putting half of it on a plate in the oven for their mother before sitting down opposite Mirren to devour the rest.
‘Robbie, don’t eat it with your fingers! Put it on a plate and stop behaving like a heathen!’
He grinned at her. ‘Fish suppers taste best eaten with fingers straight out of the paper,’ he said, as always, and she gave up.
‘You got some studying done then?’ She knew that he had, because with Robbie, the tumble of fair hair falling over his forehead indicated that he had been concentrating hard on something. From his first day at school he’d had the habit of playing with his hair while thinking.
‘Aye.’ He nodded, then frowned. ‘But I don’t feel right about you working in the evenings as well as by day, Mirren, while I’m studying. I should be the one tae do extra work.’
‘You know fine that it’s more important for you to finish your apprenticeship. Once you’re a proper engineer bringing in a good wage, I can start being a lady of leisure.’
‘Ye will be, I promise ye that!’ he said earnestly, and she smiled at him. She knew that he meant it, but Robbie was a good-looking lad in his final year as an engineering apprentice, working for one of the smaller local firms. Mirren had a suspicion that by the time he qualified and started earning more money, he would have found someone special and be thinking of setting up a home of his own. It had happened with Logan, the oldest of the family, and with poor Crawford, who had been killed at Gallipoli in the early days of the Great War.
Robbie popped the last small crunchy chip into his mouth, then crumpled up the empty packaging before yawning and stretching. ‘I’m for my bed. And you should be, too.’
‘As soon as I’ve seen to Mam. Sleep well.’ Although she was the older of the pair by little more than two years, Mirren often thought that the love she felt for Robbie was more like that of a mother for her child than a sister for her brother. Like almost every other woman in Paisley she had been ravaged by fears throughout the Great War; in her case they had been for Donald, and for Robbie, who might become old enough to serve as a soldier before the fighting ended. Her prayers had been answered, but by that time her brother Crawford had been killed and relief had given way to guilt. Somehow it had never occurred to her that either of her confident, brawny older brothers could be in any danger, but each time she looked at her sister-in-law Agnes and her nephew Thomas, Crawford’s now fatherless son, she wished with all her heart that she had devoted more of her prayers to Crawford. Sometimes she wondered if it would have made any difference, since she hadn’t prayed for Logan either, and he had come home unscathed.
Guilt, she thought as she tidied the kitchen, seemed to be as much a part of her as her blue eyes or the soft fair hair pulled back each morning into a bundle at the nape of her neck. It had been fully fledged at the moment of her birth. It was because of her guilt over Crawford that she was determined to do all she possibly could to make their invalid mother comfortable, and to stay with her until the end, no matter how much she and Donald wanted to be together.
Tidying the books Robbie had left sprawled over the table, she found a copy of Forward tucked beneath them. That was something else to fret over – his growing interest in politics and his friendship with Joe Hepburn, an older man and an active member of the Independent Labour Party. To Mirren’s mind, politics only brought trouble, especially to working-class folk. She was tempted to put the broadsheet with the rubbish waiting to be taken down to the midden in the morning, but instead she folded it and put it neatly on top of the pile of books before going into her mother’s room.
The upper flat that Helen and Peter Jarvis moved into on the day of their marriage had consisted of a kitchen, a front parlour, both with bed alcoves, and a small bedroom which Peter, a plumber, had converted into a mere sliver of a room, where Robbie slept, and a lavatory, a triangular-shaped wedge that only just managed to contain a bath and water closet. Here, Helen and Peter had raised their four children; now, with only three adults in residence, it seemed quite spacious.
The parlour, the most elegant room of all, had been turned into Helen’s bedroom when she became an invalid following the shock of her husband’s sudden death.
‘Is that you, Mirren?’ Helen asked from the darkness.
‘Yes, Mam. How are you feeling tonight?’
‘Ye might as well put the light on, for I cannae sleep. My back’s that sore and I’m needin’ tae go but the pot’s full. I thought you were never comin’ through.’
The bedclothes were tossed and tumbled, a clear indication that Helen had had a restless evening. Mirren removed the chamber pot from the commode and emptied and cleaned it, thankful that her father had had the wisdom to provide his family with indoor sanitation in an age when families thought nothing of sharing privies on the stair landings or out in the back courts. While her mother used the commode she plumped and turned pillows and smoothed out wrinkled sheets. After helping Helen back into bed she re-emptied the pot and cleaned it again.
‘I’ve brought some fried fish for you. Could you manage it?’
‘I’ll have a try. Robbie gave me some soup earlier. He’s a good laddie, but it’s not the same as having you here, Mirren,’ Helen said with an invalid’s fretfulness. ‘There’s things that a woman cannae ask a man to do for her.’
‘I know.’ When Helen had eaten the fish, Mirren washed her then rubbed her back, before helping her into a fresh nightgown and combing her wispy grey hair. Once settled, Helen gave a sigh of relief.
‘That’s grand. I could mebbe sleep now.’
Back in the kitchen Mirren stripped and washed, then put on her nightgown and brushed out her long fair hair, before drawing back the chenille curtains that hid her inset bed by day. It was close on midnight now and she had to be up at six in the morning in order to get the breakfast ready and see to her mother before going off to work at Ferguslie Mills. As she turned down the top sheet, the relief of knowing that another day had been got through and that she was free to slide between the sheets and lay her head on the pillow was indescribable.
But it was not to be. When she went as usual to have one final look at her mother, praying as she opened the door a crack that she would hear the sound of steady breathing, Helen said, ‘Mirren? I cannae settle, hen.’
‘I’ll sit with you for a wee while,’ Mirren said with a sinking heart, knowing that it would be at least an hour before she could hope to crawl into her own bed and get the sleep her body and mind yearned for.
2
Paisley’s Ferguslie and Anchor thread mills each employed some five thousand workers, mostly women and mostly living within walking distance, which meant that on six mornings of every week any birds perched on vantage points such as the elegant spire of the Coats Memorial Church or the roof of the Clark Town Hall were able to view a mass of townsfolk streaming towards one or the other of the mill complexes.
When Mirren stepped out of the close every morning she could see a seemingly endless stream of men and women flocking westward along Broomlands Street on her right towards Ferguslie Mills’ West Gate, while on her left a similar river of humanity poured along George Street towards the North Gate.
She could have chosen the West Gate herself, but instead she always walked down to George Street to meet Grace Proctor. On this particular morning she had spent most of the previous night in a chair by her mother’s bed, lulled into sleep by the soft voice in the dark stillness, then startled awake when the tone changed or when Helen, amused by a memory, uttered one of her infrequent rusty laughs. The sick woman had finally dropped into a sleep as dawn began to filter through the thin curtains, and Mirren had slipped out of the room and into her own bed for a blessed hour of deep sleep before it was time to get up and make breakfast, then settle her mother for the day. Now she walked in a daze, head down, scarcely aware of her surroundings until her name was called out just as she approached the George Street junction.
‘Agnes, what’re you doing here? Is it wee Thomas?’ Her mouth suddenly felt dry; Thomas was her mother’s only grandchild and the apple of her eye. If anything should happen to him…
‘He’s fine,’ her sister-in-law said breathlessly. ‘I’m glad I caught you on your lone.’
‘I’m on my way to work.’
‘So am I. Mirren, I’m…’ Agnes hesitated, the fingers of one hand plucking nervously at the shawl loosely wrapped about her head and shoulders, then said in a rush, ‘I’m gettin’ wed.’
‘Oh, Agnes, I’m pleased for you!’
‘Are ye? Are ye really?’
‘Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘You don’t feel that I’m turning my back on your Crawford?’
‘You’re doing no such thing. Our Crawford’s dead and nothing’ll bring him back to us. You’ve got a right to a life of your own, Agnes, and wee Thomas needs a father.’
Sudden tears filled Agnes’s hazel eyes and her voice shook when she said, ‘Ye’ve no idea how much I’ve been frettin’ over havin’ tae tell ye. I thought ye’d miscry me for forgettin’ your brother. And I’d never ever do that,’ she added fervently. ‘Nor will Thomas… me and Bob’ll always keep the memory of him there for the laddie.’
‘Is that Bob McCulloch? He’s awful nice,’ Mirren said when Agnes nodded shyly. ‘He’ll be good to you both.’
‘I know that,’ Agnes said, and for a moment the small pale face, which looked older than her twenty-four years, was lit by an inward happiness. Then the light went out and the worry returned. ‘But how’s yer mam goin’ tae take the news, Mirren, and what’ll yer brothers say?’
‘Whatever they say it’s your business. You must do what you think best for yourself and the wee one.’
‘Aye, that’s what my mam says. I’d best run,’ Agnes added as the Ferguslie bell rang for the second and final time. The other factories and mills in Paisley summoned their workforce by means of sirens and hooters, but Ferguslie had a great bell in the bell tower atop the original mill building. It rang every morning at seven o’clock precisely, and again at a quarter past the hour. Its voice could clearly be heard throughout most of the town, to ensure that every worker was in his or her proper place by the half-hour, when the machines involved in the detailed processes of turning baled cotton into thread roared into life.
‘I’ll bring Thomas on Sunday as usual,’ Agnes called over her shoulder as she turned to run back down the length of George Street to the other end of the town. ‘I’ll mebbe tell yer mother then. Or mebbe it would be best tae leave it for a wee while…’
As Mirren crossed the road junction where George Street bisected Maxwellton Street, Grace Proctor emerged from the red-stone tenement on the opposite corner.
‘Was that Agnes you were talking to?’ Grace always watched for Mirren from the parlour window of the Proctors’ first-floor flat. ‘What’s she doing at this end of the town just before the mills go in?’
As they joined the crocodile of people hurrying up Maxwellton Street towards the mill’s North Gate, Mirren told her Agnes’s news.
‘How will your mother feel about it?’
‘I doubt if she’ll take it kindly,’ Mirren admitted. ‘Crawford was always her favourite and I don’t think she’ll like the idea of Agnes taking another husband.’ It was just another worry to add to all the rest on her shoulders.
‘Bob McCulloch’s a good man. It’s nice that he and Agnes have found each other, to make them happy again.’
Bob McCulloch, a quiet, civil-spoken man in his early thirties, was one of the tenters, a team of mill-trained men adept at setting and adjusting the machines and dealing with minor problems that didn’t require the skills of a trained engineer. A friend of Crawford’s, he had fought in the Great War and survived, only to come home to find that his wife had been taken by the terrible flu epidemic that ravaged the world in the final months of the war.
‘You look tired.’ Grace changed the subject.
‘It’s cheery of you to say so!’
‘Well you do. You know that Mother worries about you.’
‘There’s no need,’ Mirren protested, though there was a certain comfort in knowing that someone was concerned on her behalf. She had been the one to worry about other people for as long as she could remember.
‘She says to be sure to come on Sunday afternoon.’
‘I don’t know if…’
‘You know she likes to see you. We all do.’ Grace squeezed Mirren’s arm as they turned left into a narrower street, known simply as Maxwellton. ‘I saw George last night.’
‘How is he?’
‘He was much more like himself.’ Grace’s fiancé had only recently come home, having spent over a year in English hospitals and a convalescent home recovering from wounds that had almost cost him a leg.
‘Is he settling in at his work?’ Since George’s injuries meant that he could no longer work at his former job as a van driver with Robertson’s Marmalade Factory at the east end of Paisley, one of his uncles, an oiler in the mechanical department of the Anchor thread mills, had managed to obtain work for him as a desk man in the mill’s stores.
‘He didn’t say much about it. It’ll take a wee while for him to settle in.’
Glancing sideways at Grace, Mirren saw that despite the other girl’s happiness at having George home again, the little worry line that had developed between her clear grey eyes since he had gone into the army had deepened since his return. George Armitage had always been a chatterbox and the very fact that he didn’t seem to have much to say nowadays indicated that something was wrong, apart from his injuries.
They were passing the Half-Time School, a handsome little building with intricate stone carving and polished granite columns set above the main entrance. Erected in the 1880s by the Coats family to enable their eleven- and twelve-year-old workers to continue their education for part of each working day, the school had closed in 1904, when under a new Education Act children below the age of fourteen were required to have full-time schooling.
Mirren knew from her mother, who herself had been a ‘Half-Timer’, that because of the new Act some two hundred children had to be dismissed from the mill. ‘And their parents were deprived of their wages. It was a good school, too. I liked it fine… and I enjoyed my work. Mind you,’ Helen had often enthused while Mirren peeled potatoes or changed her bed or sat with her in the small hours of the morning, ‘I’d a good gaffer, and if your gaffer was kind you were all right.’
Now the school had become the mill’s book-keeping department and, as always, Mirren shot a wistful glance at it as she went by. If things had turned out differently, she might have been leaving Grace at this point to go in and take her place at a high desk, with an inkstand and a pen and a blotter as neat and snowy white as the blouse she would have been wearing. She had always been secretly glad that, born in 1900, she had been too young to start her working life as a Half-Timer, for she had loved school, and had been happy to stay in it for as long as possible. She had done well enough at school to be chosen for the mill offices when the time came, and had enjoyed every minute of the work, but a year later, following her father’s death, she’d had no option but to move to the twisting department, where she earned more than in the offices.
Inside the mill gates they separated, Grace hurrying off to the nearby Number 2 Spinning Mill while Mirren set out for Number 9 Twisting Mill, adjacent to the West Gate entrance. She had quite a walk before her; the sheer size of the complex, with its offices and counting house and stores and dyeworks, as well as the huge mill buildings themselves, each between four and six floors high, often astonished visitors to the town.
Once Paisley had been a weaving centre, home of the famous Paisley Pattern shawls, but by the twentieth century thread production had become the major textile industry, with the town boasting the Anchor Mills, built by the Clark family on the banks of the river running through the town centre, and Ferguslie Mills to the west, built by the Coats family. The mills had merged by the end of the nineteenth century to become United Thread Manufacturers, but in the eyes of the townsfolk they were still two separate businesses, united in the common purpose of making the best thread in the world but divided by friendly rivalry among their workers. The Anchor employees were immensely proud of the anchor motif on the bobbins that left their mills, while the Ferguslie workers stayed true to their own chain motif.
