Home Is A Strange Country Chapter One

 

HOME IS A STRANGE COUNTRY

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

December 1903 Bolton

Florence's nose froze. It was six o'clock in the morning, and the hard December weather was cold enough to create intricate flower patterns of frost on the inside of her bedroom window, not that Florence could see them. She lay with her eyes tightly closed under the bedclothes. A thin dribble of transparent snot slowly ran from her nose onto her top lip. In her sleepy state she rubbed at it with her hand from beneath the blankets and sniffed.

'Florence.' It was the voice of her Pa calling from downstairs to wake her. The unconscious part of her brain had dimly registered the voice coming from the foot of the stairs, but the noise still had to make the transition upwards into the conscious part of her brain to make any real impact.

'Florence.' This time a little louder, but still not shouting. The impact on her unconscious was marginally greater, but still only enough to make her eyelid twitch and her head move slightly, unwillingly and unconsciously.

'Florence.' This time his voice was just about normal talking level. Florence's unconscious registered the noise, and this time so did the conscious part of her brain. She tossed under the thin blankets and eiderdown on her bed, and flipped from her left to her right side.

'I'm up Pa,' she muttered almost in her sleep. There was a wait of three seconds, and then,

'Florence.' This time Pa called her in a slightly louder tone. Florence turned again and groaned,

'I'm up Pa.' He didn't believe her and called her name again, and again, each calling of her name two seconds after the preceding call. The sound broke the thread of sleep and her eyes flickered open and then closed again, just as quickly.

Florence snaked out her left leg from under the covers, and tapped her foot hard on the bare floor by the side of her bed three or four times to indicate to her Pa that she was up and out of bed. Her Pa was not fooled, he continued to call her name gently to her, just above normal speaking level, every two seconds. Florence could bear it no longer and in a fury she swept the clothes off her bed and stamped her way blindly and angrily to the door of the bedroom, flinging open the door and stepping through onto the small landing at the head of the stairs. The warmth of her body melted away in the cold morning air and she stood shivering on the small dark landing.

'I'm up Pa!' she shouted down the stairs to him. He wasn't there. He had heard the real sounds of her movement in the bedroom and had resumed his seat by the kitchen fire. In a blind anger she stood at the top of the stairs with her hands clenching and unclenching by her sides, her face twisted with hate and anger, her breath coming in deep uncontrolled gasps, her long dark brown hair falling over her face in a bedraggled mess, like a Welsh pony needing a haircut.

'I'm up Pa!' she shouted angrily. There was no response, so she shouted again, 'I'm up!'. His voice floated up gently in reply from the kitchen.

'Right-o love. Tea's ready when you are.'

Florence turned back to the bedroom, pulling at her long cotton nightdress from the cheeks of her bottom, which had been trying to eat it since she had risen from her bed. She stamped back into the dark bedroom and slumped down on the side of her bed, fishing in the darkness with her toes for the socks and clogs she knew were somewhere under the bed. From the other side of the room she saw a small pile of bedclothes move as her Ma turned over in the bed she shared with her husband.

'Do you have to make so much noise,' her mother muttered. 'It's still the middle of the night.'

'Sorry Ma.' Florence quietly threw a reply over her shoulder, whilst pulling on the rough hand knitted socks she had found stuffed into her clogs from the previous night. She stood up shivering, her breath blowing in small clouds into the room, and pulled on her drawers and smock and then a cardigan, before rubbing the sleep from her eyes with the heel of her hand. She crept silently now from the room, not wishing to waken her sleeping mother any further. Her mother had not been well for some time, and always slept late in the morning; her weakness the result of bearing too many children too quickly over too few years.

Florence pulled the bedroom door gently behind her and walked as quietly as her clog shod feet would allow, down the plain uncarpeted wooden staircase. Though there was no light on the staircase itself, she could see where the door at the bottom on the stairs stood closed, illuminated by a yellow line of light shining through from under the door, where it failed to meet the bottom stair. Holding her hand on the banister on the wall she crept downstairs and entered the kitchen, closing the door quietly behind her. Her father was seated in his armchair by the fire, resting his hand on a large white pot mug on the table set in front of the fire. Hearing the door at the foot of the stairs open he half turned his head towards Florence, his only daughter.

'Tea's here ready for you,' he said, nodding towards the teapot standing on the griddle over the open fire in the cast iron range in front of him. Florence said nothing in reply, simply walked quickly in a simmering silence the few steps to the back door. She slithered down the short icy back yard to where the privy stood by the back gate. She sat in bitter cold and almost total darkness in the privy, clutching her arms around her and shivering uncontrollably in the early morning cold. Icy blasts blew through the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor, making life difficult for her as she sat on the wooden toilet seat. She reached up in the darkness to take a piece of torn newspaper from a short length of bent wire which hung at the side of the door and wiped herself with it. Then, clutching her shawl around her shoulders, she hurried back into the kitchen, kicking closed the door behind her. She went to the fire which was now sending flames half way up the chimney, and rubbed her frozen hands together in the heat. She looked over her shoulder down at her father's balding head, as he sat sipping his tea from his pot.

'Why do you do that Pa?' she demanded, still angry. He looked up from his tea and grinned.

''Cos it works love, 'cos it works. Never fails to get you out of your bed in a morning, does it?' he said. Florence did not reply, simply took a mug from the table and filled it with dark brown tea from the teapot by its side. She stood gazing into the flames of the fire, sipping her tea until the mug was empty. Neither of them said a word whilst they both drank their early morning tea. Placing the empty mug down on the table she took her shawl from the back of one of the chairs at the table and wrapped it around her shoulders. She bent down and planted a kiss on her father's head.

'Don't deserve it,' she muttered. Her father turned his head towards her as she went to leave the room.

'Work hard love, work hard,' he said grinning.

'No choice have I?' she replied sullenly, walking quickly down the hallway to the front door.

Florence was tempted to slam shut the front door in anger, but remembering her mother in bed above she simply closed it normally, and stepped out into the freezing morning. Stepping out along Waterloo Street she pulled her knitted shawl tightly around her head and almost immediately stopped at the house next door. She kicked her clogged feet one against the other as she listened to the sound of her friend Hettie coming noisily along the corridor, and then the front door was opened by her. The wooden front door did nothing to hide the noise of what was going on inside, it simply formed a barrier from people on the outside. Florence said nothing but stepped sideways and started to walk on again up the street, Hettie stepping out quickly to catch up with her. 'Alright Het,' Florence asked eventually.

'God but it's cold isn't it?' her friend answered.

'Language Hettie. What would your Ma say if she heard you swearing like that?'

'Don't care, it's freezing. Put a hurry Flo, I'm freezing to death here.' The two young women increased their pace and soon joined up with other clog shod young women walking in their direction. By the time they reached the top of Waterloo Street where it met Blackburn Road the pavements on both sides of the road were full of single individuals and groups of two or more, all heading in the same direction as Florence and Hettie. The pavement was frosty white and uneven where the stone flags had tipped and chipped over the years, and where now the cold winters frost had taken hold. They walked as quickly as was possible in their steel tipped clogs, but were constantly aware of the danger of falling flat on their behinds. In twenty minutes they had walked up Waterloo Street and Blackburn Road until they were almost at the Iron Church, so called by the locals who attended the church because when first built the congregation ran out of money and could only afford a sheet iron roof. Opposite were the imposing double wrought iron gates of the Prospect Mill. The mill was made up of three solid block like buildings, each of six or seven stories, and finished some ten years before Florence and Hettie started to work there. The two young women were forced to slow to a crawl almost, as the throng of workers grew larger at the double gates of the mill. Elbowing their way silently into the crowd they entered the doorway on the ground floor of the mill.

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The two young women were soon lost in the crowd of men and women bustling to enter the comparative warmth of the mill, and elbowed their way through the large wooden door leading to their respective workrooms. Both joined a queue of workers at the time clock on the left hand wall by the foot of the stairs, and punched their cards and then placed them in the correct place in the rack by its side.

The floor of the cotton spinning mill was over two hundred feet long, but probably nearer to three hundred, and sixty to eighty feet wide. Then it disappeared into a haze of semi darkness at the far end. Since the mill had opened in 1864 it had accumulated steadily increasing layers of smelly oil from the machines installed there, and natural oils and grit from the cotton which was worked on those machines. The room's ceiling was about fifteen feet high, to accommodate the lines of cotton spinning machines which were crammed shoulder to shoulder along the whole of the floor, and the extraction ducts which followed the ceiling.

There were so many machines in the room, that human passage around the edges of the floor, and between the individual machines, was done only with difficulty and care. Along the short ends of the room high windows allowed the winter sun to create an aura of brightness and light which belied the intense industry for which the room was constructed. Over the years the windows had become coated with a thick film of grime made from the oils and dust coming off the cotton, so that even on bright summer days it was sometimes not possible to make out anything beyond the windows other than shadowy shapes and figures.

Florence hated the place with a fierce and youthful vengeance, and had done from the first day she had started work there. When she was a child on her way home from school, she had frequently peeped into the mills during the summer months. It was only during these hot and steamy days, when the interior of the mill became so hot as to be intolerable even to the foremen and overseers, that the spinners and doublers working there were permitted to open up the doors to allow some warm air to draft into the place. She would stop, and bend her young legs down, to peer inside the maelstrom of noise coming from the looms, and each time she did, she became more and more convinced that she was never going to work there when she left school.

Life isn’t always ours to decide upon though, and Florence dutifully, though not with any pleasure, went to work at the mill when she left school at the age of twelve. The mill she worked at was owned by Barlow and Jones Ltd., and was called the Prospect Mill. The mill was on Blackburn Road, Bolton, close to the Blackburn Road Congregational Church, and was no better nor worse than many others in the Lancashire mill towns. Bolton was similar in many ways to all the other mill towns which had grown with the cotton trade. The Prospect Mill had one thousand three hundred looms in it, running eighteen hours a day in good times, twenty four hours a day in better times. Florence worked the day shift, from seven thirty in the morning until four thirty in the afternoon. In the winter time she went to and from home to work in darkness and cold for weeks on end, kept warm in winter by a thick woollen shawl around her head and shoulders, identical and indistinguishable from all the other mill girls. She wore solid wooden clogs tipped with steel horseshoe shaped soles on her feet. Like horses, but not as well fed or treated.

Bolton had nearly two hundred mills which spawned a series of spin-off industries of bleaching and dyeing mills. The town existed, had grown, and lived for cotton, but in recent times had also grown prosperous with the addition of paper, coal mining and engineering companies, which for the men of the town, provided some occupational alternatives. For women and girls there was little alternative. It was the mills or pregnancy. In the previous hundred or more years cotton had grown and flourished in the town, developing from family run looms worked by hand in the cellars and roof spaces of the poor homes in which people also brought up their families. With the invention of new looms and processes by Crompton and Arkwright the town itself had grown to accommodate the influx of workers from around England and afar, mainly from Ireland. The massive and rapid growth of the town brought with it all the social ills associated with that growth. Housing was built cheaply and badly, health facilities were poor or non-existent, drink was cheap and work was hard.

Florence hated working in the mill more than she hated her youngest brother Albert, who demanded more of their mothers’ attention than Florence received when she was his age. She hated the mill almost as much as walking through the dark cold streets in the morning to get to the place. She hated it more than the ice cold weather outside on winters mornings, and the contrasting overwhelming stifling heat of the spinning floor generated by the hot machines, which kept the operatives scurrying antlike all day, until they were at last switched off. The noise on the spinning floor was constant whilst the machines worked, and the shuttles shot to and fro turning out the miles of thread every day. The level of the noise was such as to make conversation impossible. Most of the men and women who worked in the mills, particularly the women, quickly developed the skill of lip reading across the length and breadth of the looms, above the noise they made.

The noise was worse than the Margam iron mills of South Wales, or steel works of Sheffield and Rotherham, worse than the riveting yards at Clydebank, louder than the loudest steel pressing plants of Tyneside, which is why after only a few weeks working in the place she, like all the other mill girls, had mastered the art of lip reading at a distance. She had also fostered a solid determination that working in the cotton mill was not going to be how she would spend the rest of her life. For many of the mill girls the way out was marriage and pregnancy; for more than a few it was the other way round. In her mind there was an angry conviction that she would not remain in the mill a minute longer than she needed to. She also developed a jealous regard for her brothers who were not automatically thrust into the mill when they had finished at school. She would get out of it in time and would not be relegated to its dimness and noise like her mother had been, and her aunts and uncles, and those others before her. Unlike them, she would not wait for marriage and a string of babies, one each year of the marriage, to escape from the place. For many of the women she knew, like her mother, they would probably lose as many of the children she birthed as they managed to persuade to live. She was sure she could do better than them. She had that level of solid determination which comes with the inexperienced knowledge and longing of youth, youth which had still to learn the pitfalls and hurdles which adult life could place in her path. She also had a level of natural intelligence, like her brothers, to enable her to view life and the world around her with a cynical and yet optimistic attitude. It was an attitude which would allow her to see life as others of her class could see, one which gave her a level of freedom few of her mill contemporaries possessed. She knew she was different, but had yet to understand why she was different.

Her father frequently commented to his wife, Harriet, that she had as much cunning and intelligence as either of their two older sons, Ernest and Willie, and that she would make something of her life, or end up, 'under the town hall clock.' A popular euphemism in Bolton for making an appearance at the local magistrate’s court, which lay in the town hall which stood in the centre of Victoria Square, a town hall which sported a large and imposing clock face.

The floor which she and Hettie worked on in the mill was one of six floors in that building, and one of three red brick and stone buildings which now made up the entire mill. Since the completion of the third building earlier that year it was one of the larger mills in the town, and just one of almost three hundred mills in the town of Bolton. Bolton was one of the main eleven ‘Cotton Towns’ in Lancashire, apart from the metropolis of Manchester, named Cottonopolis by the newspapers, and one of almost three hundred towns and villages within a fifteen mile radius of Manchester engaged directly in the processing of cotton. It was easy to understand why the cotton trade had become such an important part of the industrial wealth of the country. In the previous one hundred years the population of Bolton had grown massively from under twenty thousand people to over two hundred and sixty thousand. An enormous growth which in itself brought problems of a similarly enormous nature. Florence was a worker ant. One of hundreds of thousands who worked in the cotton and woollen mills of the north of England, whilst the queen ant dictated and controlled their lives.

She pulled her reluctant clog shod feet one after the other sluggishly up the stone steps from floor to floor of the mill, walking alongside her best friend Hettie Thornton. The two girls, being now fifteen years old, had gone beyond being classed as Half Timers, and now worked the full shift in the mill five and a half days a week. The memory of the luxury of being a Half Timer now seemed far away. On leaving school at twelve her Pa, William Henry, had walked down Blackburn Road and Waterloo Street onto Flash Street, along with many other fathers of school leavers that year. They were bound for the Bolton Council education and employment offices on Flash Street, to purchase the necessary birth certificate and licence, issued under the Factory and Workshop Act of 1901. The licence permitted their children to work part time in the mills, and then return to the school for the rest of the day. Sometimes the children did go back to school, but frequently the lure of addition hours and wages was too great, and they worked almost full time. The licence had cost him seven shillings and six pence, a sum he begrudged, but was forced to pay. The sooner Florence went full time to the mill, the more money she would be able to ‘tip up’ at the end of each week, to contribute to the family coffers. It was an important contribution, now that there were three other brothers in the family who were younger than Florence, but made up for in some ways in that there were two brothers who were older than her, plus her Ma and Pa. Eight in total in the family, living in a brick built, terraced, two bedroomed house.

Florence walked with her head down into her chest, almost shuffling, as she and Hettie trudged slowly up the wide stone staircase to the fourth floor of the mill. The staircase was eight feet wide and the risers were a little over eight inches high, higher than the ones at home, and so particularly difficult for the shorter legs of young women to manage. If truth were known, they were difficult for some of the grown men to manage as well, but no one mentioned this out loud to any of the foremen or managers. It didn't do to complain, although by nature the girls in the mill were frequently happy enough to voice their complaints amongst themselves, they had enough inbred sense of survival to keep their mouths shut and their opinions to themselves when one of the bosses was about.

Florence walked on the inside edge of the stairs and took advantage of the unpainted wooden handrail to help hoist herself up the steps, her breath becoming more and more laboured as they ascended. The stone walls of the outer part of the staircase were painted in a dark cream colour from the ceiling down to within three feet of the actual stairs, and then the colour changed to a very dark dismal green to the floor. When it was first completed and opened, the mill staircase and the outside of the mill, had looked very handsome, but now, some ten years later the sheen had gone off the paintwork and knocks and chips were in evidence on all the door jambs. The high wrought-iron mill gates on the front of Blackburn Road were also in need of a fresh coat of paint, and the mill as a whole was starting to look used and old.

Hettie puffed as she heaved herself up the stairs.

'What do you recon they will give us off for Christmas?' she asked her friend between breaths. Florence thought for a moment before she replied through equally breathless effort.

'I recon we’ll get Christmas Day and Boxing Day and not much more besides. Even though Boxing Day is on a Saturday they will probably not give us an extra day off on the Monday.' She paused then added after extra thought, 'They might give us Monday off though.' She turned to her friend and grinning added, 'Fingers crossed eh?'

'Can’t help but wish can we? I suppose ‘cos New Years Eve is on Thursday next week we’ll get the Friday off then we’ve got the weekend, so at least we’ll have three days off. You going to the fair? It'll be opening New Years Eve, we could go on New Year's Day couldn’t we?' She paused to take a breath and looked across the staircase at Florence before continuing in excited fashion. 'I’m dying to go this year. Last year Pa wouldn’t let me, but this year I'm older and bringing in a full wage, so he can’t stop me, an’ if he tries I’ll sneak off anyway.'

The two girls grinned at each other, contemplating the prospect of the visiting fairground which came to the town each year at this time. The fairground was one of the highlights of the young girls’ lives. The coconut shies and roundabouts each tried to out-compete each other for the few pennies the visitors to the fair clutched in their freezing hands. Favourite for both of them was the Black Pea stall. A white tent erected behind a huge steaming metal container of peas cooked in boiling water then served up in a thick white cup in a vinegary juice. Seated on a wooden bench around the edge of the tent, gripping the cup in their hands, on a cold winter’s day, this was an eagerly anticipated treat for anyone who visited the fair. The stall could be located simply by its smell from almost anywhere on the fairground.

Pulling hard on the handrail Florence finally arrived at the top of the flight of stone steps and turned the corner to face the remaining step before the door which lead into the spinning room. The door was made of hard three inch thick solid wood with a half window of reinforced glass. The doors were coated in the same dark green paint as the walls, but had suffered from the constant opening and shutting, much of it caused by the banging of large wicker skips filled with empty pirns and bobbins. Chips were knocked out of the paint where the hard skips running on small black wheels banged against the woodwork by men unconcerned about the damage they were causing to the doors. The heavy door had to be slid open sideways on its runners by the girls, pulling against the weight of a large piece of cast iron attached to a length of stout rope which would pull the door shut once they were through it. Often the door had to be held open to allow skips to be pushed through, hence the damage to the paintwork. Florence pulled the door to one side and allowed Hettie through before stepping through herself and then allowed the door to bang closed noisily behind them.

The girls edged through the opening into the dimly lit mill room. Electricity was not wasted on providing full lighting until the workforce were ready to start the looms, but the heat was something else. Despite the fact that it was winter outside, the temperature in the mill rooms was at least eighty five degrees, and would become higher once the machines started to run at ‘full tilt.’ The heating was not turned up high until the workforce came on shift; whilst the room had to be kept warm to ensure the cotton did not dry out, there was little point in heating it beyond that point until the workforce arrived.

Heating for the whole of the mill, and the electricity for the looms, was provided by a large pump room engine in a building separate from the three mill buildings. It was a dangerous place to work, and not unknown that serious or even fatal accidents happened from time to time. It was not unknown for a large explosion to completely destroy the entire pump room, often with loss of life.

The girls shed their thick woollen shawls, hanging them on pegs set on the walls close to the doorway, and donned white overalls to protect their clothes. At the end of the shift their sweaty clothes were stained with splashes of oil from the looms, and their hair and clothing would be festooned with small ghost like wisps of cotton which held in the air until disturbed by a body walking too close to the machines. By the time the girls had set the machines to work, the full lighting had been switched on and the temperature raised, they were already starting to sweat uncomfortably.

Florence had served an unofficial four year apprenticeship after leaving school, until now, at the age of almost sixteen, she had made her way comfortably, but with hard work, to the position of spinner in the mill. Being a half-timer, she had learned the work of the spinner, but had done so in small parts, it was too complicated to take it all in at once, until finally when she was fifteen and a half she, and Hettie, had been moved full time onto spinning the cotton thread which was the mills existence. Though she had come to hate the mill and the work she did, she had been taught by her parents the accepted working class norms of hard work and not answering back to the ‘mesters.' Whilst it was accepted that talking back would earn a reprimand or fine, it did not prevent workers in the mill from enlarging their own education and experience after work at their own expense. Often, Florence, despite her tender years, would bite her tongue in order not to answer back with a sarcastic or argumentative response to the foremen's comments to her and the other girls on her floor. She would smile at the foremen from time to time, and occasionally when the managers put in an appearance on the spinning floor to confront a serious problem, she would shyly offer them a smile as well. By the time she had reached the age of seven she knew that she could wriggle her little finger and her father and brothers would do anything for her. When she had reached the age of twelve she understood why this was so, and by the time she reached sixteen her developed body told her that this would always be so. Not that she was a girl to take advantage of her looks and warm smile, simply that if the opportunity arose, well then, she would use it as best she could. Her smile was always returned by the women and girls around her, and it stopped the men dead in their tracks, whilst all manner of unworthy thoughts coursed through their minds. She learned quickly what it meant to be a woman, but did not flaunt it like some of the girls. It was well known that some of the older women would be only too ready to make a grab for any of the younger men walking through the loom rooms, and sometimes there was a willing man on hand as well to help satisfy the urges which seemed to fester with the heat.

Her name, and her work, became known in the upper circles of the hierarchy, so that when they were content that she knew her skills well enough, the promotion was given to her. Not in some formal presentation, she was bluntly told that as from Monday of next week she would be a full time spinner on a spinner’s wages. She had grinned with pleasure when the foreman told her the news, at last she would have more money in her pocket. After all, her father and mother could not keep all of her wage for the running of the house, could they? Less than a man’s spinner’s wages to be sure, but a raise despite that. Like all the other women who worked in the mill, she was bitterly aware of the anomaly between men and women’s wages, but put up with it. It’s what women did, it’s what they were accustomed to and brought up to expect. But for Florence it was a means to an end. What that end was she had no idea at the moment, but knew that when the opportunity presented itself, she would be ready to take it. The women's suffrage movement had already provided her with thoughts which her stunned mother felt were very out of place for a girl of her class.