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Ethel reached the mill a moment before the gates were closed to latecomers. She’d woken later than usual and had to run to get here on time before the gaffers docked her pay at the end of the week.
She joined the queue of workers crowding through the mill gates and tagged herself on the end of the line, to wait her turn to insert her time-card into the clocking-on machine. Women and girls made up the workforce of weavers, spinners and winders, though a few men – mechanics, engineers and box boys – straggled along beside them. She looked for her ma but couldn’t see her. A pang of fear twitched at her, and she tried to shrug it away. Her da couldn’t touch her inside the mill – the women would protect her. He knew that and Ethel was sure he’d keep his distance. The fear that remained was for her ma and what her da might have done to her.
Caught in the middle of the crowd, Ethel had no choice but to keep moving forward. Once the mill started to hum, she’d have no time to think of anything except work.
The huge wooden doors leading into the courtyard were open. They closed after the last worker was in and wouldn’t open again until the bummer shrieked its loud whistle to release them from the working day. Then the hordes of workers would push and clatter through them, glad to escape the drudgery of their daily toil.
Ethel passed through to the courtyard, the uneven cobbles biting into her feet and threatening to unbalance her. The gable ends of three rows of stone buildings faced her at the other side of the yard. Carding and roving sheds lay in the buildings to the left and ran the length of the mill. Spinning sheds stretched all along the right-hand side. The middle building was for the weavers, who wouldn’t lower themselves to enter the sheds at either side of them.
The crowd separated. Women of all ages, shapes and sizes made their way, with weary footsteps, to where they worked. Ethel headed for one of the spinning sheds, a large, long room, with a claustrophobic atmosphere owing to all the machinery it contained.
Rows of massive, iron spinning frames extended its length. The roves, spindles and bobbins they housed stood lined up alongside the machines, looking like soldiers waiting for their orders. Workers scurried inside, eager to reach their designated spinning frame before the signal to switch on echoed through the room. Their shoes and clogs clattered in a staccato rhythm on the stone floors and muted the buzz of voices. Soon, even those sounds would be drowned out, replaced by the noise of engines and whizzing spindles beating on Ethel’s ears until they ached. Dry, musty dust, filtered into her nostrils, tainted her skin and hair and marked her as a jute worker.
A set of wooden stairs by the door led upwards to a platform that ran the length of the room. This was where the gaffer stood to get a clear view of several frames at a time; by walking its length he could oversee the entire room. At the top of the stairs was a glass-windowed office, where he filled in his time-sheets and kept a note of how many shifts each spinning frame did, keeping track of the number of bobbins available for the weaving sheds.
Ethel walked to her frame and checked every bobbin, making sure they were pressed down so they couldn’t fly up and split the jute ends once she turned the machine on, then she waited for the gaffer’s signal.
The signal came soon enough, and she switched on the engine of the massive frame, watching as the silvery spindles gathered speed until they whirled so fast they became a blur.
She stood for a moment, watching the thick, woolly thread being pulled downwards from the roves to run through the rollers, transforming it into a finer thread, similar to string. From there, each thread filtered through the spinning top of a flyer, which spun and fed it down through the machine, into the eye of one of the legs of each whirling spindle winding the thread around the bobbins. As the spindles whirled, the bobbins filled with string.
Ethel’s job as a spinner was to work the machine that spun the raw jute into string, mend any broken ends of jute after they passed between rollers and spindle caps, and then to shift the full bobbins from the machine and start another new set spinning. At the start of each working day, her prayer was the same as every other spinner’s prayer: that not too many jute ends would break at the same time. Too many half-full bobbins led to a reprimand from the gaffer. It was all right for him; he didn’t have to halt a spindle and put his fingers between its stationary legs to grasp the thread, while the other spindles continued to whirl their high-speed dance on either side.
There were many injuries in the mill; it didn’t do to be careless. Ethel, who had seen friends hurt, feared the spinning frames, imagining they were waiting for their next victim. As a result, she tried to work like an automaton but wasn’t always successful at blanking out the task and her fears. She often woke up in the middle of the night, convinced she’d lost her grip on the flyer cap which fed the jute through to the whirling bobbins. In these nightmares, the spinning legs of the spindles trapped her fingers and she always needed to feel her hands repeatedly before she was satisfied they’d only been mangled in her dream-world.
Despite this, she was a good spinner; though more often than not, she counted the minutes until the end of each shift, when she could turn off her frame.
The morning passed in a daze and she tended her machine while her mind was elsewhere.
‘You working overtime or something?’
The voice broke into Ethel’s thoughts and she started. The spinning frames around her had fallen silent, and hers was the only one still operating.
‘You’ll be giving the gaffer ideas. He’ll think we don’t need time to eat. Half an hour’s short enough as it is.’
Ethel turned off her machine.
‘I was too busy thinking about yesterday’s gathering in Albert Square. Martha – she’s a suffragette – let me hand out news-sheets. I was so excited. Fancy choosing the likes of me to do that! And when Christabel Pankhurst spoke . . . it fair fired me up!’
The spindles spun to a stop and Ethel opened the box at the end of her spinning frame. After removing the paper bag, which held two cheese sandwiches, she slammed the lid shut and turned to Maisie.
‘Let’s get a breath of fresh air while we eat.’
Dust motes glittered in the sunshine as they opened the door and left the spinning shed. Ethel leaned against the wall and breathed in the warm air, feeling its freshness after the dust-filled atmosphere inside.
Maisie took up a stance beside her.
‘You’re fairly into all this suffragette stuff,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet your da hates it.’
‘What he doesn’t know won’t bother him.’ Ethel opened the paper bag and broke off a piece of the bread and cheese.
‘I’ve been thinking about them suffragettes. I was at that meeting in Albert Square.’ Maisie took a bite of her sandwich. ‘I saw you handing out papers. Maybe I could do something like that.’
‘Martha says everyone’s welcome. I’ll bring you some leaflets if you like.’
‘Would you? That’d be good.’ Maisie brushed the crumbs from her hands. ‘Better bring a pile, actually. There’s more than me interested, I reckon.’
Ethel pushed the last piece of bread into her mouth and scrunched the paper bag into a ball before shoving it into her pocket.
‘I’ll see you later, Maisie. I’m worried about my ma. I haven’t seen her around this morning.’
She darted outside and over to the winding sheds. Most of the winders congregated at the end of their room, some sitting on stools and others on upturned boxes, but her ma wasn’t amongst them.
‘You looking for someone, hen?’ A big woman in a flowery overall stopped eating and peered curiously at her.
‘Margery Stewart,’ Ethel said. ‘Has anyone seen her?’
‘Sorry, love. She’s not in today. Heard tell her man beat her up again.’
‘Ta.’ Ethel’s shoulders slumped as she left the winding shed. She didn’t know why the news had shocked her; she’d known it would happen, the same as her ma had known. And there was nothing either of them could do about it.
The day ended at last and Ethel switched off her machine, sighing wearily. She untied the hook she used to mend broken ends and hung it from one of the operating switches, ready for the next day’s work. Lifting the lid of the box at the end of her spinning frame, she grabbed her shawl and shook the mill stour out of it before shrugging it on to her shoulders. She needed to hurry; she had things to do tonight.
There was a look of wariness in her eyes and she tried to keep to the centre of the crowd as she sidled through the mill gates. She needn’t have worried; there was no sign of her da.
All too soon, it was time to leave the protectiveness of the workers and, keeping her head bowed low, she scurried through the streets to the Nethergate. She didn’t feel safe until she was inside the house and the warmth of Martha’s welcome flooded over her.
‘Oh, you poor dear,’ Martha said. ‘You’re exhausted. Let me help you. I’ll take your shawl while you go through to the sitting-room and get your feet up for a while.’
‘That’s all right. I’m dirty. I should wash first.’ Embarrassment swept over Ethel in a wave. Martha wasn’t used to the dirt and dust brought home from the mill, and then there was the smell. She wouldn’t want that permeating the house.
‘Hurry, then. I’ve fetched something nice for your dinner.’ She turned aside. ‘I’ll be in the kitchen when you’re ready.’
Ethel watched Martha turn away. She hadn’t argued and Ethel took that as an acknowledgement of everything she was ashamed of. Her embarrassment increased. More than ever, she was convinced this arrangement wouldn’t work out. But what could she do? Returning home to face her father’s wrath was unthinkable.