The Loom (2 page)

‘Ee, love, let our Jack take care of it!’

So here she was, back in dreary old Harwood, standing at the top of Glebe Street and wondering what she was going to do. How on earth could she get Harold and those men out? She stood for a moment, thinking - a tall slim young woman all in black: black dress, black clogs, shawl and white pinny. An idea slowly began to form. Didn’t Albert Norton in the next street have a ladder? He was a painter and decorator so he should. She remembered Albert’s wife always saying as how he seemed to get more paint on him than on what he was painting.

‘I don’t know how he sees through his glasses, I don’t, they’re that thick with paint, and I have to get it off with a razor; takes me ages’.

She’d give Albert a try, because she knew he was a kind man. He’d helped her one day when she’d sprained her ankle, carried her home and deposited her on the sofa like a sack of potatoes.

Albert was not too keen to lend his ladder, especially when Emma wouldn’t tell him exactly why she wanted it. She wasn’t sure herself yet she explained, but could she please
borrow it, looking at him with her big black eyes, so he hadn’t been able to refuse.

‘Well, I’ll bring it around for you, then, love,’ he said, not unkindly, because he could see that Emma was all het up over something. ‘It’s a bit heavy.’

‘Oh, thanks Mr. Norton, thanks a lot.’

When they reached number five, Emma’s house, Mr. Norton stopped to get his breath back because Emma had almost run from his house to hers and he’d had a job keeping up.

‘Just lean it against the top window sill, if you wouldn’t mind.’

Albert looked at Emma, his eyebrows raised.

‘Don’t worry,’ Emma said. ‘I won’t be a minute. I just want to see if Mrs. Rishton next door can lend me some coal.’

Mrs. Rishton was reluctant about the coal.

‘I’ll give it back, Mrs. Rishton, don’t worry.’

‘Aye, think on that tha does.’ Mrs.Rishton wasn’t over generous. Rubs two farthings together for two days before she spends it
,
Emma always said of her, but she had to admit coal
was
very expensive at the moment.

Emma walked back to the ladder with the bucket of coal. She took enough to fill her pinny, which she tied up about her waist. Then she went unsteadily up the ladder to the upstairs window.

Albert held the ladder apprehensively. ‘Be careful, love,’ he said, watching her climb up.

Mrs. Rishton stood on her doorstep. Her mouth was set in a tight line of disapproval (as usual, like a duck’s you know what Emma thought). By this time other neighbours stood watching.

‘What’s she up to?’

‘Buggered if I know.’

When Emma reached the top she leant against the sill, feeling the bulky bits of coal against her stomach. She was afraid to look down. She’d forgotten how much she hated heights. Even standing on a chair made her dizzy. So instead she concentrated on the window, only now she had to free her hand from its vice-like grip at the top of the ladder. She had to get the window open somehow. If she leaned hard against the sill the coal wouldn’t fall out of her pinny, she could hold the side of the ladder with one hand and open the window with the other. She hoped to God the window wasn’t locked! She put her hand to the lower half and pushed, then breathed a sigh of relief when it opened. She could hear comments from people gathered around the ladder.

‘Ee, she’ll fall, she will. What the hell does she think she’s doing?’

‘What’s it look like. Aye, if she’s not careful she’ll fall and break her bloody neck!’

Emma had the window fully open by this time and almost gagged at the smell: beer, vomit, urine and other obnoxious odours, which almost knocked her off the ladder. What was she doing here, she suddenly wondered in a moment of fleeting panic? Standing on a ladder outside a bedroom window with her pinny full of coal? She must be mad, she really must. If her mother could see her now she’d have a fit. She was nearly having a fit herself she was so terrified of falling. She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the sweat trickling down the side of her face.

The sight inside the bedroom was one she wouldn’t ever forget. A pig pen looks better, she later told her mother. Five men lay sprawled around the room. Only two were on the bed. Most were snoring loudly, all quite oblivious to Emma’s look of rage as she peered in. The next moment they were bombarded with coal. Emma saw Harold on the bed and hit him with the biggest piece. He opened his eyes and yelled loudly when he saw Emma with hand raised, ready to let fly with another one.

‘
What the hell do you think you’re doing, Emma?’ he yelled, trying in vain to dodge the avalanche, ducking this way and that with his hands over his head. ‘Bloody hell, you’re going to kill me!’

‘Serve you right if I did,’ she yelled back.

The men shot down the stairs and out the front door, only half dressed. The crowd jeered as they staggered and swayed up the street, Emma watching in satisfaction from the top of the ladder.

‘Good riddance, you lot of drunken sods,’ she called. ‘If you come here again I’ll call the police and that includes you, Harold.’

Harold turned around and made a rude sign. Emma shook her fist at him, but there was a smile of satisfaction on her face.

I’ve done it, she thought, by God I’ve done it. I’ve got ‘em out!

CHAPTER TWO

A
fter the coal episode most people thought it would only be a matter of time before Emma was back with Harold. To everyone’s surprise this didn’t happen. Emma was kindhearted, but she was stubborn. Nor did she like to be made a fool of.

Harold’s gallivanting around with Annie Mullen was, as the saying went, the final nail in the coffin, and it might well have been his coffin, she would say to her mother, because sometimes she wanted to kill him.

She’d never forgive him for showing her up! She’d always disliked Annie with her small mean eyes and mousy look and who was, in her opinion, the biggest bitch in Harwood.

Not for love or money would she ever get back with Harold. Over her dead body, she promised herself. The last time she’d seen Annie Mullen, with that smug look on her face, she’d wanted to wipe it off with the back of her hand!

Harold Hammond was not a bad man, or stupid, but he was weak, especially where booze was concerned. His vacillating and self-indulgent nature had made him a good target for life’s vices. It was all too easy to succumb to the temptation of a mouth-watering pint at the Wellington pub when your insides were caked with coal dust. He’d always had a way with women and it came natural to him to flirt. When flirt turned into something more he hadn’t been able to resist.

After Emma left, however, and after that nasty fracas with the coal, he’d come to his senses. For a while, at least! When it registered that Emma had finally left him it was only then that he realized, with some surprise, that she and the children were the shining light in his drab existence.

At first he’d tried going on the wagon. Emma had to give him that, and from all accounts he’d given Annie the boot. He appeared at her front door one fine morning, not long after the coal episode, a big bunch of flowers in his hand and so clean that Emma could well believe that he’d used the scrubbing brush. He’d lost some of that bloated look as well, and a glimmer of the old Harold smiled at Emma when she opened the door. The Harold she’d fallen in love with when he’d returned from India after three years as a private in the British Army, where the sun had burnt his already dark complexion a deep, attractive bronze, teeth gleaming white in a face which glowed with health. At that time Emma’s heart had done a dozen somersaults and she’d been smitten. It had been in India, however, where he’d become addicted, because as he said, ‘it was as hot as hell over there and the only thing to do in that heat was to hit the bottle’.

When Emma left him he vowed to get her back. To do whatever it took, even, he’d thought in desperation, going down on bended knee. He’d almost tried it once, but thankfully hadn’t, at least saving himself
that
embarrassment. But even his gift of the gab couldn’t change Emma’s mind. She was adamant. She didn’t want him back and no amount of cajoling or conniving was going to do the trick.

Harold was flummoxed for a while, until the thirst got him. Then he began to turn up at number five, drunk, nasty and threatening. The last time Emma had let him in the house (big mistake), and only managed to get him out by threatening him with the poker. He’d sworn at her something terrible. Thank goodness the children were in bed, she’d thought. Then he began to make a ritual of every Friday night. Never any other night, just Friday, turning up at the house, full as a boot and demanding that she stop playing the fool and that they should get back together.

When it became obvious that this was going to be a regular Friday night occurrence Emma made sure that by seven o’clock, the time when Harold appeared, on the dot, she and the children would be out!

Then she got to thinking. Why should she have to leave the house just because her drunken sod of a husband had taken it into his head to terrorize her and the children? She’d be damned if she would, after she’d spent another Friday night at her mother’s. She was fed up having to rush home after a hard day at the mill, and all the paraphernalia of tea, for they would all be starving. Packing to go to her mother’s, then trailing to the train station, all of them tired and irritable and arriving in Accrington at about ten, every one of them exhausted.

They’d stay home and bugger Harold!

The children were in their nightwear ready for bed a little before seven. Emma drew the curtains and sat them on the kitchen table. Then they waited! At the stroke of seven they heard the faint chime of the Mercer clock on the Square. The chimes had only just finished when there was the sound of clogs on the cobbles in the back lane

‘
Not a muff,’ she whispered. The clogs stopped at the back gate. The latch lifted and the door was flung back with such force that it thudded with a loud bang against the wall. They all flinched.

‘Sh…sh….’ Emma mouthed.

The steel runners of clogs rang loud on the cobbles in the back yard, coming closer and closer and then stopped. A fist thumped heavily on the back door! Janey let out a small cry, which she quickly stifled when she saw her mother’s look.

‘Open up, open up, I know you’re in there. Open t’door, Emma.’

She had never opened that door to him again, but he’d continued this Friday ritual for a few more weeks.

‘As slow as a wet week,’ Emma said to her mother with ironic humour. Everyone knew that Harold was hardly that, but he finally got the message and left her alone.

CHAPTER THREE

E
mma Hammond lived for her children, literally, from when she rose in the morning, and donned her working clothes for the mill, until she went to bed at night. After the split with Harold she never looked at another man. Sometimes she would mutter, ‘Can’t abide ‘em.’.

Emma was not overtly affectionate and was, in fact, quite reserved. Nonetheless, her love for her children was obvious: making sure they were well-fed, warmly dressed in winters (
have you your liberty bodice on
?), that they were clean. She worried about them non-stop. She was the hub of their existence.

Leah Hammond, her daughter, never felt that a man was needed in their house. Only occasionally did she feel a pang of envy when she saw Kitty O’Shea, her friend who lived next door, sitting cuddled on her mother’s lap or walking with her father, hand in hand, up Glebe Street. At other times, however, they would hear Shamus singing loudly, his voice slurred with drink, at which times Emma would jerk her head in the direction of next door.

‘Thank goodness we don’t have to put up with that’.

‘Do I have to go, Mam? I hate going there.’

‘Now, Leah, don’t carry on. I wouldn’t ask you if I was feeling up to it.’ Emma Hammond eased herself up and leaned weakly against the pillows, pulling the threadbare blanket further around her.

She regarded her eldest daughter with heavy eyes. She’d been feeling poorly for a week now and had collapsed into bed yesterday, which had been Thursday, after she’d finished at the mill.

It was now Sunday afternoon and she hadn’t had the strength to stir since then. God only knew what the house looked like, or what the children had been feeding themselves. She knew
there’d
been a few bits of leftovers: bread, jam, dripping, but food must be getting low, although none of them had said anything.

Leah stood uncertainly just inside the bedroom. She was a thin girl, of medium height, with delicate features. Her auburn hair was pulled back into two tight plaits, done with great effort by Emma as she lay in bed, and her dark blue eyes were now shining with the hint of tears. Don’t tell me she’s going to cry, Emma thought in exasperation.