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Part-timer |
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by |
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Alan Brown
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Miss Newton was nearly finished calling the register. She had a separate list of her part-timers who came to school only in the afternoon, after a morning’s work in the mill. “Robert Weaver.” “Yes, Miss.” He sounded weary, and it was only two o’clock. The young teacher knew that Robert would soon be asleep, holding his head up with an arm and elbow on the desk. She would give him half an hour before waking him with a gentle hand on the shoulder. “Tom Sutton.” “Yes, Miss.” Miss Newton look up from her register in concern. Tom was an intelligent boy, capable of much more than he achieved. Today, in his voice she heard the sharp edge of barely controlled pain. “Is there anything the matter, Tom?” “No, Miss.” Miss Newton walked in her halting way from her desk to where Tom sat at the back of the class. He was hunched over in his seat, hugging himself, shaking silently. “Let me see your hands, Tom,” she said softly. He brought them slowly out from below the desk, cradling one in the other. His left hand was swathed in rough torn bandages, stained bright with blood. “Ahhh,” the teacher sighed. “You work on the deviler, don’t you?” Tom’s reply was hardly audible, his eyes big and moist, his upper teeth biting down on his lip. “Yes, Miss.” She closed her eyes and asked gently, “How many, Tom?” A tear hit the desk top with a soft splat. “Two.” “When?” “This morning, Miss.” She could imagine. Tom tired and trying to keep the cotton flowing into the deviler, stumbling back in shock as the teeth on the shrieking, spinning drum ate his fingers. The overseer leading the boy away and binding up his wounds, quickly sending him on his way so that the machines could carry on their remorseless business. The family home would be cold and empty, everyone captive in the mill until the six o’clock whistle. Tom had come to the only place where he might find a little comfort. “Get out your arithmetic and work quietly by yourselves,” Miss Newton told the rest of the class. Their quiet mood should be good for half an hour, she thought. “Come sit by the stove,” she said to Tom. “I’ll make you some hot, sweet tea while we wait for the doctor.” “Can’t afford no doctor,” said Tom quickly. “The school will pay for the doctor. Now do as I say.” She would pay from her own wages, but the deception saved Tom’s pride.
After the doctor had left, Tom slept at the front of the classroom on a camp bed. Miss Newton rolled up one of the girls’ shawls for his pillow, and spread another over him for a blanket. The children tiptoed round him, staring at his white face, wondering if this would ever happen to them. When Tom woke, his teacher was sitting at her desk, writing quietly in the gentle light of an oil lamp. The other children had left. For a moment, he did not know where he was or why he was there. Then it came back to him. An ordinary day had suddenly exploded. The shock of his fingers being torn off was so great that, at first, he had felt no pain. The pain had come as feeling returned to his hand. The missing fingers were on fire. He felt dizzy and sick. He was so confused that he had come to the schoolroom, as he always did in the afternoons. He should have gone to Grandmother Sutton. They would be worried about him at home. All the same, he lay still, enjoying the peace and quiet. He could hardly believe that part of his body was gone. He seemed able to move phantom fingers, the pain now an aching throb. Miss Newton looked very young in this unguarded moment. A strand of hair hung loose over her face. She wouldn’t get away with that in the mill, Tom thought. As if he had spoken aloud, the teacher looked up and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Hello, Tom. How are you feeling?” Tom swung his legs out of the camp bed, holding his injured hand carefully. “All right. Where is everybody?” “Oh, they went home ages ago,” laughed Miss Newton. “I didn’t want to wake you, so I asked Robert to tell your parents where you are.” “Well, I got to get back,” Tom said. He stood shakily, holding on to the nearest desk for support. The teacher rushed across the classroom with that crabbed gait of hers and gave him her arm to lean upon. “Your father will come for you. Just sit quietly until he does.” She led him back to the chair by the stove. A kettle was murmuring to itself on the hot iron surface. Miss Newton moved it to the middle of the stove where it soon began to boil. “I’ll make us some more tea. That’s what my mother gave me whenever I was ever ill. Cures everything, she used to say.” Tom was still a little feverish, or he would never have spoken so freely to his teacher as he did now. “She didn’t make it, did she? Her own tea? I mean, she must have been a lady.” Miss Newton laughed. She was a person who liked to laugh, Tom realised. That was another way you could tell that she had never been in a mill. There was some laughter there, but more coughing on cotton dust. “Of course she made it! Whatever are you thinking of? We didn’t have servants, any more than you do!” Tom’s ideas were not so easily changed. “You’re an educated person, Miss. Not like us.” This time Miss Newton did not laugh. His words seemed to make her so sad, Tom was sorry he had said them, but he would not apologise for speaking the simple truth. The young woman gave him a steady look. “You could be an educated person, Tom, if you chose.” He was taken completely by surprise. “Me? I can’t do half the things you tell us. I’m not clever, like you.” “But you try, Tom, don’t you? And when you’re not too tired and you listen the way you should, you nearly always get it right.” She took a sip of her tea, to give these ideas time to take root. “You are very good at things that interest you, like science and arithmetic.” Tom responded reluctantly. “Well, I can see the sense in them things, Miss. But what use is reading and writing, in the mill?” Miss Newton sighed. “They’re what everything else is based upon! How could a scientist do his work, if he couldn’t read or write?” Her insistence was starting to make Tom angry, though he did his best not to show it. “But I’m not a scientist, am I? I don’t have to read or write on the deviler in Helmshore Mill!” He held up his damaged hand, and his voice was choked with hurt. “I won’t ever write no more, anyway. Not now, with this.” The teacher brought his arm down gently. “Forgive me, Tom. I didn’t mean to upset you more than you are already. Drink your tea, and I’ll tell you a story.” Tom calmed down and sat back in his chair. Everybody liked stories. Even today he would enjoy a parable from the Bible, or a tale of far away Miss Newton sat back also, and gathered her thoughts. “Once upon a time, there was a young girl called Becky who loved her mother and father very much and would do anything to please them. She lived in the same village as her grandparents, and lots of aunts and uncles and cousins.” Just like me, thought Tom. “It was a village that had once been just a few farms and labourers’ cottages. They kept sheep thereabouts, and in every cottage the women carded and spun woollen yarn and the men wove it, all on simple wooden looms and spinning wheels. They worked long and hard, but they never seemed to get much money for their cloth.” “Helmshore was like that,” Tom blurted. “My grandmother remembers it.” “Yes, Tom, the old folk in Becky’s village remembered too,” said Miss Newton softly. “They remembered the dark days of winter when they couldn’t afford candles for the light, and they remembered the hungry days of summer when the crops failed.” “But people looked after each other, didn’t they, Miss? It’s not a bible story. Her village was somewhere like here, wasn’t it?” Miss Newton smiled. “Yes, it was like here. And, just like here, a rich man came along. He saw all the sheep, and the spinning and weaving in the cottages. He saw how the people spent a lot of time growing crops on the land. And he thought, I could do all this better and cheaper.” “That would be Mr Turner,” said Tom. “In Helmshore it was Mr Turner,” said the teacher. “In other places it was somebody else, different people all over the north of Tom raised his mug to take another swig of tea and found that he had finished it. He had also not thought about his hand since Miss Newton started her story. “Who’s your story about, Miss? Is it Helmshore and Mr Turner?” Miss Newton opened the stove and shovelled in some more coal. Tom’s father would be coming soon, so she was careful not to use too much. “It’s about Becky, Tom. She worked in the mill as soon as she was old enough. All the family worked in the mill. The old loom at home was broken up for firewood, the spinning wheel was taken up to the attic and forgotten. The small-holding that her father had rented to grow vegetables was let go. From then on, everything the family needed had to be bought, and the place to earn money was the mill.” Tom snorted. “But it was better, wasn’t it? They could buy stuff they couldn’t before. Proper food, smart clothes. I’ve got a new suit I bought with my pay at Helmshore mill. Grandfather Sutton was always going on about the good old days, but they buried him in the suit he wore all his life.” The teacher studied Tom’s white face. He was really very young, and saw things with the simplicity of the young. “Nothing is ever all good or all bad,” she said gently. “By working at the mill, they never starved. The mill owner built cottages for his workers and piped water to fountains in the streets. He built a school, and paid for the church to be repaired and enlarged. Soon, he owned most of the village as well as the mill.” Tom nodded enthusiastically. “That’s just like Mr Turner! He brought the new roads to Helmshore, and the railway. We’re not the middle of nowhere any more!” Miss Newton wondered how often Tom or his family used the new toll roads or the smoke-belching railway to go beyond Helmshore. Hardly ever, she suspected. Sunday was the only day off from the mill, and half of that would be in church. Mr Turner wanted the roads and the railway to bring wool and cotton and coal to his mills, and to take away the finished cloth. She said none of this, but pressed on with her story. “Becky was glad to go to work, at first. It made her feel grown-up and important. She started when she was six as a scavenger in the spinning room.” “I did that ’till I was too big!” Tom sat forward, totally caught up in the tale, though he nursed his hand protectively. “It was scary! Crawling around under the machines to pick up bits of cotton. It’s dark and noisy, and the machines never stop.” “That’s right. The spinning mule clattered over Becky’s head with iron hooves, always ready to take a strip out of her scalp, or worse. She had her hair cut short, or it might have strangled her. She scuttled around under there like a crab all day, until her knees and bottom were scraped and sore, and her back ached. When she came out, she could not stand for a while, and walked bent up like an old woman.” Tom remembered this well. Happily, he had grown fast. “Becky hated it. But the family needed the money, so she went to the mill every day just like an adult. Then, like you, Tom, she became too big to get under the machines. She became a little piecer.” “I never did that,” said Tom, dismissively. “It’s girls’ work. A man is in charge.” Miss Newton smiled at being told what she knew very well. “To be a piecer, Becky had to be nimble and quick. The arms of the spinning mule trundled out on tracks on the spinning floor. Two banks of machines faced each other, and if the arms came out at the same time, as they were bound to do sometimes, there was hardly room for her to stand. And, all the time while dodging the machines, Becky had to piece together the broken strands of cotton.” Tom nodded to himself and his lips made the soundless words, “Girls’ work.” The coals in the stove had burned away and their cheerful glow through the air vents had died. It did not matter. The thick cast iron would give out heat until the story was ended. “Well, Becky was quick and nimble, but a bit of a dreamer,” said the teacher. “What did she dream about, Miss?” asked Tom. He was interested in this girl, and wanted to know all about her. “She dreamed of leaving the mill, of doing something different. She was clever, like you, and did well at school, when she could stay awake. She wanted to do something with her brain as well as her hands. She day-dreamed, and was careless at work. The spinning floor was covered with oil. Piecers went barefoot to get a better grip on the boards. But while Becky was tending one machine, the one behind hit her in the back, and she slipped.” Tom hissed in alarm. “She was alright, though. Wasn’t she?” “No she wasn’t alright,” the teacher said, with a little shudder that Tom hardly noticed. “The mule dragged her across the spinning floor. Her leg was caught under it. She screamed in pain but nobody heard her, at first. Then the spinner stopped the machine.” Miss Newton closed her eyes. Her fists were clenched, tight. “They had to lift the mule off its tracks to get her out. It was heavy and men had to be fetched to do it. She was moaning like a trapped animal all the while.” Tom swallowed hard. When he lost his fingers, it was so quick he hardly knew what happened. This was much worse. “She wasn’t killed? Was she?” he asked in a small voice. Miss Newton opened her misty blue eyes and gave him a reassuring smile. “No, Tom, Becky wasn’t killed. She couldn’t work in the mill any more, but the mill owner paid for her to go to school full-time. That was kind of him, because he didn’t have to.” “Is she still there, Miss? Did it really happen?” The teacher laughed. “Yes, it did really happen, and she is still there, in a way. Becky did very well at school, when she was able to stay awake all day. In the end, she got a good job and earned more money than any of her family did in the mill. So she was able to help them after all.” They heard a respectful knock on the school door. Tom guessed that it was his father, come to collect him. Miss Newton stood and patted her hair into place. She looked hard at Tom, and spoke urgently, as if she had got to the most important part of her story. “That’s the value of education, Tom. It opens doors. It helps you make the most of your abilities. Through education, you can achieve your dreams, in the mill or out of it. You could be a manager, you’re clever enough.” Tom stood also, a little unsteadily, and held up his damaged hand. “With this?” Miss Newton nodded without sympathy. “Yes, Tom, even with that. You can still write! You can still read! You could take advantage of this accident to spend more time at school, just like…” The knocking was louder this time. Tom went to the door and Miss Newton shuffled after him. He waited for her to open it. “Like you, Miss?” he asked softly as her hand went to the latch. “Like me, Tom,” she replied as she swung the door open. Framed in the doorway was Tom’s father, still in his working clothes. He screwed his cap up in his hands as he spoke. “Evenin’, Miss Rebecca.”
Part-timer copyright © 2005 by Alan Brown |
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