The Overlooker Read online

  At a crossroads, his eye briefly registered a brown-and-white tourist signpost that read Thorncliffe Mill Museum.

  ‘You’ll need to turn left in the town centre,’ Thelma was saying. ‘The hospital’s a bit up the hill on the other side.’

  The centre of the town seemed quiet in the early evening. There were pub signs here and there, but no evidence on the pavements of customers. Perhaps they were all inside, enjoying the warmth and light. In the deserted streets, Nick felt they were passing through a no man’s land. He thought it must be the heaviness which was lying on his spirit. He had so much looked forward to this expedition. The meeting with Great-uncle Martin, whom he had neglected for so long. And Thelma, of course. But it was the link with the past that had drawn him. The sudden awareness of what he had nearly missed. The knowledge he had failed to ask from his own grandparents.

  And now Uncle Martin lay in a limbo between life and death.

  ‘In here,’ Thelma said, startling him.

  Nick had hardly noticed that they had left the streets of shops below them. He swung into the large hospital car park. Lights were on in the tall building, making it look like a liner moored alongside a dimly lit quay.

  Thelma hurried over to the reception desk.

  ‘They’ve put him in Crompton ward,’ she said, turning to Nick. ‘When I left, they were still doing all sorts of tests. I didn’t know where they were taking him.’

  A red line on the reception floor led them round corners and along a corridor. At the ward door, there was another desk, more questions.

  The plump, dark-faced nurse shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. He’s still not come round. I’ve got a note here to ring you if there was any change. I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey, pet.’

  It had been in Nick’s mind all the way that this was likely. But he recognized the tense anxiety in Thelma that needed to be doing something, however futile.

  She hesitated. ‘Can I see him?’

  The nurse looked surprised, but she got up and led the way down the ward. Blue-and-pink flowered curtains were drawn around a bed. The nurse twitched them partially aside and motioned Thelma in. The curtain fell back behind her.

  Nick stood, uncertain. He had had a momentary glimpse of a lean, grey figure, connected by wires and tubes to clinical equipment. The face had been obscured by the nurse’s large figure. Should he follow, or leave Thelma a few moments of privacy with her father?

  He had not had time to decide before she came out. She sniffed loudly, took out a tissue and snapped her handbag shut.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to the nurse with forced cheerfulness. ‘I just wanted to say goodnight to him. Silly, really.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said the nurse. ‘Look on the bright side. He’s had a setback, but he’s still with us. With luck, we’ll have better news for you in the morning.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  The mist was creeping up around the edge of the car park.

  ‘I’m sorry to have dragged you all this way for nothing. And it’s not a nice night for driving.’

  ‘I’ll be OK. There’ll be street lamps all the way.’

  ‘And after you’ve driven all that way today.’

  It was beginning to hit home to Nick. That long drive up the motorway from the south-west to the other side of the Mersey. And then the blow of finding that the man he had come to see was in a coma, and might never recover. Having to care for Thelma, who was gallantly hiding her inner anguish. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to be home in bed.

  Nick woke early. He slid out of bed, dressed quietly, and let himself out of the front door. On the gravelled path in front of the house he drew lungfuls of keen air.

  He could not repress a wry chuckle. Last century, this air would have been full of the smoke from a hundred mill chimneys. The same smoke that had blackened the stone of the house behind him. The streets would have been noisy with the clatter of clogs along the cobbles. Klaxons would have brayed the need for workers to hurry before their pay was docked for arriving late. Go back another century, and pale-faced children would have dragged their weary bodies to another twelve-hour day.

  His thoughts flew to Uncle Martin. That had been his life. A beamer in the cotton mill, whatever that was, and then an overlooker. Had he survived the night? At his age, there was the imminent risk of another stroke that would finally sever the thread of his tenacious life.

  He turned indoors. Thelma met him at the foot of the stairs. Her face bore an unexpectedly beaming smile.

  ‘He’s awake! At least, they say he opened his eyes. He’s not saying anything yet, but they think he’ll come round.’

  ‘That’s great!’ Nick kissed her spontaneously. ‘I’ll take you down to see him this morning, shall I?’

  ‘There’s no need. It’s kind of you, but they say it might be best if I come on my own to start with. Don’t overtire him.’

  Nick felt a surprising disappointment. It was years since he had seen his great-uncle. They exchanged Christmas cards, but it had always been Thelma who wrote chatty letters about the family news. He was beginning to realize what Suzie had long experienced, that his new interest in family history was making him curious about his living relatives in a way he had never been before.

  He felt oddly jealous of Thelma. How long would it be before he, too, could sit at Uncle Martin’s bedside? Would he ever get the chance? He knew how frail the ninety-three year old’s hold on life must be. Would he even be able to speak again?

  He smiled politely for Thelma, covering his feelings.

  ‘That’s OK. We’ve got a list of things we want to do while we’re here – as well as talking to you and Uncle Martin, of course. Top of the list is Thorncliffe Mill Museum. I know they’ve still got the old steam engine working, and at least some of the looms. It’s the sort of place my grandparents worked at, and Uncle Martin, of course.’

  ‘I wish he was here now. There was so much he could tell you about the old days. D’you know, I’ve never been to Thorncliffe. That’s life, isn’t it? You have things on your doorstep, and you never think much about them. But people like you come from the other end of the country to look at them.’

  ‘I know what you mean. In our city, there are underground passages dating from medieval times. I’m always telling myself I must go and see them, but I never do. Just because I know they’ll always be there.’

  But Great-uncle Martin won’t always be here, he thought.

  He looked past Thelma into the front room. There was no sign of the suitcase Martin had asked her to bring down from the loft.

  A figure came hurrying over from next door, hobbling slightly. Nick recognized the yellowish hair and bony chin of Geoffrey Banks.

  ‘How is he?’ he asked eagerly of Thelma. ‘Have you had any news?’

  ‘He’s awake. At least, he’s opened his eyes. That’s about as much as they’re telling me. I’m going in to see him in a bit.’

  ‘Praise God. The eyes of the Lord are towards the righteous. The face of the Lord is against them that do evil. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

  ‘I will. Thank you, Geoff.’

  The man lingered. His watery eyes were watching Thelma, as though hoping for more. Then he turned and made his way back to his own house.

  ‘He’s a good sort,’ said Thelma. ‘Though he does have some weird ideas. As I remember it, the good book says God sends rain on the just and on the unjust. That’s the way it looks in real life, anyway.’

  ‘What does he do? It doesn’t look as if there’s much happening in the town these days. I guess the recession must be hitting pretty hard.’

  ‘You’re right there. Lucky for me, people still want fruit and vegetables. I’m pretty safe doing the accounts at Sutcliffe’s, touch wood. Geoff wasn’t one of the lucky ones. He was an industrial chemist at Bray and Rose. But they shut down two years ago. Not much chance of getting another job at his age. He was bitter about it at the time. Said he’s served God al
l his life and it was the devil’s work he was thrown on the scrapheap. As far as he’s concerned, the whole world’s going to hell in a handcart. Still, he’s been kind to Dad and me.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ Nick said. ‘You may need a bit more help when Uncle Martin comes home.’

  If he does, he thought. Even so, the stroke may have left him partially paralysed. Thelma had said how his face seemed slack on one side. Could she manage to look after him? Would they have to move him to a nursing home? And what would that cost?

  But it was too soon to ask that sort of question. For the moment, it was enough that Great-uncle Martin was alive.

  The thunderous heartbeat of the steam engine thrilled Nick to the core. The Fewings watched from behind the safety line in the narrow room at the top of the mill. The huge silver piston shot forwards and back on its bed of oil. At the other end, the bright green painted mechanism it powered would be sending the leather belts whirring in the weaving shed below.

  ‘Fantastic!’ Nick raised his voice above the roar. ‘She looks in as good fettle as the day she was made.’

  ‘Aye. Not bad for a hundred and twenty years.’ The volunteer engineer patted the casing with pride. ‘She could have been put in yesterday.’

  Suzie’s long hair swung as she turned to Nick with a quizzical look. ‘You do realize it was machines like this that put your great-great-great-grandfather out of work. You know, the handloom weaver. The Industrial Revolution spelt the end of his way of life.’

  But Nick was in love with the pounding beast in front of him. ‘That’s progress. You can’t expect history to stand still.’

  One of the museum guides called up the stairs to them. ‘You’d better hurry up if you want to see the looms under power.’

  They clattered down the steps. At the bottom, fourteen-year-old Millie tugged her father’s arm. Her pixie face grinned up at him. ‘Seen this, Dad?’

  Nick read the notice at the foot of the stairs. ‘. . . Even the mill manager had to ask permission to enter the engine room.’

  ‘Now that’s power,’ Millie laughed. ‘Think yourself privileged to get up there.’

  The noise in the weaving shed was even more deafening. Over three hundred looms stretched away in row upon row under the tall windows. The dancing diagonals of leather belts carried the power from the engine room overhead. Just two of them were working. Their high-pitched clatter added another layer of sound to the thunder of the piston overhead. A metal grille separated the Fewings from the darting machinery.

  ‘Just imagine,’ Suzie marvelled, ‘what it must have been like when all three hundred were going at once.’

  Nick stared at the scene with a hungry intensity. ‘My grandmother worked in a mill like this,’ he told Millie. ‘She had five looms to look after.’

  ‘I’m trying to watch the shuttle,’ Millie said. ‘But it goes so fast I can hardly see it.’

  Their guide had joined them. ‘You’d have to imagine the air thick with cotton dust. And first thing on a winter morning the machines would be covered in frost. Your hands would freeze to the metal if you didn’t wrap them in cloth. And the noise was so terrific, the weavers worked out a way of lip-reading.’

  Suzie was silent for a while. She carried the details of Nick’s family tree in her head better than he did.

  ‘James Bootle was a handloom weaver back in the 1851 census. And then he re-invented himself. He turns up in later records as a medical herbalist. There’s a trade directory that shows he had a shop on Market Street Court, in the centre of the town, where the shopping precinct is now. But he couldn’t save his children from being sucked into the mills. Millicent was a cotton factory worker in the next census at the age of eight.’

  Millie’s eyes grew round. ‘Millicent! You never told me! Did you name me after her?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Suzie laughed. ‘We weren’t into family history then. I only discovered her a few weeks ago, when I started chasing up Dad’s family history as well as my own.’

  ‘All the same . . . But it’s daft. She couldn’t have managed even one of these looms at that age. She wouldn’t have been big enough to reach.’

  ‘She’d be working her socks off, supposing she had any, keeping the weavers supplied with weft for the looms, and clearing away the waste.’

  ‘She’d learn to be a weaver when she was older,’ the guide agreed. ‘But if you could reach your arm over your head and touch the opposite ear, you were thought big enough to work. And they didn’t stop the machinery if something needed fixing or cleaning. If she didn’t look out, she could lose an arm or her scalp.’

  Millie shuddered. Her hand went protectively to her own blonde head.

  She gazed back at the clattering machinery with renewed intensity. ‘Millie Bootle. She worked here?’

  ‘In a mill like it, certainly.’

  ‘It’s just possible,’ Nick said, ‘that your Great-great-uncle Martin knew her.’

  Millie swung her wondering eyes round to him. ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s possible. If she lived that long, she’d have been in her sixties when he was born.

  The noise slackened overhead. Nick could hear the piston slowing to rest. The flicker of hundreds of leather belts ceased their dancing. The shuttles on the looms fell still. A strange silence held the vast weaving shed. For several moments, none of the three Fewings moved.

  Then Suzie’s hazel eyes smiled sympathetically at Nick. ‘That was great, wasn’t it? I never thought it would seem so real.’

  He turned away from the looms reluctantly. ‘My gran and granddad left all this to move south, soon after they got married. Apparently Granddad Fewings had been posted to Portsmouth in the First World War, and liked it. They set up a fish and chip shop. But Gran was always a Northerner at heart. She was proud that she’d worked in the mills.’

  ‘I bet James Bootle was proud of the cloth he wove on his handloom. But his was a different world. Before all this.’

  They wandered off to the café, through rooms stacked with samples of cotton cloth, the myriad sizes of shuttles for every conceivable job, arrays of weavers’ tools, and the Jacquard looms that could weave more complicated patterns. Room after room opened up in the rambling mill. And there were more doors that were marked ‘Private’.

  Nick thought of the contrast between his own modern office in the southern cathedral city, his architect’s practice designing houses and offices for the future. Until recently, he had not shared Suzie’s all-consuming passion for family history. But this had gripped him. Here he was in touch with a woman who had died only a few years ago. His grandmother. A woman whose shy grey eyes had come to life as she told her children and grandchildren about her life as a cotton weaver. The knocker-up tapping the bedroom window with his pole, the clogs on the cobbled street, the close-knit community where almost everyone on the street worked at the same mill.

  And now that high tide of the Industrial Revolution had receded. The mills were deserted, the chimneys cold. Here and there they were being demolished, but slowly. There was no money to replace the mills. No new industries. Half the town seemed to be on benefits. He thought of Geoffrey Banks, the embittered industrial chemist. A disappointed man whose life’s work had been taken from him.

  Suzie could take her mind far enough back to imagine the way of life James Bootle had lost in the 1850s. Nick could only feel sadness for the loss of his grandparents’ world.

  They enjoyed a homemade lunch in the museum café. Nick chased the last crumbs of a rhubarb-and-apple crumble round his bowl.

  ‘I wonder how Thelma’s getting on at the hospital. Visiting hours don’t start till the afternoon, but it sounded as if they were letting her see him this morning.’

  ‘You could ring her.’

  ‘I’m not even sure if she’s got a mobile.’

  They stepped out of the café on to the canal-side. Millie looked along the once-busy waterway. Derelict mills stretched into the distance. Only the textile museum was a hiv
e of activity.

  ‘What do people do with all these empty buildings?’ Millie asked. ‘There must be something going on, mustn’t there?’

  THREE

  Nick checked his watch. ‘It’s only early afternoon. If Thelma’s gone to visit Uncle Martin, she won’t be home yet. Do you feel like a walk along the canal? I’d like to take a look at Hugh Street, where my family used to live. We could drive round, but it’ll be more interesting on foot than taking the car.’

  ‘I’m fine with that,’ Suzie said. ‘Is that OK with you, Millie?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Millie dug her hands deeper into her jacket pockets. ‘It’s a bit creepy, though. Those mill chimneys. If you stand too close and look up, you feel they’re going to fall on top of you.’

  ‘I’m sure they wouldn’t have left them if they were unsafe,’ Suzie reassured her. ‘There used to be a spate of programmes on TV about blowing up chimneys like these. There’s an art in getting them to collapse just where you want them to. I haven’t seen one of those for a while.’

  They were walking along the muddy towpath, avoiding the puddles. Nick peered through a gap in the stone wall alongside them. ‘They may have left the chimney, but the rest of the mill has gone. There’s just an empty space and a bit of rubble.’

  Suzie looked across the canal. ‘There are plenty of them still standing on the other side. But they all look empty. The lower windows are boarded up or they’ve got metal grilles over them.’

  ‘Gran said they needed those big windows for the weaving sheds,’ Nick said. ‘It could be freezing cold in the morning, but once you got all those looms working at once, they generated a terrific heat. And they had to have good light for mending broken threads or spotting a dodgy patch in the weaving. If the overlooker said your work wasn’t good enough you’d to unpick the weft and do it all again. And you were paid by the piece, so that meant you lost money.’

  The stone wall of the demolished mill ended. They were walking now beneath the towering brickwork of another derelict mill, four storeys high.