The Bobbin Girls Read Free Page A

village shop caught them just as they were about to rattle her letterbox. She pounced before they could hope to escape and, with an ear belonging to each of them grasped firmly between fingers and thumbs, took them right into her kitchen where she made them fill all her coal buckets. Then she gave them each a sticky toffee and sent them on their way with what she called ‘a flea in their ear’.
    ‘I’ll have that kind of flea any time,’ mumbled Rob through a mouthful of caramel.
    ‘Me too.’ And they grinned at each other in perfect companionship.
    ‘Does she sit waiting for us, d’you reckon?’
    ‘I think she must.’ The idea of Mrs Rigg with whiskers on her chin and her pink floral pinny wrapped tightly about her skinny body sitting behind the shop door in wait for them, made them laugh out loud. But she’d always been a good sport. In all the years of rattling her letterbox, she’d never failed to catch them, make them do some task or other, and then produce a reward as if they’d done her a favour, at the end of it.
    Next door to the village shop stood The Golden Stag, which seemed half empty this early in the evening, though it would no doubt fill up later when the workers from the bobbin mill had eaten their supper and came out for their usual pint, and perhaps a bit of a sing-song.
    They peeped in through the door and saw Jack Turner, the pot-bellied publican, shake a fist at them. He’d come back from the Great War to find his wife had run off with his best friend, so had never been quite so amenable as Mrs Rigg. They backed quickly away, taking no offence since this was their village and his irascibility held no threat for them. They ran around the back of the public house and headed towards Applethorn Cottages. just beyond Ellersgarth Green.
    ‘Let’s go to Hollin Bridge instead,’ Alena suggested, dragging Rob to a halt.
    She knew that the Suttons lived on Applethorn. Dolly Sutton had once been a close friend but the friendship had faded. Two years older, Dolly thought herself above hanging around with schoolgirls now that she worked at the mill and had money in her pocket to spend. She wore lipstick, marcel-waved her hair and always had a string of boyfriends in tow.
    ‘We’d best not touch Dolly’s house,’ Alena warned. ‘She’d half kill me.’ And think her such a child.
    Rob raised an eyebrow at this sign of weakness. ‘I thought you weren’t scared of anyone?’
    ‘I’m not.’
    ‘Well then?’
    ‘I’m no fool neither, Robert Hollinthwaite. Dolly Sutton is bigger than me.’ And tough with it.
    ‘So you’d run a mile from her, all the way to Hollin Bridge?’ It was dark down there, and there was talk of a ghost; a pale lost maid who wandered that part of the woodland, weeping and wailing for her lost love. ‘It’s getting late. We’ll have to be getting back soon. I promised your mam.’
    ‘You’re scared.’
    ‘I am not.’
    They stood on Ellersgarth Green with the lantern between them, and argued. It was always so. If one said one thing the other would say the opposite. But it made no difference to their closeness, only emphasised it, for they both knew that in the end they would do whatever Alena had decided.
     
    The clock in the hall chimed eleven as James Hollinthwaite climbed the stairs later that evening. Following the revelations at the tarn he’d walked for miles, going over everything in his head. Had he made a mistake? He didn’t usually. Except in his marriage.
    He entered his wife’s bedroom without knocking and looked down upon her with something very close to contempt, the whole arrogant stance of him silently protesting at having to be in the same room as her, if only for a moment.
    She sat propped up in bed against embroidered pillow-cases and beneath starched linen sheets, swathed in a nightgown he knew reached from chin to toe, revealing not a glimpse of flesh between these two extremities. Even the rich sheen of her hair was denied him. It hung