‘At one stage we slept six in a bed in an attic room – three top, three bottom,’ Jo recalls. ‘We had a couple of blankets and my dad’s khaki overcoat thrown over us. The lavatory was outside and the walls were paper thin…You’d get someone’s foot in your mouth when you were half-asleep. But it was part of the normality of life…Like any family, ours has its ups and downs, its joys and sorrows, but beneath all of that is a great reservoir of love, and to this day we always watch out for each other.’
In between having her many children, and right through her pregnancies, Jo’s mum worked in the carding room of Cicely Bridge Mill, preparing the cotton fibres for spinning. Tucked behind the railway station on the south bank of the Leeds-Liverpool canal, Cicely Bridge Mill specialised in spinning, while, opposite, Alma Mill specialised in weaving.
‘The knocker-up used to wake me dad up to go to work, used to wake the whole house up, actually,’ recalls Jo. ‘It was a long stick knocking on the [upper] windows, still going on in the early 1950s. Every day started the same noisy, predictable way: bleary-eyed workers tumbling from their beds, the screech of the factory hooters, droves of blue overalls, flat caps and khaki demob-coats, billy-cans a-rattling and snap-tins shaping their deep pockets.’ Jo describes the scene in Jessica’s Girl and Angels Cry Sometimes:
The market-ball clock was showing sixthirty…Already the town was awake. Hordes of cotton mill workers huddled together, pushing towards Cicely Bridge, their flat caps like a sea of twill and their snap-cans clinking in rhythm with the stamp of their iron-rimmed clogs on the pavements…The tram shuddered to a halt, jerking Marcia’s wandering thoughts to the long hard day ahead at the spinning frames. The bleary-eyed workers, tired and worn even before they started, tumbled from the tram, all pushing and shoving towards their place of labour. ‘Morning Marcia lass…’ ‘Bit parky, eh…shouldn’t send a dog out this time o’ the day!’ ‘Ow do, Marcia love; weekend coming up, eh…thank Christ!’
The muffled-up workers shouted their cheery greetings, as they hunched their shoulders against the piercing cold, and set about trudging their way up Cicely to the sprawling cluster of cotton mills there. Marcia returned their friendly greeting with genuine affection…
As the hurrying throng of mill-hands swarmed across the top of Cicely Hill to disperse along various paths leading to their respective mills, the sounds of their departing voices was effectively silenced beneath the banshee wail of the five-minute hooter.
‘Come on, Marcia! You shoulda done your dreaming while you were still abed! Or wouldn’t the old fella let you, eh?’
Marcia turned at the coarse laughter which cut through her private thoughts. ‘Oh, morning Old Fred,’ she said as she stopped for the merest second to rub her hands in the intensity of heat radiating from the brazier. Old Fred was the night-watchman, a harmless little man with a mountain of cheek and more than his fair share of smutty humour…
Jo remembers old Fred very well: ‘Harmless, but incredibly ugly. Whenever I went up to Cicely Bridge, he was the little man always sitting there. “All right, lass?” he’d ask. He didn’t talk a lot, in fact, he was just a funny little creature sitting there.
‘I remember going into the mill for the first time and I couldn’t believe how hard me mam had to work. They all wore aprons with big pockets. The noise was horrendous! Huge machines, great big rooms.
‘And do you know they had their own language? They couldn’t hear what was being said, so they had their own language. It wasn’t a sign language with fingers but with the mouth. They used their mouths. My mum could talk to someone right at the other end, and they could converse, they knew what each of them was saying. You couldn’t hear a thing.’
The most crippling discomfort, and the hardest to get used to, was the noise. The constant highpitched whine from the machines, tempered with a rhythmic thumping, was painfully deafening and nerve-jarring. In the monstrous Victorian building which swallowed Marcia’s days, the spinning and weaving machines dominated thought and action. It was physically impossible for the workers to converse in an easy normal manner. Pitching the mere human voice against the brawling of these tireless machines was utterly futile. So, in the deviousness born of necessity, the Lancashire mill-hands had devised a silent but functional language of their own. With their sophisticated sign- and lip-reading language they cheated the screaming machines which sought to render them mute.
Marcia’s clocking-in card was the last in the rack. Everyone had punched their cards and placed them in the in-shelves. She slipped the yellow card into the slot over the time-clock, just as the hand swung round to register six a.m. ‘Good,’ she whispered, tapping the clock gratefully, ‘just in time!’
As she pushed against the heavy green doors leading into the cloakroom, she could hear the machines starting up one after the other. Wriggling out of her coat, she slung it hurriedly over one of the pegs on the rack before hastening to her own machine.
‘Come on, Marcia! Where the ‘ell ‘ave you been?’ Tom Atkinson was the gaffer. A great elephant of a man he was; shaped like one of the cotton-bobbins, swollen to bulging in the middle and tapered off at both ends. His watery red-rimmed eyes were incapable of direct focus because while the left one struggled to hold you tight in its quivering gaze, the right one swivelled about all over the place, until finally out of utter frustration the pair of them gave up the effort…
Without uncovering her long black hair, she skilfully manipulated the scarf about her head, transforming it into a knotted turban which sat tight and snug, concealing and protecting her magnificent hair from the clinging wisps of cotton which would soon fill the air like sticky snowflakes. Reaching into a small wooden locker beneath her bobbin-crate, she exchanged her ankle-clogs for soft slippers. Then she donned the regular green wrap-around overall. Strapping the deep-pocketed pinny around her waist, and checking the bottom tray-run to assure herself that it was filled all the way along with empty bobbins, Marcia threw the machine into gear. Marcia wasn’t normally given to nervousness, but the act of triggering the monstrous machine into life was definitely not one in which she took pleasure.
‘Tom Atkinson, the gaffer. I remember him. He was a man of few words, in charge of my mother’s section. He didn’t like children. He didn’t speak to me. He was just someone that was there who was part of what was going on in my mother’s life, you know?
‘But Big Bertha was the woman who worked on the next lot of machines from my mum. The one thing I remember about her was that she had this big round face and was always laughin’!
‘Often, at the end of the day, I would walk up to Cicely Bridge and meet me mam,’ Jo remembers. ‘I pushed the little babbies in the pram to meet her. I was only about nine meself. I would sit waiting for her, sit on a stool at the bottom of the run. I can see her now: at the end of each run of machine they would have a box and they would keep their slippers in there, and these slippers were the funniest things because they were just like big clumps of snow, where all the cotton had settled on them, month after month. The cotton, it would fall like snow and you’d be covered in it in five seconds, and the slippers just grew, and they shoved their feet into these great things and ran up and down the row of bobbins. She had eight bobbins to look after…’
These were the bobbins that received the slender rope or ‘roving’ of spun cotton fibres in the mechanised pre-spinning process, described in my Introduction. ‘Me mam had to keep putting the empty bobbins on and taking the full ones off, dropping them in her apron,’ said Jo. ‘And if you weren’t quick then it’d spill over and you’d be in a dreadful mess. They worked like this from six in the morning till six at night, all the time running up and down…’
The cotton poured out in great abundance, winding and wrapping itself around the receptive bobbins which spun and twirled, until swollen pregnantly with their heavy load. When full, the heavy bobbins would be removed by the harassed scurrying women who constantly raced against time and machine as they darted methodically from one end