‘Oh, I know all about that,’ John fought back scornfully, ‘and I knew about it before you did, because our dad told me first and not you…and –’
‘No he did not,’ Connie denied hotly.
‘Yes he did.’
‘Will you two stop it?’ Ellie Pride demanded, a quick elder-sister frown creasing the smoothness of her pretty face. ‘Now, John, is that a dirty mark on your collar already? And just look at your new suit! You know what Mother said…’ As she tutted and fussed, secretly, and despite her newly grown-up sixteen-year-old status, a part of her positively itched to be out on the street with the rest of the excited crowd. But, of course, she wasn’t going to admit as much to her younger sister and brother. Their mother had left Ellie in charge.
A little self-consciously she touched the pins holding up her hair. She had been practising putting it up for weeks now, but this was the first time she had been allowed to appear in public with it worn in such an adult way.
Her new dress was also more grown-up than that of one fourteen-year-old Connie, who was still wearing a girl’s starched white pinafore over hers, her long hair curling loosely down her back as she kicked impatiently at the strut of the wooden chair on which she was sitting.
Stifling her own longing to be outside joining in the fun, Ellie reproved John. ‘You know that we are to stay here in the house until our Aunt and Uncle Gibson and our cousins come round from Winckley Square, and then we are all to watch Father leading the Master Butchers in the Guild parade. Once they have gone by we’ll go to Moor Park to see the Earl of Derby open the agricultural show.’
‘Well, I agree with John. I don’t want to wait for our Aunt and Uncle Gibson either,’ Connie announced rebelliously. She considered herself far too grown-up to be told what to do by a mere sister.
John pulled a mutinous face at Ellie. ‘Why do we have to go to the showground with Aunt and Uncle Gibson, anyway? I don’t like them. Just because they live in Winckley Square and Uncle Gibson is a doctor, they think they’re better than us. Father doesn’t think so. He says it takes more skill to butcher a beast properly than it does to –’
‘John Pride!’ Ellie stopped him warningly.
John looked warily at her. He knew that there was nothing his sisters hated more than him talking about the more gory aspects of their father’s trade, though it regularly proved to be an excellent way of reinforcing his male superiority over them. Even if he was just ten, and the youngest of the family, he was still the only son, the one who would in time inherit the family business.
Ellie, however, despite her own delicate and feminine appearance, was not someone to be recklessly baited or disobeyed. She might be all dressed up in a new frock made for the occasion by their mother’s dressmaker, and be wearing her hair up in a way that made her look disconcertingly grown up, but, as John had good cause to know, she could still outrun him and deliver a smart buffet that would leave his ears stinging.
‘Anyway,’ John added, ‘they haven’t got so much to be high and mighty about now, not with our dad being President of the Master Butchers this year, and being on the Guild Committee.’
Preston’s famous Guild celebrations went back to the time when the town had been granted its Guild Merchant charter. As the Guild ceremonies were only re-enacted and celebrated once every twenty years their occurrence naturally generated intense excitement in the town.
‘You know that Mother wouldn’t like it if she could hear what you are saying,’ Ellie reproved her brother. ‘Aunt Gibson is her sister, and you know that Mother was –’
‘One of the beautiful Barclay sisters,’ Ellie’s siblings chanted in unison.
‘Quickly, Connie, Ellie. Come and look,’ John demanded, scrambling from the chair he’d pulled up to the window to stand on the windowsill itself and crane his neck so that he could look down the street. ‘There’s a photographer waiting. I bet the procession won’t be long now.’
‘John Pride, come down from that window right now,’ Ellie began, but John wasn’t listening to her.
‘When I grow up I’m going to be a photographer,’ he continued importantly.
‘You can’t be,’ Connie objected. ‘You’ll have to be a butcher like Dad. All the Prides have been butchers.’
‘Not all of them,’ John argued. ‘Uncle William isn’t.’
‘No, well, that’s because he was the younger brother and, anyway, he’s a drover and not a photographer and you can’t be either –’
‘Yes I can!’
‘No you can’t.’
‘Can, can, can…’
As John jumped down from the window and reached out to tug on Connie’s hair she let out a shriek and tried to box his ears.
‘Stop it, both of you,’ Ellie commanded. ‘Otherwise I shall send you to your rooms and you will miss the parade completely.’
‘You can’t do that; you aren’t our mother,’ Connie objected fiercely. ‘Anyway, I don’t think it’s fair that we aren’t allowed to go to any of the balls,’ she announced, strategically changing the subject, but not before she had aimed a quick triumphant hidden kick at John’s shin. ‘Two of the girls from school were both going to private dances.’
‘Private dances are different from public balls,’ Ellie reminded her sister wearily.
Connie was like quicksilver, her moods and reactions changing so abruptly that it could be exhausting just trying to keep pace with her.
‘You know that Mother and Father can’t have a party of their own because they will have to attend the official ball, with Father being President of the Master Butchers this year, and on the Guild Committee. And because of that he will be too busy to take us to any of the subscription balls,’ Ellie explained patiently, though she was aware that Connie knew this as well as she did.
‘Aunt and Uncle Gibson are having a private party, though. I heard cousin Edward talking about it after church last week. Why can’t we –’
‘Quick, quick. The floats are coming!’ John’s excited cry brought his sisters hurrying to press their noses up against the glass.
A roar of excitement from the crowds massed on the pavements below greeted the arrival of the procession. Ellie was every bit as excited as her younger brother and sister, even though she tried not to show it. After all, this was her first Guild celebration too.
For the first time in the Guild’s history, because of the huge number of displays, the procession had been split into two parts: the Textile procession and the Trades procession. The Textile procession was the first to parade down Friargate.
The Prides had been butchers in Preston for close on four hundred years, and Robert Pride was every bit as proud of his family tradition as his wife Lydia’s family were of their more ‘gentrified’ professional status.
‘Just look at that,’ John cried out as a huge horse-drawn dray lumbered past, filled with pretty female millworkers in immaculate outfits weaving at their loom.
A little hesitantly Ellie peered over her brother’s shoulder.
The cotton millworkers were considered to be lowest in the town’s workers’ pecking order, and Lydia Pride had never allowed her own children to mix with them. Some of the millworkers had been foundlings, and the threat of being condemned to the workhouse was never far away from the poorer paid.
Ellie had been warned by her mother that she must behave in a grown-up and ladylike way; that she must always remember that she would be judged by her behaviour as well as by her position in the town’s