Читать книгу Child of the North - Piers Dudgeon - Страница 7

‘Everything I have touched in my life figures in my books. Every single book I write has something that has happened to me or my family or to my friends.’

‘I was born in Derwent Street in Blackburn, Lancashire, during the Second World War, and my earliest memories are of sitting on the front doorstep, watching the world being created in that street. I would see kids playing, men fighting, sweethearts having a tiff and then making up, and I’d just sit and stare at them, soaking it all in. If I close my eyes now I can still see it, just as if I were that five-year-old again. All the stories I have ever written have come from those people.’

The street was long, but straight like the lines of a railway track, lit by the tall blue-framed gas-lamps, which winked and sparkled at regular intervals on either side. From No. 2, which was right at the neck of the street, a body could look along the continuous row of tightly packed houses and experience the same sensation as if standing at the mouth of a long meandering tunnel.

The world that met Josephine Cox’s curious stare from the doorstep of her house in the working-class Blackburn community of the 1940s was, as she noted in her first novel, Her Father’s Sins (quoted above) – ‘the old Lancashire, steeped in a tradition of cotton and ale’:

A Lancashire unwelcoming and unresponsive to the gentle nudging wind of change…Change would come, of that there could be no doubt. The old narrow houses with their steep unhygienic backyards, pot-sinks and outside lavvies, they wouldn’t escape…But for now, Auntie Biddy’s Blackburn remained relatively intact and contented and fiercely defended by every man, woman and child, who had never experienced any other way. They delighted in the open-topped rattling trams, the muffin-man’s familiar shout, as he pushed his deep wicker basket along the uneven cobbles, and the screech of the cotton-mill siren, starting another day. As long as one and all were left alone to make their own way, they bothered nobody and asked no favours. The children spilled out to all the streets, played with their skipping-ropes, hula-hoops and spinning tops, their laughter no less spontaneous because of inherent poverty…

Her Father’s Sins is about the way things were: the good times, the bad times. It is richly autobiographical. Queenie is the name of the little girl who experiences so many of the joys and traumas of Jo’s early life on the streets of Blackburn. Although her home is transferred from Derwent Street to Parkinson Street in the novel, they are, with reference to Jo’s early life, interchangeable.

Lying in the half-dark, Queenie found it hard to settle. She sensed something was wrong. But what? After a while she dismissed the notion, and turned over to warm Auntie Biddy’s side of the bed. But the uneasiness within her persisted. And slipping out from underneath the persuasive warmth of the eiderdown, she crossed to the window. For a change Parkinson Street was all quiet, save for the pitiful mewing of a frustrated torn cat, and the occasional dustbinlid clattering to the flagstones beneath some scampering cat’s feet.

Queenie looked along the higgledy-piggledy Victorian sky-line. The irregular pattern of chimneys reaching up like the fingers of a deformed hand traced a weird but comfortingly familiar silhouette against the moonlit sky. Lifting the window up against the sash, Queenie leaned out so she had an unobstructed view of the street below. Parkinson Street was home: No. 2, Parkinson Street, and Auntie Biddy, they were hers, her comforting world into which she could retreat when things became complicated and painful.

‘I loved the streetlamps and the cobbles,’ Jo remembers of her earliest childhood. ‘Many was the time I counted the cobbles in our street. When I had counted them from one end to the other, I counted the fanlights, the stained glass, on the way back. I had Queenie doing that.’

There were one hundred and four houses – Queenie had counted them all with loving precision. And there were one thousand and forty flagstones; Queenie had hopscotched every single one. She hadn’t finished counting the road-cobbles yet, but up to Widow Hargreaves at No. 16, there were nine hundred and ten; that was counting across the road to the opposite houses. When she’d finished them, she would start on the stained glasses in the fanlight above the doors. Queenie meant to learn all there was to know about Parkinson Street because the more she knew, the more it was hers.

Stretching her neck, now, Queenie attempted to identify the dark figure approaching against the flickering gas-lamps. The tottering speck grew and grew, until it shaped itself into the towering frame of George Kenney. On recognising it, Queenie involuntarily backed away…

Though Derwent Street is gone, Parkinson Street, the imaginative theatre of Jo’s real childhood joys and fears, still exists today and sparks characterful childhood memories of its own, Mill Hill being where some members of Jo’s family settled after Jo’s mum moved out in 1955. ‘We had relatives there: Auntie Margaret lived up there and we’d go and see her. My brother, Bernard, lived for many years in Stephen Street. And another brother, Richard, lived on Parkinson Street, so we were always up there. I love that area of old Mill Hill, and I have set a lot of my stories there. It has changed now obviously – you’ve got the Indian takeaway and all that; they weren’t there, it was just little shops and little houses and cobbled streets, and I loved it.’

Mill Hill, to the southwest of the town centre, developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century around Cardwell and Albert mills between the railway and the canal, together with another worker colony around Waterfall Mill in this same area, close to Parkinson Street.

The area may have seen change since Jo’s childhood, but it is easy enough even today to catch a glimpse of how it was. The Navigation pub is still to be found by the bridge over the canal where Emma Grady’s daughter, Molly, escapes from a prison van in Alley Urchin, although it has recently undergone a makeover. ‘It’s so old,’ agrees Jo, ‘and it’s got the wooden benches around the wall and the real old characters, and my God you pick up some tales.’

She reminds me that the Navigation became her dad’s haunt, and it is of course also George Kenney’s local in Her Father’s Sins, and in the Outcast trilogy (Outcast, Alley Urchin and Vagabonds), set in the second half of the nineteenth century, the pub is a haven for pickpockets and ruffians, and the place where Sal Tanner mistakes the attentions of a fellow in a spotted scarf for an invitation to bed.

‘’Ere…d’yer have a fancy for me?’ Sal said in a low, excited voice. ‘Got an urge ter tek me ter bed, have yer?’ It was ages since any man had laid her down, and the thought of a tumble had her all excited. ‘It’ll cost yer a bit more than one gill though, me darlin’,’ she finished with a chuckle and a suggestive wink.

‘Don’t be so bloody daft, woman!’ The poor fellow was shocked. ‘I’m offering you a drink…Whatever gave you the idea that I’d want to take an old soak like you to bed?’

Old Sal, a legend in the area, ‘a limping, bedraggled woman with thin, tousled hair and a kindly face that was ravaged by a rough life and a particular love for “a drop o’ the ol’ stuff”’, was modelled on a woman who used to live down on the banks of the canal in a shed, an old hut between the pub and a vicarage. ‘All the kids used to go and see her,’ Jo told me.

The hut which was now home to Sal and Molly was situated at the widest area of grassy bank, and was half hidden in the undergrowth. There was a tall stone wall immediately behind, and directly behind that, the vicarage. This fact had given old Sal a great deal of pleasure as she told one and all: ‘What more could a body want, eh?…I’ve got the ale house down one end, and the vicar at the other. If I’m tekken bad after a jolly night out, I have only ter whistle and the vicar’ll come a’runnin’ with his Bible. He’ll get me ter the gates o’ Heaven right enough. Drunk or sober, the good Lord won’t turn me away, I’m thinking!’

When they had first come across the dilapidated workmen’s hut, there were chinks between the weathered boarding ‘wide enough ter drive a horse and cart through’, as Sal had complained. Now, however, the chinks were stuffed with moss which Molly had painstakingly gathered, and the wind couldn’t force its way in so easily. On a hot day like today, though, the air inside the cramped hut was stifling. ‘Bloody hell, lass…prop that door open with some’at!’ instructed Sal as she fell on to the narrow bed, this being a scrounged mattress set on four orange-boxes, the whole length of which swayed and creaked beneath Sal’s sudden weight.

‘You’d walk to the pub with her and she’d sit you on the step. And you’d hear all this noise going on in the pub and I used to stand on tiptoes and look through the window, and there was Sal on the counter, dancing, drunk as a lord, showing her knickers to all and sundry. She was wonderful!’ Jo put the scene in Outcast:

Not daring to set foot in such a place, Emma stood on tiptoe in order to look through the windows. Her vision was impaired by the frosted pattern on the glass and the large words which read ‘Public Bar’ on the first window and ‘Snug’ on the second. Peering through a small corner below, where there was an area of clear glass, Emma’s view was still frustrated by the thick smoke screen and the wall of bodies inside…Suddenly a cackle of laughter erupted from within and as Emma peered through the haze in search of her husband, the unmistakable figure of Sal Tanner rose before her. The next moment, the laughing figure was hoisted on to one of the tables by a bevy of reaching, grasping hands. The music took on a more urgent note and the hands all began clapping as Sal Tanner executed a frenzied dance – showing her pink, grinning gums at one end and her pink, dimpled thighs at the other.

Soon after meeting Jo it became apparent just how completely the novels are based on her own personal experiences – not just the places, but the people, too, though this may be subtly done, so that, for example, Jo’s real Auntie Biddy, who lived in Bedfordshire, was a quite different character to the one portrayed as the mother figure in Her Father’s Sins. Only her name is used. Biddy’s fictional character is in fact that of the author’s mother, Mary Jane, who was the fulcrum of Jo’s existence as a child, and in a sense remains so to this day: ‘My mother was a lovely person. She was shy, but a very lovely looking lady – long dark hair, big dark eyes. She was ever so warm, you could never fall out with her.’

It was Jo’s mum who encouraged her to realise her ambition to become a writer, when the prospect seemed absurd. ‘Sadly I didn’t have success with the novels when she was alive, but she’s up there, she knows…She is Marcia in Angels Cry Sometimes, and I keep her alive in each new novel. She’s always there, sometimes she’s an old woman, sometimes a young man…I had to keep her alive, you see. Molly Davidson was also my mother [Cradle of Thorns]. Marcia is most like her, but she appears in every novel. She could be an old man, a young woman, a little boy – the persona, the soul of that character is my mother. My readers are beginning to guess: “That is your mother!” In fact, reading the book I am writing now [The Woman Who Left], they might think that the female character, Georgie, is my mother, but they’ll be fooled if they do, because it is someone who comes into the story later on…’

When I ask Jo what she particularly remembers about her mum, it is the simple things, how well they got on, the special, private, one-to-one moments of spontaneous laughter. Any one of the stories she tells me is typical: ‘I remember once we were in the scullery and me mam said to me, “Take the potato peelings out of that water in that bowl, put them in the bucket there and swill the yard with the water.” You had to go down a flight of steps to the backyard and as you came off the steps at the bottom you’d go into the smallest cellar, where the toilet was, and all the coal was kept in there. After telling me to do this, she went out, and I didn’t know where she’d gone. So, anyway, I did what she said, took the potato peelings out of the bowl and put them in the bucket – we used to give them to the milkman who’d take them to the farm to feed to the pigs. Then I took the bowl of water and opened the back door and stood at the top of the steps and I just threw it. At that precise moment me mam came out of the toilet cellar and it went all over her! I thought I’d killed her! I cried my eyes out, and then of course we just laughed and laughed together. Just things like that, so lovely.’

Jo’s dad, Barney Brindle, hailed from Kilkenny in southeast Ireland and had a job with the council when she was a child. ‘He had these beautiful blue eyes and he was fair-haired, this little man, and I loved him very much,’ said Jo. ‘He worked for the Corporation on various jobs; he kept the roads, maintenance jobs, everything. Later, he kept Blackburn Rovers football ground, which he was immensely proud of. He was fanatical about Blackburn Rovers. Oh, my dad and my brothers were fanatical. And I loved it. I used to play football in the street and I’ve got a scar to prove it! See that scar? I dived for the ball and slit my left hand on some glass.

‘Like the rest, my father worked extremely long hours. They had to because they had all these children. I mean, many of the families down the street had lots of children. So, the mothers were busy having the children and the men had to work to provide, and come the Friday they were worn out; they headed for the pub with the wages. It was a vicious circle.’

When Barney first met her mum, Mary Jane, in the 1930s, he was working as a quarryman and she was in her early twenties, lodging with her parents, Granddad and Grandma Harrison. Jo remembers her maternal grandparents well. They lived in Henry Street, Church, a suburb of Accrington, a town just east of Blackburn. Grandma Harrison is Grandma Fletcher in Angels Cry Sometimes – ‘bossy, cantankerous, but with a heart of gold…I remember her old mangle, sitting in the yard through all weathers until Monday morning when it came alive at the turn of a handle.’ And Jo remembers her grandpa as the one who opened her eyes to the magic of storytelling, when he sat her on his knee and told her stories of his adventures with his dog. Seventythree-year-old Jasper Hardcastle in Jo’s recent novel, The Beachcomber, ‘was partly based on my granddad Harrison, a wonderful man, very special,’ Jo admits. ‘I remember one Sunday morning when I visited my beloved grandparents, I was eight years old and asked why the pan lid was dancing up and down on the stove. My granddad, who worked in the butcher’s and used to get titbits at the end of the week, proudly lifted me up to show me a full pig’s head boiling away in the pan, with the lid bobbing up and down on its ears! I ran screaming from the house, and it took them a full hour to get me out of the backyard loo.’

Jo learned all about her parents meeting from her mum, and the story became an essential part of the background to her third novel.

‘Angels Cry Sometimes takes onboard a great deal of my mam’s life,’ Jo recently told the nation on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. ‘When she was eighteen she was married to a man [before Jo’s father] who made her life a misery. She was in love with this man. He married her. They had two little boys. And then about four years down the line the police came knocking at the door one day and they arrested him for bigamously marrying her and he was jailed for seven years.’

Readers will recognise this as the way Marcia Bendall’s marriage to Curt Ratheter breaks down in the novel, even to the number of years that Curt is sentenced to serve at Lancaster Assizes:

When Curt came to the doorway of the little parlour, the policeman close behind, what he saw in there tore his heart to shreds. Seated on that very settee where many a time he and his darling Marcia had experienced so many tender and wonderful moments, was that same woman whom he idolised…It gave Curt the deepest pain he had ever known when, at that moment, Marcia sensed his presence, for of a sudden she raised her large dark eyes to look on him. Their painfully stricken expression made him ask silently for the Lord’s forgiveness.

On seeing him there also, both the officer and Grandma Fletcher got up from their seats. He asked whether the fellow’s name was Curt Ratheter. She charged forward and angrily demanded of him, ‘Is it true what they’re saying? ‘Ave yer already a wife?’

‘My mother wouldn’t talk about it for a long, long time because it was such a stigma,’ Jo told me. ‘Suddenly she was an unmarried mother and he was in prison. It made her life a misery. I think she must have still been in love with him when he was taken away. He moved south when he came out. Then she met Dad, Barney. He was a happy-go-lucky chap, up for a laugh, charming as ever. And he loved her very much. And she grew to love him.’

With such a background to a marriage, successful as it was in one sense, with ten of Barney’s children born to Mary over the next two decades, it cannot ever have been easy for Jo’s dad to accept that it had only been made possible through a breach of the law. Did Barney know that his new wife still loved this man who had been put in prison? Did that count in the sad balance of fate that led Jo to say on BBC Radio: ‘They had lots and lots of children, and I am obviously one of them, but along the way, somewhere, they started to bring out the worst in each other’?

Whether or not it did, there are plenty of other reasons that would count against the marriage surviving, to be found in the difficult environment in which the young family was immediately thrown.

In the fiction, Barty Bendall (who is Barney Brindle, Jo’s father) begs Marcia to marry him and give her and Ratheter’s children a father. When, finally, she consents, they marry and move to Blackburn, just as in reality Barney and Mary Jane did.

Derwent Street, their first home, had been fields until the second half of the nineteenth century, when it emerged as part of the dense concentration of mill workers’ terraced rows into which Jo was born. It was a very poor area, all to be torn down a century later. Ruby Miller lives there in Jo’s novel Nobody’s Darling. Mollie and her fiancé, Alfie, try for a house there in Looking Back. In Rainbow Days, ‘the ruined house at the bottom of Derwent Street was a favourite meeting place for villains,’ and in The Woman Who Left it is the place to which Sal, Louise and Ben Hunter must return when they are stripped of beautiful Maple Farm on the outskirts of the town. Louise gives her true feelings: ‘I often stand at that front window and look down Derwent Street, and my heart sinks to me boots.’ Jo’s message is clear: you can’t fall much lower than Derwent Street.

However, for an imaginative child born in the summer of 1941, during the Second World War, a child who knew nothing of the wider world, Derwent Street was all-consuming. The street ‘was all little houses,’ Jo told me, ‘but it was a real community. The house was heated by a coal fire, if you were lucky enough to have any coal. There was a tiny scullery, no bigger than a few feet. Back parlour, front parlour, each of the parlours had a tiny fire grate.’ The scullery appears in Take This Woman – ‘a cold, forbidding place, separated from the parlour by a heavy brown curtain at the door-way. It was some eight feet square, consisting of an old gascooker, a single wooden cupboard with several shelves above it, and a deep stone sink beneath the window. Built into the corner was a brick container, housing a copper washtub and closed at the top by a large circular lid of wooden slatted design.’

To this came Barney and Mary Jane Brindle, and Mary’s two children by her first marriage, the family swelling in time to include, besides Jo, her two sisters, Winifred and Anita, and seven brothers: Sonny (so named because as a child he was always smiling), Joseph, Bernard, Richard, Billy, Harry and Alec.

Like Amy Tattersall with her brood in Looking Back, the Brindles suffered the trials of so many growing up in a cramped house:

‘Four little ‘uns and the two older girls. Six altogether.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Might as well be sixty, the way they drive me to despair.’

Horrified, and unable to take his eyes off the army of children, he asked, ‘How do you manage?’

‘I get by.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t know how Frank will cope though, when this one arrives in a month’s time. He doesn’t know one from the other as it is!’

‘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 of the heaving row to the other, their coloured turbans making frenzied patterns as they wove up and down, up and down.

The frequent replacement of empty bobbins for full ones was swift and skilful. The empty bobbins were quickly dropped with great accuracy over the fast spinning core-rods. It took only a few minutes for the empty bobbins to fill to bursting again; allowing the constantly mobile women no rest. They were hard pushed to keep up, and many a trainee had surrendered in tears to the devouring machines. The full bobbins were slipped into the hessian bag which the women wore around their waists until the bag reached overflowing. The bobbins were then emptied into large square wicker containers. These, in turn, were emptied into huge mobile trollies, which were frequently transported to another level of the mill by an organised army of ‘trundlers’. The fine cotton would then be woven into endless acres of fresh crisp linen, to be shipped all over the world, as well as marketed locally.

‘Do you remember the man in the novel who used to take the trolleys and the women scragged him?’ Jo asked me. ‘Well, my mam told me about this man, Tommy Trindle, who took the full bobbin trolleys away and brought the empty trolleys back, and he was always pinching their bottoms and making snide little comments, so they did scrag him one day. They got his trousers off and shoved him down the ramp in the trolley!’

George Leatherhead was a ‘trundler’ who took a pride in his work…Unfortunately for poor George, some of the young flighty girls, always ready for a bit of fun at the end of a working day, had overheard his brazen remarks. He didn’t get very far before they were on him, their pent-up exuberance now released in fits of screaming laughter.

‘Right, you sexy beast, George Leatherhead! You’ve asked for it now!’ ‘Don’t get worriting, George…we’re not going to ‘arm you…we just want to see what all the fuss is about.’ ‘Come on, George! Get them bloody trousers off!’ They came at him from all directions…

Stories like this leave little doubt about the camaraderie that relieved the twelve-hour work shifts until the factory hooter blew for shutdown and the spinning machines were wound down. Bit by bit the blanket of noise broke up and dissipated, as one by one the individual sources of it were extinguished. Normally a swell of laughter and chatter would replace the machine noise, but on one occasion, Jo tells me, there was only hushed silence. ‘That terrible scene in Angels Cry Sometimes is based on something that one of the ladies who worked with Mam told me when she took me to the toilet…She was telling me about this girl…and then, “Don’t you go near the machines, lass,” she said…’:

‘Come on, Marcia! Get your apron emptied!’ But even as Marcia was lifting her hand to throw the switch which would close down her machine, there came an almighty noise from some way up in front – a great screeching, jarring noise, which was unlike anything she’d heard before. Then, of a sudden, it was like all hell let loose! Folks ran in all directions and even Tom Atkinson, who judging by the heightened colour of his face and the wild look in his eyes, could go down any minute with a heart-attack, pelted past Marcia’s machine.

By now most of the machines had ground to a halt. But, when Marcia emerged from changing her slippers for shoes, she saw little groups of mill-hands standing about and conversing in whispers. From a distance, she could see Daisy crying, with old Bertha comforting her. Some of the other women were stark-eyed, with their hands flattened over their mouths as though to stifle any sound that might come out.

Going to where old Bertha had young Daisy enclosed in her arms, Marcia asked in a soft voice, subdued by the sight of wretched faces all about her, ‘What is it, Bertha? Whatever’s going on?’

But Bertha could give no answer, except to shake her head and gently to lead away the trembling girl in her arms. As she passed Marcia she whispered, ‘Come away, lass. Come away!’ As Marcia made to follow her…there came a flurry of activity from both behind and in front of her.

Tom Atkinson walked about, going from one little group to another, gently moving them on and telling them, ‘Tek yersel’s off home. There’s nowt to be done ‘ere!’ His face looked totally drained of colour and his shoulders stooped as though pressed down with a great weight.

When the two dark-suited fellows came hurrying by her carrying a rolled-up stretcher and looking grim, Marcia’s eyes followed them and, almost involuntarily, she took a few paces forward. What she saw came as one of the worst shocks she had ever experienced. It was Maggie Clegg’s machine around which all activity was taking place – bright, chirpy Maggie Clegg’s machine, splattered from top to bottom in great splashes of blood standing out scarlet and horrifying against the white cotton bobbins and the great iron struts, which Maggie knew like the back of her hand. From the huge cogs and rollers which ran this monstrosity, there hung ragged hanks of hair – Maggie’s hair that was once long and jet-black, and which now was crimson and split asunder.

Jo’s world is sometimes harsh, and when it is, the benefits of belonging to a community come into play. The character of her people is the environment from which the stories flow, so that, for example, Queenie’s house draws from her mother’s strong, loving character, and offers the little girl security:

There was a degree of warmth and splendid reliability in the stalwart green distemper, which reflected the half-light from the gas-lamp beneath the window. The big square wardrobe stood to attention in its disciplined uprightness, as it towered protectively over a short wooden-knobbed chest of drawers. A small ripple of pleasure bathed the knot of fear in Queenie’s stomach as her gaze rested on the kidney-shaped dresser…There in the half-light were all the familiar things.

‘It was a little house we had in Derwent Street,’ Jo reminisces, ‘they were all little houses, but it was a real community. You could go out and leave your door unlocked, then come back and find six people sitting in your kitchen drinking tea. The women all looked after each other’s children. Nobody had much, but we shared what we had.’

‘Belonging to a place, to a street, to a people, to a family is important to you,’ I suggest.

‘It is the most important thing,’ Jo agrees. ‘It is you, it is who you are, it is where you came from. I think every day of my life…I am very aware of how it used to be. Inside I haven’t changed a bit. I am still that snotty-nosed kid from the backstreets. I have been more fortunate than a lot of people, but my feet are firmly on the ground. From Derwent Street come the really early memories, when I was four, five years old and I would sit on the step and watch everything as it was going on in the street.

‘We were very poor and constantly moved house, but of all the places we lived I remember Derwent Street in particular. We had a chap who used to live at the top end, who dressed up in high heels and short skirts! All the children would follow him up and down the street as if he were the Pied Piper. And then he was arrested one day. The policemen were taking him off and we were all running after him! We all loved him! He was so kind, a lovely man.’

In Her Father’s Sins, the cross-dresser appears in the guise of Fountain Crossland, ‘who had fists the size of sledge-hammers and a head like a stud-bull, a burly pit worker’, but who would rather be wearing Auntie Biddy’s pinny and dandling Queenie on his knee.

It was a pleasing picture that greeted Fountain Crossland when George Kenney’s daughter opened the door to his tapping. ‘A sight for sore eyes, that’s what you are, young Queenie,’ he said quietly. Then without waiting to be asked he stepped inside and proceeded down the passageway towards the parlour. Queenie closed the door and followed. ‘He’s still in bed,’ she said, leaving the parlour door open as she came in from the passage. ‘No need fer that,’ Fountain Crossland told her, his face crooked into a half-smile.

Queenie had already turned away with the intention of rousing George Kenney but now the big man came to block her exit. Putting his finger across his lips he leaned towards her, at the same time reaching out behind her to push the door to. ‘Ssh…we don’t want to fetch ‘im from ‘is bed, do we? I’ve seen what ‘e’s like on wakkeningl’ He stretched his face into an ugly grimace, and it was such an accurate mimicry of George Kenney in a foul temper that Queenie found herself laughing out loud in spite of herself. Auntie Biddy had no liking for Fountain Crossland, Queenie knew, but he could be so funny, and a great deal nicer than George Kenney.

‘Auntie Biddy abed too is she?’

‘Yes…she’s been badly.’

‘Ah! Works too ‘ard does Biddy.’ Fountain Crossland seated himself in the horse-chair by the fireside, all the while regarding Queenie through careful eyes. ‘I’ll tell you what, lass,’ he said quietly, ‘let’s you an’ me ‘ave a little talk eh?’ His broad smile was disarming, and when he stretched out a hand Queenie went to him.

At once he pulled her on to his knee and Queenie was quickly enthralled by the stories he told her…funny stories about little creatures who lived in folks’ mattresses and who had the most marvellous adventures.

It seemed that Fountain Crossland got carried away in excitement, because once or twice Queenie found herself being violently jiggled up and down on his lap. And when at one stage Fountain Crossland took to acting out a scene where he took off his trousers and put on Auntie Biddy’s pinafore he looked so silly that Queenie fell about laughing.

It was this scene that Auntie Biddy came upon when she brought herself down from the bedroom to investigate the noise. It took her but a moment to see Fountain Crossland’s real game and with a cry of ‘You fornicating old sod!’ she grabbed up his trouser belt and whacked it hard across his bare legs. ‘Out! Get out and don’t show yourself here again!’ she told him. Even when Fountain Crossland took to his heels and ran off up the passage without his trousers, Auntie Biddy would have followed him if it hadn’t been for the fact that the bubble of energy she had summoned was now depleted. Falling into the nearest chair, she told the gaping Queenie, ‘Throw ‘is old trousers after him, lass.’

This Queenie did, firmly closing the front door after both Fountain Crossland and his trousers had disappeared through it, only to be tripped head over heels by Mrs Farraday’s terrified ginger torn. When she returned to the parlour, Queenie was uncertain as to whether she would be blamed for letting Fountain Crossland into the house, and looked into the little woman’s face with a sheepish expression.

‘I’m sorry, Auntie Biddy,’ Queenie said. For a moment there came no response. Then, just as Queenie began to think she would not be forgiven, she noticed a twinkle which spread into a smile and the smile erupted into laughter. Queenie ran to her Auntie Biddy and together the two of them rocked helplessly at the memory of Fountain Crossland fleeing up the passage in a pinny, after having his buttocks well and truly thrashed by Auntie Biddy.

There were other more or less permanent sentinels, too, like old Mr Craig from No. 46:

Queenie liked Mr Craig, who spent long lonely days sitting outside bis little bouse. The rickety stand-chair had a permanent place on the flagstones by the front door. Folks had long ago stopped asking questions or wondering why it was that a stand-chair should be left outside in all weathers year in year out. They’d gotten used to the old fellow sitting there, happy to pass the time of day with anyone who could spare it. From early morning to last thing at night when the biting chill of evening forced him in, he’d just sit there smiling and chatting to one and all, and generally watching the world go by.

During her flag-counting sessions, Queenie would often run errands for him, or come and set herself on his step, where she’d listen enthralled to exciting stories of his daredevil days and frightening accounts of the war he’d fought in as a young man.

‘You have to love life and love people if you are going to write stories,’ says Jo today. ‘You must live the part of every character, even the bad ones. When I am writing I am laughing and crying, and feeling angry and sad. I have so many stories I would have to live to 200 to write them all.’

Time and again it is Jo’s women who make the strongest characters: ‘Ada Humble in Angels Cry Sometimes was my mam’s friend, Mrs Brown. She was a fat little woman, a lovely, lovely person.’ Ada is noted for her washing line and ‘the numerous shirttails that pranced in the drying breeze, telling the world and its neighbour that she was the proud custodian of seven darling men.’ The novels are littered with imaginative observations from the perspective of the curious little girl next door. More significant, however, was Ada’s red trilby. ‘She had a red trilby, and, do you know, she wore that trilby everywhere. She lived next door to us, and we would laugh when every morning she would come out and bend down to pick up the milk and her trilby would stay on! She never would be seen without that trilby.’

Ada Humble was only forty-one, but looked much older. She laid no great claims to beauty and her demands were few. The great sagging belly which always looked well-advanced in pregnancy had been stretched and shaped that way by the six strapping lads she’d borne her husband Toby Humble.

The podginess of her rosy cheeks gave her a cheery clownish appearance, emphasised by the vivid colour of her round eyes, which shone bright and brown, ‘like a good strong brew of tea’ Marcia had often observed. But the most surprising feature about her was the red broadbrimmed trilby, which had become her trademark. It had been white at one time. But after cadging it from the local muffin-man, in exchange for an old pair of pram wheels for his dilapidated wicker-trolley, Ada Humble had dipped it in a dye of her own making. The end result had not been the deep respectable plum colour she’d intended, but a screaming bright shade of tarty-red. It didn’t deter Ada from wearing it though. There wasn’t a living soul now who could ever remember Ada Humble without ‘that trilby’.

‘What happened to Ada was very sad,’ Jo tells me. ‘She had five sons. One of them wouldn’t go to school. She used to come and tell my mam, and my mam said, “Take him in. Put him through the door. Make sure he gets into the classroom.” Ada did this, but he would still run off and the truant officer kept coming round, and finally he said, “If the boy doesn’t go to school, you’ll have to go to Court.” Ada was taken to court. My mam went with her.’

An uncomfortable silence settled over the court-room as the magistrate’s thin bony face twisted itself into an expression of painful thought. Then calling the same man to attention, he asked in a sharp voice, ‘May we ask the reason for the non-removal of Mrs Humble’s headpiece?’

Marcia hadn’t thought of that! She’d been so used to seeing that bright red trilby atop Ada Humble’s head that it had become part of the little woman herself, yet by the tone of the magistrate’s voice, he was pompous enough to consider its presence as a deliberate mark of disrespect.

‘We would beg the court’s pardon,’ the young man returned, extending his apology to include a reminder of the recent death of Mr Humble, and of the accused’s condition of mourning. ‘It is meant in no way as an affront to the court or its proceedings.’ But the magistrate was obviously not placated. In fact, judging by the sour expression on his face, and the sharp way he turned to consult his colleagues, Marcia felt almost as though Ada’s red trilby had suddenly become the issue, and not Blackie’s truancy.

‘Poor thing, she was jailed, for six months!’ says Jo. ‘They decreed that Ada’s husband [Toby] couldn’t have been blamed because he had been at work, it wasn’t his fault – he had been innocent of this – it was the mother at home’s fault, so Ada was put in jail. When she came out she was broken! She had lost all her weight – she was like a stick! – she was white, she was haggard and she died soon after. It was terrible.

‘Now, when somebody died, all the people in the street had to go along and pay their respects, and the children too. I said, “No.” I didn’t want to go. And I kicked and screamed. But my mam dragged us along, and there was little Ada in her coffin without her hat, and she was completely bald. That was why she had always worn the trilby! None of us had known. My mother saw the hat on the chair and she picked it up and put it on Ada’s head. I’ll never forget that.’

Now Marcia’s gaze travelled along the gleaming chrome trellis which proudly bore the weight of that tiny, polished wood coffin. Of a sudden she was staring at the inner silk which lay ruffled over the little figure in white billowing folds, and slowly she reached out to touch the podgy fingers, folded in perpetual prayer. In the silence of that room the choking sob which caught in Marcia’s throat seemed to startle even herself.

Crossing the still hands, she marvelled at their cold parchment beauty, then withdrawing her touch, she focused on the large cross on the wall over the head of the coffin, as though drawing strength to look again on Ada Humble’s face. The arch of flickering light from the half-circle of tiny candles which cradled the head of the coffin drew her eyes down, and her stricken gaze alighted on the ever-familiar lines of the little woman’s face.

The bright red trilby – which Ada’s insensitive “fficials’ had taken from her – Marcia had gently placed over the wispy stumps of hair and ragged bald patches which Ada Humble had managed to hide from the curious world for so long. It made a stark contrast against the soft silky whiteness of the pillow. As Marcia dwelt soulfully on the dear face, a sick fury tugged at her senses. Half seeing through the misty veil, she leaned forward to place a gentle kiss on the alabaster forehead. ‘I know you’d not want yon town hall folk to tek your Toby – your “soldier”,’ she whispered, ‘so you tek him, Ada lass, for he belongs to nobody else.’ She removed the frame from around Toby’s picture, then slid the rolled up picture gently underneath the long shroud and out of sight. Somehow, the act gave her a feeling of pleasure.

The inhabitants of working-class Blackburn were as varied and interesting as the higgledy-piggledy pattern of chimneys that formed its skyline, like old Martha Heigh, another eccentric of the street:

She could be seen now, standing on her doorstep, stretching her neck so as not to miss anything. Martha Heigh never bothered to wash…or so it was told. Anyone, it was rumoured, with even half a nose could not bear to stand within range of the very nasty aroma which constantly surrounded old Martha.

She’d lived on her own in the last house along the row these thirty-odd years, since the death of her poor old father. Nobody knew her real age although folks reckoned it to be grander than eighty. She rarely ventured from the safety of her home, and the only person she had ever allowed inside it was Marcia who, to the horror of her neighbours, often fetched groceries for the old woman.

Martha was as short and round as a little Toby jug, and the full-length skirts she wore did nothing to enhance her appearance. More often than not, the skirt was employed as a convenient dish rag. She’d wipe her hands on it, blow her snuffy brown nostrils on it…she was using it now to shine up her precious tiny silver spectacles, which were then promptly placed on her nose with delicate precision as she peered to focus.

Her hair stood out in a petrified state of attention, and the nervous nodding habit she’d cultivated accelerated with excitement at the appearance of the new neighbours. The wide appreciative grin as she suddenly saw Marcia displayed the blackened rows of teeth, the naturalness of which she was duly proud. Marcia smiled back, waving her hand in acknowledgement.

Then there were the street traders – the peddler, the tinker with pots and pans, the scissors grinder and the barrel-organ grinder:

A little wizened man had placed his barrel organ in a shrewd position, so that anyone emerging from Ainsworth Street had no choice but to pass him before reaching the centre of activity.

‘Good evening one an’ all!’ His voice was an odd grating squeak which seemed to suit his tiny size and general set-up. Fascinated at both his goblin-like appearance and the whole unusual ensemble before them, the little party ground to a halt.

‘Mam! just look at that!’ Polly’s voice was tremulous with the eager excitement of a child. ‘That’s a monkey!’ The incredulity in Polly’s voice caused them to stare all the harder.

‘That’s right, lass. You’re looking at the gamest little monkey in Lancashire!’ The wizened man stepped forward with the monkey squatting skilfully on the bony protrusion of his shoulder and the light from a corner street-lamp illuminated the weird pair. Marcia couldn’t help but notice the striking resemblance between the monkey and its shrunken owner. They were both of the same scrawny appearance, and even the cheeky red cap perched jauntily on the monkey’s head was identical to the one worn by the man. ‘I’m tellin’ you,’ he continued to squawk, ‘there’s no monkey in the whole of Lancashire – perhaps the whole world – as can do tricks like my Jasper ‘ere!’ He swung the monkey by the length of its confining lead to land with a soft thud on Polly’s shoulder. His quick jerky movements startled her into springing forward, whereupon the monkey flew into the air, emitting a series of jabbering squawks and chatters, before landing squarely on the side of the barrel organ.

Pre-eminent amongst the street traders was, of course, the rag-and-bone merchant. Take This Woman, set in Blackburn in 1947, presents us with Laura Blake, who makes a canny living out of ‘tatting’, as it is known. She collected from a lumbering wooden cart, manoeuvring it by settling herself between its long curved shafts, and taking a firm grip with each hand. She’d collect from the smart area of town, along the Preston New Road, and then wend her way back towards Remmie Thorpe’s rag-and-bone shop, where she might exchange some of what she had collected for a few shillings. But Laura found a better welcome in her own part of town, as this extract shows:

The women, all turbaned, laughing or talking, and nearly all pregnant, were busy white-stoning the steps, washing the windows, or watching young ‘uns, who spent their days sitting on the kerbs with sugar butties; sailing matchstick boats down the gutters; and dropping loose stones into the stinking drains.

‘Hey up!’ Smiling Tilly Shiner was the first to spot Laura and her cumbersome cart. ‘It’s young Laura!’

‘Tongue ‘anging out for a brew, I expect.’ The broad-faced Belle Strong waved a fat dimpled arm towards Laura. ‘Get your arse into my kitchen, young ‘un!’ she shouted coarsely, her numerous chins waggling and bright round eyes laughing. ‘Leave yon cart agin the kerb. They’ll ‘ave it filled in no time, lass!’

And what does Tilly intend to give her? A pair of brown, iron-clad clogs. In Her Father’s Sins, Jo recalls the occasion when, as a youngster, she took her dad’s boots out to another rag-and-bone lady. Maisie Thorogood was as much part of the street scene ‘as the gas-lamps and the shiny worn cobblestones. In real life she was really quite bad, which was why I called her Thorogood in the book.’ In the continuation of Queenie’s story, Let Loose the Tigers, Maisie and her daughter, Sheila, are charged with keeping an immoral house in Lytham St Annes, and Sheila is sent to prison for five years. In real life, Maisie’s great weakness concerned the Yanks. The American GIs came to the town in 1944. They arrived to prepare for the invasion of Europe and were accommodated in the then disused Brookhouse Mill. ‘Maisie liked them a lot,’ Jo’s mother had informed her, ‘and when the Yanks left, she was left behind with twins, called Raymond and Sheila in the book. I grew up with them.

‘Maisie had connections with everything. She was amazing. She was wonderful! She was like fairyland! She had this cart that she had painted, and she attached balloons to it. You thought the whole thing was going to take off! You couldn’t miss her. Big peroxide-blonde hair. A voice like a sergeant major. Great sense of humour. She’d have everyone in stitches. The men used to tease her and torment her and she’d give ‘em as good as she got, swore like a trooper!’

Clutching George Kenney’s old boots, Queenie hopped and skipped the few flagstones which separated her from the rag-a-bone wagon. Its presence within the excited screeching throng of children was pinpointed by the numerous clusters of waving balloons. Every colour of the rain-bow they were, dancing and jiggling towards the sky in erratic fits and starts, as the ticklish breeze played and teased the restraining strings.

There were sausage-shaped ones, round ones, egg-shaped and twisty ones; all wriggling and singing as they rubbed together gleefully. Queenie had often imagined Maisie Thorogood sitting in her parlour blowing up the balloons. The magnitude of such an operation had prompted her on more than one occasion to ask Maisie where she kept all that wind, and if it took her all week to get the balloons ready. Maisie would roll about and scream with laughter. ‘Bless your ‘eart, Queenie darlin’,’ she’d shout, ‘didn’t you know I keeps a goblin in me shoe. It’s ‘im as blows ‘em up!’ So frustrated and perplexed had Queenie grown at this regular answer that eventually she told Sheila, ‘I think your Mam’s as daft as a barmcake!’ Sheila had agreed most fervently.

The laughter and squeaky chatter of the delighted children filled the air, bringing the women to their doors to smile appreciatively at Maisie, with her rag-a-bone wagon and her little following army. Queenie muscled her way in, pushing and shoving with such deliberation that the deep barrier of small bodies reluctantly gave way to let her through. Not graciously though, judging by the angry snorts, sly sharp kicks, and loud abuse.

‘Give over snotrag! Wait yer turn!’

‘Hey! Who do you think you are?’

‘Cor! Them bloody boots don’t ‘arf stink!’

Stink they may have done but Queenie didn’t care! Not if that was why they’d all moved aside to let her in, she thought.

Her strong grey eyes widened in amazement as they lit on the appearance of Maisie’s wagon!

The spill of bright colour and treasure fair blinded her. The low sides of the wagon were painted in Catherine wheels of gaudy reds, yellows, and blacks; the big wooden-spoked wheels made a body dizzy as the zig-zag lines which wound about them screamed first in gold, then green and ended up in a delightful mingling of black and yellow blobs. The whole wonderful marvellous ensemble was entrancing. The inside of the wagon was filled to bursting and, at the shaft end, where the scabby little donkey tucked noisily into his oversized hay-bag, the piles of old rags and varying artefacts were stacked sky-high.

The remainder of the wagon was loaded down with penny-whistles; bundles of clothespegs; goldfish swimming about in little fat plastic bags; big blocks of white stepstone, and small tidy bundles of wood-stick for the fire. Around the rim of the wagon hung more cherry-red yo-yos than Queenie had ever seen in her life. Handmade they were, as Maisie was quick to point out; and polished as shiny as a still pond. They clattered against the clusters of metal-tipped spinning-tops, which also hung in groups of twenty or more from the crowded rim. Then all along the shaft arms dangled hundreds of coloured soft balls, gleaming and winking as the daylight caught the glinting lashing colours within. Finally, every spare inch of space was taken up by the myriads of brightly coloured balloons; so many that Queenie wondered why the donkey, wagon and all, hadn’t been clear lifted off the ground to be swept away forever.

‘Right then little Queenie! You’ve shoved your way affront o’ these other brats, so what’s it to be, eh?’ demanded Maisie.

Although Jo’s fictional characters are not always based on real people – ‘sometimes I put two or three people together to produce a character’ – names are often a guide to particular characteristics. If the name ‘Molly’ is used, we can be fairly certain of the sort of woman to expect. Besides Molly Davidson in Cradle of Thorns, who is Jo’s mum, there are a number of Mollies in the novels, and in a particular Dedication, Jo refers to a Molly who had known her as an urchin and had watched her grow up and get married. ‘Molly was every woman who looked after the children in the street we were in,’ she explained. ‘She was the epitome of the granny if you like. She’d be in her sixties and she’d be small and round and she’d have a kind face and grey hair and tin curlers…’

My personal favourites amongst the old-world characters that Jo fingers in the novels are two fine ladies of mature years, Tilly and Fancy Carruthers. ‘They were always in bed,’ Jo laughs, as she brings them to mind. ‘They would have been deemed lesbians today. They lived right up the top in Montague Street. I knew them because I had a friend who lived next door, Sheila Bullen. Poor Sheila, she married a man called King…It was in all the papers – I heard it on the radio – her husband shot her! He shot her while she was holding the baby and the bullet went right through and killed them both. My sister-in-law, Pat, claimed she had gone to see Sheila in her coffin, and she said it broke her heart because the baby was right there, lying at her mother’s feet. Sheila was a beautiful girl, long, black, wavy hair, very dark eyes. She was my friend, I went to school with her. We used to run errands for these two old ladies. So many characters…’

Here are Aunt Biddy and little Queenie returning the ladies’ laundry in a well-plotted trip that takes in a number of characters in the vicinity of their home, before finally arriving at the Misses Carruthers:

The front door was open into the passage. It was always open. Miss Tilly and Fancy Carruthers loved nothing more than to have visitors. They were always welcome, any time of the day or evening. ‘Go and tap on the parlour door, Queenie. Tell ‘em we’ve fetched their washing.’

Queenie skipped along the passage, making the very same bet with herself that she had made on every single occasion: that the two old ladies would both be abed and wearing frilly green caps.

Sure enough, on command of the thin piping voice which urged them to ‘come in’, the same peculiar scene awaited. The tiny parlour reeked of snuff and something suspiciously like George Kenney [Queenie’s dad] when he’d been boozing. The big bed which reached right up to Queenie’s shoulders nigh filled the room. The top and bottom of it were like the bars of a jail, and each tall corner was conspicuously marked by huge shiny brass balls, which distorted Queenie’s face whenever she looked into them. It would stretch wide and misshapen, then it would squeeze into itself like a concertina, shaping Queenie’s mouth into a long narrow ‘O’, which quickly vanished into her sucked-in cheeks.

There was real carpet on the floor, and big soft flowery armchairs which could swallow a body whole. Plants reached out from everywhere – from the tiny sideboard, the whatnot, the slipper-box, and even from the shelves on the wall.