The Mill Girls of Albion Lane by Jenny Holmes Read Free Book Online Page A

married it went downhill from there.’
    The wry comment, made without self-pity, summed up Rhoda’s early life. The youngest of five children, one of whom – a girl – had died in infancy, Rhoda had lost her mother to scarlet fever at the age of ten and her father, Bert Preston, had stayed on in the rented house in Overcliffe with his young girl and three lads, Robert, William and Richard.
    The children were left to drag themselves up while their father went out to work hauling coal from the open-cast mine at Welby to the mills in the valley below, which meant long days for little pay. Rhoda had to pick up where her mother left off, doing the washing, ironing, baking and generally making ends meet. It left little time for schoolwork and by the time Rhoda reached fourteen she found herself employed first as a scavenger at Kingsley’s, a job she hated because the machines would whirr and hiss above her as she crawled underneath to gather up fibres of wool, then as a lap joiner in the spinning shed at Calvert’s, which wasn’t much better.
    So it came as a relief when, at seventeen, she ran across Walter Briggs who had recently moved into the area for work and was knocking on doors looking for lodgings. Rhoda’s father, strapped for cash as always, squeezed an extra bed into the room he shared with the three boys and charged Walter the princely sum of two shillings and sixpence per week.
    Bert Preston might not have raced ahead with the arrangement quite so hastily, Rhoda reflected later, if he’d realized that within the year Walter would have proposed marriage to Rhoda and whisked her off from the crowded house in Overcliffe to live in a basement dwelling close to the canal.
    â€˜There was bad feeling between them after that and my father never really got over it,’ she would tell her own children. ‘I was piggy in the middle. I mean, how was Father meant to cope, with me married and living on Canal Road? That was the thing.’
    Down in the damp cellar, conditions were bad, especially when the children came along – Lily in the first year of marriage, then a gap of four years until Margie, then two years between her and Evie, and finally Arthur, a full eight years after that.
    Meanwhile the war had started. Two of Rhoda’s brothers, Robert and William, were killed early on – Robert at Mons and his brother not long after. Richard, the youngest, survived almost until Armistice Day then died not in the trenches but travelling through Belgium on the back of a supply wagon. It came under attack from the retreating Germans and a shell blew the last surviving Preston boy clean out of the vehicle. He died instantly.
    In his house on the hill, Bert grieved for his three sons and turned eventually to his estranged daughter for consolation.
    In contrast to the Prestons, Walter had succeeded in avoiding military service on the grounds of having a weak chest. It was at this time that he found their family – comprising Rhoda and Lily, and Margie already on the way – the house on Albion Lane at a rent they could afford. They lived there contentedly until 1915, when the powers that be cornered Walter and shipped him out to France. He was allowed to return home in January 1917 to convalesce from deep shrapnel wounds to his left side, but was then shipped back to the trenches for the rest of the war.
    â€˜Never mind that he’d been blown to bits and had bad shell shock,’ Rhoda told her eldest daughter when Lily grew old enough to ask questions about the ugly scarring she saw all down one side of her father’s body. ‘They sent him back without a second thought.’
    â€˜As soon as he walked in through the door I saw it would never be the same,’ Rhoda reflected from time to time and without obvious emotion. ‘Your father’s not a bad man – never was and never will be. But I took one look at him when he came back and saw the life had