Road to Ledsham , livre ebook

The Road to Ledsham
The Doffer Boys
Chris McGarry
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-01-31
The Road to Ledsham About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgment
About the Author
The author comes from the Yorkshire Dales and has lived and worked in both northern towns and its rural communities, experiencing the pretty countryside holiday environment and the impact of isolation of small communities through historical industrialisation.
Dedication
To Alice, Annie, Betty, Maureen and Margaret, who from an early age all worked for a time in the Yorkshire mills.
Copyright Information ©
Chris McGarry (2020)
The right of Chris McGarry to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528921206 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528963350 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgment
Thanks goes to the Leeds Industrial Museum and their inspirational northern heritage collection.

Ed coughed, then sneezed into the darkness of the chimney, it felt like he was choking. The hard bricks, he had braced his back on, were warming through his thin shirt. As he let go of the sweeper brushes, the air around him felt like a soup of thick swirling cloudy ash, his toes were now digging into the side walls for a firmer grip on the inside of the chimney, then he heard the brushes clatter in the hearth far below. He knew the signs, he had heard about the fires before, and this was a fire in a paper mill, he had to get out.
He slid down the walls, scratching his feet on the rough and blackened brick. Dropping onto all fours on the stone floor, he crawled out onto the oily wooden planks. There was little light through the windows to help him navigate, as outside the paper press room it was dark by teatime in February. The orange glow to his right was no sunset, it was burning paper and wooden floorboards. Head down now Ed used the wall as his guide, feeling it with his hand heading towards where he knew the door would be, faltering now, half way there he felt as if he was full of smoke, his breath began making long rasping sounds, sounds that would guide a helping hand towards him. He lay on the uneven wooden floor, seconds later a hand reached out of the ash laden heavy smoke, and gripping his shirt, then by the arm, pulling and dragging him forward, heaving him out of the burning press room. He was moving but not by himself, a blanket over his head and everything went dark.
The year was 1830, in the north of England, the light was beginning to fade on an icy-cold February afternoon where the last pageant procession that would honour St Blaise was slowly approaching the scattering of old cottages and the Bull and Mouth tavern in the village of Sandywood Top. The procession had villagers in fancy dress with lambs or piglets tied to pieces of string for children to hold, the prize pigs belonging to the butcher. A band was trying to keep time as they marched over the rough surface of the lane, then goats and sheep could be heard bleating, bringing up the rear.
The evening light was now causing dark shadows to fall between the marchers, when the mid body of the procession seemed to sway, then buckle and ranks of the festively dressed workers stumbled into each other. Cries of pain and irritation could be heard as shins were scraped, and a few of the small animals were pushed over, and now squirming on the dirt floor, everyone came to a halt as the doors of the Bull and Mouth tavern flung open with a loud splintering crash, and the gas light from inside the low ceiling rooms caused echoes of smoky coughs and rumbles of conversations well lubricated, to spill out onto the street. Then, a silence as the cold swept into the inn and everyone turned towards the door to see the two bodies that had launched out into the street, their ungainly legs and arms trying to find contact with the other man’s head. There was grunting and cries of pain as they suddenly found contact with the floor. There was an accompaniment of gasping and oohs from the children in the pageant procession, scared but at the same time interested to see what was happening. It had been a long mile and a half walk and the singing had been tortuous, with one or two booming voices made worse by the chorus of made up words as some had not bothered to learn the old songs.
Tom Law stood still and quietly waiting in the middle of the procession, he felt he was too close to this brawl for his liking even if it was now down in the dirt. He looked behind him, then took a step back and into the cover of a large colourful flag swaying above his head. Realising that he was carrying a smoking torch to light the way as dusk fell, he quickly stepped back into the empty space still in front of him before he became the crowd’s focus rather than the fight. And he would have been the focus by burning the hundred-year-old revered pageant flag flying above him, a flag that was firmly attached in the smithy’s, Mr Black’s, large hands. He would have a place in history, tales in the tavern embellished until he was the infamous lad that rumour had it that he had probably burnt down the whole village. That was how reputations started and then followed you around for the rest of your life.
To Tom’s disbelief and shame, he could now see one of the men sprawling in the street was his father, Alun Law, landlord of the Bull and Mouth. He seemed to be smaller here out in the street, not bawling out orders inside the Bull and Mouth, using his hands or fists depending on what the occasion warranted, each hand was the size of a bread paddle and Tom realised he was rubbing his ear with his free hand. He had subconsciously been thinking of the many stinging blows he had received as a result of not ducking away fast enough from his father’s hands.
It was now a moving fight, and the procession swayed along with it, and circling on the dirt each man was spitting breath on the other whilst clinging to him so a swinging punch was prevented. Neither business man, as they were known to be, wished to have bruises to explain to customers the next day. Now there were encouraging shouts, from inside the crowd. Tom knew that the cause of the fight would be that his mother, Mo, had decided very publicly to throw Alun out of the tavern after fifteen years of living together at the Bull and Mouth. Bored with her life in the tavern she had passed him over for a Mr Beasley, the local travelling clothier, considered a far better, and well-dressed catch, more sensitive or less of an oaf than her husband, especially as he often travelled to sell his clothing to the local gentry leaving a women in peace for weeks at a time.
The day after the fight, Alun, then the previous landlord, took to his bed upstairs in the tavern, refusing to leave his bed vacant for Mr Beasley, stating his intention was to not carry out another day’s work for the rest of his life following this injustice, but to lay pale and broken-hearted quietly in a back room. It was a tale that would also earn itself a reputation, one that would follow Tom around the village for some time, making him wish that he could be less visible.
Tom remained in his position in the procession looking on at the fight, now reduced more to the level of a scuffling spectacle, and wished it was as dark as midnight to hide his father’s antics. He even considered putting his torch out when his father sat down in the road, dirt sticking to his tabard, where the prize pigs had just passed in front of the tavern led by the butcher, leaving in their excitement, and no doubt as a result of the extra exercise – fresh soft dung from their rears, the wholesome smells now carried on the wafts of steamy smoke in the damp air, dung now settling into the stitched lines of both Alun Law and Mr Beasley’s handsome coats.
Tom didn’t move from his place in the procession, and was still carrying the torch, lighting the way as dusk fell. He had taken the best part of two hours to move a short distance along the procession, getting near enough to see Annice without plunging the revellers into obvious darkness as his torch weaved in and out to inch further and further down the line, and by the time they reached the next town, he would be near enough to speak to her on his own for the first time. His father brawling in the street was not going to interfere with his plans, plans carefully hatched over the year, since the last pageant procession, he had daily imagined and edited the detail of their conversation whilst gazing across at her in the morning school classroom which meant he had absorbed little of the teaching and now knew little of the changing world he lived in.
Tom was thirteen, he had seen Annice from a distance at morning school. She was the only girl that Tom had ever wanted to be closer to. Her long red hair caught up in a cotton cap, with green eyes laughingly watching him from underneath the small frill, wearing long cream skirts and black laced boots, he sighed out loud. Speaking to Annice had been the main thought occupying his mind all evening especially as Tom would be finishing school this summer. Tom had previously always enjoyed the annual St Blaise pageant. St Blaise was their benefactor, a god for all weavers reaching back for hundreds of years. The pageant procession in his honou