The Overlooker Read Online Free

of the town, where the shopping precinct is now. But he couldn’t save his children from being sucked into the mills. Millicent was a cotton factory worker in the next census at the age of eight.’
    Millie’s eyes grew round. ‘Millicent! You never told me! Did you name me after her?’
    â€˜I’m afraid not,’ Suzie laughed. ‘We weren’t into family history then. I only discovered her a few weeks ago, when I started chasing up Dad’s family history as well as my own.’
    â€˜All the same . . . But it’s daft. She couldn’t have managed even one of these looms at that age. She wouldn’t have been big enough to reach.’
    â€˜She’d be working her socks off, supposing she had any, keeping the weavers supplied with weft for the looms, and clearing away the waste.’
    â€˜She’d learn to be a weaver when she was older,’ the guide agreed. ‘But if you could reach your arm over your head and touch the opposite ear, you were thought big enough to work. And they didn’t stop the machinery if something needed fixing or cleaning. If she didn’t look out, she could lose an arm or her scalp.’
    Millie shuddered. Her hand went protectively to her own blonde head.
    She gazed back at the clattering machinery with renewed intensity. ‘Millie Bootle. She worked here?’
    â€˜In a mill like it, certainly.’
    â€˜It’s just possible,’ Nick said, ‘that your Great-great-uncle Martin knew her.’
    Millie swung her wondering eyes round to him. ‘
Really
?’
    â€˜It’s possible. If she lived that long, she’d have been in her sixties when he was born.
    The noise slackened overhead. Nick could hear the piston slowing to rest. The flicker of hundreds of leather belts ceased their dancing. The shuttles on the looms fell still. A strange silence held the vast weaving shed. For several moments, none of the three Fewings moved.
    Then Suzie’s hazel eyes smiled sympathetically at Nick. ‘That was great, wasn’t it? I never thought it would seem so real.’
    He turned away from the looms reluctantly. ‘My gran and granddad left all this to move south, soon after they got married. Apparently Granddad Fewings had been posted to Portsmouth in the First World War, and liked it. They set up a fish and chip shop. But Gran was always a Northerner at heart. She was proud that she’d worked in the mills.’
    â€˜I bet James Bootle was proud of the cloth he wove on his handloom. But his was a different world. Before all this.’
    They wandered off to the café, through rooms stacked with samples of cotton cloth, the myriad sizes of shuttles for every conceivable job, arrays of weavers’ tools, and the Jacquard looms that could weave more complicated patterns. Room after room opened up in the rambling mill. And there were more doors that were marked ‘Private’.
    Nick thought of the contrast between his own modern office in the southern cathedral city, his architect’s practice designing houses and offices for the future. Until recently, he had not shared Suzie’s all-consuming passion for family history. But this had gripped him. Here he was in touch with a woman who had died only a few years ago. His grandmother. A woman whose shy grey eyes had come to life as she told her children and grandchildren about her life as a cotton weaver. The knocker-up tapping the bedroom window with his pole, the clogs on the cobbled street, the close-knit community where almost everyone on the street worked at the same mill.
    And now that high tide of the Industrial Revolution had receded. The mills were deserted, the chimneys cold. Here and there they were being demolished, but slowly. There was no money to replace the mills. No new industries. Half the town seemed to be on benefits. He thought of Geoffrey Banks, the embittered industrial chemist. A disappointed man whose life’s