Winners and Losers Read Online Free Page A

didn’t?’
    â€˜Now there’s a job.’ Betty pointed to a sign in the window of a large, square four-storey house on the corner of the street. They stopped and read the card propped inside the window:
    GIRL WANTED TO HELP WITH DOMESTIC WORK.
    MUST BE EXPERIENCED COOK, ABLE TO WASH,
    IRON, AND DO GENERAL CLEANING WITHOUT
    SUPERVISION. ABOVE AVERAGE WAGES OFFERED TO AN EFFICIENT PERSON. APPLY WITHIN.
    â€˜I’ve heard that Joyce Palmer is prepared to pay as much as a pound a week to the right girl.’
    â€˜Really?’ Megan’s eyes rounded in wonder.
    â€˜Not that I’ve spoken to Joyce myself,’ Betty added. ‘Well, not since the colliery company gave notice to all the miners in the lodging houses they owned and made them over to policemen. No decent woman would have stayed on to wait on them.’
    â€˜Mrs Palmer had nowhere else to go.’ Megan repeated an observation Victor had made.
    â€˜She could have found somewhere if she’d tried,’ Betty dismissed. ‘Mrs Payne in the Post Office told me that Joyce has taken one girl out of the workhouse to help her, but she’s found her a bit slow, and she’d rather not take on another. I can’t see any man in the town who sympathizes with the colliers’ grievances, let alone the colliers themselves, allowing any member of their family to wait on police or soldiers.’ Two officers headed towards them. ‘Come on, time we were on our way.’
    Megan gripped her basket and trudged on up the hill after Betty. Turning left, they greeted their neighbours again. Megan said goodbye to Betty and turned the key that was kept in the lock of her uncle’s house and opened the door. Goose pimples rose on her skin when she stopped in the hall to take off her cloak and hat, but she was afraid of staining her cloak if she tried to do housework wearing it.
    She carried her basket through to the kitchen, tied on her apron and filled the tin bowl in the sink ready to wash and peel the potatoes. The strike had made life cold, hungry and uncomfortable, but it had done little to change her routine. Her uncle and his brothers still rose at half past four in the morning, although they no longer had to be at the colliery gates before six in time to go down in the cage. But they didn’t linger in the house. In an effort to eke out the last coal ration they had received from the pit, she lit the kitchen stove for an hour in the morning so she could heat water for washing and tea and raked it out until three in the afternoon when it was time to cook the evening meal. She found it hard to do housework in the icy temperature but she didn’t doubt that her uncle and his brothers found it just as cold on the picket line.
    She poured the packet of tea she had bought into the empty caddy and fetched a swede, half a dozen turnips and a bunch of carrots that her uncle had brought down from his allotment the day before and put in the pantry. She wouldn’t have had to buy potatoes if theirs hadn’t been struck by blight. She unwrapped the lamb from the newspaper. It was a very small portion of meat for so many people but the first her uncle had allowed her to buy in two months. At least they would eat tonight. There were plenty in the town who wouldn’t.
    She’d put the lamb in a pan of cold water to soak and picked up a knife to start peeling the potatoes when she heard someone walk up the stone steps that led from the basement to the kitchen. There was a tap on the door, then it opened.
    Victor’s massive frame filled the doorway. He smiled and his teeth gleamed startlingly white against his blackened face and filthy clothes. He held up a bucketful of coal. ‘You can light the stove early. There’s plenty more where this came from, I’ve just emptied a couple of sacks into your coalhouse.’
    â€˜You’ve been working in the drifts the strikers have opened up on the