A Country Girl. Nancy Carson
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Algie picked it up and took it over to his father. ‘I read today in the newssheet at work that Lord Sheffield’s eleven took a beating by the Australians.’
‘Did they?’ A look of disappointment clouded Will’s face as he looked up from his work. He was a keen follower of cricket and liked to keep abreast of all the first class matches. ‘I never heard. What was the score?’
‘The Aussies won by an innings and thirty-four runs.’
‘Damn! Was W. G. Grace playing?’
‘Yes, but he only scored twenty in the first innings and nine in the second. I reckon he ain’t half as good as what he’s made out to be.’
‘Wait till the test match in July. He’ll show ’em who’s the best batsman in the world.’
‘Pooh, I doubt it, Dad,’ Algie argued. ‘Not on his showing this week.’
A discussion ensued, also involving all the men gathered around, about the merits or otherwise of the world famous W. G. Grace. It seemed to go on for ages, by which time Will finished his task and collected his tools together. Father and son walked back to the cottage, but Algie removed himself to the shed, to tend to his precious bike.
Algie was so proud of his Swift bicycle with its pneumatic tyres. It was in desperate need of a thorough clean after its unscheduled dip in the cut, so he set about polishing it up. When it was gleaming again, he picked up the oil can and oiled the wheel hubs and the brake linkages, then trickled a few spots over the chain. Rust was the arch enemy of the conscientious cyclist, especially when the machine had cost twelve pounds of hard-earned and hard-saved money.
As he applied the oil, he became interested for the first time in the engineering that had gone into the bicycle’s manufacture. It struck him that with the proper jigs and fixtures at his disposal he could make a machine like this. It was hardly like building a complicated steam engine. His research into bicycles, before making his purchase, had revealed that the frames of some were made from bamboo, for lightness. But bamboo would not do for him. He would prefer to sacrifice that inherent lightness for the durability of steel. And so would most other folk who had to save hard and long to be able to afford a bicycle. They wouldn’t want to see their bamboo frame warp and split. The only obstacle he foresaw to building a machine like his would be making the wheels – all those spokes. A wheel seemed like a perfect work of art; so precise, so finely balanced. If only he had enough money to start a business making bikes … maybe he could even buy the wheels already finished from another firm. He would start designing bikes anyway. They were all the rage. Everybody was mad about bikes.
Such enterprising thoughts eclipsed the immediate guilt he felt about Harriet Meese. However, it niggled him to realise that Eli, the grumpy old devil, had prevented him from seeing her when Algie believed he had a perfect right. He’d been anxious to explain to Harriet how he felt; that he honestly believed she would be better off released from any obligations of loyalty to himself. Their courtship, however apathetic on his part, had left him with a great deal of respect and admiration for her. Perhaps he should write to her, explaining his side of the story.
The ride along the towpath towards the Parkhead Locks took Algie through the most squalid, intensively industrialised landscape on the face of the earth. From the lock-keeper’s cottage at Buckpool the canal followed the contour around the hill, meandering first between a tile works, a small ironworks, workshops, and several collieries. Some of the collieries were still active, others defunct, but all had their forbidding black spoil encroaching everywhere. There were gas works, brick and firebrick works with their attendant clay pits, generally filling up with dangerously murky water. Huge red-brick cones loomed, presiding over the bottle works and potteries to which they were attached. And all this before the area’s industry got to be really densely packed.
Algie rode up the incline at the Nine Locks, keen to see the fresh, new girl in his life, not minding the visual blight which so much heavy manufacturing had engendered. Rather he wondered at it, when he bothered to contemplate it at all, as a symbol of a richer life; it brought relative prosperity, giving folk some opportunity to pick and choose what work they did; it sucked up like a sponge the young men from the countryside who came in search of their fortunes, as well as country girls who sought excitement, husbands, more lucrative work in factories, or the guarantee of ample food and a clean bed that working in service offered.
At Round Oak it was overwhelming. The vast ironworks owned by the Earl of Dudley, and known to all as ‘The Earl’s’, surrounded him on every side. Its massive furnaces released roaring pillars of flame that would redden the midnight sky like a storm at dawn. The canal here vied for space not only with the furnaces, the rolling mills and vast travelling cranes, but with the network of internal railways and their clanking, hissing locomotives. Chimney stacks pricked the sooty sky; a haphazard array of obelisks erected in celebration of man’s daring enterprise. Beam engines dipped and withdrew their gigantic arms, pumping water out of deep mines, where night and day were ever one, and work never ceased. There were lesser ironworks, another glut of collieries with huge circling wheels atop their tall headgear. Glowing slag laced the tops of black spoil banks like the flame-licked soot at the back of a fire grate. The stoke-holes of brick kilns glimmered through their own smoke, and fountains of fiery sparks spat from under black-roofed workshops with sides open to the elements. Forges, where monstrous thudding hammers shook the earth, crudely smote and shaped yellow-hot metal into preordained designs.
Algie reached Parkhead, spanned as it was by an impressive viaduct that bore the Great Western Railway between Oxford and Wolverhampton, and all points between. At last he spotted Seth Bingham’s highly decorated narrowboats moored abreast, at the basin near the entrance to the canal tunnel. Hannah was pushing some garment or other through the cast-iron mangle, while Marigold was amid the flutter of drying skirts and shirts, pegged out on a line which stretched from the chimney pipe to the front of their butty, and propped in the middle.
‘Marigold!’ Algie called, as he pulled up alongside and dismounted.
She turned to greet him with a perky smile. ‘Hello, Algie. Your mother gave you the message then?’
He nodded and grinned. ‘Course she did.’
‘I won’t be a minute. I’ve just gotta hang these last few things.’
‘What time did you go past our house?’ he enquired.
‘About four, I think. Your mom gave me some of her jam tarts.’
‘Nice, aren’t they? I had a couple meself.’
She nodded. ‘Beautiful. Shan’t be a minute,’ she said, and disappeared into the cabin.
While he waited, Algie chatted affably with Hannah, who was wiping down the mangle. Seth appeared from inside the Sultan and passed the time of day while he emptied the dolly tub in the long grass that lined the towpath. He was still talking as he carried it off and stored it in what they called the laid-hole. Soon, Marigold re-emerged, and stepped off the Odyssey onto the towpath. She took his arm affectionately and they began walking away.
‘You didn’t have to stay in Kidderminster last night then?’ Algie commented.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘When we got to the carpet factory, Jack was there. I told him straight away as I didn’t see any point in us seeing one another anymore. I told him it was because I never knowed when I was gunna be there.’
Algie smiled with relief at this news. ‘And what did he say?’
‘That I’d been taking him too serious, and that it was nice just to see me when we did go to Kidder, even if it wasn’t all the time. Anyroad, we was offloaded in no time.’ She chuckled at that. ‘Just goes to show, I’m sure he used to fix it that we couldn’t get offloaded, just so as he could see me of a night time, just like you said. Lord knows how much that cost me dad, losing time like that, but I ain’t said nothing.’
They walked past the locks, towards the bridge that would lead them away from the canal. Three canals met at this point and, in whichever direction the