Towards democracy

A Lancashire Mill-hand 153

Here she had grown up a bright-eyed strenuous girl, to blushing maidenhood, and had become a young woman, and in '_ time married ; and here she lived, and bore her family, and died.

In those days—it happens even now—whole families, father, mother and children, would go out (locking up the house behind them) to work in the Mills; thus to earn perhaps a~decent combined wage.

And in this instance it was so. But the mother worked hardest of all: her one idea—her blind religion—being work : to bring up her children to work—never to give in.

During the last twenty-four years of her life she never missed a single work-morning being at the mill at 6 a.m.

Eyen before that, on each occasion of her-confinement, -she would only allow herself three weeks off. When she returned to the mill she would leave the new-born babe every morning at the house of a nursing woman on the way.

The youngest-born—and he it was who told it all—said he remembered very well as a child being picked out of bed in the early dawn, wrapped in a shawl, and carried through the streets, just as he was, to the house of an old woman.

Here his mother would just pop him down, and hurry on

to work.

At the last, after her half-century of toil, she was terribly broken with bronchitis. Often, after going out at 5.30 a.m. into the cutting winds of winter, the gas-lamps would reveal her leaning for a while, wheezing and coughing, in the shelter of a doorway to get her breath and strength.