The Good Provider by Jessica Stirling Page A

hills of Carrick seemed so far, far, far away. She too felt pangs of homesickness, though, God knows, she had never been happy there. But at least it had been her place and she had known what was expected of her and what pattern each day would bring.
    She reached out and put an arm about Craig. Startled out of his reverie, he glanced at her and then caught her head and brought it to him, her lips to his mouth, their hats tilting awkwardly. He kissed and cuddled her, rubbed his chest against her breasts but it was done without real desire and the moment of forced passion ended with a sudden deafening shriek as, somewhere behind the brickwork, a steam klaxon sounded.
    Craig leapt as if it had been a police whistle and Kirsty flinched too.
    Seconds later, from a gateway hidden some hundred yards down the lane, a crowd of women and girls emerged, twenty or more, shawled and aproned, all in a hurry to quit the work place. They swamped the lane, four, five, seven abreast, some with arms linked, some walking with elbows clenched to their chests, indrawn, scowling.
    Craig and Kirsty gaped.
    The girls were followed by men, young and old, and a handful of boys no older than Gordon. They sped past energetically. The men were dusted with a strange white coating which, in the March breeze, whirled from them like ectoplasm as if their spirits were being released as well as their bodies.
    There was a threatening sense of purpose in the workers as they crammed the lane, heading fast away from the factory, but some, the younger girls and men, had time enough to notice the odd-looking couple on the bench, to laugh, wink and point them out. Chirping noises were addressed in their direction, catcalls, cutting sarcasm: ‘Hey, Jenny, see the gingerbread man. Aye, him in the strippit coat there. Thinks it’s the Groveries, so he does, him an’ his wee budgerigar. Cheep, cheep, cheep .’
    Craig shot to his feet, bristling at the insults; then sat down again.
    Taking a clay pipe from his mouth, spitting, a man shouted, ‘Lost yer yacht, sonnie, eh?’
    This comment was taken up, swelled into a snatch of song: ‘ Sailin’, sailin’, over the boundin’ main .’
    Nobody stopped for conversation, polite or otherwise, and Craig and Kirsty were obliged to remain where they were, rigid with embarrassment like a couple clamped into village stocks. In three or four minutes the bulk of the crowd had departed.
    ‘What – what do they do?’ Kirsty whispered.
    ‘Search me,’ Craig answered.
    Still Craig and Kirsty did not move to escape. They stared down the lane, craned forward, watching as an old man with a club-foot came limping out of the gate. Hands in pockets, pipe in mouth, he clumped towards them, paying them no attention at all.
    ‘Sir?’ Craig got to his feet, took off the daft boater and left it on the bench. ‘Sir, what do they make in there?’
    The eyes were not inquisitive, the expression was neither friendly nor hostile.
    ‘Pots,’ he answered tersely.
    ‘Pots?’
    ‘Crocks, pots, china-like.’
    He glanced at Kirsty. There might have been a softening of the bunches of tight muscle under his powdered moustache; Kirsty could not be sure.
    ‘Sir, would there be work goin’ there?’ Craig called out.
    ‘Aye, for skilled hands.’ The old man with the club-foot went on at his clumping pace. ‘No’ for a bloody farm labourer – or his pretty lassie.’
    Taken aback, Craig sat down again.
    ‘How did he know? How the hell did he know?’ Craig asked, bemused.
    ‘Your voice, perhaps,’ said Kirsty.
    ‘He knew I was a bloody hick, just by lookin’ at me.’
    ‘Craig, it was only a guess.’
    Craig got to his feet again.
    Men in bowler hats were coming out of the gate now, a handful of them and one or two neatly dressed chaps upon clean, green-painted bicycles, trousers shaped to their calves by wire clips.
    ‘No work for a farm labourer, eh?’ Craig muttered and, snatching up the wicker dressing-case, left Kirsty to