The Overlooker by Fay Sampson Page A

the same route as the Fewings. Next time Nick looked round, the man with the moustache was no longer with them.
    They tried their hands at carding wool with teasels from the hedgerows and with combs. They looked at different sorts of loom.
    In one room they came upon a life-size tableau. A girl was combing a hank of wool with a spiky teasel-head. Her mother was turning it into yarn on her spinning wheel and the father was weaving the yarn on his loom.
    As he stood regarding the realistic figures, Nick’s mind flew back to James Bootle, the handloom weaver. This was the sort of domestic scene, the whole family at work, James and his wife had once assumed would be theirs for a lifetime. It had been taken away from them by the building of mills, like the one the Fewings were standing in.
    Unbidden, a thread of thought ran through his mind. Like the illegal sweatshop he thought he had discovered in Hugh Street. Women forced by poverty into working long hours for low wages . . .
    That was before Inspector Heap had suggested it might be something worse still.
    How many young women like James Bootle’s daughters been forced into prostitution as their livelihood was taken away by machines?
    And now his own daughter was in a different danger because of what he had unwittingly discovered.
    Had the man with the military bearing really been here innocently?
    â€˜Are you all right, Dad? You keep looking at me strangely all morning.’
    â€˜Yes.’ He pulled himself up sharply and put on a smile for her. ‘Yes, of course I am. And why wouldn’t I want to look at my beautiful daughter?’
    They left the fulling mill behind. As the Fewings crossed the yard, Nick was conscious of that other family with children waiting by the doorway. Only when the Fewings had passed them did the round-faced father and his angular wife follow.
    In another part of the building, there were demonstrations of spinning. The equipment changed, from the distaffs women hung on their girdles to work with as they walked, to spinning wheels of various sizes and complexities, and finally to a room filled with rows of Crompton’s Mules. Here again, the two families paused for a demonstration. At a signal, the machines sprang into motion. The moving carriages shot out and raced back, temporarily opening up a gap between the spindles and the roller beams.
    â€˜Scavengers had to get under there to clean up the waste that dropped,’ the guide shouted above the noise. ‘They used kids for that. Probably the most dangerous work in the mill. You were working your way up to be a piecer, mending broken threads. But even then you were lucky if your spinner would stop the mule for you. The older ones might take pity on you. But the young men with growing families didn’t want to lose a penny by slowing down. You had to risk life and limb while it was moving.’
    â€˜Don’t tell me, Dad,’ sighed Millie. ‘That’s what I’d have been doing a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a wonder you had any ancestors left to grow up and have kids.’
    â€˜We’re a tough lot, the Fewings,’ Nick laughed. ‘But yes, the mill was a dangerous place.’
    A mobile phone rang. Alarm leaped in Nick’s throat. It took a second or two to realize that it was not his own ringtone.
    He saw the father of the children step back out of earshot to answer it.
    All the same, his heart was thudding. All morning he had been resisting the urge to take out his mobile and check for messages.
    He looked at his watch again.
    â€˜We ought to be getting back. Thelma’s doing lunch for us at one. I told her we could look after ourselves, since she’s back at work this morning. But she wouldn’t hear of it.’
    â€˜I suppose she’s always been used to nipping back to see to Uncle Martin at lunchtime,’ Suzie said. ‘She wouldn’t want to leave him alone all day at his