Mollie Walton - The Daughters of Ironbridge

Contents

To my lovely Mam, my compass in fair weather or foul.

The iron bridge glimmered in the moonlight. A woman trudged across it, carrying a precious package. She could barely walk, one foot dragging as she struggled to place it before the other, dry leaves crisping underfoot, her pale face wincing with every step. She peered up at the full moon, took some distant hope from it and looked down at the face of her child, asleep in her arms, wrapped in rags. She tucked the cloth tighter around her tiny baby, trying to protect it as best she could from the autumn chill. She could feel its bones. It was thin, too thin and too quiet. She had given her child every ounce of milk she could but it had dried up. She was too hungry herself to nourish her child. Weak and exhausted, she knew she could not go much further. With all of her will, she reached the centre of the bridge. The centrepiece stated the date it was built: 1779. Fifty-five years ago, just over a half century, since the town itself began to bloom alongside its namesake. Her master had been a boy then, a spoilt boy no doubt; that family always spoiled their children. It was why they all turned out that way, all turned out bad. She looked down at her babe in arms again.

Not you, littleun, she whispered, her throat hoarse from thirst. Youll be different. Youll be sunlight, not moonlight.

She kissed her childs head and looked up at the imposing mansion, built on iron money, that loomed above the town, above the bridge, above them all. If only she could keep going. But her legs were now as heavy and immovable as stone. She had come to the limit of her endurance, the final shred of her strength gone. She heard footsteps. She looked up to see a man in a broad hat walking purposefully across the bridge. He was coming towards her and he was talking to her.

Good woman, he was saying, can I assist ee?

Good woman, she thought. I was a good girl, once. Her thighs were shaking. She felt her knees buckle. Will you help me, sir? she croaked. Please, hold my baby as I canna stand no longer.

The man, who she now saw wore the simple, curious clothes of a Quaker, came to her quickly and took the child. The moment the weight of her warm bundle was lifted from her, it was as if her body knew before her mind did that it was time to rest. She felt her legs give way and the bridge came up quickly, the ground smacking her face with a hard, iron slap. She heard her child whimper in the kind mans arms. It was the last sound she heard.

Fire and smoke, suffocating and infernal, reached up into the sky, staining it red and black for miles around. A traveller approaching Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale would be met with the wonder of it and stop to stare. The blast furnace belched with heat and life all day and all night, the whole year round. Men fed its mouth with fuel, men like John Woodvine, furnace fillers who nourished the monster to try and meet its hunger, but it was never satisfied. Always, the furnace wanted more. They filled the barrows with coke, iron ore and limestone, pushed them out along a gangway and tipped the charge into the boiling throat of the furnace. Inside, the heat did its magical work and out came molten iron in the cast-house below. Around them, the fire, smoke and gas billowed and blinded them.

A shift at the furnace was twelve hours of hard labour and in the heat of this summer, it was hard indeed. John Woodvine thought to himself, and not for the first time, Itll be summat like this in Hell. John would come home filthy with smut and ash and so exhausted of limb and heart, his wife Rachel and his daughter Anny barely had a word from him before he collapsed on their hard bed. Rachel would wake him to eat before he fell back into a dead sleep again till the birds about their cottage sang and day had come, then he would have to start it all again. Excepting Sundays, his one day of rest, when he could talk to Rachel and watch Anny grow and giggle, sweet child that she was.

Woodvine! shouted the foreman. Stop your dreaming, mon!

John shook his head to rid it of his daydreams. A moment of distraction in this awful, dangerous place could be fatal. Men were injured here; blinded, lost fingers, lost arms, received dreadful burns from fire, steam or hot metal, suffocated, bruised and battered, limbs crushed. Some never recovered to work again; some died. You had to have your wits about you. He looked about him, focused his eyes and forced himself to concentrate. But he had a bad feeling that something was amiss.

Look out, there! someone shouted and John whipped around, terrified of what terrible thing was coming this time.

*

Anny looked at her fingers. They were red raw from scrubbing clothes. They had welts from carrying the buckets back from the water pump, a third of a mile away. They were not even her clothes, or her parents clothes either. Her mother took in washing to make ends meet. Anny did not go to school. She had been working for three years now, since she was nine years old. She looked up at her mother, careworn and sweating in the heat of a hot June day, as she pushed a shirt through the mangle, huffing and puffing.

Let me do that for you, Mother, Anny said and went to her, but her mother shook her head.

I worry about your fingers, she said, and shooed her daughter away. I canna have you losing your fingers.

Dunna be daft, Im turned twelve. I anna got little fingers anymore.

Her mother looked up at her and smiled. Youre right. I always think of you as my babby. But youre a young lady now.

Anny smiled then saw her mothers face fall. What was she thinking about, that made her sad? What is it?

Just thinking that I wish I could give you more, Anny.

But you give me everything. You give me all your love, every day. And you feed me and keep me warm. She wiped the sweat from her brow. Leastways, too warm, sometimes!

They laughed. But her mother was still frowning. And you taught me to read and write when everyone said whats the point of it, for a lass like me? But you did it anyway.

Yes, well, maybe they were right. What can you do with your book learning here? I was learnt to do it by my mother. But what could I ever do with mine, in this house, with these piles of washing ever biding for me and never seeming to lessen?

Its good we have plenty of washing. Because washing means money and that means well be all right.

Her mother smiled proudly at her. Always the sharp one. Oh, but I wish you could be a lady, Anny. A proper lady like that Margaret King. You were born in the same month, in the same year. I wish I coulda given you everything she had.

Anny wrinkled her nose in disgust. Oh, I wouldna want her life. Not all that curtseying and how-do-you-do. I wanna be here with you and Father.

Oh, your father! Your fathers bait! cried her mother. His slice of pie is there on the side. He forgot it this morning. Run and take it to him. Hell be clemmed without it.

Anny grabbed the cloth-wrapped slice of fidget pie, his favourite. Her mother lovingly made a portable dinner for her father six days a week. It might be a slab of rabbit or pigeon pie, or if times were hard it would be filled with crow or sparrow. Or it might only be a Dawley doorstep, simply a hunk of bread spread with butter or sometimes cheese. Or if a pig they had shares in had been butchered, it might be his favourite: a thick wedge of the gammon, apple, tatties and onion pie he loved so much.

Youd best hurry, lass! cried her mother, but Anny wanted to do one thing before she went. She grabbed a stubby pencil from the stool beside the hearth where she would sit and write stories and poems of an evening. Taking a scrap of paper her parents saved up to purchase for her, she scribbled a quick note: