Only one more week left at work … one good thing is that I will be able to spend more time writing and catching up with Friday Fictioneers.  I haven’t done much ‘visiting’ recently and I want to say thank you for putting up with me and still visiting and commenting on my posts. 🙂

Thanks as always to Rochelle for making time in her very hectic schedule to continue to lead us- sympathies with the dental work, I’ve been in the same boat recently, painful. Thanks to to Ted Strutz for the intriguing photo this week.

Genre: Family history

Word Count: 100

Early One Morning

May woke her brothers. The room was dark and cold. Condensation collected in puddles on the windowsill. Ernest pulled the blanket tighter.

‘Ernest, Walter, wake up. There’s water for a quick swill, your clothes are on the chair. Hurry up, don’t wake the others.’

They walked together alongside the canal, huddled against the cold, breathing out clouds into the morning.

‘Boys, hurry up!  If we’re late and refused work today, Joe Stamford will dock our pay for the week. Think of ma and the bairns, come on!’

Joe Stamford watched them running across the yard and started to close the door.

                                  *******

A little bit of history… May in the story is my grandmother. She left school aged 12 and went to work in a cotton mill in Colne, Lancashire, with her two older brothers. They left home around 5.30am to walk the two miles to work every day. Conditions in the mills were very hard, if they were late one day, they were refused entry and could lose their pay for the whole week. They worked hard to support their mother and six other siblings as by now, their father was quite ill and without work for long periods of time.

This is a photo of her, much much later, with my grandfather on a rare day out to Blackpool. (Apologies for the quality.)