Grandad, Emma, And George

Grandad’s older sister was Emma, and his older brother George. Great Aunt Emma was a crack weaver, as was Grandad. Like all the Lord family, they were hard workers; neither of them could bear to be idle. Grandad, when he lived in Arthur Street in Rochdale, worked at Mitchell Hey Mill. It was owned by the Shackleton siblings, Florence, Clarence, and Roger. Grandad thought nothing of walking straight into their office to ‘tell them what’s what’, if there was something about the running of the mill he wasn’t happy with. Usually they followed his advice….

When he was seventy, he decided to retire, to concentrate on his poultry. (He kept poultry all his adult life). He was presented with a magnificent clock, which had a Westminster chime, and it forever after took pride of place on the sideboard in the sitting room. Four months later, he walked into the Shackletons’ office, and told them he was coming back to work, as he was bored. He then worked another ten years, until he was eighty, when he retired again, and this time was given a watch.

I remember when I was seven or eight going to wait for him at the mill-gate, and seeing all the men and women trudging out wearily, their clog-irons clattering on the path, and wisps of cotton flying through the air from their clothes. Then Grandad appeared. He looked quite fresh, and did a little jig for me as he got near.

When it was Wakes fortnight – Grandad called it Rushbearing – he’d bring the two mill cats to live in his hen-pen for the holiday. All the mills in the town shut down at the same time, so the boilers could be cleaned with no-one there. Meanwhile, the town’s workforce decamped to Blackpool.

The cats were very sociable. They lived in the big cabin where Grandad kept the hen food in great vats, and spent their days lying in the sun. It must have been a wonderful treat for them, as for fifty weeks a year they were working cats. The mill was next to the spot where the River Spodden joined the River Roche, and would have been overrun with vermin, but for the cats.

Meanwhile, Aunt Emma was still working, too. She had been a wild one, and had married twice. Both husbands were Irish Guardsmen, well over six feet tall. Emma was barely five feet. She had three sons, one of them born ‘between husbands’. Widowed a second time, she had settled in Bacup. Her weaving – and dancing– days came to an abrupt end in the Catholic Club on her eightieth birthday, when she fell off the table where she was doing a clog dance, and broke her hip. She lived another nine years, till she was eighty-nine, crippled, as nothing was deemed to be able to be done about her hip. Those were the days!

She lived in what I can only describe as the slum area of Hill Street, in a tiny back-to-back house, long since demolished. It was very neat and clean inside, but very old-fashioned, even for those days. There was a big black-leaded stove-cum-fire, where all the cooking was done, and it had a cauldron suspended over the flames. I thought it looked like a witch’s house, and Aunt Emma looked like a witch.

I only visited there once, with my Grandma. We went on the bus to Bacup, and the house was near the centre. My Grandma and Aunt Emma had little in common, other than their connection with Grandad, so I suppose the visit was out of duty. Aunt Emma had a rather effeminate neighbour called Lawrence at her beck and call. She told us he was her ‘loblolly’, doing her housework and shopping. She cackled as she said it, showing gums but no teeth.

Grandma told me to go and play outside, but only just outside the door, which opened straight onto the cobbled street. There was nothing to do. I sat on the kerb, and pulled up bits of grass from between the stones. A little girl my own age came up and asked if I wanted to play. I remember her clearly; I had never seen a child like her before. Her hair was all matted, and her skin was dirty. Her dress was ragged and soiled, and she had no shoes or socks, just pumps with holes in them. I had plaits with ribbons, a pretty starched frock, white socks, and Clark’s sandals. None of this mattered, once we started to play. She showed me where there was warm tar, melted under the sun, between some of the cobbles. We had a great time pulling some out, rolling it into little balls, and sticking bits of grass into it. I was getting lovely and dirty, when Grandma came outside to make sure I was all right. She took one look at me and my new friend, and almost dragged me inside the house, and next thing we were to leave, and I was to kiss Aunt Emma goodbye. I didn’t want to. She had whiskers. And I wanted to carry on playing.

We got on the Rochdale bus. Grandma said, “I should never have brought you. It won’t happen again,” and I said, “But I want to play with Pamela again. She’s my friend,” and Grandma said, “Well, you can’t, and that’s that.”

It was the last I saw of Aunt Emma. Although Grandad loved her dearly, she had been his rival in many things, especially in weaving prowess, and he was determined to outlive her. When he passed eighty-nine, he said, “One more year, and I’ll have done it.”

He outlived his favourite sibling by quite a lot. This was his elder brother, George. Like all the Lords, George was married twice, first to Alice, and then to Margaret. I never met Gorge – or if I did, I was far too young to remember – so everything I write about him is anecdotal.

George was what’s known as ‘a bit of a lad’, which endeared him to some, and appalled others. Soon after he and Alice married, and settled in their new home, they invited Grandad and Grandma to visit them. This was long before my mother and her sister were born. Grandad had been given instructions about getting to Barlick, where George and Alice now lived. He and Grandma set off, and caught the bus from Rochdale to Bacup, and then another to Burnley. George had told Grandad, to wait in Burnley bus station, and they’d soon see a bus with the Barlick destination on it, and they were to get that. Grandad and Grandma reached Burnley, stood in the bus station – and waited…..and waited…..and waited. Buses came and went, but no bus for Barlick ever appeared.

Eventually, they asked someone if he knew where the Barlick bus set off from. “Here”, the man answered.

“We’ve been here getting on for two hours, and haven’t seen one,” Grandad said. “My brother told me they are every fifteen minutes.”

The man looked at him as if he was stupid. “There’s one right there now,” he said, pointing to a bus a few yards away.

Grandad and Grandma looked at the bus. Its destination was clearly displayed on the front : Barnoldswick. They were not to have known the locals shortened the name.

I’ve already said George was known as a bit of a lad. One night, his wife Alice had retired early to bed. She woke a couple of hour later, and found George hadn’t come to bed yet. Worried he’d fallen asleep downstairs, she went down to see. She got more than she bargained for. There he was, on the rug in front of the fire, with a strange woman, ‘in flagrante.’ Auntie Alice shrieked, and George uttered the immortal words, which have gone down in my family’s annals:

“Nay, Alice, don’t take on so. It’s nobbut a bit of harmless innocent fun.”

The Lord family, from what I can see, didn’t take adultery too seriously, and in any case thought it was no-one else’s business apart from those involved. As Grandad said, when told of someone ‘playing away’, “Well, he’s using his own tackle, in his own time.”

When the war broke out in August, 1914, George was well into his forties, so he lied about his age, and enlisted in September. Two months later, he was demobbed, when the powers that be realised his age. Meanwhile, all four of his sons signed up, the youngest, John, running away to Liverpool to enlist. He was only fourteen, and lied about his age. His mother followed, and brought him back. She said, “I’m not risking all my sons, war or no war.” According to Grandad, John never forgave her. The other sons, Richard, Albert, and Walter, came home safely when the war finished. The odds against that must have been pretty high.

After George’s wife Alice died, he married Margaret, and moved to Earby.

It was in the depths of the hard winter of 1947 that Grandad answered the door to find a policeman there. This officer had come to tell Grandad that George and Margaret had been found dead. He could give no further details.

No buses were running. In some places the snowdrifts were up to the upstairs windows of houses. Even so, Grandad said he had to get to Earby, to find out what had happened.
Grandma pleaded with him not to go, but he was determined. The following morning, he set off on foot from their house in Rochdale, but arrived back some hours later.

“I’ve been as far as Bacup,” he said. “I know now what it’s like. I’ll go to Earby tomorrow.”

Nothing anyone said would make him change his mind.
Next day he was up at four, and dressed in his warmest clothes. Then he set off. It was still dark, and bitterly cold. It was a couple of days before he returned. There had been no news of him between going and returning, and Grandma had been frantic with worry. She had no way of knowing if he’d survived.

He’d walked to Bacup, then over the heights of Deerplay Moor to Burnley, on through Nelson and then Colne and so on again to Earby. He’d stayed two nights even further away at Barlick, with his nephew Richard, and then come home the same way. It was a round trek of nearly seventy miles on foot, through the Pennines in the deepest, coldest winter in memory. He was seventy-five.

What he had found had left him heart-broken.

George and Margaret had been sleeping. The gas fire in their bedroom had been left on, because of the bitter cold. Somehow, the flame had gone out, but the gas still came through. Richard had called round to see if they were managing in the wintry conditions. He could get no reply, and the bedroom curtains were still drawn. Fearing the worst, he went to the police station. When the police broke in, they found Margaret in bed, but George was on the floor, stretching out his arm, trying to reach the gas fire to turn it off, …. and failing by about six inches.

I don’t know what would have been worse for Grandad – the long walk to Earby through the winter landscape, not knowing what he would find; or his weary way back home, knowing what had. He would never speak of it. It was Grandma who told me. I had no brothers or sisters, so I can only imagine the bond that held these Lord children together, forged from their childhood of near-destitution, seeing their mother’s stoicism and bravery, standing against whatever fate through at them, - and looked down on by the rich and powerful, who in reality were not fit to lick their clogs.