Trinity: A Novel of Ireland

by Leon Uris

  They could hear the angelus toll, a signal that their day together had come to an end. Dary tossed the last of the crumbs to the little beggars. They returned over the bridge, up the path to the seminary, and halted before the gate knowing it would be a long time before another visit.

  "Not that it will do much good, but squeeze in a prayer for me now and again," Conor said.

  "I always have."

  "Sure I know that, runt. I've watched you pray since you could walk. Of course you were always mighty quiet about it. Tell me, Dary, what is it you say for me?"

  "What's the difference?"

  "Nae, tell me. I think I need to know."

  "I pray that my brother Conor won't be shot down by British guns."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  No one knew for certain that it was half four in the morning but when that hour arrived movement began by rote. The single-bedroom row house of eighteenth-century vintage on Sparrow Lane was less crowded these days with only two daughters of the eight Tully children remaining. Henry and his wife Bessie occupied the bedroom. Peg, the oldest sister, her husband and their four children slept in the parlor.

  For the privilege of their privacy in a curtained-off alcove in the kitchen, Maud and Myles had to be first up. They spent the night wound around each other and held on till the last instant with the baby kicking up a fury as Maud ended her seventh month. Maud sat up on the mattress looking only half her size, thin arms and small breasts understated by the hugeness of her belly. They dressed in silence with long-practiced movements of people who lived in crowded quarters and awakened to darkness.

  Myles rolled the bedding up off the floor and tucked it beneath the staircase as she made to the back yard to lead the parade to the privy and water pump in the predawn chill.

  Breakfast of minced pork scraps and potatoes was eaten by Bessie, Peg and Peg's daughter, Deirdre, who had started working at the factory. Their meal was taken in red-eyed drowsiness, a morning stupor orchestrated by Henry Tully sleeping off his perennial drunk with a bombardment of snores. Peg's husband stayed in bed also with their three remaining children cuddled on a single mattress.

  When they finished, Maud and Myles got the table and took their breakfast with an egg, one of the two they spoiled themselves with weekly. Lunch of a pork sausage, a potato, an apple and tea was packed into her small net shopping bag. She lit her lantern and stepped into the darkness, the chill of it frosting her breath. Myles always walked his wife to the factory although the forge wouldn't be open for almost two hours. He spent the time doing extra work if any was to be had, or in Conor's office studying Gaelic or reading from the extensive collection of books on wrought iron.

  Up and down the side streets, lanterns glowed as the women wended their way to Witherspoon & McNab and the other factories and mills for the six o'clock starting hour in a dirge like procession. Maud's niece, Deirdre, had just turned eleven and joined the sorrowful parade along with hundreds of other Bogside children to disappear from childhood in the black jaws of the Londonderry workshops.

  Myles put his arm about his wife to ward off the sting of cold. It would be a particularly hard day because the factory had no heat except from the presser's stoves on the third floor and she would be working too far from it to reap much benefit. Winter added to the cruelty, for Maud would rarely see daylight except on Sunday, awakening and returning from work in darkness like a miner above the Arctic Circle.

  She was frightfully tired but refused to submit. Summer would come and there would be light. A year and a half would fly by and they would leave the Bogside forever. They came to a stop across the street from the factory and stared as it swallowed up its human fodder. As banks of gaslights were turned on inside, their faint glow penetrated unwashed windows, casting a dim yellowish illumination. Maud climbed to the sixth floor more slowly each day, yielding reluctantly to the burden in her stomach.

  "I hate that place for taking you away and for what it does to you," Myles snarled. "I'll work my hands raw to make it up to you."

  "Sometimes," she whispered, "I loathe myself for wanting you so badly at any price and I'm ashamed of using you to get me out of Derry."

  "It's only your condition making you talk this way. I'll hear no more of it. This will pass, Maudie, like a bad dream. Look what's coming up, would you? We've a League meeting tonight with a lecture by Father Pat and Sunday we take the train to Convoy after mass and look over the forge that's up for sale."

  "Do you really think he'll wait until you're ready?"

  "He promised he would and what if he doesn't? There will be others to buy."

  She girded herself for entry. Myles seized her shoulders. "I've never had anything in my twenty-three years except your love, Maudie. Without you, I'm nothing. With you, I'm everything."

  "On with you, lad," she said, pinching his cheek and forcing a small smile. "It's not so bad up there; I get to think of you all day."

  The girls tittered on their way in as Myles and Maud McCracken stood there holding each other and kissing as they did almost every morning. One would think they were still courting instead of herself nearly eight months' pregnant. Myles could scarcely bear the sight of her disappearing into that dark place; he turned quickly and left, with the darkness consuming him immediately. Deirdre ran beside her aunt. Maud looked up to the sixth floor and sighed, "Come on, love, let's give his lordship his pound of flesh."

  *

  The Londonderry Corporation Council fathers thought Angus Witherspoon and Simon McNab slightly mad when they unveiled plans to erect a shirt factory on Abercorn Road. The year was 1870 and the two immigrant Scotsmen had prospered famously. Shirts were made through a complex of small shops and piecework done largely in homes as a "cottage industry." Before the reform laws, that wily pair utilized labor of the orphanages, workhouses, prisons and borstals. In 1870 linen never looked so good. The world cotton market had bottomed and busted because of the American Civil War and linen was on a hinge.

  Their idea of unifying all the small, scattered elements into one large modern building conceived for mass production was a staggering idea. Even more staggering was the building itself. What pierced the Londonderry sky in 1873 was a seven-story monolith, the mightiest architectural achievement ever in that part of Ireland. The structure was made possible by the use of huge, hollow-tubed cast iron pillars. Each of the seven floors was designed as a segment of a unique master plan to make shirts on an assembly line basis.

  The ground floor on Abercorn Road housed the company offices and directly behind them on the left side of the building stood the receiving department where the linen was disbursed. On the right side of the ground floor the finished shirt came down for shipment so the rear of the building held a bustle of horse-drawn draying wagons and a large stable.

  Bolts of white and dyed linen moved to the seventh story on the left-hand side by a huge rope-and-pulley hand-operated elevator. The top of the building held the cutting room where natural light could be best utilized. Simon McNab, production genius of the partnership, designed mammoth cutting tables and the sixteen-inch bladed "McNab shears" capable of slicing through seven thicknesses of linen and thus making seven pieces at a single cutting.

  Cutters were male. Although linen was more difficult to work with than cotton, pure brawn was needed to cut the magic number of seven. With seven sets of sleeves, pockets, fronts and backs cut from the pattern, the cutter bundled and tagged it by color, size and style.

  "Runner!" he called. "Bundle, bundle!”

  Girls ranging from nine to fourteen kept a constant stream to and from the cutting tables, holding a bundle under each arm, totaling fourteen unsewn shirts. Moving down a matching elevator on the right side of the building, they got off at the sixth, fifth and fourth floors. Each of these contained a battery of two hundred foot-treadle sewing machines and a much lesser number of button-holers. A bundle was dispensed at one of the six hundred machines requiring it and the apprentice girl returned to the cutting room by t
he left elevator in what was a never ending cycle of movement.

  Sewing machine operatives, all females, pulled their special tags off the bundle. One tag per shirt, one penny per shirt, and proceeded to stitch them together at a rate of three to five shirts an hour.

  The button-holers on each of these three floors then applied their craft, hand-sewing the buttons and attaching collar bands. These were the elite workers on a flat salary of one pound, two shillings a week.

  The finished shirt continued down to the third floor, the sweatbox, to the pressers. Twenty-five coal-burning Stoves were interspersed about the block-square room near ironing tables. Intricate pleats and tucks required a woman's hand at the iron. These were girls of fifteen and sixteen graduated from being runners. Five apprentice boys, future cutters, kept the coal stoves roaring. The third floor of Witherspoon & McNab was a prelude of hell where human endurance was at a breaking point, winter and summer. The pressers remained at their trade for a year or two until a sewing machine became open on one of the upper floors.

  Continuing ever downward, the second floor was for labeling, packaging and boxing by older women no longer able to do ten hours at the machines. They were allowed to finish out their years with no further body or mind damage but at half the former pay, eleven shillings a week.

  On the ground floor the finished product, some thirty thousand shirts a day, went to shipping docks and were moved to warehouses, to city stores, to the rail station for disbursement about Ireland, or to the waterfront for Britain and the world market.

  When Simon McNab conceived and executed his factory he took everything into consideration except the fact that the eleven hundred women, three hundred men and two hundred children laboring therein were human beings.

  Within weeks, he had the movement of his production line refined. But no regular maintenance was kept except for the ground floor, which housed executives, bookkeepers, salesmen and designers. Up in the factory it was expected that every man and woman would keep his or her own area clean, which was an impossibility. Layers of filth grew gummy on the floors, grimed the pillars and blackened the windows.

  Cutters had the best of it, for theirs were the only windows cleaned, for use of natural light sped production. The balance of the factory's windows could not be seen through. There was a single toilet stool on each floor for use by some two hundred workers, both male and female. These, likewise, were not cleaned and the sink faucets clogged in a few years so there was no running water. Odors of urine and feces grew so powerful they penetrated into the working areas and men and women held their bowels and bladders for hours rather than enter that place.

  McNab's design never smoothly regulated the inflow of raw material so that a backlog of linen bolts was stacked on the stairs, landings and aisles, impeding passageways and adding to the universal clutter.

  Within a year the windows were stuck shut from filth so that there was no circulation of air whatsoever and lint and linen dust were inhaled into the lungs with every breath.

  The workrooms were lit by banks of gas mantles never fully turned up so as to save expense, so there existed a grayish light insufficient for close work. Competition among foremen on the three floors of piecework was vicious. The high man was rewarded, the bottom man under brutal pressure so the operatives were pushed and kept at their limits.

  Human wreckage set in in a matter of a few years. Ten hours a day, six days a week at the foot-treadle machine put unnatural stresses on the body and few women escaped severe back and neck ailments and their eyes were mercilessly overtaxed. The lungs fell to coughing fits from lack of fresh air and in pour of dust. Tuberculosis scourged the Bogside. Rheumatic swelling of joints crippled in those long damp winters without heat.

  The summers were the worst. Heat from the stoves and irons on the third floor raised the temperature of that room to over a hundred and fifteen degrees and was transmitted up the cast iron pillars to the upper floors, turning the entire plant into a furnace.

  Noise from the machines, which had damaged the hearing of every operative, came to a halt only twenty-five minutes a day, during the lunch period. Congestion in the stairways made it impossible to leave the plant so meals were eaten at the machines.

  Even so, things were better than in the old days before the reform laws, when most of the labor came from public sources, prisons and orphanages, some from cottage labor. Wages then ran about sixpence a day. When girls were needed from the outside, they were compelled to live in dormitories on the premises with only Sunday to visit their families. Things, indeed, had gotten better.

  *

  Maud reached the sixth-floor landing straining for every step and hung onto the railing gasping until the furious thumping in her chest slowed. Peg put her arm about her shoulder, steadied her, then pulled her out of earshot behind a stack of linen bolts.

  "I'm all right, Peg."

  "The devil you are. Look at you, you're skin and bones. It's your first baby and you should be taking better care of yourself." She felt her sister's clammy forehead. "I'm talking to Myles tonight."

  "No, I won't have it, Peg."

  "For God's sake, your husband's making a living."

  "We need the money if we're to get out of here."

  "It will do you no good at all if you kill yourself in the process."

  "Don't talk to Myles."

  "I am."

  "I promise I'll quit in a few weeks." She pushed past her sister and entered the workroom. It was out of focus and whirling. Two hundred girls . . . two hundred machines. The gaslight turned up grudgingly. She made her way unevenly toward the chair before that machine as she had gone to it two thousand times over . . . only few more times till after the baby comes . . . The foreman strutted up and down the aisle in his pre-work blathering. The sixth floor had fallen behind the other two in production for a week now. Changes would be made if they didn't get on it proper! Maud buttoned her sweater up against the cold. There would be some heat coming through the pillars on the third floor soon. Thank God she worked near the pillar. If only she didn't have to work near it in summer as well. The fingers had been cut out of her woolen gloves so she could keep her hands warm and still operate the machine. A bundle of seven waited on her machine. She snipped the cord, pulled her tags and placed them in her apron pocket. Seven pence for seven shirts. Seven pence for freedom. Seven pence for the blacksmith shop in Convoy. It wasn't too bad on the sixth floor except for the walk up the steps. Winter's cold was more than compensated for by the fact that the heat from the third floor didn't reach them in full fury during the summer. Peg was at the machine beside her and Deirdre would be running to their floor from the cutting room.

  Poor Deirdre. In a few months she would put in her terrible year or two at the irons on the third floor. After that, a penny a shirt. Her niece, Deirdre, and her ma, Bessie; the old and the young of it. Bessie was a ravaged old woman of forty-four now, doing the last of her days in packing on the second floor.

  Deirdre came between Maud and Peg and gave a bundle to her ma. "The dawn just came up," she said. "It looks like it may be a nice day. Maybe we can go to the roof for lunch."

  With that lovely thought in their heads, the six o'clock whistle shrieked the room into bombastic action.

  After an hour of the aches and discomfort of the treadle, the hunching over, the baby, the cold, the noise and turmoil, she became oblivious to it all. Maud was in Donegal, in Convoy, where the hills rolled lovely, and she was standing in the doorway of Myles's shop with a wee wane in her arms and another hanging onto her apron and Myles looked up from the anvil all muscled and sooty and smiled and wiped the sweat from his forehead and washed his face and hands before kissing her and they walked with their arms about each other as they did to the big tree between the shop and their she where she had spread their lunch . . .

  *

  Angus Witherspoon, the business half of the partnership, sensed a nibbling around the edges of the linen market as cotton made its return. He and
Simon McNab were old, without suitable heirs, and with more money than they could spend in a lifetime. When a serious buyer appeared in the form of the Earl of Foyle, it was time to unload.

  MacAdam Rankin, representing Lord Arthur Hubble, brought in a respected firm of architects to examine the physical property and they came up with a list of staggering flaws. With this in hand, Rankin had a bargaining tool. He argued that a minimum of two hundred thousand quid would be needed to set the factory straight. Countering their claim that the building was fireproof, the architects maintained that if the cast iron pillars ever became overheated in a fire and were hit with water they would crack. This could cause the entire building to collapse.

  In addition to introducing steel framing to get rid of some of the beams, a sprinkler system and fire escapes would be required. Moreover, an additional warehouse had to be built to end the practice of cluttering passageways with material. Finally, a head-to-toe renovation was needed, from replacement of most windows to ventilation and heating systems to redesigning the women's chairs, all in order to obtain maximum production.