A Christmas Cracker

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘You must go on a pilgrimage to the top then, one fine day, and remember all the happy times,’ she suggested.

  ‘Actually, if you don’t mind, I thought I might do that this weekend on Mothering Sunday.’

  ‘Of course not – the weekends are your own to do with as you wish. Silas and I will be going to the Friends’ meeting in Great Mumming on Sunday morning, of course, and you and any of the workers who want to come with us will always be sure of a warm welcome.’

  ‘Do many of them go?’

  ‘Not regularly, but some are occasional attenders, especially Freda, Job, Joy and Bradley.’

  ‘I’d like to go another time, because Ceddie told me so much about the Quakers,’ I said, and she beamed at me.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll find it will give your thoughts a new turn,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t actually driven for years, because my old car failed its MOT after I moved into Jeremy’s flat and I couldn’t afford to replace it.’

  ‘I’ll put you on my insurance, dear, and then when I’m not using the car, you can borrow it.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, but I’m so out of practice I’d be nervous about it.’

  ‘It comes back to you very quickly. I never drive in Malawi and yet as soon as I get home and back behind the wheel, I’m fine,’ she assured me. ‘The drive all the way down to the road at the bottom of the hill is private, so you could take a little practice spin up and down to get used to it again.’

  ‘I think that’s a good idea,’ I agreed.

  ‘I expect I’ll be sending you on all kinds of errands, so it will be very useful. You can take either car, though of course Job considers the estate as his own and it’s his pride and joy, so while he drives Silas and me around in it quite happily, he gets terribly grumpy if I take it out myself.’

  ‘Right,’ I said thoughtfully, because I certainly didn’t want to get on anyone’s wrong side, especially five minutes after I’d arrived. Anyway, I’d never driven anything that big in my life.

  ‘Come along,’ she said, setting off again down the drive to where a second and more substantial bridge spanned the stream on sturdy stone piers. ‘Silas tells me there was originally just a ford here, then stone slabs on piers, until it was rebuilt as you see it now, in the eighteenth century, or thereabouts. Job painted the inside of the walls white, after one of my friends accidentally grazed it on their way home in the dark.’

  I followed her across it but Pye, who had appeared from some shrubbery and was trailing us, didn’t. Instead, he jumped onto the low wall and watched. I felt he’d probably already marked the area on that side as his own territory and he’d never been a cat who strayed far away from home.

  ‘We’ll be back soon, Pye,’ I assured him.

  ‘Mrrow!’ he said, in a scathing tone, though I don’t know what I’d done to deserve that.

  ‘Now, from this side you can see the whole lay of the land,’ Mercy said, with a sweeping gesture of her arm that encompassed the mellow redbrick house we’d just left, sitting on its raised green cushion above the moat, with a backdrop of trees and hillside, as well as the other side of the valley, where the mill building stood higher up the stream with, below them, the curved terraced houses.

  On the B road at the bottom of the valley, occasional cars slid past like beads along a waxed string.

  ‘This, and a couple of farms along the road, makes up all of Godsend – it really is a tiny hamlet, not even a village. It’s marked in the Domesday Book, though.’

  ‘Perhaps there were more people here then?’ I suggested.

  ‘I think it was more likely because there was already a house on the site of Mote Farm,’ she said. ‘One of my husband’s ancestors built the mill, then in Victorian times it was changed from some aspect of cotton manufacture to the production of fancy goods. The cottages were specially built to house the workers.’

  ‘Did the family always employ ex-prisoners in the mill?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘There’s certainly a long tradition of it, though we haven’t taken on anyone new for many years: the workforce has naturally dwindled, but none of them wanted to retire. But now, if Marwood’s Magical Crackers is to survive, we must move with the times and embrace change.’

  ‘Or close, as your nephew, Randal, would like,’ I commented. What Freda had said earlier about the elderly workers not liking change very readily had made me wonder if they were up to the challenge.

  ‘Oh, I’m quite sure you can come up with an alternative plan,’ Mercy said, with more faith in me than I felt myself at this point. ‘In fact, we must, because I feel I’ve let my husband down by not taking more interest in things. But my mission in Malawi seemed to do so much good …’ She sighed, but then her natural cheerfulness and energy returned and she said, ‘Still, I’m back now and we’ll see what can be done. Come along!’

  We were now almost at the mill, which, since it lacked a chimney, grime and urban setting, was not at all darkly satanic, or even Lowry. Mercy pointed out the extensive attached outbuildings, the roomy parking area and more garages, where they kept a delivery van and Bradley’s small car.

  ‘Phil, who has the last house in the terrace, keeps his motorbike in one of the garages, too – men do seem to like taking machines apart and putting them back together again, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes. My ex fiancé used to spend a lot of time polishing his car and tinkering with it.’

  ‘Do you miss him, dear?’ she asked suddenly, with her acute, bright-eyed gaze.

  ‘No, not at all,’ I replied, surprised into frankness. ‘I think I must have been in love with a mirage. Perhaps we both were, because he can’t have known me, or he’d have realised I was telling the truth about the fraud. And he sent my cat to a rescue centre without telling me.’

  ‘That was not an act of great kindness, but he probably meant it for the best.’

  ‘Yes: his best. I’m sure Pye thought it was a cat prison and he was being punished for something, but I’ve got him back now, that’s the main thing,’ I said. ‘We can both have a fresh start together.’

  ‘Once you’ve found your bearings, you can register him at the vet’s practice in Great Mumming – turn left onto the road at the bottom of the hill. You already know the way to Little Mumming, but you can get to it by means of a track behind the factory, too, if you don’t mind a bit of a climb.’

  She led the way into the main building, which had ‘Friendship Mill’ carved into the stone over the entrance, with, below it, a faded royal-purple board proclaiming, in worn gilt lettering, ‘Marwood’s Magical Crackers’.

  Inside was one of those large, anonymous lobbies, with washroom facilities, a coffee table and worn tweed-effect chairs. An office was partitioned off from it with glass windows, like an aquarium for secretary fish. It was in darkness today: no piscine inhabitants lurked in its depths.

  ‘Arlene, Dorrie Bird’s daughter, works part-time in the office and the rest of the week at the bank in Great Mumming, but this isn’t one of her days,’ Mercy explained, pushing open double doors at the far end of the lobby with a flourish. ‘And here we are: the cracker factory!’

  The interior was surprisingly large and well-lit, both by a series of long windows down one side and a double row of large suspended green-shaded lights. A staircase ran away to the right to a mezzanine floor.

  Only one side of the space seemed to be in use and most of the workforce were seated there at benches. They looked up curiously as we entered.

  ‘Hello, everyone, I’ve come to show Tabby, my new assistant, around,’ called out Mercy. ‘Do carry on and I’ll introduce you individually as we get to you.’

  They continued to suspend operations and stare, but Mercy didn’t seem to notice, just led me across to a slender black lady with striking short silver hair. She had on a flowing dress in a bright yellow daisy pattern, an Arran cardigan with big wooden buttons and red leather clogs. My initial impression that she looked as serious and stately as
an elderly Maya Angelou was dispelled the moment she spoke.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, luv,’ she said in a strong Liverpool accent along with a puckish grin. ‘My daughter, Arlene, will be, too. She works in the office a couple of mornings a week, but she won’t be in till tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to meeting her then,’ I said. She was sitting at one of a row of workstations, with drawers and trays at the back, and a small unit on casters next to her.

  ‘We’ve got everything we need to make the crackers right to hand,’ she explained. ‘We lay out the novelties ready, according to what kind it is, though we only produce two different ones now, unless we get a special order.’

  ‘Do you all make the complete crackers from start to finish?’ I asked. ‘I thought it might be sort of an assembly line, with each of you doing different parts.’

  ‘We can all make them, but Bradley and Phil do other jobs, too. Brad makes sure each workstation is stocked with the right paper, jokes, novelties, hats and decorations, while Phil rolls and glues the central tubes and gets the snaps out of the storeroom as needed.’

  ‘Don’t you need those to hand, too?’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t want a lot of them together, because they’re a fire hazard,’ she said. ‘They’re in a reinforced fireproof bin in the back room.’

  ‘Silver fulminate,’ said Mercy. ‘When the snap is pulled apart, the friction makes the small explosive sound.’

  ‘Joy and Lillian usually pack the crackers in the display boxes and the boys carton them up for delivery. But as I say, if we’re busy we can all do anything.’

  It didn’t look as if they’d been busy in a very long time but it did remind me very much of Santa’s workshop, what with the half-open drawers and trays full of novelties, spools of bright ribbon and half-made colourful crackers in crinkled crepe paper.

  As I watched, one of the other women rolled a tartan-edged green paper rectangle round the central tube, secured it with a dab of glue and dexterously gathered and tied off the ends with red ribbon.

  ‘Them glue guns we got last year were good, once we got the hang of them,’ Dorrie said. ‘That was our Arlene’s idea.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ Mercy said. ‘I’m sure she and Tabby will come up with all kinds of other things too, once they put their heads together.’

  She introduced me to the others one by one, who eyed me with a wary speculation that I recognised from prison. I only hoped I wasn’t permanently wearing the same expression.

  Bradley was a pale, slender man with thin, pepper-and-salt hair, freckles and watery grey eyes behind severe glasses. He seemed morose and didn’t look directly at me when he shook hands, barely touching my fingertips before dropping them.

  Phil, on the other hand, was a burly, cheerful, bald-headed man with no discernible neck, and tattoos up both arms. The mermaids would have looked at home in the aquarium office.

  The other two women were totally unlike each other. Lillian’s improbably bronze curls were lacquered into an upswept nest and she had outlined her lips – or at least where she thought they should be – in a dark pencil before sloppily filling in the generous shape like a child who had trouble staying between the lines in a colouring book.

  Joy, who I remembered had passed herself off as a member of the upper classes at hotels and then absconded without paying, was small, quiet, well-spoken and pleasant. The word that best described her was grey: grey hair, grey clothes and grey eyes.

  I wanted to linger over the dusty racks of card and crepe, old-fashioned paper scraps of Santas and cheeky cherubs; the foil stickers, tinsel edging and curling festoons of ribbon.

  It all looked a lot more exciting than the finished boxes, which were, it has to be said, rather cheap and tacky-looking and old-fashioned in a bad, not retro, way.

  ‘There are three large storage rooms here at the back,’ Mercy said, remorselessly detaching me from a box of old scraps I was rummaging in and urging me on. ‘Apart from the first one, which has the doors to the loading area at the back, I can’t say they’re really used any more, and goodness knows what’s in them. They could do with a good clear-out.’

  She switched on a dim light, revealing a trio of adjoining rooms running right across the back of the building, full of racks and shelves jam-packed with shapes so furred with dust it was impossible to see what they were.

  ‘We’ve always kept a few boxes of each kind of cracker we’ve produced – there were lots of varieties at one time. But now we only have two, Happy Family crackers and the Marwood’s Magical ones. The latter have little harmless jokes and tricks in them.’

  ‘Mmm …’ I said non-committally, because the ones I’d seen out in the workshop hadn’t looked terribly exciting.

  ‘So, that’s the extent of the operation now,’ Mercy said finally, taking me out of the further room onto the mill floor again, though this area under the mezzanine level was entirely empty.

  We looked into the extensive attached outbuildings, the rooms bare except from a sifting of soft dust and the occasional packing case, apart from one that was fitted out as a sort of staff room, with a kettle, small fridge and more of the tweedy armchairs like the ones in the reception area. One of the side doors was fitted with a new-looking cat-flap.

  ‘I don’t know where the cats have gone,’ Mercy said, but the two resident moggies silently appeared as we began to retrace our steps into the mill.

  ‘This is Ginger, obviously,’ she said, stooping to stroke them, ‘and here’s Bing. Lillian feeds them, because she’s very fond of cats.’

  The cats, perhaps bored and in need of a diversion, trailed us as we said our goodbyes and headed back towards the house … only to stop dead when we got to the bridge and they spotted the large, dark and menacing form of Pye, still sitting on the far end like a monstrous gargoyle, awaiting our return.

  There was a confrontation of silent stares. With his strange, odd-coloured eyes, Pye did staring very well. It seemed to unnerve the other two, at any rate, but the final straw came when he slowly rose, puffed himself out hugely and began a slow advance.

  They backed away, one paw at a time … then suddenly, their nerve broke and they turned and fled back towards the mill.

  ‘You big bully,’ I chided him, but he just made his strange ‘Pfft!’ noise and stalked regally past me towards home.

  ‘Funny old pussycat,’ Mercy said to him fondly. Then she added, with her usual sunny optimism, ‘I’m sure they will all soon be the best of friends! Come along: I think we’ve earned our lunch.’

  Time had flown by and suddenly I realised what the strange feeling in my stomach was: hunger!

  Chapter 12: Christmas Lists

  Q:What do you get if you eat Christmas decorations?

  A:Tinselitis!

  Mercy had a few calls to make and emails to send and told me to help myself to whatever I fancied for lunch in the kitchen and she would make herself something when she’d finished.

  ‘Breakfast and lunch are always whatever comes to hand, and Silas won’t join us – he has become addicted to meals from a service that brings frozen food and Job will have popped one into the microwave in his kitchenette, though he’s perfectly capable of doing it himself. Truth to be told, I think he prefers his ready meals to my home cooking!’

  ‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ I said.

  ‘No, but a family should eat together at least once a day, that’s so important. Besides, I can’t let him turn into a complete hermit.’

  I made myself a cheese sandwich and followed it with a crunchy apple from the fruit bowl, and Mercy, when she came down again, opened a tin of pea and ham soup.

  ‘Well, we’d better go and look at Randal’s proposals, hadn’t we?’ she said with her inexhaustible energy, once she’d finished chasing the last bit of soup round the bowl with a hunk of bread. ‘Do you feel any ideas of your own are forming yet, now you’ve seen the lay of the land, as it were?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘I do, ac
tually,’ I said. ‘I was thinking about it while I ate my sandwich.’

  ‘There, I knew your clever, artistic mind would come up with something!’

  We went through to the library where Mercy opened a drawer in a mahogany desk and pulled out a large manila envelope.

  ‘These are the original plans Randal had drawn up. He emailed me copies to Malawi.’

  She spread the papers and plans out on the desk top and I studied them. They were much as she’d already described, but with more detail.

  ‘Hmm … I think he was right about opening the mill to the public and his idea of a café on the mezzanine floor is inspired,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t see why anyone would come to an old mill,’ Mercy objected.

  ‘But in the last few years lots of old mills have opened as tourist attractions, usually with craft workshops and that kind of thing,’ I told her. ‘People will go anywhere for a day out, especially if there’s a café.’

  ‘So, you consider his ideas have some merit?’

  ‘Definitely, though I think he’d be missing a trick by replacing the cracker factory with more craft units or shops, because it could be the central attraction. Visitors would love to watch them being made and then have the opportunity to buy them right afterwards.’

  ‘But surely crackers are just a Christmas thing and visitors would be seasonal?’

  ‘Not at all – they’d come all the year round, especially if there was one of those Christmas shops too, selling not only the crackers but everything from baubles to fake trees.’

  ‘Well, I never!’ she said. ‘Christmas all year!’

  ‘The cracker factory hardly takes up half the mill floor, leaving plenty of room for a Christmas shop. And the customers could see down into the workshop from the café, if it’s on the mezzanine.’

  I sketched out a rough plan on a piece of notepaper. ‘See – the visitors come through the front door into the lobby, where they can pick up a free leaflet giving them information about the attractions on offer. You might have to upgrade the loos there; I don’t know what they’re like,’ I added. ‘You’ll certainly need a disabled one somewhere and a ramp up to the front door.’