A Christmas Cracker

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘I’m so glad you’re out of prison and living nearby again,’ she said. ‘And there’s a chance I might be offered a full-time job at Marco’s school after summer, since, with the supply teaching I’ve been doing there, I’ve got my hand back in.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘You’d be totally independent then.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought, just in case we do split up. I’d better go now,’ she added. ‘Marco went straight from school to a friend’s birthday party and it’s almost time to pick him up.’

  ‘You can email me here or ring this number. My mobile won’t work unless I walk down the hill a bit, but I’ll try and do that once a day to check for messages.’

  I set out my art materials on the small, sturdy table under the window in my sitting room, while Pye got into his furry igloo and snored.

  Already I was feeling settled, as if there was some magic in the little valley to soothe and heal. I could see why the residents of the cottages had stayed put all these years and I might well end up doing the same!

  When I finally emerged from my work and went to see if I could help with dinner, Mercy was there in the kitchen and said that Freda had been in to prepare vegetables and put a fat chicken to roast in the oven, so all she had to do was make gravy.

  ‘I can cook a bit, mostly thrifty meals like casseroles,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never really done much baking.’

  ‘I can show you, later on, when you’ve settled in. I love to cook and bake and I’m sure you’d enjoy it, too,’ she offered kindly. ‘By the way, did I tell you that I have some old friends coming for dinner?’

  ‘No, but I’d be happy to serve it and then eat in here so—’

  ‘Oh, no, dear,’ she interrupted. ‘We’ll all eat together – it’s the Quaker way. You’ll like the Brownes, they’re a lovely couple.’

  They were, too, and interested in our plans when Mercy told them what we intended. Silas had already printed out a short history of the factory and said he would look out for old photographs, too, and start to think what would make a good display in the museum. I got the feeling he felt bad that he hadn’t had more input into the ailing cracker factory while Mercy was occupied with her overseas work and was making up for it now.

  Mrs Browne, though fascinated with all this, was almost deaf, so her husband had to relay everything loudly into her ear. This made the conversation somewhat long-winded.

  By the end of the meal, the second long day began to catch up with me, though Mercy still showed no sign of flagging.

  Later, lying in bed with Pye a weight on the end of the duvet, I looked out at the slender moon through the drawn-back curtains of the window and listened to a silence broken only by the occasional mocking quack of a duck out in the darkness. I felt quite tranquil.

  Chapter 14: Cat-Flap

  Q:What do you get if you cross a sheep with a kangaroo?

  A:A woolly jumper!

  Mercy remarked, while drinking tea and watching me eat cereal and toast, that it was as well to be out of the house on a Wednesday morning in any case, because a team of cleaners from an agency called Dolly Mops went through it like a dose of salts on that day every week.

  ‘Normally Silas gets Job to drive him into St Helens and he goes to the library, to be out of the way, but today he’s coming to the meeting instead. I’m so glad he’s showing such an interest, it will take him out of himself.’

  ‘He’s obviously going to be vital when it comes to the information boards and displays in the museum,’ I agreed. ‘He had some great ideas at dinner yesterday and he’s got all the know-ledge about the Marwood family history at his fingertips.’

  ‘It might inspire him to actually finish writing the Marwood and Fell family histories, too, and if so we could even have copies printed to sell in the mill,’ Mercy suggested.

  ‘What was he intending doing with them?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing at all, apart from preserving them as family memoirs, though I told him he could put them on the internet as e-books. Other genealogists and those interested in Quaker history would find them of interest.’

  ‘Yes, that kind of specialised area is where self-published e-books are really useful.’

  Pye elected to accompany us when we set out to walk down to the mill and Job appeared from the east wing, pushing Silas in a wheelchair.

  ‘I could walk, but it would take me so long you’d probably be coming back before I got there,’ he explained.

  ‘I really should have noticed how bad your rheumatism has become lately, Silas,’ Mercy said remorsefully.

  ‘It’s not always this bad, and anyway, I could have told you, couldn’t I?’

  ‘True,’ she said. ‘Job, this is very kind of you, but we could have managed the wheelchair ourselves, had we known.’

  ‘That’s all right, madam,’ Job said in his plummy, deeply mournful tones. I noticed that even the stiff March breeze wasn’t disturbing his centre-parted black hair, which lay as flat and glossy as patent leather. ‘The exercise of pushing Mr Silas down and, especially, back up will do me a world of good. Or so Freda informed me earlier.’

  ‘Well, I suppose she’s quite right in a way, because once you get older, it’s either use it or lose it,’ Mercy agreed.

  ‘I’m not sure I ever had it in the first place,’ Silas said gloomily. ‘Shall we get on? This wind is coming straight from the polar ice cap, from the feel of it.’

  Pye probably felt the same, because he didn’t cross the bridge over the stream with us and I suspected would be back through the cat-flap into the warm kitchen in minutes.

  Ten in the morning was the normal time for the cracker makers to start work, so they were all there waiting for us when we arrived. They’d arranged a miscellaneous collection of stools and chairs in a half-circle near the door and stood about like an audience awaiting a call for the first act of a play.

  ‘Good timing, I’ve just made a brew,’ Freda told us. She was presiding over a tray, on which reposed a giant, mottled brown teapot, a carton of milk and a collection of mugs, which Dorrie was distributing as fast as they were filled.

  ‘Lovely – two sugars for me,’ Mercy said, but Silas and I turned down the offer. I was already feeling nervous at being, if not the centre of attention, then at least a satellite to Mercy’s planet, and I thought I’d probably spill it, or drop the cup, or something.

  I remembered that the thin, pale man with the glasses and pepper-and-salt hair was Bradley, while Phil was the burly, tattooed one, but for a moment I went blank on which of the two remaining older women was Lillian and which Joy. Then it came back to me: Joy, dressed in fifty shades of grey, looked the least joyful, while Lillian had drawn herself a pair of even larger, smiling, sugarplum-pink lips than yesterday’s.

  Dorrie introduced me to the tall woman of about my own age standing next to her, though I’d already guessed who it was.

  ‘This is my Arlene, who works part time here and in a bank in Great Mumming.’

  ‘Job share at the bank, but they’re closing the branch down soon,’ Arlene explained, shaking hands in a businesslike manner. She had skin the colour of dark coffee, black, spiky hair in an urchin cut and was wearing a burgundy leather pencil skirt, cashmere jumper and stilettos, so she looked about ten times more elegant than the rest of us put together.

  ‘How lovely to see you again, dear,’ Mercy said, kissing her. ‘It seems ages since I was last home. I hope your family are all well?’

  ‘Yes, thanks – Jon finished retraining as a paramedic and he loves it, and the boys are sports mad, so that keeps them out of trouble.’

  ‘And little Lucille?’

  ‘Worried she’s going to grow too tall to be the next Darcey Bussell.’

  The tea and biscuits distributed, they all sat down and Mercy outlined the reason for the meeting as though they’d no idea what it was about, though I was pretty sure Freda would have brought them up to speed by now. Or Job, who seemed to flit about the house like a sh
ade at all kinds of odd hours, so probably knew everything going on.

  ‘Being away so much, I’d managed to overlook the fact that the cracker business has been declining over the last few years, until my nephew drew my attention to it and suggested it should be shut down,’ Mercy said, and there was an angry mutter from the room.

  ‘He was poking round the mill for ages a while back with some strange bloke,’ Phil said. ‘We wondered what he was up to.’

  ‘That must have been the architect Randal employed to draw up some interesting plans for the redevelopment of the whole mill complex.’

  ‘But without the cracker factory?’ said Dorrie acutely.

  ‘Yes, indeed. But naturally that was not at all what I wanted, so I’ve employed Tabitha here to come up with some fresh, alternative ideas for rejuvenating the cracker factory. But before we discuss them, I must first ask if you all wish to carry on working. Of course, you can continue living in Hope Terrace, whatever your decision.’

  There was a buzzing, like bees stirred up with a stick.

  ‘I don’t know what we’d all do with ourselves if you closed the factory down and we weren’t coming here every day,’ Lillian said, and there was a murmur of agreement.

  ‘It’s not like it’s hard physical work anyway, is it?’ said Phil. ‘Though there’s nothing wrong with me – I can still haul boxes about with the best of them,’ he added, flexing the impressive tattoos revealed by a short-sleeved black T-shirt.

  ‘Seventy is middle-aged these days,’ agreed Joy, though I suspected she – and probably Job, too – were nearer eighty.

  ‘I think you can take it that none of us want to retire,’ Bradley said.

  ‘And I don’t want to lose my job here either, because when my branch of the bank closes down they’ve offered to relocate me to another branch so far away that the commute would make family life impossible,’ Arlene said.

  ‘I’m so sorry to hear that, Arlene. But I’m glad everyone would like to carry on,’ Mercy said, ‘because I’d hate to see the end of Marwood’s Magical Crackers after all these years – and on my watch! My poor husband would have been so disappointed in me for letting it get to this pretty pass. Still, now I’m home for good and raring for action.’

  She beamed around them impartially. ‘You have all grasped that regenerating the business means things will have to change, haven’t you?’

  ‘What kind of change?’ asked Bradley suspiciously.

  ‘Well, I think it’s perhaps best if I first outline what Randal proposed, and then Tabby can tell you her ideas for modifying his plans to include the cracker making – and more besides.’

  She quickly summed up Randal’s plans to transform the site and then open it to the public, including his intention to quit his job eventually and manage the mill.

  Then it was my turn and I nervously explained how I thought we could retain and revitalise the cracker factory, producing an extended and expensive range of both traditional and new designs, made in quality materials and with much improved novelties. ‘No more cheap crackers,’ I finished.

  ‘I thought the advice was always to “pile them high and sell them cheap”,’ Dorrie said.

  ‘Not where crackers are concerned,’ I told her. ‘People are prepared to pay for good quality ones, especially if they have unusual contents. And they aren’t just for Christmas these days, either. You can now buy them for weddings and birthdays and even Hallowe’en and Easter.’

  ‘Well I never!’ Lillian said. ‘Still, I expect we’d all be up for the challenge – especially if there’s no alternative.’

  ‘What about Randal and his plans for opening the place to the public, with all these craft shops and so on?’ asked Freda.

  ‘Some of his ideas were really good,’ I said. ‘We’d still open to the public, have a café on the mezzanine floor—’

  ‘What’s a mezzanine, when it’s at home?’ interrupted Lillian.

  ‘It’s that upstairs floor over half the mill, you daft ha’porth,’ Freda told her.

  ‘Yes, so they could look down on the cracker factory while they were eating. And in the second phase of the development, there’d be a gallery and craft workshops in the attached outbuildings.’

  ‘So we’d carry on as usual where we are?’ asked Bradley.

  ‘More or less,’ I agreed. ‘But you’d lose two of the storerooms to the museum and the right-hand side of the floor space, though you don’t appear to be using that anyway.’

  ‘What’s this about a museum?’ asked Joy.

  Silas, who had been a silent onlooker so far, said, ‘A most fascinating display about the Marwood family and the history of cracker making.’

  ‘Right,’ Phil said doubtfully. ‘That sounds riveting, then.’

  ‘Oh, it will be!’ Mercy exclaimed, then enthusiastically described how the space would be divided up, so that the visitors would be able to see the cracker making, walk through a small museum area and then on into a Christmas shop.

  There was a short pause while the workers digested this.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m keen on the idea of being watched by a lot of visitors, like something in a zoo,’ Phil said at last.

  ‘But it won’t feel like that, because there’ll be a partition with viewing windows between you,’ I said quickly.

  ‘I saw something similar in a clog factory once and it worked very well. I love the idea of an all-year-round Christmas shop, too,’ Arlene said. ‘I think it could be a real visitor attraction. But would you still want me to work here if Randal was managing it full time?’

  ‘Of course, we’ll always need you,’ Mercy said, ‘and anyway, he won’t be giving up his job straight away. Even when he does he’ll be involved in the creation of the café and the craft workshops and will have his hands full. In fact, we’ll probably need you full time, as well as eventually employing extra staff for the café and shop.’

  Arlene looked pleased and said that that would be perfect and her mother-in-law was always happy to look after the children in the holidays.

  After that we had a lot of general discussion. Most of the employees would really have liked things to stay exactly the same as they were for ever, but Dorrie and Lillian were up for a change.

  ‘What about our working hours?’ asked Bradley. ‘We work ten till four weekdays, with a bit of overtime if we have a lot of orders, but if the mill’s open to visitors, they’ll probably mostly come weekends, except in the school holidays, won’t they?’

  ‘We still have to decide the finer details like that,’ Mercy said. ‘I’m certainly not keen on anyone being forced to work longer hours against their will, or on a Sunday …’

  ‘If the cracker factory isn’t open at weekends, I thought perhaps some of you might like to demonstrate cracker making to the visitors at set times instead. But as Mercy says, we can sort all that out later.’

  ‘We’d aim to get the ground floor of the mill up and running by the end of the summer,’ Mercy announced, taking me by surprise, because I thought she was being optimistic, given that we’d need planning permission and probably have all kinds of other hoops to jump through first.

  ‘Then we’d make a big killing on the run-up to Christmas!’ she finished, rocking to and fro on her heels like an excited child, so that the lights in her shoes flashed.

  You could tell she came from generations of businesspeople. I was only surprised she’d taken her eye off the ball for so long. But she was certainly making up for it now!

  ‘The factory is usually shut in December and January,’ said Freda. ‘And we always go to Blackpool for Christmas and New Year. Would we have to give that up?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Mercy assured them. ‘We’d want the mill to stay open in the run-up to Christmas, obviously, but Tabby thought it could close before Christmas Eve and reopen after the New Year, when you’ve returned.’

  ‘That’s not so bad, then,’ said Lillian.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to me as though we’ve got any al
ternative but to go with what you want, though we’re old dogs to learn new tricks,’ Joy said.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Freda told her.

  ‘I really need you all onside to make this work – and also, to convince Randal that it will, when he visits next week,’ Mercy told them.

  ‘Right you are, then, we’ll back you up: and you set Tabby onto that Randal when he comes home; she’ll sort him,’ Dorrie said, seeming to speak for all of them. I had no idea why they thought I’d be able to deal with this unknown nephew!

  But Freda was nodding her agreement. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Now, anyone want another brew, before you start work? The morning’s half gone and not a cracker made yet!’

  We left them to it and went into the office with Arlene, where I told her some of my initial ideas for new boxes of crackers.

  ‘Arlene, you and Tabby can start sourcing new materials and novelties online – we get most things from China, these days, Tabby – and perhaps find somewhere that can create fresh artwork for the boxes,’ Mercy said.

  ‘I’ll enjoy that,’ she replied. ‘It gets boring, putting in the same orders over and over.’

  ‘Meanwhile, I’ll press on with getting the plans for the mill changed and the necessary permissions applied for,’ Mercy said. ‘The whole thing shouldn’t be too disruptive, if done in stages.’

  ‘Who’s going to tell Randal there’s been a bit of a change to his plans?’ asked Silas.

  ‘I will,’ Mercy said happily. ‘I’m sure the dear boy will see they’re an improvement.’

  I much preferred the idea of her telling him to Dorrie’s suggestion that she should set me onto him!

  We’d just popped back into the mill to say goodbye to everyone – finding them still grouped round the tray of fresh tea on an extended workers’ playtime – when there was a sudden scuffling, hissing and yowling, followed by the arrival of Pye from the direction of the outbuildings. Presumably he had discovered the cat-flap.

  He stalked majestically in and fixed one blue and one green eye on the assembly. Ginger and Bing slunk in after him, looking resentful but cowed.