by Anne Doughty
From where she’d perched on the roof ridge, she could see up to the main road but not into the area immediately in front of the main entrance. Above the roar of flames, she might not have heard the horses pulling the Fire Engine or Hugh’s motor. She had just decided to climb down and go and see if there was any sign of them, when a small movement caught her eye. High above her head on the top floor of the mill, she caught sight of something white.
She stared up at the window, sure it must be a reflection of the small white clouds moving quickly across the blue sky, or a fragment of cleaning rag hanging on a nearby hook. But the more she looked, the more convinced she became it had to be a face, a child’s face, for it appeared through the haze of smoke only in the lowest pane of the window. Often enough she had braced herself against those window ledges taking pictures of the girls at the spinning frames. She knew well enough they were only three feet above the floor.
With the heat and smoke now making her eyes water, she stood up carefully astride the roof ridge, as if the change of angle might make the pale smudged image cleared. She waved her hand and was convinced that the white smudge moved in reply.
She folded up her camera, pushed it back into its case, secured it across her body and slid down the roof, jumping the last few feet on to the convenient grassy mound, part of the winter flood defence. She ran past a group of men who’d managed to get one of the pumps going again, round to the main door where Tom was making a record of events and cursing the Fire Brigade.
‘Tom, keep this safe for me,’ she said, hauling off her camera. ‘There’s a child up on the top floor. I’ll have to get to it before the smoke does,’ she cried, dashing past him and up the main stairway that led to all four floors.
She was breathless by the time she got to the top, but there was no smoke yet at the top of the stairway, only the familiar, thick, dusty air of the spinning floor. The silence was strange, almost eerie, as she ran along the bare boards between the windows and the tall metal frames, the motes of dust dancing in the sunlight. She’d never been in the mill before with all the spindles still. Halfway along, she began to hear the roar of flames and saw smoke and sparks shooting upwards outside. Then she spotted a small figure. It was crouched by a window, exactly where she had seen it, its back to her, still staring down at the scene below.
As she bent down to pick up the child, it turned towards her, eyes wide with fear. At the same moment, she heard glass in the windows below crack and tinkle as the flames got to them. Smoke billowed up more densely outside.
‘Come on, we must run,’ she said, taking the little girl’s hand.
‘Can’t run,’ said the child. ‘Bad leg.’
‘Right then, piggy back,’ she said quickly, not stopping to wonder how she’d got there in the first place.
She lifted her up unto the window sill, bent down and felt the small arms clutch her neck.
‘It is getting very hot up here,’ she said to herself, as she straightened up and began to run back towards the distant stairwell. She had to pause to persuade the child to grip her blouse and not throttle her by clutching her tightly round the neck.
She made good speed to the staircase, but going down was far more difficult than she could have imagined, her skirt threatening to trip her at every step because she had no hand free to hitch it up. As they came down to the third floor, they met the first wisps of smoke. Pouring along between the idle machinery from the burning end of the building, it had already reached the stairway.
The child was clinging like a limpet, its small weight increasing every moment, as she hurried down the next flight, knowing that each lower floor would be worse than the last, and that smoke, not fire, was the real danger. Her eyes were streaming and she and the child were coughing repeatedly. Had she not known the building so well she would have been thoroughly confused by the turns and landings she had to negotiate. Halfway down the last flight, she found her way blocked by a dark figure.
‘Sarah, thank God.’
She couldn’t see who it was and she was coughing so hard she couldn’t manage a reply, but suddenly an arm was round her, the child lifted from her back. Moments later, they burst out into the sunshine and a woman, held back forcibly by the Manager broke free and called blessings upon her.
‘Sarah, come over here into the shade. Just a little further,’ Hugh said as she bent over still coughing, her eyes streaming.
She sat down gratefully on the Supervisor’s chair and felt the bliss of a damp handkerchief wiping her face. She rubbed her eyes and was able to open them at last as the irritation eased. Hugh was kneeling beside her on the dusty cobbles with a look of such anxious concern and tenderness on his face, she knew she would never forget.
A short time later pumps arrived from the Lenaderg and Seapatrick mills. The stream had now been dammed and men were taking it in turns to stand in the small reservoir of water and hold the hoses just under the surface where the water was cleanest. A handkerchief had been tied over each hose end to filter the water as it was pumped up. For half an hour, the entire contents of the stream were directed into the burning building without any visible effect on the flames. The afternoon grew heavier and more humid. The heat and smoke swirled so much there was now no place free of it.
Hugh came up to the night watchman’s hut where he’d left her gratefully sipping a mug of tea one of the women had brought from the nearby cottages.
‘Sarah, I can’t leave to take you home. Will you let me send you with Tom on one of the small drays?’
‘No thank you, I’m staying,’ she said, shaking her head emphatically. ‘I’ll be perfectly all right when I’ve drunk this. I want to finish what I started,’ she insisted, touching the camera on the seat beside her. ‘Are they making any progress?’
‘No, it’s a losing battle,’ he replied, matter-of-factly. ‘The breeze gets stronger all the time and now it’s gusting. We’ll run out of water shortly unless the Fire Brigade show up.’
‘Hugh, why isn’t Da with you?’
‘They had a problem down at Ballievy. His department, not mine,’ he said shortly. ‘I asked Billy to tell him on his way back to town. I’m sure he’ll come when he can.’
They walked back down to the main forecourt together. The women and children had all gone, but a small crowd of watchers sat on the grassy slopes nearby. The two hoses from the neighbouring mills appeared to have failed and efforts were being made to get them going again. As they walked, they felt a sudden gust of wind in their backs. Immediately, they saw the flames bend back upon themselves. The other hose bearers adjusted their position. A few moments later a great jet of water, far more powerful than either of the two that had failed, began to play upon the flames as they retreated in the direction they’d come, their strength diminished by the lack of fresh fuel in the area they’d already devastated.
As they registered the diminishing flames and the power of the new jet of water, there was a warning cry. The fierce gust that had blown the flames back on themselves had also sent a raft of burning material across the narrow space from the main building to the engine house. Flames rose from the roof as slates cracked with the heat. The wooden doors flared up before their eyes and the foreman leading the fire-fighters shouted for everyone to get well back as the roof dipped under its burden and collapsed onto the well-greased machinery below. There was a flash and a roar as the flames reached the tins of lubricant that had been removed from a storeroom on the ground floor and put there for safety, well away from the original source of the fire.
Apart from the men playing the single, powerful jet on the retreating flames of the main building, everyone just watched from a safe distance. The engine house disappeared behind a wall of flame from which missiles flew into the darkening sky as tins of lubricant detonated with a series of explosions that sounded like a Jubilee firework display.
Sarah looked at Hugh, his face damp with sweat, his expression inscrutable. She would have liked to take his hand and comfort him, but
she couldn’t do that in such a public place. All she could do was stand close to him and let him sense how fully she shared the frustration and anxiety she knew he was feeling.
Before the flames had quite spent themselves, leaving the twisted and burnt remnants of the engines smoking in the ruins, they heard the wheels of the brougham behind them. It was her father arriving. Following him closely was another pump from Ballievy with four volunteers ready to use it. As they swept down the slope, they heard in the distance the clanging of a bell. The Fire Brigade was approaching, at last.
‘I need to take some more pictures,’ Sarah said quickly. ‘I’ll be perfectly safe. You can watch me from here.’
She left Hugh to direct the men from Ballievy and greet her father. She waved to him as she tramped off to where she could take a picture of the smoking ruins of the engine house.
Behind her the Fire Brigade had stopped by the main entrance to consult Hugh and her father. She saw the Fire Chief shake his head. He was waving his arm at the distance between the river and the still burning mill. Even from where she stood, she could guess what was going on. Their hoses were even shorter than the ones in use at Millbrook.
She took two pictures of the engine house, now a smouldering ruin after the conflagration. As she was selecting the best angle to photograph the still burning remains of the west end of the mill, she felt something brush her cheek. For most of the afternoon flakes of ash had filled the air with flying fragments, fine as early snow, catching in her hair and clothes and sticking to her damp skin, but she was surprised there should be any left. The sudden stiffening of the breeze and its change of direction had swept all the floating debris away, wafting them across the river and into the surrounding pastures, leaving the air cleaner and cooler.
She took one picture. Then another. As she lined up a third, to show the west end of the mill in relation to the burnt out engine shed, she felt the same tickling sensation. She managed to ignore it until she’d pressed the shutter. Then she put her hand up to her cheek. To her great surprise she found that it was damp.
Only then did she look up at the sky. The drop in the light level was not due to the smoke, as she’d thought, but to a great mass of dark, threatening clouds. They’d crept up the sky and now entirely shut out the sun. They had just released the first large drops of rain.
She hurried back to the main entrance and arrived just in time to avoid getting soaked. The conference with the Fire Brigade was coming to an end. The Fire Chief, his polished helmet splashed with huge drops, went to view the damage, his firemen standing around their shiny new pump from which the hoses had not even been unrolled.
The heavy rain saturated the blackened brick work round the empty, gaping windows, poured down through the burnt out floors and filled up the temporary reservoir created by damming the stream. By splicing two hoses together and running it back to the river, the Millbrook firefighters had created one powerful jet. Now their colleagues from the other mills, created another in the same manner. The short hoses brought by the volunteers from Ballievy were quite adequate to tap the overflowing reservoir, their hand pump manned in turn by many willing men from Millbrook. They worked on, soaked to the skin by the pouring rain, until the last pockets of flame were doused and only great columns of steam rose from the damaged building.
The Fire Brigade left without a mark on their new uniforms or a speck of ash on their well-polished pump, the Fire Chief’s report promised for Monday morning. As the rain eased, a group of women came down from the nearby cottages carrying kettles of tea and jugs of milk and took over the sodden table where earlier that afternoon they’d queued up for their wages.
A young lad brought Sarah a steaming mugful as she stood patiently in the shelter of the main entrance, knowing well she would only add to Hugh’s worries if she got wet. From her vantage point, she watched the women quietly serve the small groups of men who came up in turn from the pumps and hoses. Some men exchanged a word or two with a wife, or a sister, but most remained silent. Not so much exhaustion, as apprehension, she thought, as she studied the faces.
She had no idea how long it might take to restore the buildings, refit them and get back into production. They knew no better than she did. But for them every week’s delay raised the question of survival. No wages, no food. It was a brutally simple equation. For families whose only breadwinners worked in the mill, today had been a disaster.
However sodden the blackened remains might look, pumps and hoses would be kept in readiness all through the night for everyone knew the danger of hot spots surviving even after such a soaking under the burnt wreckage of floor girders and scorched machinery. The exhausted Millbrook firefighters were sent home, while the fresher team from Ballievy and the recently arrived men from the other two mills volunteered to be on hand till morning.
Suddenly, there was nothing more to be done, except remove the tarpaulins Tom had hastily thrown over both Hugh’s motor and the brougham.
‘Da, I’ll keep Hugh company. Is that all right?’ Sarah whispered to her father, as a young man brought Bess back from the nearby meadow where all the mill’s working horses had been led.
‘Aye, do that,’ he said, as the young man manoeuvred Bess between the shafts. ‘Ye might raise his spirits a bit, more than I can,’ he said wearily, his face streaked with soot and ash.
‘Tell Ma, I’ll be a wee while yet,’ he said, as he prepared to leave. ‘I have to call in at Ballievy on the way home to see if we’ve solved our other problem. We had the beetles jammed this morning.’
‘Right, I’ll tell her. I’ll see you later,’ she said, kissing his cheek, as Hugh came up to them, grey with exhaustion.
‘If we wrap Peter’s bicycle in the tarpaulin and put it in the back seat, I wouldn’t have to cycle home,’ she said thoughtfully, looking him straight in the eye.
‘Peter’s bicycle?’ he repeated, baffled.
‘I met him at the station and borrowed it when I heard about the fire. How did you think I got here?’ she asked, teasing him gently.
‘I never quite thought,’ he said honestly. ‘Not when I heard you’d gone into the mill,’ he added, shaking his head, as the memory came back to him. ‘Where is it?’
‘Where is what?’ she echoed, confused by his obvious distress.
‘The bicycle.’
‘Oh yes. I’ll fetch it,’ she said quickly. ‘I parked it up by the Night Watchman’s hut.’
‘No, you won’t,’ he said firmly. ‘Get in and sit down. I’ll see to it.’
They said little to each other as he drove up the slope and turned right onto the main road. The sky had cleared and the air was fresh again after the rain. Huge spinning globes of water fell from the trees, showering them as the breeze freshened again. A stream of carts and wagons came towards them as they drove into Banbridge. The Post Office clock said it was ten to six.
‘It’s been a long afternoon,’ she said quietly.
She found herself almost unable to think back to the moment when she’d met Billy outside the station and learnt of the fire.
‘Are you exhausted?’ he asked, after a moment.
‘No, I’m not as tired as you are,’ she replied, turning to register the grim set of his face. ‘But I haven’t the burden of responsibility that you have. What happens next?’
‘Fire Chief’s report. Insurance assessor’s valuation. A greater or lesser degree of haggling which they like to call negotiating. Meantime, we must start the rebuilding just as soon as we can. If I wait till the claim is settled we could lose months of production. And I’ll have to find a new source of spun thread, otherwise the weavers go out of production, followed by the hemstitchers and the finishers,’ he said calmly.
‘What will you do in your spare time?’ she asked, as he stopped on the road just beyond Ballievy Mill to let a herd of cattle make their leisurely way across the road ahead of them.
He looked at her in surprise. Seeing her smile, he managed a little laugh.
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p; ‘If you were at home, I’d ask you to let me come and carry your camera,’ he replied, picking up her light tone. ‘Perhaps we might manage an hour on Sunday and go and feed the swans.’
‘That would be lovely, Hugh,’ she said, beaming at him. ‘Is there anything I can do to help in the meantime?’
‘I think you’ve already done it,’ he confessed smiling, as they drew to a halt outside Jackson’s farm. ‘I shall think of the swans all day tomorrow when I’m tramping round the debris with your father, thinking of empty pockets and purses,’ he added, as he raised a hand in greeting to Peter Jackson and his father who’d come out to greet them and now stood staring at their smirched faces and dishevelled dress.
‘Thank you so much, Peter,’ Sarah said politely, as they moved to extract the bicycle from the back seat.
‘She won’t tell you if I don’t,’ said Hugh, looking from father to son. ‘Thanks to your bicycle, Peter, she got to Millbrook twenty minutes before I did. She spotted a child way up on the fourth floor. God knows how she got into the mill, or how she got up to the fourth floor, but she owes her life to Sarah,’ he said, shaking his head slowly. ‘Sarah went and got her out,’ he ended matter-of-factly.
‘Much damage?’ Tommy Jackson asked abruptly
‘About a third of the main building and the entire engine house. Bad enough,’ Hugh nodded, as he got back into the driver’s seat. ‘But no one hurt, thank God,’ he added, as he reversed back down the yard to give him more momentum for the hill.
The Jacksons watched till they were out of sight and went back indoors to tell the story to Mrs Jackson and a former neighbour from Lenaderg who had come to visit them. By the next day, everyone in the district would know all the details of the fire at Millbrook, probably somewhat enlarged in the telling.
