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Back Sisters of Gold
Chapters (64)
  1. Cover
  2. Title page
  3. Dedication page
  4. A Week’s Work in Birmingham
  5. I
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Twenty-Two
  28. Twenty-Three
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. II
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. Thirty-Eight
  45. Thirty-Nine
  46. III
  47. Forty
  48. Forty-One
  49. Forty-Two
  50. Forty-Three
  51. Forty-Four
  52. Forty-Five
  53. Forty-Six
  54. Forty-Seven
  55. Forty-Eight
  56. Forty-Nine
  57. Fifty
  58. Fifty-One
  59. Fifty-Two
  60. Fifty-Three
  61. Acknowledgements
  62. Further Reading
  63. About the Author
  64. By the Same Author

‘Come away,’ Margaret said. She pulled Annie’s hand and the two of them hurried back to the street, which felt like another world of light.

‘There must be yards like this all along behind here,’ Annie said. Even she seemed sobered by what they had found. ‘You’d never know they were there, would you, unless you went in? I wonder if the whole city is full of places like that?’

Margaret looked along the street, imagining the dank yards crammed in behind the frontage facing them.

‘How do people live?’ she said as they walked away. The place had oppressed her. ‘Even the washing was grey with soot.’ She thought of their washing line in the garden at home, the clothes billowing in the fresh country wind.

‘How can souls flourish in a place like this?’ Annie said. ‘It’s bad enough in Watery Lane.’

In the worst and poorest lane in the village, the water level rose during the winter months so that the path became a stream or a swamp of sucking mud. The cottages were damp, their thatch covered in moss and mould, and the inhabitants and their children were afflicted by coughs and wheezing chests. But on summer days it could look quite pleasant and even Watery Lane felt cheerful compared with the yard they had seen.

The girls walked side by side in silence. Margaret felt a sense of despair wash through her at the enormity of the Lord’s calling. Were they not charged to bring the word of Jesus to all people in this wretched world? It was enough of an uphill struggle in a small village, where she had usually felt unequal to the task. Where did anyone begin in this dark warren of Birmingham streets?

Annie, walking fast, her head down, did not share her sister’s despair. God had brought her here for a reason, she knew. Her father and mother had met through the Congregationalist Church and God had been the air they breathed through their upbringing. William Hanson, their father, had spoken to them of the work of Quaker Seebohm Rowntree, the clarion call he had sent up about the poverty on which he had reported in York. His book, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, sat on their father’s shelves.

Their parents’ work, Annie knew, was God’s work: the work of souls as well as material welfare. And Annie was sure she had a mission in life. She knew right from wrong. She knew the word of the Lord and it was her life’s work to take it to others. Any quarrel she had was with her father, and the puritan gloom and rigidity into which he had sunk after their mother’s death – not with God.