BooksBarbecue
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

‘It’s astonishingly complicated for something so small,’ she said to Margaret, in wonder. ‘I can barely imagine how they even thought of it!’

Annie worked like a whirlwind, but still she was slow compared to the others.

‘Not done many today, ’ave yer?’ Doris would say to her smugly, when they did their daily weigh-in.

Doris always had a pronouncement to make about everything. Many of these outbursts were directed to the room in general, and some of them of the sort that made Annie wish she could block her ears. Since the room was so long, she only really became familiar with the women close to her – Lizzie, Doris and a few others. But Doris targeted most of her remarks at a girl called Hetty, not much older than Annie, a skinny wisp of a thing with a blotchy face. Hetty never said much, just sniggered a lot, showing off decayed teeth. She was the perfect audience for Doris.

At first Annie had wondered why Doris had not moved up to a more skilled job as she was well into her forties. But she soon saw that Doris was slow-witted – except when it came to being insulting. Hetty, though younger, seemed much the same. Annie even wondered for a time if Hetty was Doris’s daughter, but learned that she was not.

All day the two of them exchanged filthy jokes, especially about the men in their lives – or rather Doris joked about ‘the old man’ and Hetty sniggered.

Doris gave Annie snooty, hostile looks if she ever turned Doris’s way. Not that Annie was easily intimidated. She would look away, standing as tall as her petite height would permit, and go to her machine without looking to one side or the other.

I’ll show them, Annie thought, driven by the need to prove herself. I’ll show them I can be one of them and work hard. She didn’t want these women looking down on her as an outsider, especially a pair like Doris and Hetty. They might be God’s children, she thought, furiously, but they were still crude as tar.

During those first weeks, Annie did her best to keep quiet and take in what was going on around her. Some of the women entering the factory in the morning looked roughly dressed, only just managing to pass the regulation of being ‘neat’ for the work. They were a mixture of ages. One or two, in the blanking room, were hard-faced and intimidating, but they worked up at the other end from Annie.