Free The Overlooker by Fay Sampson Page B

said,’ Nick sighed. ‘But really, we can’t let Uncle Martin down. Thelma said he’s dying to see us.’
    â€˜Come on,’ coaxed Suzie. ‘It could be fun.’
    As they drove down the dale out of town, the high crags closed in above them. Nick kept glancing in his rear-view mirror. Were they being followed, or was he just imagining that that blue car was sitting steadily on their tail? It was just too far back for him to make out the driver.
    In twenty minutes they found what they were looking for. The tall mill building was almost screened by trees. The Fewings got out and Nick’s ears were immediately filled with the sound of rushing water. The river was narrow here, but racing past. He looked up. There was no mill chimney like Thorncliffe’s. No steam engine powering the machinery. Belldale was a watermill.
    â€˜There’s probably been a mill on this same spot since the middle ages,’ Suzie said, looking round.
    Nick felt a moment’s excitement. This was taking the history of the Fewings and Bootles way back beyond the coming of cotton and the Industrial Revolution.
    But his mind switched to the present. Surely it was fanciful to think they had been followed out of town out into the dales?
    Again, his eyes were alert as they crossed the car park to the mill entrance. He had feared that the blue car would draw in beside them. But though he scanned the road, he saw no sign of it. It must have turned off, or driven past.
    He breathed more easily. He had been letting his imagination run away with him, seeing threats where there were none. The rush of the river was soothing. The cluster of houses around Belldale Mill was no more than a village. They read the board beside the entrance. In the nineteenth century, an industrialist had chosen this site to expand the home-based wool production of the dales on a mechanised scale. It looked as if it had changed little since. But its history was older still.
    â€˜I was right,’ Suzie said. ‘The earliest reference to a mill here was in the fourteenth century.’
    â€˜I thought you said these big mills didn’t happen till the Industrial Revolution,’ Millie pointed out.
    â€˜Not
that
sort of mill, for mass-produced weaving or spinning. This used to be a fulling mill. People wove the cloth in their own homes and brought it here to be finished. You’ll see all about it inside.’
    Nick tried to lock his anxieties away in the car and enjoy the experience.
    They wandered through the galleries, which demonstrated the fulling process. Explanatory boards illustrated how, back in Roman times, people had soaked the freshly woven cloth in stale urine and then trampled it underfoot, to make it stronger and thicker.
    â€˜Yuck!’ cried a childish voice behind them.
    Nick looked round. There was a family of four following the same route through the mill. To judge by the ages of his children, the father was probably younger than Nick. But he carried more weight. Black hair was slicked down over a forehead that was already receding. His wife was thin, angular, in a pink cardigan. She had anxious eyes on her children. It was the faces of the children that amused him. The boy, about eight, had creased up his face in exaggerated disgust. The little girl, some two years younger, was laughing as she danced up and down, mimicking the drawing of slaves trampling the cloth.
    Nick exchanged a grin with the father. ‘Don’t they just love things like that?’
    â€˜The more disgusting the better,’ he laughed back.
    Even Millie could not resist her delight at the earthenware pots in which, in later times, the millers had collected urine from the families around, to soak the woollen cloth before fulling.
    â€˜A penny a pot, and tuppence if you were a teetotaller,’ chuckled the guide who had followed them into the gallery. ‘The Methodists did well out of it. Now, if you’ll follow me, we’re