Free A Child of Jarrow by Janet MacLeod Trotter

pay’s better.’
    â€˜Aye, and the dirt’s thicker,’ Lizzie snorted. ‘Good luck to them. I wouldn’t gan back for all the tea in China.’
    â€˜Have they taken on anyone else yet?’ Kate asked eagerly. ‘I’m used to that sort of work. Mam had me scrubbing butcher’s aprons when I was still too small to see over the side of the poss tub.’
    â€˜You get yourself down there the morrow, hinny,’ her aunt encouraged.
    Kate went and had little trouble persuading the housekeeper of her willingness to work hard. Miss Peters, who had worked for the dowager all her life, was herself old and deaf and at a loss as to how to keep her young staff. Kate held herself erect and told her she had worked for the best in South Shields. She gave her name as Fawcett, her father’s name, rather than her stepfather’s Irish name of McMullen. Kate determined to start a new life here, well away from John McMullen’s influence. Pleased with the look of her, Miss Peters started the Tyneside girl the next day at the rambling, ivy-covered manor house that nestled in a hollow in the woods, halfway up the castle drive.
    The laundry room was cramped and hot. It was little bigger than the wash houses she’d worked in back in South Shields, and had none of the labour-saving devices that they used in the castle, Suky, the other laundry maid, was quick to tell her.
    â€˜Up at the big house they’ve got all these mangles and rollers all in one,’ the young girl said as she and Kate hand-wrung a linen sheet between them over a stone trough. ‘Me cousin Olive works there - head housemaid’s a real dragon, but the place is spotless.’
    They carried the sheets out to the moss-covered courtyard and threw them on to the washing lines.
    â€˜And they’ve got all these drying rooms - big wooden racks to put all the clothes on - warm as toast.’ Suky pulled her black hair away from her damp forehead and blew out her cheeks.
    Kate soon learnt that nothing at Farnacre Hall could compare with the standards at the castle. Every chore they did, Suky told her how much worse off they were working at the old manor house.
    â€˜None of this fiddling about with hot coals in these old box irons,’ she grumbled. ‘Always burning me fingers, I am. No, Olive says there’s this great big iron stove they keep hot all the time - with eight irons on it all ready and waiting. And you know what they’re talking of getting? Electric ones!’
    Kate looked up over her mound of ironing. ‘Electric irons? How do they work?’
    â€˜I don’t know exactly, but Olive says they won’t even need to stoke the stove. You stick a bit rope in the wall and they heat up, just like magic.’
    Kate was dubious. ‘Well, it’s not going to happen here. Her Ladyship likes her oil lamps and her coal fires - she’s not going to try anything fancy like electric.’ She held up a piece of lace and grinned with satisfaction at the way she had mastered the crimping iron.
    â€˜Aye, we’re lucky to have water in the house,’ Suky grumbled, then mimicked the querulous voice of their ancient employer. ‘In my day, young gels were happy to walk miles to draw water from the well.’
    Kate snorted with laughter as Suky hobbled around the laundry room wagging her finger.
    The cook, Mrs Benson, bellowed through the door from the kitchen, ‘Stop larking on or we’ll have Miss Peters down here causing a riot!’
    The girls stifled their sniggering. ‘Aye,’ Kate whispered, ‘she’ll give us a blast of her ear trumpet.’
    â€˜Boer War could break out down here and Miss P wouldn’t hear it,’ Suky muttered, and Kate burst out laughing again.
    â€˜Kate Fawcett, stop that noise!’ Cook bellowed to no avail. She was a kind woman and Kate knew her reprimands were half-hearted. Besides, Kate was a hard worker and