One Sunday afternoon, as they walked home from church, Mrs. Slessor and Mary fell in step together. The younger children walked on ahead, jumping over the cracks in the sidewalk. Mrs. Slessor spoke quietly. “Mary, I need to talk to you alone. Let’s take the children home and get them something to eat, and then we’ll go out walking for a bit. Your father should be awake by now; he can watch the children.”
Mary pulled her shawl around her shoulders and tried to imagine what her mother wanted to talk to her about. Her mother sounded so serious, as if she were talking to another adult.
Back at the apartment, Mary held her breath as she waited for her mother to ask her father to watch the children. Her father begrudgingly grunted his agreement, and Mary and her mother slipped outside into the damp afternoon. As they left the building and began walking up Queen Street, Mrs. Slessor began to speak. Her voice was soft, and her eyes were fixed on the cobblestones.
“Mary,” she began, “I had such high hopes for us all moving to Dundee. Your father promised me he would stop drinking and get a proper job, but…” she sighed deeply, “after last night it’s just not going to happen. He told me he was fired for being rude to the foreman, and I don’t think he’ll ever hold down a job. Alcohol has got him good and proper.”
Mary reached for her mother’s hand and held it as they kept walking.
“I’ve been talking to Mrs. Clunie in the next apartment,” Mrs. Slessor went on. “She works in the Baxter cotton mill and says they are hiring women. I’m a good weaver. I’m going to apply for a job tomorrow. I need you to stay home and look after the others,” her voice trailed off as she stopped to look her eleven-year-old daughter fully in the face. “Oh, Mary, Mary, lass, I never meant for it to be this way,” she sobbed quietly. “I wanted you to go to school and learn. You have a quick mind, and it breaks my heart to see it wasted.”
“It’s all right, Ma. We’ll find a way to cope. I’ll go to school one day. It won’t be too late,” Mary said gently, feeling older than her eleven years. “It’s all right, honest.”
Mrs. Slessor blew her nose and bent down to kiss her daughter on the cheek. “Whatever else goes wrong,” she said, “I will always thank God for giving me a daughter like you, Mary.”
A lot more did go wrong in the next few months. Within a few weeks of each other, Mary’s two youngest sisters caught diphtheria and died. Secretly, Mary blamed her father for their deaths. If he had been able to keep a job, they would be living in a cottage on the outskirts of town by now instead of being stuck in the middle of Dundee, where the air was foul and the sun never shone between the towering gray buildings.
Despite the death of her sisters, Mary enjoyed being a little mother to the family. The wake-up bell from the mill clanged at five o’clock each morning, and Mary would get up with her mother so they could have a drink of tea together before she left for work. Sometimes her father joined them, but more often than not he was sleeping off a night of heavy drinking.
Things went on this way for about six months until one day in early 1860, when Mary awoke early to hear her mother sobbing quietly into her pillow. Mary crept out into the living room where her parents slept and found her mother in bed alone. She sat down gently on the edge of the bed. “What’s wrong?” she quietly asked her mother.
Mrs. Slessor rolled over to look at her daughter and stifled a sob. “I don’t have the money for the rent,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do. Your father found the money I put away under the flour jar for the rent. He spent it all on alcohol. Not that it would have mattered anyway. We would have come to this in the end. The money I make is not enough to keep us all, and your father can’t pass a pub without going in and getting drunk.” She put her hands over her face. “Oh, Mary, Mary, what are we to do?” she sobbed.
Mary’s heart sank. She could see it all very clearly. Her father was away at a pub drunk, and her big brother was dead. It was up to her and her mother to keep the rest of the family together. “I’ll get a job,” Mary replied. “I won’t be able to earn as much as you, but if we put our money together, we should be able to scrape by, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Slessor reached out and hugged her daughter. “Mary, I’ll make it up to you somehow, you’ll see. Here, you must be cold. Come and lie down with me. Your father will just have to stay with the younger children and do his drinking after we get home.”
Mary climbed under the thin blanket with her mother.
“There is one good thing,” her mother said softly.
“What’s that?” asked Mary wearily.
“The mill has just opened a school for the younger workers. Since you’re only eleven, they will employ you in the mornings and let you go to school in the afternoon, and then the reverse the next day.”
Mary lay in bed, suddenly wide awake. A school! She was going to school! “Oh, Ma,” she said, reaching out to hug her mother. “I can stand anything if only I learn to read.”
Mary’s mother hugged her tightly, and eventually the two of them drifted off to sleep.
The following day, Mrs. Slessor filled two lunch pails, and mother and daughter set off for work together before sunup.
At the mill gate, Mrs. Slessor stopped to talk to another woman, who Mary assumed was some type of supervisor. Mary was right. A minute or two later, her mother beckoned to her. “Mary,” she said, turning to her daughter, “this is Mrs. Dugan. Go with her, and she will show you what to do. You will be working this morning, and this afternoon her daughter will take you over to the classroom.”
Mrs. Dugan smiled a toothless smile at Mary and beckoned her to follow. They entered a door at the far end of the huge brick building, and a man handed Mary a card with numbers on it. The card was to be used to keep track of the hours she worked.
“Thank you,” said Mary.
The man grunted and then said, “Let’s see if you’re still thanking me when you come out tonight, lassie.” He laughed coarsely.
The noise inside the building was deafening. The clanging and banging of machinery echoed inside the largest room Mary had ever seen.
Mrs. Dugan pointed to a cubbyhole where Mary could put her lunch pail. “Leave your shawl and cardigan there, too, lass. It’s hot work in here. I’m sure you’ve been told that already.”
Together Mary and Mrs. Dugan walked over to one of the large machines in the room. “Now, I’m only going to explain this to you once,” said Mrs. Dugan, “so you’d better listen carefully. You have to be quick to be a piecer. Looks like you’re built for it, being so slender.”
Mary wiped her brow and tried to concentrate on what the woman was saying. Her head was already swimming. It was so hot in the room. Mary’s mother had warned her that the mill owners liked to keep the inside of the mill between eighty and ninety degrees Fahrenheit because they believed it made the quality of the cotton fabric they produced finer, but it was hotter than anything Mary had ever experienced before. Mary took a deep breath. It was going to be hard to work in such heat for hours. Already she found herself longing for lunch time when her mother had told her she would be allowed to sit on a bench outside.
The job of a piecer was simple enough to explain. It took Mrs. Dugan less than five minutes. Basically, Mary had to walk or crawl back and forth between the reels of the spinning machine, tying together the threads on the spinning frames when they broke. The quality of the fabric produced depended on strong threads. The job, however, was much more difficult to perform than it sounded. Most of the time, Mary had to run from one broken thread to another. If she didn’t go fast enough, the person operating the machines would clip Mary across the back of the head with her hand. Other times, Mary had to crawl under the machines to reach the bottom threads, coming perilously close to the pulsating machinery. Within an hour or two, she was exhausted and not at all surprised to learn from one of the older girls that a piecer often walked or crawled twenty miles in a day between the spinning machines.
When the lunch whistle blew at noon, Mary picked up her shawl, her cardigan, and her lunch pail and headed out the door, where a rush of cold air greeted her. She struggled to pull her cardigan on. Her fingers throbbed with tiny cuts from the taut threads she’d had to tie, and her feet were so tired that every step was an effort. She slumped onto a wooden bench and rested her back against the rough bricks of the mill wall. Overhead, thick black smoke belched into the air. Other workers talked and joked with each other, but Mary was too tired to join in.
Once she had eaten her bread and suet, Mary went to find Mrs. Dugan, who was sitting in the midst of a group of older women laughing raucously at a joke. Mary waited politely for Mrs. Dugan to notice her. Finally the woman did. “Luv, now, how did your first day go?” Mrs. Dugan asked kindly.
Mary smiled. “Fine, thank you,” she replied, glad her first day of work was over.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting Janet to show you where the classroom is. Just a minute. I’ll call her.” Without moving from where she was sitting, Mrs. Dugan yelled over the surrounding din. “Janet, get over here. I’ve got a new lass for you to meet.”
Mary watched as a tall, dark-haired girl walked over to them.
Half an hour later, Mary was sitting in a chair staring at a chalkboard. The room was long and narrow, and the lighting was so poor that Mary had to squint to see what the teacher was writing. The teacher was explaining the schedule for the week which included reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, sewing, knitting, and geography. Mary’s eyes sparkled as she listened. She could stand working half days in the hot, sweaty mill as long as she got to go to school for the other half of the day. If she walked home exhausted every evening, it didn’t matter. She was learning to read and write, and that made everything worth it.
Chapter 3
Tragedy and Drudgery
It was a dismal, damp Sunday afternoon not long after Mary had started working at the mill. It was her one day a week off, and she spent the afternoon walking with three other girls from her tenement building. As they strolled along past a house at the bottom of King Street, an old woman came out to greet them. Mary recognized her from church. “Hello, girls,” the woman said. Then peering at Mary, she asked, “Aren’t you the young Slessor girl who goes to Wishart Memorial Church?”
“Yes, ma’am,” replied Mary.
“Well, why don’t you come in for a while and bring your friends with you. You all look so cold. I have a fire going, and I just pulled a fresh batch of scones from the oven. How does that sound to you?”
Mary looked at the other girls. She knew they were probably no more interested in visiting with the old woman than she was. Yet a warm fire and fresh scones were hard to pass up. “Well, we can come in, but just for a moment,” Mary finally agreed. “My mother will be expecting me home soon.”
A glowing, hot fire crackled in the fireplace, and the four girls were soon crowded around it, eating scones and drinking hot, sweet tea. The old woman asked Mary what she had learned in Sunday school that morning, and Mary told her. Then the old woman bent down and poked the fire with a stick. The fire flared up, and sparks shot up the chimney. Abruptly, the woman sat back in her chair and changed the conversation. She looked right at Mary and said, “You know, lassie, if you were to put your hand in that fire, it would sear it completely, and you would be in terrible pain.”
Mary nodded politely, wondering whether the old woman was a little crazy. Before she could decide, the old woman went on. “The Bible tells us that hell is like that fire. It burns forever and ever, and those who don’t accept the Lord Jesus Christ will spend their eternity there. Their bodies will be seared, their throats parched, but there will be no way out and no end to it. Do you want to burn in hell, lassie?”
Mary shook her head. Given the old woman’s description, who in her right mind would want to burn in hell? At the same time, Mary felt an unexpected sense of dread overcome her. She became terrified she’d end up in hell and never see Robert and her sisters again.
