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one inch of material.’
    Lily admired the dextrous movements of the manageress’s small fingers and wondered if she would ever learn to be so clever with her needle.
    â€˜A quick mender can mend three yards in one hour,’ Miss Valentine told her. ‘So you see, Lily, you have no time to stop and chat.’
    â€˜Yes, Miss Valentine. I’m sorry, Miss Valentine. It won’t happen again.’
    The manageress nodded then stepped down from the stool. ‘Remember what I showed you and now try it for yourself while I stand by and watch.’
    Lily felt her mouth go dry. This was ten times worse than school, she thought, afraid that her fingers would fumble and Miss Valentine would declare her too clumsy to do the fine work required. Before she knew it, she would be back down in the weaving shed, red faced and with her tail between her legs, on the wrong end of Fred Lee’s nasty jibes.
    â€˜Begin,’ Miss Valentine instructed.
    So Lily took a deep breath and picked up her needle. Keep calm, she told herself, don’t let yourself down. Concentrate, Lily Briggs, and prove you’re as good as the next girl at Calvert’s Mill.

CHAPTER FIVE
    â€˜So how was your first week?’ Harry asked Lily and Evie as they left work the following Saturday. He sat behind the wheel of his boss’s shiny black Bentley, parked outside the main door, his peaked cap tipped back and his broad smile inviting a detailed account from the weary girls. He smiled warmly at Lily.
    â€˜Long.’ Evie sighed. The days had been packed with action. From the moment the knocker-up had rattled his lead-tipped pole against the bedroom window of 5 Albion Lane at six thirty each morning until the five o’clock buzzer had sounded at Calvert’s she’d been on her feet. The routine was unvaried – get up and dressed in the icy-cold attic bedroom, eat breakfast then trudge down the hill to join the jostling crowd on Ghyll Road, on then almost to the junction with Canal Road and then left under the mill’s arched entrance to clock on and run errands for her fellow workers all morning long. Mash the tea and shop for dinners, trying not to forget who took three spoonfuls of sugar and who wanted a pork pie and who had ordered tripe and onions, and Lord help Evie if she got it wrong. Her afternoons had been taken up learning from Maureen Godwin what it took to be a loom cleaner.
    â€˜Very long,’ Lily echoed. There’d been so much to learn under Miss Valentine’s eagle eye, and not a day had gone by so far without her missing a flaw or a broken end, or being reprimanded for working too slowly by Jennie Shaw, standing by with a knowing smile and a fresh bolt of cloth for checking.
    It was only at dinner times, when the two sisters got together with Annie and Sybil in the canteen to relax and swap cheerful stories, that the situation had been made more bearable.
    â€˜Listen to you two!’ Harry teased. ‘Anyone would think you had a hard life!’
    â€˜Look who’s talking, Harry Bainbridge,’ Lily retorted. ‘Sitting on your backside all day long, driving around like Lord Muck!’
    â€˜Sticks and stones,’ he replied merrily. ‘Oh, you haven’t seen Billy by any chance?’
    â€˜No – why?’ As Evie gave her answer she was forced to step aside by Fred Lee in flat cap and goggles, riding his motorbike out from under the archway, weaving his way through the departing crowd and leaving a whiff of exhaust fumes in his wake.
    â€˜He’s supposed to be here, working on the manager’s garden,’ Harry explained. ‘I’m meant to pass on a message from Mr Calvert.’
    â€˜Oh well, you’re in luck. There he is.’ Evie pointed out the figure of Calvert’s gardener wheeling a barrow along the path by the side of Derek Wilson’s house at the far end of the mill building. Spotting Harry in their boss’s car,