Disability Arts Online

Chapter One

September 1948. No one really knew Thomas Edgar Street even though he had worked in Heskeths Cotton Mill for nearly thirty years. He wasn’t weird or anything like that he just wasn’t talkative.

His job was stoking the fires deep in the ‘fire-hole’ below ground level where very few entered except for maybe the police or such like who brought in dead dogs or cats to be ‘got rid of’ ...

Catherine Conroy was alone on the outside wall of the cotton mill eating her dinner when Thomas Edgar Street walked over to her and with out even saying hello asked: “So when is the baby due?”
“In four months,” “Is it right you jilted him at the altar?” “That’s right. What on this earth has it got to do with you?”

Christmas 1948. Being a Christmas baby, mum had planned to call me Gabriel or Noel! Then uncle Peter suddenly died a fortnight before. So she pushed me into the hands of a Wigan mid-wife in Billinge Hospital around 1am Christmas morning and re-named me Peter.

For eighteen months she coped with the loneliness, name-calling, and the abuse from other local women who didn’t even know her! She accepted that, but to have women from her own village who she had shared nappies, knickers, nylons and lipstick with, became too much, especially when they started to shout out: “How’s that little bastard of yours?”

She now understood why the other single mum from her village ended the abuse in the cold waters of the local canal? Mum never understood why it was her so-called friends from childhood.

Women, she had worked on the ammunitions with. Women who had lost boyfriends and husbands to the Germans. Women who had stuck together and supported each other through what ever and they did support each other ... except when a new born baby out of wedlock was involved. Then everything changed!