#writephoto: History

For Sue Vincent’s Thursday Photo Prompt. This would have fitted in nicely with my last WIP but one. Thanks Sue. Atmospheric photo.

They used to meet at Weatherall’s where there was no one to bother, his wife being dead and his children grown and moved on. It was a corner house, neighbour on one side, an old lass whose wits had flown away years. They weren’t all union men; many of them didn’t dare. If Taylor or Holdsworth or Sheard had known about it they’d have been given their cards straight away. But they still gathered round on a Sunday evening to listen to George Hewitt explaining where they all fitted into the gaffers’ scheme of things. He wouldn’t stand for them bringing the minister into it either. He scoffed.

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

That’s what Minister tells you when you say you can’t live on what Jeremiah Taylor pays you, isn’t it? When you’ve nowt to pay a doctor with when one of the bairns is sick, isn’t it? He says it’s the way of the world, your labour belongs to Caesar and the rest of your time belongs to God. But what belongs to you? Between Caesar and God, what do they leave for you? Neither Samuel Sheard nor Alfred Holdsworth, nor the God Almighty’ll listen when your bairns are crying with hunger, will they? No matter how much you render them!”

George Hewitt worked in the carding shed at Samuel Sheard’s mill. He never married because he wouldn’t be responsible for bringing more bairns into the world to be eaten alive by the looms. He left no weeping wife and children when the Peelers rounded him up and the men who sat with him on Weatherall’s step on a Sunday evening. His ‘disciples’, as the presiding judge called them, got five years hard labour, but George was deported for life for sedition.

The steps where the men sat were smashed as a symbol of the might of the law, as if any were needed, and it wasn’t until a hundred years later, when George Hewitt and the Peelers were forgotten, and the mills themselves were silent, that the owner of the house that had been John Weatherall’s made up two neat concrete steps. Children walk carefully up the worn upper steps now, pausing sometimes to wonder why they are hollowed like the bed of a river, listening to the ring of the stone and trying to catch the words. But the new steps are dull and silent. They do not stir beneath the feet and have no story to tell. And if the children were to ask why the steps were dumb, who would be able to answer them?