One of Us Buried by Johanna Craven (year 2 reading books TXT) 📕

The tallest of the soldiers stepped up to the waterman, exchanging words I couldn’t hear. He looked out across the barge at the new arrivals. I lowered my head, cowed by his presence, shame tugging my shoulders forward. I held my breath as I stepped past him onto the narrow wooden jetty.

I had not been expecting London, of course. But this place; what was this? Rusty plains of farmland pushed up against a tangled, grey-green forest, intercepted by a wide, dusty road that cut through the middle of the settlement. Huts dotted the farmland, presided over by the twin spires of the church. The morning sun was searing the tops of the trees, and I squinted in the brassy light.

Two of the soldiers strode past and I found myself taking a step closer to Hannah. She gave my wrist a squeeze as we followed the marines down the main street.

“Just keeping walking,” she murmured.

And so I kept walking. For what else was there to do?

We were led to the government food store, a sandstone warehouse on the edge of the settlement. Soldiers turned through our indentation documents and scrawled our names on their ledgers. And here was our food for the week, wrapped into packages as small as our fists. I looked down at the bundle in my hand. I had little thought of what was inside it. But one look at its miserable size and my stomach was already rolling with hunger.

The factory was nothing more than two long warehouses above what I would later learn was the men’s jail. Up the stairs we went, herded by the soldiers who had lavished us with food.

It was the stench of the place that hit me first; the same filth and damp, and unbreathable air we had languished in on the prison ship. The floorboards were misshapen and dark, the blackened bricks above an unlit grate marking all there was of a kitchen. The place was a chaos of rattling looms and whirring wheels, punctuated by the shrieks of young children. Women hunched over spinning wheels, their babies in baskets, strapped to their backs, tottering across the muck and straw that carpeted the floor. The carding machines and looms sighed and thudded steadily, my muscles tensing as the jagged rhythm moved inside me.

Here came the superintendent, with his beak of a nose and cloud of white hair. Waistcoat straining against a puffed-out chest. He looked over us, clustered at the top of the stairs like lost sheep.

“Plenty of them,” he said to the soldiers in a thick Scottish accent. “The men not like what they saw?”

One of the marines chuckled. “A bad bunch perhaps.”

The superintendent led us into the second warehouse through a sea of blue-striped dresses. Some of the women peered at us, as though inspecting, calculating. Others kept their eyes on their spinning, seemingly oblivious to our arrival. What were we to these other women, I wondered? Potential friends? Rivals? Nothing more than an inconvenience?

The bad bunch of us was divided; some to the carding machines at the far side of the warehouse, others to the looms. I was shunted by the superintendent to an empty stool in front of a large spinning wheel, a sack of colourless wool dumped at my feet. I watched some beastly black insect crawl through the mass of it.

“See she knows what she’s doing,” the superintendent said to the woman next to me. Then his heavy footsteps clomped off towards the other new arrivals. I gave the young woman next to me little more than a glance.

“I know how to spin,” I mumbled.

In truth, I’d had little cause to do such a thing in the past, but I didn’t want to speak, or sit by that mangy sack of wool and be taught the ways of my new life. Tears were stabbing my throat, and I knew if I spoke again they would spill. For all its chaos, there was an empty, hollow feeling to this factory above the jail. A sadness that pressed down upon the place, wrought by the regret and grief of these striped-skirted women. I felt an ache deep within my chest that I was to exist in a place filled with such sorry creatures. And at the realisation that I was now one of them.

I shot a quick glance at the woman beside me, watching as she sat rolls of carded fleece on her lap and teased it onto the yarn that was gathering on her wheel. Yes, I thought, I remembered this from some long ago, barely accessible part of my childhood. An aunt’s house. A spinning wheel in the parlour. I let the memory in my hands take over.

Slowly, I pedalled, then faster, eyes on the wheel to avoid even a glance at this horror that was now my life. At the feel of the wool sliding through my fingers, and the mesmerising cycle of the spokes before me, I felt my tears sink back below the surface.

An hour, perhaps two, and heavy footsteps sounded up the stairs, the rhythm a counterpoint to the clattering of the looms. Here was the soldier I had seen at the river. He strode across the factory floor towards the superintendent. Bent his head and spoke in a murmur.

His presence seemed to suck the air from the room. I felt my eyes pull towards him.

 “No,” hissed a voice beside me. “Don’t even look at him.”

The woman next to me at the spinning wheels was sharp-eyed and slender. A few years from thirty, I guessed; close to my own age. Strands of brown hair hung out the sides of her cap, the lines of her face precise and angular.

I frowned, taken aback by her brusqueness. “Who is he?”

“That’s Lieutenant Blackwell.” The woman’s voice was dark, despite the gentle Irish