Bad Woman?

[Gerry]

I remembered the baby's pram had been emptied and refilled as high as we dared.Every bundle neatly tied with the string made from off cuts from shirts trimmings from the factory floor. We would all need to push over the cobbled stones and broken pavements past those tiny bars filled with drunken men and bad women. Mammy always said it was only bad women walked that street looking for business.

Each week I'd help my big sisters carry the bundles of collars and cuffs up those creaking wooden stairs into the room with the big brown counter. My job was to stand guard once the first bundles were put up onto the high counter as they rushed down for the more. My wee brother only was only lifted back into the pram once all the precious cargo was unloaded.

The was a lovely man who owned the factory and he would come out from his office with lolly pops for us all. Even the wee brother sitting in the pram down below.He always wore a broad brimmed hat his shirt sleeves held up by silver bands and the cuffs rolled up to his elbow. He had a big number tattooed on his arm but he never minded me looking at it. He said it was a bad man wrote on him when he was a boy.The same bad men killed all his brothers and sisters my Granny said.

The lady gave my sister a brown envelope for my Granny and then we would repeat the carrying of bundles down to refill the pram. These bundles of cut cloth and white stiff card were tied up with the same sting cloth strips.

Granny always smiled when the envelope arrived and off she would go to the corner shop to clear her tick book. If there was anything over sometimes we got a treat from her too before she started into the bundles with her steam iron rising that distinctive smell as the starch was sprayed. My Granny was a paten turner who like many women worked from home to feed the big factory with the parts they needed to assemble all their shirts.

I then mentioned the above piece I had written about my memory of visiting the shirt factory and "That Tattoo". She was able to tell me that my memory wasn't that bad. She recalled a traumatic day I probably had burned into my mind that sparked my writing.

I would have been all of three years of age at that time and Mam had been with us on the trip down to the street were the bad women worked outside the sailors bars. My memory of the rickety staircase that went up the outside of the crumbling building was true but my innocent mind had blocked out that the factory was above a pork store. We would have passed through the large arched entrance to that courtyard that was full of the smells and sounds of so many animals going to their death. Yet that protective part of my child's brain had filtered out that part I didn't need to retain.

All my other memories of Mr Seledgy were very accurate from his kind generous nature, his broad brimmed hat, his silver arm bands on his shirt sleeves and that tattoo.

My Mam recalls that day because when she arrived home the envelope holding those precious few pounds had fallen from the pocket on the well used pram. A weeks wages for her and Granny lost. No money for that weeks food or rent. She remembers the horror of that moment all these years later.

More in faith than in hope she retraced her steps all the way back to that big arch leading to the courtyard of death and the rickety staircase. She nervously climbed the stairs with her faith being tested to its limit with no trace of that envelope found and as she entered the office with that big brown counter she was greeted by a smiling man in his broad brimmed hat sliver bands on his sleeves and tattoo.

That missing envelope that meant so much to our family had been found and brought back to the factory still intact by one of those "bad women" who had been forced to walk that awful street to put food on the table of their children.

But as Mam said the term "Bad women" was not a judgement, just a job description for many honourable women in poor circumstances.

By Gerry Temple

[Ged]

An honest bad women. Good writings Gerry, keep it up.

[Gerry]

And an honest employer. If he had pocketed the pay packet when the girl brought it back no one would ever have know about it.