Ordsall Street, by Margaret Hulme

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Every Monday at ten o’clock Mr Gorton came up Ordsall Street with the rent book under his arm, and every Monday at five to ten my mother went into the scullery and stood behind the door with her apron pressed to her mouth.

‘If he asks, I’m at our Edie’s,’ she would say. ‘And don’t look at the scullery.’

I was twelve that winter, in 1934, and I had become a good liar. I could stand on the step with my hands behind my back and tell Mr Gorton that Mam had gone to her sister’s in Pendleton, that she was at the wash house, that she had been taken poorly and was lying down. He would write something in his little book with a pencil he licked first, and he would look past me into the house, at the cold grate and the table with nothing on it, and he would say, ‘Tell her it’s mounting up, Nora love.’ Then he would go next door, where Mrs Bracegirdle did exactly the same thing with her twins.

My father had been laid off from the docks in the autumn. He spent his days walking to Trafford Park and back, asking at every gate, and he came home in the evenings with his boots soaked through and nothing to say. My mother did not ask him how it had gone. She could tell from the sound of the latch.

On the first Monday in February Mr Gorton did not ask where she was. He stood on the step for a long moment and then he said, quite loudly, so that his voice would carry down the passage, ‘Seven weeks, Mrs Kenyon. The agent says Friday or the bailiffs. I’m sorry. It isn’t me that says it.’

When he had gone she came out of the scullery and sat down at the table with her hands in her lap. She did not light the lamp, though it was a dark morning. I made her tea with leaves we had already used twice and she let it go cold in front of her. That evening, when my father came in, she told him, and he put his head down on his arms, and she laid one hand on the back of his neck and left it there.

On Thursday she got up before any of us. When I came down she was standing by the window in her good coat, the brown one with the fur collar going bald, twisting her wedding ring round and round her finger. It was tight; she had to wet it at the tap to get it off. She wrapped it in a twist of newspaper and put it in her purse.

‘Where are you going, Mam?’

‘To pay the rent,’ she said. ‘Like a decent woman.’

She did not wait for Mr Gorton. She went first to Hartigan’s on Regent Road, where the three brass balls hung over the door, and then she walked the whole length of Chapel Street to the agent’s office, where she had never been in her life, and she stood at the polished counter and counted the money out in front of the clerk, coin by coin, while men in stiff collars watched her.

She came home at dinner time and put the rent book on the mantelpiece, open, so that we could all see the clerk’s stamp. Then she took off her coat and hung it on the nail behind the door.

‘We’ll not hide again,’ she said. ‘Not in this house.’

At tea I watched her hand on the bread knife. Where the ring had been there was a narrow band of skin, paler than the rest, as if part of her had been kept out of the weather for fifteen years.

“Nora’s mother is presented as a weak woman who is defeated by poverty.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how Nora’s mother is presented in the extract
• how the writer has created these thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.