The Weaving Shed, by Margaret Ashby

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Edith Marsh had worked the same four looms at Holden’s Mill for thirty-one years, and on the last Friday she arrived a quarter of an hour early, the way she always had. The gatekeeper nodded at her without speaking. Someone had already chalked a date on the board by the clocking-in machine, and beneath it, in a different hand, the single word ‘Finished’.

Inside, the weaving shed was as loud as ever. The noise had once frightened her, as a girl of fourteen, so that she had cried into her shawl on the first morning; now it was simply the weather she lived in. She checked her shuttles, wiped the oil from her fingers and watched the cloth creep forward, inch by patient inch, the same grey cotton she had watched for half her life. Nobody wanted it any more. The orders went abroad now, the manager had said, as if he were reading out a bus timetable.

At eleven o’clock the engine man pulled the lever. The shafts slowed, the belts slapped and sagged, and one by one the looms gave a last shudder and stopped. The silence came down on the shed like snow. Edith stood with her hand still raised, waiting for a sound that did not come. She could hear the pigeons on the roof. She could hear Lily Pratt, three alleys away, blowing her nose.

For a while no one moved. Then the women began, quietly, to collect their things: a tin mug, a cushion, a calendar from 1958 that nobody had ever taken down. Edith folded her pinafore into a neat square and put it in her bag, although she could not think what she would ever wear it for.

On her way out she laid her palm flat on the nearest loom. The iron was still warm. ‘Well,’ she said to it, under her breath, ‘that’s us, then.’ It felt foolish, talking to a machine, and she was glad nobody heard. At the gate she did not look back. She had decided that on the walk in, and she held to it all the way to the corner of Albert Street, where her legs, for no reason she could name, began to shake.

How does the writer show Edith Marsh’s thoughts and feelings about the closing of Holden’s Mill?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Edith
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.