If Molly hadn’t entered her photo into the competition, then who had?
BY PAMELA ORMONDROYD
Set in the 1930s
HAVE you seen today’s paper, Mam?” Archie Shawcross, red-faced and gasping, ran up the cobbled street towards his front door, waving a newspaper above his head.
“Mind that bucket of water, lad!” Agnes warned, struggling up from the cold flagstone pavement. “I’ve just spent an hour donkey-stoning this step.
“Mind you take off those mucky clogs before you go in. What’s all the fuss?”
“It’s our Molly,” Archie replied enthusiastically.
He kicked off his clogs and jumped across the step into the house.
“She’s in the paper. She’s going to be this year’s Cotton Queen.”
Weary and irritated, Agnes picked up her bucket and followed her thirteen-year-old son into the parlour.
“Nonsense.”
Agnes spread the paper over her brown chenille tablecloth.
Her expression changed as she stared at her daughter’s photograph and read through the column.
“Our Molly in the local paper,” Agnes said as she flopped down in a chair. “Though you’ve jumped the gun here, Archie.
“It says that Molly’s photograph has been put forward with two other girls from the mill, that’s all. She hasn’t been picked yet.”
“She’s as good as picked.” Archie smiled as he wandered into the kitchen in search of a spare crust. “They’re all talking about it in the factory.”
Agnes studied the photographs.
She recognised all three of the girls from Ebron’s cotton factory.
Ida Thorpe, a supervisor, was indeed a good-looking lass with her green eyes and fiery copper-coloured hair.
She lived only a street away.
The other young girl, Minnie Barlow, was a shy but pretty child with chestnut locks and nice complexion whom Agnes recognised as the tea trolley girl.
Yet Agnes couldn’t deny that her own daughter seemed to shine out from the middle of the page.
She was a real beauty, with her golden ringlets, plump lips, sparkling blue eyes and endearing smile.
Agnes was forever at a loss to know from whom in the family Molly had inherited such good looks.
But at the same time, her daughter seemed unaware and unaffected by the fact of her beauty.
And that was how Agnes wished it to be.
Molly might be feisty and occasionally challenging, but she was a good girl with a big heart and seemed happy as she was.
“Our Mol
