Road to Berry Edge, The by Elizabeth Gill

that he had found for himself with Vincent Shaw and his family made coming back here all the more impossible. It didn’t seem strange that the mother he hadn’t seen for ten years shouldn’t want to kiss him or hold him. Ida kissed him and touched him so much that it should have been odd when his own mother did not, but his mother had never touched him. Ida treated him just like she treated Harry. She called him ‘young man’ when she was angry with him, whereas in fact he had been almost twenty two when he met her so shehad never known him young. Ida was his mother now and he adored her. John had been dead for almost a year when he met the Shaws and Rob was already a different person.
    He had travelled a lot that first year, working in various foundries but moving on after a few weeks because there was no reason to stay until he reached Nottingham, and there Vincent Shaw and others were building yet more railways and setting up businesses. Rob was fascinated.
    Nottingham was everything to him that Berry Edge was not. The city was so exciting and everybody was in work. They were making lace, stockings and bicycles. There were foundries and factories producing parts for new machinery. Jesse Boot had already overturned not just the pharmaceutical industry but the whole concept of marketing with his new ideas of buying in bulk and selling cheaply to the public. He had changed the face of shopping.
    Girls there were independent because they worked in the lace and hosiery factories. He would listen to their confident voices and see their uplifted, laughing faces and be glad.
    Nottingham had its slums, it had its back streets but it was going forward at a great pace and Rob wanted to be there among it all, the hum of a hundred interdependent industries, the people who were making money, the prosperous shops in Angel Row and King Street. Nottingham was all contrasts, woods and fields, busy streets, work and leisure, there were music halls and pubs and places you could take pretty girls dancing. There was the famous Goose Fair in October which had once been a place for farmers to hire help and buy and sell stock, but was now a huge entertainment for the entire area. There were rowing and pleasure boats on the River Trent, cricket at Trent Bridge, new schools and public buildings. Nottingham and its surrounding towns and villages was the place that Rob decided he wanted to stay.
    Vincent was an engineer, a successful, flamboyant person who already had a number of businesses. He lived in a bigdetached house on the outskirts of the city overlooking a park. Rob would have given a great deal to talk to him. He hadn’t talked to anybody for a long time other than necessary conversation, but Vincent was clever and educated and had nothing directly to do with the workmen in his foundries and factories. It was one of his biggest failings, Rob thought. Vincent lacked the imagination to see that he kept his workforce poorly in almost every way, and now that Rob had been in so many places he had seen good masters and bad. He knew that although Vincent paid his people fairly he could have done a great deal more for them, and they would have repaid him by working more competently and turning out better goods.
    Once a year he invited them to his house. Each winter he provided a party and there Rob went.
    He was fascinated by what he had heard about the Shaws, and because they were so prosperous and unconventional the whole town talked about them. It was well known that Ida Shaw, Vincent’s wife, had come from a rich, titled family, and that when she married him her family had been shocked because he was so far beneath her. Although his family had been respectable, they were trade, and Vincent was a man who abhorred idleness.
    They had a huge London house which had belonged to his wife’s parents and from them she had inherited a vast fortune, but Vincent Shaw was the kind of vulgar man who had made his money when he