In Harrowby, seventy miles north of Manchester, the morning sun was breaking through the cold autumn mist. He cast long yellow rectangles across the kitchen floor of Ada Morland’s stone terraced house. The kitchen was warm. It smelled of toasted crumpets, strong Yorkshire tea, and the clean, healing scent of eucalyptus ointment.
Ada sat at the scrubbed pine table, her right arm resting on a folded flannel towel. Her husband Ben, a quiet man who worked as a machinist at the locomotive works, was carefully unrolling a length of fresh elastic bandage from her forearm. The skin where the boiling steam from Lathmere’s bronze under-road drain had struck her two weeks ago was still pink and tender. But the angry blisters had flattened into a smooth, shiny sheet of new outer skin.
‘Doctor says the graft took clean,’ Ben remarked. His calloused thumb gently tested the mobility of her wrist. ‘No contracture in the tendons. But he said if you pick up a twelve-inch pipe wrench and haul on a stubborn union, you’ll tear that new skin right off the muscle tissue.’
‘I don’t need to haul on wrenches, Ben,’ Ada said, sipping her tea from a heavy fine china mug. ‘I have Eren Tal and two hundred river wagon drivers to pull the levers. What they need over there is someone who can look at a pressure gauge and tell them which pipe is going to blow before the bricks turn into shrapnel.’
