A Novel
We had a knocker-up, and our knocker-up had a knocker-up
And our knocker-up's knocker-up didn't knock our knocker up
So our knocker-up didn't knock us up
'Cos he's not up.
Ada Marsh has spent thirty years waking people up.
Every morning before dawn, she walks the terraced streets of a Lancashire mill town with a brass pea-shooter and a knowledge of her neighbours so precise it has become a kind of love — though Ada would never call it that. She knows which window wants the frame and not the pane. Which house must not be touched before half past on Thursdays. Which light comes on a little earlier now that the man who used to sleep beside it is gone.
She thinks of herself as a function. Like the lamp posts. Like the mill whistle. Useful but not meaningful.
Then one October morning, the curtains at number sixteen are the wrong ones. New people. A young widow with a boy. And the thirty-year sentence Ada has been writing in the dark — house by house, tap by tap — begins, very quietly, to change.
Lancashire, 1908
From Chapter One
The trick, Ada has learned, is not to think about being warm.
She dresses in the dark by feel. The familiar weight of her wool coat. The particular resistance of the second button, which has never sat right and never will. She winds her woollen muffler twice, tucks the end in, and lifts the pea-shooter from its hook by the door. Thirty-one inches of hollow brass. She measured it once, for no reason she could name.
Outside, the street holds its breath.
This is the part people never understand. The ones who know what she does and feel sorry for her, which is most of them. They imagine the cold, the dark, the loneliness of it. They do not imagine the quiet. A town of twelve thousand people making almost no sound at all. Just her footsteps and somewhere distant a horse shifting its weight and the soft, dependable hiss of the gas lamps.
Essays, research, and other things that didn't fit in the book but couldn't be left behind entirely.