short to make up a shilling for the gas meant they sat in the dark. A penny short for a bag of coal meant they went cold. She told Aidy, in a low voice, ‘I’ll see your pay packet isn’t short, in the circumstances.’
She saw the quizzical look that Aidy gave her, knew she was wondering how her forewoman could manage to get the wages manager to sanction payment for work she hadn’t done. Imelda wasn’t about to divulge to her that worksheets were often lost by slipshod junior clerks en route from the factory floor, and figures were often redone from the forewoman’s say so. There were always discrepancies in the output of garments too, with articles mislaid or pilfered, so if the output and hours didn’t quite match, for someone in Imelda’s position it was easy to write off any discrepancy.
‘Go, before I change my mind,’ she ordered her charge.
Bertha was busy washing and drying small brown bottles in readiness for filling with a new batch of one of the potions she was in the process of brewing. An eye-wateringly pungent smell was filling the kitchen, originating from a large blackened pan of simmering nettles and dock leaves and other peculiar-looking ingredients.
Bertha’s interest in natural remedies had been sparked as a young girl by an old friend of her grandmother’s. The old woman had lived in a ruin of a cottage surrounded by fields and woods a couple of miles out of town. How her grandmother had become friends with the wizened old creature in the first place would always remain a mystery to Bertha, but she would periodically pack a basket with home-made food and, taking her granddaughter along for company, set off on the two-hour journey to visit her.
The inside of that cottage was a source of wonderment to young Bertha. The low-beamed ceiling was lined with hooks from which hung bunches of wild flowers and vegetation in varying stages of drying out. Rows of shelves on the old wattle walls were crammed with bottles and jars containing ready-prepared potions and ointments. A basket of strangelooking fungi stood by the hearth. A rickety table at the back of the room was where the old crone made up her concoctions from a tattered if meticulously detailed recipe book, using a pestle and mortar and a set of weighing scales. The cooking up of her potions was done in a cauldron-like pot hanging from a hook over the fire. Bertha’s grandmother always returned home from these visits with her basket filled with an assortment of potions, ointments and pastes which she’d use to help ease, or hopefully cure, the ailments suffered by herself, her family and close friends.
How the old lady went about making her potions and what went into them fascinated the young Bertha. On one visit, forgetting her manners, she bluntly asked the old lady. Delighted that a youngster was interested in her pastime, she happily answered her questions, and from then on during each visit would enlighten Bertha further on the healing and soothing properties of different plants, flowers and fruits, and how she used each one or combined it with others, with a pinch of this or that, to make up cures which covered just about every ailment. She wasn’t, though, just an authority on the beneficial properties of what Mother Nature produced, but also on everyday products found in household pantries, which could also be used in the making up of healing and soothing concoctions.
It was with great sadness that on one visit Bertha and her grandmother arrived tired from their long journey to find the cottage deserted. On enquiring after the old lady’s whereabouts with her nearest neighbour, they learned that she had died in her sleep a few weeks before. Much to Bertha’s shock, though, the neighbour had been keeping for her a sealed box with her name scrawled on it in the old lady’s spidery handwriting. Curiously opening it up, she found inside the recipe book, pestle, mortar and scales.
Even at that tender age, Bertha was very touched by the old dear’s bequest to her and determined to put it to good use. The recipe book became her favourite bedtime reading and, as soon as she was allowed to go out alone, she would roam the countryside gathering her ingredients. She set up what she called her ‘potion room’ in her grandmother’s outhouse, cooking up her ingredients in a battered old cauldron on an antiquated oil stove begged from her