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Updated: July 9, 2025
To accommodate the regiments of miners, Carston, Waite and Co. built the Squares, great quadrangles of dwellings on the hillside of Bestwood, and then, in the brook valley, on the site of Hell Row, they erected the Bottoms. The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners' dwellings, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve houses in a block.
So it pleased him to talk to her about himself, like the simplest egoist. Very soon the conversation drifted to his own doings. It flattered him immensely that he was of such supreme interest. "And what have you been doing lately?" "I oh, not much! I made a sketch of Bestwood from the garden, that is nearly right at last. It's the hundredth try." So they went on.
The child required much attention, and the flies were teasing. The children were put to bed at seven o'clock. Then she worked awhile. When Walter Morel and Jerry arrived at Bestwood they felt a load off their minds; a railway journey no longer impended, so they could put the finishing touches to a glorious day. They entered the Nelson with the satisfaction of returned travellers.
Two fields away Bestwood began, with a jumble of roofs and red house-ends, out of which rose the church tower and the spire of the Congregational Chapel. And beyond went woods and hills, right away to the pale grey heights of the Pennine Chain. Paul looked down the garden for his mother. Her head appeared among the young currant-bushes. "Come here!" she cried. "What for?" he answered.
He flew home with his anvil, breathless, with a "Look, mother!" That was the first real tribute to herself. She took it like a queen. "How pretty!" she exclaimed. Then he began to get ambitious. He gave all his money to his mother. When he earned fourteen shillings a week, she gave him back two for himself, and, as he never drank, he felt himself rich. He went about with the bourgeois of Bestwood.
In this subtle antagonism they knew each other like old friends, they were as shrewd with one another almost as man and wife. But Annie had always kept him sufficiently at arm's length. Besides, she had a boy of her own. The Statutes fair, however, came in November, at Bestwood. It happened that Annie had the Monday night off.
Water ran down the sides of the waggons, over the white "C.W. and Co.". Colliers, walking indifferent to the rain, were streaming down the line and up the field, a grey, dismal host. Morel put up his umbrella, and took pleasure from the peppering of the drops thereon. All along the road to Bestwood the miners tramped, wet and grey and dirty, but their red mouths talking with animation.
"Where should we go for dinner?" asked the mother. It was felt to be a reckless extravagance. Paul had only been in an eating-house once or twice in his life, and then only to have a cup of tea and a bun. Most of the people of Bestwood considered that tea and bread-and-butter, and perhaps potted beef, was all they could afford to eat in Nottingham.
He has finished school now." "He would live in Bestwood?" "Yes; but he could be in at the station at quarter to eight." "H'm!" It ended by Paul's being engaged as junior spiral clerk at eight shillings a week. The boy did not open his mouth to say another word, after having insisted that "doigts" meant "fingers". He followed his mother down the stairs.
One day a friend of his and of Clara's, in Bestwood, asked him to take a message to Mrs. Dawes. He went in the evening across Sneinton Market to Bluebell Hill. He found the house in a mean little street paved with granite cobbles and having causeways of dark blue, grooved bricks. The front door went up a step from off this rough pavement, where the feet of the passersby rasped and clattered.
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