He was known as the Never Never man in the mill towns up and down the Holme.
When the cottage weavers came down from the hills they came without furniture to the workers housing that sprang up in long terraced rows around the mills. Two up two down and a privy in back.
The Never Never man offered furniture - a table, chairs. A couple of beds. In the hills life had been simple. Build your own rough furniture. Grow a little food, keep some chickens and maybe a hog. In the mill towns it was different. The Never Never man got you going. Collected a few pennies every week to pay for what you got.
The hard thing was collecting. He had to collect Saturday dinner time, before the money was gone on gin and groceries.
``I'm doing them a service,'' he told his wife, ``I'm getting them something to show for their work before they can drink it away.''
In the best of years he broke even.
When the strikes started he supported the strikers. He could see what he could see. The blighted children put to work at two years old to clear the lint from under the whirring looms. Women too poor to own any covering for their bodies except a ragged skirt and a shawl crossed over their breasts and tied at the waist. Men, women, children all finding a refuge in the gin palace. Mill owners and managers living in garish Victorian splendor, their children out-rigged in lush velvets and held prisoner in their oppressive homes. The Never Never man stood with the strikers.
But the strikes drew out. He did not attempt to collect when people were on strike, but as the strikes went on, people began to leave. They went quietly in the night. They loaded hand-carts toppling high and flit the cobbled streets. Raggle taggle families on the move. Taking the Never Never man's furniture with them.
He would hear their clogs on the cobbles in the night. He would hear the creak and clatter of the over loaded carts. He would stand in his night shirt in the chilly dark watching his kitchen tables, legs in the air, receding down the valley in the rain.
The Never Never man would follow them.