Daphne Randall slipped the centre rope through a metal hoop on the quayside and held it fast as Hilary Carrington stepped gingerly from the stern onto the frosty flagstones. Her friend was still recovering her boat legs, but remembered enough of the routine to secure the stern rope as Daphne tied off the bowline.
'So this was the actual pottery that your mother's coach party came to?' asked Hilary. She had heard the story many times of how old Mrs Randall stowing away on a coach at a motorway service station had brought Daphne to the Potteries, but this was her first visit to the place where the old lady was safely retrieved.
Daphne rested her arms on the roof of her boat as her glance swept back along the canal. There had been no ice on the water that day, only glinting sunlight and a scattering of litter as the boat she now called home had putted past and she had waved to its cheeky-faced skipper.
'Fancy a brew, Hils?' She had planned to show her friend the restored Victorian offices and the bottle kiln first, but the trip up from Etruria had been bitterly cold and she needed something to thaw her out.
'Rather!' Hilary agreed.
Tea and snacks were no longer served in a corner of the Seconds Shop. Instead, the glass doors of a smart new cafe overlooked the canal, facing across the water to a mural that mirrored the chintzy china for which Burleigh was famous.
'Grab a seat by the stove, Hils and I'll get the drinks.'
'My treat - I insist!'
Daphne settled herself onto a leather sofa and relaxed in luxury beside a glowing stove. Moments later, her friend landed a tray with two generous cream-crested mugs of hot chocolate and two rich chocolate brownies on the table before her.
'I see you're not cutting down after Christmas!'
Hilary cast herself onto the leather sofa. 'There's plenty of time for that once we get back home,' she said. 'And actually, we didn't go mad over Christmas or New Year - we were on edge waiting for the news from Skipton...'
'So do I have to call you Grandma now?'
'I'd really rather you didn't!'
Daphne chuckled. Advancing age was always a sensitive point with Hilary.
'There's something else to remind us we're getting old,' said Daphne, raising her eyes to the heavens and the background music. 'I well remember the first time they released Do They Know It's Christmas, and this has to be the third or fourth version now.'
Hilary smiled thoughtfully. 'We were talking about Christmas songs and our memories of them when we had our Christmas Eve drink at work. The others told some funny and touching stories - I did laugh at Paula's, as I know her father-in-law and he is a bit of a character. But this was my tune, thanks to the Christmas Party you organised for the Miners' children during the strike. I could remember it playing at the end and...' She dabbed her eyes with her napkin.
'Aw pet! Don't get all upset! I always think of it as one of the happiest memories of that year. There wasn't a lot a bunch of students could do to help but giving the kiddies a party with jelly and ice-cream, balloons, cakes and all the other things that they'd usually take for granted at Christmas was something we could do.'
'Except we didn't know how much work it would involve - Sandra and I must have spent days making butterfly cakes and I'd never cut up so many sandwiches in my life!' Hilary cut her brownie into dainty squares. 'I thought we'd have a lot more helpers.'
'We always thought everyone was on our side, didn't we?' Daphne slurped her chocolate and wiped cream from the tip of her nose. 'Mind you, a lot of the others had started going home for Christmas so we shouldn't have been surprised to find it was just the die-hards left - or should that be die-hard lefties?'
'Buttering bread and grating cheese for the cause!' Hilary laughed. 'Hardly the stuff of proletarian revolution.'
'I don't know. We could have built proper barricades out of Morag's scones!'
'Don't be unkind!' Hilary looked pensive again. 'They all got eaten.'
'I'm not surprised at that. The kiddies didn't stop tearing about from the moment they arrived, except for that first twenty minutes of furious feasting, and we were run ragged keeping them entertained after that.'
'Where did that bouncy castle come from? I don't think I'd ever seen one until then. I certainly hadn't been on one before.'
'I don't remember, Hils, but I think you trying it out was the high point of the evening for a quite few of the lads!'
Hilary was sipping her hot chocolate and her laugher blew a few bubbles of whipped cream onto the table. 'It was your speech before the children arrived that impressed me,' she said.
'I don't remember any speech,' said Daphne.
'Well, perhaps it wasn't really a speech - more of a briefing. You told all of us helpers that we were to remember that it was a party for the children, and that while we were there for political reasons, because we wanted to support the Miners and encourage them to carry on, the children weren't coming for a lesson in political science and lectures on Socialism, but to have fun and forget the strike for a couple of hours. "I don't wanna hear any political shit from any of yous," you said. And then you opened the doors...'
'And all hell broke, with a horde of bairns bearing down on the food tables as if they hadn't seen scran like it for months...'
'Which they hadn't,' Hilary recalled. 'That's what brings a tear to my eye - that when it was time to go home, they were loading all the left-over sandwiches and cakes, and even Morag's scones, onto paper party plates and in plastic bags so they could take it away. I'll never forget that. I'd never seen children so desperate for food. I never thought I would again.'
'But we have lately, haven't we?' Daphne said.
'I know. There are families without enough money for food everywhere, only this time it's sanctions, benefit cuts and zero-hours contracts to blame. And of course the poor little children don't understand...'
'I think you'll find those poor little children sometimes understand better than you think.' Unexpectedly, Daphne smiled. 'You mentioning my pep-talk and the wee'uns gathering up the spare food at the end reminded me of something. I was helping a couple of little lads, about nine or ten I suppose, to make a parcel of sandwiches, when one says to me, "I hate that Maggie Thatcher, Miss! Do you?" And I said, "I certainly do, boys. But one day she'll be dead and gone and people will stop believing in her way of doing things, and we'll be here to see it, and we'll have won." And they cheered, and carried on stacking their plates with sandwiches, until their mams came to take them home.'
'Only it feels like she's never gone away,' Hilary sighed. 'And if anything, more people than ever seem to believe in Thatcherism. After all, we have the two main parties squaring up for the election commited to making much the same cuts over slightly different timescales, and the ghastly UKIP, who are essentially turbo-charged Thatcherites, supposedly offering an alternative. That doesn't feel like a victory to me.'
'I believed what I said then Hills, and I believe it still,' Daphne asserted. 'Mark my words, pet; we'll see a change in our lifetimes.'
'What makes you so sure?'
'These things go in cycles, don't they? And it's time for the tide to turn.'
'I do hope you're right.' Hilary gazed out of the window and across the canal. 'For the sake of the next generation.'
'And the one after that to. Here's to baby Freya, Grandma!' Daphne raised her mug in salute.
'Don't call me that!'
Hilary sounded fierce, but her eyes were smiling.
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