‘Nightmare Sounds’ is the second story in the ‘Orchard to Orchard’ series I created in collaboration in 2024, with photographer James Sebright. The series imagines lives interacting with one site in urban Sheffield over a 300-year period, combining creative writing, photography, photomontage and archival research.

It’s the sounds that bring my mind back to the horrors I’ve tried to put away.

When it rains heavily, the broken gutter on the house opposite overflows with a rhythmic slop, which takes me straight back to the flood. The house we lived in then had a step down into the scullery. The dirty, stinky water squeezed under the door and, sucked and flowed and then poured down the step in that same, rhythmic way. I loved that house – so much nicer than this tiny place with its window looking straight at the works wall.

When I hear Bertie Halstead walk past with his death cough, every third hack culminating in a high-pitched, squeaking wheeze, I’m right here with my Terry in his last few months before the grinder’s lung finished him off. Sometimes I could see where he’d wandered to, by the specks of grey-brown phlegm he’d spat as he shuffled out in search of something other than these dusty walls.

But worst of all it’s the children playing and laughing and shouting, and chanting their daft rhymes. Surely this should be the most joyful sound for a mother? For me it’s hell, a witch’s spell. It’s odd really, because this house is out of earshot of where the accident happened, especially when the furnace is firing and there’s the clatter of tools. The kids had been playing in our street an hour or so earlier.

I didn’t hear the wall come down, but I did smell the dust, and then there were people running and shouting urgently. Jilly and seven of her friends, crushed. A horrible death.

Now I don’t have the old house, I don’t have my Terry and I don’t have little Jilly either. And it’s these sounds that bring back the nightmares, and push away the happier times. I’ve got my sewing work, and fixing the leather aprons. But when the memories take me over my hands tremble, and I make mistakes and stab my fingers with the needle. Then it’s too painful to work for a day or two, and then I don’t get paid. I’ve been asking about getting some finishing work on the scissors to get some more money in, but I really want to move out and live with cousin Peggy at Ecclesfield.

My mind swings between wanting to burn my ears off to stop the sounds from coming, and then other days wanting to fight, to spare other families, other mothers from this nightmare.

The women at the chapel were talking about a protest in Paradise Square next Friday. They want people like me to speak about what we’ve lost because of the way the bosses don’t repair anything until someone gets killed. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it, but Dorothy just says, ‘all you have to do is tell them what you tell me.’ But I don’t know if anything’ll change.

Only last week there was talk of a steam boiler with a stuck safety valve. They say they’re going to fix it but there’ll be a shutdown and then they won’t pay the men. I’ve got this feeling in my gut that something bad is going to happen. I think we do need to protest. Something needs to change. I hope I can manage to stand up and speak.