Phoebe had to go and, when he was old enough, that is to say at five, John also went. The legal age for apprentices was seven--they were workhouse children bound to the master till they were twenty-one--but John was a “free” laborer, so, until the Act of 1819, which made nine years and twelve working hours the minimum, John was “free” to work at five, to be a breadwinner, to add his magnificent contribution to the family wage which kept the Bradshaws from the workhouse. The factory bell was the _leit motif_ of his life, but the Bradshaws had a relic of their past which made them envied. They had a clock, and the clock told them when it was time to get up to go to the factory. Others, clockless, got up long before they needed and waited in the chill of early morning, at five o’clock, for the door to open. The idea of ringing the bell as a warning half an hour before working hours began had not occurred to any one then, and people rose in panic and went out, cutting short sleep shorter, stamping in snow (or, if snow is sentimental, is it ever particularly joyous to rise, with a long day’s work ahead, at five and earlier?), waiting for the doors to let them in to warmth. No one was ever late. The fines made it expensive to be late, and the knocker-up, the man who went round and for a penny or tuppence a week rattled wires at the end of a clothes-prop against your bedroom window till you opened the window and sang out to him--the knocker-up was a late Victorian luxury. In John’s day, there was only the factory bell, and one was inside the factory when it rang. The bell was the symbol of the system, irritating the weavers especially, as the power-loom increased in efficiency, and drove more and more of them to the factories. The spinners, indeed, had had the interregnum of the water-factory: it was not, for them, a straight plunge into the tyranny of the system. The old hand-weaver, whose engine was his arms, began and stopped work at will, which is not to say that he was a lazy fellow, but is to say that he had time to grow potatoes in a garden, to take a share in country sports and, on the whole, to lead a reasonable life: and his wife had the art and the time to cook food for him. When she worked in the factory, she had no time to cook, and there was nothing to cook, either, and if she had worked from childhood, she had never learned how to cook, and there was no need. They lived on bread and cheese, with precious little cheese. They rarely lived to see forty.