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CHAPTER FIVE
I LOVE A LASSIE
I would be about eighteen when I started to "love a lassie" ! The tender passion comes early to the boys and girls in the Black Country. At least it did so in my time. We were men and women at sixteen and seventeen. School days were left far behind. We were battling for bread at an age which today would be looked upon as childhood. I was "boss o' the hoose" when I was thirteen; a year or two later I was a man earning a man's pay and with a man's outlook on life. Was it to be wondered at, therefore, that I early fell under the spell of two bonnie blue eyes and a mass of dark curls when the former flashed a look at me from a Salvation Army "ring" in the Black's Well one Sunday afternoon? I was smitten on the spot. I was captured and enraptured. It was love at first sight — first, last, and only. Annie Vallance — Nance! It's just on forty years ago, but I can scarcely write the dear name for the feelings that memory causes to surge within me. If ever a bonnie lassie knocked a young fellow "tapsalteerie" (literally, dizzy) fourteen-year-old Annie Vallance did me ! I couldn't eat the first night I saw her, I couldn't sleep, and the next day I couldn't work ! I had got it bad. Oh, dear me ! I thought I was going to die. But there's aye a Providence in these things. I managed to get an introduction through one of her young brothers. For Tom Vallance I have had a very soft side from that day to this. I taught him his job as a miner and he is now, as he has been for thirty years, my faithful friend and manager. Where I go Tom goes. I do nothing without consulting him. He is almost as well known all over the world as I am !
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