by Penny Thorpe
Mary held up a letter, but didn’t offer it to Diana. ‘It’s from Herr Baum. I went to collect it, but the post room said that Mrs Starbeck was going to check my post to make sure my mail from him is legitimate company business. I went to talk to Reenie, but when I got there she was tearing a strip off some lady toffee wrapper because she’d dropped a toy soldier in a vat of Harrogate Toffee—’
‘What, Reenie?’
‘No, Mrs Starbeck. She was on Reenie’s line, throwing her weight around. So I knew she wasn’t in her office and …’ Mary swallowed hard. ‘I went straight there, looked through all the letters on her desk until I found mine, and then I took it back. I came straight here after that.’
Diana glanced at the clock. Why was nothing involving Cynthia Starbeck ever simple? ‘Did anyone see you?’
‘I passed Dolly Dunkley in the corridor, but no one saw me in Mrs Starbeck’s office.’
Diana considered a moment and then said, ‘Although I don’t like her interfering in the work of every department in the factory, I think it would be wise on this occasion to put the letter back before she notices so you can’t be charged with the serious offence of stealing.’
‘No, I won’t let her see it!’
‘I know it’s galling, but I can speak to Mrs Wilkes first thing on Monday and she can take her to task for you. She’ll make sure it never happens again. In the meantime, you’ve got nothing to hide, have you?’
Mary said nothing, but her expression said everything.
Diana supposed she ought to have predicted something like this would happen. She didn’t ask what was in the letters and she dreaded to think. The only matter of importance to Diana at that moment was to postpone this problem so that she could leave the office on time.
‘All right, then, take the letter out of its envelope and give the envelope to me. I’ll tell Mrs Starbeck that it was delivered to this office and that she must have bundled it in with her memorandums to me by mistake. I’ll say that I opened it, but I won’t tell her this until Monday. That gives you a full weekend to either forge a run-of-the-mill letter in Herr Baum’s hand, or find an earlier letter from him which would pass for our purposes. Either way, you need to bring me a letter to show her first thing on Monday morning which shows that you have nothing to hide and that she was wrong to suspect you of unprofessional conduct, and so she had no good reason to intercept your post; do you think you can do that?’
Mary nodded.
‘Good.’ Diana rose and picked up her coat from the stand by the door. ‘Come straight here on Monday morning – and for God’s sake don’t get caught again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a dinner engagement.’ She slung a new leather satchel over her shoulder and opened the door for Mary and herself before another thought occurred to her. ‘Oh, and write to Herr Baum as soon as you can and warn him that his letters are not private if he sends them to the factory; if you must carry on with him, have him write to your home.’
But there were to be no more letters from Herr Baum. Diana could not have predicted that Mary was holding the last one …
Chapter Five
Cynthia Starbeck despised her assistant Dolly Dunkley – and Dolly Dunkley hated her manager Cynthia Starbeck. They made one another’s lives unpleasant day after day, word after word, and only their mutual dependence prevented them breaking into open hostility.
Dolly had applied for a position in Mrs Starbeck’s department at a time when a trained Shetland pony would have been given a job at Mack’s if it could hold a broom and follow an order, but at any other time in the firm’s history Dolly would not have made the grade. Coincidentally, Dolly had joined the British Union at the same time, just when their numbers had been dwindling and they were glad of any recruit and Cynthia Starbeck’s great passion in life was the cause of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and National Socialists; this had been part of the reason she had taken Dolly under her wing. But the factory no longer had a shortage of staff and the British Union’s membership had doubled in a year. In its swell of popularity, people like Dolly were becoming an embarrassment and Mrs Starbeck wished she could get rid of her somehow.
‘Dunkley, why are there still posters about influenza on the walls outside my office?’ Mrs Starbeck’s sweet, sugary tones were slightly impeded by the fact that she was clenching her teeth.
‘They’re not on the walls. They’re just on one wall.’ Dolly appeared to think that this was a get-out-of-jail-free card and she pressed on. ‘I took them down from the side of the wall I was walking past. You didn’t say you wanted me to walk down both sides of the corridor.’ Dolly whined as easily as she breathed, perhaps a little more easily because a congenital nasal obstruction tended to give her something of a waking snore.
If Mrs Starbeck hadn’t had Reenie Calder in tow she might have given Dolly a sound ticking off, but as it was she merely said, ‘Go and take the rest of them down and bring them here.’
‘Why can’t Reenie do it?’ It was the same old complaint; Dolly was from a good grammar school, had obtained the Higher School Certificate, and felt personally cheated that someone of a lower social status should be allowed to achieve advancement in the factory through a combination of hard work, innate gifting, and heroism in the face of blazing danger as Irene Calder had. Dolly knew what trigonometry was and could recite chunks of things which she didn’t understand in ancient Greek which meant, in her mind, that she should be in charge. Mrs Starbeck knew that, once in charge, Dolly would be just as ungrateful, but Dolly was greedy and she wanted everything she saw, whether she could make use of it or not.
Mrs Starbeck gave her a steely look. ‘It is not your place to question your manager, Dunkley.’ She watched Dolly stomp out of the office, and then directed Reenie to sit while she removed the white coat and mobcap she always wore when she visited the factory floor, revealing the neat, glossy rope of golden plaits which were twisted tightly round the crown of her head like a halo.
Mrs Starbeck’s office in the Time and Motion Department was spartan. She didn’t permit work spaces to become cluttered with evidence of the daily grind, personal mementoes, distracting family photographs, or rogue plants. Perhaps, deep down, she was trying not to settle in the Halifax factory; she wanted to return to her émigré’s life in Düsseldorf where she had enjoyed a lively social calendar and an unprecedented amount of power over the day-to-day running of the factory. She would go back to her friends and her fascism in Germany if it weren’t for the cost. Financial constraints now meant that her departmental manager position in the factory was a necessity rather than a hobby. Little reminders of her old life remained: a notebook cover bound in Austrian calf skin and monogrammed in gold; a box of new pencils wrapped in marbled paper that she’d picked up on her way through Florence last spring; a letter opener with the insignia of the British Union of Fascists emblazoned on the bone handle – a gift from a Greek admirer. Yes, there was a good life to return to on the continent as soon as she’d settled her affairs in Halifax once and for all.
‘I’m shutting down your so-called “experimental” line’ Mrs Starbeck said once she had made herself comfortable in her own seat of power. ‘Allowing a foreign body to contaminate raw product is unacceptable.’
‘Oh no, please don’t do that, Mrs Starbeck! My ladies really do work so hard and they have done such a good job setting up a whole new line from scratch and getting it running without any fuss at all.’
‘I hardly call stopping production on an entire line while you cry wolf about a dangerous tropical spider to be an absence of fuss.’
‘Please don’t blame them for that – it was my fault. I was the one who said I thought it was a spider and they weren’t to know. I was tired and I couldn’t see properly, and I mistook the leg of the tin soldier for—’
‘I don’t have time for this, Irene. You have not only wasted my time today, but also that of the factory pest controller, the factory laboratory, and the Mackintosh’s nurse. Not to mention the ti
me lost by shutting down the line while you drained an entire vat of toffee, which now has to be incinerated as unfit for consumption. You leave me no choice but to shut down—’
‘But what about Mr Johns?’ Reenie blurted out the question against her better judgement, and cringed at her superior’s reaction.
Cynthia Starbeck was frosty. ‘What about Mr Johns?’
‘Well …’ Reenie hesitated as she embarked on a dubious course of action. ‘I just thought that if he’s still acting head of our department, then … because shutting the line down would mean putting so many ladies out of work and losing us so much production time … he’d have to be notified and give due consideration …’ Reenie looked as though she were trying to suck all of her words back into her lungs and expunge the horrible echo of the veiled threat she had just made against Cynthia Starbeck, a manager far more senior than herself.
‘Give due consideration? And what do you think a disciplinary panel would decide if they had the opportunity to give due consideration to your histrionics over an imagined spider? I do hope you appreciate that I am treating you very leniently by not taking this to a disciplinary hearing?’ Mrs Starbeck waited for a reply and then prompted, ‘Well, do you?’
‘Yes, Mrs Starbeck. I’m sorry, Mrs Starbeck. I only wanted to save the jobs of my ladies.’
‘Yes, well, I suppose if they’re good workers I might be able to use some of them. I will agree not to take the foreign body incident to a disciplinary on the condition that you don’t make any trouble while I take over the running of the experimental line myself. As a particular kindness to the women on your former line I will give them a one-week trial to see if they can work according to my methods.’ Cynthia Starbeck waited a moment while Reenie looked at her like a rabbit caught in headlights and, once she was confident that the girl was not going to mount any challenge, she ushered her out. This was how Cynthia Starbeck annexed new territory in the power game she played at Mackintosh’s Celebrated Toffee Factory.
Chapter Six
Kathleen Calder wanted to be the first woman to sit in the House of Lords. The fact that she was thirteen years old, still shared a bed with her sister Reenie, and lived on a sheep farm in rural West Yorkshire, were merely temporary obstacles to her plan to reach the elevated status of the highest in the land. So too the fact that a woman had never been allowed to sit in the second chamber; there were women in the House of Commons as Members of Parliament, which meant – as far as Kathleen was concerned – it was only a matter of time before a woman of wealth and ambition bought herself a peerage and got the rules changed.
Kathleen Calder was one of those strange combinations of vaulting ambition mixed with pragmatic fatalism. Where her older sister Reenie would invest great energy into forcing an outcome, Kathleen was ready to watch, anticipate, and play the long game.
Kathleen’s plan centred around her starting a successful business empire and becoming High Sheriff of Yorkshire. To the sister of Reenie Calder this did not seem such a stretch in the twentieth century; after all, Violet Mackintosh had started her own business selling toffees on a Saturday in Halifax and now her family were rich as Rockefeller and her eldest son had received a knighthood in 1922 and had become a baronet in 1935. Their business was worth making a particular study of as far as Kathleen was concerned and the most obvious way to study them would be to get a job at Mack’s, but here were her first two major obstacles: they didn’t take girls under fourteen and her sister Reenie – who already worked there – had explicitly told her she didn’t want her getting a job at her factory.
Reenie, however, hadn’t reckoned on Kathleen finding a loophole, and on Friday after school Kathleen went to assess its potential.
‘Excuse me, Mr Hebblewhite?’ Kathleen assumed her most Shirley Temple-esque expression of polite and well-meaning innocence. ‘I’ve found some litter outside your shop and I was just wondering if you’d allow me to put it in your wastepaper bucket. I do so like to try to leave places looking better than I found them.’
Kathleen had chosen her mark carefully; Mr Hebblewhite not only ran the only Mackintosh’s misshapes shop in town, but he was also vain about his shop premises. Any young person who showed an enthusiasm for the shabby little place under the bridge, and the presentability thereof, was likely to do well with the old man.
‘Yes, well,’ Mr Hebblewhite sniffed with a resentment which concealed a weight of pride, ‘quite right too. Young people these days, they come round here on a Saturday and mob me like gannets, then leave the place looking like a bomb’s hit it.’ Mr Hebblewhite shuffled his hunched old shoulders around the cramped shop counter in search of a wastepaper bucket, and when he returned – proffering it with long, arthritic fingers – he was waving it in the direction of the door to demonstrate that he expected Kathleen to extend her Good Samaritan work even further and go back outside to pick up even more of the litter which had gathered around the shop under the bridge.
The bridge was no mean lean-to; it was a mighty iron construction the Victorians had put up. It had statuary, supporting towers in carved stone, streetlamps and gaudy paint. It crossed the river and the railway line in grand style and it left one tiny surviving relic of the old days and the old bridge nestling beneath its east span: Hebblewhite’s Newsagent, Tobacconist, and Fancy Confectioner. As far as Kathleen could tell, the refuse of the entire town had blown down from the bridge and gathered at the feet of the old man’s shop and he hadn’t lifted a finger to sweep it away for weeks. Kathleen was not keen on picking up other people’s rubbish as a rule, but if this was her way to secure a job – and a job which got her one step closer to Mackintosh’s – then she’d willingly push a broom.
‘They’ve left it in a terrible mess this time, Mr Hebblewhite. Would you like some help clearing it all up?’
‘There’s no free sweets in it for you, if that’s what you’re thinking!’
‘Oh no, Mr Hebblewhite, I just offered to be public-spirited. I’ve not much of a sweet tooth; I’m bookish.’ The fact that the two didn’t need to be mutually exclusive did not come up.
‘Hmm …’ Ropey old Mr Hebblewhite growled as he thought aloud. ‘More youngsters ought to show an appreciation of local landmarks like this one. Oldest building in town, this is. Older even than the Oak Room.’
Kathleen knew her local lore; she’d even been to the Halifax library at Belle Vue to do an extra bit of reading on it in readiness to impress the shopkeeper if she got the chance. There had been a bridge over that part of the River Hebble since the last years of King Edward I, that miserable, warmongering, Hammer of the Scots. In those dim and distant days of Edward Longshanks the town had been little more than a cluster of huts around a brook, but they’d had a wooden bridge all the same, and it must have been well-used because it was eventually rebuilt in good Yorkshire stone.
‘You’re too right, Mr Hebblewhite.’ Kathleen gathered up handfuls of old paper bags and discarded bus tickets to stuff into the bucket which waited. ‘I heard tell your shop used to be a chapel, back in the time of the Wars of the Roses, like?’
‘That one fell down.’ Mr Hebblewhite pulled his ratty brown woollen shawl a little closer in at his throat and turned to go back into the shop, his bucket now full. ‘This one were built in 1490 with roof beams as could last till doomsday; just look at those roof beams. Solid elm, they are.’
From her reading in the library Kathleen had gathered that, in the age of knights and damsels, it was common to see little chapels at the end of bridges. They weren’t true churches with Sunday services and a regular congregation who’d be hatched, matched, and dispatched under the auspices of one priest; they were just little shrines where folks who’d travelled a long and dangerous journey to get to a town could stop and give thanks that they’d reached safety. Now that same little chapel had lost what symbols of religion it might once have borne and was papered from floor to ceiling with advertisements for Rowntree’s Clear Gums, Dairy Box chocolates, and Mackintosh’s Tof
fee Deluxe.
‘I’m very interested in the history of your premises, Mr Hebblewhite.’ Kathleen hoped this sounded plausible; her entire plan hinged on him believing that she was a budding antiquarian. ‘I should be most grateful if you’d be good enough to tell me about them.’
The old man made a show of reluctance, but talked at length while Kathleen got a good look at this shop which was once a chapel. The chantry – so this type of chapel was called – at the end of a bridge was a small place; it only needed to be large enough to hold a handful of travellers for a short mass, then the rest of the time a monk would rattle around it on his own, offering up prayers for the safety of all those who might be coming to, or going from his little chapel. The old chantry had survived not only the Wars of the Roses, but also the ravages of West Yorkshire weather. Even those loyal subjects of King Henry VIII, who went about tearing down so many examples of piety, didn’t touch it either; they ignored it and let the locals use it as a warehouse and then as the local gaol. After changing hands too many times to follow, it became a little grocer’s shop, and then metamorphosed like a butterfly from a grub into the solidly successful sweetshop Mr Hebblewhite thought of as his home away from home. Its success was down to one thing, and one thing alone: it was the only store in town which sold the cheap misshapes of Mackintosh’s toffees.
It seemed peculiarly fitting that the goods which were surplus to requirements at Mackintosh’s should be sold from a building which had itself always been surplus to requirements – chapel, gaol, warehouse, shop. Like the broken confections it sold, the shop had a gnarled and bobbly appearance. What had once been gargoyles and decorative flourishes carved into the outside walls were now weathered to lumpy outcrops of sandstone, worn down by wind and rain to stumps like lollipops. Yes, Kathleen Calder thought she could make something of the old place.