The Quality Street Wedding

by Penny Thorpe

  If I could just see your face, just for a moment …

  Mary sobbed as she draped the smeared sheaf of paper as close to the fire as she dared. Now she had nothing to show to Diana, and nothing of Albert until he appeared. If he appeared.

  Chapter Twelve

  One of the highlights of the week for Reenie and Peter was their visit to see their old manager, Major Fergusson. While most courting couples were queuing outside the pictures waiting for the latest offering from Dashiell Hammett on Saturday night, Reenie and Peter waited in the visitors room of the Stoney Royd Cottage Hospital for the visiting hour bell to sound.

  St Hilda’s was a cosy little place compared to the infirmary the Major had been admitted to at the start of the summer. It had a fresh, clean linen smell, mingled with sweet cut flowers and waxy furniture polish. Oddly enough Reenie took particular comfort from seeing the Major surrounded by homely things again, like the wooden bedside table and the framed picture of Beacon Hill on the wall. She’d visited him in the other hospital ward, the ward which had rattled with the clatter of metal medicine trollies and stung her eyes with the aroma of bleach. It had been the best place for him at the time – it was thanks to the infirmary that he had survived the poisoning at all – but she felt the peace of the cottage hospital was a good sign; he must be getting stronger if he didn’t need to be in the ‘big’ hospital any more.

  ‘Have you thought about what we can safely tell him?’ Peter was not a loud lad, but even so he felt the need to lower his voice in the hush of the waiting room.

  ‘We could tell him about Bess’s new job in the canteen?’ The matter of what they could tell Major Fergusson became more difficult with every passing week. Reenie and Peter had agreed that they wouldn’t tell the Major about any of the troubles they were having at the factory while he was recovering in the cottage hospital. The doctor had warned them that the older man must not be agitated, and they thought it likely that if he knew how the land lay in his old department he would be very agitated indeed.

  ‘That’s a good one. What about the factory stables? He likes horses. Has Ruffian been up to much or any of the other horses?’

  ‘Not much. Although one of the factory mares is in foal and there’ll be hell to pay when they work out whose fault it is, but apart from that it all just ticks along same as always.’ Reenie chewed the inside of her cheek in thought. ‘Do you think that if we don’t tell him quite how bad it is in the factory, but maybe mention one or two of the things very gently, we could get his advice? The Major is very good at advice.’

  Peter wished they could. Working in a department where no one fully knew who was in charge was the last thing he wanted. He shook his head. ‘I don’t think we can risk it. All the troubles stem from his absence and we don’t want him trying to hurry back if he needs more rest.’

  As it happened, Reenie and Peter fell back on the old, safe topic they always talked to Major Fergusson about on Fridays; it also just so happened to be the topic the two of them least wanted to touch on. It always seemed to be the best way to divert the Major’s attention from their real predicament, but it was creating an even greater strain.

  ‘I must say, I’m looking forward to your wedding immensely.’ The Major beamed at them happily from his hospital bed. ‘Have you set a date yet?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Peter blushed and tried not to seem too keen, ‘there’s time yet, Major. We’ve got a bit of saving up to do and Reenie wants to finish off this project she has running an experimental line …’ Peter trailed off, looking to Reenie to take over the topic of conversation that he wasn’t supposed to mention.

  ‘We’re in no hurry, Major.’ Reenie was torn between the joy she felt at giving the Major something to hope for, and the worry she felt about a wedding in the near future. ‘We’ll definitely wait until you’re back on your feet.’

  Reenie saw an opportunity to refill the Major’s water jug and seized it, saying she’d be back soon and she’d see if she could find them biscuits. She was clearly more agitated than usual and the Major had noticed.

  ‘I hope I haven’t brought up a distressing topic, Peter?’

  ‘No, no, I think we will get married one day, it’s just …’

  ‘Very early days.’ The Major was all understanding and reassurance, ‘You’re both still young. Whole lives ahead of you. Don’t want to settle down yet.’

  ‘It’s not that, Major Fergusson, it’s the marriage bar at Mackintosh’s. Reenie won’t be able to work once we’re married.’

  ‘I know your salary isn’t quite enough to set up home with, but wouldn’t your parents give you an allowance?’

  ‘I think they would but it’s not that, Major; it’s Reenie. You know how she loves her work – I don’t think there’s a factory girl in all Halifax that loves factory life as much as she does! If we married she could come back and do seasonal work with the married women when there are jobs to be had, but that would never be enough for her.’

  ‘She would settle down soon enough; I’ve seen plenty of girls do the same.’

  ‘But I don’t want that for my Reenie, Major. I’m so proud of her, so proud of what she can do that no one else can. You set her to a problem and she’ll find you a solution you’d never have thought of. I’m sure she’d find a way to make herself useful in the Mother’s Union, or the Women’s Cooperative Guild, or on some committee somewhere, but it would be a waste and we both know it. I’m proud of how different she is; I love seeing her eyes light up when she’s come up with a new plan for a production line and she’s talking ten to the dozen because she’s just so excited about it. How can I ask her to give that up? How can I ask her to give up one of the things about her that I love best?’

  The Major was silent, but sympathetic in his silence. He knew as well as Peter did just what a rarity Reenie was and just how perfectly matched the young couple had always been. There was no easy answer to their situation; the world was not going to change overnight.

  ‘We’ve got a new project, Major. We’re employing some of the married ladies on an experimental line. Reenie got permission to bring back a dozen or so, just temporarily, see if it makes time savings.’

  ‘Excellent news; excellent. You young people have so many fresh ideas, it’s wonderful. We must invest in our young people. And speaking of young people, how are your young cousins? Did they make it to Spain?’

  ‘Oh, you heard about that did you?’

  ‘I heard that you tried to go with them.’

  Peter looked a little embarrassed, perhaps because he had tried to run away to Spain to fight in their civil war, perhaps because he had been talked out of it.

  ‘I think you made a wise decision to remain here. The factory needs you – and Reenie needs you. We will have war in England soon enough and we’ll need you to be ready then.’

  ‘My cousins have been arrested.’ Peter didn’t like to burden Major Fergusson with his worries, but he was a long way from home, and he knew so few grown-ups in Halifax. ‘They were arrested even before they left England.’

  ‘And you’re feeling rather cowardly for not being arrested with them?’

  Peter nodded and rubbed the back of his head awkwardly with his palm. ‘They might have been arrested, but at least they were doing something. I’m just kicking my heels here in Halifax making toffees. I should be trying to—’

  ‘You should be keeping an eye on my department for me, and reporting to me on any developments. You could not be doing a more valuable job.’

  Now Peter felt even more guilty for not having told the Major any of the things he would have wanted to know.

  ‘Has Mr Sinclair arrived yet to take over as Head of Time and Motion?’

  ‘Not quite yet.’

  ‘But Mr Johns is still holding the fort all right?’

  ‘Oh yes, everything’s just fine. Nothing changes, really.’ Peter swallowed hard and wished Reenie would come back so that they could talk about the wedding she’d been avoiding.

/>   Chapter Thirteen

  ‘She can’t take Reenie’s experimental line. It’s not right.’ Peter was sitting at the kitchen table with his arms folded in opposition. It was later that same Saturday night and neither he, Reenie, nor Diana had to be at work again until Monday morning, but still they found themselves turning to the same old topics: who the force was for ill in their factory and how could they stop them?

  Diana preferred a quiet life and was much less inclined to seek active remedy in these matters. ‘She can and she has. I should stay clear of her if I were you.’

  ‘But the line was given to Reenie by a director!’

  ‘Yes, as an experiment.’ Diana reached behind her for a fresh packet of tea and threw it to Reenie who was brewing up, despite the fact that she no longer lived in Diana’s boarding house and had invited herself in with Peter when she’d bumped into Diana on her way home. ‘And that experiment failed when Reenie turned the production line upside down over a tin soldier.’

  ‘Yes, but that was—’ Reenie was quick to attempt to explain the intricacies of the mix-up, but Diana didn’t give her a chance.

  ‘Only to be expected when you put a seventeen-year-old in charge of a line. I don’t care how good you are setting up the machines, Reenie, it takes a different kind of talent to run a production line day-to-day. Say what you like about Mrs Starbeck, she runs an efficient line and we wouldn’t keep her on if she wasn’t liked by the overlookers.’

  Reenie wrinkled her nose as she put the kettle on the range to boil. ‘The horrible overlookers. None of the nice overlookers like her!’

  ‘We don’t have any horrible overlookers at Mack’s. We have women whose job it is to make sure the girls start work on time, don’t leave early, don’t run a piece-rate racket for more money, and don’t do anything dangerous. You forget that I used to work on the line same as you did, but I did it for a damn sight longer. I know just what chaos we’d have if there were no overlookers. You think of them all as cruel slave masters but you forget that they’re trying to look after their staff same as you are. You’re too busy trying to be everyone’s friend, letting them go early if they need to pick up their kids, chatting to them about their creaky knees—’

  ‘But it worked!’ Reenie wasn’t angry, just enthusiastic to expound on her theory of factory governance. ‘My line was faster than—’

  ‘It didn’t work.’ Diana rose to move the cat so that Reenie could put down the cups and saucers. ‘You had a shutdown over a tin soldier and called out half the medical staff for a scratched thumb. I know you don’t like losing your line to Mrs Starbeck, but sometimes these things happen. People have got better things to worry about just now than Time and Motion. Yours is the smallest department in the factory and the business can run without you. All right, you come along with your stopwatches and clipboards and find ways to make things a bit faster, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter.’

  Peter was frustrated by the way that Diana’s manager in the employment department allowed Mrs Starbeck to do so many things unchallenged. ‘If it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, then why can’t you stop her just this once?’

  ‘Because she’s right,’ Diana said. ‘Reenie shouldn’t have been trying to run a line on her own. Being made a Junior Manager at her age was a stretch, but being put in charge of a line was too much. She needs to wait until she’s older and has more experience.’

  Peter appeared to feel that this was not the real heart of the matter. ‘That’s not why Mrs Starbeck did it, though. She’s been taking over everything. There’s not a department where she hasn’t tried to interfere and you know it. She had six lines running under her last year, now she’s got thirteen.’

  ‘Well, that’s unlucky for her. If she wants all that extra work, she’s welcome to it. But there are bigger problems for the Employment Department and this isn’t one of them.’

  ‘Then what’s the Employment Department even for?’ Peter demanded.

  ‘It’s for the acres of paperwork you generate every time you resign to go to Spain to fight with your cousins, but then change your mind because you’ve realised you’ve got no fighting experience; it’s for writing up employment contracts and references for Jewish staff at the German factory who want a permit to come here; it’s lobbying for higher wages for women staff because they work just as hard as you, but they’re only getting paid a third as much, and it’s for—’ Diana was silenced by a key in the lock of the front door above their heads. ‘Shush! That’s her. She’ll hear you.’

  They waited in silence as they heard the front door click shut and quick footsteps disappear upstairs.

  Diana slumped back in her chair, relaxing into the gloom of the basement kitchen lit only by the oil lamp on the table and the occasional flash of light when Reenie opened the door of the range. ‘She won’t hear us now. She’s going to change out of her uniform.’

  Peter leant forward and asked in a hushed voice, ‘What uniform? She’s a senior manager, she doesn’t have a uniform.’

  ‘It’s not work, it’s her Blackshirt get-up. She has meetings with the British Union at Crabley Hall and gads about like Unity Mitford.’

  Reenie warmed the teapot with a little water and then spooned in the loose tea. ‘I thought it was illegal now to wear all that stuff in England?’

  ‘It is in public, but Crabley Hall is a private house, and she sneaks over there with a great raincoat covering her from neck to knee. She’s recruited a few more young ones from the factory to join her and she gets them writing to the Home Office to complain every time Mack’s employs a foreigner. That’s why Mr Baum got sent home early in the summer; she wrote to the Home Office and told them he was taking a British person’s job, despite the fact that there were no British people qualified to do the job.’

  Reenie dearly wanted to see the best in everyone, but she had failed to find anything praiseworthy in the Time and Motion Senior Manager. ‘Why don’t you sack her? Why doesn’t your boss sack her?’

  Diana held out her hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Nothing illegal about being in the BUF, and she’s entitled to her opinion about us employing foreigners. She’s someone who likes order and efficiency and she thinks that’s what Germany and Italy and Rumania have all got now they’ve got fascism, and she wants that here. She thinks the world would be a better place and everyone would be happier if Oswald Mosley took charge and made us like those European countries.’

  Peter, who had only recently tried to run away to Spain to fight those very people, struggled to see Mrs Starbeck’s point of view. ‘How can anyone think that? How can anyone see the newsreels of the fascists in Spain bombing women and children and think that’s better?’

  ‘You’d be surprised. This time last year the BUF weren’t so popular, but they’ve doubled their membership since the government started talking about us having air raids here – and that’s just the paying members. There’s plenty more who think Mosley’s ranting bile is all good sense, but they just can’t be bothered going to meetings. Mosley says he can prevent war by making us Hitler’s allies. People believe him and they join his rotten little party in their tens of thousands.’

  Peter shook his head with the hopelessness of it all. ‘Why did you let her move in here? How can you stand to be in the same house as her?’

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. And, I don’t own the place, do I? Mrs Garner’s sons own it and they’re still waiting for someone to buy it. Until then I’m just minding it for them and reminding all the lodgers to send them the rent. Besides, it might be worth keeping an eye on her.’

  Reenie’s ears pricked up. ‘I thought you said being in the BUF wasn’t illegal?’

  ‘It isn’t.’ Diana sipped her tea. ‘And neither’s keeping an eye on her.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was not yet time for the factory whistle to sound the start of the morning shift and Mrs Wilkes was already on her third cup of tea that day. As far as
Diana Moore could tell her manager existed exclusively on tea and toast. Where the woman got her energy from was an ongoing mystery; she was a phenomenon. The Head of the Women’s Employment Department could be said to hide her light under a bushel; she didn’t come to work in expensively cut suits like the other heads of department, or wearing pearl earrings like Mrs Starbeck. Amy Wilkes was ready to do battle on behalf of her employees each day armed only with a tweed suit and her tortoiseshell spectacles. Diana liked her, and she didn’t regret moving from the factory floor to be her assistant a year before.

  Diana had a reputation for being if not imperious, then at least a little difficult to tame. What Diana liked most about Mrs Wilkes was that she did not try to tame her because she did not want a meek and deferential assistant. Passive acquiescence might be a valuable trait in the Minnows – the fourteen-year-old girls who came straight from school to learn the most menial factory work – but Diana wasn’t making Strawberry Creams any more; she and her manager were determined to spend every day making working life better for their women workers, and an accommodating manner wouldn’t cut it.

  Diana slipped silently into her office with the first clutch of factory memoranda for the day and placed the crisp manilla envelopes on her manager’s desk then sat down without waiting to be asked. They had settled into a natural rhythm in the last year of working together and Diana had realised quickly that her manager was irritated by people who waited to be given permission to do things which they ought to do; and that she valued efficiency over antiquated etiquette. They were not quite friends but they had a bond of trust, and they were both glad to be working with the other rather than anyone else.