The Quality Street Wedding

by Penny Thorpe

  ‘But she’ll not hear you …’

  Albert took Mary’s hand and kissed it, then looked to Mrs Norcliffe to understand.

  ‘What’s all this?’ Mrs Norcliffe sat up. ‘You’re not that letter-writer are you?’ It was more of an accusation than a question. ‘I don’t hold with letter-writing!’

  ‘She doesn’t go in for reading or writing,’ Bess tried to explain to their visitor. ‘It’s a rotten shame because it would be a lot easier to tell her what we’re on about if she could read it off a slate or summat.’

  Mrs Norcliffe was preparing to shoo Albert Baum from the house. ‘What use is letter-writing? You won’t get work writing letters. You’ll be on the dole and expecting to live here; well, I’ll not have it.’

  Mary reverted to bellowing. ‘No, Mother, he’s at the factory! He’s at Mack’s.’

  ‘Not in those clothes, you’re not.’ Mrs Norcliffe looked appraisingly at Albert Baum, who was not dressed for factory work. ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’

  ‘No, Mrs Norcliffe.’ Albert remained bright and cheerful. ‘I am German.’

  Mrs Norcliffe frowned. ‘You’re who?’

  Albert raised his voice a little louder. ‘I am German.’

  ‘Well, Mr Herman, I think you’ve got a foreign look about you, and I don’t trust foreigners.’

  Albert Baum did not take offence; he was used to far worse treatment at home. ‘I am a foreigner. I am German, and I am Jewish, and I am proud of this.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘I am German and Jewish.’

  ‘Welsh? I knew it! Black hair! Celtic look about you! I’ve never trusted the Welsh; nor the Cornish, neither. Well, you’ll not walk out with our Mary, and I’ll not have you under my roof, so don’t you think about coming calling here.’ Mrs Norcliffe went shuffling off in search of her broom, the better to sweep away the dangerous Celtic stranger.

  Albert Baum’s polite smile did not falter, but he did betray a certain confusion when he asked Mary and Bess quietly, ‘What is Welsh? Is this a profession?’

  Bess did not appear surprised that the conversation had taken this turn, nor was she attempting to disabuse her mother of the idea. ‘No, Wales is a country. It’s British – you know, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales?’

  ‘Oh, Welsh is a person from Wales? I see … no, I don’t see, why does your mother become angry at the thought I might be Welsh?’

  Bess shrugged. ‘She’s never liked the Welsh, so don’t mind her, we never do.’

  ‘But is the German accent very similar to Welsh?’

  Mary sighed in resigned exasperation. ‘It is if you’re deaf.’

  ‘I see. Mrs Norcliffe, I am here to ask if I may walk out with your daughter; I wish to court her.’ Albert said this so loudly and clearly that there could be no mistaking him. ‘I can provide excellent character references.’

  Bess pointed out, ‘She can’t read ’em. You could try giving her flowers. Or oranges – she likes oranges – she ate all mine when I were poorly.’

  ‘If you think there is a chance then I will try it. For Mary, I will try anything!’ Albert Baum wasted no time in dashing up to the shop on the corner of the next street, purchasing a crate of oranges, and returning with them to present to the mother of his intended.

  ‘Mrs Norcliffe,’ he cried, ‘I propose an exchange!’

  But he was too late. By the time he returned Mrs Norcliffe had stomped off to her job at the Sunlight Laundry where she washed the linens from the Isolation Hospital. She had left Mary and Bess sitting on the front step to await Albert’s return.

  ‘We don’t need her permission,’ Mary told him, with the sadness of a daughter who had never shaken the need for her mother’s approval but had also never got it, ‘we’re only going to the People’s Park.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mary,’ Bess piped up, ‘I’ll talk her round. She listens to me.’ But even if her mother had been capable of hearing Bess, there was much less time than Bess thought.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Reenie had never thought that there would come a day when she would find herself sick of the sight of Peter’s bicycle. She was convinced he’d changed the ball bearings in the wheels three times that month alone, and she couldn’t understand why he needed new pedals when there was already a pair attached which fitted his feet. Reenie began to suspect that Peter was playing for time alone when they could talk but Reenie didn’t want to talk – not about the same things Peter did, anyway.

  Reenie had left Ruffian at the stable behind the factory and walked round to Peter’s boarding house where his easily irritated landlady gave her ‘one of her looks’. The yard at the back of the boarding house was not inviting, not like the yard up at her parents’ farm where her mother would bring out a hot cup of cocoa and a toasted scone, and the warm light of the kitchen would flood the flagstones from the window where her sister always sat. At one time Peter had tried to plan his bicycle jobs around Sunday afternoons at her parents’ farm; he would ride up for lunch with them and then he’d get on with whatever he needed to do while Reenie chatted away to him, or brushed Ruffian down, or did some mending while she sat on a kitchen chair. If it was a cold afternoon, her father would throw some rubbish from the farm into a brazier and she’d keep warm beside it while Peter worked as quickly as he could. But he rarely came up to the farm any more and she realised now that this was deliberate; he was doing things this way so that he could talk to her away from her parents. He asked again about the wedding.

  ‘Are you sure it’s marriage that you want?’ Reenie found it contrary to her nature to be resisting a new experience and a new opportunity, but this felt so much like that threatened future in domestic service which she had thought the factory job was saving her from forever. There was a suffocating quality to the feeling and she wanted to put it off for a while longer because she was sure she’d come around. ‘Couldn’t you go for a soldier while we have a long engagement?’

  ‘But don’t you want our lives to start? Don’t you want to get on with being whoever you’re going to be?’

  ‘I’m already who I’m going to be, my life’s already started, it started when I was born. Getting married is just one of the things I’ll do and I’m not kicking my heels until we can set up house, are you?’

  ‘Yes, Reenie! That’s what I’ve been telling you! This feels like treading water until I can get to dry land. I don’t understand how you can bear it. Everything we do now is temporary; we don’t get to choose what our home looks like, or who crosses the threshold to eat dinner at our table – we can’t even choose our own furniture. We’re living like children in a nursery when we’re old enough to make our own decisions.’

  ‘If you think that will all change by making me an army wife, then you’re more fool than I thought, Peter Mackenzie.’

  ‘That’s just until the war is out of the way – and if it starts by Easter it will be over by Christmas.’

  ‘Where have I heard that before?’

  ‘It’s true this time. Things are different this time.’

  ‘And if we get married you’ll be impatient for your army commission to be served before our lives can start; and then you’ll be impatient for us to have a baby so that our lives can start; and then a bigger house so that our lives can start; and then get the children off to school so that our lives can start. If your life hasn’t started yet it never will and you’ll always be reaching for something. Marrying me isn’t going to start your life off in a new world.’

  ‘But I love you, Reenie! Why shouldn’t I want to marry someone who I’m in love with? Why shouldn’t I want to start a life with them?’

  ‘You’ve already started it. I’m here. And if you really want to go for a soldier, I’ll wait for you and I’ll write to you. If the war’s really over by Christmas then you’ll be back long before I turn nineteen. Still on the young side for a bride, if you ask me, but significantly less hasty than marrying at seventeen.’

&nbs
p; ‘Are you saying that if we wait a year we can be wed?’

  Reenie didn’t answer.

  That damn bicycle. She had felt a strange fondness for it when they’d first started walking out. She’d thought of it as his loyal steed, as reliable as Ruffian. It had been invaluable that night of the factory fire when they needed to go in search of Bess, it had made the search for the poisoned chocolates over the summer so much quicker, and it had given them a means of seeing each other when they weren’t at the factory. She used to be glad at the sight of his blue racer, but now it felt like one more thing trapping her. She realised that if they married she would spend the rest of her days watching him take it apart on the kitchen table, before slowly, messily putting it back together again.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  ‘I’m so exhausted I can’t see what I’m doing.’ Siobhan Grimshaw turned the sweet carton over in her hands and squinted at it. ‘Is this the right way up?’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’ Pearl folded up another carton and passed it to her colleague. ‘I haven’t been able to see anything without my glasses since 1922.’

  ‘Change places with me.’ Doreen Fairclough rose from her stool at the wrapping table. ‘You can foil-wrap for a bit and I’ll pack.’

  ‘I can’t touch the sweets, look at me hands!’ Siobhan proffered her hands for inspection, and sure enough they were red raw and deeply cracked around the knuckles and fingertips.

  ‘What have you been doing to yourself!’

  ‘It’s all the washing. Stuart’s been transferred to work at the isolation hospital while they’re rammed, but they make him change his porter’s uniform at every break in case he’s picked up some contagion. That’s four uniforms a day, and they’ve all got to be clean on! But he’s only got five uniforms, so there I am every night after work, waiting with a sack for these uniforms which have got God knows what on them, and I’ve got to have the hot water at the ready to begin washing immediately, because they need to be dry by morning, and the only way that’s happening is if I stay up all night and keep ironing them until they’re crisp. Then we both go out to work for the day so that the whole bally palaver can start again. I’m run ragged, he’s run ragged, my fingers are run ragged – and I don’t know how long his uniforms will stand up to this sort of treatment; they’ll be fit for nothing.’

  Pearl was incredulous. ‘Don’t the hospital have their own laundry?’

  ‘Yes, but they’re busy with all the extra sheets and masks. They’ve even had to start sending loads out to the old Sunlight on Hebble Street, so it’s mayhem.’

  ‘Well, let’s just hope none of your kids get sent home from school, because then you’re really in trouble.’ Pearl remembered only too well the difficulties of having children of school age; it was a privilege, but it was a job of hard work.

  ‘Are you worried about your Stuart?’ Doreen was of an age with Siobhan and she worried daily about her own husband’s dangerous work.

  ‘I’m not worried, I just … it’s like a field hospital up there. The things he’s seeing just break your heart. And I feel rotten guilty for being sick of the laundry and the drudgery when we’re the lucky ones. All our kids are at school, I’ve kept my job, and we’re all healthy. The worst I’ve got to complain of is Washer Woman’s Knuckle and bad eyes.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not a competition, love.’ Pearl was known for her pearls of wisdom. ‘You don’t have to be having a worse time of things than anyone else in Halifax to be allowed to have a moan. A good moan now and then’s not so terrible a vice. Besides, we’re all in it together, aren’t we? Your troubles are our troubles. Look, how about I take your load of washing off you on Wednesdays? Wednesday nights are my nights for the washing when we’re all working in the week. So there you are, one less wash night for you.’

  ‘And I can do Friday nights,’ Doreen volunteered eagerly. ‘I get mine done Fridays and hung up round the parlour to dry through Saturday when I do me baking, so I’ll take Fridays.’

  Winnifred, who had heard most of their conversation as she busied round them with sweet wrappers, called, ‘I can move mine to Monday if it’s in a good cause.’

  ‘Crumbs, do you remember when we weren’t working and we used to get a whole day to do the washing in and a whole night of sleep? Halcyon days!’

  But they didn’t realise that now was the time of the halcyon days; very soon something far worse would be taking their sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ‘This is not an acceptable standard.’ Cynthia Starbeck had returned to her office and she was brandishing a sheaf of papers at her waiting assistant. ‘I expected better of you, Dunkley; you told me that you were a grammar school girl.’

  Dolly said nothing. Dolly’s sense of disillusionment with her manager and her office job were now complete. When they had first met at the glamorous meeting of the British Union of Fascists in Crabley Hall she had thought they were kindred spirits, destined to form an alliance that would last a thousand years; then Mrs Starbeck had recruited her to do ‘special work for the fascist cause’ and she had seemed so charming and had lavished her with praise and cake – Dolly’s two great weaknesses. But since then Dolly had failed again and again and she knew it. She was not the success that she had felt certain she was going to be and it hurt her every time she saw it.

  Mrs Starbeck’s nose twitched in irritation. ‘I left you to type my memorandum for the Harrogate Toffee line and I find this waiting for me on my desk.’

  Dolly shrugged sulkily. ‘I don’t know what you want. I typed up the thing you told me to type. It’s all there.’

  ‘You’ve smudged some of the lines and you haven’t used the guillotine to cut the paper; you’ve torn them down the sides and given them a ragged edge. Do you honestly expect me to put my signature to these and have them distributed?’

  ‘I did my best, but I’m not a secretary,’ Dolly whined. ‘You said I was here to learn how to be a junior manager, not do paper cutting.’ A part of Dolly sometimes hoped she would be dismissed so she could pack in this stupid job and go back to terrorising her stepmother and step-siblings in the rectory.

  ‘I want you to do these again and have them finished by noon. I want them perfect – and I want you to use the guillotine to cut the paper so it doesn’t look like I’ve had my memoranda typed on old fish-and-chip wrappings.’

  ‘But then I’ll get paper cuts! The guillotine always cuts the paper too sharp and I get paper cuts from it. If I just tear it neatly with a ruler—’

  ‘No one ever died from a paper cut, Dunkley. Please be more careful.’

  Cynthia Starbeck swept up her notes for her next meeting and strode out into the hall where she proceeded several paces before she noticed that there was blood on her clipboard. By an unfortunate coincidence Starbeck had sliced her own hand on the notes she was carrying because the guillotined paper was so sharp. The paper cut had made a slice through that fleshy join between her right thumb and forefinger and it had gone surprisingly deep. Cynthia Starbeck dabbed at the wound with her handkerchief to soak up the blood before it could spoil her notes, but had no intention of bandaging it; Cynthia believed in treating these things with good fresh air and no nonsense.

  Dolly Dunkley was growing increasingly irritated by the amount of work she was expected to do both at Mackintosh’s and at home. At home she had grown up with the expectation that she would always be waited on by servants, but in recent years their numbers at home had dwindled. The diocese continued to pay for a gardener to maintain the rectory gardens alongside the churchyard, and her father could still stretch to a char and a daily, but the cost of educating his brood of stepchildren was beginning to loom, and the Reverend Dunkley was making economies. The first thing had been to suggest to Dolly that she got herself a little job earning the money for her ‘lotions and potions’, then there had been the suggestion that she offer ‘little bits of help’ to her stepmother when she needed someone to help with the children. Now Dolly found herself be
ing given regular jobs around the house which she was expected to perform daily as her designated duty. This, she thought, was beyond the pale. She was slaving away at the factory all day only to be given skivvying jobs at home which her stepmother ought to be doing for herself. Her stepmother was still young, and if she didn’t want the work of so many children, she shouldn’t have had them.

  Dolly’s latest job was boiling the children’s milk in the morning before she went to the factory. It was a ridiculous exercise as far as Dolly was concerned. The Salvation Army – of all people! – had hammered on their door at two o’clock in the morning to warn them that their milk was from a tainted batch and that they must boil it to save themselves and their children. But the Salvation Army were notorious for their hyperbole; you only had to look at their chapels (which they called Citadels) to see how far they took things, having the words ‘Blood and Fire’ carved in the lintel stone above every door. If the Salvation Army were claiming that Dolly needed to do something, then Dolly doubted she really needed to do it. She’d been in a hurry that morning because the Sally Army had disrupted her sleep and then she’d had trouble getting herself up in time to make the tram, or even the late tram. She had put the children’s milk into a saucepan and put it onto the hot plate while she fetched their beakers, but it had only really warmed it. She was confident that they wouldn’t catch anything, and if they did they wouldn’t die of it; they were healthy children and they’d certainly survive a bout of scarlet fever. The month or so of suffering might even do the household some good because they’d all be forced to be quiet and keep to their beds. Dolly was not afraid of suffering: it was something she delegated to other people on an almost hourly basis.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ‘You have wonderfully clear eyes.’ It was the sort of compliment veterinary surgeons paid to lame dogs when they wanted to look on the bright side, but in this instance it was the best thing Percy Palgrave could manage to say to the girl he was attempting to pay court to. Fortunately, Dolly had received few compliments in her life and was ready to gobble up any which were offered.