The Quality Street Wedding

by Penny Thorpe

  Mr Hitchens heaved an almighty sigh. ‘All right, give them my apologies for absence and telephone me with developments. Bring in Time and Motion, Engineering, and Production to make any changes you think useful. I want us to do everything we can to head off a factory shutdown before it’s forced on us by circumstance. We’ve got enough to worry about without that, believe me. They want us making gas masks here for the national stockpile – and we can’t very well do that if half our staff go down with plague.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  ‘There’s a question that I’ve always wanted to ask you.’ Amy Wilkes didn’t take her eyes off the main factory door. It was late in the evening and the rest of the office staff had gone home for the night, leaving the commissionaire’s desk and the visitor’s entrance empty. Amy and Diana remained for the emergency visit of the District Medical Officer, the Borough Factory Inspector, and the man from the Ministry of Health. It must be bad if they were getting a visit of this sort, but could it really be as bad as all that? As they sat in the empty stillness of the deco ground-floor entranceway they had a sense that something awful was coming and they wanted to make the most of the last few moments of normality.

  ‘Out with it, then.’ Diana was very respectful of her manager – especially when they were in company – but they had built up an easy rapport when they were alone together and they spoke their minds.

  ‘I heard that you once refused to speak for a month on the production line. I’ve seen the written warning in your employment file.’

  ‘Is that a question?’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  There was a long silence, but not because Diana was deciding how to answer; she just enjoyed the slowness and the silences she had with Amy Wilkes.

  ‘My father had died. I lost my voice.’

  ‘It wasn’t stubbornness, then?’

  ‘Would it matter if it had been? There are plenty of managers at Mackintosh’s who would prefer it if all the girls stopped talking tomorrow; most of them don’t listen either way.’

  ‘You put a lot of people’s back’s up at the time; I remember it.’ Amy Wilkes pondered the effect Diana’s silence had made on the overlookers. ‘It’s funny how some people can ignore what you say, no matter how loudly you say it, but are threatened by persistent silence when they see that they have no control over it, and you do.’ A gust of wind made the glass front door clatter in its brass frame, but there was still no sign of the officials. ‘Why did you ask to come and work for me?’

  Diana thought about the question, and then asked, ‘Why did you agree to take me on?’

  ‘Curiosity. I’d heard a lot of things about you; I wanted to know which of them was true.’

  Diana kept her cards close to her chest, but she thought her manager was a greater mystery. She appeared to be well-educated and she suspected she was not from a factory background, but something had driven her to not just join Mackintosh’s, but to become head of Women’s Employment. ‘Why did you choose this work? You could have worked somewhere better. Like a law office, or a bank; why a factory, why Women’s Employment?’

  Amy Wilkes gave a light shrug, ‘I suppose it’s because I knew that in any other position I’d have been voiceless; another underpaid, overworked woman ignored by her so-called betters. Here I can make a difference to the lives of voiceless women and girls. When people like Starbeck try to wring them out, I can stop them. This is one of the largest employers of women in the town and I’m here to protect their interests. Not only that, but we set the standard for neighbouring employers. There is no better use of my time than this. I could have taken up secretarial work in a nice, straightforward bank which never required me to sit up at night waiting for a medical officer, but what a waste of a life that would have been.’ Amy Wilkes frowned and then narrowed her eyes at her assistant. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  Diana was saved from having to do so by the arrival of the Medical Officer.

  ‘It’s a good job this didn’t happen three years ago; the old fever hospital only had room for fifty-odd patients; this one’s got nearer two hundred beds and the way this outbreak is looking we could need all of them.’ The District Medical Officer had burst in like a hurricane in full force, throwing off his overcoat and beginning a tirade of information before his party had even finished walking through Mackintosh’s front door.

  ‘Surely not so many as that!’ the Borough Factory Inspector was already trying to underestimate the extent of the problem in the hope that he wouldn’t have to recommend too many alterations to the factory-floor plans. The new Factories Act had given him enough trouble.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Amy Wilkes rose to meet her visitors and tried not to look as though her eyes were closing with fatigue and the lateness of the hour, ‘I am Mrs Wilkes the Head of Women’s Employment, and this is my assistant—’

  ‘Have you stopped the milk yet?’ the Medical Officer barked, perhaps being used to talking to the hard of hearing. His colleagues, presumably, were now somewhat deafer than when they first encountered him.

  ‘I heard about the outbreak of scarlet fever in the town and I had the deliveries of fresh milk to our canteens stopped two days ago. Our staff have been making do with tinned milk since then.’

  The civil servant from the Ministry of Health spoke timidly, ‘I’m afraid we have traced the source of the outbreak and the dairy in question, in addition to supplying two local schools, they do … err … in point of fact …’

  ‘They supply your factory!’ The Medical Officer couldn’t abide beating about the bush.

  ‘The incubation period is anything from … er … a week to perhaps … a fortnight?’

  ‘In short, madam, you should expect your staff to start showing signs of fever. Possibly even you yourself.’

  ‘Well, erm … we hope that you will all stay quite well, but as a precaution we have arranged for some testing to be done. Nothing to worry about unduly … The government are allocating capacity at a testing laboratory in Reading to deal with the extra testing which will need to be done … a lot to do in Halifax … erm … not just this factory.’

  ‘It’s a bad one!’ the Medical Officer was evidently not trying to maintain confidentiality. ‘Seen it before.’

  ‘Erm, yes, this is the same strain which caused the epidemic in Doncaster, you know? Very interesting case, er … did you read about it over the summer?’

  ‘Terrible thing, the Doncaster outbreak! Turned into the largest outbreak of scarlet fever in this country for twenty years. Not only that, but it’s a particularly dangerous strain; damages joints, causes pain for months afterwards. We need to contain it as best we can so that it doesn’t move to other towns!’

  The Factory Inspector, who was expected to follow along with this travelling circus of doom, was still trying to argue that he might not need to recommend any changes to the factories they would inevitably visit. ‘But scarlet fever isn’t so very dangerous, is it? Fatalities are only one in a hundred?’

  ‘That’s bad enough! If we carried that across the whole nation we’d lose more of the populace to scarlet fever than we did to the last war! Besides, it’s not just the fatalities we need to worry about, it’s the effect it will have on industry while the workers are quarantined and the transport network if the tram drivers are too ill to work. The influenza epidemic in London this winter took out two-thirds of the operators on the London telephone exchange and all hell broke loose; we cannot let this spread and cause the same level of disruption!’

  Amy Wilkes wished she’d ushered them up to her office first so that this discussion could be conducted in comfort, but it was too late now, she supposed. ‘I’m pleased to report that we’ve only had a few cases here at the factory.’

  The District Medical Officer towered over Amy Wilkes. ‘We can only hope that it stays that way, but we cannot hope idly. There will be quarantine orders on families of school-age children.’

  Amy had not expected this. ‘Oh, but th
at’s hundreds of parents! We can’t lose that many workers.’

  ‘That’s only the start of it! We want you all wearing masks! We want you to increase the allocated floor space for each employee from twenty-two inches to twice that and we want you to close the communal areas where staff might usually eat together – and tell any pregnant women to stay away from work indefinitely!’ The District Medical Officer did not notice the Factory Inspector shudder as he made his demands.

  Amy was glad now that they had taken some action early. ‘We’ve already closed the staff canteen, but I really was hoping that we could avoid all the rest of this sort of thing until we saw just how serious the outbreak was.’

  ‘Hope is an excellent thing, Mrs Wilkes, and I always encourage it. But hope must never be idle! We can hope for the best, but it would be unconscionable laziness in the circumstances not to prepare for other outcomes!’

  Chapter Forty-Two

  ‘Mother, you need to take care!’ Mary was bellowing at the top of her voice and she felt certain that her mother could hear her, but was choosing to ignore something that she thought overwhelmingly inconvenient.

  ‘Don’t bother me while I’m at the supper.’ She was frying up mutton chops and had a particular dislike of interference while she was handling a pan of hot fat.

  ‘Have you been told the news? Has anyone told you what’s happening in the town?’ Mary brandished a copy of the Halifax Courier with a headline she knew her mother likely would not have read. She had never established whether her mother couldn’t read, or refused to read, but it didn’t matter; she needed to be told.

  ‘Yes, yes, you’re gettin’ married; you told me. I’ve got my dress down for you, it’s on the back of the wardrobe and I’ve taken it in. You’ll want a shawl with it.’

  This stopped Mary short – a matter which in any other household would be a cause for shared joy conveyed in the same irritable manner her mother told her they’d run out of coal. She had come to impress one item of news on her mother, but found that she had taken in another. She wondered when it had happened, when her mother had finally come around to it; had Bess worked that strange magic of hers and explained to their mother without raising her voice? Mary suddenly felt a desperate need to protect her mother from everything and shouted very much louder, ‘There’s scarlet fever, Mother! You have to take especial care!’

  ‘Scarlet fever?’ Her mother wrinkled her nose and brow in a show of disgust and disapproval together.

  Mary’s shoulders sagged in relief as she made her first step of progress towards getting her message home. ‘Yes, Mother, scarlet fever.’

  ‘You’ve already had it.’ She said it as though the whole epidemic was swept away and powerless through the sheer force of her own will to ignore it.

  Mary took a deep breath and threw herself once more into the breach of her mother’s determined ignorance. ‘It’s you, Mother! I’m worried about you!’

  ‘I haven’t got scarlet fever and I don’t care either way. It’s nothing. You were all right. People make such a fuss.’ Mrs Norcliffe flicked the mutton chops onto a cracked willow pattern dish and didn’t flinch as the hot fat splattered on her calloused red hands.

  With her mother there was always going to be stubbornness. She was a dying breed, sleeping in the chair in the corner of the parlour under an old army coat through the coldest night. Mary had come to expect that when everyone around her was making compromises, her mother would refuse.

  ‘It’s everywhere, Mother. It’s a bad one. They’ve had it in Doncaster. Folks have died.’

  ‘I want to eat my chop in peace. Go and put the dress on, it wants fitting. I didn’t sew all those beads on for nothing.’

  If it were any other day Mary might have run straight to the dress, one of the few examples of her mother’s sporadic care. She’d have luxuriated in the opportunity to feel like any other excited bride-to-be, would have rehearsed her progress down the stairs on her wedding day. But the weight of the responsibility she had to her mother outweighed any anticipation she felt for herself. She wondered how she’d ever leave her, if she really could leave her to be wed.

  To an outsider looking in on their family it might have looked like a loveless and uncaring household, but their situation was not as simple as that. Mary could remember life before her father and brothers died and she knew that her mother had got worse since then. Vera Norcliffe had cut off emotionally from her last surviving children so that she needn’t feel any more loss if they too succumbed to the tuberculosis which had ravaged the men in the family, but seemed to be biding its time with the women. Mary’s father had told her that the change had started when Mary was born. He had been away fighting and the worry of keeping a new baby and two boys safe on her own during wartime had broken her. Perhaps that was why Mary worried so very much, or perhaps it was because her sister didn’t worry at all and she needed to provide the counterbalance.

  There was a variety of love and care in the Norcliffe household, and while it might not be understandable to outsiders, it ran deep and it bound them tightly together. Mary accepted that she had to supply what her mother and sister were lacking – and they in turn did the same for her: Bess supplied affection and Mrs Norcliffe pragmatism.

  Mary knew that she wasn’t going to get her mother to listen while she ate; a fried chop was one of her few pleasures in life and Mary supposed she would be safe to leave her to it for a few minutes. There was a dress waiting to be seen, and something about the thought of it upstairs made Mary’s spine shiver. She took off her coat and hung it over the bannister where their coats had been polishing the wood smooth for the best part of a decade and made her way up the stairs whose every creak she could have mapped in her sleep.

  It was odd to think that in the house she knew so intimately, her mother could still produce items she’d never seen. There were tea chests up in the eaves of the roof which they raided every so often for shoe leather, but by and large they went untouched, filled as they were with the effects of the dead.

  Mary reached the doorway of her bedroom and stopped. It occurred to her that she’d never seen the dress that her mother was married in and she felt an odd reluctance to be reminded of her father and the hope her mother must have felt on her wedding day and the way in which all that hope was dashed by consumption.

  And there it was, immediately recognisable. It was near identical in cut and design to the black silk dress Mary had borrowed from the tea chest last May, a twin of the very same dress her mother had worn to her father’s funeral, and she knew that it was just her size. Obviously the black funeral dress had been copied from the white wedding dress, but why? Perhaps her mother only had one dress pattern and couldn’t afford to buy another on top of the cost of the black silk and her husband’s funeral. Perhaps it was a farewell, a message to him that she would never let go.

  Mrs Norcliffe had sewed pearlised beads around the neckline of the old-fashioned gown, and Mary didn’t know what to think of her mother, who could still surprise her by producing from nowhere things that Mary had never seen.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Percy Palgrave believed the little chapel under the bridge was a gift from the gods. Ordinarily, he thought, he might have struggled to bring Dolly’s mind around to the topic of marriage only a few weeks after meeting her, and to persuade her to hurry along and marry him before his leave was ended, but as it was, he had the sweetshop.

  Dolly had clearly always wanted her own wedding to be in that crazy old pile one day, and if he could champion the cause to have the shop owner chucked out and some religious types chucked in, he’d not only win her favour, but he’d also be able to point out that if Dolly really did want to be the first bride to be wed in the chapel, she’d have to hurry before some other blushing bride beat her to it. What better way for him to propose marriage than to present her with the fait accompli of her dream wedding chapel? And Percy Palgrave did intend to propose marriage. He had returned from Burma with the express
intention of picking up a wife to cook, clean and iron for him and he wasn’t going to return to colonial life without one. Dolly would get the little wedding she wanted and he would get both the housekeeper he needed and a nice little pot of money as a sweetener. If he could just get the use of the chapel changed, everything would fall into place.

  Starting his campaign was easy; a letter to the Halifax Town Council, another to the editor of the Halifax Courier, and a third to the member of parliament. Palgrave had them all signed by his mother – a pillar of local philanthropic society – and given weight by her headed notepaper which listed her various trusteeships. For the trifling price of three stamps he could now, quite naturally, turn Dolly’s thoughts towards a quick marriage.

  It was while reading the letters to the editor in the Halifax Courier that Kathleen Calder discovered her shop – and by extension, her job – had been threatened. She had never previously known of any objection to the commercial use of the premises, but now, all of a sudden, some old buffer called Mrs Palgrave was writing to the paper to complain.

  ‘The chapel must be returned to its original use!’ the letter writer had demanded. ‘Too many young Halifax couples have been deprived the chance of a Christian wedding in this hallowed ground. Trading must not be tolerated in the temple of the Lord.’

  The reasons given in the letter were patently ridiculous and, as far as Kathleen was concerned, this old Mrs Palgrave didn’t have the first idea what the chapel had been built for. Putting it back to its original use would mean undoing the Reformation, abolishing the Church of England, and bringing back cash for prayers. Kathleen was always exasperated by people who presumed to know what something’s original use had been but hadn’t bothered to read up on it. And all this nonsense about couples deprived of weddings on hallowed ground! It had never been hallowed ground and it had never been intended for weddings. Kathleen was fuming with anger when Reenie came home from work and the kitchen table was piled high with books and handwritten notes which were being condensed into a very strongly worded reply, which Kathleen would be sending to the editor by the first post.