by Penny Thorpe
‘The De Whyte’s got it lawfully at the dissolution,’ she declared, scowling, ‘and if this Mrs Palgrave don’t like it she can go back in time and take it up with Henry VIII, because not liking an owner is completely different to an owner not being well within their rights!’
Percy Palgrave was pleased with the Town Council’s response to his mother’s letter. It had hit the right note. They were concerned about the safety of the old building which sat so precariously over the bank; they were frustrated by the litter which built up around it; and they were alert to rumours that illicit Sunday trading was going on. The suggestion of a compulsory purchase order was mooted and the police were requested to watch for any sign of commercial life on the Sabbath, so it was a hopeful time for Percy. The more time he spent with Dolly, the more he fell in love with the idea of never having to do his own domestic chores again. Percy knew that Dolly wasn’t a rich heiress, not in the style of the Mackintosh family, or any of the big industrialists in the town, but when he looked deep into her clear eyes, he saw all the ease and comfort of a second-class ticket on the boat back to Burma, instead of a third. Dolly represented a few more luxuries – and a lot less hardship – and his heart ached lest he should lose her after he’d got this far.
A wedding in that little hole in the wall would be perfect. Barely room for a handful of guests, so nice and cheap. Plenty of money left over for a nice family car, or a few really good lounge suits.
Kathleen might have been stuck at home, but she was still keeping abreast of the various letters now circulating about her shop. The Palgrave woman who had written to the local paper had also written to the Town Council and they had sent Mr Hebblewhite a carbon copy of their reply. Kathleen was incensed. She would not be beaten by someone who did not know the difference between a chantry, a chapel, a church, and a temple. Not only that but she wasn’t going to take the Town Council’s accusations of ‘a litter nuisance’ lying down. She’d have them know that since she’d started working there it was cleaned thoroughly every Saturday and Wednesday – Mr Hebblewhite had soon given her an extra shift after school on a Wednesday – with special attention paid to gathering litter which had blown down to the other end of the road.
Kathleen was being kept home from school, from the library, from her friends, from her foes, and from her job; this left her ample time to launch her own campaign of letters in defence of Hebblewhite’s.
Kathleen’s mother knew that the girl was just angry at being cooped up at home, but all that frustration was spilling over into the shop business. It was like Reenie and the flower pots all over again; when Reenie had got her first job she’d paced up and down the farmyard holding two flower pots in each hand to build up strength in her fingers so she’d be better at working quickly on the sweet-wrapping line. Her girls had determination and it was a mixed blessing. At least Kathleen’s letters couldn’t get her into any real trouble – or could they? Mrs Calder worried so much about her children and these days there was plenty to choose from. The fire at the factory Reenie had been caught up in, the poisoned Mackintosh’s sweets which had been frighteningly close to Reenie, and now an epidemic in the town. If that wasn’t enough, the talk of a coming war in the newspapers increased by the day. The government were still talking about stockpiling food and they’d already made it law that the local councils had to have plans for aerial gas attacks. She worried most about the gas attacks. How would they know if there was one? Kathleen was right about one thing: they needed to get a wireless.
Chapter Forty-Four
Amy Wilkes outranked Cynthia Starbeck, but still she found the woman disagreeing with her again and again. It was almost pathological. When she argued about the work of the Women’s Employment Department, it was usually to insist that employees were made to work harder, for longer hours, and less money. Starbeck’s overriding obsession was that the people who ran the factory machinery should become machines themselves.
‘I can’t make any changes to my lines at present.’ Cynthia Starbeck did not look up from her desk where she was fully and conspicuously occupied with putting her many typed memos into envelopes ready to send out and disrupt the various departments for whom she was a bane. ‘We’re conducting studies which require absolute continuity.’
‘Might I remind you, Cynthia, that this direction does not come from me, but from the chief of the District Medical Officers? We have an outbreak of scarlet fever and it could tear through our workforce like a hurricane if we don’t make the necessary undertakings.’
‘The District Medical Officers are notorious Liberals. They come up with a scare story like this every so often to disrupt business and keep themselves in work. I remember the Spanish flu and I can assure you that no one fussed this much in those days.’ Cynthia herself was suffering, but was managing to make the best of it. The very deep paper cut in the web of her hand would not close and was throbbing horribly, but she didn’t allow it to prevent her from doing her duty.
‘If you’ve apprised yourself of the details of the changes then you’ll have seen that all of them will improve productivity on your line, not lessen it. The staff canteen is closed with immediate effect, and the girls can only eat food which they have brought with them and no one else has touched; they will eat at the edge of the workroom and not leave it. They must all wear gauze masks – which will prevent them from slowing the line by chatting – and we will take over the laundering of overalls and distribute them at the start of each shift and they will be required to change in silence. Every single one of these changes gives you what you’ve been lobbying for for years, so what, precisely, is your problem now?’
‘It’s an unnecessary disruption to routine and the results of this study are reliant on nothing being altered.’
‘I would have thought the results of your study are reliant on none of your staff dropping dead from contagious disease!’
‘It’s septic sore throat, not the bubonic plague; I think we can keep a little perspective.’
‘I think you can spare the time to stop what you’re doing and give me your undivided attention for five minutes. What could possibly be so important that you need to send out this much internal correspondence?’
‘Yours is not the only department which seeks to interfere with the smooth running of the important work of Time and Motion. A great deal of work is involved in defending the climate in which we work.’
Amy Wilkes had heard about her colleague’s ‘defence of her climate’. She must get up before dawn to type all the things she did. Some were as innocuous as demands to the head porter that he have his bogies’ wheels oiled because they all squeaked, to the more sinister letters she wrote to the Home Office complaining about staff from overseas. Their very own Albert Baum had found his three-month work permit revoked earlier in the previous summer after a tip-off that a local woman could easily do his job and he wasn’t really needed. Amy Wilkes believed that all Mr Baum’s present difficulties were as a result of Cynthia’s continued efforts to keep foreign workers out of the country. Well, she’d very quickly have to get used to foreign workers if she killed off all the British ones by giving them contaminated milk and refusing to let them wear masks.
‘Mrs Starbeck, my instructions in this matter come from the board of directors. Where do yours come from? I’m curious to know?’
There was a knock at the door and a messenger girl tentatively poked her face around the office door, wary of germs. ‘Mrs Starbeck? There’s someone asking for you at the gatehouse, Mrs Starbeck.’
Chapter Forty-Five
Dolly Dunkley enjoyed the feeling of riding around on her high horse. In Dolly’s case this was figurative rather than literal. She was not lucky enough to have a horse of her own like Reenie did, and even if she had owned a horse it was unlikely that she would have had the necessary dedication to take care of it. However, she liked feeling a combination of moral superiority, righteous indignation and having something to complain about. This new project to evict
the Mackintosh’s misshapes shop from their old premises was just her cup of tea.
‘I’ve always said that it should be put back to how it was,’ she told her young man as they walked out of step through People’s Park. The moment Dolly had heard about Percy and his mother’s campaign of letters to convert the old sweetshop chapel she became convinced that she had been lobbying for it all her life. Dolly was not alone in this; there were one or two genuine antiquarians who had spent decades writing letters to the corporation and the diocese to request that ‘something be done’ to preserve the history of the building, but it was only when Percy started making discreet suggestions in strategic places that scores of people suddenly realised that they had always been in favour of converting the chapel back to its original function and that they were appalled at the immorality of its existing tenant. How the sale of wonky Caramel Cups was immoral was never specified, but it was certainly a running theme.
‘It should be put back to its proper purpose; it should have a congregation again.’
Percy, feeling more secure in his courtship with the Dunkley daughter, was beginning to challenge her mistakes a little now. ‘But wasn’t it a Roman Catholic chantry? It wouldn’t have had a congregation, would it?’
‘It might have had a Catholic one,’ Dolly said defensively.
Since beginning his campaign of letters Percy had been directed to an accurate history of the building and was now not so sure he wanted to wait as long as it would take for a full restoration of the building; he just wanted a quick wedding in a sweetshop, then back to Burma with his housewife and his new set of luggage. Starting the campaign at all was going to give him the entrée into the topic of marriage, and that was all he really needed and he said, ‘It would have just been one monk on his own, praying for lost souls and eating people’s forgotten sandwiches. What’s the use of restoring that? I thought you were Protestant?’
Dolly didn’t like it when Percy corrected her with such bluntness, but she had failed to notice that he was correcting her with bluntness almost all the time; he appeared to enjoy feeling superior just as much as she did. It did not occur to Dolly that this might not be the ideal basis for a lasting marriage, especially if theirs was going to involve living in so-called ‘primitive conditions’ and with no social company but one another for months at a time. Dolly flustered to defend her position, but shifted her ground. ‘Well, yes, obviously I know that, but it’s not what I meant at all. I meant that it should be restored to the purpose it would have had if there had been some Protestants back in the days when it was built.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, a little church congregation for people who live along that side of North Bridge. It could be run like a sort of mission in the town – maybe we could get some of the railway men to go along between their shifts in the railway yard?’
Percy Palgrave opened his mouth to ridicule the idea, but just as the words were forming in his mouth, his stomach rumbled, which reminded him that if he didn’t want to cook his own dinners and iron his own shirts when he went back to Burma, he needed to get a move on and do the deed. With this prosaic thought in mind, he said, ‘What if we were the first couple to be married in it?’
‘Be married? In the chapel on the bridge?’ Dolly was breathless with excitement. She hadn’t noticed that this was not a romantic proposal because it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was a real proposal and that she was going to be married.
‘Yes.’ Percy was optimistic, but not enthusiastically so. ‘It’d be all right, I’d have thought. Tart it up a bit, take down the sign with the cigarettes on it and it ought to be rather jolly. Bit on the small side, but we could get our pictures in the paper if we were the first couple to be wed there. What do you say? Shall I ask your father? Do you think you could be ready to come back to Burma with me before Easter?’
Dolly was over the moon. She did not notice that there were no professions of love, or even a suggestion of devotion. All Dolly heard was that someone wanted to marry her and this would be a way out of Mackintosh’s, Halifax, housework in her father’s rectory, and all the trouble of paying her own way in the world. Palgrave might not be handsome, but he offered a life of ease with servants to wait on her in glamorous, colonial Burma. If her newly acquired fiancé had a yen to be married in the chapel under the bridge then she would make damn sure that the Hebblewhites were chucked out before they’d had time to so much as pack. Dolly Dunkley was getting her wedding.
Chapter Forty-Six
‘Are we allowed to meet here?’ Mary hovered at the door of the old stable, nervous about doing the wrong thing.
‘What do you mean, “are we allowed”? We’ve always been allowed; this is Ruffian’s stable.’
‘Yes, but if we’re not allowed into the staff canteen because it’s too crowded, isn’t this just as bad? There’s never been much room in here.’
Reenie cast her eyes around the stables which had always been their safe haven, a kind of clubhouse and refuge, now – like all innocent pursuits – potentially deadly. ‘Well, you always sit on that side with Bess and I always sit on this side, so if we just stick to our own sides …’ Reenie didn’t finish her sentence; she had lost heart. There was something so very sad about having to treat everyone as a possible threat. Reenie could put an optimistic light on any topic, but not this one.
They sat in silence for a minute or more, unwrapping sandwiches and unscrewing thermos tops. Their breaktimes in the stables were usually abuzz with eager chatter from the moment they were within hailing distance across the cobbles, but life these days seemed to have knocked the wind out of their sails.
Bess chirped up, ‘Mary’s got a wedding dress.’
Reenie’s eyes brightened at this news. ‘Has she? When did you choose it? Where’s it from? Why didn’t you tell me you were—’
‘It’s not one I’ve picked out.’ Mary was careful not to get too enthusiastic on the subject. Perhaps it was the fear of putting the mockers on it, or perhaps it was that feeling of hallowed ground which accompanied anything to do with her parents’ life before her father died. Either way, she was careful to keep a matter-of-fact tone. ‘It was my mother’s wedding dress, so it’s already the right fit and she’s sewn some new pearlite buttons on it to brighten it up.’
Reenie sensed that this was not the time for over-enthusiasm, and in a moment of Herculean restraint she managed to dampen her own excitement enough to say, ‘Oh, well, that’s good. You just need something borrowed and something blue now.’
‘And a wedding licence.’ Mary rolled her sleeves up, unconsciously preparing for the battle she was anticipating with another official body. ‘I have to go to the register office in Halifax to make appointments for us both to go in and declare our intention to wed.’
‘Wouldn’t Albert do that for you? Save you the worry?’ Reenie knew that Mary’s capacity for worry was beyond that of most mortals.
‘He’s got residency permits to apply for. Sometimes I think the solicitor’s clerk sees more of him than I do. He’s there now. And none of it does any good.’
Reenie tried to bring her thoughts back to the one bright ray of hope on their horizon: the wedding. ‘What happens once you’ve both declared your intention to wed? Will it be plain sailing after that?’
‘Then they put a notice up in the register office to give folks a chance to object.’
‘Do you think folks might object?’ The idea shocked Reenie, but then she remembered that when Mr Baum had applied for his last work permit he had been refused because Mrs Starbeck had taken the time and trouble to write to the Home Office and tell them that he didn’t deserve it. Reenie had never thought there could be such strong personal feeling towards a stranger, but as she got older she was beginning to realise more and more that you never knew what went on in other people’s heads.
‘We’ll just have to wait and see. Neither of us are married and I’ll be of age, so the only objection anyone could make is th
at we’re marrying for the permit.’
‘Surely the register office will be able to see that you love each other and that it’s not anything like that?’
‘Yes, but we’d have to prove it – and how do you prove something like that?’
‘You can prove it.’ Bess chirped, ‘You can show them all your lovely letters from him.’ Bess appeared to have forgotten that the letters had almost all been all completely destroyed and that she had been the instrument of their destruction.
‘How would anyone find out that you’d been to the register office and put your name down? It doesn’t go in the paper, does it?’ Reenie asked.
‘It’s only posted on the wall in the register office. If you-know-who doesn’t go in the register office then maybe we’re plain sailing.’ Mary patted Ruffian’s flank absentmindedly and he snorted his support of her plan. ‘I’ve got to go to the register office this week to get an appointment. Would you get off work early and come with me, Reenie?’
Reenie was honoured. This was the kind of thing friends were for and she was confident that Mrs Starbeck wouldn’t think to watch the register office for notices. This was – at long last – the happy ending that Mary, Mr Baum, and his family deserved.
‘Don’t put the mockers on it. She might have a friend at the register office. We’ll just go and fill in the forms – and we’ll wait again, because it’s the only thing we can do.’
A tense silence filled the air in the stable as Reenie wrestled with all of the hopeful, cheerful things she wanted to say, but knew she shouldn’t. Bess turned the pages of her magazine and gazed at the pictures of foreign radio stars who lived apparently charmed lives in the capital.