Shop Girl

by Mary Portas

  ‘Mr Harrrrrooooooold,’ I’d wailed. ‘Geraldine thinks I’m bossy. I’m not bossy! But what else can I do but tell her? We can’t do this scene if she hasn’t learned her lines.’

  He’d taken me outside the school hall where we were rehearsing and into the corridor where he’d fixed me with a steady gaze. ‘You need to listen to me, Mary,’ he’d said. ‘You’re a leader even if you don’t know it yet. But you can’t boss and dictate to people. You have to learn to lead with charm.’

  I had no idea what he meant but it sounded nice.

  I love performing: the thrill of having an audience, the vibration in the room, learning words and lines, the beat, the timing. My mother’s love of books and poetry and my father’s of dancing and music have condensed inside me and I know instinctively when to drop a funny aside or let words hang in the air during a sad scene. It comes naturally to me and, after a lifetime in the midst of all my siblings, I am suddenly the best at something.

  So here I am: about to go up in smoke but ready to deliver my final rousing speech. The fifth-year girl bends her head even lower. I wait for her to raise it again so I can utter my final piece of saintly wisdom before the fire is lit. I wait. And I wait. And then I stare down in confusion.

  The girl is tugging her head furiously but can’t raise it. She bobs up and down, her cheeks going more purple by the second with the effort. But no matter how hard she tries, she can’t get free. Her crucifix has fallen between a gap in the stage floorboards and she’s stuck.

  There’s nothing else to do. The show must go on.

  ‘Joan, Joan,’ my followers keen, as Sister Alma turns on the orange lights that illuminate the pile of wood I’m tied to.

  I deliver my final line as Sister Frances puffs smoke across the stage and I stare into the distance. I am going willingly into the arms of God. I am St Joan. I fix a beatific smile on my face as smoke fills my eyes and my mascara starts to run in black puddles down my cheeks.

  But all I can think of is the fifth-year kneeling in front of me with her arse in the air as the stage falls dark and the applause starts. I was never any good at being upstaged.

  Embassy Number 1

  I stare out of the bathroom window as I take a drag on the cigarette. I come here every now and again when everyone is out. Mum’s gone shopping with Tish; Joe and Michael are working and Lawrence is out with his friends. I either nick the fag butts that Dad leaves in his garden jacket or take cigarettes out of the packets that Joe hides behind the piano.

  ‘If you tell then so will I,’ I wrote on a piece of paper that I stuck in the packet when I first discovered the cigarettes.

  Joe has remained silent and so have I.

  I sigh. I am all alone. Stuck here when I want to be on a stage in London or Paris. I want adventure. I want to see the world. Instead all I can see is the rooftops of North Watford’s terraces.

  I hear footsteps on the stairs. Smoke streams out of my mouth as I wave my hand in front of it and run panicking into my bedroom with the lit cigarette in my hand. Looking from left to right as heavy feet stride towards my door, I flick the cigarette and it sails down the back of the dressing-table.

  Michael walks into the room. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem like nothing.’

  ‘Honest. Nothing.’

  All I can think of is the lit fag that’s down the back of the dressing-table. If I don’t get Michael out of here quickly, the house will burn down. And then I’ll be in real trouble.

  ‘I’m sure I can smell smoke,’ he says.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dad must have had one.’

  ‘He’s been at the pigeon club since nine, Mary.’

  ‘Perhaps the smoke blew in through the window.’

  I stare at Michael. I know he’s never going to let me off the hook.

  ‘Oh, all right, then!’ I wail, as I fling myself towards the dressing-table. ‘It’s me. But please don’t tell.’

  I scrabble behind the dressing-table as Michael walks out. Whether he tells or not will not matter. In a matter of weeks, the drainpipe at the back of the house will get blocked and my father will gaze in bewilderment as he digs out all the butts I’ve thrown down it.

  Granny Smith apples

  Susan Smith, Margaret Woodhead and I are standing in the art room having snuck in during the lunch break. There’s a charity concert being put on and I don’t have the money for a ticket so I’ve decided to forge one with Susan and Margaret’s help. We know the tickets were made with orange card that’s stored in the art-supplies cupboard so now we just have to find it.

  A huge bowl of fruit is standing on a white-clothed table in the middle of the art room. It looks so delicious that I help myself to a Granny Smith on the way to the cupboard. Then some grapes and a pear followed by a banana on the way back. Susan and Margaret join in. We stuff our faces and pockets with fruit, leaving just a few pips and cores lying on the table as we sneak away with the orange card.

  ‘It’s only a bit of fruit,’ I say, with a giggle, as we scarper.

  Trouble is, the fruit is in fact the still-life for the art A-level exam due to start about fifteen minutes later. Miss Stephenson almost has a fainting fit and I get hauled up in front of Sister St James.

  ‘We meet again,’ she says, as I sit down in front of her.

  Her right eyebrow arches just a fraction. Shame fills me.

  ‘So you’re in trouble with Miss Stephenson?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘This is very unfortunate.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘As you know, there were several pupils preparing to sit an important exam and you have caused a great deal of trouble for them and Miss Stephenson.’

  ‘Yes, Sister. I’m sorry.’

  Sister St James leans back and looks at me. ‘So why did you eat the still-life, Mary?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, you must know. There must have been a reason.’

  I stare at her, scrambling to find an excuse. ‘I was hungry,’ I blurt out.

  ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Be that as it may, it is against the rules to break into classrooms, and disrespectful to eat food that is not yours. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘This is not the first time you’ve been in to see me but you’re no longer a child. You’re growing up now, Mary, and you really must learn to follow the rules. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘The thing about rules is that we need them because we are a family here at St Joan’s. Rules are important. They are what give us structure and discipline. You must follow rules in your family?’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘Then you will know they must be respected. I trust that you will remember this conversation in future.’

  I look at Sister St James. Like my mother and Aunty Cathy, she’s a woman I know not to disobey. ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘Good. You cannot keep being sent to see me. Please make sure that this does not happen again. But for now we have another problem because Miss Stephenson has decided that she can no longer teach you.’

  I gulp. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. She feels that you are too disruptive. So disruptive, in fact, that she cannot have you in her class. This really is a most unusual situation.’ Sister St James gives me a long look. ‘So what we are going to do is this: from now on, instead of going to your art class, you will come and see me each week and we will read poetry together. I’m afraid that I’m really not very good at art.’

  Elation and panic mix inside me. No more Miss Stephenson. But two hours a week alone with the headmistress?

  I shuffle out of the office hanging my head in shame. Mum will be furious when she hears about this and, sure enough, the air is icy when I arrive home later that afternoon to find the tea table laden with soda bread and cakes. />
  ‘So I’m not feeding you enough, am I?’ my mother says, her fury dripping through every syllable. ‘You go to school hungry, do you now, Mary Newton?’

  I can’t say a word.

  The next day I line up for assembly and the headmistress stands up in front of the whole school.

  ‘As some of you will know, there was an unfortunate incident in the art room yesterday,’ she says. ‘It has now been dealt with but all I’d like to say is that if any pupil is ever hungry then you can always go to the sick bay where there will be things to eat.’

  I want the ground to swallow me up, to disappear in a puddle, like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Banned from the art class, and the talk of the entire school, I am also now the starving Irish kid with a mother who refuses to speak to her. From across the hall, Tish fixes me with a sorry look.

  Mills & Boon

  The pigeon loft was the nerve centre of Dad’s racing ambitions and no one in the neighbourhood could have doubted it. Standing ten feet high by ten feet wide, the loft looked like the Post Office Tower and my mother would gaze forlornly at it as she stood at the sink doing the washing-up.

  Within weeks of the first chicks hatching, they were encouraged to explore. First they were moved to a larger section of the loft, where they learned to find the food and water Dad had left out for them. Then they were allowed into the garden and were soon taking off on short flights, developing their homing instincts bit by bit as they flew further.

  Pacing the garden, like an expectant father waiting for the birth of his first child, Dad would wait nervously until the birds came home. But his confidence grew with theirs and soon he started loading the birds into a basket and driving them out into the countryside where he would release them. Each week he drove a little further to teach them to fly increasingly longer distances.

  Once he started racing the birds, they were flown each week, and on Friday nights Dad would go down to drop off the pigeons at his club. The birds were then loaded onto a truck, taken out to the race point and Dad spent the whole of Saturday pacing around as he compulsively checked his watch.

  ‘Where are they?’ he’d huff, as he walked out into the garden to stare at an empty sky.

  But eventually they’d get home and Dad would check their tags and log their flying times as faithfully as he’d once kept notes on his Brooke Bond orders.

  Not that he had to any more. My father had been made redundant and bought himself a Rover with his pay-off plus a new washing-machine to replace Mum’s old twin tub in an effort to appease her about the pigeons. Thankfully, unemployment proved a temporary blip because he soon found a job as the stock controller at Clements.

  As obsessed as Dad was with his birds, though, the rest of us weren’t that interested in his racing ambitions and were only reluctantly dragged into them.

  ‘Don’t forget the basket!’ he’d call some mornings to Michael, as my brother walked downstairs ready to go to work in his pristine suit.

  With a grimace on his face, Michael would load the pigeon basket into his Opel Ascona, drive the birds into a field near Tring on his way to the office and then tramp into the mud to release them.

  The only one of us who had any time for the pigeons was Joe, who had now left school and was working full-time on a building site. Mum’s distress as she watched him leave for work each day was almost palpable because Joe was as unsuited to being on a building site as he had been to a classroom. Arriving home at the end of each day so exhausted that he almost fell asleep as he ate, his hands were covered with sore patches and his hair full of dust. My mother would sigh as she spooned potatoes onto his plate and we all knew her worry still weighed heavy.

  But while she tried to disguise her concern for Joe, Mum’s disdain for Dad’s hobby was all too apparent – and only got worse with the arrival of the friends he made through pigeon racing. Down-to-earth and good-natured men, they were still not good enough for Mum. She would go silent when Jack Davis, a former merchant seaman, who never wore anything on his feet but plimsolls because a life on the ocean had not equipped him for brogues, arrived at the house to spend hours talking to Dad about taggings, timings and training schedules. Or instead of loading the table as she did for every other visitor, she’d grudgingly put out a single cake when Arthur, a tiny northern man, came over with his wife Gladys, whose slightly macho exterior hid a heart that beat for romance.

  ‘So do you like Mills & Boon, Theresa?’ she asked innocently one day, over tea.

  I could almost see my mother forcing her eyeballs not to roll upwards in disgust. ‘I haven’t read any,’ she replied evenly.

  ‘You’d like to, though, wouldn’t you, Mum?’ Joe put in. ‘You’re always saying you’d like to read some.’

  As we sniggered into our teacups, my mother grimaced. But Gladys didn’t take a blind bit of notice as she sipped her cuppa and talked like an express train.

  ‘Well, I’ll bring you a few, then, Theresa, shall I?’ she said kindly. ‘When you’ve read them you can take them down the stall on Watford market that sells them second-hand and get some new ones. Just write your initials on the inside flap of the ones you’ve read because all the covers look the same, don’t they? It’s the only way I can keep track of all those sheikhs, doctors and the like!’

  Despite my mother’s misgivings, though, I liked my father’s pigeon friends. There was just one I wasn’t so sure about.

  ‘Fancy a game of Scrabble, Mary?’ he’d said one afternoon, as we sat in the living room.

  Half an hour later, we were alone when the man handed me the bag containing all the Scrabble letters.

  ‘Put that on your lap, will you, love?’

  With no hint of an expression on his face, he plunged his hand into the letter bag and started furiously rummaging around.

  ‘Hope I get an A,’ he said, as he pulled out a tile and looked at it. ‘No. Ah, well. Let’s get another, shall we?’

  He had six more tiles to get and picking each one seemed to take a strangely long time.

  I never played Scrabble with him again.

  Anne French cleansing milk

  I sigh as I inspect my face in the mirror. There are breadcrumbs stuck all over it. Ripping off a bit of cotton wool and pouring cleanser onto it, I start to scrub. If the bright orange nylon overall that I have to wear at Garner’s each week isn’t bad enough, then removing all the breadcrumbs impacted on my face by the end of each day is. I didn’t realize that working would have downsides like this. But it’s worth it for the brown envelope I get at five o’clock each Saturday night. I’m saving up for a pair of Kicker boots and it won’t be long now until I can afford them.

  Geraldine Quinn, Lorraine Attard and I had all started work after turning fifteen. Geraldine had got a job in the greengrocer’s, which I decided would be too cold, and I wouldn’t be seen dead working as a Saturday girl in a North Watford hair salon, like Lorraine, because it was way too naff. I’d learned a thing or two about hair since Joe started training as a stylist after a year working on building sites.

  Dad had spotted the advert in the Watford Observer asking for young creative people to apply for a junior position in a swanky salon in Stanmore.

  ‘It will be perfect for you,’ said Mum, as she packed Joe off for an interview. ‘You tell them that you got your art A level at fifteen. Take your certificate and show them your book of bird drawings too. They won’t find more creative than you. You’ll not go anywhere in life if you stay on that building site.’

  Joe had got the job and immediately started to thrive as he discovered an innate talent for hair-styling. You could almost hear Mum’s sigh of relief when he came back each evening and told her what he’d learned that day as they sat together at the kitchen table. Suddenly Joe was happy again, the clouds that had hung over him for the past few years lifted. He loved the work and Mum didn’t blink an eye when he gave me the latest cut dyed a fetching purple. Rules had to be followed when it came to behaviour and school, but
fashion, music and art were never censored.

  ‘I like to see you all dressed up,’ she’d say, as we appeared in the kitchen. ‘Although I’m not so sure about those, Mary.’

  I’d just bought a pair of 1950s-style cream granny sandals from a dance shop in Rickmansworth. ‘But it’s the latest fashion, Mum,’ I cried.

  ‘Well, be that as it may, they look like something my mother would have worn.’

  I spent my Saturdays at Garner’s behind the counter serving customers alongside the manageress, Mrs Tanner, while Ethel – who looked like a rubber doll and must have been almost seventy – stood out the back furiously slathering slices of bread with butter before filling them with egg and salad cream or cheese and pickle.

  ‘I’ll have one bloomer, three split tins, and how much is the custard slice, love?’ customers would ask, as they stood three deep at the counter. ‘And give us four apple turnovers and three doughnuts, too.’

  Desperately trying to add it all up in my head, I lost count most of the time. But Mrs Tanner didn’t correct me too often as I went to the till and pulled down the levers to ring everything up, so I guessed I wasn’t too far wrong.

  Each lunch break, I’d meet up with Geraldine and Lorraine to go and flick through the records in Woolworths. Or we’d go into Boots to see Tish and her friend Angela Horne before spraying ourselves with Charlie and Tweed. Blasé was my favourite and I couldn’t wait to buy a bottle.

  The best bit of my working day, though, was the moment when I was given an iced apple doughnut for my mid-afternoon break: I’d decided I needed to put on weight. Flares and skinny rib jumpers might have been perfect for my straight-up-straight-down figure, and there had been more kisses after Stephen Bradley, but I still envied Tish’s looks. I had fried eggs, she had proper boobs. I had dead straight hair whereas hers was thick, falling in luxurious copper waves to her shoulders.