The Surplus Girls

by Polly Heron

  ‘Your Belinda’s different. She’s bright.’

  Miss Kirby had actually come to their house – sometimes it was hard to remember that the Laytons had lived in a house back then; a modest two-up two-down that seemed like a palace compared to the squalid couple of rooms they were crammed into these days. Miss Kirby had come to plead for her star pupil to be granted this potentially life-changing opportunity.

  ‘Let her sit the scholarship. Let her go to high school. She’ll pass, I’m sure she will.’

  Listening, crouched on the other side of the door, Belinda had felt a moment of glory. Her heart drummed in her chest and she felt more awake, more alert. But she had known permission wouldn’t be granted and, truth be told, she wasn’t disappointed, not really. She had gorged on Angela Brazil books in those days, but when faced by the dazzling possibility of rubbing shoulders with girls called Philippa and Katrine, who got up to larks and had private art lessons and were captains of tennis, she knew she would die a thousand deaths if she fetched up in a place like that. What, a back-street lass stopping on at school till fifteen? Alongside girls whose fathers were doctors and senior clerks and owners of the better class of shops? Not on your life. Or not on Dad’s life, anyroad, and his was the word that counted.

  ‘Nay, miss,’ he had told Miss Kirby. ‘Our Belinda’s the eldest. I need her out working. She’ll stop at the elementary school, go to work half-time when she’s twelve and leave when she’s thirteen, and that’s flat.’

  ‘If she goes to high school, she’ll get a better job.’ Miss Kirby had managed to say the words and bring more money home without uttering them out loud.

  ‘No point,’ said Dad. ‘She’ll only get herself engaged and get wed. That’s what girls do.’

  And he had been proved right, hadn’t he? She and Ben had had an understanding when she was just fourteen and had been allowed to get engaged when she was fifteen.

  ‘A mill-worker?’ There was no scorn in Miss Kirby’s voice, only kindness. That was worse, because it felt like pity. ‘That’s hard work.’

  ‘It’s regular.’ If she hadn’t been talking to her old teacher, she might have jerked her chin in open annoyance. ‘Skilled an’ all. I could work my way up to six looms if I stay.’

  ‘That’s the point, my dear. You’ve got to work. You’re a surplus girl.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A surplus girl. That’s what they’re being called. With so many of our young men having lost their lives in the war, there’s now a generation of girls with no men to marry them.’

  She bridled. ‘I’m not looking for another husband. Ben were the only boy for me.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to give offence. My point is that surplus girls face a lifetime of fending for themselves. What education, what training, do they have under their belts to equip them for that?’

  ‘I’ve been trained.’

  ‘You’re being deliberately obtuse, my girl. Yes, one day you might run six looms. I’m not underestimating the skill that takes, but – oh, Belinda, with the right education, you could have been an office girl. You could have started as the office junior and by now you’d be adept at typewriting and filing and the correct layout of business letters. You could be training up your own office junior. Goodness, a clever girl like you could have learned to keep the books.’

  ‘Anyroad, I’m at the mill.’ She might not have greeted Miss Kirby so warmly had she known she was going to get a lecture.

  ‘I know. It’s no use fretting over what might have been.’

  Belinda laughed and then smiled because the laugh might have sounded bitter and she didn’t want to give the wrong impression. ‘There’s no might-have-been about an office job. That was never going to be. I knew Dad would never let me try for high school. The only might-have-been I care about—’ She stopped, clawing in a deep breath to stop her chest caving in.

  ‘I know,’ Miss Kirby said softly. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. I’d best let you get on. It was good to see you again.’

  ‘You an’ all, Miss Kirby.’

  But instead of being glad to see the back of her old teacher, she felt a stab of guilt. This dear lady had done her best for her and didn’t deserve to walk away thinking she was hurt.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Belinda went after her. ‘Would you like to help me choose blouse material?’

  The light in Miss Kirby’s face was reward enough. ‘I’d be delighted, if you’re sure.’

  Bolts of fabric were laid out across the stall, with boxes of cotton-reels, ribbons and buttons at one end, and pin-cushions (fancy not making your own!) and sewing-boxes at the back. At one end of the stall was a pyramid of bolts of blacks and mauves, just as there had been for as long as Belinda could remember, though the pyramid had been significantly bulkier since the outbreak of war. Surely it must reduce in size now that the influenza epidemic was behind them. Surely.

  ‘What sort of fabric are you looking for?’ Miss Kirby asked.

  She pretended not to notice the glance that swept over her all-consuming black. ‘Well…’

  ‘Will it be more black? I’m sorry, dear, but I have to ask if I’m to be of any assistance. How long ago were you bereaved? I assume your young man was taken by the influenza.’

  She drew her shawl more tightly round herself. ‘No, he was killed in France at the start of 1918. Four years ago this month.’

  ‘Four years? And you’re still in deepest black. You must have loved him very much.’

  Oh, heck, now Miss Kirby thought she was some latter-day Queen Victoria type. Yes, she had loved Ben with all her heart, but… but… It wasn’t that simple. She took off her gloves and ran her fingers over some of the materials, testing texture and drape.

  ‘What are you looking for today?’ Miss Kirby’s voice was gentle.

  Go on, say it. You’ve been thinking it for long enough. ‘I’ve been wondering…’ Oh, Auntie Enid and Grandma Beattie were going to kill her for this. ‘Something in mauve, not an entire blouse, but with mauve trimmings.’

  ‘You’re going into half-mourning. Don’t look so stricken. I can see this is hard for you.’

  Aye, but not for the reason Miss Kirby imagined. Belinda felt a complete heel. In spite of the chilly afternoon, her flesh felt hot and prickly.

  ‘What about a mauve collar and cuffs?’ Miss Kirby dealt her a sharp, though not unkind, look. ‘That’s pretty material, isn’t it? Your hand keeps going back to it, even though you’re meant to be choosing mauve.’

  ‘Oh – this. No, really, I…’

  Oh, but it was heavenly. Her colour-starved soul yearned for it. Rose-pink cotton scattered with a pattern of tiny rosebuds in darker pink with green leaves. It would be perfect with her colouring, dark brown hair, blue eyes. Imagine wearing something pretty, something flattering, instead of endless black.

  ‘I’ll have some of that mauve,’ she said briskly. ‘As you say, collar and cuffs.’

  ‘You might try lavender, my dear, if you’d like something… prettier.’

  ‘I always feel sorry for lavender matched with black. Mauve looks like it can hold its own better.’ She took a breath. ‘I have a blouse pattern with panels in the front so you can have contrasting fabric, so I’ll need mauve for that as well as the collar and cuffs.’ There, she had said it. Never mind all her shilly-shallying.

  Her purchase made, she felt torn between pleasure and panic.

  ‘Thanks for your help, Miss Kirby.’

  ‘A pleasure.’

  Turning from the stall, they began to walk away, avoiding an old girl carrying a sagging bag made of sack-cloth. Without planning to, Belinda stopped dead.

  ‘Wait.’

  She returned to the stall, heart pumping. Mauve wasn’t what she wanted. She had dreamed of colour. She was sick of black.

  Her hand trailed across the pink. It was a deep pink, a serious pink, not pale, not too summery, and the pattern was small, not too frivolous. Was she wrong to want it? Want it? She ached for it.r />
  If it was bad of her to buy the mauve, what sort of person was she to want this?

  But she didn’t have to make it up immediately, did she? She could start with the mauve and give Auntie Enid and Grandma Beattie time to grow used to it; then, at a later date, she could suggest having a colour. Tension held her taut; her muscles felt sore. She tried to roll her shoulders inside her shawl without making it obvious.

  ‘It would suit you with your dark hair and fair skin,’ said Miss Kirby.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Was she really going to do this? She had worn black for four years. Four whole years. Her fingers curled into fists, then straightened. She caught the stallholder’s eye. ‘How wide it is, please?’

  Moments later, she had a second paper bag tucked under her shawl, but there was no time to think about what she had done, because from behind her came a yell followed by the clatter of running footsteps. She glanced round – oh no, not them. As they barged past, Miss Kirby staggered and Belinda was a second too late to save her from falling. Her parcels dropped to the cobbles as she bent to help Miss Kirby to her feet.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, just shocked.’

  Folk gathered round. The draper came from behind her stall.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ voices asked. ‘Did you see them lads? I’d tan their hides if they were mine.’

  Miss Kirby’s face had lost its colour, but there was a glint in her eyes as she met Belinda’s gaze. ‘Was that who I think it was?’

  Oh, heck.

  Chapter Two

  SHE HAD LIVED here once, in squalid Cromwell Street. Simply walking up the road was enough to set little spikes of fear jumping beneath Belinda’s skin. What if everything went wrong and she ended up back here? Things did go wrong. She was living proof. Look at her, losing Ben. Life could be cruel.

  Not that she was one to complain. She wasn’t like her father.

  She arrived outside the house the Laytons squeezed into along with three other families. Dad blamed the war for the way they had come down in the world, but the truth was they had lived here before it started. Belinda could remember the gradual slide that had happened while she was in elementary school: Dad losing his job and finding another, only it hadn’t paid as well; then losing that job and the family taking another step down the ladder. The scrimping and saving; the first time she was sent to the grocer’s to ask for cracked eggs. The first time there was meat on Dad’s plate but not on the children’s. The first time she lied to the rent-man about Mum not being in the house when really she was hiding under the kitchen table. The time she looked at the sour-smelling, gaunt-faced children who took turns to come to school because they shared clothes with their brothers and sisters, and instead of the usual sneering pity, she felt dread streaming through her: what if we end up like that?

  Things had changed between Mum and Dad. There had always been arguments, but now there was constant carping and bickering. It hadn’t all been bickering, though. There had been plenty of making up afterwards. Oh aye, Denby and Kathleen Layton, who had had just three children between 1901 and ’06, fell for three boys in two years. Two years! Twenty-three months, to be exact.

  Belinda had not long turned seven when Thad was born. She had been thrilled to have a baby to look after; but by the time Jacob came along twenty-three months later, with Mikey in between, she was sick of babies. As the oldest, and even more so because the second-oldest was a boy, she had become a nursemaid; and if she complained, Mum would give her a thick ear and set her to mop the floor or fill the coal-scuttle.

  ‘It’s how girls learn,’ said Mum.

  She had learned a great deal in the next few years.

  The time came when the family did a moonlight flit and went to their new home. It had never felt like home. Two rooms in a house bulging with people, mould and bad temper, with smelly, sticky fly-paper dangling everywhere, covered with houseflies and bluebottles, a single stinking privy out the back, and if one person came home with a flea or if one person had diarrhoea…

  How could somewhere you were ashamed of be home? If they had been a happy family struggling to get by but making the best of things, it might have been different, but not with Mum and Dad at it hammer and tongs because Dad had raided the housekeeping jar again, and Thad giving Mikey a good kicking in bed and swearing he had done it in his sleep, and the girls complaining bitterly about the lack of privacy on bathnight, and all of them digging their elbows into one another, not always by accident, because there wasn’t enough room to swing a cat.

  Please don’t let me ever have to come back to live here.

  The gate, its wood rotten at the bottom, lolled from one hinge, permanently wide open. From gate to doorstep was only a yard, but that would have been room for a tub or two of plants or herbs under the windows, if anybody could have been bothered. But no one could be bothered, the same way the front step hadn’t been donkey-stoned in years. Mum had done it when they first moved in, but then she got fed up of being the only one and had stopped.

  As she let herself into the narrow hallway, Belinda’s skin tightened over her bones so as to have less surface area to feel unclean. Entering the kitchen-cum-sitting room, she pinned on a smile.

  The room was damp: it always was, but it was worse in winter. The pulley-airer was full and there was a clothes-horse that was undoubtedly meant to be stationed round the fireplace, only Dad had shifted it and was now ensconced in their one armchair by the hearth, with half of the newspaper, while George, wearing the pullover Belinda had knitted him for Christmas, sat hunched over one end of the table, reading the other half and steadfastly ignoring Mum, who, eyes weary, mouth sullen, was using the rest of the table for ironing. They had had an ironing-board once upon a time, but it had had to go, one in a long line of things that had had to go, because Mum had needed a few bob and, anyroad, they didn’t have room. Mum looked like she was bashing the clothes rather than pressing them: Sarah was going to get an earful when she showed her face. Ironing was her job, just as it had once been Belinda’s.

  Mikey crouched on the hearthrug at Dad’s feet, bent over something he was constructing out of matchsticks. He would have to defend it with his life if he intended it to last longer than two minutes after Thad returned.

  Had her smile slipped? She hitched it higher.

  ‘It’s only me.’

  ‘Shut the door,’ said Dad. ‘You’re letting the warm out.’

  She draped her shawl over the back of a chair, depositing her paper bags by the door before taking the iron from Mum.

  ‘Let me help.’

  ‘That’s our Sarah’s job.’

  ‘Then I’ll help both of you. Where is she?’

  ‘Lord knows. Not where she should be: here, seeing to the ironing. Lazy cat, leaving it to me.’

  ‘She’s not lazy. She puts in long hours cleaning that hotel and she’s on her feet the whole time, either that or on her knees.’

  ‘Trust you to stick up for her.’

  There was no talking to Mum in this mood. Belinda took the cooling iron from Mum’s hand and popped it onto the iron hob on the range to heat up again, picking up the hot one.

  ‘Take the weight off your feet, Mum. I’ll make us all a pot of tea in a minute.’

  ‘About time someone did,’ George said without looking up.

  Mum heaved a dramatic put-upon sigh and grabbed the kettle.

  ‘Saint flaming Kathleen,’ Dad muttered. He crushed the newspaper into his lap. ‘Let our Bel do it, for Pete’s sake. She does little enough else for us.’

  Belinda’s mouth dropped open. Had he forgotten already? The capon, the presents, the tin of Mackintosh’s Toffee de Luxe – de Luxe, mind – the crackers, the box of dates.

  ‘Steady on, Dad,’ said George.

  ‘Oh – aye.’ He had the grace to look shame-faced. No, he didn’t. That sideways glance was sly. ‘At the mill this morning, were you?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  �
�Give us your money, then. It’s not needed for Christmas now.’

  Her heart lurched. Would he force her? ‘Auntie Enid said I could keep it for myself.’

  ‘Easy for her to say. She hasn’t got family responsibilities.’

  ‘Nay, leave her be, Denby.’ Mum perked up, the washedout drudge transformed into a straight-backed lionheart. ‘She spent all her Saturday money to give us a good Christmas. The least we can do is let her keep this one week’s. I don’t suppose Mrs Sloan will let her do any more Saturdays.’

  ‘No, she won’t.’ Belinda threw her a grateful look.

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ Dad demanded. ‘I’m the one with mouths to feed. It’s not as if Bel has a husband and children at home.’

  She flinched. How could he hurl that at her?

  ‘Oh aye,’ Mum taunted, ‘and you’d use her money to top up the housekeeping, would you? I weren’t born yesterday. What you didn’t waste over the bar, you’d lose on the horses.’

  Dad roared to his feet, scattering sheets of newspaper, and then they were at it, him bellowing and Mum shrieking like a fishwife. Belinda’s energy seeped out of her. An all-out row like this made her mind freeze.

  The door crashed open and Thad burst in, followed awkwardly by Jacob, clutching a half-full sack, their arrival cramming the already crowded room still further. George stuffed his fingers in his ears and bent closer to the newspaper. Belinda stood the iron on its end on the trivet, keeping hold of the handle in case she got jostled.

  Thad gave his parents a filthy look. ‘Ruddy hell, another barney.’

  Mum and Dad stopped rowing and turned angry faces on the newcomers.

  ‘I want a word with you,’ said Belinda. Did she sound like just another loud-mouthed Layton? But she couldn’t let Thad get away with his behaviour in the market. With luck Jacob might see that Thad’s wasn’t the best lead to follow.