The Mill Girls of Albion Lane

by Jenny Holmes

  Lily put down the blouse and hurried to help her into the chair by the fire. ‘Are you sure you should be up?’ she asked.

  ‘I had to get out of bed some time and this way it’ll stop your father nagging me to fetch Dr Moss,’ Rhoda replied as she sank down into the chair. She winced as she reached up to tuck stray strands of hair behind her ears. ‘Don’t go on at me, Lily. Just make me a cup of tea, there’s a good girl.’

  Rushing to do as Rhoda asked, Lily squashed down her fears and cast around for ordinary, everyday subjects. ‘Harry called to take Arthur out for the afternoon,’ she told her. ‘That was nice of him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Betty Bainbridge has brought him and Peggy up nicely, considering she’s been by herself since their father died of the influenza – when would that be? Let me see, it was ten years back, during the winter of 1921. Is that where Evie is now – at Raglan Road?’

  Lily nodded.

  ‘And whose blouse have you been sewing?’ Rhoda pointed to the garment, finished except for the buttonholes, hanging over the back of a chair.

  ‘I made it for Vera Wilkinson at work.’

  ‘How much will she pay you for that, pray tell?’ Rhoda went on.

  ‘I don’t know, Mother. We haven’t mentioned money. Maybe she’ll give me sixpence out of next week’s wage.’

  ‘It’s worth a shilling at least,’ Rhoda said sharply then she grew distracted and stared into the fire. ‘You’ve been to see Margie,’ she stated after a lengthy silence, taking the cup of tea and looking directly into Lily’s eyes.

  Lily found it impossible to deny. ‘I have,’ she agreed, noticing that her mother’s hand was shaking so hard that the cup rattled in its saucer. ‘I saw her on Monday after work.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And again last night. We ran into one another outside the Victory.’

  Rhoda pressed her lips together in a thin line and took a sharp breath to overcome a fresh bout of pain. ‘That’s not what I meant. I want to know how she behaved when you saw her on Monday. What did she say? And don’t fob me off because I’ll be able to tell and then you and I will have a row, Lily, I’m warning you.’

  Lily frowned and moved Vera’s blouse on to the table as she drew the chair across the room. ‘The last thing I want is an argument,’ she insisted, sitting down close to Rhoda. ‘But I made Margie a promise not to tell anyone what we talked about. I’m sorry, Mother, but I can’t break that promise.’

  Turning her face away, Rhoda nodded then spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘That’s all right, I can read between the lines as well as the next person. I’d hoped I was wrong about Margie but it seems I’m not.’ As embers shifted and sank in the grate, Rhoda told Lily to put more coal on the fire. ‘How many bags did Holroyd deliver this week?’

  Her face burning from the glow of the fire, Lily was torn between her sister and her mother and shocked once again by Rhoda’s ability to deny her motherly feelings. It felt like a cellar trapdoor slamming shut. ‘Three bags,’ she answered flatly.

  ‘That’ll be nine shillings we owe him,’ Rhoda calculated, tapping the arm of her chair with her fingertips. ‘And where will we get that with Christmas just around the corner? Pray tell me that.’

  When Lily took the new blouse to work on the Monday morning and gave it to Vera, her fellow mender was all smiles and praise.

  ‘It’s grand,’ Vera told her, agreeing to a dressmaking fee of nine pence, to be paid out of her wages on the coming Saturday. ‘Why, I could go into town to Merton and Groves and buy one just like it for ten times the price and no one would know the difference.’

  ‘You picked a nice, fashionable pattern.’ Never one to blow her own trumpet, Lily pointed out another reason why the end result was so pleasing.

  ‘But the buttonholes are perfectly neat, and look at the cuffs with the beautiful scalloped edging.’ A happy Vera showed off the blouse to Mary and Ethel. Jennie, not wanting to be left out, came to deliver her verdict on Lily’s seamstress skills and by the time Iris Valentine pitter-pattered into the mending room, the praise was universal.

  ‘Girls, please!’ The manageress clapped her hands and sent them to their work stations, telling Vera to put the blouse back in its brown-paper wrapping. Before long, the atmosphere in the room had changed and heads were bent in quiet concentration. It was only when the buzzer for dinner sounded that the women, backs aching and fingertips tingling from their painstaking work, were free to talk once more.

  ‘I’m saving up for a length of plum-coloured crêpe de Chine I’ve seen in the remnant shop on Market Row,’ Elsie told Lily as the menders traipsed along the crowded corridor to the canteen. Though Elsie was well over forty, with two grown-up children, she still kept up an interest in fashion and was vain about her appearance. ‘I asked them to put it aside for me and now I’m wondering if you would make it into a dress – one with long sleeves and a little Peter Pan collar, with pearl buttons all down the front. Would you have time to do that after Christmas, do you think?’

  Promising to make time, Lily hurried to join Sybil, Annie and Evie at their favourite bench by the window. The talk there was all about Fred Lee, who was absent from work due to an accident on his motorbike on his way home from the Rovers match on Saturday. The rumour was that he’d broken an arm and given himself a black eye when his bike hit a patch of oil and skidded out of control. As a result he’d spent the rest of the day at the King Edward’s Hospital having his arm put in plaster.

  ‘Accident on his motorbike, my foot!’ Annie scoffed as she dug into a dinner of pork pie and gravy. ‘According to Robert, that bike’s been in the workshop for repairs since last Wednesday. By all accounts it needs a new gasket, which they’ve had to order from Birmingham.’

  ‘Oooh!’ Sybil gloated over this latest piece of gossip. ‘So who really gave Fred the black eye and why is he covering it up?’

  ‘Why are we wasting time talking about it?’ Lily’s dislike for the overlooker made her unusually curt but at the same time she gave Evie a reassuring nod.

  ‘Because we are!’ Annie insisted. ‘And do you want to know what I think really happened?’

  ‘You’re going to tell us anyway.’ Sybil laughed at their irrepressible friend as she swept back a thick lock of hair and pinned it firmly in place.

  Annie leaned across the table and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I think the worm has turned!’

  ‘Which worm? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Fred’s wife, Nora. I think she’s got wind of Fred’s goings-on behind her back and got someone to teach him a lesson.’

  ‘Never!’ Sybil gasped. ‘That little thing? She wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘I’m saying that’s just what I heard.’ Giving the impression of keeping something back and enjoying the suspense she’d created, Annie returned to her pork pie and for a while the sound of plates being scraped clean combined with the hum of general conversation and the background churn of giant cogs turning in the engine room in the yard below.

  ‘What are you looking for, Lily?’ Sybil had caught her friend going off into a daydream and clearing a patch in the misted window. ‘Or rather, I should say, who are you looking for?’

  ‘If it’s Harry, you won’t see him. He’s already been and gone,’ Annie chirped.

  ‘I know that.’ Lily tried but failed to stop herself from blushing. She was on the brink of making a clean breast of it and confessing that she and Harry had been to see Gracie Fields together when all heads turned towards the door as Stanley and Winifred Calvert walked in with the mill manager, Derek Wilson, and the office secretary, Jean Carson.

  There was an immediate and uncomfortable hush during which there was plenty of time for the mill girls to take in every detail of Winifred’s appearance – a process that they executed with forensic precision.

  ‘Why does she come to work all done up like a dog’s dinner?’ Jennie would say to Mary as they returned to the burling and mending room after dinner. ‘
Who does she think she is?’

  ‘I liked her dress,’ Vera would tell Ethel. ‘Black and white stripes show off a girl’s figure a treat.’

  ‘But crêpe de Chine?’ Ethel would query. ‘I like the feel of it, but it’s no good for sitting around in all day.’

  There were other comments about Winifred’s hair – ‘natural or permed?’ – her black patent leather shoes – ‘too high’ – which the girls would whisper to each other later.

  At the time, though, these thoughts were kept private as Stanley Calvert ordered his manager to create a space for the four of them and Jean asked the cook to brew a pot of tea. They sat down at the table next to Lily’s and Calvert pontificated in a gratingly loud voice, as if volume alone were a measure of his importance.

  ‘A full order book is what we’re after,’ he told Wilson, a small, slight man with prominent teeth, a clipped moustache and round glasses, who dressed in a pinstriped suit of inferior quality that was too big across the shoulders but fashionably wide in the trouser leg. ‘Are you listening to this, Winifred? We have to be there before Kingsley and the rest with a better price and an earlier delivery date, which we stick to come what may. That’s the secret to modern worsted production – low prices and keen delivery, whatever it takes.’

  Lily wondered that a man in Calvert’s position could talk so confidently about full order books in times like these. Then again, perhaps this was what it took to keep production going against the odds – an unthinking self-belief that carried you through even while you had your back against the wall.

  Stanley Calvert certainly didn’t look like a worried man, rather one who was used to issuing orders and getting his own way, with a well-fed, well-groomed appearance and one of those smooth, plump faces without lines and furrows, though the thinning hair, coarsening skin and thickening waistline suggested an age closer to fifty than forty.

  As for his home circumstances, he’d been married for twenty-five years to Eleanor, who was five years his junior but a woman who considered herself to be his superior in every other respect. A patron of the ballet and opera, an avid reader of the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, which she discussed with a circle of educated, artistic friends, Eleanor seldom turned her thoughts to the sordid business of manufacturing cloth and refused point blank to accept that she, like everyone else during these pinched, straitened times, must tighten her purse strings. As a result she bitterly resented her husband’s decision to involve their only daughter Winifred in the daily grind of Calvert’s Mill and had promptly decamped from Moor House to stay with her sister in Scarborough in the build-up to Christmas.

  ‘Now if we find a way of buying wool in the grey at a cheaper price than the one we get from the suppliers here in Yorkshire, we’ll be on to a good thing,’ Stanley Calvert told Derek Wilson. ‘You’ll make it your business to find out how much it would cost us to ship it in from further afield – from Leicester or from the Lake District, say – and come back to me with half a dozen different prices by the end of the week.’

  The manager, who valued the three-bedroomed house that came with his job and a wage that gave him enough money to run a little Ford car, eagerly agreed. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Local suppliers are getting greedy and now that we don’t rely so much on the canals for transport, I can look into cutting back costs in that direction, too.’

  As the men talked business and Jean poured tea and produced a plate of neatly cut ham sandwiches, Winifred grew more obviously bored. Refusing both tea and sandwiches, she pulled a silver and mother-of-pearl compact out of her pocket, powdered her nose and touched up her lipstick. Then she examined her fingernails and drummed them on the table, after which she stared sulkily around the room until she spied Jennie Shaw.

  ‘She may be the boss’s daughter, but that doesn’t give her the right to push in front of me in the clocking-on queue,’ Jennie muttered to Mary, not flinching under Winifred’s haughty gaze.

  ‘When was that?’ Mary asked.

  ‘This morning. She was two minutes late. By rights she should have half an hour docked off her pay like the rest of us.’

  At the table next door, Sybil, Annie, Evie and Lily overheard every word and cringed. It seemed to them that Winifred was going out of her way to get herself disliked. Lily bit her lip, waiting to see what Stanley Calvert’s reaction would be. When he shoved Winifred’s manicured hand out of the way as he reached for another sandwich, she saw a flicker of apprehension pass across his daughter’s face before she composed herself and went back to an inspection of her fingernails. It was as if Winifred had overplayed her hand, realized her mistake and would suffer the consequences later, when the two of them got back to Moor House.

  ‘Am I the only one who feels sorry for Winifred Calvert?’ Lily wondered aloud to Annie on the way back to work at half past twelve.

  ‘Yes, love, you are,’ was the swift, decisive reply.

  ‘Well, I think she’s a fish out of water and doesn’t know how to behave.’

  ‘That’s you all over,’ Annie laughed. ‘Feeling sorry for those who don’t deserve it.’

  And so it went on at work for the rest of that week – Winifred rubbing people up the wrong way, Fred Lee recuperating at home after his mysterious ‘accident’ and Lily looking longingly out of the mending-room window each morning and teatime for a glimpse of Harry dropping off or waiting to collect the boss’s daughter.

  On the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday Lily was out of luck and she was beginning to doubt herself. Was it possible, she wondered, that Harry had taken a step back after the thrill of their first dance and their cinema outing and was now avoiding her? Yes, that must be it. In the cold light of day, Harry had regretted his long speech about his feelings for Lily and now wanted to go back to their old situation of being just good pals. The notion lodged itself in her mind and gnawed away at her, adding to her ongoing worries about Margie, Evie and her mother.

  ‘Why so glum?’ Sybil asked her on the Thursday as the mill girls filed out under the archway. The weather was bitter, with the sort of damp cold that got into the bones and with a northerly wind that brought swathes of mist down from the moor to mingle with the soot and the smoke of the town.

  Lily shivered and turned up her collar, automatically checking up and down Ghyll Road for Calvert’s Bentley. ‘It’s this nasty weather – it makes you want to curl up by the fire and not move an inch until the winter’s over and done with.’

  ‘We’ve a long way to go yet,’ Sybil reminded her, drawing her shawl over her head. ‘We’ve got Christmas before that. Then January – that’s usually the worst.’

  ‘Cheer up, you two, for goodness’ sake,’ Annie chided before steering the conversation in another direction. ‘What’s Father Christmas bringing you this year, Evie – a shiny new overlooker?’

  They all laughed and agreed how much nicer it would be if Fred didn’t bother coming back to work.

  By the time the girls came to the parting of the ways, Lily felt more cheerful. She and Evie said their goodbyes and walked on up Albion Lane arm in arm, discussing whether or not they would need to ask for Peggy’s help again the following morning to take Arthur into school.

  ‘Mother swears hand on heart that she’s feeling better,’ Evie pointed out.

  ‘But she’s not seen Dr Moss and she’s not put her nose outside the front door since she fell ill. They’re saying it’ll be cold and wet again tomorrow.’ On balance, Lily felt they should ask Peggy to help out after all and sent Evie down the alley to pass on the message while she hurried on home.

  It was so foggy that Lily could hardly see two feet in front of her and almost ran slap bang into the person she’d been longing to see all week.

  ‘Harry!’ she exclaimed as he put out both hands to steady her.

  ‘Lily!’ For a moment he was tongue tied, his thoughts scattered.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked. ‘Have you been avoiding me?’

  ‘Crikey, no!’ In fact, Harry
had been doing some loitering of his own, trying to run into Lily and fix up a time for their next outing but missing her by a few minutes here and there. Getting control of his jitters, he resumed his old, teasing manner. ‘I take it you’ve been missing me something rotten, Lil?’

  ‘No, I’ve been far too busy,’ she retorted, her heart beating to the new fast rhythm it adopted whenever Harry put his hand on her arm or her shoulder, or around her waist. ‘Anyway, why aren’t you at work?’

  ‘I knocked off early because I wasn’t needed,’ he explained. ‘Mr Calvert said he would drive to town to collect Winifred for a change. I just popped into your house to see if Arthur fancied coming down to the brewery again but your mother said he had to stay in to learn his five-times table and she gave me that stern look, the way she does.’

  ‘Mother’s been poorly,’ Lily said by way of excuse.

  Slow to release his hold on Lily, Harry was happy to let the conversation meander on. ‘He loved those horses. He says he wants to drive a wagon when he grows up, not that there’ll be many horses and carts left by that time, I reckon.’

  ‘He’s a funny little lad,’ Lily murmured as Harry finally let go of her arms. Her heart felt light as she read between the lines. ‘Did you really drop by to see Arthur? Is that the truth?’

  ‘Yes. No. Oh, what the heck – I came to see if I can call for you this Saturday,’ he announced bluntly and then realized he ought to have made the invitation sound more enticing. ‘You can tell me if there’s something you fancy doing – the world is our oyster!’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she laughed. ‘Our world doesn’t go much beyond Overcliffe Common, remember.’

  ‘All right, then – how about that Frankenstein picture that Billy mentioned?’

  ‘That didn’t sound very cheerful, did it?’ Lily was working out a way of telling Harry that she would like it better if just the two of them went out without making it sound too forward.

  ‘Greta Garbo in Mata Hari then?’ he ventured.

  Lily shook her head. ‘Doesn’t she end up facing a firing squad?’