The Victory Girls

by Joanna Toye

  Eileen smiled at him.

  ‘Don’t tell me, Gloria’s moaning about stocks of face powder again?’

  ‘Not for much longer,’ he replied. ‘She’s leaving.’

  Miss Frobisher, usually imperturbable, gaped.

  ‘She’s never been accepted into the WAAF?’

  This had been Gloria’s long-held ambition, though unlike Lily, duty didn’t come into it. Snaring a pilot for a boyfriend – or even better, a husband – was the draw for her.

  ‘She has. She’s given me her notice.’

  ‘Well, there’ll be someone else doing that if we don’t act fast,’ said Miss Frobisher briskly. ‘Lily Collins. She’s thinking of joining up too. So will you please see Mr Marlow and get her promoted to first sales?’

  Peter took a step backwards, pretending surprise.

  ‘Speak your mind next time, why don’t you!’

  ‘You know I’m right, Peter.’ Eileen softened her tone. ‘You know how it is in the forces, better pay, better food, better everything, and – Gloria excepted – the feeling that you’re doing something for your country. Lily’s a girl with a conscience but she’d be completely wasted square-bashing all day and saluting till she fractures her elbow!’

  ‘Thank you. Rubbish my previous career, go ahead!’ he teased.

  ‘You know what I mean. She’s done nine months, pretty much, as second sales. Please speak up for her. I’m not prepared to lose her – and I don’t think Marlows should be either.’

  Chapter 2

  Lily had timed her morning break to coincide with Gladys’s, thinking her friend would want to talk. Instead, Gladys pushed a coloured postcard across the canteen table. It showed the sun rising over the sea. On the back Bill had written:

  Wherever I am, wherever I be,

  Nothing can separate you and me.

  Our love will go on like the endless seas

  And keep us close till we have peace.

  Then he’d added:

  Love you always and forever, your Bill xxx

  ‘I reckon he made that up all by himself,’ said Gladys, awestruck, as if she’d suddenly found herself married to Shakespeare. ‘He tucked it under the top sheet. I only found it when I went to bed.’

  Lily handed the card back. No wonder Lily’s brother Sid, who’d trained with Bill in the Navy, had called him ‘a great sloppy date’ – and now a poet to boot! Jim was lovely and loving, and clever with words – he loved a crossword and wrote the Marlows staff newsletter every month – but she couldn’t imagine him ever saying, or sending her, anything as flowery. And a verse was all very well but not much help when Gladys was having a baby and her husband was half a world away. That was when someone literally close by would be important. Off her mind went again in the same groove: to join up or to stay?

  ‘To me … about another three inches, I think.’

  With Les, Beryl’s husband and one of the store’s porters, Jim was positioning a newly delivered sideboard. Utility-made, light oak, two cupboards, three drawers, decent workmanship – he didn’t see it sticking around for long. Satisfied it was now in prime position, he stood back.

  ‘Thanks, Les.’

  Les touched a finger to his forehead in mock-salute.

  ‘Anything to oblige.’ He passed Jim a wooden clipboard and Jim squiggled on the form. ‘So how’s it going? Taken Lily ring shopping yet?’

  ‘Nowhere near! I’m still saving.’

  Les did one of his exaggerated eye-rolls; he fancied himself a bit of a comedian.

  ‘Blimey, what for? The Koh-i-Noor?’

  ‘Yes, and a necklace and bracelet to match.’ Jim grinned, then frowned. ‘What’s it to you, anyway? Why are you so keen to hurry it along?’

  ‘Why? I’ll tell you for why!’ Les rolled his eyes again. ‘Me and Beryl married that quick, with our Bobby on the way, we didn’t even bother with an engagement ring. Now she wants one, doesn’t she? So you’d better not set the bar too high!’

  ‘No, no, it’s out of the question. She’s only been at second sales level for what …?’ Cedric Marlow, seated at his big mahogany desk, ruffled through Lily’s personal file.

  ‘Nine months, sir.’

  ‘Eight, I think you’ll find.’ Cedric had found the relevant page. It was eight months, two weeks, and two days, in fact. Peter Simmonds had checked, but he didn’t correct the older man, who went on: ‘You know perfectly well we expect a year at second sales level before promotion to first. Some assistants never move up – and never want to.’

  ‘If I may, sir …’ Mr Marlow always needed careful handling. ‘That’s not the case with Miss Collins. She’s already proved she has the potential to go far. And with Miss Frobisher having taken on extra duties …’

  Cedric raised a warning hand.

  ‘Even so. I like Miss Collins; she’s bright and a fast learner. But if we make an exception for her, it sends the wrong message to other staff. It’s bad for morale. And we need to keep that up!’

  Peter sighed – he hoped not too visibly. He’d already made the argument that Eileen had made to him – and which he believed – that they might lose Lily altogether, but Cedric Marlow was obviously going to dig in his heels. The store’s owner might have handed over most of the day-to-day running of things but although he was nearly seventy, he clung on to the power he still had. Perhaps it was precisely because he was approaching seventy, thought Peter with a flash of insight.

  Cedric wrote something in his meticulous script on Lily’s file, closed it, and re-capped his pen.

  ‘Send Miss Collins to Small Leather Goods for a while. She can change places with the current second sales there. Let her widen her experience on a different floor with different stock, type of customer, and type of purchase. Then come and talk to me again.’

  The matter, Peter knew, was closed. For now.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lily. This is all my fault.’

  Jim and Lily were walking home in the inky dusk. They knew the way almost blindfold by now, and neither wanted to use their torches till they had to, batteries being so hard to come by. Lily couldn’t see Jim’s profile clearly, but she tilted her head to look up at him anyway.

  ‘Because I’ve got to wait for my promotion to first sales like everyone else? How do you work that out?’

  ‘Promoting you early’d look like favouritism. Because … oh, you know.’

  Lily did.

  Cedric Marlow was Jim’s uncle by marriage but Jim had had nothing to do with his wealthy widowed uncle or his cousin Robert when he’d been young. Jim’s family background was much humbler and when he’d needed a job, he’d never expected or asked for preferential treatment – he’d started at the bottom, like Lily, and worked his way up. Maybe his new supervisory role did mean that Mr Marlow had something bigger in mind for him eventually, but as for saying she was being held back because they were a couple …

  ‘That’s right, make it all about you!’ Lily teased, then relented. ‘It’s fine. I don’t mind really. A couple of months on the ground floor on a different department … it’ll be a chance to get away from you picking me up on things, Mr Deputy Supervisor!’

  ‘Honestly? You would tell me if you’d still rather leave and join up?’

  ‘Yes. Of course I would.’

  And she would, if only she knew what she really thought. Lily squeezed his hand through two layers of knitted gloves – his and hers, both carefully crafted by her mum. Her mum … She always knew what to do. Maybe she’d be able to help her sort it out.

  As soon as they’d eaten with Dora, Jim, with his armband on, tin hat under his arm, and gas mask over his shoulder, headed out again for ARP duty. With Hitler tied up on the Russian front, air raids had virtually stopped, so Air Raid Precaution these days was more a case of barking ‘Put that light out!’ at careless householders or businesses working late. But it was still war work, which was more than Lily was doing, just helping her mum wash up.

  ‘I don’t know which way to turn, Mum,
’ she confessed.

  Some mothers might have pussyfooted around. Not Dora Collins. Widowed young with the boys, Reg and Sid, under school age and Lily still a baby, Dora had had to stand on her own two feet and speak up for herself – and for others. If you couldn’t say what you thought to your own children and give them advice when they needed it, when could you? Dora might mince bread crusts and scrag end, but never words.

  ‘Lily,’ she said, scrubbing at a bit of burnt-on sausage on the frying pan, ‘you’re making a mountain out of mouse droppings here. You love your job. Even if you’ve got to wait a bit, you’re going to get this promotion before too long, that’s plain. You’re acting as if it’s black and white: stay in Hinton with Jim, do your job at Marlows, and do your duty by Gladys, or join the forces or go off to some factory miles away and do your duty by the war. You can easily do both things right here!’

  ‘What? How?’ Lily took the clean pan from her mother and balanced it against the crocks already draining. Only the cutlery was dried nowadays, to save wearing out the tea towels. ‘Oh, look, if you mean doing ARP or the Auxiliary Fire Service, sitting by the phones all night, when nothing’s happening any more, I’m not sure that’s for me.’

  ‘Nor am I. Which is why you can start coming with me to the WVS.’

  ‘What?’ Lily was glad she’d put the frying pan down or she might have dropped it. ‘I can’t serve at the tea bar when I’m at work in the day!’

  ‘I know that. Give me some credit!’

  ‘So what can I do? Knit balaclavas? Sew gloves? You know I’m hopeless! And as for the farmworkers’ pie scheme, you’re the first to say my pastry’d make good shoe leather!’

  It was a source of amusement to Jim and of bafflement to Dora, who was an accomplished cook and housekeeper, that Lily was so cack-handed with a pair of knitting needles and heavy-handed with a ball of dough.

  ‘Oh, you don’t slide out of it like that!’ Lily’s mum had a knack of combining what sounded like a scolding with a smile. ‘We’ll find something for you to do, don’t you worry!

  Dora let the scummy water out of the sink, shook her fingers dry, and reached for the towel. Like the tea towels, it was worn so thin you could almost see through it.

  ‘We’ve had twenty sacks of seaboot socks arrive this week. Seems the Navy’s got socks coming out their ears, so to speak, when what they really need is polo-neck jumpers. So we’ve got to unravel the socks, card the wool and rewind it for our knitters. Surely even you can manage a simple thing like that, and if that isn’t directly helping the war, I’d like to know what is. And you can do it alongside your job.’

  Lily considered.

  ‘Polo-necks … for the Navy … Some might even end up on Bill’s ship.’

  ‘They might well.’ Dora dried carefully around her wedding ring, also worn thin. ‘Will you do it, then? Will that satisfy your conscience?’

  It would be tedious and repetitive, but so was life in the forces a lot of the time, Lily knew, and factory work certainly was. It was still war work – hadn’t some minister or other called the WVS the country’s ‘domestic soldiers’? And if Lily imagined Bill in one of the reknitted jumpers and gave it a human face, well, she could do the work with pride.

  ‘Yes.’ She tried out a smile. ‘I think it would.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that!’ said Dora. She turned away to hang the towel up and to hide a smile. ‘We’re not all dried-up old biddies in the WVS, you know. There’s quite a few younger women, not as young as you perhaps …’

  That was enough for Lily. She caught her mother round the waist and spun her round.

  ‘You’re not a dried-up old biddy, you know you’re not! You’re still young and you’re really pretty, Mum!’

  Dora was. She’d never lost her girlish figure, and her brown hair, cut last year in a more fashionable style, had only a few threads of silver.

  ‘Oh, get away with you!’

  Dora sounded pleased, but Lily didn’t push it.

  Guessing what her daughter was thinking, Dora kissed her forehead, then pulled gently away. Sam, a Canadian corporal, had only been a friend and he was gone now, back home across the sea. But he wasn’t forgotten, not by Dora and not by any of them. How could he be, when he’d left them the golden spaniel that he’d adopted and made them promise to take care of?

  ‘Talking of your conscience, it’s your turn to take that dog for his night-time lamp post inspection.’

  ‘More like a route march, the way he pulls!’ Lily smiled as she took down the dog’s lead from the back of the door. Buddy had a lovely temperament but he was only young and, as Dora said, as daft as a bottle of pop. ‘But at least it’s not square-bashing and it’s in my own clothes, not some scratchy uniform!’

  Chapter 3

  The following week Lily spent her first evening in the Drill Hall with the WVS, unravelling socks till her eyes went fuzzy. She went to sleep still trying to blink the blurriness away and dreamt she was being chased by a giant ball of wool while a bristling ATS sergeant shouted ‘faster, faster!’.

  In fact, her evening with the WVS had been far more fun than she’d expected. They’d been a jolly crowd, and though her mum’s idea of younger women was not quite Lily’s, she’d palled up with a girl not much older than herself. Over copious cups of tea, she’d made Lily laugh about the time she’d tinted her eyebrows with Bisto, only to have it run down her face in the rain. At the end of the evening, Lily had lain down in her own bed, not a dormitory with twenty others with a kit inspection to look forward to in the morning. And she’d still done something worthwhile for the war.

  Next day was her first on her new department, so she gave herself a kit inspection anyway and presented herself at Small Leather Goods with well-scrubbed fingernails and a well-pressed blouse. As the Handbags buyer also sourced the department’s purses, wallets, and key fobs, Lily would be answerable to the first salesgirl, Rita – Miss Ruddock.

  Rita wasn’t that much older than Lily – mid-twenties, perhaps, but from asking around, Lily knew that she couldn’t be called up because she lived with her father who’d lost a leg in the Great War and had no one else to look after him. Unlike Lily, Rita Ruddock wasn’t very happy with her lot. And despite another Marlows dictum – a cheerful smile at all times – when there were no customers around, it showed.

  ‘I don’t know what all this is in aid of,’ she sniffed when she’d finished showing Lily where everything was kept. ‘Making Betty – Miss Simkins – swap with you, I mean. I hope I’ll be getting her back. No offence.’

  Why was it that whenever people said that, you automatically did take offence, wondered Lily. And they meant you to.

  ‘They like to move us around sometimes, don’t they?’ she said innocently. ‘To get more experience, to test us out.’

  ‘Betty doesn’t need experience, she’s got plenty,’ said Rita tartly. ‘She doesn’t need testing, or want to go anywhere else; she’s suited here. She’s not always got her eye on the next rung of the ladder, like some.’

  ‘Like some’? She meant ‘like you’, Lily knew. Fortunately, a customer was approaching and Rita moved away; she’d explained that you had to keep an eye on people. Small Leathers was an ‘island’ department – four counters in a square – and though most of the goods were under the glass-topped units or in drawers, there was a stand with hanging key fobs and a basket of end-of-line ‘oddments’ which had to be counted and accounted for at the beginning and end of every day.

  Lily smiled at the junior, Annie, who was busy with a duster, polishing an already sparkling countertop. That was a job and a half, as well, with small items constantly being brought out, handled, and put down.

  Lily tested herself by opening a few drawers to check that she remembered where things were. At least Rita hadn’t skimped on facts, and though Lily suspected it had been more about showing off her superiority than making sure her new assistant was well briefed, she was grateful. She couldn’t afford any slip-ups – t
hey’d get back to Mr Simmonds and beyond him to Mr Marlow, Rita Ruddock would make sure of that. Welcome to the ground floor, Lily, she thought.

  As the days passed into weeks, however, Lily got to rather like her new role. Rita was no more friendly and Annie was a little mouse of a thing who did as she was told and the rest of the time did her best to make herself invisible. But the ground floor was a livelier place than the first. There were more customers, both male and female – more to see, more going on. The goods Lily was selling were attractive, too. She loved the smell and feel of the leather and enjoyed guiding customers who were undecided, or choosing a gift, asking about colour preferences, or whether the recipient wanted, for example, a little clear window in their wallet where they could put a photograph. As with everything, there wasn’t always much choice, of style or of colour, but Rita, Lily had to admit, had an eye for display. She changed the arrangement under the glass-topped counters every fortnight, and sometimes even let Lily help. Lily still watched her step with her, though. She could turn on a sixpence.

  Talking about undecided customers, though … Lily closed the drawer and placed another purse in front of the woman on the other side of the counter With this last offering, every small coin purse they had was laid out between them, with the customer picking them up, opening and closing them one at a time, laying them back down, then starting the process all over again. There might have been four different colours, but there were only three styles – was it really that difficult?

  Still the woman dithered, and Lily’s mind wandered – her gaze, too. That was when she saw her – or rather, the back of her. Someone she surely recognised. She was at the neighbouring counter – Scarves, Gloves and Umbrellas.

  ‘Well? Miss Collins?’ Startled, Lily snapped back to attention. Rita had loomed up and was standing over her. ‘Madam is asking you a question.’