The Shop Girls of Chapel Street

by Jenny Holmes

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Violet cried again.

  Donald shook his head then his legs gave way and he had to sit down on the bottom step. Up in the bedroom they sensed the urgency subside then heard the slow, heavy tread of Dr Moss as he descended the stairs. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a grave voice, his stethoscope still dangling from his neck. ‘We did our best but in the end there was nothing anyone could do.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Exactly what was so unfair in Violet’s mind was hard to explain. As the black-coated funeral men moved in to carry out the smooth and silent business of death, she sat in her bedroom choking back tears but unable to order her thoughts. It isn’t right, she told herself repeatedly. Aunty Winnie didn’t show any signs of being ill. She’s been her usual self, perhaps a bit tired lately, but never less than cheerful. She’s fifty years old, which is nothing these days – stout and capable, always well turned out, the sort who goes on and on – everyone says so. And complaints never pass her lips.

  But maybe that had been the problem, Violet concluded. She never said, ‘I’ve an ache in my back or a pain in my chest’, rarely visited the doctor but instead relied on home remedies – treacle and sulphur for rashes and heat lumps; monastery herbs for stomach upsets, comfrey for sprains. Anything more serious she must have kept to herself.

  She insisted she was fit as a fiddle – her own words said in a breezy way that brooked no argument. It was typical of Aunty Winnie to keep it to herself, but I should have noticed she was breathless when she came in with the shopping, Violet thought in silent misery. It was my fault. Uncle Donald said that she needed more help and I flatly denied it. That was me being selfish. She felt an almost unbearable pang of shame and regret.

  Goodbye and God bless. A faltering, faraway voice. A life well spent drawing to an end. But still Violet’s chaotic heart and mind protested that it was all too soon and too sudden, like stitches being dropped or knitting unravelling. Winnie should still be here to tut and smile, to keep Violet’s feet on the ground, to glow with pride. But she isn’t, Violet realized. And now she won’t see the rest of my life, which is the one she made for me as truly as any natural mother on this earth. She won’t see her Cinderella go to the ball, if and when that happens. She won’t see me married with children.

  Sorrow overwhelmed Violet and she sat on her bed and wept.

  One of the unexpected things that Violet noticed was that, amid all the arrangements – the notifying of neighbours and the issuing of certificates, commiserations and explanations, the setting of dates – Donald Wheeler refused to speak with the minister from the chapel at the top of the street.

  ‘I’d like to set a time for the funeral of eleven o’clock next Thursday,’ Minister Frank Bielby told Violet after he’d knocked on the door and she’d invited him into the cool, clean front room at number 11. ‘I take it your uncle will agree?’

  ‘He’s out at the moment, but I’m sure he will.’

  The minister sat on the edge of the black horse-hair sofa. He was a tweed-suited bald-headed man who wore a stiff, shiny collar, silver-rimmed spectacles and sturdy brown shoes. ‘Is there anything in particular that you’d like me to include in the service?’ he asked gently. ‘I know plenty about Winnie, of course. So I won’t be stuck for something to say.’

  Hands resting in her lap and sitting on a chair by the window, Violet simply nodded.

  Bielby moved smoothly on. ‘And how is your Uncle Donald?’

  ‘He’s at work.’ Violet avoided the question. How was Uncle Donald? The truthful answer was he hadn’t spoken a word since the funeral men had carried Winnie from the house into the hearse. He’d locked and bolted the door and gone upstairs and she’d not heard a sound until he’d gone down the next morning, out of the house and across the street to open his shop. She’d registered the coming and going of customers all day until her uncle’s return at teatime.

  ‘What will you have to eat?’ she’d asked, intending to break the atmosphere between them, so heavy that you could almost touch it.

  He’d washed his hands at the sink and gone upstairs without a word. The same thing this morning – up and out without food or drink.

  ‘You’ll let your uncle know that I’m at hand any time he wishes to speak to me.’ A small frown appeared on Minister Bielby’s face as he sensed that all was not as it should be. ‘And please hand on my sincere condolences during this difficult time.’

  Ah yes – those were the phrases. Condolences … a difficult time. Nothing specific to Winnie and Donald who had been regular chapel-goers all their lives, whom Frank Bielby had known through countless whist drives and charabanc outings, weekend bring-and-buys and evening lectures. ‘I’ll tell him,’ Violet said with quiet finality.

  ‘It must be the shock,’ Ida decided. She’d waited until after the weekend for things to settle down, but now on the Tuesday she called in at Hutchinson’s to see how Violet was coping. Violet, pale faced and with her hair pushed back behind her ears, had told Ida that her uncle was maintaining his mysterious vow of silence and that it was driving her round the bend. ‘He’ll come round. You just have to give him time.’

  ‘We have the funeral on Thursday so I won’t come to rehearsal tomorrow evening,’ Violet reminded her in a subdued voice.

  ‘No, of course – I realize that.’ Ida trod carefully through the conversation with none of her usual vivacity on show. She’d walked up from Jubilee without a coat, in only a yellow cotton day dress with orange panels set into the bodice and skirt. ‘Muriel and I would like to come. What time should we be at Chapel?’

  ‘The service will be at eleven. I’m only hoping I can get Uncle Donald to leave his precious shop for an hour or two.’

  ‘He’ll be there, of course he will,’ Ida murmured.

  ‘Yes, even if I have to drag him kicking and screaming all the way up the street.’

  ‘Try not to worry. Grief hits people in different ways. Keeping the barber’s shop going is probably Donald’s way of coping.’

  ‘But he doesn’t speak to me when we’re in the house together – not a word. It’s as if I’m not there. Or rather, he glares at me as if – well, as if he wishes I wasn’t there.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true, Violet. By the way, Eddie feels very bad for you after what happened. He asked me to tell you that if there’s anything you need …’

  ‘There isn’t, ta.’ Right now Violet didn’t have room inside her head for Eddie or the secret glen or the kiss. All that had taken place when Winnie’s heart had been failing and her life had been ebbing away. I’m ashamed of myself, Violet had decided as she’d heard the hooves of the funeral men’s horses strike the cobbled street. I don’t deserve to be happy – not now, not for a long time.

  ‘Eddie wants to help but doesn’t know what he can do,’ Ida said gently.

  Violet shook her head. ‘Tell him I said ta very much, but no, there’s nothing.’ She must put aside happiness of the kind she’d felt with him; Aunty Winnie must be mourned properly in Violet’s own version of sackcloth and ashes.

  Ida nodded and drew her purse from her pocket. She took out a sixpence. ‘Mother said to give you this,’ she said sadly, her eyes full of tears. ‘She’s more sorry than she can say that she didn’t pay it back to Winnie in time.’

  The hearse that came down Brewery Road and turned up Chapel Street that Thursday led a very different procession to the Whitsuntide festivities that Violet had revelled in only a few weeks before. It was pulled by two plumed horses and driven by the funeral director in top hat and black coat. Winnie’s coffin was visible through its gleaming glass sides.

  Donald and Violet, the only two family mourners, also in black, walked behind, their hands clasped in front of them, faces drained of emotion. Friends and neighbours followed in silence, looking straight ahead. As they passed Thornley’s Brewery, Wilf Fullerton and his fellow workers stood outside and doffed their caps.

  In the doorway of Chapel Street Costumiers, Sybil D
acre, Evie Briggs and Annie Drummond (Annie Pearson as was) stood with Annie’s little boy. Evie’s sisters, Lily and Margie, had joined them too. The colourful little group stood out as a contrast to the dark, stiff-limbed march of the mourners.

  ‘It’s Violet I feel sorry for,’ Evie told Sybil with a sigh. ‘She’s the one who’ll feel it most.’

  Sybil chose to disagree. ‘No, it’ll be Donald who goes to pieces – you’ll see.’

  ‘I admire the way Winnie took Violet in when she was a baby,’ Annie Drummond said. ‘We all do. What age is Violet now, Evie?’

  ‘Two or three years older than me, that’s all.’ Evie’s young spirits were dragged down by the solemnity of the occasion but she took heart in the presence of her two sisters and their young daughters, Rhoda and Nancy.

  True to their word, Muriel and Ida closed their shop and joined the procession, as did an unusually silent Marjorie Sykes and even Ben Hutchinson, determined to pay his respects despite the impact on his daily takings. For Winnie Wheeler had worked and sung, baked, sewed and knitted her way through life and was a much-loved figure in the close-knit neighbourhood and people were sorry that she’d died early and without warning.

  The procession passed on up the street until it reached the wide stone steps of the Methodist chapel at the top of the hill, where it stopped and the coffin bearers alighted from the carriage.

  Violet waited beside her uncle while the men manoeuvred the coffin up the steps. She felt detached from her surroundings and had to be prompted to move forward, to take her seat inside the enormous white space of the chapel, to stand and sing then kneel and pray. She listened without emotion to the minister’s eulogy, noticing instead the way the light streamed in through the tall, clear windows.

  What now? she thought when the last strains of ‘Lead Us, Heavenly Father’ had died away and people began to file out. Or is there nothing else? Is this it? Do we go home now to an empty house and go on as before?

  But no – there was tea and sandwiches provided in a back room by the women from Winnie’s sewing group. There were people to thank for coming, compliments to listen to – she was the salt of the earth; you could rely on Winnie always to help you out; never a cross word.

  The dingy room didn’t get the sun. It smelled damp even in summer. Paint flaked from the walls. This was what Violet saw.

  Now do we go home? She looked at her uncle, pinned in a corner, taking tea and sympathy with misery etched into his gaunt features.

  ‘Well done, love. You did well.’

  Violet turned with a grateful smile towards the speaker – Muriel in her green hat and coat, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze, standing next to Ida and Eddie.

  ‘If there’s anything you need, you only have to ask,’ Ida assured her. ‘I mean it – anything at all.’

  Eddie said nothing but he stayed almost until last, helping the caretaker to clear trestle tables and chairs after everyone had dispersed, making sure that Violet knew that he too was on hand if she needed him.

  I hope he doesn’t say anything nice to me, Violet thought. I won’t get through this without crying if Eddie is kind.

  He departed quietly, and then there was no one. Uncle Donald had already left and gone who knew where. After Minister Bielby had led her out onto the doorstep and solemnly shaken her hand, Violet walked down Chapel Street alone.

  She went into the house but of course her aunt wasn’t there – only her ghost. She looked at the linen cloth on the table that Winnie had washed in the peggy tub, dipped in Reckitt’s Blue then starched and put through the mangle twice. The white Staffordshire dogs gleamed on the mantelpiece. Winnie’s empty shopping bag hung from a hook on the door.

  How could absence be so strong that you could reach out and touch it? How could silence shout? Violet trembled from head to foot and had to sit down at the table. She felt altogether alone. Her life seemed empty and she didn’t think she could bear the loss.

  Days went by and somehow Violet managed. She got up and went to work, took tins of biscuits down from the shelf to serve to customers, polished the brass scales and pulled down the blind at the end of each day. She went home and made the tea, unsure of whether her uncle would be there to eat it.

  On the first Sunday after the funeral she roasted a leg of lamb in the gas oven, mashed some potatoes and made gravy. She set the table and waited for Donald to come down from his room.

  ‘Your dinner’s going cold,’ she called up to him. There was no reply. Eventually she took a slice of the lamb for herself then put the rest away in the food-safe in the pantry, relieved when Monday came around and the bustle of working in the shop took the place of the heavy silence of the house.

  ‘I didn’t see your uncle at chapel yesterday,’ Ben Hutchinson mentioned after he’d taken delivery of two sides of bacon, which he suspended from hooks in the storeroom.

  ‘No. Uncle Donald didn’t leave his room all day,’ Violet replied with a troubled frown. ‘I knew he was in there and I kept on knocking on his door but he refused to come out.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Is he poorly?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He went to work this morning as usual.’

  But later that day Marjorie popped in to tell Violet that she’d walked by the barber’s shop on Brewery Road and seen the landlord’s man up a ladder, taking away the red-and-white striped barber’s pole. ‘The blind was down and there was no sign of Donald,’ she reported. ‘I hope nothing’s the matter?’

  The news startled Violet. She rushed home from work and found her uncle sitting at the kitchen table, hands tightly clasped, staring straight ahead.

  ‘Uncle Donald, what’s happened? Why have you closed the shop?’

  He blinked then continued to stare into space.

  ‘Marjorie says you have. And I can see for myself that the pole is missing. Talk to me, Uncle Donald. Whatever is the matter?’

  At last he turned his head towards her and focused his gaze. ‘Nothing’s the matter. A man has the right to close down his business if he chooses.’

  ‘Not if he wants to carry on putting food on his table, he doesn’t.’ Aware that she was in danger of sounding like her Aunty Winnie, Violet sat down opposite and pointed out the obvious. ‘That shop is a little goldmine, people coming in and out all day. You’ve built it up so nicely over the years. Uncle Donald, why stop now?’

  ‘Because,’ he said, shrugging, his gaze stony and cold.

  Studying him more closely, Violet noticed that he hadn’t shaved for a while and there was dirt under his fingernails. ‘I know it’s hard,’ she said softly.

  ‘You know nothing!’ he retorted with a contemptuous curl of his lip. ‘Not the first little thing about what went on.’

  The words seemed heavy with an unspoken secret and Violet’s stomach churned – so much so that she refrained from asking any more questions.

  Donald got up from the table and went to look out of the window. ‘I went along with things all these years for Winnie’s sake, but what I do from now on is my own business, do you hear?’

  Violet nodded. His bitter mood unsettled her deeply but she thought, like Ida, that in the end he would deal with his grief in his own way and come through. Meanwhile, she would make herself scarce.

  So for the rest of that week she tried to set aside her sorrow and put in as many hours as possible in the grocer’s shop and in the evenings she either swam at the public baths or went walking on the Common. Once or twice she dropped in at Jubilee for a chat with Muriel and Ida.

  ‘We’re thinking of branching out,’ Muriel announced when Violet went in with the grocery order on the Tuesday. She was surrounded by new stockpiles of lace hankies and dainty tablecloths, boxes of cotton reels, skeins of knitting wool and big rolls of silk ribbons. ‘Ida and I have had a long talk. We’ve decided there’s money to be earned in making clothes from scratch instead of sticking to minor alterations.’

  ‘Like Sybil and Evie further up the street,’ Violet pointe
d out.

  ‘Hush! Not exactly the same as them.’ Muriel introduced a note of caution and held her finger to her lips. ‘We don’t want to set the cat among the pigeons so we wouldn’t like this to get out before we’re ready.’

  ‘Your secret’s safe with me. But if you begin taking orders to make clothes, won’t they be upset eventually?’ Violet didn’t see the difference between this so-called branching out at the drapers and what currently went on at the dressmakers.

  ‘Not if we aim at a different type of customer,’ Muriel explained, arranging the hankies into a fan shape for a display that she would prop up on the top of the glass counter. ‘Chapel Street Costumiers makes a point of sewing outfits for special occasions. It appeals to the better-off classes with money to burn. We’d be charging less, using simpler materials – cheap cotton poplins, seersucker and suchlike. A girl from Calvert’s Mill could save up for a few weeks and be able to afford one of our dresses if she was careful.’

  Violet went away with an undeclared interest in what Muriel had told her. She allowed herself a dream. She imagined – whispered it to herself as she took in the evening air instead of heading home to Brewery Road – that Jubilee’s new business blossomed and they needed extra help. Ida and Muriel know you can sew, her inner voice said. They might turn to you in small ways at first – a hem here, a piece of smocking for a child’s dress there. You would do the work quickly and well …

  Heading up Chapel Street onto the Common, Violet crossed Overcliffe Road and sat on a sunny bench watching a group of young boys kick a football around an impromptu pitch marked out by discarded jerseys and jackets.

  ‘How does that sound to you, Aunty Winnie?’ she murmured out loud. ‘Wouldn’t it be smashing if Muriel and Ida were to offer me a job?’

  On Friday of that week, clutching her miserly wage packet and heading home from Hutchinson’s determined to make more effort with Uncle Donald so that they could avoid another weekend like the last, Violet found the front door open and voices coming from within. She entered quickly to find her uncle listening to a man she recognized as the rent collector, Mr Fisher.