The Shop Girls of Chapel Street

by Jenny Holmes

  ‘I’m not leaving here without my money,’ a red-faced Fisher insisted. Despite the heat, he wore a navy blue guard’s coat and a brown trilby hat as a way of setting himself apart from and retaining the respect of the tweed-jacketed, flat-capped tenants.

  ‘And I’m telling you I’ve no rent money to give you.’ Donald presented the facts defiantly. He didn’t acknowledge Violet as she hurried down the corridor and entered the kitchen. ‘I’ve no wage coming in, that’s the beginning and the end of it.’

  ‘Well, it won’t do.’ Fisher stood firm, though he looked embarrassed to be continuing the argument in front of Violet. ‘If I go back to the office and tell Mr Gill that you can’t pay your rent, how do you think that’ll go down?’

  ‘I don’t care if your precious Mr Gill blows his top,’ Donald retaliated. Mockingly he turned his trouser pockets inside out. ‘You can tell him from me that Donald Wheeler of number 11 Brewery Road is skint. He doesn’t have the seven and sixpence to give him.’

  Fisher pressed ahead. ‘But you’re a sensible chap – you have something put by for a rainy day, surely?’

  ‘I did, but that all went to pay for Winnie’s funeral. Yes, that took the wind out of your sails!’ Donald laughed at the rent man’s sudden intake of breath.

  ‘Uncle Donald!’ Violet stepped forward, feeling sick with shame. She took the rent book from under the mantel clock then dipped into her wage packet and began to count out the money. It left her too little to get through the week with, but at least the debt would be paid.

  Fisher spread his plump palm and took the coins. ‘That goes part of the way towards where we need to be,’ he said, his face aflame with embarrassment.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Violet’s stomach twisted again and she gave her uncle a beseeching glance.

  ‘Look in the book and you’ll see we owe Mr Fisher three weeks’ rent,’ Donald said with a nasty sneer. ‘I don’t suppose you have any more money to spare, Violet? No, I thought not. So Mr Fisher will be forced to go back to the office without it. Then who knows what our lord and master Mr Gill will decide?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Violet knew that there was no point trying to reason with her uncle after the rent collector’s visit. She pictured him as a crumbling castle surrounded by a moat with the drawbridge up and the portcullis firmly down. In fact, the more she thought about it in the following hours, the more she saw that he’d done this on purpose, deliberately stopping work, isolating himself and putting them both in a position where the landlord, Mr Gill, would be within his rights to turf them out.

  No, at the moment Uncle Donald was a dead loss and if Violet wanted to keep a roof over their heads, she saw that the only way forward was for her to go out and find the extra rent herself.

  So, the following Tuesday, after she’d given Donald his tea of two fried eggs on a slice of fried bread, she took her red hat from its hook, ready to set off and look for work.

  With the food uneaten and congealing on his plate, he broke his silence. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’

  Violet was surprised and for a split second she felt sorry for him as she thought of him sitting in the house day in, day out – a broken man since Winnie had died. ‘I’ll explain later, Uncle Donald.’

  ‘I always say, the trouble with you is you can’t sit still,’ he complained and a sly look appeared on his face. ‘Don’t tell me – you’re going to hang around on a street corner, smoking cigarettes and hoping one of your so-called young men shows up.’

  ‘When have I ever hung around on street corners?’ she protested. ‘And I don’t even smoke.’ Stung to the quick, her pity for him vanished in an instant. ‘Shame on you, Uncle Donald! If you can’t say something pleasant, it’s better that you don’t say anything at all.’

  ‘That suits me,’ he muttered, seemingly satisfied at having provoked her. He pushed his plate away and leaned heavily on his elbows, shutting her out as before.

  Doing her best not to cry, Violet fled from the house and hurried down the alley to cut off the corner onto Chapel Street. How could Uncle Donald be so mean? she wondered. What exactly had got into him? She shook her head in exasperation and hurried up the hill, noticing Ida and Eddie’s dad, Dick, in his painter’s overalls, standing outside Sykes’ bakery talking to Marjorie. She waved at them and rushed on, hoping that she would find someone still working at the Chapel Street dressmakers. Forced off the pavement to avoid a couple of boys pushing an old pram loaded with scrap metal who had stopped to tease some girls playing hopscotch, she paused to catch her breath. The girls had tucked their skirts into their knickers, showing off their spindly legs without a care in the world. A housewife at number 20 shook a dusty rug from a bedroom window and at the corner with Overcliffe Road an ice-cream seller with his cart advertised his wares for a penny a pot.

  Arriving at the top of the street, Violet plucked up the courage to knock on Sybil Dacre’s green-painted door. The shop front was smart with a sign written in gold letters above the window that read ‘Chapel Street Costumiers – Outfits for Special Occasions’. Violet peered inside and saw that, luckily for her, Sybil was still hard at work, while Evie stood chatting to her married sister Lily. Evie heard her knock and jumped up from her treadle sewing machine to unbolt the door.

  ‘I came to speak to Sybil,’ Violet explained, out of breath from hurrying. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course you can,’ Sybil called from the shaded interior. She snipped some thread then set down the rosebud-patterned bodice of a blouse she was working on. ‘Well, Violet, what can we do for you?’

  Violet relaxed as she took in her surroundings. Behind the sewing machines there were multi-coloured bolts of cloth stacked on a wide shelf and in one corner a tailor’s dummy. A work table was laid out with measuring tapes, pinking shears and boxes of dressmaking pins, just like the attic workroom at Jubilee but with more space and without the sloping ceilings. ‘I hope you don’t think this is brazen of me,’ she began. ‘Only, I’m in a tight spot. I can’t say what – that wouldn’t be right – but I need to earn a bit extra this week. Before next Monday, to be exact.’

  It took a while for Sybil to cotton on to what their visitor was saying, distracted by the freshness of the vision in front of her. Violet was well named – a lovely wayside flower with a natural beauty that made you pay close attention each time you encountered her. Today she was wearing a simple, short-sleeved pale blue dress with a skirt cut on the bias. Under the brim of her red hat, her delicate face was flushed by the evening sun and there was an apprehensive look in her dark brown eyes. ‘If you’re asking me for a job, I’m afraid we don’t have a vacancy at present,’ Sybil told her plainly but not unkindly, while Evie and Lily made sure to stay in the background as the older seamstress put Violet out of her misery.

  ‘No, not a full-time job,’ Violet rushed on. ‘I’m still working for Mr Hutchinson during the day but I have time on my hands in the evening.’

  ‘I see.’ Sybil grasped what she was getting at. ‘You want to take on extra work.’

  Violet nodded. ‘I would go to one of the mills for evening shifts as a comber or a spinner, and I did consider it. Only, everyone knows that Calvert’s and Kingsley’s are both on short time at present, orders being low as they are. And anyway, I’m not trained for mill work. Sewing is the only thing I’m any good at.’

  ‘I can’t see you doing mill work. Can you, Lily?’ Sybil remembered all too well the relentless whirring and thumping of the giant weaving machines at Calvert’s, and the dust and the grime, the stench of untreated wool, the backbreaking work of apprentice loom cleaners and bobbin liggers.

  ‘I would do it if I could,’ Violet broke in, trying to stay bold but suddenly finding herself on the verge of tears.

  ‘I believe you.’ Sitting at her machine, Sybil was torn between a hard-headed consideration of the cost of paying out extra wages and her natural tendency to help those in trouble. ‘You know that we’re only just getting on
our feet here,’ she explained. ‘It’s true you’re a skilled needlewoman and you’ve been well taught by your Aunty Winnie – your Gala Queen dress proved that. But you do know we wouldn’t be able to pay much for odd jobs here and there?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Violet vowed. ‘I could machine-sew buttonholes or put in zips for a few pennies – whatever you like.’

  ‘It would help us to get the garments out to customers sooner.’ Lily spoke up, though she knew it was no longer her place to interfere.

  ‘If people see how quick we are, wouldn’t that bring in more business?’ Evie added.

  ‘I get the picture: you Briggs girls are ganging up on me. Even you, Evie, and you’re a little spring chicken.’ Sybil allowed a smile to creep across her face. Though only twenty-six herself, she sounded and sometimes felt much older. She reached for a ledger tucked away in a drawer under the work table. ‘I’ll tell you what, Violet,’ she said after a long consideration of the handwritten order book. ‘Right this minute you can take away this blouse I’m sewing and a dress I’m in the middle of making that has fasteners all the way down the back. They both have rows of fiddly buttonholes. If you can do them well and get them back to me by Thursday morning on your way into work, I’ll pay you threepence for the blouse and six for the dress. How’s that?’

  Violet’s eyes lit up and she felt a flood of relief that her brazenness, as she called it, had paid off. ‘That’s smashing!’ she told Sybil, already thinking ahead towards putting in a similar request to Ida and Muriel. ‘You won’t regret this, I promise.’

  With the wind in her sails and a package containing the unfinished blouse and dress tucked under her arm, Violet marched straight from Chapel Street towards Valley Road on the edge of town. She knew that it overlooked a stone quarry which in turn faced out towards open moors interspersed with green fields where sheep grazed, but it was unfamiliar territory and she wasn’t even sure of the Thomsons’ house number until an old man sitting on a bench by the side of the quarry answered her query.

  ‘That’d be number twenty,’ he replied, sucking at an empty pipe and ignoring a baleful, upturned gaze from the ancient sheepdog lying at his hobnailed feet.

  Violet thanked him and continued her quest, calculating that if she spent half an hour persuading Ida to give her some mending tasks, she would still be home before sunset.

  Counting the house numbers, she saw that Ida’s family lived at the end of a row of small, terraced houses clinging to the bank of a murky pond, with the raw cliff face of the quarry rising behind them. Most of the homes looked damp and run down, and it was clear that the sun rarely brightened their cramped rooms, confirming Violet’s impression that this wasn’t a salubrious neighbourhood.

  Once again, she had to gather her courage to knock. Needs must, she told herself.

  Violet was glad when Ida herself opened the door and invited her to step into the living room. She accepted a cup of tea from Emily then sat down with Ida at the kitchen table. She noticed its worn oilcloth covering and saw that the sink was piled high with unwashed dishes.

  ‘What brings you here?’ Ida began, while her mother poured a trickle of dark brown liquid into a best cup and saucer. ‘I know – don’t tell me. You’ve come to give back word on your part in Mistaken Identity.’

  Violet frowned. Come to think of it, this was a good place to begin. ‘Yes, I’m so sorry but I won’t have time to come to rehearsals any more.’

  ‘No need to apologize,’ Ida said hurriedly. ‘I can see that it wouldn’t look right so soon after … Well, so soon at any rate.’

  For a moment Violet’s shoulders drooped as she felt the weight of her recent loss. In the background, Emily shook her head and gave a sad sigh. ‘There’s another reason why I can’t come,’ Violet explained. ‘I have to stay at home—’

  ‘To keep an eye on Donald,’ Emily interrupted. ‘Yes. How is the poor soul?’

  ‘He finds it hard without Aunty Winnie,’ Violet answered truthfully. ‘But to be honest, from now on my evenings will be taken up doing sewing work to earn extra money, which is the main reason why I’m here.’

  ‘To ask for alteration work?’ Ida queried, as though the idea hadn’t come completely out of the blue. ‘I did notice that Donald had upped sticks and left his barber’s shop.’

  ‘Well, I never.’ Emily sighed. ‘Whatever next?’

  ‘I can work quickly and neatly,’ Violet assured her, skimming over the problem at home and getting back to the main topic. She kept her fingers tightly crossed. ‘Hemming, putting in zips, whatever you like.’

  ‘Left to myself I’d say yes straight off, but let me talk to Muriel about it first,’ Ida decided, her heart going out to Violet, whose hand shook as she set her empty cup in its saucer. Through the front window she noticed her father and Eddie unloading brushes and tins of paint from the panniers on Eddie’s motorbike and wondered how Violet would react when she bumped into him. According to Eddie, the course of true love was not running smoothly between him and Violet.

  ‘I did think she was interested in me,’ he’d confided to Ida soon after Winnie’s funeral. ‘At least, I hoped she was. But now I’m not sure.’

  ‘Give her time,’ had been Ida’s advice. ‘The poor girl’s just lost Winnie. It’ll take her a while to get over that.’

  But patience wasn’t one of Eddie’s virtues. He was more the sort who wanted things to happen fast – a footballer with a great turn of speed, a cricketer who could thump a ball for six, but not someone who could happily wait for a love affair to develop slowly. And this wasn’t due to arrogance, but more to shyness and a lack of confidence and experience.

  ‘Drop by at the shop first thing tomorrow,’ Ida told Violet now. ‘I’ll have an answer for you then.’

  Thanking her, Violet picked up her parcel and made haste to leave. By this time she too was aware of Dick and Eddie’s arrival and her face coloured up as she opened the door and stepped out into the small front yard. ‘Hello, Mr Thomson. Hello, Eddie,’ she said as cheerily as she could.

  Tired and hungry after a hard day’s work at the top of a ladder, Dick gave a cursory reply and sidled past Violet. The smell of paint and wallpaper paste followed him into the house.

  ‘I see you’re not working at the Victory tonight.’ Violet felt awkward and snatched at something to say to Eddie, whose bike blocked her way out of the yard. His face was sunburned and he looked windswept after his ride home.

  ‘Not tonight,’ he replied, side-stepping first one way and then the other but only succeeding in staying between Violet and the gate.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

  ‘No, it’s my fault,’ he muttered back. Then he clutched at a sudden, hopeful straw wafting by in the wind. ‘I tell you what – Ida’s asked me to deliver another parcel to the Barlows over at Bilton Grange. I don’t suppose you fancy a spin out on the Norton?’

  ‘Now? I don’t really have time …’ Violet began, until she saw the stricken look on Eddie’s face. Her answer really seemed to matter to him, she realized. ‘How long would it take?’ she asked.

  ‘We’d be there and back in well under an hour. What do you say?’

  ‘Then I’d like to come,’ she decided, calculating that they could go for the spin together and she could still fit in some sewing before she went to bed. Then, if she got up early she could make up more lost time, sew again in the evening and have everything ready for Sybil by Thursday as planned.

  Within seconds Eddie had dashed into the house and picked up the necessary parcel from Ida. ‘How about that – she had it ready and waiting,’ he reported to Violet as he invited her to hop onto the pillion seat.

  There was no time for second thoughts – they were off along Valley Road, with Ida standing at the window, a smile playing on her lips, watching the two lovebirds fly.

  Mrs Barlow’s parcel was safely carried to Bilton Grange.

  ‘What’s this?’ Colin Barlow asked as he took delivery and turned over the brown pac
kage tied up with string. The owner of the thriving chain of chemist shops didn’t bother with niceties unless they suited his purposes. He was tall and slim with wavy fair hair and a trim moustache and this evening he was dressed in fawn slacks and a blue blazer, with a yellow silk cravat that gave him a dandyish, matinée-idol air.

  ‘It’s for me!’ Alice Barlow trilled, appearing behind her husband in the wide doorway of their elegant, modern house. ‘I asked for a jacket to be altered and here it is, right on time!’

  ‘Altered – how?’ Colin tussled with Alice as she tried to seize the parcel. He seemed annoyed for a reason that neither Violet nor Eddie could fathom.

  ‘I’ve had it shortened, Colin – not that it’s of any interest to you.’ Finally, wresting the jacket from him, she tore at the paper as if taking out her bad mood on it.

  ‘It might fit you better if you’d had it let out at the seams.’

  As Colin had intended, his ungallant remark caught his wife off guard and reduced her to instant tears. She rushed across the hallway, out of sight. Lightly stroking his moustache, he raised an eyebrow at Eddie. ‘Never criticize a lady’s weight,’ he advised mockingly before looking Violet up and down. ‘Not that it would be necessary in your case,’ he added.

  Their job done, Eddie and Violet beat a hasty retreat. ‘What did you think of Errol Flynn back there?’ Eddie said over his shoulder as they left Bilton Grange behind.

  ‘Not a lot,’ Violet answered. In fact, she wondered how it was possible for two people to be so obviously miserable, living in a grand house with a Daimler in the drive and flower beds decked out like a public park.

  ‘Me neither.’ Once they’d dropped the parcel off and begun their journey home Eddie drove more slowly than usual up onto the moor top, wanting to make their time together last longer. When their route home took them past Little Brimstone, he turned once again to ask if she wanted to stop by what he now thought of as their glen.