The Telephone Girls

by Jenny Holmes

  ‘No … Yes. Don’t say sorry.’ Norma struggled to breathe. ‘I really am not saying “no”, Douglas.’

  ‘But you’re not saying “yes” either.’ Her first words – ‘I don’t know’ – were already etched in his memory. They were three short words that would colour their lives for ever, whatever she decided in the end.

  ‘I’m not sure of my answer,’ she confessed. ‘I can’t picture what it would be like, getting married and leaving my job to be a full-time housewife …’

  ‘Living together.’ Douglas held this out as part of the cherished dream – he and Norma eating their meals and keeping house, climbing the stairs to bed.

  She looked at him in fresh confusion. ‘We would be engaged first?’

  ‘Yes – however long you like. You can choose your ring – a ruby, a sapphire – anything you want.’

  ‘Oh, Douglas!’ It was what girls wanted – a glittering ring, a handsome fiancé. And Douglas was wonderful to look at, with his light brown eyes and straight brows, a small cleft in his chin that just now bore a dark shadow because he hadn’t stopped to shave when he got changed out of his uniform but instead had dashed up to Albion Lane to meet her. More importantly, he was known as the friendliest bobby on the beat. He saw good in everyone, even in the petty criminals that he arrested every day of the week. Everyone deserves a second chance, he would say, believing that a short spell in Armley prison would set wrongdoers back on the straight and narrow. Upbeat, affable, ambitious, a pillar of the community – what more could she ask?

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he murmured, reaching out to cradle the back of her head in his hand. Her hair was soft and perfumed. He adored her, would lay down his life for her.

  ‘It’s too much for me,’ she said weakly. Say yes, the voice inside her head repeated. But her heart was doubtful.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He withdrew his hand and stepped back to try to get his feelings under control, turned away towards the Crag then looked back at her.

  ‘Give me a while to think it over,’ she pleaded humbly.

  He swallowed hard then nodded to show that he would respect her wishes. ‘I won’t mention it again until you’re ready. Come on. I’ll walk you back home.’

  Gratefully she slid her hand into his and they walked back the way they’d come. They parted at the pavilion with a sad, hopeful kiss.

  ‘I’ll meet you out of work on Wednesday, then?’ he asked, still searching her face for the answer he really wanted. ‘I’m on mornings this week, so I’ll finish early.’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded, her heart beating fast, her head in a whirl. ‘Outside the exchange. I’ll see you then.’

  Sunday wasn’t treated as a day of rest by Millicent. She liked to be out and about, exercising by taking a bike ride into the country or joining her rambling group for a day’s walking in the Dales, which is what she chose to do on the day after she’d confronted Harold outside the King’s Head.

  The company will do me good, she’d told herself. Out early, she met up at the corner of Ghyll Road and Albion Lane with regulars Herbert Carney, the two Janets – Holtby and Jenkins – Ruth Ridley and Agnes Mercer from work and a new member called Sam Altham. They were all outdoorsy, energetic types equipped with stout shoes and binoculars, carrying small canvas rucksacks containing sandwiches and thermos flasks. The women wore jumpers and pleated skirts that allowed freedom of movement, the men were in khaki shorts, long socks and open-necked shirts. Everyone wore hats – berets, cloches or flat caps.

  A bus journey out of town took them through Hadley and far beyond, heading north through quaint villages that hadn’t moved with the times – not much sign of the twentieth century here, with farmers out in the steeply sloping fields scything grass or loading milk churns on to horse-drawn carts. The houses were low with stone slate roofs and mullioned windows, set around village greens complete with church, pub and post office.

  Millicent’s group alighted at a remote village called Shawcross and spent the day walking over high escarpments into the neighbouring dale. It was a steep climb over shale and rock into a green valley then down and along a riverside track, stopping for a picnic by an ancient packhorse bridge then covering another eight miles before they reached Saxby and the one bus of the afternoon that would carry them home.

  After a ten-minute wait, the bus hove into view and the men hung back to let the women on board first, which put Millicent behind Agnes and Ruth for the homeward journey, with Herbert Carney next to her and the rest of the group spread around.

  Herbert, a confirmed bachelor with horn-rimmed glasses and thinning hair, wasn’t much of a talker, so Millicent settled in for a quiet ride, taking in more of the countryside and slowly tuning in to the conversation between the two supes from work.

  ‘Brenda and Molly are talking about setting up a record club for the switchboard girls,’ Agnes told Ruth. ‘They propose to club together and buy a phonograph for the restroom.’

  ‘Whatever for? We have a wireless, don’t we?’ Ruth’s response was predictably unenthusiastic.

  ‘They say they want to listen to more up-to-date music during their dinner breaks.’

  ‘I might have known Molly and Brenda would be behind something like that.’

  On they went, with Millicent lending an idle ear, until the supes’ conversation drifted away from work on to acquaintances they had in common.

  ‘You know about George Green’s window getting broken overnight?’ Agnes mentioned.

  ‘Yes. I bumped into his wife first thing – she told me all about it.’

  ‘Done by a pair of his delivery lads, apparently.’

  ‘That’s what I heard, too.’ Again, Ruth couldn’t summon up much interest and she quickly moved on. ‘But what about Joseph Oldroyd’s plan to lay off more people in the weaving shed? That’s going to come as a big blow.’

  ‘That’s news to me,’ Agnes admitted.

  Able only to see the backs of Ruth and Agnes’s heads, Millicent pricked up her ears for more details.

  ‘I heard it from Doris Buckley, who’s a chum of mine from our badminton club. If it’s true, this time it’s not just the learners who are in for the chop – the reaching-in people and the loom cleaners – it’s the weavers themselves and the weft men.’

  ‘Doris must know what she’s talking about,’ Agnes conceded. ‘She’ll have heard it straight from Harold, after all.’

  Ruth leaned her head closer to Agnes and spoke more softly. ‘Don’t spread this around, but she dropped a hint that Harold is worried about his own job.’

  ‘No – Oldroyd would never sack his manager!’

  Millicent frowned and leaned back in her seat. She stared steadfastly out of the window, now trying to block out what she was hearing.

  ‘I wouldn’t waste much sympathy on Harold Buckley.’ Ruth’s caustic remark turned the talk in yet another direction.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Rumour has it that he follows interests outside of his wife and family, if you pick up my meaning.’

  ‘Never! Does Doris know?’

  ‘She’s not daft. I’m sure she suspects. A wife does, when something like that is going on.’

  In the seat behind, Millicent’s face flushed deep red. Try as she might, she couldn’t avoid being plunged into the purgatory of hearing Harold’s name dragged through the mud.

  ‘He’s the type,’ Ruth insisted with the certainty that came out of bitter experience.

  ‘Really? I can’t say I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Believe me – I know when a man is carrying that kind of secret around with him. You just have to take one look – Harold is shifty through and through.’

  ‘But it’s not right.’ Agnes struggled to comprehend. ‘He has two kiddies to think about.’

  ‘That’s just it – they don’t think,’ Ruth said sourly. ‘Just like the “other woman” in these situations – they don’t think of anything or anyone except themselves.’

  Millicent felt her throat
constrict and she clenched her fists until her knuckles turned white.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Herbert asked. ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet.’

  ‘I’m a bit queasy, that’s all,’ she confessed. ‘It’s the motion of the bus when it goes round the bends.’

  Herbert took a bag of peppermints from his pocket. ‘Suck one of these,’ he suggested.

  ‘Ta.’ She took a mint and clumsily undid the wrapper.

  ‘Selfish through and through,’ Ruth concluded with unconcealed venom. ‘If what I’ve heard is true, Harold Buckley deserves to lose everything – wife, kiddies, house, job – the lot.’

  Cynthia’s head was full of Wilf Evans – Wilf had said this, said that, turned his head in a certain way, had a rising inflexion in his voice when he wished her goodnight.

  ‘Goodnight?’ he’d said as they’d parted at the fork in the road the night before.

  ‘Yes, goodnight.’ Her heart had raced at what else he might expect.

  She hadn’t leaned in to kiss him, which was answer enough. This was a young chick teetering on the edge of the nest, he reminded himself. Slowly, slowly she would prepare to take flight. ‘Have you had a nice time?’

  ‘Very nice, ta.’ She had thrilled to every single moment, danced every dance with him, held his hand as they left the Institute and walked towards Moor View.

  ‘Will you walk out with me again?’

  Her breath had caught in her throat as she’d nodded.

  ‘How about next Friday?’

  Another wide-eyed nod. Six whole days to wait before she felt his arm around her again, felt his cheek against hers – the unexpected sandpapery roughness and dryness, the smell of Imperial Leather soap.

  ‘Shall we go to the flicks?’

  ‘Yes please. I’d like that.’

  ‘Champion. Where shall we meet?’

  ‘In town, next to the cenotaph in City Square?’

  ‘Rightio. Goodnight, then.’

  He’d let her go and she’d walked on along the narrow path under the moon and stars, past the cricket pitch, through the gate and up to the house where she’d turned her key in the lock and entered quiet as a church mouse so as not to wake her uncle.

  She’d crept upstairs and got undressed then lay awake as the church bell struck midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock. Wilf was still there in her imagination, smiling at her, tilting his head, whisking her off her feet. At last she dropped off to sleep and woke to hear her uncle’s stick thumping the ceiling below her.

  ‘Missy, wake up!’ he called. ‘It’s ten past eight. Where’s my cup of tea?’ And so she began the routine of the day – take the old man his tea and then clear out the grates in the kitchen and living room. After that, she cooked a breakfast of bacon and eggs, swept the floors, made the beds then sat down to study more routes and rates in the front room overlooking the garden.

  Once her head was stuffed with names and numbers, she put the booklet aside and placed the training record on the turntable of the wind-up gramophone. She reread the printed instructions on the brown paper sleeve.

  ‘This record provides correct pronunciations of words commonly used by telephone operators throughout the United Kingdom. Regional variations are discouraged. Listen carefully and proceed slowly. Remember – practice makes perfect.’

  Cynthia wound the handle then set the turntable spinning before gently lowering the needle on to the record, which produced a static hiss. Then a woman began to speak – slow, high and nasal like the voices you heard on the radio. ‘Hello, caller.’

  ‘Hello, caller,’ Cynthia repeated with a self-conscious grimace.

  ‘I have a connection.’

  ‘I have a connection.’ Pronounce the ‘h’ distinctly, don’t slur the last word.

  ‘Go ahead, please.’

  ‘Go ahead, please.’

  ‘Well, well.’ The door opened and Beryl entered the room in her brown cloche hat and fox-fur collar, straight off the bus from chapel, bemused by what she saw. ‘What have we here?’

  Hastily Cynthia lifted the needle and rested the arm back in its cradle, then she flicked the switch to its off position. ‘Hello, Mum. I’m practising for work.’

  ‘So I see. William told me all about it over a cup of tea.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘I slipped in the back way.’

  Cynthia invited her mother to inspect the gramophone. ‘The record tells you the right way to say things. What do you think of that?’

  Beryl eyed the machine with sniffy disdain. ‘I’m happy with the way I talk, ta very much.’

  ‘That’s not the point. This is for switchboard girls only.’

  ‘And why can’t you use your normal voices? That’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘Because.’ There was no point in entering into explanations, Cynthia realized as she sat her mother down in the chesterfield by the window. ‘Anyway, how are you? How’s Dad?’

  ‘Your dad’s caught a cold. He risked going up on to his allotment – when was it? – on Wednesday and got caught in a shower. He came home soaking wet and took straight to his bed.’

  ‘Did you call Dr Bell?’

  Beryl shook her head and eased off her threadbare gloves. ‘We can’t afford to bother the doctor with a common cold, can we?’ Beryl’s hard-done-by expression deepened. ‘I was telling William – I honestly don’t know what we’d have done without him. It’s bad enough trying to feed two mouths on what your father earns from odd jobs here and there – whenever he feels up to it. If your uncle hadn’t stepped in when you left school, we’d never have managed.’

  Cynthia tried to shrug off the burdensome responsibility that her mother regularly placed on her shoulders. ‘How’s Bert getting along with the rent collecting – did Uncle William say?’

  The lame attempt to change the subject quickly backfired. ‘If you want to know what I think – you never should have handed that job over to Bert.’ Beryl shook her head wearily. ‘It gives him a foot in the door.’

  ‘But I couldn’t carry on – not with the hours they expect me to work at the telephone exchange.’

  Her mother raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

  ‘It’s a good job, Mum, and the supes say I’m a quick learner.’

  ‘Supes?’

  ‘Supervisors – Miss Mercer and Miss Ridley. I’ll soon be put on the actual switchboards – once I’ve learned the proper pronunciations.’

  ‘Oh yes, you’re a right little Eliza Doolittle, I’m sure.’ Beryl’s flash of sarcasm contained a lifetime of thwarted ambition. Like Cynthia, she’d been a bright spark at school, always top of the class in reading, writing and arithmetic. Her aim had been to study hard and become a pharmacist and she’d travelled a fair way down that road as an apprentice until she’d made the big mistake of meeting and marrying Ellis Ambler.

  That had been in the build-up to the Great War, when he’d been young and full of life, apprenticed to a picture framer on Westgate Road. Then the war took him to the trenches in Belgium where the mud and the blood, the hiss of gas and the choking cries of comrades had extinguished any flame of hope that may once have flickered in the young man’s breast. He’d been invalided out at the start of 1917 and returned home with stooping shoulders, a glazed expression and an aversion to mixing with his old friends and family that he never succeeded in shaking off.

  Cynthia winced but she was used to her mother’s criticism – if not outright then always inferred. Her mind flashed back over the efforts she’d made as a small child to please her parents – to be polite at all times, to sit on the window sill and learn her ABC while other little girls ran up and down the street, plaited hair flying, bare knees scraped and muddy, screeching each other’s names.

  It had been enough to win the occasional pained smile from her mother; there had never been any flicker of a response from her father.

  Beryl stared at her now with an anxious expression. ‘As a matter of fact, William isn�
��t in the best of moods. He says he had to knock on the ceiling to get his cup of tea this morning, and that’s because you went out gadding last night.’

  ‘I didn’t go far – just to the Institute.’ Cynthia grew hot under the collar as she tried to cover her tracks.

  ‘Who with? No, don’t tell me. Let me guess – it was one of the women from the telephone exchange. I’m sure they’re very modern – just the type to lead you astray.’

  ‘Not at all,’ she protested. ‘They’re very kind to me.’

  Beryl ploughed on regardless. ‘William caught sight of you done up to the nines in an outfit he’d never seen before.’

  ‘I borrowed a dress from Millicent – yes. And some shoes.’ Let Mother get side-tracked away from Wilf was the thought at the forefront of Cynthia’s mind.

  ‘You see – I was right. Those girls will turn your head in the wrong direction if you’re not careful.’ The weight of the world was evident in Beryl’s lined face as she sat with her hat on, her coat undone and her darned gloves laid neatly across her lap. ‘I’ve said it to your father a dozen times and I’ll say it to your face – new job or not, your first duty is still to your uncle. That must come before everything else.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cynthia acquiesced, for there was no point arguing.

  ‘And don’t let Bert step in and make himself too useful, do you hear?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ She smiled to herself at the idea of crash-bang-wallop Bert cleaning grates, polishing stair rods and doing the laundry. ‘I can’t see him being that handy with an iron, can you?’

  ‘It’s no joke, Cynthia. We’re relying on you to mind your Ps and Qs with your uncle and not to upset him.’ It had been a long waiting game as far as Beryl was concerned, with Moor View as the prize. Though she never expressed this outright, it was the natural order of things. An ailing bachelor brother had to make a will and it ought to be in favour of those who had helped him most – which was her and not their estranged younger brother, Gilbert – Bert’s dad. ‘Promise me you won’t do anything to upset him.’