The Girl Now Leaving

by Betty Burton

  It’s ironical that I should be earning my living making things that restrain and control women, when I spend half my time thinking how I can break out. When I’m making up ‘Grand Duchess’ corsets which are all bones and hooks and laces that can be pulled tight, I sometimes think how lovely it must feel to get released from one of them. Kate laughs at me. Nothing much bothers Kate. She’s a good person to have around. She makes me laugh.

  It snowed today and is still snowing. The machine room is so cold everybody put on double clothes, but that doesn’t help your feet and hands. We aren’t allowed to wear mitts in case they make smudges on the pink ‘Courtiel’. We have all got chilblains, the same as we all have corns on our thumbs from using scissors on heavy twill, which must be the toughest material going. There is a four-inch hot pipe running round the walls about a foot from the ground, and as we have to squeeze by to get in and out of our ‘lanes’ (the rows we sit in), most of us have got some sort of a burn on our shins from it. Some older women have leg ulcers from these burns not healing up.

  I don’t know why Ezzards don’t make a bit more room for us to move about – yes I do, it would mean taking out machines and they would only do that if it meant they could make it pay. Like the burning pipe, it could easily have a guard of some sort put over it, but guards don’t make money.

  Scissors. They supply us with scissors, but they are cheap and don’t cut which spoils the material and then we get docked wages. So we buy our own. It’s right what Ray says, everything is one way.

  There was a real to-do today. Something went wrong with the boiler and it sent out black sooty clouds. Later on all soots started to rain everywhere, all over us, and our machines and our work. We tried to keep going, but when Mr George saw what was happening, he turned off the machines. Everybody was as mad as hell because no matter what the cause, we only get paid for what is passed by Nellie and put down on each of our tally-boards.

  Mr Ezzard came into the factory, something he hardly ever does, and a big row started between him and George and the mechanic who keeps the boiler running. We could all hear this because the engine was stopped and we could hear through the glass. Mr Ezzard said George should have told him about the boiler ages ago. George swore he told his brother but Mr Ezzard shouted that if he’d been told then the work would have been done. It was a bit of a laugh watching the bosses have a stand up row, but at the same time we were sitting on pins wondering how long we were going to be kept with our machines cut off, and what would happen about the spoilt work. They could hardly dock us for spoilt pieces we hadn’t spoiled ourselves.

  But they did, at least they docked our pay because of idle time. It was awful, some women broke down because they didn’t know how they were going to face their husbands. Most of us are in debt one way or another, things to pay off at the Co-op or the tallyman and there’s always the rent man. Most women in the shop I work in are in debt up to their ears, always borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. I know what it was like when I was little, Mum sending me to the door to the rent man to say she had gone down the town.

  Ray is very good with money. We get everything we can from the Co-op because of the Divi. Divi pay out is about the most important and happy day of the year. Ray keeps a tin with slots for different things that have to be paid and he puts that by before we see what is left to buy fancy things like soap and hair oil. Right from when he first took over he said he guessed there was things a girl has to have he wouldn’t ever think of, so he always gave me a few pence of my own. He meant buying Dr White’s and sanitary belts which we can’t talk about. I love Ray. I love our Kenny too, he’s a lot better looking than Ray. Kenny and I never spent much time together which is funny really, because he’s nearer my age. Ray is ten years older than me.

  I like Kate Roles, we both look forward to our night at the pictures. I read in Picturegoer that they are probably going to make a film out of Jane Eyre which is now my favourite book.

  D.B. puts me in mind of Mr Rochester, I can imagine him keeping a mad wife shut up. Sometimes I have dreams about D. In some he looks hard and cruel and I try to hit him, but he just laughs because he has a magic circle round him. In other dreams he is smiling yet I still want to hit him, and when I do my hand goes right through him. Sometimes D. turns into Mr E. when I hit him. I hate dreaming about Mr E.

  Kate likes musicals and romance, I quite like some romance. We both like Fred Astaire’s dancing and Gracie Fields’ singing. Kate is really good at imitating her and sometimes she gets everybody in the machine room going.

  George’s dog ‘Nig’ (which is short for ‘Nigger’ because he’s dark brown) caught a rat today, right in the machine room. That is two this month. Mr Ezzard had a large notice pinned up saying that anyone caught bringing food into the machine room will get instant dismissal. We all know it’s not allowed, but we get hungry between eight-thirty and dinner-time. There are no breaks at all so what we do is to have a bit of something in our pockets, nothing that would mark our work. Sometimes one of us will bring in a lemon or an orange and share it out along the bench, this freshens up your mouth, but you have to be careful because of getting juice on your work. My cousin Mary told me that in their shop they sometimes have mugs of Bovril or Oxo, but she wouldn’t tell me how they managed the hot water, or how they get away with it without being seen. She wouldn’t say because somebody would be sure to give the game away. (I think it’s just because Mary hasn’t ever liked me. She’s still on about Aunty May making me a favourite.) It’s probably not true about the Oxo anyway.

  That’s how it is here. Everybody working to see they come off best, and every shop working against every other shop. Ray said that’s why he is so keen on unions. He said All right, so the bosses hold nearly the whole deck of cards except for the one workers hold which is their labour, and nobody can play the game without it, and sometimes they should take their card away and refuse to play. That would soon sort out the bosses. Though it seems to me that bosses like Mr Ezzard would find it easy to make the married women in my shop play their card, because being in debt or having hungry children and no coal can make them do whatever the boss says. Ray says that is because they are all playing their own card separate and that the garment factories should get unionized. I don’t see why railway workers should be allowed to start a union but not factories like ours. Ray said it has always employed female labour. I’ve been thinking a lot about that.

  Jeana, one of the fanners in our section is getting married. To a sailor off the Augusta, my dad’s old ship. We made a collection for her, nobody must give more than threepence because even that is hard for some women to find. We all came to work with our hair in pins and done up in a turban, and a spare skirt in a bag which we changed in the machine room. After work some of us went on the tram to the pier restaurant and gave Jeana a send-off party.

  For this sending-off party, the twenty girls went to a cafe and had several tables put together. Lu looked down the length and saw nothing but happy faces. Girls laughing, all talking at once, giggling, pulling Jeana’s leg, gusts of laughter – what she would see on the marriage night, was there much to see? – more whoops of laughter, teeth demolishing ham sandwiches, with mustard/without mustard, pickled onions, chutney, piccalilli, sausage rolls, pork pies, cream cakes and iced fancies, port and lemon.

  How different it would have been if I had gone to grammar school. Sometimes Lu thought like this. I would probably be just starting out as a junior clerk in some solicitor’s office.

  I’m one of Ezzard’s experienced hands. There’s no part of a garment I can’t do: seams, slots, fans. I can work single-needle machines, twins, triples and four-needlers.

  Would I want to be a clerk? Would I?

  Do I seem to be hard and unfriendly, too, when I’m hell-bent on getting in a good week? When I was a runner I vowed I’d never shout at a beginner.

  ‘No need to swear at the girl, she’s doing her best but she’s only got one pair of hands.’

  ‘So
rry, Nellie.’ I’m not really sorry. The girls have to learn to keep their machinists going.

  Just imagine… twenty grammar school girls enjoying a wedding party. But then, if I had been to the county grammar, I’d be a different person.

  Why did Jeana choose an electric iron? Lord! Imagine actually wanting an iron of any kind. A pretty bed-cover would be something, but to choose such a useful thing seemed awful.

  What would I choose?

  I wouldn’t!

  Can you imagine taking an electric iron home to Duke?

  Since Christmas she had been in love with Duke. Whilst she bent over her machine, she daydreamed scenes wherein Duke would suddenly appear. He wouldn’t say anything. They would just go off somewhere and have fun. ‘I’ll come down your way and see you one of these days.’ But Duke at the pictures? Duke shop-window randying? Duke wanting to go for a walk after WEA class? Duke standing on the corner eating chips? He didn’t fit into many of her ideas of having fun. But she could picture him at the funfair. He stood up in the swinging boats and took no notice when told to sit down, he won fluffy rabbits, shot off all the clay-pipes and knocked off coconuts. He was all right on the beach, too. He skimmed stones. She tried to make him run with her into the waves – he would have unwound his club of hair – but the idea never got far because of being arrested for indecent behaviour and getting her name in the paper. Duke wouldn’t care.

  ‘You awake, Lu? Just look at her, Daydream Number One…’

  ‘She’s a dark horse.’

  ‘That’s why she’s always running for the train on Saturdays.’

  ‘Can’t wait to get to him, a country boy with hair on his chest and big muscles… Been learning you to milk the bulls. An’t that right, Lu?’

  ‘I’ll bet he takes her off to the Wild Woods, don’t he, Lu? Or is it in the cornfields?’

  ‘What’s he like behind a haystack?’

  Lu grins, it’s a bit like being back in the classroom, acting the fool behind the teacher’s back and being the focus of attention. ‘You don’t think I’d tell you lot that, do you? There wouldn’t be a haystack left standing.’

  After all I said about the steam pipes and old women having ulcers on their legs from burns, today I got a really bad burn on my arm. As George kept telling me, I should have known better than to try to push by the steam pipes, but we do it all the time because the tables are pushed so close to the walls, we have to if it isn’t going to take us all day to get out to go to the WC. This time I caught my apron on something and fell with my arm caught between the wall and the hot pipe. I let out a scream which brought George out. Nellie gave me a couple of sugar cubes for shock and ten minutes to recover in the stock room.

  That happened six hours ago, my arm really hurts. Nellie said try not to let the blister burst, but I think it has. I’ll have to wait for Ray to come in to put some fresh rag on it.

  Nellie is our guardian angel. We’re always saying we don’t know what we’d do without her. She is supposed to be on Ezzard’s side, checking that we don’t turn in bad work – she makes sure we don’t. But she knows staymaking inside out, as well as all the short cuts and wrinkles to unpicking and re-doing. Work has to be really bad to get thrown out and docked. She seems to know everything about our floor (the factory is divided into floors, different work carried out on each floor, and an overseer like Nellie to each machine room with George and his rotten dog over the lot, and Mr Ezzard over us all like a cherry on an iced fancy). I think that Nellie could run the factory better than George.

  Ray says, until female workers (when he’s got his union hat on, he don’t seem able to say women workers) get organized, they will never have their skills recognized. He said that if Nellie was foreman of a shop in the railway works and belonged to the NUR, she would probably be picking up twice or three times what she does now, plus cheap rail travel, a works canteen, first-aid room with a nurse, and a shop steward to negotiate with the bosses. ‘No boss is going to offer you better pay and conditions. Unity is the only way you get anything out of them.’ In our house then, Ray belongs to a union, Ken belongs to an association, Lu is not allowed to belong. When I think of it, it makes me feel very peevish.

  Two days after the accident, Lu’s arm was hot and swollen, so much so that she found it difficult to feed into her machine. When she stopped for a minute, George came out of his office to know why.

  ‘Hells-bells, some of you girls do know how to make a fuss. It’s only a hot pipe, you didn’t set fire to yourself. You’re lucky it hasn’t happened to you before, it’s your own fault for trying to take a short-cut.’

  As the factory cleared out to the dinner-time hooter, Nellie beckoned Lu. ‘What was the trouble with George?’

  ‘He thinks I’m making too much fuss about this burn.’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  Lu gently pulled the strips of rag away and revealed a red and weeping patch above her inner wrist.

  ‘Nasty. Pity the blister busted.’

  ‘It’s just in the place where I have to keep moving it backwards and forwards feeding the machine.’

  ‘I can see that. If I was you, I’d go round and see Dr Steiner in your dinner hour, let him have a look at it.’

  Dr Steiner rolled Lu’s arm back and forth, humming with pursed lips. ‘When did you do this?’

  ‘Day before yesterday.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come straight away?’

  ‘It didn’t seem anything—’

  ‘A burn is always something. Cold tea or cold water straight away, and then let somebody take a look at it. Septicaemia isn’t unknown if wounds are neglected. Where do you work?’ As he talked he was carefully cleaning the festering wound.

  ‘Ezzard’s.’

  ‘Ah well, no hope of tea there, hot or cold, eh? (That hurt? Sorry, but I have to get it clean.) Salt and water cleans wounds. No need to buy antiseptics. Tea, bicarbonate of soda… use boiled water if you can. Always bathe any wound and cover it at once. Is there anyone trained in first aid in the factory?’

  Lu shrugged. ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘You should at least have some dressings. Go to the dispensary when I’ve finished with you. Mrs Steiner will make you up something to clear this up, and I’ll get her to give you a few things in a box to keep in the factory.’

  ‘Somebody was just saying that the factory ought to have a first-aid box, but it don’t hardly seem fair that you should give it.’

  ‘If we wait for fairness, we are in for a long wait, I’m afraid.’

  He ran his practice from his own home, which at one time had been a backstreet bakery until the Co-op came with cheap white bread. The surgery was in the shop part, and the dispensary was where bread had once been put to rise. A smell of cooking pervaded the medical area, a spicy aroma quite strange, but not so strange that it didn’t stimulate Lu’s ravenous hunger. He broke out a wide gauze bandage from its blue paper wrapper, a size that cost twopence in the chemist’s, which was equivalent to Lu’s share of the family contribution to the Doctor’s Club. Why did he work in the slums when he could have been in Southsea and lived along the sea-front and been doctor to people who could pay? Perhaps he was like Miss Lake who had come to work here because nobody else would. Lu didn’t understand.

  He fastened his neat bandaging with a small gold pin. ‘There you are, wounded soldier. Would you like a sling?’ His long, sad Jewish face was always surprising when it smiled.

  ‘Thank you, it feels better already.’ She offered him her Doctor’s Club card. He looked at the name and handed it back thoughtfully. ‘I remember, 110 Lampeter: you lost both your parents tragically.’

  ‘When I was fourteen.’

  ‘And before that you came through that bad diphtheria epidemic, didn’t you?’

  Lu nodded. ‘When I was twelve.’

  He changed to another pair of spectacles and read a record card he had selected from a cabinet beside his desk. She had always imagined him to be a lot older; at the time
when he was treating her for diphtheria she had thought him an old man. It was the glasses. Between one pair and another she caught a glimpse of a man in his forties. ‘Well, young lady, you seem to have bounced back pretty well. It looks as though you haven’t called upon my services since you were twelve.’

  ‘I don’t get much wrong with me, Doctor.’

  ‘Do you look after yourself? I mean, now that your parents are gone?’

  ‘We live together, the three of us, my two older brothers and me.’

  ‘You have relations around, don’t you.’

  ‘Oh yes… there’s lots of Wilmotts about.’

  ‘Good… good. Take your card and the club card to Mrs Steiner. She’s my right-hand man in the dispensary.’ Lu rose to leave; he held up a finger to stop her. ‘I suppose this is your dinner-time. Will you find time to eat?’

  ‘I’ll grab something quick on my way back to work.’ He pressed a buzzer and Lu heard it ring in the next room.

  ‘What are you now? I see, nearly seventeen. Have you got a good sensible woman you can talk to?’

  ‘What do you mean, at work?’

  ‘At work or in your immediate family… a neighbour?’

  ‘I spend quite a bit of my spare time with my aunty at Wickham. She’s sensible, she runs strawberry beds.’

  ‘What about sexual matters? What to do, young men, how to look after yourself in that way…’

  ‘She told me a bit. I was staying there when I got my first – you know, when I started.’

  ‘Your periods. Nothing to be ashamed of, you can say that word, it is a normal function of women to menstruate. No problems in that direction?’

  Lu remembered Ann Carter and what she said about it being natural and normal. The fact that he was a doctor didn’t make it any easier to look at him – he was still a man. ‘No, I never do.’

  ‘Being your family doctor gives me some sort of duty to ask personal questions. I play a part in your general good health, so if I allowed you to go without doing what I’m paid to do, then I wouldn’t be a very good doctor. But you don’t have to answer.’ Mrs Steiner, her generous body in a starched white dispensary coat came in, smiled, and raised her eyebrows questioningly.