Radio Girls

by Sarah-Jane Stratford

  “Suppose I ought to dash, then,” her interrogator remarked, unruffled. “You’ll be back, will you? I do want to hear more!”

  “Er . . . I—I don’t think so,” she mumbled, but he was scaling the stairs two at a time. “Thanks anyway,” she said to his back as it disappeared.

  She glanced at the receptionist, wondering if she should be marked as leaving. The receptionist was simultaneously directing a man with a parcel, asking someone on the phone to please hold the line, and scribbling at a pad with a pencil.

  Maisie closed the door on the painted trees and the gleam and the polish. She swiped impatiently at her eyes, rounded her shoulders against the chill, and trudged up the appropriately dark street.

  “Miss! Miss!”

  Rusty was sprinting toward her, a fiery little Olympic torch.

  “Lucky you’re here, miss. Didn’t think I’d find you, but I took the chance. Miss Shields, miss, she asked if I did find you, would you return a moment, please?”

  He ran back to the BBC, gone so fast Maisie was sure she was hallucinating.

  But Rusty was decidedly solid, standing in the light spilling from the open door, beckoning to her with the impatient exasperation of boys universal, and was only mollified when Maisie finally walked back toward him. Her heart was behaving in a most peculiar fashion, as though it were holding its breath, wondering if it should crumple completely or take a leap of hope.

  Miss Shields was descending the steps into reception. Her expression was resigned, with a soupçon of fury, and her words sounded rehearsed.

  “Ah, Miss Musgrave, that is convenient. It has been decided to offer you the position. You may begin on Monday. Be here promptly at nine.”

  Maisie knew she should close her mouth or say something, but she was thoroughly incapable of doing either.

  “Are you interested in the position?” Miss Shields snapped.

  “I . . . yes, that is, yes, abso . . . Thank you!”

  “I will allow for your surprised enthusiasm, but do know that Mr. Reith expects clear-spoken decorum in his presence at all times. As to—” She pursed her lips and appeared to change her mind. “The position pays three pounds, five shillings a week, and we are not accustomed to negotiating. Is that understood?”

  It would never have occurred to Maisie to negotiate. This woman had just offered her life. She only hoped she wasn’t, after all, hallucinating.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much. I can start tomorrow, if you like?”

  “Monday, Miss Musgrave. You’ll report directly to me and we can begin. I expect you to be fully prepared.”

  “Yes, Miss Shields.” Maisie nodded fervently. She had a bad feeling “fully prepared” meant better clothes. It was tempting to hop a tram to Oxford Street right that minute. But she wasn’t the sort of person to whom the shops gave credit. Shoes and clothes would have to wait. She would just be prepared to do a good job.

  A squeal escaped her as she bounced back to the street, which seemed much brighter. What had turned the cards in her favor? Miss Shields hadn’t seemed to like her much. Maybe she was one of those people who were hard to read. Lots of people were like that. Maisie hoped to be one of them someday.

  Her Charleston-dancing heart reminded her that she would get to see Mr. Underwood again, too. Those eyes, that smile . . . I’ll go to the library first thing tomorrow and catch up on all the papers. New York ones, too, if they have any. I most definitely want to have something new to say about New York.

  TWO

  Monday morning Maisie tumbled out of frantic dreams and into the uneasy darkness of the predawn hours. Trepidation marched down her arms and shoulder blades, pinning her to the iron bedstead. The short gasps of breath allotted her lungs pounded in her ears and felt loud enough to endanger the sleep of the other boarders. Except Lola, who wouldn’t wake up if a biplane crashed into the house.

  Maisie crawled out of bed, wishing she had slippers and a dressing gown. Instead, she wrapped the thin, fraying blankets around her like a Roman senator and tiptoed across the equally thin rag rug to the window. Everything in Mrs. Crewe’s house was worn and thin, though impeccably clean. Including Maisie.

  The view was moderately improved by being in shadow. This sliver of London insisted it was for the respectable working poor, not a slum, but the rows of identical dingy Victorian terrace houses to which people clung by their fingernails were hardly the stuff that was featured on a picture postcard.

  More like the cover of a penny dreadful.

  Maisie hugged her knees to her chest and watched the sky slowly grow lighter, waiting, wondering what the day was going to bring her.

  In the hospital, Maisie had changed bandages on men whose eyes had been destroyed by poison gas. She dressed wounds on nubs of wrists, no longer extending into hands. She was doused in blood, in vomit, in tears. And not a bit of it prepared her for the rigors of the BBC.

  Miss Shields spared her one critical glance, clearly displeased that she still looked like a companion to Oliver Twist, but waved her into her work space, a cramped closet with a typewriter and a hook for her coat and hat. There was no swivel chair, just a straight-backed spindly terror, but nor was there any sitting. Rusty was deputized to give her a “general tour” of the premises. He did so at a near run, Maisie tracking his bright red head while trying to absorb something of her surroundings.

  “That’s the Schools Department, miss. They broadcast to classrooms specially. And down here is the Music and Drama Departments, thems that do plays. Some of them quite funny they are, too, miss, sometimes. There’s a control room in the basement. Ripping machines they’ve got in there, too, but the engineers, and Mr. Eckersley who heads them, they don’t like anyone messing about near them, nor asking questions.”

  On and on his buoyant speech ran them around the L-shaped corridors, so fast that a place was no sooner mentioned than lost in a tangle of syllables. The artistes’ waiting room, the sound room, the offices of this man and that one, Department of Whatsit, Office of Whosit, the typing pool, the room where broadcasters stored the evening dress suits worn when they were on the air—the tumult slowed just enough to allow Maisie to be beguiled—then on and on. The rabbit-warren building seemed much larger on the inside than it looked from the street. The only room whose location she was able to commit to instant memory was the tearoom, from which emanated the most enticing scent of buttered toast.

  Throughout Savoy Hill was that glorious—terrifying—noise and rush and whirl and people who must be delighted in their importance and glamour. It was a heady cloud around her. The accents, the chat, the speed. Despite their varied ages, they possessed a glow of youth that eluded Maisie, even at twenty-three.

  Rusty deposited her back with Miss Shields, who stacked an Everest-sized pile of papers on Maisie’s desk—“typing and filing and familiarizing yourself”—and ordered her, in a tone that suggested a lengthy quiz would follow, to read and memorize the week’s programming schedule and Mr. Reith’s packed diary.

  Maisie started reading, her lips curling into a grin. Nearly her whole childhood had been spent in windowless corners, reading. Now she was getting paid for it.

  “Miss Musgrave!”

  The grin vanished and Maisie scurried to her mistress. Miss Shields pointed a pencil at a chair and began dictating a memo. It was understood that Maisie had, of course, snatched up her own steno pad and pencil.

  Miss Shields didn’t pause in her remorseless dictation, not even when a slim, spotty young man with a crooked grin wheeled in a basket threatening to shatter under the weight of envelopes. He deposited a leaning tower of correspondence in a wire in-tray on Miss Shields’s desk, nodded to her politely, and turned, untroubled by a lack of acknowledgment. He started on seeing Maisie and glanced back at Miss Shields, who roused herself enough to say, “Was there something else, Alfred?”

  “No, miss, that’s all for
now,” he said. “Good luck,” he whispered to Maisie as he maneuvered the basket out.

  “And that’s to go to all the men of the Engineering Department,” Miss Shields finished with a snap. “Read back the last line.”

  Maisie skirted from the glinting eyes to her shorthand.

  “‘I expect this investment means we will not see so many technical errors in the future and that I may assure the governors thereof.’”

  “Yes.” Miss Shields nodded, a vaguely disappointed frown creasing her forehead. Maisie wondered what technical errors there were—with radio so new, how could there be mistakes? Or perhaps the opposite, and it was rife with error?

  Miss Shields beckoned Maisie to the in-tray.

  “We are most exact in our handling of correspondence. Everything is stamped and dated properly.” She pressed a large rubber stamp into Maisie’s palm. The word “RECEIVED” was cut into it in neat capital letters, and underneath were tiny wheels for setting the date. “This is yours to keep at your table.” As if it were a prize. “Set the correct date every morning upon arrival.” Her tone insinuated that failure to do so would result in an apocalypse to make the destruction of Pompeii look inconsequential.

  Maisie turned the wheels carefully, Miss Shields’s eyes circling along, to “29 Nov. 1926.”

  Miss Shields continued her lecture.

  “When you have ascertained a letter has been read, you are to draw a pencil line down the page. You will be very neat.” A cocked brow queried Maisie’s capacity for neatness. “Well, get started, then, and mind you type the memo promptly.”

  Maisie gathered the correspondence and bore it back to her little desk. She wasn’t sure which she was supposed to do first, though the typewriter, a gleaming black Underwood with sleek rounded keys, was a seductive siren. It’s like Miss Jenkins said at the secretarial school. Don’t ask anyone’s opinion or assistance. Just find a way to do everything at once.

  By midmorning, when she was dismissed to a cup of tea, Maisie was exhausted. Perhaps those afraid the radio would turn everyone into robots had a point—the staff of the BBC seemed tapped into the very transmission wires, able to buzz along without even pausing for breath.

  “Well, hello, New York!”

  Maisie’s spine seized up and that pestilent hot flush danced over her neck and cheeks. She supposed controlling one’s color was part of the privilege of gentility. Certainly, they never seemed to get embarrassed.

  Mr. Underwood (eyes, grin, freckles) swung a leg over a chair and sat down opposite her.

  “The old battle-ax brought you on, eh? Well-done. You must be a good one. Or perhaps they’re trying to diversify?”

  He seemed to be joking, and Maisie risked a smile.

  “Cyril Underwood,” he announced, extending a hand in the manner of one taught how to do so shortly after mastering a rattle. “Yes, like the typewriter, but not our branch of the clan.”

  Cyril. It could not have been more perfect.

  “Maisie Musgrave,” she said, wishing her voice sounded less wobbly.

  “How d’ye do? So! Are you from New York, then?”

  “No, not . . . I suppose I grew up there, mostly.”

  “How do you mean, ‘mostly’?”

  “Er, well, I was born in Toronto . . . That’s Canada, I mean.”

  “I’m familiar with its work,” he assured her.

  If I blush any harder my hair might catch fire.

  Cyril supplied his own laugh and persisted. “But New York, that’s something, if the stories are to be believed. If you don’t mind me saying so, you don’t seem to be quite the sort of New Yorker they describe.”

  Maisie yearned to point out that this might be why she was in London instead. Those sorts of thoughts always charged into her brain unbidden and had to be subdued. Men didn’t like sarcastic girls. The glossies all said so.

  “Well, that might be the effect of Toronto? But I . . . I prefer it here.”

  “Clever girl, then. The grapevine was a bit unclear. You’re with the Great Shields and the typing pool—is that it?”

  “No, I’m assisting Mr. Reith. I mean, Miss Shields, but helping her with Mr. Reith. And I’m a part-time assistant to the director of Talks, but I haven’t met him yet.”

  Cyril’s eyes twinkled. He opened his mouth, then swallowed his thought in a schoolboy’s unmistakably mischievous grin. He stood and gave her a rather elaborate salute that she hoped was friendly, even though it looked ironic.

  “Good luck, Miss Musgrave, and welcome to the madhouse. I hope you enjoy it!”

  “Very much, if it has such people in it,” she answered, but only in a whisper, and only to the safety of his back again.

  Five minutes later, she forgot she’d ever sat down. No Olympian could have trained harder than under Miss Shields’s direction. Nor was there anyone in Savoy Hill who seemed to move at any pace slower than a canter, as though they were eager to reach the future that much more quickly and make sure it wasn’t gone by the time they got there.

  Maisie saw the usual glances slanting toward her, the familiar half smiles. And, of course, the muffled chuckles. Her clothes, her nose, her nothingness, it was the same record, turning around and around. But it didn’t matter. Invisible Girl would rise again. She concentrated on keeping her head down, hugging the walls as she scurried along the corridor, ignoring the ancient echo of the Toronto gang children as they chased her: Mousy Maisie! Mousy Maisie! You can run, but you can’t hide!

  Oh, but I can.

  She shut the door to her tiny haven and grinned as she settled herself to another mountain of typing.

  Too soon, she was shunted back to the corridors. It wasn’t even lunchtime and she was contemplating writing the hospital to ask if they’d post her some Ephedrine.

  “Here.” Miss Shields thrust several heavy folders into her arms, papers peeking out from the string binding, yearning to breathe free. “These belong to the Talks Department. I can’t think how they came to be here. Oh, and this.” She added a large brown envelope with the imposing words: “Interoffice Memo: Dir. Talks H. Matheson” emblazoned across it. She also added a disparaging sniff. “I suppose you’ll need a steno pad. You remember where the Talks Department is.”

  Since it was a statement, not a question, Maisie pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and nodded.

  Let’s see. It was on the fourth floor, I think, and at the far end of the corridor. Or, no, wait. Maybe it was down this way . . .

  Everything Rusty had rattled off that morning sat piled in her brain like unsorted items for a jumble sale. No one took the lift—that much she remembered—unless they were transporting something awkward. It was faster to run up and down the stairs; the more impressive noise was a bonus.

  She walked with purpose, drawn to the clatter of loud typing and louder chat. Too late, she realized it was only women’s voices she heard and thus the typing pool. She was accosted by a statuesque blonde, a sketch artist’s dream of curves and curls and country-pink cheeks, depositing work in a tray marked “Output.”

  “Hullo! Is that all for us?”

  “Er, no,” Maisie muttered. She couldn’t discern any of the women individually, but collectively they oozed glamour and modernity, a sea of red lipstick and snapping eyes. “It’s for the Talks Department.”

  The curvy blonde’s interest was further piqued.

  “No! You must be the Shields hire! Well, I . . . What are you doing along here?”

  Maisie was not about to let the entire typing pool, who, if past was prologue, were the beating heart of gossip and judgment in Savoy Hill, know she was less than thoroughly competent and capable.

  “Nothing,” she answered. “Do excuse me.” She strode away fast to avoid hearing giggles.

  Down another flight and scooting around an awkward bend in the corridor, Maisie, eyes firm on the pol
ished floor, collided hard with a man carrying a tuba. One of her overworked shoes slid forward, then the next, and then she landed with a hard “phlumph” on the floor. The files gave one great leap—dozens of papers flew free and fluttered down on her, burying her like a pile of autumn leaves.

  A musical giggle landed on top of the papers, and Maisie looked up at a girl every studio in Hollywood would have offered a mansion and the moon. Her dark red hair curled in the natural waves only a Mayfair hairdresser could concoct. Enormous green eyes, lashes that could have doubled as hedgerows. She tilted her head; long jet earrings rested against her jaw. Even from the distance of the floor and her infinite humiliation, Maisie could tell the girl’s jersey and skirt were Chanel. And her stockings were most definitely silk.

  “Need a hand?” another man volunteered, though not going so far as to set down his own box full of unidentified objects, or even come to a complete stop.

  Maisie scrambled to her knees, wondering if there was any chance no one had spotted the holes in her shoes.

  “No, I’m all right, thank you,” she told the papers on the floor, sweeping them into piles.

  “You’ve got to move quickly around here,” the Chanel beauty told Maisie in the most aristocratic accent she had ever heard. “Can’t blink even for a moment, you know.”

  “Yes, I . . . I’m learning that.”

  “Miss Warwick!” one of the men called in a deferential but hurrying tone.

  “Oh, this is a super place for an education!” she trilled, ignoring him. “Better fun than Cheltenham, and I’ve told my teachers there so. Mind you, I think they were pleased to see the back of me.” Another melodious giggle.

  Maisie’s knees stayed glued to the floor.

  “Miss Warwick!” the man called again.

  “You don’t look the BBC sort,” she went on. “Unless perhaps you work in the tearoom? Oh, no, you’ve got papers. Oh, are you giving a Talk? You rather look like a bluestocking. It must be awfully relaxing, not being bothered with your clothes. I suppose that’s how you find time to write, or whatever it is you do.”