Kathleen, May 1935
‘It was the gas what got him,’ said Grandad.
‘What are you on about now?’ snapped Nanny Day. ‘He had tuberculosis.’
‘Yes, but his lungs were never the same after the mustard gas attacks. You ask the butcher.’
‘Oh stop wittering on,’ said Nanny, who had been ever so grumpy since her brother, Old Uncle Dennis, had died.
Kathleen had been spending more time around in Cornwall Road, with her mother’s blessing, to try to cheer Nanny Day up but it didn’t seem to be working. Even going up to the Cut to get her a pint of prawns or whelks did little to lift her mood. To make matters worse, Grandad’s leg had been playing up and he had to go up to the hospital a lot to see the doctors, which meant he wanted looking after too and Nanny didn’t want to be bested in her hour of grief. Kathleen felt she was keeping two squabbling children apart half the time when she was round there. Only the prospect of her new job at the Hartley’s jam factory down in Bermondsey seemed to break the deadlock.
‘I expect you’re excited about going out to the factory, aren’t you?’ said Nanny Day, stirring a pot on the range. ‘Do you know what section you will be working in?’
‘Haven’t a clue,’ said Kathleen, who was pleased to put her school days behind her, but nervous about entering the world of work.
‘She’ll be in the clever girls’ section because that is what she is,’ said Grandad. ‘Makes me proud.’
‘Of course she’s clever! She’s my granddaughter!’ said Nanny Day, turning to pinch Kathleen’s cheeks.
Kathleen smiled. She was bright but she knew she was not as clever as her big sister Peggy, who seemed to have got all the brains in the family. Peggy had helped Kathleen’s twin, Jim, to get a job as an errand boy for the General Post Office up at Mount Pleasant, which her parents were really pleased about. Kathleen, meanwhile, was going to be a factory girl, with a few of her friends from school, including Nancy.
Of course, it wasn’t her dream job. She hadn’t given up hope of going on the stage in the West End but she was realistic enough to know that she had to earn a living. She was young, only fourteen, so there was plenty of time for her to make it to the West End. She had mentioned to her parents about getting some proper dance lessons and maybe trying out as a chorus girl up at one of the shows but the look on her father’s face had stopped her pursuing that – for now.
When Dad’s back was turned, Mum had whispered, ‘We’ll talk to Eva about starting a little fund for some lessons. Don’t you worry.’ And that had made her feel a bit better. She still had plenty of time to make it on stage and some of the big stars from Hollywood started out waiting tables, so there was no shame in it, Nancy said so.
Besides, Mum was cock-a-hoop at Kathleen getting the job because she knew from other people in the neighbourhood that, among the many factories south of the river which kept Britain’s larders stocked, Hartley’s was one of the most generous firms to work for. There was Peek Frean’s for biscuits, Jacob’s for cream crackers and Crosse and Blackwell for pickles, but Hartley’s gave their workers a share of the profits, a pension, sick pay and a convalescent scheme. There was even a social club and day trips out on a charabanc to Margate – Kathleen couldn’t wait to go on one. There’d be bound to be loads of sing-songs for a start, and she relished the chance to show off her singing voice.
‘I don’t care how boring it is, Kathleen,’ her mother told her early on her first morning, as Kathleen sat, bleary-eyed in the scullery. ‘You make the most of it, my girl, because it ain’t jam tomorrow, it’s jam today as far as you are concerned with that factory. You won’t find anything better, you mark my words.’
Some of the other girls from Tenison Street had told her how to get to the factory and they had warned her not to be late, so Kathleen got up early on the first day, with butterflies in her stomach which even a chunk of bread and marg couldn’t sort out. She met up with Nancy at the tram on Waterloo Road, which took them down to the Elephant, where they hopped on a bus to Rothsay Road. They joined a horde of women and men hurrying towards a vast red-brick building, six storeys high, spreading out in all directions, with a central chimney billowing smoke into the morning sky and the name HARTLEY’S picked out in white lettering on the brickwork. A hooter sounded at eight minutes to eight and there was a stampede towards the wrought-iron gates which guarded the factory entrance. Kathleen and Nancy were swept along with hundreds of people, pushing into a courtyard.
The most delicious sweet smell filled the air. ‘Jam,’ said Nancy, licking her lips. Kathleen was just happy they didn’t have to work at one of the tanneries or the glue factory, which stank to high heaven, but she had a feeling that after a day, she’d be sick of the smell of jam.
Once through the gates, people filed off to different parts of the factory and the girls had to ask where to go. A man in a smart uniform directed them up to the third floor to register for work and get their cards to clock in and out. The thrum of the engines in the basement which kept the vats of hot jam bubbling could be heard and felt as they made their way up the narrow staircase. They walked down a highly polished parquet floor and stopped outside a door with a little sign on it. It said ‘MANAGER, MISS KENDRICK’. Knocking quietly, they heard a woman say, ‘Come in!’
She was busy with a pile of papers and barely looked up as she said to Kathleen, ‘Labelling. Go down to the factory floor and report to the supervisors there. They will fit you out with an apron and hat.’
‘Yes, miss,’ said Kathleen.
‘What about me?’ said Nancy, twirling a finger through her hair.
The woman looked over her half-moon glasses. ‘You can work on filling. We have a vacancy there. And you’ll have to tie that back,’ she said, waving a pencil at Nancy’s abundant curly hair. ‘It’s three-quarters of an hour lunch break and if you are late by more than five minutes we will dock you half an hour’s pay. Two lavatory breaks per day while you are on shift and you clock on at eight and clock off at six – noon on Saturdays. Clear?’
‘Yes, miss,’ they chorused. It was as if they had never left school.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ she said, handing them their cards, to clock in and out. ‘Run along.’
The factory floor was a bustling centre of activity, with vast vats of red liquid boiling away and the constant chink of ceramic pots. A round woman who was almost as red in the face as the jam liquor came bustling over. She may have looked kindly but her eyes were hard, like little lumps of coal, and she barked at them, ‘You’re late!’
‘Sorry, miss,’ said Kathleen. ‘We’re new.’
The woman threw her hands up in the air. ‘I can see that. Talk about statin’ the obvious. Come on, come on!’ She hustled them over to the supervisor’s office, a little whitewashed room, with windows overlooking the factory floor, and from a peg behind her door pulled a couple of white overalls which tied at the side, and little caps for their hair.
‘These are yours and I expect you to look after them. You will get another set at the end of the week. Take these home and wash them. If you lose them I will dock your pay. Clear?’
‘Yes, miss.’
Kathleen wondered if soldiers got bossed about as much as this. She was like a little sergeant major.
‘We have quotas to fill on our jam production and you are joining us at our most busy time as the strawberry season is upon us. Everything has to run smoothly. I will give you today to learn the ropes and after that, I expect you to keep up with the others.’
Nancy looked as if she was about to cry.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the woman, patting her on the arm. ‘We all had to start somewhere. I was once a new girl, fresh from school, just like you. My name is Miss Bainbridge, by the way. And tie that hair back!’
‘Yes, Miss Bainbridge.’
The girls put on their overalls and stuffed their hair into the caps, which made them giggle, as they did look quite silly. They followed Miss Bainbridge out into the factory. ‘You, over there.’ Miss Bainbridge gestured Nancy towards the filling stations, where ceramic pots were loaded onto a circular turntable.
‘Good luck,’ Kathleen whispered to her friend, who gave a scared sort of smile in return.
The women at the filling station worked in pairs, scooping little pans full of the hot jam from a sort of metal bath on wheels, before carefully pouring it into each jar. Exactly the same amount had to go in each jar and they wore heavy aprons over their overalls to protect against spills. Now and then, one of the women would go over to one of the big vats in the corner and refill the trolley-bath with boiling hot liquid. The smell of strawberries and sugar was everywhere. The fruit was arriving by the truckload each day from Kent, as the season had begun early, with a warm May, and tons of sugar came each day by barge up the river Thames. The factory looked as if it was full of worker ants.
Kathleen was shown to a workstation at the other end of the factory, where a dozen women were quietly gluing and sticking labels to the Hartley’s ceramic jars. She’d seen the jars before in the grocer’s shop but she’d rarely bought them, because jam was a luxury they couldn’t afford often.
Kathleen was just grateful she didn’t have to hull the pesky little strawberries. That was back-breaking work and she’d heard about girls not only nicking their fingers on the sharp knives, but slicing off the tops of thumbs. Besides, once strawberry season was over, it would be back to making marmalade and the last thing she wanted was to have to peel oranges, day in day out.
‘I’ll leave Beryl to show you the ropes in the finishing section, which is one of the more important areas because how you glue those labels on is the first thing the customer sees when they come to buy our products,’ said Miss Bainbridge, before bustling off in the other direction. ‘What in God’s name are those sacks of sugar doing on the floor?’ she yelled at a boy who had just plonked them off his sack barrow in the wrong place. He tipped his cap at Miss Bainbridge and gave Kathleen a wink before loading them back up and wheeling them away.
Beryl was an old hand at the job, having been on labelling for the past five years, since she had left school. Her family lived over in the East End and she was the eldest of six. She spoke in a whisper, so that Miss Bainbridge wouldn’t ever catch her talking, but was quite a gossip and she managed to make Kathleen laugh that morning, as she showed her how to position the labels carefully across the middle of the jar and not get too much glue on the brush, or, worse, too little.
‘Nice and even, that’s right,’ she said, as she peered over the divider between her workstation and Kathleen’s. She had done ten pots in the time it took Kathleen to do one.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said warmly. ‘You’ll catch up.’
Kathleen was by nature neat and tidy and by the afternoon she was speeding up but the lettering of those labels seemed to have seared itself into her subconscious: ‘W. P. Hartley’s Strawberry, Liverpool and London’. And on the bottom, each pot was stamped with ‘not genuine unless bearing W. P. Hartley’s label’. Miss Bainbridge walked past to inspect her work and gave a little ‘hmm’ of approval.
When Kathleen clocked off at the end of that first shift, her fingers ached, her eyes were tired too and her legs were killing her from standing up. She couldn’t believe she had to get up the next day and do it all over again. At least she was better off than poor Nancy, who had several scald marks up her arms where she had got too close to the vats of boiling jam.
As they joined the surge of women making their way out through the courtyard, Kathleen caught sight of the sugar delivery boy. He was heaving bags of the stuff off the back of a lorry in the yard. Their eyes met for an instant and Nancy smiled at him and gave her curls a little twirl with her finger. ‘Stop doing that,’ said Kathleen, who felt she was being upstaged.
‘I’m not doing anything,’ said Nancy, giving her a nudge in the ribs. ‘But it looks like someone is interested in you!’
The whole of Howley Terrace was buzzing with excitement for the rest of the week, as a huge tea-party was planned for Saturday afternoon, to mark the King’s Silver Jubilee. Being a British summer, there was the risk of rain, but the blue skies overhead looked promising.
Kathleen and the other factory girls were each given a pot of jam by Miss Bainbridge as a present to take home and share with their families. Her new workmate, Beryl, complained that she wasn’t likely to taste any of it.
‘Once the five others have had their sticky fingers in the jar, there’ll be nothing left for me!’ she said, departing with a cheery wave.
By the time Kathleen got home, the party was just starting and the street looked breathtakingly beautiful. All the women had organized themselves into an unofficial decorating committee and were now competing to outdo each other because word had got around that a photographer from the London News was coming to take pictures of the best-turned-out streets in the borough.
Peggy had found her most prized new possession, a Singer sewing machine, commandeered by Mrs Avens and Mrs Davies from number 16, who had spent every spare moment running up bunting from scraps of material. The strings of colours flags now hung in a magnificent crisscross, from house to house, the length of the street.
Nanny Day had had a word with some of the flower sellers over in Covent Garden and had managed to get enough flowers for every home to have some around the doorway. The men of the street spent ages nailing little trellises over each door and foliage mysteriously appeared, thanks to the boys, led by her little brother Frankie. Many suspected it had been pinched from the local park but no one asked too many questions, because this was a happy occasion and the whole community was pulling together to make this a celebration to remember. A huge makeshift table was constructed with planks of wood and every home brought out some linen and china. There were jam sandwiches and tarts for the children, as well as bread rolls and currant buns. Every child had a place at the table, with upturned crates pressed into service when they ran out of chairs.
Even Mr Pemberton from the Poor Law had found favour by donating a huge banner, which had God Save the King in gold and silver letters and a little crown underneath, which his wife had spent ages sewing by hand. He had also donated some cash from the Poor Law Authority coffers to provide cakes for the children, as the area was underprivileged.
‘He’s probably just trying to get his ugly mug in the photograph,’ muttered Mrs Avens, who still hadn’t quite recovered from the loss of her mahogany sideboard and held Mr Pemberton partly responsible for his failure to give her financial assistance in her hour of need.
Kathleen’s piano was lifted outside into the street, where she guarded it with her life from the likes of Eva and her little friend Gladys. The sun shone brightly and for once it seemed that all the cares of the neighbourhood had been forgotten. Women put on their best dresses and hats and men donned their smartest suits. Only Mrs Davies resolutely bustled about in an overall on top of her dress, making sure she was in the thick of the action, serving tea from a giant teapot. Mr Pemberton even gave a little speech about the nation’s gratitude to the monarch, until one of the dockers from Tenison Street had enough of it and started hammering out ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ on the piano, loudly, to drown him out.
The kids had running races with a prize of a penny for the fastest up and down Belvedere Road, while a crowd gathered around the piano to hear Kathleen sing. The fella who normally bashed out tunes down at the Feathers turned up with a crate of beer for the men and soon ousted Kathleen from her spot at the piano stool, much to her annoyance. The piano was her prized possession but she knew that she would have to share it because he was a better player than she was, although she would only admit that reluctantly. He started playing lively tunes, things Kathleen didn’t know the words to, but the older women seemed to recognize them and started dancing a kind of funny jig across the pavement and back, as the men lined up on the other side and moved forwards and back in a long line. Even her parents joined in, meeting each other in the middle of the street and twirling around.
At bang on three o’clock, the man and a photographer from the London News came and got everyone to wave and smile for a photograph. Some older lads were mucking about on the costermongers’ barrows but even they stopped to come and pose. ‘Watch the birdie!’ the photographer said to the little children, many of whom had never seen a camera before and were too scared to smile. ‘Lovely to see the whole street getting into the spirit of it,’ the reporter said to Mr Pemberton, who had of course appointed himself spokesman for the neighbourhood. ‘Not like that Commie lot down in Red Bermondsey. The mayor’s only gone and burned an effigy of His Majesty on the steps of the town hall and there were hundreds cheering him on.’
‘Good gracious, no!’ said Mr Pemberton. ‘Let’s sing the National Anthem and show people how London really feels.’
He turned and shouted, ‘God Save the King!’ and was greeted by cheers as the pianist struck up the tune. The singing and dancing went on into the small hours. Kathleen, Peggy and Eva stayed up late but tiredness got the better of them and they were soon tucked up in bed, peering out of the window at the party still going on outside by the dim glow of the gas lamps. This was their community, their home in 1935, and in that moment Kathleen felt that nothing could ever take that away from her.