Saturday, thought Marie Partridge, Saturday, when Charlie had only the one round of deliveries, always had a different feel about it. Kids were about. Girls feeding chickens, fetching the bread, minding babies, doing shopping for grandmothers. Boys running errands, helping on allotments, lugging home a shilling’s worth of coal in old prams. All of them scuttling about to get jobs done and be away to the river-banks or to the twopenny rush at the Picture House.
Women did the weekend shopping on Saturday mornings.
The choice of the weekend joint was the most important purchase. It provided a roast on Sunday, cottage-pie on Monday, stew from the bits on Tuesday, and if any stew remained with a few lentils and pearl barley, a good broth for the kids on Wednesday. Marie and her mother-in-law always went together, leaving Bonnie to go to the allotment with Charlie and be spoilt by him for an hour or two.
This morning there was an atmosphere you could cut with a knife between her in-laws.
‘You all right then, Dad?’ Ignoring what was obvious to anyone who knew him – that Sam Partridge’s nose had been put out of joint.
‘No, Marie, but there I dare say you knew all along what she was up to.’
Although she did not know what Dolly was up to, Marie flushed, ‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ knowing that she looked guilty.
‘Oh no? Well she’d better tell you then.’ He flicked his head in his wife’s direction.
‘Who’s she, the cat’s mother?’ said Dolly, rubbing her lips aggressively with a nub of lipstick.
Marie and Dolly exchanged sharp glances, and Marie knew it was best to keep neutral. Her father-in-law’s tone was scathing. ‘She wants to go out to work. A decent woman… at her age, too.’
‘I’m still in my forties, Sam Partridge, not a hundred.’
‘And just what do you think it makes me look like? Oh, I know… it makes me look like an old soldier who can’t even keep his own wife.’
‘Take no notice, Marie,’ Dolly said, blotting her lips and setting the lipstick with powder.
‘What about your Mum, Marie?’ Sam said, determined to draw her in. ‘I ask you, what would your dad say if it was her, eh?’
Marie knew well enough that her father would as soon lock Mum in as allow her to go out to work, but Marie kept out of it.
‘And Charlie’d soon put his foot down. Make him look small in front of everybody… put his foot down all right.’
Sam already knew that Charlie had put his foot down, ages ago when Marie had been offered a chance to go back to hairdressing on Saturdays. Charlie had been incensed – ‘If the day ever comes when I can’t provide for my own wife and child, we’ll be in bad straits. Till then you can forget about any Saturday job.’ Marie hadn’t broached the matter again, but had never let up the pressure when it came to making him shell out for decent things for their home.
‘Don’t try and drag Marie into it,’ Dolly said. ‘I’ve got the job and that’s that!’
Marie was surprised into saying, ‘You’ve got a job, Dolly?’
‘Without asking me. Without saying nothing to nobody,’ Sam said.
‘Yes, Sam Partridge, making up my own mind and without saying nothing to nobody. And don’t drag Marie into it.’
‘Marie’s already in. How do you think she’s going to feel married into a family where women goes out skivvying? Her family’s like ourn, kept ourselves above that sort of caper.’
‘God alive, Sam, anybody’d think I was going down the Docks and stand on the corner of Bugle Street to hear you talk. And I keep telling you, this is a proper job – it’s not skivvying.’
Sam drew breath to answer back, but Dolly raised her voice and continued, ‘People can do and think what they like, and I’ll tell you this for nothing, if there’s a war, there won’t be many weeks pass before half the women in this road will be sorry they hadn’t heard about this job, just you mark my words. It’s a good, decent job and nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Oh you think so? Well, I’ll tell you this for nothing. If there’s half the women getting the idea of working, there a be half the husbands that a be giving them the rough side of their hand.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt that for a minute, there’s plenty of men trying to keep going on Hardy’s wages that’d rather see their wives go all week on a Foster and Clark soup cube than see them get a few hours’ work.’
‘You an’t never gone on soup cubes, Dolly.’
‘I never said me.’
Dolly, now ready for Saturday shopping, wearing the beige straw summer hat she had worn for years, turned to face Sam and Marie.
‘I’m sorry if anybody’s feels hurt because of it, but I made up my mind and I mean to do it. It’s a decent, respectable job working in the kitchens of the new Town Restaurant the Government is starting. It isn’t any different from when I worked in hospital kitchens years ago, except that I shall get training under the cook.’
Sam, fiercely buttoning up his park-keeper’s uniform, said angrily, ‘A course it’s different, woman – you’re married! And a woman’s place is in the home.’
‘And I suppose that’s wrote into your bloody Labour Party manifesto, too.’
Dolly, keeping her dignity, unwilling to be ruffled, picked up her leatherette bag and nodded to Marie that she was ready. ‘When it comes to it, Sam Partridge, your lot and the Tories is hand in glove with one another about women. Half the world’s made up of women and none of you ever been able to work that out yet, have you?’
Sam’s fingers seemed to freeze to his metal buttons and for once he had no cliché to refute her accusation.
Dolly was exciting. Marie had never seen her mother-in-law so worked up: the thrill of it made her behind tighten and her eyes widen. ‘Married women will have to work in this war, same as in the last one,’ Dolly went on. ‘You can see that can’t you, Marie, and it will be first come, first served with the good jobs, and up to now the Partridges have been too proud to push themselves forward for anything like that.’
The two women left the house. Half-way across the yard, Dolly called back over her shoulder, ‘And if Marie wants a job, there’s one going.’