10 MAY 1940
Never underestimate the power of a smile, thought Dolly Doolaney, daughter, sister, tea lady and all-round darling of the East End. Pausing outside the doors to the fifth floor of Trout’s garment factory in Bethnal Green, she gripped the handles of her tea trolley, took a deep breath and plastered on a smile. She had been away from the factory for a little over a week now and it was vital no one guessed the truth about where she had really been.
For a second, her reflection sparkled back at her from the vast stainless-steel tea urn. Dolly took a moment to regard herself. The image was a pleasing one. Thirty-six years old, but her looks had not diminished over time. Cornflower-blue eyes, blonde curls peeking out under a red polka-dot turban and soft, dimpled cheeks.
Dolly may only have been five foot nothing, but the diminutive tea lady was a gently curving powerhouse, with a generous bosom and nipped-in waist, all wrapped up in a white pinafore.
Reaching into the pocket of her pinny, she fished out a tube of pillarbox-red Coty lipstick and, using the tea urn as a mirror, painted on a slick of colour. Smacking her lips together, her smile now dazzled that bit brighter. There, now. That was better. There was nothing in her reflection to betray her secret.
For a second, that practised smile quivered on her lips as she recalled the turbulent meeting she had just come from, at the end of which her mother’s words still ricocheted through her brain: Isn’t it time you told them?
Get a grip, Dolly Doolaney, she scolded, shaking herself to banish the image of her mother’s face. The show must go on.
‘All right, everybody, let’s be having yer! I’m back now and I know how much you’ve missed me,’ she hollered, using her tea trolley like a battering ram to push open the door to the factory floor. ‘It’s eleven o’clock. Shut them machines down and gather round. It’s time for a nice cup of Rosie Lee.’
The vulnerability of moments earlier dissolved, as Dolly the consummate show woman burst into life. Thirty faces looked up and creased into warm smiles. Nothing was more anticipated than the sight of Dolly and her gleaming urn on Trout’s daily tea breaks.
‘Thank Gawd you’re back,’ yelled a voice from the back of the floor. ‘We didn’t ’alf miss yer.’
These hard-working seamstresses were relying on her, not just to dispense mugs of hot, strong tea, but also to keep up morale. Goodness knows that’s what the factory foreman, Archie Gladstone, had told her often enough. ‘As long as we’ve got our Dolly Do-Good’ – as he affectionately called her – ‘on our side, we’ll win this war.’ His garrulous laugh was so loud it almost took the roof off Trout’s, and Dolly always laughed along too. How could she reveal to Archie and the girls the private war she was waging?
Parking the tea trolley by the high windows of the former workhouse, Dolly stuck the brake on and grinned at her boss as he strode from his office.
‘Welcome back, Doll,’ Archie winked, as he perched on the corner of a workbench. ‘You ain’t ’alf a sight for sore eyes.’
‘Nice to be appreciated, Arch. I might go away more often if this is the welcoming committee. All right, girls, what comes after “S”?’ Dolly asked her attentive audience.
‘“T”!’ roared back thirty voices.
‘How does Moses make his?’
‘Hebrews it!’ groaned Archie, rolling his eyes in mock despair.
‘Enough of the jokes. Hurry up and get pouring, Doll. Me tongue’s ’anging out,’ shot back a veteran worker by the name of Pat Doggan. ‘And don’t yer dare go away again.’
A gale of raucous laughter rang round the room as Dolly picked up her giant pot and started to pour. The banter was good-natured. Dolly’s patter was always the same: corny, predictable, but above all reassuring. And goodness knows they could do with some stability at troubled times like these.
The war was eight months and seven days old now, and the Bore War, as they had jokingly called it, was now firmly over. In the East End, there had been none of the jingoistic flag-waving that had accompanied the first war. The loss of so many good men was still felt in every quarter. Each narrow street in Bethnal Green contained the ghost of a man, shuffling about, begging or selling matchsticks under the arches at Wheeler Street just to survive.
Dolly had lost her own beloved father, Harry, one suffocatingly hot day in late June 1922, shortly after she had turned eighteen. It hadn’t been trench warfare that had killed Harry, but the deadly gas he had inhaled that had finished him off years later. Coming so soon as it had after her other loss, his death had had a profound impact on her. If she closed her eyes, she could still picture the white rags in her hand staining crimson with blood, her father having coughed and gasped his last. War had turned her big, jovial bear of a father into a corpse. Dolly had lost not one but two very precious things that fateful week.
So today, she felt nothing but a weary resignation. News had been breaking on the wireless as she had left that morning that Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg might be next to fall. Dolly didn’t even know where half these places were, just that every country that was invaded brought the Nazis one step closer to Britain.
Mind you, what they would make of it if they ever landed here in Bethnal Green Christ alone knew. They might have been just three miles east of the wide, tree-lined streets and gracious Regency mansions of LondonW1, but E2 – Dolly’s postcode – was a very different neighbourhood.
Her eyes instinctively drifted to the open window and Dolly gazed out fondly at the familiar landscape below. Row after row of smoking back-to-back terraces stretched as far as the eye could see, punctuated by grocery stores, public houses, synagogues and backroom factories, all pumping putrid smells into the drowsy heat. It humbled Dolly every day to look out over her manor and think of all those thousands of people living, working and battling to survive.
In the street directly beneath Trout’s, two children were playing, taking potshots at imaginary Germans, and further along the road, Dolly spied two women squabbling loudly over some flapping laundry in the yard of a tenement. She chuckled to herself as their shrieking voices carried on the breeze. The language was enough to make her gran turn in her urn, but no matter – they’d be firm friends again by dinnertime.
It might have been airless, parochial and an impossible place for an outsider to understand, but Bethnal Green, E2, was home. It was Dolly’s beloved East End and she would sooner die than see a swastika flag flying on the roof of the town hall.
Sighing, she turned her attention back to the job in hand. Out of respect, Dolly always served tea for Archie first, then the older, veteran workers, swiftly identifying which mug belonged to whom by the small but brightly coloured rags she tied round the handles.
‘Here you go, ducks. How’s your rheumatics?’ she smiled brightly to Pat, handing her a tannin-stained enamel mug with a bolt of vivid scarlet material wound round the handle. Dolly took pride in matching the colour of the rag to the personality of the mug’s owner.
‘Mustn’t grumble,’ grinned Pat, taking a noisy gulp of her tea. ‘Blow me, Doll. No one can hold a candle to your tea.’
It was widely regarded that Dolly’s brews – hot, sweet and so strong you could almost stand a spoon up in the swirling brown liquid – were the best in all the East End, and when it came to the drinking of them, no one could out-slurp Pat Doggan. Her tea-drinking was legendary in the factory.
‘I’m so glad you’re back,’ she went on. ‘Your replacement was next to bleedin’ useless. Tiny little thing she was, so skinny she couldn’t have knocked the skin off a rice pudding, and as for ’er tea! Talk about weak. I ’alf wondered if it weren’t nun’s piss she was serving up.’ Pat sniffed in disgust, placing her tea down on her workbench to tighten her turban and anchor the metal curlers underneath. In one swift move, she extracted a Craven ‘A’ cigarette at the same time and popped it behind her ear. ‘Your tea’s the only reason I come to work, Doll. That and to get away from my useless lump of a husband. He was knee-deep in the beers last night and betting all my housekeeping on the nags. Waste of bleedin’ space.’
Dolly chuckled. Yes. Pat was definitely a scarlet-rag person.
‘Mind your language, Pat – there’s young girls present,’ rang out a terse voice from the other side of the factory floor. Dolly glanced up and through the steam saw the slight figure of Vera Shadwell, the factory forelady, marching towards her trolley, accompanied by a small slip of a girl.
Pat rolled her eyes and leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘Don’t know what’s eating ’er recently,’ she scowled, her gigantic bosom straining beneath her wraparound pinafore. ‘She’s been biting chunks out of everyone all week like I don’t know what. Even Archie’s copped it.’
Pat’s eyes narrowed and she looked about cautiously as if she were imparting state secrets, not factory gossip. ‘We had a trial run of using the shelter yesterday and she refused to come down, said she suffered from claustrophobia, whatever that is.’
Pat wasn’t known as Trout’s foghorn for nothing. Her voice was easily the loudest on the floor, drowning out the rumble of thirty or so Singer sewing machines and the gale of laughter and song that accompanied it.
Pat swiftly moved on as Vera neared the tea trolley. ‘Blimey, would you look at ’er phizog. I’m off for my ciggie,’ she muttered. ‘Ta for the tea, Doll.’
‘That woman,’ snapped Vera, exasperated, as Pat stomped down the stairs to the small yard out back. ‘No respect, that’s her problem.’
Dolly smiled at her old friend as she passed her a mug of tea with a royal-blue rag wrapped round the handle.
‘Pay her no mind, Vera,’ Dolly said, patting her hand. ‘It’s been hard for her, for all the women, in fact, adjusting to the new workload.’
‘You think I don’t know that, Dolly?’Vera replied stiffly, dashing away a greying hair that had escaped from her tightly knotted bun. ‘But we have a duty to our country. In the last war, my mother, Anne – God rest her soul – worked at a concern up Sugar Loaf Walk. Milns, Cartwright & Co. took on women to replace the men sent to fight, but, by God, those proud women proved their worth. She put in sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, making army uniforms for the troops.’ She finished with a deep sigh of martyrdom. ‘Women today don’t know they’re born.’
Dear old Vera. Dolly knew the troubles that plagued her old friend so well, and unlike her, she couldn’t seem to hide her problems easily. Vera Shadwell fell out of the cradle as a factory forelady, and respectability and decency were the bywords that governed her life. Little wonder the women called her ‘Kippers and Curtains’ behind her starched back. At thirty-two, Vera was four years younger than Dolly, but with her prematurely greying hair, buttoned-up black blouse and old-fashioned, ankle-skimming black skirt, you would never have guessed.
As a forelady and a tea lady, at opposite ends of the social scale, their friendship was unusual to say the least, but having both grown up in Tavern Street in Bethnal Green, their roots in a shared community knitted them together as tightly as kith and kin. When neither had married nor raised children by the age of thirty, that bond had only deepened, and now Vera leaned on Dolly, emotionally and practically. Dolly knew her old friend could never cope with knowing her explosive secret.
‘You’re right, of course, Vera, and in time they’ll come to see that,’ Dolly said soothingly.
Vera sighed. ‘Bless you, Dolly. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you here as my ally. You going away like that so suddenly made me realize how much I’d miss you if you weren’t here. Maybe I should be more tolerant, but the work . . . The government just can’t get us doing enough. Why, only yesterday Mr Gladstone received an order for eighty more consignments of field bandages to be delivered by the end of this week. They seem to think we’re as big as London Brothers, but they must have nigh on a hundred workers there.
‘Do you know,’ she went on, ‘I even heard that Cole & Sons in Stepney now insists the day workers do piecework from home in the evenings, on top of their daytime shifts, so they can meet their uniform deadlines? So you see, I’m not the slave driver the women would have you believe.’
‘True,’ agreed Dolly. ‘But they have just installed a welfare room and given the women a rise.’
Agitated, Vera fingered the top button of her blouse. ‘That’s as maybe, but I don’t know how we’re expected to deliver, though deliver we must.’
Until recently, Trout’s had been producers of children’s wear, supplying the poshest stores up West – Marks & Spencer, Bourne & Hollingsworth and, rumour had it, even Harrods – but now, as it had in the Great War, production had switched to essential war work, sewing surgical field bandages and army and navy uniforms for the troops. The Irish machine used for embroidery lay silent and dusty in a corner.
Dolly knew that replacing delicate embroidered garments with army battledress had been a heavy blow for the machinists of Trout’s, all of whom were highly skilled needlewomen and for whom working in the rag trade was bred in the bone. It had also brought the sobering reality of war into sharp focus. How could the women escape the heartache of having a loved one in the forces when it could very well be his uniform they were sewing?
Vera’s face darkened, and she lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Can they really think that we will need all those bandages, that so much blood will be spilt by our menfolk?’
Dolly knew the question didn’t really require an answer. Vera had listened to the news of the Nazis’ advance across Europe, just as she had.
‘So tell me, how did you get on at your auntie’s? Is she feeling any better? Where is it she lives again?’ Vera asked.
Dolly hesitated. She hated lying to her old friend, but there were times when small white lies were the kindest thing of all.
‘She moved down the line to Dagenham,’ she said. ‘Poor old girl had another fall, and what with her being Mum’s oldest sister, I promised I’d look after her until Mum can get up there herself. Thanks for granting me the time off, Vera. I promise to make the hours up.’
‘I don’t doubt it – you’ve not let me down yet,’ Vera replied. ‘No disrespect to your auntie, but this is what happens when people leave the streets they were born in for these fancy new builds in the suburbs. I mean to say, what use is a big garden to her now? Better to stay close to your own.’
Suddenly, the young girl standing a step behind Vera coughed, and for the first time in the conversation, both women seemed to become aware of her.
‘Where’s my manners?’ grinned Dolly, grateful for the interruption. ‘Are you a new starter, sweetheart? How do you like your tea?’
‘Oh, please, ma’am, don’t go to any trouble,’ blustered the girl, who Dolly put at around eighteen.
Gracious, but she was a timid little thing, not like some of the cocky young girls at Trout’s. Her slate-grey eyes seemed lost in the white pallor of her face, and her long curtain of chestnut-brown hair was scraped back into a bun. Dolly immediately wanted to feed her a big hunk of bread and dripping. Poor girl wasn’t further through than a coat hanger.
‘Nonsense. Nice mug of hot tea’s just what you need by the looks of you,’ she beamed, picking up a new mug from her trolley. After surveying the girl for a moment, she thoughtfully selected a delicate piece of soft dove-grey material from under her trolley, wrapped it round the handle, filled it to the brim with piping-hot tea and popped in an extra sugar lump.
‘There you go, my darlin’,’ she beamed, ‘and don’t call me “ma’am”. You make me feel ancient! I know I’m thirty-six, but I’m not on my last knockings yet.’ She extended her hand. ‘Dolly Doolaney’s the name. I’m just the tea lady here – bit thick to do much else, truth be told – but I do serve up a decent cuppa. Welcome to the Trout’s family. Don’t mind this lot,’ she added, gesturing to the rest of the factory workers, who had cranked up the wireless and were singing a rousing rendition of ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’ while they guzzled their tea.
‘I swear they never sang this much before the war. Anyways, they’re a bit rough round the edges, but salt of the earth, all of ’em,’ she joked.
‘’Ere, Doll. Who you calling rough?’ shrieked one. ‘I’ll ’ave you know I’m dead posh,’ she joked, cocking her little finger and wagging it in their direction. ‘By the way, you still all right to sit for my two tonight while I nip out?’
‘Course, lovey. I’m looking forward to it.’
Dolly was still chuckling as she turned back to the new starter. ‘So sorry, darlin’. Wotcha say your name was again?’
‘Flossy Brown, ma’am. Sorry, I mean Dolly. Old habits die hard. When I lived at the home, we always had to address Matron and the domestic staff as “ma’am”, so calling people by their Christian names takes some getting used to,’ she smiled timidly.
‘I recruited Flossy from a small Jewish tailor’s just up the road,’ Vera chipped in. ‘She’s a skilled hand seamstress apparently, so shouldn’t take her long to find her way round a machine. Before that, she lived at a children’s home in Shoreditch. Her welfare officer visited myself and Mr Gladstone last week. She felt working in a larger concern such as Trout’s would be of greater benefit to Flossy and the war effort than simply hand-stitching suits in a small family firm, and I’m glad of the extra help.
‘She’s sorted her out with lodgings not far from us in Tavern Street. I’ve got another new starter, Peggy Piper, arriving tomorrow and I’ve sat them both together on the apprentice bench. I know you’ll look out for them both while they find their feet, won’t you, Dolly? Dolly . . . are you quite well? You’re as white as a ghost!’
Dolly heard Vera’s words, but they seemed to be echoing around somewhere in the back of her head. She had the queerest sensation, as if she had been sucked into a giant wave and was being tumbled through pounding surf.
Dolly was thunderstruck as she gazed on the young girl’s pretty face. She had thought there seemed something familiar about her when she first clapped eyes on her. Flossy Brown. How could it be? How? Today of all days . . . Her past seemed to be gaining on her as surely as the German juggernauts’ advance across Europe. Fate had a hand in this; of that Dolly was sure.
Quickly recovering her composure, she put an arm round the shy orphan and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly.
‘Don’t you worry about a thing, Vera. I’ll look after this lovely young girl.’
‘Splendid,’ replied Vera, smiling for the first time that day. ‘I knew I could rely on you, Dolly.’
With that, Vera turned to her newest recruit. ‘Flossy, I’m sure you and this other new girl will be firm friends in no time.’
Vera glanced down at the watch on her birdlike wrist and the look of brisk efficiency returned at once. She placed her mug back on Dolly’s trolley with a resounding clatter and clapped her hands together. ‘Tea break’s over, girls,’ she said curtly. ‘Back to your stations. There’s work to tend to.’
*
From the moment Dolly Doolaney had swept onto the factory floor pushing her trolley, Flossy had been captivated. Dolly was not like any other woman she had ever met. There was something else too. Something Flossy couldn’t quite put her finger on. As she had watched her pour tea and crack jokes with the factory workers, Flossy had felt the strangest of sensations wash over her, an overwhelming sense of familiarity.
Settled behind her sewing machine, Flossy had to pinch herself once more at her good fortune. She really had been most grateful when her welfare officer had secured her employment at the tailor’s, but it was such a tiny firm. Just Flossy, a rather strict pattern-cutter and one other elderly woman, sat on tiny wooden stools, hand-stitching suits in the gloom and silence of the governor’s front room. The time had crawled by so slowly that a minute had felt like an hour. But one morning at Trout’s and already Flossy could see it couldn’t be more different.
The high windows of Trout’s garment factory afforded little light, and the floor was strewn with cotton and waste material. The room was packed to the gunnels. There must have been thirty or so women of all ages, Flossy noted, from the fourteen-year-old apprentices right up to formidable-looking veteran factory workers, like Pat, in their fifties.
Flossy had never seen so many sewing machines, all lined up like soldiers. Under each machine lay bundles of material, and the benches contained wells into which the women threw their finished bundles.
Penny song sheets were gaily slung from machine to machine like bunting. Not that the women seemed to need them, for most of them were singing along at the top of their voices to be heard over the hum of the machines, their hands a blur of seamless activity.
Those who weren’t singing were chattering away ten to the dozen, their faces animated as they loudly gossiped over the humming of the machines and the other women’s song. The noise of it all was something else and already Flossy felt her ears ringing. It was also stiflingly hot, and the unseasonably warm May sunshine beat down on the windows, which had been crisscrossed with anti-blast tape. The furnace-like heat wasn’t helped by a giant Hoffman clothes press, which pumped out clouds of steam at the back of the room. Not that the other workers seemed to mind the temperature, though a few of the women had tied rags to the wheels of their machines, which gave off a limp breeze as they spun round. This did little to permeate the intense fug of heat and hormones, Flossy observed with a wry smile, but she admired their ingenuity all the same.
In among the organized chaos, Dolly weaved her way round the floor, sweeping up rag ends and bantering back and forth merrily with the women. A mouse scampered across the concrete floor in plain sight of all. No one batted an eyelid! It was like entering a club, Flossy mused, where everyone knew the unspoken codes except her.
It was also extraordinary how different two East End factories could be. Not that she should be that shocked, she supposed. Having grown up in a children’s home in nearby Shoreditch, she was more than accustomed to the sharp contrasts of life lived in the East End.
Inside the ruthlessly clean and carbolic-scented four walls of the institution that had been her home since she was a baby, Flossy was used to obeying rules. After a morning of prayers, domestic chores and schooling, the girls would troop single file back to their sparse dormitories to rest. Flossy would lie on her bunk and stare out of the windows of her dorm, down at the maze of narrow, unlit streets, filled with darkened brick terrace houses, which clustered around the Victorian home like naughty children at their governess’s knee.
All life was out there on the streets, and they teemed with fun and boundless possibility. Day after day, month after year, Flossy had gazed down longingly at the shrieking children beneath as they roamed the neighbourhood in huge packs, swinging on gas lamps or playing dead man’s dark scenery. Not for them the misery of enforced rest or monitored playtime. In fact, Flossy doubted the gangs of local kids had ever had to walk single file anywhere. The streets and cobbled alleys were their playground, and they were free to run, hop, skip or jump wherever their fancy took them, their vivid imaginations replacing toys. So absorbed had Flossy once been watching them career up the street in a go-kart made from a fruit box and some pram wheels that she hadn’t spotted Matron come in for her daily dorm inspection.
‘Wicked, godless children,’ she’d shrieked loudly behind Flossy, before slamming the window shut.
That misdemeanour had earned Flossy an extra three hours in the laundry with a flat iron, but it hadn’t been enough to stop her spying. By watching from her window onto another world, Flossy had worked out that East End mums were fiercely protective of their children. It hadn’t been unusual to see fistfights erupt in the streets between two mothers when one child had been taking liberties with another. Those children were loved, and nurtured, a valuable cog in a wider neighbourhood of rich family life.
Closing her eyes, Flossy suddenly felt something twist and lurch painfully inside her. The truth was inescapable. For also out there, on those same narrow, cobbled streets, was a mother, her mother, who had abandoned her.
‘Penny for ’em,’ rang out a voice, and Flossy’s eyes snapped open.
There was Dolly, crouched down beside her. The tea lady’s soft face gazed at her inquisitively. Close up, she was even more perfect and Flossy longed to reach out and stroke her velvety skin to see if it felt as smooth as it looked. She smelt faintly of violet water, and her eyes were quite the bluest Flossy had ever seen.
‘Sorry, Dolly. I was just wondering if I’ll be able to pick up this machining lark,’ Flossy blustered, struggling to make her voice heard over the din as she wiped her brow.
‘Packed in like sardines, aren’t we? When one breathes out, the other has to breathe in,’ Dolly joked. ‘But don’t worry. You’ll get used to it soon enough. Watch the old-timers like Pat and Ivy – they’ll show you what to do. Just keep your eyes open and work hard. You’re not afraid of hard work, are you?’
Flossy shook her heard vigorously. ‘Oh no, Dolly, ma’am. We worked hard every day at the orphanage.’
‘I know you did, sweetheart . . .’ Dolly said. She seemed about to say something else too, but at that moment, the door to Archie Gladstone’s office flew open and the burly little foreman bowled out.
‘Stop your jawing and pay attention, girls,’ he ordered in such a booming voice Flossy flinched. He was flanked by his forelady, Vera, standing so stiffly she looked like an army major on manoeuvres.
‘Don’t mind the gov’nor,’ whispered Dolly. ‘He may seem a little brusque, but he’s a diamond in the rough. He’d give you his last shilling if you asked for it.’
Staring at the gruff little man, with his craggy features and broken nose, Flossy was quite sure she would never have the nerve to ask him for a farthing, much less a shilling.
‘I’ll get to the point. I have news,’ Archie announced. ‘It’s official. The Huns have invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, and now they’re marching on France. The days of stitching dresses are well and truly over for us, and something tells me it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.’
A feeling of despair swept over the floor, but Archie was quick to pick up on the mood.
‘Now listen here, girls!’ he thundered. ‘I’m relying on you to give your best and support your factory forelady so that we get the work done,’ he said, staring pointedly at Pat. ‘Vera asks you to jump, you say, “How high?” You women – each and every one of yer – have a part to play, and you have to serve our country in her hour of need. Let’s not be under any illusions: we have a hard slog and many sacrifices ahead, but I know my girls – we’re all up to the job! I don’t want no defeatist talk from anyone.’
‘Too bloody right,’ piped up Pat. ‘That ’itler ain’t marching into my country. Not while I’ve got a hole in my arse!’
Pat’s vulgar joke lightened the mood and the women fell about in howls of laughter. Only Vera’s lips remained tightly pursed together in disapproval.
‘Not sure I’d have phrased it quite like that myself, Pat,’ said Archie, with a throaty chuckle. ‘But the sentiment’s the right one. We must fight for Blighty. We drove Mosley’s blackshirts out of the East End before the war and we ain’t going to stand for none of that fascist nonsense now neither.’
Up until now, Flossy had been listening with a mixture of bewilderment and awe, but suddenly she realized the factory foreman was staring straight at her.
‘You, new girl. What’s yer name?’
Flossy felt her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth as all eyes in the room swivelled to stare at her.
Dolly’s hand reached out and squeezed her shoulder. ‘Tell him your name, love,’ she coaxed.
‘F-Flossy Brown, sir,’ she stammered.
‘Well, young Flossy Brown, you and our new prime minister, Winston Churchill, have something in common.’
‘We do?’ she gulped, aware that her cheeks had flushed a high crimson.
‘Yeah. You’re both starting new jobs today. His might be at number 10 Downing Street, Whitehall, and yours at Trout’s, Bethnal Green, but your new role in life is every bit as important as his.’
Try as she might, Flossy couldn’t see how her new job as an East End seamstress could compete with the prime minister’s. In fact, she felt about as significant as the tiny mouse she had seen scampering for cover earlier on.
Archie drummed a stubby little finger down on the workbench before pointing it at Flossy. ‘He has to find a way to win this war, but it’s girls like you, Flossy, on the Home Front, that are giving him the tools to do it. Every stitch you sew is helping to win this war.’
Flossy felt he might have been overplaying her role somewhat, but she smiled back all the same and nodded her head.
‘I won’t let you down, Mr Gladstone,’ she whispered shyly.
‘Good girl. I know you won’t. You’re a part of the Trout’s family now, and like all families, we bicker, we get fed up of each other, but above all, we’ve always got each other’s backs. Understood?’
Flossy nodded and felt a little ripple of warmth spread through her. For the first time in her life, she was truly in the thick of things.
‘Now for some brighter news,’ the foreman went on. ‘As you know, Empire Day’s coming up. On the day, a lot of local factories will be raising money for the navy, which is admirable, and Vera will also be passing a collection bucket round too. I’ll bet a penny to a pound half of you lot in here have a loved one working either in the merchant navy or in HM Navy, but I have another way in which we can show our patriotism towards these brave lads.’
His pale blue eyes sparkled as he pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his back pocket. ‘On here are twenty-seven names of the crew of HMS Avenge, a British naval minesweeper. The men of the minesweepers are among the bravest there are and have one of the most dangerous jobs at sea. I know this ’cause my younger cousin is one of ’em on board, and he has requested pen pals for all his shipmates. They’re risking their lives for our liberty and all they want is word from the Home Front and a few friendly letters. Who’ll oblige?’
There was an instant show of hands and a clamour of excitement on the factory floor, especially, Flossy noted, among the younger women. All traces of the dark mood of earlier was now gone, replaced with renewed fight, thanks to their foreman’s rousing speech, not to mention the prospect of contact with the opposite sex!
‘That’s the ticket,’ Archie nodded approvingly. ‘Dolly, if you’d be so kind as to hand round the names of the sailors to those that want to write . . .’
‘Course I will, Arch,’ chirruped Dolly.
‘Oh, and one last thing, girls, before we get back to work. Two new starters are arriving tomorrow: another seamstress to lighten the load and a new odd-job man and mechanic. I know you’ve all been grumbling like mad since Alf’s been called up. Lucky Johnstone is a lovely eighteen-year-old lad I know from my boxing club. Be kind to him, girls, will yer? Don’t eat him alive.’
‘Where’s he from, Mr G?’ asked a sassy-looking young machinist with a halo of bright copper curls. ‘And more importantly, will we fancy him?’
‘Well, he’s got a pulse, so I’m sure you will,’ Archie shot back. ‘He’s from right here in Bethnal Green, as it happens . . . Russia Lane.’
‘Ooh blimey, I know Russia Lane all right,’ she replied. ‘Police only dare go in there in pairs.’
‘So he’ll know how to handle himself,’ Archie retorted. ‘And he’ll need to around you rabble. Anyway, enough of this yapping. Let’s extractum digitum, as the ancient Romans would say.’
‘You what?’ gawped Pat.
‘Pull your finger out. Our boys are relying on us for uniforms.’
As the floor settled down to work, Flossy glanced at the empty seat next to her on the apprentice bench. It would be lovely to have someone else to learn the ropes with. She hoped this girl, whoever she was, was the friendly sort, perhaps even the sort she could confide in. With that, she gazed down at her handbag, tucked safely just beside the treadle under her machine.
The package had arrived at her lodgings two days ago, in plenty of time for her birthday.
It was the same every year on 10 May, only this time it had been forwarded on from the orphanage to her new address in Bethnal Green.
Flossy had hardly dared to hope that the anonymous gifts would keep on arriving even after she left the home. She had assumed that once she started a new life outside the four walls of the institute, they would stop, especially now the orphanage had been evacuated. So when the postman had delivered the brown waxed-paper package to her tiny digs, a sweet rush of delirium had filled her veins. There had been no time to open the parcel that morning, as she had no wish to be late on her first day at Trout’s, so instead she had carefully placed it in her bag before walking to work. But she already knew what the package would contain, for each year it was the same: the most beautiful-smelling treasures one could ever dream of – bars of Sunlight soap, talcum powder and a snowy-white full-length cotton underskirt. Small but thoughtfully chosen gifts that told Flossy someone cared.
The first time she recalled opening one must have been around her eighth birthday. It had only been a wooden red-and-blue spinning top, but the cheerful little gift had lodged in her child’s memory.
As Flossy had grown and matured so had the gifts. The spinning top had been followed a year later by a charming rag doll with corn-coloured plaits, just the right size to nestle into the crook of a nine-year-old girl’s arm, but then on her tenth birthday had come the gift that had given her the sweetest joy of all, a slightly dog-eared copy of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, which she had devoured each night after lights-out by the moonlight seeping in from the dormitory window. It was just words on a page, but the story had transported her from a narrow view of ramshackle tiled rooftops to wide, rolling pastures.
Age thirteen, the books had given way to sensible underskirts and soap, birthday gifts to mark her transition into adolescence.
Matron had been at pains to stress the parcels were probably from an altruistic, wealthy local business, anonymously gifting the poor and needy. Flossy could still hear her barbed voice in her head now when she had first asked whether the gifts could be from a family member: Young lady, remove any fanciful notions from your head immediately. The children who enter this home do so through the death, vice, neglect or extreme poverty of their parents, or because they are left abandoned as foundlings.
But each year, as it would this evening, tearing open the package gave Flossy the only real hope she had ever known, for in her heart, she was convinced the sender could only be one person.
‘And here’s your sailor, Flossy.’ Dolly’s voice snapped her out of her reverie. ‘Sorry,’ she added, with an apologetic grin, as she handed Flossy a piece of paper. ‘His name’s the last on the list.’
‘That’s all right. I don’t mind a bit,’ Flossy replied quickly, glancing down at the paper. ‘Tommy Bird! Golly, what a smashing name. He sounds like a comic-book superhero,’ she chuckled. ‘I hope he doesn’t mind being stuck with me.’
‘I’d say he’s a very lucky chap indeed to be paired with you,’ Dolly asserted.
As the tea lady bustled off, Flossy found herself wondering what words of comfort she could offer to such a brave young man, risking his life to defend his country.
She only hoped her letters would provide him with as much succour as her mystery parcels offered her each year.
When the final bell sounded to mark the end of the shift, Flossy rose wearily to her feet. Her ears were throbbing from the whirring of the machines, and her eyes were as dry as parchment. The rest of the floor was a giddy whirl of gaiety, though. The younger women were busy tearing out their curlers and doing their eyelashes. There was much fluffing of hair and pinching of cheeks. Fresh stockings were slipped on, perfume dabbed on behind the ears and lipstick touched up as excited young workers talked eagerly about which dance they were going to or speculated about their pen-pal sailors.
Flossy watched, wincing as the lively redhead who had bantered with the foreman earlier deftly pierced her pal’s ears with a factory needle, still threaded with cotton, before setting about her eyebrows with some tweezers.
The recipient caught Flossy staring and winked. ‘You admiring my beauty spot, sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘Shall I let you into a secret? It’s the black bit outta a winkle. Looks the real deal, though, don’t it?’
She extended a slender hand over the workbench and Flossy found herself intimidated by her verve and vigour. Her arched eyebrows and sophisticated victory rolls gave her the appearance of an older woman, but Flossy guessed she was about seventeen.
‘My name’s Daisy Shadwell, and this here is my best mate, Sal Fowler,’ she smiled, gesturing to the redhead. ‘Vera’s my big sister, but don’t hold that against me,’ she added, wincing as she cautiously dabbed her tender earlobes with a hanky. ‘Me and Sal are off to a dance up at Shoreditch Town Hall. Why don’t you join us? I’m sixteen, nearly seventeen, but Sal’s twenty-two, so Vera lets me as long as Sal chaperones me.’
‘That’s right. It won’t cost you nothing either,’ said Sal, who despite having a less refined beauty was still striking, with her wide, slightly crooked smile and vivid red hair. ‘I got a mate who works there who always leaves the side door open. I can even tidy those eyebrows up for you if you like,’ she added, snapping her tweezers in Flossy’s direction.
‘Go on – we’re going to paint the town red tonight,’ purred the forelady’s younger sister, extracting a tube of Tangee lipstick from her purse and slicking it on.
‘Erm . . . thanks ever so, but I have plans,’ Flossy lied. She didn’t like to tell these worldly-wise girls that she had never been to a dance before. She had never even painted the town pink, much less red.
‘Suit yourself,’ shrugged Sal. ‘But if you change your mind, you know where we are.’
‘Thanks, girls,’ she smiled appreciatively. ‘It’s nice to be asked.’
Flossy watched as the pair teetered giggling out of the factory, their work pinafores and flat shoes tucked away in brown paper packages under their arms.
As she hastily grabbed her bag, the parcel fell out, just as Dolly reached the side of her workbench.
‘I was just coming to see how you found your first day,’ she said breezily. ‘See you met our Daisy and Sal. They’re quite a pair. Don’t be fooled by Sal, though. I know she comes across as a bit of a saucy piece, but she’s devoted to her two young boys, and now they’ve been evacuated, she misses them something rotten.’
Suddenly, Dolly spotted the parcel on the concrete floor and bent down to pick it up. ‘Is this yours?’ she asked, handing the package to Flossy. ‘What is it?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Flossy said, blushing. ‘It’s . . . Well, it’s just my birthday. It’s a gift that was forwarded on from the orphanage.’
‘Just your birthday!’ exclaimed Dolly. ‘Fancy not telling me, you daft apeth! How old are you?’
‘Oh, I didn’t like to make a fuss. I’ve just turned eighteen. We didn’t really celebrate birthdays at the orphanage, you see . . .’ Her voice trailed off uncomfortably.
‘Well, we do here at Trout’s. Happy birthday, sweetheart,’ Dolly beamed, enveloping her in an enormous hug.
Feeling the warmth of Dolly’s arms wrapped round her, Flossy savoured her embrace and the comforting smell of lavender soap on her cheeks. Being hugged by Dolly Doolaney was like slipping into a warm, scented bath, she thought with a smile. It was only a cuddle – two arms holding her tight – but with that embrace came security and a powerful sense of belonging. And so that precious thing a friendship was born.
‘Good to see you smiling,’ Dolly said as she pulled back. ‘So, do you think you’re going to like it here, Flossy?’
‘Very much so,’ Flossy replied earnestly, her grey eyes shining like a soft, milky dawn. ‘It’s going to be the start of a whole new life for me.’
Flossy meant every word. Maybe starting at Trout’s would give her the confidence she needed to finally set about uncovering the truth.
Another question lingered . . . Did she have the nerve to ask her new friend Dolly to help her? Would the street-smart tea lady think her stupid for wanting to search for a mother who had never featured in her life? Or worse, delusional for thinking that she might be behind the anonymous gifts?
Flossy gazed up at Dolly’s face and tried to assemble her muddled thoughts into something resembling a question.
‘What is it, love?’ asked Dolly, her smile melting into concern. ‘You look like you’ve got something on your mind.’
Flossy heard Matron’s sharp, scornful voice tearing through her brain and she faltered, feeling foolish.
‘It’s nothing, Dolly. See you in the morning.’