At Roman’s Fields, May was preparing for the arrival of Lu, Ralph and Ken for Christmas. She cleared out the box room, painted it, put in two camp beds, trimmed the house and baked, excusing her abundance with the excuse that, ‘It never seemed worth it for just us, so I thought I’d have a bit of a splurge.’
Everybody had to be back at work on the morning following Boxing Day, so they piled everything into the two days.
Lu mostly spent her time beside the fire, curled up hugging her knees, in one of the big chairs, absorbed in a novel. Ted took Ken out with a gun, who suddenly found a sport more enthralling than football. Ted didn’t mind: he thoroughly enjoyed trudging over the frozen fields with his talkative young nephew. ‘Young Ken’s all right, May. I’ve took to him. You should have seen him – a natural shot. I wished for a minute I had two good arms so we could have had a proper shooting match. I should have liked that.’
Ray suddenly took to horses, and Bar, who had never got over her first sight of him back in that first summer, had a heart overflowing with love for him and a soul filled with joy at having Lu again. She had become a woman. Even wearing her usual breeches, shirt and man’s cap, one could see that. At seventeen she carried splendid round breasts high on a wiry, spare figure, which seemed almost too slender to support them. Her uncut, black curly hair, when she let it free to blow in the wind as she exercised a fast horse, made her look as untamed as she probably was.
Bar spent whatever time she had free from the stables in their company. On Christmas morning, before their coats could become spoiled by the Boxing Day chase of the fox over winter fields, she took Ray to see the hunters. They were beautiful animals and she was proud. She was on duty much of the time, but on Christmas evening she came in wearing a full black skirt and a knitted top, this so shrunken that both Ray and Ken found it hard to stop watching her all the time.
May said, ‘Didn’t Duke want to come?’
‘I told him I was coming over, but he never said. You can never tell with Duke, can you?’
Gabriel Strawbridge said, ‘He said he didn’t hold with Christmas, so I told him that the Yule log and the holly and mistletoe was pagan and nothing to do with Christmas. I thought he quite took to that idea. Hark… I think that’s his tread.’
At that point, Duke makes his appearance. Lu, who has been curled up cracking nuts, jumps up and brushes the debris into the grate. He is a grown man now and is beautiful. His boyish chin has squared off and his hollow cheeks show off his fine, high cheekbones. He has still not cut his hair, but wears it oiled and tied back and bound in a kind of black stocking tube. In spite of his boots, black trousers and a knitted fisherman’s jumper, nothing can stop the image of him standing on the bent willow from leaping into her mind.
‘Right on cue, Duke,’ Gabriel Strawbridge says. ‘I was just about to say you were on your way to making your fortune. You’ve got some nice horses up in the field.’
‘I have, Master Gabr’l, main good bloodstock. I reckon I’m ready to ask the estate to let me rent some of their spare stabling.’ Although he is speaking to Gabriel Strawbridge, his unwavering gaze is directed at Lu.
May says, ‘D’you know Ray and Ken? Well, you do now. Why don’t you take a plate, Duke, and help yourself to what you want whilst we go on clearing a bit of space?’
‘I shall, Mis Wilmott.’ He takes a plate, fills it with meat and bread and goes directly to where Lu is and seats himself beside her. ‘You’ve grown up.’ His eyes roam over her from ankles to breasts and back again, as men’s eyes do. ‘You out to work?’
The unabashed appraisal doesn’t make her bridle as it often does with men at the factory; instead it makes her unconsciously breathe deeper and raise her rib-cage, provoking his interest. ‘I’m a machinist.’
‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ He opens his mouth to the bread and Lu watches his teeth as they bite through the crust and then his tongue as he cleans his lips of powdery flour. Without thinking, she brushes a stray crumb from the corner of his mouth, and a fleeting sensation like a sweet, pleasurable twitching, almost a pain, flashes between her thighs.
‘I work a sewing machine in a corset factory.’
‘I thought you was going to college.’
She shakes her head. ‘I gave it up.’
He laughs. ‘Fancy that. And there’s me thinking about you all dolled up in one of them posh uniforms. What d’you wear to be a corset girl then?’
He sits just a couple of feet from her, and she is more aware of his presence than she has ever been, even more than on the significant day at The Swallitt Pool. She still can’t stop herself from thinking of that image of him ready to dive. Lean, white body with patches and lines of growth of dark hair, brown arms, feet and face, black hair plastered to his head… and the thing that was the focus of her attention, the unforgettable thing – which as yet doesn’t have a name because playground words are too silly and the others she doesn’t yet know.
‘You’re making fun of me.’
‘I’m not. What’s wrong with asking?’
‘Nothing, but it’s just any old skirt, and an overall.’
His direct gaze and direct way of asking what he wants to know puts Lu in mind of her aunts’ blunt manner of questioning. The corners of his mouth lift a little and his eyes incite. ‘Do you go swimming?’
There! Now she stirs herself and looks directly back at him and, keeping her voice so that it doesn’t carry to her brothers, almost snaps, ‘Yes. Do you?’
‘When the mood takes me. Do you go in the sea?’
‘When the mood takes me.’
‘In your skin?’
She knows that she has flushed and is annoyed with herself. ‘Not since I grew up.’
‘That’s a shame. It’s the best way.’ Half smiling, he bites into a slice of tart. ‘I don’t see what growing up’s got to do with it, anyway. I enjoy myself in any natural way I can. So should you.’ He sucks a bit of stickiness from his fingers. ‘I’ll come down your way and see you one of these days.’ Without a further glance in Lu’s direction, he puts his plate on the hearth and goes. ‘Thanks for the supper Mis Wilmott. I’ve still got the horses to water.’
Ray is sitting easily, smoking a cigarette and talking about his union work, Bar listening quietly. Bar, who hardly knows what a union is, let alone a shop steward, is absorbed in the workings of that earnest world.
Ken is listening to Ted explain the distracting tactics of some game birds.
Gabriel has nodded off.
May is filling hot water bottles.
Lu sits with her knees drawn up to her chin, gazing into the burning log fire recalling that he said – there’s me thinking about you all dolled up. Did he mean her to know that he’d been thinking of her? The unsuspecting virgin has been visited by one of the darker gods, who has left her with an exciting image of potent unconformity.
In the new year, Lu, putting up her hair in a tidy bun and her age from sixteen years to eighteen, enrolled in a WEA class in local government – not because she was particularly interested in the subject, but because she had made up her mind to do something to educate herself, and local government was the only evening class that wasn’t dressmaking or cookery – which wasn’t her idea of education. Mr Matthews, the tutor, said he wasn’t supposed to take anyone under nineteen, so he bent the rules – and rather more than he realized.
The prospect of not being accepted for a class she hadn’t been particularly keen on in any case made Lu determined they should take her. ‘It’s supposed to be the Workers’ Educational Association, isn’t it? I’m a full-time worker, so why shouldn’t I be able to join?’
Mr Matthews being a man who gave all his spare time to educating workers in civic affairs, thought that no such arbitrary rule should keep a youngster so eager for his subject out of his classroom.
On Friday evenings, until Kate started going out with a regular boyfriend, Lu and Kate went to the cinema, the ‘Royal’ or the ‘King’s’ for a show, no matter what the programme. Sometimes they went to the cinema again on Sundays. They bought Picturegoer, and argued over their favourite stars. The boyfriend put paid to those outings unless the Pompey team had an away game, in which case the girls could have that Saturday evening together.
Whenever she could manage to fit in the cleaning and ironing during the week, she went out to Roman’s Fields on Saturday afternoon and returned on Sunday evening. By running to the station after she had taken her machine to pieces, cleaned and oiled it on Saturday morning, she was just in time to catch the train to Fareham, where half an hour later she would arrive to find Uncle Ted waiting with the new second-hand pick-up truck that was big enough to get the strawberry crop to the station more quickly than waiting for the unreliable carrier’s cart. It also proved invaluable in getting about for pleasure. Mr Strawbridge loved a trip a few miles out to a country pub. And so, throughout the year, Lu became such a regular visitor to Roman’s Fields that she kept a change of clothes there, and took to wearing breeches and a shirt like Bar.
Bar had taught her to ride without a saddle on her father’s work-horse – a strong, fluffy-hoofed mare; and Ted had taught her to drive the van. As with her work as a machinist, the synchronization of foot and hand was paramount, and she worked hard to become a competent driver.
She kept her two worlds quite separate. Kate tried to pump her about what she got up to when she went away, but Lu would only say that she went to stay with her aunty and uncle. The fact that she could ride and drive now would have made her different from the girls she worked with, especially now that she had lived down her short episode as a scholar.
When the WEA course finished after the spring term, Mr Matthews suggested that the class should go for a fish-and-chip supper. The course had been surprisingly interesting, and she had never missed an evening of listening to him describing how a council worked, how the electoral system worked, what democracy was.
Over the chip supper, he asked, ‘Have you ever attended a meeting of the full council, Miss Wilmott?’
‘No. I didn’t know we could until you said.’
He leaned forward, his glasses glinting with enthusiasm. ‘You should go. If you’re a bit apprehensive about going to a place like the Guildhall for the first time, I’d be pleased to show you. Could you get time off?’
She grinned, ‘I could probably be sick enough to go to something like that.’
‘But you’d lose an afternoon’s pay.’
‘They say you have to pay for experience. It might even be better than going to the pictures.’
The Guildhall, which as a child she supposed must belong to somebody important, was a revelation, as was the council in special session, the mayor and aldermen in robes, the mayor wearing a heavy gold chain; the polished wood panelling of the council chamber reflecting the blaze of lights.
Mr Matthews was, it appeared, quite well known to many of the council officials. He gave her a short conducted tour along some of the many impressive corridors.
‘You said the ratepayers paid for all this, is that right?’
‘Yes, in a way it is the official home of the mayor, and he’s Portsmouth’s representative.’
‘But what’s it for? Why does it need to be so big and grand?’
As so often over the past weeks, this questing girl had put him on the spot with her simple questions. He did his best to give her a reasonable explanation about civic pride and its effect on the population as a whole.
‘It doesn’t work though, does it? How can people be proud of paying for a place like that when half of them are out of work? People where I live can hardly afford paint for their walls or lino for their floors. The council could run just the same without spending all this money on robes and cars and stuff that doesn’t matter, couldn’t it?’
She had learned well over the months. Mr Matthews did not have an answer that would sound convincing to a girl who lived in a place like Lampeter Street. ‘I’m afraid my answer will be too lame for you. But it is traditional, and such trappings give dignity to the office, wouldn’t you agree to that?’
‘No. It just seems silly. It’s all right for children making each other into princesses with daisy chains; I don’t think grown-ups ought to. If I was a councillor, I’d put a stop to it.’
For the tutor, it was one of those moments that made all the winter evenings spent in stale, cold classrooms worth while. ‘Perhaps one day you will be.’
‘Me? No, I don’t think so. I expect I shall go away when I’m a bit older, there’s so many other things to do.’ Until then, she hadn’t known that this was what she intended.
He offered to buy her tea in a cafe, and she accepted with the kind of pleasure that made the occasion a pleasure for him. She intrigued him. She had the kind of eagerness for learning that he used to have when he was her age – still did have for that matter, the only difference being that he had found a channel into which he could guide his enthusiasm, whilst hers appeared to be uncontained and ready to break out in all directions. That was how it should be in the young.
In the tea-shop she still questioned him closely about the ethics of spending ratepayers’ money on pomp and luxury. Stock answers were not for her: she taxed him, made him question what he had not questioned for years, put him on the spot, until almost in self-defence he asked her about herself. She told him about having won a free place at the grammar school, which did not surprise him. What a bright light she must have been in that backstreet school amidst the terraces and factories. What a bright light she was in his class.
‘I know it’s too late now, but I do sometimes wonder how I would have got on there.’
‘There are more roads than one to education.’
‘That’s what I thought, and why I started your classes. I’ve learned things with you that I shouldn’t ever have learned at the grammar.’
The ageing tutor admired the girl’s confidence… wisdom even. She shouldn’t be lost to factories and babies. ‘But they do give you that piece of paper that opens doors to opportunity.’
‘That’s all right if they’re the sort of doors you want opened. I mean, would I want to be a teacher? It’s what everybody said I could be. It’s what my mother would have been if she hadn’t met my dad.’
It suddenly occurred to him that she was even younger than the age she had given to get into his classes. She was simultaneously innocent and wise. A young woman teacher with a Lampeter Street background would be exactly what poor schools could do with. Much better than the usual tired teachers with nowhere else to go, or the modem, idealistic products of private education and university.
‘What job would you like?’
‘I don’t know, I really don’t. I only know that I couldn’t bear to stop around here. I’d like to go everywhere. When I told Ray – that’s my brother – he said I’d got itchy feet, which perhaps I have because I sometimes just want to run and run and run.’
‘Where?’ He watched as her eyes searched inside her head.
‘Where? I remember in geography we used,to have tests about places: names like the Russian steppes, Guadalajara, Minnesota, and then there was this poem about Xanadu, and another that went, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree… ” And there’s the place where they thought all the gold was – El Dorado. I used to say names like that to myself, over and over, I just used to wish that I had a magic carpet to go to places with names like that.’ She came back, smiling, looking a bit shy that she had opened up like that. ‘Then I’d wake up and still be in Pompey… I mean, Pompey!’
He could have said, The world is full of Pompeys with names like Minnesota; instead he encouraged her. ‘When I was about your age, I saw an illustration of the Acropolis… you know? I longed to go there, but to travel back in time and see it when it was gloriously new; sadly that’s something I can never fulfil. But I have travelled in the region of Guadalajara myself.’
The revelation seemed to quite take her breath away. ‘Guadalajara? Have you really?’
‘So you won’t stay and change things here? Do away with the mayor’s funny hat and spend the ratepayers’ money on better schools?’
‘I don’t think things like that could be changed.’
‘Why not?’
He watched her face reflect the goings-on in her thoughts. ‘Because it would take too long. You said yourself that a lot of that stuff goes on because it always has gone on.’ She grinned mischievously. ‘Anyway, men like big funny hats, don’t they? You know, like admirals and the king?’ She giggled, quite out of character for the young woman with the upswept hair and the ever-ready notebook. ‘All those feathers. I expect it’s because of the hats that they have to travel about in posh cars.’
As he walked with her to her tram he asked, ‘Will you be enrolling next term?’
‘Of course. I’ve only just started.’
When the new term started, there she was, her eager pencil poised over her ready notebook. The prospect of hearing her views on Parliament and national government cheered Mr Matthews. So, on the first evening of term he proposed that there should be a debate to consider whether the luxurious trappings were essential to good government.
For a while after she had started at Ezzard’s factory, whenever she’d passed by the grammar school, or seen a girl wearing the uniform, a satchel of books slung over her shoulder and carrying a tennis racquet or hockey-stick, Lu had felt a hot pang of jealousy to be one of them. But now she began to think differently. The curriculum of a grammar school was planned to cram the brain but not to broaden the mind. Here she had a real chance to extend her knowledge and think for herself.
With all this new experience, it might have been expected that she would neglect to keep up the journal Gabriel Strawbridge had started her on five years ago, but she did not. In fact, most nights she quite looked forward to sitting at the scullery table with a mug of cocoa or packet soup before bed, writing whatever came to mind.
Inevitably many of her entries were to do with her working day.
Ezzards is a very old building, with whitewashed walls. These get done every year when they close down for the first week of August which is when we take our holiday. Factories that close down the last week in July get an extra day because of August bank holiday, but if anybody was to suggest that Ezzards give an extra day, he would just say as he always does, ‘If you don’t like it, you know what to do.’ Which I don’t think is fair.
We are all glad to get away because the place gets as hot in summer as it gets cold in winter. It wouldn’t be so bad if the heat from the boiler room came up through the floor to warm our chapped ankles when it’s cold, but it seems to wait till the sun is belting down before it does that. The running belt and the treadles make the spindles and wheels warm, and the belt seems to carry the heat right through the room. The windows have all got bars and don’t open, so that the only air that comes in is from the end door which is propped open. It might let in a bit of air, but it is warm air. Upstairs in the offices, they have got ordinary windows that open and blinds they can pull down. I don’t know why people who come to work in suits and dresses need better treatment than us. If it wasn’t for us, they wouldn’t have jobs, but I don’t expect that they would see it like that.
If it wasn’t for us losing our wages, shut-down week would be a nice break. But still, seeing as there is nothing we can do about it, I try not to let it stop the fun I get out of going to Roman’s Fields. I can’t hardly wait to be on the train there. Bar said she would ask if she could borrow one of the horses – ‘hacks’ she calls them – so we can go riding together. When I am sitting at my bench with sweat running down my sides, it is as though this is all happening in a different world from where Roman’s Fields exists. But I like being with the other girls, we have a lot of laughs.
Ezzards factory isn’t a lot of laughs though. It is a really harsh place. Perhaps if I never got away to Roman’s then I wouldn’t be able to judge, but I do, so I can. Factory owners live comfortable because we do not. Sometimes a girl will say ‘I wish somebody would put a bomb under this b—y place.’
[Later] Mr Ezzard knows he can treat the girls like that because there are so many women and girls desperate for work no matter how bad the money. As Ray says, the bosses hold all the cards in this game as well as making up the rules as it suits them. It’s like the houses we have to live in, nobody would live in places huddled together and falling apart and having to be fumigated if there was anywhere else to go. Dotty has applied for one of the nice council houses in Portsea, but she won’t get one, nor will we because Lampeter Street is not as bad as a lot of other streets. It’s only when I sit down to write that these things make me angry, it’s best not to think about it but to enjoy yourself as much as you can.
I didn’t used to know that I was Lower Class. Now I know what it means I hate it that there are people who think I’m that. When I walk past all the big houses on Southsea Front, I get so bitter I would like all of them to get bugs and cockroaches and bad drains and damp under the floors. Yet another part of me wants to have one of the houses and a garden with a wall round so nobody could see in. I would have a high gate with ‘Beware of the Dog’, and red tiles on the roof. I really hate being common and working class. I won’t always be. I’m going to be Somebody! I have made myself a promise.
I was telling Kate Roles how I felt about wanting to get out of Pompey and do something exciting. She thinks getting a good-looking husband and a home of your own is exciting so she doesn’t really know what I’m talking about.
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.’
‘Sorry, 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.
‘You might not recognize her now that she has become such a grown-up young woman, and so blooming, brimming with health, but this is Miss Wilmott, Sarah. Louise Wilmott, from further along the street… both her parents died within a few days of each other.’
‘Of course, I remember. Your mother was ill for a very long time. I liked her, I used to call in sometimes. I remember how pleased she was when she got you away to convalesce after you had been ill yourself.’
‘I didn’t realize at the time how ill she was. I suppose I was too young.’
‘I’m glad to see you looking so well. You are right, Aaron, she’s absolutely blooming – except for your poor arm, but healthy bodies soon heal. I hope it’s nothing to keep you from your work.’
‘Sarah, Miss Wilmott is thinking of rushing back to work with a crust in her hand. We can do better than that, I’m sure?’
‘Do you like vegetable curry, Miss Wilmott?’
‘I don’t know, but if that’s what I can smell, I expect I do.’
‘Ha, Aaron, an adventurous eater, now that’s something you don’t come across every day in Lampeter Street. Come through, my dear, I was just putting out a bowl for myself. If you like it, I’ll tell you how it’s done.’
It was funny, suddenly the Steiners were ordinary people who asked you if you’d like a bowl of food. Until now, he’d been the tall man with a sad face seen in and around Lampeter Street every day, who opened doors without knocking and went upstairs two at a time, and Mrs Steiner was usually just a head and shoulders looking out of a little trapdoor and a hand that gave out bottles of medicine wrapped in stiff white paper and blobbed at the ends with sealing wax.
They had a living room crammed with everything. Odd and strange and different in a score of ways from anything Lu had come across. The brightly woven shawls thrown over old chairs, as well as shelves of books and collected objects, reminded her of Miss Lake’s room. That there were Jews anywhere but in the Bible was information that had not so far come Lu’s way, no more than the fact that there were European Jews and that Mr Ezzard had descended from them.
‘My husband is probably concerned that you are in danger of not knowing as much about yourself as he knows, Miss Wilmott. That isn’t why he suggested the vegetable curry (by the way these are matzos if you haven’t had them, a kind of bread), but I know he’ll feel easier in his mind if I ask you whether you have any problems. When I was your age, I had my mother. Girls do need their mothers when they are growing into full womanhood.’
She put down her spoon, smiled, and folded her arms across her large bosom. ‘Do you mind if I ask you about yourself?’
‘Not really, but I told Dr Steiner that I didn’t have any problems with… periods and that.’
‘And I’m sure you don’t. Have you got a boyfriend?’
‘No. Just sometimes I go to a social with one.’
‘Have you gone all the way yet?’
Lu did her best to appear unfazed. All the way was something girls whispered and giggled over when one of them had had a solo date.
‘No. And I wouldn’t anyway with a boy from round here.’
‘Do you know about protecting yourself? Preventatives… contraceptives?’
‘I know about boys getting Durexes from the barbers.’
Mrs Steiner said, ‘Did you know that women don’t have to rely on men? I don’t mean that it is safe to stand up, or afterwards to cough, or pass water, or jump around. What I mean is that women don’t have to rely on men to provide the protection; they can provide their own.’
Lu shook her head.
‘Not everybody would agree with what I propose doing – which is to give as many women of child-bearing age the knowledge and means to protect themselves. Now this is not something new. There are clinics in London that have been running for ages, but not here. Yet it is here as much as anywhere where there should be one. Sometimes Portsmouth appears to overflow with soldiers and sailors, doesn’t it?’
Lu had finished her stew and, without asking, Mrs Steiner served her a slice of sticky cake. ‘Oh, honey… lovely: it reminds me of my aunty’s place.’
‘Would she mind me talking to you like this?’
‘No. She told me to be careful, that it’s easy to say you won’t let anything happen with a boy, but sometimes you can’t help it.’
‘Then I hope she will be glad if I tell you that you can be prepared for that eventuality. Society is very touchy about unmarried women and girls obtaining information, as though we don’t fall in love until it is our wedding night.’
Lu was fast losing her embarrassment. ‘So why don’t Portsmouth have a clinic?’
‘Prejudice, religion, ignorance, money. Maybe one day, that’s the idea. But, until then, people like myself have to do what we can where we can.’
‘I reckon you’d have women lining up at the door if you started one.’
‘Understand, I am in no way offering or encouraging you to accept contraceptive advice. All I would say is that, if and when you ever want to come and see me, then I hope that you will. I neither condone nor disapprove of premarital sexual love, or casual love – we all have to sort that out for ourselves, don’t we? But it would be nice, wouldn’t it, if all children who were born were wanted, instead of so many by accident?’
‘What is it… I mean, how are the babies stopped from coming?’
In the dispensary, Mrs Steiner opened half a dozen of the assorted little boxes and rowed up their contents. ‘Simple, aren’t they? The eighth wonder of the world.’
‘What do you have to do with them?’
‘Once you know which one fits, it is slipped in and taken out. Clinic nurses explain these things.’
‘They look too big to—’
Mrs Steiner joined the tips of her left finger and thumb, pressed the sprung rim of the largest device with her right hand, slipped it into the space between the finger and thumb. It shot through like a freed animal, bounced on the desk, fell on to the floor where it rolled and wobbled across the linoleum. The dimpled smile appeared again. ‘That’s the general idea, but it was never intended to be inserted between finger and thumb.’
Lu left with only five minutes to sprint back to the factory before the gate was drawn and she was shut out for the rest of the day.
It was amazing how much better her arm felt when she got back to her machine. So much to think of. Every day there was something new. She felt blooming, she was blooming. She hummed quietly to herself as she fed strips under the foot and quietly burped memories of the tasty spicy new food.
I don’t know what to think about that. I know they are young men, but don’t want to think about my brothers going with girls.
Eileen Grigg. Lena Grigg has come back. She has grown fat. At least fat for Eileen Grigg who I remember as the skinniest girl with rickets in our street which is full of thin rickety children. She just appeared in the factory one morning, sat at a machine near Nellie and started work as though she had done it every morning for three and a half years like I and Kate Roles have. Lena is acting very strange, a bit like my Gran Wilmott is these days, it’s as though a bit of her brain has gone or been shut down. I never thought Lena would forget who I was. I would have sooner she had come and shouted and put her fist up to me than to see what somebody has done to her. Tomorrow I’m going to see Miss Lake about it. Somebody must be to blame for what has happened to Lena. One thing, Lena is a good machinist.
Kate hooked a thumb in Eileen’s direction and mouthed, ‘What’s going on?’ Lu shrugged and indicated, ‘Search me.’
Lu almost hungered for the money to save for dress fabrics, clothes and hairdressing appointments, but she was never reckless in the work she turned out; she made sure she made no rejects or let anything distract her.
Eileen Grigg attracted her attention all morning, so that she felt more than the normal relief when the dinner-time hooter sounded.
Kate nodded in Eileen’s direction and they chose her aisle to get out of the machine room. It must have been the sudden cessation of the machines that attracted Eileen’s attention. She looked around her as though trying to fathom out where she was, then slid from her stool and made her way past the other machines in her row.
‘Hello, Lena,’ Lu said quite affably. She had no reason not to be. ‘Nice to see you back again.’
Lena dragged her eyes in Lu’s direction. ‘Oh, hello… Katie, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ Kate said. ‘I’m Katie, Katie Roles, that’s Lu… Lu Wilmott. We was all at Miss Lake’s together.’
‘Oh yes, Lu. I get mixed up… It’s been a long…’ She never finished, but went off touching the wall at every step, as though she might be counting the bricks.
‘Blinking Hell!’ Kate said. ‘She’s off her rocker.’
Lu thought it was more as though she had had the stuffing knocked out of her. She watched her with curiosity over the next few days and found that, although she was changed, she wasn’t off her rocker. She was sort of loose and baggy – not so much physically, but in the way her focus needed a moment to catch up with her gaze, her speech and her actions.
If anyone had asked Lu, she would have said that the last person she would find herself drawn towards would be Lena Grigg. Something about Lena’s whole demeanour was an affront. To whom? Lu couldn’t possibly have said. But somebody had done something to stamp on Lena’s old spirit. The deeper her studies and classes carried her along, the more certain Lu became of her opinions. She wasn’t above changing them frequently, but her mind was always alive and coming to conclusions about everything.
There was no such thing as bad luck; most situations had a root cause created by the men who made the rules. In a word, things happened to people – such as with Lena – because other people created the circumstances in which they were bound to happen.
Lena had no hand in what she had become.
This had been done to her.
Why? Why should any person have such power over another?
Who were they, the Theys who had decided what should be done about her? Who chose them? Who gave them the right?
From her evening classes she knew how the magistracy worked. Magistrates chose other magistrates. In secret. They chose their own kind. The same with Boards of Governors; how could that sort of person know anything about girls from Lampeter? And the same people kept on choosing one another for every position going in the city.
It was people like those who must have had something to do with changing Lena.
As soon as Cynthia Lake opened the door to Lu, she said, ‘It’s all right, Lu. I know exactly why you’re here. Come in. Sit down, pour yourself some coffee, take a cigarette, and tell me. What do you think?’
‘Kate says she’s off her rocker.’
Cynthia Lake rubbed her eyes. ‘Oh, dear. Is Lena really bad? I really hoped she’d find something there with a few of the girls she used to know.’
‘Oh, she’s all right at her work. She’s been a machinist a long time – you can tell the way she reaches out for her pieces without looking.’
‘Yes, she’s been in a similar factory in another town. But she had… she was quite ill.’
Suddenly her behaviour made sense to Lu. ‘She had a nervous breakdown,’ she said intuitively.
‘Come along, Lu, you know I can’t break a confidence.’
‘And you come along, Miss Lake, you know I would never either.’
‘Touché. Yes, she did have a slight breakdown. Of course, she hasn’t been under the care of the authorities for some time. However—’ she paused and blew out a long stream of smoke, then took a drink of coffee – ‘there was a move to send her for treatment in a mental hospital.’
‘Bung her in the nut house, out of the way.’
‘I don’t know why you do it, Lu. If you don’t know by now that factory talk doesn’t shock me, then you’ll never know. I’ve taught here for twelve years now; do you think there’s anything I don’t know about Lampeter Street? In fact, I could probably quote you a few choice dockyard words you’ve never heard. But if it suits you… Yes, there were people who thought that she would be better off being “bunged in the nut house”.’
‘Was it you stopped them?’
‘No. Actually, it was Mrs Steiner and the Reverend Crompton. It was I who asked Mr Ezzard to take her on.’
‘What did he charge to take her?’
‘Lu! Your cynicism doesn’t do you justice. Have you ever thought that you may not know Mr Ezzard well enough to make such judgements upon him?’
‘Speak as I find, miss.’
It looks as though Eileen Grigg is back for good. She has got lodgings in Lake Road. Miss Lake thinks she will be all right because Mrs Grigg has taken the pledge with the Salvation Army. I don’t know what it is makes me talk to Miss Lake the way I do. It’s as though I’m back in Standard Four and think it’s clever to say rude or shocking things. Cheeky. Sharp as a tack to get a laugh from the class. Afterwards, I feel so stupid. I admire Miss Lake above all women I know, except perhaps Aunty May, but they are admirable in different ways. I’m never rude to May, why do I have to be to Miss Lake?
The meeting which Lu had been hoping to attend as Ray’s visitor was not an NUR meeting, but a big conference with other organizations about the future of public transport, and was held at Bournemouth.
It was hard to see whether it was Ray or Lu who was the more excited about the event.
Ray said, ‘One day, and maybe it won’t be that long, this country’s going to be run by the socialists, so we’ve got to be ready. People with vision will be there, Lu. Good public transport can change people’s lives.’
Lu wouldn’t have minded had the conference been to discuss wooden blocks, provided she had a visitor’s ticket and was going away. ‘Is the Seaview Hotel big? Will we be staying near where the big shops are? Shall I take all my three dresses? I’m going to wear that new two-piece I made. Katie is making me a blouse to go with it. Oh, Ray, I can hardly wait. Fancy sleeping two nights in a hotel!’
Lu took a half-day off on the Friday and went to meet Ray at the station dressed in a new two-piece suit in the latest cafe-au-lait shade, worn with a cream Peter Pan blouse, silk stockings and high-heeled court shoes. She felt a million dollars. Because it was an object of real class, she carried Gabriel Strawbridge’s well-labelled leather grip with her overnight things. At Southampton, where they changed trains, Ray introduced her to a group of other NUR men, all a lot older than Ray, all going to the same meeting, who treated her with great awkward politeness and joviality. When the Bournemouth train drew in, Ray said he’d see them at the other end. ‘Why can’t we sit with them, Ray?’
‘Well, talk gets a bit well… you know.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Ray, go and sit with them. I’m not a kid. I go to and fro enough by train when I go out to Roman’s. I’ll find a seat on my own and read all the way. I’d rather, so go and sit with your old union blokes.’
But Lu didn’t read all the way. When a well-dressed woman sitting in the opposite corner couldn’t get her cigarette lighter to work, Lu offered her own box of matches, and they dropped into easy conversation about how good Ronson lighters were, how neat, how slim, how reliable – if one just remembered to put some fuel in. Although the woman sounded like a real lady, she was friendly, and questioning, and to Lu’s surprise she found herself talking about life at Roman’s Fields as though that was her home, and Ted and May her parents. She didn’t actually say they were, but when the woman referred to Lu’s ‘people’, Lu responded in that way.
Another small falsification was to do with her accent, which Lu had been gradually modifying whenever there was a chance to do so. Many of her WEA classmates were worth listening to and copying. She could have mimicked radio accents, but they were so crack-jawed that she would never get away with that. She practised her better way of talking when buying goods in shops where she wasn’t known, asking for a tram ticket, and quietly reading aloud to herself on the sea-front. She didn’t try too hard with this woman, she just concentrated on vowels, word endings and aspirants in the right places. Because her mother had been Vera Presley, a dentist’s daughter and trainee teacher, there had always been a home way of speaking which was more careful than the outside way.
In her role as Louise, she was glad that she had been working hard on getting her hands and nails into some sort of shape so that they did not immediately announce her as a factory girl.
‘Are you holidaying in Bournemouth?’
‘My brother is meeting some people down here, and I’m just going along for the fun of it.’
‘Lucky you. It’s work for me. I’ve got a meeting. Transport! The Comrades, no less. The Brothers. Hundreds of them all under one roof. Talking about unions, underground trains and buses – and steam-engines too, I shouldn’t wonder. Can you imagine?’
Lu’s false heart sank. What a fool! ‘Oh?’ Is there a more lame-sounding response?
‘I’m a reporter, you know. Malou.’ She spelled it out. ‘Malou. French. I do fashion pieces.’
At this information, the third occupant of the compartment, a bowler-hatted, stiff-white-collared, dark-suited, grey-haired man who had been either asleep or deep in his newspaper gave the woman a glance of curiosity.
Idiot! A reporter. Lu did not know. Of course she did not know. Had she known she would have never dreamed of becoming Louise, the nicely-spoken girl whose home was in a lovely setting in rural Hampshire. It was so completely embarrassing. The weekend was ruined.
‘The thing is there are so many lady comrades these days, that my editor thought we ought to do a piece on their fashion sense… their style.’
This was the first Lu had heard of any women trade-unionists. Not that it mattered in view of having made such a fool of herself. Showing off to somebody she would probably meet again at the conference. A reporter!
‘I said, Can you imagine: double-breasted suits, navy blue, with an inch of petticoat showing; lisle stockings; crocheted jumpers and hair shingled half-way up the back. I said…’
She lost Lu, who could see no way out except to make her way along to the toilet compartment, then stand in the corridor until the train reached Bournemouth. It could not be too long. The last station had been Boscombe. She tried to remember the order of the stations, but could not.
She picked up her handbag and scarf and made a move to leave the compartment. The man shuffled his irritable feet and untidy newspaper. Lu smiled a brief apology and slid back the compartment door. Was he smiling? Or smirking? Had he seen through her sudden elevation in class?
In the toilet compartment, she stood for a minute looking at herself in the mirror, seeing what the reporter had seen. Louise Wilmott, a young woman invented by an ambitious factory girl from the slums of Pompey. She smiled slightly at her own reflection. That woman thought that I was her own sort. Then she looked into her own eyes and quickly looked away, concentrating on the tip of the lipstick as it outlined her mouth. Who am I, then?
For so long now she had been switching from one Lu to another, trying out various roles. I could invent a whole fictitious background, she thought.
She combed her new bouncy hairstyle and wondered how the two of them appeared to the man who had been sharing their compartment. Did he see two fashionable modern young women of the same class? He probably couldn’t care two tics whether I’m working class and she’s middle.
What was that performance all about then? Who was it for? Not for the man. Not for Malou French – she was the worst sort of snob, ridiculing women who are more concerned about getting better working conditions than about fashion. She would probably ridicule Ray because he didn’t wear the right tie or something and wore his work shoes to meetings.
Suddenly, she felt quite ashamed, then angry. There was nothing wrong with making the most of yourself, but nobody had the right to poke fun at people who had better things to do. She was the sort who would gang up with her snobby friends as they had done at the grammar school and ask, I say, you’re the charity girl, aren’t you? Her shame at not having stood up for herself then – and just now – was revealed to her in the reflection of her eyes. To let yourself be put down by some posh cat who’s never so much as seen the inside of a factory. You rat!
Lu brushed her shoulders fastidiously, sprayed her ears with 4711 and went to stand in the corridor deep in thought. I don’t want to be like my own sort, and I certainly don’t want to be like them. How does Miss Lake manage it? She can be on the side of poor people, yet she still talks lovely and she’s not ashamed of being interested in clothes and fancy things like painting, and she doesn’t think reading is a waste of time. She’s just herself.
But then, she didn’t start out being born in the slums; nobody can be proud of that. Hanging on to the window rail, Lu watched the steam from the engine stream past, much like the thoughts that were streaming through her mind. Can I be myself? No. The world’s set up to keep top people up, and low people down. Therefore, if people at the bottom want to get heard, we have to be like them. No, we have to appear to… we have to fool them by talking and dressing like them, but we don’t have to think like them. Join them and beat them at their own game, Kenny had once said that. He probably didn’t think like that now, but it was the way to do it. She was sure that she was worth two of Miss Malou Whatsit. Miss Lake had explained the great difference between compositions and essays, and Mr Matthews had encouraged his classes to practise debate, discussion and discourse. Mr Matthews loved his three Ds. Her two mentors would probably be quite pleased at how she was learning to sort things out for herself.
What am I doing skulking in a corridor?
Malou French was inspecting her own features in a powder compact mirror. When Lu returned to the compartment she looked up and smiled briefly at Lu standing, about to reach for her grip. A little cough was the only sign of Lu’s lack of confidence. ‘Miss French, can I ask you… Do you think my style is all right?’
‘My dear, love it. Holds together beautifully. I just love that new coffee colour with the cream. Ach, and so totally right for your lovely auburn colouring.’
‘Oh, good. Ah, you said you wanted to write about lady comrades’ style.’ She held out her hands in an attitude of presentation. ‘This is it!’ As Lu went to retrieve her grip from the rack, the man in the corner threw down his newspaper, jumped up and took it down for her, but Lu was hardly aware that he was carrying it until he stopped outside an empty compartment and asked, ‘Will this do?’
‘Oh, yes… thank you.’
He put the grip on the rack, raised his bowler-hat and said, ‘Thank you, miss. Bucked me up no end you have. Should you mind if I joined you? I gather we’re going to t’same place.’
Lu was almost gushing in her gratefulness for his friendliness. He offered a hand to shake, and with amusement in his eyes, said, ‘Aye, a brother… one o’ the comrades.’
‘Oh. Louise Wilmott, and I’m not really one of them, I just said that… I’m only a visitor.’
‘Aye, I thought you might be.’
‘You did? Why?’
‘You’ll likely not remember me.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘Sidney Anderson. I were at sea with your dad. I lost a good shipmate. When I came to the funeral, I had not a notion that there had been a double tragedy. A terrible thing. I were right wrung out for you all.’
‘I do remember you. You’re the man who carried a wreath and put it by the graveside.’
He nodded. ‘Aye, I shan’t forget that day in a hurry. I stood there thinking how proud Art would a been to see the three of you like that. A credit to the Wilmott family. I said to my sister later, I’ve seen more dignity in Art’s children than you’d find in a carriage-load of dukes and duchesses.’
‘I’ve never met anybody outside the family who knew my father, except for neighbours and that.’
‘I’ve often thought how hard it must be for the wives and children of a man always at sea.’
The grey-haired man and the golden-haired girl sized one another up and wondered what was going on in the other’s head. What did he mean, he thought how hard it must be? Was she as hurt as her eyes showed?
‘It was hard… it certainly was hard. If it hadn’t been for Ray, I don’t know what we would have done. I didn’t realize it when I was young, but I see now that my mother had been slowly dying for years.’
Yes, she was even more hurt than she showed.
He decided to take the plunge: after all, it had been on his mind for long enough. ‘I dare say you won’t have a deal of time for men who join the Navy and leave their families?’
‘If there’s no work sometimes it’s the only thing they can do.’
‘That’s true.’
‘What I don’t have time for are sailors who don’t write home, don’t ever send their children a message, let alone a letter. I’d have given anything to have got a letter from him.’
What could he say? He remembered odd, tawdry toys that Art had bought from some downtown market when he was maudlin drunk. A fan, a paper-knife, a kite; nothing that travelled well. He remembered a little silk baby’s bonnet embroidered lavishly. Art had held it up on his fist. ‘Look, it’s for my little Lu.’ ‘Art, your little Lu is going to school now.’ Sid Anderson could have told it amusingly if it hadn’t been such a tragic little story. He felt that he had to do something, say something to help her to have some kind of a father. Children needed that. He remembered years ago thinking, Most men make damned poor fathers, yet families needed them in the same way that a bit of canvas needs a pole if it’s ever going to be a tent.
‘It’s a shame you didn’t get a chance to know him.’
Lu noticed that he was leaning forward, his fingers laced, his knuckles white, as though he was straining to prompt her to remember something. I might have really hated him if I had had a chance to know him. Yet, instinctively she liked this man in much the same way as she had grown to know and like Mr Matthews. Mr Matthews, whose radical ideas were hidden behind old-fashioned glasses and a stammering way of speaking. Mr Anderson spoke quietly in his northern way, but he had what Pompey people would have called ‘sea-dog eyes’ that could see over the horizon. If her dad had been anything like this…
‘Tell me something about him.’
His blue gaze wandered to the steep banks as the train ran into a cutting. I must give her something. She’s so splendid herself that she needs to know that her father was not weak and neglectful. She must sometimes wonder about herself, how much of him she has inherited. There was no doubt that she would have quite as devastating an effect on the opposite sex as Art had always had. Would that be a plus for a young woman of this modern age? For sure he wasn’t going to test that. ‘I reckon my last memory of him was the best in a way. Aye. We’d been together since we were lads, and as far as I knew, Art never had a political bone in his body.’
He saw her eyes widen with interest. ‘That’s the last thing I’d expect anybody to say about him. I thought you’d say he was a bit of a lad, like his brothers and sisters do. I know he had that reputation.’
He smiled. ‘Ah well, all sailors have that hanging round their necks. Take it from me, lass, most of it’s talk. There’s good and bad in sailors, tall and short, hard-workers and loafers, same as men everywhere. Now there’s something Art Wilmott never was – a loafer. He was as good and reliable a sailor as you’ll find in the British Navy. People these days laugh, but a good job well done is still something to be admired, in my book.’ He expected that she would turn that back on him; instead she said, ‘Tell me about that last memory you had of him.’
‘Oh, I can tell you about that all right. Look, is it all right if I call you Lu? Good, thanks, I spent a good many years practically knowing you, as you might say. Look, Lu, there’s a refreshment carriage. Should you like to have a spot of tea?’
They made their way to the refreshment car. Sidney Anderson watched her as she delicately sipped her tea and used a cake fork. Funny how things can happen. If Art hadn’t died when he did, how would this girl have turned out? She caught him looking at her and smiled.
‘We’d stand there for hours keeping each other company for a spell, me and Art drinking Bovril, the old Augusta’s bow dipping and rising. When it was dark, you could imagine you were alone in the world.’
‘Did you do that on your last trip?’
‘We did. We’d both been a bit quiet like. I was trying to break it to him that I was thinking of packing it all in. You see, I wanted to get into this lark.’ He pointed to his briefcase.
‘It had been a long tour, that last one, we’d been too long away. We both knew we were running pretty close to t’finishing tape. I knew that if I didn’t get out, it would be too late.
‘We were sailing north, and with luck would be in Pompey before October. He was on watch, and as usual I fetched us both some Bovril.’ His gaze went inwards, and unconsciously he took a sip of tea. ‘You know about the Invergordon strike?’
‘Vaguely. It’s why the Augusta was late home that year.’
‘They were going to cut our pay, only three per cent for officers, but a twenty-five-per-cent cut for ratings.’
‘A quarter reduction, I didn’t realize.’
‘Well, it was obvious that the country was going down the pan fast. All those Navy ships whose home ports were in the south were diverted to tie up alongside in the Invergordon dock. I always reckoned we were as near to a revolution then as we’ve ever been since Cromwell. There were over two and a half million out of work, and the dole was being cut. The Stock Exchange was in one hell of a mess, and t’government about to chuck its hand in. Aye, there could a been revolution, it was touch and go.’
‘How did my father react to that?’
‘Well you know, it was strange. He’d never taken the slightest interest in politics or current affairs, but he seemed to change overnight. All the way until we reached Scotland, he was asking me a lot of stuff. It was as though he was trying to catch up on twenty years of ignoring what was going on. He seemed to soak it up like a sponge. I tell you one thing about Arthur Wilmott, he was nobody’s fool. His head was screwed on the right way.’ He knew that she was watching him like a hawk, ready to pounce if he said something trite. ‘The trouble with Art, as I always saw it, he was a bit of a sybarite.’
Lu seemed to relax, probably because she knew that at least was the truth.
‘Only a bit?’ she said.
He made a gesture, rocking his hands. ‘Well, by the time we reached Invergordon we were really steamed up. I mean how, on ships at sea, can you dissipate the resentment of thousands of sailors? We all streamed ashore. The commanders were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. You see, if we’d have been kept on board ship until new orders came to sail, they’d have been hard put to contain their crews, yet if they let us ashore, we would be bound to feed one another’s hostility to the admiralty. The worse evil of the two was to keep us aboard – like as not they’d have a mutiny on their hands. In the event, the officers didn’t have any choice; we simply walked off.
‘Arthur and I attended a meeting being held in a canteen. Men were standing shoulder to shoulder and overflowing through the doorway. The atmosphere was that explosive, a spark could have set it off.
‘Ah, there were some good speeches made there, bar none. We had a good leader: he went to Russia after he got out of the brig. There was a lot of wild talk too. Well, at this particular meeting we were all standing there listening, fired up to anything, then out of the blue your father jumped up on the rostrum. Now I have to admit this about him, there were times when he could go off like a penny fire-cracker, sometimes get himself into a scrap, but never over politics. But that day… I don’t know… it just seemed to come to him.’
Lu did know. ‘Looks like I got one thing from him then. I could go off like a penny fire-cracker too when I was at school. You needed to know how to use your fists.’ She smiled. ‘Not so much now, I’m trying to be lady-like.’
He smiled warmly. ‘I can believe that, seeing how you set about our reporter friend, but I’m glad you’ve given up fist-fights.’ He watched with pleasure as laughter bubbled up in her. My, she was a cracker and no mistake. If I had a daughter, that’s the one I’d choose.
‘What makes you think I’ve given up? It would have been difficult to have given her a right-hander to the shoulder. Best done standing up, it throws your opponent off balance.’ She held her hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter. ‘I’m sorry, please go on.’
‘Art was good, I have to give him that… I reckon you’d have been proud of him. I was.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I can remember it nearly word for word, because I was so amazed. It’s like the old story about a dog walking on its back legs: the surprise is not that it does it so well, but that it can do it at all. I’ve thought since that he must have caught politics in the same way as those Holy Joes who catch religion. You can hear them in Hyde Park, spontaneous and natural because they speak from their guts. Not like me, I speak from reason and my head.
‘Any road… He said, “I’m no speaker, I’m just an ordinary seaman, but I just feel I’ve got to say something. What’s happening at home isn’t of our making. How many of us got a vote in the last election? I didn’t, I was down in Hong Kong, obeying orders… some of you were somewhere off Sydney, or patrolling off the Med. None of us got a say in anything. Did you? Right! Yet we’re expected to suffer for the mess made by a bunch of nincompoops elected without our say-so.” (I’m just saying it as I remember.)
‘He said, “Maybe it wouldn’t be quite so bad if we were treated equal. Or if we worked under officers who had scrubbed a deck or slung their own hammock. Do the gold lace know what it means to live on a rating’s pay?” he said. “Is the wife of an officer expected to keep house on fourteen shillings a week?”’
Sid Anderson made a long pause. Lu watched him frowning as though searching for something. ‘I’m afraid there’s no climax to this story… well, it’s not a story, it’s the truth: I suppose that’s why it doesn’t round off as it would if it was a story. It’s a queer thing, many a time I’ve thought about it. There he was, in full flow as you might say. He had them in the palm of his hand; you could have heard a pin drop. Then, just as sudden as he jumped up and took over the meeting, so he jumped down and pushed his way out of the canteen. I never had a chance to ask him, because it was just after that he got the message about Vera.’
Bournemouth turned out to be as Sidney had promised, ‘a nice sort of place’. Lu need not have worried about not knowing how to behave at the hotel. The first meal, dinner, turned out to be easy to handle; even the soup, which at home they always drank from mugs, was served exactly as she had seen it scores of times in films. The hotel was full of delegates, so when they gathered in the bar, Lu slipped away, changed into a floral dress she had made from the cheap remnant of an expensive fabric (spoiled by an easily-dealt-with pulled thread), and went out to take a look at Bournemouth on a summer evening.
It was wonderful.
The beautiful public gardens, the ornate streetlights, people in holiday dress wandering on the promenade, some men wearing dinner-jackets with women in filmy dresses, the imposing sea-front hotels, and the Winter Gardens where the conference was to be held, a modern building glittering with lights. She was seventeen – the age she had always wanted to be – in the kind of glamorous setting she had always wanted to be in, and with some spending money in her purse. In the window of a tobacconist, some of it was wooed from her by a Ronson Ladies’ Special, a pretty, slim little cigarette lighter, and a little more when the shopkeeper offered to engrave her initials on it. She settled on a curly ‘L’.
It was just so wonderful!
The sound of dance music spilled out on to the promenade and she suddenly longed to be in there. She had been going to quite a few dances recently, and Sonia, Kenny’s hairdresser girlfriend, who after work was a professional partner at a ballroom dancing school, had taught her a lot of new steps which Lu had practised at every sixpenny hop in town. She was drawn to the brightly lit foyer of the dance hall. She would love to go inside. If only Kate had been there.
Suddenly, she was inside, had bought a ticket, and was seated at a table ordering ginger ale from a foreign waiter, her heart turning over with apprehension and her skin tingling with excitement. She would not stop long. Just long enough to use her new lighter. Just as long as it took to drink the ginger ale. Ginger ale in a very tall glass chinking with ice. She had no idea what the little bamboo stick with frayed ends was for, so she left it until she noticed a young man twirling one in his own fizzy drink. It was a sophisticated thing to do in such a gleaming, glittering place full of hot foot-tapping music from the sprung floor to the rotating mirror ball. This was such an experience.
There was no clock that she could see, and she didn’t own a watch but, judging from the ice in her drink, she guessed that she had been there for about half an hour, and ought to get back before Ray started worrying.
‘Excuse me, could I ask you for a dance?’ His accent was very top-drawer. His skin was tanned and his fair hair sun-streaked. His teeth were white and perfect. He was tall and long-legged. He was dressed in light fawn trousers, a cream-coloured casual shirt and a coffee-coloured linen jacket. All this Lu took in as his hazel eyes looked at her questioningly.
‘I was about to go.’
‘What a pity. I’m here on my own, and I thought you must be too.’ He smiled. ‘I noticed your feet were tapping. Mine too. Brilliant band.’
‘I love them.’ She desperately wanted to dance.
‘Well then, just one dance? Listen… a tango. Do you?’
Oh yes, Lu tangoed. She had learned from Sonia and later had a marvellous experience at a tango session of being twirled and caught by an olive-skinned naval officer who hadn’t known a word of English, but who danced like a dream.
‘I’ll have to go directly afterwards.’
‘Come on then.’ He held out a hand. ‘David.’
She shook his hand. ‘Louise.’
Although he was much taller than the Latin naval officer, he was just as good a dancer. Lu followed without even a minor fault. The music slid into a slower tempo, and hardly aware that the tango had finished, he drew her closer as he led them into the more leisurely dance. They didn’t speak, but the silence was not awkward. She was aware of her breasts against his thin, unlined jacket. One hand, warm and firm on her back, pressing her close, the other enclosed around hers. It was so romantic, dancing with a handsome stranger. The music stopped, there was a roll on the snare drum indicating an interval, and they stood pressed close for a moment. He looked down at her, pressed his lips to her fingers, and led her back to her table. ‘Thank you. You dance beautifully, put me to shame. Do you really have to go?’
‘Yes, I do. I really do.’ She picked up her purse. ‘Goodnight. It was lovely.’ She hurried out into the evening which had now grown dark, her heart thumping with excitement. Wow! She had never even dreamed of such a romantic adventure. They didn’t even know each other’s names properly, yet he had held her close on the dance floor and kissed her fingers like a lover. He was fast!
Kate loved fast workers; Lu was glad now that Kate was not with her. She would have gone on and on. What about his hair, Lu? Didn’t he have a tan; where do you think he’s been? What did he say… are you going to meet him again? Kate didn’t really know what romance was. She knew about dates and boys, and French kissing, and butterfly kissing, and love-bites and how far to go, but she’d never understand in a hundred years how romantic the quiet men like Duke and David were.
Back at the hotel, Ray was seated in a gathering of about twenty soberly dressed men who were loud with beer. Lu waved to him over their heads and slipped upstairs to her room, where she flung herself on top of the unblemished bed-cover and gave herself up to being totally happy and as much in love with David as she had been with Duke. The Malou French episode was entirely forgotten.
Next morning, although she breakfasted with Ray, he had to be off long before the conference started. ‘Just show your pass and you can come and go as you like. If you get bored, then you can get off down to the beach. I probably won’t get a chance to see you till after the last session, so it’ll be supper-time, I expect.’
‘Dinner.’
Ray smiled. ‘Right. We’ll meet for dinner, then.’
When she arrived at the Winter Gardens, there were a number of other people with visitors’ passes being directed to part of a balcony reserved for them. As part of her WEA courses, she had attended a full meeting of Portsmouth council, but this conference was different. Nobody here had any gold chains or fancy robes, nor was there any fancy language. The man who was speaking when she took her seat was talking about toll bridges; then a woman went to the platform and spoke for about five minutes about the need for a plan to give old people free tickets on public transport.
From where she was seated, the delegates looked tiny, so she had to count the rows and seats to distinguish which was Ray. He was there. He must have seen her before she saw him because he was looking up at her smiling. She waved two fingers at him.
A man on the platform pulled a microphone stand towards him. ‘Right then, comrades, shall we move on to Item Four?’ She at once recognized the voice that came through the loudspeaker system as Mr Anderson’s. She would have loved to tell somebody that she knew him, and that he had been at sea with her father since they were boys.
The balcony opposite was filled with people who kept coming and going, talking to one another, exchanging bits of paper, passing messages, and generally seeming to take very little notice of what was going on, except for certain short spells when they gave the speaker their full attention.
It was just dawning on her that they might be from the newspapers, when Malou French made her way down the steps to the front row. Lu slunk down until she was well hidden behind a broad man and a broad woman who kept their heads close as they commented on everybody and everything. She was quite shielded now, but as there wasn’t much going on that seemed of interest, she decided to slip out at the first opportunity.
When she looked up from checking the agenda, and peered between her shields to check on Malou French, her heart missed a beat; more than one, perhaps, for brushing the journalist’s cheek with his lips was the man the scent of whose spicy shaving soap had stayed on her cheek all night. Her tango man with the top-drawer accent and soft voice. A dreadful vision arose of the reporter looking across, recognizing Lu, pointing her out and telling him her version of the factory-girl-on-the-train story.
The best thing Lu could do was to get out of here, go back to her room, fetch her book and swimming costume and sit on the sands until supper-time. The next time Lu looked across, her dancing partner was loping up the steps two at a time towards the exit, making little signs of acknowledgement to several people as he went. She left the Winter Gardens cautiously, and was glad that she did so because from within the foyer she glimpsed him, David, the man she now wanted to avoid, tossing a canvas bag into the back of a small green open tourer and driving off.
As she lay on the pale sandy beach, which was much more seductive than the shingle shoreline at home, her mind constantly wandering from her reading, she came to the conclusion that the episode in the dance hall would have its place in a modern novel. Strangers meet by chance and part without either knowing the other’s full name… perhaps one day they would meet again, when they were married to other people. They would remember that brief romantic experience that only they shared… they might fall deeply, passionately in love, a mature true love that would destroy two families but was too strong to resist.
That evening, Lu and Ray were invited by Mr Anderson to have dinner with some of the official guests. Ray was buoyed up with his whole experience of this weekend, and kept apologizing as if she might think that he was neglecting her.
‘Ray, I should hate it if I had to drag around on your coat-tails.’
‘Fancy you meeting Sid like that. Of course I knew his name, but I never put two and two together, and there was never a hint in his letters about what he was doing. I mean, it wouldn’t occur to anybody that Sid, the sailor who was Dad’s pal, was one and the same as Sidney Anderson who was chairing a transport conference. He’s asked me if I’d like to serve on a couple of local committees, and to write a report. Have you got something to wear to dinner?’
‘I’ve got that dress I went out in last night.’
‘Good, that’s just right. Sir Walter Citrine, Lu. Did you ever imagine eating your dinner with a Sir?’ Or imagine entering a dance hall alone, or falling in love with a stranger in a single dance?
Sir Walter Citrine was a quiet, white-haired man. Lu wouldn’t have picked him out as a Sir, but then her mind was humming ‘Jealousy’, her legs still dancing the tango, her back held by a warm hand, her breasts conscious of being pressed in the slow waltz, smelling the shaving cream from her partner’s cheek pressed close, hearing his soft voice: ‘Thank you. Do you really have to go?’
A remark made during the evening, ‘We’ll be all right tomorrow, the harpies and vultures are away back to Fleet Street’, told Lu that she could go to the final session and hear Mr Anderson’s speech without fear of meeting Malou French. In a jovial goodnight to brother and sister, of whom he felt proud without any good reason for doing so, Sid said, ‘I’ll not keep you long about with my speechifying, and I’ll not have a deal to say about high-speed roads and public ownership, but I’d be honoured if you’d be there.’
It was true, he was not long about.
‘If a thing is wrong, then it is wrong. No good saying otherwise. Wringing our hands is no good. Bitterness is no good. Cynicism is worst of all. It’s up to people to stand up and say, No! And if nobody listens we have to get out in t’streets and shout, No, this is wrong! If a thing is wrong, it is wrong!
‘Not one of us is let off the responsibility for what goes on in the world.’
His words, when Lu came to record them in her journal, seemed uninspiring, until she recollected his voice and accent. His manner of delivery had been so impressive, and his idea of the future so visionary, that Lu, at the impressionable age of seventeen, was not likely to forget easily. What it all had to do with the future of public transport, she had no idea.
With three single people bringing home wage-packets, 110 Lampeter Street began to look up. Since Lu started earning they had bought a settee, and four kitchen chairs, front curtains, and a mirror over the mantelpiece. Not all at once: they paid weekly into a club; then there was the Co-op dividend which came in useful for new linoleum and a few frivolous items – a clock for the mantelpiece, a picture in a gilt frame and a silk bedspread for Lu’s bed. They got on pretty well together, except when they got on to politics, in which they differed in means to ends, but not the end. Since the Bournemouth conference, Ray had been wrapped up in committees and sub-committees. Kenny had emerged from the Labour League of Youth – which he had joined for its football team – and become a full member of the Labour Party. What with Ray and his union and Ken with his politics, there was sometimes a bit of table-thumping.
Lu had been in the Labour Club and the NUR meeting hall. What sort of people were they who enjoyed such places? Deadly dull places that she would never have entered but for those occasions when a visit formed part of Mr Matthews’ course. Even their social evenings seemed to Lu as tedious as a Good Friday church service compared to the glamour of the dance halls or the modern cinemas with beautiful soft pink lights and gold-sprayed walls. Lu closed her ears and looked at Picturegoer or the instructions on a dressmaking pattern.
By the time he reached his early twenties, Kenny’s life outside Lampeter Street seemed never to leave him enough time to throw out his shaving water, or help with clearing out the fireplace or riding his bike to take the washing to the bag-wash. Lu did the ironing when it came back from the bag-wash, but she hated it. As she hated all housework. But then, she had been brought up to do it, and who else was there, now that her mother was gone? Ray and Ken might think that stripping beds and scrubbing out the lavatory wasn’t man’s work, but they slept, didn’t they? And they peed, didn’t they?
Lu did a lot of angry crashing and banging about on Sunday mornings when most of the cleaning was done. It was true Ken always brought in something hot at Sunday lunch, but Lu suspected that was only because he didn’t like bread and cheese. She absolutely refused to cook a meal, though, when she had just put the gas stove back together after soaking off the grease in hot soda-water.
Ken had finished his years as a junior, and now wore a black coat and acted as one of the pall-bearers at funerals. Lu thought he looked good in his pall-bearer’s clothes. He had grown tall, lean, like Duke, and handsome. Large brown eyes fringed with long lashes; a mild expression that, when not set in his professional mould, smiled readily.
Girls liked him. The general opinion of the Wilmotts was, like father like son. Not that he had much chance of a fling on his home ground, because for one thing he didn’t like girls to know what he did for a living, and for another the sight of a pall-bearer flinging himself around a dance floor wouldn’t be good for trade. So he went to Southampton for the gay life. If they wanted to know, he told the girls there that he worked at the Co-op. Where at one time he had spent his weekends on earnest rambles with the League of Youth, he now found the big Saturday dances and modem bars of Southampton more his style.
From time to time he would meet a girl off the train at Portsmouth station and bring her home for tea, take her to the pictures and see her off again on the last train. There was a whole series of different girls. Usually they were about twenty and, although older than Lu, it was from these modern young women, who all seemed to work in hairdresser’s or fashion departments (Southampton being a greatly sophisticated city compared to Portsmouth), that Lu began to be interested in the very latest fashions and beauty styles.
Sonia – the girl who had taught Lu to tango and had cut her lively locks so that the line of her hair swirled from ear to ear, curling under and dipping to the top of her spine, bouncing as she moved – lasted longer than most. Ken was quite proud of Sonia and her glamorous work, but when she and Lu became absorbed in hair and clothes he got ratty that he was not the focus of her attention. ‘Come on, Sonia, or we won’t make first house.’ Sonia took no notice, but continued to comb and snip Lu’s hair until she was satisfied. ‘You need some earrings. Here, try these.’ She gave Lu her own large, imitation pearl blobs. Lu felt transformed. ‘Keep them as a present for the nice tea you made. Any time you want to come shopping in town, let me know. You can ring me at the shop. I love buying clothes and things.’ This infiltration into the family was not what Kenny had intended; next time he would not be so hasty to bring a girl home.
But it was Sonia who had catapulted an eager seventeen-year-old Lu into a more glamorous world than she had hitherto inhabited. Lu and Sonia were shopping and dancing companions long after she and Ken had broken up. Lu developed a passion for fashionable clothes and, whilst she was good at turning out good copies on her mother’s old treadle sewing machine, she loved the whole mystique of buying from a proper gown shop: the groomed and snobbish saleswomen, the curtain changing rooms, the flattering approval of the manageress, the tissue paper and the exit with the smart box which discreetly indicated that it held something from a very posh shop. This desire to go out with Sonia, both dressed to the nines, drove her on at work to keep topping her own piecework figures.
At times when she was working, day in day out at the same task, doing dozen after dozen, she could work up a speed. It was very hard work, with no time even to look up; she kept her head down and her rhythm going hour after hour. The same thing again and again until she felt herself to be an extension of the machine, of the fan-belt, of the driving wheel, of the boiler turning the wheel, and the wheel running the band, and the band powering the machine and so on, round and round with Lu’s skilled hands pushing hundreds and hundreds of seams under the needle-foot. The only part of the entire operation that could not be done by a machine. Ezzard’s needed her. Her runner and button girl were kept going. Every so often, a pile of her work went to Nellie for checking for flaws which she never found. Lu’s estimate of herself was right: she was a good, skilled machine operator.
In all her years, Nellie could remember no one able to keep up the speed at which Lu Wilmott worked. Girls would sometimes go flat for a week if they were going to buy their wedding dress, or if the ‘bums’ were coming round to settle a debt, but not just to keep pushing up weekly wages. On one occasion, memorable to every woman working in the same machine room as Lu, the girls had a lottery on her tally for one day, with Lu trying to beat her own record.
A Tuesday was chosen because her machine would still be clean after the Saturday dismantling, and nicely run in from the Monday. It was several weeks since the burn to her arm, so that had healed and was no longer a handicap. The lottery was to guess how many pieces Lu would produce on this Tuesday. They paid a few pence for each guess, which was written on a sheet divided into numbered squares. The winner would be the one whose guess was nearest to Lu’s tally for the day. Sixpence was usually more than anyone could afford to lay out on a bit of fun, but a kind of fever seemed to build around the idea, particularly as it would have to be done under the eye of George Ezzard. By the time it was all set up, there was over seven pounds in the kitty: half would go to Lu and half to the winner. A lot of money, more than a second week’s wages for an average pieceworker.
Although the place seemed to crackle with excitement when they clocked on, once the treadles and fly-wheels started moving, the machine shops settled down to their usual noise. The idea of fast machining was catching, so that in the entire room there was little movement except to grab scissors and start off on another pile of seaming pieces and tapes. When Mr George walked through the shops, he felt uneasy. Something was up. He tried to pump the security man, but he shook his head and said he couldn’t see what Mr George meant: things looked all right to him. The security man had had two goes on the lottery.
When the dinner-time hooter sounded it was as though the girls themselves were letting off steam with their sudden burst of loud chattering and rolling of stiff necks and shoulders. No one was even a minute late back, certainly no one risked being five minutes late and being shut out for the afternoon.
At three o’clock when there was usually a bit of coming and going for a pee and a puff in the toilets, there was very little disturbance. George kept looking up from his tally-sheets. There was something up. He’d been here a sight too long not to sense when something was up. He loosened Nig’s rope, which usually meant that, as soon as the dog saw the door open, he would scoot off out of the office and down the length of the factory like the whippet he was, causing the girls to look up and laugh. Nig went off as though coursing a hare, but nothing happened in the machine room. At four o’clock he went over to the main office and said, ‘Something’s up on the bottom floor today.’
‘What are you telling me for, George? Sort it out.’
‘I can’t put my finger on it. But they’re up to something.’
‘Somebody getting married?’
‘No, no. It’s nothing like that. When that’s happening, they get giggly and fidgety, and they come with their hair in curlers, same as when they’re going out randying. No, it’s just all quiet and the machines are going like merry hell.’
‘What do you want me to do then, go over and stop them working?’
‘All right, have it your way, but I tell you, there’s something going on.’
When his brother was gone, Mr Ezzard pushed his glasses up on to his forehead and tried to think, but couldn’t imagine what might be going on. The thing was, George knew the factory, and he knew female labour. God knows he should, he’d been in trouble with them often enough.
About fifteen minutes before the five-thirty hooter, Mr Ezzard tidied his desk, put on his Melton cloth coat, picked up his briefcase and said to his secretary that he was just going to have a walk over to the work shops before he went home.
At five-twenty the security man opened the factory door and ushered his boss in. Mr Ezzard stood for a moment. Nothing amiss, an industrious workforce doing what it was paid to do, keeping its head down, and earning its keep. He started, as he usually did when visiting the work shops, at a slow, determined pace, his tipped heels ringing on the concrete floor. As he progressed he sensed rather than heard that he was observed. George was right, there was something going on. The sound that went ahead of his progress was the whispered sibilants of ‘Watch out… Missster Esssard… Missster Esssard.’
It was only when he reached the row of machines that the fastest seamers always claimed as their own, that he realized that whatever was going on, was going on here. The girl was oblivious, and there was no doubt that she was the disturbing focus of attention of all the other workers. Even in her white head-cloth and with her head bent low, he knew who she was. He remembered her at first because Alma would ask him how Miss Lake’s clever little girl was progressing, then he had begun to notice her sometimes as she went out through the gates talking nineteen to the dozen, laughing, gesticulating. Several times recently, he had found himself standing at the window actually trying to pick her out. It was not difficult; she had a habit at the end of the afternoon shift of, as soon as she reached the gate, ripping off her head-cloth and shaking her bright chestnut hair free and running her fingers through it. Even in the rain. Against his will, he found her attractive – he would not let his mind admit to finding her desirable – but undoubtedly she had developed into a striking young woman.
‘Wilmott! What’s going on?’
Lu jumped out of her skin and her thumb went under the needle-foot. So fast was her machine working that it had made two stitches before it jolted to a stop. She sat there, pain streaming down her face in tears.
‘Don’t stand there, George! Fetch the mechanic.’
The mechanic was not always as swift in answering a call to free a machinist who had run over her fingers, but the news that Mr Ezzard was on the shop floor reached the whole factory almost before Mr Ezzard himself. Although the mechanic dismantled the machine-head quickly, Lu was pale and fainting by the time she could free her hand with the needle still embedded.
There were four outlets for her blood to flow: it dripped over her worktable, over the unstitched pieces, down her skirt and across the floor as she dripped her way to George’s office.
‘Get out your brandy, George.’
Lu was dazed, and allowed the spirit to be tipped into her mouth.
‘Fetch Nellie.’
‘I think she should go to the emergency at the hospital.’
Lu sat looking weak and pale; not so much from the injury to her thumb – although that wasn’t pleasant – but from eight hours of working flat-out at top speed, but Mr Ezzard wasn’t to know that. Through the glass partition she saw Kate, her machine still running, trying to see what was going on in the office. The hooter sounded, but tonight there was no rush to cover the machines and run for the door; instead they diligently tidied away every thread and brushed off every bit of lint. Nobody would know who had won until Nellie had counted the pieces Lu had been working on, and added them to her running total.
Nellie said, ‘It looks nasty, Mr Ezzard. I’ll send out to the chemist’s and get some sal volatile and something to put round her finger, and then I think somebody ought to see she gets to the doctor.’
Lu said, ‘Kate will. Ask her Nellie, please.’
The whole episode discomfited Mr Ezzard, and he wished to be away from George’s stuffy little office, away from George, away from the factory women with their secrets and that kind of silent, sullen exchange that they went in for. And he wanted to be away from the Wilmott girl, who had sat in George’s chair, straight-backed and looking as arrogant as any of the spoilt daughters of county mothers he had had the misfortune to meet – and infinitely more interesting. During the entire dismantling of the machine, she had hardly said a word. She had not even cried out or sworn at the mechanic like any normal factory girl. He had no wish to walk back through ‘the factory of a thousand eyes’ as he had once described it to Alma, but dignity, and not making mountains out of molehills, ensured that he must do so.
‘What happened, Wilmott?’ George said. ‘Did you nod off at your machine? Do you pay into a hospital scheme? You should. Always be insured for doctors and hospital treatment.’
Kate, indignant and blaming Mr Ezzard all the way, and Lu, her hand still with its needle covered with a piece of reject cloth provided by Nellie, walked through the streets to the hospital where the needle was removed.
As he drove out through the factory gate, Mr Ezzard was still puzzling about what had been going on. George was welcome to spend his time down there with hundreds of females. Always trouble, always mischief going on; women were so secretive. He never knew what was going on in Alma’s mind, even when she pulled up her nightdress and put her arms around him, he was never certain what she thought about it. A man had physical evidence that he had had pleasure, but neither of his wives had shown much response, even after five or ten minutes of his attentions.
‘TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE WINS’ chalked on the factory wall meant nothing to Mr Ezzard. But, the following week, when George saw the tally Wilmott had totted up last Friday, he guessed what had been going on. Wilmott was one of the fastest seamers he could remember, he guessed that she had been trying to break some sort of record.
When Lu came in with her thumb bandaged, she was greeted by a cheer, which brought George to the window and started Nig barking. Pam, who had kept the board and money, handed Lu three pounds and eighteen shillings.
On the weekend when she got her big pay-packet, she took what was left after her contributions to Ray’s box, plus her winnings, and caught the train to Southampton to meet Sonia; they went round the shops. Lu bought cosmetics, had a bright chestnut colour put on her hair, and bought a beautiful swing-back coat. They had tea in the art-deco surroundings of the Odeon cafe, and then went into the cinema. Afterwards Sonia signalled a taxi as though they did it every day and, as they parted, Sonia said, ‘I say, Lu, you’re more fun than your Ken.’
Lu’s life was becoming more interesting and complex, but she kept each component separate from the others. Glamorous interludes in Southampton – window-shopping and dancing – contrasted with and – because there could be Louise as well as Lu – added spice to the other lives at Ezzard’s, at Roman’s Fields and at the WEA classes. Mr Matthews was now running a course on International Affairs, so she began to gain insight into people of different origins and different classes from her own, if not Miss Lake, then Jews generally and the Steiners in particular, and to learn that there were worse origins than those of an illegitimate child of a sailor born in the Pompey slums.
Eileen Grigg came into the factory day after day, plodding and unobtrusive, then sat industriously working until the hooter sounded. Lu, against her will, often found herself drawn to looking at her, always trying to catch a glimpse of the old Lena behind the expressionless face. It was the very placidity of her old antagonist that poked and prodded at Lu. On rare occasions Eileen would look up and catch Lu’s eye and at once jerk her attention back to her work. It bothered Lu that she could not see beneath the layer of fat that now overlaid the once jagged little skull that the fighting Lena used to thrust into Lu’s face.
Sometimes Lu hung about waiting whilst Eileen methodically tidied her table and cleaned lint from her machine. She would then fall in beside her to walk out of the factory and along the road to the corner. Kate Roles, irritated with Lu, said, ‘What you starting palling up with Lena Grigg for? She’s just a fat, boring old daftie.’
‘She’s not daft.’
‘Well, you can’t say she’s not boring.’
‘We–ell, I know, it’s a lot more fun with you, but don’t you feel sorry for her? I do.’
‘There’s a lot of people I feel sorry for, but that don’t mean I have to start palling up with them.’
‘You can’t just chuck people to one side.’
‘Oh, Lu! Sometimes you’re such a goody-goody.’
Lu flushed with resentful crossness and embarrassment. ‘That’s just stupid. How would you feel if people said I only went to the pictures with you because I’m sorry for you?’
‘It wouldn’t be true.’
‘Well, somebody’s got to mind about her. She used to be one of us.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘You know what I mean, you can’t get away from all those years we sat in the same classroom, can you?’
Kate wouldn’t see Lu’s point of view; perhaps didn’t suffer the same kind of guilt at how things had turned out with Lu and Kate having everything and poor old Lena nothing. ‘It’s not asking much just to be a bit friendly.’
‘I wasn’t never unfriendly… you were the one always falling out and fighting with her.’
‘We were just kids then.’
Kate went sulky: she resented her friends having other friends. ‘She probably likes her own company anyway; she don’t make much effort to talk.’
‘And it don’t take much for us, either.’
Kate flounced. ‘Do as you like, Lu, if it makes you feel any better.’
Even if trying to get some response from Lena wasn’t going to make Lu feel better, she felt compelled to try. Lampeter girls might be hard, touchy and belligerent, and develop into sullen, obedient workers, quarrelsome wives and harsh mothers, but they never withdrew into blank acceptance, nor removed themselves from their workmates as Lena appeared to have done. Two things especially troubled Lu: one, it scared her that such a young person could have had the stuffing knocked out of her; the other, nobody seemed very bothered that she had. Her old belligerent self was at least a girl you took notice of. Lu smiled to herself. If you didn’t, she’d smash you in the teeth.
Embedded somewhere within Lu’s mixed bundle of thoughts was that an injustice had been done. The Grigg family were certainly a nuisance: they didn’t fit in, they didn’t even seem to care. Nobody had ever had a good word for them and it seemed as though somebody had to be punished for being a Grigg. It had been easy to pick on Eileen.
‘Kate? Do you think it’s OK what’s happened to Lena?’
‘You don’t ever give up, do you, Lu? Look. Eileen’s quietened down and the Grigg family have been cleared out of our area into a council house. I can’t see what there is to keep on about.’
‘What’s to keep on about is that Lena’s a scapegoat.’
‘I tell you this, Lu Wilmott, if anybody’s changing out of all recognition, it isn’t only Lena Grigg.’
Kate was right; there were times when Lu couldn’t leave things alone. She waited for Lena one evening and asked her what she did after work.
‘Nothing really.’
‘Don’t you go out?’
‘Sometimes on the beach.’
‘Don’t you go to the pictures?’
Lena shook her head and turned off to where she lived without another word or look in Lu’s direction.
Lu ran after her. ‘Do you want to come to the pictures?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘You could come with me.’
‘If you like.’
‘We’ll go in the cheap seats.’
‘If you like.’
‘Shall I call for you?’
‘All right, then.’
‘First house or second?’
‘I don’t mind.’
It was like stirring custard powder with insufficient milk. ‘First house then, straight after work tomorrow.’
‘All right. Which one?’
The first spark of interest. ‘There’s one with Frederic March, do you like him?’
‘I don’t mind. I like musicals.’
‘All right then, shaU we go and see the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire?’
‘Yeah, all right.’
They sat side by side in the cheap seats, viewing the screen at a neck-aching angle, Eileen solidly in her seat eating her way through a bag of broken biscuits which she offered to Lu from time to time. When the lights went up at the interval, Eileen watched the progress of the approaching girl selling ice-cream. ‘Are you going to have one, Lu? They sell Eldorados here… better than Walls’s.’ Lena rummaged in her pocket.
Lu said, ‘I’ll treat you if you like.’
‘All right… can I have a tub?’
At twopence, a tub was an expensive treat, but Lu felt quite pleased that Lena was at least acknowledging her presence. Lu devoured a water-ice whilst it was still frozen and hard, but Eileen was still methodically dipping her wooden spoon into the tub well into the start of the big film. When the lights came up and the organist playing a Wurlitzer rose from the depths, Eileen sat on. ‘Are you going to see it round again?’
Lu felt that to say no would be like taking a treat away from a child; even so she said, ‘I ought to get home really. Anyway, I’m quite hungry.’
‘All right, then.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘I like a musical.’
‘Are you going straight home?’
‘I’m going to get my chips.’
‘So will I, save me doing anything. Ray’s out tonight.’
Eileen was obviously well known in the chip shop. ‘Two penn’orth with scraps, open, same as usual, Eileen?’
‘Closed, I want them closed.’ Eileen’s eyes followed every movement of the shopkeeper as he scooped up two large portions of chips and three scoops of batter scraps in a separate bag wrapped in newspaper. Lu had a threepenny fish and a pennyworth of chips. At twice the price, Lu’s supper was a quarter the bulk when wrapped.
In that part of town where Lu and Eileen Grigg had grown up, scrap pudding, scraps with bread and vinegar, chips and scraps or simple scraps in a bag had in some families been part of the daily diet from the time when there were chip shops to provide it. Towards the end of the week, when the money had run out, scraps were in demand. Children would hang around chip-shop windows and watch for the fryer to sieve out the bits of fried batter from the hot oil and then build them into small mounds on either side of the stove. Fried flour, salt and water, still not drained of delirious hot lard and oil, called to hungry children. Some fryers would not give scraps unless chips were bought too, so sometimes a penny needed to be scrounged or lifted, or winkled from a chocolate vending machine.
‘Don’t you like fish, Lena?’
Eileen shrugged. ‘It’s all right, but it’s threepence.’
On the following Thursday morning, Eileen waited for Lu at the factory gate. ‘There’s Shirley Temple on tonight, first house starts at quarter to six. I don’t want to see King Kong.’ Lu had some reading to do for Mr Matthews’ class, but because Lena had strung two sentences together and spoken before being spoken to, Lu derided to postpone her first plan.
‘All right then, Lena, but I shan’t stay on to see it round.’
‘That’s all right, I don’t mind.’
And so Lena and Lu, still in their working clothes, started to go together to first-house pictures on Thursday evenings, the pattern following the first outing. Lu didn’t tell Kate, but as Kate was going out with another new boyfriend, they were going through one of the periods when they saw very little of one another outside of work.
Ray said, ‘You lead a funny old life, Lu. The pictures and chips with Lena Grigg in your work clothes, and then posh shops and shows with Ken’s girl all dolled up to the nines.’
‘I know, I was just thinking the other day, it’s like having a row of little boxes and each one’s got a different Lu inside. When I get up I have to think which one has to come out today.’
It was only at Roman’s Fields that she felt completely herself; nobody expected anything of her.
But who was this person Herself?
On the return journey from the comforting and undemanding atmosphere of Roman’s Fields, and the often silent affectionate hours with Bar, she could see clearly the changes in herself and in Bar; yet there was no question that they were still basically the same people of six years ago.
But Bar’s family were not the same deviating family they had been then. Eli now owned Gabriel Strawbridge’s field and stable, and had converted the buildings into a more permanent home; as a consequence, they had become slightly more acceptable in the village.
Duke had never come to see her, and had now gone off to make his fortune at Newmarket.
His mother said, ‘He says he’s going in for breeding and training, but I don’t know, I reckon that’d cost a deal of money. There, you can’t never tell with our Duke. He’s always been a law to himself.’
Now that the stables were partitioned inside, windows put in and a wood-burning stove installed, Lu felt a loss of some of the magic a visit to Ann Carter’s had been. They were still not ‘respectable’ people. Eli made his money in ways that were too mysterious and nonconformist for that – knackering, breeding and dealing generally in horses, on the hoof or as flesh. The villagers proper still believed that what Ann Carter had done was scandalous – to ‘go’ with a gyppo who wore a gold earring – but the two youngest of the family, Ephraim and Mary, attended the village school with much less aggravation than Bar had experienced.
The more her family became part of the village, the less Bar seemed able to adjust to it. She could not accept the greetings of such as Mrs Catermole: ‘Well, if it isn’t Barbara. I hear from Mrs Stickland that you are proving a star with the horses.’ Mrs Stickland was an Honourable, so Mrs Catermole was bound to concern herself with any comments made by such a personage. Nor did Bar find herself able to reciprocate the smiles of some of her erstwhile playground bullies when they were forced to serve her in the village shops.
As her skill with horses developed, she withdrew into her life at the stables, relieved only when she could visit Roman’s Fields where, as May Wilmott expressed it, she was as welcome as the flowers in spring. When Lu paid her visits there, May would sometimes tell Ted, ‘Did you see our two girls go off together? I never knew two girls take to each other like they did.’
Through the strawberry fields towards the woods or The Swallitt Hole, or any one of the secret places of that first summer they had spent together. When Ralph visited, May would say, ‘Do you think there’s going to be a romance there?’ Ted would cast his eyes upwards and say, ‘Why do you women always want to marry everyone off?’
It wasn’t that May particularly wanted that, it was more that she wanted the people she loved not to have problems, and she supposed that if Ray and Bar were to fall in love then she could feel sure that they had each found a good partner.
When Christmas came round again, May invited the three of them for their two days’ holiday at Roman’s Fields. Early on Christmas morning, Bar, eighteen years old now that the winter solstice had passed, came to tell Lu that she was allowed to borrow two of the Barneys’ horses to take Lu riding; but Lu was full of a head cold and decided to stay by the fire with Mr Strawbridge. Ken was off out with Ted to take a look at the pack at the estate kennels before the great Boxing Day hunt.
‘What about taking me on, then?’ Ralph said.
Bar’s eyes brightened. ‘Riding, d’you mean?’
‘Why not? I’d do my best not to fall off.’
‘Then I’d best get a saddle for you.’ And within fifteen minutes she was back with just one horse, saddled ready for Ralph.
May and Lu watched from the window whilst Ray, refusing to try to mount with them watching, waited for the privacy of the yard before subjecting himself to any indignity. ‘I think we’ll go round my pa’s field a bit first. I’ll have to lead you.’
Ralph, who had never had so much as a kitten for a pet, was, even though Bar had insisted that it was only a docile little animal, suspicious of a creature of this size and, looking down from the saddle once she had helped him to mount, it seemed to him that he was much further off the ground than he knew to be the fact. Looking down too, he caught glimpses, between watching his own hands on the reins, and watching where his horse was being led, of Bar’s head, which had more than once entered his thoughts since that occasion when he had realized that she was no longer a girl. At the moment her long, black hair, which had seemed to him so much at odds with her short, slight figure, was bundled in a coarse net, and he wished that she would set it free.
‘Go as limp as you can… not floppy, keep your knees in. Get your head up, look ahead. Keep your back straight, loose off the rein. That’s it, good… that’s it.’ She began to quicken her pace, urging the horse to a gentle trot. ‘Don’t grip the reins so hard.’ Round and round and back and forth over the frost-hardened grass where there was a pig-sty and where goats were tethered. Ralph, out with Bar and no Lu, became aware of the intimacy of this fortuitous circumstance. Thought of it, led to arousal by it.
She had led the horse out of the field where her father kept his own few animals, and into a small meadow which was lying fallow, the seed-head ghosts of last summer’s poppies, winged pepperwort and cornflowers protected from the crisp wind by an ancient, high hedge. The hedge, providing its own protection, still held here and there flames of dog-rose hips, dark crimson haws of the thorn bushes, mummified crab-apples, and a few sagging strings of shiny black beads of the nightshade. Having shut the gate, she said, ‘Now, slowly forward on your own. Knees together, straight back, forget your ass, it knows what to do if you let it.’
Twice, three times he went slowly round the field, with Bar sitting astride the gate calling encouragement to both horse and rider. When she was on the back of a horse, she was totally at ease, in command, an extension almost of the animal. She made it look easy, and although he felt that he was slowly getting the hang of it, he felt rigid and awkward. Sixth time round the field, he called for the instruction about ‘pulling up’. Bar laughed, ‘Try the handbrake, or just shout “woah”.’ The horse stopped close by where she sat straddling the gate.
‘Now I’m stranded, how do I get down?’
She smiled at the silliness of his situation, and he smiled back. Ralph knew that she idealized Lu, almost hung on her every word; more so now that Lu was becoming quite the fashion model. Bar wore no cosmetics, but her skin, having known only rainwater upon it, was clearer and finer than any that had been daily laved with cream and lotion. Her cheeks were reddened by gentle exertion and the winter chill. He would have liked to see her hair unloosed, ‘gypsy hair like my Dad’s’ she had once said it was, and later he had realized that she often referred to that side of her ancestry. Which was surprising, remembering all that Lu had told him about the villagers’ prejudice against the Barney family.
Ralph thought, ‘Whoever would have thought I’d fall for a gypsy girl?’ He knew, of course, that this was not altogether correct, but he liked it, the colour and romance of a railway clerk and a girl who had been brought up as hardy as a red Indian, and had seldom been out of her home village. Yet, as he suddenly became aware, it didn’t matter who or what he had been, who or what she was: he was in love with her.
In love with a girl only Lu’s age and himself ten years older.
In love with a girl who had been a barefoot urchin when he was already a man. He had first seen her, standing in May’s kitchen, one leg tucked into her thigh. At that time the difference in their ages seemed great. When she was twenty-five, he would be thirty-five. When she was sixty he would be seventy. Not until then would the age-gap appear reasonable.
‘You froze up there, or do you want me to lift you down?’
He returned her challenging smile. ‘If I thought you could, I’d let you.’
‘Don’t you worry, I could. Swing your right leg up and over. I’ll see you don’t fall.’
He looked down at the diminutive figure, boyish in her breeches and pullover except where her swelling breasts and hips showed her femininity. As he swung down, he twisted too much; his left foot did not leave its stirrup so that he hung there helplessly.
And it was in that situation that he received a long and ardent kiss upon his mouth.
A kiss he quickly returned. Then exchanged again when he took off the riding net that offended him and laced his fingers into her long, black locks.
Lu and May were about to chaff him for his dalliance in frosty meadows, when they exchanged glances at what they thought they perceived in Ray’s frivolous and boyish manner.
A working-class Christmas was short but was packed with as much pleasure as could be had in two days. Except that this year Duke was not there to make an enigmatic visit, which was disappointing in view of the impression he had made upon Lu last year. But Duke had gone off, Mr Strawbridge said, ‘to seek his fortune in the manner of all young men with romantic notions’.
Until then Lu would have scarcely associated Duke with romantic notions, but as she had discovered over the years, Mr Strawbridge had the ability to see into people. It was he who had said that the two eldest Barneys hankered after things they wouldn’t find round here. ‘You’ve only got to see young Bar on fair day, she becomes her true self in the crowds and bright lights.’ Until then, in Lu’s imagination, Bar was forever a fey, mystical girl who belonged in the woods, or riding hard on big hunters. But Mr Strawbridge was possibly right. Lu remembered from that very first visit that Bar’s dream had been for a proper house with a cooker indoors, and the way she had dressed up for the fair. And remembering Duke’s noble pose with Pixie’s reins running through his fingers, it became clear that he had no future in the self-contained little village.
Early in 1935, and quite out of the blue as far as Ray and Lu were concerned, Kenny suddenly announced that he and two of his oppos were going to pack up their jobs and go on a hike through France and then into Spain. ‘We’ve all got a few quid; we shall sleep rough and get what work we can.’
‘What brought this on so sudden, Ken?’
‘Not sudden, but we decided to do it instead of keep talking about it. Three of us from the old Labour League football team. I was going to say about it when we were at Aunty May’s, but I still wasn’t sure then whether I was being a fool giving up a safe job. I told Ted I was thinking about it. He said, “Young men out of universities do it, so why not?” It was Georgie Hoffard that started it.’
‘Georgie’s dead,’ Lu said. ‘He jumped off the tram right into a lorry.’
‘Don’t tell me something I know, Lu. Wasn’t it me laid him out? And that’s it really. Georgie started school the same day as me, and there he was gone. So I thought to myself, you’d be better seeing a bit of the world and end up falling off a mountain or going under the wheels of some lorry in China or India as never do anything.’
Ray said, ‘There’s trouble brewing in Spain.’
‘I know, Ray.’
Ralph said, ‘So it’s Spain you’re really aiming for then? It’s not just a hike through France. I never thought you were that serious about hiking off abroad.’
But he had been. ‘Why not? What is there here for us? There’s no chance of us getting another Labour government in for a hundred years. Yes, I do want to see Spain, I want to know what it’s like living in a republic.’
To see Spain. From half-remembered geography lessons, she created a place of sun and blue skies and the warm Mediterranean sea. Castles… olives and oranges… or was that Italy? To go there, to be there. To walk out of the house as Kenny was going to, with a bit of money, some friends. The idea exhilarated and excited her. She was envious. She wanted to be Kenny. ‘You don’t know how to speak Spanish.’
‘No entiendo… ah lo que quieres… decir,’ he stammered. ‘How will I get on? With a dictionary to start off. Terry Black’s one of the others going. He’s a teacher, speaks good French. And I’m the Spanish expert.’ He grinned, ‘El pan – bread, el te – tea, por favor – please. Gracias – thank you. Nobody thinks twice about all those French onion-sellers who come over here and can’t speak English. It can’t be that hard getting around in a foreign country.’
He left in early spring. The letter he wrote home was composed in fits and starts over the days that followed. Lu devoured every word.
Dear Ray and Lu,
The night crossing was so cold that I wondered if the climate on the continent really was going to be warmer than home. Then we arrived in Paris. It was early morning, the sun shining warm and bright and sparkling, steaming the wet pavements.
At first it was disappointing to find that the trees and winter flowers were no more exotic than those in Portsmouth parks, but the buildings were very different. So was the way in which groups of small tables were put out very early. The four of us who started out from England together are forced to be mean with our money, but the pastry rolls and plentiful coffee are nicely filling and stimulating. Over breakfast I watched Terry Black reading a French newspaper, can you imagine being able to do that? But I will learn. How would we manage without Terry? He even took us on the Paris Metro. You should see it, the ticket cost twopence and we could go anywhere the trains went.
‘The night crossing.’ The words leapt from the page and into her daydreams, embedding themselves in the great pool of fertile imaginings that sustained her during her long hours of repetitious machining. She saw the decks lit up, light streaming from portholes and smoke streaming from the funnel as the steamer’s prow cut into the dark waters of the English Channel. Lu had suggested to Ray that they should buy an atlas and mark up where Ken went. She didn’t know what to make of Ray since Ken left. Certainly the house seemed a lot emptier than she had anticipated, but Ray and Ken had never been in one another’s pockets, except when they went together to watch the Pompey team play. Ray thought Ken, when he was away from his sober work, to be too rackety, and Ken thought Ray too much of a sobersides.
For the first time in their lives, Lu and Ralph began to fall out over trivial matters. They were irritable with one another. Once, Lu bolted the outside doors and went to bed, forgetting that Ray was going to be late, leading to a wrangle that lasted days; another time they each said that the other had promised to bring home something for supper. Nit-picking arguments, until on one occasion Ralph actually raised his voice to Lu when she launched into an angry tirade against the Ezzards. ‘Give over, Lu, you’ve only got yourselves to blame.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous!’
‘You’d soon sort him out if you formed yourselves into a damned union!’
‘It’s all right for you in your safe railway job. If anybody at Ezzard’s joined a union, they’d just sack them and take on some more hands. I can’t do without my wages, can I?’
‘He can’t sack you all. Where would he get three hundred trained hands overnight? If all three hundred of you switched off your machines and walked out together, he’d soon learn. He wouldn’t want to lose a day’s production.’
It was the same at work, snapping people’s heads off, arguing, burying herself in the mind-numbing slog. She had no patience with the unnecessary rules, whose only purpose was to keep factory girls in their place: rules about starting time, peeing too frequently, walking in the factory without permission, talking, singing; so she took pleasure in rubbing George Ezzard up the wrong way.
That same disturbing unsettlement had a wider focus. Massive rearmaments in Germany. Counter-arming at home. The country was said by its leaders to have eighty per cent recovered from the Depression. It did not show on the streets. Unemployment was nationwide. Signs of poverty and deprivation did not appear to lessen. A housing bill was passed outlawing overcrowding. It had no effect in areas like Lampeter.
Then, in May 1935, the whole country was given a prolonged whiff of laughing gas in the form of the king’s Silver Jubilee. A great show of pageantry, wealth, privilege and abundance was put on to calm the unsettled nation.
It was from this time that there began a sequence of events that sent Lu hurtling into a whole new realm of experience. She often needed someone to talk to to make sense of what was happening, but of the people close to her, there was none she could trust not to treat her as a child to be protected. Ray wrapped her in cotton-wool, May would probably have liked her to settle down and have lovely babies, Sonia and Kate judged on the amount of pleasure or fun to be had. Bar was inexperienced and would want Lu to do what Lu wanted without judgement. Which left Ken. He seemed an ideal person on whom to test out her ideas, so she often wrote to him. She never expected him to comment, and usually he did not.
The trouble is [she was forced to confess when she wrote to Ken about the Jubilee celebrations] Miss Lake asked me to be one of the helpers to go on the train taking Lampeter Street schoolchildren on an excursion to London to see the big parade. I didn’t like to refuse, because she is very good to the people round here. The factory was closed down for the day, and she said she had hand-picked some of her old girls to go with her because she knew they were reliable. (I know what you’re thinking, but girls like me and Katie are reliable when it comes to Lampeter kids because we talk their language, not like the Sunday school teachers who are so soft they let even the tinies run riot when they take them on outings.) I’m like you and don’t agree with royalty and, like Ray says, we ought to be wondering why we keep on putting up with them, but most people don’t care, and I don’t see why children shouldn’t have a bit of a treat now and then, Lord knows there’s few enough of them round here.
So, early on Monday morning, a special train full of schoolchildren went up to London. I have to say it, the three compartments full of Lampeter Street Mixed Infants Kate Roles and I travelled with were proper litde angels. The third ‘aide’, as Miss Lake called us, was (you’ll never guess) Mrs Ezzard! I thought I would die when Miss Lake said, but she turned out to be nice. I can’t imagine how she ever came to marry him. But then I could never understand how Miss Lake was friends with her – until now. Perhaps underneath he is nice too (ha-ha).
You won’t want to know, but I’m going to tell you about the parade. His Remoteness in a scarlet uniform wearing all his medals (for bravery in marrying Her Haughtiness, Kate said her dad said) was in a carriage with Her H. Everything was plumes, horses, jingling harness, swords, peals of bells, scarlet uniforms, busbies, bands and a dog that got in the way of everything and couldn’t be caught even by soldiers with swords and policemen with truncheons. Miss Lake said ‘Britain at its best’. Mrs Ezzard agreed. I thought they were being ironic (the dog). I hope they were.
In the evening there was a street party. Ray says he can remember the Armistice party when the street was all decorated with flags and there was a supper in the middle of the street. Can you? The kids loved it. If I’m honest, we all did. Do you remember Eileen Grigg (who used to fight me)? She doesn’t have any friends, so I asked her to come. Her only pleasure in life seems to be food, so I thought that she would love all the jellies and cakes, but you’d think I had asked her to enter a lion’s cage the way she reacted. Something happened to her between the time she was sent away and the time she came back, it’s as though somebody pulled the heart and spirit out of her. When she speaks it’s a bit like she was talking in a different language from her natural one, just short sentences, no conversation, almost childish (no, childlike).
Even Ray condescended to come and have a dance when it was dark. I’ll tell you something, Kenny, our Ralph’s a bit of a dark horse, he’s a really good dancer, so I suppose when he goes off on his old union ‘dos’ it isn’t always work. It did us both good. We’ve been like bears with sore heads lately. We miss you. Really. Forgive our lapse into monarchy (or is it royalism?). There’s a lot to be said for Maytime in England. Back to work on Monday (when I shall take a close look at Mr E to see if I can fathom what a nice person like Mrs E saw in him). Love, Lu.
When she returned to work the day following the day off, Lu felt restless. Meeting Kate Roles at the factory gate, she said, ‘Come on, Katie, how do you feel about running away from home?’
Kate Roles asked, ‘What’s up, you got the hump?’
‘You used to be the one who wanted to run away from home.’
‘I know, that was when I didn’t get my own way with my dad.’
‘I don’t think I can stand this place much longer.’
‘What you going to do then?’
‘I don’t know… something. I feel like a balloon that’s been blown up too much. If I don’t do something I’m going to explode.’
‘You shouldn’t go mixing with the nobs. What was she like, Mrs Ezz? Did you like the procession?’
‘It was quite good, the kids loved it.’
‘Quite good! You get a free trip to London to see the parade and all you can say is it’s quite good. There’s times when I could slosh you, Lu Wilmott.’
They punched their time cards and walked down the aisle between the rows and rows of machines. Bright sunlight beamed through the barred windows, illuminating the disturbed motes of lint. ‘See, Kate, we breathe that all day. I expect our chests are full of pink fluff.’
‘I don’t know about yours, but mine isn’t.’ She jiggled her breasts up and down with her hands just as George Ezzard stepped out of his office. ‘Watch out, it’s Goodtime George… Trust him to get his eye full.’
‘When you two ladies have finished your little chat… The boss wants to see you in his office, Wilmott.’
‘What’s he want, George?’
‘How should I know? I just run the place.’
‘Somebody else got the hump. Must be catching.’
‘Get to work, Kate, and you get on upstairs.’
‘Why does he always call you by your first name and me Wilmott?’
‘Because he’s afraid of you.’
‘You must be joking.’
‘Has he ever tried to touch you up?’
‘And he’d better hadn’t.’
‘There you are then. Makes you pretty unique in this place. You scare the pants off him.’
All the way across the yard and up to the main office, Lu tried to think why she was being called upstairs. She wasn’t the most careful employee when it came to factory rules and regulations, but George was the one to give the dressings-down. The only contact she had had with Mr Ezzard was when he had made her jump out of her skin and stitch her thumb. She had often felt eyes boring into the back of her neck when she was in the yard, and had looked up knowing he would be at his window, but she never crossed his path. Perhaps she had said something she shouldn’t have to Mrs Ezzard; but Mrs Ezzard had seemed nice, not the kind to go complaining. She hadn’t been much help with the children, especially considering she had so many of her own, but she had been quite friendly and thankful for Lu’s help.
It was four years since she had last stood before his desk. Full of anger and anguish I was then. He seemed so old then, yet I don’t reckon he’s much more than his mid-forties. This time he didn’t keep her standing long. ‘Well, Wilmott, is your hand mended?’
‘My hand…? Oh, yes sir… Mr Ezzard. It is… ages ago.’
‘I suppose you nodded off… Not a clever thing to do.’
‘I was working very fast, and it is not easy to hear footsteps in the noise of the machine room.’ Lu felt that she could almost read his mind. She sensed that she made him uneasy, as apparently she did George also. He didn’t seem able to look directly at her. But, no matter how much she despised him, he had the upper hand. She needed the job, for a while longer, until she had enough savings to do whatever it was she eventually decided to do. He knew well enough that he had been the cause of that accident.
He looked at Cynthia Lake’s clever girl, as Alma had referred to her at breakfast. ‘Jacob, what do you think, one of Cynthia’s aides with the Jubilee outing was that clever girl who gave up the grammar scholarship. You know who I mean?’
He did indeed. Often, when the hooter sounded, he would go to the window where he had a full view of the main gate. He could always pick her out, surrounded by her acolytes, chattering enthusiastically, flinging her hands, often laughing with a display of those strong wholesome teeth. She seemed unable to talk without gesturing. He did indeed know her.
Sometimes she wore her hair knotted on top, showing off that long, slender neck, damp wisps and tendrils escaping, giving the primness of such a neck a confusing touch of amorality. Occasionally, as she was walking along, she would unleash that hair and allow it to flow round her shoulders like molten bronze. Her lively breasts were not shaped by ‘Queenform’; they moved, they swelled, they seemed too full ahd mature for a girl of eighteen. She wore her working apron tied tightly about her slender waist. The swing of her hips swayed her cheap, thin skirt into a rhythm of movement. She showed humility and respect that day in the factory, but she was not humble and the respect was false. If she had been a man, he would have suspected her of being an agitator and dismissed her. As it was she was an intriguing young woman, out of place on the factory floor, and he could suspect her of anything.
What he didn’t know for sure of Cynthia Lake’s clever girl, he guessed at. The silkiness and length of her upper thigh, the density and colour of her pubic bush, the tight roundness of her behind and whether she was bare beneath her skirts. George, in explanation of a sudden temptation, had once said most of the younger girls wore no underclothes. She was an irritant, a touch of sweetness, an enigma. Twice recently she had turned and stared up at him, as though she had expected him to be there. That look had caused an arousal of a proportion that would have been a pleasure had it not had such a whore-touched origin. How could any man not sense when she was near? How could a man in his position not feel guilty at finding himself watching a common girl from the Lampeter slums?
‘Jacob? Did you hear? I met Cynthia’s protégée.’
‘Yes, Alma, I heard, she helped with the Jubilee outing. It must have been quite an occasion.’ He continued looking at his newspaper, giving the appearance that her breakfast-time chatter was distracting him from important affairs.
‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Cynthia’s liberalism (with a small “l”) hasn’t brushed off on her. When a child asked what does the king do when he gets home, she (Cynthia’s girl that is) said, “Search me, perhaps he gets popped back into his box till the next time he’s needed.” She didn’t know that I had overheard her, perhaps I should have said something; but it was such a spontaneous reply and the child saw that it was a joke… and it was amusing. She has a brother who is exploring the Continent on foot. I don’t think she found that at all a strange thing to do for people of their sort. She is really an extraordinary young woman; she has views on everything. I felt quite unread and ill-informed at times. Cynthia says she attends evening classes – you should take her into the offices, Jacob.’
He had already intended to give the girl a try-out in the filing department before Alma had mentioned it. Now she would believe that he had taken her advice.
‘How old are you, Wilmott?’ he asked Lu.
‘Coming eighteen, Mr Ezzard.’
‘And how long will it be before you are off getting married and leaving “Queenform”?’
‘Married! I haven’t even got a regular boyfriend.’ The ‘Mr Ezzard’ came a second too late to stop her reply being an indignant retort.
‘I won’t have young marrieds in the office. As soon as they are trained up and worth their salt, they start families. Factory work is best suited to married women.’
‘It’s best to be a young man, then.’
That innocent little smile couldn’t hide the look in her eye. She knew exactly what she was saying behind the harmless words. Cynthia Lake and Alma were right, she was no ordinary factory hand. Any other factory hand, male or female, would be struck dumb at having been called up to the top office. He had been right himself when he had put a touch of arrogance into the character he had created for her when watching from his high window. What he should do was to get rid of her. That had been his same instinct when he had become interested in Alma. The last thing any employer needed were factory hands who believed in egalitarianism. One couldn’t even say that she believed that she was his equal; this young woman was certain of it. This was a mistake. Yet it could work, as it had worked with Alma. No one had believed that such a young widow with small children would be the best wife for a widower with his own established family to take on, but it had worked out very well, and he had had a life infinitely more interesting than he might have had with a safer woman nearer his own age.
‘I am prepared to give you a trial period as a trainee clerk in the filing department.’
Lu was astonished but wouldn’t let him see it.
‘You know the kind of dress required?’
‘Do I have to decide straight away?’
Mr Ezzard was astonished. ‘What is there to decide? The opportunities to work in the “Queenform” offices are few and far between. We have never taken a girl off the factory floor. Miss Lake thinks you are capable, and I am prepared to try this experiment. Yes, you do have to decide straight away. The filing department needs a clerk at once.’
‘I haven’t any idea how much clerks earn.’
‘If you live up to Miss Lake’s assessment of you, then you must see that money is not everything. Lady clerks have status; a girl like you could move up in the community. The salary is twenty-five pounds.’
Ten bob a week! Is that all those stuck-up office girls got? Walking around in their cuffs and collars, filing bits of paper, typing letters. A girl off the factory floor in the office would put their noses out of joint. Apart from that, would the girls in the factory speak to her if she became a clerk? Office girls and factory girls lived in separate worlds. Office girls didn’t come from Lampeter Street. It would be nice to come to work in a decent skirt and blouse, though. Ray and Ken always left the house looking respectable and a cut above the rest. Why was working a typewriter posh and working a sewing machine common?
‘Thank you, Mr Ezzard, but the thing is… my brother and I have got our budget worked out, and I can’t see how we could manage.’
He had never counted on her rejecting him. In his mind he had dressed her in a grey flannel skirt with white collar and cuffs, tied her hair in a black velvet bow, and set her walking in and out of his office in silk stockings and polished shoes, taking away papers and bringing him customers’ files.
‘There would be an increase of five pounds a year after six months if you prove satisfactory.’ That was a top-rate starting wage for a girl out of commercial college. ‘Reasonable sick pay, and one week’s paid holiday.’ He had never intended offering her so much. In a minute she would see how close to bargaining this was becoming. That was how Alma had come so close to being master in his own house – she had seen how pathetically weak his need of her was. George had no such nonsense. When a girl caught his fancy he didn’t offer to take her into the offices, he used her fear of losing her job. But he was not George, and this girl wasn’t one to be intimidated. Had she been then he would never have even noticed her. ‘There is also a bonus scheme based upon the profitability of the factory as a whole. It is intended for senior staff, but I am considering including more junior members.’
‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate the offer, Mr Ezzard, I do, but I think I’ll keep on with what I’m doing now.’
‘Very well.’
As she made a move to go, he said, ‘You understand that everything said here is confidential?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Then I have your word that you will not talk in the factory about this?’
Her colour rose. ‘Why do you need my word? I agreed it was confidential, that means I won’t talk about it – except for with my brother. We don’t keep things from each other.’
‘So much for your Miss Wilmott, Alma,’ he said later. ‘She prefers the factory floor.’
‘Really? I should have thought she would have liked to work with her head.’
‘She said that she needed the piecework.’
‘Do factory girls earn better money?’
‘A girl like that one can.’
‘What is the machine girl’s wage then?’
‘Factory hands don’t receive a wage. Their payment is by result, by piecework. A girl is paid according to how many pieces of work she turns out.’
‘And Miss Wilmott can earn more that way?’
‘Because she is one of George’s fastest and best workers, yes, she can.’
‘I wonder that she can stand such repetitive work. I really wish that we could do something for her. I liked her very much.’
Jacob Ezzard continued to keep his head down in his newspaper. He too would have liked that. She had turned him down. Had even had the audacity to insinuate that he doubted her understanding of confidentiality. He had felt intimidated, half-ashamed of having watched her, guilty of the sexual thoughts she had caused in him; yet he was still unable, or unwilling, to do anything about them.
When Lu told Ray about the offer of the job as a filing clerk, his response was, ‘Is that all Ezzard’s pay them? I reckon office workers need a union as much as the rest of you. What did you tell him?’
‘That I needed piecework money.’
‘We could manage if you wanted to be a white-collar worker.’
‘You know we couldn’t.’
It was a two-minute wonder. Having discussed it briefly they were soon lost in their food and reading. They still missed Ken, especially at their one meal of the day. Ray was no longer on shiftwork, but was working the same hours as Lu, and they would sit eating whatever the day brought: knuckle-bone ham, shop pie or fritters or fried fish or peas and faggots, or sometimes enormous potatoes left baking in a low oven whilst they were at work. As they ate they leafed through a shared daily paper, reading out any news items that might be affecting Ken in Spain. Much of it was disturbing news. When Ken wrote, it was usually not about the threats to Spain’s stability, but about the people: how primitively they lived in rural areas, and how advanced they were in the cities. He had become enthusiastic about the history and architecture of the country. He was especially taken by the Moorish buildings of the south. ‘I shouldn’t mind settling down here, but there’s still a lot more to see. And then there’s Italy, I shouldn’t mind going on there eventually.’
Lu said, ‘Do you reckon he’ll come back?’
‘Of course he will, people always want to come home.’
‘I don’t think 1 would, if I was in his shoes. I can’t imagine anything more exciting than to wake up one morning and be able to say, I’m leaving! To go and see elephants in the wild, or watch glaciers floating along, or get a job on a newspaper. It wouldn’t really matter what you were leaving for, just that you had decided to go and you went.’ At that moment something about her father flared up like a match-head, but she doused it before it had the chance of illuminating any similar desires in him. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it’s different if you’ve got responsibilities.’
Ray kept his head in the newspaper and didn’t respond. Suddenly, she felt unreasonably irritable. ‘What are we going to do, Ray?’
‘What are we what?’
‘You might at least listen, Ray. I might only be a factory girl, an unimportant woman, but you could listen sometimes.’
‘I’m not going to let you pick another argument, Lu. Just say what’s up.’
‘You and me. What are we going to do? We’re just here, look at us, we’re like some old married couple when their children have gone. We sit here, one each side of the table, then we wash up and then we sit one each side of the fire, then we go into the scullery and get things ready for work, then we both have a cup of cocoa.’
‘For God’s sake, Lu, do shut up. What’s the matter with you? You’re always picking a row these days. When are we ever here in the evenings? More often than not, you’re flying round going off somewhere or other, and I’m getting ready to go to a meeting. How many evenings have we sat one each side of the fire?’
‘Well, we probably are going to.’ She had a sudden glimpse of something which panicked her. ‘I don’t want to live in this hole for ever.’
‘You’ll get married.’
‘Married! I should hate being married. Besides, where in this dump would I meet the sort of man I would marry, even if I wanted to – which I don’t!’
‘What about all these tango merchants in their Burton’s suits you’re always meeting in Southampton?’
‘To dance with, yes, but I should be bored to death in two days with somebody like that.’
‘Come on, stop being so quarrelsome. If you are going to snap my head off, then I’ll stop talking.’
‘Well, they are about as good at conversation as Lena Grigg. They’re just for dancing.’
‘You make them sound like a special breed of dancing chap.’
‘Well, they are really. We meet there, we dance, and we go home. For all I know, the band brings them in special men-shaped cases, like they do the drums and double-basses.’ Although they had more quarrels now than before Ken went away, no argument between them ever lasted for very long. Now she saw Ray’s usual kindly self re-emerge. She liked to amuse him and see him respond.
‘I reckon that sometimes they unload the vans and find they’ve brought all fox-trotters and left the waltzers back in the store room. That accounts for all the dancers with two left feet. Have you finished with that plate? I want to get washed up.’
He grinned. ‘You are a fool, Lu.’
Jacob Ezzard should have known that his wife would not leave the matter there. She had that streak in her which made her want to take up causes.
A day or so later, she had raised the matter again. ‘I have been thinking, Jacob. Do you think Cynthia’s girl would consider modelling? I thought about that beautiful little corselette you will be taking to Paris to show Monsieur Lascelles—’
He interrupted her. ‘This will not at all be like one of our usual factory showings: this will be something of a fashion show in the Parisian manner.’
In normal circumstances, when a new style needed to be shown, one of a few ‘suitable figures’ was selected from among the Ezzard’s employees. The item would be shown in the factory demonstration room being worn over undergarments. Very respectable, and nothing that warranted more than a passing comment on whether the figure was suitable. It meant a shilling or two extra, but none of the unmarried girls would have wanted that bit extra if they were asked to model one of the boned and plated battleship styles.
‘I am aware of that, Jacob. You said that you would engage a professional model. Why not give Cynthia’s girl the opportunity? I’m sure she would be very suitable; her stature and bearing are very fine. I do think that we should try to foster the talents of our own local girls. Jacob? Are you listening?’
‘No, Alma. I went along with your filing clerk idea, but this is altogether different.’
Had she but known it, ‘Cynthia’s girl’ had been his inspiration for the new corselette. Watching her from his window, there was no doubt that lithe figures such as hers had no business confined in the usual ‘Queenform’ styles, but that was between him and the drawing board. He would never have gone so far as to suggest that she model it. It would not do to show enthusiasm. ‘Alma, she is a factory girl, not a professional model.’
‘Was it not for the young working woman that you designed the new lightweight? Such a pretty design, Jacob. You are so talented in that direction. Just imagine how marvellous it would be to be able to say, I have designed this for the young modern, working woman, and here it is actually being worn by a true working woman. My instinct tells me that this would be an excellent selling point.’
‘It is not merely a matter of showing it, it is the manner in which it is shown. A girl not used to it would be embarrassed and awkward.’
‘Wasn’t I right about producing a white corteil version of some of the “Queenform” styles instead of always making them up in the pink?’
‘It would mean going over to Paris, to show Monsieur Lascelles.’
‘Heavens, Jacob, do you think the girl would die of fright being in Paris?’
‘It might have some currency in terms of publicity in the trade… but it’s a crazy idea.’
‘Haven’t I heard you say that it is the innovative man who gains the lead in the market?’
‘Working-class people are easily scandalized. The Wilmott family have been with us for generations; they are highly respectable.’
‘This is 1935. There is nothing scandalous in modelling lingerie, especially corsetry: it’s so modest that it’s almost stuffy. I’m certain Monsieur Lascelles’ dresser would drape her as decorously as they do your “Queenform” queens.’
‘I meant they might not like the idea of her tripping off to Paris. In the working-class mind, Paris doesn’t equal business or even the Tuileries and the Louvre; to them Paris is low life and the can-can.’
She would win him over. Alma considered herself an enlightened and modern woman. ‘That is easily overcome. I will ask Cynthia to act as chaperone if you like. No one could ever connect Cynthia with anything scandalous. In fact, I am sure she would think it a wonderful idea to expand Miss Wilmott’s experience.’
‘Would you let one of your daughters do it?’
‘Of course I would not, but my daughters don’t have to earn their keep. They visit the Continent almost as a matter of course, and I sometimes wonder whether they get anything at all from the experience except a knowledge of the most expensive new fashion. However, a girl such as Miss Wilmott might benefit very much from a visit, even if it was just there and back. You don’t know her, Jacob, but as I keep telling you, she is no ordinary factory hand.’
‘You seem very keen on the girl, Alma.’
‘She is eighteen, Jacob, well read and intelligent. I was much like her at that age, except that I was a pregnant bride. I like the idea of this girl getting the opportunity of having a little wider experience before she finds herself in the same situation. She’s a splendid young woman, she’s bound to be snapped up before long.’
‘As I snapped up you?’
‘But as a widow, older and wiser than when I leapt into my first marriage.’
Somehow, Alma’s undoubted faith in his faithfulness to their marriage protected Jacob Ezzard from any doubt about how he came to be won over by her idea. If a bronze-haired girl in a white, lacy ‘Princess’ corselette crept into their marital bed, she only served to confirm Jacob and Alma Ezzard’s continued assurance that they had a very good relationship still.
It was Nellie who called Lu aside and put to her the idea that had come from the top office via George.
Lu could scarcely believe it. ‘Paris? I’d get to go to France? Nellie, please tell me it’s not a joke.’
‘It’s no joke, Lu, but it’s work. You won’t be going up any Eiffel Towers, you know.’
‘But I’ll have to get there, won’t I? Going on a journey anywhere is exciting. I’d have to go on a ship, even a plane! Do you think I’ll have to fly? I’d give anything to go through clouds. Just fancy, going abroad, and I won’t even have to pay my own fare. I’ll be scared to death, I know it, but I’ll love it. France!’
Nellie smiled, ‘I take it that you’ll do it?’
‘Like a shot.’
‘I don’t know what your Ray will think.’
‘He’ll be proud. And he’ll be green it’s not him getting a chance to go abroad.’
Nellie’s unspoken doubt was nearer the mark than Lu’s certainty about Ray’s response.
‘You forbid me! You forbid me? Who the hell do you think gives you that right? I’ll do as I please.’
‘You’re not twenty-one yet.’
‘And you’re not my father!’
‘I’m responsible for you.’
‘I’m responsible for me. Jesus, Ray! What do you think I’m going to get up to in Paris that I couldn’t get up to here if I wanted to.’
‘I’m not suggesting anything like that.’
‘What then – that Mr Ezzard has designs on me?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘He might… why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t he take one of his factory hands to Paris just to get his way with her? Isn’t that what you’re thinking?’
‘No!’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘Of course I trust you.’
‘Then what is it, Ray? What is it that worries you so bloody much that you’re behaving as if this is Victorian times instead of the twentieth century?’
He didn’t respond. She felt let down and miserably disappointed that he was being so mean-minded. This was not how she expected her brother to react, her brother who was always on about equality. It was just equality for men he wanted. If he meant real equality then he’d take turns to cook the Sunday dinner and scrub the kitchen floor. Oh no, men couldn’t ever be that equal. She fell sullenly silent. Crushed and furious, she said to herself, I shall go. I don’t care what he thinks. This is a chance of a lifetime and nobody’s going to stop me taking it.
Even so, in spite of this silent protest, she really wanted him to be pleased. Half the pleasure would be gone if he wasn’t.
She looked across at him staring at his unfinished meal. The loud ticking of the clock began to widen the gap between them. This was a serious row.
He looked desolate and perplexed, and Lu sensed that if they did not settle it now, then they would become so distant that their life together could easily become intolerable. She loved him too much to throw away all those years of care and happiness he had given her, yet she could not allow him to continue to think that he had the right to make decisions for her now that she was an adult.
She put down the knife and fork she had been holding on to but not using, and went to his side of the table and put her arms around his neck. ‘Ray, listen. I know you’ve only got my best interest at heart, and I love you for it, and I don’t know how I would have got on without you. I can’t bear hurting you. Please, Ray… I’m sorry I said those things. I’m sorry I swore. I know you trust me and you wouldn’t ever think I’d do anything to make you ashamed. But modelling is a proper profession, Mr Lascelles is one of the most respected buyers of lingerie in the trade, they have proper dressing rooms with women dressers, and nobody sees the garments, only Mr Lascelles, his manageresses and top assistants. It’s all very proper, I wouldn’t do it otherwise. You know that, Ray, don’t you? Ray, look at me. You know that, don’t you? Please don’t be miserable about it. I shall go. It’s too good a chance to miss.’
He took her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles, in the way that he sometimes said goodnight when she was preoccupied with her reading. ‘It’s not about any of that, Lu. You’re growing away, you’re leaving your own kind. You have been for months now: this is just one more step.’
He was right, and her respect for him was too deep for her to leap in at once and deny it in order to placate him. ‘But it’s not the end of the world, Ray. We were born in a slum and nobody’s to blame for that, but I’ve no intention of staying in it.’ She kissed his cheek briefly, hoping that he was not too hurt to mend. ‘The way out of here is up, and that’s the way I intend going.’
When, quite by chance, Lu met David, her dancing partner from Bournemouth, again, she did not tell Ray. David was better than middle class; he was top-drawer – accent, manners, dress, confidence.
She and Sonia, at one of the tables set back from the dance area, were sitting drinking cool drinks, criticizing the dancers, enjoying themselves, giving marks for deportment and dress, when Lu suddenly felt that she was being watched. When she looked across to the other side of the balcony, she saw him. David, the man she had met in the Bournemouth dance hall, whose manners and style were so casual and modern. In a Hollywood film he would have said even less, just ‘Hi’, then held out a hand and she would have followed him on to the dance floor. She was suddenly struck by the notion of how ineptly she had behaved. She had run away. It had amounted to that. She had seen him speaking with that snobby journalist woman and lumped them together.
Just as she remembered him. She could imagine that, even from across the open space between them, she could smell his shaving cream and hair oil, that she could see greenish-gold eyes. He had wheat-coloured hair and eyebrows, and a lot of the same rough hair on the backs of his hands and fingers, but on his hands the hairs were almost invisible. His nose was straight and long and blunt as she thought a good-looking man’s should be. And he was good-looking. He was about six foot tall. This time he was not wearing the linen jacket, but a navy blue blazer, a pale blue shirt such as would never be found in Portsmouth, and grey flannel trousers.
She had often thought of him and day-dreamed of a second meeting, but not as it was happening now. Her heart raced. She panicked. Even though this was a second chance, she still could not bear for him to know that she was a factory hand. Nice as he had seemed to be, he was posh, and probably had as distorted a picture of what working-class girls were like as that journalist. If she told him about herself, saw so much as a flicker of distaste, it would be mortifying.
He touched his forehead in a one-finger salute. Sonia, noticing her inattendon, followed Lu’s line of sight.
‘Hey, is he trying to pick us up?’
Trying to keep to their usual flippant style of talking about men, she said, ‘Actually, he’s trying to pick me up.’ She raised her hand and he began threading his way between the tables towards them.
‘He’s coming over. He’s a fast worker.’
‘Sonia, listen to me… listen! I’m serious. I know him. Don’t you dare call me Lu. Louise. I mean it, I’m not joking. Don’t you dare say anything about me at all. I don’t want him to know anything about me, not even my surname. Do you understand? I’ll tell you later.’
‘All right, keep your hair on. How come you met an absolute bear like that and didn’t say anything?’ Sonia’s greatest of compliments to masculine desirability was to call him a bear. She sipped her drink nonchalantly and watched the handsome chap as he smiled down at them, at Lu.
‘Hello, Louise.’ His hand was strong and firm and dry and warm and Lu liked the feel of it very much.
‘David.’
‘You remembered my name.’
‘Well, you remembered mine too.’
‘What a fantastic coincidence. I never believed it would happen, but I’ve carried this about with me just in case.’ He placed on the table the little lighter she had lost in Bournemouth. ‘It was on the table after you had left. I ought to have handed it in, but I lived in hope that I might come across you somewhere during the weekend.’
Sonia picked up the lighter and inspected it. Lu was certain that she must be consumed with curiosity, but was equally certain that Sonia would never reveal her true interest, common curiosity being considered unacceptable. ‘I didn’t know you had this, Louise. It’s so pretty.’ She slid a smile between Lu and David. Lu thought, She thinks he gave it to me. ‘And it’s got your initial.’
‘Sonia, this is David. David, this is my friend Sonia.’
Sonia held out her white, well-groomed hand. ‘You don’t have to stand there, come and sit down. Louise is such a dark horse keeping you to herself.’
‘You remember, that weekend I went to Bournemouth…?’
‘I do.’
‘I met David at a dance.’
He smiled warmly. ‘We were pretty good together, weren’t we?’
Lu smiled back, suddenly very light-hearted and happy. ‘Sonia should get any credit; she’s the one who taught me.’ A tenor sax ran up the six notes that led to the dramatic note that led into the most popular tango music of the day. ‘I say, right on cue. Shall we?’ He held out a hand and nodded a little acknowledgement at Sonia.
In Bournemouth, Lu had been uninhibited and relaxed. There they had been complete strangers, neither of them expecting anything of the other. She kept her fingers crossed that this time, in a hall where she knew people, it would be the same. She need not have worried; as soon as they slid their shoes on to the silky floor, they were carried forward by the passionate rhythm. It was not the kind of dance for conversation, but from time to time they caught one another’s glance and smiled with pleasure. When they returned to their table, Lu saw Sonia showing off her foxtrot with Marco, the male teacher from the dance school where she spent many of her evenings.
David brought fresh iced drinks to the table and said, ‘Cheers.’ The short silence seemed longer, then he said, ‘Go on, say something.’
‘I can’t really say, “Do you come here often?” I know you don’t. Do you have a regular dancing partner?’
‘No, do you?’
‘Sonia and I come together. She usually leaves with Marco.’
‘Her boyfriend?’
‘Her dancing partner… he’s married.’
‘Ah.’ That ‘Ah’ expressed the same polite doubt that anyone seeing Sonia and Marco dancing together might have expressed.
‘What about your equivalent to Marco?’
She gave him a crooked smile. ‘I try not to have one. Serious dancers are deadly dull once they are off the floor. I like different partners for all the different dances.’
‘Was deadly dullness why you flew away last time?’
‘Of course not, I was really enjoying myself. What I said was true: I had promised to meet my brother.’
‘What a good thing we have brothers or we might never have met. This time it is one of my brothers who has brought me here.’
‘How many brothers have you?’
‘Two, my twin, and then a much younger brother, Dominic – he’s at school here in Southampton. Being a bit of a tyke at the moment. I have to placate his headmaster. I come in for the dressings-down when Dom threatens the good name of the school. I’m sort of Dom’s guardian, parents live abroad much of the time. One in America, one in Brazil. It’s not surprising Dom gets a bit too anarchic for headmasters: it’s his third school in two years. He wanted to leave, but… No! that’s enough about me. Tell me about you.’
Lu’s daydreams had prepared her for such a question. ‘My parents are both dead. Two brothers, I live with one, the other is travelling on the Continent at the moment. Last time we heard, he was in Spain.’
‘I was there in January. An astonishing country. Have you been?’
‘No, never, actually. I’m about to cross the water for the first time. Paris.’ That sounded wonderful. She would never invent or tell a lie about herself, especially to a man like David who seemed so open, but she had such good truths now. She would be enigmatic. Allow him to draw what conclusions he liked. She hoped that one conclusion would be that a young woman who could converse well in a classless voice, whose hair had been styled in Southampton’s best salon, and who was about to travel to Paris, could not possibly be a factory hand. He said, ‘Paris in spring. I wish I was going too. How long will you be there?’
‘A few days.’
Sonia returned and he stood up at once. ‘I just want my bag, Louise. Marco wants to leave now. What do you think?’
‘It’s all right. You go with Marco.’
‘What about you, Louise? Should I leave you with this handsome stranger?’ She smiled at David.
Damn you Sonia. I can manage this myself. ‘I’ll get a taxicab as I usually do.’
When David discovered that her taxicab was to take her to the railway station, he asked, ‘Where do you live? Couldn’t I drive you? My car is just down the road.’
‘My brother will be waiting at the other end.’ Naturally she did not say that before she reached her waiting brother she would be catching the terminus tram and that he would be waiting up for her at home, sitting by the fire with cocoa ready mixed and some fish and chips keeping warm in the oven.
‘Right. Could I write to you?’
‘I’m not sure where I’m going to be…’ She was teetering on the edge of having to lie to him.
‘The thing is, I’m trying desperately to make sure that you won’t run away a second time without knowing that we will meet again.’
She couldn’t think. She too didn’t want that.
‘How about this?’ He produced a small card from his breast pocket. ‘It’s an invitation to a buffet dance. At the Royal Navy dockyards in Portsmouth.’ He laughed. ‘Well, no need to look so alarmed – officers’ mess affair, lots of gold buttons, very nice food and drink.’
‘Are you Navy?’
‘No, I’d never stand the discipline. Look, I’ll be staying in Southsea, at the Queen’s Hotel. I’ll write it on the back so you’ll know. If it suits you, we could meet there. It’s not a bad place, on the sea-front. We could have a drink first, if you like. It’s not until mid-July, so you’ll be back from France by then.’
What flashed through her mind was, did she know anyone who worked there? If she did, then it would be a chambermaid, or someone in the kitchens. An opportunity to go through those splendid doors and into that world where the other half lives was worth the small risk.
‘I’d love to come. I’ll be back from France ages before that.’ When she heard herself say that, she could hardly believe this was her own real life, and not something she was dreaming as she machined her way through a morning at Ezzard’s.
When she got off the Lampeter Street tram, every one of her senses was heightened. Light breezes drifted across at the many intersections of the grid of streets, her heels clicked rhythmically on the pavements. As she passed the great facade of St George’s, the church that dominated the factory area where she worked, the Guildhall clock struck twelve. Cinderella! She twirled as though still dancing. The smell of lilac, drifting over a vicarage wall, added an unbelievable glamour to the night and her thoughts about her prospects.
The way out is up! Yes. Up in an aeroplane to Paris, and after that up the grand steps leading into the Queen’s Hotel. Up in the world. Her future was lilac-scented, strewn with rose petals, a stairway to the stars.
Ray, as usual, had waited up. Recently, they had been in a state of truce. When she had come home and said that she had been picked out to be the figure for the new model and would be going to Paris, instead of being thrilled for her, he had behaved as though he was one of the aunts saying that she was too young, it was not a proper thing to do. He had called it a jaunt and that had made her furious. They had rowed, then lived in an atmosphere of chilly politeness. But Lu was determined that she was not going to let him dominate her. When he learned that Miss Lake would be travelling with her, he made an effort to put things right. But Lu had been hurt that he should have thought that she would have anything to do with a mere jaunt to Paris with the boss.
Slowly the chill had gone out of the atmosphere so that when she saw that he had waited up and was mixing her some cocoa she decided that she had made her stand for long enough. She smiled at him as though nothing had happened. ‘Oh, lovely, I can just fancy that.’
‘Nice time?’
‘Lovely.’
In his usual careful way, he put the newspaper he had been reading back together and folded it good as new. ‘Is that your new dress?’
She turned round to show him the dark gold satin calf-length frock.
‘You’re really clever with your needle. You look like you stepped off the front of one of your fashion magazines. Nobody would ever think you worked for a living.’
‘I hope they don’t. I don’t want people to know that I’m working class.’
‘You don’t have to be ashamed of your class.’
‘Why not? They’re rough and coarse and small-minded.’ Oh, no, here they were, off again before she had hardly got into the house. She hadn’t meant Ray, he must realize that, but she had called him narrow-minded when they had blazed away at each other over the modelling job.
She watched his fingers as he ran them along the folds of the newspaper; familiar, practical fingers that she took for granted until suddenly they seemed terribly special and precious. She would have liked to have caught hold of them, but to do so would have made her so full of emotion that she would probably have cried. It had been Ray’s hands as much as their mother’s that had tended her as a baby. She had told Lu how he used to dip his knuckle into the milk to test the temperature. It had been his hands that had wrung out cloths to keep her temperature down when she had been in crisis with diphtheria. She wanted to tell him that he was such a nice man. Nobody said those things until the person was dead. Everybody was good after they were dead. ‘I didn’t mean you, Ray.’
‘Oh, good. Am I just the one exception, or are there others who get your seal of approval?’
‘You mean well-mannered, broad-minded, well-read people like Uncle Hec and Mary and the Wilmott aunts?’
‘I thought you might approve of Sid Anderson and some of the delegates you met at the Bournemouth conference.’
‘They’re different.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘They’ve risen above it. They’re not like the people who live around here.’
‘So, what are you going to make yourself into? You can’t go on for ever with one foot in the coarse world and one in that one you’ve got when you’re out with Ken’s girl.’
‘Don’t let’s fall out again, Ray.’
‘What do you expect when you seem hell-bent on joining the middle classes?’
‘What’s wrong with them? They don’t hang around chip shops and billiard halls. They speak nicely, and wash, and do more interesting things than us.’
‘Of course they do, they’re the ones with the money. They can afford bathrooms and tickets to orchestra concerts; they can travel, and sit in the sun.’
She wasn’t going to let him be cross, so she quoted his own words. ‘Because they’ve got people like me turning out millions of aprons and corsets and brassieres for the smallest pay-packet they can get away with.’
‘We’ll make a union member of you yet.’ He gave her a token peck on the cheek and went to lock up, leaving her with an apron over her gold dress and her hands in soapsuds washing the supper things. What sort of future could she possibly have? The weight of responsibility for his young sister hung heavily on Ray Wilmott’s shoulders.
She called him back. ‘Ray?’
‘That sounds like you’re going to sweet-talk me into something.’
‘I was thinking, how about if we asked Bar to come here for a few days?’
‘If she’d want to come to Pompey, go ahead, it’s up to you. I’ve got a district meeting next weekend.’
‘That’s the week I go away with Miss Lake.’ She no longer spoke of it as going to Paris. ‘I thought the weekend of my birthday.’
‘That’s nice, but just don’t go making your arrangements around me. I’ll be really pleased to see her, but don’t go making any more of it than that.’
Bar came on the Friday of Lu’s eighteenth birthday, laden with foxgloves and flags from around Swallitt Pool, Roman’s Fields strawberries, Cowslip cream, and a jelly tart that May said would remind them of Lu’s twelfth birthday, their first Midsummer Day. Ray, who had been to the barber’s and changed into grey flannel trousers and an open-necked shirt after work, took chairs into the back yard and shared the tart with them. Later, the two girls took a punnet of strawberries to eat on the beach, after which they wandered round the late-opening shops and market-stalls. It was such fun that Lu wondered why she had never thought of asking Bar before this. Bar showed her enjoyment at everything. Her questions made Lu look twice at things she had taken for granted. Walking up the impressive steps to get a close look at the stone lions guarding the Guildhall reminded Lu that it was not so long ago that she had been as much in awe of the place as Bar now was. And again, when sitting in a booth at Palccino’s Ice Parlour, as they consumed parfaits with long silver spoons, she admitted, ‘I used to think that this place was too posh for the likes of me.’
‘I never even knew there was such places. Southey’s sells Sno-fruits and choc-ices, but fancy having ice-cream in glass vases. Ma would laugh at eating out of a vase.’
They took tram rides all over the city, sitting on the top deck; they walked on Southsea Pier and had refreshments there; then they walked the sea-front and had afternoon tea prettily served in a cafe, and then on to first house at the Theatre Royal, where Bar could hardly believe the velour curtains, chandeliers, murals and gilded plaster. To pack in as much pleasure as possible, Lu had even ordered refreshments for the interval.
Bar’s ingenuous pleasure made Lu feel very sophisticated, and dwelling on that thought during the boring second half of the performance, she saw that, compared with all the girls she had known since childhood, she was sophisticated. She had set out to be and it was working. Slowly, bit by bit, she had learned the tricks of ‘doing things right’. Some of her confidence had come via Mr Matthews’ classes on local affairs, knowing that even the grandest and most intimidating buildings were on the whole quite ordinary places inside, containing rooms and curtains and chairs and tables and lavatories, and realizing that even the grandest palace had been made by human beings for human beings. There were really no ‘special’ people in the way that she had seen them as a child. Kings were only kings because other people said that’s what they were, the same as mayors were only mayors. Since Kenny had started writing about republican Spain, Lu had thought a great deal about the monarchy. When Lu asked Mr Matthews, ‘What are they for?’ she found his reply about tradition, stability and order very inadequate. Even so, at the end of the show she stood for the National Anthem, which Kenny had vowed never to do again: ‘If we’ve got to have a national song, then “God Save the People” will do for me,’ he’d said.
When the girls came out, Ray was waiting. ‘I just thought you might like to go somewhere else.’ It was Bar he was really asking.
‘Where?’ Lu asked.
To Bar: ‘How about the funfair?’
Lu said, ‘When did you last go to the funfair, Ray?’
‘Too long ago. Would you like to, Barbara?’
‘If Lu wants to. I love fairs.’
Lu said, ‘Just don’t ask me to go on anything that goes fast or goes up high.’
Which left the side-shows, cars and rocking-boats for the three of them together, and the switchback, big-wheel, and all the other spinning and whirling rides for Ray to ride with Bar, who clung to him, thrilled and bubbling over with enjoyment. On the long walk from the seafront to Lampeter Street, Ray walked between them, linking arms. He stopped to buy three bags of chips, and when they crossed over the railway bridge, they leaned on the parapet whilst Ray pointed out to Bar the office where he worked, and answered her questions about what he did there and about the other men. He told the traditional railway stories about horrific accidents, headless corpses, crashes prevented by some brave soul in the nick of time, trains that jumped the lines, and the dodges people found to travel without paying. Lu thought that she had never heard him talk for so long about the railway without once mentioning his beloved union.
Back at Lampeter Street, where Bar couldn’t get over how many people were about at night, and how light it was on the streets, the three of them sat with their feet on the fender and talked about Ken, and Roman’s Fields, and Bar’s favourite horses and the ones that were devils. ‘I kept my eyes about me today, just in case I might see Duke. I keep thinking he might come over to Wickham Fair. I always ask them, but they’re a close lot, my pa’s people. He says, if Duke wants us to know, he knows where we live. And that’s the trouble. Dad don’t want to roam. He’s took to living on the Strawbridges’ land.’
Later, when Lu and Bar were in bed, Lu pinning her hair down and Bar plaiting hers into a long fat pigtail, Lu said, ‘I shouldn’t worry about Duke. I expect when he’s king of the gypsies he’ll have to tell you.’ Lu too, whenever she heard the clop of horses pulling drays and floats in town, without being too conscious of the connection of that sound with Duke, would look to see who the driver was.
‘He never could, because he’s only a half-breed. Duke couldn’t ever be a king, he comes from the wrong sort of family.’
Lu said, ‘My teacher at evening school reckons that if people really want to change something, and if enough people decide it must be changed, then it will be changed.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘I don’t know. I’d really like it to be true.’
‘What would you change, then?’
‘I…’ She paused then went on vigorously, ‘Oh, there’s so much! Wherever would I start? I’d do something so that people who had to work in factories got a say in what goes on there. I’d make bosses talk to us like we were human beings. They think that if we had windows we’d be forever looking out, but we wouldn’t, we’d just have more fresh air so that we didn’t get half dopey with fumes from the boiler and the stuffy air.’
‘Why do you put up with being treated so bad?’
‘Why do you?’
‘Because of who I am. At least on the estate they leave me pretty much to my own.’
What must it be like to be Bar? Her life straddled two camps as well, but nothing like the two Lu inhabited.
‘If I lived here, it wouldn’t matter being a Barney. Towns are exciting, you can’t hardly walk down a street without finding out something you haven’t ever seen before. All the stuff you’ve got – trams so you can get about anywhere, you just wait and it comes along and it takes you where you want to go. You got pavements to walk on everywhere. You know what it’s like out our way, if a van or a wagon comes tearing along, sometimes you have to jump in the ditch or up in the hedge, and when it rains it kicks up mud. And there’s all these different places to look for work.’
‘Different, but factory girls are factory girls everywhere. They pay you what they like, and if you don’t like it then you can leave, and you won’t get more anywhere else because the owners get together and fix piecework rates.’
‘So why don’t fact’ry girls get together? There’s a lot more of you than them.’
Lu laughed, ‘Ray would love you saying that.’
Bar blushed. ‘Why would he?’
‘Because he thinks trade unions solve everything. Of course, he might be right, but I don’t see how we’re ever going to find out.’
‘Why?’
‘Too many women with kids to feed.’
‘Ray told me once that girls like you could do it. You haven’t got kids to feed, you wouldn’t starve, you got Ray and your aunty would send you down boxes of food on the train.’
Lu laughed. ‘Strawberries, Cowslip butter and stickbeans.’
‘Your uncle’s got a couple of porkers now, and another sow about going to farrow. Good ones, they’d send you bits of belly pork. You wouldn’t starve, Lu.’
‘Who’d pay the rent and gas and coal?’
Bar lay back on her pillow, gazing at the ceiling, smiling at her foolproof plan. ‘I could get a job here and be your lodger, and I’d put in share and share alike.’
Lu leaned on her elbow and looked tenderly at her friend. ‘Bar, you working in a factory? You wouldn’t last a month away from your horses.’
‘Why not? You’re all right.’
‘Are you serious, would you like to live in Portsmouth?’
‘Like a shot out of a gun. I’d give anything to live like you. You go to all those classes, you got girls your own age to talk to all day, you can go out at night… look at it, streetlights still on – you can buy chips when it’s near midnight – and look at the shops… Everything in the whole world anybody could want.’
‘And not enough money to buy it.’
‘Oh, Lu! You should just hear yourself.’ She jumped out of bed and opened Lu’s cupboard where her swingback coat and two dance dresses hung over gold dancing shoes and a pair of high-heeled patent courts. ‘You earned enough for these.’
‘It took me months of slog and going without… and I won a bit of money. Factory work is terrible, I shan’t stop there for ever.’
‘But you got them. I couldn’t get things like these, it wouldn’t matter how hard I worked or how long. I only got my coat to come here because I got some field-work with your aunty and she helped me make the skirt and this night-shirt on her machine, and Joycey got some cheap shoes off the traveller.’
‘Your pa would never let you go.’
‘He let Duke.’
‘Duke’s a man.’
‘He couldn’t say anything. My ma did as she liked, so did my pa. It wouldn’t hardly be fair if he said I couldn’t.’ They lapsed into silence. Lu lay imagining what it would be like with Bar here every day. Three people in the house again, except that it would be a sister who would live there instead of Kenny. She envied girls who always had some tale to tell about one or other of her sisters. They could go together for weekends at Roman’s Fields. But she could not visualize Bar in a dance hall. As she drifted into sleep, Lu wondered why she had always supposed that Bar must be happy working in the stables. When Lu visited Roman’s Fields they spent hours trying out hair-dos and practising dance steps. Why wouldn’t Bar enjoy those things too?
Next morning she awoke early, her mind still buzzing with what Bar had said last night. She had been disturbed by Bar when she put her coat over her night-dress and went downstairs and across the yard to the lavatory. She’d heard the lavatory flush, the back-door latch click, the kitchen tap squeak and water gurgle through the pipes, stairs creaking, Ray’s voice, Bar’s voice, the kettle being filled, cups being set out, scullery chairs being pulled out from the table. There was not much privacy in the jerry-built terraces of Lampeter Street.
An element she hadn’t considered in her fantasy of Bar living here as her sister was Ray. Not just Ray, but Ray and Bar. Ray with Bar… With Bar as a lodger… Bar could never be a lodger, but living with them, she and Ray would meet like this every day. It would be throwing them together. Ray said he was much too old, but it wouldn’t be long before he stopped thinking about that. Lu sat on the side of the bed unpinning her hair. Good God, what the hell am I thinking about? It’s not my affair if Ray and Bar…? If they what? If they fell in love and got married. Bar would still be a sister. Lu and Bar and Ray would all be closer; they all loved one another.
But Bar would be Ray’s wife. Ray’s wife would not go to the Pier Ballroom on Saturday nights. Ray’s wife would not jump on the train after work on Saturdays and spend the weekend messing around at May and Ted’s, would not go riding on Mr Barney’s horses, not venture out on to the quiet Sunday lanes in the van. Ray’s wife would sleep with Ray, and Lu would have the single back room to herself. Not the same thing at all as the original fantasy.
Ray shouted up the stairs, ‘Tea, Lu!’
With her big baggy working cardi over her night-dress, she went down. Bar was seated at the scullery table, her coat demurely buttoned. Ray fetched a chair from the other room. He was dressed as he usually was first thing on Sunday mornings, in his working trousers and yesterday’s shirt without a collar.
He had put some bread under the grill and, as he was taking it out, he said, ‘Barbara was just saying she’d like to live in Pompey.’
Bar twisted her pigtail round in a bun and fixed it with a bone pin on top of her head before she added, ‘I don’t want to stop a stable-hand for ever.’
Lu said, ‘We could give it a try. It won’t be easy getting a job, but there’s got to be something.’
‘1 know where there’s one going if it hasn’t been took already.’ Her cheeks blushed red with excitement.
‘Where? How do you know?’
Bar smiled. ‘It was plain there for all to see where we went yesterday. If you’re sure I could be your lodger, I’m going after it.’
Lu protested, ‘You can’t go on your own. You don’t know Portsmouth.’
Bar shook her head. ‘Of course I do, we walked all over the town yesterday. I’ve been finding my way around since I was three.’ She rearranged the long twist of her hair, and encircled her head with it. ‘Do I look all right? They won’t want anybody who don’t look nice.’
Lu said, ‘For goodness’ sake tell us where you’re going.’
‘No. If I get the job it will be a nice surprise.’
It was six-thirty when she returned. Lu was just making a pile of dripping toast for tea when Bar tapped the front door and came in. Her prim coronet of hair had gone and her long black mane hung beautifully around the shoulders of her cheap coat. Her eyes shone, her cheeks were flushed and she greeted them with an open-armed twirl. ‘I got it! I got it! I started straight away. And look,’ she delved into her pocket and brought out a handful of assorted small coins, ‘a down-payment on my first week’s lodging money.’
Lu had never seen Bar demonstrate such exuberance.
‘Tips!’ Bar said. ‘I don’t know how much there is, but it don’t matter. I got the job, ten-and-six a week. It’s long hours, but I already work long hours at the stables. Plus tips. A bit extra for summer work because they open late. I get a bit of a snack during the day when things are slack. If they’re pleased with me – and they were, they said I was just what they was looking for, they said it was really good getting a girl with long black hair, because that’s what their daughter has got, and customers will think I’m family… it’s a family business. I start proper on Tuesday. That gives me time to go home and get my things. Is that all right with you?’
‘For goodness’ sake, tell us what the job is.’
Bar threw off her coat and took a drink of the tea. ‘Guess.’
Ray said, his face showing the pleasure he was experiencing watching this lovely display of ebullience, ‘Waitress in one of the cafes?’
‘How did you guess that?’
‘Couldn’t think of anything else that opens Sunday and gets more custom in the summer months. Which one?’
‘Palccino’s.’
Lu said, ‘They’re famous, you know.’
‘I know. Mr Palccino (he’s called Papa) told me that they supplied ice-cream to the old king when he visited the Navy. They had some other girls went for the job last week, but Mrs Palccino (she is always called Mama Palccino), she said she wouldn’t take any of them because they wore powder and scent. She didn’t say it like that (she speaks funny like “door-to-door Indians” but not the same).’ Bar tried to mimic Mama Palccino. ‘“They all a-stink like a-bath salt. People not like a-bath salt with ice-cream.” She told me that half a dozen times. She said Papa Palccino is very fussy about the way his ice-cream is served up (he can’t hardly speak any English). I won’t be allowed to do the scoops straight away, only take the orders and carry them to the tables. She said she liked my hair, because it smells fresh. I smell “like a-girl”.’ Bar giggled with delight. ‘She says a lot about how things smell. I didn’t tell her that last Friday I smell-a like a-stable.’
‘What are you going to do about that?’ Lu asked. ‘You are supposed to be back at work on Tuesday.’
‘I’ll go back as early as I can tomorrow morning. Go up to the stables and tell them I’ve left. They don’t owe me any wages, and they docked me for the two days off, so I don’t owe them anything. Go and tell Ma and Pa, and your aunty, and then catch the train back and start on Tuesday morning. I told Mama Palccino – don’t that sound silly, I expect I’ll get used to it – she said she would keep the notice out of the window till Tuesday afternoon. And if I go back, she will take me to the store and buy me two white overalls and some caps and aprons – I said I liked red, and she said she did too. I told her, “Mama Palccino, I said I would be back and I will; I don’t never say things I don’t mean.” I just wanted to get things straight right from the start. She said all right, she would throw the notice away. That’s how I knew there was a job going… the notice, it was in the side window when we went there yesterday afternoon. Didn’t you see it?’
Lu shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t have registered if I had.’
‘It did with me. “Young girl wanted to wait on tables.” All the way on the tram I kept wondering whether I was young, and then thinking what you said about there being a dozen girls for every job going, so I kept my fingers crossed. I think I was meant to get the job, don’t you?’
Ray said, glancing at Lu, ‘You realize Lu won’t be here for a couple of days next week.’
‘I know. I won’t get in your way. I expect you won’t hardly know I’m in the house.’
Lu expected Ray to have something to say about that, but he didn’t; what he did say was, ‘You and me might be able to get back on our old footing with somebody else in the house.’
‘She’s a bit like Ken in that respect: they’re not such earnest people like you and me; they don’t want to change the world like we do.’
That gave Ray something to think about. He thought Lu wanted to be in a different world, not change the one she was in. If she did, he didn’t see much sign of revolutionary fervour in the kind of fake Hollywood life she seemed to live when she could.
Bar moved in to Number no the day before she started her job at Palccino’s Ice Parlour. The busy summer season had just begun. She found it all so stimulating that for a few days she never seemed to stop talking and laughing. There was no doubt she refreshed the crumbling little terrace house and the jaded relationship of its two occupants like a cheerful new coat of paint.
‘I brought my picture, Lu. Can I put it up with yours?’ The well-remembered first photos in the meadow with the poppies were put together on the mantelpiece, Lu with poppies in her hat looking out timidly, Bar, her wild bush of black hair starred with ox-eye daisies, grinning fearlessly, directly into the lens of Ted’s camera.
‘Just look at us, Lu. Who’d have thought then that you’d be goin’ off to Paris and I would be living in a big city? Pa give me five gold sovereigns for a rainy day (would you look after them for me, Ray?), and my ma sent two of her ornaments to remind me that I must go home and see them sometimes on my day off. And she give me the gold earring she’d been saving for if I got wed, but she said I should have it now so I had something nice to wear to show I’m not just anybody. Duke’s got the other one, he got it on a chain because he said it was too fancy to wear, so Pa gave him his out of his own ear. That meant a lot to Pa, you know, it was the last bit of his old ways. Ma said she would buy Pa a new one for a wedding ring.’
The earring was fancy, but very distinctive and beautifully embellished. The heavy gold in one ear and her hair tied back in a ribbon, as she took to wearing it now, gave her a particularly feminine appearance. She believed that her new appearance made her blend in with the modem city girl; she was wrong, she stood out as an exotic exception. When men’s eyes were upon her as she walked towards them, and after she had passed by, Bar did not notice, she was interested in just one man, and she would see him every day.
There were mixed feelings amongst Lu’s workmates when they heard that one of their own sort had been chosen to go abroad with the boss to show the new ‘Princess’ line. It wasn’t surprising that there were some who thought it was just a better way than George’s of trying to get a girl’s clothes off, but nobody who knew her was foolish enough to say that to Lu’s face. Some thought that having a common factory girl modelling the latest style would bring ‘Queenform’ down to the level of Woolworth’s, and Old Mr Ezzard would turn in his grave. The majority, especially the ones working on the prototypes being made exclusively for the Lascelles store, thought it was modern and a kind of Hollywood thing to do. Kate said, ‘It’s real rags to riches, taking a poor girl and making her into a princess. “Princess”, see? You might get your picture in the paper even.’
That had never occurred to Lu. Miss Lake said, ‘Kate Roles was always able to carry anything to the nth degree. There will probably be something in the trade journals – the garment, not the model.’
Lu and Cynthia Lake were booked on the night crossing. Mr Ezzard had flown over ahead of them. The train to London was ordinary passenger, except that they travelled second class, which was quite superior and roomy compared with the normal third class by which working-class people ordinarily travelled. She eyed the splendour of first class, but did not wish that for herself, at least not for the moment. Second was enough for now.
Once on the boat-train, Lu, in a window-seat opposite Miss Lake’s, leaned back into the plush comfort and rested her head against the fresh white linen antimacassar and felt so thrilled she almost felt sick.
Outside on the platform, the last-minute stages of preparation for departure were going on: passengers hurrying, porters running with bags, others pushing baggage carts, carriage doors banging, hissing steam, and indistinct voices echoing in the vaulted roof of the station. Within the comfortable compartment, Lu felt both a participant and voyeur of the drama in which only she and the other travellers on this expedition, on this particular boat-train, were involved. It was a unique set of circumstances which she felt sure she would never forget.
Gradually her sick excitement subsided into a warm, pleasurable elation and she could relax.
Over the last few days she had felt unable to eat, and at work had had to force herself to hold in her excitement, not wishing any of her mates to think that this meant more than an extra duty imposed by the Ezzards. Insincerely she agreed with girls who said it would be horrible having to eat frogs’ legs and stuff like that, and with others who said that she must take her own flannel because their dads knew for a fact that French people only used all that scent because they didn’t like washing. Now, though, having left all that behind, plus the stand she had to make against Ray, she could give herself entirely to the experience. This was a chance to leave Lampeter and the factory behind for a couple of days. The more she read of Kenny’s freedom and experience in foreign countries, the more she longed to find a way of doing something equally adventurous, and this was a start.
At last the long train began to pull out with great ceremony. Only then did she become conscious of Miss Lake watching her. When she drew her eyes away from the scene slowly passing and gaining momentum, she met her chaperone’s eyes which, like her mouth, were smiling at Lu. Miss Lake leaned forward, slightly resting her arms on the table and her chin on her fists, and said quietly, ‘Well?’
Lu, equally discreetly, said, ‘It’s like a dream. I’ve seen scenes like this loads of times at the pictures. I feel a bit like an actress.’ Her attention was caught again, this time by the snatches of London as it rapidly changed from the great capital of the Commonwealth to stretches of blackened houses and factories not much different from their own smoke-grimed streets.
Miss Lake removed her velvet beret and laid it beside her. Lu, feeling nicely dressed herself, observed every detail of her dress and her actions, and decided that, if she modelled herself on Miss Lake – when she wasn’t being headmistress – then she couldn’t go far wrong. Long ago she had copied her way of speaking, sounding aitches in the right place, putting ts and gs where they belonged. Now she could observe the correct way to travel. ‘You never expected to find yourself leaving England on a boat-train, Lu?’
‘Oh I did, yes. Every film I see where there’s somebody leaving, I always imagine that it’s me. I’ve left on stage-coaches, aeroplanes and big liners. Have you ever been on a liner?’
‘I’ve travelled by air several times, and I’ve been as far as the Mediterranean on a steam-ship.’
‘If I was a boy I’d do the same as Kenny. Do you remember that poem we had to leam in Miss Nash’s class? “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree”. That used to give me goose-bumps, that idea of just “arising” and “going”.’
‘Ideas like that do have great driving force. Gives one the impetus to do what one wants – without let or hindrance, as they say.’
Lu was surprised at the tone, the enthusiasm with which Miss Lake concurred. ‘If that’s the case, then how did you come to arise and go to Pompey? Lampeter of all places?’
Her reply was interrupted by a waiter serving refreshments and taking orders for dinner. Not recognizing a single item except beef – boeuf – on the impressive menu, Lu nodded at Miss Lake’s suggestions, trusting her not to order frogs’ legs. ‘You might say that Lampeter was my Innisfree.’ She pursed her lips, and smiled wryly in anticipation of Lu’s expression.
‘You’re pulling my leg.’
Thrusting her fingers into her thick waves, and combing them back from her broad forehead in a gesture that Lu now recognized as a prelude to directness, Miss Lake went on, ‘This may sound rather patronizing, but I had an idea that I could do some good for children in Lampeter. I was born into a family who had a lot of everything. My father was, still is, a mill-owner… Lake’s of Shirebrook.’ She lit a cigarette. Lu followed her gaze to the new passing scene of suburbia: green, spacious, leafy and clean. ‘My father had this quality: he saw no harm in allowing a daughter to be educated. By the time I had obtained a degree in teaching, I knew what I wanted to do.’
‘A mill’s a factory, isn’t it?’
Cynthia Lake nodded. ‘Though people who live in the south of England hardly ever think of them as other than the ubiquitous cotton mills of fiction – Mrs Gaskell’s North and South, you know? Eh lass, there’s trouble at mill.’
Lu could have laughed aloud hearing Miss Lake talk like that: ‘Like Gracie Fields in “Sing as We Go”.’
Miss Lake nodded. ‘Lake’s is a knitwear mill: they make stockings, jumpers, cardigans and suchlike.’
‘Are things better in that sort of factory?’
She blew out a long stream of dgarette smoke and shook her head. ‘So why did I not arise and go to inflict myself on some school closer to home?’
Although the question was in her mind, Lu shrugged non-committally.
‘Because I would have always been Alfred I. Lake’s tommy-opposite daughter and I wanted to get as far away from that as was possible. Had I chosen a village school nearer to home, I should have had my father against me, and that would not have been easy.’ She smiled. ‘And I am sure that my mother would have felt compelled to send me over nourishing broth and pies. In my first job as a teacher, I went as far south as I could without falling off the edge: a hamlet near the Tilly Whim caves in Dorset, and worked my way eastwards until I obtained my headship in Portsmouth.’
‘And you like it?’
She stubbed out her cigarette with an air of finality, but added, ‘You have seen my small cabin built there, of clay and wattles made… Yes, I find work in Lampeter entirely to my liking.’
The waiter brought a fresh pot of tea, which gave Lu time to consider this experience of being treated as a friend rather than as a charge. ‘I suppose I must have been more of a disappointment to you than I realized over the scholarship.’
Miss Lake considered the tablecloth, then looked up. ‘I was – yes, to an extent I was. But then, the girl who I had thought to mould into something had ideas of her own, and stood up for what she wanted against everyone with great strength of character. That was not disappointing. She was doing what I would have done, in fact what I did do, saying, No, I’ll lead my own life, thank you very much.’ She put out her hand and briefly touched Lu’s fingers. ‘And look where it has got us. Leaving England on the boat-train and heading for the Continent. Would this have happened to a grammar school girl? Who knows? As my mother is fond of saying, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.”’
Lu supposed that this meant approval. ‘Why a cat?’
‘A cat? Oh, heaven only knows. Perhaps my mother’s nourishing pies are not rabbit after all.’
Lu made a face and Miss Lake smiled.
Something had happened between them, Lu felt. Their relationship had become more that of equals; she seemed at last to have left Lampeter Street school behind.
The rest of the journey was filled with new experiences which she stowed away in short cryptic notes to be translated into her journal later – the boat, the crossing, strange, almost public sleeping arrangement, Calais and at last Paris.
Paris. Paris. I am in Paris. Those are French people and I am a foreigner. None of the little French she knew was of any use – she could not understand the quick, run-together words with odd inflections – but Miss Lake spoke the language fluently.
She sent a letter poste restante to Ken, wishing that she could see his face when he received it.
I’ll bet that puzzled you, seeing my handwriting on a letter posted in France. Well, yes, it is me, and this is the life. Even after this short while I understand why you always sound so enthusiastic about being out of England. I knew that somewhere there must be some trick exit through which people who grew up in the sort of places we did could escape. Here in Paris, I’m having a peep through. Do you remember the story in that science-fiction magazine you used to take about there being a fault in Time and Space and people from the past and future and other worlds kept falling through? I think you fell through something like that and landed in Spain. Now I want to. I would come looking for you and then keep going with you. Oh my, Ken, the prospect of such freedom and adventure. To be where no one knows you, to be whoever you want, to be anybody or nobody, to be just passing through, or stopping off.
I don’t know what I shall do from here on. ‘How’re they goin’ to keep ’em down on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paree?’ Now that they’ve had a carriage ride, now that they’ve visited the Louvre, been to see the Tuileries. Did you go? Goodness, Ken, what extraordinary things kings did with the money they stole from their people. I suppose it’s the same at home, except that palaces in England aren’t open to the public. I can imagine you and your Marxy friends there.
Miss Lake is with me (I shan’t go into detail of how it all came about. Suffice to say that it is a business trip – don’t that sound grand? – to show a buyer a new style that ‘Queenform’ is starting off in Paris), and of course being Miss Lake we had to go to the Louvre, not to see (as she put it) ‘pictures that are on every calandar and in every popular art book ever made’, but to look at one or two works of real importance. I think I could really get very interested in the ‘Impressionists’.
While I’m at it, I should tell you that I have been invited to a posh dinner-dance at the shore base in the docks. No, not the usual coach-load of factory girls invited to entertain the sailors, but a long dress affair in the officers’ mess. Miss Lake says she will lend me a dress, black, I’ve never worn black. Très chic (I think that’s right). I would like my own, but beggars can’t be choosers. I am meeting my escort at the Queen’s… yes, the Queen’s Hotel on Southsea front, and am being taken on from there.
Don’t ask, Ken, because I’m not going to tell you, only that he is a very nice man, and an exceptional dancer. We are great show-offs, and there’ll be no one to touch us in the officers’ mess. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned against the working class. Oh, but Ken, life is so exciting that I hardly care. Ray doesn’t even know this much, so don’t mention it, he just thinks I’m going to a dance at the base. I have to do this sort of thing these days, because he doesn’t seem to realize that I’m grown up and quite capable of looking after myself. I told you all about Bar coming to live with us in my last letter – I’m hoping that with her there Ray isn’t going to be picking at everything I do. I’m really looking forward to her being there. I only hope it all works out and she’s happy living in Lampeter Street. Imagine what her life must be now if her magic door opens to Pompey.
I have no idea where I am going, but I do know that I am going somewhere. I have to, I am a plant that has taken all the available nourishment from my original plot. If I don’t move away, then I shall never bloom, but will wither in the bud. I feel that it is the same for you. How much better I seem to know you now. Keep going, Kenny, your journey inspires me.
Lu wrote to Kenny on the night of her arrival, before she went to Lascelles’. She probably wouldn’t have told him about the episode anyway; he might quite likely have been as censorious as Ray. Lascelles’ was a store that prided itself on the exclusivity of its clients (not customers) and the quality that went with a Lascelles label. It glittered with crystal hanging lamps and whispered with carpets and refined assistants. Her own part in convincing M. Lascelles himself that the ‘Princess’ had the quality and style fit for his store lasted about an hour and was surprisingly unstressful, and involved no embarrassment to herself. For the purposes of modelling, the corselette was worn with a modesty skirt of filmy georgette pinned to the hem.
M. Lascelles’ chief sales-lady, Mme Manet, a beautifully groomed woman, helped her step into the boneless corselette, pulling and tweaking until it was like a second skin, then arranged Lu’s breasts in the brassiere of the ‘Princess’, adjusting them with a finger until Lu’s nipples were pointing directly ahead. Finally the modesty skirt was attached.
Miss Lake looked on, absorbed in the procedure. ‘Heavens, Lu,’ she whispered when the fitting seemed to have been done to Mme Manet’s satisfaction, ‘I hope working girls are going to be able to jump into these things a bit more quickly than that.’
Lu, who had been standing on a plinth watching herself in the many mirrors surrounding her, said, ‘It is pretty, though. I expect it won’t be long before every bride will include one in her trousseau.’
‘And we shall all be rich.’
Lu didn’t miss the irony. ‘It will give us factory girls a lot of work, though, won’t it?’
‘You must learn to sift the propaganda. I’m not saying that you won’t find a grain of truth, but don’t swallow the thing whole. The purpose of the exercise is not to keep you all in work – except only incidentally.’
In an odd way, although dressed only in undergarments and wisps, Lu felt invulnerable. Perhaps it was Mme Manet’s expression of approval at the position of Lu’s nipples and the smooth curve of the elastic panel over her buttocks which gave her confidence. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw a Lu she hardly recognized. Mme Manet had tied Lu’s hair on top with a white ribbon, allowing the bundle of curls to fall down over the right temple. If I saw myself in a painting, I’d think, She’s really beautiful. I am. At this moment, if never again, I am beautiful.
As she smiled faintly at herself she caught Miss Lake’s eyes watching her, and almost imperceptibly she too smiled. At first, Lu couldn’t interpret the look, then it occurred to her what it might be. She had no means of knowing because, although she knew half a dozen names for ‘pansies’, homosexual women were only known to her through literary references. But that look was no different from those that Duke or David or any one of half a dozen of the ‘Queenform’ cutters gave her. Miss Lake must be a lesbian woman. Until now, she hadn’t really believed they existed outside the story of the women of Lesbos. She and Bar had loved one another since they were girls, and she had been unable to imagine any other sort of love between women.
But now she saw it in Miss Lake’s eyes. Miss Lake would have liked to arrange her breasts and pin on the gauze. The idea didn’t offend her, neither did it excite her. What it did do though was to make Miss Lake admirable. If she was not attracted to men, then all that worrying about finding a husband was gone.
The reappearance of Mme Manet stopped her line of thought in its tracks. ‘Z’ gentlemen are ready Mam’selle.’
Miss Lake left, giving Lu an approving nod. ‘You know that I don’t approve, but you do look splendid, absolutely.’
‘Please, Mam’selle, makes the body relaxed. Monsieur Lascelles has never seen the “Princess” except as the garment. Monsieur Ezzard wishes to show that here he has something which is soft and boneless, you understand? Yes, like that. Perfect. I like this very much, so that Monsieur Lascelles must like it also. It is sold, you see. Lascelles will have “Princess” on offer to special clients before the end of the summer.’
She pulled open the drapes, and at once the dressing room was transformed into a kind of small stage with mirrors on three sides. The fourth side was open to an audience of about a dozen. Lu kept Mme Manet’s pose as still as a statue, and looked into a space where there were no faces. There was a little flutter of female voices voicing approval, followed by a patter of clapping. She raised her eyes and met those of Miss Lake, who nodded almost imperceptibly. As Lu had argued with Ray, there was nothing immodest in revealing no more of herself than she would on Southsea beach. True to an extent, but bathing costumes do not have six satinized suspenders topped with six little bows.
M. Lascelles rose and made a little bow to Mr Ezzard, who said, ‘Well, Paul, what did I tell you?’
‘Aah… this is the one, Jacob. This is the break with traditional styles that the modern young women do not yet know that they want, but will know that they must have it as soon as they see it.’
They walked towards Lu, followed by a group of Lascelles ladies. They all walked round her, looking at every inch, every curve, every seam and bow. She might have been a window dummy. Although the men, when discussing detail, outlined seams to within an inch of her body, she was never touched.
She must have stood there for a full fifteen minutes. Eventually Mme Manet said, ‘Messieurs, may I take the model away?’ Without a glance in the direction of ‘the model’, M. Lascelles nodded. ‘Yes, yes. Then you come to my office and we will discuss with Monsieur Ezzard.’
Lu relaxed as the drapes were drawn across and the stage became a dressing room once again. ‘Miss Wilmott?’ Mme Manet threw a large peignoir around Lu.
‘Yes, Mr Ezzard?’
He drew the curtains a little apart. ‘Well done, Miss Wilmott: very well done indeed. I have come to the conclusion that in future every new style “Queenform” presents to the trade will be modelled by our own employees.’
‘Even the “Empress” and the “Grand Duchess”?’
For a moment he looked blank, then he smiled. ‘Perhaps Nellie Tuffnel for the “Grand Duchess”. I should have to think about “The Empress”.’
‘I have an aunt who is exactly that figure.’ You should smile more often, she thought.
‘My wife suggested that you would make a good model, and she has been proved right. She often is.’ You should be a little more human more often, she thought.
‘Cynthia, would you mind?’
Miss Lake appeared round the curtains and took up her seat again. ‘Cynthia, I should like Miss Wilmott to have something to take home, something with a Lascelles label, of course. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping her choose?’
‘Of course.’
‘Don’t be sparing, it won’t break the bank.’
Lu noticed the sour look Miss Lake gave him, but didn’t understand what it was for.
The dinner gown was so beautiful and so expensive that Lu could hardly bear the embarrassment of having chosen it. Equally, now that she had tried it on and imagined herself walking up the front steps of the Queen’s Hotel and then on into the officers’ mess, she could not bear the thought of letting it go.
‘I think the Ezzard accounts department can stand the shoes as well, don’t you? English shoes will never look right with a Lascelles gown. I’m sure Mr Ezzard won’t quibble.’
The gown was so dark a blue-green as to look almost black, until the light caught the weft of the fine fabric which was somehow compressed down its length into minute concertina pleats. This was a gown only for a youthful figure; one still held together without the aid of cortiel and bone. Anything but the sheerest of undergarments would show. The bodice was two pleated cups that became wide shoulder straps which met at the back then continued on down the pleats, expanding over the hips then contracting again to become a flaring fish-tail skirt. Although it was packed in folds of tissue and placed in an enormous Lascelles gown-box, the gown itself was so fine that it could have been rolled up and slipped into a handbag. Part of the gown’s appeal for Lu was its double life: on the hanger it looked nothing more than strings of crumpled cloth, but it was a chrysalis of a gown that turned into a wonderful butterfly on a woman’s figure.
She had never suspected gowns this beautiful existed anywhere but in films, and when it became hers it aroused in her memory that same emotion as the amazing diamond comet hair-slide that Peggy at The Bells at Southwick had spontaneously given her. Perhaps the surprisingly generous gift of a Lascelles gown was not quite as simple a gesture as Peggy’s had been. For a moment – a moment only it was true – she thought Mr Ezzard had looked at her with the same explicit interest that Miss Lake had done.
Cynthia Lake had been against this scheme to promote Lu as a model for several reasons, all of them to do with Lu’s welfare. Her talents were certainly being wasted in that factory, but for her to have agreed to consider this modelling work was no improvement. That the girl’s experience would be widened by the trip was all that could be said for it, but when it became obvious she was not going to be deterred, Cynthia Lake was forced to say that she would go along. Who could blame the girl; it must have seemed like a chance in a thousand, which of course it was, but not really the chance she would have wished upon a girl who had shown such promise.
On their return to Lampeter, Jacob Ezzard stopped his car outside the headmistress’s house, carried her bags into the sitting room and accepted her offer of a glass of whisky. He was well pleased with himself, all affability and cigar puffing, thanks for her help, and compliments about how well the girl had performed.
‘I know that you were against the idea, Cynthia, but you have to agree that the exercise was a success. I must use the girl again.’
‘No, Jacob.’
He was taken aback. He hadn’t even intended her to think that he was seriously asking her agreement. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said, no, don’t even consider it. Leave Louise Wilmott alone.’
‘I’m sorry, Cynthia, but I don’t like your tone. You might spend your days telling little girls what to do, but it doesn’t wash with me. What plans I have for my own employees are no concern of yours.’
‘But I make them my concern, and I shall continue to do so.’
‘Now you listen to me. I’ve taken girls into my factory that I would not consider were it not for your friendship with Alma. She likes to think she’s doing some good among the poor, and I don’t mind that. She has some very confused notions for a woman who has never worked in her life, or gone short of any creature comfort, and it pleases me to help salve her conscience. When I took on the Wilmott girl, I didn’t really have a vacancy – she came along weeks after the school-leaving intake – but to please you and Alma, I found one. The same with the girl who was involved in that incestuous affair. I used my influence to get training for her and found her a place in the factory. I haven’t minded too much – both girls have turned out to be good workers – but I will not have you meddling in company policy. If I decide that this girl will become attached to my sales department as a part-time model, then that is what she will be. I decide, not you… not Alma.’
‘Not so that you can go creeping along hotel corridors in the middle of the night.’
She had been sitting in her hotel room with the light out, smoking and watching the comings-and-goings of night-time Paris. No matter how careful, no one can move about perfectly quietly; certainly trying to creep quietly in a stiff moire dressing-gown is hardly possible. By the time Cynthia Lake had reached the door and opened it a crack, he had already started to walk away from the room occupied by Lu, obviously having thought better of it.
‘Sour grapes?’
‘Ha! Why would anyone suppose that I would want sexual attention from you?’
No backstreet church school teacher was going to intimidate Jacob Ezzard! ‘Because you don’t get it from anyone else?’
The gloves were off now.
‘A mile wide of the mark, Jacob.’ She looked at him with a steady gaze as she lit one of her colourful cigarettes. ‘Corridor creeping is unpleasant but minor. What isn’t minor is Mrs Barfoot and Pansy Morgan.’
He blenched but kept his head. ‘Mrs who?’
‘Oh, come along, Jacob. Let’s at least be straight. I know about that incident. You were on the Bench when she pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Pansy Morgan was pregnant and Mrs Barfoot tried to help her out of trouble. Five pounds Pansy paid, and all she got for it was blood poisoning.’
His expression hardened. ‘Make your point, Cynthia.’
‘You had no business sitting on the Barfoot case. Your brother made the girl pregnant and the five pounds came from Ezzard’s. You should have declared an interest and left the court. But you couldn’t, of course. Your colleagues would be most curious to know what possible connection there could be between a respected businessman and magistrate, and a backstreet abortionist.’
Jacob Ezzard burned with a sullen, silent anger. ‘You’re a bloody blackmailer!’
‘And your brother’s a bloody lecher. And you paid to clear up after him. Except that paying people off doesn’t clear it up. Pansy Morgan was her father’s only support. When she died, he was put in the workhouse.’
‘It would be a waste of time trying to bring the case back for a new hearing.’
‘Of course it would be a waste of time. But that wouldn’t be the point of it. The point of it would be that people will talk, and they aren’t merely going to say, Sour grapes, they’re going to say, No smoke without fire.’
‘You’re a blackmailer.’
‘You’ve already said that. Leave Louise Wilmott alone and do something about your brother.’
He tossed off the rest of the whisky. ‘I don’t know how you know, and I’m not admitting that there is anything to know, but this case was in the lower court months ago. If you thought that you could connect the good name of Ezzard with that business, why wait till now?’
‘Because I did not know. I’ve been visiting old Mr Morgan – he died recently. He blamed himself for not asking Pansy earlier why Ezzard’s had started paying her so well, and who gave her the money to go to Mrs Barfoot.’
‘Old men will say anything on their deathbeds.’
‘I know that. And your fellow magistrates will certainly come to that same conclusion.’
‘All this because I foolishly went along the corridor and stood outside the Wilmott girl’s room?’
‘All this because next time you might open the door, and there is no way I will stand by and see any more of my girls ruined at the hands of the Ezzard men.’
It wasn’t easy going into work and sitting at her machine after the extraordinary experience. But she did it and, on the first evening back, she went round to collect Eileen Grigg and go down town to have an ice-cream at Palccino’s.
Lu’s outings with Lena were usually arranged around Lena’s only two interests: films and food. They never really conversed, except in the way of questions by Lu and short, unembellished answers from Lena. The girls they worked with thought that Lu Wilmott was daft wasting her time on Lena. To them it seemed to be all one way, the benefit going to Lena. Lu couldn’t have explained, she could hardly do so to herself, except that there was a particular kind of peacefulness around Lena; she made no demands, except that Lu be there. Lena didn’t care whether Lu was making herself a copy of a skirt she had seen in Vogue, or that she had been away to Paris with Mr Ezzard. She would watch the first film and say, ‘That was good, wasn’t it?’ Eat her ice-cream and say, ‘I like choc ices, don’t you, Lu?’ Watch the big film and say, ‘I’m glad we chose this one.’ Buy her chips and scraps, and say, ‘See you tomorrow then, Lu.’
The visit to Palccino’s was out of their routine, but Lena wasn’t put out when Lu suggested going there to meet Bar out of work and walk home with her. ‘All right, then, we could have one of their ones with fresh strawberries and cream and a long spoon.’ Lu would have been interested to know how Lena came to have experienced the famous ‘Palccino’s Pink Specials’ already, but Lena was such a secretive person that to ask would be insensitive.
Bar hushed when she saw Lu and Lena waiting to be served, but she came over with her little notebook and pencil, smiling politely and asked what they would like to order. Before Lena even mentioned the ‘Pink Special’ she said, ‘You’re Lu’s other friend, aren’t you? So am I. We never been here together before, but we come to walk home with you. We want the strawberry one with a long spoon and I’m paying.’ For Lena, a long speech.
As Bar was writing down the order she whispered, ‘You’re Lena, aren’t you? You knew Lu a long time before I met her, so you’re her oldest friend.’
Lena nodded and sat back smiling. A Lena smile was a rare thing. When Bar returned with the tall confections, Lena said, ‘I shall see you every Sunday now. I got my own place. I always come in after church, sometimes I have a doughnut and cocoa if it’s a cold morning,’ then stopped the flow of information with a whole, red strawberry.
Lu and Lena had been going to the pictures for weeks now, but this was Lu’s first insight into the rest of Lena’s life. She had never liked to ask, because there was always the inhibiting memory of what Lena’s life had been before she had been taken away to the Home for Wayward Girls. As they wandered home along the pebble beach, Bar told Lena that she had left home because people never forgot that her pa was a gypsy.
Lena said, ‘That’s why I got away from Lampeter Street.’
Bar said, ‘You’re not a gypsy, are you?’
‘No, but everybody there knows about me having a bad baby with my brother.’
For long moments Lu didn’t know what to say, or whether she should say anything.
Bar handled it better. ‘That isn’t your fault, no more than my pa being a gypsy is mine.’
Lu couldn’t believe that she had been so deaf or blind to what had happened to Lena. ‘Lena, nobody knows anything about you having a baby. I didn’t know, and I lived in Lampeter Street. You went away to school, I know that, but nobody’s ever said anything about you having a baby. You know Lampeter Street, if anybody had known it would have been up and down the street in ten minutes.’
‘Miss Lake knows.’
‘Does she? Miss Lake? But she wouldn’t tell anybody, would she, not Miss Lake.’
‘The doctor knows, and Mrs Steiner. Mrs Steiner wanted it to be took away, but the vicar wouldn’t.’
‘You mean an abortion?’
‘Yes, Mrs Steiner said it would be better, but the vicar said it was criminal and a sin. Mr Ezzard knows. He got me away from the first place after they took the baby for adoption, and got me into a home where they teaches girls how to earn a living.’
‘But Lena, honestly, nobody has the slightest idea about all this. That day when you came back – if anybody had known, it would have been all round the factory.’
‘They must know. Didn’t you know?’
‘No.’
‘I wondered why you never said anything. Why do they give me the cold shoulder at the fact’ry if it isn’t because of the bad baby?’
‘You don’t speak to them.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t, would I?’
Bar said, ‘There isn’t any babies that are bad. Babies can’t be.’
‘Mine was. It’s because of incest. Do you know what that is? It’s because our Brian was always fuckin’ me.’ She breathed several heavy, puffing breaths down her nostrils. ‘Yes. He did. Yes… She was a little girl. I wanted to see her, but the nurse said, No, she has to go straight away to a good home. I said, Just let me see her, but she said, No, it won’t do no good, she has to go to a good Christian family where she won’t know she was born bad.’
Suddenly rage, like a great enveloping wave, swept over Lu, almost taking her breath away. Her emotions and her mind were in a state of agitation, yet it was in her body that she seemed to feel the greatest disorder. Her heart palpitated unevenly, her pulse raced and she felt quite terrified. She picked up pebbles and began smashing them down with all her strength, embedding them in a strand of soft sand.
When she came to her senses, she realized that the other two were standing quietly watching. Lena said, ‘What’s wrong, Lu?’
Lu went as close as she could, pushing her face into Lena’s as Lena used to do when they were little. ‘What’s wrong? What they did to you! That’s what’s wrong! They took you away and knocked the stuffing out of you. They took your baby away.’ She began to cry. ‘Bar’s right, there aren’t bad babies. Bad people.’ She clutched Lena’s shoulders. ‘Why didn’t you punch them in the teeth like you used to punch me? Why don’t you punch me now? People did that to you and when you came back all I did was take you to the pictures and buy ice-creams. Why don’t you wrestle me down in the dirt, Lena Grigg? I’d let you win.’
Bar prised Lu’s fingers from Lena’s shoulders and Lu stood, her arms hanging loose, mucus and tears streaming down her face as though she was a beaten five-year-old. ‘Here.’ Bar pushed a handkerchief at Lu. ‘Your nose is running.’
For a moment Lu looked at the handkerchief as though she had no idea what it was for; then she went down to the water’s edge and splashed her face with water. The other two came and sat on a ridge of stones beside her.
Lena asked a bit apprehensively, ‘You didn’t really want me to… did you?’
‘I don’t know, Lena. Maybe I did.’
Later, when Lu and Bar talked quietly in bed about what went on down on the beach, Bar said, ‘It wasn’t you crying and shouting like that, it was Lena. You know, like when a message gets sent through the voice of a seer. The spirit can’t talk so they make somebody else say it for them. She couldn’t talk properly until you got all that off her chest for her.’
That, coming from anyone else, Lu would have said was a lot of tosh, but coming from Bar it was the most reasonable explanation of something very strange.
When Lu had calmed down, Lena stopped speaking in her usual short, lifeless sentences and spoke to them naturally, almost fluently. ‘Hitting people don’t do no good, Lu. First off when they shut me up in that place, I punched everybody who come near me. I was that angry that it was me shut up in there and… him whose fault it was didn’t have nothing done to him. I could have killed him… not just hit him, I’d have put a knife in him if he’d a been there. Instead, I just hit them. Anybody. They just hit me harder. The housemother had a little cane, she used to swish it across the backs of your legs. I didn’t care. They made the ones like me who caused all the trouble scrub out the lavs. That winter I had stripes on the backs of my legs and great chilblains. Some of us was sick all the time, but we didn’t care, we just said all right because then we could get miscarriages. I never seemed to matter.’
Bar said, ‘It must have been a strong little baby.’
‘I reckon so. She used to kick the living daylights out of me. It’s a queer thing, being kicked on your insides like that. You can feel the feet through your own skin. I started thinking that’s a person in there, and after that I never wanted to start a miscarriage. I used to call her Feet, and I used to say “Hello, Feet” and “Goodnight, Feet”, but not so anybody else could hear. I started being good then.’
Bar said, ‘It must be hard going through all that and having a baby, then it gets taken off you.’
Lu was thinking just that same thing, but couldn’t say so, in case it was the wrong thing, but Bar always knew what to say to make people feel better. Lu was no good at it, so people never knew how she felt.
‘They put me out to have the baby because her head got stuck. After, it’s like they took everything out from inside you and left you empty. That must sound daft, but I feels like this—’ she ran her hands down her plump torso – ‘is just like one of them cardboard eggs they have in the shops at Easter to put presents in. They look like they would be solid, but they’re hollow. Oh well.’ She gave a queer little smile. ‘That ice-cream I had down at Palccino’s has got lost in there already. I could do with a bag of chips and scraps. You can come in my place if you like, and I’ll make us a cup of tea.’
Lu never had any difficulty in hugging or squeezing Bar, but she couldn’t touch Lena; even though she would have liked to, she was too uncertain and inhibited. ‘Come on then,’ Bar said, and put her arm round Lena’s neck, and Lu wished for the hundredth time since she had known Bar that she knew how to be calm and kind like that instead of hot-headed and distant.
For a few days, Lu felt that she could, or should, never enjoy herself again. As soon as she found herself thinking back to the excitement of Paris, or forward to dressing up in all her splendour, she forced herself to draw back and feed herself some guilt about having had the good fortune not to be Eileen Grigg.
Bar settled in easily, and took a much greater share of the chores than Kenny had ever done. Sometimes, when Bar worked late on Saturday, and Lu was out with Sonia, Ray walked down town to meet her and they meandered back through the late-night markets. A couple of times he took her to a film and once to the theatre, but he never let their relationship be anything but friendly.
Ray had thought that there was no harm in them enjoying a bit of one another’s company. He still felt that she was far too young for him. And after the episode last Christmas at Roman’s, he decided they should have a platonic relationship.
Madrid – June 1935.
Dear Lu and Ray, In case you were wondering or worrying, it is true that there is trouble in Spain which to anyone outside must all seem very complicated, but I don’t go looking for trouble. Some trade-unionists here make the NUR look like the Mother’s Union, Ray.
When I started out on this ‘working-man’s grand tour’ I had a longing to see this country, as you know, but I never thought I’d be so caught up and inspired (yes, that’s the right word) by life in a republican country. I feel that I am my own man here. I love the place and the people, and would have no trouble in settling down here.
In some places there is no work to be had, in others there is plenty (labouring, of course, a lot of picking which is back-breaking) so we don’t fling our little earnings about, but keep as much as we can so that we can keep ourselves fed as we walk and walk and walk.
I wish I was better with words, or that I had a camera or could paint, but come to think of it none of them would do justice to any of the sights I am seeing daily – not all good, and some are pretty terrible, but all memorable. You have to be here, smell the place, feel the hot sun and the bitter winds, taste the tomatoes and wine, burn your throat with chilli peppers. Holiday-makers come here and sit on the shores of the Med, which is nice enough of course, but they miss what’s going on in the small towns.
I’ve learned to speak quite a mixture of languages – only words, my sentences make people laugh. But I shall get the hang of it, be sure. Hasta luego (see you later), Ken.
… Have just collected Lu’s letter. What is going on? What on earth did the aunts say to that, Lu? A journey from Paris to Espana, not bad for a lad from Lampeter Street. Hells-bells, our little Lu giving an opinion on the Impressionists. Now it only needs you to take the plunge, Ray. You’d never regret it.
‘Wouldn’t you just love to do that?’ she had asked Kate Roles. ‘Just pack your bags and be off?’
‘What? Go tramping off amongst foreigners? They eat horses. My dad was there in the Great War, he knows. You got itchy feet going off like that with the boss.’
When, in July, the day of the officers’ mess dance came, Lu had still not told Ray where she was going. Bar knew, and it was she who suggested that if Lu didn’t want him to ask a lot of questions, she should get ready round at Lena’s and get a taxicab from there. As once or twice a year factory girls were invited into the naval base to a dance, Ray wouldn’t think this any different.
After she had been to the public baths, Lu took her things to Eileen’s and got ready. Eileen sat, contentedly watching as Lu fastened her stocking to a tiny suspender belt. ‘An’t you going to wear nothing else except French knicks?’
‘It would show through. Anyway, the dress don’t need anything under it.’ Lu took out the Lascelles gown from its box.
‘Oh, Lu, I thought you was going to wear a ball-gown. It looks like it got into a hot wash by mistake.’
‘Just you wait and see. I’ve been waiting for this moment for weeks.’ She stepped into the simple arrangement of straps and pleats and slid her arms into the long sleeves. As she pulled the dress up, the concertina pleats moulded themselves around every dip and curve of her figure. ‘Is the back right, Lena?’
‘What there is of it.’
She arranged the straps correctly. ‘Well? What do you think?’ Lu tried to see herself in the only mirror Lena had, which was a small hanging one.
‘Don’t leave much to the imagination, Lu.’
Lu grinned. ‘I know, lovely isn’t it?’
‘It shows your figure off all right, but I wish you’d got one with a big skirt. That one clings tight round your bum – you won’t be able to sit down.’
‘I will, look, it stretches everywhere, that’s what’s so clever about it.’
‘Haven’t you got nothing to go round your shoulders?’
‘No, I don’t want to spoil it with any clutter, just my little bag.’
When she was finally ready, Lena ran down the road and called a taxicab. As it drew away, Lena stood on the pavement waving, smiling. Lena had started smiling lately. Occasionally she spoke to someone at work. About this same time of year it must have been, when Lu and Bar had been dervishing by The Swallitt Pool, Eileen’s grown-up brother had made her pregnant. Only a few years. It seemed hardly feasible that they could have become the people they now were in so short a time. Eileen’s brother and Ray were the same age. She felt a sudden flash of regret that she had been underhand with Ray. She decided to tell him, and that she was sorry. Then, as the taxicab turned off the sea-front and in through the gates of the Queen’s Hotel, she put Lampeter Street and everything connected with it out of her mind.
Several times over the past weeks she had wondered what she would do if she turned up and he didn’t. But he had come. As the porter ushered her, with her heart in her mouth, into the revolving doors, David, dashing and romantic in dinner-jacket, perfect shirt and bow-tie, stood up and came towards her.
Holding her by the shoulders, he kissed her lightly on both cheeks. ‘You came! I wondered whether you would, or whether you were one of those women who keep a fellow waiting half the evening.’
She smiled happily. ‘Is that what they do? It never occurred to me to be late.’
The interior of the hotel was even more splendid than she had imagined. She had glimpsed a mural, and a glass dome, and longed to look round and be overawed, but she sat – as she hoped elegantly – on a comfortable, upright padded chair with her legs drawn to one side as she had learned from years of watching how the stars did it in Hollywood films. She accepted a tipped cigarette from the slim gold case David held out. A waiter placed an ice-bucket at the side of the table and deep glasses alongside. ‘I took a chance on you liking dry: is that OK?’
Hoping that it was… It would be, whatever dry was like, she said, ‘Lovely.’ She had thought champagne glasses had to be flat, but these were deeper and held the fizz longer. David chinked her glass. ‘Here’s to it, whatever it is.’ He seemed to be enjoying himself and totally at ease, which he would be, of course. He must have been here before because he had said, ‘It’s not a bad place.’ She sipped the drink: dry must mean very fizzy or very sharp. It was certainly nice… most likely dry meant it dried your mouth. Tomorrow she would have to go down to the library and look up ‘champagne’.
‘I’ve quite taken a liking to this place.’ He looked around, giving Lu a chance to do likewise. There were archways, beyond which were glazed doors, through which lighted chandeliers shone. She knew that that was the dining room. It faced the sea; she had seen it from a distance scores of times; sometimes when the evenings were hot, the sea-facing French doors were opened and people could be seen sitting on the veranda; strains of music could be heard as far as the promenade. Until this minute, nothing except those strains of music had connected the people who inhabited that world to the one normally inhabited by Lu and people like her. Suddenly, like Paris, like the Lascelles store, it became part of the world she needed to inhabit. First she needed to get away – she had told herself that before; but it was time for her to begin to think seriously about how. ‘You said you knew it, have you stayed here?’
‘No, I’ve never stayed in Southsea at all.’
He refreshed their glasses. ‘Louise?’ She looked over her glass at the query attached to her name. ‘My name’s David Hatton, and I live in Kensington. Are you going to tell me anything, or will you continue being mysterious? I can only think that you are married or something. I don’t know what to make of you, except that you are extremely beautiful, tantalizingly enigmatic, and you obviously have a taste for Paris dresses. I had ordered a gardenia for you, but it would be sacrilegious to do anything to that line.’ He looked for a second at the pleated cups that supported her breasts.
‘I’d love a gardenia, I could pin it on my bag.’
He beckoned the bellboy, who brought the flower in a small shiny tray. It was Hollywood; real, romantic musical Hollywood. ‘You still haven’t answered my question. Will I go home tomorrow still not knowing who you are, or how to find you? It wouldn’t hurt you to tell me your name.’
It would. She would have this one evening, and let it end there. She wouldn’t be devastated, nor would her life be in ruins. She liked him, though, for similar reasons to why she liked Duke: neither of them appeared to take themselves particularly seriously. Both were totally different from all the other young men she went out with. Both inhabited worlds that were totally removed from her own. She laughed, making a joke of it: ‘I would tell you my second name if it wasn’t such a dull one.’
‘All right, at least that.’
‘Vera.’
‘Louise Vera. I have an Aunt Vera… You see, I’m more generous with my family secrets than you.’
‘David Hatton has a brother who is a tyke and an Aunt Vera. I could write a biography knowing that. I have your telephone number, I know your name. Trust me, I will keep in touch with you.’
‘Promise?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled at him and drank some more of the champagne, not knowing what else to do or say. ‘I love this.’
He leaned forward. ‘Fine and simple and expensive and understated, just like that piece of crumpled stuff you’re wrapped in to such effect. I can hardly wait to see how it moves when you’re dancing. Shall we go? I was going to order a car and driver because my car’s such a low one it doesn’t usually allow for ladies’ long skirts, but I’d like to drive there if it’s OK with you.’
‘I fold up as easily as a card-table.’
Had it really been Hollywood, then the car would probably have been white and long or black and shiny, but his wasn’t. It was what she might have guessed: a new, low, sporty two-seater with the roof folded back. ‘I’ll leave it down, there’s no wind… it’s not far.’
That was true; within five minutes of leaving the hotel they were getting out. She had been to wave her father’s ship off from the dockside, but not to this part, which was guarded by a naval patrol.
After the splendid hotel, the officers’ mess was a bit of a disappointment, but it was full of men in naval officers’ uniform and women wearing pretty summer dance dresses, and it was the best band Lu had heard in a long time. Almost as soon as they were in the door, David caught her round the waist and guided her on to the floor. After the dance, they stopped for drinks of fresh orange juice, soda and wine, which Lu thought a great improvement on the champagne, then danced again. When the dances were slow he held her close, his cheek against hers; when the band played jazz and ragtime they were self-satisfied at the pleasure they were getting from playing up to one another: they constantly caught one another’s eyes and smiled.
When the interval was announced, they followed the line of guests drifting into the room where a buffet was laid. It really was sumptuous, with every dish a decorated exhibition of the catering art. A few men with their partners came up and said, ‘David, a stranger… glad to see you’, or, ‘I say Hatton, old chap, where have you been lately? Nice to see you around. Must get together again.’ They were all young, informal and on first-name terms. He introduced Lu as ‘Louise Vear’.
It was easy-going and informal refreshment, and Lu loved it. People drifted in and out, to and fro; she and David took their plates and glasses to a small corner table. ‘OK, Miss Vear?’
‘Absolutely. The Navy does itself very well, doesn’t it?’
‘That’s a clue. Your people are obviously not Navy or you wouldn’t be surprised.’
Her people not Navy? An illegitimate daughter of an able seaman who had fallen in the drink not a hundred miles from here? Absolutely not from a naval family. Unperturbed by what she was thinking, she smiled and said jokingly, ‘Keep going, Holmes, you’re hot on the trail.’
There was only one incident in the entire, perfect evening that caused her a moment of panic, but she carried it off quite to her satisfaction. David had gone to the men’s room and came back with a grey-haired man showing the insignia of ship’s captain. ‘Louise, this is Arnold Gore, a distant cousin, wouldn’t you say that, Arnold? Something, something removed? Arnold, this is Louise Vear.’
‘I can see a family likeness,’ Lu said.
When the captain smiled it was with great charm. He took her hand and held on to it, caressing it slightly, as ladies’ men did. ‘We Gores are the respectable arm of the family. You’d do well to ditch David and tie up alongside me.’ He had a deep-throated, pleasant chuckle. ‘I watched you dancing. You do it beautifully.’ As she withdrew her hand he said, ‘I say, that’s nasty,’ and rubbed the ball of his thumb over the hard scar left by the machine needle. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘No. I don’t even notice.’
‘Accident?’
She withdrew her hand, holding the thumb in the palm of her other hand and saying lightly, ‘Yes, glass. I impaled myself on a long sliver of glass. Scarred for life, I expect.’ She wished he would go, but he was the type who would do his courteous duty by chatting to all the ladies. He was good at it. If he hadn’t alighted on this one topic, Lu could have enjoyed herself enormously watching him operate.
‘I’ll tell you something interesting about just such a thing. You know we have these same shore-base evenings for ratings ashore for a short turn-round? Young women of the town are invited – sorry, no, don’t mean “women of the town” – these are nice young girls from local families, they are chaperoned in, we give them a good evening, they dance with the ratings…’
She had been on such outings, had danced with the ratings and enjoyed the good food. Lu’s mouth dried. She sipped the fizzing orange and wine, appearing, as she hoped, unperturbed, perhaps a little bored.
‘I was doing my bit, saying my piece, you know… Anyhow, these young ladies were all from the same factory. They make shirts and shrouds or some such… and they had scars. Almost proud of them, one might say.’
‘They all had scars? What caused them?’
‘They sewed their hands with sewing machines. It appears they go so fast that they occasionally can’t stop, and zzzt! Pierced right through the finger. Quite often they have to take the machine apart to release them.’
‘Please, Arnold,’ David said, ‘do you mind? I shall pass out cold if you go on.’
‘Sorry, sorry, I suppose it is a bit… you know. I find these bits and pieces of information so very interesting… all these girls the same injury. It was a kind of sign that they had made it, like skiers – can’t be a real skier until you’ve broken a leg.’ He took Lu’s hand again. ‘Hope you’re not weak-kneed, like these young Hattons. Glad to see David enjoying himself for a change. Ah well, duty calls. Hope you’re enjoying it.’
‘Thank you, Captain Gore. It’s lovely.’
‘Arnold. Please.’
‘Sorry about that, Louise,’ David said when he had gone. ‘Nothing one can do about one’s family. I should have warned you, I suppose. Actually, the invitation came from him. He likes the family to see him in his glory. He’s OK, bit of a snob, terrible womanizer, too. I think I’ll get you safely away before he returns.’
She laughed, relieved that the captain had been more interested in the sound of his own voice than asking how a sliver of glass could penetrate a thumb. Glass sliced, it didn’t penetrate. ‘No need to worry, he’s really not my type. Maybe we should go, it must be late.’
‘Not yet. What time must you go? Where are you going? How will you get there? May I take you? Or is it pumpkins at midnight and once again I shall be left holding the crystal cigarette lighter?’
‘I like to use taxicabs when I can. If you would like to take me back to your hotel, I will get you to order me one from there.’
‘Shall we go now? Maybe we could have coffee or something.’
‘Lovely.’
He drove the short way back to the promenade, but instead of turning into the hotel gateway, he pulled up on the sea-front. ‘What’s up with the moon, it’s lurking behind that cloud, the only cloud by the look of it? I think we deserve one of those twinkling pathways across the sea. From here I should think one ought to be able to walk over to the Isle of Wight on it. Do you really want coffee now, or would you like a bit of a spin? Not far, just to get the wind in our hair.’
‘Let’s do that.’
‘I don’t know whether you know the road that goes over the Portsdown Hills from here…’
‘I know it.’
‘Have you ever seen it at night?’
‘No.’ That was absolutely true. Although she had been that way with Uncle Hec on more than one occasion, she had never been at night.
‘It’s a fantastic sight.’
He pulled the car off the road not far from the spot Uncle Hec had chosen six years before. ‘There! Isn’t that wonderful?’
Seen at night, the two sides of the dividing hill were perhaps as awesome as when she had first seen them on that spring morning. Far below on the seaward side, the plan of the town and its harbour was outlined by lights, on the land side there seemed to be endless dark.
‘There’s a rug back there if you’re chilly. Or…’ He put his arm about her and pulled her towards him, then laughed. ‘Damned bucket-seats. My brother won’t have sports cars, he says they’re more inhibiting than knicker elastic… I’m sorry, I don’t usually quote my brother, especially on his ways with women. Arnold Gore was right, you can’t take us Hattons anywhere. I only wanted to kiss you, nothing else.’
Lu held his face and did it for him. He obviously knew how to manage bucket-seats, for he enclosed her in his arms and kissed her firmly, with lips as warm as the hands that were caressing the bare skin of her back.
‘We could sit on the grass, there are binoculars in the glove box… probably not much use until the moon comes out, but we might see something.’ There were two large, soft tartan rugs which he dropped on to the grass a little way down the slope, away from the car. Then he pulled off his black tie, unfastened the neck stud and handed her the binoculars.
‘I can’t see a thing.’
‘That wheel adjusts the eye width, and this… brings it into focus.’ He had to sit very close to show her.
‘I see something. I think it – oh yes, there’s a boat moving. That’s marvellous.’
‘Now if I was my twin, I’d have thought to have a bottle and two glasses in the box. All I’ve got is chocolate and bananas.’
‘I love chocolate. Look, look, the moon’s coming out.’
The chocolate was like nothing Lu had ever tasted before: smooth, thin, crisp and bitter. ‘Mmm, I love it.’
‘Floris. My grandmother spoils me. Doesn’t let me go out unless I am provided for – iron rations for if I get shipwrecked.’
‘Is she a Gore or a Hatton?’
‘Both. And now I shall clam up until I know something sweet about your grandmother.’
‘There’s nothing…’
He stopped her with a long kiss, during which they somehow ended up prone and closely entangled, with him looking down at her now clearly lit by the moon. ‘My God you’re beautiful… so beautiful. Seriously, now, are you engaged to be married?’
‘No.’
‘Or married?’
‘No.’
‘Or… ah… are you in the process of divorce?’
‘No!’
‘OK, I didn’t suppose that you were, but it would answer why you won’t let me into your life just a little bit.’
‘I should have thought that this was being in my life.’
‘Not enough. Not enough by half.’ He picked up her left hand, the one with the two scars, and without looking at it took the thumb between his lips and held it there for a few seconds, perhaps apologizing for his cousin. ‘My grandmother believes in kissing things better. You’d make a good criminal, you wouldn’t give yourself away given the third degree.’
‘I won’t steal your cigarette case and cufflinks.’
‘You have no intention of being serious for two minutes together. I have it! You’re a nun. You lead this double life: a life of silent prayer by day, a Paris gown by night. You keep your habit and wimple in a woodsman’s hut and creep back into your cell in time for matins or whatever it is.’
‘What about the hair? Aren’t nuns shaven?’
‘Oh yes… the hair.’ He pushed his fingers into her hairline, parted his lips and hers, and kissed her again, making a shiver rise up and spill over her whole body like a fountain of the most delectable pleasure. ‘I really do want to meet you again. Please.’
She felt his weight beginning to press more heavily, the sensation of his masculine warmth raising her pores and hardening her nipples. The light scent of shaving cream, the slight suggestion of bristle when his face touched hers, the sound of his breath. She even imagined she could hear his heart, but perhaps it was her own.
She wanted to keep it like this, romantic and almost mystical, yet at the same time she longed to move on into reality where she would tell him the truth about herself. No, I’m not a nun by day, I’m a factory hand and I got this dress as a present from my boss for going to France and standing about in my underwear. Oh yes, the truth about herself.
The thought of him ever seeing her coming out of Ezzard’s was appalling. It would be better if they parted tonight, leaving her with a dried gardenia as a memento, as her mother had kept her father’s colourful postcards. Except that this was something entirely more glamorous than that. This was a romance, a romantic interlude. It was thrilling and wonderful.
When he slipped his hand into the pleated cup, she did not stop him, did not want to. The sensation, which started up within her pelvis, then coursed downwards and into her loins, and then back up inside her, quite taking her breath away, was overpowering. As they swallowed one another’s kisses, he moved one leg over her and she was pinned by its weight. She knew what she wanted, which was to feel the bare skin of her own thighs against his own, her naked hips touching his, her breasts pressed by his chest. She had never done this before, but she knew how to do it, all the other sexual arousals, sensations and climactic dreams were feeble substitutes. She wanted nothing now except that he penetrate her until she lost her virginity. She wanted to know the extreme sensation of going all the way.
Yet, even as she made the first movement of her legs, she panicked and pushed him away. Her whole body felt moist and slick, her dress and knickers clung to her body, her hair felt in disarray. She could scarcely breathe, and a voluptuous feeling of desire hung about tempting her.
‘Christ! I’m sorry.’ He threw himself on to his back and lay panting beside her.
Sitting up, she inhaled quietly, deeply, and felt senses begin to return. Then he too sat up. He turned a little away from her, then he turned back and again said, ‘I’m sorry… I …’ With unsteady hands he lit her cigarette, and for a long minute they sat in electric silence. ‘I’d say, Forgive me, except that I’m not sorry for wanting so much to fuck you.’
She drew on the cigarette, making it crackle and grow bright as she blushed. Men of her own class didn’t use the word fuck in front of women they respected. Yet it was the best and only way to describe what they both wanted.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to fuck a woman so much.’
‘I wanted to let you, but I…’
‘It’s all right.’ He looked closely at her, his fingers twisting a bunch of her hair round and round his fingers. ‘You’re so desirable.’
Lu felt that anything she said would be the wrong thing.
‘We’d better go.’
With mixed emotions she looked down the chalk escarpment that flattened out where houses and shops were. Where she belonged at the same time as not belonging. The houses by the sea followed the line of the shore; large, three-storey houses with names, trees, gardens, high brick walls and iron gates. The houses by the sea were owned by doctors, lawyers, high-ranking naval officers and people who appeared to do nothing except have enough money to live there. David belonged there. Lampeter Street lay further inland, in that area where the streetlights were in long, straight, close rows, unbroken by any tree.
‘Say something, Louise.’
‘When I was twelve years old, this was my road to Damascus.’
‘God spoke to you?’
She laughed quietly, and trod her cigarette into the short grass. ‘I was so full of myself, I felt like a dragonfly nymph about to burst its skin and take off into the blue.’
‘And did you?’
‘I think I did. This was my taking-off point. I had seen both sides of the hill.’
‘I guess you must live somewhere down there?’
She liked him too much to keep on playing that coy game, yet to be honest was to change everything, and she wasn’t ready to do that. ‘I don’t think we should meet again.’
‘Please.’
‘This has been the best evening of my life, but it wouldn’t be a good idea to keep it going.’
‘Then say you’ll telephone me.’
‘What is the point?’
‘The point is I just can’t leave it like this. Look, I’m usually at home on a Sunday, would you ring me there?’
‘I don’t know… maybe in a little while.’
‘Yes, please.’ He laughed gently. ‘My grandmother would think that’s pathetic. A mooning schoolboy, she’d call me.’
‘I’ll ring on the first Sunday in September, in the morning. Don’t say “Promise?” because I will do it.’
‘First Sunday, right! I will be there come hell or high water.’ He held open the car door.
‘Would you…?’
‘What? Ask.’
‘I’d love to drive your car.’
He didn’t hesitate, but picked her up and deposited her in the driving seat, then threw the rugs in the back. ‘She’s a roaring monster, and I shall absolutely love to see you controlling her.’
The controls were as simple as Ted’s pick-up, the great difference was in the engine capacity. Even so, she discovered that she could feel her way easily into the gears. She had never imagined an engine could be engaged so smoothly. She never doubted that she could drive it. She could and she did – not fast, but competently and enjoyably. She was aware of him sitting sideways on, watching her; she did not feel intimidated either by him or by the roaring car.
When she stepped out she said, ‘I’d love a car like this. I would fill it up to capacity and drive away and see where it took me.’ He looked puzzled; she knew that he must be. Then he would have to be puzzled.
Their goodnight kiss as he handed her into the taxicab was as gentle as the one with which he had greeted her earlier that evening. She let the driver draw away before she told him where to take her.
From the Queen’s Hotel to Lampeter Street. He probably thought she was an expensive street-walker.
In spite of Ray’s insistence that he was too old to think of Bar romantically, their relationship slowly evolved into that of a couple – not lovers, but people happy in each other’s company. When they took to occasional outings to the cinema, which Bar adored, the usherette would show them to back-row seats but Ray would press on to find seats in a safer position, cross his legs away from her, and keep his eyes firmly on the screen during love scenes.
Lu went to May and Ted’s only once during that summer. She had a good many things on her mind and, at the moment, Lampeter Street was not the place where she could think clearly. Certainly she felt very confused by Ray and Bar.
Bar not only loved Ray, she admired him, and Ray knew it and would not want to lose that admiration. But Ray was cautious, he had grown up having too many responsibilities. If he wasn’t careful, Bar would think he wasn’t interested in her. One thing Lu did know, he’d got it fixed in his mind that Bar was too young for him. He imagined people saying he was a cradle-snatcher. Against the concern that Ray and Bar would not get together was an equal concern that they would; they had more in common with each other than with her. She was changing, growing away, she could see it with every month that passed, not only from them, but it seemed from everyone who had been part of her life till now, except perhaps Gabriel Strawbridge, who had always treated her as an equal.
In the peaceful atmosphere at Roman’s Fields, Lu was able to tease at these tangled threads of her confusion and make some sense of herself. To make sense of her feelings towards David and the tangle of deception she had woven for herself, she told May about him. May, as always, was direct.
‘Do you want to see him again?’
‘I don’t know, sort of yes and no. If I was his sort, then yes, I would, but he’s a toff, Aunty May.’
‘When you call me Aunty, you’re usually trying to hide your real feelings.’
‘My real feelings are that he’s a toff and I’m a factory hand, and if he ever found out I’d be mortified.’
‘Well, he isn’t worth spending time on then, is he, Lu?’
‘I know what you’re getting at, but it’s not him, it’s me. He quite likely couldn’t be bothered if I’m Lu Wilmott or Princess Elizabeth, but because I’m not Princess Elizabeth I don’t want him to know who I am. Perhaps it is childish and shallow, but that’s how I feel.’
‘What are we wasting time talking about it for, then?’
For a while Lu went on sorting reusable bean-sticks from firewood. ‘Because I said I would telephone him.’
‘What for?’
‘Because I wouldn’t give him my address, and he wanted to keep in touch.’
‘That sounds like you’re keeping him on a piece of string to me. I must say I feel sorry for the poor chap. He must think something of you or he wouldn’t put up with all this secrecy.’
‘Aunty May! It isn’t like that.’
‘If it isn’t, then stop messing him about. When you do ring him you should say to him, That’s it, and finish, or be straight and tell him, and then see what he’s made of. There’s nothing to be ashamed of working for your living.’
‘He works for his living, too.’
‘What at?’
After a pause, Lu said, ‘I don’t know, but he has to travel. He’s got this lovely sports car.’
May’s ‘outspoken’ expression melted. ‘Cat burglar, d’you reckon?’
Lu beamed, as though May had stumbled on a truer perception of the situation. ‘And not a toff at all?’
‘Perhaps he thought you were, and played up to you?’
‘But he’s got a cousin who’s a naval captain.’
‘We’ve all got something other people are impressed by.’
Lu’s face fell again. ‘Oh? And what have I got that would impress anybody?’
May twisted binder-twine around a bundle of sticks, threw it on to the trailer, then stood looking at Lu. ‘You’ve got yourself, Lu Wilmott, a beautiful, well-read and intelligent woman. Anybody who isn’t impressed by that, isn’t worth knowing.’
‘Aunty May, you always knew how to make me feel good. I think I’ll telephone him at that number. I don’t really want to get serious about a man yet, do I? I still haven’t got my ticket for Xanadu.’
May’s love showed. She smiled. ‘Of course, if you really wanted to impress somebody, there’s always the Louise Wilmott loom-weight over there at the Alton museum.’ When Lu went back to Portsmouth, she was set in her mind about what she would say. Light-hearted, but firm. She was young; the way out of Pompey wasn’t by means of a man, no matter how exciting and intriguing. She regretted that they had not satisfied the sexual craving they had experienced that night, but in one way it was good, because now she knew how easy it was just to keep going, she would go back and see Mrs Steiner. When she thought seriously about it, she had really had a narrow escape; a second time she might not.
The next morning, when Lu arrived at work, the road outside the factory was thronging with women and girls, the gates locked. George Ezzard was trying to make himself heard as he nailed a notice to the gate. ‘Fire in boiler room. Closed until further notice.’
Kate Roles said, ‘They shut us out, Lu! We’re stood off.’
Lu said, ‘They treat us like bloody dirt!’
‘Language, language,’ Nellie said.
Lena Grigg, standing close to Lu, said, ‘Two girls dropped their scissors on Friday.’
Lu said, ‘Don’t be daft, Lena, dropping scissors don’t start a boiler-room fire.’
‘Don’t you be daft either, Lu Wilmott, bad luck’s bad luck and it comes in threes, anybody knows that. People don’t make these things up.’
George came out and, standing on a box, announced that the damage would take three days to put right. Until then everybody was laid off.
As Lu pushed her way towards him, she was suddenly struck by the notion that George Ezzard could not stand her. ‘That’s not fair. It’s not our fault your blinking boiler caught fire. We can’t afford to be stood off for three days. Who’s going to pay people’s rent and groceries?’
‘You, Wilmott, are a damned trouble-maker.’
‘That’s not fair either. I’m only saying I don’t see why we should be the losers if the machines stop.’
‘You think we should pay you lot to stop home enjoying yourselves?’
Somebody shouted, ‘I could be home enjoying myself at the wash-tub.’
George went on. ‘Money for not working, that’s a good one.’
Lu raised her voice. ‘But we will work. That’s what we’ve got out of bed and come here to do, only you’ve locked us out.’
‘You can’t work without machines.’
‘And you shouldn’t let the boiler break down.’
‘That’s all I’ve got to say. Factory’s closed until further notice!’
‘No!’ she shouted as he went to get down. ‘We kept our end of the bargain.’
Flicking her comment aside contemptuously and addressing the crowd, he said, ‘Well, Madam Wilmott, if you can find a clause in your contract says we got to pay you, then you’d best consult your solicitor and sue us.’ He jumped down and dived through the small door in the chained and bolted factory gate.
In the midst of all the noise, and an atmosphere tense with frustration and anger, Lu saw quite clearly that his contempt for their arguments had been directed at her. That riled her. Oh, this place! Why did she even care what happened? She turned on her mates. ‘You lot might be scared to speak up for yourselves, but you don’t have to let him insult you… It wasn’t just me he was jeering at – it was all of us. He knows they’ve got us where they want us… If they’ve got the upper hand, you don’t have to kiss it!’ Nobody wanted to go home, that seemed too final. No work, no money.
Once George had disappeared, there was really little point in hanging around the factory gates, but this they felt compelled to do.
Women waiting for no reason other than they were with others in the same boat. Three days. They calculated what debts they could ‘leave’ this week, and who must be paid, what would husbands and mothers say about a two-and-a-half-day pay-packet. It wasn’t that they were unused to being laid off. Regularly each summer they were sent on ‘holiday’ for a week or two when orders were short or the walls whitewashed or the engine dismantled and serviced. If there was a week off, they could draw six shillings from the dole office, but there was nothing for this sort of casual shut-down.
Kate and Lu, with a number of other girls from their floor, stood leaning, backs to the factory wall, face to the sun, smoking cigarettes and grumbling. Nellie joined them. ‘Any of you girls going to be in real trouble over this?’ Nellie would do her best to try to bail anyone out if things got really bad. She was as good as they came, and none of the girls would ever try to put one over on her. Nellie was their harsh task-master and their good fairy. She put them through the hoop for their own good, they knew that; slap-dash work was only thrown out, so they might as well do it right first go. The girls looked at one another and shook their heads.
Nellie said, ‘I was thinking to myself, only an idea, like. Maybe if we had a kind of “Sinking Fund”. Say we all put in a few pence a week. It’d be like the Doctor’s Club: you could get help from it when things got bad. It wouldn’t be a lot, and we’d have to work out how to do it. What do you think?’
What Lu thought was, why haven’t I suggested something like that? In her heart of hearts she knew why. She preferred Mr Matthews’ classroom theory of politics to its practice in the factory. She had grown up seeing what commitment to other people had meant to Ray. She went dancing and he went to union meetings. He didn’t know how to be frivolous.
Kate said, ‘I reckon it’s a good idea. I’d be in!’
Others said that they would too. A new machinist, a married woman, said, ‘If they was anything of employers, they’d set it up. You need somebody who knows what they’re doing handling other people’s money.’
Nellie said, ‘I was wondering about Lu.’
It was a good idea, but what they really needed was proper insurance. What she needed was not to be drawn into it, not to be asked to run the thing. All summer she had had the feeling that her time at Ezzard’s must soon come to an end. Something would happen, would present itself, as the Palccino’s job had to Bar. She’d already decided to use the three days off work in making up some winter remnants she had bought in the spring sales on Vera’s old sewing machine.
But first Nellie called to her. ‘We thought of getting up a delegation and going to ask Mr Ezzard if he didn’t ought to pay us something for being laid off. It has to be women who won’t suffer too much if he gives notice. There’s Rita Bell from the box-making room says she’d do it with me; she’s got her two sons working, and there’s only me and my Fred. Me and Rita are getting on, anyway. We thought we should ask one of you young ones. Katie would probably do it, her dad’s in a good job and Katie’s going to leave anyway when she gets married, but you know Katie, you never know what she’ll say next and she’s got quite cocky since she got that engagement ring. We don’t hardly like to ask you, but you’ve got the gift of the gab, Lu. I mean, the rest of us’d be struck dumb and peeing our pants at having to go off abroad like you did.’
Jacob Ezzard may well have been surprised by Lu’s telephone call to his office – surprised enough to agree to see them. Word had got about, so that when the three of them arrived at the office entrance, quite a crowd had gathered.
Because of her gift of the gab, Lu was elected spokeswoman. Mr Ezzard’s face was expressionless; it was difficult to believe that this was the same person who had been so affable and generous a few weeks ago. ‘Well, Wilmott, if you have something to say, get on with it. My time’s money.’
‘Well, Mr Ezzard, so’s ours, and that’s why we’re here. We can’t afford to be stood off. Three days is nearly half our money.’
‘You don’t think I want the factory closed, do you? Three days is half a week’s output.’
‘But we haven’t got insurance, Mr Ezzard.’
His face darkened at the accurate point of her argument. ‘What do you expect me to do? Give you three days’ holiday and pay you all for hanging around in the streets?’ He indicated that he was aware that there was a crowd below.
‘No, Mr Ezzard, but we think it might be fair if you did pay something. After all, we all turned up for work. Nobody wants to hang around in the streets.’
His eyes slid to Nellie and Rita. ‘You’ve been working at Ezzard’s for a long time.’
‘Since we were girls, Mr Ezzard.’
‘Would you say that conditions are better now?’
Nellie and Rita looked at one another.
‘It was treadles when you started, and now the entire work is mechanized. These days girls can turn out the kind of piecework you could only have dreamed of. Right?’ Rita nodded. ‘And you got us that new glue that didn’t get on our chests. That made a difference.’
He changed tack, became patronizing. ‘I’ve made huge investments in bringing “Queenform” up to date. Where do you think the money came from? Come on, Nellie, where?’
‘The bank?’
‘But how did it get into the bank?’
Lu jumped in. ‘Capital investment. Profits set aside for the purpose.’
He engaged her eyes dominantly, but she would not back off her own gaze. ‘Which have to be earned.’
‘And which we all have a hand in earning, Mr Ezzard.’ She was impeccably polite.
‘And which with a three-day shut-down for repairs are not likely to increase, and will certainly not allow for a pay-out for non-productive factory hands. No. The answer is no. The gates will be unlocked on Thursday morning and there’ll be overtime working until Saturday evening ten o’clock. Plenty of opportunity for making up for lost time.’
Before Lu could add anything, Nellie took over. ‘Thank you for seeing us, Mr Ezzard. Will you put a notice up to that effect?’
‘All right, why not? I’ll get George to see to it.’
As the three were leaving, he did his usual trick of making a parting shot. ‘I would have said that you were perhaps three of “Queenform’s” most reliable employees, not at all the hot-heads who want to upset the status quo with unions and conditions of work. I shouldn’t like to lose you.’
Lu could have spoken for herself, but not for the two older women.
Outside there was a great deal of jeering up at the office windows. Some stones were thrown, only one of which reached the offices; the others went through the barred windows of the ground-floor machine room where Nellie and Lu worked.
As she had promised, on the first Sunday in September, Lu rang the number David had given her. A woman with a London accent answered, Lu asked if David Hatton was there.
‘I’m sorry, no.’
‘He was expecting me to call.’
‘Was he? May I ask who is calling?’
There was a beat of pause before she answered. ‘He won’t know me except as Louise… he was expecting me to call.’
‘I see. Could you hold on for a moment, please?’
Lu heard her saying something with her hand held over the mouthpiece, then it cleared. ‘Lady Margaret will speak with you.’
‘Who?’
‘Lady Gore-Hatton, Mr Hatton’s grandmother.’
‘Hello.’ The voice was loud, the manner imperious and tetchy. ‘Who is that?’
In Lu’s terms the voice was top-drawer, cut-glass, posh, and associated with arrogant authority. Her instinct was to put down the receiver but she managed to stammer out, ‘Can I speak to David, please?’
‘No, I am afraid that you may not.’
‘Well… ah …’ She slammed the earpiece into its clip and left the call-box blushing and confused, then went into one of the many little cafes in the Lampeter area that opened despite it being Sunday. There she sat and drank tea until she had got over the shock of that voice, that title. He had said, hadn’t he? ‘My grandmother is called Vera.’ Not with an accent like that, she wasn’t. Lu felt extremely foolish and naive. Lascelles gown or not, he had probably seen right through her. Embarrassment at her silly deception was replaced by indignation at his more serious one of not being there on the day she had arranged to telephone him. She left the cafe feeling quite justified at having crashed the earpiece into the holder.
Miss Lake wanted to hear from Lu about the delegation. ‘Mr Ezzard’s a hard and proud man, Lu; he’s not going to forgive three women trying to tell him what he should do.’
‘He can do what he likes. It’s time I left there. If I just knew what to do, I would be gone in a flash.’
‘Well, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t fly off for the moment. Did you know that Eileen Grigg’s brother is home on leave?’
Lu’s heart sank. Not now! She had quite enough on her plate just now, thank you very much. She felt irritable and put upon. She wanted to say, What’s it got to do with me?
She would stay, of course. If Lena wasn’t exactly a friend in the same way that Bar and Katie were, she and Lu were part of one another’s lives, and if Lena had taken some things for granted, it had been Lu herself who had been the intruder into Lena’s world which, until Lu had persuaded her to go to the pictures, had been self-contained.
‘OK, I will. Is he much of a threat to her these days?’
‘Lena still thinks so.’
‘Yeah, well, it’d be a pity if she went back into her shell again.’ It was a habit of Lu’s when she was irritated with Miss Lake to revert to her old street-talk.
‘Don’t expect too much of her, Lu.’
‘I don’t expect nothing of her.’ Which wasn’t true, and Lu knew it; she still thought that somewhere inside the phlegmatic woman was the old Lena.
When Lu went round to Lena’s room the door was bolted and the key turned in the lock. It wasn’t opened until Lena was assured that Lu was alone. The normally spartan and tidy place was in a mess; Lena was sitting in bed, dressed, flicking through a pile of old magazines and drinking from a large bottle of cherry-red fizz. Her dull, toneless voice had returned. ‘He’s come back, Lu.’
‘I know. He’s not likely to come here, is he? He’ll be off round the pubs with his friends.’
‘He’s worst when he’s had a skinful. He’d think it was funny to bring them all round here.’
‘Do you want to come round with us until he goes back?’
‘No. I’m safer here. This is the top floor. He’d have to take a chopper to get through that door. If he did…’ From within the pile of assorted blankets she produced the type of thin, pointed knife used to bone out ham.
‘Eileen! That won’t do any good. Come and stop with us.’
‘My ways are queer, Lu. I wouldn’t fit in. It’s why I like my own place.’ Her own place was pathetic, but Lu supposed that after life with the Griggs and then time spent in various hostels, a little attic room with a key to its door was better. ‘When the factory starts again, you could walk home with me. Specially if we got to work extra shifts.’
The last of the summer visitors to the seaside had gone home. Palccino’s Ice Parlour turned to its winter role providing ‘Bacon Breakfasts and Hot Snacks All Day’ to workers and shoppers in the centre of town. Bar’s tips became less, but during the summer she had accumulated a tidy sum of money in a tin box.
Ken and his friends continued walking and working, sometimes stopping for weeks at a time in the same area, helping with the harvesting of olives, oranges, tomatoes and garlic bulbs. Sometimes, where a small bit of land was cropped by a family and could not stand the cost of extra labour, they would work for their food and a place to sleep. ‘You’d not recognize me now, Lu. I’ve got big and broad and brawny and brown (which goes down a treat with the girls).’ It was the day he mentioned Guadalajara in one of his letters that Lu truly began to feel resentful. It was one of the places she had claimed for herself, for her future away from Pompey. Guadalajara was one of the places that had hummed a siren song which had reached her ears in a classroom in the slum streets of Portsmouth. She grew even more envious of Ken’s carefree existence.
Ray too began to have moody silences. He seemed happy enough at times, especially when the three of them had been to a show in town, or when Lu had gone dancing in Southampton, and he and Bar had gone to the cinema, but many times he would sit after his meal staring at the newspaper but not reading it. Whatever it was that was going on in his mind clearly troubled him.
On the machine floor at the ‘Queenform’ factory, the windowpanes broken during the lock-out demonstration stayed broken. George said that they had a choice: give him the name of who did it, or have money docked to pay for the repairs. Nobody wanted to or could say, and nobody could afford to have money docked, so that those girls who were affected most by the draught wrapped themselves up in something extra where the cold hit most.
One evening after she had seen Lena safely locked up for the night, Lu returned home to be shocked at the sight of a gleaming car parked outside Number 110. David! Her stomach turned over. It was a new car, but a similar model. How could he possibly have tracked her down? It was Bar’s half day, so the light was on in the house and the curtains drawn; she must have invited him into the house. Lu didn’t know what to do, except to go back to Lena’s and wait there till he had gone. Wrapping her scarf round her head so that it partly covered her face, she turned and, head down, walked quickly in the direction from which she had just come.
When she reached the bread shop she caught a glimpse of Bar’s black hair with its red ribbons, so she stepped out into the road away from the light. As she did so, someone she hadn’t noticed waiting on the corner grabbed her elbow and pulled her back on to the pavement, holding her tightly and pinioning her arms. Duke Barney!
‘You’ll get yourself killed bucking away like that.’ She had not heard that half-mocking, half-insolent tone for months. He was smartly but unconventionally dressed in a roll-necked jumper and narrow trousers; she had seen such costume at the pictures on wealthy Brazilian cattle-ranchers. He still wore his hair tied in a club; pulled back from his face it emphasized his racial features. ‘I said I’d call round, didn’t I? Come on, I’ve come to take you up to see the Fire Boys Fair.’
Later, when she tried to recall that evening, she couldn’t remember much about what they had said to one another on that drive. Perhaps they had said nothing.
She got into his car, just as she was, wearing her work clothes, and they drove off to Heathfield, a small village twenty miles away. Surprisingly, he was a steady, slow driver, perhaps from years of travelling by the one horse-power of little mares like Pixie. The car smelt of new leather, and its engine performed perfectly. For Duke it would have to be a car to impress. Even when he had been a youth, he had never galloped any horse as Bar would do, but preferred to sit erect, composing himself into a noble image. She had seen him do it. It was the same with his driving; straight-backed, head erect, looking at the road ahead down his long nose. He didn’t mention the car, or how he came to be so prosperous. He didn’t need to, it would be sufficient for Duke to be seen as such. Lu did not want to know.
Although he behaved with authority, Lu sensed that he was not entirely at ease. She wondered whether what he required was for her to see that he had succeeded, that it should be herself in particular – having known him as a half-breed village boy gypsy – who should see that he had made Duke Barney into a man of substance. He had come to show off to her, much as he had that day in Swallitt Wood when he had dived into the pool.
He was certainly a very attractive man, but with something about him that was unknowable; he had that same mystical spirit that was part of Bar’s enigma. There was part of them that was difficult to understand. Perhaps they had been born with extra senses. Lu had felt that about Bar, and about her mother, Ann Carter, which was strange because you would have thought it would have come to them from their gypsy side. Duke’s unknowability was quite different from not knowing David Hatton. Her ignorance of David was because she had made the choice not to continue to see him. It wouldn’t be difficult to discover David if she chose. It would be a challenge to know what made Duke Barney tick.
She would never take up that challenge, for she felt that the more one knew about a person, the more one became bound to them. To love was worse, love dragged like an anchor on people’s lives. She had seen it everywhere. If Ray had not loved her and Ken and their mother he could have done as he pleased, as Ken had. Girls at work who had always been one of the bunch, free to do what they liked in their own time and with their own pocket money, free to dress as they pleased, wear their hair as they pleased, fell in love with the idea of falling in love and changed. They gave up everything that had made them who they were to become attached to their young man. Not only attached, they became part of him, his life became theirs and in a matter of months the carefree girl became weighted down by all the rules and traditions that went with falling in love.
But that did not mean that she wasn’t enjoying being here with Duke. Indeed not, she was elated.
After he had parked, they went along with the thronging crowds making their way through the narrow streets. As they passed street-hawkers, he bought bunches of balloons and flags on sticks and insisted that she carry them. He put coins into every collecting box. Taking her by the hand, he pushed a way through the crowds. He said hardly anything, but from time to time looked back at her with an amused expression. She felt that he might be daring her to protest, or pushing her to see whether she would show some curiosity. But she did not; she felt elated by the surprise and excitement at the dramatic change of scene. One minute she had been in dimly lit Lampeter Street, and almost the next she was part of a thronging crowd, marching bands, fife and drum troupes, tableaux, floats, decorated wagons and lorries, little girls dressed as fairies and princesses and little boys as Zulus and fire chiefs, all lit by flaring torches.
‘You ever been to the Fire Boys before?’
‘No, I thought it was just a carnival with fireworks.’
He nodded. ‘Come on, the bonfire’s down yonder meadow. I never miss the Fire Boys.’ She followed where he led, wondering as she went how had he travelled to this place on other occasions. Riding one of his horses bareback to sell or exchange with other horse traders perhaps? In a van like some of the travellers? She guessed that he wouldn’t have been so keen for her to have seen him then.
He had said earlier on, ‘I was waiting for Bar when she came out of work.’ How had he known where to find her? Perhaps he had been back to Wickham first to display his prosperity there. Bar wouldn’t have withheld her praise or curiosity as Lu had done. Then he’d said, ‘She’s found her right place. She belongs where she is. She’s happy all right, and she wants that brother of yours, don’t she? She wants to be married like house-living people.’
She wondered whether he would offer an opinion to Bar about herself. How did he see her? There were ways in which she and Duke were two of a kind. He would be wary of any display of emotion that would give another person a hold upon him, he too must think that he was separate, different and, she guessed, he recognized that in herself. What an admission. Wasn’t it Tess Durbeyfield who, although she thought herself less worthy of Angel Clare, knew herself to be more impassioned, cleverer and more beautiful than the worthier women? Not that Lu had any such humble thoughts of her own worth. Had she been here with David Hatton, his amiable conversation would have cut into her thoughts, but uncommunicative Duke left her thoughts to ramble on. Quite risky thoughts too.
In the field a bonfire was alight at one end of a roped-off lane, lined several rows deep with people whose faces were lit sporadically by coloured flares and silvery showers of fireworks’ sparkles. Standing at the end furthest from the bonfire, he confidently put an arm about her. How natural and friendly that seemed.
From the moment when they had set eyes on one another in Lampeter Street, mutual physical desire had flickered about them like an unseen St Elmo’s Fire. Her own eager libido was distracting. He did not make any other movement, yet she had a strong sensation that her whole body was enveloped by him. Taking his free hand she drew it into her coat and held it against her midriff, where there was bare flesh at a gap between skirt and top. He flexed his fingers upwards and found her breast. That contact effected a circuit.
They did not look at one another, but stood in total awareness of each other’s presence within the dense, noisy crowd which was illuminated redly by the raging bonfire. The stillest and most silent stimulation.
Suddenly he drew away, ranted off his hacking jacket, thrust it at her and dived into the crowd. When he reappeared, he was inside the roped-off lane with a group of men who were preparing to be Fire Boys by wrapping themselves in sacking aprons.
The climax of the Fire Boys Fair was a much-tempered twentieth-century version of what in the far distant past was possibly a rite of passage. Lu had, during one of her visits to Roman’s Fields, found a book about such rituals in Gabriel Strawbridge’s shelves. A man must prove himself fit for coupling – wasn’t that how it had been put? Bundles of straw, resin-smeared and bound into rolls, were set alight; young men carried these bare-handed, tossing them into a fire as an offering to a winter god. Lu felt almost breathless with anticipation. It was not difficult to make the connection between the crackling, burning symbols and male potency. Had Duke intended her to make another connection between this ritual and the one she and Bar had performed at Swallitt Pool? Water and Fire. This time it was she who was hidden but looking on. He must be aware of it, she was certain.
He ran, knowing how to control the dangerous burden. He was not intent on out-running other men, many of whom were pie-eyed from day-long drinking. Lu supposed that it was enough for him that he was part of the ancient masculine rite, and that she was there to see it. Having tossed his fiery offering into the heart of the fire, he returned to her, put on his jacket, and guided her out of the field.
By the feel of its bark she knew that this was an oak tree against which her back was pressed. Its solid trunk buttressed her against the pressure of Duke’s strong, lean body, making a trio of them. This was no suddenly awakened desire as it had been with David Hatton; this mysterious lust had been burning underground since the day when he had walked out on to the bent willow and dived into Swallitt Pool.
No preliminaries, except the swift, practised rolling of rubber. Body to body standing in the chilly woodland. ‘It’s what you wanted, and now you’ve got it.’
‘And I wanted this. Red hair, main thick. I watched you spinning round with Bar. Red hair, red hair, red hair everywhere. I was cross-threaded to see that.’
That day, ages ago… years ago. She hadn’t seen him watching, but she’d known that he was. She’d felt his presence, hadn’t wanted to cover herself – that would have been too childish.
‘You watched me, too. This is what you saw and you wanted it ever since.’
Not in the way he thought she had; her desire for him had been buried under newer desires, of which many were nothing to do with wanting Duke Barney to be her lover.
‘That Christmas, when I had supper at Roman’s, you’d a come with me if I’d a said half a word. We was both cross-threaded that time. You thought to see Eli Barney’s rag-ass youth, but I had grown to a man, and I didn’t look like no man you had ever seen. I know that… I know what I look like. Nobody ever forgets meeting Duke Barney, do they, Lu?’ He was mocking her with his voice, ‘Nor will you forget tonight, I’ll see to it you don’t,’ teasing her with his hands. ‘That Christmas, I thought you would have got yourself into a snooty college girl, but you was a woman working for her own keep. I could have had you then; you couldn’t take your eyes off me. I licked my lips a purpose to see what you’d do and you damned near come there and then. If I’d have sucked your finger when you touched my mouth you would have, you was that hot for me. Like now.’
‘I never knew a man as cock-sure as you, Duke Barney.’
He had pulled away, just his head and shoulders, as he tried to see her by the light of the moon and stars, his hips still pressed against hers, the smell of tar strongly about him. He laughed as he leaned back. ‘Buggered if you ever will again, Lu Wilmott.’
She was no more gentle than he, but her body was soft and rounded, so that the thrusting of her hips did not bruise; so she used her teeth and fingers.
For both of them standing against the oak tree, they tempted and teased, holding out against the moment when they must give in to – not a long-awaited love-making – but to fierce, vibrant, earthy lust. ‘This is what you wanted since you saw it showing itself off to you over at Swallitt Pool.’ He was manly, insecure, and needed to know that women wanted him… wanted it.
Often over the last year she had experienced panting, perspiring, erotic dreams. Duke, from an earlier existence in his faun guise. David, with his weight impressing the pleats of the Lascelles gown into her skin. Casual boyfriends who had kissed her. Miss Lake and other people who disappeared at the moment of waking up. Her need to be satisfied by real sex with a real man had been spreading in the way that a forest fire can burn below the surface of the soil, insidiously, until it can no longer be contained.
It seemed inevitable that it would be Duke who would turn up. When he did, it seemed inevitable that he would supply the oxygen that would set her afire.
‘I reckon you didn’t want to stand up for a man till I came and broke you.’
‘Think what you like, Duke Barney, but just stop talking like a horse-dealer trying to talk up your stock to the crowd.’
He laughed, pleased with himself, pleased with her. ‘There wasn’t never no doubt that we’d got a deal.’
When their moist skin came into contact Lu remembered vividly how white his youthful skin had been. Now as it touched her own it felt hot, and soft. He clutched her hips, lifted her, drew her hard against him whilst she held him tightly about his slim waist, responding instinctively. Easily, expertly perhaps, he moved into her. There was no virginal resistance, no momentary recoil. No hesitation. Mrs Steiner’s little device was in the box with her Saturday-night dance shoes, where it was least needed. But at least Duke Barney had come prepared.
What she and Duke were, each to the other, was the missing half of their sexual whole. No matter who or what she might pretend to be at other times, with her body in contact with Duke Barney’s, she was a sexual and lustful woman, and he would have found her no more desirable had she been dressed in the Lascelles gown.
Separately, using each other selfishly, they each strove to satisfy their own lust, but all the while aware that if they were going to experience the profound and supreme climax they expected, they must reach it simultaneously.
To extend the last moments they held one another still. Kissing, hardly breathing. Their bodies alive to every last spark of erotic anticipation before they let themselves go. Their senses were raw as they climbed to the peak of this most physical kind of dervishing. When they reached it, the extreme sensation was almost violent in its power. Not an encounter in any way spiritual, just elemental; lusty hunger being fed the sensation it craved; bodies of positive and negative force drawn by a primitive instinct neither of them questioned.
Their parting was as unceremonious as their meeting a few hours earlier. She let herself out of his car outside the corner shop. David Hatton would have been there holding it open, offering a hand to help her step out. Duke did at least casually walk round to her side, hands thrust into his trousers pockets.
‘Here, I got this for you.’
It felt like a small pebble wrapped in crumpled tissue paper.
‘What is it?’
‘Near as I could get to your birthstone. It’s not polished or set or anything, just its natural self as it was when it came out of the rock.’ His voice had a much gentler edge than earlier. ‘Just put it in your pocket. If it falls in the gutter you won’t find it again.’
‘My birthstone?’
‘Should be a moonstone, seeing as you was born to the summer solstice, but this is better.’
Lu, unable to contain her curiosity, carefully unrolled the ball of tissue paper in the light of the car’s big headlamps to reveal a piece of stone in which another stone swelled like a bubble. ‘I can see it’s not a moonstone. What is it?’
He came round to where she stood and leaned nonchalantly against the radiator grille. ‘It’s an opal – a black one, pretty rare.’
‘I know.’
‘It don’t signify nothing. It’s just that I had the chance to get it, so I did. I always knew I’d be down this way some time, so I kept it about me.’
‘But I can’t—’
‘You can. What would I do with it? It an’t any use to anybody else. In any case, it’s yours now. If you don’t want it, give it away… chuck it away if you like. It an’t mine now.’
‘It must be valuable.’
‘It is. Duke Barney don’t give away trash. Only remember, I said it don’t signify nothing.’
He was lying. It signified that he must have been thinking of her a lot more than she had been thinking of him, knew a lot more, remembered a lot more.
‘When I left home my pa give me his earring. He said, “Don’t be afraid to sell it, but sell it for something worth having. Don’t get sentimental over it: it’s only gold and there’s plenty more where that came from.”’
‘And did you sell it?’
‘’Course I did. When I bought my first stud, I had to put up a year’s rent for the stabling. I didn’t have enough, so I sold the earring. It fetched a good price too. Pa said I got a good deal on it.’
He went back to the driver’s side of his car, and started the engine. For a moment Lu wished that she loved him, or could fall in love with him. For a moment too she wished that she was going wherever he was going and not back home. She hurried along the pavement. The car drew away. The lights in the house were out. Ray and Bar had not waited up. A little way on he stopped the car and began to reverse. He stopped it beside her and, keeping the engine running, leaned over and wound down the window.
‘You don’t belong here. You should get out.’
He revved up the engine and was gone.
She sat for a short while on the front doorstep. Front doorsteps in Lampeter Street were as near as the people there would ever get to the seats on the balconies of the Southsea villas, a place to watch the world go by. She held the stone up to the gas-lamp outside Number 110. In the overnight case she had bought for the Bournemouth trip, she kept certain possessions that would go with her when she left home. Her journal – pages and pages of which were now filled with her clear, round handwriting – the sparkling diamond hair-slide which never failed to bring a great longing to her mood. She never knew what it was she longed for; perhaps that experience when, in the course of a few weeks, the whole world seemed to open up and spread and grow like a Chinese paper flower in water. Ann Carter’s pocket-piece: a strange item, containing a kind of power she did not believe in; yet she often sat holding it, rubbing her fingers over the smooth surface. The photo Ted had given her, the cross and chain that had been her mum’s. Not much else really.
Now she had this. This large and valuable piece of precious stone that Duke Barney said he had ‘kept about him’. She fingered its unusual surface. What made it precious? Rarity. No rarer than the ash pocket-piece which was unique. Her virginity was even more so. What did Duke Barney think of that? Only two men had aroused her to such heights of desire, the kind of passion where, for its duration, only that matters and nothing else. She could have given her virginity to either of them, it wouldn’t have mattered which, really. It just happened to be Duke. Another of those coincidences that had often exercised her mind: the what-ifs. What if she hadn’t hung up on Lady Margaret? Would David have thrust upon her a rare opal still embedded in its rock? A dark stone that had the power to flash out red fire? No, it was not David’s style, he would be more likely to give polished and set moonstones. How different they were, the two men who captured her imagination. Or were they? What did it matter, she had at last experienced real sex as she had always imagined it would be. It happened with Duke, and it had been a marvel.
Ray had taken Bar to the pictures, a romantic film full of laughter and tears, the kind of story Bar loved and wept at unashamedly. At a point where a baby had hovered between life and death, with tears streaming down her face, she had said, ‘Oh, that poor little mite.’ Ray had been quite unable to do anything but put his arm about her and let her cry on his shoulder until the baby recovered.
All the way back from town to Lampeter Street, he had kept his arm round her as she chattered away giving her own idiosyncratic view of the story. ‘I wouldn’t a let it get that far without doing something about it. Anybody could see that baby was bad. Keep trying to feed it milk like that was bound to make things worse… cool boiled water, that’s all it needed. People in films are so daft at times.’
Ray had let himself go as far as to press her to him and say, ‘I never knew anybody like you in my whole life, Barbara.’
Then, as she had done once before, Bar took the initiative and kissed him. A group of youths lounging outside the billiard hall whistled. Ray said, ‘They’re probably wondering what a pretty young girl is doing kissing an old bloke.’
She waved at the youths and called out, ‘It’s because I love him.’
‘You might think you do, but—’
She cut him short. ‘Ray, I can’t help it if you don’t love me, nor can you help it if you’re set on somebody older.’
‘It’s not—’
‘Let me finish. I know what the matter is. But I think if you just stopped for half a minute and tried to see things like they really are… Lu isn’t your baby sister no longer, she’s a grown woman. Duke knows that, he’ll treat her like a proper woman.’
‘I know she is, but it’s hard to accept, and I have to be honest, when you said she’d gone off with Duke. In her working clothes, too. It’s not like Lu to go off like that. I didn’t like it.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that. Anybody’d have thought he was the goat-king himself had carried her off.’ She was not far wrong. He didn’t reply. ‘The thing is, Ray, even if they was going off to do that sort of thing to each another, it’s their business.’
‘I’m still responsible for her.’
‘You’re not! You still wait up for her when she’s been to a dance – that’s treating her like a child. It’s time you let her go her own way.’
When they were back inside Number 110, she took his face between her hands and gave him a nice, comforting kiss. ‘I don’t know about me being too young for you, there’s times when I feel I’m your wise old grandmother.’ He put his arms round her, linked his hands in the small of her back and looked closely at her. ‘Are you sure about it? I couldn’t bear it if you went off me when my hair starts getting grey and you’re still young.’
‘There’s about the same difference between you and me as between your aunty at Roman’s and Mr Wilmott. She haven’t gone off of him.’
‘I do love you, Barbara. Really love you, and I know I shan’t ever love anybody else.’
‘Well, then… are you ready to go to bed with me?’
He really had no more strength to resist her. He no longer wanted to. It would be a long time before he could face up to what Lu might get up to with a man like Duke Barney but, in admitting to himself that she might get up to something, he was admitting to himself that she was now a woman. ‘Not in your bed.’
‘Of course not. It’s Lu’s bed, anyway.’
‘I wouldn’t want Lu to find us…’
‘Making love like grown-up people?’ She grinned and began unknotting his tie. ‘Best hurry up then.’
Ray’s bed was narrow, but they found as much delight in it as in a four-poster with a feather mattress strewn with rose petals. It would never have occurred to Ray that they might be better on the floor. So, predictably conventional, behind closed doors, curtains drawn, Ray made love to Bar. Man to woman. Lover to beloved. Gentle kisses. Happily satisfying. A real act of love. Not to be likened to the transaction between the other couple, hungrily taking of one another in the open air, instinctive, lustful, hedonistic, standing with the oak tree, joined at the hips.
As usual that winter, a general invitation was sent to the ‘Queenform’ girls to attend one of the buffet-suppers given to entertain the crew of a visiting ship. It came just at the right time to cheer them up a bit during the dark days. It was a star event for the Ezzard’s girls.
Kate Roles was full of it, all the girls were. Except Lu.
‘It’s only one step up from taking girls out on the bum-boats to entertain sailors like they do in the South Seas.’
‘Oh, shut up being such a Jonah. You’ve always wanted to come, I don’t know why you’re being like this.’
Now that she knew what she knew about David’s background, nothing would induce Lu to put herself in the way of an accidental meeting with Captain Gore.
‘Lu! You haven’t heard a word I said, have you? You’ve been in a right queer mood lately. You need taking out of yourself, you should come.’
‘No, I said I’ll go somewhere with Lena.’
‘I don’t know why she don’t come too. Always shut up on her own.’
‘Not everybody wants to be always gadding about like you and me.’
‘Yes, but it isn’t natural, the way she won’t go nowhere.’ Lu knew that Kate was right, but Kate didn’t know how afraid Lena was of her brother. Lu wished he would hurry up and sign on again. He had been home for weeks now.
Lena found some comfort in repeating that his money couldn’t last for ever, and then he’d have to sign on. But until he did, Lu and Bar did what they could to stop Lena becoming a total hermit when she wasn’t at work. Lena had said that she would go to a show with them, but she probably wouldn’t when it came to it.
Although he would have denied it as too daft for words, Ray was a bit resentful of Lu and Bar’s attention to Lena. ‘I can’t understand why you want to sit in a garret when you’ve got a nice comfortable place here.’ Bar had said, ‘She’s just a poor thing, Ray, how would you like it being shut up on your own?’ and Ray had said, ‘You’re too softhearted.’ Bar had answered back sharply, ‘What would you do then, let her get on with it?’
All around Lu, on the afternoon of the day of the dance at the base, were girls with their hair in pins and covered with scarves tied into turbans. Early in the evening, a coach from the naval base would arrive at the works gate to collect them, dressed, lipsticked and earringed, and looking vastly different from their daytime selves. What they loved most of all was the elaborate buffet, the politeness with which they were greeted by the sailors under the watchful eye of their officers, and the general air of being special for the one night.
‘I shan’t be able to eat a thing,’ Kate wailed. ‘I never can. I starve myself all day, and get that worked up that when I see all that lovely food, I can’t swallow it for excitement. And it’s a Yankee ship, too; they always have the best food.’
‘Rubbish,’ Lu said. ‘One dance with a jivey American sailor and you’ll love it.’
‘I know, it’s just the anticipation. Perhaps nobody will dance with me.’
‘Oh Kate! In your red dress and your hair all in ringlets, they won’t be able to resist you.’ On these occasions, Kate took infinite pains over her thick, blonde hair, keeping it rolled around sausages of cotton wool all day and then teasing it out into a thousand curls.
‘Would it look bad if I didn’t wear my engagement ring?’
Knowing what was expected of her friendship, Lu said, ‘Of course it wouldn’t. If I were you, I’d leave it at home. Then you’ll be sure you won’t lose it.’
‘You’re right, it is a bit loose. Only I wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea.’
They were talking quietly without looking up from their machines. Kate had taken out her cotton wool and had wrapped an artificial silk scarf loosely about her head. ‘Damn! The belt’s come off.’ As the belts deteriorated, they slackened: it was a common enough occurrence that Lu didn’t even look up. All machinists were adept at slipping the belt back on to the drive-wheel without the need to call the mechanic.
Suddenly, Kate let out a shriek of pain and horror. Lu was off her stool in a flash. Other girls fell over one another to get to Kate’s station as they realized that her scarf and hair were being twisted around the belt. Kate was screaming and holding on to her hair like grim death. Lu jumped over her own table to get to the belt and help Kate hold on to her hair.
George rushed out. ‘Turn it off… turn off the power,’ Lu yelled.
But there was no power-switch on the factory floor. The belts were power-driven from the basement, and it was only there that the power could be cut.
Nellie thrust scissors into Lu’s hand. Without knowing how she managed it without the scissors being flicked out of her hands by the belt, Lu sliced through the mass of Kate’s yellow-blonde hair which was fast becoming saturated with blood. The belt slapped on and on, free now to take a great bundle of Kate’s hair with it. The security man had run downstairs to get the power turned off there, but it was a bit late now.
Kate fainted, blood running down her face and dripping on to her apron. Lu caught her as she fell and they lowered her to the floor. Lu became almost as bloodied as Kate herself.
Nellie shouted for someone to fetch a bowl of water. There was a general unhelpful move by some of the girls. Others stood around helplessly. There was nothing to fetch it in. ‘Isn’t there a bowl in this whole shop, George?’ George watched the growing pool of blood as Lu made an effort to bind the wound with her apron. Nellie shouted at George, ‘Move, you useless article! Get that fruit-bowl thing from your office. Bring your brandy bottle, and tie up that dog!’ Nobody had ever heard Nellie speak so harshly, or seen George move so fast.
George sloshed brandy into a teacup and held it to Kate’s white lips. ‘Come on, sweetheart, come on,’ he said, shocked into gentleness. ‘Take a sip of this. Go on, just a sip, Katy love, that’s my girl. Good girl, good girl.’ When she pushed the cup away, George drank it himself. He looked as though he needed it.
‘We’ll have to get her to the hospital,’ Lu said.
‘No, I’ll be all right.’ She trembled violently, then grew cold and clammy, beads of sweat formed on her brow and upper lip. She became deathly pale. ‘I couldn’t help it, the hair-slide broke and it all fell down.’ She began to cry, then, when she caught sight of Lu, who seemed to have blood everywhere, she collapsed again into a dead faint.
Lu said, ‘Get her to your office, George. Phone for an ambulance.’
‘I can’t, there’s no outside line down here.’
Lu flew out of the factory. Taking no notice of the protests of Mr Ezzard’s secretary, she ran through the outer office and, without hesitation, opened Mr Ezzard’s door. ‘There’s been a terrible accident. Kate Roles’s hair caught in the driving belt and her scalp’s torn away from her head. She’s lost a lot of blood. You’ve got to get her to hospital.’
His secretary appeared at Lu’s side, waiting for instructions to throw her out, but Lu was a daunting and bloody sight.
He too seemed intimidated and, waving his secretary away, reached for a telephone and ordered his driver to take the car over to the ground-floor machine shop. ‘Go with her.’
Lu turned on her heel. ‘Thank you.’
It was only when she was pushing her way past the clerks and typists gaping at the astonishing scene that she realized how bloodstained she was.
The surgeon ordered Kate to be kept in hospital, and when Lu went to visit her that evening, Kate’s father and mother were already there. The ward sister said testily, ‘You can’t go in there – only two visitors at a time!’
Lu bore into her the same self-confident gaze that had made Mr Ezzard move. ‘I’m probably more concerned about my friend than you are, so you can be sure I won’t do anything to make her worse. I’ll be five minutes, that’s all.’
Before the sister could cite matron and hospital rules as higher authorities, Lu had walked on into the ward. Mrs Roles started back when Lu appeared round the curtain. ‘Only two visitors,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll go.’ Lu pressed her back down into the only visitor’s chair. ‘I shall only be a minute. I just wanted to see what they said.’
Tears welled in Kate’s eyes. Mrs Roles said, ‘Katie love, they never said it was definite.’ To Lu she said, ‘One of them said that her hair might not grow again… it wasn’t very tactful.’
‘I might as well be bald all over as just in a patch. And it hurts, Lu, you’ve got no idea how much your scalp can hurt.’
Mrs Roles said, ‘Don’t get worked up, Katie, it never does no good to work yourself up when you’re bad. It could a been worse.’
Mr Roles said angrily, but keeping his voice low, ‘Aye! If the scarf had a got round her neck she could a been throttled. They should a let that bloody sweatshop burn when it was going. If you had a union, the lawyers’d fight for compensation for an accident like this. I’d like to see him in court, but folk like us haven’t got that sort o’ brass.’ Mr Roles, like Ray, was a railwayman, and so could safely talk glibly about unions. He also came from the north, where people did not seem so prone to tugging their forelocks.
Surprising herself, Lu said, ‘I’m going to start one.’
Yes! It was as though the last digit in a coded sequence had been entered, tumblers fell into place, and the door to her subconscious swung open to reveal an idea almost ready-formed.
‘You’ll not work as a staymaker any more if you do.’
‘I know.’
‘You’ll be needing help.’
‘I know that too.’
‘You can count on me.’
After she left the hospital, Lu went round to Lena’s to see if she was all right. In the confusion she had forgotten her. Although her brother had not yet bothered her, she still waited for Lu to walk her back to her room after work. It was disappointing that she had returned to her old uncommunicative self just as she seemed to have begun to come out of her shell. Occasionally Bar would bring home a magazine left discarded by a Palccino’s customer, or the last of a box of biscuits which Mama had told her to take, and drop in with them to Lena’s room, staying there for a couple of hours. When Lu asked what they talked about when she wasn’t there, Bar said, ‘I don’t know. Nothing much. She likes me to tell her hand. It isn’t a good hand, so I read the good bits, which is that she’s good with her fingers and she’s got a strong lifeline. Actually, you don’t have to talk to Lena if you don’t want to, so it’s quite a nice change after being nice to customers all day long.’
What were they going to do about Lena, though? When Kenny had gone away to live his dream, he hadn’t had any Eileen Griggs or Bar Barneys or Kate Roleses to think about.
The spur-of-the-moment decision to try to start up a union caught fire. She felt certain she could do it. So, on the following evening, she went to call on Nellie, whose cooperation would be vital. Nellie, without her cap and large white apron, was quite transformed. Her hair was white and fluffy, and she was wearing a soft dress with a bar-brooch on the bosom, and a locket on a chain round her plump throat.
‘I called round at the hospital. Oh, poor Katie, she’s always been that proud of her hair. They used to call her Buttercup when she was little, but then you’d know going to the same school. Fred, this is Lu, one of my girls.’
‘Sit yourself down. You just caught us right, we’ve been to a meeting.’
‘That’s just what I’ve come about.’
Nellie smiled, ‘Not a Baptist meeting, though.’
‘No, a meeting to start a union.’
‘Do you know what you’d be taking on? I don’t know that it’s a job for an eighteen-year-old.’
‘I can do it.’
Nellie nodded thoughtfully. ‘I believe you can, Lu.’
Fred Tuffnel said, ‘Why not? It don’t take anything except a bit of guts and an ex-marine on the door to keep out any riff-raff.’
‘All right,’ Nellie said, ‘we’ll help. It’s time we got on an’ did something instead of hoping and praying.’
Seeing Nellie and her husband like that gave Lu heart.
A meeting was arranged in the greatest secrecy, and in secrecy too they were visited by a Mr Gus Greenfield, who already had experience of establishing a branch of the Garment Workers’ Union in the West Country. It was all a bit fraught having to organize it under the very noses of the Ezzards, and they were forced to distribute leaflets only on the day of the meeting. But Gus Greenfield seemed confident that, if it had worked in his part of the country, it would work anywhere.
It was March now, and although the evenings were getting lighter, it would be cold in the hall. Lu became ever more anxious and edgy. She knew their opponents well enough to understand that this was the only real chance they had of a shot; if it misfired there wouldn’t be a second. But if it worked… If it worked then tonight they would form a branch and sign up members, but from then on they would be forced to function under cover, because it was a dead certainty that anyone found having a paid-up card would be O-U-T, fast. They had no idea how many would turn up; all they could do was hope. It was an upstairs hall, so that with Fred TufFnel and Mr Roles, who knew just about everyone in the area, they felt fairly certain that they could keep an eye out for anybody who might be there to make trouble. They knew that it was bound to get back to the Ezzards after tonight, but hoped that enough people would turn up to feel that there was safety in numbers.
When Lu was still bothered about whether it was fair asking people to risk their jobs, Fred Tuflnel said, ‘It’s always been a fight between Them and Us. We have to fight.’
Nellie said, ‘When I was a girl, women didn’t have a vote – it all had to be fought for. In the end all the factories are going to have to let in the unions.’
Before Lu left for work that morning, Bar said that she would see if Lena was all right and then come on to the meeting. ‘You look as white as a sheet,’ she said to Lu. ‘You eat something before you go or you won’t be any good to anybody this evening.’
‘I already feel sick with fright, and that’s the truth. I told Ray not to come, I should feel worse knowing he was there.’
‘You’ll be all right. You’re good with words.’
‘I shan’t remember any of them if there’s a room full of people.’
‘Just fix your eyes on me and you’ll be all right. I shall be proud of you.’
‘What would I do without you, Bar?’
‘You’d stop eating altogether and drop down through a crack in the floor.’ There were times when she reminded Lu of little Bar as she had first seen her, carrying the tray of milk and Sunny Jim’s.
‘I don’t think I ever met anybody so contented with what they’ve got.’
‘That’s because I’ve got everything. I used to wish I could be like you and live in Portsmouth, and then my dream came true and I do.’
How could anyone have a dream to live out in this place? For Lu to live her dream there would need to be ancient olive groves and sunshine, or mountains with winding tracks leading to ancient walled cities, or a place like Paris or New York where the people were elegant and interesting. Her dream could be lived in any number of places – but not here. Not here in Pompey.
She’d have to leave to do that. This morning they had received a letter from Kenny. Although he didn’t write a lot about the threat to the new republic, it was worrying what was happening in Spain: the uprisings, the threat from the Fascist powers on its borders. Lu went almost daily into the public reading room of the library to see what she could find in the newspapers about the area in which Kenny was working. Worrying and inspirational. In Spain, long before the people took over, there must have been any number of small groups doing the sort of thing the Ezzard’s workers were doing. In one of Kenny’s letters he had said the most powerful nation in the world was the nation of workers. Lu had liked that. It was the kind of inspiring statement she had heard that time at Bournemouth, the kind of thing that cheered people up.
She knew, though, without it having to be spelt out, that she was about to reach some kind of peak, some crossroads; that the various threads of her life over the last seven or eight years were coming together and making some kind of significant pattern. But, for the time being she was too involved in what was going on day to day, minute to minute, to think about it.
One thing was for sure, though: she would be called to Mr Ezzard’s office and made to account for herself before she was sacked. Maybe she wouldn’t even be given that satisfaction, and would find herself being given her marching orders by George, or even shut out by the gateman.
Mr Tuffnel was already guarding the outer door and Mr Roles waiting with a collecting bag upstairs when Lu arrived. Mr Roles patted Lu’s back. ‘Good lass. We brought our Katie home today. She reckons she’s coming to the meeting, but it depends who gets top-side in the argument wi’ the missis.’ He smiled, proud of his two strong-minded women. ‘I’d back ower Kate. If she comes, she’ll have summat to say.’
By seven-fifteen, only about thirty of the seats were taken. Spread around the hall, this audience looked very sparse. Gus Greenfield arrived, his West Country voice assuring them that people would come. ‘Last minute. The fellers’ll be having a pint, and the maids putting on their faces. You won’t get none of the women who’ve had little childer.’
He handed her a cigarette straight from the packet, lit it with the match cupped as he would for a mate.
Soon the room was two-thirds full, then more and more people began streaming in. ‘You see, my gel, I told you it a be standing room only. When the time’s right for summat like this, it will go.’
And then they were on the platform. Gus Greenfield and Lu. She felt pale and sick, her throat was dry and her hands cold and clammy, and she knew if she should unclasp them they would tremble uncontrollably. Her stomach was rumbling horribly; she hoped the sound wouldn’t carry beyond the table.
Gus Greenfield said something formal. Lu tried to attend but she was thinking of what she had in her notes, at the same time scanning the audience for Nellie or Bar or anybody she knew; but without aprons and scarves tied round their hair, all the women seemed to be strangers. By the time she returned her attention to Mr Greenfield, he was getting towards the end of his remarks about the need for unity, about recognizing that labour and capital had equal value, and about the benefits of a unionized workforce to workers and management alike.
‘But this is not my show tonight. This is an inaugural meeting, the start of a new branch of the Garment Makers’ and Tailors’ Union…’
As Lu looked, more and more unknown faces became people she recognized. Workers from other factories, but who lived in the Lampeter area had come. They’d be saying, She’s only one of the Wilmotts. You know, her dad was that sailor who drowned, brother of him that drives the beer-lorry. Who the ’ell do she think she is? She wished she could run away, but she was trapped by her own cockiness now.
Then, at the side of the hall, she saw Bar’s familiar topknot of black hair tied with a red ribbon, and standing close beside her was Ray. She should have known he wouldn’t be able to stay away, was glad that he hadn’t. She spotted Nellie, standing as she did in the factory, arms folded across her large bosom. Then Miss Lake! Miss Lake winked… surely she had winked?
‘…and she is a local young woman, who knows the staymaking industry, having worked in it as a skilled machinist for several years. Miss Louise Wilmott.’ He turned to Lu and suddenly she was on her feet.
The voice she heard coming from her own mouth was amazingly clear, unbelievably confident as she said how glad she was that so many people had been willing to come and sit in a cold room on a Friday evening. ‘But we shouldn’t look upon it as giving up the picture-house or the pub, because we’re doing something for ourselves. We’re not here by permission of our bosses, we are here because we want to be, we need to be. We are here because many of us believe that it is high time the health-hazards, the long hours, the unpaid work, the shut-outs, the stand-offs and poor pay need to be talked about openly. There’s nothing shameful in expecting good, safe working conditions and honest payment.’
A burst of applause surprised her, and when she looked up from her notes, Kate Roles was taking a seat on the end of a row, bits of her buttercup hair ringleting from a silk scarf fastened by a diamante brooch covering her bandages.
Abandoning her prepared speech she said, ‘I was going to say all these things about wages and conditions, but I won’t, I’ll just tell you this story about a girl I went to school with, who works the machine next to mine. Let that say it for me.
‘In my time as a machinist I’ve seen the usual accidents, I’ve had a burnt arm and twice been run through by the needle. In the staymaking factories we say a needle through your finger shows you’ve served your apprenticeship, don’t we? But recently I saw an accident, one I shall never forget, and it’s that which has made me determined to get this union started.
‘If there’d been a safety-guard on the machine, this accident couldn’t have happened. If there had been an emergency switch, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But it did happen and it was bad and it happened because the bosses don’t bother about us. We’re not people, we are “hands”, just so many hands pushing hundreds of miles of elastic and cortiel through the machines.
‘The girl who had the accident is the same age as me. She is very pretty. She likes dancing, going to the pictures, and pretty clothes. She’s engaged to be married. She was just like all the rest of us. But not any longer, she isn’t.’
She looked at Kate and held her eyes, momentarily reliving that terrifying moment, the horror of it flowing into her voice and expression as she told the audience about the accident.
As they listened to the horrific tale, women and men shuddered, and men turned down the corners of their mouths squeamishly.
‘I’m proud of her, so should you be, because although she still wants her old job back, she’s here to support the start of our union branch.’ Lu indicated Kate, who stood up. Dressed to kill as she always was, thinner than when she went into hospital, but looking pretty and defiant, Kate walked forward, unfastening her scarf as she went dramatically to uncover her swathed bandages. Gus Greenfield gallantly helped her on to the raised platform, where she stood between him and Lu, facing the audience.
‘I haven’t got much to say, but I’m going to say what I’ve been thinking about laying there in hospital. This sort of thing happens because we are women, and because there’s a lot of unemployment. We get treated like dirt, and nobody cares if we lives or dies, just so long as there’s two women for every job. If I was a railway labourer got injured, I would have had a union solicitor to fight a case for me. Like Lu says, we women and girls are skilled workers, we deserve better treatment, but we won’t get it till we respect ourselves and make our bosses respect us. So join the union!’
Fifty members signed up that night. Fifty in an industry of twelve thousand. An industry that outdid the naval dockyards in contributing to the economy of the town. But fifty was good. Fifty was a start.
Wealthy industrialist and factory hand. The encounter between them was as inevitable as between Lu and Duke. There had been no ignominious shut-out by the gateman, no instant dismissal by George; Lu was, as she knew was fitting, to be dismissed by the managing director. A small triumph, an acknowledgement that what she – they – had done was significant.
The machines had stopped and all eyes were on her. Her mates knew she was for the high jump, and that this was no ordinary sacking. Nobody was fanciful enough to say that she was a contender in an unfair fight who had been forced to surrender, but as she shut down her machine and made her way slowly between the rows, touching girls on their shoulders as she passed by, that was not far from the general idea. As she walked through the factory knowing that this must be the last time, she was more filled with emotion than she would have believed, and she found it hard to hold back some tears. As she went through the big bay doors she did not look back. Her life as a factory girl was over. Every name, every voice, every position of every girl would be in her mind for ever. Set in aspic, domed in glass, they all would be a set-piece shelved in her memory, much as the loom-weight in the Alton museum. An appropriate label would be affixed: Machine room – Ezzard’s ‘Queenform’ Factory, Lampeter, Portsmouth, circa 1936.
In his office, Jacob Ezzard made no pretence at being occupied. He knew that she must be on her way to see him now; all he could do was sit and wait and try to ignore the effect this business was having on his selfpossession. He had never been able to understand how it came about that of all the hundreds of ‘Queenform’ factory girls, this one had made such an impression upon him.
Even now he could remember perfectly clearly how she had stood there on the day when she came to be set on. He hadn’t looked up at her, but had come to be aware that a contest was going on between them. She had stood it out, though, and when he had at last paid her some heed, he had thought that she meant to give him a reason for turning her down, yet there had been nothing… nothing at all to take exception to – the opposite, in fact.
Until now, she had never behaved less than well. Her best piecework figures had never been topped before or since. She came from the Wilmotts, one of the true staymaking families who had been in the business as long as the Ezzards. Had she been a man, then he would have had no hesitation in promoting her to foreman and most likely to a sector manager.
One thing he did have to thank God for: that he had not given in to the temptation on that visit to Lascelles in Paris. Perhaps it was best that she herself had given him this unquestionable reason for banishing her. There was not an employer in the whole city who would not do the same with such a trouble-maker. Even so, the reported success of her action had sent a cold chill through him. He was realist and intelligent enough to know that this could be the beginning of the end. Ideas had their time, and the idea that there should be some sort of accord between worker and employer was taking hold. Such ideas had struck at the foundations of the old order in Spain, then in France, and it was happening in a different way in Germany.
The details of the meeting had been given him by, of all people, his own wife. Cynthia Lake had attended the meeting, that was obvious. Alma had thought that she would have loved to have been there to listen to the thrilling speech Cynthia’s girl had made, and to see that other pretty girl mount the stage so dramatically. ‘Like some heroine, Jacob, all swathed in bandages.’ He sometimes wondered whether Alma’s apparent prattle was as ingenuous as she made out: she’d sprinkled that information cleverly into a whole serving of inconsequential gossip.
He had no choice but to get rid of her, and get her blacklisted in the city. Nellie Tuffnel and the Roles girl must go too, because they had presented themselves as obvious organizers. More than that was not necessary. He knew his workers, and this morning when he looked down upon them as they arrived, he had sensed their tension. He wanted no more trouble to upset production figures, especially now that they were getting enormous orders for the ‘Princess’ model. The dismissal of the three ring-leaders could stand for all the others he knew about. The Roles girl’s father had apparently threatened taking legal action, but he hadn’t a leg to stand on, or the money to go to law. The girl should have had her hair securely pinned.
Jacob had read an article that purported to prove in terms of production figures that a happy workforce produced higher profits. Well, he wouldn’t go that far. In his own experience workers jumped when you said jump, because if they did not, then they knew that there was always somebody prepared to jump in their stead. Still, he could institute a few improvements that would show he was prepared to move with the times, but not prepared to set a trend that would upset his fellow factory owners. The whole of history proved that no one kept the upper hand by showing weakness. But, he saw sense in providing a few chairs in the women’s lavatories, and an experienced rodent exterminator would do a lot better than George’s dog. Simple medical kits on the premises made sense. He had already decided that George must investigate some form of safety guard around the belt drives. If the scarf had been around that Roles girl’s neck, she could have been strangled by it.
They faced one another across his desk.
‘You are a very foolish and hot-headed young woman,’ Jacob Ezzard began. ‘You might have done very well for yourself at “Queenform”, instead of which you set yourself up as a spokesman for the rabble. You’re a troublemaker, and now there’s not an employer in the area who would let you through his factory gates. There is a blacklist, and you will find yourself at the top of it.’
She was not wearing her working clothes, but a street coat with side pockets into which she thrust her hands nonchalantly – he couldn’t help finding the gesture seductive. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘And of course, by the same token, there is a blacklist of bad employers, and you’ll be at the top of that. Do you really think you can stop us? You can’t.’
‘I’m sacking you.’
‘You can sack me, sack Nellie, and Kate Roles, but we’re like the Hydra: try to kill us off and twice as many others will come in and take our place. But you won’t know who they are. How will you know who holds a union card and who doesn’t? They’ll all be there, gathering in numbers. Then one day you will discover that “Queenform’s” got a hundred per cent union membership. Then the machines will go off and everybody will walk out and you will have to meet your employees and talk to them like human beings.’
She turned her back on him and walked out. He noticed that she wore high-heeled shoes and silk stockings. That was like cocking a snook.
When Lu and Kate and Nellie came to collect their wages the following Friday, there was what seemed to be a spontaneous large gathering of girls and women waiting outside the factory gates. Among them, Eileen Grigg took her place beside her best friend, knowing that she was no longer going to be able to rely on Lu now that she had been given the sack. They said how sparkling Lu seemed to be, more like she was off on another trip like the one she’d had to Lascelles. Lu was delighted at the unexpected show of solidarity. Kate shook her wage-packet. ‘Come on, I don’t know how much there’s here, but let’s blow it down the Pier Cafe.’
Lu said, ‘Yes, I’ll put mine to it. You coming, Nellie?’
Nellie, who knew that the gathering was not entirely spontaneous, said, ‘No, these dos are for girls, but I’ll put in my packet.’ The Pier Cafe was a favourite rendezvous for factory girls; they could sit for ages over pots of tea and plates of buns and doughnuts, gathering tables together to accommodate whatever number of girls assembled. So, in dozens, they crammed on to the passing trams and tumbled off laughing at the pier.
After half an hour, the initial hubbub quietened, and Kate Roles stood on a chair and told everyone to shut up. ‘I got something important to say, and now I’ve got the taste of spouting at meetings, it’s going to be hard to give it up. And I don’t intend to. I might be on the dole, but that won’t stop me going to all sorts of meetings and standing up and asking awkward questions. But that’s not why I’m perched up here where half of you can see my stocking tops. I’m up here because of you, Lu Wilmott.’
Lu, feeling intoxicated from the essential gaiety that groups of women exude when they are enjoying themselves and there are no men around, said, ‘Well, don’t blame me if you drop off your perch.’
‘Oh, dear, I said I wouldn’t cry. Here, Lu. We put together and got you this. It’s the dearest one we could find. There isn’t one of us here could make much use of one ourselves, but we know you will.’ Unceremoniously she thrust the highly decorated package at a surprised Lu.
Although they all knew what the package contained, they still crushed around to see Lu’s reaction when she opened the leaving present. In a world where electric irons, sets of picture table-mats and embroidered tablecloths were luxuries, this was the first of its kind. Lu let out a ‘Waah!’, Portsmouth’s own particular expression of shock and surprise. ‘A proper fountain pen!’
Lena said, ‘With a real gold nib.’
‘And my initial on it. I don’t know what to say.’
‘Go on,’ Kate said, ‘say it just the same. Come on, get up and show us your stocking tops too.’
Lu went one better than Kate and climbed on to a table. ‘This… is the nicest thing anybody could ever ask for. Not just the pen, but that’s just wonderful too, but all of you coming here like this. I said to Nellie that we had got to find a way of getting together and making sure what happened a week ago don’t get lost, and this is the perfect chance for me to start getting on to you.
‘Keeping the union going isn’t going to be easy. You can be sure every time somebody puts their head above the parapet, the bosses are going to try to shoot it off. This time it was Nellie, Kate and me got our heads shot off, but we knew it was sure to happen when we organized the meeting, and none of us regrets it. But what you have got to make sure is that nobody else loses their job because they joined the union.
‘The bosses have got their secret ways: you might not have heard of what goes on, but there’s a club called the Freemasons that practically runs the city, there’s businessmen’s clubs, there’s associations, they meet at golf clubs, sailing clubs, they have dinners, visit each other in their homes… They settle things amongst themselves, to suit themselves, and none of them thinks that’s wrong.
‘The only weapon girls and women like us have against all these societies the bosses have set up to look after their interests is ourselves. They need us, they can’t do without us. Even if they tell you: There’s plenty more where you came from, don’t go into a panic and start kissing their feet. Sticking together is what counts, and sticking together is what being in a union means. In our factory, we’ve done the worst bit, we’ve had a meeting and got it going.’ The young women looked at one another and nodded: they knew that they had done something important last Friday.
‘When Mr Ezzard called me into his office to tell me what he thought of me, I told him that there would come a day when every woman and girl in “Queenform” would hold a union card. Then one day, when there’s a shutdown, or somebody asks for a washbasin to be installed and you refuse, you’re going to see every woman in the factory get up from their machines and walk out through those gates.
‘He knew I was right. You could almost hear the cash register in his brain working out how much profit would go down the drain. They’ve done it in other places, in other trades – the mines, steelworkers, ship builders. Not because there was more jobs than men, they got their unions working because they saw the sense in sticking together and standing up to the bosses. Now, a lot of the men’s trades have got proper arrangements with union leaders to speak up for them—’
A young girl called out, ‘But you’re our leader aren’t you? If you go, who’s going to keep us together? Who’s going to take our subs and go to meetings and that?’
The room was now totally quiet. Others were nodding in agreement with the girl, as Lu looked around at a sea of wide eyes. ‘Listen,’ Lu said firmly. ‘I’m not your leader, I never was. I was just the one who got mad enough to start the ball rolling. You don’t need me. You’ve got each other, you’ve got all this strength and spirit. It’s what keeps us slogging away day after day in a place that’s hardly fit to be called a dungeon, and still able to keep tabs on where George’s hands are, and still able to see the funny side of things.
‘And the other thing none of us must ever forget – and it’s easy to forget it because nobody ever gives us credit for what we do, and we never get a certificate saying we passed anything – but we are skilled workers. It takes ages to learn how to do what we do at such speed. That’s part of the skill, the speed; we work so fast that you can hardly see the needle.’ She held up her damaged finger and thumb. ‘Too damned fast sometimes.’ They laughed, they reviewed their own scars, the tension dropped, Lu Wilmott was one of them.
‘We aren’t female “hands”, we aren’t “factory girls”, we are women workers employed in the staymaking industry for our skill and knowledge. And now we are Members of the respected Garment Makers’ and Tailors’ Union. We count for something.’
Somebody asked, ‘What you going to do, Lu?’
‘I don’t know. I’m blacklisted in the Portsmouth factories – not that that means much. Kate and I have had offers to go into the Co-op bespoke tailoring department. Kate might go, but I don’t know yet. And as far as Ezzard’s is concerned, it doesn’t matter, I’m finished there. All you need for now is to decide who is going to take on collecting the weekly subscriptions and keeping tabs on things. You’ll get help from people like Gus and my brother if you need it. But why should you: you’re as good as any of the men.’
‘Please, Lu.’ Lena held up her hand as though in school. ‘I’ll do it if you like.’
Lena. Lena Grigg, of all people, coming forward, offering herself in front of a room full of girls. Lena would be perfect. Conscientious and unlikely to allow defaulters to backslide.
‘I was always good at figures, wasn’t I, Lu?’
‘You were, Lena… She was. She was always near the top of the class.’ Lu grinned at Lena. ‘The times I could have thumped you for coming out top over me. I tell you what, I propose we make Eileen Grigg our… what? I don’t know. It’s going to be a Jack-of-all-trades job.’
‘Jill-of-all-trades,’ Kate said.
‘What shall I propose Lena as?’
‘I’ll be the “Queenform Union Representative”.’
‘Good!’ Lu said. ‘Then I propose Lena as Representative of the “Queenform” branch of the Garment Workers’ Union.’
Back home, Lu related what had taken place in the Pier Cafe. ‘Lena got up on a chair and made a little speech… can you imagine? She was wonderful. She said, “Anybody who don’t know me, I’m Lena Grigg, I’m Lu’s friend, and like she said, I’m a skilled machinist and I’m proud of that. I never owed nobody a penny piece, and I’m proud of that. If you don’t know me now, you soon will. I shan’t never try to collect money from you at Ezzard’s – I might look green, but I’m not a cabbage.” She was good, she made them laugh.’
Ray said, ‘It’s amazing what people can do.’
Bar said, ‘Not when it’s women, Ray, you shouldn’t never be amazed at anything women do. We can do anything when we puts our minds to it.’ She touched Ray on the back of the hand with one finger. Lu was astonished at how intimate the gesture was, and suddenly saw what she had been blind to: that Ray and Bar were openly in love. Bar continued, ‘Some of us can even get stiff-necked old railwaymen to propose to us.’
‘You and Ray?’
Ray flushed, actually flushed like a youth when he said, ‘That’s right, Lu, we’re going to get married.’
‘We’re going to have a baby.’
Bar and Ray were married quietly at the Register Office. May and Ann Carter had come down by train, and Chick Manners and Lu stood as witnesses. When the small celebration in Palccino’s was over, Lu collected her bag from Number 110, boarded the train with Ann and May, and went to Roman’s Fields where, as May put it, she would have time to sort herself out. It was one of the busiest times of year, so her labour was welcome there.
They were strange days, for although Lu was as fit as a fiddle and as strong as a horse, she sometimes had the feeling that she was once again recuperating after an illness. She reasoned that she must be gathering strength for whatever came next. Something was coming: she knew it, sensed it.
Sometimes in the late evening she would walk alone through the wood down to The Swallitt Pool, where she would sit on the bent willow and swish her toes in the still water. Inevitably she thought of Duke. She would hear a horse pass by in the lane and wonder what would happen if Duke were to show up there. Not that it was likely, for Duke now preferred to ride his thoroughbred motor car. Paid for, as Lu had learned from Ann Carter, by people who paid him very silly amounts of money to have their mares serviced by one of Duke’s two thoroughbred stud horses.
She felt a strange detachment about him. It was as if he was somebody interesting she had read about, a character in fiction or mythology. She had no particular wish to see him again. She had erotic dreams in which Duke and David became one lover, being at the same time both dark and fair, slim and broad, courteous and negligent. The one thing they had in common was a long, fast racing car which only she was allowed to drive.
During those weeks at Roman’s Fields, Lu was in limbo, gathering her wits and strength about her as well as building up her Post Office account. The outside world came in the form of Ken’s letters, which Ray sent on. These were to a great extent about the political situation in Spain and France.
Imagine, the Left has come to power here and there’s a Socialist coalition in France. I almost persuaded myself to go see how it is working there, except that I’ve begun to feel a great loyalty to this country and the people. For the first time in history the Spanish people have not got the Church and the monarchy on their back. But nobody is hiding their heads under the sand; the Fascists are at the gates and they have Hitler and Mussolini itching to try out their new armies and air forces in somebody else’s war.
But if only the working class back home could sniff the air of the true kind of democracy. Here is where Spaniards are citizens, not subjects, as we British are. In France, the new prime minister has ended the strikes – pay rises of twelve per cent! A forty-hour week! Two weeks’ paid holiday a year and free collective bargaining. Socialism and unions, Lu. I expect the Ezzards and their like are sweating bricks.
Ray and Bar’s baby was due in August. Not only was Ray behaving as though nothing like it had ever happened in the world before, but Mama Palccino and Lena were knitting and sewing enough small garments to set up a shop.
Lu, who loved driving Ted’s truck, took over the daily delivery of strawberries to the Portsmouth and Southampton depots. She started calling in at The Bells, where she was always greeted with great enthusiasm by Peg and Dick Briardale. They now had four children, of which they were both very proud, and another was on the way. Peg, who was now as plump as Dick, always joked that, ‘He’s trying to grow his own cricket team.’ Lu would sit with Peg and the children in the garden which, although it was quite as charming as it had been when she first saw it, seemed to have shrunk. But then so had the village, and the strawberry fields and the journey between Wickham and Portsmouth.
Two things had not changed, perhaps never could be changed. One was the panoramic view of Spithead and the Solent from the top of the Portsdown Hills. The other, Swallitt Woods and Pool, where serene nature and pagan mystery were still undisturbed.
When her deliveries coincided with the ‘Queenform’ dinner-break, Lu would drive round to the factory, taking a basket of fruit for her old workmates. There she would park, blocking the gates, and make several blasts on the horn, always hoping that one day Jacob Ezzard would want to drive through and would have to ask her to move. He never did, of course, it was a petty game, but she enjoyed it. He would know that she was there. Her skin was tanned and her hair lightened by the sun to a pale gold on top. She knew that she looked well and she took trouble to appear carefree and happy, even though, as the weeks went by, she became increasingly tense at not having resolved her future.
She still believed that her dream to go somewhere and be somebody was attainable, but could not see what move to make next. Life at Roman’s was mesmeric. She halfheartedly did a bit of French language with May, having some vague notion that she might ask M. Lascelles if he would take her. It wasn’t likely, given the Ezzard connection, but the idea fired her imagination. She imagined herself as a chic and stunning sales assistant, but she knew only too well that she would not last five minutes being ordered about by the kind of Parisian who patronized Lascelles’. French versions of a Lady Margaret Gore-Hatton.
She still thought of David Hatton quite often, and one day, when she and May were eating their midday sandwiches, she mentioned how much she’d liked him.
‘You should have persevered, Lu, told him the truth. You don’t want to take much notice of class… posh voices and cockroaches in the kitchen. You don’t need to apologize to anybody for being who you are.’
‘I know that. But how do you think the Gore-Hattons would treat me if they suddenly found out it was a factory girl David took to the dance in the officers’ mess? I’d die of shame. I made out I was one of them. I can “put it on” all right… I know a fish fork when I see one, I don’t look “common”, but I wouldn’t want to be questioned about the Wilmotts by that cousin of his, Captain Gore, or Lady Margaret – she sounded like the old queen looks.’
There is a low time at the end of the strawberry season, during which Lu spends whole afternoons alone in Swallitt Wood. Bar’s old cairn is still there, a bit toppled where a branch has fallen on to it, so Lu sets about rebuilding it. Sometimes she slips into the cool green water and floats lazily, watching the sun through the filtering willow and birch leaves. In the quiet solitude in and around the pool, she finds herself more and more thinking about her father. What was he like? It starts with thinking about herself and Duke, and then more generally about her tendency to act impetuously, her capacity for anger, her strong sexual desires. How is it that she has turned out to have such traits? Has she inherited them from him?
Stiff from having floated too long in the pool, she climbs out, stands on the flat dervishing stone where Bar showed her how to spin into a trance. Smiling at the sweet memories she has of those two young girls spinning their way to ecstasy, she spreads her arms and begins to revolve. She remembers how wonderful it felt then. At first the leaves quivering against the twinkling sun, the smooth green surface of the pool appearing and disappearing. She remembers Bar, a short girl with womanly hips and breasts. Don’t start raising your arms till the pool is all round you.
It was like that, when you were spinning fast enough: the pool became a shining blur.
Still smiling, she raises her arms, stretches them until she can temple her fingers. Trees, sun and pool become a cylinder of twinkling green, with herself whirling at the centre, twisting on the ball of her left foot, giving herself spinning impetus with the right.
Now she can see nothing except light, feel nothing except the air moving across her bare skin, hear nothing except her own shallow breathing.
But all that happens is that she gets giddy. Warm now, she slips on her clothes and makes her way back to Roman’s. The sky spirit has not sent a nice dream down the invisible thread. Perhaps it dealt only with girls, women have to find their own dreams.
She has at least decided where she should look for them.