It was late April 1928, and the 8.05 a.m. train to London, Fenchurch Street, was due to arrive at any minute. The Swain girls, however, still hadn’t appeared.
The commuters at Grays station kept looking at the large clock that hung above the platform. The sisters’ timing was unpredictable, but the manner of their entrance was consistent and could be summed up in one word: dramatic. The five girls, with their reddish hair and way-out clothes, would storm onto the main concourse, filling up the space with exuberance and excitement, like leaves whirling around in an autumn gale.
For the citizens of Grays, the Swain sisters were a daily distraction from the monotony of the commute, with one question always in their minds: what on earth would they be wearing today?
Like most girls of their age and class, the sisters made their own clothes, and they were rather good at it. Weekly ladies’ magazines would have patterns of the latest fashions from Paris – the Pictorial Review was their favourite – and the girls would pour over it, cutting out designs that took their fancy.
With all of them on London wages, the Swain sisters had the money to buy quite luxurious fabrics, and in the evenings the sewing machine they shared was never silent, although it was the source of much arguing. The main culprits were Dora and Bertha, who were particularly into their fashions, although as Dora only tended to wear navy or black – bright red lipstick was the only colour that was allowed to disturb her vision – the sisters couldn’t understand why she was bothering.
‘It doesn’t look any different from the last one you made,’ Bertha would complain.
To which Dora would retort: ‘What you don’t understand is class and style,’ which never failed to wind up Bertha, not least because the littlest sister had her own ideas about what constituted chic.
Bertha’s wild taste in colour had been apparent from a young age. For the whole of the 1927–1928 season she lived in her ‘technicolour dreamcoat’. A forerunner of the Second World War red and green plaid, her late-twenties coat was in the wraparound style that was fashionable at the time, and was constructed from large blocks of vivid velvets – oranges, reds and purples – that clashed rather effectively with her bright red hair. It was finished off with a sable collar that Bertha had funded from her first few weeks’ pay, working at the BBC.
What her sisters didn’t know was that their mother had let Bertha off from paying her full contribution to the housekeeping as a secret treat for bagging such a splendid job!
Eventually, the sisters arrived. Bertha’s coat had been left at home. Spring was lingering at the threshold, and the sisters were wearing either long cardigans or jackets over their silk shirts and pleated skirts – Alice’s was scandalously short, only just hitting the knee. This look was completed with a range of accessories: scarves, beads and corsages of fabric flowers. They were still all wearing their cloche hats and gloves and, according to the fashion of the time, their faces were powdered, with rouged cheeks, kohl-shadowed eyes and cupid bow lips. (Nanna persisted in reapplying her lipstick and powder right up until her eighty-ninth year. She would reach into her handbag, bring out her compact, and then start reapplying whatever she felt was lacking. It didn’t matter where she was or who was looking.)
Alice and Grace walked onto the platform, arm in arm and giggling; Katie trotted in after them; and then, following close behind, came Bertha, gliding. She had what can only be described as a ‘distinctive’ gait – the movement of her legs was barely perceptible, but her hips made up for it, swinging gently side to side like a boat rocked by a gentle ocean. Her left hand was poised, outstretched as if permanently checking to see if it was raining, and her smart crocodile handbag hung on her right arm, which was folded neatly across her waist. Bertha had spent many hours in the bedroom practising this effortless sashay. She would walk backwards and forwards with a book on her head, turning every so often to gaze at the effect in the mirror, much to the merriment and accompanying voiceover from Grace: ‘And here we have her Royal Shyness, Princess Bertha of Essex, glorious in her very loveliness.’
And then Alice would join in, singing a popular love song in the manner of Gertrude Lawrence, such as ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ or, when she ran out of inspiration, simply the National Anthem with adjusted words: ‘God bless our gracious B’ – until Bertha would either dissolve into giggles, which sent the book tumbling, or grab the book from her head and throw it at one of them.
Dora, as ever, was having to run to catch up. Grace turned round and shouted at her: ‘Get a wiggle on, Swainy!’
‘Swainy’ was the name that Dora’s admirers on the Grays to Fenchurch run had christened her, much to the amusement of her sisters.
As Dora trotted along the length of the platform, the train came level and then overtook her and came to a halt. The girls bounced up the steps into a carriage, and Grace hauled Dora in after them. She lowered her voice and whispered to her, ‘You spend far too long faffing with your hair, you do! You’ll get your wages docked again if you’re late. How will you get to the fair then?’
Dora wrestled her arm out of her sister’s grasp.
‘Oh, shut up! I don’t want to go to the fair, anyway.’
‘Ohhhh, get you! Did you hear that, Alice? Dora doesn’t want to go to the fair.’
‘Why ever not?’ Alice asked.
‘None of your beeswax,’ Dora snapped.
Alice and Grace rolled their eyes, pushed the tips of their noses up with their fingers and mouthed ‘Bluenose’ to each other, and then giggled. If Bertha was the princess of the family, then Dora was the queen.
But the girls did have something to be proud of. They had all found themselves jobs in prestigious establishments in London: Alice was working in the typing pool of a bank in the City, Grace was secretary to the boss of a famous hat company, Dora was a secretary in a patent office in Lincoln’s Inn, Katie worked as the secretary to an editor at the Daily Express in Fleet Street, and all of Bertha’s Christmases had come at once when she had got the job in the typing pool of the newsroom at the fledgling BBC.
Being a shorthand typist was glamorous in the 1920s. Women were only allowed into offices with the invention of typewriters and shorthand at the end of the 1800s. They were seen as more physiologically suited to typing and scribbling than men – a case of nimble fingers. Increasingly, clerical work got the reputation as being for sissies and so men withdrew and job opportunities opened up for women. Demand for these skills grew rapidly. At first it was only middle-class, grammar-school or university-educated women who could hope to get such a position (however mundane the job really was), but by the time the First World War had finished there were a few working-class girls entering into the hallowed sphere of the office. However, it was just a few. Secretarial college was expensive, and most people did not have the money to send one of their daughters to college, never mind five. And it wasn’t really working-class girls who went into offices – by the time they left college, they had been turned into polished, middle-class ladies.
It only took a week of Alice, Grace and Dora trotting off with great excitement to Pitman’s College in London for the change to be noticeable. As they sat down to their meal on Friday night, Charlie was struck by the way all three of them were sitting up straight as pins. This was extraordinary, as Dora’s stoop had been so bad as a child that Charlie had made her a back brace. ‘One bent child is enough,’ he had muttered under his breath as he strapped in a complaining Dora. Now they were all seated, hair neat, hands clean and folded on their laps, silently and patiently waiting for their supper.
Charlie asked: ‘Why do you look like a line of lampposts?’
Katie and Bertha giggled and Clara turned round from the stove and looked. He was right – they were seated beautifully.
‘It’s Miss Faber. She makes us walk backwards and forwards with the Encyclopaedia Britannica on our heads and if we drop it, she hits us with a ruler,’ Grace said.
The clerical colleges were really finishing schools with typing skills attached. The young ladies learnt how to answer the telephone properly, the right manners, deportment and how to dress appropriately. Miss Faber had eschewed marriage and dedicated her life to turning out a generation of accomplished, well-mannered and presentable young ladies who would quietly, efficiently and, most importantly, elegantly, run the nation’s offices.
Alice was haunted by a bruising encounter during an early shorthand lesson. Her attention had wandered to the thought of her trip to the cinema the night before with a certain boy … that is, until Miss Faber barked a question at her.
‘Miss Swain!’
Alice jumped. ‘What, miss?’
‘What? What? Kitchen maids say “what”.’
There was laughter around the class.
‘What does a young lady say?’
Alice felt herself overwhelmed with embarrassment. ‘Pardon?’
‘Pardon? Pardon? You belong on the stage of the music hall, Miss Swain, rather than in an office.’
Alice tended to agree, but kept quiet.
‘No, young ladies either say, “Excuse me, could you repeat that?” or, occasionally, if the relationship with the person you are in conversation with is less formal, it might be appropriate to say a simple “Sorry?” So, shall we start again?’
‘Yes, Miss Faber. Um … excuse me, please could you repeat that?’
‘Yes, Miss Swain.’ Miss Faber turned to address the room. ‘Remember, you will be mixing with authority, the top echelons of whatever establishment you are employed by, and as such you will be close to power. You will have a personal relationship with men at the very top. They have wives at home, but you will be their wife in the office – in fact, you will be spending more time with them than their own spouse. If you don’t please him, if he doesn’t feel comfortable with you, he will cast you off for a better model. Therefore, to protect your position, you must speak like his wife, you must look and act as if you are at her level, even if you are not. Otherwise, you will find yourself back scrubbing the floor of a tradesman’s kitchen.’ And she turned and looked pointedly at Alice. ‘It is the veneer.’
And then the lesson resumed, much to Alice’s relief.
If Miss Faber’s first impression of the Swain girls was one of alarm, they soon grew to be her favourite pupils. Their competitiveness with each other meant they picked up shorthand quickly and were top of the class for the number of words per minute that they could type. She liked the style of their red hair and unusual yet elegant clothes. She saw a great future for them.
But Miss Faber wasn’t the only enduring influence on the sisters. For the first time, they mingled with real middle-class girls. And, like chameleons, they learnt to imitate their ways. My Nanna made friends with a young rich Jewish girl from Hampstead called Hetty, and for years she would arrive at Bertha’s house with exotic presents for my mum and her brothers.
Clara watched with pride as her little cockney caterpillars turned into upmarket butterflies. Armed with top marks, excellent references and the best telephone manners, the sisters were able to go straight into the top rank of clerical jobs.
Like most things in Britain in the 1920s, there was a strict pecking order. There were the girls who went straight from school and learnt typewriting on the job. A cut above those were the girls proficient in typewriting and copying, who could be found in the better class of typing pools and businesses. And right at the top were the secretaries – those were girls with superior secondary and commercial qualifications, who worked as secretaries for one person. They had a very personal relationship with the boss, and were respected and courted as they held access to him. Power by proxy. They also answered his telephone and organised his diary. They were indeed the wife in the office.
It was Clara’s plan, come to fruition. Ten years before, when she had sat by the fire in Marlow waiting for Charlie to come home, this was exactly what she had dreamt of – to have all five of her girls in office jobs, all working in town, all with a chance of moving up and out of the hand-to-mouth existence she had grown up in. Of course, just a few decades later, Clara might have reached higher for her girls – grammar school and university and a leap into the middle class – but before the Second World War this really was as good as it got. And it was certainly a better life than her own. For many women, just to see their daughters step up the social ladder was a great achievement they would take pride in: it was enough.
But it was exactly at this moment of triumph that things started to become unstuck. In fact, that day late in April 1928, when the girls strode onto the station, was actually the last day when Clara appeared to have pulled it off – broken the spell, if you like – because, the next day was the day of Grays fair. And the day that Alice agreed to elope with Joseph Davidson. The wicked fairy had barged back into the christening and the whole fragile illusion that the spell had been broken was shattered by a wager made in front of the Mighty Striker.