By the next evening, Margaret felt she had lived a year instead of a day.
Far from the grilling with questions she had expected the next morning, her uncle and aunt asked nothing, were both very busy and seemed intent on keeping her and Annie busy all day as well.
That first morning she woke to the warm glow of light through the curtains, confused for a second by the sounds. In place of the quiet of home, broken only by the vociferous cockerel along the lane or the distant cows protesting, she could hear horses’ hooves and cartwheels from the street below, the ring of something metallic being dropped on the ground, clattering sounds and shouts and the tread of many pairs of feet.
It all came flooding back to her. She was not at home – she was here, in Birmingham. And she lay in the curtains’ light, red as if seeping through blood, thinking of her father, the pain of it all filling her once again.
Even before they had got downstairs, they could sense that the house was already in full swing. They were hit by a cocktail of smells: whiffs of acrid fumes mingled with milky porridge and the sour smell of a wet mop. The maid, Fanny, a bony, ginger-haired girl about Margaret’s age, was busy cleaning the landing on the middle floor. Fanny’s job, they would discover, as well as washing and general cleaning, was to wage war on the stairs and passages, which Aunt Hatt was determined to keep clean and respectable, despite the number of feet passing through each day.
Coming down the linoleum-covered attic stairs to the first floor, they could see that the door of the workroom at the front was ajar. They looked at each other, then crept closer for a moment. A man was sitting with his back to them, bent over his workbench in the bright morning light. They could see an array of tools in front of him. Margaret realized he was one of the people to whom Uncle Eb rented a room and she would have liked to go and see what he was doing, but it might have seemed rude. They said good morning to Fanny, stepping apologetically over her handiwork in the corridor. Good-naturedly, she mopped it again.
The banister of the main stairs felt smooth and well-polished under Margaret’s hand as they went down to the ground floor. The back door was open in the warmth and from the workshop out at the back of the house came sounds of thuds and voices. Doors opened and closed.
‘Good morning, Aunt Hatt,’ Margaret said, leading the way in. Aunt Harriet was already at the desk in the office, at the front of the house, leaning over a ledger. The girl called Susan was at her desk and Bridget turned and smiled at them once again, saying hello softly.
‘Ah, you’re awake!’ Aunt Hatt looked up over her wire spectacles. Margaret saw that the dress she was wearing today was in a deep, sea green. How lovely it was, she thought. How elegant her aunt looked. She was taken aback by the worldliness of her thoughts.
‘We left you to sleep a bit,’ Aunt Hatt said. ‘Now – there’s breakfast for you. Mrs Sullivan will boil you an egg apiece. And after that, Eb says he’ll show you about the place. Then you can go and have a look around the district if you like. I’ll have to get on, I’m afraid. There’s so much to do . . .’ She drifted back to her work.
‘Does she mean us to go out on our own?’ Annie whispered, thrilled, as they sat at the neatly laid table.
‘I suppose she does,’ Margaret said uncertainly. She could see that Aunt Hatt could probably do with the pair of them out of the way for a while and felt guilty for burdening her. Her aunt and uncle seemed to be so busy! ‘I mean – she’s not going to send us with a chaperone, is she?’
‘Jack Sidwell,’ Annie grinned, knocking the top off her boiled egg. ‘In that hat!’
Margaret looked reproachfully at her. ‘Poor man,’ she said. ‘He was kind. You’re so mean.’
‘Right, you two wenches – you can come and have a look round out ’ere.’
Uncle Eb led them out to his long, brick workshop in the yard. Only a narrow alley separated its back wall from the house. Stepping inside, they could see that the place was packed full of such a variety of activity and people and machines that Margaret hardly knew where to look.
Male faces turned briefly to look at them, then hastened back to their work. The workshop was full of hammering and banging and from the back, with rhythmic regularity, came much heavier thumping noises. A pungent, chemical smell stung their nostrils.
Margaret and Annie exchanged glances. They were both dressed in sober clothes, grey skirts and pale blouses, buttoned high at the neck. But in this entirely male environment it was difficult not to feel self-consciously female. Margaret found herself blushing uncomfortably. She thought of her aunt, at the heart of all this grime and graft, in her jewel-coloured clothes like an exotic little bird.
‘Right.’ Uncle Eb beckoned them to a desk in the corner which seemed to be his territory in the workshop. ‘I’ll give yer a quick run-through, all right? It all starts with these – designs.’ He picked up one of several notebooks which were on the table. They saw drawings of bracelets, all beautifully executed. ‘See that? That’s our Christmas special this year.’ The design showed a slender twist of metal with holly leaves and berries around it. Flicking pages, he showed them other inked drawings.
‘Any road – once we’ve approved the design . . .’ He was already on the move. ‘Come over here with me . . .’
A young man at the side bench was working one of a row of presses. It was about three feet high with a crossbar at the top, weighted at one end with a black iron ball. They watched as their uncle spun the bar round and there came a thud from below. Turning the bar back round he extracted something from the flat jaws of the machine and held it out to them. Margaret saw a dull piece of metal, but when she looked closely it was stamped with an intricate floral pattern.
‘Don’t go near them presses,’ Eb warned, before she could comment. ‘You want to mind your heads. I’ve ’ad a few knocked out cold in my time. Now – these two lads are my apprentices. Tom, here –’ he indicated the boy at the press – ‘and that young feller over there –’ Another boy was seated at the end of the table. He kept his head down, sawing at something which he held pressed against a sliver of wood fixed above the curved bench. The saw was about six inches long, its teeth so fine that all they could see was a thin strip of wire.
‘He’s learning how to use a piercing saw,’ Eb said. ‘In six months he’ll be able to turn any shape I ask ’im. Now – see this?’ He bent and pointed out through one of the grimy windows at the side of the building.
Margaret looked out to see a wall ahead of them. She was not sure what she was supposed to be looking at.
‘All these works’ve got as many windows in as you can get,’ Eb said. ‘And see them tiles, all along the wall there?’
The tiles, though lightly covered in soot, were a creamy colour beneath, giving off a soft gleam.
‘Glazed, see? You put tiles like that opposite the windows – brings more light into the room. Now – along this side, we’ve got cutting and stamping machines.’ He waved an arm as if this was all the explanation needed. Margaret saw blanks of flat shapes lying on the workbenches – the oval beginnings of brooches, cut in wafer-thin metal.
‘We do plated gold and pure gold – mostly nine and eighteen carat.’ Seeing Annie’s frown, he said, ‘Gold’s too soft to work well, you see, until you’ve heated it and mixed it with another metal. Twenty-four carat’s pure, one hundred per cent gold. Eighteen carat’s seventy-five per cent gold with a bit of silver or copper or zinc mixed in. The colour depends on what you mix it with – you mix gold and copper and you get a rosy pink colour. Mix it with silver and it’s a white gold. The nine carat’s thirty-seven and a half per cent. Got it?’ He grinned at their serious faces.
‘You mean, it’s more than sixty per cent not gold, but you still call it gold?’ Annie said rather severely.
To Margaret’s relief, their uncle’s grin widened. ‘You don’t miss much, do yer? That’s about it, yes.’ He stood with his hands at his waist, flexing his back for a moment. Course, I’ll do fine work if the order comes in. But nine and eighteen carat’s more affordable for your man or woman in the street. And the more can afford ’em, the more we can sell. And why shouldn’t anyone be able to have a pretty brooch or bracelet or a cigarette case if they want one, eh?’
‘So what do you make here, Uncle?’ Margaret asked.
‘Oh – all sorts. Jewellery – that’s bracelets, brooches, rings, pendants, cufflinks and studs, speciality picture frames – some like their pictures with jewelled frames – we’ve got a bit of a name for them.’
‘What about chains?’ Annie said. ‘In Chain Street?’
‘We don’t do them – there’s plenty of chain makers about. We don’t set the gems either – not yet. I send that out to be done. One day . . .’ He smiled. ‘Best thing is to have everyone working under one roof, but –’ He shrugged. ‘At the moment this roof ain’t big enough.’ He walked on, beckoning.
‘Right, to tell yer quick, ’cause I need to get to work.’ They stood to one side of the workshop. ‘The bullion gets delivered here . . . So, three mornings a week, before you young ladies’ve even prised your dainty eyes open, I’ll be down under there in the cellar.’ He pointed to the far end. ‘Well away from the house. You don’t want to live over the furnace if yer can ’elp it ’cause it makes a fair old stink. I were down ’ere at half past six this morning, getting it ready, see. We roll it out, or pull it through a machine to make it into wire – depending what it’s for. It’s kept in the safe over there . . .’ He pointed at a huge, solid iron thing. ‘And then . . .’ He reached for a metal box that was lying on one of the benches. ‘Every morning when they come in, they get one of these – everything’s in here that they need for the job. Every box is weighed and recorded. At the end of the day we weigh them back in.’
‘Why?’ Annie asked, frowning.
‘Well, why d’yer think, my dear?’ Eb leaned towards her, his face serious. ‘We don’t want any gold going missing, do we? Course – there is a bit of wastage allowed for. It happens when you’re working. We sweep everything – the machines, floors, the lot. All the sweepings go back in the furnace to burn off the dust and I sell the lemel back to the metal dealers. Lemel – that’s all the shavings of waste metal.’
‘I suppose you have to employ very honest people,’ Margaret said, trying to digest all this information. ‘As gold is so valuable.’
‘Oh, we work on trust – have to. And all my lads are good’uns, aren’t you, you lucky lot?’ He addressed his workers jovially. ‘You get wise to all the tricks. No turn-ups on trousers in here – and no hair lacquer. You’d be surprised how much gold dust you can stick in yer hair if you keep running yer hands through it all day long! And all these sinks –’ He pointed. ‘That water don’t go out into the drains – oh, no. It goes down into sawdust in the basement and we get the gold out of that an’ all. Aprons, overalls – all washed here and the dust strained out.’
‘Gracious,’ Margaret said. ‘I’d never have thought of all that.’
‘Oh – it soon comes, with time,’ Eb laughed. He hurried them through the rest of the workshop – the shelves of dies for stamping out shapes for decoration, the drop stampers at the end, working the machines, each using one leg to work the long rope, raising a heavy metal weight and letting it release with force to stamp out the metal.
‘The deeper the cut, the more difficult the work,’ Uncle Eb said. The men kept working steadily. The boss was there and they had work to do. The weight of the stamp came hurtling down and crashed on to the dies below.
‘Right – there’s a few girls up in this end room.’ In a narrow side room, four women sat working at various machines, the straps whirring round large cogs close to the ceiling. ‘They do finishing and polishing in here – women’s work, that.’
‘Why?’ Annie asked, in her challenging tone. Margaret gave her a look – not that she took any notice.
‘Just is,’ Eb said, ignoring her tone.
As their uncle steered them back along the workshop, they saw a man pouring liquid into a shallow bath in a kind of cupboard, with an outlet pipe above it leading out through the roof. The constant, overpowering stench seemed to be coming out of there. It was not something Uncle Eb had mentioned. Margaret didn’t like to ask as her uncle seemed in a hurry now, but Annie said, ‘What’s that then?’
‘Oh – that’s the pickle,’ he said. ‘Vitriol – an acid, that is. It gets all the muck off the gold – solder and such. Right – last thing, I’ve got to get on.’ He indicated the work tables on the other side from the presses. ‘These on this side are the pegs.’
Each table had semicircles cut out all round it, each with a leather pouch fastened to it which Margaret guessed must be to catch any gold waste. Beside each semicircle a man sat on a stool, bent over his work, a leather apron tied across his lap. Most of them had a tube of some kind in their mouths and were working with a gas flame which burnt at the end of a cable fixed to the bench.
‘Birmingham sidelight, we call that,’ Eb said hurriedly. ‘And them things in their mouths, those are blowpipes. That’s how they direct the flame exactly where they want it to go. This thing . . .’ He picked up a long tool in the shape of a cross, with strings attached from the top to each end of the crossbar. ‘The Archimedes Drill – look . . .’ He twisted it round and pumped it up and down, drilling a hole in a little piece of brass scrap. ‘Old as the hills, that is – still the best way of doing it.’
Margaret and Annie exchanged smiles. There were a whole host of tools at each workstation and Margaret found herself fascinated by all of it. Each man was working away, one or two alternating a drag on a Woodbine with blowing into the pipe.
‘So – you’ve got the gist of it. I must get on. If you go and see yer Aunt Hatt, ’er’ll give you an idea what to do next.’
They thanked him and went back into the house. Fanny was sweeping the passage and she pressed herself against the wall to let them pass. They caught a glimpse of Mrs Sullivan in the back kitchen, a gaunt, severe-looking woman, bent over a board of chopped onions.
‘What shall we do?’ Margaret whispered to Annie. ‘I feel as if we’re in the way.’
‘Let’s go out,’ Annie said. ‘We’ll go and ask Aunt.’
They were walking along the passage to the office when scurrying footsteps came down the stairs and Jack Sidwell, who had brought them from the station, squeezed past them.
‘Mornin’!’ he said chirpily. But he was blushing furiously and hurried out of the front door.
Margaret and Annie looked at each other.
‘D’you think he’s sweet on you?’ Annie whispered.
‘Me?’ Margaret said. ‘You, more like!’ Annie made a scornful noise at this and Margaret smiled. ‘I think you’ve got an admirer – heaven help him.’