‘Me and my sister have made a pact not to get killed with our rollers in.’
Joan pushed herself out of the collapsible canvas chair to stamp her feet and rub her gloved hands up and down her thick-sleeved arms. It was jolly perishing up here on Ingleby’s rooftop, doing fire-watching duty in the pitch-darkness. The charcoal hand-warmers tucked inside her woolly gloves, which had been toasty warm at the start of her shift, had cooled to almost nothing by now.
‘Oh aye?’ Hunched in her chair, hands thrust deep in her pockets, Margaret waggled her face from side to side, easing out her nose and mouth from behind her scarf. ‘So if the bombs start falling—’
‘When,’ said Joan. ‘Not if. When.’ It was better to tell yourself ‘when’. It kept you on your toes.
‘All right, when. When the siren goes off and everyone else springs out of bed and legs it downstairs, you and your Letitia are going to jump up and start flinging rollers here, there and everywhere?’
Joan grinned. ‘Something like that.’
She turned to look across the rooftops of the centre of Manchester. Not that she could see anything apart from deeper shapes of darkness that denoted where buildings were, and maybe she couldn’t really see those. Maybe it was her imagination filling in those dark shapes because she knew they must be there.
It felt as though she lived her whole life in darkness at the moment. Not even the snow brightened things up. The short winter days meant getting up in the dark and it was still gloomy when she arrived at Ingleby’s. Her days were spent in one of the sewing rooms. They had two of them now, the second one having been added last summer when blackout fabric was being sold in huge quantities and many folk wanted their curtains made up quickly. Both the sewing rooms were internal rooms with no windows, and unless Joan bolted her midday meal in order to dash outdoors for a spell, she wouldn’t see the outside world again until it was finally time to go home after her now regular overtime, working on WVS uniforms and uniforms for bus conductresses and the like. The sewing rooms were filled with girls and women working overtime, and as well as the extra money being welcome, Joan was glad to feel she was doing something for the war effort. But she would much rather be wearing one of those uniforms than sewing them.
At the end of her long working day, she would walk outside into a darkness that was more complete than any she had ever known.
‘I don’t care who you’re with,’ Gran had instructed her and Letitia. ‘Make sure they walk on the road-side of the pavement. If anyone’s going to stumble into the path of a motor car, I don’t want it to be you, Letitia.’ She turned to Joan. ‘Or you.’
Had she paused and turned to look at Joan to reinforce the importance of her message? Or had she added her as an afterthought?
Tuesday nights were the darkest of the lot, because of fire-watching duty on Ingleby’s roof.
Gran was used to it now, but she hadn’t been pleased to start with.
‘I’m not having you out all night,’ she had declared. ‘It isn’t respectable.’
‘I’ve already registered,’ Joan replied. ‘It’s official.’
Darned right it was. There were some things you didn’t tell Gran in advance. It had been Letitia’s idea that she should register first and confess later, and she had been proved right.
‘Then I want you partnered with another girl,’ Gran had insisted – as if Joan would have any say in the matter.
She had been partnered with Margaret from haberdashery – well, Margaret was what Joan called her when they were on the roof, and Margaret called her Joan. In the shop, they were Miss Darrell and Miss Foster. Gran probably thought they maintained that formality up on the roof as well.
It was a long night. During her first stint of fire-watching, Joan’s heart had pitter-pattered all night long, but she had soon learned that being on watch was pretty dull. That was the phoney war for you. Not to mention the freezing-cold war, she thought, stamping her feet again. Other fire-watchers had rigged up a canvas windshield, and men from the stock-room had shovelled away the snow, but unless you were prepared to spend all night running on the spot, nothing was going to keep you warm. They weren’t allowed to have a brazier up here because of the glow, so the only way to combat the low temperatures was to take turns to nip inside and boil a kettle for a hot drink, though the steaming Bovril that warmed you at the time soon sent you racing to the Ladies.
‘Cold air plus a hot drink equals a fast sprint,’ according to Miss Armitage from ribbons and braids.
‘More like a brisk hobble with your legs crossed,’ Miss Dent from millinery had said. ‘And then you have to fight your way through all your layers before you have an accident.’
Joan wore an extra camisole, two pairs of socks over her stockings, plus two jumpers and slacks beneath her coat. She had run up the slacks in her dinner-hour, using a warm wool fabric provided by Ingleby’s, payment for which had been taken from her weekly wages before she received her pay packet.
She kept her slacks in her locker at work. Gran would have kittens if she knew about them.
‘They’re called “slack” for a reason,’ was Gran’s opinion. ‘Only slack girls wear them.’
Even Letitia, who had been nagging for yonks about shorter skirts, wouldn’t dare ask Gran about slacks.
‘Will you carry on with your fire-watching if you get this other job?’ Margaret asked.
Joan frowned. The tug in her brow made it feel like her forehead would crack open in the cold. ‘Don’t call it “this other job”, as if it isn’t important.’
‘Golly, you really are keen, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am,’ she replied frankly, ‘ever since I read about it in Vera’s Voice. With so many men being called up, there’s a great need for girls to take on railway jobs. Women stepped up and did their bit in the last war and we’re being called upon again now. The part the railways will play is going to be crucial. There’ll be precious little petrol, so everything and everyone that needs to get from A to B will have to be transported by rail. Just look at how the railways coped with evacuating all those children last autumn. It’s going to be like that, only more so.’
‘Well, I’d rather stay put here, thanks.’
‘For as long as they let you, you mean. Girls will be ordered into war work – not straight away, but it will happen.’
‘So you thought you’d choose your own job before one was chosen for you?’
‘No, I chose it because I want to do something more important than sewing blackout curtains and uniforms.’
‘Which brings me back to my original question: will you carry on fire-watching? You’ll be working shifts, won’t you? Including nights.’
‘Working nights doesn’t stop folk fire-watching on one of their nights off.’
Indeed, there seemed to be no end to what folk were prepared to do. That was why this new job was so important. Hark at her. This new job – as if she had already got it. Ingleby’s were giving her time off this afternoon to sit some tests. Lord, what if she wasn’t suitable? Wasn’t clever enough?
Oh, she had to be. It mattered so much. She didn’t want to spend the war working in Ingleby’s. She longed to do proper war work – like Letitia. Well, no, not like Letitia. You had to be really clever to do what she did.
A proper wartime job, that was what she dreamed of, the chance to serve her country in a role that was considerably more meaningful than sewing blackout curtains and WVS uniforms. The country couldn’t manage without the railways, not with a war to be won. Was it foolish to imagine the railway lines as lifelines?
Did she have what it took to become a railway girl?
It didn’t matter how much you stamped up and down during the night, you were always stiff with cold when the time came to leave the roof. Ingleby’s had set aside a small room for male fire-watchers to use for getting changed night and morning, but there wasn’t a spare room for the girls, who had to use the ladies’ lavatories. Joan and Margaret draped their uniform dresses over the vast radiators, which were starting to warm up, and, oh the luxury, dunked their hands in basins of hot water.
‘D’you think it’ll give us chilblains?’ asked Margaret.
‘Like sitting on the radiator is meant to?’ said Joan. ‘I always wondered if girls said that at school to make you get off so they could get on.’
Modestly turning her back on Margaret, she hastily pulled off her night clobber and drew on her black dress. All the girls’ dresses were a perfect fit because they were made to measure in Ingleby’s sewing rooms. Joan had made her own, so it was faultless – except for the length. She removed her snood to comb her hair, then tucked it back inside. Wearing snoods was one of Gran’s rules. The only time Joan and Letitia didn’t have to wear one was when they went dancing.
Checking her appearance in the mirrors over the line of basins, she noted that Margaret was wearing yesterday’s collar and cuffs, whereas Gran had provided her with fresh ones, which had spent the night inside a small cardboard box to preserve their starched perfection.
‘You’re the only girl I know whose C and Cs have their own little gas-mask box,’ said Margaret.
Did her ultra-crisp appearance make her look like she hadn’t been up all night fire-watching? And what sort of big-head did that make her? Wanting others to know she was doing her bit – honestly! If she passed the tests this afternoon and was given a real war job, she wouldn’t have to worry about petty things like that.
After stashing their things away in their lockers, they headed for the staff canteen, where the cook came in early these days to provide breakfast for the fire-watchers and the chaps who manned the local first-aid point up the road. Shortly before quarter to nine, Ingleby’s staff rushed up the stairs to the various departments to present themselves for inspection by their superiors at eight forty-five sharp.
Miss Trent, who oversaw both sewing rooms, walked up and down the rows of sewing machines, beside which the sewing girls stood, hands folded demurely in front. She paused next to Joan.
‘Fresh C and Cs after a night on the roof. That’s what I like to see.’
The morning seemed to last for ever. At last Joan dashed to the canteen to bolt down a hasty meal. There was an anxious tightness inside her chest, but she was excited, too, as she put on her coat and gloves and slid her scarf around her neck, positioning her beret carefully so as not to disturb her snood. Then she swung her gas-mask box over her shoulder, looped her handbag over her wrist and set off. Which was better? The centre of the pavement, where there was slush, and the danger of getting your clothes splattered, or the edges, where the snow had been stamped on and was possibly more slippery than it looked. Today of all days, she didn’t want a broken ankle. She headed along Market Street, passing the huge shop windows criss-crossed with anti-blast tape, before striking off in the direction of Victoria Station. She hadn’t been there since the days when Gran used to take her and Letitia on day trips to Southport, and it was further than she had anticipated, but that was probably because of the snow slowing her down.
The sight of the station’s handsome and imposing building, with its clock tower atop one elegantly curved corner, brought her to a standstill. Even her breathing slowed. Might she really and truly get a job here? Was there time to pop inside and soak up the atmosphere? No, she mustn’t make herself late.
She made her way along Hunts Bank, her pulse quickening as she looked for the right doorway. Here it was, set inside a porch. She blew out a breath. She was early – too early? She wanted to look keen, of course, but she might look daft if she had to sit here waiting for everyone else to arrive.
‘Are you here for the test?’
It was a girl about her own age or perhaps a year or two older. Dark brown hair showed in a glossy roll beneath a felt hat with top-stitching and a smart, upturned brim. The girl’s wool coat, with its large collar and padded shoulders, ought to have made her look confident and business-like, but there was no disguising the uncertainty in her eyes or that little tug at the side of her mouth that suggested she was biting the inside of her cheek. Good: someone else was nervous.
‘Yes,’ said Joan. ‘I don’t want to be too early.’
‘I know, but it’s a bit chilly to be hanging about out here. Shall we?’ The girl glanced at the door. ‘My name’s Alison Lambert.’
‘Joan Foster. Pleased to meet you.’
They went inside, presenting themselves at a hatch in the wall. On the other side, a girl walked across an office, skirting a desk to speak to them, and directed them upstairs. The Stephenson Room was large with frosted windows adorned with the ubiquitous blast-tape. Two big tables butted up against one another to create one long table stretching the length of the room. A number of girls and women already sat around it, all with their hats still on. Having felt too early, Joan suddenly felt late. What a good job she and Alison hadn’t waited outside to walk in at what they thought would be precisely the right moment.
‘Good afternoon. Names, please?’ A middle-aged lady in what looked like a silk blouse, but Joan knew artificial silk when she saw it, smiled at them, her fountain pen poised over a list. ‘You may hang up your coats over there. Sit wherever you like.’
There was a rail with hangers. Joan hung up her coat, hoping it wasn’t obvious that she was glancing round the table. There were empty seats here and there, but no pairs of empty seats. Goodness, how silly. She didn’t need to sit beside Alison. They weren’t children. She took the first available place, which happened to be beside a red-headed girl in a hat with a wide satin band that boasted a jaunty bow. Those already at the table smiled and nodded, but apart from a few murmured greetings, no one spoke. There was a distinct air of nervousness.
‘It feels like walking into an exam at school,’ said Joan.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said the red-head. ‘I never sat any. I don’t know why they sent me here. I went to the labour exchange to ask if I could be a telephonist, but they said I wasn’t tall enough.’
A couple more girls arrived and sat down. Then another woman walked in. She held herself erect and her chin up, which had the odd effect of obliging her to look down on everyone. Followed by the lady in the artificial-silk blouse, who was giving out pencils, she walked around the table, placing a paper face down on the table in front of each person.
‘I’m Mrs Pugh, the invigilator. These are your test papers. You shall sit three tests, in English, maths and geography. Each test will be timed. This is the English paper. Please don’t turn it over until I tell you. There are two sets of tests, A and B. A papers and B papers are given out alternately, so no one can copy from the person beside them.’
Alison gave a little toss of her head, as if copying was beneath her. She was beside a woman who Joan thought would be the sort of age her own mother would have been had she lived, except her own mother wouldn’t have looked like this. It was impossible to imagine Estelle with a thickened figure and looking, well, motherly. The woman across the table wore a hat that had seen better days, having lost much of its crisp shape, and beneath it showed faded brown hair that was now heading for grey. Although the bags under her hazel eyes suggested she didn’t get enough sleep, there was an energy about her.
There was a lady of similar age further down the table, but the two of them couldn’t have been more different. This second lady, with her elegant hat and discreet earrings, was slender, with high cheekbones and calm grey eyes. Her hair was ash-blonde, dressed in smooth waves. Was this what Estelle would be like now, had she lived? Beautiful and grave?
‘You may start.’
Joan turned over her first test paper and began.
Putting down her pencil for the third and final time, Joan rolled her shoulders. She felt she had done quite well, though it was difficult to be sure. She hadn’t done anything of this kind since she had left school and she hadn’t been brilliantly clever then.
A flash of memory. Gran saying, ‘My two both left school in the summer of ’36.’
The polite lady staying in the same seaside boarding-house had looked at her and Letitia. ‘They don’t look like twins, do they?’
And the triumph in Gran’s voice as she delivered her boastful, ‘They’re not. Letitia is a year older, but she went to grammar school, so naturally she stayed on the extra year until she was fifteen. She was awarded a Distinction in mathematics in her School Certificate, you know. Joan, of course, is good with her hands.’
Good with her hands: Gran’s not-so-secret code for ‘dim’.
‘Thank you, ladies,’ said Mrs Pugh. ‘Your test papers will be marked and those of you who pass will be required to attend a medical. Thank you for attending this afternoon.’
Joan glanced round, feeling a faint uncertainty, an unwillingness, perhaps, to be the first to stand up and leave. Then the grave-looking lady with the ash-blonde hair rose and tucked her chair under the table. She picked up her handbag and gas-mask box before fetching her coat from the rail.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said to Mrs Pugh before smiling briefly at the other candidates. ‘I hope to see you all again soon.’
As she left, the motherly woman bounced off her chair. ‘Well, if nowt else, it’s been nice to take the weight off my feet. Now I must dash. Bye, all.’
She came round the room towards the coat-rack. She moved quickly, but without looking as though she was hurrying. It was more as if she lived her life at speed. Was that the only way she could fit in everything?
Joan caught Alison’s eye and they left together, walking downstairs at the same time as the red-head and another girl who was quiet-looking and neatly-dressed. They stepped outside into the winter twilight.
‘We’ve been in there all afternoon,’ said Joan. ‘It’s just gone five. My supervisor said I could go straight home after the tests.’
‘Where do you work?’ asked the red-head.
‘Ingleby’s.’ There was no need to say more than that. Everyone knew Ingleby’s, the same way everyone knew Paulden’s.
‘Cor, lucky you. I wouldn’t leave there if I was you.’
‘I want to do my bit,’ said Joan.
‘Of course you do,’ said Alison. ‘We all do.’
‘I’m Lizzie Cooper.’ The red-head stuck out her right hand.
Joan shook hands, introducing herself; Alison followed suit. Then the three of them looked at the fourth girl.
She looked back at them. Wasn’t she going to join in?
‘Mrs Colette Naylor,’ she said. Her voice was soft, her smile restrained. Was she shy? ‘How do you do?’
They made a quick comparison of destinations. Joan would have liked to share her journey with Alison, but Alison lived to the north of Manchester and it was Lizzie she was paired with. Lizzie lived in Whalley Range, which lay between here and Chorlton.
‘We can walk to Deansgate together and catch the bus,’ said Lizzie.
‘How about you?’ Alison asked Colette. ‘Where do you live?’
‘I’m going to wait here for my husband,’ said Colette. ‘He’s coming to collect me.’
‘I wish my boyfriend could come and collect me,’ said Alison. ‘He would, of course, if he could, but he’s at work. I’ll have to save everything up to tell him later.’
Joan’s feet were starting to feel the cold. She was about to stamp them, then noticed the slushy pavement and decided against it. ‘Come on if you’re coming,’ she said to Lizzie. To the others, she said, ‘Goodbye. I hope we’ll all see one another again.’ She gave Alison a smile, wanting to show her willingness to become friends.
She and Lizzie set off for Deansgate, where the shops were shutting.
Like a homing pigeon Lizzie headed for one of Kendals’ windows. ‘Come and see these shoes. I’ve been looking at them for weeks. Aren’t they gorgeous? Here – take a look. Quick, before they put up the blackout.’
‘Very pretty,’ said Joan. They were too. They were evening shoes, with heels high enough to be stylish, yet not too high for dancing – but they were red. Inside her head, she distinctly heard Gran’s sniff, and a shiver passed through her. But the shoes were still pretty. Oh, imagine wearing something like that, proper evening shoes, to a dance, instead of the daytime shoes she and Letitia were doomed to wear. ‘Red is for tarts,’ said Gran’s voice.
Lizzie sighed. ‘You’d have to buy ’em sharpish if you wanted ’em. They’re bound to put clothes on ration, my mum says. You wouldn’t want to fritter your coupons on them.’
‘We need to cross over,’ said Joan. ‘We don’t want to miss the bus.’
They didn’t have to wait long.
‘No room downstairs, girls,’ said the clippie.
‘We’ll stand,’ said Joan.
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Lizzie. ‘Let’s go up.’
She swung her way upstairs, leaving Joan no choice but to follow. She hated going upstairs on buses and trams, because of showing her legs – or rather, because of not showing them. There went Lizzie with her coat and skirt dancing around her knees, but Joan’s flapped around her calves. She felt like a dowdy old biddy. She might have made her shop dress herself, but she had made it to Gran’s instructions.
Lizzie flung herself into a seat. ‘I can’t wait to tell my mum all about this afternoon. I bet your mum can’t wait either.’
A familiar tingle spread through Joan’s body. ‘Mine died when I was a baby.’
Lizzie turned to look at her. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Me and my big mouth. I don’t know what I’d do without my mum, especially now there’s only the two of us. Dad was run over in the blackout in October. Have you still got your dad?’
Joan didn’t know whether to be more shocked at Lizzie’s way of blurting out private details to a virtual stranger or downright scared. Was she expected to reciprocate? She slapped down the flutter of panic. She had been brought up not to blab. This chatterbox had caught her unawares, that’s all.
‘My dad died as well.’
‘What, both your parents? You poor love.’
‘Me and my sister were brought up by our grandmother, Daddy’s mother. Are you doing anything this evening?’
‘Me and mum have got mending club,’ said Lizzie.
‘For mending clothes?’
‘No, it’s things like how to change a plug or unblock a sink. Mum says it’s important now we haven’t got a man in the house, and we’re getting better at doing things. We put up a shelf last week and it’s still up. Not like when we fixed the pulley airer and it dropped like a stone the next day and the damp washing landed on the kitchen table in the Yorkshire pudding batter.’
‘Oh no.’
‘It wasn’t that bad. I mean, we jumped out of our skin, obviously, but afterwards we laughed like drains. Mum said it was the best laugh she’d had since Dad popped off, so that sort of made it worth it, if you know what I mean.’
Lizzie looked at her. One bereaved child to another? She couldn’t have that. She glanced out of the window.
‘Is it your stop in a minute?’
‘Lord, yes.’
Lizzie jumped up, slinging her gas-mask box over her shoulder. Joan turned sideways in the seat to let her scramble past.
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Lizzie. ‘Good luck with the test results.’
‘You too.’
Lizzie vanished down the stairs, leaving Joan feeling as if she had made friends with a whirlwind. Made friends? Really? No. Lizzie was just a chatterbox who spilled out her personal business to all and sundry. Or maybe, in Lizzie’s book, that constituted making friends.
At any rate, one or both of them might not pass the tests, and then they would never see one another again. A frisson of anxiety passed through her. She would pass the tests … wouldn’t she?