27 How Do You Get Away? Who Do You Have To Ask?

Highgate; Harlington; Thurnscoe, 1956–58

If you stand on the doorstep of 34 Highgate Lane and look across the road and over the fields you can see the railway line that runs from Sheffield through Highgate on its way north. At night, the long freight trains move the coal and steel, their steam spreading out behind them grey against the black sky, sparks flying from their wheels, the orange glow of the firebox lighting up the drivers and the firemen in their cabs. Pauline Hollingworth often comes to stand on the doorstep in the evening so that she can watch the engines and trucks passing by; they make her feel both moved and calm at the same time. She likes it best when she can see the men in the cab; she admires their skill and concentration, and imagines them at ease in each other’s company. She watches each train right until the last wagon disappears into the cutting, and then when it has gone she tries to sniff out its lingering smokey, greasy tang in the night air until it too fades away.

Pauline is in her last year at school and the arts and humanities teachers have put her at the top of the class in their reports. The school does not offer academic qualifications, but at Easter the headmistress, Miss Garbutt, asks her what she plans to do after leaving. Pauline says that she would like to work with animals. Miss Garbutt says she may be able to get Pauline a place on an agricultural course at Brampton Ellis, the further education college a mile the other side of Manvers Main. She asks if Pauline would be interested and Pauline says she will have to ask her mam.

Her mam doesn’t know if the course would be useful, and is wary of forgoing the money Pauline would bring in if she was out working. Having no one else to ask, Winnie walks across the road to seek the advice of Jane Seels, a young woman whose husband has that year bought the farm from Benny Slater. Jane is articulate and educated, so Winnie assumes she will know about further education courses, and believes her when she says Pauline should go. There could be no end of opportunities for a girl with qualifications, Jane says; she could work at a vet’s, or in an office, maybe even as a secretary.

Winnie tells Pauline to tell Miss Garbutt to make her enquiries, and Pauline, having once thought the idea outlandish, feels excited. When Roy visits he says she does right to go to college, and he, Harry and Winnie make jokes about what she’ll be like when she’s in with the professors, and thinks herself too good to speak to them. Three days later, however, Miss Garbutt calls Pauline back at the end of a class to tell her the course is full. She says Pauline can always try again next year, but Pauline feels as if there is a brick wall collapsing inside her chest, and she knows the chance has passed. She looks bravely at Miss Garbutt, thanks her and says that she’ll come for a reference before she finishes school.

Four weeks before the end of term Winnie is taken into hospital to be treated for what she will refer to only as ‘ladies’ problems’. Annie comes to look after the family for a fortnight, and she and Winnie agree that Pauline must help too. As she is due to finish school soon anyway, they decide there will be no point in her going back, and so in the end, Pauline will not even collect Miss Garbutt’s reference.

This decision taken on her behalf is like a hard, dull blow against the senses. Pauline can see that although opportunities in school and college are real, her mam and Muv don’t take them seriously. In some ways, she thinks, they are glad to have her done with education; they do not quite trust the teachers, or at least they do not trust their own ability to take from the teachers anything of lasting value. Not of lasting value to a girl, at any rate.

*

From the start of her mam’s stay in hospital, Pauline realises that her grandmother needs the extra assistance not because of her frailty, but for reasons that are rather the opposite. To the family’s surprise Muv has on recent visits been energetically courted by Mr Edwards, a retired widower from Darfield, the next village along the Barnsley Road. Mr Edwards is smart and modestly cultured, and Winnie has accepted him as her mam’s ‘friend’, while knowing, as everyone knows, that there is a great deal more to the liaison than friendship. He and Annie, both young sixty-seven-year-olds, go on bus trips together, and he visits her at home in Elland and at Winnie’s. The presence of Mr Edwards means that Annie’s two weeks in Highgate become a romantic holiday for her. ‘I’ll just catch a bus up to see Mr Edwards, and then come back to help you wi’ t’ cleaning,’ she says to Pauline and Lynda after breakfast, before slipping out and returning home at teatime after a day of walks, half-pints of stout, and leisurely visits to the Darfield bookies.

Pauline cannot complain because, school-leaver or not, she is still regarded as a child. She spends her last school days looking after her recuperating mother and covering for a courting grandparent. Her last communication from her teachers is via her final report, which arrives through the post in July: she has two A grades and the rest are Bs, but no one in the house besides her looks at it.

Pauline doesn’t know what she wants to do, other than work with animals. Some of the girls at school had talked about jobs in the mills or a factory with their sisters or cousins, and how much money you could make there, but her dad scotches that the first and only time she mentions it. ‘Tha needn’t think tha’s working in t’ mills, cos tha’s not.’ Harry wants her to do something better, although he is unsure of what a better job might be, and even less sure of how you went about getting one.

He tells her to go to the Labour Exchange to ask for a job, so she puts on a red twinset and her best black skirt, slips her school report into her handbag and walks up to the Ministry of Labour building next door to the Comrades Club. The main entrance is through a panelled wooden door, and leading off the long, lino-laid corridor inside is another door marked ‘School-leavers’. Pauline pushes it open gingerly. Down one side is a line of wooden counters, behind which stand men in suits: opposite some of the counters, young lads looking for work lean forward and speak in awkward voices. Pauline walks up to a man who has no one speaking to him. He is fiftyish with a tweed jacket, collar and tie, and sharp nose. He seems ancient.

‘I’ve come to see about a job,’ says Pauline.

The man writes down her name, age and address, and asks what kind of work she is interested in. Pauline says she would like to be a kennel maid; she has decided this at home, having read about kennel maids in Our Dogs.

‘Righto,’ says the man, and takes a box file down from a shelf. He nods slowly to himself as he leafs through the papers inside the file, and finds her a job as a kennel maid at Brandon Park House in Suffolk, accommodation provided, start next week. ‘Just ask your dad to sign these forms to say you can go, and bring them back to me,’ he says. ‘Thank you, Miss Hollingworth, and the best of luck. Cheerio now.’

She smiles as she walks back through Goldthorpe and across the railway bridge, thinking how lovely it will be to be among dogs all day, and how her dad will think she has found a good job. If the unnerving prospect of living somewhere new comes into her mind, she pushes it down into her coat pockets with her fists, and rehearses the new-job speech she will give back at Number 34.

When she gets home her dad is in the sitting room, trying to get a tune out of a trumpet. ‘I’m going as a kennel maid to Suffolk, Dad!’ she says.

‘No, you’re not,’ he replies. ‘Suffolk’s too far off. Anyroad, thy mam wants thee here to help her in t’ house.’

Pauline has no idea where or what Suffolk is, but she would live at the North Pole rather than upset the Labour Exchange man. ‘But I’ve told them I’ll go, Dad.’

‘Well then tha’ll have to go back and tell ’em that tha can’t.’

‘Can’t you tell them?’

He doesn’t answer. When she goes back to the Labour Exchange, the man shouts at her. ‘Young people,’ he says. ‘All these opportunities, and they don’t want to know.’

The man does not mention any other jobs, and Pauline is too afraid to ask again. Unsure of what to do next, she spends most of August at Beech Farm with Joan and Gordon. She feels happy when she is there, but she knows that it is an avoidance, a means of putting off her adult life. What to do about a job? Would she be allowed to have another offer, having turned one down in the way she did? She likes the idea of Marks and Spencer’s in Doncaster, working in a shop being the next best option and Marks and Spencer’s the best shop. But how did you get a job there? People she has asked, people who know other people who work there, say you just go in and ask if they have any vacancies. Ask! They make it sound like something everyone does all the time, which persuades her that her shyness makes her an oddball – a square peg in a round Marks-and-Spencer’s-shaped hole.

*

In early September, Winnie takes Lynda on a coach trip to see Blackpool illuminations, and sends a postcard home addressed to Pauline, who has stayed back to look after Harry and the dogs.

 

Dear Pauline,

Margaret Hanson’s mother is on this trip, and Margaret works at Windell’s in Thurnscoe and she is leaving on Friday. Go straight down and see if you can get the job.

Mam

 

Pauline knows no more of Windell’s in Thurnscoe than she does of Suffolk, nor has she any clue how someone goes to see if they can get a job, but she is not going to disobey her mam. She puts the skirt and twinset on again, stuffs her school report back into her bag, and hurries off to the bus stop.

Windell’s on Lidget Lane used to be the village pawn shop. Old Mr Windell had fought the Irish in the uprising during the Great War, and returned to Thurnscoe with haunted memories and a deep suspicion of Irish people. He had married, and set up the pawn operation with his wife in the late twenties, when many villagers relied on pawning to get through the week. The shop had prospered, but as wages grew in the 1950s pawning decreased until it was hardly worthwhile, and when Mr Windell handed the business down to his son Jack, Jack turned the shop into a haberdashery. It now sells clothes and fabrics for men and women: shorts, blouses, Wellington boots, wool trousers, pinnies, tea dresses, cotton, calico, wool and more. Piled to the ceiling with up-to-date clothes and pretty material, the shop likes to think of itself as a genteel outfitter and drapers, but its balance sheets also rely on a steady income from miners’ work clothes and flat caps, sold out of cardboard boxes laid on the floor.

Jack Windell is in his early forties, tall, slim, and well dressed in navy blue blazer, collar and tie, and slacks. He nods slowly as he listens to Pauline’s story about her mam’s postcard and Margaret Hanson’s mother, and asks to see her references.

‘I haven’t any references because I’ve never had a job before. Will this do?’ She takes the brown envelope containing the school report, and offers it across the counter, arm trembling over the yarns and cotton.

‘This looks first-rate!’ he says. ‘Can you start on Monday?’

Pauline’s shifts are nine until six, Monday to Saturday, with a half-day Wednesdays. Jack pays her £2 1s a week and says he will put up the wage a little each April. Every Friday she hands over all her wage to her mam, and Winnie gives her back five shillings for herself, from which she has to pay the bus fare to and from work. Most girls that Pauline knows pay board, but she is at the highest end of the payers.

Jack Windell spends most of the day in his office at the back of the shop while Pauline and a girl of about her age called Marjorie Swift work at the front. Jack shows her how to serve people, and how to correct the broader parts of her accent and dialect, because a broad accent holds you back and makes people think you are thick. When she says, ‘I aren’t going,’ or ‘I waited while half past seven,’ he says, ‘Where’s your grammar, Pauline?’ and she says, ‘She’s dead!’ and they laugh, but she remembers what Jack has taught her and gratefully corrects herself.

She likes some of the customers, especially the younger women who come in to buy fabric for dresses. With regular customers Pauline discusses new fashions, dress patterns and sewing techniques, and she begins to advise them on the shop’s stock, and to make suggestions about new orders to Jack.

Selling the men’s clothes is less pleasant. She is put in charge of pit pants, the blue trousers that miners wear for work, and has to keep the high piles of them neat and topped up with the weekly deliveries that arrive from the warehouses in boxes as big as her. Pit pants are manageable once she learns to judge the sizes, but her other menswear specialism, flat caps, can be an ordeal. Windell’s trade in the caps is brisk. They sell about half a dozen a week, more in the winter, and for ease of access Jack keeps the various sizes and patterns in the cardboard boxes they arrive in, laid out on the flagstone floor. Like most other shops in Thurnscoe, Windell’s is infested with cockroaches, and while the insects tend to avoid the pit pant towers, they do crawl into the flat cap boxes. Every time Pauline opens a box, or takes out a cap for someone to try on, several cockroaches scuttle out across her hands and up her lower arms.

‘Oh dear!’ Jack exclaims the first time he sees her leap back, wincing, from a cap box. He waits for the customer to leave before talking to her, and she anticipates sympathy. ‘Remember not to let them see if the cockroaches come out, Pauline. Try to get yourself in between them and the box. If one runs up your arm, just flick it off without them seeing.’

*

Pauline tells Gordon Benson about the cockroaches, playing up the story because he wears flat caps. By now she and Gordon have become close friends, and she is relaxed in his company. Sometimes Pauline, Gordon and Joan meet on Sundays to go to church, or to walk along the criss-crossing paths in the countryside looking out for animals or with Gordon commenting on the progress of crops in the fields. In the evenings they go out into the fields to watch the rabbits and hares playing in the dusk.

One day the three of them are in the farmhouse kitchen after a family tea. They have cleared the table and are washing plates, putting away the willow-pattern crockery and sweeping the flagstones. Joan unlatches the back door and steps out into the yard to take food scraps to the cows. As Pauline wipes the tabletop she catches Gordon’s eye. Both of them blush. She moves towards the door. ‘I’m off to see what your Joan’s doing,’ she says, but Gordon darts across to the doorway and stands in front of her, blocking her path with his hand on the latch.

‘What are you doing, you daft ’apeth?’ says Pauline. ‘Let me out.’

‘Not unless tha gives me a kiss.’

‘– you what?’

‘– tha ’eard,’ says Gordon. He looks as if he is about to laugh.

Pauline grins, bounces up onto the balls of her feet, pecks him on his stubbled cheek and then ducks down under his arm and slips out through the door.

‘What’ve you been doing?’ asks Joan.

‘Me?’ she replies. ‘Nowt!’

No one mentions this again, but afterwards something changes between her and Gordon.

The three of them go out more, driving in Mr Benson’s Wolseley to watch Westerns at the cinema in Goldthorpe. Gordon wears his charcoal suit and Brylcreems his hair, and buys Black Magic chocolates for them to share during the film. Pauline lets Joan sit in the middle seat, because it would feel strange to sit beside Gordon in the dark.

There are evenings when Gordon drops Pauline off at home and she walks in to hear Harry and Winnie, and sometimes Roy, shouting at each other in the sitting room. They argue about Roy staying at the house, about Roy being a good husband, and the arguments turn into personal rows between Harry and Winnie. No one ever talks to Pauline or Lynda about Roy though. Pauline was not even invited to his wedding, and no one had told her Margaret was pregnant; she only realised when Margaret turned up at their house looking a strange shape.

The arguments make her feel like an outsider trapped in her own home. She goes back to the front door and opens it, and stands on the doorstep to watch the trains travelling through the darkness. She imagines being the driver or the man shovelling the coal into the fire, engrossed in their work, joking with their companions, loving their train in the way men loved things like trains. She would like to get on one of the trains and go somewhere else, but she doesn’t know how she would do that, or where she would go.

How did you get away?

Who did you have to ask to do that?