The Shop Girls of Chapel Street (3 page)

‘I'll bet you anything that's Mrs Barlow,' Ida guessed. ‘She'll be after stockings or such like. Something she can't do without.'

‘Doesn't she know you're closed?' Violet wondered, paying attention to the small metal contraption that Ida was showing her.

‘Shop hours mean nothing to the likes of Alice Barlow. She drops by regardless, knowing we can't afford to turn away custom. See, you unscrew the normal foot then insert this new one, like so. Then you're ready to sew in the zip fastener.'

Caught up in the ins and outs of the exciting innovation, Violet drew closer. ‘But you have to tack in the zip beforehand?'

‘To make a proper job of it, yes you do.' Ida smiled up at her. Considered less stiff and starchy than Muriel, Ida's dark brown eyes were lively and intelligent and she gave off the air of someone who took an interest in everything and everyone around her. ‘When's your next day off?' she asked. ‘I could show you exactly how it's done.'

‘Chance would be a fine thing,' Violet countered. Days off from Hutchinson's were rare as hens' teeth, and anyway her uncle constantly reminded her that she should jump at any chance of overtime because the household needed every penny she could earn.

Ida raised an eyebrow. ‘The old slave driver keeps you chained to the till, does he? Well, I'm here until half six most days so why not call in on your way home one evening? Oh, except Wednesdays – I leave early then because that's my night with the Players. We've started rehearsing a new play – a murder mystery, very modern.'

It didn't take much imagination for Violet to picture Ida treading the boards. At twenty-five, she had a slim, almost boyish figure, a mass of fair, wavy hair and a way of claiming your attention in whatever she did. Not that she was what you would call a show-off. It just happened naturally due to her quick, athletic grace and a genuine lack of awareness that people liked to look at her.

‘You should come along some time,' she suggested, as if the idea had suddenly struck her. ‘We need extra people for the smaller speaking parts.'

‘Don't look at me.' Violet grimaced. Much as she'd enjoyed her turn as Gala Queen, she didn't fancy getting onstage and being gawped at. ‘I don't think Uncle Donald would like it,' she offered by way of excuse.

Ida overrode her objections. ‘Well, my young man, Harold Gibson, he takes me over to Hadley on his motorbike but you know my brother, Eddie – he'll give you a lift on his Norton if I ask him nicely.'

‘No, ta.' As Violet shook her head in some alarm, she heard footsteps taking the stairs two at a time and blushed to see that it was Eddie himself who burst through the door.

‘Talk of the devil,' Ida said and grinned. ‘Eddie, I was just telling Violet that you'd be happy to give her a lift to rehearsal tomorrow night.'

‘No, I said I wouldn't, thanks,' Violet interjected. She felt her face go red under Eddie's gaze.

‘What's up, Eddie? Has the cat got your tongue?' Ida, who had an inkling about Eddie's long-held but secret feelings for Violet, delighted in teasing her brother.

‘No. Sorry, I didn't know you were busy up here,' he told them. Finding this particular visitor in the workroom had come as a surprise and now he was forced to stumble his way through a conversation without giving away the fact that, despite his best efforts to steady himself, his throat was dry and his heart was thumping against his ribcage.

‘What did you want, Eddie?' Deciding to call it a day, Ida folded up the dress she was altering and turned off the electric lamp.

‘Just to tell you I went after that job as a projectionist,' he mumbled awkwardly.

‘The one at the Victory Picture House? How did you get on?'

‘I reckon I managed not to put my foot in it but I don't have an answer yet. They said they'd let me know before the end of the week. Meanwhile, I've got plenty on my hands, helping Dad.'

As the brother and sister talked, Violet did her best to fade into the background. From what she knew of the Thomson family, both Ida and Eddie still lived at home with their parents. The house was on Valley Road, out on the edge of town – the only one in the short row that had been given a fresh lick of paint in recent years because their father was a painter and decorator by trade and it was important for them to put on a good show.

She'd known the family since she was small but never played with them or joined the same gang – partly because they were both a few years older than her, and partly because Aunty Winnie, with the best of intentions, had a tendency to shelter Violet and had taken her along to grown-up events rather than leave her to play in the street. This had set her apart from other children – something that both Winnie and Violet now regretted.

‘Violet was taking an interest in the alteration work I'm doing,' Ida explained to Eddie, drawing Violet back in to the conversation. ‘By the way, Violet, I hear you've got hidden talents in the sewing department. Now, don't be modest – everyone was saying how well you looked yesterday, weren't they, Eddie? And that you made the dress yourself?'

‘Yes, well then, I'll be off,' Eddie said hurriedly. At over six feet tall, and broad shouldered, he felt cramped by the sloping ceilings and out of place amongst the female paraphernalia. And given Violet's reluctance to catch his gaze, she was obviously as embarrassed as he was by the situation. He wasn't surprised – she'd never shown any interest in him in all the years he'd known her, and despite acting decisively when the occasion demanded it, he didn't have Stan's brash confidence to push himself forward.

‘No need, I'm on my way myself. Ta-ta!' Violet was nearest the door and able to slip out before Ida or Eddie could protest. She was already down on the first-floor landing when Ida caught up with her to thrust a printed leaflet into her hand. ‘It's advertising our play,' she explained. ‘Derek King's
Mistaken Identity
. I mean it – why not give it a go?'

‘I'll think about it,' Violet said as she fled downstairs into the shop, past Muriel laying out the latest Lastex girdles for her tardy customer and sidestepping Eddie's motorbike, which he'd parked bang across the pavement, almost blocking her way.

‘Slow down – you'll give yourself heartburn,' Winnie remonstrated as Violet bolted down her poached eggs on toast.

The table in the back kitchen of their home on Brewery Road was laid out with the linen cloth that Violet's aunt always insisted on with knives and forks, blue and white plates, a brown earthenware teapot and matching milk jug.

‘Where's the salt?' Uncle Donald demanded as he sat down, just in from shutting his barber's shop directly across the street. He brought with him a whiff of Brylcreem and shaving soap and the permanent impression that any stray strand of hair or unruly whisker would receive short shrift.

‘There it is, right under your nose.' Winnie hovered behind him, ready to refill the teapot from the kettle simmering on the gas cooker in the corner. ‘I've baked scones if you've still got room,' she told her niece. ‘And don't tell me you're watching your figure.'

‘No time for scones.' Violet was up and on the move before her uncle had a chance to have a go at her as usual – Violet, where's your manners; take your elbows off the table; don't talk with your mouth full. She knew he didn't mean anything by it – it was just the way he was.

Slow, steady Uncle Donald, the methodical Methodist barber had been married to Aunty Winnie since before the Great War, though the two were chalk and cheese. Where she was cheery and friendly, he was dour and determined to see the worst in people. She was stout, whereas he was wiry and gaunt. Each evening she would chat, chat, chat as she knitted or sewed while he stuck his head in a newspaper and never said a word.

Their marriage was a mystery to Violet, as it was to the whole neighbourhood, and once, during her early teenage years, when Violet had overheard a series of arguments and ventured to ask her aunt what kept the two of them together, Winnie, with tears in her eyes, had squeezed her hand and whispered three little words: ‘You, love – you!'

Violet had considered this answer and convinced herself that she understood. After all, her aunt and uncle had stepped into the breach left by both her parents passing away in quick succession. First her mother, Florence, had died giving birth to Violet and in the same year her father, Joe, had been lost in battle, scrapping with the enemy for a few yards of mud in a Flanders field. Donald was Joe's brother and it must have seemed the right thing to do for him and Winnie to step in and give a home to the poor orphaned baby.

‘I loved you the minute I clapped eyes on you,' Winnie would often tell Violet during the years of her growing up. ‘Who could help it? You were such a bonny, magical little thing.'

To the best of Violet's knowledge, the word ‘love' hadn't once crossed her Uncle Donald's lips. ‘We did our Christian duty,' he would tell people in his upright way, as if he ranked the care of a child alongside the meticulous shaving of his customers and the conscientious saying of prayers in chapel.

‘Don't mind him,' was Winnie's advice to Violet whenever her uncle seemed too severe. ‘It's not that he enjoys coming down hard on you. He does it for your own good.'

And it was apparently for Violet's good that the ill-matched pair had stayed together, keeping a roof over her head through the worst of times, putting a meal on the table even when Donald had fallen out of work as a clerk in the office at the local mine and onto the dole when Violet was a little girl. Winnie had immediately taken a part-time job in the spinning shed at Kingsley's Mill and Donald had rented an allotment on the edge of the Common to save the cost of buying vegetables by growing everything himself. Then he'd taken up scissors and razor and taught himself the skills needed to become a barber. Countless short back and sides and sticks of shaving soap later, here was Donald Wheeler at the age of fifty-two, nicely set up in rented premises, snipping and clipping hair and trimming moustaches all day long. Meanwhile Winnie, long ago accepting that she would never have children of her own, had cut back her hours at Kingsley's to wash and iron, cook and bake and generally dote on precious, pretty little Violet, the centre of her world.

‘What's the rush?' Donald asked as Violet reached for the scarlet felt hat hanging from a hook on the back of the kitchen door. A sunny evening meant that the window overlooking the back yard was open, letting in the sounds of boys playing cricket in the alley between Brewery Road and Chapel Street. Cries of ‘Howz'at!' and the solid chuck of leather ball against willow bat interspersed the short interrogation beginning inside the house.

‘I want to catch the seven o'clock session at Brinkley Baths.'

‘Ah, gadding off, as per usual?'

‘I'm not gadding, Uncle Donald. Swimming is good for you.'

‘Is that what they say? You can never sit still – that's your trouble.'

Setting her hat at a jaunty angle and taking up the bag containing her swimming costume, rubber cap and towel, Violet blew her aunt a kiss and fled.

‘If you see Emily, tell her she still owes me that tanner she borrowed for her tram fare a week last Wednesday,' Winnie called after her from the top step.

‘Emily Thomson? You mean Ida and Eddie's mother?'

‘Yes. She's found herself a new job taking entrance money for the swimming baths. Tell her I haven't forgotten.'

‘I will do, Aunty. Now I have to dash.'

At somewhere between a walk and a run, Violet crossed Brewery Road and threaded her way down back alleys, between rows of shabby terraced houses, down steep, moss-covered stone steps until she came to the canal. From here she hurried on along Canal Road, past the tall, oppressive walls of Kingsley's woollen mill then Barlow's chemist's shop and finally the brightly lit Victory Picture House until, at seven o'clock on the dot, she came to the green-tiled entrance of Brinkley Corporation Baths.

‘Hello, Violet. Fancy meeting you here!' were the words that greeted her from the lips of Stan Tankard as she stepped inside to join the short queue of women waiting to purchase a ticket. He stood beside the box office with a rolled towel under his arm, wearing grey flannel trousers, canvas deck shoes and a white shirt but no jacket.

‘Hello, Stan,' Violet answered with a hint of reserve. Even though they'd danced together after the gala, Stan needn't think that he'd laid claim to her in any way. Yes, he was funny and you could have a lark, and yes, he had a certain way of flattering a girl and making her feel special, but for some reason she wasn't that keen on him. ‘What brings you here?'

‘What, aren't I allowed to practise my breaststroke along with everyone else?' he said with a wink at the woman in front of Violet.

‘Of course you are, but I thought this was a ladies-only session.'

‘It is, but I'm the new lifeguard, so I'll be looking after you lovely girls, seeing that you don't come to any harm.'

It was Violet's turn to pay and recognizing Emily Thomson's long, serious face behind the desk, she quietly passed on Winnie's message about the sixpence. With that done and clutching her ticket, she headed for the changing room without taking any more notice of Stan. Five minutes later she emerged from her cubicle and followed the smell of chlorine through the tiled archway containing the footbath out onto the side of the pool.

She found to her satisfaction that there was plenty of room for her to dive in at the deep end and swim some steady lengths. Plunging in head first, she enjoyed the buoyancy of the clean water, the feel of her limbs pushing and kicking, the cool splash against her face. Lost in the pleasant sensations, she came to the shallow end and was about to turn when Stan called down to her. He was standing on the wet tiles directly above her, legs wide apart and wearing his lifeguard's swimming trunks, with a whistle dangling down his bare chest.