Winnie of the Waterfront

by Rosie Harris

  ‘Don’t worry, Miss Henshaw, she uses sticks to get about. I only used the wheelchair because it was rather a long way for her to walk,’ Sister Tabitha said quickly.

  ‘I see! Well, I have allocated you to a bedroom on the ground floor, Winnie Malloy, so you should find that easy enough to manage.’

  The room was small, almost cell-like. Against one wall was a narrow bed covered with a white candlewick bedspread. Above it was a framed picture of the Sacred Heart. On the other side of the room there was a four-drawer tallboy with a small oval mirror standing on top of it. There was an alcove with a row of pegs to hang clothes on and a small wooden chair with a cane seat.

  Winnie stared round her in delight. For the first time in her life she was going to have a room of her own. No matter how bad her working conditions might be, she would be able to come back here to her very own room every night.

  ‘Put the crucifix we’ve given you on the tallboy by the side of the mirror, Winnie,’ Sister Tabitha told her. ‘That way it will remind you of Our Lord’s suffering every time you look in the mirror, and that will save you from the sin of vanity.’

  ‘Yes, Sister Tabitha!’

  ‘Now, Miss Henshaw will find someone to accompany you to Johnson’s Mantles factory tomorrow morning. You start at eight o’clock sharp so make sure you are up and ready in time. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, Sister Tabitha.’

  ‘And remember, you must keep your room clean and tidy at all times. Miss Henshaw will be inspecting it regularly.’

  Winnie nodded. She wanted them all to leave; she wanted to be alone to savour the wonder of shutting the door on the rest of the world and knowing that no one could disturb her.

  The moment the door closed behind Sister Tabitha, Winnie gazed around, enchanted by every aspect of the tiny room. She went across to the tallboy and for a long moment studied her reflection in the small oval mirror. Lifting both hands she ran them over her hair, which she had been made to pin back flat to her head with metal slides. Daringly, she pulled the slides out. She shook her head vigorously and felt a wonderful sensation of freedom as her hair fell forward to softly frame her face.

  As her own turquoise-blue eyes stared back at her she gave a gasp of astonishment. It was as if the pretty face with the luxuriant black curls reflected in the mirror belonged to a stranger. She ran her fingers through her hair, fluffing it out, smoothing it down, twisting the curls behind her ears then pulling them forward again.

  She felt light-hearted and confident. Having her hair loose transformed her from being an ugly cripple into a whole new person, she thought delightedly. She was no longer afraid to face the world.

  Taking a deep breath she opened the top drawer of the tallboy and, automatically crossing herself first, slipped the crucifix inside it.

  Winnie had imagined that as she was working in the packing department at the dress factory she would be sitting at a polished table wrapping each garment in tissue paper and then laying it carefully in a big cardboard box.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth. Perched on an uncomfortable stool she found herself wedged in between two other girls at a slowly moving rubber belt that seemed to stretch almost the full length of the room.

  The garments they handled were men’s shirts and ladies’ blouses. At the far end of the bench was the checker, who took the work from the machinists, scanned it with an eagle eye and then passed it on to the first girl on the bench.

  From then on, each of them had to carry out a specific function. The first girl fastened all the buttons. The next operator slipped a stiffener in under the collar. The third girl placed the garment face down on the moving belt and folded the sleeves back so that they were parallel and lay flat at the back of the garment. The fourth girl folded the shirt into three, pinned it in place and passed it to the last girl on the row who placed it in a deep cardboard box.

  Each box contained twelve garments, and as fast as each box was filled a boy carried them away to the dispatch section. Here they were marked off against a sheet and each box labelled ready for delivery.

  The girls worked fast. They buttoned and pinned and folded with such speed that Winnie felt dizzy.

  Maggie Weeks, a small, hard-faced, cross-eyed girl sitting next to her, grew impatient as the work piled up in front of Winnie and was carried along the ever-moving belt to where she was sitting before Winnie had time to complete the work allocated to her.

  ‘Wake up, can’t you,’ she snapped irritably. ‘You’ve got the easiest job of the lot of us. All you have to do is slip a stiffener under the collar.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I seem to be all fingers and thumbs and I can’t make them stay in place.’

  ‘Here, let me show you,’ offered Sonia Perks, a plump blonde girl who was sitting on Winnie’s other side. Her job was to fasten all the buttons on each garment as it moved past her on its way to Winnie. ‘Look, try doing it this way.’ She picked up one of the stiffeners between her right thumb and finger, and, holding the shirt in her left hand, deftly slipped the piece of white card underneath the collar.

  ‘There! Now you try it. It’s dead easy. Don’t worry about straightening the shirt out afterwards, leave Maggie to do that.’

  By the time they stopped for a break, Winnie’s fingers were sore and her arms and back were aching, but she had mastered the technique.

  ‘Come on, we go to the canteen for ten minutes. It gives us a chance to go to the lavvy, get a cuppa and have a fag. Sets you up for the rest of the morning,’ Sonia grinned.

  Winnie struggled off her stool and looked around for her sticks, only to find that someone had moved them.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Sonia asked.

  ‘My sticks! They’re gone! I left them under my stool.’

  ‘They were probably in the way so the foreman will have moved them.’

  ‘Where’s he put them?’

  ‘Heaven knows, we’ll ask him later on. You don’t need them until you go home, do you?’

  ‘Well, I can’t walk, not unless someone is helping me or there’s something to lean on.’

  Maggie and Sonia exchanged looks. ‘Come on,’ Maggie grabbed her arm, ‘we’ll give you a hand this time, but you’d better find yourself a proper place for those walking sticks, or crutches, or whatever they’re called. Put them somewhere where they won’t be in the way and people won’t trip over them. Where’ve you been living until now?’

  ‘The Holy Cross Orphanage.’

  ‘Oh my God! You a Cat’lick then?’

  Winnie nodded. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Does that mean Father Bunloaf will be visiting to check on yer?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘He does, you know,’ Sonia gabbled. ‘He comes on Fridays to make sure you ain’t eating meat. You wait and see.’

  Maggie clapped a hand over her mouth, choking back her laughter as she saw Winnie’s eyes widen in disbelief.

  ‘You’re having me on, aren’t you,’ Winnie said huffily. ‘Are you two Catholics?’

  ‘No, we’re not, and you’d have known that if you’d been here last time there was a bloody Prot Parade.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  The two girls exchanged looks and giggled. ‘If we told you now there’d be no surprise for you next time the Orangemen walks with their poles stuck in their bellies.’

  ‘Are you talking about the Loyal Order of Orange Lodge March on the twelfth of July?’

  ‘That’s the one, chook! You can come along with us to see it if you last out until then. If you don’t buck your ideas up you’ll be out on your arse when your week’s trial is over.’

  Winnie bit down on her lower lip and remained silent. The way she felt about working at Johnson’s Mantles she would have liked nothing better than to know she would be there for only one week. She already hated everything to do with the place, but since she had to work in order to live, it seemed she had no choice.

  That night she couldn’t sleep
as she felt so despondent about the future. She stared out of her small window and wondered how Bob Flowers was making out. She wondered if the reason he hadn’t kept in touch as he had promised was because he, too, had been so terribly disappointed with life in the real world.

  While she’d been in the orphanage she had often thought that one of the first things she would do when she came out was to go back to see Father Patrick and his housekeeper, Mrs Reilly. There was no one else who would remember her and she wasn’t even sure they would, she thought sadly. Probably so much had happened in their lives since then that she and her family were long forgotten. Life wouldn’t have stood still for them as it had for her because they hadn’t been isolated in an unreal environment like she had been.

  She had never thought about what was involved in earning a living, or having to do shopping, or coping with all the hazards of getting on a tram or crossing the road. Now it all seemed to be so overwhelming that she could understand why nuns took the veil and retreated from the world to the cloistered safety of a convent atmosphere.

  Not that she was tempted to do anything like that, she told herself fiercely. She couldn’t be happy knowing that she was going to be confined to one space for the rest of her life.

  One of the things she disliked so much about working at the factory was being shut in and having to sit in the same place for the whole of her working day. All the time she had been at the orphanage she had looked forward to being free to go outside and breathe fresh air whenever she wanted to do so.

  So far, the only fresh air she’d managed to enjoy was when she made her way from the hostel to the tram stop in the morning. The tram stopped right outside the factory so there was little chance to fill her lungs before she was inside the building and taking her place at the conveyor belt.

  It was much the same at night. By the time she got back to the hostel she was so exhausted that she was much too tired to take a walk after her evening meal.

  Even if she’d had the energy to go out she would have been afraid to do so on her own. Her uneasiness was because everything was so strange, she assured herself. Once she was adjusted to her new surroundings it would be different. She might even come to like working at Johnson’s Mantles, she told herself.

  By Friday she’d perfected the technique of putting stiffeners under the collars of the shirts and blouses so well that there was no longer work piling up in front of her. When she remarked on this to Maggie the other girl laughed. ‘Don’t sound so cocky, you’ll be moved on to something else next week!’

  Winnie’s face fell. ‘Why? I’m doing it right now!’

  ‘No one stays on the same job for more than a week. You’ve got to learn all the jobs. Then, when you can do them all properly, you get moved to another department. Some of us have done every job in the factory.’

  ‘Every job?’

  ‘Well, all those to do with the production line. They are classed as unskilled and are on the same rate of pay. Engineers and designers, and people like that, are skilled workers and they get paid more. They’ve had to do years of training at college or night school to learn their jobs.’

  ‘Are you going to train for something like that?’ Winnie asked.

  Maggie sniggered. ‘You taking the piss, kiddo? I’m a factory worker and that’s all I’ll ever be. Perhaps one day I’ll be made a charge hand.’ She shrugged her thin shoulders, ‘That’s only if I’m lucky and the gaffer takes a shine to me. I’ve got about the same chance of that happening as finding a fella to marry me, though I’m looking all the time.’

  ‘Where are you hoping to meet this young man who’s going to marry you?’ Winnie persisted.

  ‘I don’t know! At some Saturday night hop, I suppose.’

  ‘Is that what you do at the weekend, go dancing?’

  Maggie nodded. ‘Mostly, don’t we, Sonia? What do you do, you can’t very well go dancing, can you?’

  Winnie shook her head. ‘I’ve never been to a dance because we weren’t allowed out of the orphanage.’

  ‘Never? I thought you Cat’licks had to go to Mass every Sunday, and to confession and all that sort of thing. You’d have to come out of the orphanage to go to church.’

  ‘No!’ Winnie shook her head. ‘There was a chapel inside the orphanage and a priest came on Saturday evenings to hear our confessions and again on Sunday to celebrate Mass.’

  ‘That’s like being in prison!’ Sonia told her. ‘What’re you going to do now you’re out, go mad?’

  Winnie shook her head and smiled wanly. ‘I’ve gone straight back to the hostel and gone to bed every night this week I’ve been so exhausted,’ she said.

  ‘Well, tomorrow is Saturday and we stop work at midday so you’re not going to waste the afternoon by going to bed, are you? We’re going shopping. Want to come?’

  Winnie shook her head. ‘I haven’t any money to spend. After I’ve paid for my room and keep at the hostel I will only have three shillings left and I’ve got to keep threepence a day for my tram fares because I can’t walk to work.’

  ‘You’d better move to somewhere cheaper then, because that’s all you’re ever going to earn at Johnson’s Mantles, or in any other Liverpool factory for that matter.’

  ‘Best thing you can do is find yourself a bloke and get him to marry you,’ Sonia advised.

  ‘She doesn’t stand much chance with legs like hers, does she,’ Maggie cackled unkindly.

  ‘I dunno! She’s pretty enough,’ Sonia argued, ‘and going dancing isn’t the only way to meet blokes.’

  ‘It’s the best way!’

  ‘You can meet up with fellas in dozens of other places. It might be on the tram, or you might even get to know one of the delivery chaps at the factory,’ Sonia reminded her. ‘Or when you go shopping, if you go to the right place.’

  Winnie felt bewildered by their conversation. ‘So where’s that – the right place to go shopping, I mean?’

  ‘Paddy’s Market, of course. That’s the best place for bargains, too. By the sound of it that’s where you’ll be doing most of your shopping anyway. It’s the top spot for buying second-hand clothes,’ Maggie sniggered.

  ‘Come with us,’ Sonia urged. ‘We’ll show you where it is. It’ll be a laugh.’

  ‘I’m not sure …’ Winnie felt her colour rising. Paddy’s Market was in Great Homer Street, so close to where she’d lived before she’d gone into the orphanage that it would be like turning the clock back. It was one of the places her mother had taken her begging.

  ‘Go on, be a little devil. We’re going anyway,’ Sonia assured her. ‘We’ll be there at two o’clock, so if you’re coming then meet us there. We’ll keep an eye out for you.’

  ‘Be a job to miss her, the way she walks,’ Maggie commented nastily.

  ‘Take no notice of her,’ Sonia replied. ‘You be there. Wait for us by the steps. Two o’clock, Don’t forget! See you then.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  EVERYONE SAID THAT Saturday 27th May was the hottest day so far of 1922. In the packing room the girls were feeling exhausted by mid-morning. They snapped at each other and grumbled non-stop. The only good factor was that they would be finishing work at midday.

  Bert, the charge hand, was even more irritable than the girls. He found fault with the speed at which they worked and with the quality of their work. He snapped at Winnie because he said her sticks were protruding from under her stool.

  ‘I’ve told you half a dozen times about leaving those bloody things sticking out. Someone will go arse over tit and break their sodding neck. You’ve only been here five minutes and you’ve caused more trouble than all the rest of the bunch put together. To make matters worse you’re no great shape at the work either.’

  Winnie felt humiliated. She’d tried so hard, even though she didn’t like it there, and she’d thought she was doing quite well.

  ‘You coming to Paddy’s Market with us then?’ Maggie asked when they started to pack away the last of the shirts they’d been
working on.

  Winnie bit down on her lower lip uncertainly. She’d thought of nothing else since Sonia and Maggie had mentioned it. The minute she’d come out of the orphanage she’d planned to visit there as soon as she could, but she intended to go on her own, not with two people like Sonia and Maggie.

  That was why she hadn’t mentioned to the two girls that she knew the place like the back of her hand. She wondered what they would think if she told them that her mother had taken her begging in her home-made invalid carriage to Paddy’s Market, as well as to St John’s Market and the dockside, when she’d been a kid of eight.

  ‘Come on, there’s the twelve o’clock hooter, and you promised,’ Sonia urged. ‘Tell you what, instead of meeting up there why don’t we go straight from work?’

  Winnie gave in. Ten minutes later she was hobbling out of the factory gates, trying to keep up with Maggie and Sonia.

  They took a tram to Scotland Road, Maggie and Sonia chattering all the way about what they were hoping to buy. As they made their way to Great Homer Street, Winnie found herself looking round eagerly for familiar faces. Deep down she knew it was unlikely that she would recognise any of the people she had known as a child, even if she passed right next to them.

  The market seemed different from what she remembered. There was so much hustle and bustle, such a variety of stalls.

  ‘Come on, we want to go and find some clothes. You can get some real bargains, you know, if you dig around carefully on the second-hand stalls,’ Sonia told her. ‘They’re really cheap, too, because most of the stall-holders are willing to haggle. That’s the best bit really,’ she giggled.

  ‘You go on then, and I’ll follow. I can’t keep up with you,’ Winnie told her.

  ‘You sure you don’t mind?’

  ‘She said for us to go on, so let’s get cracking,’ Maggie said, grabbing hold of Sonia’s arm and dragging her away.

  Left on her own, Winnie looked round more leisurely. More and more memories of her childhood days came flooding back. Once she thought she saw Mrs Reilly, Father Patrick’s housekeeper.

  I must be going off my head, or else it’s the heat, she told herself. Someone like Mrs Reilly wouldn’t come here to Paddy’s Market. If she went to a market at all it would be to St John’s, which was in a different category altogether.