Mill Town Girl

by Audrey Reimann

  Dad wouldn’t be stopped. ‘I know what I’m talking about. I’m in insurance. I see it every day. He wants to get his hands on your sister’s property. Your father, though he left it to Carrie, meant you to benefit as well.’

  ‘Danny, please!’ Mum was really mad with him now, Rose saw. ‘Think what you’re saying. She’s always said she’d leave it all to Rose, to the girls. She’s no fool. And she’s had a hard life. She deserves a bit of happiness.’

  ‘Well, she won’t find it with him.’ Dad’s jaw was set in the firm line, which meant he was not teasing. ‘He’s a nasty bit of work,’ he said. ‘I don’t talk about people behind their backs and I don’t let people tell me their tales, but there are rumours that persist so long you have to take account of them.’

  ‘What rumours?’ Mum asked.

  ‘They say he was warped when he was younger. Unnatural. And this guardian work at the girls’ reformatory. Do you know who metes out the punishments? Cecil Ratcliffe!’

  ‘They have to be punished,’ Mum said. ‘They’ve done wrong.’

  Dad looked quickly from Mum to herself, as if wondering if he should tell them all he knew, then, ‘They are girls, Jane. Young girls. He takes them into the punishment room and it’s said he beats them.’

  Mum and Rose were silent. They were both shocked, though it was well known that the reformatory girls had to be corrected.

  ‘Somebody has to do it,’ Mum said in a small voice. ‘We don’t believe in corporal punishment, I know. But they’ve always done it in schools and reformatories.’

  ‘He enjoys it. He likes punishing them. Then he makes them kneel and pray for salvation.’

  ‘But, Dad,’ Rose asked. ‘What have they done to deserve it?’

  ‘They’ve done no more than any young girl wants to do, love. They want to wear lipsticks and fancy underclothes. And these things are forbidden in there. And to the likes of Cecil Ratcliffe frippery is the mark of a Jezebel.’

  ‘Oh, Danny,’ Mum said. ‘It gives me a queer turn, just thinking about him.’

  ‘And by all accounts,’ Dad added, ‘he was cruel to his wife and daughter.’ He knocked out his pipe slowly. ‘I’d never allow a man like that to have authority over my girls.’

  ‘Well, that’s not likely to happen anyway,’ Rose said.

  ‘Carrie says he wants someone at his side. For council dinners and all that,’ Mum explained. ‘He doesn’t want a real marriage. She wouldn’t tolerate that.’

  ‘If she can have Cecil Ratcliffe within a yard of her she can tolerate more than you think,’ Dad answered with a cynical edge to his voice.

  Rose knew there was no point in expecting Dad to see how preposterous it was to imagine that Aunt Carrie would marry. Dad and Aunt Carrie had never been soulmates. But she’d never speak to Aunt Carrie again if she married Cecil Ratcliffe.

  Three months later Rose gained distinctions in her Higher School Certificate. There was a place for her at teacher training college and, though it gave her satisfaction, the ebullience she’d felt at winning the scholarship did not return to her on the morning the results came out.

  Mary and Vivienne were upstairs in their bedroom, sorting through Vivienne’s dressing-up clothes, an assortment of costumes she used when she gave impromptu ‘concerts’ in the back garden for her friends.

  Rose smiled at the girls’ cries of delight and the occasional shout of rage when Vivienne found she had outgrown one of last year’s creations. Her sisters had one overriding interest in common and that was – Vivienne. Viv had asked to be sent to dancing lessons almost as soon as she could speak and went to Miss Barton’s Dance Studio four times a week, accompanied by the devoted Mary who sat out and watched her sister through lessons in tap-dancing, ballet, country-dancing and acrobatics.

  Mary, lovely Mary with her talents for drawing and sewing, had no higher aim in life than to be Vivienne’s handmaiden despite Mum and Dad’s hopes for her. Mary was fourteen. She should be spending every spare minute working for her School Certificate. Instead, she altered the costumes that Vivienne shamelessly begged from dancing troupes; searched for bright pieces of satin and lace in the market; found an occasional twopenny treasure in the pawn shop sales – a broken mother-of-pearl headdress, sparkling glass necklaces and old-fashioned long kid gloves. Her reward for her labours was a share in her sister’s glory and supporting roles in the one-girl pantomimes.

  Now they called downstairs to Rose, ‘Alan’s here! He’s coming up the road. Rose!’

  Rose watched him turn in at the gate. He was six feet tall now, dark and very slim with an easy, loose-limbed walk. Today he wasn’t wearing the baggy old trousers and pullover he put on to work on Nat Cooper’s farm. He was smartly dressed in grey pressed flannels and a green Harris Tweed jacket. The very sight of him nowadays made her heart turn over.

  She went to the door and opened it before he could knock. His face had lost its soft edges but not the boyish grin that spread across his features as she let him into the hall.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Have you got the results?’

  Rose handed the letter to him, trying not to give away anything by her expression but her eyes never left his face as his brown eyes flew over the page. He looked at her, grinned and threw wide his arms as if inviting her to be hugged. Rose smiled but made no move towards him. She was afraid that if she let herself be held, the feeling of closeness might overwhelm her and she’d do something silly, like cry.

  ‘Are you going to college?’ he asked. He was still smiling, as if he’d not seen her hesitation.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been away from home before and I’m nervous.’

  ‘Don’t be. You’ll enjoy it,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to Scotland in a couple of weeks to do a bit of flying.’

  He followed her through to the living room where Mum was ironing at the table. Rose had felt shaky, alone with Alan, and she was comforted when she watched Mum’s quick movements, as the flat-iron hissed over a starched tablecloth.

  ‘I’ve come to ask you to have dinner with me on Saturday,’ Alan said. ‘I thought we’d take Dad’s car and drive out to a roadhouse I know where they have dinner dances.’

  Rose felt a great flood of colour flood into her face. He was asking her out. Was it a date? Did he want to reward her for passing the exam? Oh, she couldn’t, not yet. She’d make a fool of herself. He was used to taking girls out. She had never been out with a boy. She’d have to refuse him. She took a deep breath and clenched her hands together.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alan. I can’t.’ Her voice sounded strained and unusually high-pitched and false. If only he had given her warning, she might have worked out a way to accept, to deal with the banging of her heart and the jelly in her legs. Why was this happening to her?

  It was too late. She wanted to change her mind when she saw his expression change. Now he looked the way he did with strangers, distant and polite. The smile had gone. It was as if the light behind his eyes had been put out. He turned towards the door. ‘Write to me, Rose. Let me know how you like college, will you?’ His voice was quiet and cool, with a new formality.

  She followed him to the front door. ‘I will,’ she said, ‘and thank you for being pleased.’

  Alan looked hard into her face for a few seconds. ‘We’re still friends, aren’t we?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Rose felt a great knot in her throat. If he had only put his arm around her then, as of old, she knew she’d have been lost. But he looked at her with a serious kind of expression she had not seen before, making her look straight back into his eyes.

  ‘I’ll ask you again,’ he said, ‘when you are older.’ Then he turned on his heel and walked away. He did not look back. He did not see her biting her lip, raising her hand as if to call him back.

  She ran back into the living room and flung her arms around Mum. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she wailed, ‘why did I say no?’

  Mum held her at arm’s length and looked into her eyes with perfect unders
tanding. ‘You’ve fallen in love with him, haven’t you Rose?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Rose answered as tears began to roll slowly down her face. But she wanted to smile with happiness as well as cry. ‘I’ve sent him away, Mum. Do you think he’ll ask me again?’

  It was a fortnight before she heard from him, when she received a letter telling her that he had joined his friend in Edinburgh in advance of the new university year. After that his letters began to arrive regularly.

  Aunt Carrie gave up her attempts to keep her at home, prophesying that war would be declared at any moment and that the universities and colleges would be closed down, but Rose began her studies in September at the college in Manchester.

  There too the talk was all of the worsening situation in Europe. Lectures often ended early, in discussions with senior lecturers about the inevitability of war. Outside, on hoardings, posters read: ‘Don’t Leave it to Others. Serve to Save. You’re Wanted. ARP.’

  Every evening, in her digs in Levenshulme, she listened to the wireless. At the cinema she saw Neville Chamberlain, whom she thought of as a true, honest Englishman, waving aloft a piece of paper on his return from Germany, which, he said bore Hitler’s signature as well as his own, promising that their two countries would never go to war again.

  ‘Peace in Our Time’, he declared.

  Most people believed he had been duped. For, if war was not expected, why had thirty-eight million gas masks been issued? Why was everyone urged to carry them at all times? They were ugly, heavy objects in cardboard boxes with a string that constantly broke. Rose had a black, imitation-leather carrying case for hers and wore it slung across her shoulder over the blue tweed coat Aunt Carrie had bought for her. She took it everywhere at first but soon found it an encumbrance, as did her friends, and abandoned it.

  On Friday nights, when she returned to Macclesfield for the weekend, she was in the habit of calling in at the Temperance Hotel when she got off the train, to have a cup of tea and a chat with Aunt Carrie before walking the mile and a half to Wells Road.

  Always, Aunt Carrie told her which of the mills had switched over to making munitions and which were making shirts and uniforms for the services. She told her the names of the boys who had joined up. Gerald was in the army. She told her that the mill boys were waiting for their call up; that the country was rearming as fast as it could; that she was buying tinned food and half hundred weight bags of sugar, to store in her cellar.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Aunt Carrie had foreseen events. On 15 March the following spring, news came through that the president of Czechoslovakia had signed away Bohemia and Moravia to Hitler. Hitler had not consulted Neville Chamberlain and the good man was forced to admit, ‘We have been deceived’.

  Rose would finish her first year at college but she had accepted the fact that she would not complete the course. In any case, she wanted to do her bit if it came to war.

  In April, young men of twenty and twenty-one who were not exempt were called up. Many had already joined the services and some of the older lecturers had gone too, to replace the schoolteachers who were in the forces.

  By May everyone was reconciled to the prospect of war. It was all anyone talked about. Dad dug an Anderson shelter in the back garden and, in the washhouse next to the back door, he kept a stirrup pump and buckets filled with sand and water to put out incendiary bombs.

  It was Rose’s eighteenth-birthday week and she was home for the weekend. Aunt Carrie made a fuss of their birthdays so, on the Saturday morning, she went down early to the Temperance Hotel. All thoughts of war were absent today. She felt as if she were walking on air. Her feet hardly touched the pavement in Chestergate for, in her pocket, she had a letter from Alan, which he had tucked inside her birthday card. She knew it off by heart and kept recalling it, word for word, as she glanced, unseeing, at the shop windows as she passed.

  ‘Dear Rose,’ he’d written, ‘I’m sorry I won’t be home for your birthday. I am staying in Edinburgh for an Air Squadron course and will not be home until September. I enjoy reading your letters so much. Do you think you could write more often? Once a week?’

  Here, the handwriting changed. It was as if he’d broken off, thought a bit, plucked up courage and started again, for the writing was faster, untidy. ‘I have no right to ask you to wait for me, I know. You are eighteen with no doubt half of Macclesfield at your feet, but would you, could you, be my girl? I can’t wait a week for your answer, especially if it is yes, so please telephone me,’ – here he had given a number – ‘on Saturday night. Yours, in hope, Alan.’

  What a wonderful, beautiful day it was. She was Alan’s girl. She’d ring him tonight. She’d be with him again in September. And she was glad, so glad that she had waited until Alan had asked her. She was glad she hadn’t had lots of boyfriends.

  Were other girls like this? Rose didn’t think so. There were girls who could kiss anybody – the more the better it seemed. You saw them linking arms with one boy one day then another – and another the next and the next again. She could never do that. She had only been kissed twice. That horrible first time in the park when she’d felt ill for days afterwards and that summer, that wonderful summer when Alan kissed her at his farewell party. She’d had to tear herself away that time, before she fainted clear away from all the lovely sensations that had swept through her.

  She reached Churchwallgate and hardly remembered getting there. As she went down to Waters Green she reminded herself again of what a lucky girl she was; she was going to see Aunt Carrie, who would make a tremendous fuss of her. Later she would buy chocolates on her way home and call for Norah, her old school friend, who was coming for tea. And tonight she’d talk to Alan on the telephone and say, yes, yes, yes.

  She saw Nat Cooper in Waters Green and stopped, to stroke his horse and talk to Nat.

  ‘Goin’ to see yer auntie, are yer?’ Nat smiled widely. ‘Watch yer frock. Old Dobbin’s goin’ to tek a chunk out o’ it if yer dunna watch out.’

  Rose laughed and stepped back before the horse, rattling his bit, drooled all over her green print dress. ‘It’s my birthday, Nat. I’m eighteen,’ she said.

  ‘By gum,’ Nat answered. ‘I thought you was younger’n that.’

  She teased, ‘Do I look old?’ then wished she hadn’t for Nat blushed bright red before leaping on to the front board and taking up the reins.

  ‘You look luvly,’ he managed to say, before urging the horse into a walk and turning his head towards the Cooperative Dairy. ‘I wish yer many happy returns.’

  Rose watched him go and looked down to check that her dress hadn’t been given too much of a wetting by the faithful old Dobbin who seemed to know everyone and every stopping-place in the town.

  It was then that she saw Cecil Ratcliffe’s car parked a little way up from the Temperance Hotel. It was the first thing to cast a cloud over her happy mood. What was he doing here? Aunt Carrie had refused to talk about him when Dad questioned her and they all assumed that old Ratcliffe had been sent packing.

  Mrs Bettley opened the door. ‘Come in and wait,’ she said, ‘your aunt’s upstairs, talking to someone. She’ll be down in a minute,’ before she scuttled off down to the kitchen.

  Rose did not want to go into the residents’ dining room in case any of the guests were still eating so she opened the door to the glass-fronted cubicle her aunt used as an office. She had never been in here before though Aunt Carrie had not forbidden it.

  Everything was neat and tidy. It was a dark little cubicle, tucked into and under the curve of the staircase with a good view, through the glass above the desk, of the front door and hallway. There was just room for the roll-top mahogany desk, a chair and a drawer cabinet. The desk lid was rolled back. Set upon the top of the desk were a leather-bound blotting pad with a clean sheet of blotting paper upmost, a round jar of sharpened pencils, an inkwell in a silver holder, a wooden stationery holder with neatly stacked headed notepaper and envelopes, and three penholders
with shining clean J-nibs.

  The only disordered note was struck by the heap of just delivered letters the postman or Mrs Bettley had dumped on the ledge in front of the little glass window. Rose picked them up to put them into a tidy pile. And what was this? She could not believe her eyes. A blue envelope with the so-familiar handwriting and a bulky number of pages inside evidently. A letter from Uncle Patrick. Aunt Carrie had always given the impression that she had no time at all for Uncle Patrick. What did it mean?

  She felt guilty, as if she’d been prying. She put the letters back, as they had been, untidy, the Canadian stamped letter underneath, and went to the door.

  No sooner had she turned the handle than she heard Aunt Carrie’s sitting room door, right overhead, open; heard her aunt saying in a quiet, confidential voice, ‘I don’t want you to announce it or anything Cecil. Especially not at the chapel. I’ll not tell my sister and her husband until I’m ready.’

  ‘Very well, my dear,’ Cecil Ratcliffe answered.

  ‘If I sell, I want to get a good price for the hotel. If it is like the last time, if they want to commandeer it for a ministry, then it’s better I’m compensated for a going concern.’

  ‘I understand. We’ll announce it in the New Year, shall we? It’s only six months away. I’ve waited all this time, Caroline.’

  To Rose’s horror she heard what she could only assume was a kiss; Cecil Ratcliffe making sloppy noises and no sound from Aunt Carrie.

  ‘Oh, God,’ prayed Rose. ‘Don’t let them see me.’ She pressed her back against the stair-wall panelling and edged her way towards the kitchen. The door was ajar and inside, at the far end of the big stone-flagged room, Mrs Bettley and a kitchen maid were standing, chattering, drying a pile of wet dishes with carefree unconcern.

  ‘There you are, Rose,’ Mrs Bettley said. ‘Is your aunt down yet?’

  ‘I don’t know. I – I was in the – the – dining room,’ Rose stammered weakly. ‘I was just looking round.’

  Aunt Carrie came into the kitchen, dressed severely in a plain black dress with cross-over fastenings, not a hair out of place. She looked just as she always did. Not in the least like a woman who had just been kissed by that disgusting man.