by Marie Joseph
Contents
About the Author
Also by Marie Joseph
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Copyright
About the Author
Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service. She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a retired chartered engineer, and they have two married daughters and eight grandchildren.
Marie Joseph began her writing career as a short-story writer and she now uses her northern background to enrich her bestselling novels. Down-to-earth characters bring a vivid authenticity to her stories, which are written with both humour and poignancy.
Her novel A Better World Than This won the 1987 Romantic Novelists’ Association Major Award.
Also by Marie Joseph
MAGGIE CRAIG
A LEAF IN THE WIND
FOOTSTEPS IN THE PARK
GEMINI GIRLS
Non-fiction
ONE STEP AT A TIME
One
IT WAS BLOUSES that week, so the buttonholes were being made on the machine, not bound as they were for the dresses and jackets. Emma Sparrow manoeuvred the satin-look material into position beneath the foot, guided it carefully and swiftly round the pencilled outline, then moved onto the next.
She knew she was going to cop it for being late for work that morning, so when the summons came to take the long walk to the office, past the rows of electric sewing machines, past the cutting tables and the ironing boards set in a long row, one behind the other, she showed no surprise.
Harry Gordon, manager of Delta Dresses Limited, was a stickler for punctuality, and being late two mornings together was a crime he would never overlook. Excuses cut no ice with him either, so it was no use Emma telling him that both her stepbrothers were sick and sorry for themselves with mumps, or that Sharon, her stepsister, had refused to get out of bed. Or that her father had gone grumbling out of the house because his breakfast hadn’t been ready on time.
‘My heart bleeds for you, lass.’ That was all Mr Gordon would say if she was daft enough to tout for sympathy.
‘This happens to be a clothing factory, not the bloody Civil Service,’ he had said last time. Then just for a minute, but only for a minute, his expression had softened. ‘I’ve heard as how you are up against it at home, love, but rules is rules. Time means money. That is why we have that clocking-in machine up on the wall, and as you rightly know, clocking-in time is eight-fifteen, not eight-thirty.’ He had wagged a fat forefinger at Emma. ‘Don’t you go forgetting it now. I could have another lass with her behind on your stool quicker than skinning a black pudding.’
Emma opened the door of the glass-fronted office and went inside. Mrs Kelly, the clerk-typist, nudging sixty but admitting only to forty-five, stopped typing to wink kindly, but over by the window, behind his own large and cluttered desk, Mr Harry Gordon did not even bother to look up. Emma stared at the top of his head where a bald patch showed as round and pink as a baby’s bottom. Harry Gordon was a fair-minded man, but with eighty girls in his employ he had developed an immunity to hard-luck stories. ‘Soft soaping’ he called them. So Emma stood before him, head bowed, waiting philosophically for what must be.
It had been one o’clock that morning before Sharon had come in, glowing rosily from riding home on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Emma tried to smother a yawn. Being a substitute mother to a sixteen-year-old rebel was a waste of time; Sharon took no notice of anybody.
Some days, like today, Emma had a desperate longing to run away from everything. Out of the little house in Litchfield Avenue, running as fast as she could away from the responsibility that was at times too much to bear. A longing to tell the lot of them – Alan, Joe, Sharon and her father – that it was time they tried to fend for themselves and stopped leaning on her. That at twenty she was unequal to the task of taking the place of her stepmother, killed two years ago crossing the street in the dark on her way home from work by a driver who hadn’t even bothered to stop.
Life being what it was, Emma guessed that most of the girls in the factory were up against it in some way or other. A third of the workforce was Pakistani, part of the twenty per cent making up the population of the Lancashire cotton town. Not that there was any racial discrimination. Emma had to admit that Mr Gordon treated all his girls with scrupulous fairness.
‘Religion, colour, politics, creed, makes no difference to Harry Gordon,’ he was fond of saying. ‘What matters is getting the stuff out on time, nowt else. So there’s no need for bloody chips on bloody shoulders here. There’s more prejudice in the bloody United Nations than what there is here!’
‘Ah. Emma Sparrow,’ he said at last, shifting a slim cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘Aye, well, what have you to say for yourself this time?’ He turned his head to a strange man sitting silently at the corner of the desk. ‘Won’t be a minute, Mr Martin, though I’m not exactly deviating from what we were talking about. Punctuality is all part of the set-up, and what I have to say won’t take long.’
Emma glanced briefly at the man, then as quickly away. Mr Martin. Mr Bernard Martin. Managing director of Delta Dresses. So this must be – this was almost sure to be his son. Managerial type anyway, sitting there in his dark suit, with a striped tie neatly knotted over a shirt of a spanking brilliant white. About thirty or a bit more, and when he spoke Emma placed him immediately as coming from down south. London. From Head Office maybe, or from their sister factory on the outskirts of Acton. Not top drawer, but certainly from the middle, with money behind him and the privileges that came with it. Not cockney, but not public school either. Confident and sure of himself, and amused, if the twinkle in his eyes was anything to go by.
Emma did not realize that her quick ear for a tune and her accurate ear for the geographical placing of an accent were synonymous. What she did realize was that the presence of this man was causing Mr Gordon to show off, to parade his authority, and to hide his usual benevolence.
‘I’m not a hard man, Emma.’ Mr Gordon was speaking at her but not to her. ‘Never say that. Nobody could say this place was run like one of them sweat shops in Victorian days. You all get proper tea-breaks and a good bonus at Christmas, plus the two paid weeks in July.’ He threw a ball-point pen down on the desk with a sudden show of impatience. ‘But getting in late I won’t stand for. Dammit, lass, you’re nowt but a young whippersnapper! Why, at your age I’d done a paper round and cleaned my father’s car before breakfast. At younger than what you are. How old are you, Emma?’
‘Twenty, Mr Gordon.’ Emma stared down at the floor. ‘I am really sorry. It won’t happen again, I promise.’
She liked Mr Harry Gordon, and if he wanted to show this London bloke how he ruled his employees with an iron fist then she was prepared to sound as penitent as possible. What she wasn’t prepared for was the way he suddenly stubbed out the cigar, jumped to his feet and leaned over the desk, pointing an angry finger at her, jabbing the air to emphasize his words.
‘Once more, lass. Just one more late card, and that’s it! Finished! Out! With a reference that won’t get you a job sweeping the street. Is that clear? Is that perfectly clear, Emma Sparrow?’
He was shouting so l
oudly that Emma backed away, nodding her head before escaping from the office and running back to her machine.
In a right state he was, she muttered as she switched on. An’ all because of the dark bloke with the lazy twinkle in his eyes sitting there in judgement. Emma reached for another blouse and slid the right-hand button trim underneath the foot, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly as she guided the trim into position.
So the rumours going round about the Lancashire branch of the firm doing badly could be right. She shot a quick glance at the rows of heads bent in concentration over the sewing machines ranked either side of the long table. At the busy fingers pulling the material backwards and forwards, twisting, stopping, breaking off threads and starting again.
What would happen to all these girls if the factory were to close?
Her own father had been a small boy at the time of the Depression, but he was for ever telling how his parents used to describe the early days of their marriage.
‘They lived not one week ahead, but one meal ahead,’ he would say when Sharon grumbled at having to hand over six pounds a week. ‘Raw onions many a time for their dinner. Just an onion dipped in salt, and lucky to get that at times. So don’t talk to me about being hard up. Nay, being hard up means being hungry, not sitting watching colour telly and spending money on frozen stuff tipped out of packets and shoved under a grill. Nourishing soups they had, made from marrow bones stewed till the stock set like jelly, and rice puddings that gave you a layer to your stomach, aye, and ox-tail stew so thick you could have made a poultice out of it….’
Emma pushed a strand of brown hair away from her face. One thing about this job – it did mean she could let her thoughts wander. She could switch on, switch off, press the pedal, release the pedal, all with the same automatic rhythm as if she were an extension of the machine. Leaving her mind free. It was no use making excuses to a man, to any man. If things went wrong, they always found a woman in the background to blame somehow. Blaming women boosted men’s flagging egos. It would never occur to her father that his daughter didn’t have the time to stew marrow bones till they set to flamin’ jelly. Emma tried to blow the wayward piece of hair out of her eyes. An’ it was a good job she wasn’t martyr material either. Not for her the injured silences, the hurt withdrawals, the quivering lips. She smiled to herself. Aye, life was what it was, flamin’ awful at times, and there was nothing to do but just get on with it and hope that some fine day the scales balanced in your favour. If you were lucky….
Mrs Arkwright, the supervisor, a neat woman who just missed being pretty, dumped a pile of blouses on to Emma’s table. Automatically Emma reached for the top one, her thoughts still far away. She frowned. Take Ben Bamford now, her boyfriend. He was just as bad. Blaming her because she wouldn’t go out with him every night. Men were all the same.
‘Why don’t you just let them get on with it?’ Ben would grumble. ‘Tell them you have your own life to lead. It’s not your fault your dad married an ailing woman. She’d never have got run over if she’d been a bit nippier on her feet.’
‘That’s cruel!’ Emma had been horrified. ‘She had rheumatism bad, yet she used to go to work when she could hardly crawl. You’re not blaming her for getting herself killed, Ben Bamford. Surely?’
There it was again. Blaming, always blaming.
Ben blamed his sister Patty for the mess she’d made of her life, but he still lived with her, and her man of the moment. Waited on hand and foot, Emma told herself, by Patty who, because she was a woman, had got the wrong end of the stick again.
She reached for yet another blouse, pushed her hair back behind an ear, then guided the material into the exact position, her face as pale as the ivory satin-look material slipping through her fingers.
Emma Sparrow of Litchfield Avenue…. A bonny girl, of average height, with long, silky, brown hair tied back during the day with a narrow velvet ribbon, or even with a rubber band at times. A bonny girl with brown eyes amber-flecked, and bright with an untutored intelligence.
If she had not believed that the soul could transcend its environment, she would have given up long ago. She knew that most people were victims of circumstance and, clinging to this, she accepted the drabness of her life and the boredom of her job, not with resignation, but with the optimistic surety that some day, somehow, things would get better.
At exactly twelve o’clock she switched off her machine and got down stiffly from her stool to join the rest of the girls on their way down to the canteen.
Delta Dresses took up the whole of the top floor of the tall Victorian red-brick building. The packing and dispatching department was down in the basement, and it was there Ben Bamford worked at the moment, using the job, Emma knew, as a temporary stopgap before moving on to something else.
He was waiting for her at their usual table, drinking coffee, eating a meat-pie, calling out to the men at the next table, laughing, throwing his head back when he laughed as if he were coming apart at the seams. A carefree young man of twenty-two, popular and admired, followed around by the more reserved types who basked in the aura of gaiety that surrounded him.
‘Two!’ he called after Emma as she joined the queue for coffee, and she nodded and smiled and did exactly as he asked. It was no good coming women’s lib with Ben. She had tried that more than once, and he had thought she was joking.
When she set the two coffees down on the table he jerked his head in the direction of the tall windows.
‘Seen the gaffer’s son from London? Group accountant he’s supposed to be – at least that’s his title, but I know better.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘A snooper, that’s what he is. He’s come up here to check that Big Daddy down there is getting his money’s worth out of us peasants. Have us lot down the salt mines if they had any round here, he would.’
‘Oh, Ben….’ Emma opened a packet of biscuits and passed it over. ‘I didn’t have time to bring sandwiches this morning. I was late again, and Mr Gordon threatened me with the sack if I didn’t pull my socks up, an’ he meant it too.’
Ben pulled a face as the scalding hot coffee stung his mouth. ‘Get one of your mates to clock-in for you, Em. There’s always a way if you know how.’ He tapped the side of his forehead. ‘We’re the bosses now, girl. Not them. One more threat like that from old Gordon, and you complain to your union. Then if they called the lot out, where would old Duck’s Arse be?’ He turned round. ‘Just look at the two of them, queueing up for a meat-pie and coffee, trying to make out they are just like us. They’ll never be like us, Em, you know that.’
‘That’s stupid, Ben.’ Emma curled her hands round the thick white cup. ‘Mrs Kelly told me once that old Mr Martin started with a stall in a street market after the war.’ She glanced over to where the two men were carrying trays to a vacant table. ‘An’ if Mr Martin is an accountant, then he’s worked hard to get his qualifications. Anyway, he was on my side when Mr Gordon was ticking me off. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell. He’s worked his way from the bottom up, he has.’
‘And bottoms up to you, Em.’ Ben grinned, lifting his cup and toasting her. ‘Pick you up at seven tonight. Okay?’
‘No.’ Emma shook her head so that the skewered pony-tail did a little dance. ‘Not tonight. The boys are really poorly, and there’s a pile of ironing as high as the ceiling. No, I can’t come out tonight.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Ben pushed the cup aside. ‘Get your Sharon to do the bloody ironing. She’s not exactly run off her feet working behind the sweets counter at bloody Woolworth’s. Tell her to stay in for once. Force her to pull her weight, Em.’
‘Me? Force Sharon to do anything she doesn’t want to? That would be the day.’ Emma sighed. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if our dad backed me up, but all he does is sleep in front of the telly after he’s had his tea. His chest’s that bad he has to sleep sitting up now, but will he see a doctor? Ben… I can’t keep on at them all the time, can I?’
Simon Martin, drinking his canteen coffee
, found himself stealing glances at the girl Emma Sparrow, sitting with the curly-headed fair boy. He had decided earlier on in the office that here was a girl who was not merely pretty, but almost beautiful. Her brown eyes were the eyes of a trusting child, and there was a touching vulnerability about her, a delicate awareness.
‘Never spoilt a garment yet,’ Mr Gordon had told him. ‘And she’s not cheeky with it like some of them.’ Then he had seemed to remember his position of authority. ‘But you can’t let them get away with lateness. Give them an inch and they’ll take a yard.’
The fair boy was leaning across the table now, taking Emma’s hand in his own, running his finger round the inside of her wrist and whispering. There was a sensual intimacy in the gesture, and Simon looked quickly away, but out of the corner of his eye he saw how Emma snatched her hand away and how the fair boy was no longer laughing.
‘I’ve got it bad for you,’ Ben was saying. ‘But let’s get one thing straight. I’m not used to birds who play the hard-to-get game. If you won’t come out with me tonight, then there’s plenty who will.’ He jerked his head towards a table where a group of young machinists giggled together. ‘Young carrot-top there. She won’t say no. Not to anything she won’t say no.’
‘Oh, Ben.’ Emma kept her voice low. ‘You know I’m not as free as they are. On top of the hours I work here I’ve got everything to do at home. I couldn’t come out every night, even if I wanted to.’
‘Hah!’ Ben’s good-looking face set into sulky annoyance. ‘Look, Em, we’re not a couple of kids playing at courting. A cuddle in a doorway doesn’t do a thing for me.’ His face flushed pink. ‘I got over that lark when I was fourteen. Are you my girl, or aren’t you?’ He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘You’re not a kid, Emma Sparrow. I won’t let you come to no harm. Bloody hell, our Patty was on the pill when she was fifteen! If that’s what you’re frightened of, why don’t you go down the clinic? They don’t ask questions. They just think you’re being a responsible citizen, they do.’
