‘Canteen at the end. Get someone to show you at dinner time. Tea break at ten-thirty. Trolley comes round to your bench.’
They were walking down the floor now, and the noise was getting louder as more and more women and girls turned on their machines and got started on the first consignment of the day. All of them were dressed in navy nylon overalls like the one Scarlett had been given, and they would have looked spookily like robots attached to their machines if it were not for the different coloured headscarf each one wore, turning her into an individual.
‘I’ll put you on something simple to start with. It’s piece work here, did they explain that to you?’ Mrs Laver shouted above the row.
‘Yes.’
She followed the forewoman down a row of women to where a machine lay idle, and sat on the seat in front of it. Mrs Laver showed how to take a small plastic shape from the container to her left, place it on a metal holder on the machine and operate a foot lever that brought a head with six sharp points on it down to punch through the thin membrane over six holes in the plastic shape. She then had to take the shape off the holder and toss it into another container on her right.
‘Now, do you think you’ll be able to do that?’ Mrs Laver asked.
Scarlett couldn’t believe she was seriously asking this.
‘No, that’s far too difficult,’ she said, revelling dangerously in the sarcasm.
Mrs Laver glared at her. ‘You’re not at school now, my girl. No larking around and cheeking the teachers here. You don’t work, you don’t get paid. Got it?’
Scarlett nodded. She got it all right. She placed a piece on the holder, brought the six-pointed head down and lifted it up again. Six holes appeared.
‘That all right?’ she asked, showing it to the forewoman.
Mrs Laver looked closely at it, and seemed disappointed that she couldn’t find any fault.
‘It’ll do, I suppose. Now, get on with it. There’s five thousand of them things to be done by the end of the day. If you don’t get them done, you don’t get your bonus. Got it?’
She knew she ought to say, Yes, Mrs Laver, but just couldn’t get the words out.
‘Loud and clear,’ she answered.
Beside her, she thought she heard smothered giggles from the next girl.
Mrs Laver snorted. ‘I’ll be back to make sure you’re doing them properly,’ she warned.
Scarlett couldn’t think what could go wrong. She looked at the full container. Five thousand. OK. That shouldn’t be too much trouble. She reached for the nearest one and got going.
The girl next to her leaned over and shouted above the noise, ‘Wotcha! I’m Brenda.’
‘Scarlett.’
‘No kidding? Scarlett? Like Scarlett O’Hara?’
‘It was my Mum’s favourite film.’
Try as she might, Scarlett couldn’t quite keep the catch out of her voice. Brenda didn’t seem to notice.
‘Yeah, that Clark Gable. Bit of all right, eh? Don’t know what she saw in Lesley Howard, though. What a drip! You wouldn’t catch me mooning over him, not with Clark Gable around.’
‘Nor me,’ Scarlett agreed.
‘You like films?’
‘Love them.’
‘Me and all. Look—’ she glanced behind her dramatically, as if they might be overheard in all the racket going on ‘—you don’t want to cheek Mrs Laver. I know she’s a pain in the backside, but if she takes against you she can make your life hell here. To start with, you’ll never get any of the decent jobs. Like, you’re never going to make anything on that one. It’s only one piece, so the rate’s rubbish. You keep your nose clean and you’ll get to do some of the five-bit pieces. They pay really well. But if she don’t like you, she’ll come along and say what you’ve done is no good and your pay’ll get docked, see?’
Scarlett saw.
‘Thanks, Brenda. You’re a pal.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Scarlett got on with her consignment, determined to get them done within time. Reach, place, push the lever, lift, throw. Reach, place, push the lever, lift, throw. After an hour, the pile in the left hand bin hardly seemed to have gone down at all. The parts in the right hand bin hardly made one layer. Determined not to be beaten by something so ridiculously simple, she kept going.
By the time the tea trolley came round, her shoulders were beginning to ache. Brenda glanced at what she had done.
‘You’re never going to get them done by the end of the day at that rate,’ she said. ‘You having a bun with it?’
‘What?’
‘With your tea.’
‘Oh—no, thanks. I’m not hungry,’ Scarlett lied. Her stomach growled at the thought of a big sticky bun, but she couldn’t afford any extras, not until she had got her wages and paid off the rent arrears plus what she had had to borrow from Mrs Sefton to get her through this first week.
Both girls stretched their arms and flexed their shoulders as they walked along the row to where the elderly tea lady had stopped with her trolley. The other women and girls were joking amongst themselves and with the tea lady. Brenda joined in. Nobody spoke to Scarlett. Mrs Laver marched by and chivvied them all back to their places. Brenda was still chatting to the girl on her other side. They went into gales of laughter over something. Scarlett felt very alone. This was worse than her first day at the new school. She sipped her thick tea and picked up an unpunched plastic piece. She might as well get on. At least then she would be earning some money.
Brenda stopped shrieking with her neighbour and came and leaned over her shoulder.
‘Look, mate, you got to get moving,’ she said through a mouthful of Bath bun. Scarlett could smell the delicious sugariness of it.
‘But I’m moving as fast as I can,’ Scarlett protested.
‘Nah—look—you got to be getting the next bit while you’re throwing the last one. Move both hands at once, like.’
Scarlett saw what she meant. It cut a quarter of the time off the entire process. She practised it slowly a couple of times, then speeded up.
‘That’s brilliant!’ she said. ‘Thanks a lot.’
Brenda shrugged. ‘It was Doris what showed me. Her over there—’ She indicated a small middle-aged woman in a pink headscarf. ‘She’s the top earner. She sometimes takes home four pounds fifteen a week.’ Her voice was awed.
‘Wow,’ Scarlett said.
Four pounds fifteen would go a long way. As she attacked the heap of plastic pieces again, she started to plan what she would do with so much money. But after a while her brain seemed to stop working. It was as if the machine had taken over her mind. The same small phrase went round and round her head in time with the simple task she had to perform. All proper thought stopped.
A large hand dipped into her right-hand bin and picked up a piece.
‘You’re pressing too hard.’ Mrs Laver was looming over her.
Scarlett glared up at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re pressing the foot pedal too hard. The holes are too big. See?’ She thrust the piece under Scarlett’s nose.
‘No, I don’t see,’ she said. And she couldn’t. The holes were already in the piece. She was just clearing the thin bit of plastic that remained over them. How could she be making them bigger?
‘Don’t make trouble, girl. Do it lighter or I’ll have to reject the whole lot. Get it?’
Scarlett dearly wanted to tell her where to put the whole lot, but the thought of four pounds fifteen got in the way. She needed that money.
‘Right,’ she agreed.
‘I hope you have. You’re only on trial, you know.’
‘Right.’
‘Right what?’
‘Right, Mrs Laver.’
Scarlett waited till the woman had gone off to annoy someone else, then tried different levels of pressure on the pedal. She looked at the resulting pieces. They all looked the same to her. She went back to doing it the way she had been. They still looked the same.
&n
bsp; ‘Interfering old cow,’ she muttered.
Now she had wasted all that time when she could have been whizzing through the consignment. She went into overdrive, trying to catch up. She was so intent on getting the work done that she did not notice machines shutting down round her until Brenda spoke to her.
‘Blimey, you’re a bit keen, aren’t you?’
‘What?’
Scarlett looked up. All around her, women and girls were standing up and stretching and gathering up their bags.
‘Don’t you want your dinner?’
Scarlett looked at her watch. Twelve o’clock.
‘You bet.’
‘Come on, then. If you don’t hurry, we’ll have to queue for ages.’
Scarlett followed her to the toilets, where they had to queue first to get into cubicles, then to wash their hands. Then they hurried right through the long building to a double door at the end, passing groups of women chatting to each other as they all headed in the same direction. The double door led into another large space filled with long tables and the smell of cooking. Brenda was right, they did have to queue for ages.
‘Smells like school dinners,’ Scarlett said.
‘Tastes better, though,’ Brenda told her. ‘Canteen here’s really good. That’s why I stick it out. It’s nicer working at a smaller place, but you don’t get the food, and my mum’s so tired by the end of the day you’re lucky to get tea, let alone dinner.’
Scarlett didn’t want to get onto the subject of mothers.
‘You worked in lots of places, then?’ she asked.
‘Three since I left school. Rawlings first. Blimey, that was awful. You think Mrs Laver’s a tartar, you should of met the old bat they had there. Then I went to TS Novelties. That was good, but the money was rubbish…’
Brenda could talk for England. Before they reached the head of the queue, Scarlett had learnt about all her jobs and all the people who worked there, her mother and her six younger brothers and sisters and all the places she had lived. A lot of them sounded even worse than Scarlett’s flat. At least they didn’t have rats, and there was a bathroom, even though they did have to share it with all the other tenants.
They reached the counter and chose from steak and kidney pie or toad-in-the-hole. Scarlett went for the pie. It smelt delicious. Not quite as good as her mother’s, of course, but the best thing she’d had on her plate for ages. She added carrots, cabbage and mash and took a Bakewell tart and custard for pudding. All that slaving over the hole-making machine seemed well worth while. She paid out of the money she had borrowed from Mrs Sefton, picked up some cutlery and followed Brenda to a couple of spare seats at one of the long tables.
‘We got one of them prefabs now. It’s heaven. Of course, it ain’t big enough, not for all us lot, but who cares? We got our own kitchen and bathroom and everything. My mum can’t get over it.’
‘What about your dad?’ Scarlett asked through a mouthful of pie. No mention had been made of him.
Brenda shrugged. ‘Oh, him. He run off ages ago with this war widow. She’s welcome to him. Good riddance, that’s what I say. We’re better off without him.’
Scarlett stared at her, shocked. ‘How can you say a thing like that about your dad?’
Brenda immediately took umbrage. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘You shouldn’t talk about him that way.’
Jonathan’s parents were pretty awful, but he was never disloyal to them. Her own father… She turned her thoughts away from her own father’s failings.
‘I can talk about him any way I want,’ Brenda blustered. ‘And it’s none of your business anyhow. Blimey! I look after you and show you what to do and all you do is criticise.’
Part of Scarlett knew she should back down and apologise. She was the new girl round here. She needed friends.
‘Family’s important,’ she insisted. ‘Maybe it’s different when you’ve got lots of family. I don’t know. I haven’t got lots of brothers and sisters like you. There’s only me and my dad. We have to look after each other.’
To her humiliation, she found tears standing in her eyes.
‘You still ain’t—’ Brenda began, then caught sight of Scarlett’s expression. ‘What happened to your mum?’ she asked.
‘She died of a heart attack. On Coronation Day.’
The tears were threatening to spill over. She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand.
Brenda dropped her knife and fork and put her arms round her. ‘You poor thing! That’s dreadful. I dunno what I’d do without my mum. And you’re only a kid, ain’t you? This your first job?’
Scarlett nodded.
‘Well, look, if anyone gets at you, you tell me, right? There’s some right cows round here. I’ll be your big sister.’
‘Thank you.’
The afternoon seemed to go on for ever, with only another short tea interval to break the monotony. But Scarlett managed to finish her consignment and start on the next. At five she clocked out with the rest and took the long walk home. She was tired, the job had been boring in the extreme and she had to do it all over again tomorrow, and next week, and all the weeks after. But she was earning money and she had found a friend. It wasn’t all bad.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1955
‘GOODBYE! Good luck! Á bientôt!’
Jonathan leaned out of the window of the Dunkirk train, waving and calling. On the platform, his gang of Parisian friends waved back. Hortense jumped up and down and blew kisses, her small face anxious for a last promise.
‘Au’voir, Jonathan! Write to me!’
Jonathan avoided her eyes. He liked Hortense. She was fun and pretty and he liked being with her as part of the group, but she was far too clingy. Most of all, she wasn’t Scarlett.
The train was pulling away. Hortense sent a last kiss, Jonathan gave a last wave. The end of the platform passed by. He was really off. He sat down, slightly embarrassed, amongst fellow passengers who were already immersed in books and newspapers.
He took a deep breath. So this was it. Goodbye Paris, goodbye Ortolan, hello national service. One important part of his life has finished, the next was about to begin. And in between there was two weeks of home, his parents, his Southend friends—and Scarlett. He patted his jacket, where he kept a photo of her in his inside pocket, but didn’t need to take it out and look at it. Her face was imprinted in his mind and his heart. Scarlett laughing as they ran through the rain, Scarlett crying as they parted, Scarlett poised on a breakwater, about to dive into the water, Scarlett toiling over the dirty glasses. A store of memories that had helped him through his lonely days and stayed with him as he’d fashioned a place for himself at the restaurant and made friends in Paris. Nothing Hortense or any other girl could do would ever erase Scarlett from his heart.
The Paris suburbs were trundling by. The city that he had grown to love was going about its daily business, but he was no longer part of it. He was going to miss it, but there were new adventures to come. He knew something of what to expect. Older brothers of his English friends had made much of the horrors of basic training, of bullying drill sergeants, of forced night marches, but had also enthused about the comradeship and the new skills learnt. ‘It’ll make a man of you,’ was what everyone said. Well, at least he was used to being away from home and getting on with strangers, which put him ahead of most boys of his age.
Monsieur Bonnard had advised him to make the most of his skills.
‘I do not know how the English army works,’ he’d said. ‘All these military types are quite mad, and the bureaucracy treats you as a number. But in the army of France, a young man who had trained at the Ortolan d’Or would always be assigned to the kitchen of the highest officers’ mess. The English, of course, they know nothing of good food. They may send you to be a tank-driver.’
Jonathan felt that he would much rather be a tank-driver than serve up mince and lumpy mash in a canteen. But who knew where the army in its wisdom would send him? In the
mean time, there was a brief respite at home to look forward to.
When he finally got back to Southend he found that life at the Trafalgar was going on much as usual. The main bar had been painted since Christmas and his parents had yet another new cellar man to complain about, but otherwise nothing much had changed. The sea front was just opening up and getting ready for the new season as he strolled along it the next day. It felt odd to be back. Even though Mrs Mancini and Aunty Marge had both welcomed him with open arms and told him how big and handsome he’d become, still he didn’t feel quite part of the place. He wondered if he belonged anywhere now. He wasn’t a real Parisian, but neither did he feel quite like a real Southend boy any more.
At half past four he got out his old bike and cycled through the town towards a new industrial estate. He hated to think of Scarlett having to work at soulless factory jobs. In the year or more since she had had to leave school, she and her friend had slaved at three different places, each one more boring than the last. Now they were working for a firm making cheap jewellery. As he powered along the familiar streets, the odd sense of not being part of real life lifted. This was what he had been waiting for. All the rest was just filling in time. Excitement flooded through him, edged with doubt. It was five months since he had last seen Scarlett, and then only during his brief Christmas break. Had she changed in that time? Would she still like him?
He found the right road, and then the right building. Ten to five. He was in good time. He waited by the main gate, his whole body aching in anticipation of holding her again. The first few workers came out, hurrying by in order to be at the head of the queue for the bus. Then a few more emerged, and then a flood of people, mostly women and girls, laughing and chattering. He scanned the faces. He thought he saw her and his heart leapt, only to crash with disappointment. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t even like her, just someone with similar dark hair. Some of the girls called out to him.
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