by Mia Dolan
‘You wish me to look after Joanna.’
It was a statement rather than a question. Marcie nodded. ‘Well. Yes.’
She felt her stomach turning inwards and wished she hadn’t asked. It was much too big a burden for her grandmother. How could she have even suggested it?
‘Of course I will look after Joanna.’ Rosa’s smile brightened her face and sent a sparkle to her eyes. ‘It’s wonderful to have a baby in this house again. Your grandfather warned me you would ask. Your grandfather had such insight you know. I miss him.’
The last three words sounded tacked on and a little sadder than everything else. Though Marcie’s granddad had long since died, Rosa gift was such that she maintained that she talked to him regularly since his passing. Her grandmother’s words also touched a chord in Marcie that she hadn’t known was there. What would things have been like if Johnnie had lived? Would she still be in London? Would they have a little place of their own where the boards were bare, the furnishings old and battered? Poor as it might have been, they would have been happy. Of that she was sure.
‘It’s a sewing room serving the hospital, making nurses uniforms, sewing hems around sheets and making pillowcases. I thought three days and on the other days I could do my own sewing.’
She wasn’t sure about the uniforms, but hoped that the sewing wouldn’t be confined to sheets and pillowcases. If it was, well, she would have the consolation that she’d be doing her own sewing on the other days.
‘Mrs Spontini is very pleased with her funeral dress,’ said her grandmother.
Mrs Spontini was one of her grandmother’s closest friends. They went to church together and drank tea with the priest on those days when he met with the more senior members of his congregation.
Marcie said she was glad. In her heart of hearts she never wanted to make Mrs Spontini a funeral dress ever again. The old trout had criticised the whole project from beginning to end so it came as something as a surprise to hear that she’d intimated to her grandmother that she was pleased with the end result.
Like her grandmother, Mrs Spontini was a widow who had married an Englishman back in the 1920s. Originally from Italy, she had crooked legs and black eyes either side of a hooked nose. As was the habit of Mediterranean widows, she only wore black but had different black dresses for different occasions.
The very next day Marcie took her application form into the hospital sewing department that maintained and made the various items needed on the wards. The interview was for ten o’clock. She also took a sample of her sewing: a very pretty blouse she’d made for herself, the front of which was covered in pin-tucks.
She didn’t bother with her fake wedding ring. She had heard it was still difficult for married women to get jobs. Single girls always got priority.
Miss Gardner, the workroom supervisor, had black kiss curls and a bouffant hairstyle. She wore a tight skirt and a black polo-neck jumper and big gypsy-style earrings jangled from her lobes.
She read the application form in quick bursts, glancing up intermittently. It made Marcie think she was trying to catch her doing something she shouldn’t.
Marcie felt as though a wire-wool brush was scouring her insides. She put her nerves down to the fact that this wasn’t just for herself, this job was for Joanna too and their future together. She badly needed the money.
At last Miss Gardner put down the form and picked up the blouse, examining the pin-tucks one by one.
‘Not bad,’ she said at last. ‘Well, Miss Brooks, it seems you have a number of things in your favour. Number one, you can sew. That fact is very evident.’ Her fingers lightly touched the blouse. ‘Number two you’re very young and not married. That means we’ll have a few years’ work out of you before you get yourself hitched to a man and proceed to produce a family. It is both the hospital’s and this section’s policy that we employ single women with no family ties. Once you get married we expect you to leave. That is why I am still a Miss not a Mrs,’ she said with a short, sharp smile.
Marcie deduced there was bitterness behind that smile and imagined that at some point in her career, Miss Gardner had been forced to choose between her work and a man. She thanked her lucky stars that she’d chosen to go along as Miss Brooks and not to admit that she had a child. She sensed that being an unmarried mother would be regarded as a far worse crime than marrying.
‘You don’t mind working only three days?’
‘I look after my grandmother on the other two days. She’s getting on a bit,’ Marcie lied.
She crossed her fingers beneath the desk as she said it. Her grandmother had advised her that it was the best thing to say. ‘And what’s more, I am old,’ she had added, with one of her rare wry smiles.
‘You can start on Monday,’ said Miss Gardner without giving her the option of whether she could make it or not. The workroom, explained Miss Gardner, was run on disciplined lines similar to that of the wards. A ward sister was in charge in the hospital. Miss Gardner ruled the sewing rooms, alternating her supervision with a Miss Pope. Miss Gardner explained what wage Marcie could expect, when time and a half was paid and when double time, plus piecework rates.
Marcie was walking on air when she left. She gladly ran for the bus home, needing to spend her energy before getting on and sitting down because she just wouldn’t have been able to keep still.
‘You look happy,’ said the middle-aged woman sitting next to her on the bus.
It was true. She just couldn’t stop smiling. ‘I am,’ she said exuberantly. ‘I’ve just got a job.’
‘Best of luck to you, darling and may you be happy in your work.’
Marcie said that she would be. It was just the kind of job she’d been looking for: three days a week.
Yet again she thanked her lucky stars that she’d opted not to mention having a baby. She suspected that should they ever hear of it they’d fire her right away and no way must that happen.
Chapter Four
BABS HAD LEFT her job at Woolworths following the move into a council house, but had managed to get two days’ cleaning a week. On those days she brought her youngest, Anne, round for Rosa to look after, with Marcie’s help of course.
Marcie’s half-sister was now walking well and, although Marcie didn’t mind looking after her, she was beginning to get into mischief. The fact was that Marcie was still working on her two days off. She’d started designing and making dresses. The patterns were based on the pictures she saw in magazines. Seeing as they were basically what was termed a ‘shift’ dress, that is straight up and down, very short and with few darts, she found them easy to make. If she included working on weekends, she managed to make two and a half dresses a week, sometimes three.
Her father, being a cheeky bugger at the best of times, had acted as her salesman and managed to coerce Sheppey’s first and one and only boutique to sell what she made.
‘You’ve just got to go along and see the woman in charge. Her name’s Angela. I said you were as good as that Mary Quick woman …’
‘Mary Quant,’ Marcie corrected.
‘That’s the one. Anyway, get yourself along there and show her what you’ve got.’
In the past Marcie would have curled up inside at the thought of doing something like that, but that was in the days when she only had herself to think about. The fact that she was doing this for Joanna made a big difference.
Her grandmother helped her put the dresses on silk-covered hangers inside a full-length polythene cover. Her quick hands smoothed out the wrinkles, patted the sleeves straight and lay the whole package over Marcie’s arm.
She did this silently. At times like these Marcie felt the old guilt descend about getting pregnant before Johnnie had married her. Her grandmother was old-fashioned. She’d been brought up in a different world. Marcie wondered …
‘Gran, I’m sorry to have been so much trouble …’
Her grandmother looked at her. The olive-skinned face was composed: neither condemning nor implying
that everything was in order.
‘God made it happen.’ Her hand patted her granddaughter’s shoulder and she smiled. ‘You have blossomed from a rosebud into full flower. Who are we to question?’
Marcie noticed that the jet-black eyes were moist and there was a proud jut to her grandmother’s chin. A lump came to her throat. She could say nothing in response, but she knew what her grandmother meant. First she’d procured the job at the hospital and now there was this. In a small town on a small island this counted as success.
‘I’ll see you later,’ she said, her lips brushing her grandmother’s cheek. The skin was very soft and also very thin. It struck Marcie that her grandmother was getting old. She’d never thought of her as old before now. But Marcie was older too, no longer the innocent little girl not long out of school. In the space of a year she’d grown up considerably.
It would have been difficult to carry three dresses on the bus into Sheppey, but her father had offered her a lift. By hook or by crook – most probably the latter – Tony Brooks had acquired a car. Marcie couldn’t recall whether her father actually had passed a driving test, but didn’t question his right to be cruising down the road with the window open. Every so often he flicked a cloud of cigarette ash from a smoking Woodbine. He was in a good mood, his spirits at an all-time high.
‘The Brooks’ are going places,’ he exclaimed with pride and patted his daughter’s knee. ‘You’re a clever girl, our Marcie. I always knew you were. OK, you made a little mistake – not that it was your fault,’ he added before she had chance to remind him that Johnnie had died. His motorcycle had been crushed by an oncoming lorry. They would have married. She knew they would have married. ‘And we got Joanna out of it. Wouldn’t wish her away for the world,’ he said proudly.
‘Looks as though you’re going places too, Dad. I didn’t know you could drive.’
He made a huffing sound. ‘There’s a lot of things you don’t know your father can do, our Marcie. Driving’s only one of them. Not that it’s that difficult mind you. It’s like riding a bicycle, once done never forgotten.’
‘Don’t you have to have a licence?’
‘Not if you don’t want to or if you were driving before the war when licences weren’t needed.’
Marcie wasn’t sure what he was saying here and was wise enough not to push the matter. She preferred riding along in ignorance rather than worrying about being stopped by the law. The police and her father were past bedmates. So was prison.
She tried studying her father’s face to glean some semblance of the truth, but without success. He was whistling and smiling as though he hadn’t a care in the world.
‘So what do you think of the car,’ he asked suddenly.
‘It’s lovely. Where did you get it?’
‘A mate of mine in London lent it me. I did a few jobs for him when I was up there last. “Tony,” he said. “You’re a right diamond and that’s a fact. You’ve done me proud. Here’s your moolah. Now get off down and see that family of yours. Family is dead important,” he said to me. More important even than dosh, except that you get to spend it on your family.’
Marcie laughed. It wasn’t what her father was saying that made her laugh, but the way he was saying it. He’d picked up a lot of cockney idioms during his sojourn ‘working’ in London.
Her father laughed too. ‘It’s great. Bloody great!’ he exclaimed with overblown exuberance.
The boutique was named ‘Angie’s’. The window display consisted of black and white dresses, black and white shoes, black and white sweaters, hats, feather boas and tights.
Her father promised to wait for her outside. ‘Now go on,’ he muttered, shooing her towards the shop door.
Heaving the dresses over her arm, she headed in that direction and pushed open the door.
An old-fashioned brass bell jangled above her head. Multicoloured spotlights picked out the clothes hanging on the rails and pinned to the walls. A huge poster of the Rolling Stones, a fairly new group with an R and B beat and an impertinent attitude dominated one wall.
‘Can I help you?’ The speaker was a tall, slim girl with long black hair and a square-cut fringe hanging low over sharp blue eyes. Marcie was reminded of Cathy McGowan on the TV show Ready Steady Go! Her clothes were spot on too. She was wearing a pale-mauve dress with a mandarin collar and a zip up the front. Her tights were white and her shoes patent burgundy that changed colour dependent on which spotlight she was standing under.
Marcie went straight into her pitch. ‘I’m Marcie Brooks and I believe the shop owner, Angela Babbington, expressed interest in my dresses.’
‘I’m Angela. How do you do.’
They shook hands, Marcie almost dropping her samples when she did so.
‘I’ve brought three along to show you.’
The welcoming smile tightened a little. ‘Look, I know I did say I would take a look, but you have to understand –’
‘You can have them on sale or return,’ blurted Marcie. She’d heard the term somewhere and it did sound self-explanatory. If the dresses got sold, she got paid. If they didn’t sell then she would not.
Angela Babbington seemed to pause for breath, her pink lips slightly parted. ‘Well …’
Marcie jumped in again, unzipping the dust cover and taking each dress by turn, holding it against herself for effect.
The first one was made of a pink woollen material with speckles of blue and green interwoven into the fabric. The sleeves were gathered into a tight cuff and it had four buttons and the collar had elongated points.
‘Winter, spring or autumn wear – even summer given our English summers,’ Marcie added with a laugh.
To her delight, Angela took the dress from her and began to study it.
Marcie went straight on to the next one, which was a soft peppermint green and had an A-line skirt. The material was fairly silky and swirled slightly at the hem.
‘Great for the weekend,’ Marcie exclaimed.
Silently, Angie took that one too. Marcie could tell by her expression that she was hooked on both dresses. Now for the third. She’d purposely left the one she regarded as her best dress until last.
‘This is definitely for dancing.’ She held the black all-wool dress against her. It was plainly cut, the sleeves long, the neck round and a cavalcade of small brass buttons down the front. It also had red inserts over the shoulders and the hem ended way above the knees.
‘Great with black or red tights,’ said Marcie.
Judging by the look on Angela’s face, she thought the same.
Marcie’s heart seemed to burst into song when Angela said, yes, she would take them.
‘Can you make more by next weekend?’
‘Which one?’
‘All three.’
A creeping fear seeped down Marcie’s spine. She was a one-man band and couldn’t make any more than three in a week. Four would be a push and she couldn’t possibly make three of each design in a week. She pointed this out to the boutique’s highly impressed owner.
‘That’s just it,’ said Angela. ‘I don’t want to be the same as the big chain stores in the high street. I want to be more exclusive, so if you could make me one of each of these for next week, we’ll see how things go. I think I’ll sell these this week, though I’ve got a suspicion that the black dress will be in great demand. I might have to ask you for three of the black for the following week in different sizes. Would that be alright?’
Would that be alright?
Marcie could almost have skipped with delight.
‘Yes! Yes! Of course it would.’
‘Shall we say a split of sixty–forty?’
Sixty and forty made one hundred. That was what sale or return would mean. Whatever Angela sold the dresses for, she, as the manufacturer would get sixty per cent.
‘That depends …’
‘I’m thinking of seven pounds ten shillings and sixpence. They’re each worth that.’
Marcie made no comment bu
t kept her gaze fixed on the dresses. It was worth doing.
Thinking that Marcie was in two minds whether to leave the dresses – and the opportunity – with her, Angela bounced back again.
‘OK. How about seventy–thirty?’
Out of necessity, Marcie hid her delight. The material had been given to her by a friend of her grandmother’s. The price of cotton and buttons was neither here nor there. Basically it meant that she would earn somewhere around five pounds per dress after expenses.
‘Done,’ she said, offering her hand. She promised she’d call into the shop on the following Monday.
She grinned like a Cheshire cat all the way back to the car.
‘Hey! You looks like the cat that got the bloody cream, girl,’ her father crowed. His face beamed with delight.
‘I have,’ said Marcie as she slid into the passenger seat, hunched her shoulders and sighed with satisfaction. ‘She wants me to make some more.’
‘I guessed it,’ he said, smacking the dashboard with his hand. ‘I just knew she’d pay you handsomely for them frocks. How much did she give you?’
‘Nothing yet. She’s bought them on sale or return.’
Her father frowned. ‘What’s that mean when it’s at home?’
She began to explain. He stopped her.
‘I know what sale or return means, girl. I weren’t born under the bloody gooseberry bush. What I mean is why didn’t she pay you out then and there? What’s wrong with handing over the readies?’
‘Dad, I’m happy with that. It means I’ll make fifteen pounds in total on those “frocks” as you call them. And she wants more!’ Exhaling a deep sigh, she sat back against the sun-warmed leather and closed her eyes. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’ve been so lucky!’
