Penny Thorpe - The Mothers of Quality Street

At this, Peter’s shoulders moved and he lifted his head very, very slowly. ‘Please don’t make me drink again. Reenie, I don’t want to drink again.’ He looked sad and lost and put his head back on the cool, comfortingly stable kitchen tabletop.

‘You were meant to be a good influence on m’dad! “I’ll go with him” , you said. “He’ll only have a couple this year,” you said. Now look at the pair of you. And what am I meant to do with the ’orse?’ Reenie’s questions were in vain as Peter had already begun to snore and Mrs Garner’s cat was looking daggers at him from her place by the stove for making a noise while her kittens were trying to sleep.

‘I didn’t know your Peter drank,’ Mrs Garner said.

‘He doesn’t, really; I think that’s the trouble. Me dad asked if he could take him to the Ale Tasters’ summer do. After their big do last October I thought it couldn’t be any worse.’ Reenie looked at her father and her young man, put her hands on her hips and huffed. ‘There’s me dad encouraging me to board in town so’s I’m not riding back to the farm late after a night shift at the factory; there’s him sayin’, “Oh no, Reenie, you’re a manager now, lass. We can’t have you run ragged helpin’ on the farm when you’ve got a chance at Mackintosh’s. You stay in town, don’t mind us.” And I come home from a night shift, ready to crawl into me bed, and what do I find? Merry hell.’

‘Should I fetch them a blanket each, do you think?’ Mrs Garner’s maternal instincts were strong. ‘And maybe a little cushion for their heads?’

Reenie ruminated. ‘All right, let’s throw a blanket on each of them because I don’t want the nuisance of nursing them through pneumonia, but I draw the line at a cushion.’

‘What about a pitcher of water and some glasses? They might wake up thirsty and be glad of them.’ Mrs Garner shuffled busily round her kitchen-parlour in her flapping slippers, opening cupboards and humming cheerily as she looked for the tin of Carr’s water biscuits, ‘And just one or two little dry crackers.’

Reenie rolled her eyes ‘You’re soft on them, that’s what you are.’ But she smiled because she liked knowing that her father and her young man were in good hands. ‘I’ll walk the ’orse round to the factory stables and bed him down there for the night. If I’m not back in an hour you know I’ve fallen asleep on an ’ay bale.’ Reenie checked for her latchkey in her pocket and then crept up the stairs to her own room to leave Peter’s ulster on a hanger out of the way. Reenie almost missed the figure who was waiting in the open doorway at the other end of the landing. The young woman had evidently been woken by the noise downstairs and was now leaning against the door frame in her nightgown with her arms folded.

It was the factory colleague who boarded in the next room to Reenie, and she did not like to be disturbed. ‘Are we quite finished for the night?’ It was a sarcastically nonchalant question.

‘Yes, Diana. Sorry. M’dad and Peter were just …’ Reenie’s voice trailed off; she was not known for holding back if there was an opportunity to give someone a bit of cheek, but Diana was not someone to whom anyone would dare give lip. ‘I’ll just go and take away the ’orse.’

As Diana turned back into her own room Reenie caught a glimpse of her orderly quarters. Diana was something of a mystery to Reenie; she was ten years older but never had gentleman callers, which always puzzled Reenie because Diana at, twenty-six, was of an age to be getting serious, and she was the most beautiful girl that Reenie had ever seen. It was a mystery, too, that they were not better friends because though Diana might be older than Reenie, they had been thrown together in innumerable ways. From the moment of Reenie’s arrival at the toffee factory nine months previously, they had worked together on the line; they had collaborated to help save the Norcliffe sisters from dismissal; they had been tried together at the same unjust disciplinary hearing that had nearly lost them their jobs – and they had fought to save the factory after they had watched it burn almost to the ground.

Now they were living under the same roof, but still not really friends. Reenie couldn’t understand it; she seemed to make friends with everyone she met, but Diana was as distant as ever. Reenie might have put it down to Diana’s forced separation from her family after the factory fire – the separation which had led her to seek lodgings – but Diana had been withdrawn even before those changes.

Diana was quiet, but never shy – she simply appeared to have little interest in anything except the gramophone records she had inherited from her father, or spending time with her young half-sister Gracie, who she visited at the home of Gracie’s adoptive family every Sunday. Diana sometimes brought Gracie round to their boarding house for tea after they had been on an outing together and Reenie was hoping the little girl would be back again soon because when she was with Diana it was the only time she ever saw her fellow boarder smile.

To see the Mackintosh’s toffee factory from the outside it would be difficult for a stranger to notice that anything unusual had happened to the old Albion Mills building in the last six months. Tens of thousands of people regularly rattled past the factory by rail, and apart from the telltale scar in a brighter brick where the gash in the factory wall had been repaired, there was almost no reminder of the terrifying fire which had nearly destroyed the business. And if a busy traveller looked up from their railway timetable at Halifax station and looked across at the enormous toffee factory in the canal basin below the platform, they would see a flash of fashionable Art Deco offices, a steeple of a chimney in gleaming, glazed white brick piercing the sky, a sea of white-capped workers flooding into the gates, and rows of gritstone Victorian mills reclaimed for the town’s new industry, disgorging scores of liveried lorryloads of Mackintosh’s Quality Street to be shipped to all four corners of the globe. To the outsider, Mackintosh’s Toffee Town appeared stronger than ever, unassailable by either competition or calamity. However, on the inside it was at breaking point; some thought they could not possibly survive the year.

Before the fire at Christmas Mackintosh’s had come tantalizingly close to running the fastest confectionery production line in the world, but all that work – and, more crucially, all those machines – had been destroyed overnight. The floors which had survived were caked with thick soot, and water from the firemen’s hoses had poured through their storerooms like a river. There had been no choice but to reopen their old factory on the Queen’s Road. A relic of another age, the Queen’s Road factory had been a partially mothballed warehouse for years, and without their machines they were forced to set up scratch lines, making their sweets by hand. The factory had called back retired married women to take up their old jobs on the hand-making lines and save the day, but they had all known that in time the factory planned to restore the old machines, line by line, and reopen the damaged factory as soon as they could.

Now the gabled production hall, where Gooseberry Cream was starch pressed and chocolate enrobed, had heard a rumble of gossip that their situation was about to change.

Emily Everard took it upon herself to spread the word during their morning tea break, striding up and down the rows of women sitting beside shut-down conveyor belts gasping down their well-earned, steaming hot cups of Assam. Mrs Everard was only a factory line worker herself, but she assumed an air of authority. ‘They want to see all the married women at the end of the shift. We’re to go to the canteen where there’ll be an announcement.’