Penny Thorpe - The Mothers of Quality Street

Young Siobhan Grimshaw looked up from her Mackintosh’s monogrammed teacup with a worried expression. ‘But I can’t stop on at the end of the shift; I’ll miss the Stump Cross tram. I’ve got to be home for the kids. Don’t they realize what we have to do to be here? We’ve got lives outside of work, if they didn’t know.’

Emily Everard pulled her white cotton wraparound overalls a little tighter across her capacious bosom. Emily had retired from factory life twenty years earlier, when she had left to be married, and was very proud of the fact that she could still fit into her old overalls. Her colleagues were too kind to point out that the overalls didn’t fit if she had to keep pulling at them all the time. ‘I wouldn’t complain too loudly if I were you; rumour has it they’re about to announce the first list of married women to be let go, and you don’t want to sound like you’re volunteering.’

‘They can’t be letting us go already! We’ve not been here five minutes.’

Old Mrs Grimshaw, mother-in-law to Siobhan, was philosophical, ‘Some of us have been here five months – and they always warned us it would only be temporary. We knew this day would come.’

‘Yes, but I never thought it would be so soon; I thought it would take them years to rebuild; I thought they’d need us at least until after the summer.’

‘Until after you’d saved up to buy your lass a uniform for the grammar school?’ Emily Everard asked.

‘You heard about that?’

Emily nodded to Siobhan’s mother-in-law who was packing Gooseberry Creams into cartons beside her on the production line. ‘I’ve not heard anything else from this quarter! No one from Back Ripon Street has ever won a scholarship that I can remember – you must be very proud of her.’

‘If I can’t get the money for the uniform, she can’t go, they’ve said as much.’ Siobhan was keeping her eyes on Mrs Everard as she spoke, but her hands were moving with dizzying speed to pull pink, flattened card cartons from the rolling cage behind her, flick them open and fold them into shape before tucking them under her mother-in-law’s elbow to be filled with sweets. ‘When I sounded as though I wasn’t going to be able to buy it they started to talk about withdrawing the scholarship offer.’

Emily Everard was appalled. ‘They can’t do that!’

‘They can. Then I heard they’d lifted the marriage bar at Mack’s and that they needed married women who’d worked here before to come back while they pulled together after the fire and I knew we were saved. I paid for a taxi cab, of all things, and went straight round to the school without wasting a minute and I told the headmistress in person that I was one of the Mackintosh girls she’d heard about in the paper, and that I’d be working for Mack’s again, and my daughter would wear the best uniform in the whole school.’

‘What did she say to that?’ Emily Everard did not like the sound of any child being excluded from a scholarship for want of a few clothes, and was already mentally composing a letter of complaint on Siobhan’s behalf.

‘Well, she said she’d be pleased if my daughter was as determined and resourceful as I am, and they’d be glad to see her in full winter uniform at the start of the term.’

‘Well then, it’ll be reyt,’ Old Mrs Grimshaw said, exchanging two filled card cartons of Gooseberry Creams for empty ones.

‘Only if I can get her the uniform, Mam! They have a summer uniform, a winter uniform, a gym kit uniform, and a speech day uniform! I’m on my way to the winter one, but I need another six months to save up, at least! Don’t get me wrong, the money’s good here and I’m not knocking it, but one month’s pay packet isn’t going to buy a gym kit, let alone a full uniform.’

‘You’re telling me.’ Doreen Fairclough, a lady of Siobhan’s own generation piped up from further down the conveyor. She had been almost in tears that morning as she had tried to get to work on time after her daughter had delayed her by announcing that her younger brother, Fred, had stuck a piece of bath sponge up her nose and now neither of them could get it out. The sympathy the other women had shown to her plight had given her the courage to join their conversation. ‘It’s almost impossible to put anything by. I’m feeding my two kids and the three next door who haven’t seen a proper dinner since their dad lost his leg falling off a scaffold. I’d be feeding half the street if our Frank would let me, but he says we’ve got to save something to feed our two after this lot of work dries up.’

Old Mrs Grimshaw was glad of the money she could earn by being back at the factory, but for her it was about something more than the wages: for three decades she had watched with longing as other women walked through the gates of her factory to do the jobs that she had once done, and to live the life she missed so much. ‘I’ve always known it wasn’t going to last,’ she said, ‘and honestly, I always said I’d give my eye teeth to be back at Mack’s, even if it were just one shift. I have loved every bloody minute of it, because I knew that any minute it could be taken away – but my God it hurts to know they’d let us go so easy! They don’t know what it means to us to be back.’

Emily Everard leant over the conveyor belt to say confidentially to the other women, ‘You know they sent Sir Harold Mackintosh hisself round to my mother’s house to beg her personally to come in and work?’

Mrs Grimshaw laughed. ‘Isn’t she about ninety? They can’t have been that desperate for staff.’

‘She’s seventy-six and she worked with Violet Mackintosh back in the day. She knows how to make toffee with nothing but a tea kettle and a Swiss Army Knife.’

‘Did she say yes?’ Siobhan was only thirty-two but even she was feeling too old to be back at work on the production line. Working a full week of packing shifts and then going home to feed and bath the kids before she staggered bone weary into bed, was tough enough on her but a woman of seventy-six?

‘Of course she said yes. She nearly bit his hand off. They put her in charge of Queen’s Road factory for the first two weeks of hand production and she taught forty girls how to make fudge in a barrel.’

The women smiled at the thought of someone whose love of the factory and the job went back even further than their own, getting her wish and returning to such a glorious welcome.

‘I just can’t bear to go.’ Siobhan was shaking her head at the injustice of the idea that they could lose their jobs so easily. There were tears in the young woman’s eyes and she tried to brush them away with discretion. ‘I love my kids, and I’m not saying that I don’t want to be at home while they’re growing, but …’

‘You don’t have to explain yourself to us,’ Emily Everard said, ‘we know. We might be the only people who know.’

‘I’d do anything for my kids – and I’m doing this for them, to put food on the table and save up for a uniform, to put something away for Christmas and pay off the doctor’s bill from when my last one was born. But it’s not just that …’ Siobhan was exhausted, and the production line work was a heavy burden on top of all she had to do at home, but there was something that made her want to hang on and she knew it wasn’t just the money for her daughter’s school uniform.

The other young mother on the line knew what she meant: Doreen had re-joined the factory to put food on the table, but that wasn’t her only reason. ‘It feels like everyone’s taking from us – and God knows Mackintosh’s are taking just as much from us as everyone else – but when I’m on the line with you lot I don’t think about that. When I’m on the line I’m more myself than I am anywhere else. There’s something I’m good at; I’ve got a skill and it’s like—’