Joanna Toye - A Store at War

Lily bit her lip. It was one of the nicest things her mother had ever said.

Her mother put her hand over hers.

‘You’ve done very well, love – and thank you.’

‘You’re thanking me? Why?’

‘Oh, Lily,’ said Dora. ‘You know and I know you should have stayed on at school. And you know as well as I do that you could have gone to the grammar school back along if things had been different.’

Lily knew. But she hadn’t even taken the exam, because she also knew her mother could never have afforded the uniform.

‘You’ve had to give up so many opportunities already,’ Dora went on. ‘I hope this job’ll be the start of something good for you. And it could be, you know, if you work hard.’

‘I know, Mum. And I will. I’ll do my very best to make them like me and keep me on.’

‘Course they will,’ Sid assured them. ‘Give her a few years, she’ll be running the place, won’t you, chick?’

Her mother squeezed Lily’s hand and they both had to squeeze back tears.

‘Oh, blimey,’ said Sid, offering his handkerchief to each in turn. ‘Women! Give over, will you? There’s a slice of brawn with my name on it in front of me! Can we get stuck in?’

‘Are you coming, going, or going to stand there all day thinking about it?’

Lily’s feet had brought her as far the staff entrance of Marlow’s, but they were showing a complete inability to take her any further.

‘Oh, never mind!’

A sharp-shouldered blonde pushed past her in a swirl of cheap perfume and peroxide and disappeared through the door.

‘Take no notice,’ said a voice at Lily’s side. ‘She’s like that with everyone.’

Lily smiled gratefully. The girl was shorter than Lily, and plumper, with straight brown hair in a pudding-basin shape. Under a too-small jacket, she was wearing a plain black dress. With her intimate knowledge of second-hand, Lily could tell from its greenish tinge that, like her own, the dress had had at least one previous owner. The girl’s white lacy collar, too, had suffered many launderings – but never mind her clothes. Best of all, from Lily’s point of view, she was wearing a smile.

‘You wouldn’t happen to be the new junior on Children’s?’

Lily nodded.

‘I was the same on my first day – stomach feels like it’s in a lift!’

Lily nodded again. Her head would fall off at this rate.

‘Don’t be. It does get better. I’m Gladys, by the way. I’m a junior on Children’s too. Well, I suppose I’m the senior junior now! We’ll be working together!’

‘Lily.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

They shook hands awkwardly.

‘Come on, I’ll show you what’s what.’

Gladys pushed open the door and Lily entered another world.

If what she’d seen of Marlow’s on the day of her interview was like something from a fairy tale, this was more like the reality Lily knew. There was nothing fairy tale here. The corridor walls were scuffed where pull-along wagons delivering goods had bumped against them, the lino was worn, and the stairs which led to the basement staff cloakrooms were stone, dipped from years of footfall and as far away from the soft-carpeted dove-grey staircase inside the store as it was possible to get.

All around them staff moved purposefully this way and that. Men in brown coats rattled past with sack trucks or shoved metal cages full of boxes into a creaking goods lift. Shop-floor staff, some in outer coats going in their direction, others without their coats and ready for the day ahead going in the other, pulsed and flowed in a human tide. Lily dodged as best she could until Gladys pushed through a swing door into a long, low room alive with noise and movement. Wooden benches with pegs above ran down the centre and the walls were lined with pitted metal lockers.

‘My locker’s along here,’ explained Gladys, leading the way. ‘Let’s see if we can find you one close by.’

‘Oh, look, it’s Slow and her new friend Slower.’

The girl who’d accosted Lily outside was patting her hair in a cracked mirror fixed to the wall before retying the bow at the neck of her blouse.

‘Don’t ever go to the zoo, you two, will you? You might get dizzy watching the tortoises whizz round!’

She smiled to herself at her witticism and turned away.

‘Who is she?’ whispered Lily. ‘Or who does she think she is?’

‘Beryl Salter,’ muttered Gladys. ‘Junior on Toys – well, fourth sales she calls it, though there’s no such thing. And Toys is right next to our department, unfortunately.’

‘There’s always one, my mum says.’

Gladys said nothing more, so Lily bundled her gas mask, bag and cardigan into the locker Gladys indicated and checked that the clean handkerchief her mother had insisted on was still tucked up her sleeve.

‘But we don’t have to take it, you know.’

Gladys shook her head. ‘You don’t answer Beryl back.’

Lily had already noticed that, in front of Beryl, Gladys looked like a rabbit being hypnotised by a snake.

‘You may not,’ she responded. ‘But I’m here now.’

‘Well, Lily, you join us on something of an unusual day.’

Lily was hardly listening to a word Miss Frobisher, the Childrenswear buyer, was saying, so dazzled was she by her appearance. Though Lily was no judge of age – anyone over twenty-five was simply ‘old’ – Eileen Frobisher was probably not much over thirty. Tall and imposing, she had a proper figure (hour-glass, Lily would tell Sid later) outlined in a fitted grey pinstriped costume. Her enviably smooth toffee-blonde hair was swept round her head into an elegant French pleat in which not one single hairpin showed. How did she do it?

‘For reasons that … well, reasons you don’t need to know, Furniture and Household are having to move down from the second floor to join us here on the first. So we shall have to condense our stock. The good news for you, Lily, is that you’ll get to know everything we sell straight away. The bad news for the two of you’ – she included Gladys – ‘is that we’ll be losing a display counter, drawers and several racks. So in future you girls’ll be running back and forth to the stockroom a lot more.’

Lily and Gladys nodded dutifully. The department’s two saleswomen – or salesgirls, as Lily learnt they were called – Miss Thomas and Miss Temple – were already going through the racks, removing the covers that protected the stock from dust and dirt overnight. As the morning ticked away, along with Miss Frobisher, they pondered party dresses and picked out little summer coats. Beautifully smocked romper suits, tiny embroidered blouses, fluffy pram covers and soft leather bootees piled up on the counters as they made their decisions over what should stay and what should go.

As she smoothed and folded, Lily marvelled at the detail, the workmanship in every garment – all in miniature – and tried not gasp when she saw the contrastingly enormous prices. Not that she had much time to gasp. Her job, with Gladys, was to carry armfuls of tiny clothes and boxes of accessories to the stockroom and stow them away under the supervision of Miss Thomas, who was now stationed up there. Occasionally, to rest their legs, they folded fresh tissue and cut holes for the hangers to protect the clothes from the stockroom’s much dustier atmosphere.

But their main task, as it turned out, was trying to avoid Beryl, whose own department was also being reduced in size. Despite her self-styled senior status, Beryl had been set the same job, carrying boxes of Meccano, train sets and soft plush toys off the sales floor and up three flights of unforgiving stone stairs to the fourth-floor stockrooms – with accompanying moans.