Joanna Toye - A Store at War

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she complained as they toiled up the stairs for the umpteenth time. ‘But Toys have already moved once to make space for the Red Cross and St John Ambulance stalls. Now I’ve got to lug this stuff about again! Where are the porters?’

‘Helping bring the furniture down, I suppose,’ panted Lily as she plodded on up.

‘Children’s has moved too,’ pointed out Gladys mildly. ‘From ground to first. That was soon after I came,’ she explained to Lily. ‘To make way for the Permits Office and the interpreter’s desk. For French and Belgian refugees,’ she added, when Lily looked blank.

Lily couldn’t help but be impressed. It seemed there was nothing Marlow’s wouldn’t do to attract custom. Mr Marlow must have a very shrewd brain.

‘And now it’s the Air Ministry!’ snorted Beryl, grabbing at a velveteen monkey as it tried to make a break from the armful she was carrying.

‘What?’

‘Oh, hasn’t Frosty Frobisher taken you into her confidence? I wonder why?’

‘I don’t think she’s frosty.’ Lily was defensive. ‘She seems very nice.’

‘Thinks a lot of herself, if you ask me.’

‘She’s not the only one,’ muttered Lily to Gladys, thinking that Miss Frobisher had a lot more right to than Beryl, about whom you could say the same.

‘I suppose she knows you two dumbclucks’ll do as you’re told without asking questions. I asked Mr Marlow.’

Gladys’s eyes widened.

‘Robert Marlow. Floor supervisor,’ she mouthed to Lily. ‘Mr Marlow’s son.’

‘The management have known about it for weeks but the communiqué’ – Beryl rolled the word around triumphantly like a diver surfacing with a rare pearl – ‘only came through on Friday. They’ve requisitioned half the second floor for aircraft parts.’

‘Come along, come along!’

Miss Thomas was waiting for them at the double doors to the stockroom.

‘Come along, girls! The war’ll be over before we get our stock moved at this rate!’

But she gave them a smile and when dinnertime finally came – Lily’s stomach had been growling for over an hour – Miss Frobisher let them both go off together as it was Lily’s first day – as long as they only took forty minutes instead of the usual hour.

At last, in the basement canteen, where Marlow’s provided a daily hot meal for all their employees, Lily got a chance to take stock instead of moving it.

As they chewed their rissoles – not as good as her mum’s, but they were grateful for anything; you had to be these days – Lily learnt that Gladys was six months older than she was and had started at Marlow’s just before Christmas. As soon as she heard where she’d been born – Coventry – Lily had a horrible feeling she knew what Gladys was going to say – and she was right. Worried for their only child’s safety, her parents had sent her to stay with her gran in Hinton soon after Dunkirk – and they’d also been right in their thinking. When Coventry had taken its pounding from German bombers the previous November, the cubbyhole under the stairs where Gladys’s parents had been sheltering was no protection against a petty burglar armed with a paper knife, let alone the Luftwaffe. The house had been completely obliterated and Gladys’s mum and dad with it. With no home or other family to go back to, Gladys had had no option but to stay on with her gran – and since she’d never enrolled in school in Hinton in the first place, she thought she might as well find herself a job. She thanked her lucky stars every day, she said, that she’d been taken on at Marlow’s – her chances boosted by the fact that her parents had run a small corner shop and she’d always helped out there.

‘What happens if there’s an air raid here?’ asked Lily. ‘I mean, there must be over a hundred staff, more maybe, and with customers too …’

‘I’ll show you when we’ve finished.’ Gladys forked up a final shred of cabbage and a chunk of watery potato. ‘There’s an air-raid shelter down here, big enough for all the staff and as many customers as Mr Marlow thinks could be in the store at any one time.’

Lily couldn’t help but be impressed again by Cedric Marlow’s foresight.

‘And he’s had a door cut through that leads into Burrell’s basement too.’

‘Burrell’s! But that’s way down Market Street!’

Burrell’s was another big store and, Lily would have assumed, a rival.

‘Their basement and ours meet in the middle. Weird, isn’t it? So if there was a raid and we got hit, we could get out through their shop, and the other way round.’

‘What are you two gassing about now?’

Beryl plonked her tray down on the table and plumped down beside them – naturally assuming there’d be no objection. Lily noted that, however much she appeared to despise them, she didn’t seem to have anyone else to sit with.

‘Air-raid precautions.’ Lily sipped her water.

‘Hah! I suppose Little Miss Muffet’s been telling you how they say it’s all about “protection not profit”. Has she told you how long we have to wait till we can go down the shelter?’

Lily shook her head. Beryl sprinkled salt and pepper vigorously over her rissole and pushed her cabbage disgustedly to one side.

‘It used to be that we all went down the minute we heard the siren. But now they’ve got plane spotters on the roof – with flags.’

‘So have Burrell’s. And Marks and Spencer. And Boots. And—’ added Gladys.

‘Yes, thank you, we don’t need the entire Trade Directory.’ Beryl didn’t appreciate being interrupted. ‘White for the alert, shop to shop, then red once they actually see a plane,’ she continued matter-of-factly. ‘Then it’s all bells and whistles on the sales floor and everyone scuttling down as fast as they can. Well, you have to make way for customers, of course.’

She didn’t sound too impressed with that, either.

‘But sometimes the air-raid warnings can last all night,’ objected Lily. ‘What then?’

‘You’re stuck, ducky.’

‘It’s never actually happened,’ said Gladys consolingly. ‘And we’ve never actually been seriously bombed, have we, in Hinton. There’s only a couple of factories, and nothing big like Birmingham or West Bromwich or …’

She obviously couldn’t bring herself to say ‘Coventry’.

‘No, but … well, they can always get things wrong,’ said Lily. ‘Burrell’s got hit last winter.’

‘That,’ said Beryl dismissively. ‘A couple of incendiaries the Jerries couldn’t be bothered to lug back with them.’

‘I suppose.’

Lily was glad she’d be able to tell her mum about the precautions at Marlow’s. She knew it had been bothering her. Dora would be relieved Lily had had a hot lunch too. It wasn’t just Lily’s wage which was going to be a help to their household budget.

‘Why does Beryl have to be so snide all the time?’ she asked Gladys as they made their way back to the sales floor. ‘I notice she still had to sit with us. Obviously nobody likes her. And fancy asking the boss’s son what was going on!’

‘I know,’ Gladys sounded resigned. ‘But that’s Beryl. She seems to get away with it. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get” is what she says.’

‘Yes,’ replied Lily. ‘And one day you might get more than you’re asking for, like the sack!’

Gladys shook her head.

‘Not Beryl. Mr Bunting, the buyer on Toys, you’ve seen him—’

Lily had. Short, plump, with a frill of white hair round a bald crown, he looked like the old toymaker in the fairy story. It had come as no surprise to Lily to learn that he doubled as Santa at the staff Christmas party.

‘He’s been here years. He’s a soft touch – that’s what I heard Miss Frobisher call him.’ Gladys hesitated. ‘Beryl calls him something quite different, of course.’