The Railway Girls Read online

  The despair that was never far away pounced on her, wrapping her in its jagged-edged gloom. Pain tightened the back of her throat as guilt surged through her. She started to wrap her arms around herself, but dropped them to her sides. She didn’t deserve comfort.

  Stop it, stop it, stop it.

  After pulling on a pair of stripy woollen bed-socks over her faintly damp stockings, she ran downstairs to the drawing room, whose vast old Victorian furniture Pops had purchased along with the house. She paused outside the door at the last moment because she could hear voices within, which made it necessary to adopt the entrance required by Mumsy’s dratted etiquette book. Opening the door softly, she entered ‘with confidence but without commotion’, slipping her hand behind her to close the door while facing forwards. It wasn’t a visitor with Mumsy. It was Pops. She could have burst in, after all.

  She fingered her necklace as anxiety fluttered through her. She hadn’t expected to do this quite yet, but since Pops was here, it must be done now. Oh Lord.

  ‘There you are, Mabel,’ said Mumsy. ‘Come and sit by the fire.’

  She complied. She wanted to hold out her hands to the flames, but it was essential to look her parents in the eye for the next bit.

  ‘Mumsy says you’ve been out visiting your old dears,’ said Pops. ‘How about a drop of something to warm you up? It’s a bit parky out there.’

  Mumsy softly cleared her throat while gazing into the middle distance. Mabel shared an amused glance with Pops. Hitting the decanters wasn’t permitted until you were dressed for dinner. Mind you, today might be the exception.

  ‘Actually, I only called on Mrs Kennedy. I had something else to do as well.’ Her heart took a few beats in rather a rush, but she straightened her spine. ‘I … I went to the labour exchange.’

  ‘You did what?’ Pops sat bolt upright. His slicked-back, Brilliantined hair gleamed in the firelight.

  ‘Mabel, really!’ cried Mumsy. ‘You know what it’s like for us. It isn’t easy being new money. If you get a job, it’ll give certain people another reason to look down their noses. Besides, you know what we’ve always hoped.’

  Didn’t she just? Mabel Bradshaw, heiress to Bradshaw’s Ball Bearings and Other Small Components, was widely expected to bag herself a penniless lordling, or at the very least an honourable, and become the mother of an unutterably respectable family.

  ‘I want to do my bit,’ she said quietly. ‘I want to do war work.’

  ‘I’ve told you before,’ said Pops. ‘Young ladies don’t go out to work.’

  ‘I think we’ll all be going out to work if the war continues – which it will. You’re always saying so. Anyway, I have an interview and I have to go. It’s all arranged.’

  ‘Where?’ Pops demanded.

  ‘Hunts Bank in Manchester.’

  ‘Never heard of it. Mind you, there are so many banks.’

  ‘I suppose being a bank clerk might not be so very bad.’ Mumsy’s hand fluttered towards the bookcase, then fell away. Had she thought of checking her etiquette book?

  ‘The address is Hunts Bank Buildings, which sounds rather grand, don’t you think?’ Mabel shamelessly pressed the point and was rewarded with the sight of Mumsy’s eyes turning thoughtful.

  ‘But … Manchester?’ said Mumsy. ‘You couldn’t do that on a daily basis, especially these days, with ordinary passengers playing second fiddle to soldiers and goods and heaven knows what besides.’

  ‘It would mean finding somewhere to live,’ said Mabel.

  Pops slapped his hands down on the chair’s arm-protectors so suddenly that he almost shoved the cotton covers to the floor as he surged to his feet. ‘That’s that, then. You’re not leaving home. When is this interview? You simply shan’t attend.’

  ‘I have to. I asked to do war work, so I can’t not turn up. It would be looked into.’

  His fleshy cheeks puffed up and Pops blew out a stream of air. ‘Put like that, I suppose you have to go. Bradshaw’s Ball Bearings is in line for an important government contract – but you didn’t hear me say that. I can’t have it said that my daughter tried to dodge doing her duty.’

  He stomped across to the sideboard and clattered about among the crystal. When he turned round, he had a whopping three fingers of Scotch. Mumsy opened her mouth, then shut it again.

  ‘Well, my girl,’ said Pops, uttering words that were normally an endearment in a completely different tone of voice, ‘you’ve got your own way. I hope you’re satisfied.’

  Mabel’s feet were like blocks of ice when she descended from the train, but she had aimed for elegance rather than warmth when she got dressed, so it was her own fault. Drawing her coat’s fur collar more closely round her neck, she headed along the platform, surrounded by the sharp, spicy aroma of smoke and steam mingling together. It was a smell she adored. The railway meant Grandad: simple as that.

  Handing over her ticket to the ticket collector, in his peaked cap and polished buttons, she entered Victoria Station’s main concourse, where she absorbed an impression of large round clock-faces with Roman numerals, hanging from the metal gantry beneath the station’s canopy; a departure board in a handsome wooden frame; large noticeboards in between the sets of platform gates; a long sweep of polished wood-panelling, with ticket-office windows; and a small cluster of interior buildings with tiled walls the colour of buttermilk, above each entrance the words RESTAURANT, GRILL ROOM and BOOKSTALL depicted in elegant capitals against a background of deep blue with white and green swirls, not unlike the Prince of Wales’s feathers. And, oh my, that glass dome in the restaurant’s roof said First Class far more eloquently than any notice ever could.

  She made her way out of the station, realising just before she walked outside that this wasn’t the main entrance. Before she could turn back, she spotted a blue Austin taxi across the road. Good! But as she approached, she saw no driver.

  A middle-aged man in a sturdy hat with ear-flaps that made him look like he was about to trek across Alaska, detached himself from a stall selling coffee and hurried across.

  ‘Could you take me to Hunts Bank, please?’ she asked.

  ‘Hunts Bank?’

  ‘Hunts Bank Buildings is the address I’ve been given.’ Honestly, weren’t taxi drivers meant to know things like this?

  ‘Are you sure you want taking?’

  ‘Of course.’ What a strange question. Only good manners stopped her from looking round for another taxi. The official taxi rank must be elsewhere.

  The driver looked at her, making her acutely aware of her felt hat, trimmed with a petersham ribbon fashioned into a cluster of curls to make a rosette, which was definitely not suitable for trekking across Alaska. He glanced down at her high-heeled shoes, their tongues fashioned into tiny pleats forming fan-shapes. Likewise.

  ‘Aye, happen you do want taking, dressed like that.’

  Rude fellow. Mabel climbed into the back seat, employing the ‘derrière first, ankles together’ method advised in a supplement to Mumsy’s etiquette book, entitled Modern Etiquette for the Motor Car, which Mumsy had sent off for in response to an advertisement in Woman’s Illustrated, at a cost off five shillings plus thruppence in stamps.

  She peered through the window, eager to view her surroundings. As she did so, she secretly scrunched and unscrunched her toes at a furious rate to pump blood into them before they succumbed to frost-bite and dropped off. The taxi drove sedately round the corner and came to a halt.

  She leaned forward. ‘Why have we stopped?’

  ‘Hunts Bank Buildings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Here we are.’

  ‘Are you sure? We’ve only just left the station.’

  ‘I can drop you somewhere else if you’d rather.’

  ‘No, thank you. Why didn’t you tell me it was just round the corner?’

  ‘I assumed you wanted to save your pretty shoes. That’s two shillings, please.’

  ‘Two shillings?’

  ‘Minimum fare.’

  She added thruppence as a tip, not sure that one was deserved, but it would have felt mean not to give something. She scrambled out, too flustered to remember to emerge properly. Far from the high street of smart shops she had pictured, this was a road of imposing, stone-clad buildings. Was it silly to find them unwelcoming? Maybe this was the bank’s back entrance. Did interview candidates go in via the back? But the taxi driver hadn’t known why she was here.

  Well, there was one way to find out. She walked to a door set deep inside a porch and went through it, telling herself not to expect a handsome banking hall, but unable to prevent a dip of disappointment when she didn’t find one, a dip that became a positive plunge when she absorbed the plain hall and staircase, and the hatch in the wall.

  A man looked up from his desk inside the office as she appeared at the hatch.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘I’ve come for an interview.’

  ‘Do you mean a test?’

  ‘It could be a test, I suppose.’ Had Miss Eckersley actually called it an interview?

  ‘Did the labour exchange send you? Have you got a card?’

  Mabel slipped her hand inside her bag. ‘I hope there won’t be a maths test – though I suppose there’s bound to be, isn’t there? Not my strongest subject, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Maths, English and geography of the British Isles.’

  She stared. ‘Geography? What for?’

  It was the man’s turn to stare. ‘I’d have thought geography was the most important. A heck of a sight more useful, pardon my language, than the other two.’

  ‘For working in a bank?’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Hunts Bank.’

  ‘Hunts Bank – as in money?’ The man chortled. ‘I’ve heard it
all now. Hunts Bank!’ He laughed out loud. Catching sight of her confusion, he pulled himself together. ‘This isn’t a bank. These buildings belong to the railways. The tests are to see if you’re cut out for railway work.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Me and my sister have made a pact not to get killed with our rollers in.’

  Joan pushed herself out of the collapsible canvas chair to stamp her feet and rub her gloved hands up and down her thick-sleeved arms. It was jolly perishing up here on Ingleby’s rooftop, doing fire-watching duty in the pitch-darkness. The charcoal hand-warmers tucked inside her woolly gloves, which had been toasty warm at the start of her shift, had cooled to almost nothing by now.

  ‘Oh aye?’ Hunched in her chair, hands thrust deep in her pockets, Margaret waggled her face from side to side, easing out her nose and mouth from behind her scarf. ‘So if the bombs start falling—’

  ‘When,’ said Joan. ‘Not if. When.’ It was better to tell yourself ‘when’. It kept you on your toes.

  ‘All right, when. When the siren goes off and everyone else springs out of bed and legs it downstairs, you and your Letitia are going to jump up and start flinging rollers here, there and everywhere?’

  Joan grinned. ‘Something like that.’

  She turned to look across the rooftops of the centre of Manchester. Not that she could see anything apart from deeper shapes of darkness that denoted where buildings were, and maybe she couldn’t really see those. Maybe it was her imagination filling in those dark shapes because she knew they must be there.

  It felt as though she lived her whole life in darkness at the moment. Not even the snow brightened things up. The short winter days meant getting up in the dark and it was still gloomy when she arrived at Ingleby’s. Her days were spent in one of the sewing rooms. They had two of them now, the second one having been added last summer when blackout fabric was being sold in huge quantities and many folk wanted their curtains made up quickly. Both the sewing rooms were internal rooms with no windows, and unless Joan bolted her midday meal in order to dash outdoors for a spell, she wouldn’t see the outside world again until it was finally time to go home after her now regular overtime, working on WVS uniforms and uniforms for bus conductresses and the like. The sewing rooms were filled with girls and women working overtime, and as well as the extra money being welcome, Joan was glad to feel she was doing something for the war effort. But she would much rather be wearing one of those uniforms than sewing them.

  At the end of her long working day, she would walk outside into a darkness that was more complete than any she had ever known.

  ‘I don’t care who you’re with,’ Gran had instructed her and Letitia. ‘Make sure they walk on the road-side of the pavement. If anyone’s going to stumble into the path of a motor car, I don’t want it to be you, Letitia.’ She turned to Joan. ‘Or you.’

  Had she paused and turned to look at Joan to reinforce the importance of her message? Or had she added her as an afterthought?

  Tuesday nights were the darkest of the lot, because of fire-watching duty on Ingleby’s roof.

  Gran was used to it now, but she hadn’t been pleased to start with.

  ‘I’m not having you out all night,’ she had declared. ‘It isn’t respectable.’

  ‘I’ve already registered,’ Joan replied. ‘It’s official.’

  Darned right it was. There were some things you didn’t tell Gran in advance. It had been Letitia’s idea that she should register first and confess later, and she had been proved right.

  ‘Then I want you partnered with another girl,’ Gran had insisted – as if Joan would have any say in the matter.

  She had been partnered with Margaret from haberdashery – well, Margaret was what Joan called her when they were on the roof, and Margaret called her Joan. In the shop, they were Miss Darrell and Miss Foster. Gran probably thought they maintained that formality up on the roof as well.

  It was a long night. During her first stint of fire-watching, Joan’s heart had pitter-pattered all night long, but she had soon learned that being on watch was pretty dull. That was the phoney war for you. Not to mention the freezing-cold war, she thought, stamping her feet again. Other fire-watchers had rigged up a canvas windshield, and men from the stock-room had shovelled away the snow, but unless you were prepared to spend all night running on the spot, nothing was going to keep you warm. They weren’t allowed to have a brazier up here because of the glow, so the only way to combat the low temperatures was to take turns to nip inside and boil a kettle for a hot drink, though the steaming Bovril that warmed you at the time soon sent you racing to the Ladies.

  ‘Cold air plus a hot drink equals a fast sprint,’ according to Miss Armitage from ribbons and braids.

  ‘More like a brisk hobble with your legs crossed,’ Miss Dent from millinery had said. ‘And then you have to fight your way through all your layers before you have an accident.’

  Joan wore an extra camisole, two pairs of socks over her stockings, plus two jumpers and slacks beneath her coat. She had run up the slacks in her dinner-hour, using a warm wool fabric provided by Ingleby’s, payment for which had been taken from her weekly wages before she received her pay packet.

  She kept her slacks in her locker at work. Gran would have kittens if she knew about them.

  ‘They’re called “slack” for a reason,’ was Gran’s opinion. ‘Only slack girls wear them.’

  Even Letitia, who had been nagging for yonks about shorter skirts, wouldn’t dare ask Gran about slacks.

  ‘Will you carry on with your fire-watching if you get this other job?’ Margaret asked.

  Joan frowned. The tug in her brow made it feel like her forehead would crack open in the cold. ‘Don’t call it “this other job”, as if it isn’t important.’

  ‘Golly, you really are keen, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she replied frankly, ‘ever since I read about it in Vera’s Voice. With so many men being called up, there’s a great need for girls to take on railway jobs. Women stepped up and did their bit in the last war and we’re being called upon again now. The part the railways will play is going to be crucial. There’ll be precious little petrol, so everything and everyone that needs to get from A to B will have to be transported by rail. Just look at how the railways coped with evacuating all those children last autumn. It’s going to be like that, only more so.’

  ‘Well, I’d rather stay put here, thanks.’

  ‘For as long as they let you, you mean. Girls will be ordered into war work – not straight away, but it will happen.’

  ‘So you thought you’d choose your own job before one was chosen for you?’

  ‘No, I chose it because I want to do something more important than sewing blackout curtains and uniforms.’

  ‘Which brings me back to my original question: will you carry on fire-watching? You’ll be working shifts, won’t you? Including nights.’

  ‘Working nights doesn’t stop folk fire-watching on one of their nights off.’

  Indeed, there seemed to be no end to what folk were prepared to do. That was why this new job was so important. Hark at her. This new job – as if she had already got it. Ingleby’s were giving her time off this afternoon to sit some tests. Lord, what if she wasn’t suitable? Wasn’t clever enough?

  Oh, she had to be. It mattered so much. She didn’t want to spend the war working in Ingleby’s. She longed to do proper war work – like Letitia. Well, no, not like Letitia. You had to be really clever to do what she did.

  A proper wartime job, that was what she dreamed of, the chance to serve her country in a role that was considerably more meaningful than sewing blackout curtains and WVS uniforms. The country couldn’t manage without the railways, not with a war to be won. Was it foolish to imagine the railway lines as lifelines?

  Did she have what it took to become a railway girl?