All That Glitters, page 3
The pennies rocked against her empty stomach as she followed her new employers to the lodge gate. A swift nod of the head and she was outside. On the street. The first time in over two years she had actually stood on a street.
‘I said no time to waste, girl,’ the woman reminded harshly. The couple turned right and Jane trailed clumsily in their wake. They walked past the Union offices and the Court House, both faced in the same dour granite as the workhouse, past Jubilee Hall where she had watched the Salvation Army feed the children of the unemployed through the windows of the female ward, down a short, steep flight of narrow stone steps and into High Street. She stretched out her hand, gripping the windowsill of a shop, steeling herself against the sudden onslaught on her senses. There were people everywhere, more than she could remember seeing in one place before. And the shops! She stared through the window into the one beside her, its atmosphere thick, buzzing with flies, its shelves loaded with trays of bread and wilting vegetables. A woman with a child in her arms was standing before the counter, watching as the shopkeeper unscrewed a jar of brightly-coloured lollipops.
‘Girl!’
She wrenched her ankle painfully. It was impossible to walk quickly in clogs. A marvellous smell of coffee, mingled with baking meats, pastry and hot chocolate, wafted appetisingly towards her. She saw a café, read the sign above the door, RONCONI’S TEMPERANCE BAR. One day she’d have enough money to eat in a place like that. Anything she wanted. One of those meat pies from the glass case on the counter, and an enormous ice cream piped into a tall silver horn exactly like the illustration in the window. Remembering her new employers’ injunction to hurry, she turned, just in time to see their padded rumps waddle into the gloom beneath the railway bridge at the foot of the hill. She followed, passing white-tiled walls blackened by layers of soot and coal dust at the higher levels, but rubbed to a cleaner grey-white where queues of passengers leaned as they waited for their buses. The short tunnel opened on to the Tumble. On the left was Station Yard.
One of the unmarrieds who’d scrubbed a corridor alongside her had told her about Station Yard. How a girl with a ‘bit about her’ could make as much as two bob a time for what most of the unmarrieds had given away for free. And how the Station Yard girls sometimes ‘packed in’ as many as ten men a night if they could find them. A pound for a night’s work! It had seemed like unimaginable riches. But then the story had been tempered by the tale of one Station Yard girl who’d ended up in the workhouse. She hadn’t thought to save a penny when she’d been earning her pound a night, and when her condition had prevented her from working, she’d been forced to throw herself and her baby on the mercy of the parish guardians.
Jane looked around the station car park for evidence of girls with ‘a bit about them’. There were none that she could see. A row of old men sucking empty pipes sat on the low grey and red brick wall that separated the yard from the hustle and bustle of the crossroads. A few families were dashing up the stone steps that led to the platforms and the trains. Disappointed that there were no painted ladies on show, she clutched the string that bound her spare dress and crossed the road, careful to keep her employers within sight.
There’d been more people on the Graig hill than there were in town. But then it was Sunday. She knew from what someone in the workhouse had said that market days were Wednesday and Saturday. She’d never seen the market, but she’d heard about it. Children in the orphanage who’d been there had talked about stalls groaning with all kinds of toys and sweets. Perhaps she’d be sent to do the shopping there. Maybe she’d even be paid enough to buy a few things for herself. Books – she loved books – clothes, because she needed them, and a few sweets. Her mouth watered at the thought as she trailed behind her benefactors, an insignificant rowboat bobbing in the wash of two fully-rigged yachts. Straining her neck to the right and left she tried to take in all that the shops and cafés had to offer. To her, Pontypridd was a strange and exotic place. She’d only walked through it a few times in her life. Once to attend a special Christmas Day showing of films in the White Palace put on for needy children, courtesy of the manager; once to attend Harvest Thanksgiving service in St Catherine’s Church when the Maesycoed orphans had been relegated to the back two rows of pews, and twice on outings to Pontypridd Park. She looked around for the entrance to the park. It had been a magical place. With green lawns, flowers, a playground...
‘Look where you’re going!’ a young woman shouted as she accidentally walked into a pram.
‘I didn’t think they let them out of the workhouse to mingle with decent people.’ The woman’s companion looked Jane up and down as if she had no right to be on a public street.
Upset, Jane stepped out of their path into a doorway. Her eyes widened at the poster in front of her.
All this week, straight from their triumphant success in the West End, Alice Delysia, Queen of Comedy in her latest success A PAIR OF TROUSERS.
‘Girl, keep up. If you don’t, I’ll be sending you back, sharpish!’
‘Sorry, ma’am.’ She wasn’t, not in the least. Thirty seconds in the doorway of the New Theatre had been enough to make her forget the disagreeable encounter with the two women and evoke her most treasured memory. The night the orphans from Church village had been taken to the Town Hall Theatre to see a circus. Four years on she could still recite the sequence of acts off by heart. Gyto the juggling clown, Pooples the performing dog, the flying …
‘I have to call in a café. We’re out of bread,’ the woman announced.
‘I thought you were going to send the girl.’
‘How could I when she knew we intended to take her back? She would have run off with the money.’
They walked on past the New Inn and the deserted entrance to Market Square.
‘Girl!’
Tearing herself away from Gwilym Evans’s window display of ladies’ summer fashions, Jane caught up with them at the other end of Market Square. A little further on she saw a café set behind an ornate fountain; to the right were two massive doors, one sporting a poster headed TOWN HALL. Jane stared at the lettering. So that’s where she’d seen the circus? The woman disappeared into the café, the man inched towards her. Afraid he’d touch her, she walked into the café and stood behind his wife.
‘Mrs Bletchett, how are you today?’ A dark young man with a foreign accent leaned over the counter.
‘Fair to middling. I’ll have four large loaves if you can spare them.’
‘Business must be good,’ he said cheerfully as he heaped the loaves in front of her.
‘Full house, thanks to the pits reopening and people flocking in from all over the country looking for work.’
‘Anything else?’ The man, taller and better-looking than any of the porters in the Graig, winked at Jane as he flashed a wicked, insincere smile at Mrs Bletchett. Jane lowered her eyes. She’d seen and heard enough reactions and comments as they’d walked through the town to know that her workhouse dress stuck out like a sore thumb. Still, now she was in work she’d earn money. More to add to the shilling and eleven pence concealed beneath her dress. She’d be able to buy herself something pretty like the blue cotton the woman who’d shouted at her had worn.
She turned to avoid the man’s eye. On the back of the café door was a poster advertising a revue in the Town Hall: All London Girls.
She studied the sketch of three striking blondes wearing nothing but beautifully arranged curls and ostrich feather fans that concealed what her housemother in the Homes would have called ‘the naughty bits’. Jane was wondering just how London girls differed from Welsh ones when she saw another notice. Small, handwritten, it was pinned below the poster.
VACANCY.
USHERETTE/CONFECTIONERY SALES ASSISTANT. APPLY ASSISTANT MANAGER, TOWN HALL, 10.00 AM PROMPT, MONDAY.
Monday – tomorrow – there was a chance of getting a job in a theatre; the same theatre she’d sat and watched the circus in.
A woman wearing a hat trimmed with blue feathers strolled past the open doorway arm-in-arm with a younger woman dressed in the uniform of a waitress.
‘I can’t see any decent girl crossing the threshold of the Town Hall again, let alone applying for that vacancy,’ she snorted in a loud voice. ‘Not with the type of show the Council has allowed the management to bring into the town. I don’t know what they think they’re doing, turning Pontypridd into Sodom and Gomorrah.’
It was then Jane noticed the small print below the word REVUE.
All nudes straight from London stage success. Compere, and singer, Pontypridd’s own Haydn Powell. Fresh from a stormingly successful spring season in Torquay.
Nudes – naked girls on stage? Jane continued to stare at the poster in bewilderment.
‘That’s the bread bought.’ The brown paper and string carrier bag was dumped in Jane’s arms. ‘And you can stop gawping when you like,’ Mrs Bletchett admonished when she saw what Jane was looking at. ‘In my experience girls like you have enough ideas along those lines, without getting any more from the theatre.’
Red-faced, Jane whirled around. The handsome counter hand caught her eye, gave her a smile and another wink. She tossed her head high in the air, for once forgetting her cropped, pauper-style short-back-and-sides haircut. She’d had a few dealings with boys in the school in Church Village. Enough to know that they expected only one thing from ‘Homes’ girls. She had no illusions about her looks. Even without the drab grey dress, austere workhouse haircut and clogs, she was plain by any standard. Mousy hair, brown eyes, thin face, fat lips, and a figure like a broom handle. But then boys were never particular about the appearance of girls they thought they could take liberties with.
Now she was finally out, she intended to stay out of the workhouse, and the unmarrieds’ ward. But she knew if she was going to succeed in her intentions she’d have to keep one step ahead of everyone. The workhouse guardians, the Master, her new employers – and especially boys like that counter hand.
‘That’s a pretty shawl.’
‘Haydn gave it to me.’ Bethan folded the square of blue and green crêpe de Chine, and left her chair. ‘Would you like tea?’
‘I asked the girl to bring it in. You have help in the house, remember?’ Andrew pressed her gently back into her seat.
‘How did Haydn get on with the family?’ she asked, her mouth dry with apprehension.
‘Fine. I told them you were resting, and they all send their love.’ He pulled a newspaper out of his briefcase and settled into the chair opposite hers. He looked up, the paper unopened on his lap. A frown creased his forehead as he noted the dark shadows beneath her eyes. She hadn’t been able to take proper care of herself during her last pregnancy, but he was determined that it would be different this time. ‘I don’t know what you said to Haydn, but he certainly seems to be trying with Phyllis and Brian.’
‘In what way?’
‘He asked me to run him down High Street so he could buy presents for them. He brought something back for everyone else, but of course not knowing about Phyllis and Brian he’d left them out. And I’ll say this much for him, he’s not stingy with whatever he’s earning. He bought the big toy lorry out of Edwards’s window for Brian and a large box of chocolates from the café for Phyllis.’
‘Then he won Brian over?’
‘I didn’t stay long, but you know Haydn. He can charm the birds off the trees when he wants to.’
‘Or the knickers off a showgirl.’
‘Mrs John!’ He lifted his eyebrows in amusement.
‘He warned me that he won’t tolerate any interference in his private life.’
‘Nor should he. He’s a grown man. It’s time big sister left him to get on with it.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘You know I am. Come on, let’s go.’
‘Where?’
‘Upstairs. I’ve got some reading to catch up on and you need a rest.’
‘Andrew it’s the middle of the day. What will Annie think?’
‘She’ll think we’re resting before going out tonight.’
‘We’re not going out tonight.’
‘We are now. I’ve booked dinner in the New Inn. Everything’s arranged. You don’t have to do anything except look beautiful, which you always do very well. Trevor and Laura are picking up William, Eddie and Diana in their car. We’re taking your father, Phyllis and Haydn in ours. Mrs Ronconi is having Brian for the night and Charlie and Alma are meeting us there.’
‘When did you arrange all this?’
‘When I took Haydn into High Street.’
‘Can we afford it?’
‘Have to welcome the star home. And as he’ll be working every night next week, tonight seems to be the logical choice.’
‘That was kind of you, but you don’t have to keep trying quite so hard with my family. They’ll come round in their own good time.’
‘For purely selfish reasons, like your peace of mind, I’d prefer “their own good time” to be sooner rather than later.’ He left his chair, and held out his hands. She took them, and he helped her to her feet.
‘I love you, Mrs John.’ He kissed her on the lips.
‘I love you too, Doctor John.’
‘Now we’ve cleared that up, let’s forget Haydn for five minutes and go to bed.’
‘Here’s where you sleep. It’s clean. I made sure the last girl left it as she found it.’
Panting from the exertion of climbing three flights of stairs, Mrs Bletchett opened the door to the small attic bedroom. It was undeniably clean. Clean and bare except for a rickety wooden chair and a metal-framed bed. The mattress was stuffed with horsehair; Jane knew because brown fibres oozed from the side seams. A pair of threadbare sheets and a single thin, grey blanket lay folded on top. The floor had been scrubbed almost white, the boards dried and bleached by successive applications of washing soda and water. Jane could smell the soda: a dry, astringent odour that caught the back of her throat and reminded her of the workhouse.
‘I’ll expect you to wash the sheets when you wash the lodgers’ bedding. There’s a chair for your spare dress.’
Jane obediently laid her bundle on the seat. At the head of the bed was a small uncurtained window. She glanced through it. She was higher than she’d thought. Below her stretched an undulating sea of slate roofs and smoking chimney pots.
‘Now you’ve seen where you’ll sleep, you can start earning your keep.’
The lodging house was vast. Larger than it looked from the outside, and it had appeared daunting then. Crushed to learn she was the only ‘help’, Jane followed her new mistress down warrens of corridors into dormitories that reeked of male sweat, soiled clothes and stale air. Washrooms and toilets flooded with pools of foul-smelling water were situated at the end of every passage, and everything she was shown looked as though it hadn’t been given a thorough cleaning in years.
The ground floor was little better. An ill-ventilated, smoky kitchen, filled to capacity by an enormous table and dresser that might have been made for the ogre in Jack and the Beanstalk opened into a dingy bar furnished with round tables and rickety chairs. A counter was set at one end, barrels of beer and cider ranged behind it, the gleaming china handles of the pumps polished – no doubt by the previous skivvy.
‘You served beer?’ Mr Bletchett demanded.
Jane shook her head.
‘I’ve yet to meet a workhouse girl who’s good for anything besides scrubbing floors,’ his wife sneered. ‘Well, we’ve no time to teach you how to pull a pint now. Into that kitchen and peel all the potatoes in the basket. You have peeled potatoes before?’
‘Yes ma’am.’
‘Then what are you waiting for?’
‘You’re the last person I expected to see here.’
‘Why’s that. Eddie Powell? Think I’m not good enough for the New Inn?’ Jenny Griffiths flirted provocatively.
‘Of course not,’ he apologised, anxious not to upset her. She certainly looked different to the everyday Jenny who served behind the counter in her father’s shop. Her long, blonde hair had been crisply waved and styled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and she was wearing a shiny blue dress that showed the creamy skin on her neck and arms to fine advantage. He found himself wishing they were alone.
‘You here to celebrate your Haydn’s homecoming?’
Eddie’s hopes of making any headway with her were dashed as they glanced over to where his brother was holding court at the head of the table that Andrew John had booked. The look in Jenny’s eye told him everything he would have been happier not to know. She had been Haydn’s girl before she had been briefly – very briefly – his. And she couldn’t have made it any plainer that she still carried a torch for Haydn if she had screamed it from the band’s microphone.
Oblivious to everyone who wasn’t sitting at his table, Haydn’s laughter echoed around the room, cutting Eddie to the quick. Although Eddie would sooner have died than admit it to anyone, he loved his brother. But standing next to Jenny Griffiths he wished Haydn a million miles away, or at least back in London.
‘Do you want to talk to him?’ he enquired tersely. ‘I could take you over if you like.’
Jenny looked at the others seated at Haydn’s table. The Johns, Andrew and Bethan, Dr Trevor Lewis and his wife Laura, Eddie’s father Evan, Phyllis Harry, Diana, William, Charlie and his wife Alma – there were too many people. She wanted to meet Haydn Powell again, more than she wanted anything else in life, but not now, not like this. She shook her head. ‘I don’t want to break in on a family party.’ When she saw Haydn again she intended there to be only the two of them, so she could tell him all the things she’d dreamed of and stored in her memory through the long winter months that had frozen her emotions as well as her body. ‘I’m here with my mother and my aunt and uncle,’ she explained. ‘It’s my aunt’s birthday. Why don’t you come and meet them? Then, after we’ve eaten, if you want to and the band’s playing, I’ll go to the ballroom with you.’
