The Sweethearts: Tales of love, laughter and hardship from the Yorkshire Rowntree's girls. Lynn Russell

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СКАЧАТЬ an anaesthetic – some gas – and you won’t feel a thing.’ He gave her a brief professional smile that did little to reassure her. He then asked her when she’d last eaten, and luckily – if that was really the word, Madge thought, as she peered over his shoulder at the frightening-looking steel implements in the sterile cabinets behind him – she’d been too nervous to eat breakfast before she left the house that morning. The dentist studied her pale, frightened face for a moment. ‘Do any of your family work here?’

      She nodded. ‘My father, three brothers and six sisters.’

      He smiled. ‘Then I’m sure we can spare one of them from their work for half an hour. I’ll send word for one of your sisters to come and sit with you.’

      The dental nurse took her back out to the waiting room and sent for Madge’s sister Rose, the next in age to her, to come from the Card Box Mill. Rose arrived ten minutes later, glad of any interruption to the monotonous routine of the working day, and sat with Madge, making nervous small talk until it was time for her to go back into the surgery.

      The nurse helped Madge into a white gown and settled her back in the chair. She felt like a very small child as two men loomed over her, the dentist behind her and a red-faced anaesthetist with the ruptured veins of a heavy drinker in front of her. He wheeled a metal stand with two tall gas bottles over to the chair and checked the gauges and settings. ‘Is that laughing gas?’ Madge asked, half frightened and half intrigued.

      ‘No,’ he said. ‘This one puts you completely to sleep.’ He unhooked the mask with a flexible hose attached to it and placed it over her nose and mouth, then told her, ‘Now, just close your eyes and breathe deeply.’ The mask was cold and hard and smelled of rubber, and it also had a slightly acrid tang, like the cupboard under the kitchen sink at home where Madge’s mum kept the bleach and lye soap. She heard a faint hissing sound and took a tentative breath and then another, her palms prickling with a nervous sweat. The gas felt cold in her nose and mouth and a feeling of dizziness and nausea crept over her. She couldn’t remember anything after that.

      Rose had stayed in the waiting room, but she could see the blurred movements of the dentist through the frosted glass, and heard the murmured conversation of the two men and then the gruesome, grinding sounds as the steel forceps gripped and twisted Madge’s teeth and pulled them out one by one. Madge herself saw and heard none of that, and remembered nothing else until she came round a few minutes later. As she regained consciousness, still half drugged by the gas, she began shouting for her sister and saying, ‘I remember, Rose. I remember.’

      At the sound of her sister’s voice, Rose jumped up, knocked on the door and without waiting for an answer, pushed it open and ran in. ‘What do you remember, Madge?’ she said, squeezing her sister’s hand.

      In her gas-fuelled dreams, Madge had been seeing herself as a piece of confectionery on the Rowntree’s production line. ‘I was coming down this chute,’ she said. ‘And I saw you at the end of the chute waiting for me.’ She tried to sit up but was still very groggy. Her mouth tasted foul and as she probed with her tongue, she felt the soft fleshy cavities in her gums where the two teeth had been removed. The dental nurse had meanwhile steered Rose back to the waiting room while the dentist made a final check of Madge’s mouth.

      ‘Everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘They’ll heal up perfectly well, but don’t eat or drink anything until teatime and, tempting though it is, don’t keep testing the cavities with your tongue, because if you do, they’ll start bleeding again. And Miss Fisher? If you don’t want to be coming back to see me again, you need to take better care of those teeth. Brush them twice a day, morning and night, and don’t eat so many toffees.’

      ‘I don’t eat toffees,’ Madge protested.

      ‘Well, chocolates then, or gums, or whatever sweets you do eat.’ He paused, studying her face. ‘All right now? Then let’s see if we can get you back on your feet and into the waiting room. You may be a little unsteady at first, but the nurse will help you.’

      Later, Madge would look back on her first taste of dentistry with relief that the experience had not been worse, because the stories circulating around the factory about the company dentist cast serious doubts over his competence. One of her fellow workers, Muriel, recalls that ‘After a visit to have a tooth removed, it put me off going to any dentist for life, as he broke it so many times and even then left a bit of tooth stuck in my gum,’ necessitating several visits to a different dentist to repair the damage. Others suffered even more at his hands. One girl, Marjorie Chapman, had to have five teeth out before she could start work at Rowntree’s. As she went under the anaesthetic, the last thing she remembers seeing was ‘a tram going by with all the faces looking at me’. The extraction was a prolonged, messy and very bloody affair, and Marjorie ended up having to be taken to hospital to have her gums stitched. ‘It was rough,’ she says. ‘My mouth was dreadful and I was only fourteen. It was about eight weeks before I could start work and the dentist got in terrible trouble over it.’

      With Rose walking alongside them, the nurse steered Madge back to the waiting room and then, after she’d had a few more minutes to recover, took her out to the main office area, where Mrs Sullivan was still sitting at her desk. She peered at Madge over her glasses, then turned to Rose. ‘Your sister seems fine now,’ she said. ‘So you’d better be getting back to work, hadn’t you?’

      Rose gave a reluctant nod, squeezed Madge’s hand and walked off down the corridor as Mrs Sullivan turned her attention to Madge’s form. She made another note on it, then nodded to herself and added her signature at the bottom.

      ‘Right,’ she said. ‘You’ll start in the Card Box Mill tomorrow morning at 7.30 a.m. prompt. Your pay will be eleven shillings a week for a forty-four hour week.’ She took a printed booklet from her desk drawer and handed it to Madge. ‘This is a copy of the Works Rules and Regulations. We expect you to read it, know the rules and abide by them at all times. Any breach of them will be treated as a matter for disciplinary action.’

      She paused and gave Madge a questioning look, making sure the message had been received. ‘Now, you’ll need two white turbans and two overalls with no pockets in them. We don’t supply them, you have to provide your own, but if you’ve no money and can’t afford them, we have an arrangement with the stores in town. You can get them there and we’ll deduct the money from your wages, a shilling a week, until you’ve paid for them. You’ll need to wear stockings and flat shoes, no high heels, no sandals and no jewellery other than wedding rings.’ She paused again. ‘Though you’ll not have one of those just yet, will you? No make-up and no perfume allowed, no pins or small objects of any kind, and no food to be brought into the working areas. You’ll need money for a drink at break time, and a little “sailor bag” to hang around your neck to keep your money in. There’s a ten-minute morning break and you get an hour at dinnertime. If you’re not going home for your dinner, you can buy a meal in the Dining Block – the food is good and it’s cheap, too. Any questions? No? Then we’ll see you tomorrow at 7.30 a.m. sharp. Don’t be late or you’ll be locked out and lose your morning’s pay. Report to the timekeeper’s office just inside the main doors and someone will meet you there and take you over to the Card Box Mill.’

      As Madge turned into Rose Street on her way home, with the metallic taste of blood in her mouth, she saw her mother on the step, still chatting to her neighbour. ‘Well?’ she said, as Madge walked up to her.

      ‘I’ve had two teeth out,’ Madge said, opening her mouth to show her mother her sore and bleeding gums.

      ‘Never mind that,’ her mum said. ‘Did they take you on?’

      ‘Yes, in the Card Box Mill.’

      Her СКАЧАТЬ