The Quality Street Girls. Penny Thorpe
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Название: The Quality Street Girls
Автор: Penny Thorpe
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780008307776
isbn:
‘I don’t care what she means and what she doesn’t. This isn’t how we do things here.’
Reenie hadn’t realised when she came to work at the factory that everything would be so complicated. Instead of being paid a set amount of money for the time she spent working on the line, like she would if she’d worked in a shop, Reenie had been told they would all be paid for how many pieces of work they completed; depending on which department she worked in it might be how many cartons she filled with sweets, or how many tins she could make on the tin making machine. If she got though twenty boxes of sweets a minute she would earn the minimum rate for the day, if she got through ten percent more boxes she would earn ten percent more; twenty percent more boxes meant twenty percent more pay or ‘piece rates’. However, there was a maximum, once you made your maximum piece rates you had to carry on working even though you knew that you weren’t earning any extra money. Reenie didn’t mind this at all, she just enjoyed working alongside so many other girls her age. ‘Oh, but I can give you all some of my extra work if you like, you can keep the piece rates if you want to. I always reach my maximum and then after that I can’t get paid for any more so I just do it for fun—’
‘It’s fun for you, but not fun for the rest of us who have to keep up with you. Did you ever think what you having fun does to everyone else?’
‘But I’ll give you my extra—’
‘That’s a piece rate racket. You cannot share your extra work with other girls or they’ll sack all of us. Do you understand? If you try to do what you’re suggesting then there will be no more work for any of us because we will all be tarred by the same brush and no one else will take us without a reference.’
‘But why? I don’t understand! I can’t see why they wouldn’t just want me to work as fast as I can so that they get more sweets at the end.’
‘Because, you total doyle, if it is possible for a human being to work that fast. They will make us work even faster, and faster, and faster if we want to earn our basic rates for doing the minimum, and they will go on and on and on until we are all in our early graves. The Time and Motion men do not care about you or I, they care about the time it takes to do the work.’
‘But I’ve seen you do your sister’s work lots of times. Why don’t they complain about that if they’re so fussed?’
Bad Queen Mary’s eyes widened with an icy rage and her words came out in a controlled hiss. ‘You have never, ever seen us do anything of the sort. And don’t even think about telling anyone else that poisonous lie.’ Mary turned on her heel and left. There was a stunned silence from the other girls, and though Bess tried to offer Reenie a look of apology, she had to go after her sister, who was marching to her place on the production line.
Reenie was hurt and angry that anyone would treat her like that when she had clearly not meant any harm. She was particularly angry at being called a liar. If her grandmother had been there she’d have told Reenie to let it go, but in her absence Reenie began hatching a plan to make certain that Bad Queen Mary would never be cold with her again.
Reenie worked a little more absentmindedly that afternoon, thinking about how she might get closer to Mary and Bess, the Quality Street factory’s very own Tudor Queens. She watched them carefully from her side of the conveyor, and every time Mary caught Reenie’s eye Mary would give her an icy, threatening look.
Reenie noticed several things, that Mary had to look at her work all of the time in order to follow what she was doing, and could only look over at Reenie occasionally. This was Mary’s first mistake, the trick to speed was not to look, but to work by a instinct.
Reenie also noticed that Bess was markedly slower than everyone else on the line, as though she just didn’t have the strength. She took work from her older sister almost constantly. If the overlooker could see them then Bess would keep going, but she’d struggle to keep up even with surreptitious help from her sister. The wrapping girls were clearly unhappy about the situation, but tolerating it grudgingly. There was an understanding with them, Reenie thought, but they were not allowing it to happen out of friendship. Here was Reenie’s opportunity: she would target the wrapping girls.
‘Do you want to earn the highest piece rates of anyone on our floor?’ Reenie had not bothered with introductions; she just presented herself at dinner time beside the wrapping girls’ table and stated her proposition.
The dinner hour was just as segregated as the workroom; the older girls who wrapped the sweets chose to sit on tables apart from the younger girls. While the younger ones gossiped animatedly and leant over one another’s dinners, snatching at leftovers and sharing comics. The older wrapping girls looked as still and bored as the portraits of Hollywood starlets in Vogue magazine.
The dining hall was not so different from Reenie’s kitchen at home; there were scrubbed wooden benches below scrubbed wooden tables, but the difference here was that there were six hundred benches, and a sea of women all dressed the same. It was like finding a needle in a haystack, but she found them, sitting in the warmth of the corner near the kitchen hatches that were serving everything with a rich, mouth-wateringly fragrant beef gravy.
‘And who are you when you’re at home?’ Heather Rogers, a wrapping girl with long, platinum blonde hair looked up from her dinner, and down her nose at Reenie. This was exactly the reception that Reenie had anticipated; which was why she had chosen to skip introductions and start with what was in it for them.
‘She’s Reenie, my server. She’s the fast one.’ Reenie’s wrapper (known to the overlooker as Number Twenty-Eight, because that was the conveyor position she occupied, but to the vicar who’d christened her, she was Victoria Scowen) didn’t sound enthusiastic about it, but Reenie felt that this still wasn’t going too badly.
‘I want to move to your end of the conveyor. I want to be up top behind that pillar. If you help me move you’ll get higher piece rates because I’ll be your server instead of Bad Queen Mary who’s always slow because she’s naffin’ about wi’ her sister.’
‘Hang on,’ Victoria Scowen didn’t like the sound of this. ‘What about my piece rates? You’re my server; what’s in it for me if I let you go up to the far end and leave me with God-knows who?’
‘You’ll get the same as you’ve been getting wi’ me.’
‘And how do you figure that one ou—?’ Victoria was about to ask about the logistics of the problem when Diana – who was Reenie’s intended target since she was the girl who had already warned her that if she had any bright ideas she had to take them to her first, and who appeared to have sway over all the girls on their line – cut in with a more important question.
‘What do you want to move up to my manor for? Are you planning a piece time racket? ‘Cause it sounds to me like that’s the only way you can be offering all three of us better rates. No one can be in three places at once so you’ve got to be talking a racket.’
Heather Rogers tried to move Reenie on by saying in a haughty Harrogate drawl, ‘We’ve got enough trouble up at our end with the Tudor Queens; we don’t need the aggro of some new kid who thinks they know all running a piece time racket right under Rabid Roth’s nose, thank you very mu—’
‘No, СКАЧАТЬ