The Quality Street Girls. Penny Thorpe

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      ‘You eat them. Mother’s not got us anything in for breakfast so that’ll have to do you until dinner time at work.’

      ‘I don’t mind. I don’t get hungry in the morning.’

      Mary’s wandering mind was interrupted by a call from the house opposite to their own:

      ‘You found her then?’

      ‘Yes, thank you Mrs Grimshaw.’ Mary tried to shove her sister unceremoniously through the soot-blackened front door. Leaping at the chance to start a cheery conversation with the neighbour, Bess called over Mary’s shoulder:

      ‘Goodnight, Mrs Grimshaw! Thank you for the lovely bread you left—’

      ‘Don’t start that, just get inside.’ Mary whispered to her sister, ‘You’ll wake the whole street.’

      ‘You’re alright.’ The neighbour sucked casually on her old white clay pipe as she stood on her doorstep, placidly waiting for Mary knew-not-what.

      She always did that, Mary thought to herself, she was always standing on her front step in her slippers and housecoat smoking on a pipe waiting for nothing in particular when they got back late. It was an unfortunate coincidence that Mrs Grimshaw always seemed to go out for a pipe when Bess was out late, and Mary had gone to fetch her. What must the woman think of the pair of us? Then Mary realised that if Mrs Grimshaw thought her younger sister was a dirty stop out, then she was, in fact, correct. However, Mary preferred to think that her sister was somehow a special case and that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Then she remembered what Bess had told her the preceding week and realised that it was worse.

      ‘I don’t know why you won’t let me pass the time of day with Mrs Grimshaw.’ Bess tottered into the front parlour that opened straight onto the street. She clattered over the bare boards on silver high heeled shoes as silly as herself while her sister lit a slim, farthing candle from the table beside the front door.

      ‘Take your shoes off; you’ll wake Mother.’ Mary didn’t need to look over to the corner of the parlour to know that their mother was asleep under grandad’s old army coat in her chair beside the dying embers of the range. As far as Mary could remember their mother had never stayed awake to see that they came home safely because, like Bess, her mother took it for granted that they always would. The reason she slept in the parlour was no late-night vigil for her only children, but the practical solution to the problem of space; since their father died they had been forced to make do with a one-up-one-down. Mary and Bess shared a bed upstairs in the only bedroom. At a squeeze, Mrs Norcliffe might have been able to fit into it with her daughters, but she had moved down to the parlour years ago.

      Bess unfastened the dainty t-straps of her shoes and carried them with her up the creaking stairs to their bedroom. She didn’t lower her voice because her mother was deaf as a post and wouldn’t hear them, but they were both careful to tread softly, and in stockinged feet, to avoid shaking the floor and waking her that way.

      ‘I like her ever so much.’ Bess dropped the shoes onto the floor beside the dresser and hung up her coat on the open door of their wardrobe. ‘I think she wishes you’d talk to her more because I know that she’s very fond of you.’

      ‘Mrs Grimshaw does not like me.’ Mary said it as though it were a fact that she had come to terms with long ago and only shared in passing as she folded the stranger’s coat neatly and laid it in the corner furthest away from her as though it were a dangerous animal that might attack.

      ‘Oh, but she does!’ Bess’s large, blue baby-doll eyes were wide with concern and love, and she reached out to rub her sister’s shoulder reassuringly, ‘You worry too much, and if you’d just talk to people and let them get to know you—’

      ‘You’re too trusting.’ Unlike her sister, Mary didn’t have to remove cheap costume jewellery and climbed into their lumpy, old, but nonetheless welcome bed. ‘You’re used to everyone liking you, so you don’t see when you’re getting yourself into trouble.’

      Bess had pulled on her nightdress and thrown her silk stockings carelessly over the top of her messily heaped shoes. ‘Your trouble,’ she threw her arms around her sister’s neck to give her a goodnight hug, ‘is that you’re too hard on yourself!’ Bess giggled, kissed her sister on the cheek and then wriggled down beneath the coverlet to sleep.

      Mary was sitting up in bed, about to lean over and blow out the candle beside her, but in her exhaustion her mind caught up with what she had seen. Her sister had just taken off a pair of fancy-looking stockings, so Mary picked the candle up to cast the weak light a little higher. ‘Bess?’

      ‘Mmm.’

      ‘Are those silk stockings?’

      ‘Mmm.’ Bess hummed the affirmative contentedly into her pillow ‘They’re lovely.’

      ‘Where did you get them from?’

      ‘Tommo, he gave them to me as a present at lunchtime when I saw him at the factory gates.’

      Mary turned to look down at her younger sister who had already closed her pretty, long-lashed eyes, and put her head on her faded-grey pillow. The candle wax melted down Mary’s knuckles but she ignored it. ‘I cannot believe you sometimes! I thought I told you that you weren’t to see him anymore. If he thinks that he can just—’

      Bess pulled herself up in bed for a moment, leant over, and blew out her sister’s candle, plunging them both into darkness. Mary could feel Bess plonking her head back on her pillow and settling down to sleep. She sat up for a moment longer, debating whether or not to waste a match re-lighting it and trying to pursue the subject, but she knew better than to try. Her sister would never see reason, Mary would have to take matters into her own hands.

      Diana could hear a church clock striking four o’clock in the morning somewhere down near Queen’s Road. She was standing in the dark, galley kitchen waiting for Tommo to return; she had waited all night. To pass the time Diana had attempted to clean up some of the usual detritus that littered her stepmother’s kitchen. An empty Oxo tin was lying on the flagstones, the crumbs trodden into the floor along with innumerable other ills. Diana had cleaned what she could without waking little Gracie and her stepmother. She had swept up crumbling shards of plaster that had fallen from the damp, mould-blackened walls; she had reset the rusted mouse trap and returned it to its place under the stove that badly needed blacking, and she had folded up the dirty sheets of newspaper that her stepmother had laid out on the kitchen table. None of them ever read much of the pages from the papers these days; the sheets were there to eat their bread and dripping off instead of crockery, and they were always a few days out of date.

      As she had folded up the dirty sheets of the West Yorkshire Gazette, she’d cast her eye over stories about Italy, Spain, and Germany and fascists. The stories all seemed to weave into one another; the Spanish were fighting their fascist leader, the Germans were bombing the Spanish to stop them fighting the fascists, the Italians were with the Germans, and Londoners in the East End rioted. They’d shouted, ‘They shall not pass’ in Spanish when the British Union of Fascists had tried to march through Whitechapel. Fascism was spreading across Europe like the plague, and carefully constructed treaties were toppling all over the world like a flimsy house of cards.

      A photograph in one of the newspapers caught Diana’s eye; it showed a razor-necked Oswald Mosley in his black, military-style uniform. He wore a black peaked cap like a police sergeant but his was emblazoned with the lightning bolt of the BUF, and the shiny peak was tilted rakishly СКАЧАТЬ