A Store at War

‘Oh, look, it’s Slow and her new friend Slower.’

The girl who’d accosted Lily outside was patting her hair in a cracked mirror fixed to the wall before retying the bow at the neck of her blouse.

‘Don’t ever go to the zoo, you two, will you? You might get dizzy watching the tortoises whizz round!’

She smiled to herself at her witticism and turned away.

‘Who is she?’ whispered Lily. ‘Or who does she think she is?’

‘Beryl Salter,’ muttered Gladys. ‘Junior on Toys – well, fourth sales she calls it, though there’s no such thing. And Toys is right next to our department, unfortunately.’

‘There’s always one, my mum says.’

Gladys said nothing more, so Lily bundled her gas mask, bag and cardigan into the locker Gladys indicated and checked that the clean handkerchief her mother had insisted on was still tucked up her sleeve.

‘But we don’t have to take it, you know.’

Gladys shook her head. ‘You don’t answer Beryl back.’

Lily had already noticed that, in front of Beryl, Gladys looked like a rabbit being hypnotised by a snake.

‘You may not,’ she responded. ‘But I’m here now.’

‘Well, Lily, you join us on something of an unusual day.’

Lily was hardly listening to a word Miss Frobisher, the Childrenswear buyer, was saying, so dazzled was she by her appearance. Though Lily was no judge of age – anyone over twenty-five was simply ‘old’ – Eileen Frobisher was probably not much over thirty. Tall and imposing, she had a proper figure (hour-glass, Lily would tell Sid later) outlined in a fitted grey pinstriped costume. Her enviably smooth toffee-blonde hair was swept round her head into an elegant French pleat in which not one single hairpin showed. How did she do it?

‘For reasons that … well, reasons you don’t need to know, Furniture and Household are having to move down from the second floor to join us here on the first. So we shall have to condense our stock. The good news for you, Lily, is that you’ll get to know everything we sell straight away. The bad news for the two of you’ – she included Gladys – ‘is that we’ll be losing a display counter, drawers and several racks. So in future you girls’ll be running back and forth to the stockroom a lot more.’

Lily and Gladys nodded dutifully. The department’s two saleswomen – or salesgirls, as Lily learnt they were called – Miss Thomas and Miss Temple – were already going through the racks, removing the covers that protected the stock from dust and dirt overnight. As the morning ticked away, along with Miss Frobisher, they pondered party dresses and picked out little summer coats. Beautifully smocked romper suits, tiny embroidered blouses, fluffy pram covers and soft leather bootees piled up on the counters as they made their decisions over what should stay and what should go.

As she smoothed and folded, Lily marvelled at the detail, the workmanship in every garment – all in miniature – and tried not gasp when she saw the contrastingly enormous prices. Not that she had much time to gasp. Her job, with Gladys, was to carry armfuls of tiny clothes and boxes of accessories to the stockroom and stow them away under the supervision of Miss Thomas, who was now stationed up there. Occasionally, to rest their legs, they folded fresh tissue and cut holes for the hangers to protect the clothes from the stockroom’s much dustier atmosphere.

But their main task, as it turned out, was trying to avoid Beryl, whose own department was also being reduced in size. Despite her self-styled senior status, Beryl had been set the same job, carrying boxes of Meccano, train sets and soft plush toys off the sales floor and up three flights of unforgiving stone stairs to the fourth-floor stockrooms – with accompanying moans.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she complained as they toiled up the stairs for the umpteenth time. ‘But Toys have already moved once to make space for the Red Cross and St John Ambulance stalls. Now I’ve got to lug this stuff about again! Where are the porters?’

‘Helping bring the furniture down, I suppose,’ panted Lily as she plodded on up.

‘Children’s has moved too,’ pointed out Gladys mildly. ‘From ground to first. That was soon after I came,’ she explained to Lily. ‘To make way for the Permits Office and the interpreter’s desk. For French and Belgian refugees,’ she added, when Lily looked blank.

Lily couldn’t help but be impressed. It seemed there was nothing Marlow’s wouldn’t do to attract custom. Mr Marlow must have a very shrewd brain.

‘And now it’s the Air Ministry!’ snorted Beryl, grabbing at a velveteen monkey as it tried to make a break from the armful she was carrying.

‘What?’

‘Oh, hasn’t Frosty Frobisher taken you into her confidence? I wonder why?’

‘I don’t think she’s frosty.’ Lily was defensive. ‘She seems very nice.’

‘Thinks a lot of herself, if you ask me.’

‘She’s not the only one,’ muttered Lily to Gladys, thinking that Miss Frobisher had a lot more right to than Beryl, about whom you could say the same.

‘I suppose she knows you two dumbclucks’ll do as you’re told without asking questions. I asked Mr Marlow.’

Gladys’s eyes widened.

‘Robert Marlow. Floor supervisor,’ she mouthed to Lily. ‘Mr Marlow’s son.’

‘The management have known about it for weeks but the communiqué’ – Beryl rolled the word around triumphantly like a diver surfacing with a rare pearl – ‘only came through on Friday. They’ve requisitioned half the second floor for aircraft parts.’

‘Come along, come along!’

Miss Thomas was waiting for them at the double doors to the stockroom.

‘Come along, girls! The war’ll be over before we get our stock moved at this rate!’

But she gave them a smile and when dinnertime finally came – Lily’s stomach had been growling for over an hour – Miss Frobisher let them both go off together as it was Lily’s first day – as long as they only took forty minutes instead of the usual hour.

At last, in the basement canteen, where Marlow’s provided a daily hot meal for all their employees, Lily got a chance to take stock instead of moving it.

As they chewed their rissoles – not as good as her mum’s, but they were grateful for anything; you had to be these days – Lily learnt that Gladys was six months older than she was and had started at Marlow’s just before Christmas. As soon as she heard where she’d been born – Coventry – Lily had a horrible feeling she knew what Gladys was going to say – and she was right. Worried for their only child’s safety, her parents had sent her to stay with her gran in Hinton soon after Dunkirk – and they’d also been right in their thinking. When Coventry had taken its pounding from German bombers the previous November, the cubbyhole under the stairs where Gladys’s parents had been sheltering was no protection against a petty burglar armed with a paper knife, let alone the Luftwaffe. The house had been completely obliterated and Gladys’s mum and dad with it. With no home or other family to go back to, Gladys had had no option but to stay on with her gran – and since she’d never enrolled in school in Hinton in the first place, she thought she might as well find herself a job. She thanked her lucky stars every day, she said, that she’d been taken on at Marlow’s – her chances boosted by the fact that her parents had run a small corner shop and she’d always helped out there.

‘What happens if there’s an air raid here?’ asked Lily. ‘I mean, there must be over a hundred staff, more maybe, and with customers too …’

‘I’ll show you when we’ve finished.’ Gladys forked up a final shred of cabbage and a chunk of watery potato. ‘There’s an air-raid shelter down here, big enough for all the staff and as many customers as Mr Marlow thinks could be in the store at any one time.’

Lily couldn’t help but be impressed again by Cedric Marlow’s foresight.

‘And he’s had a door cut through that leads into Burrell’s basement too.’

‘Burrell’s! But that’s way down Market Street!’

Burrell’s was another big store and, Lily would have assumed, a rival.

‘Their basement and ours meet in the middle. Weird, isn’t it? So if there was a raid and we got hit, we could get out through their shop, and the other way round.’

‘What are you two gassing about now?’

Beryl plonked her tray down on the table and plumped down beside them – naturally assuming there’d be no objection. Lily noted that, however much she appeared to despise them, she didn’t seem to have anyone else to sit with.

‘Air-raid precautions.’ Lily sipped her water.

‘Hah! I suppose Little Miss Muffet’s been telling you how they say it’s all about “protection not profit”. Has she told you how long we have to wait till we can go down the shelter?’

Lily shook her head. Beryl sprinkled salt and pepper vigorously over her rissole and pushed her cabbage disgustedly to one side.