The Quality Street Girls

So, that’s how it is, is it? Diana thought to herself. If I shop you, you’ll shop me. She knew that Tommo didn’t care if she lost her wage and her last taste of independence and self-determination; the only reason he hadn’t exposed her until now was because he enjoyed tormenting her with the idea that he would. They stared at one another in silence, both as determined as the other not to give an inch. Tommo stood, smirking with mischief, Diana fuming with rage. And then Stewart yawned.

‘Are we going, or what?’ Stewart sounded bored. ‘We’ve only got half an hour to put that bet on, and it’ll take us best part of a quarter hour to walk to the bookies. If I miss this one, so help me—’

‘Alright, alright.’ Tommo had evidently been trumped by Stewart, who hadn’t cared two hoots about the spat between his former girl and his best friend. Tommo rubbed his eyebrows with his bony, nicotine-stained fingers as though this demanding day had taxed his great intellect. ‘This tip better be worth it, Stewie.’

‘He’s doping the horse hisself. It’s a cert.’ Stewart looked at his wristwatch. It narked at Diana that he could afford a wristwatch but worked less than she did.

Diana could tell that Tommo wanted to save face. He thought for a second or two and then allowed a smile to stretch over his horrible lips. ‘Don’t say I never do anything for you, sis. We’re leaving you in peace.’ And then he added theatrically, ‘For now.’

Stewart and Tommo began strolling unconcernedly towards the concrete stairwell, but even though they were leaving the factory, Diana made sure that she stuck to them like glue. If she knew Tommo he had planned this so that he could steal something to order for his gangland cronies in Leeds; he wasn’t an opportunist thief.

Tommo had taken the boldest route through the basin, right under the view of the office block windows, the Albion Mills factory windows, the railway station platforms above, and the main entrance gate cabin. Diana resolved to say nothing while he was within earshot and then to tell the commissionaires what he’d been up to as soon as he rounded the corner. Diana thought she could always get the commissionaires a photograph of Tommo from home if they didn’t catch a good enough look at him, but when she got to the gatehouse cabin she saw, for the first time in all her years at Mac’s, that it was empty. Tommo must have paid someone to create a diversion so that he could stroll in and out unimpeded. There was no one for Diana to tell. She stood there, helpless, angry. She watched their retreating silhouettes in their stolen blue overalls and hated them. What a change, she thought, from when she’d first walked through those gates; how her heart would have leapt to see Stewart walk around the corridor all those years ago. She’d have boasted to all the other girls that she had a young man and that he’d come to work to see her. Now, ten years later, she felt nothing but dread. Stewart had found his way into the place where she felt safe, and she didn’t like it.

Diana looked around, hopeful that one of the commissionaires or the watchmen would come back, but the basin, as they called the deep space between the railway bank and the Albion Mills building, was deserted. As she turned to walk back to her line, out of the corner of her eye she caught movement. She looked up toward the windows of the office building, there on the third floor, lowering a dainty teacup into a dainty saucer, was Mrs Wilkes; she had been watching Diana.

Chapter Four (#ua99d1feb-5903-5249-a8ee-8159066b0299)

Reenie’s grandmother had always told her that she had a good heart, but she liked the smell of trouble too much. As far as Nanna Martin was concerned, Reenie was a lost cause, and they would all just have to do their best to keep her on the straight and narrow and keep her in work until she could be safely wed.

Reenie didn’t think her family were fair on her. It was true that she found herself in the stew quite a lot, but she didn’t deliberately go out of her way to find trouble; it just found her. It was just this kind of situation that Reenie was walking into at the Mackintosh’s factory known as Toffee Town.

‘Do you know those two girls up at the far end? The one’s that work behind the pillar?’ Most of the girls sat in the same space that they had found themselves in on their first day at break time, and talked to the same handful of friends, never venturing out into the territory of other girls. Reenie, however, went round trying to make friends with everyone during her break. Impervious to any snubs she mostly won them over, but there were two exceptions: the two girls that she had watched on her first day, and who had given her a warning look. One of them was small, with a doll-like face; the other was plain with a red birthmark on her cheek like a blood-red tear. Today Reenie was passing the time of day with the boys who worked as porters on her floor and who filled the cages with the materials that the server girls needed to do their jobs. When the workforce wasn’t segregated by order it seemed to naturally segregate itself; it was typical of Reenie that she would drift beyond the bounds of shop floor etiquette and mix with everyone.

‘They call the younger one Good Queen Bess.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because her older sister’s called Mary, and she’s a Bess, so it’s like the queens who were sisters.’

‘Oh, of course.’ Reenie had no idea who the queens were that the boy porter referred to, but she thought it was wise to act as though she did.

‘She’s the lovely one so she’s Good Queen Bess, but her sister’s miserable so they call her Bad Queen Mary.’

‘Not always.’ One of the older porters put in matter-of-factly. ‘Not to her face.’

‘Aye, that’s true. But mostly she’s known as the Bad Queen.’

‘Bess and Mary? Right-o. Thanks for that. I’ll go and see if they want to make a new friend.’

‘Good luck with that. Those two don’t talk to anyone except Sarah who works in the dining hall.’

‘That’s a shame for them. You wait here while I go and find out why.’

The boys laughed and shook their heads. They liked Reenie, but she didn’t know what was good for her.

‘Everyone at home calls me Queenie Reenie.’ She put out her hand to shake the other girl’s. ‘I hear they call you Good Queen Bess,’ Reenie turned to smile at Mary too and hesitated, the words, ‘and they call you Bad Queen Mary’ hanging in the air unspoken, but cracking like an electric storm. Her voice faltered as she said, ‘… and you’re … her sister, aren’t you?’

Mary said nothing, but Bess laughed to break the ice and said, ‘Two Queens! Oh no, Queenie Reenie, which of us will be Queen of Quality Street?’

Reenie tried to shake the other girl’s hand, but as she touched it she felt the thin skin, the delicate bones, and worried that she would break it. Up close Bess seemed like a little bird, lighter than air and just as fragile; her huge blue eyes seemed all the sharper for the dark circles round them.

‘What do they call you Queenie for? I’ve never heard of a Queen called Reenie.’ Mary wasn’t taking Reenie’s hand to shake it, although Reenie did offer it.

‘Well it just sort o’ rhymes wi’ Reenie. My real name is Reenie, but you know: Reenie, Queenie, they just sound …’ Reenie trailed off in the face of such obvious hostility.

‘I think we need to get back to work. If we’re going to work as fast as you we’ll need to start early.’ Mary said it bitterly, as though she resented Reenie’s pace.

‘Oh no, don’t think of it like that, it’s not a competition. Everyone works differently. I just like trying to be the fastest because then I call tell me’ mam that I’ve done as she asked.’

‘And does your mam know that the faster you go, the more likely the Time and Motion men are to see that it’s possible to do our jobs faster, and then force us all to work faster so that we can never keep up with all the work that we have to do? And does your mam also know that that will mean we’ll all earn less, if we manage to keep our jobs at all?’ Bad Queen Mary was squaring up to Reenie now, hostile and cold.

‘Mary, love, there’s no need.’ Her sister gently put a worryingly pale hand on her shoulder and tried to draw her back. ‘Reenie doesn’t mean any harm—’

‘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.

Chapter Five (#ua99d1feb-5903-5249-a8ee-8159066b0299)

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.