Secrets of the Homefront Girls Page 2

  ‘Very well,’ he said with a reckless grin, grinding out his fag and sprinting after the lorry.

  ‘You mad bugger!’ Renee screamed as he leapt up beside her with ease and, gripping her tightly round her waist, kissed her firmly on the lips as a red bus flashed past them.

  Renee drew back, her face breaking open into a wide smile.

  ‘You stink of fags.’

  ‘Just as well you smell so sweet then,’ he grinned, running his hand dangerously low down the curve of her back before resting it on her bottom.

  ‘I don’t half fancy you, Renee Gunn. Come out with me tonight? They’re showing The Ice Follies with Joan Crawford down the Gaff. That’s a picture girls like, ain’t it?’

  ‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t,’ Renee quipped back.

  The lorry pulled over to the kerb.

  ‘I know you’re on the back, Renee Gunn, now clear off,’ called the driver.

  ‘Cheers, Fred,’ she called, as she and Alfie jumped off.

  ‘So … Tonight?’ Alfie persisted.

  ‘Very well,’ she agreed, dazzling him with a smile she knew showed off her dimples.

  ‘Smashing! Oh, and made sure you wear this.’ He pulled a small package from his pocket.

  ‘Alfie! Evening in Paris! It’s my favourite. Wherever did you get it?’

  ‘Boardman’s, half a bleedin’ week’s wages, it was. But you’re worth it. Eight p.m. Don’t be late.’

  He planted a final kiss on her lips, then turned and sprinted back up Carpenters Road.

  Renee was still grinning as she pelted up to the factory gates.

  Sandwiched between a fishmeal factory and a chemical works, Yardley and Co Ltd perfume and cosmetics manufacturer was a lavender-scented oasis in a cloud of stench.

  The Victorian Factory Act had scarcely addressed the dizzying array of hazardous chemical processes most local factories employed. The area was built on the misery of older firms: poison gas, blinding acid spills and chemicals to crumble your bones and rinse your skin blue.

  But rising up like a shining beacon out of a grim swamp of sweated labour was Yardley’s. Renee felt a sense of pride she found hard to put into words that she worked for such a modern firm, one with space, a subsidised canteen and unheard-of staff welfare. They were also sticklers for punctuality amongst their workers, who were known locally as the Lavender Girls.

  The elaborate wrought-iron gate slammed shut in Renee’s face.

  ‘Oh Bert, do a girl a favour?’ she begged. ‘I’ll lose fifteen if you don’t let us in now. Peerless’ll have my guts for a laundry line!’

  The old security guard, immaculate in his navy tunic, sighed extravagantly as he unlocked the heavy metal gate and swung it back open. ‘Bleedin’ hell, Renee Gunn, you’ll do for me …’

  ‘You’re an angel,’ she said, slipping a carton of cigarettes into his pocket. ‘From Mum.’

  Renee sprinted into the cobbled yard, past the teams of burly men standing on a raised level, open to the yard, rolling heavy wooden barrels onto great haulage lorries. She knew they’d be watching her and she didn’t like to disappoint, so she hitched up her skirt a fraction as she ran.

  ‘Another inch, Renee!’ bellowed a voice.

  ‘Not today, you saucy sod,’ she grinned, blowing them a kiss as she slipped in through the factory door.

  On account of her lateness, she’d missed the great rush towards the board on the entry wall, where clocking-in discs were located. Renee grabbed hers and clattered up the iron staircase, one floor up to the lipstick room cloakroom. With one hand she lit a fag, with the other she grabbed her deep burgundy overalls. Hastily buttoning them up, the cigarette clamped between her teeth, she pinned her blonde curls beneath a white turban, piling them up like cream on a trifle.

  Remembering it was Nan’s last day and therefore competition for Yardley’s highest turban would be steep, she grabbed a scarf from her locker and bundled it under the turban, before turning to the mirror and polishing her teeth with her finger.

  She took one last long drag on the cigarette, before mashing it out under the wooden bench and wafting her arm about to try to get rid of the smell.

  ‘Oh sod it, if you’re gonna be late …’ she muttered. Turning back to the mirror, she fished out her Yardley lipstick in poppy red and slicked on a fresh coating. A quick touch-up with the Max Factor Pan-Cake she kept in her locker …

  ‘Now I’m ready for work!’ she announced to no one, snapping the compact shut and heading towards the belt, attempting to slip into her place unseen.

  The hand on her shoulder was surprisingly heavy.

  ‘That’s fifteen minutes docked, Miss Gunn, and if I find you’ve been smoking in the cloakroom, I shall deduct a further fifteen. Now get on with your work,’ ordered Miss Peerless, the lipstick room supervisor, whose age was uncertain, but the girls estimated her to be at least forty and therefore ancient.

  ‘Miserable old cow,’ Renee muttered under her breath as she slid into her place on the belt next to her best mate, Nan Rogers.

  ‘And girls, one more thing before I start up the machines,’ called the supervisor, clapping her hands together. ‘After morning tea break, senior management require us all to be assembled upstairs in the canteen for an emergency meeting.’

  ‘Do you think they’re gonna lay off jobs ’cause of the war?’ Renee asked worriedly as the machinery started up with a great groan and the conveyor belt shuddered into life.

  ‘Search me,’ shrugged Nan, covering her fingertips with little white paper thimbles to protect her skin. ‘Don’t much care anyhow. It’s me last day, ain’t that right, girls?’

  The rest of the girls on the belt – Betty, Joanie, Joycie and Mavis – didn’t need any encouragement and soon their voices were drowning out the machinery.

  Knees up Mother Brown, Knees up Mother Brown.

  Under the table you must go. Ee-aye, Ee-aye, Ee-aye-oh

  If I catch you bending –’

  ‘– all right, all right,’ laughed Nan. ‘My wedding is more than a chance for you lot to get on the drink you know. Me and my Jimmy will be pledging our love and solemnizing our vows.’

  Blank faces all round.

  ‘But they’ll be gin afterwards, right?’ asked Betty.

  Renee had to laugh. They might be a touch over enthusiastic, but the girls had done Nan proud. The whole belt was covered in streamers, balloons and gifts.

  ‘You wait until tea break,’ Renee winked.

  Soon the lipsticks were flying down the belt and production was in full throttle, but the girls’ incessant chatter didn’t let up. They didn’t need to stay silent in order to concentrate. They’d all worked their way up from service girls to the most coveted job in Yardley’s, in the lipstick room. No one really knew why it had such status, beyond the fact that traditionally the girls in the lipstick department were the best lookers and, without doubt, had the highest turbans.

  In a room packed full of smashing-looking girls, Renee and her childhood friend Nan were the belles of the lipstick room. When they had taken their burgundy overalls home and altered them so they skimmed every curve on their body, Joycie, Joanie and even little Irene, the fourteen-year-old service girl, had soon followed suit. When Nan and Renee had taken to filling out their turbans with smalls and socks to give them more height, soon everyone was doing it. When Nan started sending off to Hollywood studios for signed photographs of the stars, it triggered a craze that swept through all one thousand of the Yardley girls down Carpenters Road.

  Every floor at Yardley’s factory housed a different production unit. Powder and soap workers were on the ground floor, distinguished by their white overalls. Next door to lipstick on the first floor were creams and brilliantines, who wore a dreary brown. The only other department Renee, Nan and the girls envied was that of the perfume girls on the top floor, who wore emerald green and smelt permanently of the English Lavender Water they helped pack, unless they happened to be packing April Violets, in whi
ch case they got called ‘Cat’s Nats’.

  It didn’t really matter what floor you worked on, though, as all the girls of Yardley’s were united by their three main preoccupations. Boys. Sex. Make-up. Most of the girls had begun working at fourteen, fresh from school, and their formidable education in the ways of the world had continued on the factory floor.

  Renee snuck a sideways glance at her old pal Nan and felt sadness, and if she were honest, a twinge of envy. They had shared everything together, even starting at Yardley’s on the same day when she was fourteen and Nan was sixteen. Now twenty-one, Nan was going off to marry her childhood sweetheart, Jimmy Connor, before he went into the Navy. As was custom, she would have to hand in her clocking-in card, as Yardley’s wouldn’t employ girls once they had married.

  ‘Nan, what am I gonna do for fun when you’re a respectable married lady?’ Renee groaned. ‘You’ll come and see us for dinner, yeah? We’ll still go for mie and pash?’ she grinned, throwing in their secret silly language. ‘Or chish and fips?’

  ‘You’re joking, ain’t yer?’ Nan exclaimed. ‘I won’t wanna be seen consorting with factory girls once I’m married.’ She tapped her slender waistline. ‘’Sides I can’t eat that food no more. My Jimmy don’t want me getting fat.’

  ‘Ooh, you stuck up cow,’ Renee laughed, poking her in the ribs. ‘Just ’cause you’re moving to East Ham, don’t be thinking you’re a cut above.’

  Nan’s mum and stepdad had spent a small fortune renting them a flat in the more upmarket neighbourhood of East Ham. Despite being born in the Shoot, everyone knew Mrs Rogers had delusions of grandeur and, when it came to her little girl, only the best would do.

  Nan shrieked with laughter and cocked her little finger up in the air. ‘Too good for the likes of you.’

  ‘You’ll be sewing curtains round yer keyhole next,’ Renee teased.

  ‘Seriously, though, Renee sweetheart,’ Nan said, her smile tailing off as she picked up the sterilising flame to level off the end of the lipstick she was holding.

  ‘Don’t expect to see too much of me. My Jimmy likes everything just so. We’re getting the keys to our new place later, so I’ll be tied up with making it lovely for him and being the perfect wife …’ She batted her eyelashes and lowered her breathy voice.

  ‘Jimmy leaves for sea the day after we marry and I ain’t gonna let him leave the bedroom.’ She winked. ‘He wants me in the family way before he leaves.’

  Pinned to her tunic was Jimmy’s regimental Naval Crown badge, which, like so many others, Nan wore as a sweetheart brooch.

  Renee felt deflated. She found Nan’s departure far more unsettling than the announcement on the wireless yesterday morning that they were at war with Germany, as selfish as she knew that was. Anyhow, the talk down the Shoot was that it would all be over by Christmas. Renee’s father himself had said so, so it was bound to be true. In fact, he’d even trotted off to place an illegal bet on it straight after the declaration. Mind you, he’d bet on two flies crawling up a wall. But still, for Renee the breaking apart of their tight-knit little friendship felt more catastrophic to her personally than a foreign dictator invading a country she’d never really heard of.

  ‘Honestly, girls, I’m so happy I could burst,’ Nan announced to the entire belt, similarly oblivious to the shadow of war. ‘I really hope you all find the happiness that me and my Jimmy have.’

  Joycie sighed.

  ‘Oh Nan, what I wouldn’t do to be you. Come back after the wedding and give us the lowdown, won’t you?’

  She lowered her voice as Miss Peerless walked past.

  ‘I wanna known everything.’

  ‘Leave off, you nosy cow,’ Nan laughed breezily, but there was an edge to her voice that only Renee detected. Nerves, she supposed. For girls like them, who’d spent their whole lives having the fear of God drummed into them about getting ‘in trouble’, Renee wondered if Nan was scared at the prospect of actually doing ‘it’ and what went where. For all their cocky chat, she suspected Nan was as clueless as she.

  ‘Least you won’t have to prick your finger and pretend to have bled, like Daisy who works in brilliantine did after she got married,’ whispered Joanie.

  ‘She never?’ gasped little Irene as she scurried past the belt on an errand.

  Joanie nodded, eyes wide as pebbles. ‘That’s what Sandra in soap reckoned … Anyhow, we got our Nan to tell us what’s what now, ain’t we? How else are us girls gonna know how to get a fella’s pecker up.’

  She raised her little finger suggestively and the whole belt fell about.

  ‘We could always ask him,’ Joycie winked, as the poor hapless service boy from the stockroom came in wheeling a large wooden barrel of animal fat for the lipstick churn.

  A chorus of whistles filled the room as eighteen-year-old Walter Smith, nicknamed Whiffy Smithy, walked past the belts.

  ‘Show us your muscles,’ called out a curvy girl by the name of Fat Lou on the lipstick-packing bench.

  ‘Oi, Smithy, can you help out?’ hollered Joanie. ‘Only, now we’re at war, us girls need to know how to keep a fella’s morale up. Any suggestions?’

  Smithy took one look at Renee, who everyone knew he was hopelessly in love with, and his cheeks scorched as red as beet. A great cackle of laughter rose up over the belt, with all the girls hooting like a pack of hyenas. Poor Smithy! He was shy at the best of times, but in Renee’s presence he just couldn’t seem to control the colour of his face.

  ‘Why you asking me, girls?’ he replied. ‘How would I know?’ His good nature was born out of an instinct for survival. Being one of the few lone males on the factory floor meant an acceptance that you would always be the butt of the joke.

  ‘How comes you always answer a question with a question?’ asked Joanie.

  ‘Do I?’ he joked, and the girls screeched even louder.

  ‘Stop it,’ Joycie protested. ‘I’m gonna wet myself.’

  Somewhere at the back of Renee’s mind lurked the uneasy thought that perhaps the girls imagined that if they laughed loud enough, they could drown out the uncomfortable new reality they had awoken to that morning …

  At 10.30 a.m. the machines shut down and a cantankerous tea lady with a penchant for snuff shuffled in wheeling her trolley.

  ‘You girls,’ she muttered. ‘Everything’s funny, even when another bloody war’s been declared.’

  Little Irene had been round earlier collecting everyone’s tea break orders, so in no time, they were all polishing off mugs of strong tea and crusty white dripping-filled rolls.

  ‘A toast, to our girl Nan,’ declared Renee, holding up her tea mug. ‘You’re a bloody pain in the backside at times, but I ain’t half gonna miss you.’

  ‘To Nan,’ came back a chorus of excited voices.

  ‘Up the Yardley’s,’ Nan laughed, giggling as all thirty girls in the lipstick room descended, smothering her uniform with ribbons, bows and bright paper flowers. As was customary, every woman that left to get married could expect to be decorated like a tree at Christmas. They made merry hell at her, scoffing and tickling her ribs, until every available bit of her tunic was covered and Nan was helpless with laughter.

  ‘I gotta get the bus later,’ Nan protested, as Renee attached a bright silver balloon to the top of her turban.

  And then, checking the supervisor’s back was turned, Renee fetched the bottle of whisky she’d nicked from her dad’s supply and set about topping up all the girls mugs.

  ‘Hell’s teeth,’ said Nan, shuddering after she took a swig, ‘no wonder they say as how it puts lead in your pencil.’ And then, arching one pencilled brow: ‘Not that I reckon my Jimmy’ll need that.’ A gale of filthy laughter echoed round the lipstick room.

  ‘Come on then, knock it back,’ urged Renee. She felt her duties as chief bridesmaid extended to getting the bride-to-be pissed on her last day in the firm. In the past, girls leaving to get married were made to down as much alcohol as humanly possible down the Carpenters A
rms in the space of a tea break, but the forelady banned that after a bride-to-be called Patsy on the talcum machine drank so many port and lemons, she accidentally pressed the wrong button, sending an enormous cloud of English Lavender talcum powder billowing out of the chute instead of up. The clear-up had taken days.

  ‘’Ere,’ said Fat Lou, wincing as she swallowed back her tea, ‘who do you reckon our new charge hand’ll be?’

  ‘I still don’t know why Sal decided to join the WAAF,’ Joanie sniffed.

  ‘Uniform most likely,’ Nan replied. ‘If I weren’t getting married, I’d almost consider it myself.’

  ‘Oh, let’s not talk about the war,’ Renee groaned, ‘it’s all anyone can bleedin’ chat about, and like me dad said, it’ll be done with by Christmas. Let’s talk about where my Alfie’s taking me tonight instead.’

  ‘Behind the Regal,’ Joanie quipped.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Renee said with mock offence. ‘You know I don’t let him go beyond the dotted line.’

  ‘Rumour has it,’ said Joycie, leaning in, ‘that Elaine in the typing pool has gone way beyond the dotted line with Billy from dispatch.’

  ‘That’s office girls for you,’ declared Fat Lou. ‘All fur coat, no knickers.’

  Miss Peerless glared over as they collapsed into yet more fits of helpless laughter.

  Suddenly they were interrupted by a small cough.

  A service girl, green as a gardener’s thumb by the looks of her, stared up at Renee.

  ‘I-I am sorry to interrupt,’ she stammered. ‘But could you possibly tell me where I can get a long weight from?’

  She glanced down at her list. ‘I’m also looking for a rubber mallet for the brilliantine machine. I’m in a bit of a hurry as I also need to go to the personnel office.’

  The girls glanced at each other, before doubling over. The whisky was clearly beginning to take effect, as Nan laughed so hard she had to dribble her tea back in the mug.

  ‘What is so funny?’ the girl asked, her large liquid eyes reproachful.

  ‘Oh sweetheart, is it your first day, by any chance?’ Renee asked. ‘You’re a new Lavender Girl, are ya?’