The Mothers of Quality Street

Mr Calder beamed with pride and told his daughter in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘He’s a cracking lad, he is. Cracking lad.’ Then sighed contentedly back to sleep.

‘Did I do the right thing?’ Reenie’s landlady asked with concern. ‘Bringing them in to the parlour, I mean. I didn’t like to let your Peter catch cold without a coat. And Mr Calder was ever so wobbly.’

‘No, you did right. They’re in no fit state to go home.’

At this, Peter’s shoulders moved and he lifted his head very, very slowly. ‘Please don’t make me drink again. Reenie, I don’t want to drink again.’ He looked sad and lost and put his head back on the cool, comfortingly stable kitchen tabletop.

‘You were meant to be a good influence on m’dad! “I’ll go with him”, you said. “He’ll only have a couple this year,” you said. Now look at the pair of you. And what am I meant to do with the ’orse?’ Reenie’s questions were in vain as Peter had already begun to snore and Mrs Garner’s cat was looking daggers at him from her place by the stove for making a noise while her kittens were trying to sleep.

‘I didn’t know your Peter drank,’ Mrs Garner said.

‘He doesn’t, really; I think that’s the trouble. Me dad asked if he could take him to the Ale Tasters’ summer do. After their big do last October I thought it couldn’t be any worse.’ Reenie looked at her father and her young man, put her hands on her hips and huffed. ‘There’s me dad encouraging me to board in town so’s I’m not riding back to the farm late after a night shift at the factory; there’s him sayin’, “Oh no, Reenie, you’re a manager now, lass. We can’t have you run ragged helpin’ on the farm when you’ve got a chance at Mackintosh’s. You stay in town, don’t mind us.” And I come home from a night shift, ready to crawl into me bed, and what do I find? Merry hell.’

‘Should I fetch them a blanket each, do you think?’ Mrs Garner’s maternal instincts were strong. ‘And maybe a little cushion for their heads?’

Reenie ruminated. ‘All right, let’s throw a blanket on each of them because I don’t want the nuisance of nursing them through pneumonia, but I draw the line at a cushion.’

‘What about a pitcher of water and some glasses? They might wake up thirsty and be glad of them.’ Mrs Garner shuffled busily round her kitchen-parlour in her flapping slippers, opening cupboards and humming cheerily as she looked for the tin of Carr’s water biscuits, ‘And just one or two little dry crackers.’

Reenie rolled her eyes ‘You’re soft on them, that’s what you are.’ But she smiled because she liked knowing that her father and her young man were in good hands. ‘I’ll walk the ’orse round to the factory stables and bed him down there for the night. If I’m not back in an hour you know I’ve fallen asleep on an ’ay bale.’ Reenie checked for her latchkey in her pocket and then crept up the stairs to her own room to leave Peter’s ulster on a hanger out of the way. Reenie almost missed the figure who was waiting in the open doorway at the other end of the landing. The young woman had evidently been woken by the noise downstairs and was now leaning against the door frame in her nightgown with her arms folded.

It was the factory colleague who boarded in the next room to Reenie, and she did not like to be disturbed. ‘Are we quite finished for the night?’ It was a sarcastically nonchalant question.

‘Yes, Diana. Sorry. M’dad and Peter were just …’ Reenie’s voice trailed off; she was not known for holding back if there was an opportunity to give someone a bit of cheek, but Diana was not someone to whom anyone would dare give lip. ‘I’ll just go and take away the ’orse.’

As Diana turned back into her own room Reenie caught a glimpse of her orderly quarters. Diana was something of a mystery to Reenie; she was ten years older but never had gentleman callers, which always puzzled Reenie because Diana at, twenty-six, was of an age to be getting serious, and she was the most beautiful girl that Reenie had ever seen. It was a mystery, too, that they were not better friends because though Diana might be older than Reenie, they had been thrown together in innumerable ways. From the moment of Reenie’s arrival at the toffee factory nine months previously, they had worked together on the line; they had collaborated to help save the Norcliffe sisters from dismissal; they had been tried together at the same unjust disciplinary hearing that had nearly lost them their jobs – and they had fought to save the factory after they had watched it burn almost to the ground.

Now they were living under the same roof, but still not really friends. Reenie couldn’t understand it; she seemed to make friends with everyone she met, but Diana was as distant as ever. Reenie might have put it down to Diana’s forced separation from her family after the factory fire – the separation which had led her to seek lodgings – but Diana had been withdrawn even before those changes.

Diana was quiet, but never shy – she simply appeared to have little interest in anything except the gramophone records she had inherited from her father, or spending time with her young half-sister Gracie, who she visited at the home of Gracie’s adoptive family every Sunday. Diana sometimes brought Gracie round to their boarding house for tea after they had been on an outing together and Reenie was hoping the little girl would be back again soon because when she was with Diana it was the only time she ever saw her fellow boarder smile.

Chapter Three

To see the Mackintosh’s toffee factory from the outside it would be difficult for a stranger to notice that anything unusual had happened to the old Albion Mills building in the last six months. Tens of thousands of people regularly rattled past the factory by rail, and apart from the telltale scar in a brighter brick where the gash in the factory wall had been repaired, there was almost no reminder of the terrifying fire which had nearly destroyed the business. And if a busy traveller looked up from their railway timetable at Halifax station and looked across at the enormous toffee factory in the canal basin below the platform, they would see a flash of fashionable Art Deco offices, a steeple of a chimney in gleaming, glazed white brick piercing the sky, a sea of white-capped workers flooding into the gates, and rows of gritstone Victorian mills reclaimed for the town’s new industry, disgorging scores of liveried lorryloads of Mackintosh’s Quality Street to be shipped to all four corners of the globe. To the outsider, Mackintosh’s Toffee Town appeared stronger than ever, unassailable by either competition or calamity. However, on the inside it was at breaking point; some thought they could not possibly survive the year.

Before the fire at Christmas Mackintosh’s had come tantalizingly close to running the fastest confectionery production line in the world, but all that work – and, more crucially, all those machines – had been destroyed overnight. The floors which had survived were caked with thick soot, and water from the firemen’s hoses had poured through their storerooms like a river. There had been no choice but to reopen their old factory on the Queen’s Road. A relic of another age, the Queen’s Road factory had been a partially mothballed warehouse for years, and without their machines they were forced to set up scratch lines, making their sweets by hand. The factory had called back retired married women to take up their old jobs on the hand-making lines and save the day, but they had all known that in time the factory planned to restore the old machines, line by line, and reopen the damaged factory as soon as they could.

Now the gabled production hall, where Gooseberry Cream was starch pressed and chocolate enrobed, had heard a rumble of gossip that their situation was about to change.

Emily Everard took it upon herself to spread the word during their morning tea break, striding up and down the rows of women sitting beside shut-down conveyor belts gasping down their well-earned, steaming hot cups of Assam. Mrs Everard was only a factory line worker herself, but she assumed an air of authority. ‘They want to see all the married women at the end of the shift. We’re to go to the canteen where there’ll be an announcement.’

Young Siobhan Grimshaw looked up from her Mackintosh’s monogrammed teacup with a worried expression. ‘But I can’t stop on at the end of the shift; I’ll miss the Stump Cross tram. I’ve got to be home for the kids. Don’t they realize what we have to do to be here? We’ve got lives outside of work, if they didn’t know.’

Emily Everard pulled her white cotton wraparound overalls a little tighter across her capacious bosom. Emily had retired from factory life twenty years earlier, when she had left to be married, and was very proud of the fact that she could still fit into her old overalls. Her colleagues were too kind to point out that the overalls didn’t fit if she had to keep pulling at them all the time. ‘I wouldn’t complain too loudly if I were you; rumour has it they’re about to announce the first list of married women to be let go, and you don’t want to sound like you’re volunteering.’

‘They can’t be letting us go already! We’ve not been here five minutes.’

Old Mrs Grimshaw, mother-in-law to Siobhan, was philosophical, ‘Some of us have been here five months – and they always warned us it would only be temporary. We knew this day would come.’

‘Yes, but I never thought it would be so soon; I thought it would take them years to rebuild; I thought they’d need us at least until after the summer.’

‘Until after you’d saved up to buy your lass a uniform for the grammar school?’ Emily Everard asked.

‘You heard about that?’

Emily nodded to Siobhan’s mother-in-law who was packing Gooseberry Creams into cartons beside her on the production line. ‘I’ve not heard anything else from this quarter! No one from Back Ripon Street has ever won a scholarship that I can remember – you must be very proud of her.’

‘If I can’t get the money for the uniform, she can’t go, they’ve said as much.’ Siobhan was keeping her eyes on Mrs Everard as she spoke, but her hands were moving with dizzying speed to pull pink, flattened card cartons from the rolling cage behind her, flick them open and fold them into shape before tucking them under her mother-in-law’s elbow to be filled with sweets. ‘When I sounded as though I wasn’t going to be able to buy it they started to talk about withdrawing the scholarship offer.’

Emily Everard was appalled. ‘They can’t do that!’

‘They can. Then I heard they’d lifted the marriage bar at Mack’s and that they needed married women who’d worked here before to come back while they pulled together after the fire and I knew we were saved. I paid for a taxi cab, of all things, and went straight round to the school without wasting a minute and I told the headmistress in person that I was one of the Mackintosh girls she’d heard about in the paper, and that I’d be working for Mack’s again, and my daughter would wear the best uniform in the whole school.’

‘What did she say to that?’ Emily Everard did not like the sound of any child being excluded from a scholarship for want of a few clothes, and was already mentally composing a letter of complaint on Siobhan’s behalf.

‘Well, she said she’d be pleased if my daughter was as determined and resourceful as I am, and they’d be glad to see her in full winter uniform at the start of the term.’

‘Well then, it’ll be reyt,’ Old Mrs Grimshaw said, exchanging two filled card cartons of Gooseberry Creams for empty ones.

‘Only if I can get her the uniform, Mam! They have a summer uniform, a winter uniform, a gym kit uniform, and a speech day uniform! I’m on my way to the winter one, but I need another six months to save up, at least! Don’t get me wrong, the money’s good here and I’m not knocking it, but one month’s pay packet isn’t going to buy a gym kit, let alone a full uniform.’

‘You’re telling me.’ Doreen Fairclough, a lady of Siobhan’s own generation piped up from further down the conveyor. She had been almost in tears that morning as she had tried to get to work on time after her daughter had delayed her by announcing that her younger brother, Fred, had stuck a piece of bath sponge up her nose and now neither of them could get it out. The sympathy the other women had shown to her plight had given her the courage to join their conversation. ‘It’s almost impossible to put anything by. I’m feeding my two kids and the three next door who haven’t seen a proper dinner since their dad lost his leg falling off a scaffold. I’d be feeding half the street if our Frank would let me, but he says we’ve got to save something to feed our two after this lot of work dries up.’

Old Mrs Grimshaw was glad of the money she could earn by being back at the factory, but for her it was about something more than the wages: for three decades she had watched with longing as other women walked through the gates of her factory to do the jobs that she had once done, and to live the life she missed so much. ‘I’ve always known it wasn’t going to last,’ she said, ‘and honestly, I always said I’d give my eye teeth to be back at Mack’s, even if it were just one shift. I have loved every bloody minute of it, because I knew that any minute it could be taken away – but my God it hurts to know they’d let us go so easy! They don’t know what it means to us to be back.’

Emily Everard leant over the conveyor belt to say confidentially to the other women, ‘You know they sent Sir Harold Mackintosh hisself round to my mother’s house to beg her personally to come in and work?’

Mrs Grimshaw laughed. ‘Isn’t she about ninety? They can’t have been that desperate for staff.’

‘She’s seventy-six and she worked with Violet Mackintosh back in the day. She knows how to make toffee with nothing but a tea kettle and a Swiss Army Knife.’

‘Did she say yes?’ Siobhan was only thirty-two but even she was feeling too old to be back at work on the production line. Working a full week of packing shifts and then going home to feed and bath the kids before she staggered bone weary into bed, was tough enough on her but a woman of seventy-six?

‘Of course she said yes. She nearly bit his hand off. They put her in charge of Queen’s Road factory for the first two weeks of hand production and she taught forty girls how to make fudge in a barrel.’

The women smiled at the thought of someone whose love of the factory and the job went back even further than their own, getting her wish and returning to such a glorious welcome.

‘I just can’t bear to go.’ Siobhan was shaking her head at the injustice of the idea that they could lose their jobs so easily. There were tears in the young woman’s eyes and she tried to brush them away with discretion. ‘I love my kids, and I’m not saying that I don’t want to be at home while they’re growing, but …’

‘You don’t have to explain yourself to us,’ Emily Everard said, ‘we know. We might be the only people who know.’

‘I’d do anything for my kids – and I’m doing this for them, to put food on the table and save up for a uniform, to put something away for Christmas and pay off the doctor’s bill from when my last one was born. But it’s not just that …’ Siobhan was exhausted, and the production line work was a heavy burden on top of all she had to do at home, but there was something that made her want to hang on and she knew it wasn’t just the money for her daughter’s school uniform.

The other young mother on the line knew what she meant: Doreen had re-joined the factory to put food on the table, but that wasn’t her only reason. ‘It feels like everyone’s taking from us – and God knows Mackintosh’s are taking just as much from us as everyone else – but when I’m on the line with you lot I don’t think about that. When I’m on the line I’m more myself than I am anywhere else. There’s something I’m good at; I’ve got a skill and it’s like—’

‘You know what my mother said it was like?’ Emily Everard pulled her overalls tighter as she stuck her chin out with dignity. ‘She said it was like witchcraft, turning sugar powder into toffee gold.’

‘She’s right, though,’ Doreen said. ‘It’s like being able to do magic.’

‘I hope to God they don’t send us in the first round.’ Mrs Grimshaw kept her eyes fixed on the line that she didn’t need to see with her eyes to work quickly. ‘I just want one more day.’

Chapter Four

Laurence Johns was nervous. He had been a Head of Department at Mackintosh’s for some time and meetings like this one in the Mackintosh’s boardroom were a common occurrence for him, but his department was International Affairs and he knew that he had been interfering in domestic matters which were not within his jurisdiction. This meeting was not a routine one, and he baulked at the thought that he was about to be forced to admit to his colleagues that he had made a rash decision which was putting their employees into immediate danger.

Departmental managers filed into the oak-panelled boardroom, some with their private secretaries, some with junior managers who were eager to take notes and prove themselves to the very people who might advance their careers. When the director was quite sure that everyone was present, he thanked them for attending at short notice and proceeded to business.

‘We have run,’ said Mr Hitchens, making a careful steeple of his fingers as he rested his elbows on the shining surface of the mahogany board table, ‘into some difficulties which we need to address.’

Amy Wilkes looked over her delicately rimmed spectacles at him and asked, ‘What kind of difficulties?’

The director gestured to Laurence to answer, which threw Laurence into renewed panic before he said, ‘Difficulties of supply.’

There was a strained silence as the senior Mackintosh’s managers looked around at each other’s faces to see who looked the most like they already knew what was happening. There were a lot of puzzled expressions and that prompted more muttered concern.

Laurence continued, ‘We have to cut supply from our main Irish factory.’

A young man in an over-starched collar who was taking notes for the factory’s Chief Accountant, piped up, ‘But what does that have to do with us? That’s the Irish factory manager’s problem, not ours.’

‘It is our problem; they were making almost a third of our Quality Street.’ Mr Hitchens’ words silenced the room.

Major Fergusson looked very grave indeed and smoothed down his moustache with thumb and forefinger, before saying, not unkindly, ‘I’m sure it can’t have escaped your notice that Great Britain is in the midst of a trade war with the Irish Free state and has been for nearly five years. It has been mentioned in the newspapers. After the Easter Rising in 1916 and the Great War, there was so much anti-English feeling in Ireland that any English produce, including Mackintosh’s toffee, would be seized by the general public, taken out into the street, and burned with the aid of paraffin. How could they possibly have made our Quality Street without drawing attention to themselves?’

Laurence Johns explained. ‘Mr Sinclair, a Mackintosh cousin from America, is managing the exports of the toffees made at the Irish factory and masking the fact that the factory is under the ownership of English proprietors. Mr Sinclair has been very good at maintaining supply without revealing where the produce is going. The reason we asked you all to this extraordinary meeting is because we have been sent photographs this morning by the Irish factory manager by special courier.’

Laurence took the file of photographs from the secretary sitting beside him and tossed them carelessly across the table. The photographs had been enlarged to give as much detail as possible and showed the exterior of Mackintosh’s principle factory in Ireland. On the walls, painted in huge letters, were the words ‘Burn everything English except their coal’.

Amy Wilkes was a shrewd bird and could see the direction their problem was taking. ‘So local people know the factory is secretly owned by Englishmen and the American manager is just a front?’

Johns took a sip of water and wished that he could have explained this in a written memo without having to face his colleagues. ‘After the accident here at the plant we had to take desperate measures to ensure supply which is why we chose to have a Quality Street line set up in Ireland. We did the same in Ireland as in Halifax: we lifted the marriage bar and brought back skilled married women to work on a temporary line. They’ve made enormous sacrifices to save Quality Street – and we’ve put them in danger.’

The starched collar was not following as quickly as Amy Wilkes. ‘Why would this risk the safety of the workers in Dublin? What’s so dangerous about toffee making?’

‘Because if Mackintosh’s toffees can be seized from shops and burned in protest, what’s to stop a raid on the factory itself?’ Major Fergusson waved the picture of the Inchicore factory. ‘Look at the photograph, man. It’s a direct threat!’

Johns nodded. ‘We had to stop production yesterday. Word got out that the product they were making was by appointment to the royal household and we couldn’t allow the risk any longer, so we need additional girls to work at toffee making here in Halifax now that the Inchicore factory has had to return to normal production levels.’

Amy Wilkes narrowed her eyes. ‘Just how many extra girls do you need us to find?’

‘Five hundred and ninety.’

Amy could not respond at first – the number was too great to comprehend. If he’d said twenty she’d have told him he was expecting too much, but this many was impossible. They were already employing married women who they’d taken out of retirement as an emergency measure, and although there were plenty of unemployed labouring men in Jarrow and Clydeside, they weren’t trained confectioners, and they weren’t moving to Halifax in the morning to work for something as paltry as a woman’s wage. Amy Wilkes shook her head. ‘That’s impossible, I’m afraid. We’ll need time to recruit and train them up and even then we’ve taken on every girl we can get in Halifax.’

‘What about the married women? I heard that they were being let go—’

‘I don’t know where you heard that.’

‘News travels fast in the factory. You’re making an announcement to them after the late shift tonight.’

‘That’s not what we’re announcing. We have a bigger problem than you thought.’

‘I don’t mind that you got blotto with m’ dad, that’s not the problem – it’s what you said when you were blotto.’ Reenie was brushing down her horse in the factory stable and looking over his withers at Peter McKenzie who was sitting on a hay bale in a shady corner.

Peter was looking uncharacteristically sorry for himself and somewhat confused. ‘But I’d never say anything bad to you—’

‘You hardly said two words to me at all, but you said an awful lot to m’ dad.’

‘I don’t really remember what I said to your dad. I know I only said good things about you, Reenie, I definitely sang your praises.’

‘And?’ Reenie folded her arms and raised her eyebrows to indicate that there was another matter which he really ought to remember.

‘And I think I drank your health?’ Peter looked worried; he rarely drank, and although he vaguely remembered spending a happy evening with Reenie’s father, he was worried about what kind of a fool he might have made of himself, if only because he hoped he hadn’t brought embarrassment to Reenie.

‘And you asked m’ dad for permission to take my hand in matrimony. Not only did you ask my dad’s permission, but you asked everyone else in the pub what they thought. I’m getting a lot of comments on the factory floor and I am not best pleased.’

Peter’s face blushed red. ‘Oh, I … I didn’t—’

Reenie interrupted his surprised and embarrassed stammering ‘Do I need to remind you, Peter McKenzie, that I’m not seventeen until October, you’re not twenty until August, we’ve not been walking out five months – and I’m not leaving my job at Mack’s willy-nilly for a goose’s bridle!’

‘But we could have a long engagement?’