Sinners and Shadows (44 page)

‘I've heard more talk about the private side of married – and unmarried – life from Jinny and the girls in the factory in the last couple of months, than I heard in the four years I worked below stairs in Llan House,' Rhian divulged.

‘I admit I was shocked by the way Jinny talks at first, and it's taken me some time to get used to Meriel's language, but I don't even notice her swearing half the time now.'

‘Which goes to prove that it's possible to get used to almost anything.'

‘Did you ever consider giving up working in the shop to start a family?' Julia knew that her question would embarrass Rhian but she couldn't resist asking it. Although she had been shocked when she had first heard that her father was living with Rhian, now that he was dead, she wanted to know whether or not he was happy during the last few months of his life.

‘No, I … we … decided to take life one day at a time. Especially after the war broke out. Occasionally your father would talk about retiring in a few years and divorcing your stepmother so he could marry me. But he knew that his practice wouldn't survive the scandal if he divorced her while we both lived in Tonypandy. As it was, I'm sure that people must have talked about my living in the same house and working for him.'

‘But you were happy?' Julia pressed.

‘Yes, we were.' Nothing would have made Rhian say otherwise. She sensed that it was important for Julia to believe that her father had been happy after the misery of his marriage to Mabel. And when she compared the short time they had lived together to the life he had led just before in Llan House, they had been comparatively happy, despite the fact that they hadn't loved one another.

‘And you would have married my father when he retired?'

‘Like I said, we tended to live day by day and not plan too far into the future.' Rhian tried to think of something comforting she could say. ‘You know your father. His tastes were simple, in food and in life.'

‘Certainly in food, unlike my stepmother,' Julia agreed.

‘He enjoyed plain cooking, sitting in front of the fire in the evening reading a book or the paper, smoking a cigar with a drink at his elbow.' Rhian blushed when she thought of the other things Edward had enjoyed that involved her. ‘And we did have one particularly wonderful week in a hotel in Brighton. I'll remember it for the rest of my life.'

‘I'm glad.' Julia gripped her hand.

‘How about we ask Mrs Williams to get some layette patterns and white wool for us tonight, so we can start knitting for your baby?' Rhian suggested.

‘How about we get a move on and catch the tram before we're given a black mark and have our pay docked for being late for work.' Julia couldn't think much further than the letter she had to write that night. Whichever way she phrased it, Geraint wasn't going to be pleased, so perhaps a
‘Dear Geraint, congratulate me, I'm pregnant, Julia'
would not only be the simplest way to tell him, but the best. Blunt and informative, because the more she thought about it, the happier she was at the prospect of becoming a mother and having her father's first and very probably only grandchild.

‘I have never seen anything so disgusting. This cloakroom is filthy. No woman – decent woman that is' – the tall, thin, middle-aged woman glared at the female workers gathered around her in the cloakroom – ‘could possibly wash, change or do anything else in here.'

‘You've been working in a National Factory?' Bronwen asked the newcomer, who was standing transfixed in the open doorway because she couldn't bring herself to walk inside.

‘Yes, and it was a palace compared to this. How can you put up with it? There isn't even a tap and a plumbed-in sink. Don't tell me they expect us to wash in that?' She pointed to a scummy tin trough filled with blood-coloured water that bisected the room. ‘I can smell the lavatories from here and there aren't even doors on the cubicles. Heaven only knows what germs or disease I'd pick up if I tried to use them.'

‘There are always the sand dunes,' Meriel suggested.

‘Are you serious?' The woman looked at her in disgust.

‘There are fewer rats out there but you might come across the odd crab with sharp claws.'

Seeing that the woman wasn't sure whether to take Meriel seriously or not, Bronwen came to her rescue. ‘We only use the lavatories when absolutely necessary and the trough's better than nothing, which is the only alternative.' She hung her coat on the hook nearest to the door.

‘You go home without washing?' the woman asked in horror.

‘I have my own bucket in my lodgings and the comfort of knowing that the dirt in it is all mine.' Jinny straightened her cap and headed for the factory floor. She opened the door and out wafted the roar of hundreds of voices singing,
My old man said follow the van and don't dillydally on the way.

‘Are the conditions in the National Factories really so much better than these Controlled Establishments?' Julia asked.

‘Yes, and if this is an example of a privately owned factory I never want to see another one. The changing rooms in the Nationals are cleaned at the end of every shift. We had games rooms and canteens with really good subsidized food. You can get good, hot, three-course meals in them for ninepence.'

‘Well, don't go expecting to find anything like that here. The warmest things in our canteen are the rats' nests.' Bronwen picked up the sturdy wooden box Mrs Williams had filled with cake, sandwiches and bottles of water. She never let it out of her sight until after their lunch break.

‘Rhian?' Their supervisor called to her from outside the door. ‘Six new girls are waiting outside Mr Owen's cubicle and you're on initiation duty.'

‘I'm on my way. You are going to see the manager now?' she said to Julia.

‘Yes.' Fighting a fresh bout of nausea brought on by the latrine stench, Julia nodded.

Rhian joined the group of volunteers clustered around the cupboard-sized room the caretaker used to store his tools and brushes. There was something odd about them, and Rhian realized that after only a couple of months in the factory, she found their glowing pink-and-white complexions and glossy brown and black hair unusual. She unpinned the printed sheet of regulations from the door and faced them.

‘Ladies, I am Rhian Jones, I'm going to give you a tour of the factory. I'll explain the rules and why it is so important that we all stick to them. Please stay as close to me as you can, and try not to get in the way of any of the workers, or stand too close to their machines.'

She braced herself for the noise and opened the door to the main factory floor. But whereas she was deafened by the singing and noise of the machinery she could see that a couple of the new girls actually found the level of noise painful.

‘Stay close to me.' She strained her voice, trying to make herself heard, but no matter how loud she shouted she could barely make sense of what she was saying herself. And it was a struggle to make the talk interesting when it was chiefly comprised of warnings about carelessness, and why it was dangerous to bring anything metal that might cause a spark on to the shop floor.

When one of the new recruits started yawning, she was forced to stifle a yawn herself. She was halfway through reciting the catalogue of the accidents that could occur if care wasn't taken – acid burns, eye injuries – when they reached the sheds where shell casings were filled with high explosive.

Meriel and Jinny were lifting an eighteen-pound shell they'd just filled on to a packing cradle. Bronwen was standing outside being searched by a supervisor who had earned himself the nickname of ‘Desert's Disease' because of the way his palms wandered whenever he searched the girls for contraband cigarettes, matches, metal hairpins and jewellery.

Rhian flashed Bronwen a sympathetic smile and encouraged the new recruits to stand in a circle around her in the hope that it would curb the supervisor.

‘You can expect to be searched any time,' she warned. ‘It is essential that we all have a safe working environment. Any questions?'

To her dismay, three hands shot up. It was quieter in the sheds than the main factory but the noise level was still considerable and by the time she finished talking, she was exhausted. She walked the girls to the supervisor who had been delegated to place them, returned the list of regulations to the cubicle and made her way back to the shed.

Bronwen was standing at their machine, waiting for her.

‘Where's Julia?' Rhian mouthed.

‘She's been put on light work.' Bronwen knelt in front of the machine. ‘Let's make a start and see if we can catch up with Meriel and Jinny.'

At a quarter to one the whistle blew for the midday dinner break. Rhian helped Bronwen to lift the last shell they had filled on to its packing, climbed stiffly to her feet and rubbed her aching back.

‘We're all going to be crippled when the war ends.' Bronwen fetched the wooden box she'd left in plain sight at the shed entrance.

Rhian squinted out into the sunlight. ‘The weather looks good enough to eat outside.'

‘You go to the toilets. I'll find us a good spot to eat, then I'll go before the afternoon shift starts,' Bronwen offered.

‘Thanks.' Rhian made her way to the toilets, where three of the new recruits were screaming.

‘Rats,' Meriel explained laconically, dipping her hands in the trough of filthy water.

‘I'd sooner die than put my hands in that,' the woman who'd come from the National factory said.

‘It's your choice. Some say a bit of explosive never did no one no harm. Me, I think different.' Meriel shook the excess water from her hands and wiped them on the back of her overalls rather than use one of the rags hanging on the metal bars beneath the makeshift sink. She looked around. ‘Where's Bronwen?'

‘Outside, waiting for us,' Rhian left the cubicle and went to the trough.

‘Good, I'm starving.'

‘You're always starving.' Jinny ran out ahead of them. ‘First to reach Bronwen gets pick of the slices of cake.'

Bronwen had found a warm and sunny spot on a dune overlooking the factory sheds. She waved to Jinny, Meriel and Rhian when they emerged. Rhian waved back, pulled the cap from her head, shook out her hair and looked up at the sun.

‘Funny how the small things you take for granted become so important when you spend most of your days working hard indoors,' Julia commented when she caught up with them. ‘I never appreciated sunlight so much before.'

‘You look better,' Rhian said in relief.

‘I told you it was just morning sickness.'

‘You finishing work for good today, Julia?' Bronwen prised the lid off the box and lifted out the individual paper bags of cheese sandwiches Mrs Williams had packed for them.

‘Yes. And they've put me on light duties for the rest of the day.'

‘That's a laugh in this place,' Jinny jeered. ‘What the hell are light duties?'

‘Small pellets.' Julia took her sandwiches, opened one to check inside and bit into it. ‘I am absolutely starving.'

‘That comes of not eating a proper breakfast,' Meriel lectured.

‘I'd like to see you do that when you are pregnant.' Jinny took her bottle of water, unscrewed the top and drank half of it down in one noisy gulp.

‘You know something.' Bronwen leaned back on her arms and stared up at the vast expanse of pale blue sky, scratched with wisps of clouds. ‘When the sun's shining like this, and we've a whole hour free to eat our sandwiches and a comfortable house and a good supper to go back to, life's not half bad.'

‘We've four and a quarter hours of the afternoon shift to go and, even if the sun is shining when we're finished, it won't be as bloody warm as it is now,' Meriel complained.

‘There you go, swearing again,' Bronwen reprimanded.

‘Take my advice, give up Ianto and find yourself a vicar, you'll be great running the Mothers' Union and the temperance society,' Meriel snapped back.

‘That's enough sniping, it's too nice a day to quarrel,' Julia interposed.

‘I mean it, life's not bad,' Bronwen continued unabashed. ‘We've money in our post office accounts and pockets –'

‘And no vile mistress breathing down our neck.' Realizing what she'd said, Meriel glanced guiltily at Julia. ‘No offence meant.'

‘None taken.' Julia bit into her second sandwich. ‘My stepmother was horrible to all of you but she was even worse to my father and me. She might not have made us work, but she had – has,' she corrected herself, ‘an unerring talent for finding people's weak spots and tormenting them with their shortcomings.'

‘I wonder what she's doing now,' Bronwen mused.

‘I neither know nor care,' Julia dismissed.

‘Jinny and I were talking earlier; if this weather holds, we might go to Barry Island for our next week off.'

‘The way you two carry on, you'll kill each other,' Meriel warned, envious because she had a different week off to the sisters and couldn't join them.

‘No, they wouldn't because although they fight like cat and dog they'll always stick up for one another. I bet you'll have a great time.' Julia lay back on the sand and shaded her eyes from the sun.

‘Want my last sandwich, Julia?' Rhian offered.

‘No, thanks.'

‘If you don't eat it, I'll feed it to the gulls. I really have had enough.'

‘If you're sure.' Julia took it while Bronwen rummaged in the box for the wedges of fruitcake Mrs Williams had packed for them. She distributed them together with the rest of the water bottles.

‘Seriously,' Meriel said when the box was empty and Rhian had flung the last few crumbs for the birds, ‘does anyone want to come to the pub tonight?'

Bronwen groaned. ‘Don't you ever think of anything other than going to the pub to meet men, Meriel?'