Velvet (2 page)

‘Very well,’ said Mrs Sloane. ‘That’s all settled, then.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Velvet bobbed a grateful curtsey. Her aching back, her swollen ankles, the cramps in her stomach and her sore, chapped hands – she could bear all these just as long as she kept her job.

‘Missus! Oh, missus!’ one of the little girls waiting in the yard called over to Mrs Sloane as they turned to go in. ‘Begging your pardon, but is there any casual work today?’

‘No, none at all, I’m afraid,’ said the supervisor.

‘If you please, missus! Me ma says I’m not to come home with me pockets empty!’

‘Then I’m sorry for it,’ said Mrs Sloane, ‘but there’s still no work. If I do have any, you’ll be the first to know.’

The girl looked across at Mrs Sloane and Velvet, then turned away without another word. She lifted one bare foot and held it in her hand for a moment to try and rub some life into her blue-tinged toes, then exchanged it for her other foot.

‘Ask again on Monday,’ Mrs Sloane called over to her, relenting slightly, ‘but I can’t promise, mind.’ She said to Velvet that she hoped there would be no more fainting from her that day, and that she should report to the laundry’s upper table the following Monday at seven thirty in the morning.

Returning to the vast space that was the laundry, the wall of heat and noise hit Velvet so that she recoiled instinctively. The steam billowing from the huge washers, the hissing jets of the gas irons, the scorching heat of the ironing machines and the damp reek of sweat pervading from the massed lines of one hundred girls hard at work always made her feel she wanted to run and hide in a corner. The laundry was a heaving, vile nightmare of a place – as hot as hell and twice as nasty, as the girls were fond of saying. There were large circulating fans above the boilers in the centre of the room, but these did little to move the air around, and the windows were never opened because of the risk of smuts coming in and spoiling the newly washed linens. It was no wonder, Velvet thought, that most girls could only manage two years, or at most three, in the steam laundry before succumbing to a life of marriage and babies with the first boy who asked them. If they couldn’t find anyone to wed, then quite often their health – affected by both the relentless work and the humid, unhealthy atmosphere – would break down completely and they would ‘fall into a consumption’, as they said. They were then left with no option but to take up some badly paying home employment, such as stitching shirts or sewing on buttons for a few pennies a day.

Mrs Sloane returned to the top of the room where, standing on an upturned crate, she watched proceedings with – steamed-up glasses notwithstanding – the eye of an eagle. If more than a few words were exchanged between workmates, if someone took longer than half an hour for dinner, if a white towel touched the floor, or if some procedure was not carried out correctly, she always knew.

Velvet went back to her ironing table, meeting the eyes of her friend Lizzie and giving her a quick smile.

‘Velvet Groves! I thought you’d gone for good!’ Lizzie whispered. The room was dense with noise – a hissing and roaring from the big steam washer, a whooshing as the paddles turned in the wooden washing barrels, and dull thuds from the pressing machines – so that Lizzie had to speak right into Velvet’s ear in order to be heard. ‘I thought she’d shown you the door.’

‘No! Actually, I have a new position.’

Lizzie gaped at her. ‘Never! Doing what?’

‘I’ll tell you on the way home,’ said Velvet, for Mrs Sloane was still on her crate and Velvet was anxious not to do anything which might cause her to change her mind about the job.

A little girl learner appeared at Velvet’s shoulder bent double under a basket of wet, freshly washed sheets, and Velvet heaved them on to the enamel table and began folding them ready to go into the box mangle. The sharp smells of washing soda and carbolic soap stung her nose and the sweat was already beading on her forehead again, but now that it seemed her fortunes had turned, she could stand it. She scraped her hair off her face and wound it into a knot at the base of her neck. With luck, she thought, these might be the last linen sheets she would ever have to fold in her life. A better sort of laundry life awaited.

‘And I said my ma was a laundress and made out that I knew all about the sewing-on of trimmings and such,’ Velvet said to an amazed and envious Lizzie on their walk home. ‘Mrs Sloane said I could start next week.’

‘And
was
your ma a laundress?’ Lizzie asked, for the girls had not known each other for very long. It was only a month ago that one of Lizzie’s numerous aunts had managed to get her a regular job at Ruffold’s.

Velvet shrugged. ‘I suppose so, if that’s the same thing as a washerwoman.’

She made a quick sidewards glance at Lizzie to see if her face registered disapproval, but Lizzie merely nodded. Velvet’s father had always been bitterly ashamed of the fact that his wife washed the dirty clothes of strangers for a living, though it was clear enough to Velvet that if her ma hadn’t done so, they would have starved. Besides, occasionally the families who she had washed for would pass on their old clothes and, though these were often patched, faded or the wrong size (sometimes all three), they were more than welcome, for they could never afford to buy new. Her father had hated them wearing other people’s cast-offs, of course – but then, she thought, he hated most things. He had once ripped a waistcoat from Ma’s back, saying that she should have more self respect than to wear discarded leftovers, but Ma had retaliated for a change, saying that sometimes you had to wear what fortune had provided or go naked. Ma hadn’t often spoken back to him, for to do so meant risking a slapped face. Or worse.

‘When did you say your ma passed away?’ Lizzie asked gently.

‘When I was about eight.’

‘And can you remember much about her?’

Velvet smiled. ‘I remember little bits.’ Sometimes she would spend hours trying to recollect more; wondering what she’d been like as a girl, going over old times and guessing what might have caused her to marry the miserable old grouch who was Velvet’s father. ‘If I’d known my ma was going to die I would have kept those past times a bit safer,’ she said. ‘I’d have gone over and over them so that I could remember every single day.’

Lizzie gave her a sympathetic smile and the two girls linked arms as they crossed busy Hammersmith Broadway to take the road towards Chiswick. ‘And what about your pa? You told me once he did children’s parties,’ she said when they were safely on the other side.

‘That’s right.’ Velvet gave a wry laugh. ‘He was Mr Magic.’

‘Mr Magic!’ Lizzie said, and then the tone of her voice changed to one of concern. ‘But how long have you been an orphan?’

Velvet swallowed and hesitated, trying to sound as natural as possible. ‘My father died last year.’

‘That must have been very hard.’

Velvet didn’t reply to this, for in all honesty she couldn’t pretend that – apart from her guilt, of course – she’d felt anything but relief after his death. She’d been his housekeeper since her mother had died, and had found it a hard and thankless job.

‘If you don’t mind speaking of it, how did he die?’ asked Lizzie.

Velvet took in a deep breath. ‘He drowned.’

‘Oh, how awful!’ Lizzie gasped. ‘What happened?’

There was another long pause, then Velvet said, ‘We had a room in a worker’s cottage next to the canal in Duckworth. It was night-time and . . . and he was chasing me. It was raining hard and he slipped and fell down between two boats.’

She didn’t say any more. She couldn’t possibly tell her friend that she’d heard the splash of him going into the water, heard him shout for help – and just let him go under.

Chapter Two

In Which It Is Discovered That Velvet Did Not Begin Life as Velvet

That night, after her father had fallen in the canal, Velvet did not go back to the room they shared – at least, not to live in it. There seemed little point in doing so. She’d known nothing but misery in the place. Indeed, not only could a legion of rats be heard scuttling under the floorboards at night, but eight weeks’ rent was owed on it. Even without her father in it, it would never be home.

After Velvet heard the splash she kept on running along the canal until she was exhausted, then took a convoluted route back to their room, where she retrieved her best shawl, her Sunday hat and an old lace petticoat which had once belonged to her mother. After spending a night curled up like a dog in someone’s garden shed, she ventured into a baker’s to buy bread with a portion of her emergency shilling and saw a large, bright advertisement for Ruffold’s Steam Laundry. Thinking, rightly, that a company which boasted of employing over one hundred girls must have a high turnover of staff, she made her way to Brook Green in west London, where the laundry was. After waiting in line for three days, she was taken on at half pay as a learner, with the hope of being elevated to the position of fully fledged laundress after six months. Velvet wasn’t to know this, but it was a case of her filling a dead girl’s shoes, for her arrival at the gates of Ruffold’s coincided with the deaths of several young laundry workers who had fallen ill with consumption and then died, for none of them was able to afford the medication, fresh air and healthy diet necessary for its cure.

Finding a new room wasn’t difficult once she had a job, but she couldn’t afford to be too fussy. The room Velvet secured in the big house in Chiswick was little more than a store cupboard, but at least it was cheap. It had a bed, a chair, a small window and – most importantly – a door which could be closed against the world.

During the time she spent waiting outside Ruffold’s, Velvet slept on park benches and in doorways under layers of old newspaper, blessing the fact that it was summer. In one of these papers she’d read that, following the landlord reporting him missing, the body of her father, Fred Marley, ‘
also known as Mr Magic
’, had been found in the Duckworth Canal. It gave notice of a funeral service but she was too frightened of being implicated in his death to attend, nor was she such a hypocrite that she could have gone along and pretended sorrow at the demise of the man she’d come to dislike so much. Even the thought of his funeral service irked her, for she knew he had put away enough money for a proper gentry funeral with a glass carriage, black horses and mutes, as if he were a man of some standing; a man held in respect. No, she decided there and then, what was over was over. She would try to forget her past and resolved to build a new life for herself.

Exhausted by the working week and a little overwrought, wondering what might be expected of her in her new role, Velvet slept until noon on Sunday. She’d intended to go out to one of the morning markets and buy some meat – a pork chop or meat pie at a bargain price just before the stalls closed – but woke too late for that. She had just enough time to go to the local public baths where, after paying tuppence, she washed herself with three inches of tepid water in a tin bath. She then went back to her room, tidied it and swept the floor, darned her stockings, washed her work clothes, read a story in an old copy of
The Young Ladies’ Journal
, and ate some bread and cheese before the light faded (she didn’t want to go to the expense of lighting a candle) and it was time to go to bed again. She was exhausted, yes, but grateful to be so, for it meant she was in work whilst so many in London were not.

Most mornings she was woken by the church clock on Turnham Green striking five, but that particular Monday, despite all the extra sleep she’d had, she didn’t wake until six o’clock. By this time, the house’s other lodgers were up and about and she had to wait ten minutes to get into the privy in the yard. Then, having forgotten to fill her water jug the previous evening, she had to join a small queue in the kitchen to fetch washing water, so she wasn’t ready by the time Lizzie arrived and called up to her window.

Velvet put her head out, said that she’d be just a moment and asked Lizzie if she wouldn’t mind waiting. She was glad it wasn’t raining so that she didn’t feel obliged to invite Lizzie in; she was too ashamed of the room for that. It wasn’t that it was dirty (she was always going over the floor with a dustpan and brush), but because it was such a small and poor room. Bare of any furniture except the single iron bed and chair, it had dusty floorboards, faded paper, peeling paintwork and patches of damp under the uncurtained windows. The many small black beetles scurrying about between the floor planks were another potential embarrassment, and altogether she felt it was not a room to which you could invite someone without making apologies and giving explanations. Perhaps later on she would ask Lizzie to come in, Velvet thought, when they knew each other better. She’d been to Lizzie’s house several times and realised it must appear somewhat unfriendly not to return the gesture, but hoped that when her friend eventually saw the room she would understand. Lizzie’s family, she knew, were not wealthy by any means, but although she had three younger sisters to be fed and clothed, her father was in employment as an omnibus driver. Consequently their house was a proper one with curtains and carpets, furniture, pictures of the royal family on the walls and a full larder. It was a home rather than a cold and anonymous box to sleep in.

The walk to work from Chiswick took nearly an hour and although the horse buses went in that direction, neither girl could afford the fare; it was only clerks and office workers who could spend
that
sort of money every day. Lizzie and Velvet were glad to be able to walk together, therefore, and usually spent the time chatting about young men they knew (or hoped to know), the current story being serialised in the paper, the misdemeanours of younger members of the royal family, or whether it was quite the done thing for young ladies to wear bloomers on bicycles. They spoke to each other a lot more in the mornings; in the evenings they were sometimes too tired to do more than put one foot in front of the other.