Daisy's Wars (6 page)

Mrs Johnstone gestured with one of her small, cool, delicate hands to a chair on the other side. Look at that, Daisy marvelled to herself. Now if I’d tried that I’d have cleared
everything off the desk. Her heart sank even further as she sat down.

‘Look,’ she said, her voice rising with panic, ‘I think I’d better go. You’re just going to kick me out anyway for fighting with the old woman. I shouldn’t
have come here, but it was either that or the ropeworks, and I don’t want to work in the rope-works, but maybe that’s where I should go anyhow.’

Mrs Johnstone stared at her, eyebrows raised and a smile on her lips. ‘But I thought you were looking for a job here?’ she asked calmly, putting her pretty hands on the desk in front
of her.

‘Well, I was, but …’

‘That’s where we’ll start, then,’ Mrs Johnstone said briskly. ‘What do you want to do?’

‘Not go to the ropeworks!’ Daisy replied.

‘Well, I think that shows ambition,’ the woman said. ‘Nothing wrong with that. And it takes a bit of confidence to come into a place like this. I appreciate that, Miss
Sheridan.’

‘Stupidity, more like,’ Daisy said quietly.

‘Confidence, Miss Sheridan,’ Mrs Johnstone smiled firmly, then looked at her for a moment, but Daisy knew it was a different look from the one the old woman downstairs had given
her.

‘May I call you Daisy?’ she asked.

Daisy nodded.

‘Well, Daisy, if we took you on here, you’d have to start at the very bottom, doing whatever anyone else wanted you to do. You understand that?’ She watched the expression on
Daisy’s face and laughed quietly. ‘Yes, even Miss Manders downstairs,’ she said, ‘and I have to tell you that there’s a great many just like her.’

Daisy smiled; her thoughts had been read. She nodded.

‘What I can promise you is that if you don’t have stand-up fights with her or the others like her, if you work hard and learn, you will get on here.’

‘You mean you’ll give me a job?’ Daisy asked in amazement.

‘I think you have a lot to learn, but, yes, if you abide by what I’ve said to you.’

‘Why?’ Daisy asked.

Mrs Johnstone chuckled silently, shaking slightly. ‘Daisy, you are a very good-looking young woman. Customers like that. I think you’re bright and I think you’ll get on.
Besides,’ she said, looking directly at her, ‘before I married my name was O’Neill and I grew up in Byker. I know what it is to be judged on things other than my ability, as I
suspect you do. Everyone deserves a chance and I didn’t get mine till I changed my name. I don’t think that’s right, do you?’

Daisy shook her head. ‘You don’t sound as though you come from Byker.’

‘I can when I want to, pet,’ Mrs Johnstone said in a strong Geordie accent, and they laughed. ‘It’s like playing a part, Daisy,’ she said kindly. ‘Here
I’m the way you see and hear me; outside, in my own home and with my own family, that’s different, a different me, in fact. Where do you live?’

‘In Heaton, now,’ Daisy replied, ‘in Guildford Place.’

‘My sister lives in Guildford Place! What a coincidence, and what a difference a mile up the road can make, can’t it? Well, that’s settled then.’ Mrs Johnstone got up and
glided gracefully out through the door as Daisy followed. She put Daisy in the lift, pressed the button for the ground floor and closed the two gates. ‘I’ll see you on Monday morning,
Daisy,’ she called. ‘And don’t worry, you’ll be just fine.’

Daisy walked out of Fenwicks in a daze, marvelling at how good life could be when you least expected it, smiling as she passed the old woman she had first spoken to, and then
smiling all the way home to Guildford Place. Once she was back home she changed out of her best clothes and set about catching up with her chores. She opened up the fire, she’d banked up with
dross before she had gone out and coaxed it into flame again. She finished the family washing, started the evening meal, and only then did Kathleen awake.

Michael came home first; he was on early shift these days. Then Kay arrived with Dessie, who seemed to spend more time in the Sheridan house than in his own. Daisy set out the evening meal and
listened as the others went over the events of their day, saying nothing herself. When she had cleared away the dishes she deliberately left them on the draining board and closed the door before
returning to the family. She knew that if she started washing them Dessie would offer to dry them. It earned him the praise of Kathleen and Michael, but Daisy knew he used his offer of help as a
means of legitimately brushing against her as often as possible in the small space. Out of necessity she had learned to think ahead, to block every move before it happened.

Dessie looked up.

‘Not washing the dishes, then, Daisy?’ he asked, grinning at her.

‘I don’t feel like it,’ she replied casually. ‘I’ll do them later.’

‘Well, if you’re fed-up washing, I’ll do it and you can dry?’ he offered.

He never gives up! she thought grimly.

‘If you’re that keen you can wash
and
dry,’ she suggested calmly, and the others laughed. Dessie laughed, too, but he didn’t take up her suggestion.

Didn’t think you would! she said to herself, sitting on the single stool beside the fire because then he couldn’t move beside her.

‘I have some news for you that might change your mood,’ he said, still grinning.

You’re running away to sea? she thought hopefully.

‘I’ve arranged for you to see one of the managers at the works.’

‘Why?’ she asked, staring into the fire.

‘I’ve fixed you up with a job, of course,’ he bragged. ‘I don’t think you’ll have any bother.’

Kathleen and Michael made ‘oooh’ noises, as though Daisy had been presented with the greatest prize in the world.

She waited for silence. ‘I’ve already got a job, thanks,’ she said evenly, and the tone of the silence changed.

‘What job?’ her father asked.

‘In Fenwicks. I start on Monday.’

‘
Fenwicks?
’ Michael asked, as though he had never heard the word before. ‘You mean the one in Northumberland Street?’

‘There is only one, Da,’ she smiled.

‘So when did this happen?’ Michael asked.

‘What does it matter when it happened?’ Daisy shrugged. ‘I’ve got a job there and, I start on Monday.’

‘A job doing what?’ Dessie demanded.

‘Anything they want me to do,’ she said without looking at him.

‘Well, that’s a bit of a turn-up when you knew Dessie was putting in a word for you!’ Michael accused.

‘I didn’t ask him to put in a word for me; I didn’t say he could!’

‘But it was understood,’ Kathleen wheezed.

‘Not by me it wasn’t,’ Daisy returned tartly. ‘I’m not Kay, he doesn’t rule
my
life!’

‘Daisy!’ Michael said. ‘That’s no way to talk! Dessie was doing you a favour.’

Daisy straightened up and looked directly at Dessie. ‘Was he?’ she said flatly. ‘Well, I don’t need his favours, I’ve got a job and that’s that.’

Lying in her bed that night she heard the usual backdrop to night-time in the Sheridan household. Downstairs her mother breathed in her tortured way and upstairs Kay snored gently. Nothing
disturbed Kay’s sleep: she didn’t seem to dream and wakened each morning in the same position she had gone to sleep in – a skill, if it was a skill, that Daisy had always
envied.

She thought over how they had greeted her news. From Kay there was no response, but that was Kay, she had no opinions; and from her parents there had been something like disapproval. She lay in
the darkness trying to analyse the feelings in the room when she had announced that she had found a job on her own.

The disapproval, resentment even, hadn’t just been because kindly Dessie’s good word had been thrown back in his face. It was more than that, it was because she was going to work in
Fenwicks. Her parents saw her as getting above her station in life, she realised. The very people who complained about anti-Irish prejudice holding them back objected to her getting on. Why was
that? she wondered. Because if one of them got on it proved that it was possible for all of them? It undermined their cherished victim status? Well, they could keep that; she had no intention of
living her life as a victim, being grateful and resentful in equal measure for whatever crumbs those above threw down to her. For a start, she thought furiously, she didn’t accept that those
above had that power, and, even if they did, she wouldn’t put up with it in future, in
her
future. And as for Ireland, the fabled Emerald Isle their hearts ached for generation after
generation, well it was someone else’s country as far as she was concerned and she longed to be free of it too.

In the future she now planned for herself, she decided, neither the place her family still referred to as ‘home’, nor Newcastle, would have any claim on her. Granny Niamh would have
applauded her, she knew that, and Aunt Clare would have cheered her on, but no one else in her family had that kind of mind. She’d been aware of that for a long time, from when she had first
started to question her father’s stories; from the time, in fact, when she had begun to think for herself.

And Dessie? Well, Dessie understood perfectly well why she had done what she had done, and Dessie didn’t like it. She knew that from the look in his eyes as she had met his gaze for that
fleeting defiant second. It had taken him by surprise so he had no time to think up a reply, and that night he had left the Sheridan home early. She had shaken him off
and
he’d gone
home early, so she had scored a double victory, and the thought warmed her.

But being young, Daisy didn’t know that there were as many male reactions as there were males. She had misread Dessie that night. She thought she had beaten him at last, and she had no way
of understanding the difference between battles and wars. In Daisy a different female had emerged from the union between Michael and Kathleen, as had happened in the family in the past, and lying
in her bed in the Guildford Place house she was filled with optimism and ambition. There were no doubts, no threats to cloud her horizon, at least none that she was aware of, because she was
young.

5

Fenwicks became Daisy’s refuge in the years that followed. She lived for and through her job, and even if Mrs Johnstone was true to her words, and made her work hard, it
became work she loved.

On her first day, though, it was clear that the word had got round. She could tell that from the stares of a few of the old dears, no doubt tipped off by Miss Manders. She glanced at them as she
made her way to the rickety lift that would take her to Joan Johnstone’s office. Their lips were set in disapproving straight lines. She knew why they disliked her, of course. These women of
a certain age didn’t take kindly to competition that beat them hands down, and in their eyes, just by being young, attractive and from the wrong part of town, Daisy had beaten them. Maybe
there was a trace of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bias in there too. That was something you never knew about unless they spat in your face, but the Newcastle Irish had what they regarded as a sixth
sense about such things, although Daisy wondered if it was also a kind of paranoia. Anyway, none of it had anything to do with her. She couldn’t help her background nor her shape – if
only she could! As her hand reached out to press the lift button, Miss Manders said behind her, ‘You’re expected down here to sweep the floor.’

‘I was told to report to Mrs Johnstone,’ Daisy said.

‘Well, do that,’ the older woman replied tersely, ‘then you’re expected back down here right away. Is that understood? You’re only a junior, that’s what
juniors do.’

Daisy nodded. ‘Miserable old cow!’ she said to herself once the lift gates had clanged shut, but as she ascended she could feel her mood doing the same.

Mrs Johnstone was behind her desk, a tiny, bright presence set against dark woodwork and piles of paper. She indicated with a gracious hand movement that Daisy should sit down.

‘Now, Daisy,’ she said quietly, ‘what I have in mind is to teach you the business. I want you to see yourself where I am now in a few years, or even beyond. How would you like
to be working in one of the big Paris fashion houses?’

She giggled and Daisy giggled too.

‘But first you have to work your way up, as I explained. Now there’s one thing you’ll learn about me, and that’s that I hate paperwork.’

Daisy looked around. She’d never have guessed.

‘I do it, of course, because I have to or it would overwhelm me.’ She followed Daisy’s gaze and laughed. ‘You’re thinking that it already has, aren’t
you?’

‘No …’

Mrs Johnstone clapped her hands and laughed again. ‘What I’d like you to do is help me keep it all in better order. I know it doesn’t look as though it’s in any order
now, but it is, believe it or not.’ She looked around, shaking her head. ‘Now, that pile there, it needs to be properly filed, you know? It should be to some extent already, well,
roughly, but if you could make sure it’s by date, strictly by date, that would be a great help. Now, I have a client to see to, so off you go, walk around the store first, familiarise
yourself, and come back to my paperwork.’

They travelled down in the lift together and when they reached the ground floor went in different directions. Before Daisy had gone two steps she was stopped by Miss Manders.

‘I want the stockroom floor sweeping,’ she said shortly. ‘There’s a brush behind there.’

Daisy said nothing, but turned from the splendour of the shopfront towards the dark dinginess of the stockroom and started brushing. It was an impossible job; there was an endless supply of dust
and fluff that seemed to elude every pass of the brush and land exactly where it had been before.

Miss Manders reappeared. ‘You’re not doing much of a job, are you?’ she asked, before turning and disappearing again. Half an hour of useless brushing later, Miss Manders
reappeared with seemingly no interest in whether the floor was dust and fluff free, and proffered a bottle of bleach, sniffily instructing Daisy to clean the staff toilet.

Daisy stood thinking for a moment. The only thing stopping her from telling Miss Manders precisely where to put her bottle of bleach and walking out was the thought of the alternative.
‘
Ropeworks, Daisy
,’ she said to herself, ‘
ropeworks
’, though she knew there was no telling how long that thought would hold her.