Daisy's Wars (7 page)

Just then she heard Mrs Johnstone’s voice in the distance, then she burst in through the door. ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, though by the wretched look on Miss
Manders’ face as she followed, Mrs Johnstone already knew. ‘Didn’t I tell you to file the paperwork in my office?’

Daisy didn’t reply, sensing that Mrs Johnstone’s anger wasn’t directed at her, and looked behind her to the older woman.

‘Miss Manders,’ Mrs Johnstone said tightly, ‘can we please have a word? Daisy, if you would be so good as to go up to my office and I’ll see you there in due
course.’

Daisy made her way through the sudden silence of the stockroom, past the even louder silence of the shop floor and the cold stares of all the Miss Manderses who watched her, and went through the
lift procedure that seemed to take forever before it actually moved. She wasn’t entirely sure what would happen, but she couldn’t help feeling apprehensive. She wasn’t to blame
for what the old cow had made her do, but Mrs Johnstone had told her to look around the store and return to her office. She should have done that, she realised. Now she could be out on her ear and
on her way to joining Dessie’s harem after all. But if the old cow had complained to Mrs Johnstone that she had refused to do as she was told by her elders, if not betters, she could have
been out on her ear anyhow.

When ‘in due course’ arrived, Mrs Johnstone came into the office and sat down.

‘Well, that’s that all sorted,’ she said brightly.

Daisy looked at her blankly.

‘Well, don’t just sit there, girl, get on with my filing!’ She suddenly laughed. ‘On second thoughts, let’s have a cuppa and biscuit, what do you say?’

‘So I’ve still got a job?’ Daisy asked, surprised.

‘Well of course you have! Whatever made you think you hadn’t?’

‘The old, um, Miss Manders,’ Daisy mumbled.

‘Oh,’ Mrs Johnstone said with a dismissive wave of her hand, ‘that was all a misunderstanding. My fault really, I should’ve explained to the other ladies that you
weren’t to be treated as a normal junior. I have something different in mind for you: you are to be my assistant. I should’ve explained that to the ladies on the shop floor,’ she
repeated briskly, if unconvincingly. ‘It was my mistake, but they understand now.’

Daisy lowered her head to hide a grin.

‘I do hope you’re not smirking, Daisy!’ Mrs Johnstone said. ‘Because I would expect better from you. It wouldn’t be lady-like to gloat over the old, um, Miss
Manders, you know!’

‘No, no, it’s not that,’ Daisy said, laughing despite her best intentions. She looked up and as they met each other’s eyes they both laughed out loud.

Mrs Johnstone sat back in her chair, rubbing her chest. ‘She really is an old cow, isn’t she?’ she said breathlessly, now dabbing at her eyes. ‘I’m sure
you’ve met a lot like her, Daisy. I have, too. You won’t get any more trouble like that, but I fear you’ll always be regarded as my favourite and that won’t help you make
friends here. Does that bother you?’

Daisy shook her head. The fact was that it honestly didn’t. She was a loner; she had always been a loner, partly because the life she had been given had made her one by separating her from
girls of her own age, and partly because of her own nature – and that was before Mother Nature had aided and abetted the process by giving her a body and looks other women would have died
for, and would have killed her for as well. All her life she had had to take on responsibilities beyond her years; maybe it was her destiny to always be older than her years, too.

She soon fell into a routine with Mrs Johnstone, who already had her own highly personal system of keeping track of pieces of paper that worked for her; but gradually Daisy brought an order to
the office that even her boss fell into without noticing. She also made the tea, kept track of stock and learned how to use the telephone, an instrument of mystery to someone of Daisy’s
background, and, even more daunting, how to modulate her strong Geordie accent while doing so.

‘You’re not betraying your background, if that’s what you’re thinking!’ Mrs Johnstone would tease her. ‘You’ll still have your own voice, but
you’ll have another as well that will make it easier to converse with people who don’t have Geordie.’

‘It’s not that,’ Daisy grimaced. ‘What has my background ever done for me that I owe it any loyalty? It’s just that I think I sound like such a fraud that the
people on the other end will know and they’ll laugh at me.’

‘Daisy,’ Joan said, staring at her with wide eyes and smiling, ‘they’re doing just the same as you! Everyone puts on an act of some kind for other people, doesn’t
matter who they are!’

Daisy worked in ladies’ fashions, a man-free environment where she could relax, gradually being introduced to the well-heeled ladies of the area as they came in for fittings, seeing their
fine clothes and the ones they left with, which were even finer. From Mrs Johnstone she learned that fashion wasn’t just about wearing something nice, but it was affected by what was
happening in the world at any given time. In Daisy’s own life-time the Flappers of the 1920s had caused a mini revolution when they threw away their Victorian corsets – torture garments
reinforced with whalebone, tightly laced to give fashionably narrow waists of fifteen or eighteen inches.

‘But I really like the dresses in these old pictures,’ Daisy said, flicking through a magazine of the Victorian era. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Heavens, no!’ Mrs Johnstone screeched. ‘I can’t even look at them without thinking of women in torture! My mother wasn’t rich, but as a young girl she had a waist
of seventeen inches, can you imagine that?’ She shook her head and tut-tutted. ‘No woman was intended to be that shape, and the tightness of the corsets made them deformed. They
couldn’t breathe and couldn’t move, and I’ve heard they were so tight that the marks of their ribs were imprinted on their lungs underneath, can you imagine that? Then on top they
wore layers of slips, vests, bodices, knickers, and stockings as well, and those heavy floor-length dresses with bustles.’ She shook her head. ‘It was all a trick, of course.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, they were trussed up, weren’t they? Which meant they couldn’t move, so they had to stay at home, delicate flowers who had to be cared for and kept away from the world;
but it kept them from taking their place in the world, didn’t it? Because the world belonged then, as it still does, to men – only a little less now, thanks in part to the
Flappers.’

‘So what else changed then?’

‘The First World War, Daisy, that’s what changed,’ Mrs Johnstone said grimly. ‘The men were sent to the Front, God help them, and for the first time women were needed.
They either freed more men to be killed by taking over their jobs or they worked in munitions factories, and they couldn’t do that trussed up, so they were freed. Men’s rules
again,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘The only problem was that once they’d been allowed a few years of freedom they didn’t take kindly to being shut up again. It was as if
freeing their bodies had freed their minds as well. But do you know the strangest thing?’ she laughed quietly. ‘The Flappers of the 1920s did everything they could to look like
boys.’

Joan got up from her desk and lifted a bound book of magazines from a shelf and handed it to Daisy. ‘Look at those tubular shapes. Ladies of means went to men’s tailors to have
masculine clothes made. It even became an insult to compliment a woman on her nice figure, and they bound their breasts to be as flat as possible.’

‘I can sympathise with that,’ Daisy said glumly.

Mrs Johnstone laughed. ‘Your shape is coming into its own, Daisy,’ she chided her. ‘You should be grateful for the 1930s, these days the fashion is for womanly women. But back
then, well, I think in a strange way those ladies were trying to replace the poor boys lost in the war by almost becoming boys themselves.’

‘Did you wear things like that?’ Daisy asked.

‘Heavens, no! I couldn’t afford it, for one thing, but I was always a feminine kind of woman, if you know what I mean. The “Gay Thirties” suit me much better, though I
still can’t afford the wardrobes of our customers. Besides, who has time to be constantly changing into morning, sports, afternoon and evening wear? And they can’t seem to be able to
make up their minds where their hemlines should be.’ She produced another book and opened it at a
Punch
cartoon. ‘This always makes me laugh,’ she said, pointing to two
pictures of the same young woman, one in her afternoon suit six inches below the knee and pencil-slim, so that she could only manage to walk in ‘the nine-inch hobble’, in the second
wearing a loose-skirted evening dress, enabling her to perform ‘the metre stride’. ‘These are the kind of ladies we come into contact with, Northern women who desperately want to
keep up with London and Paris, women like us, I suppose, only we don’t have their wealth!’

Daisy became as fascinated by the lives of such women as by their clothes, which she loved. The dresses sewn into sections, or on the bias, garments so ‘well-cut that they didn’t
need fastenings, so craftily designed that making your own was beyond most females, even for someone as experienced with a needle as Daisy. She gradually became familiar with the names of designers
like Chanel and Schiaparelli, and learned the tricks of film stars like Joan Crawford, who wore impossibly wide, padded shoulders, giving the illusion of the still-prized narrow waist without the
agony of corsets. She couldn’t have afforded the magazines that were part of her working tools and she and Mrs Johnstone spent breaks devouring each one, discussing and dissecting every
detail.

‘I love the dresses Ginger Rogers wears,’ Daisy said, looking at the still photos of floaty, frilly dresses worn by the actress as she flew down to Rio to cance backwards and in
heels with Fred Astaire.

‘Is that what you’d like to do, Daisy?’ Mrs Johnstone smiled. ‘Dance with Fred Astaire?’

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful?’ Daisy replied, hunching her shoulders and clapping her hands together with feeling. She got up and laughingly improvised a tap dance, caught in the
dream of being Ginger for a moment, a dream shared with thousands of other women.

‘You couldn’t wear her clothes, though,’ Mrs Johnstone said quietly.

‘Why not?’ Daisy demanded, stopping suddenly mid-step.

‘You’re a different shape.’

‘Daisy looked down at her ‘lumps’. ‘There they go,’ she muttered, ‘ruining it for me again!’

‘Daisy, Daisy, there’s nothing wrong with your shape!’ Mrs Johnstone said, shaking her head at the girl. ‘Ginger’s built for frills, you’re built for good
lines, for well-cut clothes. If, ever a girl was designed for her time, it’s you. I saw that the first time I set eyes on you, especially now that we have brassieres to guide and support the
bust rather than flatten it.’

‘I’d give anything to be like you and not need one,’ Daisy said with feeling.

‘Are you suggesting that I’m flat-chested?’ Mrs Johnstone asked, faking outrage.

‘No, no,’ Daisy replied. ‘But you’re built like Ginger, you’re built for frills, I just wish I was.’

‘And I wish I had your curves. Never satisfied, are we?’

Joan Johnstone was impressed by the courage of the girl from Heaton via Byker, but she also had an eye for business. In recognising that Daisy was built to wear the fashions of
the Thirties, even if she couldn’t afford them, she knew that the girl would be perfect to model them for prospective buyers, once the rough edges were smoothed over, of course, and once she
knew something of the business she was now in. From the very first day she had changed her lunchtime habit, and it became established that she and Daisy ate together in her office. ‘I have
hopes for you, Daisy,’ she had told her. ‘You’ll get fed-up with filing and dealing with bits of paper, but you mustn’t give up, you have to know everything, it’s part
of my plan.’

Daisy had nodded, though she didn’t understand. For her the choice was simple, work with pieces of paper at Fenwicks or, if she was lucky, pieces of paper at the ropeworks with Dessie
always on hand, leering at her. No choice at all, really.

Joan Johnstone was a smart woman, though. She was a good judge of when routine became drudgery, especially for a bright youngster like Daisy, so every now and again she would take her to the
shop floor to watch some wealthy young woman buying a new wardrobe. Daisy was forbidden to speak, only to watch and learn, and what she learned was that the divide between her and the customers was
much wider in some ways than she had thought, but in other ways much narrower. She would have to save for a very long time to buy one dress and she would think it was the world, while these women
bought a whole collection complete with accessories, and they didn’t just buy the best, they recognised it when they saw it. Sometimes Daisy was allowed to help them change and was always
amazed by the finery they wore underneath, the embroidered silks, satins and gossamer laces that weren’t seen as they moved gracefully through their lives. She was impressed, too, by the way
these wealthy women treated her. Not as an equal – that would have been too much to expect – but as a human being, when all her life till then she had lived in a world of Us and
Them.

One day they had Mrs Armstrong in for a fitting, a lady in her forties who wasn’t married but carried the title as a courtesy. She was a tall, slim woman, with dark, waved hair in the
style of her young womanhood, and very pretty, with neat features and a sweet smile. Joan Johnstone had brought Daisy into the fitting room with Mrs Armstrong because she knew the woman had a kind
disposition and wouldn’t make Daisy nervous, even if she was very rich.

‘They say there’s to be another war, ladies, what do you think?’ Mrs Armstrong asked, as Daisy did up the long row of tiny buttons on the back of her dress while Mrs Johnstone
evened out the hem.

‘It’s too horrible to think about,’ Mrs Johnstone said. ‘You just can’t believe they would do it again, can you?’

Mrs Armstrong sighed. ‘I lost everything in the last show, you know,’ she said sadly. ‘Three brothers and my fiancé, all in the same regiment. At the Somme.’ The
words hung in the air. ‘My parents didn’t last more than a year afterwards, so that was me, all on my own. I had the family money, but nothing else. My lovely chap wanted to get married
before he left, but my family wanted a huge society wedding for their only daughter and there wasn’t time. The times I’ve gone over that in my mind and cursed myself for being a damned
fool!’