Faith - Lesley Pearse [37]
From then on she had a regular source of cash. She varied the branches she went to, always making certain she claimed her refunds at times when the shops were busy, and on these expeditions she invariably helped herself to items in other shops too. Having a wardrobe full of beautiful, expensive new clothes helped her to forget the image of ‘Stinky Wilmslow’, and gave her the confidence she needed to keep up the fictitious background she’d created for herself.
Laura shook her head despairingly as she thought back to those days. It was a miracle she was never caught, and even more surprising that Jackie was never suspicious of how she managed to live and dress so well on a shop assistant’s wages. But then, Jackie was an innocent in those days; she buried her head in glossy magazines and aspired to the kind of glamorous life she saw depicted there. She saw her family as being quite poor because they had no car, didn’t eat out in fancy restaurants or go abroad, and she had no idea of what a struggle life was for most ordinary people.
Yet it was Jackie who persuaded Laura she could do far better than working on the bacon counter of the Home and Colonial, and with her friend’s encouragement she got a job as a junior wages clerk in Pawson and Leaf, a wholesale company by St Paul’s Cathedral.
Pawson and Leaf was an old-fashioned company that supplied everything from corsets to haberdashery to the retail trade. It had a Dickensian atmosphere in its four or five dusty, gloomy floors filled with goods which had to be picked out when a customer rang in with an order. The wages department was on the top floor, with a wonderful panoramic view of London, but when Laura was sent with inquiries to any of the various departments below, she found it all quite fascinating. There was a huge steel chute, something like a helter-skelter, and once the goods had been picked out and invoiced, they were tied up and dropped down the chute to the packing department in the basement. Quite often the younger lads would slide down it during the lunch hour or at the end of the day, accompanied by shrieks and yells.
Yet it wasn’t just that it was a more fun place to work, or that she earned two pounds more a week and had the whole weekend off that delighted Laura, it was the whole package of working in the City. It felt so sophisticated to catch the tube to work and never again to have to wear an overall and a net covering her hair. She was proud to say she was ‘in wages’, it was good working alongside people of a similar age, and she often met Jackie straight from work so they could go home together.
She had begun work at Pawson and Leaf in early December and there was already a buzz of excitement in the air about the Christmas party to be held on Christmas Eve. Laura heard it was always a great opportunity to get off with someone you fancied, and she was told many stories about staff who had ‘had it off’ in the post room, a drunken telephonist who was put down the chute, and an elderly floor manager who’d had too many drinks and fell asleep and got locked in the building for the whole of the Christmas holiday.
The girls, it seemed, were in the habit of bringing in their party dresses to change into, so when Jackie suggested the night before the Christmas party that they should go to a pub she knew in Moorgate frequented by bankers and stockbrokers, Laura was all for it. That meant she’d get two opportunities to wear the stunning midnight-blue lace dress she’d recently stolen from a West End shop.
‘It’s time we moved on from boys,’ Jackie said airily. ‘We are never going to meet anyone rich in Crouch End. All the local boys want is sex and they don’t even take you out anywhere. The blokes that stop in this pub for a few drinks before going home are all men of the world, they’ll know how to treat us properly.’
Although the girls had had a lot of fun locally during the summer, since the weather got colder and wetter they’d been stuck