Park Lane by Frances Osborne

at the mixing bowl, her arm a mill wheel, pasting the eggs and flour. My daughters are going to see better than the inside of an oven. Even though back then there was still a maid to rattle the coal into it.
    So Grace and Michael sat side by side in Miss Sand’s parlour, willing the fire to burn higher, though with a half-dozen of them in that tiny parlour they might as well have been sitting around the funnel of one of Da’s engines.
    Miss Sand’s, where they went when they grew out of school at twelve. The rest of the class were half a dozen girls, with fathers in the professions, who’d been told not to mix with Grace and Michael. When they were all let outside, the girls just turned their backs. Not good enough, railwayman’s children, even if Da was an engineer and hardly a navvy – and it was at Miss Sand’s that Michael started to change.
    Michael was the only boy. Some days there’d be a crowd of lads his age on the street a few doors down from Miss Sand’s. The jeering didn’t bother him, he just walked straight on the same side of the road as the crowd to shield Grace from it. More of a reader than a talker, he was, and Miss Sand found the books to lend him from her friends.
    While Michael learnt Latin, Grace learnt shorthand and typing. Miss Sand worked through the book with her and, after Michael went to London, she blindfolded Grace as she sat down to type and timed her. First-class secretary, she said, any man would be lucky to have you in his office.
    My hope’s with you, said Ma as she put Grace on the bus to the railway station, the day after the New Year. By which Ma meant send back all you can of that good salary you should have in an office. My investment, said Ma, for even though Michael was clerking – now that, Da said, is a career – it would be a while before he was making good money.
    Where he was boarding, women weren’t allowed. Not that you should be in the same building as men, said Ma, even if they are gentlemen. If there is such a thing as a gentleman, because in the railways she’s not sure of that. She stopped as she said this and looked hard across the room at somewhere altogether different for a moment or two, then was quiet. So Grace went to another boarding house, three to a room and ladies only, though Grace soon saw that what was meant by ladies was broad as a river. Ma didn’t know that. All right and proper, she had said to Grace as she put her on the train. You two keep an eye on each other down there, promise me that.
    Grace sent off Miss Sand’s reference with the letters. Invitations to interview came by return. She’d turned up the next day, scrubbed clean and shining, in gloves and a hat. The interviewers smiled as she came into the room. Their faces fell as she started to speak.
    ‘We’ll write if we need you to come back.’
    In one interview a gentleman looked her gently in the eye and spoke slowly, as if she didn’t understand English.
    Grace had a month in hand if she eked out the pennies, holding on until the boarding-house meal in the evening. Before each interview just a slice of bread to stop the stomach hollering. Halfway through the third week she moved on to another sectionin the newspaper. No letter this time about her typing skills, instead the character-only reference Miss Sand had given her. It wasn’t what she’d come here for, nor where she wanted to end up. Grace knows there’s more to her than service, for all those back home who said she had a nerve to set her mind further than Carlisle.
    She had been too nervous to notice the size of the house on Park Lane. She was so focused on finding the tradesmen’s entrance, she can’t even remember now who it was who let her in, just the sitting in Mrs Wainwright’s housekeeper’s office. Mrs, but no ring on her finger, and kind as she was in the interview, since Grace started Mrs Wainwright has become a wall with no door.
    Were the servants fed here, Grace wondered, but it was Mrs