The Shop Girls of Chapel Street by Jenny Holmes

FIVE
    â€˜I decided to call in and collect our order for a change.’ Muriel stood patiently waiting for Ben Hutchinson to make up the usual Tuesday list for Jubilee. She turned to Violet who was up a stepladder tidying shelves. ‘It’s been one of those days. We had to rush to finish a sewing job on that dress for Mrs Barlow then we found that she couldn’t come in to collect it herself so we had to ask Eddie to break off from his job at Sykes’ and ride all the way out to Bilton Grange with it. But did he get any thanks? Not one word, I assure you.’
    â€˜No, I can imagine,’ Violet sympathized.
    â€˜But she helps us pay the bills.’ Muriel’s gaze ranged along the shelf stacked with boxes of cereals. ‘I’ll take some porridge oats, please, Mr Hutchinson. And a jar of marmalade.’
    Taking a pencil from behind his ear and with no glimmer of a smile breaking through his permanent frown, the middle-aged grocer added items to the list then barked at Violet to fetch them. When the order was complete, he took Muriel’s money and rang it up on the till. ‘Would you like little miss to carry it down the street for you?’ he asked.
    â€˜No ta – I can manage.’ Muriel took the box and left the shop with a cheerful goodbye.
    â€˜Say what you like about Muriel Beanland,’ Hutchinson commented as he wiped down an already spotless counter and Violet carried the stepladder into the stockroom at the back of the shop, ‘she’s had her fair share of troubles but she never lets things get her down.’
    â€˜What troubles?’ Violet wondered aloud.
    Hutchinson tapped the side of his nose. ‘Never you mind.’
    That’s just like you
, Violet thought, emerging from the stockroom.
Lead a person on then clam up on them. I’ll ask Aunty Winnie. She’ll tell me what things Muriel has risen above in her seemingly neat and orderly life.
    Violet’s curiosity about Muriel Beanland’s past couldn’t be immediately satisfied, however, because it was Uncle Donald and not Aunty Winnie who greeted her when she got home.
    â€˜What’s this I hear about you joining the Hadley Players?’ he demanded as soon as she got through the door. He was in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, but immaculately groomed as always.
    Violet adopted the careless tone she used whenever her uncle came down hard on her. ‘What if I did? It’s not a crime, so far as I know.’
    â€˜Less of your cheek,’ he snapped. ‘I only got to hear of it through Eddie Thomson when he came in for a haircut first thing this morning. You kept it quiet, though I expect Winnie was in on it. You two are always hugger-mugger.’
    Violet drew a deep breath. ‘We kept it quiet because we knew how you’d react. And sure enough, we were right.’
    Filling a kettle at the kitchen sink, Donald set it to boil on the gas cooker that he’d recently had installed, after years of nagging from Winnie.
    â€˜Entering the contest for Gala Queen is one thing,’ he grumbled, ‘but prancing about on a stage in front of every Tom, Dick and Harry is different. It’s not something I hold with.’
    Violet sighed and sat at the table. Suddenly the kitchen seemed small and dark, full of antiquated objects like the pair of white china dogs on the mantelpiece, the ticking wall clock and the heavy flat iron resting on its stand next to the fire grate. Her uncle was old-fashioned too – thirty years out of date and miserable with it. Whereas Violet thought of herself as a sort of Cinderella, dreaming of her prince but always prevented from going to the ball.
    â€˜Are you listening to me?’ Donald asked. ‘I get to know everything in the end, as long as I keep my ear to the ground. It was Eddie who gave you the lift back after the rehearsal, wasn’t it? And I expect it was him you went to the pictures with on Saturday