More Tales of the West Riding Page 15

  Miss Ellis looked round at the well-loved Pennines on the lower slopes of which the town was built, and gave a modified agreement.

  “Perhaps,” she said in her high light tones. “Still, I should not care to live in a flat town.”

  “I should,” snapped Mrs Jowett.

  “A friend of mine,” pursued Miss Ellis, eager to express opposition, “who married and went to live in Cambridge—a very level district, you know—used to say that the moment she got out of the train here, in Hudley, she felt better. Livelier. More alive. The air felt fresher here.”

  “I’ll bet she was young to say that,” countered Mrs Jowett crossly.

  “She was at the time, yes,” agreed Miss Ellis.

  Her voice held a note which Mrs Jowett, though she could not name it, recognised. But she was not to be wheedled.

  “You’ve lost her then, have you?” she said, harsh.

  “Yes,” said Miss Ellis briefly, looking aside. “When her baby was born.”

  “Well—it happens,” said Mrs Jowett, matter-of-fact. “I lost my young sister, you know. Same way. Pity.”

  “Indeed,” agreed Miss Ellis, her tone still flat and chilly.

  They arrived at the threshold of the pedestrian crossing, and paused. Cars of every shape, size and hue, buses, vans, motor-bikes, flew by.

  “Well, here we are. Not that they’ll take much notice of us,” said Mrs Jowett, sour.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” countered Miss Ellis, vexed. “My brother drives and he’s always most scrupulous at crossings.”

  A very young teenager, with dark flowing hair and flowery short pants, came rushing up and put one toe on the crossing. Amid horrific shrieks of brakes, the cars, almost rearing in their effort to stop, managed to prevent their front wheels from trespass on the crossing. The drivers all scowled, and the scowl spread down the long line of traffic. The teenager skipped blithely and nimbly across to safety. She did not even condescend to smile at the halted cars.

  “What do you think of that, eh?” demanded Mrs Jowett.

  “It’s not easy to stop a car suddenly in a yard and a half,” countered Miss Ellis.

  The driver of the foremost car now made frantic signs to Mrs Jowett, urging her to cross.

  “No, thanks. Not for me. I can’t hurry,” said Mrs Jowett. “I have to wait till there’s a real gap, you see.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Rheumatism. I limp a bit. Don’t wait for me,” urged Mrs Jowett disagreeably.

  “I can’t hurry either,” admitted Miss Ellis.

  “Oh? Boots too tight?” said Mrs Jowett sardonically.

  Miss Ellis’s boots were certainly rather dashing; tall and tight, with black and silvery patterns. She was vexed by this attack on them, but managed to laugh.

  “No—as a matter of fact they’re rather helpful,” she said. “They give support. I sprained one of my ankles twice, that’s all.”

  “A sprain is worse than a fracture, they say,” said Mrs Jowett, unctuously gleeful.

  “It has proved so in my case.”

  “You should have some of those what-do-you-call-them injections,” reproved Mrs Jowett.

  “I’ve had several,” riposted Miss Ellis.

  “Or physio-therapy or what is it.”

  “I’ve tried that too. The truth is,” volunteered Miss Ellis coldly, spurred to defence, “I fell down our cellar steps when I was four years old, and my left hip and ankle have always been a little—”

  “Wonky,” nodded Mrs Jowett, enjoying this depreciating word.

  “Exactly.”

  “Spine a bit out of true.”

  “Just so. Still, I haven’t done so badly until the last year or two.”

  “You should wear an anklet,” urged Mrs Jowett, reproving as before.

  “You’re quite right. I have done so from time to time. But it’s a bit of a bore, you know.”

  “All these gadgets are. How’d you come to fall, eh?”

  “My mother went down to get some milk for me. She told me to stay at the top—”

  “But of course you didn’t.”

  “Luckily I was wearing a thick coat and bonnet of corduroy velvet, and this protected me from serious harm.”

  “You remember your coat, do you? I’ll bet you do.”

  “It was blue corduroy,” said Miss Ellis dreamily. “A kind of sea colour, you know.”

  “I’m surprised your mother didn’t send for the doctor.”

  “Oh, she did. But he couldn’t find anything seriously wrong.”

  “Not then,” said Mrs Jowett with significance, cleverly implying how long ago was Miss Ellis’s youth, before the days of X-rays.

  “Just so. Still, I’ve not done too badly until the last year or two, when these sprains came along, you know. But such a happening in childhood, the result of adventure, disobedience, is apt to curb one’s spirit.”

  “Ha!” snorted Mrs Jowett in disbelief.

  “What about your rheumatism?”

  “Least said soonest mended,” said Mrs Jowett, grim.

  “The traffic seems to be calming a little now,” said Miss Ellis. “Shall we try it, do you think?”

  “Well, we might,” said Mrs Jowett doubtfully. “Don’t wait for me.”

  Miss Ellis hesitated. It was against her code of conduct to desert a rheumatic patient on a pedestrian crossing, but she disliked Mrs Jowett too strongly to wish to aid her.

  Just then a middle-aged man, rather plump and dirty, not well shaven, in his working clothes, with greying untidy hair, came rushing up to them.

  “Can you manage, loves?” he cried.

  He seized each by one arm, and without a moment’s hesitation urged them both on to the crossing. Lulu, excited, barking shrilly, large ears flapping, sprang joyously after them.

  “Now then!” the man cried cheerfully to the oncoming cars, nodding his head.

  The drivers nodded back and laughed, drawing up politely. The man whisked the pair across. Giving each of the arms he held a vigorous lift, he assisted Mrs Jowett and Miss Ellis to mount the causeway kerb, then shouting: “Ta ta!” vanished away down a side-street.

  The two ladies looked at each other, breathless but smiling.

  “Well!” said Mrs Jowett. “Safe this time, choose how.”

  “I think we should all adopt that as our slogan,” said Miss Ellis earnestly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Can you manage, loves? If we all said that to each other, and acted on it, the world would be a happier place,” said Miss Ellis, blushing, very serious.

  “Well, it certainly was a bit of all right,” agreed Mrs Jowett. “I’m going in here,” she added in a friendly tone, nodding towards an hotel with one of those circling doors. “To meet my husband, you know.”

  “Shall I carry Lulu for you?” suggested Miss Ellis. “Those doors might be awkward for her?”

  “Well—if you would just lift her up into my arms,” agreed Mrs Jowett.

  Miss Ellis picked up Lulu, caressed her and put her carefully into Mrs Jowett’s embrace. Lulu mildly licked her hand.

  “Come in and meet my husband,” urged Mrs Jowett.

  “Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you,” replied Miss Ellis, smiling.

  The two women walked up the steps of the hotel side by side, smiling and feeling happy.

  On the Station

  1971

  Mrs Ellis and Mrs Gowland, laden with parcels, made their way up the steps under the big Yorkshire railway station to the far platform. Mrs Gowland grumbled bitterly about the steps.

  “How they expect us to climb things like these, every time we come to their shops,” she said, “I really don’t know.”

  Mrs Ellis, who had an arthritic hip and disliked the steps quite as much as Mrs Gowland, said nothing till she had reached the platform and regained her breath, when she remarked mildly:

  “Bert says it’s something to do with the gradient.”

  Bert was Mrs Ellis’s husb
and and Mrs Gowland’s brother.

  “He would” said Mrs Gowland scornfully.

  “He says, to make a slope would be too steep or something.”

  “Then they should have digged deeper,” snarled Mrs Gowland.

  “Wouldn’t that make it worse, Gladys?”

  “Or used more space.”

  “They know their own work best, I expect,” soothed Mrs Ellis.

  “First I’ve heard of it.”

  “We aren’t late, anyway,” said Mrs Ellis, looking round.

  Mrs Gowland snorted. (It was she who had been so anxious about catching the train.) “Small help from them”

  If anything, they were rather early. The side of the platform from which the local diesel train would start was empty, and not many passengers were as yet awaiting it.

  “There’s room on that seat. Let’s sit down,” suggested Mrs Ellis.

  They moved across to the seat with relief, arranging their parcels round their ankles.

  “What that girl Nerissa costs me is nobody’s business,” grumbled Mrs Gowland, looking down at her purchases stuffed into a brightly coloured carrier. “The tights she goes through!”

  Mrs Ellis thought Nerissa rather a high-flown name for Mrs Gowland’s daughter, who was black-haired and black-eyed, with red cheeks and a plump bosom, who earned a good wage at a multiple store and was rather apt to be rude to her mother. But she thought Nerissa might not have an easy time with Gladys for a mother, and her father, too, though a friend of Bert’s, was often rather grumpy—and no wonder. So she said kindly, defending the girl:

  “She’s young and pretty, she wants to look nice.”

  “She needn’t split her tights every week.”

  “Now, come, Gladys, it isn’t every week,” objected Mrs Ellis mildly.

  “Well, I don’t like her going out with holes in her tights,” explained Mrs Gowland, virtuous and solemn. “It might give people ideas, holes in her tights.”

  “People?”

  “Boys,” said Mrs Gowland, ominous.

  “Ideas?”

  “Well, you know what I mean. Or perhaps you don’t, your Dollie being so young yet.”

  Mrs Ellis smiled. “Dollie is a good girl,” she said.

  “Her father spoils her,” said Mrs Gowland, acid.

  Mrs Ellis bridled. “Now, Gladys, don’t you say a word against my Bert,” she said. “Because I won’t stand it. I won’t really. I warn you.”

  “Of course it’s p’raps natural, with Dollie coming so long after the boys,” said Mrs Gowland nastily.

  “That’s nothing to do with you, Gladys, and I’ll thank you to hold your tongue,” said Mrs Ellis.

  She spoke quite sharply, her fair pleasant face crimsoning.

  “A silly name, Dollie, I always thought and still think,” said Mrs Gowland, unable to resist firing a final shot. “Not ‘with it’ at all. Bert’s fault, of course, I expect, always calling her Dollie.”

  “Gladys!” said Mrs Ellis in a warning tone, looking her sister-in-law firmly in the eye.

  “Well, you know me. I always speak my mind.”

  “You do indeed.”

  “No offence, I hope.”

  “I hope none intended.”

  So much fight from a placid pussy like Dorothy Ellis was really alarming. Mrs Gowland thought it best to change the subject.

  “Where’s our train, I wonder?” she said, turning her sharp eyes around.

  “It’s not time for it for five minutes yet.”

  “There it is! Look! It’s standing there outside the station.”

  “So it is,” agreed Mrs Ellis. Her tone was mild; she was always ready for a reconciliation.

  “What is it waiting for? Why doesn’t it come to the platform, so we could get in and be comfortable?”

  The seat they occupied had an open back. Mrs Ellis now turned a little, so that the other side of the platform came within her view.

  A great many people stood there. Several, in fact many, were obviously business men of the “top” kind; executives, Mrs Ellis thought they called them. They wore heavy, well-cut topcoats of good West Riding cloth, with striped silk scarves and fur-lined leather gloves. They carried “real” leather brief-cases which looked heavy with papers, and appeared serious and concerned. One or two had secretaries with them; very bright young things, with abundant lustrous hair either very long and well-brushed, sweeping their shoulders, or gathered up tightly on their heads in complicated curls. Would Dollie look like that one day? Perhaps. The executives swung their brief-cases, examined their watches, and looked cross; the secretaries spoke soothingly, very competent about the time.

  Among these business groups stood occasionally women; some of mature age in superb fur coats, obviously executive wives; some young, pretty, very much made up, hoping to become so. They wore charming, often brightly coloured clothes, some in trouser suits, some in mini-skirts, some in knee-length skirts which Mrs Ellis could not help preferring, some in long heavy coats. Their shoes or long boots, often patent leather (or at least looking like patent leather) were usually black or scarlet, and gleamed.

  In a word, everybody on that side of the platform was wearing his or her best clothes. Mrs Ellis, who had known the bad times of the thirties, smiled at them benignly if with a certain wistfulness.

  “They’re waiting for the London train,” she said.

  Mrs Gowland whisked round and eyed them shrewdly.

  “Yes! That’s right!” she cried. “That’s why our train doesn’t come in. It’s waiting for the London train to get in first. See! Look! That other line out there crosses our line. Of course they hold up the local train for the London train; they don’t care two hoots about the local people.”

  “The people going to London are local too,” murmured Mrs Ellis.

  “If I had Lord Beeching here I’d tell him a few truths!”

  “I’m sure you would, Gladys.”

  “They all look very well off,” snarled Mrs Gowland.

  “I daresay they work for it. And worry.”

  “Pooh!”

  “And they’re all going to London. They’re in their best. We’ve only been shopping, think on.”

  “And had to carry our parcels up those awful steps !”

  “There’s a notice up saying passengers should ask porters for help with luggage and steps.”

  “What’s the use of that when there’s no porters? I don’t see any porters carrying our parcels up those steps!”

  “I believe there are lifts up from that passage underneath.”

  “I’ve never seen one. Have you?”

  “Well, no. But that doesn’t mean—” Mrs Ellis finished her sentence with a joyous cry: “But, see! There’s one along there.”

  “It looks like it, certainly,” said Mrs Gowland, grudgingly. Another woman might have agreed cheerfully: “So it is!” But that was not her way.

  For a clash as of metal gates proved to be in fact the clack of one metal gate withdrawing into its appointed compartment. It slid back; an open space was revealed, shadowy in the distance; out of there a flat truck was emerging, laden with luggage; it rolled out, pushed by an elderly porter, rolled noisily but steadily along the platform on the London side, until it stood not three yards from Mrs Gowland and Mrs Ellis. They gazed at it. In fact, everybody gazed at it. The luggage on it was very handsome, four suitcases, all matching, black, with silvery locks and edges; obviously new.

  “Looks new,” observed Mrs Ellis in a low admiring tone.

  “It does that. Somebody’s got some money to spare, choose how,” said Mrs Gowland, disagreeably envious.

  At this point the elderly porter gave a slight twitch to the handle of the truck, which swung slowly on its axis, revealing what lay on the far side of one pair of suitcases. Mrs Gowland exclaimed. Mrs Ellis exclaimed. In fact, almost everybody on the platform exclaimed. Even the business men smiled a little beneath their well-groomed moustaches, though they turned away quickly so as not t
o betray their interest. For on the far side of the truck lay a superb pair of ladies’ long boots. They were of suede; they had concealed zip fastenings, extremely neat; they were very long, oh, very long. And they were turquoise; yes, bright, fresh, new, beautiful turquoise.

  “They’re pale blue,” whispered Mrs Ellis. “Though a deep colour in a way.”

  “Turquoise,” snapped Mrs Gowland.

  “Yes, turquoise,” agreed Mrs Ellis.

  “Well, as I say, some people have money to waste,” commented Mrs Gowland.

  “It’s not waste, Gladys. Not those beautiful boots. At least we don’t know it’s waste.”

  “Whoever belongs to them, she shouldn’t leave them lying about on a railway truck,” criticised Mrs Gowland in an uncomfortably loud voice.

  “We don’t know,” began Mrs Ellis.

  “Encouraging people to steal, that’s what I call it.”

  “Do you mean to steal the boots, Gladys?” enquired Mrs Ellis, vexed beyond bearing.

  “Why, no, of course not, Dorothy,” exclaimed Mrs Gowland.

  The astonishment of her tone was justified, for Mrs Gowland’s honesty, though perhaps she flaunted it a bit much, was permanent and sincere.

  “Then why assume everybody else has a lower mind than you?”

  The moment she had spoken Mrs Ellis was ashamed of herself; she felt she had been insulting. So she said hastily:

  “Of course it is a bit risky, leaving boots like that on an open truck.”

  “Yes.”

  “The boots might fall off.”

  “Aye, and then somebody would be in trouble,” said Mrs Gowland, recognising the olive branch but unable not to feel a little pleasure at the prospect of somebody in trouble.

  “Exactly.”

  The two women exchanged friendlier glances. The elderly porter, not stirring a hair, continued to look straight ahead of him, but with a grim expression, which seemed to indicate that anyone trying to take those boots off his truck would have a tough job of it. All passengers present now discreetly withdrew their glances.

  “It’s interesting, though, the things you see at railway stations,” murmured Mrs Ellis, turning away from the truck.

  “I don’t say otherwise,” conceded Mrs Gowland.

  At that very moment, two things happened.