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furniture to look for missed dust. Feeling nervous, she finds work at the doctor’s house in Goldthorpe, wages six shillings a week. She will get nothing for a month and then five-sixths of it; all but a shilling will be handed over to her mam. Not only that, on her days off Annie leaves the washing up for Winnie to do, and then asks her to black the grate, or beat a carpet (‘I thought I’d leave them for you, seeing as you were coming’). It is typical of her mother’s selfishness, thinks Winnie, but she cannot say no. Annie doesn’t enjoy the housework, but Winnie, her father’s daughter, cannot relax if there is a surface where dust has gathered.
    She hears about better-paid work at the Broad Highway, a large modern travellers’ inn on a junction of the Great North Road near Doncaster. Abutting a newly opened golf course and country club, it is the kind of place that has flourished with the popularity of the motor car. Staff can live in, so when Winnie obtains a position as a general chambermaid and cleaner there, she escapes her home and Walter’s temper. Scrubbing floors and guest rooms, washing crockery and dusting bars, she feels freer: the Broad Highway is airy and light, and full of commercial travellers and coachloads on their way to the races at Doncaster. The work makes Winnie, boosted up on bread and dripping breakfasts, physically strong as she enters her late teens. Her sisters and friends note the stocky power building in her body.
    Her boss, Mrs Bligh, the wife of the good-looking, get-ahead owner Thomas Bligh, is kind to her, and their daughter Marjorie (‘Miss Marjorie’ to Winnie) is friendly and protective. Miss Marjorie is three years older than Winnie, beautiful, radiant with glamour, and full of stories from the new, stylish arcades and dance halls of Doncaster. She has fashionable dresses made up in velvets, organdies and printed cottons from the town’s market, and comes back from shopping trips in her father’s car with silk stockings, cloche hats, make-up and perfumes with French names. ‘Try some of this, Winnie,’ she says, and applies deep red lipstick to the younger girl’s tremulous, awestruck mouth. ‘I’ve a new one of these’ – holding up an almost empty bottle of Soir de Paris – ‘would you like to take what’s left?’
    Miss Marjorie is the only woman Winnie knows whose parents do not labour for a living, and she tries to ape her manners and attitudes, as her mam had copied her mistress’s before her. Winnie might not have her bone structure, and she could neither afford make-up nor risk it in her father’s sight, but it costs nothing to mimic Miss Marjorie’s elegant mannerisms which, she imagines, set her apart from the rougher girls in Goldthorpe. Miss Marjorie encourages her to share her feelings about Rudolph Valentino after she has been to see his films and in turn tells her about the new music, jazz and quicksteps, the comical dance moves to the Black Bottom and the Charleston that some of the girls do in the dance halls. ‘If you go dancing you have to watch, because their legs go everywhere,’ she says. ‘They clip your ankles.’
    Winnie says she hasn’t been dancing yet.
    ‘You want to be going soon,’ says Miss Marjorie. ‘Have some fun!’
    At home, though, fun remains a vexed and dangerous area. Walter alternates between gentleness and rage, and despite Winnie being of working age, he still addresses and treats her as a child when she is there at weekends and on her half-day Wednesdays. His moods are erratic, possibly made worse by anxiety over money as the coal owners threaten to reduce the wages again. If Winnie complains she sometimes gets a sympathetic hearing, and sometimes a slap or the belt. The only difference her age makes is to increase Walter’s aggressive protection of her against men, most of whom he regards as idlers, gamblers and ne’er-do-wells. Winnie does not go with boys, but this only makes Walter more suspicious.