Status Updates From High Wages

“ She was happy. The business enthralled her. Not only the making of money enthralled her, but the actual life of the shop enthralled her. The people who came into the shop. Those women, now, whose sole interest in life was clothes, clothes, more and more clothes. Jane had often an entirely unbusiness-like impulse to beg them to stop buying. There was pathos in this urge for clothes.”

“ She admitted that many a time she had felt Mr. Chadwick was right; that she had no experience, that she must fail. But she’d gone on, dealing with things as they came, and here she was through her first year with more success than she had ever dreamed of. It was a grand little business, thought Jane proudly. It seemed to have a sturdy, independent life of its own.”

“ She left the muted, war-time London night and travelled back to Tidsley, feeling that she had taken a plunge into a most exciting and adventurous sea, and come up with a wonderful haul of new ideas, new views. She slept soundly from sheer fatigue, rolling about with unconscious abandon from the unbuttoned private on her left to a substantial old woman on her right.”

“She found her way to Westminster Abbey and sat in the Poets’ Corner for Wilfrid’s sake. She wandered into the cloisters and was enchanted by the sudden glimpses of beauty—a flight of worn steps under a plane tree in one place; in another a square of garden shut away with its small sleeping fountain; all so quiet and holy.”

“ Alone in the room behind the shop in the middle of the night, life took on strange and terrible aspects. But when the day came with its brimming measure of work, she was confident and happy again. Life was mixed, she decided, trying her elbow again on the inadequate window-ledge of the compartment; mixed, but interesting.”

“Mr. Chadwick was busier than he had ever been in his life before; money rolled in. Yet he paid Jane one pound a week, and Maggie thirteen and sixpence, and looked with complacency on his wife’s schemes to deprive them of their food rations.”

“…the War ceased to be exciting…For Jane and Maggie it gradually resolved itself into a struggle to get enough food from Mrs. Chadwick. The War called Mrs. Chadwick’s full powers into play…She enjoyed the difficulties in the way of procuring food…She spent exciting moments stealing down to her own scullery, when the girls were out of the way, to take parings from their margarine allowances with a razor blade.”

“ Jane besought him to depart from his usual procedure. He gave in to her, but not without irritation. He felt he could not cope with her ideas. Youth and enthusiasm can be fatiguing to those who have lost both. Mr. Chadwick, however, had enough shrewdness to know that, though her ideas made him tired, they were nevertheless good ideas. So he left her to it.”

“Mrs. Greenwood was considerably upset by the sight of the Chadwicks and Jane. As Queen Victoria, in her time, had been determined not to countenance the advance of democracy in England, so Mrs. Greenwood was determined not to countenance the advance of the workingclasses in Tidsley.”

“But Jane, Lancashire born and bred, did not find it depressing. It was no feeble, trickling ugliness, but a strong, salient hideousness that was almost exhilarating. She would, however, have found almost anything exhilarating in her present mood. She felt she was again going to smile at the prospect of going to Manchester.”

“…the occupants of the first-class carriages playing cards, or fallen into unlovely sleep. They did well to avert their eyes from the landscape they had made. They had made it; but they could not, like God, look and see that it was good. Monstrous slag-heaps…stretches of waste land rubbed bare to the gritty earth… great blocks of mill buildings, the chimneys belching smoke as thick and black as eternal night itself.”