Susan in NC’s Reviews > High Wages > Status Update

“ 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.”