The Gown(2)

She had worked for Mr. Hartnell for eleven years. There was no reason for her to still find her heart racing when she thought of her handiwork being worn by the queen. Her family and friends had stopped being impressed by it long ago. Some, like Milly, all but groaned when she came home with stars in her eyes.

She couldn’t help it, though. It was exciting. She was an ordinary girl from Barking, the sort of girl who usually ended up working in a factory or shop for a few years before getting married and settling into life as a wife and mum. Yet by some twist of fate she had ended up working for the most famous dress designer in Britain, had risen to one of the most senior positions in his embroidery workroom, and had helped to create gowns that millions of people admired and coveted.

It had been a near thing, too. When she’d finished school at fourteen, there’d been no money for anything like secretarial college. So she’d gone to the labor exchange, and a gray-faced woman had set a list of jobs in front of her. They’d all sounded awful. Trainee shirt machinist, assistant nursemaid, restaurant cashier. She’d turned the page, ready to give up, and that’s when she’d seen it:

Apprentice embroiderer, central London, training given.

“This one,” she’d said shyly, pointing to the listing. “‘Apprentice embroiderer.’ What does that mean?”

“Exactly what it says. Let me see the reference number. Right . . . it’s at Hartnell, where the queen has all her clothes made.”

“The queen?”

“Yes,” the woman said, her voice sharpening. “Are you interested or not?”

“I am. Only . . . I don’t know how to sew very well.”

“Can’t you read? ‘Training given,’ it says.”

The woman wrote down an address and shoved it across the desk. “I’ll ring them up to say you’re coming. Be there tomorrow at half-past eight. Don’t be late. Make sure your hands are clean.”

She’d all but waltzed home, eager to share her momentous news—London! the queen!—but her mother had only sighed. “You, an embroiderer? You can barely thread a needle. They’ll see the dog’s breakfast you make of whatever they put in front of you, and then you’ll be out the door. Mark my words.”

“But they’re expecting me. The woman at the exchange won’t send me out for another job if I don’t go. Please, Mum. I’ll get in trouble.”

“Suit yourself. But straight there and back, mind you. Can’t have you traipsing around London all day when there are chores to be done.”

The next morning she’d left at dawn, since the early trains cost sixpence less, and had perched on a bench in Berkeley Square Gardens until Big Ben in Westminster chimed the quarter hour after eight o’clock. Then she’d finished her journey, which ended in a quiet back mews in Mayfair, and had rung the bell with a trembling hand.

A girl about her age had answered the door. “Good morning.”

“Good morning. I’m here for the job. Apprentice embroiderer?”

The girl had smiled, and nodded, and told her she was at the right place, and then she’d taken Ann upstairs to meet the head of the embroidery workrooms.

Miss Duley had looked her over, had asked if she had any experience with embroidery, and Ann had answered fearfully, but honestly, that she did not. For some reason that had pleased Miss Duley, who nodded and smiled just a little, and said to Ann that she would do, and that her pay would be seven-and-six a week, and she would begin on Monday next.

“Seven-and-six?” her mother had scoffed, even though it was more than any of Ann’s school friends were making in their new jobs as shop assistants or trainee stenographers. “You’ll spend all of it on the train.”

Ann had started work at Hartnell the next Monday, and those first few months had been a blur. She had learned later that Miss Duley had chosen her because she knew nothing, so there was nothing for her to unlearn. Things were done a certain way at Hartnell, which is to say they were done to the highest conceivable standard, and anything less than perfection was unacceptable.

Miss Duley’s eye was infallible: if a bead sat in the wrong direction, or one strand of satin stitch sat proud of the rest, or even one sequin was duller than its neighbors, she would notice. She would notice, and her left eyebrow would arch just so, and she would smile in that confiding way she had. As if to say she, too, had once been an apprentice and had made her share of mistakes.

It was hard to imagine Miss Duley as a girl of fourteen, or indeed as anything other than the diminutive yet somehow towering figure who dominated the embroidery workrooms. She had bright blue eyes that noticed everything, the faintest echo of the West Country in her speech, and a calmly certain demeanor that Ann found immensely soothing.

“Attend to the work in front of you, and the rest will take care of itself,” Miss Duley was fond of saying. “Leave your cares at the door, and think only of Mr. Hartnell’s design.”

The years since had brought no end of cares to her door, and some days—some years—it had been almost impossible to follow Miss Duley’s advice. Her mother had died suddenly in the summer of ’39. Her heart, the doctor had said. Then the war, and the Blitz, and the horror of the night when her brother had been killed. Burned beyond recognition, they’d been told, with even his wedding ring melted away.