Polly Pride stared at her boss open mouthed. ‘Laying me off? I’m thinking that’s a mean-minded, low-spirited thing to be doing to a body, particularly since you know I’m the family bread winner just now.’

        ‘Your Charlie no better then?’ Jack Lawson had the grace to look uncomfortable, as well he might faced with the blistering power of Irish temper which now confronted him.

        Standing with her fists screwed into her still slim waist, Polly Pride was an awesome sight even in a crossover pinny. She was still a handsome woman, her dark shining hair with its glimmer of red catching the light as she shook her head at him, greeny-grey eyes flashing dangerously. The fact that she was still known as Polly Pride for all she’d been wed to Charlie Stockton, her second husband, for near a decade spoke volumes.  ‘Indeed you know full well he’s been off work these three weeks past. So how are we to manage without a wage coming in, will ye tell me that?’

        Lawson’s solemn face did not soften the slightest degree. ‘Same as everyone else Poll. By doing the best you can. Anyroad, your Benny’ll be home from the front soon, and your Lucy’s chap. That’s why we have to let all you women go, to make way for our boys.’ He raised his voice a little, glancing about him as if appealing to their compassion but more than one woman in the workshop shook a clenched fist and told him where he could stick the cards he was giving them all.

        ‘Put ‘em where the sun don’t shine,’ yelled one, not known for her finesse.

        ‘Aye, and then take a long jump off th’end of Irwell Street Bridge.’

        Many of the women no longer had husbands, brothers or fathers who could come home, and those men who had survived in one piece weren’t necessarily coming home to them. Jack Lawson turned away, almost at a run, so eager was he to evade their accusations and sharp wit. The workers in this warehouse close by Potato Wharf weren’t the only ones to get the chop, not by a long chalk. The building had served as a store for many things during the long war, cotton, timber, packing cases, even food. Now it was returning to its original purpose - a print works. There’d be no employment then for women like these.

        The waters of the canal basin looked as black as ever, thick with oil and cluttered with rubbish, seeming to echo the women’s dour mood as Polly and her friends made their way home at the end of their morning shift. For all they’d dreamed of this day for years, happily planned the celebrations for weeks, yet there was precious little laughter as they walked up Medlock Street and past Liverpool Road Goods Station, the taste of coal dust in their mouths and the booming and shunting of trains loud in their ears so they had to raise their voices to shout to each other.

        It’d been the most exciting summer anyone could remember. They’d already enjoyed VE Day with jubilant street parties as well as the usual May Day Parades with Shire horses bedecked in ribbons and rosettes and the coronations of the various district May Queens. Now, with the surrender of Japan, hostilities really were at an end and red, white and blue bunting flapped joyously in the breeze, criss-crossing every street the women passed through, from bedroom windows more accustomed to blackout curtains during the long days of war. A Union Jack painted on a back yard wall, the hammer and sickle flying side by side with the stars and stripes; bright, brave flags heralding a day the likes of which had never before been seen, not even in Manchester where they knew how to have a good laugh. They’d soldiered on and ‘med do’ for nigh on six years, and they were only too ready for a good knees-up.

        Bright eyed children in threadbare jerseys with holes in the sleeves. Boys in sleeveless pullovers and trousers they would ‘grow into’ hung on elastic braces, sparking their clogs on the setts as they kicked a ball about; girls skipping in skimpy cotton frocks, dirty bare feet thrust into scuffed sandals, not a hair ribbon among them to hold back shining bobbed hair recently washed and trimmed for the occasion but their singsong voices rang out with youthful joy and a certainty in the future, one their mothers were now beginning to fear.

        ‘Ta ra,’ the women called as one by one they peeled off and went home to make dinner for their children, trying not to worry about what the next week, the next day might bring.

        By the time the remaining stragglers turned the corner into Pansy Street, a long string of a street which jostled with many another around the canal basin, they’d almost convinced themselves that they were doing a public service by allowing themselves to be sacked. Even so there was much bitter talk about how eager the bosses had been to take them on at the start of hostilities when men were scarce on the ground.

        ‘It’s all right for you,’ Maisie Wright said, as she and Polly broke their linked arms for a moment to dodge a young lad wheeling a barrow load of coal to one of the barges moored on the canal. ‘You can start up your precious carpet business again. It’s the likes of me who are up the 

Swanee. What am I supposed to do? I’m too old to go on the streets. I’d have to pay them to take me on,’ she joked.

        ‘Nay lass, you do yourself a disservice, Maggie Stubbs told her. ‘It’s experience what counts every time,’ and chuckling at her own drollness, was already yelling to her brood to ‘get t’kettle on’ even as she strode in through her own open front door.

        Perhaps, Polly thought, ready as always to look on the bright side, Maisie was right. Could this be an omen? Someone up above giving her a kick up the backside and telling her to do something different with her life. ‘Tis mebbe true,’ she agreed. ‘I could take over the carrier’s warehouse and fill it with carpets, so I could.’

        ‘Aye, that’d be grand,’ Maisie agreed, happy to go along with the fantasy. ‘You could have the swanky manager’s office and I’d be foreman and have the pleasure of giving po-faced Jack Lawson the boot. Both women enjoyed a good laugh at the prospect, but the chuckles soon faded as they neared their own doorsteps.

        ‘Well, me darlin’, the war might be over, but we still have a fight on our hands,’ Polly said, ‘if only to earn a dacent living. But then we’re expert at looking after ourselves, so we are.’

Even so as she gently closed her own front door behind her, some of the shine and laughter slipped from her face and a flicker of pain and worry seeped through.

        In no time at all it seemed, the women were back on their doorsteps doing a bit of ’camping’, revelling in the undercurrent of buzzing excitement, arms folded over their pinnies, as excited as the children at the prospect of the street party that afternoon to celebrate V.J. Day. Others sat on their window sills, the sash windows pulled down to their knees to hold them secure while they vigorously polished already gleaming glass. Today was a day when spit and polish was important, for a husband, son or father could at any minute walk in.

        At the far end of Pansy street, a young woman knelt scrubbing a doorstep, her neat figure moving with the rhythm of her effort, nose pert and mouth tight with concentration. A lock of soft brown hair fell across her brow and Lucy Shackleton pushed it away with a tired hand then sat back on her heels to survey the length of the street.

        ‘’ave you not finished yon steps yet? You want to shape thissen. I haven’t got all day.’

Lucy didn’t even need to glance up to picture the pale oval face and blackcurrant eyes watching her through the window. It was a favourite occupation of Minnie Hopkins, owner of this fine double doorstep which, as she was so often at pains to remind her, should be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you’d a mind. Lucy tried to imagine the woman pulling up her rocking chair, which she rarely left, to eat her pie and pickles off the whitened steps. It almost made her laugh out loud but Lucy smothered the eruption of giggles with the flat of her hand just in time.

        ‘Rightio, Mrs Hopkins. I’ve nearly done, then I’ll get you a nice cuppa,’ she called, as cheerfully as she could, then slid the donkey-stone with a final flourish along the edges of each step, to add an artistic touch.

        ‘You said that an hour back.’

        Lucy did not respond, merely surveyed the two steps she’d just spent the best part of an hour cleaning. She’d scrubbed them with a solution of washing soda that strong her hands were red raw, then whitened them with a donkey-stone got from the rag-and-bone man. They must be the cleanest steps in all of Pansy street and that was saying something. But then nobody in this part of Castlefield would be seen dead with a dirty doorstep, despite all the muck dropped onto them from the movement of coal from barge to warehouse and back again, not to mention factory chimneys belching smoke in this city.

        Manchester’s chief claim to fame was that although its rows of back-to-back houses might be black, its cotton was the whitest and finest in the north, if not the world; it’s men the most inventive and skilful, and its women the hardest working and most good humoured. Give or take one or two notable exceptions, Lucy thought as she rubbed at an itch and deposited a smear of dirt on one round pink cheek.