The Dressmaker's War Read online

  The Dressmaker’s War is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Mary Chamberlain

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom under the title The Dressmaker of Dachau by The Borough Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2015.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Society of Authors for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. Reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors as Literary Representative of the Estate of Alfred Noyes.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chamberlain, Mary. The dressmaker’s war: a novel / Mary Chamberlain. pages cm ISBN 978-0-8129-9737-8 eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9738-5 1. Women dressmakers—Fiction. 2. Women—England—Fiction. 3. Dachau (Concentration camp)—Fiction. 4. Women in war—Fiction. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. 6. Germany—History—1933–1945—Fiction. I. Title. PR6103.H356D74 2016 823'.92—dc23 2015008154

  eBook ISBN 9780812997385

  randomhousebooks.com

  Title-page and part-title-page images: copyright © iStock.com / © dp3010, © ivan_baranov

  Book design by Victoria Wong, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Laura Klynstra

  Cover images: Deborah Pendell/Getty Images (Paris view), Mint Images/Shutterstock (sky), Jane Rix/Shutterstock (needle and thread)

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  One: London, January 1939

  Two: London, July 1945

  Three: London, November 1947

  Historical Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Mary Chamberlain

  About the Author

  Holloway Prison, February 16, 1948

  They had weighed Ada and measured her. She was eight stone three pounds, and five feet six in stockinged feet.

  She still had the slender figure of a mannequin, and a mannequin’s grace.

  The wardress handed her the thick, calico knickers with drawstrings. Ada wound the tapes fast round her thighs and waist, so nothing would leak. They would leave marks on her skin, when they came off. The wardress was biting her lip, putting on a brave face, Ada could see.

  Ada removed her glasses and placed them on the table.

  “I won’t be needing these,” she said. “Or these.” She handed the notebooks to the wardress.

  “Do something with them. I wrote it all down, what really happened in the war. What happened to women, what happened to me. The truth. Nobody wanted to hear.”

  “Are you ready?” the wardress said.

  “No,” Ada said. “No.”

  Ada peered into the broken mirror propped up on the kitchen dresser. Mouth open, tongue to attention, she plucked at her eyebrows with a pair of rusty tweezers. Winced and ouched until only a thin arc was left. She dabbed on the witch hazel, hoped the stinging would fade. Dunked her hair in clean, warm water in the old, cracked butler sink, patted it dry with a towel, and parted it along the left. Eighteen years old, more grown up this way. Middle finger, comb and straighten, index finger, crimp. Three waves down the left, five down the right, five each herringbone down the back, pin curls and a kirby grip tight to her skull, leave it to dry.

  Ada was taking her time. She opened her handbag and fished around until she found her powder, rouge, and lipstick. Not too much, in case she looked common, but enough to make her fresh and wholesome like those young girls from the Women’s League of Health and Beauty. She’d seen them in Hyde Park in their black drawers and white blouses and knew they practiced on a Saturday afternoon in the playground of Henry Fawcett’s. She might think about joining them. It was good to be supple, and slender. She could make the uniform herself. After all, she was a dressmaker now, earned good money.

  She rubbed her lips together to spread her lipstick, checked that the waves were holding their grip as her hair dried, picked up the mirror and carried it into the bedroom. The brown houndstooth skirt with the inverted pleats and the cream blouse with the enamel pin at the neck—that was smart. Good tweed, too, an offcut from Isidore, the tailor in Hanover Square. Just fifteen she was when she’d started there. Gawd, she was green, picking up pins from the floor and sweeping away fabric dustings, plimsolls gray from the chalk and her hand-me-down jacket too long in the arm. Dad said it was a sweatshop, that the fat capitalist who ran it did nothing but exploit her and she should stand up for her rights and organize. But Isidore had opened her eyes. He taught her how fabric lived and breathed, how it had a personality and moods. Silk, he said, was stubborn, lawn sullen. Worsted was tough, flannel lazy. He taught her how to cut the cloth so it didn’t pucker and bruise, about biases and selvages. He showed her how to make patterns and where to chalk and tack. He taught her the sewing machine, about yarns and threads, how to fit a newfangled zipper so it lay hidden in the seam and how to buttonhole and hem. Herringbone, Ada, herringbone. Women looking like mannequins. It was a world of enchantment. Beautiful hair and glistening gowns. Tailored knickers even. Isidore had shown Ada that world, and she wanted it for herself.

  She wasn’t there yet. What with Mum demanding a share for her keep and the bus to work and a tea cake in Lyons with the girls on payday, there wasn’t much over at the end of the week.

  “And don’t think you can come into this house and lord it around,” Mum raised a stained finger at Ada, knuckles creased like an old worm, “just because you pay your way.” Still had to do her share of the dusting and sweeping and, now she was trained up, the family’s dressmaking, too.

  Ada knew this life of scrimping and nit combs and hand-me-downs was not what she was meant for. She damped her finger and thumb with her tongue, folded down her Bemberg stockings with the fitted toe and heel, and rolled them up, crease by crease, careful you don’t snag, so the seam sat straight at the back. Quality shows. Appearances matter. So long as her top clothes looked good, nobody could touch her. Lips pinched, nose in the air, excuse me. Airs and graces, like the best of them. Ada would go far, she knew, be a somebody too.

  She propped the mirror on top of the mantelpiece and combed her hair so it settled in chestnut waves. She placed her hat, a brown felt pillbox that one of the milliners at work had made for her, on her head, nudging it forward and to the side. She slipped her feet into her new tan court shoes and, lifting the mirror and tilting it downwards, stood back to see the effect. Perfect. Modish. Groomed.

  Ada Vaughan jumped over the threshold, still damp from the scrubbing and reddening this morning. The morning sky above was thick, chimney pots coughing sooty grouts into the air. The terrace stretched the length of the street, smuts clinging to the yellow stock and to the brown net curtains struggling free from the open windows in the city-hobbled wind. She covered her nose with her hand so the murk from the Thames and the ash from the tallow melts wouldn’t fill her nostrils and leave blackened snot on the handkerchiefs she’d made for herself and embroidered in the corn
er, AV.

  Clip-clop along Theed Street, front doors open so you could see inside, respectable houses these, clean as a whistle, good address, you had to be a somebody to rent here, Mum always said. Somebody, my foot. Mum and Dad wouldn’t know a somebody if he clipped them round the ear. Somebodies didn’t sell the Daily Worker outside Dalton’s on a Saturday morning, or thumb their rosaries until their fingers grew calluses. Somebodies didn’t scream at each other, or sulk in silence for days on end. If Ada had to choose between her mother and father, it would be her father every time, for all his temper and frustrations. He wasn’t waiting for Heaven but salvation in the here and now, one last push and the edifice of prejudice and privilege would crumble and everyone would have the world that Ada yearned for. Her mother’s salvation came after death and a lifetime of suffering and bleeding hearts. Sitting in the church on Sunday, she wondered how anyone could make a religion out of misery.

  Clip-clop past the fire station and the emergency sandbags stacked outside. Past the Old Vic, where she’d seen Twelfth Night on a free seat when she was eleven years old, entranced by the glossy velvet costumes and the smell of tungsten spotlights and orange peel. She knew, just knew, there was a world enclosed on this stage with its painted-on scenery and artificial lights that was as true and deep as the universe itself. Makeup and make-believe, her heart sang for Malvolio, for he, like her, yearned to be a somebody. She kept going, down the London Road, round St. George’s Circus, and onto the Borough Road. Dad said there was going to be a war before the year was out, and Mum kept picking up leaflets and reading them out loud: When you hear the siren, proceed in an orderly fashion…

  Ada clip-clopped up to the building and raised her eyes to the letters that ran in black relief along the top. BOROUGH POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE. She fidgeted with her hat, opened and shut her bag, checked her seams were straight, and walked up the stairs. She was sticky under her arms and between her thighs, the clamminess that came from nerves, not the clean damp you got from running.

  The door to Room 35 had four glass panels in the top half. Ada peered through. The desks had been pushed to one side, and six women were standing in a semicircle in the middle. Their backs were to the door, and they were looking at someone in the front. Ada couldn’t see who. She wiped her palm down the side of her skirt, opened the door, and stepped into the room.

  A woman with large bosoms, a pearl necklace, and gray hair rolled in a bun stepped forward from the semicircle and threw open her arms. “And you are?”

  Ada swallowed. “Ada Vaughan.”

  “From the diaphragm,” the woman bellowed. “Your name?”

  Ada didn’t know what she meant. “Ada Vaughan.” Her voice crashed against her tongue.

  “Are we a mouse?” the woman boomed.

  Ada blushed. She felt small, stupid. She turned and walked to the door.

  “No, no,” the woman cried. “Do come in.” Ada was reaching for the doorknob, but the woman put her hand on Ada’s. “You’ve come this far.”

  The woman’s hand was warm and dry, and Ada saw her nails were manicured and painted pink. The woman led her back to the others, positioned her in the center of the semicircle.

  “My name is Miss Skinner.” Her words sang clear, like a melody, Ada thought, or a crystal dove. “And yours?”

  Miss Skinner stood straight, all bosom, though her waist was slender. She poised her head to the side, chin forward.

  “Say it clearly.” She smiled, nodded. Her face was kindly, after all, even if her voice was strict. “E-nun-ci-ate.”

  “Ada Vaughan,” Ada said, with conviction.

  “You may look like a swan,” Miss Skinner said, stepping back, “but if you talk like a sparrow, who will take you seriously? Welcome, Miss Vaughan.”

  Miss Skinner placed her hands round her waist. Ada knew she must be wearing a girdle. No woman her age had a figure like that without support. She breathed in Mmmmm, drummed her fingers on the cavity she made beneath her ribs, opened her mouth, Do re mi fa so. She held tight to the last note, blasting like a ship’s funnel until it left only an echo lingering in the air. Her shoulders relaxed, and she let out the rest of the air with a whoosh. It’s her bosoms, Ada thought, that’s where she must keep the air, blow them up like balloons. No one could breathe in that deep. It wasn’t natural.

  “Stand straight.” Miss Skinner stepped forward. “Chin up, bottom in.” She threaded her way through the group, came to Ada, and pushed one hand against the small of her back and with the other lifted Ada’s chin up and out.

  “Unless we stand upright”—Miss Skinner rolled her shoulders back and adjusted her bosom—“we cannot project.” She trilled her rrr’s like a Sally Army cymbal. “And if we cannot project,” Miss Skinner added, “we cannot pronounce.”

  She turned to Ada. “Miss Vaughan, why do you wish to learn elocution?”

  Ada could feel the heat crawl up her neck and prickle her ears, knew her face was turning red. She opened her mouth, but couldn’t say it. Her tongue folded in a pleat. I want to be a somebody. Miss Skinner nodded anyway. She’d seen the likes of Ada before. Ambitious.

  “I THOUGHT YOU were one of the customers,” the Honorable Mrs. Buckley had said, “when I saw you standing there, looking so smart.” Taken for one of the customers. Imagine. She’d been only eighteen years old when she started there last September. Ada had learned fast.

  The Honorable Mrs. Buckley traded under the name Madame Duchamps. Square-hipped and tall, with painted nails and quiet earrings, she dazzled with her talk of couture and atelier and Paris, pah! She would flip through the pages of Vogue and conjure ball gowns and cocktail dresses from bolts of silk and chenille, which she draped and pinned round slender debutantes and their portly chaperones.

  Ada had learned her trade from Isidore and her nerve from Mrs. B., as the other girls all called her. Where Isidore had been wise and kind and funny, genuine, Mrs. B. was crafted through artifice. Ada was sure the Honorable Mrs. Buckley was neither an Hon. nor a Mrs., and her complexion was as false as her name, but that didn’t stop Mrs. B. What she didn’t know about the female form and the lie of a fabric was not worth writing on a postage stamp.

  Mrs. B. was a step up from Isidore. Paris. That was the city Ada aimed to conquer. She’d call her house Vaughan. It was a modish name, like Worth, or Chanel, but with British cachet. That was another word she’d learned from Mrs. B. Cachet. Style and class, rolled into one.

  “Where did you learn all this French, madame?” The girls always had to call her “madame” to her face.

  Mrs. B. had given a knowing smile, her head pivoting on the tilt of her long neck. “Here and there,” she said. “Here and there.”

  Fair dues to Mrs. B., she recognized in Ada a hard worker, and a young woman with ambition and talent. Aitches present and correct without aspiration, haspiration, Ada was made front-of-house, Madame Duchamps’s in-store, fresh-faced mannequin, and the young society ladies began to turn to her, rather than Mrs. B., whose complexion and waistline grew thicker by the day, to model their clothes.

  “Mademoiselle,” Mrs. B. would say. “Slip on the evening gown.”

  “The douppioni, madame?”

  Midnight blue with a halter neck. Ada would lean into her hips and sway across the floor, swirl so her naked back drew the eye, and that eye would marvel at the drape of the fabric as it swallowed the curve of her figure, out and in, and fanned in a fishtail. She’d turn again and smile.

  “And now the chiffon.”

  Veils of mystery and a taffeta lining, oyster and pearl and precious lusters. Ada loved the way the clothes transformed her. She could be fire, or water, air or earth. Elemental. Truthful. This was who she was. She would lift her arms as if to embrace the heavens, and the fabric would drift in the gossamer breeze; she would bend low in a curtsy, then unfold her body like a flower in bloom, each limb a sensuous, supple petal.

  She was the center of adoration, a living sculpture, a work of art. A creator, too. She woul
d smile and say, “But if you tuck it here, or pleat it there, then voilà.” With a flourish of her long, slim fingers and that new, knowing voilà, Ada would add her own touch to one of Mrs. B.’s designs and make it altogether more modern, more desirable. Ada knew Mrs. B. saw her as an asset, recognized her skills and taste, her ability to lure the customers and charm them with an effortless eloquence, thanks to Miss Skinner’s skillful tutoring.

  “If you cut on the bias,” Ada would say, holding up the dress length on the diagonal to a customer, “you can see how it falls, like a Grecian goddess.”

  She draped the fabric across the breast, a single, naked shoulder rising like a mermaid from a chiffon sea.

  “Non, non, non.” Mrs. B. tut-tutted, spoke in French when Ada pushed the limits of decency. “That will not do, mademoiselle. This is not for the boudoir but the ball. Decorum, decorum.”

  She’d turned to her client. “Miss Vaughan is still a little inexperienced, naïve, in the subtler points of social correctness.”

  Naïve she might be, but Ada was good publicity for Madame Duchamps, modiste, of Dover Street, and Ada had hopes that one day she could be more than an asset but a partner in the business. She had developed a respectable following. Her talent marked her out, the flow and poise of her design distinguished her. She conjured Hollywood and the glamorous world of the stars and brought them into the drawing rooms of the everyday. Ada became her designs, a walking advertisement for them. The floral day dress, the tailored suit, the manicured nails, and the simple court shoes; she knew she was watched as she left the shop and sauntered west down Piccadilly, past the Ritz and Green Park. She would clip-clop along, chin in the air, pretending she might live in Knightsbridge or Kensington, until she knew she was free of curious eyes. Then finally she turned south, clip-clopped over Westminster Bridge and into Lambeth and past the sniggering urchins who stuck their noses in the air and teetered behind her on imaginary heels.