Church Street, by Winifred Askew
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
Madame Rosalind’s on Church Street sold hats to the kind of women who did not ask the price, and on her first morning there, in the spring of 1923, Edie Marsh, who was fifteen, was told that she would not be selling anything at all.
‘You will dust,’ said Madame, in an accent that went up at the end of every sentence like a curl of ribbon. ‘You will hold ze door. You will say good morning to ze ladies, and nothing else.’
Madame was a tall, powdered woman in black silk who had come, she let it be known, from Paris. She spoke to customers as though she were doing them a great favour by allowing them to buy anything at all. To Edie she spoke very little. Edie dusted the hat stands, held the door and kept her mouth shut, which was not easy, because she had opinions about hats.
At one o’clock Madame went to lunch, leaving Edie alone with strict instructions to tell anyone who came that the shop was closed. At ten past one the door opened anyway, and in came a lady in grey furs who did not look like a person who had ever been told a shop was closed.
‘I am going to a wedding at three,’ said the lady, ‘and I look like a disappointed horse. Help me.’
Edie meant to say that the shop was closed. Instead she found herself bringing out the hats, one after another, and the lady tried them on and pulled faces at herself in the long mirror. None of them would do. Then Edie remembered the hat on the back peg in the workroom, a small dark-green felt with a single pheasant feather curving over the brim. It had no ticket. It was the best hat in the building.
The lady put it on and stopped pulling faces. ‘How much?’
Edie had no idea. She named the largest sum she could think of. The lady paid it in notes, without blinking, and walked out into Church Street looking like nobody’s horse at all.
Madame came back at two. She hung up her coat, went into the workroom, and came out again quite slowly.
‘Where,’ she said, ‘is my hat?’
When Edie told her, Madame’s face went through several colours. And then a remarkable thing happened. The accent fell off her like a dropped glove.
‘You daft little article,’ said Madame Rosalind, in the purest Peckham. ‘That was my going-home hat. I’ve had that hat since the Armistice.’
Edie stood by the door with her hands clasped and waited to be sent home. She was still waiting at half past four when the lady in grey furs came back, flushed with wedding champagne, with three friends behind her. They had all, it seemed, admired the hat. They each wanted one exactly like it, and they wanted the young lady who had chosen it to choose the colours.
Madame took the orders herself, with the accent firmly back in place. When the friends had gone she turned the sign on the door to Closed and looked at Edie for a long time.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said at last, ‘you will come in at eight, not half past. And Edith?’
‘Yes, Madame?’
‘Not a word about Peckham.’
“Edie is presented as a foolish and naive girl who is lucky to keep her job.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.
40 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 1.3.6 Reflecting critically and evaluatively on text. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.