A Liverpool Legacy Read Online Free PDF

she’d said. She’d applied for the job and was delighted when she got it. They gave her a white coat to wear over her own clothes and she went home in the evenings with the scent of exotic perfumes in her hair.
    Millie was fifteen when she started working for William C. Maynard and Sons. It was a small family firm with premises near Liverpool’s Brunswick Dock and an enviable reputation for its luxury products. She had always loved its scented soaps and talcum powders, as had half of England. The firm found its customers amongst the wealthy.
    Pete called it a one-horse firm because they made nothing from scratch. Instead they bought in the best quality half-prepared materials from companies that manufactured in bulk. Their soap was bought in pure shreds from a firm in Widnes and their raw material for talc was a rock-like lumpy powder from France.
    What Maynard’s did so well was to add exotic perfumes and colour, and shape the soap into large luxurious tablets finished to the highest possible standard. They were wrapped to look elegant and were advertised in the ladies’ magazines that were gaining popularity in the late years of Queen Victoria’s reign.
    Millie found she’d been hired to keep the equipment clean and be a general dogsbody. She was expected to follow Arthur Knowles, the chemist in charge, round the lab as he worked on the perfumes, helping where she could. As they moved along, he explained what he was doing and why, and he was happy to answer her questions. He recognised her interest and did his best to encourage her. She felt she’d entered a new world that was truly absorbing and was soon very content in her new job. Mr Knowles was gentle and kind and treated her like a fond child.
    She felt she had everything she could possibly want. The other young girls working near her in the office admired her handsome boyfriend, they thought Ryan McCarthy quite a catch. The only flaw was that her mother’s health continued to deteriorate and she didn’t approve of Ryan. ‘He’s wild,’ she said, ‘but perhaps he’ll quieten down and grow out of it.’
    Most of the working day Millie spent in the laboratory with Mr Knowles, and he was friendly with other members of staff who came into the department to chat from time to time. In the lunch break one or two would drop in to eat their sandwiches round his desk. Millie made the tea and pulled up a chair to listen to their conversation. Soon she was joining in.
    She discovered that the boss, Peter Maynard, took a great interest in the perfumes they made, coming occasionally to work with them. It was he who decided which of the scents would be used in the products the company made.
    She learned that every lunchtime many of the senior staff went to a small dockland café called Parker’s Refreshment Rooms in the next street. They spoke approvingly of the food there. One day Mr Maynard asked if she knew the place.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I walk past it twice a day, delicious scents drift out but I’ve never been inside.’ She’d never had a hot meal anywhere but at home.
    There was white lettering across the Refreshment Rooms’ window: ‘Large Helpings, Good Hot Meals Served Every Day, at Everyday Prices’. Millie was fascinated by the blackboard standing outside displaying the day’s menu: Irish hotpot, beef stew and dumplings, casseroled mutton chops, apple pie and custard, rice pudding with rhubarb. It made Millie’s mouth water just to read it.
    In the week before Christmas, Millie was thrilled when Mr Maynard brought round two of the fancy boxes of soap and talc made in the factory to catch the Christmas gift trade, and swept her and Mr Knowles out to lunch in Parker’s Refreshment Rooms. That day, there was roast pork with stuffing and roast potatoes followed by Christmas pudding.
    ‘I’ve got two daughters pretty much your age,’ Peter Maynard told Millie. He had a way of looking at her and teasing her gently. She liked him, he was popular