The days were getting cooler. It was darker now when Peggy and Greta walked to the warehouse. One day the supervisor came up and asked if they’d like to train to do the shop. They were very keen to do the shop. The shop looked like fun and felt like a step up. Like, maybe if they did the shop, there might be some kind of way they could get a job that paid – in a real shop. Not that the shop wasn’t real. The responsibility was huge. There was money and customers and the things to be sold in the shop, and when you worked in the shop you were responsible for all of it. Not one person but everyone who worked there was responsible together.

They met the manager at the shop so they could see the open-up. The keys were a big responsibility, so big that most of the time only the paid manager looked after them. People volunteering in the shop met the manager at eight-thirty so they could be ready to open at nine. The manager unlocked the door and the people volunteering that day came in and then it was locked again. There were usually piles of clothes outside the door, but you ignored them to start off with.

Inside, the manager would turn on the lights, because they knew where all the lights were. While the manager turned the lights on and went to the till, Peggy and Greta would go around the store and tidy up. Sometimes this was a bigger task than it should be. The people who locked up were meant to check the store for rubbish or any clothes on the floor or in strange places. They were meant to put the dresses back with dresses. The trousers with the trousers, and all the oversized clothes went in one part of the store – to save people time. Sometimes they would look at an item and not be totally sure where it went, but they were allowed to make an educated guess and it wasn’t a blaming culture. Sometimes the end of the day was busy – customers looking around right up until the last minute and wanting to buy something at three minutes to five, just before the till closed, and maybe the people who locked up had other things to get to: meetings, after-school pick-up, dates – so sometimes that first clean-up would take until ten in the morning, an hour after the shop opened. There was no way the manager could wait until the clean-up was completed to open the door. That would be crazy. There wasn’t much else to do other than clean-up. It made up the bulk of the work and it could be done while there were customers in the shop. In between cleaning up there was the labelling and eventually Peggy and Greta would be taught how to use the till.