It could be tough. As Katherine Schaub had observed in Newark, the girls were under a lot of pressure. If a worker failed to keep up, she was criticised; if she fell short repeatedly, she eventually lost her job. The only time the girls really saw Mr Savoy, whose office was downstairs, was when he came to scold them.
The biggest issue was the wasting of the paint. Each day, Miss Rooney issued a set amount of powder to the girls for completing a particular number of dials – and they had to make it last. They could not ask for more, but neither could they eke it out; if the numerals were not sufficiently covered by the material, it would show up during inspection. The girls took to helping each other out, sharing material if one found she had a little extra left over. And there were also their water dishes, filled with the radium sediment. Those, too, could be a source of extra material.
But the cloudy water hadn’t gone unnoticed by the company bosses. Before too long, the crucibles for cleaning the brushes were removed with the explanation that too much valuable material was wasted in the water. Now the girls had no choice but to lip-point, as there was no other way to clean off the radium that hardened on the brush. As Edna Bolz observed, ‘Without so doing it would have been impossible to have done much work.’
The girls themselves were also targeted in the drive to limit waste. When a shift was over and they were about to leave for home, they were summoned to the darkroom to be brushed off: the ‘sparkling particles’ were then swept from the floor into a dustpan for use the next day.
But no amount of brushing could get rid of all the dust. The girls were covered in it: their ‘hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial-painters were luminous’. Edna Bolz remembered that even after the brushing down, ‘When I would go home at night, my clothing would shine in the dark . . . you could see where I was – my hair, my face.’ The girls shone ‘like the watches did in the darkroom’, as though they themselves were timepieces, counting down the seconds as they passed. They glowed like ghosts as they walked home through the streets of Orange.
They were unmissable. Unassailable. The residents of the town noticed not just the wraith-like shine but also the expensive, glamorous clothes, for the girls dressed in silks and furs, ‘more like matinee idlers than factory workers’, a perk of their high wages.
Despite the attractions of the job, however, it wasn’t for everyone. Some found the paint made them sick; one woman got sores on her mouth after just a month of working there. Though the girls all lip-pointed, they did so at different intervals, which perhaps accounted for the varying reactions. Grace Fryer found that ‘I could do about two numbers before the brush dried’, whereas Edna Bolz lip-pointed on every number, sometimes even two or three times per number. Quinta Maggia did the same, even though she hated the taste: ‘I remember chewing [the paint] – gritty – it got between my teeth. I remember it distinctly.’
Katherine Schaub was one of the more infrequent pointers; only four or five times per watch would she slip the brush between her lips. Nonetheless, when she suddenly broke out in pimples – which could have been due to her hormones, for she was still only fifteen – she was perhaps mindful of some of her colleagues’ adverse reactions, as she decided to consult a doctor.
To her concern, he asked her if she worked with phosphorus. This was a well-known industrial poison in Newark and it was a logical suspicion – but it made Katherine feel anything but logical and calm. For it wasn’t only her acne that caused the doctor concern: there were changes, he noted, in Katherine’s blood. Was she sure she didn’t work with phosphorus?
The girls weren’t entirely clear what was in the paint. Flummoxed by her doctor’s questions, Katherine turned to her colleagues. When she told them what her physician had said, they became frightened. En masse, they confronted Mr Savoy, who tried to allay their fears, but this time his words about the paint being harmless fell on deaf ears.
And so, as any middle manager would do, he went to his managers. Soon after, George Willis came over from New York to lecture the girls on radium and convince them it was not dangerous; von Sochocky also participated. There was nothing hazardous in the paint, the doctors promised: the radium was used in such a minuscule amount that it could not cause them harm.
And so the girls turned back to their work, their shoulders a little lighter, Katherine probably feeling a bit sheepish that her teenage spots had caused such bother. Her skin cleared up, and so too did the minds of the dial-painters. When one of the greatest radium authorities in the world tells you that you have no need to worry, quite simply, you don’t. Instead, they laughed about the effect the dust had on them. ‘Nasal discharges on my handkerchief,’ Grace Fryer remembered, ‘used to be luminous in the dark.’ One dial-painter, known as a ‘lively Italian girl’, painted the material all over her teeth one night before a date, wanting a smile that would knock him dead.
Those budding romances of the girls were now coming into full flower. Hazel and Theo were as close as ever, and Quinta started courting a young man called James McDonald – but it was Mae Cubberley who became a winter bride on 23 December 1917. As was traditional, she wanted to leave work right away, but Mr Savoy asked her to stay a little longer, so she was still in the studio when Sarah Maillefer signed on that same month.
Sarah was a little different to the other girls. For a start, she was older at twenty-eight: a shy, matronly woman who often seemed a little separate from the teenagers, though they were inclusive of her. Sarah was broad-shouldered with short dark hair – and those shoulders needed to be broad, for she was also a single mother. She had a six-year-old daughter, Marguerite, named after Sarah’s little sister.
Sarah had married, back in 1909. Her husband, Henry Maillefer, was a tall, French-Irish sexton with black hair and black eyes. But Henry had disappeared; where he was now, nobody knew. And so Sarah and Marguerite still lived with her mom and pop, Sarah and Stephen Carlough, as well as her sister Marguerite, who was sixteen. Stephen was a painter and decorator, and the family were ‘hard-working, reasonable’ people. Sarah, too, was hard-working, and would become one of the most loyal employees the radium company had.