(2)
The question now, however, seemed to be, what, with another taxi approaching and the fat man just in front of me, I was going to do.
I lifted the heavier of my suitcases. Then, with such strength as I could muster, I bashed it as hard as I could against the bend behind the fat man’s knees.
He curtsied profoundly. Before he could get his balance, I elbowed past him and, hurling my luggage into the taxi, fell headlong into the only vacant seat. A moment later we had left the station far behind.
Not a very edifying incident, you will say, considering the way I had been brought up. I couldn’t agree more.
But then, I simply had to catch that train.
(3)
The last incident in this educative journey had Wigan for its setting.
I arrived there in the dark and small hours of the morning. My sense of humour was quiescent: my vitality extremely low. Moreover, I was so tired and sleepy that when a porter with a face like something in a horror tale by Edgar Allen Poe informed me that I must cross Wigan to another station, I nearly lifted up my voice and howled.
There was no transport. The porter advised me to ‘park’ my baggage with an organization called ‘Luggage in Advance’. It might, he told me, just possibly be delivered within a week or two; provided always that it didn’t get bombed; which was, it seemed, as things were at the moment, almost too much to hope. The terms ‘parking’ and ‘Luggage in Advance’ were unfamiliar to me, but I implored the porter to do what he considered best.
I then set out, torchless and with no umbrella, into the cold and dripping fog.
To linger in Wigan is the very last thing I desire to do. My remembrance of it is too unpleasant. What befell me there shall in consequence be briefly told.
It was about as dark and foggy a night as you could wish for. For a while I floundered about, stumbling in and out of gutters and trying, unsuccessfully, to follow the porter’s directions. The station, however, appeared to have temporarily withdrawn itself from the map. At last, despairingly, I began to retrace my steps.
It was then that I realized that I had lost my way.
Now, ordinarily speaking, darkness and solitude do not alarm me. I don’t think I’m psychic, though I still hope to see a ghost before I die. So it was all the more curious that for no reason that I could think of, I suddenly became aware that I had got The Creeps. A nightmare certainty took hold of me that in the surrounding darkness some evil Thing was lurking, soaking the night with horror as a dreadful odour saturates the air.
I stood still. My knees felt wobbly with terror. I went cold and my heart thumped so hard that I began to feel slightly sick.
All round I could hear the clippety-clop of clogs as they clattered past me. Factory-workers, I supposed, on their way to the early morning shift. But their neighbourhood gave me no feeling of security. A rather frightening sense of isolation had come over me. Had an uninhabited continent separated us, I couldn’t have felt more alone. And all the time the horror grew and grew.
I must here warn anyone who hopes for thrills that they will be disappointed. Because nothing happened. I simply stood there, petrified, sweating with terror, unable to move. For I knew, beyond all possibility of doubting, that this Thing, formless, horrible, malignant, was closing in on me. Somehow or other, I had got to get away.
Possibly, if I’d held on a little longer, quite an interesting contribution might have been made to the psychic literature of to-day.
But I didn’t.
A moment came when I felt I couldn’t endure it any longer. I was long past reasoning. I just yielded to instinct, and, when at last another pair of clogs came clattering past me in the darkness, I reached out with a mighty effort and clutched frantically at the invisible passer-by.
There was—not unnaturally—a screech. A torch flashed. An instant later, an outraged factory-hand and I were glaring into one another’s eyes.
The preternatural withdrew.
With that, I’m afraid, all interest vanishes from the story. The woman at whom I’d grabbed turned out to be as kind as she was bulky—which was saying a lot. When I’d explained and apologized for my behaviour, she insisted on coming all the way to the station with me herself. For her sake I shall always feel tenderly towards the Lancastrians.
‘Eee, luv,’ she said, ‘I’ve been lost in t’fog meself before t’night.’
Well, you may, if you like, explain it by saying that my fears were due to imagination. But I don’t believe anybody could have reached the pitch of terror that I experienced that night without some authentic and even formidable cause.
When I was still a nun, I sometimes wondered, as I recited Compline, what exactly the psalmist had in mind when he spoke of the protection promised from the Noonday Devil—daemonio meridiano—and its opposite number—Negotio perambulante in tenebris—the Business That Stalketh About in the Dark.
To me there was something sinister in the way in which, instead of being described, these things were only hinted at. And I used to wonder, as I passed down the dim arched cloisters in the twilight or braved the darkness of the ancient creaking garrets on a winter night, what exactly it would feel like if one were to meet that Business alone on its perambulations.
Well, I knew now. And I had no wish at all to repeat the experience. All the same, it still strikes me as a little comic that it should have been in Wigan—of all prosaic places—that initiation should have been vouchsafed.
(4)
I reached Scoreswick at about seven in the morning.
A ticket collector with a broad Lancashire accent indicated a crowded workmen’s bus. Room was made for me, and presently we were rattling through the narrow streets of the mean little town.
I had never seen a place quite like it. Before the war, it had been a depressed area. But enemy bombs had driven an important arsenal northwards and comparative prosperity had followed. Traces of the lean years, however, still scarred its poor shops and the jerry-built houses along the ugly hill-road leading out of the town.
After passing some allotments, a cemetery and some bleak and hideous council-houses, the bus stopped at the gate of a large enclosure surrounded by a high fence of netting and barbed wire.
‘Flower Gardens,’ said the conductor. ‘You get off here.’
So I did.
My first impression was of surprise. I’d expected one hostel. Instead I found thirty. For Flower Gardens—(the name puzzled me, for neither bed nor blossom was visible)—was an enormous camp of huts. One of the great War Ministries had erected it about two years previously, to house some of the thousand or so girls conscripted for munition making at the factory on the other side of the town.
Beyond the gates I could see the huts dotted here and there on either side of the road that curved round the camp like a cinder-coloured snake. Built of rough, greyish brick, they had flat roofs, long low windows, and an outhouse for coal storage and central heating at the back. The place was honeycombed with ditches, crossed precariously by little bridges made of planks. Rank, muddy-looking field grass grew everywhere. The soil, newly turned up along the ditches, lay in moist heaps, like mouldy chocolate.
I went forward to investigate.
Everything at Flower Gardens was so strange and unfamiliar that my first days there were invested with a dream-like quality which makes them difficult to describe. Shock followed shock with a machine-gun rapidity. Before I had recovered from the first half-dozen, a hundred more were on their way.
Little by little I began to sort out certain basic facts.
Flower Gardens appeared to be run—though it actually belonged to the Ministry which financed it—by a well-known philanthropic society. This last, I was told, held itself more or less responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the girls. It owed its name to the lady who had been at the head of things since the place began. We will call her Mrs. Todd.
‘Flower Gardens,’ she told me, ‘is really England in the making. The perfect
democracy … I gave it its name because the girls work all day in such hideous surroundings: so one likes the poor dears to come back to a place which is at least beautiful in name.’
She showed me a coloured diagram pinned up on the office wall.
‘You see? Each hut is called after a different flower: Blue-bell Bank; Primrose Park; Crocus Cottage … just the sort of names that people like that choose when they have houses of their own.’
I asked her whether the girls belonged more or less to the same social class.
She said: ‘They’re an age-group, so are, of course, conscripted from different surroundings. You’ll find servants, shop-girls, flower-sellers, laundry-hands, quite a lot of mixed Irish, some thieves, a lady or two and several prostitutes. Most of them belong to what are called the working classes. One has to try and handle them according to their kind.’
We continued our tour of the camp.
The organization of the place was simple. Mrs. Todd, as Chief Warden, had as her underlings four Matrons, each responsible for several huts of girls. Every hut had its Steward—a woman supposed to combine the offices of mother and nanny, and a girl Orderly who came in daily to help with the domestic work.
There was also an enormous staff consisting of clerks, secretaries, typists, messengers, electricians, A.R.P. personnel, firemen, plumbers, carpenters, car and lorry drivers, gate porters, night-watchmen and heaven knows what besides. The sick bay had its staff of nurses and the canteen a regiment of cooks, caterers, cleaners, waitresses and workers of every kind.
Besides the girls’ huts, there were large offices and stores. The more important heads of departments had small bungalows of their own. The four Matrons, with several other officials, had quarters in the Staff Hut, where I also was given a room.
The large central building contained, besides the canteen, a dance-hall with a high curtained stage at one end; a lounge, with deep arm-chairs and cosy little tables where the girls could entertain their visitors, and a workshop in which trained teachers gave lessons in dressmaking, toymaking, leather-work and other handicrafts. The laundry, fitted with every imaginable labour-saving device for washing and drying, was a housewife’s paradise. Further on were a post and telegraph office, a store where sweets, make-up, cigarettes and papers could always be obtained, and a hairdressers’ shop where shampoos and permanent waves could be had for a nominal price.
Theatricals and games were taught and organized by experts. Really, it was not surprising that the munition-workers were called the pampered darlings of the Government.
(5)
As ‘relief’, my job was to do the work of whichever Matron might be taking her weekly day off.
After breakfasting in the canteen, one settled down in one of the Matrons’ offices to ‘see’ the Stewards. Attendance sheets, on which the girls’ pay depended, had to be checked carefully and excuses for absenteeism examined. By following up the explanations invented by these young women for their non-appearance at the factory, I learned things about their private lives and about human nature in general which I could never otherwise have believed.
I liked the Stewards. Some of them had been nannies in ‘good’ families. These knew what was what, stood no nonsense from anyone and had an excellent influence on the girls. One or two of the others were less admirable. They appeared to be feathering their nests very comfortably with a view to retirement at the end of the war.
I discovered this when they presented their ‘Requirements Lists’ at the beginning of the week for me to sign or censor. These were long catalogues of curiously named things such as Vim, Roo, Rinso, Brasso and so on which, of course, I’d never heard of before. I’d been cautioned to check these carefully, because rumour had it that certain Stewards who had relatives in Scoreswick tended to supply them so lavishly at the Government’s expense that they seldom needed to enter a shop.
I remember especially one Steward who asked every week on her list for a new chamois leather. I suggested that this was excessive. She replied that she used them for window-cleaning and that they had never before been refused to her. In the end, I found out that she made rather attractive gloves with them, which she sold for fancy prices in the town.
I remarked that I thought this dishonest, which made her very angry. Her argument was that, as a taxpayer, she helped to finance the Government and had therefore a right to anything she wanted ‘off the place’. Nothing I said could make her alter her point of view.
Sometimes the Stewards brought in hair-raising stories of the girls’ behaviour. At least, they raised my hair for the first few weeks; after which, I suppose my skin thickened, for I was able to listen without blenching to the most crudely worded tales.
I had never before seen or dreamed of anything like those girls. I used to gaze in amazement at their over-elaborate hairdressing, tight slacks and heavily made-up skins. Apparently, the ambition of every working girl in Scoreswick was to resemble as much as possible what in 1914 would have been primly and disapprovingly described as a ‘person of the demimonde’.
Later, of course, I discovered that the prototypes on which they modelled themselves were the Hollywood cuties who happened to be the idols of the hour.
‘Cutie’ … a terrible word for a terrible thing. None the less, into my rapidly growing vocabulary it had to go.
The girls worked in three shifts, of which the night-shift was the best-paid but the most unpopular. When not at work, a large part of their time was spent in capering round the dance-hall to the strains of the radiogram. Jealousy was their favourite. Even now, a few bars of that orange-coloured tango recalls memories of plump forms bursting out of oyster satin blouses, tight-seated slacks or attenuated skirts. Beneath these, stockingless legs pranced and wriggled with unfamiliar caperings.
How those legs appalled me. Strange as it may appear, I was not yet accustomed to the length of stocking that modern fashions revealed. But naked legs …
I could hardly endure to look at them.
Now and again a troupe of ENSA artists would arrive, tightly packed into enormous buses, spend a night or two at Flower Gardens and give a performance in the dance-hall for the benefit of the Camp.
On one such occasion I found myself sitting in the canteen next to a lively dark-haired woman with a good deal of makeup on her face. I like highly vitalized people, so we started talking; and, though I was faintly appalled at the amount of lipstick that stayed on her coffee-cup when she had finished drinking, I found her excellent company.
Afterwards, someone told me that my neighbour had been the famous Bebe Daniels: a fact which at that time impressed me not at all, because—believe it or not—I had never heard her name.
To my relief, I got on rather well with the girls.
Most of them were young, flighty, man-mad and excessively home-sick. Their one aim was to get as far as possible from Flower Gardens whenever their turn came round for a long week-end. They did not care how long the journey lasted provided that Mum and Dad were at the end of it. The alternative was to go off with a boy-friend to the nearest seaside town. Neither Matrons nor Stewards seemed able to prevent these lapses on the part of their Shirleys, Lily-Ivys and Marlenes.
‘They’re of age,’ a Steward said to me, ‘so you can’t control them. Once outside the camp, all they care for is to get off with their boy-friends.’
It was she who told me the story of That Eileen Hotchkiss. Six months gone she was, and nobody the wiser, till, only the other night, the Steward had grown suspicious and wormed the story out of her when she was in bed.
‘And when I asked her who the father was, she had the face to tell me that it might be any of them chaps she’d been going with since the Yankee Camp was set up. Five or six of them, there was; and what she said to me was, “the more the merrier”. Brazen, that’s what those girls are: leastways, some of them….’
Such cases were not, I was told, infrequent. When discovered, they were reported to the Chief Warden, who then made what were calle
d the ‘necessary arrangements’ for mother and child.
On the whole, though, my impression was that most of the girls were good and steady. I have said more concerning those who were not because, naturally, they gave me more to think about.
It was not really surprising that, in a place like Flower Gardens, people found it difficult to get away from sex. The atmosphere was at once tense and enervating. Everyone was living under a physical and emotional strain. It was an unnatural existence; not only the girls, but the Matrons and Stewards were entirely cut off from male companionship. People were worried to death about fathers and brothers, husbands, lovers and sons. Many were suffering keenly over the recent loss of some near relation, and, during the periods of intensive bombing, they were desperately anxious about the safety of their homes. The majority of the girls disliked their work and made little or no attempt to settle down. Was it, after all, so very surprising that, feeling as they did, herded together in a place they hated—despite the attractions provided by a Government whose slaves they had temporarily become—they often reacted regrettably to circumstances from which they were unable to escape?
I Leap Over the Wall Page 16
