A Woman's Place

by Maggie Ford

  Eveline had never had Connie turn on her like this before, but realising her own words had had the desired effect, she took the abuse without retaliation as the distraught girl fell into her arms in a fit of weeping and choking apology. When it finally abated, Connie was in control of herself again. There was still the pain of having lost her brother and suffering because of her parents’ rejection of her efforts at reconciliation, but she was at least coping again.

  ‘You must have thought me a big baby,’ she called over to Eveline above the deafening whirr and rumble of machinery two weeks later as, like two automatons, they fitted shell case after shell case into the hungry mouth of their screw-threading machines.

  ‘Not at all,’ Eveline shouted back, deftly and swiftly with drawing her finished casing to drop it clanging on to the growing pile in a box on her right which was waiting to be taken away, and lifting another from the pile on her left to insert into the noisily whirring aperture.

  Since her outburst Connie seemed to have grown so much stronger. Even when another letter arrived from her sister two weeks later saying that their father had suffered a mild heart attack, probably brought on by the shock of losing his eldest son, she hadn’t broken down or even flinched.

  Verity had said that their other brother Herbert had been so upset by Denzil’s death that he’d gone straight to the recruiting office and signed on.

  ‘He was seventeen only last week,’ Verity wrote. ‘But he ignored all Father’s efforts to make him either admit his age to the recruiting officer or agree to officer cadet training for when he is old enough. He says that if he interferes he will join the Merchant Navy, which will take him at that age, and you know how our ships are constantly being torpedoed. There’s nothing Father can do. Not only that, Herbert has signed on as an ordinary private soldier. I don’t understand why he’d want to do that? He must be mad.’

  Defiance: the thought came to Eveline as the letter was read out to her. He was still treated as a child, his parents still telling him what to do when his brother, just sixteen months older than he, had been killed in a foreign land. Now he’d rebelled, just as Connie had rebelled against her life being mapped out for her regardless of whether she was happy or not.

  ‘I have to write to my mother again,’ Connie said. ‘I’m being quite level-headed about it,’ she interrupted as Eveline lifted a warning hand. ‘She must be feeling utterly beside herself, losing a son, then Herbert joining up and now my father having a heart attack. She must be going through a terrible time. But if she can’t bring herself to reply, then at least I’ve done my duty.’

  Eveline suspected she was feeling it more deeply than she admitted. She was surprised when Connie came to show her a letter from her mother.

  ‘I suppose it is a start,’ she said coolly, but there was a slight tremble to her voice and Eveline knew why as it was handed to her to read.

  It was the worst letter she thought she’d ever read, filled with unjust condemnation of Connie’s apparent coldness over the years, her audacity in holding herself aloof after walking out as she had done and thumbing her nose at them when her father had only had her best interests at heart in seeking a worthy match for her. The letter even intimated that her action could have started her father’s heart condition, ending by saying he was recovering slowly but not to continue corresponding, for she’d never be forgiven for what she’d done.

  ‘How can any mother write such stuff?’ Eveline burst out, a little more understanding of how Connie must feel, but Connie remained cool.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’ve done what I set out to do and have at least jarred her into replying. And I can rest, knowing my father is getting better. If I hadn’t written and something had happened to him I would never have forgiven myself.’

  Summer was creeping on and it seemed the war was as far away as ever from being won. After two years of it, the government was now introducing conscription.

  ‘George should have waited,’ Connie complained as they left the factory. ‘He would have had two more years at home and Rebecca would have had a real family, rather than as it is now, being pushed from pillar to post while her mother is working.’

  Albert could have done the same but there was no point making a fuss over it. ‘Well, what’s done is done,’ Eveline sighed.

  But Connie was right about their daughters. After collecting them they’d take them home, to their supper, put them to bed, then settle down for the evening if they’d made no arrangements to go out anywhere, then go to bed themselves ready for the next morning back at the factory. It all meant no family life at all for a child, both girls being deprived of their right to childhood in a proper family.

  ‘Perhaps it’s fate,’ she went on, trying to be philosophical. ‘If Albert and George had waited to be called up now, who’s to say they might not walk straight into a German bullet the moment they were sent to France? You know, the wrong place at the wrong time, or something like that.’

  Connie gave her a look as if to say she was obviously talking out of her hat, so she sighed and said no more.

  She could say her brother Len had turned out to be in either the wrong place at the wrong time or the right place at the right time depending on how one looked at it, news arriving around April of his being wounded, then shipped down river to a Basra hospital. Finally he returned home in June minus a leg. It was terrible but at least he was alive.

  ‘Damned thing went gangrene,’ he’d said as he sat in the rickety hospital wheelchair with the family around him, holding Flossie’s hand as she fussed over him. ‘Nothing they could do except chop it off.’

  He said little else about his experiences but there was much in the papers describing such fearful conditions out there as made a person cringe to read – wounded lying untreated in a primitive Basra hospital with hardly any medical supplies – it was a wonder he’d survived at all.

  ‘One of the lucky ones ter tell the truth,’ he said when he was finally discharged. ‘A couple of weeks after I got this Blighty one, the whole bloody thirty thousand of my lot surrendered ter the Turks. God knows ’ow them poor sods must be faring, knowing that lot. I can only say thanks for this.’ He touched his bandaged stump. ‘All I can say is it’s a bleedin’ ill wind what blows no one any good,’ he quoted in all sincerity.

  Other than that, he refused to be drawn any further on all he must have gone through, but it was there in his eyes even as he laughed off his disability, saying at least he’d never be sent back. Two weeks later he and Flossie became officially engaged.

  Not long after that Connie was in tears again, this time for her sister, whose letter was written in mid-July from her parents’ home. Verity’s husband had been excellent officer material, a captain, but a high-explosive shell appeared to have little respect for class.

  ‘He was killed that first day of the Somme offensive, the first of July, but she’s only now been able to bring herself to tell me.’

  Connie bit back her tears. ‘She must be devastated. She’s staying with our parents for the time.’

  ‘Will you write to her?’ Eveline asked. Every time she heard of a death she thought of Albert, thanked God he was still unharmed and prayed he’d remain so. Sometimes it seemed a miracle that he was still unscathed when thousands of men were being killed and wounded, some horrifically.

  Connie shook her head to her question. ‘I’m not certain. I know how the post works in that house – if they still have a butler, he takes it straight to my father to open. If that’s still being done then anything I write to her will be seen by him. There’s no way I can correspond with her while she is there.’

  ‘Surely he can’t do that,’ Eveline said, shocked. ‘She’s a grown woman, married, it’s her letter and she’s grieving. Surely she needs a kind word, even from you.’

  Connie’s face tightened. ‘You don’t know my father,’ she said bitterly.

  But she did write. ‘I didn’t really expect a reply,’ she said when ther
e was none. ‘Not while she’s there with them.’

  Her face twisted as she looked up suddenly. ‘Eveline, whatever shall I do if that happened to George?’

  But Eveline had her own mind on Albert. What would she do if anything happened to him, despite her prayers?

  August and September with the endless to-ing and fro-ing of fighting the length of the Western Front, the daily newspaper reports of casualties – one hundred and twenty-seven thousand in August alone making readers gasp in horror – crept by for Eveline. Each day she dreaded the arrival of a telegram and felt abject gratitude as another day ended uneventfully with the drawing of her curtains on the long twilight of Daylight Saving, introduced in May. Clocks had been brought forward an extra hour in a drive to save hundreds of thousands of tons of coal much needed for industry.

  Before they knew it, it was autumn, British Summer Time, as it was now called, come to an end until next year, making the nights draw in with alarming suddenness with the clocks going back overnight.

  Their third Christmas of the war was almost upon them. They were at one and the same time heartened by the news of Allied forces breaking the German lines on the Somme and horrified by the November death toll of six hundred and fifty thousand Allies and only five hundred thousand Germans, but with both Albert and George it seemed still leading charmed lives.

  Despite the almost nightly hum of Zeppelins, the explosion as a bomb fell, often too close for comfort, the bleak, expressionless faces of those who had probably had that dread telegram from the front, the rising cost of food which was beginning to be in short supply anyway, and the still-continuing stalemate in the trenches, somehow life went on.

  There was a change of Prime Minister, Asquith stepping down to give way to Lloyd George, who was voicing his decision to form a new government dedicated to a more vigorous prosecution of the war.

  ‘I hope that means he’ll find a way to end it,’ Connie said, her tone full of doubt even so. ‘The longer it goes on, the more chance there is of George or Albert being … well, you know.’

  With the children they’d gone to the pictures together to see a Buster Keaton film and forget the war for an hour or so. But the moment they emerged, their minds went straight to it again.

  ‘I try not to think about things like that,’ Eveline lied brusquely, neatly ending that turn of conversation as she huddled inside her coat against the snow flurries, leaving her legs exposed to the chill.

  Fashions had changed, with low necklines and higher hemlines. With more money in their purse, she and Connie could afford fashionable clothes, enjoying displaying slim ankles and the lower half of those shapely calves previously hidden from view.

  One who had noticed her calves was their factory inspector, Mr John Hewitt, a young man in his late twenties, single, but who’d been kept out of the army by a perforated eardrum. He told her this after she asked why he was still a civilian. He’d become angry, his narrow face twisting into a dark frown that had her sympathising with him.

  ‘I tried to join up,’ he told her as she and Connie sat eating their sandwiches together with the other women at lunchtime. ‘I tried to pretend there was nothing wrong with me but they found out. I’m now frightened to even go out in case I’m confronted by some virago of a woman brandishing a white feather in my face. It happens quite frequently, you know. Perhaps people like me should be given a badge saying what’s wrong with us.’

  It hadn’t been a joke, but Eveline had laughed, making his dark look break into a dashing smile. She had been drawn to that smile; it was so seldom one saw a young man smiling these days. She missed Albert’s smile, longed for his arms about her, felt empty of love and comfort. It was good to talk to John Hewitt. They talked about ordinary things during the dinner breaks, ignoring the war, he telling her about his life with his mother, his father having died of some chest complaint years ago. His mother had never remarried. He spoke of his upbringing as an only child, of his hobbies, one of which was woodworking; she talked about Albert and their daughter, aware that she now saw Helena as his daughter.

  ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’ she asked him when they returned to work after the so-called festive season.

  It had been as good as they could possibly make it as they ate their less sumptuous Christmas dinner this year. The singsong afterwards hadn’t been half as jolly as last year’s, the songs more plaintive: ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’, and ‘Take me Back to Dear Old Blighty’, before they had settled down for the usual games of cards.

  ‘It was quiet,’ he said as he munched his cheese sandwich. Connie had turned her back on them to talk to her workmates. ‘Just me and my mother. We don’t mix with many people.’

  Reading between his words, Eveline strongly suspected him of being dominated by his mother with never a chance of breaking free.

  She suddenly felt sorry for him. He seemed a lonely young man, kept out of the army that would have made him strong and confident and given him pals.

  When he asked her if she’d go to the pictures with him, just friendly like, she agreed. With most of the men away fighting, his must be a lonely existence. ‘But just the once,’ she warned. As a married woman, going to see a film with a man wasn’t something she should be doing. ‘And don’t get the idea there’s anything in it, either.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, to her relief. She would go just this once, no more, just out of kindness really.

  She picked an evening when she wasn’t seeing Connie, asking her next-door neighbour if she’d come in to keep an eye on Helena for two hours.

  ‘I’m seeing a cousin of mine, going off to France,’ she told her, which was quite readily accepted.

  It was quite nice sitting beside a man in the darkened cinema. He had bought her a bag of peanuts which they both ate, the cracking of the shells no interruption to the silent film. She’d feared he might put an arm about her but he sat perfectly still beside her, engrossed and amused by the antics of Charlie Chaplin. Afterwards he walked her to the bus stop, moving back with a small goodbye wave as she stepped on the bus.

  What am I doing, came the thought as she settled down on the seat. Albert was fighting for his country in a foreign land and she was going to the pictures with another man. This had to stop, right now. She got off the bus at the other end determined that there’d be no more outings with him.

  She refused his next invitation to a theatre though the refusal served to heighten the emptiness she felt. She longed to be taken out and about by someone. She so longed for Albert to fill that void; the invitation emphasised the loneliness of her life so much that it would be so easy and tempting to accept.

  What she’d tried to guard against happened on a February day as she hung up her coat in the women’s cubicle. Connie had gone on ahead with a group of others, leaving her on her own.

  John Hewitt came by just as she was about to follow. He paused at the opening to the factory, the noise already deafening, innocently barring her way, his coat ready to hang up in the men’s section.

  ‘I didn’t see you there,’ he said, hovering before the now-deserted area. ‘I’m a bit late this morning. My mother wasn’t too well.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, making to pass him, but he touched her arm, making her hesitate.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask, would you come out with me one night this week?’

  She shook her head. ‘I told you, John, our going to the pictures was just that one time. I shouldn’t have. It could have started up all sorts of problems.’ She realised that his hand still lay lightly on her arm. The hand seemed to tremble.

  ‘Eveline, I can’t help what I feel about you,’ he whispered. ‘I feel … I feel very strange. I feel …’

  He was leaning close to her, and with her heart thumping, her throat tight, the lonely emptiness inside began to mount as, hidden by the coats hanging on wall hooks and free-standing racks, she could hear his rapid panting mingling with hers.

  Seconds later she
returned to her senses with a jolt. With all her strength she gave him a mighty push, sending him staggering into one of the racks, almost knocking it over.

  Frantically he steadied it as she shouted her anger at him. Then he was moving away, stammering that he was sorry, he couldn’t imagine what had come over him. She stood silent as he hurried from the cloak area.

  She was still there when Connie came in a few minutes later to see where she had got to. Seeing her strained expression she asked if she was feeling ill.

  ‘I came over a bit faint,’ she answered and had Connie come to look closer at her, studying her face which she felt must be unnaturally flushed.

  ‘You don’t look very well.’

  ‘No, I’m all right now,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Just a passing thing, but I thought I’d better stay here until I felt better.’

  ‘It’s this work,’ said Connie. ‘It’s too much. It can get you down. I really pray this war doesn’t go on for much longer or we’ll all be falling ill. Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she insisted, glad to see that Connie finally seemed convinced. How could she have been so silly?

  Over the coming week she felt deeply ashamed of what she had nearly allowed to happen. It felt unwholesome too, as if she must have seemed no better than a common slut for him to think he could take advantage of her like that.

  Now she couldn’t look at him without feeling creepy all over. He too appeared ill at ease and avoided her eyes if ever they met. Unable to believe that she could have actually let herself get into such a situation to warrant that sort of attention, she even thought of leaving her job with some excuse or other. But it was he who left. She didn’t know where he’d gone, and wondered if he’d perhaps tried again to join up.

  Connie remarked after he’d left, ‘He was an odd sort of person, don’t you think? He was quite friendly at lunchtimes and then without cause he began to behave as though we’d done him some injury. Strange, leaving so suddenly. I wonder why? Did he say anything to you?’