The sergeant stood at the top of the table and looked around the room until there was hush. ‘On behalf of myself and the lads, I would like to thank you all. It’s been a long time since any of us have sat down with friends to eat. And, because we’re going overseas in the New Year, it may be a long time until we do it again. I think I speak for every soldier here when I say we will never forget what you did for us today. The next time we sit down with friends, wherever it is and whenever it is, we will remember today and every one of you.’ He looked at his fellow soldiers. ‘Look sharp, lads, it’s time we were on our way.’
The soldiers pushed back their chairs and stood to attention. As they made their way to the door, they shook the hands of the children nearest to them and saluted those who were further away. At the door, they turned as one and saluted Bess and the women of the land army, who were gathered around the piano.
‘Time we made a move too,’ Ena’s father said.
The Dudley family – except Bess, who lived-in at Foxden Hall – said goodbye and put on their outdoor clothes.
The walk home was pleasant. Ena and Claire, arm in arm, followed their parents along the lane, leaving their footprints in the newly laid snow.
The following morning, Bess arrived in Lady Foxden’s Rover to take Claire to the station. Ena and her parents waited by the front door to say goodbye. ‘Your coat,’ her father said, taking it from the hook in the hall and helping Claire into it. ‘Let me take your bag for you.’
He put the bag on the back seat of the car. ‘Come home and see us soon, love,’ her father said, opening the front passenger door.
‘I will.’ Claire kissed her father and mother goodbye, promising to write soon. Hugging Ena, Claire whispered, ‘Keep up the sensitive work. I’m proud of you, our Ena.’
The relationship between Ena and Claire had always been competitive. They were close in age but opposites in temperament. No sooner had Claire arrived home on Christmas Eve than she and Ena were arguing. Both did work they couldn’t discuss – Claire’s secret, Ena’s sensitive. Once that was established, they quickly became friends again.
Reading between the lines, Ena understood that Claire did a dangerous job. ‘Be careful,’ she said, doing her best not to cry.
Claire winked at her youngest sister. ‘I always am,’ she said, dropping onto the passenger seat. Bess put the car into gear and pulled into the lane. Ena waved until the Rover turned onto the main Lowarth road and disappeared.
The winter was harsh. Snow fell almost every day, and for much of the time, the temperature was below zero. Because of black ice, which was causing havoc on the roads, Ena and her friends from the factory decided to stay in Lowarth and go to a dance for New Year’s Eve.
Ena’s friend, Beryl Clark, persuaded her father to take them into Lowarth before the dance and pick them up afterwards. He was one of only three taxis in the area, and as the Clarks lived in Woodcote and had to drive past Ena’s parents’ cottage on the Foxden estate, Mr Clark was often called upon to give lifts to the Dudley sisters.
Ena and Beryl met Freda and Madge in the smoke room of The Hind Hotel. Freda, already at the bar, shouted, ‘Port and lemon, ladies?’
‘Not for Beryl,’ Ena mouthed.
‘Yes please,’ Beryl said, standing on Ena’s toe. ‘Sorry,’ she giggled.
‘It isn’t funny, Beryl. You’re underage. If Freda’s caught buying alcohol for you, she’ll be in trouble.’
‘I’m not underage. I’m almost not.’ Beryl leaned forward and looked into Ena’s face. ‘If I can drive Dad’s taxi, I’m sure I can have one drink,’ she said, her nose almost touching Ena’s. The next round’s on me,’ she laughed, as she and Ena joined Madge and Freda at a table near the fire.
The four friends chatted animatedly, telling each other what they had done over Christmas. Madge told them about a boy she’d met at her aunt’s house on Boxing Day. ‘He’s the son of my aunt’s neighbour, on leave from the navy, his name’s Harry and he’s asked me to write to him when he goes back to his ship,’ she said, without taking a breath. Everyone was pleased for Madge who, although she was the prettiest of them, was so shy she found it difficult to talk to the opposite sex. ‘It was just the best Boxing Day ever,’ Madge sighed.
Ena told them about lunch at Foxden Hall, the army lorry breaking down, and the soldiers coming up to the Hall for tea.
‘Christmas Day at our house was a washout,’ Beryl said. ‘What about you, Freda? What did you do over Christmas?’
‘Sorry?’
‘That good, was it?’ Beryl joked.
‘What?’
‘Christmas. What did you do at Christmas?’
‘I spent it with my uncle in Northampton. We had a traditional English Christmas. We went for walks, sat by a roaring fire, pulled crackers, and ate turkey.’
Madge, leaned forward. She’s waiting for the exciting bit, Ena thought, but by the abrupt way Freda stopped speaking, she had nothing more to say. Ena looked across the table at Beryl. She could tell by the glazed look in her young friend’s eyes that she was bored. ‘It’s seven o’clock. Time to make a move if we want to sit at a table. You know what the Town Hall’s like; it gets busy really early.’ Everyone agreed and, gathering their belongings, followed Ena out of the Hind and across the road to the Town Hall.
The entrance hall was packed with girls queuing for the cloakroom and toilet. Ena, Freda, Madge and Beryl waited in line, shuffling forward every few seconds.
When Ena eventually got to the front of the queue, she took off her coat and handed it to the cloakroom girl who gave her a ticket with number 75 on it. Ena put the ticket in her handbag for safekeeping. She would need it at the end of the dance to reclaim her coat.
The four friends each paid the two shillings entrance fee and went upstairs to the dance room. Beryl, eager to find a table, pushed past half a dozen girls who were huddled together deciding which table would give them the best view of the band. By the time they had made up their minds – and chosen the table half way between the stage and the door, Beryl was sitting at it. With her handbag on one chair and her gasmask on another, she stood up and waved her friends over. The only other vacant table was on the far side of the room, which, looking daggers at Beryl, the indecisive group of friends sauntered over to.
Ena and Beryl went off to find something to drink. The bar, in an alcove on the opposite side of the room, offered a choice of dandelion and burdock or lemonade. They decided on lemonade.
They had no sooner arrived back to the table than Ray Walker’s band began to play, “Why Did She Fall For The Leader Of The Band?” Cheering, everyone took to the dance floor.
The room was packed. There was an equal mix of service men and women and civilians but as always, there were twice as many women as there were men. Ena and Freda, and Madge and Beryl were the first couples on the dance floor. Lots of women followed suit, leaving the men standing around the edge of the room like wallflowers.
Ena and Freda were soon parted by a couple of sailors. Ena’s sailor, Arthur, was tall and good-looking, with sparkling dark brown eyes and a full head of black wavy hair. Freda’s chap was as short as Ena’s was tall, with mousy brown hair brought forward in a wave to cover a receding hairline.
Ena couldn’t help but smile at the look of disgust on Freda’s face as she and her handsome Able Seaman danced past. Freda, like Ena, was taller than average for a woman, stood on tiptoe, and looked over the head of her Very Ordinary Seaman. Ena giggled, and at the end of the third dance, excused herself, saying she needed to find her friend.
Madge and Beryl were sitting talking when Ena got back to the table, Freda joining them a minute later from the direction of the stairs. ‘I swear that swathe of hair he wore across his head was to cover a bald patch,’ Freda said, and shuddered.
Ena laughed. ‘He might have been wearing a wig.’
Freda grimaced. ‘Here,’ she said, taking a quarter bottle of gin from her handbag, ‘This will cheer us up.’ Ena
said she didn’t need gin to cheer her up, getting back on the dance floor would do that, but it didn’t stop Freda from pouring what must have been the equivalent of two measures of gin into her lemonade. ‘Cheers!’
At the interval, Madge and Beryl knocked back their lemonades saying, as there was only beer at the dance, they were going over the road to the Hind. ‘No need,’ Freda said. And taking the gin from her bag, poured what was left of it between the four glasses.
‘I can’t drink neat gin,’ Ena said. ‘I’m going to the bar. Who wants lemonade?’ Three hands went up.
‘I’ll help you carry them!’ Beryl called after her, and leaping out of her seat, made her way through a crowd of people heading for the stairs, and the pub.
‘Your sailor was a bit of all right,’ Beryl said, catching Ena up.
Ena laughed. ‘Don’t say that in front of Freda. Her nose is out of joint, because she had to dance with the small, not so good-looking one.’
‘She’s a bit of an odd one, don’t you think?’ Beryl said, while they waited in the soft drinks queue.
‘Odd? In what way?’
‘She’s friendly enough, but she never talks about her family, her mum and dad, or her friends. She must have friends outside the factory. Is it true she’s sweet on old Silcott?’
‘No it isn’t!’ Ena snapped.
‘No need to bite my head off,’ Beryl said. ‘I only asked because Madge said she’d never seen her with a man, and Freda’s never mentioned walking out with anyone.’
‘As Mr Silcott’s assistant, she has a position to keep up. She’s all right when you get to know her.’
‘And because she has a position to keep up, she thinks she’s a cut above the rest of us.’
‘If that were true, she wouldn’t be sneaking a bottle of gin into the dance and sharing it with us, would she?’
‘I suppose not.’
By the time they had shuffled to the front of the queue, asked for four glasses of lemonade, and waited for the woman serving to pour them, the hall was half empty. The band had gone to the pub for a break – they always did half way through the evening, along with most of their followers.
When Ena and Beryl got back to the table, Madge was peering into her powder compact’s mirror applying lipstick, and Freda, staring into the middle-distance, looked as if she was a hundred miles away. ‘Penny for them,’ Ena said.
‘The smell of juniper,’ she said, waving the glass of gin back and forth beneath her nose. ‘Reminds me of the Christmases I spent with my grandparents. My grandmother would crush juniper berries and add them to our food. She used to say it made bland food more flavoursome.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever tasted food that smells like gin,’ Ena said, lifting her glass and inhaling.
‘The band’s back,’ Madge said. Taking Ena’s glass from her hand, she pulled her out of her seat and dragged her onto the dance floor. Taking the man’s part, Madge steered Ena to the far side of the room.
‘Madge? What are you doing?’
‘It’s him. It’s Harry Taylor.’ Ena couldn’t think who Harry Taylor was. ‘It’s the sailor I told you about. The one I met on Boxing Day.’ Ena looked over Madge’s shoulder as she twirled her round. ‘Don’t let him see you looking, or he’ll think we’re dancing over here on purpose,’ Madge said, looking down.
Ena was just about to ask which one was Harry when Ray Walker announced the Gentlemen’s Excuse-Me. Almost immediately, Ena felt a tap on her shoulder. ‘Arthur?’ The sailor who she had danced with earlier was at her side. Standing next to him, beaming at Madge, was a good-looking young man who Ena assumed was Harry.
1941 began with a lull in work. February was busier, but in March there was such an increase in orders that Silcott’s had to set on more workers. With their husbands in the armed forces, most of them overseas, it was up to the women to pay the rent and put food on the table. Women who had never considered going out to work before the war were queuing up for it now.
By the summer, women who had started their training in the spring were given easy, straightforward, jobs, which freed-up the experienced members of the workforce so they were able to concentrate on the complicated jobs. After a few months, the workload levelled out, and for a while everyone, including Ena, went back to working a ten-hour day. There was even time for a social life. Ena and Freda often went for a drink together after work. They went to the Ritz cinema in Lowarth when a new film was showing, and at weekends they would get dressed up and cycle off to a dance in one of the villages.
Freda was in charge of the work produced for a top-secret facility called Beaumanor near Loughborough. Beaumanor was accessible by train from Lowarth station, but often delivery dates clashed. When that happened, Freda took her work to Beaumanor in Mr Silcott’s car, dropping him and Ena – and Bletchley’s work – at Rugby station first. It wasn’t a long drive to Beaumanor, which meant Freda was always back at the factory in time to give out the wages.
As the war went into its second year, men in their thirties and unmarried women were called up. For every single woman who left Silcott’s, there were two married women waiting to take her job. Life was hard. Work was hard. But for Ena and her friends it was not all doom and gloom. On the 7th of September, Ena’s friend Madge Foot married her sailor, Harry Taylor.
Madge wore a cream two-piece. The skirt was straight and came to just below the knee, and the jacket was nipped in at the waist with a length of cream satin tied in a bow at the front. She wore matching gloves and shoes, and on her head, a cream saucer-shaped miniature hat with a fine veil. Her bouquet was blue delphiniums and trailing green fern, and her corsage was cream daisies and blue cornflowers.
Ena was Madge’s maid of honour. Her dress was a blue floral print. She had cream shoes and gloves and instead of a hat, she wore a halo of cream daisies and blue cornflowers.
It was a beautiful warm, sunny, day. The only things in the sky, apart from a couple of Wellingtons returning to Bitteswell aerodrome, were fluffy clouds that were soon blown away by the Indian summer breeze.
As Ena walked down the aisle of St. Mary’s Church behind Madge and her father, the sun burst through the East window and shone on Madge and her soon-to-be husband. A good omen, Ena thought.
MARCH 7, 1942
CHAPTER SEVEN
A squally March wind gusted along the platform of Rugby’s railway station. Ena turned her back on it, dropped her head, and peered under the brim of her hat. What had begun as drizzle when she arrived at work that morning had turned into sheeting rain.
The railway tracks whined and Ena looked to the north. A black steam engine blundered into view, its brakes screeching as it slowed down before coming into the station. She looked across the concourse to the ticket office. Mr Silcott was next in the queue. She watched him bend down and speak into the round porthole in the glass window. Above him the clock said 9:40. They would make the 9:45 to Bletchley.
Ena stepped back from the platform’s edge as the hissing train clunked to a halt. Before steam from its engine engulfed her, she looked at the ticket office again, expecting to see Mr Silcott. He wasn’t there. She scanned the concourse, looked up and down the platform, but he was nowhere to be seen. Probably in the lavatory, she thought.
The reinforced suitcase containing her work was heavy. She swapped it from her right hand to her left, and rolled her right shoulder. Going to Bletchley Park with the boss made her feel important. And thinking about her work; the rotors and the complicated wiring, the casing on the X-board that only she was trusted to fit, made her feel even more important. Nervous too. Her stomach was doing cartwheels. She wished Mr Silcott would hurry up.
Ena swapped the suitcase back to her right hand, looked through the steam and rain, and there he was. In his camel coloured overcoat and brown trilby, Mr Silcott was coming out of the Gentlemen’s lavatory.
‘Here we are, miss,’ the station porter said, opening the carriage door. ‘Can I take your case?’
�
��Thank you, but I can manage.’ Ena hitched the string of her gasmask box further onto her shoulder and, holding her handbag in one hand, the suitcase in the other, struggled up the steps.
Standing in the doorway of the train, she let her handbag fall to the floor and put her hands up to shield her eyes from what was now heavy rain. Mr Silcott was running across the platform. She needed to attract his attention so, putting the case down gently, she waved out of the window with both hands. He was looking down, and didn’t see her. Shielding his face with one hand and holding the brim of his hat with the other, he turned his back to the wind, as she had done a few moments earlier. Then he wrenched open the door at the other end of the carriage and disappeared inside.
‘Well I never!’ the elderly porter said. ‘He’s in a blinkin’ hurry.’
‘He is, isn’t he?’ Ena frowned. ‘I shall have to cart this heavy case all the way to that end of the carriage now,’ she said, turning and almost tripping over it.
‘I’ll pop it along for you, miss,’ the old man offered, ‘Won’t take me a minute.’
‘It’s very kind of you, but I’ll be fine.’ The old man touched his cap in a friendly salute and slammed the door. The train clunked off its brakes and hissed, before beginning its journey south.
Winding the string of her gasmask through the handles of her handbag, and putting it over her head, Ena picked up the suitcase. Using both hands, she heaved the case along the narrow corridor, resting it every now and then on her knees to peer through the windows in the compartment doors.
In the last compartment, she spotted Mr Silcott sitting by the window reading his newspaper.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Ena pulled open the door. ‘Thank goodness I’ve found you.’ Hauling the suitcase into the compartment, she stood it down beneath the window, flung off her handbag and gasmask and, exhaling loudly, dropped onto the nearest seat. ‘Oh!’
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