‘Sorry? Don’t be daft, girl, it’ll be a real treat. Fancy grub’s just not something I’m used to in this house, that’s all.’
He found the little tub of mustard powder and put it on the windowsill in front of her.
‘Yer know yer said yer was always looking for things to do? Useful things, like.’
‘Mmmm.’ Maudie was concentrating on lifting the central bone from one of the fish without leaving all the little sharp bits behind.
‘Well, I know something yer could do.’
‘There!’ She turned round to him with a triumphant smile, holding the bone aloft in her hand.
‘Yer can come and work down the sub-station with me.’
Maudie immediately turned back to the sink and got on with the fish. ‘With you at the fire station, George? I don’t think so.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t think.’ Now it was George who sounded flustered, and hurt. He sat down at the table. ‘Yer probably don’t wanna spend even more time with me.’
Maudie dropped the knife and the fish into the sink and sat down at the table next to him. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever think that. I really look forward to the time we spend together.’
‘So what’s the problem then? Yer could work on the phones. I know they’re right short of staff now so many of the younger girls are doing munitions work. They’re even having to conscript single women for war work now, the chief said – everyone from eighteen to thirty. And they definitely need someone in the watch room. It’s interesting work and all, Maud. They have to take incoming messages and send out orders to the other sub-stations – where to send the pumps and that. There’s all these maps and charts and things.’ He tapped the side of his head with his finger. ‘Right up your street, it’d be, Maud, ’cos you have to be able to use yer noddle, see.’
‘I’m very flattered you should think of me, George, but there’s a problem. I’m a little bit older than thirty.’
‘Not much.’
‘Enough.’
‘Yer making excuses.’
‘George, I’m … I’m in my forties.’
‘Never. Yer must be a good five years younger than me.’
‘I don’t want to make myself look silly.’
‘It’ll be all right, you see. I’ll have a word with Sub-officer Smith. He’s a good old boy, retired regular fireman. Been around since the Great Fire of London by the look of him – he’ll think yer a slip of a gel, a bit of a kid, you wait.’
‘But George …’
He shook his head. ‘I won’t hear another word about it.’ He winked at her. ‘Now come on, woman, back to the kitchen sink.’
Maudie stood nervously outside the sub-station looking up at the sign that once had proudly proclaimed the name of the school but had now been painted out. ‘Are you sure he said he’d see me, George?’
‘Yes.’
Maudie fiddled with her hat pin. ‘And I really do look all right?’
‘Yes.’ George took her arm to lead her through the gates, but she wouldn’t budge.
‘He’s going to laugh at me, George.’
‘I thought you said you wanted to do something useful.’
‘I do.’
‘Well, here’s yer chance.’
Maudie took a deep breath and marched through the gate and into the playground. It was full of men busily doing things with complicated-looking pieces of equipment.
As Maudie passed them, one of the men let out a low whistle. ‘Hello, darling, want any fires putting out?’
‘Oi, Burns, watch it, she’s with me,’ said Georgie proprietorially.
‘Sorry, Ringer,’ said Burns.
‘How about, “sorry Miss Peters”?’ demanded Maudie, pulling her handbag further up her arm.
‘Sorry,’ muttered Burns.
Georgie bit on his lip to stop himself laughing at Burns’s sorrowful expression and went into the mess room for a cup of tea, satisfied that Maudie could look after herself as she went in to see Sub-officer Smith in what, before the war, had been the headmistress’s office.
Maudie handed Smith her completed form and waited while he glanced at the details she had filled in. As she stared at the top of his bowed head across the big oak desk, she felt an almost hysterical urge to laugh. She knew it must be nerves, but she really did feel like a little schoolgirl who had been hauled in for pulling someone’s pigtails in the classroom.
‘This part of the form appears somewhat smudged,’ said Smith with a sceptical flick of his eyebrows. ‘Can’t quite make it out.’
‘Oh?’ she said innocently.
He nodded. ‘The part about your date of birth. So, I have to ask you. How old are you exactly?’
Maudie looked directly ahead. ‘Thirty,’ she said boldly.
Smith raised his eyebrows again. ‘Thirty?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any experience of this type of work? On a telephone switchboard, for instance.’
Remembering what George had told her, she said without any hesitation, ‘Of course. Although probably on a different system to the one you have here.’
Sub-officer Smith leant back in his chair and looked at Maudie. She didn’t dare move or show any sign of emotion.
‘Right,’ he said suddenly. Then he leant forward, stamped the form and handed it back to her. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ he said, sighing wearily. ‘Now get yourself over to the watch room. Someone there will explain the necessary.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Maudie smartly and left the office as fast as she thought was decent.
Before going to the watch room, she found the mess room. She popped her head round the door and gave Georgie a double thumbs up.
Georgie strode over to her. ‘“Beggars can’t be choosers”?’
She grinned and nodded.
Georgie bowed with mock solemnity and kissed her hand. ‘Welcome to the fun palace, Auxiliary Firewoman Peters.’ He held out his arm. ‘Can I escort yer somewhere, miss?’
Maudie curtsied. ‘The watch room, please, my man.’
‘My pleasure.’
Maudie might have sounded confident when she was fooling around with Georgie, but once he had left her at the door to the watch room with a whispered, ‘Good luck!’ she was shaking. Then when she peered round the door and got her first look at the room, she froze. What she saw was a harshly lit space hazy with cigarette smoke. There was no natural light as the windows were bricked up. Along one wall was a bank of lights and levers, presumably the switchboard. The other walls were covered with boards and maps dotted with pins and discs. In the centre was a long table loaded with apparently haphazard piles of papers and several telephones. The one welcoming looking thing in the whole room was a battered armchair with stuffing spilling from its seat that stood incongruously in the corner by a dull green filing cabinet. Maudie wanted to run all the way home to Darnfield Street. And she would have done, had Flossie, the fearsome-looking operator sitting at the table, given her the chance.
‘You the new girl Smith promised me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank gawd they’ve sent me some help,’ Flossie said, winding her thick, wiry brown hair round her hand and securing it on top of her head with a pencil. ‘I dunno how much longer I could have coped by myself. Have you ever seen so much bloody paper?’ She waved one of the sheets at Maudie by way of demonstration. ‘The other girl who used to do this shift with me got it in her head to train as a despatch rider. Silly cow. Two weeks’ training she done down the speedway on that motorbike of hers and she still falls off the bloody thing every five minutes. Right menace, she is. The messenger boys hate it when she’s driving them around. Every single bomb crater she gets near, the poor sods are off on their arses.’
Maudie wasn’t sure what response was expected of her to all this information, so she just smiled.
‘Right,’ said Flossie, pointing to the swivel chair next to hers. ‘Let’s get down to business. Now, there’s usually t
wo AFS girls – Auxiliary Fire Service girls – that’s you and me, and a mobilizing officer, that’s Ernie for us; on each shift. Well, as I say, that’s the idea.’
She scooted across the floor on her swivel chair and picked up a pad.
‘We write down any details or requests that come in over the phones on one of these. Anything from Central maybe. Then there’s the despatch riders, they bring in the reports and we use them to sort out who does what. What pump goes where, which crews are available, pinpointing fires. You know. Ernie thinks he’s in charge but yer know what fellers are like. We do all the sorting and organising and he gets in a panic.’
Maudie smiled again.
‘Right, that’s in here. That’s us – control. Then, outside, we’ve got twenty maybe twenty-five firemen on duty at a time in this particular station. This is the usual, you understand. Or the ideal, I should say. What actually happens is more like flipping bedlam. We have to work with what crews are available in all the surrounding stations. Fires don’t run to time, yer see. Anyway, when the fellers are not on call-out, they’re either seeing to the equipment or resting.’
Maudie gestured vaguely in what she remembered to be the direction of the playground. ‘I think I saw them outside. Unrolling and scrubbing the hoses.’
‘Give you any lip or whistles or anything?’
Maudie smiled, sincerely this time. ‘Yes.’
‘That’ll be them.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Our brave boys. They’re all right once yer get used to ’em. They have to check all the equipment, see, test it and dry it. I mean, there’s no good getting to a fire and it’s not working. They depend on that equipment as much as they depend on us doing our job right. They might like having a laugh, but this ain’t a game. There’s lives at stake.’
Maudie looked a bit daunted.
‘Don’t worry, it ain’t all bad. There’s a kitchen in the mess room.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘The rations are all right. Not that tasty but plenty of ’em, which is something nowadays. And we’ve been talking about starting a pig club. Mind you, it’s usually so full of soaking wet uniforms drying out on the pipes, it’s more like a laundry than a mess. And then there’s the dormitory. Not very posh but the fellers could sleep standing up, they get that tired out. And last but not least, there’s the recreation room. We’ve had a few laughs in there.’
‘George mentioned that.’
‘George?’
‘George Bell.’
‘Aw, Ringer, yer mean?’
Maudie nodded.
Flossie looked her up and down. ‘So you’re the one he goes on about. I wondered why it was him brought you over.’ She frowned. ‘Yer different to what I thought. Older. Quite a bit older actually. Here, I hope you ain’t got a job here just ’cos he knows yer. Yer’d better pull yer weight.’
Maudie was a bit nonplussed; she wasn’t used to such blunt speaking and had to stifle a nervous giggle that was building up in her throat. She opened her mouth without really having any idea what she was going to say, but one of the telephones rang and Flossie held up her hand to silence her.
Flossie spoke rapidly into the receiver, jotted down some details and then ran over to a switch on the wall. There was a sudden, piercing clatter of bells.
‘Down go the bells!’ Flossie yelled, and shoved her swivel chair across the room to the switchboard. ‘Ever seen Hell break loose?’ she asked.
Outside in the yard there was what looked like a totally disorganised mad scramble.
Ernie, the mobilizing officer, rushed into the watch room. In one hand he held a sandwich and in the other his glasses. ‘Right,’ he said, twisting the arms of his glasses round his ears. ‘Let’s be having yer.’
He stuck the sandwich in his mouth and snatched the note from Flossie, sat himself down at the table and picked up one of the telephones. Before he dialled he pointed at Maudie with the receiver and said to Flossie, ‘Who’s this?’
Florrie shrugged. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers. And we do need someone.’
‘We’ll see how she goes.’
Maudie stared at the switchboard. It had lit up like a shop window before the blackout. She was rapt with a paralysing mixture of excitement and fear.
‘Go on, get that headset on,’ Flossie instructed her. ‘Just follow me. Yer in at the deep end, girl. Can’t waste time gawping.’
Maudie pulled off her hat, sat down and did as she was told. At first she was totally baffled about what she was meant to do. Firemen ran in and out buttoning up their tunics, grabbing pieces of paper and shouting at the tops of their voices about exactly what routes to take to which fires. And then the AFS motorcycle despatch riders came in and the place turned into a madhouse.
She watched as they shoved the report forms they had brought at Ernie, the mobilizing officer, who scribbled something on each and then stabbed them onto a spike, ready for them to be dealt with in turn. Then the riders looked to Maudie and Flossie, urging them to hurry if they wanted any messages taking as they had better things to do than stand around or be polite. The adrenaline was rushing through the riders’ veins as they strained to get back on their bikes and speed from incident to incident through the smoke and rubble of the streets to collect the on-site reports from the wardens and the police and then race them back to control. They definitely weren’t prepared to stand around while Maudie dithered. She had to respond.
Following Flossie’s example, Maudie threw herself into what emerged as a sort of lunatic routine that involved doing countless things at once. They were expected to answer the switchboard and take brief but accurate notes; grab the piles of reports that Ernie had scribbled on and transmit his instructions to other stations about which pumps and units to send where, while at the same time plotting the locality of fires on the large wall maps of their and the adjacent sub-stations’ areas and mark on chalkboards the location of each fire and which unit was dealing with it. All that, as well as coping with the impatient and very noisy despatch riders.
While all that was going on, there was the faint but all too clear droning of planes passing overhead just loud enough to be impossible to ignore.
Suddenly, Maudie slammed down her pencil. ‘Listen to me,’ she shouted into the mouthpiece. ‘Central says to get there now! No, all our appliances are out. Just do it, all right?’
Flossie spun her chair round and opened her eyes wide at Ernie.
‘She’ll do,’ Ernie said, his mouth full of sandwich.
Almost as suddenly as the surge of activity had begun, it was over.
Flossie leant back in her chair and studied Maudie for a moment. ‘Yer did all right,’ she said.
Maudie smiled proudly.
‘Don’t get too carried away,’ Florrie warned her. ‘Ernie’ll tell yer, that was an easy introduction. Couple of stray incendiary raids like that are a piece of cake. Yer should have been here during the Blitz. Like being in the flipping monkeyhouse at the zoo, that was.’
Maudie felt intimidated. ‘That must have been something to see.’
‘It was.’ Flossie stood up and held her hands out. Her tough expression softened into a half-smile. ‘Looks like yer staying, so yer might as well take yer coat off.’
Maudie stood up, pulled off her coat and stretched. She felt as if she’d been on a ten-mile run.
‘What did yer say yer name was?’ Flossie asked, hanging Maudie’s coat on the stand.
‘Maud. Maudie Peters.’
‘Right, Maudie Peters, now yer know what that armchair’s for.’
Exhausted, Maudie collapsed into the chair and closed her eyes.
The next thing she knew, someone was touching her gently on the shoulder.
She opened her eyes. It took her a moment to recognise that it was Florrie standing over her.
‘Here y’are,’ she said with surprising softness. ‘Nice cup o’ tea and a slice of toast with a big dollop of jam. One of the shopkeepers sent it back with the lads.’
Maudie sat up. ‘They’re back al
ready?’
Flossie grinned. ‘Yeah, Ringer and all. He’s fine.’
As if on cue, Georgie walked into the watch room, his eyes screwed up against the glare of light. He was black from head to foot.
‘But you weren’t on duty,’ said Maudie, pulling herself out of the chair.
‘Nor were you,’ Georgie said. As he smiled, white creases in the soot appeared around his eyes and mouth. ‘But I heard you couldn’t let this mob try and get by without yer either.’
Maudie ran her hands through her hair. ‘I must look a sight. What’s the time?’
‘Ten to two.’
‘In the morning?’
‘Yeah, you went out like a light, according to yer mate here,’ George said, nodding at Flossie.
Two freshly made-up, efficient looking young women came into the watch room, laughing and joking.
‘Here’s our relief,’ Flossie said, pulling on her coat. ‘Thank gawd for that.’
‘Watcha, Ringer,’ said one of the girls, settling herself at the table and flicking briskly through Ernie’s notes.
‘All right?’ said the other one, sitting down at the switchboard and putting on the headset.
Maudie looked bewildered. ‘I think this might all have been a mistake, George. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to cope with the fire service.’
‘Well, I hope you can,’ said Georgie. He looked at the two girls who had just come in, then leant closer to Maudie and whispered, ‘I’ve just told Smith I’ve decided to sign up to be a proper fulltime fireman.’
Maudie blinked. ‘You’ve what?’
Georgie looked at her so intensely she felt as though he were trying to read her mind.
‘I thought it might be a good idea,’ he said. ‘So’s I’ll have a decent trade to turn to. When this war’s over.’
28
In the front room of her house, Blanche was sitting with Babs and Evie on the newspaper-strewn floor making Christmas decorations. Blanche was painting eggshell halves and fir cones to hang on the tree; Babs was dressing up a clothes peg as a fairy and a scouring powder tin as Father Christmas; and Evie was glueing blue strips cut from old sugar bags to make paper chains.
The Bells of Bow Page 36
