Tides of Honour

by Genevieve Graham

  Audrey blinked. “Well, I suppose so. I’m staying at the Bedford Hotel at the moment. I have to figure out what I’ll do next.”

  “Are you here to work?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Work,” Jean said, nodding. She spoke slowly, as if addressing a child. “You know. As a munitionette?”

  Audrey had never felt so stupid and small as she did in that moment. Munitionette? That was the second new word she’d heard in the past hour, and she snuck a quick peek at the paper beside her plate, wondering if she’d misheard. Maybe it was the same word, but she’d forgotten. No. The other word was suffragette. She swallowed back what she could of her embarrassment and shrugged.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, I’m afraid.”

  Marjory reached over and patted the back of her hand where it lay on the table, and Audrey noticed with horror how ragged her own cuff was. When her hand was released, she tucked both hands safely under the table, out of view. “Don’t worry yourself over that, dearie. Jean’s only talking about the factories. They’re hiring hundreds of women, you see, and a lot of them are coming from far away. So she thought perhaps with your coming from France, you might be planning to do that.”

  “Oh! Women are doing men’s jobs?”

  “No, no, darling. We’re doing our own jobs,” Marjory said with a chuckle. “Just so happens the men did them before we did.”

  “So . . . they get paid?”

  Jean nodded. “Yes, and it’s good pay too, I hear. That’s what Sophie said, wasn’t it, Marjory?”

  Marjory nodded, smiling, then placed their order when the waitress stopped by.

  Audrey waited until the waitress had left. “Do you work there?” she ventured.

  “Not there,” Marjory said, “but that’s only because we’re already working at the post office. We only just got off our shift.”

  “Oh!” Jean suddenly exclaimed, reaching for the paper by Audrey’s teacup. “Are you going?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. A woman handed me this outside, and I—”

  “Do you know what it is?” Marjory asked. When Audrey shook her head, she nodded. “That’s all right.”

  Jean jumped in. “We are fighting for a woman’s right to vote.”

  “And not just that. It’s about democracy and justice for all. Equality.”

  Audrey raised her eyebrows, listening, hoping something they said would soon make sense.

  “Do you know that men are paid twice what we’re paid for doing the same job?” Jean crossed her arms and leaned back with a little huff. “It’s not as if we’re asking for charity. Just equality.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Women all over the world are pulling together, demanding justice,” Marjory continued.

  “That’s right,” Jean confirmed.

  Marjory nodded with vigour. “They’re being imprisoned, going on hunger strikes, being forcibly fed. Treated like animals, really. It’s horrendous.”

  Audrey felt as if she were watching a tennis match, looking from one woman to the other.

  Jean turned her bright smile on Audrey. “So you’ll come tonight?”

  Audrey could think of nothing else she’d rather do. In fact, she could think of nothing else she might have done anyway. “Of course. You’ll have to give me directions, though.”

  They finished the pot of tea, then ordered another and sat for a companionable hour, sheltered from the miserable London day, and Audrey made the first two friends she’d had in years.

  TEN

  A few hours later, Audrey, Marjory, and Jean were in the thick of dozens of women, listening to speeches, learning what was being planned. Audrey was fascinated with the stories, and her mind couldn’t help but return time and time again to her mother. How she would have loved these women! How she would have jumped in with both feet and danced to their speeches! She imagined her up there, probably wearing a ruby red gown, her long black hair shining, her eyes alive with rebellion.

  “Deeds, not words!” she would have cried, leading the charge. “Equal pay for equal work!”

  Audrey had been only a child when her mother had died, fading away before her little girl’s eyes in a clinic set up for folks like them. People without true homes. Her mother had been an actress, a dancer, a gypsy who held men captive with one slow blink. She had been fearless and free. Right up until the end, when the horrible, hungry illness had stolen the twinkle from her eyes. Audrey wondered if her mother had known about this movement back then, or if it had even been going on when she was alive.

  Throughout the meeting, her hand skimmed over the back of her flyer, her pencil busy with curves and shadows. She mentally catalogued the colourful outfits, the expressions of the women, planning how she would paint it all. For she would have to do that, she knew. She wanted to remember this occasion, and painting everything she saw was how she kept her memories vivid.

  The meeting ended after they arranged for another one and told everyone present about a protest they were planning for the following Tuesday afternoon. Audrey wrote the date and time at the top corner of her drawing, sorry the evening was at an end. A few heads nodded; they’d be there. More prevalent, though, were the mutterings of women who said they’d be too busy at work to show up.

  “Will you be there?” Jean asked. “We can’t, can we, Marj?”

  “No. That’s during our shift. What about you, Audrey? Will you be at work?”

  “I . . . I don’t work,” she reminded them. “Though I suppose I should find out about that. I won’t be able to afford living at the hotel forever.”

  “What do you do, Audrey?”

  She shrugged. “I can do anything, I suppose. I worked the farm practically on my own for the past six years, I cooked and cleaned, I—”

  “Gracious, girl! You can draw!” Marjory exclaimed, leaning close to stare at Audrey’s renderings. Audrey automatically tried to cover the drawings. “Why I’ve never seen such beautiful drawings, have you, Jean?”

  Jean pulled Audrey’s protective hand away, and her beautiful eyes widened. “So lovely. Such a pity you can’t be paid to paint, or you’d be rich!”

  “That’s all right. I only paint for my own eyes.”

  “That’s a waste,” Marjory snapped. “You should share your gift.”

  Audrey shook her head, suddenly shy. She sorted her papers so the art was buried beneath blank sheets. “No, really. But thank you for your kindness.”

  Jean and Marjory exchanged a glance, then shrugged simultaneously. “Fine then,” Marjory said. “We’ll find you some kind of job, though.”

  “Job?” Another woman stopped beside them, overhearing. “Looking for a job?”

  “Yes,” Jean said. “Our friend here is looking. She’s new in town. Do you know of something?”

  “I do, as a matter of fact. At the Brunner-Mond munitions factory.”

  Marjory’s brow lifted with concern. “Not very safe.”

  “Nonsense,” the woman said. She brushed a speck off her coat with one hand. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  Audrey frowned. “Munitions? Working with weapons? You mean for the war?” She pictured Danny, remembered how she’d run her fingers over the buttons on his uniform. She pictured her cousin, walking away for the last time, so cocky, so proud of himself. How could she possibly work with weapons?

  Except these weapons were for Danny.

  “Of course,” she was told. “Very good pay, you know.”

  “Where?”

  “Down at the Royal Docks in Silvertown. I hear they’re hiring just about anyone right now.”

  Money. She needed money to survive, obviously, but the thought of even more, of saving toward that steamer to Canada . . .

  “I’m interested. Thank you very much.” She wrote down the directions, then headed back to the
hotel, making plans as she went.

  She was hired on the spot and given a pair of earth-coloured overalls—which felt scandalous until she noticed none of the others seemed to notice—then sent off with a group of women who showed her the machines. The room was black for all intents and purposes, a metal cave seeping with grease, echoing with the clang of pipes and hammers. Women in aprons and overalls worked around the room either at tables or on metal pipes that twisted like gnarled branches of an ancient, dead tree. Audrey held her breath against the clogged air, feeling trapped as the door closed behind them.

  “Just breathe,” one of the women told her. “You get used to it after a while.”

  “How can you?” she whispered, feeling close to tears. “How can you come back here every day?”

  “Because it could be worse, couldn’t it?”

  Audrey stared. “How could it possibly?”

  “We could be with our boys in them trenches,” volunteered a woman with a heavy Scottish brogue. Her cheeks were blackened and her apron filthy, but her eyes sparkled. “They be breathin’ in dirt and blood and explosives, just hopin’ to catch another one of them foul breaths.”

  Audrey clutched at the wall, her stomach lurching. She felt sick at the thought of the trenches, sick at the stink of the factory, sick at her own weaknesses. She wiped away a runaway tear, realizing too late that her hand was sticky with grease.

  “Hush, Frances. You’re upsetting the girl.”

  “Ah, there ye go,” Frances said, her teeth startlingly white in her filthy face. “Now she’s officially one of us. There ain’t no goin’ back now.”

  Audrey frowned, puzzled, until the woman came over, still smiling kindly. She took out a cloth, stained beyond saving, and dabbed at Audrey’s cheek.

  “Like a battle wound, aye? Never ye mind that. The black won’t never quite leave your skin, I’m afraid. Tears won’t wash it off neither, missy. But now you’re like the rest of us. Greasy canaries, they call us. But we’re proud of that, we are. We be doin’ our part.”

  If she’d needed more reason to stay at the job, that was it. Yes, she would do her part.

  Day after day she rolled out of bed at five in the morning, joining the army of women packed onto the tram, marching into the sweltering factory. She’d left the Bedford and moved into the barracks where most of the other factory women worked. It was easier, moving with the crowd, and the rent wasn’t bad. The barracks took away her privacy, but she soon felt comfortable among the colourful mixture of women from all walks of life. They were doing what they could, and they all got along for the most part. As well as hundreds of women could get along, she supposed.

  The tram dropped them off outside the factory’s gates, and the ocean loomed beyond that. She’d heard the ocean had a strong smell, but it was nothing against the stink of the two rival sugar refineries located nearby. After her first experience of choking over the stench, Audrey wrapped a woolen scarf over her nose and mouth, and it didn’t bother her as much.

  When the workers boarded the tram at the end of the day, she rarely managed to snag a seat, but if she did, she used the opportunity to press her nose against the window and watch the pawnshops go by, noticing how the items in the windows rarely changed. Loose women stood on the roadside, their made-up faces fogged by warm clouds of breath. Occasionally, if she got lucky, she spied an exotic foreigner—or at least “exotic” was how she liked to think of them—hunched in corners, just like the locals, against the cold.

  Her lungs and nostrils eventually hardened against the acidic stink of the air in the factory, but the shiny black ooze of the place haunted Audrey’s dreams, spilling over her memories of yellows, blues, and greens, drowning the red of wild roses in the fields at the farm. The sun hadn’t yet risen when she went into the building, and it had retired for the night by the time she walked out, dragging her feet but holding her head high. Autumn was in the air, its cool grey a dull canvas, though no colours appeared in contrast. Everything was grey these days. Grey or black. Especially now that summer was gone. How she tired of it. Back at the farm the trees would be turning, soon the ground would be littered by gold. There would be apples. And fresh eggs. The maple leaves would sweep underfoot, made slippery by the cool autumn rains. She could almost smell them . . . But she mustn’t think that way. She’d made a choice and moved on.

  Besides, she made her own colour, didn’t she? When she closed her eyes she could see every shade, and the moment she was free to grab her paints, she did. Trees, water, grass—anything with a hue found its way to the paper. Danny appeared time and time again, but she wondered if she’d unwittingly changed his features at all over time. It was difficult, not having a photograph for reference, though she’d drawn his likeness often enough. Sometimes she questioned her pencil, wondered if it were taking creative licence, but she let it happen anyway. Even drawing an approximation of him felt good. When the other girls saw what she could do, saw how she brought life to a flat image, they sat for portraits. Subtleties of eye colour and slopes of individual jawlines were puzzles she craved, and the women were happy to model for her. Audrey never asked them for money, but the women compensated her by saving up and picking up supplies when she ran low. She told them painting was an escape, and that was the truth.

  When she wrote to Danny, telling him everything about London—her job, the weekly suffragette meetings, and her new friends—she finished off by saying that she was being paid well at the factory, and it was all going into the box under her bed labelled Canada. He wouldn’t have to worry about paying for her passage, and she wouldn’t arrive at his parents’ home dressed like a gutter rat either. She’d make him proud of her, as she was proud of him. Oh, what a pair they’d make when they were finally together!

  She fell asleep thinking of him, wondering where he was, but she tried to banish the vision of him in the trenches. She’d seen photographs of what it was like there. The newspaper printed some, and she hadn’t looked away quickly enough. They wrote about soldiers dying or coming home broken. She’d seen soldiers around the city too, bandaged or hobbling on crutches. Or both. She’d even seen one who screamed like a madman on the street corners, reliving the nightmares, ducking under his hands from invisible explosions, then weeping with loss. Not Danny, she prayed. Let him be just the same as when we met. Perfect in every way.

  He’d spoken of his parents, of his seven brothers, of his old dog. She knew his father preached when he wasn’t fishing, and his mother made the best bread in the world. Sometimes, from his descriptions, Audrey could imagine a pat of golden butter melting in the middle of a slice, almost inhale the curl of steam rising up in the lamplight. He’d told her about the cold Atlantic swells, how he rode them like a teeter-totter on those dark days when storms came in fast. It didn’t take much to imagine him there, feel the rise and fall under his legs as he stood solidly on deck, fighting for balance. How she loved to see him there in her mind, and see how he’d come in after fishing, soaking wet, frozen to the bone and exhausted, wanting only to come in and get warm with Audrey. They’d sit by the fire, and if his family wasn’t there, she’d warm him with more than blankets.

  Those kinds of thoughts lulled her into a mellow, dreamy smile, but the reality behind them brought her back. What did she really know about him, this man with whom she’d promised to spend the rest of her life? They’d seen each other for less than twenty-four hours, kissed a handful of times, and almost overwhelmed the post office. Was it enough? Could a lifetime of conversations come from so little?

  What choice did she have? Stay here in London? No. As fascinating and as exciting as this city was, Audrey had found something vastly more intriguing between the lines of Danny’s letters. He would be feeling the same hesitation, wondering what on earth he was doing, proposing to a woman he barely knew. And yet . . . something had happened on that night they’d met. Sure, it was true she hadn’t met a lot of other men, living
as remotely as she had, and it was possible she could have made a connection with anyone in that battalion. But it had been Danny. From the moment their eyes had touched on each other on the road beside that wonderful! blessed! broken wheel, it had been Danny. It would always be Danny, and if anyone asked her to explain why, she wouldn’t know what to say.

  Every Tuesday night she saw Marjory and Jean at the women’s meetings, and since they worked at the post office, they often brought her mail from Danny. Audrey kept quiet, paying attention, but her thoughts always dwelled on the possibility of his letters.

  After one meeting adjourned, Jean handed her two more letters, both bearing Danny’s uneven printing. Audrey clutched them to her chest and closed her eyes, with him in that moment. Or as close as she could get.

  “Well? What do they say?”

  “Jean! Mind your own business. They’re from her sweetheart. I don’t think you’d be sharing letters from Simon with us, would you?”

  “I might,” Jean said, brow raised. “He does write saucy letters, though. They might shock your sense of propriety, my darling Marjory.”

  Her friends giggled then turned away when Audrey stuck one finger into the envelopes and slit open the first of the letters. Short missives containing nothing of any consequence, just a reaching out, a sharing of words, meant to help them both feel as if this were a perfectly normal courtship. This idea of his surviving in a muddy trench and her slaving in a greasy black hole, miles and miles apart from each other, would have to suffice for now. But someday . . . someday there would be no need for pen and ink. Someday there would be no need for words at all. They could just be together and be whole.

  July 10, 1916

  Dear Audrey,

  Your parcel arrived yesterday, and boy oh boy, were we happy to dig into that! After we’re done our weekly rations, a fellow can get awfully hungry. Do you make those ginger snaps yourself? Because they sure are delicious. Maybe someday you could bake some and we could eat them together, hot out of our own oven. Doesn’t that sound sweet as candy to you? It does to me.