Miss Seeton's Finest Hour (A Miss Seeton Mystery)

by Hamilton Crane

  Beryl and Ruby, who had spotted the twinkle, twinkled back. A lively conversation might have ensued had not Mrs. Beamish intervened.

  “It’s nearly time for the news,” she said, “so you three sit yourselves down and get your breakfasts inside you while we listen, or that blessed bus will go without you—and on Miss Seeton’s first day, too. Emily, this will be your butter ...” Tilly handed her newest guest a small, pale green bowl that had a yellow saucer for a lid. “It’ll stay with the others in the pantry outside mealtimes,” the landlady continued as her lodgers meekly took their seats. “And I’m sorry I forgot to ask last night, only you were so tired, what you wanted doing about the marge. We’ve been pooling it for cakes and so forth up to now, but you might be of a different opinion—though never you mind, we’ll sort everything out this evening when there’s more time, you being a bit pushed as you are at present.” Miss Seeton hurriedly swallowed the reply courtesy had been prompting her to offer. “You girls,” Mrs. Beamish concluded, “can do all the chattering you like, once you’re out of the house—so long as it’s not giving anything away ...” She favoured Ruby and Beryl with the same appraising look she had earlier directed towards Miss Seeton. “Walls,” came the stern reminder, “have ears.”

  “And you never know who’s listening,” chirped Beryl in the words of one of the most famous propaganda posters.

  “No, you don’t,” said Mrs. Beamish, using the bread knife for emphasis. “Not never, you don’t—so just you watch them tongues of yours and save wagging ’em until you’re out of the house—and even then you think twice before you get talking, you hear? And now all of you, keep quiet, and make haste—or that bus will go without you!”

  Everyone settled to eat and listen at the same time as the newsreader delivered the first official bulletin of the day. The destroyer HMS Brazen was reported lost under tow, having been put out of action during a bombing attack; the full ship’s complement had been saved. Enemy bombers made wide-spread attacks across Britain the previous night, losing three aircraft in the process. The latest war budget would increase income tax to eight shillings and sixpence in the pound; the cost of beer would go up by a penny a pint. Following Mr. Churchill’s broadcast, the Local Defence Volunteers were in future to be known as the Home Guard; with nearly one and a third million men registered since Mr. Eden announced the formation of the LDV on the fourteenth of May, recruitment was closed ...

  Despite their enforced silence, it was easy for Tilly’s guests to mime requests for salt, pepper, milk, or bread. No need to ask for butter: each guest had her week’s ration in an individual dish beside her place. Miss Seeton was pleased to note that her two companions were of similar habits to herself, which boded well for the future in what (she supposed) one might call a cooperative domestic establishment. Butter, thinly spread or (in the absence, so far, of rationed jam) spread not at all, would with care last the requisite seven days and leave a little spare to put with the margarine for the “cakes and so forth” Mrs. Beamish had mentioned earlier. It hadn’t taken Miss Seeton long to decide that if everyone else chez Beamish cheerfully surrendered her weekly two ounces of margarine to the mutual benefit of the household, then she, Emily Seeton, would do likewise. It wasn’t that she had an especially sweet tooth; cutting down on confectionery and drinking unsugared tea for the duration would be no great hardship; but the very idea that Hitler and his “Nahzee gang,” as Mr. Churchill called them, could try to stop the people of Great Britain enjoying a fruitcake or a Madeira when they wanted one made her ... well, indignant on the nation’s behalf, if not necessarily on her own.

  “Time to go, Emily!” cried Beryl, gulping down a final piece of toast, pushing back her chair, jumping to her feet, and heading for the hall almost in one movement.

  “Now, don’t you forget my sweepings,” called Mrs. Beamish as the others followed Beryl out of the room. “On the table in the linen bag.”

  “Now, don’t you forget your identity card,” Ruby warned Miss Seeton as Beryl called back that the sweepings would be remembered. “They won’t even let us into the factory without checking, and they ought to know our faces well enough by now.”

  Miss Seeton, quickly gathering together her gas mask, bag, and other belongings, agreed that the sisters’ non-twinnish resemblance was not only remarkable, but (she would have supposed) unforgettable.

  “But it is understandable that they would err on the side of caution,” she said with a gentle smile for her two young companions. “There is a war on, remember.”

  “Can we forget it?” said Beryl, winding a flowered headscarf into a turban that expertly concealed all of her hair except a wisp of golden fringe.

  “It’s why we’re here,” said Ruby, tucking her own wavy locks inside an equally expert snood. “Beryl, we’ve got to try that new style this evening—we look such a mess!”

  “Mess?” Beryl went to pick up a faded navy-blue linen bag from the hall table, and blinked as she saw what lay beside it. “Oh ... yes.” She coughed. “We—we were ’prenticed straight from school to a—a milliner,” she went on as Miss Seeton took her hat—such a hat!—from the table and patted it automatically in place without wasting time at the mirror. In Beryl’s hand the navy-blue bag jingled and shook with her suppressed laughter. “They let—they let Ruby leave a bit early on account of I’d be with her, see, and learning a useful trade,” she brought out with only a slight tremor in her voice.

  “But when That Man went into Poland, we could see what was coming,” said Ruby, seizing the conversational initiative at the same time as the doorknob. “We wanted to do something—something more useful than hats.”

  “That’s right,” said Beryl, recovering as the door opened and the little procession trotted down the steps. “I ask you, what use are fancy titfers when there’s a war on?” She brandished the blue linen bag in the air, and again it jingled with a metallic, martial sound.

  “We’re good with our hands, we told the lady at the Employment Exchange,” said Ruby.

  “And we said,” said Beryl over her shoulder as she reached the garden gate, “that if they wanted things doing neat and tidy, we could do them as well as anyone.”

  “Only we didn’t want to sew uniforms—or parachutes,” Ruby added darkly as the gate clicked open.

  “Uniforms,” explained Beryl, “are awful hot and heavy to work with, like the stuff they make barrage balloons out of. And parachutes is—is defeatist, that’s what it is.” With a defiant bang she closed the gate and began a brisk march to the other end of the street.

  “We are not,” Miss Seeton found herself quoting as she hurried along, “interested in the possibilities of defeat.”

  “We wanted to do something,” reiterated Ruby, before her slightly breathless companion could add that parachute precautions against ... well, mishaps in the air might perhaps be considered not so much defeatist as, sadly, realistic.

  “So we got our parents to sign for us,” said Beryl.

  “And here we are!” Ruby rounded off the narrative with a triumphant giggle. “Beryl does the ailerons, and I do the rudders—covering them, I mean.”

  “Which is harder than it sounds,” said Beryl. “You have to pin the canvas tight and turn it inside out and blanket-stitch along the seams, eight in a row and then a double knot to stop it running too far if it splits—”

  “And,” broke in Ruby, “the dope—the varnish! Ugh!”

  “That’s what makes the smell,” said Beryl. “Pear drops—you just can’t wash it out, and it gets into everything.”

  Miss Seeton, trying not to sniff, felt herself blush.

  “Your clothes,” said Ruby. “Your hair ...”

  “And it’s not as if it pays as well as the other jobs,” said Beryl. “In fact, it’s about the worst.”

  “But we don’t really mind,” said Ruby. “Because it saves having the men make fun of you.”

  “Some of the girls,” Beryl explained, “are aero detail fitters—don’t
ask, but they make special bits, I think—they’ve been trained and everything, with certificates to prove it for them that don’t believe it, but—”

  “But some of the blokes,” said Ruby, “you wouldn’t believe the way they carry on!”

  “But they showed them,” concluded Beryl with a giggle as she turned to Miss Seeton. “Are you good with your hands, Emily?” The ex-apprentice milliner could hardly ignore The Hat and its extraordinary trimming. “Can you sew?”

  Miss Seeton modestly confessed that—while she could indeed hem a seam, make buttonholes, patch, and darn—lack of both talent and inclination had encouraged her to leave anything more elaborate than the basics to her mother, who was a needlewoman of some repute.

  “Well, that’s good enough,” was Ruby’s comment as Beryl hid a smile. “She doesn’t,” the younger sister reminded the elder, “need to read patterns or anything—not if she’s going to be looking after us girls, and in an office most of the time.” She turned to Miss Seeton and tried to explain. “You see, uh, Emily ...”

  With Miss Seeton taking no particular umbrage at this boldness, Ruby looked pleased. “You see,” she explained, “you’ll have had a dressmaker come in, or bought off the peg in posh shops ...”

  Though Miss Seeton was moved to deny the charge, Ruby paid no attention. “But the likes of me and Beryl,” she went on, “we’ve made our own clothes since we could hold the scissors to cut out—with Mum keeping an eye on us to start with, of course—so it’s like second nature to make sense of a paper pattern, and anyone can do blanket stitch.”

  “It’s doing it properly that’s the difficult bit,” Beryl reminded her sister sternly, and Ruby giggled before adding that the men didn’t see it quite the same way, did they?

  Miss Seeton, above the sisters’ renewed giggles, was heard to remark that this denial seemed, one had to say, somewhat shortsighted on the part of the men. While, from the purely physical point of view—height, weight, muscular structure, and so on—there were, undeniably, some tasks better suited to males rather than to females, for her part she could see no good reason why neatness of hand and quickness of eye should not render a young woman quite as capable of—of reading a paper pattern as any young man.

  “Or any older man,” supplied Beryl, which had her sister giggling again.

  They had reached the end of the street and were nearing a group of a dozen or so other young women, all chattering together in and around a telegraph pole on which Authority had fastened a wooden sign painted with four crisp, informative words: WORKS BUS STOP ONLY. In the true Authoritarian manner, no hint was given as to where nonworks passengers might hope to board, or even to find, a bus better suited to their needs. Miss Seeton supposed that those who ought to know would know already, and that those who had no business knowing would keep their own counsel. There was, she must never forget, a war on ...

  “Girls!” cried Beryl as people began to point and wave in the direction of the newcomers, “this is Emily Seeton, our new assistant welfare lady—”

  “And this,” cried one of the girls, “is the bus!”

  And it was.

  chapter

  ~ 14 ~

  THE WELCOME GIVEN TO Miss Seeton was friendly but muted, as she had suspected it might be. The impersonal smiles, nods, and sideways glances surprised her no more than the various muffled exchanges she was not supposed to hear. Nobody’s voice, nobody’s expression, was unkind; there was no overt hostility: but there was the inevitable wariness of any close-knit group when a stranger makes an appearance. She hoped that she would not long remain a stranger, but for now even the casual wartime introduction offered by Beryl and Ruby hardly constituted a licence to join in—even had she wished so to do—the giggles and gossip enjoyed by the other girls (who were somewhat younger than she) once they were all inside the bus and bumping briskly along the road.

  Miss Seeton hid a smile. She couldn’t help thinking of school excursions in happier days: the noise was quite as deafening; she felt sorry for the driver. His ears must be ringing with the exuberant shrieks and squeals as girls who hadn’t seen one another since they left work the previous afternoon caught up on the latest items of essential news. Those who had heard the evening’s wireless programmes repeated for the benefit of their friends who had missed it the unmitigated nonsense broadcast from Germany by the renegade whose strangulated, plummy accent and ridiculous manner had caused his irreverent audience to bestow upon him the soubriquet of “Lord Haw-Haw.”

  “Jairmany calling. Jairmany calling. Jairmany calling,” intoned a young woman with curly red hair, whose green eyes held an infectious twinkle in their depths. “Where,” went on the redhead darkly, “is the Ark Royal?”

  Howls of girlish laughter greeted this wicked imitation. Miss Seeton (who with a small party of canteen colleagues had attended a recent performance of the revue Haw Haw! at London’s Holborn Empire) smiled more broadly as she savoured the moment. With such spirit and courage to support them in their endeavours, how could the British be beaten?

  “The church clock in Grantchester,” enunciated the redhead, whose ear for mimicry was almost perfect, “is stopped at ten to three. Ten to three precisely!”

  Sitting quietly amid the renewed howls of mirth and applause for red-haired Muriel, Miss Seeton reflected that Rupert Brooke had said the same thing, and said it with far greater elegance, a quarter of a century before. Between the poet and the Nazi there could really be no choice ...

  Out of the village rattled the bus, stopping from time to time to take on more workers. Houses and cottages gave way to hedgerows, beyond which could be seen newly harvested fields dotted with overturned carts, heaps of old tyres, and random bales of hay—fields on which no enemy aircraft would easily land. Around most of the obstacles there were tractors and horses already busy preparing for the next crop of the year. A small island nation under U-boat siege must use every available square inch of earth, or starve ...

  The brakes groaned, the indicator flicked out, and the bus turned to the left. After a few hundred yards, hedgerow meta-morphosed into a high chain-link fence topped with stout barbed wire; at intervals along the fence the sun baffled camouflage to glint on the barrels of antiaircraft guns, manned by day and night. After another hundred yards, barbed wire became tall metal posts on which hung heavy double gates, resolutely closed. In front of the gates, evidently waiting for the bus, milled a restless, weary crowd. Overlooking the crowd, by a smaller, open gate, was a little wooden hut, outside which a uniformed sentry stood watching as the bus disgorged its cargo and the weary crowd pressed forward, eager to embark.

  “Got your identity card and pass, Emily?” Beryl and Ruby, her official escorts, closed in upon Miss Seeton and led her up to the hut. “Hello, George!”

  “Passes!” snapped the sentry, ignoring the greeting and holding out his hand. Beryl and Ruby nudged Miss Seeton in a meaningful way, and giggled. George glared at them—and continued to glare even after he was forced to acknowledge that the sisters were indeed who they claimed to be.

  When it was Miss Seeton’s turn to be identified, he gave her a long, hard look that she was able to return without blinking. Years of quelling refractory pupils from the far side of a classroom had left their mark.

  George grunted, briefly lowered his gaze, and then returned to the attack. “New, ain’t you?” he challenged, and drew himself to an imposing height.

  “Absolutely brand spanking new,” said Beryl before Miss Seeton could reply.

  “The very latest thing,” chirped Ruby.

  “I am Emily Seeton—” began Miss Seeton as the girls were overcome by further giggles.

  “Yes, I can read,” growled George. “Can’t I?”

  Miss Seeton felt her cheeks grow warm. She hadn’t meant to imply—

  “Oh, never mind him.” Beryl snatched Miss Seeton’s pass and card from the sentry’s sullen hand. “Come on!”

  “Yes,” said Ruby. “Quick.” She tugged at Miss See
ton’s arm and pulled her through the little gate. “You’ll have to report to the welfare lady—and we’ve got to hurry.”

  “To clock in,” Beryl explained as they bustled their charge down a concrete path towards a brick building that was relentlessly utilitarian in design, and (to an artist) of even more incredible ugliness because of its camouflage paint. Miss Seeton reminded herself, not for the first time, that There Was A War On ...

  “We’ll have to leave you here,” said Beryl. “If we miss the clock, they knock off a quarter of an hour’s money, and it’s always such a rush—but through that door, and ask for Mrs. Morris.”

  “That was certainly the name in the letter—” began Miss Seeton. But it was not her morning for finished sentences.

  “She’ll look after you,” said Ruby. “But we’ll be late!”

  “We’ll see you!” cried Beryl; and with a hurried farewell, the sisters were gone.

  Their departure left Miss Seeton suddenly aware that she was on her own. She took a deep breath, reminded herself that she was a soldier’s daughter, and with an almost steady hand pushed open the door of the relentlessly ugly building. She stepped inside and paused to get her bearings.

  “Yes?” A man’s head popped out through an open hatch. “Who’re you, and whatcher want?” Once more Miss Seeton was subjected to a long, hard stare.

  This time she could not meet it as she had done before. She was indeed all too aware that she was entirely on her own in the strange, new, industrial environment. Beryl and Ruby, who had been so kind, must at this very minute be—what was the phrase?—clocking on for work. “I have to—that is, I should like to speak to Mrs. Morris, please,” said Miss Seeton meekly.

  The head, still staring, advanced through the hatch and brought with it a uniformed body with broad shoulders but—Miss Seeton caught her breath—only one arm, which extended a muscular hand to seize the papers she obediently offered in response to an unspoken command.