“An unskilled worker,” supplied Miss Seeton before Mrs. Morris could say it,
“Exactly.” Mrs. Morris was by no means mellowing, but she was undeniably less hostile than when they first met. “Unskilled—at least, unskilled in terms of what’s needed here.” It was yet another concession. “No doubt,” she went on with a creaking attempt at humour, “if Lord Beaverbrook found out you were here, he’d have you enrolled on a training course as soon as look at you—which would in my opinion be a total waste of time, because he wouldn’t have had a proper look at you. They say the man does everything at double speed, and never rests. He eats, sleeps, and dreams fighter aircraft and expects everyone in his factories to do the same—which takes me back to the blackout and the fainting fits. Heaven help anybody who even thinks of wasting time on—on nonproductive jobs like extractor fans when he could be fixing a lathe, or a drill, or anything else that’s broken down because it’s in constant use making Spitfires, and there’s never been a chance for anywhere to cool down during the night, with every machine in the place working virtually round the clock and all the doors closed to stop the light showing. And according to the locals there’s no such thing as a draught in this wretched valley. They say the hills are too high to let a breeze through in summer or to let the fog out when it settles in winter ...”
“Things,” said Miss Seeton with a firmness she did not feel, “could be worse, Mrs. Morris.”
Mrs. Morris stopped in her tracks. Once more she turned a startled look upon Miss Seeton. Was this young woman a witch? How had she so contrived to get under the guard of Susan Morris and encourage her to ... to reveal more of her worries than she had shared with anyone since the factory had opened? Even Mr. Coleman—
“Come on,” she snapped, cutting that final sentiment briskly short. It would never do to let Seeton suspect—“Through here.” They had reached the end of the corridor and would soon be outside. “Hurry up!”
In an uneasy silence the smaller of a pair of double doors was opened, and the two women emerged into a world that was far from silent, filled as it was with the roar of a Spitfire on a test flight—looping the loop and tying a knot around the sun with its white vapour trail. Miss Seeton, who knew she really should have been following Mrs. Morris along the concrete path to the next building, stopped and stared, transfixed, into the sky.
“Hurry up!” cried her superior, to whom the sight of a Spitfire was no longer as arresting as the young art teacher found it. “I told you I’ve no time to waste!”
“View halloo, Morris!” cried a cheery female voice from the shadows. “And who’s your friend?” the voice continued, drawing closer.
Miss Seeton, half-dazzled by the sun and the Spitfire’s swooping beauty, blinked as she tried to focus her gaze on what at first, before the figure spoke, she would have taken for a willowy youth with hair that (to an art-college graduate) was only a fraction too long and wavy for conventional taste.
“Miss Wilkes.” Mrs. Morris received the newcomer with a stiff nod. “This is Miss Seeton, who has been sent by the ministry to—to provide sketches for information leaflets. And,” she conceded as she caught Miss Seeton’s eye, “in her spare time, to help out in the Welfare Office.”
“A usurper in your precious kingdom, eh?” Miss Wilkes, a tall young woman whose slender build was of the whipcord-fitness kind, chuckled richly as she extended a competent hand for Miss Seeton to shake. “How d’you do, Miss Seeton? Jemima Wilkes, at your service. Pay no attention to Old Sourpuss here. She disapproves of almost everyone, so you mustn’t take it personally that she doesn’t sound so very keen on you.”
“I’m Emily Seeton,” returned Miss Seeton. who thought it wiser to ignore most of this unconventional greeting.
Miss Wilkes shook her briskly by the hand a second time, and grinned down at her. “Well, Emily Seeton,” she went on, “let me inform you that she’s not keen on you, especially if you’ve been sent by the ministry without waiting to be asked. Sourpuss Sue is far too conscious of her own worth ever to admit she might need anyone to ... what was it, Sue? To help her out. She doesn’t want strangers interfering—she knows her job backwards. Right, Sue?”
“I have no time, Miss Wilkes, to waste on levity.” Mrs. Morris, all signs of mellowing gone, studiously ignored the younger woman’s ever-broader grin. “There is,” she reminded her, “a war on. However”—this with a sniff—“as you seem to have nothing better to do with your time at present, you might give Seeton some idea of what your job, when you condescend to do it, entails. And a tour of the works would be helpful, too. Good morning.”
She nodded to Miss Seeton in a way the latter could interpret as she chose: Good morning and good riddance, or Good morning for now; I will see you later—and turned on her heel to march stiffly back, without another word, to the double doors of the office and administration block.
“Boohoo, I’ve hurt her feelings.” Miss Wilkes made a face in the direction of that ramrod spine as it vanished from sight. “Don’t worry,” she added to Miss Seeton, who couldn’t hide her surprise at so juvenile a gesture from one who was obviously an intelligent adult. “It won’t make it any worse for you that Sourpuss has her knife into me and I always take mine out and scratch her with it when we meet. She’s like that with everyone—with a few honourable exceptions. Mr. Coleman, now—he’s a widower. And if he dropped the handkerchief in front of Sourpuss, she’d be quick enough to pick it up.”
Miss Seeton, who from her reading understood the old-fashioned reference to an offer of marriage, said nothing.
Miss Wilkes chuckled again. “I’ve shocked you, Emily. D’you mind if I call you that? We’re all in this together, and it seems silly to stand on ceremony when we could be blown to Kingdom Come any minute without warning. And what price etiquette then?”
“What, indeed,” Miss Seeton found herself replying.
“Splendid!” cried Miss Wilkes, once more shaking her by the hand. “And my pals call me Jem.” She let out a peal of laughter. “Jem and Em—it sounds like a music-hall act, doesn’t it? Too ridiculous!”
Miss Seeton’s native common sense saw no objection to informality, and could never suspect Jemima of deliberate ridicule. She smiled up at her new friend and chuckled politely as Miss Wilkes continued to laugh.
“Oh, Lord,” the young woman said at last with a gasp, bending over and rubbing her side. “I’ve got a stitch. Sourpuss would say it was a judgement on me, of course.”
Miss Seeton recognised a hint when she heard one. While she could not bring herself to ask a direct question, which might smack of impertinence, she favoured the side-rubbing Jemima with a quizzical air that betokened her willingness to learn more.
“Mrs. Morris,” said Miss Wilkes, straightening to her full height after a briskly friction-filled thirty seconds, “doesn’t approve of me—of most of my crowd—because she thinks we don’t take the war seriously enough.”
“Oh,” said Miss Seeton.
“We don’t walk round with gloomy faces all the time,” Miss Wilkes translated, “and we enjoy a bit of a laugh with the factory people once in a while.”
Miss Seeton briefly pondered this heinous crime and then replied that, as long as nobody was being distracted from his or her work, which must of course take priority in this time of national crisis, she saw no particular reason why anyone should object to expressions of the lighter side of life. “Because, of course, even in wartime there is one,” she concluded, and Jemima grinned at her.
Emboldened by the grin, Miss Seeton appended that it was, after all, one’s patriotic duty not to give in to gloomy thoughts, which would not only spread the alarm and despondency against which they had all been warned, but which would also be—well—self-indulgent, would it not?
“Well said, Emily!” cried Jemima, and clapped her on the back. “I wish you could get Morris to see it our way. I’m sure that sourpuss face of hers does as much damage to the general morale as—as hearing about any number o
f planes shot down when—when the pilots were friends of yours.”
There was a note in her voice as she uttered the final phrase that made Miss Seeton look at her. The laughter was gone from the tall young woman’s eyes.
“He bought it three weeks ago,” was all Jemima said, and she needed to say no more.
“I’m so very sorry,” murmured Miss Seeton, venturing a gentle pat on the other’s arm.
“Thanks,” came the reply, from a hastily cleared throat. “Yes.” Miss Wilkes cleared her throat again. “Just one of those things. His plane was shot up, and he bailed out, but the Hun came back to make sure and—and machine-gunned him on the way down. Our chaps saw what was happening and got the blighter, but it was ... too late ...”
“Oh,” said Miss Seeton, shivering.
Jemima took a deep breath. “Well, you’re a sitting duck under a brolly, of course,” she said. She caught Miss Seeton’s puzzled look. “Sorry,” she said with a faint hint of laughter. “Slang for parachute—and that’s another reason Ma Morris doesn’t approve of us. If it’s not the slang”—she slapped herself on the thigh—“it’s the slacks—so fearfully unladylike, don’t you know.”
“Oh?” said Miss Seeton, whose personal preference was for skirts, but who saw nothing wrong with the dungarees and overalls sported by many of the factory girls. Given the unladylike bending, crawling, climbing, and scrambling that must surely be part and parcel of constructing a Spitfire, some form of slack or trouser was, she felt, a highly practical solution to the requirements of modesty.
“Catch any of our crowd,” said Jemima, “even thinking of bailing out with our unmentionables on public display just because Sourpuss thinks women should still be in crinolines! Oh—I should have explained,” she added, as Miss Seeton’s bewilderment was plain. “We’re the ferry pilots. We fly the planes from the factory to the aerodromes—once they’ve been built, that is. And—and tested okay ...”
She shrugged. “Which might be some sort of excuse for Suzy Morris’s sourpuss face,” she conceded. “Once they’ve been built—and tested ...
“You’ve heard about the sabotage, of course?”
chapter
~ 16 ~
“YOU MEAN YOU haven’t heard?” Jemima was startled by Miss Seeton’s obvious surprise. “I know everyone’s been warned not to gossip about it—careless talk, you know—but ...”
“I have heard nothing about any sabotage,” said Miss Seeton. She honestly believed this. Not for a moment did she connect the “spot of bother” Major Haynes had mentioned with something so despicable as this. “The girls with whom I travelled on the bus were, I agree, somewhat guarded in their behaviour—their conversation—but of course I took it for no more than their natural unease at the appearance of a stranger.”
Jemima favoured Miss Seeton with a swift, head-to-toe survey. The appearance of a stranger? Well, you could take that more than one way. It was probably the Hat that would have made the girls wary about gossiping too much to soon—but you had to hand it to them. They’d been told not to talk, and they hadn’t—and, goodness knew, there was more than enough to talk about ...
“Of course,” echoed Jemima, smothering a smile, “you’ve only been here five minutes, haven’t you? Still, if Sourpuss and the ministry vouch for you, I can’t see that it matters if you know. Good grief, everyone else does.”
Miss Seeton, while understanding fewer than one word in five of the story now poured out by Jemima Wilkes, was an excellent listener. She heard of problems encountered by some of the test pilots: Switch on the fuel pump at twenty-five thousand feet for a boost, and what happens? Nothing happens, that’s what! Just a loose wire, they’re told—but what good will that be when they’re out looking for Jerry? Without the pump you can’t climb much higher than twenty-five—and if you can’t climb, then Jerry’s going to be higher than you, waiting, and you a sitting duck. You might as well give up and run right back to base. She heard of undercarriage problems: First thing you check when you climb inside—but what do you do if the hydraulics say it’s down and the electrics say it isn’t? While you’re on the ground there’s no question—if it wasn’t locked down, the damn plane would fall over—but what if they decide to disagree when you’re coming in to land? You just can’t risk finding out by taking off in the first place—so back she goes to the factory again. Even the delivery pilots themselves were complaining: Those gun sights, now. They’re reflectors, so they need a lightbulb—bright in the day, dark at night. So in daylight the bulbs burn out in no time, and the pilots have three spares to save having to return to base. Well, there was I delivering a kite the other day when I happened to look at the rack of spares—and they were all duds—all three blown already!
Miss Seeton said that, of course, while she didn’t understand how a gun sight worked, she could certainly see, as it were, that a pilot with no spare bulbs wouldn’t—well, see, either—or rather, would see he had no spares but wouldn’t see the gun sights ... and she could also see that there did seem to be—well, something wrong, from what she had heard.
“Indeed,” she cried, “what you say—what you imply—is disgraceful!” Her technical knowledge might be nil, but she was no fool. “Why, it’s—it’s treachery! It ought to be stopped!”
Jemima smiled sadly for her new friend’s indignation. “Stop it?” she said. “We don’t even know how it started—or how it’s been able to continue for so long. The only thing we know ...” She paused. “The only thing we think we know,” she amended, “is that it must be one of us. Someone on the factory payroll, I mean, not someone from outside—not even from the village—because nobody from outside is allowed on site. You must have seen that for yourself,” she added as Miss Seeton stirred and seemed about to speak. “I’ll bet George on the gate was pretty careful—thorough—about letting you in, wasn’t he? Not to mention Old George in the admin, block!”
She grinned at Miss Seeton. “No, your ears don’t deceive you,” she reassured her. “We’re a very patriotic lot in this factory, apart from—well, anyway, it’s a weird coincidence, but half the men on site seem to have been named after the royal family. There’s Day George on the gate—the night chap is Albert—and Old George with his arm, or rather without it, not forgetting George Watkins, the head electrician—but never mind all that. What I’m saying is that nobody from outside gets in here without a very good reason. You’ll have seen the ack-ack positions around the perimeter, but do you know about the patrols?” Miss Seeton intimated that she did not. Jemima chuckled.
“They call them the Beaver’s private army,” she said. “All the aircraft factories in the country have their own LDV, except we have to call them Home Guard now, thanks to Churchill, and I do think it sounds better, because they will guard us, if and when the occasion arises. Rumour has it that Beaverbrook somehow ... intercepted a shipment of weapons from America before it left the docks, though they were meant for the public LDV—and we have the guns as well as our armoured cars—the Beaverettes. Every ministry property is guarded night and day ...”
“Which is why you suspect the—the guilty party to be an insider,” said Miss Seeton, who disapproved of melodrama even at a time like this, but who could think of no better way of putting it.
“Security’s as strict as they can make it,” said Jemima. “But it’s not strict enough to stop the sabotage, if it is sabotage—though it does stop outsiders coming in, which is how we know ...”
“I see,” said Miss Seeton after a pause. “If, as you say, it is indeed sabotage, then one is in the uncomfortable position of having to suspect everybody—and, with everyone concentrating so hard upon the task at hand, there can be few opportunities for what could be called the—the normal bouts of wandering attention, which is when one might expect to notice anything that was—was out of the ordinary. Or anybody,” she added thoughtfully.
“You’ve got it,” agreed Jemima. “It’s the very devil of a problem, and until he’s caught ...”
/> “Yes,” murmured Miss Seeton. She frowned. “Not an outsider, then ... But ...” It was, she knew, her patriotic duty to suggest the possibility, although she felt wretched at pointing the finger of suspicion towards one who had been so kind—so helpful ... “But has anyone considered, for instance ... the doctor? He gave me to understand that he is a—a not infrequent visitor here, and I wondered—that is, was it not Mr. Chesterton, in his clever short story, who showed how a man may be visible and invisible, seen and unseen, at one and the same time? Or the laundry man, or the plumber, or other visitors of that sort,” she concluded, a little breathlessly.
Jemima nodded. “It’s a thought ... But he would need to outsmart an awful lot of people—and don’t think we haven’t jumped through the same hoops as you! On the rare—very rare—occasions when outsiders have to be let into the factory, the security crowd makes sure their access is carefully restricted.” She grinned again. “Your Dr. Huxter, Emily, has to wait at the gate while George phones for an escort to the sick bay—he’s never allowed on the floor.”
Miss Seeton dismissed her immediate vision of the burly doctor vanquished by a muscle-man in a wrestling bout. On the floor, it seemed clear, must be a collective reference to the factory buildings.
This was confirmed by Jemima’s next words. “Talking of which,” she went on, “perhaps we should start the guided tour. It’ll keep Sourpuss Morris off your back—and mine—if we can tell her you’ve checked a few things out—and, who knows? You might spot something out of the ordinary that will give us a line on this damned saboteur.”
Miss Seeton's Finest Hour (A Miss Seeton Mystery) Page 14
