by John Wilcox
Gladwin nodded and concentrated on swinging his injured foot so as to avoid the tree roots that criss-crossed the path. Soon, they came to a clearing that opened out onto the field and Gladwin realised that he was looking at the back of the monument to which he had crawled. And there, on the left, was the bush under which he had taken cover.
“What does that commemorate?” he asked, nodding to the crucifix.
“Ah. I will tell you in a moment. But first let us sit, though we must stay hidden in the trees.”
She led him to a grassy knoll on the edge of the clearing and helped him to sit. Then she sat beside him, looping her arm under his good leg as though to prevent him flying away. “Did you bring the little horn tip?” she asked.
He nodded and fumbled under the coat to retrieve it from his uniform breast pocket. “You are up to something, I know,” he said, smiling but with a half frown on his face. “I must tell you, Marie, that I find this place and this damned horn thing all very spooky.”
“Spooky, what is sp… Oh, yes. A little frightening, yes?”
“Yes. And, although I love being out in the open air here with you, my love, I am not sure that we should be here, for all kinds of reasons. I can’t properly describe it but I just feel, well, apprehensive.”
She nodded. “I understand. It is normal, I think, and I must tell you that I feel a little troubled, too.” Her eyes were now wide as she looked deeply into his. “I do not think that what I help you to do now is dangerous, but it is the first time I have done it with you… at least, in this way, so I have concern, I think.”
“Christ.” Her air of caution was something new. “If you’re worried, then so am I. Let’s get the hell out of here, then. Apart from anything else, the Germans may come calling.”
She gripped his knee tightly. “No. We are well hidden here and I know that you must go now into this experience. It is time. You must do this. For the sake of both of us.”
Throughout this exchange, Gladwin had been holding the horn tip loosely in the palm of his hand. Now, Marie gently closed his fingers so that the horn was held tightly in his fist. He was afraid now and he regarded her intently, his mouth half open, his eyes wide. Marie reached across and held his other hand tightly. He found that his breath was now coming less easily, although he was sitting. He half expected to hear that distant rumble, but there was nothing, nothing except that that old burning sensation on his thighs and bottom had returned.
“Close your eyes, Will. What do you see?” he heard Marie asking.
“Nothing. Well, nothing much really. I must say I’m feeling a bit sleepy though. Just a bit…”
CHAPTER 4
Kathleen Gladwin held the nappy pin between her teeth, expertly folded the towelling between the baby’s legs into a V and then pulled it up and pinned the tip onto the front of the nappy as Caitlin looked up at her with her dark, deep eyes. “Now there’s a darlin’, clean, little luverly,” cooed Kathleen, picking up the child and kissing her forehead. “A nice, clean little girl for Nannie then.” She spoke with the lilt of the Welsh borders, her voice rising slightly at the end of the sentence, as though each one was a question.
As she struggled to put the baby’s arms into her pink knitted jacket, the wireless boomed from the corner of the room: “this is the BBC Home Service. Here is the eight o’clock news on Thursday, January the tenth, read by Alvar Liddell.” The mellifluous tones died away and the subsequent pause before Liddell began reading the bulletin always seemed to Kathleen to signal something portentious – another set-back in Italy, perhaps, or even the opening of the Second Front, with thousands of casualties. She caught her breath and held Caitlin to her for a moment as she stopped to listen.
“Aircraft of Bomber Command carried out a raid last night deep into Germany, bombing marshalling yards at Wiesbaden. The raid was a complete success and the Air Ministry reports that the yards were severely damaged, causing chaos to the German rail system. Four of our aircraft are missing…”
Kathleen had seen a photograph of Liddell in the Radio Times and he looked just as she always imagined him: thin face, long nose, wide forehead, hair receding a bit. The picture only showed his head and shoulders but she knew he would be tall. He had one of those tall voices somehow. Nice high cheek bones, too. Just like her Bill.
She shot a quick glance at the framed photograph leaning on the table beside the radio. Bill Gladwin stared out at her unsmilingly. But then he never seemed to smile these days. Her face clouded for a moment but then she moved to the low pram beside the door and lowered Caitlin into its dark recess, pouting little kisses to her. The baby-round face dimpled into an answering smile. There you are Bill, she thought. Your daughter can smile. Why can’t you?
She was no longer listening to Mr Liddell as she hurried to the wireless and turned the Bakelite knob to fade him out. But there, hand on the dial, she paused for a second. Four aircraft missing? Did he say if they were Lancasters? She couldn’t remember. Bill flew Lancasters… Then she shrugged. No use worrying and, anyway, she had to hurry. She mustn’t be late this morning, of all days.
Swiftly but not expertly she applied lipstick and cursed as she smudged it. She picked up the Daily Mirror and blotted her lips on the unread sports page, throwing the paper into a corner as she repaired the damage to her mouth. Then she put on her hat, fixing it with a large pin, and cocked her head on one side as she examined herself in the mirror above the fireplace. The face that looked back at her from under the up-ended flower pot of a hat was pretty enough: round, though getting a little jowly now, wide-spaced dark brown eyes, well-plucked eyebrows. She bared her teeth in a grimace. Good teeth, except that one top right. You could see that small black spot of decay. Damn! She must remember not to smile at the interview. She twisted the Yale lock of the front door, waggled the pram into position and pushed it out onto the street. Damn again! It was raining.
Mother and daughter scuttled along the front of the terraced houses, each one of which looked exactly the same as the other, down past the identical brown paintwork of the front doors, until Kathleen reached her mother’s house and banged hard on the door with her fist. It was opened by a plump middle-aged woman wearing a pinafore and a scarf wound round her hair in a make-shift turban. Kathleen pulled the pram round and pushed the back down so that the front wheels lifted to go over the front step.
“Mornin’ Mam,” she said, manoeuvring the pram into the little front parlour. “How’s Da?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. “Her milk’s in the pram and p’raps you could sieve up some vegetables for her a bit later on. I’m not sure how long I’m goin’ to be, see, because if they take me on I might have to start straight away for all I know. I think they’re a bit desperate, like, from what I hear.” She grinned. “They’ll have to be a bit desperate to have me, anyhow.”
Her mother sniffed. “I still think you’re daft to do this, Kath. It’s not as though you need the money, is it? Bill’s got an officer’s pay” – this was said with a touch of pride – “an’ he can look after you. You should be at home, with the little one.” She leant over the pram. “How’s Granny’s little sweetie, then, all tucked up nice an’ neat, eh?”
Kathleen blew a kiss to her daughter and pulled up the collar of her coat. She had no intention of entering the old argument. “Thanks, Mam,” she called, stepping out into the light rain. “She’s had a good night and shouldn’t be any trouble. Oh, and there’s three clean nappies tucked down the side of the pram. Ta Ta.”
She looked at her watch as she scurried down the street. Eight minutes past eight. Oh lord! The journey to the factory just outside Brecon would take at least twenty minutes. With the interview set for half past eight she would just have to pray that the bus due at ten past would be on time. Holding on to the brim of the cheeky red flower pot, she put down her head and ran, her heels clicking on the glistening pavement.
She was in luck, for the bus was just trundling up as she rounded the corner. Greatly relieved, she cl
imbed on board and offered three pennies. “A tuppen’appeny, please.” Carefully putting the change in her purse, she pushed along the swaying aisle, found a seat where she could wipe away the condensation on the inside of the window, and looked out. Not that she recorded what she saw, for her mind was busy pulling out a succession of memory pictures for her: seeing Bill walk away, bag in hand, after his last leave, looking around one last time at her and the baby, with that melancholy air about him; the rows that had punctuated that precious seven days – about stupid things such as her wanting to hear Geraldo on the wireless and he wanting to read his blasted book; the once, just once, that they had made love during that week. She bit her lip and raised her handkerchief to her eyes to stop the incipient tears from disturbing the powder and rouge so quickly applied. She fumbled for a cigarette, then remembered that she was in the downstairs no smoking section of the bus. Damn!
One thing was sure: she would not tell Bill about the job – if she got it – until she had settled into it and decided that she wanted to stay. Single girls now were forced either to work in factories or on the land whereas, as a married woman and mother, she need not work at all and, if she did, could work wherever she liked. But she liked the prospect of working in the harsh environment of a factory, rather than going back to the job of shopgirl in Brecon’s main department store. It would be different. A challenge. Mam was quite happy to look after the baby, though she fussed a bit about it, so there was no problem there. Working ‘on munitions’ would be helping the war effort. Bill might like that – even respect her for it.
Kathleen frowned at the thought. That was the trouble. He didn’t really respect her. Respect was the problem. Him with his blasted books and teaching at the grammar school and her with her dull job and her love of Alice Faye musicals and that wonderful Robert Taylor – MGM had all the best men. He thought she had no brain, that was the trouble. Well, she did have a brain and a mind of her own and she would prove it to him. She would get this job and do her bit for the war effort – bring in a few pennies, maybe more, too. The rumour was that J.J. Lloyd Ltd would pay up to £6 per week for trained workers on the line. He would have to respect her then, pulling down that sort of money. She dabbed her nose with her handkerchief and gave a half-smile at the window, now misting up again.
The bus deposited her at the factory gates. They were not imposing, in fact they no longer existed, for the old steel structures had been taken down and sent away to be re-processed for the war effort and were now replaced by a single wooden bar that was swung up and down to let the lorries in and out. It was not a big factory but, in fact, it was the only one in rural Brecon. Lloyds used to make bicycle parts supplying Hercules in Birmingham, but now they turned out components – she was not quite sure what – for aeroplanes. Kathleen liked that. Perhaps she could be involved in producing the very aircraft, the Lancasters, that Bill flew? That too should please him if anything could.
Kathleen’s appointment was with Mr Lucas, the Works Manager, and she was asked to wait in a little room outside his office which was itself little more than a cubicle, sectioned off from what she presumed was the main workshop. Through the glass of the partition she could see what must be hundreds of women, all dressed in green overalls and wearing mop caps, and handling a variety of small machines that seemed to be powered from umbilical cords hanging from the ceiling. Kathleen was surprised that there was no assembly line, as she expected, for the women were all standing at long benches that seemed to stretch to infinity and they were picking up pieces of metal of various sizes from wheeled bins, applying their machines to them and then tossing them back into other bins. She had feared that the work would demand a robot-like concentration but, on the contrary, all of the women in her vision seemed to be laughing and chatting as they worked. Seemed to be because Kathleen could see their animated faces as they turned to each other, but she could hear nothing for the noise that dominated everything. The hum of the machines could only be dimly heard above the non-stop ‘Music While You Work’ that was blaring out from loudspeakers hung from the ceiling. As she stood, her mouth slightly open at the wonder of it all, it was the Mills Brothers harmonising “bless you, for bein’ an angel, just when it seemed that heaven was not for me…”
“What a bloody marvellous hat!”
Kathleen whirled round. A big man was grinning at her from the doorway to his little office. He was surprisingly young, perhaps thirty five years old (ah! she surmised, a ‘reserved occupation’) and had a pleasing, open face topped with a full head of black hair that was swept back from his brow in slickly-oiled waves that reflected the light from the strip tube overhead. He was wearing a full-length brown cotton coat – she was later to know it as a cow gown, though why it was called that she never did learn – and he advanced on her now with hand outstretched. “Lucas,” he said, “although call me Fred. Everybody else does.”
They shook hands and Kathleen blushed and put an involuntary hand to her hat. “It’s not much,” she said. “Only cost ten and six but I… er… liked the colour, see.”
“Ooh, so do I,” he said. “Come on into me parlour. As you see, it’s not much and I doubt if this cost more than ten and six either. Sit yer down.”
He spoke with a distinct Birmingham accent and Kathleen surmised that he must have been sent to Brecon by the Hercules people to supervise the changeover from the manufacture of bicycle chains to war work. She perched on the edge of a little wooden fold-away chair and Lucas thumped into his own swing chair behind his littered desk. He leaned forward, cigarette packet in hand. “Sorry,” he said, “only Woodbines.”
Normally, Kathleen would have recoiled from these cheapest of cigarettes but now she took one unthinkingly and leaned forward as he walked around to bend over her and light it. He stayed low for a moment, a few inches from her face. “Still think it’s a bloody marvellous hat,” he said. “You could have paid ten quid for it.”
“Yes, well, thank you.” She looked down at the floor in some confusion. He was flirting with her. Did he do this with every job applicant?
“All right, then.” He walked back to his chair and picked up her application form from his desk. “It’s Kathleen, isn’t it?”
She nodded, blowing out smoke.
“It looks as though you’ve never done anything like this before?”
“No. I used to work in a shop, see.” She cursed herself. Her nervousness was making her sound unduly Welsh. But Lucas did not seem to notice.
“Why did you leave that, then? I see you’re a married woman.”
Kathleen cleared her throat. “I left to have a baby. My daughter is just over six months old now.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “But why not go back to the shop then? Cleaner and,” he nodded towards the partition windows and grinned, “quieter than this lot here.”
“Well, I wanted to go back to work, see, and my Mam can look after the baby easy and I wanted a change from just sellin’ things across a counter. And anyway…” she paused, anxious not to sound like someone from one of those propaganda shorts that filled in between the main features at the Odeon… “I wanted to do my bit, like. My chap’s in the RAF, see.”
Lucas nodded sympathetically. “Aircrew?”
“Oh yes. He’s a rear gunner in a Lancaster. He’s a Flight Lieutenant.” She realised that she sounded like her mother.
“Blimey. That’s higher than an Air Marshal, ain’t it?”
They both laughed and Kathleen felt more at ease with this big man who seemed so open – with a manner so very different from Bill’s Welsh taciturnity. “Anyway,” she went on, “to be frank we could do with the money.”
“What! And you living on an Air Marshal’s pay!”
They both laughed again, except this time Kathleen remembered the decay spot and put her hand to her mouth. “It’s not quite as good as that,” she said. “And I have to look after my Mam too, see, because my Da is poorly and can’t work.”
“Ah. I’m sorry to hear th
at.” Kathleen realised that she had crossed her legs and that Lucas was casting an appraising eye over them, so she blushed again and sat more demurely.
“All right then, Kathleen. Let’s get down to business. Can you knit?”
She had been worried about the questions she might be asked but had not expected this. “Beg pardon?”
“Can you knit – and sew for that matter?”
“Well yes. As a matter of fact I’m quite good at knittin’ and sewin’.”
“Good.” Lucas gestured to the busy workshop. “There are two reasons why that bloody great shed is full of women. The first is the obvious one. All men, except the very young and the very old, of course – and,” he looked up at the ceiling for a moment, “those of us with, um, special skills that have been forced to stay behind – have gone off to the war. The second reason is that women are a bloody sight better at the small machining jobs that we do here than men. Their hands are quicker and their fingers more dextrous. And I should know.” He smirked and then hurried on. “We call it tactile skills. Sounds as if you’ve got ‘em.”
“Well, I don’t know. What will I have to do?”
The smirk came back. “Nothing you don’t want to. No, to be serious now. It’s not heavy work, of course. But you’ve got to be accurate. We need another welder on our aileron – they’re wing flaps – section. You have to control a small machine that puts in the rivets and then bashes ‘em in, so to speak. It’s not difficult but it’s got to be done right. Think you could do it?”
“I think so, yes. What sort of aeroplanes do these things go into?”
“Lancasters.”
“Oh good. My Bill flies those.”
“There you are then.” He leaned forward. “But you should know it’s hard work. You will be standing all day and you’ll be expected to do shifts. Once you’re trained it will be a fortnight on days and then a fortnight on nights – and nights are long, six in the evening till six in the morning. Think you can manage all that?” He gave her body an appraising look, but this time it seemed to be caring, rather than lascivious. “After all, it’s not long since you… since you… you know.”
