by Marie Joseph
Sally’s eyes twinkled. ‘I’ll be filing. When I went yesterday they took me into the room where I’ll be working to show me. There’s nothing to it as far as I can see.’
Stanley’s expression of gloom lifted visibly. ‘A filing clerk? Oh, well, I suppose that’s office work at least. Things could be worse.’
‘They are,’ Sally told him cheerfully. ‘I won’t be filing letters. Oh, no. The things I will be filing are called “heels”.’ With a thumb and forefinger she demonstrated their size. ‘About this big, with a raised ridge on each one. I have to smooth it off with a tool like a big nail file. I’m paid so much a thousand so it’s up to me. I think they’re bits of tanks, but the technical side won’t come into it. Each of us is responsible for our own particular piece of whatever it is.’
‘Cheese and flippin’ rice!’ Stanley exploded. ‘Is that what you went to a grammar school for? Is that why you had all those private lessons in touch typing? Give me one good reason why you’re throwing your education away, then.’
‘There’s a war on, Dad.’
‘I know there’s a flamin’ war on! And what you’re laughing at I don’t understand. You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face before you’ve done, Sally Barnes. Just you wait and see. And one of these fine days you’ll come to admit it. Mark my words!’
He disappeared behind his newspaper, a bewildered man who at that moment felt his whole world was toppling down, leaving him isolated and all at sea.
It was certainly no picnic working in the large factory spread out in huts with corrugated roofs over almost an acre of ground. Sally sat on a long bench in a long narrow room, windowless and lit by glaring lights suspended from the ceiling. The drilling machines were in the centre, and from where she sat she could see the women drilling holes in heaps of oblong-shaped brass plates, their heads swathed in turbans to keep their hair from the whirling machinery.
Even though the noise of the machinery was no more than a muted hum in Sally’s damaged ears, there was a constant pounding in her head. The hours were longer than any hours she had worked before, but it was the repetitive monotony of the work she found wearing.
Take out a small ‘heel’ from the box on her left, file it smooth with quick deft strokes of the big file, then drop it into the box on her right. Over and over. Over and over, one after the other, fingers aching but mind wandering free.
She knew and accepted that to have continued to work at Duckworth Brothers would have been impossible, suspecting–well, knowing–what she did about Christine’s baby. She had even resisted the temptation to write and tell Lee about it, sensing that the decision must be hers alone. She had only, like countless other women in war-time, exchanged a comfortable way of life for one much harder, and if her motivations were not purely patriotic, well, what did that matter?
Raising her head she saw that the girls were singing at the tops of their voices, enjoying the music blaring from loudspeakers set high in the walls. If it was ‘Music While You Work’ then it must be half past ten, she decided, lowering her head again, cocooned in her own little world of throbbing silence, her familiar shell of solitude.
It was a ten-hour day. She arrived in the dark and went home in the dark. In Lee’s last letter he had accepted this as perfectly normal and reasonable. Sally smiled as she remembered his exact words: ‘The truth is it must have taken a war to wake your country up to the fact that long hours and hard work should be accepted as normal. We Americans have always worked hard.’
Sally could just see him saying it, his wide grin and twinkling eyes making the unpalatable truth more acceptable. He mentioned the Canadians and New Zealanders on his camp, and their moans about the ‘sawdust’ bread and the soggy boiled vegetables. ‘Maybe when they see your country in the spring they will learn to love it as I do – in the meantime, it’s flying almost every day and, oh boy, am I enjoying that!’
The file in Sally’s right hand was stilled for a moment. Lee had told her it would be months yet before he was ready to fly on operations, but she could only guess at the danger involved in mastering the craft of flying a heavy bomber by night. David Turner had told her a long time ago of the incidence of accidents during training, and in spite of Lee’s eagerness to get to grips with what he called those ‘winged office blocks’ he was so vulnerable she could hardly bear to think about it.
‘The plane I’m flying has a cruising speed of 140 mph. Below average nowadays. Peanuts,’ he had written. ‘I ought to be so goddamned happy, but without you near me, how can I be?’
Sally turned round startled as the girl sitting next to her touched her arm. ‘Time to knock off, love. The hooter’s gone. It’s dinner time.’
That same evening, in the local paper under the heading of Births, Marriages and Deaths, was an announcement:
‘At Springcroft Nursing Home, to Christine and Captain Nigel Myerscough, a son, Peter John.’
Sally felt the blood drain from her face, then looked up startled as Josie tapped the column with a finger.
‘Reading the Hatched, Matched and Dispatched again, are you, love? You’re getting as bad as me. I always look to see if my name’s there, and if it isn’t then I know I must still be alive and kicking.’
It was only a poor attempt at a joke, but for a moment something of the old Josie was reflected in the dulled blue eyes. Quickly Sally closed the paper.
‘One of the girls at work has got engaged to a Polish airman. It’s going to be dried egg cake all round tomorrow. I just wondered if it was in the paper,’ she lied. ‘She’s been engaged twice before, so maybe they didn’t think it worth the bother.’
‘We never got engaged, me and your father.’ Josie held out a hand for the newspaper. ‘Is there anything in about that girl being murdered down by the flats? I don’t like you walking home alone these dark nights. Murders seem out of place somehow when there’s a war going on. There’s enough killing without anyone taking it up privately.’
‘I walk in the middle of the road swinging my torch, and if anyone crept up behind me then I’d shine it straight in his face.’
Josie opened her mouth then closed it again. Sally wouldn’t be able to hear if anyone did creep up behind her. She wouldn’t hear now if a whole regiment banged the front door open and marched up and down the hall. A piece of coal fell with a clink onto the tiled hearth, but Sally’s eyes never flickered. In spite of the grief that Josie nursed like a child held close to her heart, in spite of the despair seeping through her very veins, she forgot herself for long enough to identify with the solitude that was part of her daughter’s daily existence. The ice round her heart melted a little as she surveyed her daughter in silence. A warmth of compassion flooded her starved soul as she tried to imagine how it would be to turn on a tap then have to look to see if water was coming out. To walk in high heels along a pavement and hear nothing. To dig in the garden with a spade which never rang against a stone. To see people jump up to answer a silent telephone; to live in a padded cell, and to accept so readily a misfortune that to hearing people seemed insurmountable.
Suddenly Josie was consumed with guilt. Wrapped in her own mourning she had forgotten this other child of hers. This small girl, tired half-way to death, with great bruised shadows beneath her eyes, who crept out of the house in the mornings and came back at night too weary to eat the slapdash meal prepared by a mother who couldn’t be bothered even to try and make the most of rationed food. Josie swallowed a great lump that seemed to have formed in the front of her throat. Stanley was just as bad. In his own way he was enjoying the war, revelling in the feeling that the whole country was banded together against the Germans. With his Home Guard pals he was reliving the last war, exchanging reminiscences, supping billycans of tea, like in the trenches, but far more comfortable in the evacuated junior school they used as their headquarters.
The lump in Josie’s throat hurt so much that tears sprang unbidden to her eyes. She had never even acknowledged the truth that Sally might
be truly and deeply in love with her American. Josie tried to remember his face and failed. He had been friendly, she remembered that, but after the telegram came he had been obliterated from her mind as thoroughly as if he had never existed. David Turner had come back from the dead and she had rushed away upstairs, hardly able to look at him.
Raising her head she was shocked to see how much Sally’s face had changed over the past few weeks. It was a sad face now with all the vivacity and animation drained away. It was almost as though something in that newspaper, slipping now from her knees, had upset her.
Impulsively Josie leaned across the hearthrug, holding out her hand. When Sally gripped it convulsively, the tears behind her eyelids spilled over to creep slowly down her cheeks.
‘Oh, love … Oh, Sally … I’ve been such a bad bugger. I’ve never thought how you must be feeling. I’ve been that sorry for myself …’
Josie began to cry, noisily and without restraint. Sally immediately came to kneel down by her chair, pulling her mother’s head to rest against her, patting and soothing, murmuring words of comfort, whispering them over and over again.
Sally didn’t cry. She dare not, and the trying not to was terrible. Her face was closed up tight as she fought the overwhelming desire to tell her mother about Christine’s baby. It might not be true. Even her thoughts were being carefully controlled. But if it was, and she were to speak her mind, then Josie Barnes would find a way to hold her baby grandson in her arms, even if it meant dragging the whole Duckworth family down. Sally set her face firm against any further emotion.
But she could not help wondering what Peter John Myerscough looked like. Peter John, she thought, then put the thought from her with resolution.
Captain Nigel Myerscough, resplendent in his well-fitting uniform, stood outside the glass-fronted nursery in Springcroft Nursing Home and stared into the sleeping face of his little son.
The baby was being held up by a nurse. She had picked him up from a cot lined up with other cots as if for kit inspection, in the large airy room overlooking the lawns edged with winter-bare trees.
Nigel smiled and nodded. The baby seemed particularly unwrinkled, although its face did resemble a sponge. Nigel supposed that was because Christine had gone three weeks or more over her time. He wished the nurse would put the baby back so he could stop smiling and nodding. If the truth were known he felt a right Charlie standing there trying not to look embarrassed.
‘Very good,’ he said at last, then immediately thought, what a damn-fool thing to say. ‘Thank you, nurse.’ He turned on his heel and walked down the corridor to his wife’s room, his slouching gait at distinct variance with the smartness of his uniform.
Head inclined, he was about to rap politely on the door before entering when he turned to see a sister beckoning to him from a room further down the long corridor. With her hair scragged up into a white cap and a figure shaped like an avocado pear, she was hardly the type to raise one’s blood pressure a single notch, Nigel thought uncharitably, but he went where she beckoned, surprised when she closed the door behind him.
‘Captain Myerscough?’ She stood before him, hands folded over her starched front.
Nigel nodded. ‘Yes, Sister?’ He shuffled his big feet on the well-worn carpet. There was something ominous in the way the nurse was regarding him with her pale blue eyes. His rose-madder complexion paled slightly. Was she about to tell him that his son had something wrong with him? That the boy was mongoloid or something equally unacceptable? For a moment he was shaken out of his habitual diffidence. The baby’s head had wobbled a lot, and his face had the roundness of an embryo Winston Churchill, but then hadn’t he been told that all new-born babies looked like the great war leader?
‘Your wife.’ Sister Kelly stepped back a pace to avoid craning her neck. The captain must be six foot four at least. In his stockinged feet, she decided. ‘It isn’t an unusual state of affairs, but she’s rejecting her baby.’
‘Rejecting it?’
Sister Kelly nodded. For no reason at all she had taken an immediate dislike to the gangling, stoop-shouldered young man standing before her with his mouth wide open. She knew his sort. Cushy job in peace-time working his way up in Daddy’s firm; cushy job in the army, not an ounce of leadership in him in spite of his public-school upbringing. They deserved each other, she decided. Captain Myerscough and his spoilt and pampered wife lying back on her pillows and refusing to breast feed.
‘Mother is refusing to breast feed!’ she said, her voice ringing with ill-concealed scorn.
‘My God! Is that all?’ Nigel let out a nervous laugh. For a minute the silly woman had had him worried. ‘Well, for heaven’s sake, Sister, I was bottle-fed, and it didn’t exactly stunt my growth, now did it?’ He laughed again, then smothered the laugh behind a hand as the sister quelled him with a cold glance. ‘It would be bad enough if it was merely the feeding,’ she added. ‘But mother doesn’t even want to cuddle her baby. We keep him in the nursery of course, but mother refuses to give him the bottle. In all my years of maternity nursing I’ve never come up against such a total rejection.’ Sister Kelly shook her small head mournfully. ‘I was wondering if you could throw some light on the position, Captain? When you go back off leave and we discharge mother and baby in ten days’ time, it won’t be a very happy situation unless things have changed very much for the better.’
Nigel wished the silly woman would stop referring to Christine as mother’. His wife had given the impression that the swollen protruding stomach was in a strange way a completely unconnected part of her.
‘My God! What do I look like?’ she had grumbled. ‘I can’t wait to get my figure back. I haven’t seen my bloody feet for a month. If men had to have babies the human race would die out.’
‘The baby wasn’t planned.’ He stared over the sister’s left shoulder. ‘Bit of a surprise to both of us, eh?’ His narrow face widened into an apologetic smile, causing Sister Kelly to clamp her lips tight.
‘A silly man,’ she whispered, watching him amble along the corridor, then she thought about Mrs Hardcastle lying bravely in her bed after losing her third baby with projectile vomiting. Swearing she would try again. ‘There’s no justice,’ Sister Kelly told herself, going back into her room.
‘Decent little chap, eh?’
Nigel sat down on the little hard chair drawn up to his wife’s bed and tried to find a place for his long grasshopper legs. Christine looked positively blooming, or were the spots of colour on her high cheekbones more indicative of a fever? By no means a sensitive man – even his doting mother could never have described him as that – there was a certain brittleness about his wife that put him immediately on his guard. To offset his unease he laughed out loud. ‘Sister tells me Mother Myerscough is being a naughty girl about feeding.’
‘She thinks I’m a cow!’ Christine plucked at the ribbon ties of her pink bedjacket. ‘I’ve felt like a cow for months and months, and now she expects me to behave like one.’ The green eyes flashed. ‘There’s a woman in the next room with a premature baby and no milk of her own.’ Christine shuddered. ‘Sister Sourpuss wanted me to do what she called expressing my milk into a bloody jar for it. But the more you pump – oh, my God! – the more the flamin’ stuff flows, so I refused.’ She glared at Nigel, forbidding him to laugh again. ‘The whole thing sickens me. Disgusts and nauseates me.’
Nigel shifted uncomfortably on the chair, moving his long body as if by doing so he could change the subject.
‘Did it hurt much? Having the baby?’
‘Oh, my God!’ Christine slid down the high-piled pillows. ‘Never again!’ She turned her face to the window. ‘Whoever said nature steps in to make a woman forget the pain immediately it’s over, needs his head examined. It was bound to be a man. I’ve dreamed every single contraction over and over.’ Her voice shook. ‘Do you know what that barbarian of a doctor did to me? He came in and stitched me up without even a whiff of ether!’ She moaned and moved her legs in the
high white bed. ‘They’re sticking out of me like barbed wire, those bloody stitches. Come to think of it, he probably used bloody barbed wire! “Just a little prick, mother,” he said. My God! I wish someone would sew his whatsit up for him, then he’d know!’
A tiny nurse in a pleated cap put her head round the door, then withdrew. Nigel wished with all his heart that she had come in and done whatever it had been she intended to do. He was at a loss, the way he was always at a loss when Christine got herself into this mood. He patted his pocket for his cigarettes, then remembered where he was. His pleasant face struggled to form itself into what he hoped would be an acceptable expression. He wasn’t afraid of his wife. On the contrary, when she was in a different frame of mind they had fun together. He enjoyed having a beautiful girl to show off. It tickled him when she was in one of her ‘Oh, my God!’ moods. He wondered if he dared risk a cigarette? But this was different. There was no point in him trying to say the right thing. Whatever he said would be wrong. He sighed and fingered his flourishing moustache.
‘A rum thing happened the other day,’ he said at last. ‘We were on manoeuvres on the cliffs and three Focke Wulf 190s came in at wave-top level. You could almost see the friggin’ pilot’s underpants. They dropped four 250-pounders, one on a farmhouse. The farmer and his wife bought it. Blown to smithereens.’
‘And?’ Christine continued to stare out of the window.
‘Just thought you might be interested.’
She turned round. ‘Well, I’m not. I got the impression it was safe down there in Cornwall. Is that supposed to make me feel better?’
‘It was only a hit and run raid,’ Nigel said lamely. ‘Probably a training run for the Huns. They have to get their practice in somehow.’
When he had gone, promising to come back in the evening before leaving to rejoin his unit, Christine sat up straight in bed, wincing as the stitches sent a thousand needles pricking where it hurt most. Pushing a vase of snowdrops to one side she reached for the bedside telephone and dialled a number.
