by Follett, Ken
The man answered him in the flat guttural accent of the Cardiff docks. “I don’t know how it happened, sir, exactly. Some of the Jerries got up on their parapet, unarmed, and shouted, ‘Happy Christmas,’ then one of our boys done the same, then they started walking towards one another and before you could say chips everyone was doing it.”
“But there’s no one in the trenches!” Fitz said angrily. “Don’t you see this could be a trick?”
The sergeant looked up and down the line. “No, sir, if I’m honest, I can’t say that I do see that,” he said coolly.
The man was right. How could the enemy possibly take advantage of the fact that the frontline forces of both sides had become friends?
The sergeant pointed to the German. “This is Hans Braun, sir,” he said. “Used to be a waiter at the Savoy Hotel in London. Speaks English!”
The German sergeant saluted Fitz. “Glad to make your acquaintance, Major,” he said. “Happy Christmas.” He had less of an accent than the sergeant from Cardiff. He proffered a flask. “Would you care for a drop of schnapps?”
“Good God,” said Fitz, and walked away.
There was nothing he could do. This would have been difficult to stop even with the support of the noncommissioned officers such as that Welsh sergeant. Without their help it was impossible. He decided he had better report the situation to a superior and make it someone else’s problem.
But before he could leave the scene he heard his name called. “Fitz! Fitz! Is that really you?”
The voice was familiar. He turned to see a German approaching. As the man came close, he recognized him. “Von Ulrich?” he said in amazement.
“The very same!” Walter smiled broadly and held out his hand. Automatically Fitz took it. Walter shook hands vigorously. He looked thinner, Fitz thought, and his fair skin was weathered. I suppose I’ve changed too, Fitz thought.
Walter said: “This is amazing—what a coincidence!”
“I’m glad to see you fit and well,” Fitz said. “Though I probably shouldn’t be.”
“Likewise!”
“What are we going to do about this?” Fitz waved a hand at the fraternizing soldiers. “I find it worrying.”
“I agree. When tomorrow comes they may not wish to shoot at their new friends.”
“And then what would we do?”
“We must have a battle soon to get them back to normal. If both sides start shelling in the morning, they’ll soon start to hate each other again.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“And how are you, my old friend?”
Fitz remembered his good news, and brightened. “I’ve become a father,” he said. “Bea has given birth to a boy. Have a cigar.”
They lit up. Walter had been on the eastern front, he revealed. “The Russians are corrupt,” he said with disgust. “The officers sell supplies on the black market and let the infantry go hungry and cold. Half the population of East Prussia are wearing Russian army boots they bought cheap, while the Russian soldiers are barefoot.”
Fitz said he had been in Paris. “Your favorite restaurant, Voisin’s, is still open,” he said.
The men started a football match, Britain versus Germany, piling up their uniform caps for goalposts. “I’ve got to report this,” said Fitz.
“I, too,” said Walter. “But first tell me, how is Lady Maud?”
“Fine, I think.”
“I would most particularly like to be remembered to her.”
Fitz was struck by the emphasis with which Walter uttered this otherwise routine remark. “Of course,” he said. “Any special reason?”
Walter looked away. “Just before I left London . . . I danced with her at Lady Westhampton’s ball. It was the last civilized thing I did before this verdammten war.”
Walter seemed to be in the grip of emotion. There was a tremor in his voice, and it was highly unusual for him to mix German with English. Perhaps the Christmas atmosphere had got to him too.
Walter went on: “I should very much like her to know that I was thinking of her on Christmas Day.” He looked at Fitz with moist eyes. “Would you be sure to tell her, old friend?”
“I will,” said Fitz. “I’m sure she’ll be very pleased.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
February 1915
“I went to the doctor,” said the woman next to Ethel. “I said to him, ‘I’ve got an itchy twat.’”
A ripple of laughter ran around the room. It was on the top floor of a small house in East London, near Aldgate. Twenty women sat at sewing machines in close-packed rows either side of a long workbench. There was no fire, and the one window was closed tight against the February cold. The floorboards were bare. The whitewashed plaster on the walls was crumbling with age, and the laths beneath showed through in places. With twenty women breathing the same air the room became stuffy, but it never seemed to warm up, and the women all wore hats and coats.
They had just stopped for a break, and the treadles under their feet were briefly silent. Ethel’s neighbor was Mildred Perkins, a cockney of her own age. Mildred was also Ethel’s lodger. She would have been beautiful but for protruding front teeth. Dirty jokes were her specialty. She went on: “The doctor says to me, he goes, ‘You shouldn’t say that, it’s a rude word.’”
Ethel grinned. Mildred managed to create moments of cheer in the grim twelve-hour working day. Ethel had never known such talk before. At Tŷ Gwyn the staff had been genteel. These London women would say anything. They were all ages and several nationalities, and some barely spoke English, including two refugees from German-occupied Belgium. The only thing they all had in common was that they were desperate enough to want the job.
“I says to him, ‘What should I say, then, doctor?’ He says to me, ‘Say you’ve got an itchy finger.’”
They were sewing British army uniforms, thousands of them, tunics and trousers. Day after day the pieces of thick khaki cloth came in from a cutting factory in the next street, big cardboard boxes full of sleeves and backs and legs, and the women here sewed them together and sent them to another small factory to have the buttons and buttonholes added. They were paid according to how many they finished.
“He says to me, ‘Do your finger itch you all the time, Mrs. Perkins, or just now and again?’”
Mildred paused, and the women were silent, waiting for the punch line.
“I says, ‘No, doctor, only when I piss through it.’”
The women hooted with laughter and cheered.
A thin girl of twelve came through the door with a pole on her shoulder. Hanging from it were large mugs and tankards, twenty of them. She put the pole down gingerly on the workbench. The mugs contained tea, hot chocolate, clear soup, or watery coffee. Each woman had her own mug. Twice a day, midmorning and midafternoon, they gave their pennies and halfpennies to the girl, Allie, and she got their mugs filled at the café next door.
The women sipped their drinks, stretched their arms and legs, and rubbed their eyes. The work was not hard like coal mining, Ethel thought, but it was tiring, bent over your machine hour after hour, peering at the stitching. And it had to be done right. The boss, Mannie Litov, checked each piece, and if it was wrong you did not get paid, even though Ethel suspected he sent the faulty uniforms off anyway.
After five minutes Mannie came into the workroom, clapping his hands and saying: “Come on now, back to work.” They drained their cups and turned back to the bench.
Mannie was a slave driver, but not the worst, the women said. At least he did not paw the girls or demand sexual favors. He was about thirty, with dark eyes and a black beard. His father was a tailor who had come over from Russia and opened a shop in the Mile End Road, making cheap suits for bank clerks and stockbrokers’ runners. Mannie had learned the trade from his father, then started a more ambitious enterprise.
The war was good for business. A million men had volunteered for the army between August and Christmas, and each one needed a uniform. Mannie was h
iring every seamstress he could find. Fortunately Ethel had learned to use a sewing machine at Tŷ Gwyn.
Ethel needed a job. Although her house was paid for, and she was collecting rent from Mildred, she had to save money for when the baby came along. But the experience of looking for work had made her frustrated and irate.
All kinds of new jobs were opening up for women, but Ethel had quickly learned that men and women were still unequal. Jobs at which men earned three or four pounds were being offered to women at a pound a week. And even then the women had to put up with hostility and persecution. Male bus passengers would refuse to show their tickets to a woman conductor, male engineers would pour oil into a woman’s tool box, and women workers were barred from the pub at the factory gate. What made Ethel even more furious was that the same men would call a woman lazy and shiftless if her children were dressed in rags.
In the end, reluctantly and angrily, she had opted for an industry in which women were traditionally employed, vowing she would change this unjust system before she died.
She rubbed her back. Her baby was due in a week or two, and she was going to have to stop work any day now. Sewing was awkward with a great distended belly, but what she found most difficult was the tiredness that threatened to overcome her.
Two more women came through the door, one with a bandage on her hand. The seamstresses frequently cut themselves with sewing needles or with the sharp scissors they used to trim their work.
Ethel said: “Look you, Mannie, you ought to keep a little medical kit here, with bandages and a bottle of iodine and a few other bits and pieces in a tin.”
He said: “What am I, made of money?” It was his stock response to any demand by his workforce.
“But you must lose money every time one of us hurts herself,” Ethel said in a tone of sweet reason. “Here’s two women been away from their machines nearly an hour, because they had to go to the chemist’s and get a cut seen to.”
The woman with the bandage grinned and said: “Plus I had to stop at the Dog and Duck to steady my nerves.”
Mannie said sarcastically to Ethel: “I suppose you want me to keep a bottle of gin in the medical kit as well.”
Ethel ignored that. “I’ll make you a list and find out what everything would cost, then you can make up your mind, is it?”
“I’m not making any promises,” said Mannie, which was as close as he ever came to making a promise.
“Right, then.” Ethel turned back to her machine.
It was always she who asked Mannie for small improvements in the workplace, or protested when he made adverse changes such as asking them to pay to have their scissors sharpened. Without intending to, she seemed to have fallen into the kind of role her father played.
Outside the grimy window, the short afternoon was darkening. Ethel found the last three hours of the working day the hardest of all. Her back hurt, and the glare of the overhead lights made her head ache.
But, when seven o’clock came, she did not want to go home. The thought of spending the evening alone was too depressing.
When Ethel first came to London several young men had paid attention to her. She had not really fancied any of them, but she had accepted invitations to the cinema, the music hall, recitals, and evenings at pubs, and she had kissed one of them, though without much passion. However, as soon as her pregnancy began to show they had all lost interest. A pretty girl was one thing, and a woman with a baby quite another.
Fortunately, tonight there was a Labour Party meeting. Ethel had joined the Aldgate branch of the Independent Labour Party soon after buying her house. She often wondered what her father would have thought, had he known. Would he have wanted to exclude her from his party as he had from his house? Or would he have been secretly pleased? She would probably never know.
The scheduled speaker tonight was Sylvia Pankhurst, one of the leaders of the suffragettes, campaigners for votes for women. The war had split the famous Pankhurst family. Emmeline, the mother, had forsworn the campaign for the duration of the war. One daughter, Christabel, supported the mother, but the other, Sylvia, had broken with them and continued the campaign. Ethel was on Sylvia’s side: women were oppressed in war as well as peace, and they would never get justice until they could vote.
On the pavement outside, she said good night to the other women. The gaslit street was busy with workers going home, shoppers putting together their evening meal, and revelers on the way to a night on the tiles. A breath of warm, yeasty air came from the open door of the Dog and Duck. Ethel understood the women who spent all evening in such places. Pubs were nicer than most people’s homes, and there was friendly company and the cheap anesthetic of gin.
Next to the pub was a grocer’s shop called Lippmann’s, but it was closed: it had been vandalized by a patriotic gang because of its German name, and now it was boarded up. Ironically, the owner was a Jew from Glasgow with a son in the Highland Light Infantry.
Ethel caught a bus. It was two stops, but she was too tired to walk.
The meeting was at the Calvary Gospel Hall, the place where Lady Maud had her clinic. Ethel had come to Aldgate because it was the only district of London she had ever heard of, Maud having mentioned the name many times.
The hall was lit by cheerful gas mantels along the walls, and a coal stove in the middle of the room took the chill off the air. Cheap folding chairs had been put out in rows facing a table and a lectern. Ethel was greeted by the branch secretary, Bernie Leckwith, a studious, pedantic man with a good heart. Now he looked worried. “Our speaker has canceled,” he said.
Ethel was disappointed. “What are we going to do?” she asked. She looked around the room. “You’ve already got more than fifty people here.”
“They’re sending a substitute, but she’s not here yet, and I don’t know if she’ll be any good. She’s not even a party member.”
“Who is it?”
“Her name is Lady Maud Fitzherbert.” Bernie added disapprovingly: “I gather she’s from a coal-owning family.”
Ethel laughed. “Fancy that!” she said. “I used to work for her.”
“Is she a good speaker?”
“I’ve no idea.”
Ethel was intrigued. She had not seen Maud since the fateful Tuesday when Maud had married Walter von Ulrich and Britain had declared war on Germany. Ethel still had the dress Walter had bought her, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and hanging in her wardrobe. It was pink silk with a gauzy overdress, and it was the most beautiful thing she had ever owned. Of course she could not fit into it now. Besides, it was too good for wearing to a Labour Party meeting. She still had the hat, too, in the original box from the shop in Bond Street.
She took her seat, grateful to get the weight off her feet, and settled to wait for the meeting to begin. She would never forget going to the Ritz, after the wedding, with Walter’s handsome cousin, Robert von Ulrich. Walking into the restaurant she had been the focus of hard looks from one or two of the women, and she guessed that, even though her dress was expensive, there was something about her that marked her as working class. But she hardly cared. Robert had made her laugh with catty comments about the other women’s clothing and jewelry, and she had told him a bit about life in a Welsh mining town, which seemed stranger to him than the existence of the Eskimos.
Where were they now? Both Walter and Robert had gone to war, of course, Walter with the German army and Robert with the Austrian, and Ethel had no way of knowing whether they were dead or alive. She knew no more about Fitz. She presumed he had gone to France with the Welsh Rifles, but was not even sure of that. All the same, she scanned the casualty lists in the newspapers, fearfully looking for the name Fitzherbert. She hated him for the way he had treated her, but all the same she was deeply thankful when his name did not appear.
She could have remained in contact with Maud, simply by going to the Wednesday clinic, but how would she have explained her visit? Apart from a minor scare in July—a little spotting of blood in her
underwear that Dr. Greenward had assured her was nothing to worry about—she had had nothing wrong with her.
However, Maud had not changed in six months. She walked into the hall as spectacularly well dressed as ever, in a huge wide-brimmed hat with a tall feather that stuck up out of the hatband like the mast of a yacht. Suddenly Ethel felt shabby in her old brown coat.
Maud caught her eye and came over. “Hello, Williams! Forgive me, I mean Ethel. What a lovely surprise!”
Ethel shook her hand. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up,” she said, patting her distended belly. “Just now I don’t think I could manage to stand up for the king.”
“Don’t even think about it. Can we find a few minutes to chat after the meeting?”
“That would be lovely.”
Maud went to the table, and Bernie opened the meeting. Bernie was a Russian Jew, like so many inhabitants of London’s East End. In fact few East Enders were plain English. There were lots of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish. Before the war there had been many Germans; now there were thousands of Belgian refugees. The East End was where they got off the ship, so naturally they settled there.
Although they had a special guest, Bernie insisted on first going through apologies for absence, the minutes of the previous meeting, and other tedious routines. He worked for the local council in the libraries department, and he was a stickler for detail.
At last he introduced Maud. She spoke confidently and knowledgeably about the oppression of women. “A woman doing the same job as a man should be paid the same,” she said. “But we are often told that the man has to support a family.”
Several men in the audience nodded emphatically: that was what they always said.
“But what about the woman who has to support a family?”
This brought murmurs of agreement from the women.
“Last week in Acton I met a girl who is trying to feed and clothe her five children on two pounds a week, while her husband, who has run off and left her, is earning four pounds ten shillings making ships’ propellers in Tottenham, and spending his money in the pub!”
