The supervisor walked in and Helen followed, shutting the door, reducing the noise by a fraction, but even that was welcome. The woman was beckoning to her, talking to a small man in a paisley tie and starched collar, soiled now where it rubbed against his neck. When Helen approached she shouted into her face again.
‘This is Mr French. He is in overall charge of the laboratory. You will take your directions from him.’ Her fingers, which she ran through her damp hair, were nicotine-stained but her grin made Helen smile. ‘I’ll see you down in the canteen for lunch. Half an hour, that’s all we get.’
Helen stood watching as Mr French tucked his pen behind his ear and pointed to her coat and then the rack on the wall. He smiled as she walked back, having heaped her coat on top of two others.
‘Tea break of ten minutes at nine o’clock. You’ll need that on the first day.’
Helen nodded, looking round. Three other girls were working in dungarees and short-sleeved shirts, their heads down, their hair lank and wet.
Mr French tapped one of them on the shoulder and when she turned he said, ‘Take Mrs Weber through the procedures please, Marjorie, I have to get on.’ He smiled. ‘Marjorie’s our charge-hand.’
Marjorie rose then and stuck her hands into her pockets, leaning back against the bench she had been working on. She grinned.
‘Right, they’ll already have told you how long you have to put up with this bedlam. We knock off at two p.m. sharp and leave prompt for our breaks. That way maybe we stay sane. They’ll also have told you that there are three shifts. We do two weeks on each. The graveyard shift is ten p.m. to six a.m. but I’m not going to tell you about it, I’ll let you wait and enjoy its delights at first hand.’ She laughed but it was sucked away by the noise as Mr French opened the door and left the room.
Marjorie jerked her head in his direction. ‘He’s OK. Pinches a few bums from time to time but he’s never tried mine. Fancies them blonde and giggly.’ Helen smiled and watched as Marjorie waved her hands along the benches.
‘We’re supposed to check that there is the correct standard of sugar in the beet and not too much going out into the waste products. Each result you get should be within just a few degrees of the standard.’
One of the girls rose from her bench and left and again there was an increase in noise as the door opened. Helen’s head already felt as though it were bursting.
‘Frances has gone to collect the samples. We have to take turns; it gets to be quite an art arriving back not dripping with the damn stuff. Once we get them here the waters are filtered and polarised, the beet pulp is dried out and weighed, then we record the results in the book. Sweet water and diffusion juice are brought up every couple of hours and five diffusion juices in bottles once every shift.’
Marjorie crossed her arms and nodded towards the other girls. ‘That’s Penny and Joan. Frances will be back soon and then I’ll show you what to do.’
It was twenty minutes before Frances appeared. The waters and juices were thick; cloudy and dark grey. Like the weather, Helen thought, but thank heavens the East Anglian clouds didn’t smell like this mixture. She watched as Marjorie added lead and distilled water to the samples, leaving them to filter, after which the liquid came through quite clear.
She wrote it all down on a notepad, her pencil slipping in her sweaty hand. It was HB and smudged black across the paper.
‘Don’t worry too much,’ Marjorie said. ‘It all seems strange at first but you’ll soon get used to it.’
Helen thought she never would. She looked round at these people she didn’t know and missed London, the crypt, her friends, the routine of the bank. The noise drilled through her head, the strangeness made her feel like a new girl at school. For now she had no home, just a room with newspaper stuffed in the cracks but her son was close, his heart murmur was improving and that was all that mattered.
She watched now, pushing her discomfort from her, making herself pay close attention as Marjorie poured the samples which had given a low reading into a polarimeter through a long tube with a funnel at the end. Those samples which had given a high reading were poured down a shorter tube with a funnel in the middle. She wrote this down. Then Marjorie took a reading by looking through an eyepiece which was like a telescope and turned a screw on the polarimeter until no shadow was in evidence on the screen. She copied out the reading from the scale at the top.
Marjorie made her do it too and then it was nine o’clock and time for the break. They rushed down through the factory without coats and out into the air where the cold and the quiet was like another world. They ran down the alley to the canteen where there was only time to take a cup of tea, already poured, from the trolley and sit and drink. Marjorie smoked, exhaling through her nostrils and mouth, talking, wafting it across the table, telling Helen that she would soon get the hang of the work, that she worked on a farm during the summer, though she was from Manchester and hadn’t known one end of a cow from the other at first. Then she looked at her watch and they ran back because their ten minutes was up. Up the steps and into the factory where the heat, the smell, the noise hit Helen again like a bulldozer, sucking her breath from her.
‘Come on,’ Marjorie said, pulling her arm as she paused. ‘Come on, we’ll be late.’ They hurried back past the women, the men, under pipes which dripped hot juice on to their bare arms and hair and Marjorie told her that later they would collect some of the sugar which had formed and she could take some back on her day off.
That night in bed she wrote to Chris, telling him of the sugar, Mr French, Marjorie, the canteen; asking him how he was. And then she slept and dreamt of Heine taking photographs of the beet girls near Hanover, saying he would look after her and make sure she never had to work with beet and he held her with arms that were strong and his skin smelt of the summer. His face was kind when she told him about Ed and how she wondered what his arms would feel like. He smiled but his hold loosened and he drifted from her, fading, and leaving her on the windswept beet fields even though she had called him again and again. She woke up crying.
Mr French told her that the heat in the laboratory was seventy-five degrees but the next day a belt came off one of the machines and because it stopped so too did the fans, as they often did. They all thought they would die and were evacuated down to the nearest windows, breathing in the cold damp air until the maintenance crew arrived. This too Helen wrote to Chris, and the next day told him that she had been the sample carrier, climbing up almost vertical stairs, walking along catwalks between hot sticky pipes to the tank.
She told him how she had been covered from head to foot in hot juice and how she had dropped one sample. When she visited him on Saturday night she explained how, that morning before she left, she had to set an automatic graph way up on the top floor and refill it with purple ink.
She showed him a piece of the sugar, collected by her for the girls’ tea at its point of production. It was a yellowish grey colour, but sweet, gloriously sweet. Helen and Laura put some into their drinks at the cottage, sitting in front of a fire which burnt logs collected from the surrounding countryside and for a moment it was almost as though there were not a war on, as though there were luxurious food and warmth, as though men were not dying. At dawn, though, she was woken by the aeroplanes lifting off at thirty-second intervals and wondered if there would ever be something as simple as a dawn chorus of birds again.
After the second week she moved to the two p.m. to ten p.m. shift with Marjorie and was thinner, but then they were all thin and it wasn’t just the rationing, it was the sweating, but Chris was even better and was allowed to sit up and hold his own cup, his own knife and fork, to turn the pages of his books. Ed came to see him more often because he was not flying at the moment. His Fortress had sustained a hole in the wing and an engine was shattered and there were no replacements yet, he had told Chris, but not Helen because somehow she did not arrive at the hospital until he had left.
On 15 November Helen was sitti
ng with Chris when they heard the church bells ringing out in the town and Helen clutched at the white sheet, wondering if the German invasion had happened at last but a nurse came in and told them that it was in celebration of Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein. At the end of November when the Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving the Russians began to turn the tide against the Germans but Helen sat in her room with the draught blowing past the newspaper and under the door, and read Claus’s letter from America before she began her two p.m. shift.
My dear Helen,
I am still unable to fight because of my chest but I have established at last our business. So soon, perhaps, Heine’s capital can begin to make your life a little more comfortable. I know it is what he would wish.
I am glad in many ways that he is dead because journalist friends of mine tell me from Geneva that the Nazis are systematically murdering Jews, Slavs and dissidents throughout Europe. Not thousands but millions. Can any of this be true? It would be more than he could bear, more than you can bear.
I shall write again, dear Helen.
My love to you and Christoph.
Claus
Helen worked all that day in the heat of the factory, glad that her head hurt, glad that her hair hung lank, that she was tired all the time, and that night she did not sleep because she remembered so much of her life with Heine, so much of the world outside work, rationing and bombing.
The ten p.m. to six a.m. shift was hard. She could not sleep in the day for more than a few hours and when she did she dreamt that she was searching for Heine but he could not be found and so she cried in her dreams and still heard the sound of his voice in those few first moments between sleep and waking. But at last she knew that Chris was going home to the cottage. The doctor told her that the murmur was so faint that there was no danger as long as Chris continued to rest. He could leave for Greater Mannenham on his birthday. Helen was going to book a taxi but Ed waited outside the hospital ward on 30 November to tell her that he had hired one and would collect her first from the boarding house at ten a.m. tomorrow which should give her a chance of a few hours’ sleep.
It was pointless for her to protest, he said, because he and Chris had decided between them and apart from anything else, where else could he spend all this goddamn money?
He came at ten a.m. and Helen wore her best dress and coloured her legs with stain because she had no stockings. There was no snow but a white frost and her feet were cold in her shoes, and red. She sat next to him, listening as he described the Thanksgiving dinner at the base, but watching the back of the taxi driver’s head and not Ed’s hands which were strong and still. Watching the roads which were still muddy from the lorries, hearing the buzz of the windscreen wipers as they cleaned and smeared, cleaned and smeared the glass. She looked ahead but could still see those hands resting on his thighs. He was so good and strong, so kind, but Heine had faded from her dreams and she couldn’t bear him to leave her for ever.
The ride back was full of laughter because Chris sat between them and she did not have to feel the American’s thigh against hers and was safe. He opened the present that Ed had brought; it was a baseball mitt and two balls. Ed told him there was a bat waiting at the cottage.
Helen had bought an old cap pistol from Marjorie’s brother because there were no longer any new toys in the shops. He had given her two boxes of pre-war caps too and Chris held the pistol with the mitt and rested his head on his mother’s shoulder and she felt that he was all she needed.
The suburbs turned to fields and Helen saw partridges sheltering in the stubble and bombs stacked high on the near perimeter of an air base but she also saw Ed’s face tighten as he saw them too. So she turned and looked instead at the walled churchyard on the other side, telling the American that the yews had provided the wood for longbows in olden times; that the berries and bark were poisonous and that in the old days the churchyard was the one place where cows had no access. She saw his face relax again.
They talked then about the cattle his family ran on the ranch in Montana, the miles of sage scrub on the foothills, the miles of riding range, the wild hay in the valley, and how his flying crew had laughed when they came to Greater Mannenham because they wondered how Little Mannenham could be any smaller.
‘But it is,’ Helen laughed.
‘It sure is.’ Ed leaned forward and helped Chris, who had stirred and woken as they pulled in to let an Army transport lorry pass. He fed the end of the cap spool through the hammer of the gun and Helen watched his hands again.
‘Do you miss America?’ Chris asked, clicking the hammer down gently, not firing yet; waiting until they reached the cottage when he could pounce on Laura as she opened the door.
‘Sure I miss it, Chris, but I guess there are compensations.’
‘The flying you mean?’ Chris asked.
‘No, that’s not what I mean.’ He looked across at Helen but she was staring back at the yew trees, pretending that those words had not been said.
Before Chris went to bed that night he asked his mother if she had told the village yet about his father.
‘No, darling, not yet. Joe has gone so you mustn’t worry.’
Chris looked down at the mitt which he had brought up to bed with him. ‘But we should tell them. Daddy was brave, wasn’t he? We should tell them, Mum.’
But she didn’t, not then and not on the following Sunday when she was working in the village hall with Laura after Morning Service, knotting camouflage netting with the other women of the village. Hemp was thick in the air but at least there was no smell of beet, no damp heat. No heat at all in fact. Her fingers were clumsy with cold and Laura passed her some fingerless gloves which helped.
Helen pushed her hand through her hair and pulled a face as Laura whispered, ‘The vicar’s wife was not pleased that you didn’t wear a hat.’
Helen said quietly, ‘Well, her very own archbishop has just revoked the rule that insists upon hats. It’s all part of the war effort. Perhaps I should tell her that.’
Laura laughed. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t, you’ll get turned to a pillar of salt with that evil eye turned on you.’
‘It’s all so silly. There are so many problems and she worries about a hat. Anyway, it’s stuck in the hole above the skirting board in my digs, stopping a draught. Perhaps I should tell her that instead.’ There was an edge to her voice now. She was too tired, too damn tired. There was too much going round her head, too many thoughts, too many doubts, too many fears. When would it ever end?
Laura laughed again. ‘You’re right, and next week I shall not wear mine and you can use it to plug a few more holes.’
The woman sitting on the right of Helen turned to her. ‘I shall be pleased to do the same,’ she said.
Mrs Williams was an elderly woman who lived in a small cottage at the far end of the village. She had lived in India for many years, Laura told Helen as they walked home, and was gracious and kind and had taken two evacuees while the vicar’s wife had taken only one even though she had three extra bedrooms. She also told Helen that Joe had overheard the vicar’s wife telling her husband about Heine. That was how he had known.
The following week, as they strung the twine together in the village hall again, Helen listened to Mrs Williams talking about the hot sun, the plains which stretched shimmering into the distance, the hill stations where it was cool and beautiful and when hemp dried their throats she fetched tea from the hatch for the three of them, passing the vicar’s wife who lifted her voice and said, ‘Of course, these Germans are barbarians. They are wicked through and through, all of them. It is no good to say it is just Nazis, look at Kaiser Bill. He wasn’t a Nazi, he was a German.’
Helen paused, spilling the tea into the saucers but Laura called to her, ‘Don’t let it get cold, Helen.’ Her voice was loud and determined and so Helen walked on but all that afternoon she knew that she had run away again so she dug out Laura’s Christmas tree from the bottom of the garden, thrusting her fork into
the frozen ground, picking out the earth little by little, using up her anger with herself, her shame. As she dug she wished there were spare hours in which to think, to clear her head, but at the same time she was grateful that there weren’t for what would her thoughts be? She carried the tree into the house, looking at her watch, knowing she had time to decorate it before she left for the bus.
She hung old decorations to Chris’s directions and new ones that he and Mary had made, and then Ed came, bringing ginger biscuits which he had always hung on his Christmas tree as a child. He helped Chris light the second Advent candle.
‘This is an American custom,’ he said to Helen, looking at the Advent candle.
‘It’s a German one too,’ she said. ‘Heine’s mother introduced us to it. It’s part of Heine, that’s why we have it. We love him.’
Ed looked at her quietly. ‘I know. He was a good man. You were lucky to have him. He was lucky to have you.’ He paused, smiled at Chris, then walked out to the kitchen where Laura was sitting at the table, peeling potatoes.
‘I’m going to take Helen back now. It’s too damn cold for buses,’ Helen heard him say as she followed him. He turned. ‘Get your coat then.’
They drove in silence all the way but Helen felt calmer now because she had told him that she loved Heine and he had accepted it and so perhaps now the image of her husband would come back to her at night and she would stop crying when she woke.
As she pulled at the handle of the car and stepped out into the cold, waving to one of the girls who was also returning, calling to her to leave the door on the latch, she turned.
‘Thank you, Ed.’ She smiled.
‘That’s OK, Helen.’ He leaned across, holding the door open with his hand. ‘But remember, you can’t hide behind your grief for ever, some time you’ve got to go forward.’
That night she did not sleep but neither did she cry.
During the week Helen received a letter from Chris saying that Mrs Williams and Laura were arranging a party for the villagers and the Americans in the village hall and would she help?
Somewhere Over England Page 24
