by Anne Bennett
‘It’s the kids I worry about most,’ Polly said. ‘Keeping them safe, you know?’
Aggie knew full well. It would be what any mother wanted. Polly loved Aggie’s company if she took the children out to the park on a Sunday afternoon. Lily would use this time to put her feet up, and Aggie didn’t blame her, but she loved those outings with Charlie and Clara.
Georgie had managed to procure a football for Charlie before he enlisted. It wasn’t a new one, but a ball was still a ball.
‘Don’t ask where he got it,’ Polly said, the first time she produced it from the cupboard, ‘because I haven’t a clue. He arrived home with it one day and when I asked him how he had come by it, he said them that ask no questions will be told no lies. So now you are as wise as me.’
However Georgie had got the ball, Aggie, Polly and Charlie spent many hours pounding after it in the park. Even little Clara joined in the chase, though she could barely keep up and seldom got near enough to actually kick it.
Eventually, though, other boys would sidle up and ask to play, and in the end, Aggie and Polly would sneak away and let the boys play their own version of football. Clara would usually find some little girls to play with and Aggie and Polly would talk together for hours.
‘It’s a shame that you haven’t children of your own,’ Polly said one afternoon. ‘You are so good with them and they love you too.’
‘Children without a husband?’ Aggie said with a smile. ‘Shame on you. Anyway, I don’t think I can have children. I think there is something wrong inside me.’
‘Oh, that is sad,’ Polly said. ‘Is that why you are not married?’
Aggie paused before saying, ‘Oh, there are many reasons why I am unmarried.’
She didn’t say what they were, though, and after a few minutes of awkward silence she jumped to her feet asking, ‘Shall I start rounding the children up? It’s about time we were heading back.’
Polly never broached that subject again, sensing that Aggie didn’t want to answer personal questions about her past. The children had no such restraint.
Sometimes, though, Aggie brought this on herself. Polly remembered Charlie’s open-mouthed astonishment when Aggie told him the milk he was pouring on to his porridge came from a cow.
Charlie had never seen a cow, but the thought that milk came from any animal at all fascinated him, especially when Aggie explained how it was extracted.
‘We get our milk from a woman what comes round,’ Charlie said.
‘Yeah, Mommy says before the war a man did it,’ Clara put in. ‘But it’s this woman now and we have to take a jug out and she fills it up.’
‘Well, it starts off in a cow,’ Aggie said. ‘And you make butter from milk too.’
Charlie looked a little sceptical. ‘How do you do that?’
Aggie went on described the churn the milk was poured into and the paddle that had to be pounded until the milk separated and began to solidify.
‘By then,’ she said, ‘you feel as if your arms are going to fall off, but you have to scoop the butter out, mix it with salt, pat it into shape and wrap it in muslin.’
The children were hanging on her every word. ‘Tell us some more?’ Charlie urged.
Aggie shook her head. ‘I would be late for work if I did,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you more another day.’
They didn’t forget and in time they knew all that Aggie was prepared to share. She told them of the little whitewashed cottage she had grown up in, and the thatch on the roof that was made from the flax that was grown in the fields. ‘Lots of things are grown in the fields,’ she said. ‘Things you eat like cabbages, swedes, turnips and potatoes.’ She explained how they were planted in the spring and then harvested in the autumn. She described, when they pressed her, about the woolly sheep on the hillside, the velvet-flanked cows with their deep brown eyes, and the very smelly pig and squealing piglets.
One day, when Polly had managed to get her hands on a few eggs, Aggie told the children of the rooster that had woken them every morning with his cock-a-doodle-doo, and of the hens strut ting about the yard.
‘Did you have lots of chickens?’ Clara asked.
‘A fair few,’ Aggie said, ‘and I could collect a whole basket of eggs every morning.’
‘Did you eat them all?’
Aggie laughed. ‘No, there were too many,’ she said. ‘The others we would sell at the market in the town on Saturday and the excess butter would go there too.’
‘Are they bothering you?’ Polly asked anxiously.
‘No,’ Aggie said. ‘They learn by asking questions. To tell you the truth, they remind me very much of my little brother, Finn, when he was small.’
It was the first time that Aggie had mentioned any of her family and she knew that she had made a grave mistake.
‘What age would he be now then, your brother?’ Polly asked.
Immediately, it was as if a shutter had come down, with Aggie on one side of it, and Polly the other.
‘Oh, all grown up,’ Aggie said vaguely. ‘I haven’t heard of him in years.’
Polly’s eyes narrowed and she wondered what had happened in Aggie’s past. She obviously once had had a family and yet all the months she had been there she had never had a letter. Lily had – from her brother in America, she said – and Polly had always assumed that Aggie was alone in the world. She was bursting with curiosity, but not prepared to badger her with questions she’d not want to answer. After all, everyone was entitled to privacy.
It was obvious by 1918 that the war was starting to bite financially. Meat rationing was introduced, which didn’t really affect the poor in Birmingham, who already seldom saw meat any day of the week. But fuel was rationed too, and so theatres, cinemas and restaurants were forced to close early and the age for conscription was raised to fifty.
‘Bloody Hell,’ Lily remarked when she heard this, ‘We are fighting a highly trained and disciplined German army with a load of granddads.’ Seemed she was right as well, when the Allies suffered a massive defeat in Ypres and 400,000 were killed in three weeks.
‘Seems like the end of the war is as far away as ever,’ Lily said. ‘And that means they need as many detonators as we can make.’
‘I know,’ Aggie agreed. ‘I would like to feel sorry about it. I mean, I am sorry about the loss of life; you would have to be a real heartless soul not to feel sad about that and wish it wasn’t happening. But this is the first time in my life I have made money, legitimate money that I feel entitled to spend in any way I choose. I know that is a really selfish way to look at things, but…’
‘It ain’t selfish a bit, duck,’ Lily assured her. ‘The dice were stacked against you long enough. We can’t do aught to shorten or lengthen the war and there ain’t no sin in enjoying the money you are earning, honestly. And we are earning it at the moment,’ she added. ‘Because now the summer has arrived, I feel some days that I am going to melt under them bloody overalls, and all that will be left of me by the end of the day will be a puddle of sweat.’
Aggie knew exactly how Lily felt. The weather was unseasonably warm for a British summer, and the heat in the factory could get very uncomfortable indeed.
One Friday in early July, Lily, Aggie and Jane were glad to be among a party of six to be sent into the yard to help unload the deliveries that had arrived that morning. There was no breeze, and the day was heavy with heat, but to be out in it was more pleasant than had being indoors.
They had just remarked on this fact when there was a gigantic explosion that flung the women and the two van drivers to the ground. Aggie felt as if all the breath had been knocked from her body and all her bones had been loosened. She sat up gingerly and felt everywhere, and she knew she was not seriously injured, though she might have a mass of bruises develop later on.
‘You all right, Lil?’ she asked.
Lily pulled herself into a sitting position with a groan and said, ‘I’ll live, and that’s probably more than can be said for them p
oor sods over there.’
‘Oh God!’ Aggie breathed. Their section of the factory was no longer there. It had crumpled inwards, and was now just a mass of tumbled bricks, blackened and fractured roof beams, shards of glass and broken slates. The acrid stink of brick dust, smoke, sulphur and cordite filled the air. ‘Chris is in there,’ Aggie whispered, horrified.
‘And plenty of other poor sods,’ Lily said, heaving herself to her feet. ‘Come on, let’s give them a hand before the whole bleeding thing disappears altogether.’
Jane was already there, pulling desperately at the debris while tears ran down her face and sobs shook her body. Aggie wanted to say something to the distraught girl, but couldn’t think of anything that might help. Instead she worked alongside her, moving the rubble piece by piece, for the whole structure looked unstable.
Others came to help – the other three girls, the van drivers and people from parts of the factory not affected – and the crushed body of Miss Morris was uncovered before the emergency services arrived.
Jane looked at the mangled face of her supervisor and let out a howl of fear. ‘I won’t be able to bear it if anything has happened to Chris.’
Aggie put her arms around Jane’s heaving shoulders, feeling the distress running all through her. She was hardly aware that tears were streaming from her own eyes and she said nothing for she couldn’t assure her that Chris would be fine, or urge her not to worry or upset herself. All she could do was hold her tight. Lily’s eyes were full of compassion for them both.
Now that the rescue services were in charge, they had just to watch, for it was deemed too dangerous for untrained people to help. They stood in the heat-filled yard, the air still so fetid and sour it was hard to breathe in, and the shock and sorrow all around was so palpable that it could almost be touched. Some keened and cried, but most stood in silence. As each body was brought out, a sigh rippled around those watching. Jane shuddered as each was carried past her to be laid in the yard and covered with a blanket.
When the dust-covered body of Mr Witchell was carried out, all hope that there might be survivors seemed to seep out of Jane, and when her sister was the next body to be pulled out she had almost been expecting it. That didn’t prevent her cry as she saw how badly she had been crushed, apparent from her disfigured face to the strange angle of her body.
Many were crying along with Jane, Lily and Aggie amongst them. They hadn’t known Chris that long, but they had become friends almost straight away. Aggie knew that Jane would always mourn the loss of the sister she had loved so much, and the family would be rent asunder by the tragedy.
Through bleary eyes she saw a middle-aged couple approach Jane, who spotted them at the same time.
‘Oh, Mom!’ she cried in anguish, and her mother enfolded Jane in her arms, though Aggie saw the tears glinting in her own eyes.
Her father patted her gently on the shoulder and said, ‘Let’s away home, lass. There is nothing to be gained by staying here.’
‘But Chris…’
‘Doesn’t need our ministrations,’ Jane’s father said. ‘And I will do the necessary. But you, my dear, have done enough and I want to get you home where you will have your mother to tend you and maybe you will be a measure of comfort to each other.’
Aggie and Lily watched the sad little group walk out of the yard.
Lily said, ‘Do you want to do the same?’
‘Go home, do you mean?’ Aggie said. ‘Oh, yes. I am too burdened down with sadness to stay any longer.’
The yard was filling with people as the news of the explosion was spreading, but no one stopped Aggie or Lily as they walked out of the gates and made their way home.
TWENTY
The day of the explosion Polly had been shopping. For a change she had gone into the Bull Ring in the city centre and she was unaware of anything untoward happening at Kynoch’s factory. When she arrived home, she found Lily and Aggie already there. They’d had to come home in their overalls, as the cloakroom, with their coats and bags in it, was one of the areas in the factory that was crushed. But by the time Polly had got home they’d washed and changed.
Polly was appalled at the news. ‘My God!’ she cried. ‘You could have been killed.’
‘We know that,’ Lily said. ‘If some of the other girls had been chosen to help with the unloading, then we would have been inside the building that got the full force of the blast. It’s finished me with munitions, for the next time we might not be so lucky.’
Eighteen people, mainly women, had died in the explosion. Others were injured and needed treatment in hospital. These were sad and sorrowful days.
Mr Witchell was the father of six children and it upset Aggie greatly to see them all in church, dressed in black, their sorrowful eyes standing out in their white strained faces, and their mother coping with tremendous dignity in the face of such a terrible tragedy. The saddened elderly parents of Miss Morris seemed bemused by the whole thing, as if they couldn’t quite believe it, and Aggie’s heart went out to them too.
There was so much unhappiness and anguish, so many funerals. The worst for Aggie and Lily was that of Chris Potter, where they saw her parents and Jane bowed down with grief, and Jane’s two younger brothers manfully trying not to cry. They were invited back to the house and welcomed as friends of Chris, but they didn’t stay so very long.
Jane caught up with them at the door before they left. ‘Going so soon?’
Lily nodded. ‘The strain is beginning to tell on your parents,’ she said. ‘They don’t need strangers at a time like this.’
‘I know,’ Jane said. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? I can barely believe she’s gone, that I’ll never see her again.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ Aggie asked gently.
‘My aunt Peggy is taking me back to her place in Cheshire for a bit,’ Jane said. ‘She asked Mom too, but she won’t leave Dad and the lads; said they’re all going through it too. I know they are, but I really need to get away. What will you do?’
‘Get another job,’ Lily said. ‘What else can we do?’
‘Nothing, I suppose. In munitions again?’
‘Huh, not likely,’ Lily said. ‘I think me and Aggie have had our fill of places like that.’
‘The point is,’ Lily said to Polly later, ‘we don’t really know where to look for work.’
‘Well, what line of work were you in before?’ Polly asked.
It was a reasonable question to ask, and though it had never come up before, the two women had their stories ready.
‘We were in service together,’ Lily said. ‘And we hardly want to go back to that.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ Polly said. ‘I couldn’t bear being at someone’s beck and call like that.’
‘And the wages were awful,’ Lily said. ‘It was the money tempted us to try for the munitions. Jane was working with us, and her sister, Chris, had a job at the Kynoch’s works and told us of the big money we could be earning.’
‘And wasn’t it Chris’s funeral you were at today?’
‘Yes, that right.’
‘What a shame!’ Polly said. ‘Thank God you are coming out of it. But, I suppose there might be other war-related work that isn’t as dangerous.’
‘Ah, we have talked about this,’ Lily said. ‘We think it would be better for us to get jobs we can still do when the war is over. Otherwise, we might be competing for work with the demobbed soldiers.’
Polly nodded. ‘I can quite see that. I should try Aston Cross. There are all sorts of factories there and it’s only a short tram ride away.’
Lily grinned at Aggie and said, ‘Have to get over your aversion to trams then, bab, if we get set on at Aston Cross. You was a dithering wreck when we went up to Kynoch’s that time to find out about jobs in the munitions place. I ain’t putting up with that performance every bloody morning.’
‘I know,’ Aggie retorted, ‘and you won’t have to. I know I will just have to get used to it, that’s all,
like everyone else does.’ And she knew she would. God, she would walk over hot coals if it meant at the end of it she had respectable employment. What was a short journey on a tram in comparison to that? Nothing, that’s what, and she was determined to conquer her fear.
The women were in a better position than they had ever been before to get respectable employment, for not only did they have references, they also had a genuine reason for leaving Kynoch’s. They were delighted to be taken on at HP Sauce, which was at Aston Cross, within days. Though the money would be just under half what they were used to, it was perfectly adequate for their needs.
‘We’ll need other lodgings too,’ Aggie said on the way home to tell Polly the good news that they were employed again. ‘Polly will not want us there when her husband comes home.’
Polly, however, wouldn’t dream of them leaving. ‘Wait till the war is officially over, at least,’ she pleaded. ‘I have got used to having you around.’
‘And we don’t want you to go either,’ Charlie added, overhearing what Aggie had said. ‘Do we, Clara?’
‘No, we don’t,’ Clara said, and to make absolutely sure they understood that, she wrapped her little arms around Aggie. ‘We want you to stay for ever.’
‘For ever is a long time,’ Aggie said, ‘but we will stay until the war is over and then we will be moving out because your daddy will be coming home.’
Charlie and Clara were too young to remember a time when the country hadn’t been at war – it was just there all the time – and so they were satisfied by Aggie’s reply.
With the children in bed, Polly confided in the two women, ‘It might be a bit awkward at first when Georgie comes home. I’m a bit nervous, to tell the truth. I mean, Georgie won’t be the same man as the one I married, will he? Stands to reason. He’ll have seen things and done things that’s bound to have changed him. He was different when he came home last time – shorter-tempered, like.’
‘And you will have changed too, don’t forget,’ Aggie said. ‘It’ll take time to get back to living together again, that’s all. And that is time on your own. It will be even more awkward if we are here too. But for now we’ll stay put.’
