by Anne Bennett
Gloria, however, watching Joe’s face intently, had no idea of the thoughts tumbling about his head and took his silence for disapproval. ‘Come on, Joe. Let me try at least?’ she pleaded. ‘If you’re right and we do go to war, won’t our airmen need parachutes? And if the men are sent out to fight, won’t it be the women that will have to do that kind of thing?’
Joe grinned at her. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve convinced me. You can go and do your job, as long as Ben doesn’t suffer.’
Gloria and Elsie got their jobs at a place that had been a corset factory in Phillip Lane. It was on a direct tram route ten minutes beyond the school and so they would take the children as far as the school gate first.
Gloria loved the camaraderie of the team she worked in and the women would all eat dinner together in the canteen, though what they had to eat was sometimes questionable. The canteen’s shepherd’s pie seemed to consist of much potato and hardly any meat at all.
‘Probably be worse when this blessed war actually begins,’ one of Gloria’s team, Maureen, said one lunchtime when the food was particularly grim. The other women agreed, for there was no question that war was inevitable and people spoke of ‘when’ not ‘if’.
‘I’ve heard there’s going to be rationing, and each person will have just so much.’
White-haired Winnie, older and chubbier than the rest, said, ‘Fairer if they do. I lived through the last lot and the nobs would buy up all the food in the shops. They didn’t go in themselves but would send their servants. Disgusting, it was. Course, some grocers caught on what was happening and would only sell them so much, but others were out for all they could get and would sell them as much as they wanted.’
‘Not fair, is it?’ Violet said. ‘Nobs seem to get away with murder.’
‘Yeah,’ Elsie said. ‘And I bet they will find their way around this rationing as well.’
Gloria could have said that that was true. In the years of Prohibition in America her father never went without anything. Restrictions were for other people and didn’t bother him in the slightest, but she never discussed her privileged upbringing with anyone.
‘Well, that will be up to the shopkeepers, I expect,’ Winnie went on. ‘Though if it is a government thing they might keep more of an eye on it than they did last time. Anyroad, we paid out the shopkeepers who hadn’t played fair because we boycotted the shops afterwards.’
‘I’d say that served them right,’ Elsie said.
‘Well, it’s the kids you worry about most,’ Winnie said. ‘I mean, kids’ve got to have summat decent to eat, don’t they? I had twin boys three years old when the war began, and a little girl born when the war was a few months old. The hardest sound in the world to bear is your children crying with hunger and you unable to do anything about it.’
‘I agree,’ Gloria said. ‘We left America to prevent that happening to Ben – all of us really, but him in particular – because children don’t flourish just on fresh air.’
Violet laughed. ‘I’ll say not. My two lads are always stuffing their faces. Mind you,’ she went on, ‘the two boys are a dream compared to their sister. Coming up to her teens now and a proper little madam. She would argue all day if I let her. What’s your Sandra like, Maureen?’
‘Not so bad now that she’s been working for a year. It soon sorts them out when they have to get up and out for work each day, and the bosses don’t stand no nonsense. In our house it’s Charlie that is the little bugger. Sandra says that it’s our own fault because we’ve spoiled him, but she’s as bad as me and the old man.’
‘Whatever they’re like, enjoy them while you can,’ Winnie said. ‘Before you know it they’ll be grown and gone, like my three, and my two lads I reckon will be in the thick of it before long.’
‘What you talking about, Win?’ Violet replied. ‘From what I hear this ain’t going to be a war like no other and we’re all going to be in the thick of it, every man jack of us.’
No one argued, only too aware that Violet was right. A shiver of fear trailed down Gloria’s spine and she was glad of the hooter calling them back to work.
Ben didn’t mind at all that he had to go to clubs before and after school.
‘They’re fun,’ he told Joe. ‘Even more fun than school. We play games and that, and the ladies are real nice and new kids come all the time.’
‘See,’ Gloria said. ‘I am not the only wife and mother doing this. More and more women are getting involved. When war comes, we will all have to pull together.’
Joe nodded. ‘You’re right. And I was wrong to even hesitate. And I suppose it is no good asking you if you want to go and hide away in Ireland like Tom is always urging us to do?’
‘It’s not in my nature to scuttle away at the first sign of trouble,’ Gloria answered.
‘Nor mine.’ Joe surveyed his wife and there was pride in his voice as he said, ‘You are a truly amazing woman. Not many would have coped as well as you have with all that life has thrown at you so far.’
‘I coped because I had you by my side,’ Gloria said simply. ‘I would have folded in two if I hadn’t had you.’
‘You will always have me, my darling girl,’ Joe said huskily. ‘For I will love you, body and soul, until the breath leaves my body.’
‘Ah, Joe,’ Gloria said, leaning against him with a sigh, ‘I count myself a lucky woman to have fallen in love with such a fine man, and this war is just one more trial that we will face together.’
Being together meant Ben as well. He had already been with them through thick and thin and they couldn’t bear for him to be sent away. So when they were contacted about sending him to a place of safety, Joe and Gloria rejected the idea, and that was what she told the official who came round to see her.
On the last day of August, as they sat eating their dinner in the canteen, Violet asked Gloria if she had finished her blackout curtains.
‘Yes, but only just in time because it comes in force tomorrow and I don’t fancy a two-hundred-pound fine because I have a chink of light showing.’
‘It was a right hard slog doing all those curtains by hand,’ Maureen put in. ‘I was at it night after night, and I did the ones for my mother as well. She said she wished she had kept hold of the sewing machine she dumped only a few years ago when her arthritis made it difficult to use. If I’d had that I bet I could have made them all in a couple of hours.’
‘Joe made me shutters for the kitchen and bedroom windows that I just had to stretch the material over,’ Gloria said. ‘That helped a bit. But I made curtains for the windows in the sitting room and they look awful.’ She wrinkled her nose and said, ‘I have never had black curtains on my windows before.’
‘Ah, but then you have never lived through a war before like I have,’ Winnie said. ‘Not that anyone bothered about blackout curtains then, of course. There weren’t the planes about, though Zeppelins dropped some bombs on London. I think this war is going to be very different.’
‘Why bomb innocent people anyway?’ Gloria asked. ‘Isn’t it soldiers that are supposed to fight wars?’
‘That’s how it used to be, girl,’ Winnie said. ‘It ain’t like that any more. We’ll have to wait and see what he’s got in store for us.’
‘Ooh, don’t, Win,’ Violet said with a shiver. ‘You’re giving us all the willies.’
‘Talking of war, I’m going up for my gas mask after work,’ Elsie said. ‘You coming, Glor?’
Gloria made a face. ‘Do you think we need those horrid things? I can’t see myself ever putting it on.’
‘You might be glad of it, girl, if them Jerrys launch gas attacks like they did in the last war,’ said Winnie. ‘Even if you have the slightest whiff of it, it buggers up your lungs good and proper.’
‘Anyroad, you ain’t got no choice,’ Maureen said. ‘You have to carry it round your neck in a box. Our Charlie’s is red and blue, not the usual black, and it looks a bit like Mickey Mouse.’
‘Bet it don’t make
it smell any better,’ Winnie said.
‘No, it don’t,’ Maureen grumbled. ‘It stinks to high heaven, to tell you the truth. He said it makes him feel sick and I am not surprised. But he will have to wear it the same as the rest, and I bet he won’t play the teachers up like he does me when he goes off with the school tomorrow.’
‘Oh, ain’t you going to miss him, Maureen?’
‘Course I will, and my old man says we’ll bring him home again if there ain’t a lot doing. They don’t expect you to send much with them, though. We had a list and all he had to take was one vest, one pair of pants, one pair of trousers, two pair of socks, handkerchiefs and a pullover.’
‘Is that all? No coat?’
‘Yeah, there is a coat and toiletries as well, but that is all he has for goodness knows how long.’ Maureen gave a decisive sniff and went on, ‘Point is, when we decided to let him be evacuated, I got him kitted out and I’ve packed a case of stuff. I’m having no one think that mine’s a pauper’s child.’
‘Ah, bleeding shame, ain’t it?’ Violet said. ‘Hope you packed plenty of grub. My lads are always claiming they’re hungry.’
‘He has enough to feed an army, don’t worry,’ Maureen said. ‘And a couple of comics – and the government recommended barley sugar, in case any feel sick, I suppose.’
Gloria thought it monstrous to send young children all over the country to unknown destinations. Maureen’s son, Charlie, was only seven years old.
She was still thinking about it that evening as they collected their gas masks. Just as Maureen had said, all the children’s masks were red and blue, and, stretching the imagination, did look a bit like Mickey Mouse. That didn’t impress Ben in the slightest. He said it was still horrible and he wasn’t going to put it on. Gloria said nothing. Time enough to fight with him when she had to.
The next morning Maureen came in late, her eyes were puffy and there were tear trails on her cheeks.
‘I don’t know how she is able to bear it,’ Gloria said that night to Joe. ‘Mind you, she isn’t bearing it so well because every time I spotted her she was awash with tears. She doesn’t know if she has made the right decision or not, that’s the trouble. You are persuaded to do this and then you begin to have second thoughts and it’s too late. I don’t think I could ever send Ben away.’
‘No,’ said Joe. ‘Nor me, but war has moved one step closer today.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘It was on the news on the wireless just before you came home,’ Joe said. ‘Germany has invaded Poland, and the Poles are fighting for their lives.’
The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was giving an address on Sunday 3 September, at about eleven fifteen in the morning. Everyone knew what he was going to say, but when he actually said those words, that Britain was now at war with Germany, Gloria felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
The wail of the air-raid siren suddenly rent the air and Gloria felt as if the blood in her body had turned to ice. She looked at Joe in sudden terror. Neither of them knew what to do. Then she ran, frantically collecting coats and gas masks as the all clear was sounded.
‘Must have been a false alarm,’ Joe said.
‘Thank God,’ Gloria said fervently. ‘But we are at war now and the attacks are going to come. That showed me that I am totally ill prepared and for a few minutes I had no idea what to do.’
‘Neither did I,’ Joe admitted.
‘It said in the paper to pack a shelter bag but I didn’t,’ Gloria said.
‘A shelter bag?’
‘Yeah,’ Gloria said. ‘It said to put in rent books, insurance policies and identity cards, and things you value that you couldn’t replace, like treasured photographs. And then you could have maybe a packet of biscuits and drinks and things for the kids – books they especially like and a pack of cards or a set of dominoes. The point is you haven’t time to hunt around the house for these things when you should be busting a gut getting to a place of safety as soon as possible.’
‘So it’s good advice then?’
‘Yeah, it probably is,’ Gloria conceded. ‘There are lots of government guidelines and articles about coping in wartime like crisscrossing tape over the windows. I mean, flying glass can cause a lot of damage, but I didn’t do it because I hadn’t wanted to think about war and yet I’ve known for ages that this day would come. How stupid is that?’
‘What is war?’ Ben said.
‘A terrible tragedy that should never ever happen,’ Joe said. ‘But Hitler’s armies keeps marching into other countries and taking them over and they have to be stopped.’
‘How?’
‘Well, lots of our soldiers are probably going to have to go over there and fight the German soldiers.’
‘One of the kids at school said Hitler will send planes over here full of bombs and that they will blow us all up,’ Ben said.
Joe couldn’t refute what the child said and claim he was spouting rubbish, for he knew that he couldn’t protect Ben from war and the effect it would have on his life. It was far better, though, for Ben to get the facts from him or Gloria rather than listening to the lurid and gruesome talk in the playground.
‘The planes will carry bombs, and they will try and blow us up,’ Joe said, ‘but the government know all about this and they have built shelters for us to stay in while the bombs are coming down.’
‘So we will be all right then?’
‘I sincerely hope so.’
Later that night, when Ben was in bed, Gloria said, ‘One of the women told me the other day that there aren’t half enough shelters for the people of London.’
‘I read it too,’ Joe said, ‘but it wasn’t something that I thought I should share with a five-year-old child.’
‘It is right, then?’
Joe shrugged. ‘I would say that it is true enough. But if they had a shelter on each street corner, it would hardly suffice.’
Gloria shivered. ‘Some of the women I work with say they’re going down the Tube if the raids come. They say they would just feel safer so far underground.’
‘Yes, and the sounds of it would be sort of muffled,’ Joe said. ‘But I doubt the authorities would let anyone do that. There’s bound to be some regulation about it.’
‘Yeah, there probably is,’ Gloria agreed. ‘There is about most things these days.’
Cinemas, theatres, dance halls and other places where a lot of people might congregate together were closed, and Ben’s school didn’t reopen after the holidays because most of the teachers had gone with the evacuated children. Ben was very lonely and missed his friends a great deal, and Gloria had to take leave from work to look after him.
Then she missed the company of the other women and the money. However, the biggest bugbear to them all was coping with the blackout. It made life very difficult for those who wished to go about their daily business and it was hard to see the point of it when there had been no raids at all.
Eventually, towards the first Christmas of the war, so many people had been injured or even killed in accidents because of the blackout that the rules were relaxed. Shielded torches could be used and shielded headlights were allowed on vehicles.
Immediately torches disappeared from the shops’ shelves at a rate of knots and batteries were at a premium and often unavailable. But Joe was successful and he showed his to Gloria with great pride.
‘Make it easier to get about,’ he said.
Gloria turned on the torch’s feeble light. ‘Huh, not very.’
‘Better than the nothing we had before.’
‘I suppose so,’ Gloria said. ‘I hear they’re thinking of reopening the cinemas and theatres. I wish they’d reopen the schools too.’
‘They’ll have to,’ Joe said. ‘Half the kids that were evacuated are trickling back home, according to the papers. Mothers don’t see the point of them living with strangers when not a single bomb has fallen anywhere. School will probably be open again in January.’
‘January,’ Gloria repeated, and gave a sudden shiver. ‘The government said rationing will come into force then. It’s supposed to be a fairer system, but there is little in the shops now. Every time I hear of another merchant ship being sunk I feel sick. It’s Christmas in less than a fortnight and half the things I wanted I can’t get, and there are hardly any toys either to make the day a bit special for Ben.’
‘And if you complain about anything they remind you there’s a war on,’ Joe said.
‘Yes,’ Gloria agreed. ‘Just as if that fact might have slipped your mind.’
Ben’s school did reopen in January with some teachers that had been brought out of retirement, and Gloria was delighted to be back at work. She had also registered with a grocer and was allowed four ounces of bacon, four ounces of butter and twelve ounces of sugar per person per week to start with.
By March, meat had been added to the rationed goods, and most of the evacuated children had come home again, including Maureen’s son. The war was being dubbed the Bore War, and Joe had been thinking about his role in it for a week or two. Then when he went for his weekly pint with Red, he told Joe that he and his cousin, Pete, had both received their call-up papers, and this galvanised Joe into making a decision.
Why should he languish at home in a war that threatened to imperil them all? A war in which everyone had to do their bit if Britain wasn’t to be overwhelmed by Germany, as so many nations already had been. He didn’t tell Gloria until the next evening, after Ben had been put to bed.
As the play drew to a clese. Joe stood up, switched the wireless off and then, with his arms around Gloria, told her he would like to train as a volunteer fireman. Gloria jumped out of his arms as if she had been shot and stared at him as if she was unable to understand what she had heard.
‘But you know nothing about putting out fires, and anyway, you already have a job,’ she said eventually.
‘This is as well as the job, not instead of it,’ Joe said. ‘And I would be trained to do it properly. That’s why I want to join up now. I mean, it’s no good waiting until the bombs are dropping and fires blazing all over London, is it?’