Emma could have wept with frustration. Instead, she made herself calm down and look for ways of distracting the old lady, who she felt knew more than she was admitting. She focused on a vase of flowers.
'Those are lovely roses, Gran.'
'The ones on the window sill? Yes, they are nice. Mrs Cummings, from my church, brought them the other day. They're a beautiful pink, aren't they?'
'They are,' Emma agreed shamelessly. 'Absolutely lovely. I wish I'd thought to bring you some flowers, Gran. But I was in such a hurry I forgot.'
She stood up and crossed the room to sniff the roses. 'They have a nice scent, too. So many flowers you see in the shops these days smell of nothing at all.'
'I do agree,' said Gran, who seemed to be much happier with this topic of conversation. 'Do you know, I've said to more than one person not to bring me any more flowers from supermarkets or petrol stations, because they're no better than artificial flowers.'
Emma laughed. Not much wrong with your short-term memory, Gran dear, is there? she thought. So there can't be much wrong with your long-term memory either. In fact, you're just like Mum! Seemingly remembering only what you want to remember.
She wondered if either of them could have reason to forget Freda. It was almost as if they had signed a pact to obliterate her from memory. Was she such a terrible person? It hadn't sounded like it, from what she had learnt on Orkney.
'I was just wondering, Gran. In the War, were you and Freda in the Army, or the Land Army, or something? Were you both in uniform, like so many women your age?'
Gran chuckled as she thought about that one.
'In the War? Oh, yes. I was, anyway. I was in the Land Army, working on a farm in Cumbria. We had a lovely time in the spring, when the lambs were born. It was wonderful to see them racing around the fields.
'Somewhere,' she added, 'there are photos from those days. Perhaps your mother has them? I've lost track of all sorts of things since I've been in here. I don't have any of my possessions with me, you know. It's awful.'
'I'm sorry about that, Gran. I'll have to see if I can do anything about it. Was Freda with you?'
'Freda?'
'Your sister. Was she in the Land Army with you?'
'Oh, no! Not Freda. She was far too ... intelligent for that sort of thing. At school she was good at foreign languages, you know. I remember that.'
The old lady paused for thought, and then added, 'She wouldn't have enjoyed watching lambs and harvesting potatoes – not Freda. Oh, no! Freda was in that other lot.'
'What other lot, Gran?'
'Something else. I can't recall now what it was.'
The smile left the old lady's face, which took on the same obstinate look Emma had seen earlier.
'You don't know what service she was in, exactly, but it was in uniform, was it?'
'I don't remember. You shouldn't ask me things I can't remember. I'm nearly ninety, you know. I don't have to remember everything now. It can't be expected.'
'No, of course not, Gran. You're quite right. I'm not trying to trick you. I just wanted to learn something about Freda. After all, she's left me her house in Orkney. I ought to find out something about her before I sell it, don't you think?'
'Well, it's no good asking me – or your mother either,' the old lady said firmly.
'I think I've realised that already,' Emma said wearily, wondering if she was being terribly mean in pursuing the matter.
'You'll have to ask somebody else,' Gran said even more firmly. 'But I don't know who,' she added with apparent satisfaction. 'I'm probably the only one left from those days.'
Those days? What days? Wartime, did she mean? Well, she must be very nearly right about that, Emma thought sadly.
'Oh, it doesn't really matter, Gran! I didn't want to bother you. It's not that important.'
'That's good,' Gran said. Then she seemed to brighten up in relief. 'Next time you come, Emma, please bring me some more roses. I won't mind if they're only from the supermarket. I realise you won't have a lot of money.'
'All right, Gran. I will.'
You scheming old thing! Emma thought with amusement. There I was feeling sorry for you, because I seemed to be badgering you. But you were just playing with me, weren't you? I wonder what it is you don't want me to know.
*
Soon afterwards Emma left, knowing she had learned something despite the old lady's determination to tell her absolutely nothing at all. In fact, she had learned quite a lot, she realised when she thought about it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Talking to Gran, and getting such a limited response, spurred Emma on to think more about what the war-time world must have been like for young women. How did the likes of Gran and her sister fit into that world? The more she thought about it, the more she realised how very little she knew of those times. How did women end up in uniform, for example, and which uniform?
There was only one thing to do. She set an evening aside and got onto her computer to do some research. Some of the answers she wanted were easy to find. There was far more information available online than she would have thought possible.
She found that, after a slow start, an Act of Parliament in December 1941 provided for the conscription of young women into national service. At first it applied to childless widows and single women between the ages of twenty and thirty. Later, the age range became nineteen to forty-three. The country simply didn't have enough men to do what was required by the armed forces and the wartime economy. The nation's women had to be mobilised.
Once women were signed up, they could choose between civilian work – in industry or on the land – or the armed forces. Eighty-thousand women entered the Land Army, which was a civilian force, and thousands of others worked in forestry. Soon a third of the jobs even in industry were filled by women.
It was a bit of an eye-opener. Emma hadn't realised the scale of female participation in the work force, or the contribution women made to the economy and the war effort back in those days. She had believed it had all started with the feminists in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, not with World War II.
Interesting as all this was, however, she focused on women who had entered the various uniform services. The information she found wasn't easy to digest. There was such a welt of it, for one thing, and the possibilities seemed endless. How on earth had women chosen what to do, faced with such a baffling array of possibilities?
Not all the uniform services were military either. The Land Army was one civilian force with a uniform. Another was FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. There were others.
It was perfectly possible that Freda had been in a civilian force, but Emma decided to assume that had not been the case. Apart from Gran's reluctant admission that Freda had not been in the Land Army, like her, there were all the old photographs to suggest she had been closer to the military. As Gregor had suggested, it seemed unlikely that a civilian would have been allowed access to a PoW camp.
So where did that leave her? Well, the options were still plentiful. The army, navy and air force had all had women's equivalents : ATS, WRNS, WAAF. It didn't stop there either. There was all sorts of smaller, specialist forces. It was bewildering, and baffling. Her eyes began to glaze over at the proliferation of capital letters, and her brain ground to a standstill.
She switched off, yawned and got herself a mug of hot chocolate. She needed to do more thinking, and for that she needed some fortification.
*
With a further surge of energy, she discovered that the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, seemed to have been the biggest of the military organisations for women. Essentially, that was the female side of the army. Statistically, the odds were that Freda had been in the ATS. But would a young woman volunteering to join the army have been posted to remote Orkney?
*
She put that question to Gregor when she next spoke to him on the phone.
He chuckled.
'You still make the mistake of thinking Orkney is on the edge of the world, don't you?'
'Well .... I don't mean to be disparaging, Gregor, but it is, isn't it?'
'Have you learned nothing from everything I've been telling you? Skara Brae, where I took you that day, was here a couple of thousand years before Stonehenge was built.'
'Well, yes, but ....'
'Orkney has always been on important pathways. In ancient times people didn't travel overland. They travelled by sea and river. How long do you think it would have taken to get from London to Stromness overland before there were any railways, roads or aircraft? And that's assuming nobody killed you en route!'
'Mm. I see what you mean. But 1940 was not ancient times, was it?'
'Indeed not. Think about Scapa Flow. Didn't I tell you that was where the Home Fleet was based?'
'Yes, I believe you did, Professor – now that you mention it.'
'Watch it! So with umpteen battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and whatever else they had in those days, stationed in Scapa Flow, how many people would they have needed to support them, do you suppose?'
'A lot?' she said tentatively.'
'A lot, a very lot. A hundred-thousand people were shipped into Orkney to support the Home Fleet, and everything else going on here. Orkney was critical, as well, to the North Atlantic convoys that brought the food the country needed.'
She shook her head. She hadn't thought of any of this.
'And a lot of the hundred-thousand people would have been in the armed forces?'
'Armed forces, War Ministry, civil servants ....'
'Including women in the ATS, the WRNS and ATS?'
'Absolutely – whatever they are, or were!'
She laughed. 'Oh, I'm ahead of you there, am I? That's good. I've been doing some research into the wartime conscription of women. It's proved to be very interesting.'
'And it sounds like time well spent. But have you found anything more on Freda?'
'Not yet. I've got some ideas I'm going to follow up, though, now you've set me right on the importance of Orkney. I just couldn't see how Freda could have ended up there, but you've given me something to think about. Perhaps she had no choice?'
'I think that's very likely. In wartime, people were probably told where to go, and what to do when they got there.
'By the way, my own guess would be that Freda was more likely to have been in the navy than the army. After all, Scapa Flow was a naval base.'
'That's true,' Emma said thoughtfully. 'I hadn't looked at it like that.'
'It's worth thinking about.'
She absorbed that suggestion, and then changed the subject. 'By the way, I'm coming back in a fortnight's time. I've arranged with my boss to have some more time off work.'
'Really! Oh, that's great news. I shall look forward to that.'
And so shall I, she thought with a smile and a lift of her heart.
Chapter Twenty-Three
When Emma met Anna and Kim next, they complained that she had been neglecting them.
'How can you say that?' she complained right back. 'Here I am, sitting here with you both, drinking wine, eating pizza, enjoying myself.'
'Now you're a property owner,' Anna said with a haughty sniff, 'we're not good enough for you, are we?'
'I don't feel like a property owner. I still live in my rented one-bedroom flat.'
'Just as an experiment. To see how most of us live.'
It was impossible to keep a straight face. Laughing out loud, Emma said, 'I don't know why I bother with you two!'
'Actually,' Kim intervened thoughtfully, 'I don't think it has anything to do with a house. I think it's all to do with that man she found on Orkney. What was his name again?'
'Gregory, wasn't it?' Anna said helpfully.
'Gregor, actually,' Emma corrected her automatically. Then she eyed Kim with a whimsical look and added, 'You're not totally wrong, you know. He's a lovely man. And I'm pleased to say he phones me quite often.'
'Oh!' they chorused, wide-eyed. 'He phones her!'
Emma shrugged. 'Unfortunately, it's not what you think. He phones me in the interest of research. We're both trying to find out more about this aunt who left me her house, which is far more difficult than you two might think.'
'So you said,' Anna responded with a smile, relenting. 'Has no-one in your family been able to help?'
'Not much. Mum and Dad don't seem to know anything about Aunt Freda. The only other person who ought to know something is Gran, Freda's sister, but she can't remember much.
'Why doesn't your mum know anything?' Anna asked with a frown.
'I don't know,' Emma said, shaking her head. 'She seems to have barely heard of Freda. Probably it's because she lived so far away on Orkney nearly all her life.'
'Have you worked out how she got there in the first place?' Kim asked.
'Not yet. We – that's me and Gregor – are wondering if she was conscripted and sent there by the army, or the navy, when the war started. But we haven't found any proof. We're still working on it.'
'Which war was that?' Anna asked thoughtfully.
'World War Two, of course.'
'Not the First World War?'
'No, of course not. Freda wasn't that old. Anyway, I'm going back up there in a couple of weeks. Apart from all this wondering about Freda, I still have to do something with the house. Sell it, I suppose, although I'm not really ready to do that just yet.'
'Going back to basics,' Kim said, 'why can't you and Gregor be romantically inclined? Why does it have to be only about research about Freda?'
'I wondered when you'd get back to that!' Emma said with a grin. 'Gregor's a lovely man, but he's damaged goods, sadly. His sister warned me that he isn't interested in women generally, and he doesn't seem to be interested in me particularly. Not that way, at least.'
Kim frowned. 'Oh? Is he ... you know? Gay?'
'No, I'm sure he isn't.'
'Well, then?'
Emma sighed. 'I don't know much about it, but It's very sad. Apparently, he was married and lost his wife in a bad road accident somewhere in Africa.'
'Africa?'
'He's a wildlife cameraman – didn't I tell you? – and took her on safari, or something, with him. His sister says he blames himself for taking her, but he didn't really have a choice.'
With a shrug, Emma added, 'That's all I really know.'
'How sad,' Kim said. 'So he remains faithful to her memory?'
Emma nodded. 'I do like him, though.'
'So do I,' Anna said. 'I like him already. He sounds very romantic.'
Emma stared at her a moment, and then shook her head and began to laugh.
'What?' Anna protested. 'Why can't I like him? Just because I've never met him doesn't mean ....'
'Will you tell her,' Kim asked Emma abruptly, 'or do you want me to do it?'
*
Back at the flat that evening, Emma fired up her laptop again and spent some more time pursuing Freda. Now she knew a little about how it was in wartime, she could find her way around the subject a bit more easily. Already she had come across websites that offered the possibility of tracing the military service records of individual people. One commercial site offered access to the records of seven million people, although they were spread over a great many wars. Another claimed to have fifty million records, spanning the centuries, as well as the nations. It didn't stop there either. She wondered who on earth had done the work to put all this online.
She focused on websites run by The National Archives, a branch of government, which were official and she felt would be reliable. Unfortunately, she soon realised she had hit the buffers, at least in the short term. Her task would have been easier if Freda had been alive during the First World War. Then she could have looked for her online. World War II personnel records were a different matter. They were held still by the Ministry of Defence, and amazingly, after all this time, were
still too recent to be made available online for reasons of confidentiality.
It was possible to obtain certain limited information about a person's military service record in the 1939-45 period if you were next-of-kin, or even just for research purposes, but for that you needed to apply to the Ministry of Defence. Emma made some notes on what was required, but then rather lost interest when she read that processing the application could take many months.
She grimaced with disappointment and frustration. She needed to know now, or at least very soon. It wouldn't be possible to defer a decision about the house all that time. Still, she supposed it might be worth making an application anyway, just to see what happened.
*
Late as it was, she wasn't really tired enough to sleep. She decided to do a little more searching. Particularly interesting were the archives compiled by the BBC and other organisations containing the personal stories of women who had been contemporaries of Freda's.
It was truly astonishing. Young women had been uprooted from their homes and lives to be sent all over the place, and in all sorts of uniforms. Some, plenty, had disagreeable experiences, even if they were not manning front-line trenches. But they were young, and the times were exciting. For many of the women, it was the time of their life, at least in retrospect.
There were hundreds, thousands, of stories reported in brief in the online archives. Far too many to read through in one lifetime, but they were there, on record, as testimony to a time now long gone, like most of the participants.
Scanning the titles of the contributions to one website, Emma noticed a story recorded by a Wren, who had been sent to Orkney, to serve on HMS Tern. It stuck in her mind, partly because it was about Orkney, and partly because she knew Gregor was interested in terns. She would tell him about that one, and ask him about HMS Tern.
Chapter Twenty-Four
'I've brought you some flowers, Gran – and they're not from the supermarket either! These are from a proper florist.'
And they cost an arm and a leg, she thought to herself with a wry smile.
Orkney Mystery Page 9