A Woman's Place

by Maggie Ford

  Her lamentations prompted Connie to reply that if they were to win this war, every man must do his bit for his country, as her own husband was doing. ‘Even if he is only in the ranks,’ she hastened to add pointedly, suddenly made very strong by Verity’s fear.

  Verity’s letter had also said that their brother, Denzil, at eighteen, had also enlisted instead of going up to Oxford. He too was considered to be potential officer material; the army sorely needed commissioned men.

  ‘If only my mother could have written to tell me about him,’ Connie said bitterly. ‘I feel I’ve no family at all.’

  ‘You’ve got mine,’ said Eveline, trying to comfort.

  She had to admit that Eveline’s family did treat her almost as one of their own. She had even accepted invitations to Sunday dinner, but it was small compensation for her own parents’ attitude towards her. Verity’s letter had prompted her to write once again to them, this time to say that George had enlisted, but there’d been no response, embittering her even more.

  ‘I really feel that if my George was sent off to France and I made a widow, they’d still not write,’ she told Eveline, her needles working furiously on the khaki socks she was knitting.

  The words made her shudder as if they had been prophetic, as in fact they appeared to have been when days later news came from George that his and Albert’s unit had indeed been sent to the front, as it was being called.

  The anticipated movements of battle having come to a stalemate in early November, both sides were digging in. Newspapers reported trenches and barbed wire, monotony, and mud with the onset of winter, a series of small advances and small retreats getting both sides nowhere.

  George’s letter, posted from France, sent Connie falling into Eveline’s arms, grateful for a shoulder to cry on. She was being a baby knowing so many women throughout the country must be feeling the same as her. She was well aware how weak she must seem but it helped to have someone to cling to and not feel she was being condemned for her frailty.

  Eveline too had received a letter, from Albert. She said she’d managed to hold her emotion but Connie’s crying had finally made her give way to silly tears. This was spoken almost like an accusation. Connie felt some of her strength return as they comforted each other; Eveline was made of stronger stuff than she ever would be, for all her resolve now to face up to whatever came.

  Christmas was like no other Eveline had ever known, everyone caught by a new fear. Ten days before, several towns on the east coast had been brought right into the war as, looming out of a December dawn mist, three German warships had shelled the east coast towns of Scarborough, West Hartlepool and Whitby. A hundred people had been killed, mostly civilians.

  Most viewed it with something like disbelief. Not since the Civil War had any of England’s subjects died in hostilities on English soil. Zeppelins too had been seen over England and the likelihood of bombs being dropped on English towns from those slowly gliding shapes filled everyone with foreboding.

  There’d been trouble across the country, mobs venting their anger on German shopkeepers and other suspect foreigners, breaking their windows, destroying their goods, threatening their lives until the police had to rescue them. And aliens were being rounded up and taken off to special camps. Even the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, German by birth and known to be related to the Kaiser, had been forced to resign because of anti-German feeling, even though his son was serving in the Royal Navy.

  The Christmas many predicted would see the end of the war wasn’t one for celebrations, since so many remained without their men at home. Determined as Eveline was to make the best of things and, judging by Connie’s desperate smiles, she was trying hard to do the same, there was an emptiness about this festive season that couldn’t be filled, though her being at her parents for Christmas dinner helped a bit.

  The entire family squashed into the flat above the shop as if presenting a united front against the times they were now living in. With the dinner-table leaves extended, somehow twelve adults or near adults, five children and a baby in arms, which didn’t count, managed to squeeze round it, the younger ones secured between table and wall and all having to eat with elbows well in but with lots of goodwill and give and take.

  Dad’s corner shop had made certain of a Christmas dinner to beat all Christmas dinners this year, in an effort to show that this war wasn’t going to get any of them down. But there were still the missing faces to remind them: her Albert, her brother Len, and Connie’s George.

  Eveline’s sister, Tilly, chewing steadily, said, ‘My Stan keeps talking about needing to do ’is bit. He says most of the blokes he worked with ’ave enlisted. I keep telling ’im he’s a married man with children.’

  She glanced across the table where her husband was talking to their father, then down at her small daughter, protectively holding her baby boy closer. ‘If he enlisted and anything ’appens to ’im, they’d be without a dad.’

  ‘I don’t think he’d be that rash,’ Eveline said, she too eating steadily. ‘He’s got a family to think of.’

  But so had Albert. That hadn’t stopped him. Nor George. She felt let down and angry, for herself and for Connie. Without thinking, both of them had volunteered in the initial fever of excitement to see an enemy off. The recruitment stations hadn’t stopped to consider if a man had a family or not. But that first flush of excitement had died down and even though duty and patriotism still counted, some well knew the slaughter going on at the front. To Eveline’s mind Stan was being a bit inconsiderate even though they were still pushing for recruits.

  If he was seeing only the glory of comradeship against a common foe the news alone from the front should make him stop and think. Albert’s letters were dismal, speaking not of glory but of poor food, cold, hard work, and little change of clothing. And he wasn’t yet in the fighting line; his job at the moment consisted of loading boxes of ammunition on trucks and mules to be sent on.

  Eveline found herself reading more into his letters than he meant her to, fuelling a lurking fear that at any moment his unit could be sent to the trenches. He and George were still together; generals still remained happy for mates and even those from the same street to be so, for the sake of morale.

  She would hear the same echo of fear in the letters Connie sometimes read out to her from her George. Only occasionally now, and getting less and less as each hesitated to confide in the other what they constantly read into those loving, lonely and often achingly soulful letters, each praying this war would finish before their man could be sent forward.

  But while there seemed to be stalemate over there, elsewhere there had been encouraging news. Earlier this month the Royal Navy’s magnificent victory in the Falklands had meant sinking the German cruisers Dresden, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Nurnberg with, it was said, no British losses. People were still feeding off it come Christmas. Thinking of it, she felt a little more optimistic.

  ‘Time your Stan gets to thinking of joining up, the Germans will have surrendered,’ she said to Tilly. ‘We’ve got a great big Empire to call on. What have they got? A few more months and they’ll give up, you wait and see.’

  It had been a good Christmas after all, despite her constantly missing Albert. Dinner cleared away, the men still at home, too young or too old to enlist, gathered in the kitchen to drink and smoke and discuss the present situation. Children had been put to bed for the afternoon to sleep off their meal, while the women reclined on the chairs Mum had pushed against the wall ready for a bit of fun in the evening. The mats and rugs taken up had left the linoleum clear for a bit of a knees-up later and to hell with the war for a day.

  Later they’d made ham sandwiches for tea with shrimps and winkles and crispy celery. Dad had played records on his beloved gramophone to do the two-step to songs like ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and ‘Hullo-Hullo, Who’s Your Lady Friend’, everyone pausing as he rewound the spring, finally going all sentimental with ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ an
d ‘You Made Me Love You’, which a friend of his played on his harmonica.

  Tiring of it, they’d played cards for pennies and ha’pennies into the evening, the women finally going off to bed while the men got down to some serious betting at pontoon. The war had seemed a long way away.

  Now it was January 1915, with still no end to the war in sight despite newspaper accounts of an unofficial truce on Christmas Day by ordinary troops in one corner of the Western Front. British and German soldiers had come out of their trenches to greet each other, exchange food and cigarettes as if giving Christmas presents, even having a game of football, much to the disapproval of the authorities.

  The next day they were again firing at each other from their trenches with intent to kill as if Christmas had never been.

  ‘It’s horrible when you come to think of it,’ Connie said on reading the account. ‘How can they start killing again after that?’

  But it was the appalling truth that they could, pushed on by generals and their commanding officers.

  ‘War is so senseless and wicked! If women were able to vote and be in charge of things there would be no more wars.’

  ‘If that day ever comes,’ Eveline returned with a bitter laugh to which Connie didn’t respond.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  In the coming weeks all Connie could think about was the possibility of George being sent to the front, a bullet making a widow of her.

  ‘You mustn’t let yourself keep dwelling on it,’ Eveline told her sternly. ‘We all feel the same way but we have to be strong. If we’re not, we’re just letting our men down.’

  That was easier said than done. Eveline going about as if Albert could never be in any danger was only hiding her head in the sand as far as she was concerned, though sometimes she wished she could do the same.

  Mid-January gave them something else to think about as the war was brought almost to their very doorstep, newspapers reporting that during the night a German Zeppelin had crossed the Norfolk coast and dropped bombs on Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, killing twenty people and injuring twice that number.

  There was a photograph of the devastation: three cottages completely destroyed, a mass of rubble and splintered wood, the homes on either side wrecked and gutted.

  ‘To think of people under that,’ Connie whispered when she came over to show the paper to Eveline. ‘A small boy and his sister were killed in one of those cottages. What did two little children ever do to the Germans to be killed like that? It’s inhuman. I can’t bear to think of it.’

  For once, Eveline didn’t upbraid her for her horrified reaction, causing her to feel suddenly resolute.

  ‘We simply have to win,’ she said. ‘We have to stop people like that!’ The words made her feel a lot better.

  It was in March that her worst nightmare became reality. George’s letter told her that that his and Albert’s battalion was being sent forward; she fled to Eveline’s, Rebecca in her arms, as though the enemy was at her heels.

  ‘We’ve got to be strong,’ Eveline repeated as Connie sat in her kitchen trying to stop her insides trembling. Eveline was holding her own letter, and although she sounded calm, her fingers kept creasing and uncreasing the folds of his letter until they were razor-thin.

  ‘I’m trying to be,’ Connie replied.

  In a way she wished it had been Eveline who had come over to her instead of the other way round. Sitting here she felt like a child who had lost its mother in a crowd. But Eveline was her strength, her prop.

  ‘I shall be,’ she promised although her voice wavered. ‘I shall be strong.’

  With Eveline beside her, she would face this. It was Eveline who for years had helped her face so much – her parents’ silence, trying to make a new life here in the East End, even helping her becoming a better suffragette than she might have been alone.

  ‘We must throw ourselves into helping our country,’ Eveline went on a little dramatically, but she was right. There was much they could do. They were the only ones left to do it, with their men away.

  The government had issued an appeal to women to serve their country. Workers were desperately needed in industry, trade, public services, agriculture, and, most importantly, armaments.

  None needed telling twice; women flocked to sign on at local labour exchanges, responding to the Register of Women for War Service the government had organised.

  Within days Emmeline Pankhurst was rallying every WSPU member and declaring that its members were only too willing to be recruited.

  ‘That’s what we’ll do,’ Eveline said excitedly when they heard. ‘It’ll be just like old times.’

  Leaving canteen work, which had quietened down with dwindling numbers of refugees and women starting to earn money of their own and no longer needing handouts, they went off to the Labour Exchange. Gran, bless her, had offered to have Rebecca while Eveline’s mother agreed, somewhat begrudgingly she felt, to relieve her of Helena.

  ‘Though you do know I’ve got a shop ter manage but I suppose we’ve all got ter do our bit,’ she said. ‘I just ’ope it won’t be too much for yer gran looking after Connie’s little ’un. After all it ain’t as if she was ’er blood.’

  Typical of her to make everything sound like a chore, but Eveline said nothing except to thank her and hope it wouldn’t be for long, adding that every hand was needed to get this war over as quick as possible, which Mum had to agree with.

  It was amazing what women were proving to be capable of, doing jobs hitherto seen as men’s work: heaving coal, adeptly managing horse-drawn milk and heavy coal carts alike, delivering post, so-called delicate women handling not just light but heavy industrial machinery, alongside men too old to be accepted for military service. Eveline and Connie, accepted for work, now became just two of a fifty-thousand strong female labour force employed in industry alone.

  ‘Anything we can do will be worthwhile,’ declared the chairwoman of their local WSPU branch in Hackney. Branches had sprung up everywhere again, this time in aid of government rather than against it.

  ‘At last we are needed,’ she’d gone on. ‘And Mr Lloyd George has promised that women will receive the same pay as men for war work.’

  Having been a comptometer operator and good at figures, a broad scope offered itself to Eveline, while Connie, never having had to work in her life, was skilled at nothing. Feeling she had little choice but to keep together for Connie’s sake, the only thing open to two women refusing to be separated was factory work. But with a promise of being given the same wage as men, factory war work had its attraction, even if it did mean long hours from eight in the morning to six in the evening with half an hour for lunch.

  ‘I don’t suppose it’ll be very clean work either,’ Eveline warned. Working on a factory floor would be new to her too, the old biscuit factory having of necessity been a clean place. Besides, she’d been in the office.

  She hadn’t reckoned on just how dirty munitions work could be. Not just dirty but smelly and noisy and at times hazardous, but this was what they had chosen and there was no going back to the Labour Exchange crying that they’d changed their minds, that they didn’t like the work.

  With their hair bundled up into mop caps, wearing thick coveralls, they’d been taken to their work bench that first day and shown what to do, a simple and what promised to be a repetitious and boring task of putting shell cases under a machine that made a screw thread. Before the first hour was up their palms were stained from contact with metal, their backs ached, their ears buzzed from the constant racket of machinery.

  ‘We’ve got to stick at it,’ Connie shouted above the noise and with a ring of determination in her voice that surprised Eveline. ‘If our boys can endure what they’re enduring, then we can endure this. What we’re doing must be heaven in comparison to what they must be going through.’

  Their husband’s letters increasingly told what it was like even though they tried to fill the page with cheerful trivia. The press was far more
explicit and who’d want to look that hell in the teeth after what the papers were saying?

  ‘Maybe it won’t be for too much longer,’ Connie added, clinging to that hopeful phrase that was steadily becoming more and more hackneyed.

  Albert sat with his back to the slimy mud wall of the trench, writing to Eveline, his notepad propped on one knee. It wasn’t easy to write with rain trickling off the groundsheet draped over his head and shoulders. It seemed he’d never be dry again, would live and die in these wet clothes he wore.

  Licking the stub of pencil, he stared at what he had written so far. It wasn’t much. What was there to write about? The conditions? Nothing ever dry? The rivulets of rain streaming down the trench walls? The duckboards at the bottom of the trench almost a foot under water these last two months, so that men were starting to get trench foot? He would examine his own feet to see if the damp, dead-looking skin was the start of that miserable condition or just cold, rub them dry as best he could, holding them out to air, but not for long as another bombardment would have him hastily getting back into wet socks and boots.

  He’d already spoken in his letters about the poor food. Ration parties would be sent off to bring it, then return with it all bunged in one sack, loose tea leaves and sugar mixed up with everything else. He had made a joke of it in one of his previous letters.

  He could never tell her about the constant bombardment, or being moved from one trench to another to relieve others already there. Or about the tension, the fear, the strange moments of either apathy or hilarity that came during a lull. Or of dropping with fatigue, absolutely whacked after twenty-four hours non-stop trench mortars, high-explosive shelling, tripping over bodies or parts of bodies before the medics and stretcher-bearers could do their job. Most of all, he felt unable to mention the strange lack of sorrow for a fallen man under bombardment.