The Bannister Girls

by Jean Saunders

  She would go to Margot. Perhaps the time was right now for them to go to France. There would never be a better time. The V.A.D.s were always screaming for volunteers. She would do anything that was required of her. Her thoughts careered ahead in little staccato bursts of decision.

  If she got caught up in the Front Line, and ended up drowning in mud, she didn’t care about that either. At least she had some purpose. As yet, she couldn’t think about finding Jacques. Today’s discovery was too close to her own experience to want to think of him. It was one more painful thing to add to the anguish her father had brought her. It made her love for Jacques no more than a shameful affair.

  She could hear Margot’s heels clattering back down the stairs, and dragged her thoughts back to the present. She had to be practical. Yes, she would have to go to Meadowcroft to fetch some clothes. Those she had with her were soiled and dusty. And she owed it to Clemence to inform her of what was happening. She couldn’t just send a note as Ellen had done, nor did she have the status of new widowhood like Louise to add dignity to her cause.

  Clemence would try to dissuade her, but Fred would make her see that Angel had a right to do what she felt was her duty. Angel swallowed the lump that kept rising to her throat every time she thought of him. It was hard to keep her thoughts steady. Her head ached so much. Margot had obviously been thinking too.

  ‘I’ve told Mother of our plans, Angel, and she’s resigned to it. She’s known for ages that I wanted to go, though I don’t know what I shall do, since I’m not exactly trained for anything. I don’t even have your driving skills, nor Ellen’s secretarial efficiency. I’m a complete idiot when you boil it all down.’ She said it quite cheerfully, and Angel managed a watery smile.

  ‘You’re my dearest and best friend, and if you only sat and held a wounded soldier’s hand, he’d be your devoted slave, and well you know it.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Margot laughed. ‘I can always do that, of course. It could be fun to be doing things together, anyway. What say we find an information office tomorrow and see what’s what? Then we could go down to Meadowcroft the following day and face your mother with a fait accompli. It’s too late for doing anything today, and you really do look all in, darling.’

  ‘Yes. Tomorrow.’

  It couldn’t come quickly enough. The evening was an ordeal, sitting through dinner with Margot and her mother, answering questions about her family, and trying to talk naturally about them. If Mrs Lacey’s eyebrows were raised slightly on hearing about Ellen’s unexpected departure from Meadowcroft, and Louise’s trip to Scotland, the lady showed remarkable forbearance in not commenting too much.

  What would she say if she knew of the other two … Sir Frederick Bannister with his mistress, and Angel with her French lover…? The Bannisters were turning into quite an unconventional lot after all, Angel thought, with a glimmer of grim humour, the very opposite from what Clemence had schooled them for so diligently.

  She spent a sleepless night, tossing and turning, and trying to make her mind a complete blank, until the pale pink dawn finally appeared. And then there was no more time to think, to back out, to change her mind.

  After breakfast the girls drove through the narrow streets of the town to where the posters at the information office assured them that Kitchener Wanted Them. That women could be of immense service to their country as well as men, that nurses were valued above all, but every female hand was needed…

  ‘Ellen must love all this,’ Angel muttered. ‘She was right all along. The war is doing as much to change attitudes to women as anything Mrs Pankhurst and her suffragettes did. It’s tragic to think it takes so much killing to prove a point.’

  ‘Stop being so morbid and let’s find out what we can do to help.’ Margot linked her arm in Angel’s, and together they went into the cramped office, where the efficient little clerk handed them some forms to fill in.

  By the time they came into the sunlight, they were officially V.A.D.s. With a stern warning that if they intended working in factories they would do well to have their hair cut off. More than one girl had been scalped when her waist-length hair got caught in machinery.

  ‘You can always donate it for the war effort,’ the man added helpfully. ‘Payment isn’t much, and I daresay the pittance won’t mean a lot to you two young ladies. But there’s a reputable salon in Lynn that pays a fair rate if you’re interested.’

  Outside, Angel and Margot looked at each other. Cut off their beautiful long hair? Margot used to be able to sit on hers, though it was shorter now for convenience. Angel’s had been trimmed to shoulder-blade length because of the heavy weight of it when piled into a bun.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Angel said recklessly. Anything new appealed to her at present. Anything to change her from the old susceptible Angel to someone more worldly, more modern. The image of a girl wearing cheap scent and bright Tango lipstick swept through her mind.

  She hadn’t thought of Dolly Dilkes since the night she had gone to Beezer’s Club in the taxi with her three new companions. She didn’t particularly want to think of her now.

  ‘Hold on a minute. I’m not so sure about this haircutting business,’ Margot sounded uneasy. ‘I don’t want to look like a boy. It’s all right for you. No one would ever mistake your shape, but there’s not much of me where it matters.’

  ‘No one would mistake you either! Put a bit more rouge on your lips. Your mother will really think you’re fast then. I’m going to do it anyway. I shall emerge as an entirely new personality.’

  She still couldn’t quite keep the harshness out of her voice. Everything she thought about at present, everything she said, or did, seemed in relation with her father having a mistress. She couldn’t seem to escape the knowledge. Coming to terms with it was a different matter. It was done, and she knew that nothing could undo it. She couldn’t change it. But she could change herself, and assert her new independence from them.

  Them meaning the old regime; the frothy, heady days before the war; the family who still saw her as a child instead of the woman she had become, through Jacques’ loving tenderness, through her father’s sleazy affair…

  ‘All right. Why not? It will be a lark!’ Margot agreed, eyes sparkling with admiration at Angel’s words. ‘All the same, I’m glad I’ll have you to back me up when Mother sees me. And I’ll do the same for you, darling!’

  An hour or so later they entered the house nervously, and Margot’s mother looked at them speechlessly for a moment. But not for long…

  ‘What on earth have you done to yourselves! You look positively alien! I’m more distressed than I can say –’

  Margot ran to her side as she burst into noisy tears at the sight of the two cropped girls.

  ‘Please don’t be angry, Mother. It’s for the war effort.’ She looked at Angel in desperation, not expecting quite such a reaction as this.

  ‘We all have to do what we can, Mrs Lacey,’ Angel was firm but kind. ‘Lord knows what they do with the hair – use it for stuffing mattresses or making wigs or something, but it was a small sacrifice to make. Our boys are giving so much more –’

  That was a mistake. She bit her lip as Mrs Lacey sobbed even louder. Why did she have to refer to ‘our boys’, when young Edward Lacey might well be in the thick of the fighting right now, even hanging in tatters on the ‘Front Line wire’, in the words of that dreadful song.

  ‘Angel and I have joined the V.A.D.s, Mother,’ Margot went on in a rush. ‘We’re going down to Meadowcroft tomorrow to fetch Angel’s things, then we’ll go to Dover on the train. We have to report to a leave ship in a week’s time.’

  ‘So I’m losing you as well as Edward?’ she wailed.

  ‘Yes, Mother, I’m afraid you are.’ It was time to be strong. ‘We’ll both come back safe and sound, like bad pennies, you’ll see.’

  Behind her back, Angel could see Margot’s slim fingers crossed for luck as she spoke.

  Once they had broken the news, they decided not to prolon
g the parting. It was too unnerving. Margot quickly packed the essentials, and Angel put her few things together, catching sight of herself in the dressing table mirror now and then. Her heart lurched every time she did so. The hair cutting had changed her appearance dramatically. She had been acknowledged beautiful before, with her long abundance of silky hair a truly crowning glory, as glowing as sunlight.

  Now, her face had a gamin look, a mixture of childlike innocence and the new ‘fast’ style, with the hair softly curling around her chin and ears, and slightly raised on top to lessen the stark effect. Her mother would have a purple fit. Her father would mourn the loss of her lovely hair … but she no longer cared what he thought, and hardened her feelings towards him.

  She tried not to think of Jacques twining her hair around his seductive fingers, burying his face in its springlike freshness, loving the wantonness of it spread across the pillow like a soft golden cloud … she tried not to think of anything to make her heart ache even more…

  ‘Ready?’ Margot came into Angel’s room, her own dark hair a similar stylish crop. She patted it defiantly, seeing herself beside Angel in the mirror. ‘I say. We really look rather good, don’t we? Poor Mother. She never could keep up with the times. Everyone will be wearing their hair like this soon, you’ll see. It will be far less trouble.’

  They arrived at Meadowcroft late in the afternoon. Angel had telephoned to say that she and Margot were coming, but giving away nothing of their plans. Clemence was cross at not knowing Angel’s whereabouts, and Angel was very sensitive to the petulance in her mother’s voice.

  Clemence was quite undemonstrative towards her family, but was still possessive of them in a strangely distant way. An unloving wife for a husband who needed a show of love. The thought edged annoyingly into Angel’s head.

  As the girls entered the serenity of the drawing room at Meadowcroft, Clemence took one look at the two cropped heads and put her hand to her throat in horror.

  ‘You look like street women,’ she gasped, her composure deserting her. ‘What on earth possessed you to do it?’

  Angel felt suddenly bored and weary.

  ‘There’s a war on, Mother. We donated our hair to the war effort. We even donated the money we got for it to the Red Cross box at the salon. Aren’t you proud of us?’

  How bizarre it all was. Boys little older than herself were being shot to pieces in a foreign country. Her lover’s plane might have been burnt to a crisp for all she knew. And still the domestic details of everyday life produced pain and indignation. A father’s infidelity; a daughter’s independence in having her hair cut. One might think the large-scale disasters would far outweigh the others, but they never did…

  ‘Hello, Lady Bannister,’ Margot said awkwardly, in the small brittle silence.

  Clemence gave her a brief nod, her reply distracted. ‘So you’re paying us another visit, Margot –’

  ‘We’re not staying, Mother. We’ve joined the V.A.D.s. We leave for France next week.’

  Clemence’s face changed colour. Angel sounded so – so decisive. If Clemence had ever thought she would be a pliant youngest daughter, she was revising her opinions very quickly.

  ‘Frederick!’

  At a small noise in the passageway, she suddenly shouted her husband’s name, as if totally unable to deal with any more of this. Angel felt a shock. She hadn’t expected her father to be home. Before she had time to think any further, he came into the drawing room.

  He was dressed impeccably, stiff collar and neat tie, hair sleeked down, shoes gleaming. For the life of her, Angel couldn’t help comparing him with the last time she had seen him, so comfortable, so much at home. Here, he looked more like a visitor than master of his own home.

  She tried not to consider the implications of it, her heart beating unevenly as Fred looked at her with an unfathomable look in his eyes.

  He’s wondering if I’m going to give him away, she realised with a huge shock. He’s nervous. Of me! Oh God, how can this be happening! Normally, she would have run to him, to be hugged to his chest, to be kissed with great enthusiasm. His best girl, his dearest girl … after Harriet…

  The continuing shock of seeing the girls with their hair shorn effectively stopped Clemence from noticing that neither her husband nor her daughter made any move towards one another.

  Margot noticed it, and was certain now that her suspicions were correct. Poor, poor Angel, to have her illusions about her beloved father shattered. Whatever had happened, it had gone very deep.

  ‘Margot and I have joined the V.A.D.s.’ Angel’s voice was strained as she repeated the words yet again. ‘We sail for France in less than a week. Unless you have any objections – Father?’

  His eyes never left her face. He was unsmiling, and to Angel he seemed to have aged. She smothered any pity on his account. Let Harriet revive him…

  ‘I think it’s an admirable thing to do. May God go with you both and bring you back safely.’ He ignored Clemence’s outraged gasp of fury.

  ‘What about their hair? Their lovely hair?’ Clemence could almost have wept in her frustration, if it hadn’t been so unladylike.

  Fred shrugged. He spoke distantly. ‘There’s one thing about hair, my dear. It grows. Now, if you didn’t want me for anything else, I have more important things to do than to stand here gossiping.’

  He went stiffly out of the room, and Angel bit her lip. If she was suffering, then so was her father. How he must hate the knowledge that his beloved daughter knew of his indiscretion. Even more, he must hate the accusation in her eyes, the dumb misery she couldn’t hide.

  She had never believed herself to be so unforgiving. But that was the way she felt, and for the present it was the one thing she was unable to change.

  Chapter 13

  The leave ship was crowded with khaki-clad veterans who were all of nineteen or twenty years old, and eager new recruits, full of show and aggression, all ready to put a bayonet up Jerry’s backside. There was a sprinkling of Queen Alexandra’s nurses, some officers, and the V.A.D.s, each group keeping strictly to themselves.

  ‘It’s like belonging to separate clubs,’ Angel commented, when they had found a space to put down their belongings. They wore their uniforms now, and eyed each other in the dreary dark cloth, trying to give false encouragement.

  Why couldn’t they have joined something more dashing, and worn those jolly little swishing nursing hats? Bravado made them flippant as they were crushed together on the none-too-sweet-smelling ship.

  ‘The damn thing will sink before it gets to mid-Channel at this rate,’ Margot grumbled.

  ‘There can’t be any English people in England any more,’ Angel agreed in the same spirit. ‘They’re all on board ships travelling between the Channel coasts.’

  ‘Or filling the trenches at the Front Line,’ Margot muttered. Despite their jocularity, the enormity of what they were doing struck them forcibly. Listening to the varied catcalls from the soldiers testified to that.

  The old hands … some bawdy, some subdued, having seen so much of the war … the new ones, arrogantly swaggering, having as yet seen nothing…

  ‘They say the trenches stretch for five hundred miles,’ Angel tried to make interesting conversation as they were shoved along to make room for others. ‘How many do you think it takes to fill them if you have one man to every three feet of space?’

  Margot’s voice had an edge to it. ‘How the hell do I know? I was never any good at arithmetic –’

  ‘It takes a bloody lot, I can tell you!’ A group of Tommies clustered together on the deck as the ship got under way, and grinned down at the two girls. ‘You’d better change your ideas if you think we each get three feet of space, sweetheart.’

  A second soldier added his piece. ‘More like three inches when the going’s rough, and if you count the dead ’uns buried in the mud beneath your feet, it’s less than that.’

  Margot felt decidedly queasy. The ship was lurching broadside as it moved
out into the Channel, and she had to swallow deeply to keep down the bitter rush of bile in her mouth. Angel too, was gripping on to the rail and trying not to let the soldiers’ words conjure up a ghastly picture in her mind.

  ‘Where’re you two lovelies going?’ one of the Tommies said cheerily. ‘You can warm up my bit of trench any day –’

  ‘Are you going to the trenches?’ Angel looked directly into his eyes, instantly feeling a fool for asking such an inane question. Presumably that was where they were all going. Going to die, many of them…

  ‘’Course we are, sweetheart. It’s our home from home. Can’t you see our webbed feet?’

  ‘We don’t know where we’re being sent yet. My friend can drive, so she expects to be doing ambulance duty. I’m going to ask to go to a factory to pack food kits,’ Margot said.

  She and Angel looked at each other. If they did as they intended, they would be separated. In this unreal world, it was a worse thought than working in one of the field hospitals.

  ‘I might change my mind, though,’ Margot added.

  ‘That’s right, darling,’ one of the older soldiers said lazily. ‘You stick to rolling bandages. Maybe I’ll see you again. When I’m crying out for somebody to hold my hand in the night, I’d give a week’s ration to see your pretty face looking down at me. I’ll ask for you, if you tell me your name.’

  ‘Don’t wish yourself into a hospital bed,’ Angel said quickly. ‘It’s bad luck to talk like that.’

  The man laughed, a slightly chilling sound. ‘P’raps it was bad luck to be born at all. When you’ve been at the Front for a year or more, you get a gut feeling when your number’s coming up, and this was the leave for me to put my affairs in order…’

  ‘Stuff it, Jimmy. You’ll be frightening the poor lassies before they’ve even set foot in France. They’re nobbut babbies, either of ’em.’